Devil Works

I’ve taken a look through my stats and here are some the more unusual search terms that people have used to find my site:

• how the devil works (ask George Bush)
• drunk names (I prefer sober names)
• see my devil (similar to is that a gun in your pocket?)
• how devil works (similar to the first one but less literate)
• morganlighter (who ?)
• what names does the devil use ? (satan duh)
• paxil (maybe a spam comment I missed)
• arquivolo (must be a spam comment that was indexed)
• adult dating site.com (don’t recall touching that topic with a barge pole)
• homepage (that’s so 1989)

What unusual search terms have you come across ?

I’ve just come across Xinu through Stumble upon. It’s a great little site that let’s you check your rankings at more than a couple of dozen places all at the one time. I could waste hours hear looking at all my sites and how they rank…… but I won’t I know they need a lot of work before I worry about doing any tweaking.

I received an invitation yesterday to join a new program from the creators of Text Link Ads called Shopping Ads. It’s a CPC program that says they are currently paying around 20 cents per click.

I’ve put it on a recipe site and the targeting is showing household appliances which I think will be an okay match. I imagine the CPC I get will be a lot better than the Adsense income I get for the site.

There’s 11 different ad formats and you can customise the colours to suit your site. There is a live preview on the customisation page so you don’t have to wait until you upload the code to see what your ads will look like.

One of the advantages of this program is that is no limit on how many ad units you can place on your site

It’s currently in Beta but the affiliate info says that anyone that clicks through from your ad and joins the affiliate program will give you 5% for six months.

Example Ads

250 x 250 square

125×125 button

120 x 600 Skyscraper

I’ll have to wait and see to get an idea of the results for it.

Update: For some reason the ads are not showing in this post like I thought they would. I’ve sent an email to find out if they know where I’ve gone wrong. So we’ll get to see what there support is like. They are still working fine on the ads that I’ve placed on other sites outside the blog posts, but everyone knows how well inline advertising works.

Well none of it’s real exciting, but might explain why I haven’t updated in a while.

I’m moving house in a few weeks, my lease has expired and the owners want to turn it into consulting rooms. Not sure if that will pass planning but who am I to knock someones dreams.

Initially I was going to get myself another rental but I’m now considering going into the share housing thing. Haven’t done it for a while but it does have it’s advantages. I’m not locked into a lease and I can move on anytime I like. The rent is cheap and until I win lotto or start making a fortune on the net it’s a good thing.

The downside is the friends house I’m looking at doesn’t have a landline connected, which I thought would make broadband impossible. But I’ve looked into wireless broadband, initially I was looking at $200 a month plus a $300 modem on a 3 year contract which just isn’t justifiable.

So I did a bit more digging and found out I can add a suitable data pack to my 3G phone for $119 a month. This might sound expensive, but consider that I’m currently spending $55 a month for ADSL and another $35 for a landline that I hardly ever use (6 calls last month). So for an extra $30 a month I’ll be completely wireless.

The downside is that both the packages I looked at are limited to 3 gig of data transfer a month, which I thought would never be enough. But looking at my usage history with my current ISP. If I stop doing the P2P thing I shouldn’t have a problem.

The upside is that I can get online almost anywhere, The warmer months are coming and I’m making plans to do lots more camping. I can go away for a week and still feel productive.

Though I do need to look into alternative power supplies. I’m not going to be able to run a laptop and the phone for a week without an additional power source. I’m thinking of some sort of dual battery set up for my car and maybe some solar panels. Stay tuned and see what I work out.