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.

Here’s a large list of Google Page Rank Tools. I had grand plans of linking to every single one I could find, but after a while it was obvious that a lot of them have the same features.

If you’re serious about SEO I recommend taking a look at them and choosing one from each category to add to your book marks.
Multi Data Center Page Rank Checking

These are good to see if a PR update is happening, they look at multiple Google servers and if there is a difference between the PR on the servers then it’s a strong sign that the visible PR is being updated.

• Live PR
• Smart Page Rank
• Dig Page Rank
• Iwebtool
• My Page Rank
• Lasto
• Page Rank Tool
• Dirensei
• Noulake
• Rank Alert
• Google Page Rank Checker

Page Rank Prediction

No idea how this one works, I’ll have to wait for the next visible update to see if it’s correct.

• Iwebtool Pagerank Prediction

Single Data Centers

Most of these sites do the same thing. They return the PR for a given site from a single data center. Some of them offer additional information such as Alexa ranking and backlinks and other stuff you can use to view the progress of your site in the SERP’s.

Some of them check a list of domains at the same time, this is a good way to check a lot of your own sites, or compare them to competitors.

If your just wanting to check a single sites PR fairly regulary then I’d recommend installing a PR tool bar of some sor. (a couple are listed below)

• Promotion World
• BlogFlux
• Check Page Rank
• SEO Chat Page Rank Look Up
• What’s My Page Rank
• PageRankIm
• Rank Where
• My Page Rank (multi site checking)
• Pagerankr
• Dev Attic
• Self SEO
• Bloggin Mix
• SEO pen
• Search Engine Genie
• The Page Rank Checker

Page Rank Icons (for your website)

These sites will give you some code to put on your website to show your Page Rank to your visitors. Personally I think it’s just a bit of a vanity thing and prefer to use a Page Rank tool bar (see below).

• Page Rank Bar
• My Page Rank
• Build Reciprocal Links
• Lasto
• Singer Design
• Get SEO Results
• Your Page Rank

Fake Page Rank Detection

These sites profess to tell if the Page Rank you a seeing for a certain site is fake. I’m not sure how they do it, but that’s the claim they make. It’s probably worth using one of these sites if you’re looking at buying a site based on it’s PR.

• Build Reciprocal Link
• Dirensei
• SEO Logs
• Valid Rank (also checks backlinks)

Page Rank Toolbars

These are plug-ins for your browser, that constantly show the PR of the pages you are visiting. Anyone developing websites on should have one of these installed. I can personally recommend the Search Status tool bar, very handy. If anyone knows of any for other browsers like Safari or Opera then leave a comment and I’ll add them to the list.

• Google Tool Bar (Firefox 1.5+ and IE)
• Search Status (Firefox only, also shows alexa ranking and provides quick links to other SEO info)

Adding a Page Rank Checker to Your Site

I looked at a whole bunch of scripts on the net that would let you set up a page to show other sites Page Rank. Absolutely none of the demos I tried gave valid results so I’m not going to list them here. If you know of one that works then leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list. However one that looks okay is a service run buy Iwebtool. They have a large range of tools for people running websites and doing SEO. Select the tool you want to use on your own site from the list here then click the “add this on your website” link in the upper right hand part of the screen. You’ll be taken to a page with the code you need to put into your site. The link back to Iwebtool is fairly unobtrusive so don’t feel your selling your soul by linking to another sites services.

And the last useful link

This is not so much a tool as a reference, this site gives a history of Page Rank updates going back to 2000. I’m not sure when it was last updated but it shows that the last visible PR update was 30 April 2007. They estimate that the last update should have happened around July 21, but we’re all still waiting for it to happen.

Well that’s it, I could have made the list a lot longer but of the hundreds I looked at, a lot of them give you the same info and were just a waste of space. If you know of any good Page Rank tools that I’ve missed then leave a comment and I’ll add them to the list.

As much as I’ve been in a world of blogging slackness this last month I haven’t stopped thinking about where I’m headed.

I’ve decided that I’ll complete the 10 paid posts through Pay Per Post to enable me to list another blog, then the only paid posts on this site will be direct orders.

On my other blog I’ll keep churning out the PPP opportunities that are around, but I won’t mind because that site is full of SE keyword fodder anyway.

So please excuse the rash of paid posts you’ll see over the next week. It’s all about the numbers.

If you’re interested in direct ordering a paid post I guarantee you an hour of my time where I’ll  research your site/topic and write the post and throw in some juicy deep links.

It won’t be the short fluffy cash for comments you’ve been seeing so far.

One of my old business ideas that never got past the idea phase was to set up a digital stock photography site. I had grand plans of setting off around the world taking amazing photos and selling them via subscription to fund my travels to interesting places.

As has happened many times in the past I said kept saying “one day” and missed my window of opportunity and now the internet is full of cheap stock photography.

But I haven’t completely given up on the idea. I do take good photo’s if I do say so myself, actually others have said it too, and the evidence is hanging on their walls, and no it’s not just at my mothers house !

I’m thinking that the only way to decently profit from the venture in this age of everyone owning a digital camera is to brand myself as a photographer and sell limited edition prints.

I’m still firming up my ideas around this concept, but one thing I know I need to do is upgrade my camera. Currently I’m using a Fujifilm FinePix A500, it doesn’t take a bad photo but as a compact camera with only 5 mega pixels it’s limited in what I can do with it.

I’ve still got my film based SLR camera but I’m thinking of upgrading it to something like the Nikon D3. I’d have to go out and buy a heap of new lenses but if I’m after premium prices then I need to take premium pictures.

This plan is definately long term, I know I can take good photos, just need to prove to myself I can sell them.

I bought an expired 5 letter dot com about a year ago. Unfortunately it’s not a dictionary word, otherwise I’d probably be retired in the tropics by now. However it is something that’s easy to remember and therefore brandable.

Since I bought it I’ve been pondering what to do with it. I initially set up Wordpress Mu on it, thinking that I could set up a lot of blogs with subdomains on it. I only installed Wordpress Mu to see what it could do, I set up a couple of blogs with it and then forgot about it for a couple of months.

When I went back to see what was happening with it, I found that 50 odd blogs had been set up on it. I took a look at them and found out they were all spamish type sites with lots of links pointing to other sites. I wasn’t really keen on this but the search engines were picking up the spam blogs and sending traffic.

As it wasn’t costing me any extra I let this ride for a couple of months. Then I started getting adult sites setting up spam blogs with content that I wasn’t comfortable living with.

So I needed to take the blogs down, but as I knew it was getting traffic to the site, I didn’t want to let leave it empty.

It was a short domain so I came up with the idea of setting up a URL redirection service.

I downloaded a free script from hotscripts.com and set it up and the site and promptly forgot about it.

Today I took a look at my site stats for July. I’ve had over 40,000 hits through the redirection service. I took a look at the database for the site and found that only 36 people have set up URL redirections, but yet the traffic they are pushing through my site is about 5 times what all my sites combined receive.

I think this one may have a future, will need to do some programming (or pay someone to do it) but I think once it’s properly set up it’s something that will be a stress free money maker.

Would you believe a few crappy websites making $1000 a month are worth $200,000 ?

When I tell my friends how much time I spend working on my websites and how much income my efforts generate they generally tell me I’m wasting my time. I’m happy to let them think that but I look at it a different way.

I’ve got a full time job, I don’t need the money from my sites but it’s a nice bonus. If I looked at my hourly rate for the time I spend online then it wouldn’t be 20% of what I get for my day job.

But let’s look at it another way. I’ll use fictitious figures just to make the maths easier.

Monthly Internet Income : $1000

Annual Internet Income : $12,000

Bank balance required to earn annual internet income in interest : $200,000

(based on high interest account @ 6%)

Now I’ll admit that spending a chunk of my time on the net each weak isn’t as easy as having $200k in the bank but there is no way I could save that amount of money on my current wage. Even if I took on a second job I’d be looking at working 20 hours a week at $20 an hour for almost 10 years to have that much extra cash to invest.

And I have chosen to go down the path where my sites don’t need constant attention. I could cut back my online time to a couple of hours a week and I wouldn’t see my income shrink.

I just completed an online quiz on a free dating site that rated my knowledge of the internet. At the end of it they gave me a little graphic to put on my site with my score.

Now other people will see my quiz results and visit the site and try and improve on my score and the dating site will get free traffic for the cost of creating the quiz.

That’s viral marketing.

PS The code they gave me to cut and past included a nicely targeted link to their front page. I took it out, does it make me a bad person ?