Dear WidgetBucks… Let developers and designers everywhere view their own widgets

So it’s the end of the month and true to their word, WidgetBucks have extended their pay per click network to most of Western Europe. Before the extension of the scheme, if you were placing their advertising widgets on your website and you were outside North America, then you would see a replacement banner ad rather than their more lucrative animated product adverts.

While it was always possible to preview the ad widgets in your WidgetBucks account, it didn’t really help with actual placement on your sites. So now us folks over here in Europe can see our ads as well, as WidgetBucks intended them to look.

But what about those people still outside the list of approved pay per click countries?

Advertisers like WidgetBucks surely gain a lot of business from web designers and developers living outside of Europe? And of course they are usually responsible for creating more than one site so if they find WidgetBucks a good source of income, they’ll place them on many sites.

So Dear WidgetBucks , how about the option to put the Javascript that we drop in to our web sites into debug mode so that we can see the ad as it is meant to be. Of course any views and click when in debug mode would have to be disregarded, but I’m sure it would increase take up of this scheme.

Another alternative would be to allow the widget to be displayed if the request came from localhost.

Any one else have any ideas about how this could work?

Previous WidgetBucks Posts

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Online Advertising, WidgetBucks , australia, cpc, ppc advertising, WidgetBucks

More wierd than Cuil – Does search have a new darling?

So now we have a new search engine to add to the list. Though let’s face it, it’s not really much of a list is it? Google always wins hands down. But cuil.com, the new kid on the search-engine block comes from a long pedigree of search engine excellence. Long in internet years that is.

Products from the Cuil stable have been purchased by Google in the past so they are certainly respected and this time they’re not up for sale. You’ll hear a lot about them this week so I’m not going to just regurgetate what everyone else on the web is saying, but their entry into the market on the basis of tracking less of your data is certainly intersting and will appeal to a lot of people. Their claim to have indexed more of the internet that Google will also play well, but in my opinion is worthless as I’m not really sure more is what we need of most things.

So how do they stack up in search accuracy?

Well, it’s difficult to say. They launched and they crashed. Well not quite, but the demand for mission critical task of “Cuiling” (am I the first??) your own name  etc is so high that they haven’t been able to cope completely. But if you are patient enough you will be able to – it’s so hard not to write google here as a verb – search Cuil’s index.

So of course I searched for blueclock and for some reason there is a totally irrelevant picture of someone next to my company entry. Why? Who is this person? The additional information like pictures and categories that they provide is great but now I have doubts about their results.

Also noticable is the fact that they haven’t localised their search yet. So terms that score highly on google.co.uk but less well on google.com don’t do ever so well on Cuil. Relevance to the location of the user is something that Google excels at and it’ll be interesting to see how Cuil respond.

Other than people now associating this stange photo of someone I’ve never seen in my life with me, some other interesting side-affects for unsuspecting 3rd parties are the inevitable. There will be instantaneous fame for any villages called Cuil in Scotland and Ireland (try cuil.co.uk) and the impending server overload for any poor sod that has a domain using a easily mis-typable combination of the letters in Cuil.

Oh dear, someone is about to find out why shared hsoting packages are so cheap…

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Search Engine Optimisation, Web Standards, Accessibility and Best Practice , cuil, google, seo, serps

How to add Vimeo videos to a WordPress.com blog

One limitation of a blog hosted on WordPress.com rather than an installation of WordPress via a web hosting company is that any code that you paste into the editor that contains JavaScript or embedded objects is usually sanitised for security reasons. That’s fair enough and the editor does allow video from YouTube, Google Video and Daily Motion to be easily added.

It’s not a documented feature, but by using a similar convention you can very very easily add Vimeo videos as well. Why would you want to? Well, it depends on the audience for your blog, but the content on Vimeo is original and very high quality. It’s free to set up an account and you can upload 500Mb of video per week.

So how do you add content from Vimeo to your WordPress.com blog? Easy. First of all you’ll need the to get video number from Vimeo site. That’ll be something like www.vimeo.com/123456. Take the number from the end of the URL, the 123456 part, and then type the following in your blog post, replacing 123456 with your own video number. You also need to remove the spaces that I have placed after the opening square bracket and before the closing square bracket.

[ vimeo vimeo.com/123456 ]

That’s all there is to it. When you preview or publish the post, the Vimeo information will be embedded into your post and will be ready for your readers to watch.

And so now you know, here’s a quick example of just how good Vimeo looks.

If you want to know more about the differences between a self-hosted wordpress blog and one hosted at wordpress.com you can get more details in this article at webglossary.co.uk.

Filed under: Free Software, How To Manage A Website, Support Articles , media, surfing, video, vimeo, wordpress

Alternatives to Replace Google AdSense Referrals Income

At the beginning of the month, Google announced that they would retire the referrals section of AdSense. For existing referral ad publishers, this means that any AdSense referral code will cease to generate income for them at the end of August.

It’s all part of Google’s restructuring after the merger with DoubleClick. Unlike previous changes to Google’s advertising plans, this hasn’t been met with a great deal of opposition from web publishers as it generated very little income for anyone.

But if you were using referrals ads to get your readers to sign up for things like Google software bundles or AdWords then you’ll soon have a bit of space freed up on your site and may be looking for alternative options to just adding another block of AdSense ads.

My Alternatives To AdSense Referrals

There are hundreds, if not thousands of different affiliate schemes out there and which one you choose will be dependent on the type of site that you run. I have a few monetised sites (oooh, don’t ya just hate that word) on the web and here are two advertising schemes that I use that have shown positive results so far.

The first is Widget Bucks. I’ve written about them in the past and if you are running a product based web site or technology focused site that has a lot of traffic from North America then this one is certainly worth a try. They produce very eye catching widgets that are simple to place on your web site and can be formatted to a whole range of sizes. The reason that I mention North American traffic is because their current payment model is pay per click for ads displayed to visitors in North American and per thousand impressions for visitors outside of the USA and Canada. [UPDATE, pay per click now extended to Europe]

Widget Bucks is starting to prove itself by making a small a daily income for me, but not not in the way I first expected. The bulk of my income from them has actually been created as trickle down referral income from ads placed on other people sites. When you display ads on your site, there is a small tag-line which promotes the service and anyone who signs up via this link then becomes one of your referred customers and you receive 5% of what they earn for 12 months. The 5% comes from Widget Bucks not from the person placing ads on their site so their income is not reduced.

You have two options for placing ads. You can either select a category of ads such as laptops, cameras, GPS accessories etc or just go down the contextual route and let Widget Bucks figure out what ads to place based upon your content.

WOOthemes WordPress Theme Club

The second suggestion is a new site called WOOthemes which is backed by some very well know designers and I’ve included it in this post because although it is very new, it has shown very good click through rates so far and it looks very promising.

WOO is run a WordPress theme club, offering access to a selection of really top notch WordPress themes for between $150 and $375 dollars depending on the length of your subscription. When you sign up to the club, you receive all of the current themes and they guarantee at least one new theme every month.

The themes come with good documentation and they are created by well know designers who have good reputations to maintain so the standard of the themes should remain consistently high.

Affiliates receive 20% of any new sign-ups, but the real strength of the scheme is in the opportunity to earn continuing fees from people that renew their subscriptions.

So if you have been using AdSense’s referral products there are plenty of good alternatives out there and you may as well start replacing your referrals codes before they are retired in a few weeks.

Finally, if you have been using AdSense referrals and the data is important to you then make sure you download the report information after you replace your ads as the referrals potion of AdSense reporting will no longer be available from October.

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Online Advertising, Promoting Your Website and Organisation, Reviews, WidgetBucks , adsense, advertising, referrals, themes, WidgetBucks, woo, wordpress

Google Host Javascript Libraries Free Of Charge

Performance remains top of the web app agenda with browser vendors continuing to slug it out with claims of shaving milliseconds off JavaScript performance in each new release. Meanwhile the developers of JavaScript libraries are also waging a performance war which we’ll all benefit from in the long run as web apps become more sophisticated.

But all of this is focussed on how quickly JavaScript runs in the browser and in the case of JavaScript libraries, how quickly they run, once they have been downloaded to the browser. And that’s the key point. There is still an easy performance gain to be had by eliminating the time and resources required to download these libraries from your server to the client’s browser.

So Google have begun hosting a selection of the most commonly used JavaScript libraries so that over time, they will be cached on a lot of users’ machines.

At present, if I visit a shopping web site that uses jQuery and I then visit a travel information web site that also uses jQuery then my browser will have to download the jQuery library once when I visit the shopping site and then again when I visit the travel information site even though both sites are using the same file.

If both sites download the jQuery library from a common source, in this case Google, then the file only has to be downloaded once and is available for any other sites that use jQuery as well.

By using this method, you’ll take some of the pressure off your own web server, save a bit of bandwidth and make initial performance of your site better. The latter is something that your visitors using dial up or in countries with slow connectivity will definitely appreciate.

At the moment, the libraries provided are:

• dojo
• jQuery
• MooTools
• prototype
• script.aculo.us

Google will be expanding this selection in future and its success is dependent on uptake.

You can see Dion Almaer annouce it below and full details are at code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/documentation/

Filed under: CacheFile, Free Fridays, Free Software, How To Manage A Website, Web Browsers, Web Standards, Accessibility and Best Practice , ajax, ajaxapi, bandwidth, dojo, hosting, javascript, jquery, mootools, prototype, script.aculo.us

6 Great Uses For Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a great system that sends you an email you whenever a new page containing a word or phrase you have chosen to follow enters their search index.

You can create up to 1000 alerts on as many words and phrases as you like. You can also determine how often each alert is sent: “as it happens”, once a day or once a week.

And finally you can also filter the source of the content to specific part of the web:

• News
• Blogs
• Web
• Videos
• Groups
• Comprehensive (i.e. all of the above)

I usually choose comprehensive and then adjust the settings if there’s just too much information coming in.

Here are a few suggestions as to how Google Alerts can help you keep on top of things.

1. Simple reputation management

The most common use has to be for monitoring what people are saying about you, your clients or your competitors.

I have an alert set up on several client company names and receive a once a week alert on this. It helps me to see where on the web these clients are mentioned and measure the effectiveness of publicity campaigns.

2. Measuring search optimisation effectiveness

If you set up an alert on the title of an article you have written, an “as it happens” alert will let you see how long it takes for it to enter into the Google index.

For most of my blog articles, this is usually in about one hour whereas on certain other web sites, it can take a week. Alerts also let you see where else on the web your articles are mentioned (or stolen, see 6)

3. Monitoring the launch of new products

For my sins as a web designer I’m interested in tracking developments in the latest versions of web browsers. Google alerts keeps me up to date with new releases of all the major browsers and lets me track the opinions of commentators on the same subject.

4. Trend spotting

If you have a hunch that something is going to be big or want to follow the development of a story, Google Alerts can help you with this as well. Over time you’ll start to notice the volume of alerts on particular subjects rise and fall and you may also be able to determine what caused a story to snowball.

5. Alerting you when hard to find items become available

If you’re looking for an out of print book or a classic pair of trainers, Google Alerts does the business, but patience is the name of the game.

6. Content theft

My bug bear. It’s a sad fact that as soon as you post something on the web, someone nicks it and publishes it as their own in order to have content on their web site so they can keep visitors coming and generate advertising revenue.

How much you can do about that is debatable, but it’s at least helpful to have an idea of who is doing it.

So How Do I Create A Google Alert?

Creating a Google alert is really easy.

Just go to www.google.com/alerts

If you don’t already have a Google account, you’ll need to set one up. If you do have one and you’re already signed in, just enter the word or phrase you want to track, set the frequency of the alert and set the comprehensiveness of the filter.

Use quotes for exact phrases to avoid being deluged with emails. e.g. to monitor the term “Liz Hurley” enter it in quotes rather than as Liz Hurley without the quotes.

That’s all there is to it. You’ll soon start to receive updates on any new content that Google finds.

Managing Google Alerts

To add more alerts, edit or remove existing alerts, just go back to www.google.com/alerts

But there’s an even easier way to manage your alerts than that. At the end of each email alert that you receive, there is a link with the option to delete the alert, change the settings for that alert or set up another alert.

If you’re using Google Alerts I’d be interested in hearing about the ways in which you use the service.

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Information Management, Search Engine Optimisation , alerts, google, news, notifications, reputation management