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

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 First Impressions

IE8 Beta 1 was released to the general public yesterday and here are my first impressions and quick review. I’ve installed it and taken it for a quick whistle-stop tour of the web. It’s stable, it’s a great improvement, but one caveat though, it’s only really intended for developers and designers at this stage, so if that’s not you, read on but don’t install it.

[Update: IE8 overwrites IE7, see the comments below for information on how to run different versions of internet explorer 6, 7, and 8 on the same machine using Virtual PC. It's all free of charge from Microsoft. I'll write up a post about how to do this next Friday.]

Feet First into IE8

Installing such early Betas isn’t always such a great idea and Microsoft have in the past had a reputation for not enabling different versions of products to co-exist. So why such as rash step?

Well, primarily I was just very impressed by what Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the Internet Explorer team had to say in his keynote at Mix 08 and I wanted to see the browser for myself.

Secondly, I don’t use Internet Explorer as my default browser any more. Therefore I’m not reliant on it for web browsing or accessing any web applications. Most of the time I just use it for testing client web sites.

And thirdly, (and this is why I’m going to keep it on my machine) I liked the fact that Microsoft seem to have solved the multiple version problem by enabling you to toggle between IE8 and IE7 emulation mode.

IE7 Emulation Mode

This last point means that developers can continue to do real world client site testing in IE7 at the flick of a switch. Switch of IE7 emulation and you can still continue testing and preparing for the release of IE8. This is a very nice feature and makes the life of developers much easier.

Previously, developers required a virtual machine to run IE6 and IE7 so you had to log in to the virtual machine to use and test in IE6. You still need to restart the browser each time you want to switch between IE8 and IE7 emulation, mode but that’s no real hardship.

IE8 Is Focussed On Developers

Developers were really the focus of Dean Hachamovitch’s speech yesterday. That’s not surprising, as MIX is a developers conference, but it really feels like IE8 will affect developers most. He summed it up nicely by saying that developers have to spend so much of their time and effort on ensuring that things work across different browsers that it detracts from the quality of the final outcome.

So What’s New In IE8 for Developers?

So what have Microsoft done in IE8 that will make life easier for developers? They’ve reduced the gap between what features the major browsers can and cannot implement.

Microsoft are going to implement CSS 2.1 and ensure that IE8 always renders sites in the most standards compliant way possible. That will give back so much time from fixing CSS quirks related to floats, margins and padding etc.

They are also starting to implement elements of HTML5 which will enable the back button on a browser to revert to the last “state” of an AJAX enabled page (what users expect) rather than going back to the previous page. Also new from the HTML5 stable is the ability to of the browser to use local storage.

The example of local storage given in the keynote was very slick. He started to create a blog post and while doing so pulled the network cable out of his computer. The application detected this, notified him of the fact that he was not longer connected and changed the “Post” button to “Save” i.e. his blog started to function locally so that he would not lose his work due to connection problems.

There is also a new set of developer tools that seem to be close to Firebug and may even go beyond Firebug’s present capabilities, though I’ve not looked to closely at that yet.

Now these types of things are already available in other browsers, but we now have more of a level playing field and it’s easier to guarantee certain features being available in the browser.

But What About The Users?

If you already use IE7, IE8 won’t be that much of a big surprise. They’ve moved the favourites buttons to a better position and things like clearing your cache are a lot better. There’s also a nice touch of highlighting the domain name of a URL and making the rest of the URL less prominent. I guess this has positive security implications as it can will show people where they really are if they happen to have opened a link in a dodgy phishing email.

The image below shows which part of the URL is highlighted (my screen capture software decided to ignore the highlighting) and the new position of the favourites.

he two main things Microsoft are focussing on at what they call Activities and WebSlices.

Activities are essentially context sensitive actions that you can perform on sections of a web page. So if you highlight an address on a web site and right click, on of the available Activities is to view a map for that address. The big change for the user is that they don’t actually have to leave the page or open a new tab, the map just opens as a small box on the page itself and you can drag the map around , zoom in etc just as you’d expect. To create an Activity, developers just create an XML file that describes what data is required to return information back to the page and how to supply it.

WebSlices are kind of like microformats in that you simply mark up a particular section of a page with some class names and IE8 will recognise these as a WebSlice. You can then subscribe to that particular section of the page, a kind of mini RSS and watch for changes. The example that they give is watching for changes on an Ebay item. WebSlices appear in your favourites.

All of this just reinforces the importance of the browser in modern society and how the browser affects the choices we make. The pre-installed Activities will of course favour Microsoft’s own services such as Live Maps and most people will go with the default behaviours.

Google Maps Breaks : (

In my quick tour of the sites I commonly use, I found that IE8 rendered most sites pretty well with one glaring exception. IE8 really doesn’t like Google Maps. But if you’re a developer then you probably use Firefox most of the time anyway so things like this don’t matter too much and are to be expected in a Beta release.

So take IE8 for a spin and let’s look forward to finding out exactly how Microsoft intend to rid the world of IE6.

Filed under: Reviews, Web Browsers, Web Standards, Accessibility and Best Practice , activities, css2.1, HTML 5, ie8, ie8 review, internet explorer, internet explorer 8, microformats, webslices

Anyone Using Mosso for Hosting? Opinions Please.

I have some dedicated servers that I use for hosting clients web sites, but have been following the relatively new hosting company, Mosso with some interest. I am very impressed with the idea of Mosso, but is it too good to be true?

They host on a grid and you can develop in ASP, .NET, PHP and Ruby all on one account. A single domain can use a mixture of the technologies which could be a bonus when migrating sites.

I’ve been keeping an eye on their service status feed to see how quickly they respond to problems, but that kind of thing is only as good as the information the company declare.

Does anyone have any first hand experience of hosting with Mosso or know of any good (reliable and recent) reviews?

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Reviews , .net, asp, hosting, mosso, php, ruby, web hosting

Top 6 Thunderbird Extensions – Free Fridays #10

If you’re not yet acquainted with it, Thunderbird is Mozilla’s desktop email client. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now as an alternative to Outlook because it’s more lightweight and seems to handle large volumes of mail better.

Mozilla’s philosophy is to build products that are lightweight on initial installation, which you then have the choice to extend later by downloading additional plug-ins which they call extensions.

These are the 6 extensions that I’ve found most useful over the years. All of the extensions mentioned run in current version of Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 (20071031)

Lightning

Lightning provides calendering and task management for Thunderbird. You can multiple calendars to help separate work and private life and subscribe to or import external calendars.

It has all the Day, Week and Month Views that you’d expect of a decent calendar programme and if you set dates for your tasks, they will also appear in the calendar.

Thunderbird In Month View

Thunderbird In Week View

Download Lightning here addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2313

Provider For Google Calendar

The Google provider for Lightning enables it to not only subscribe to your Google Calenders, but to also write back information to Google. So if you an an event in Thunderbird, it’ll synchronise back to your Google calendar and vice versa.

At the moment the Google Provider for Lightning is only able to sync calendar events, not tasks. All of your tasks will have to be stored in a local calendar.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631

Duplicate Remover

As people change their email address or move around from company to company, you inevitably end up with some old or duplicate contact records in your address book.

The Duplicate Remover extension runs a check on all of the contacts in your address book and when it finds potential duplicates it presents them to you side by side with the option to delete one of them.

You can choose to ignore the suggested duplicates, edit the information in both or delete the suggested record. Unlike Apple’s address book, there’s no merge function, but I’m sure that’s top of their list for extending functionality the functionality.

It’s fairly quick, but of course that’ll depend on how many contacts you have, but you shouldn’t need to run it that often.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2505

Address Book Side Bar

One thing that is missing from the default installation of Thunderbird is a pane which enables you to quickly glance through a list of all your contacts and choose which ones to send the email to.

The Address Book Sidebar fulfils that role and can be called up whether you are creating a new message or not.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/70

Signature Switcher

If you use Thunderbird for work and private email or if you have to respond in different roles at work Siganture Switcher is a very handy tool that let’s you create a number of different signatures for signing off your emails and then choose which one you use at then end of each message.

But it goes beyond simply being able to manually choose which signature to append to a message. It can also be configured to automatically choose which signature to use based on who you are replying to or the recipients of a mailing list you are using to send out the email.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/611

MagicSLR

If you use Thunderbird to collect mail from more than one account MagicSLR is a handy little toll that enables you to hit one button and it send and receive all of your mail for all of your accounts.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/902

Toolbar Buttons

As you get more familiar with Thunderbird you’ll probably want to change the tool bar options to include the functions that you use most often. There are loads of functions available, but not all have a button, so you’ll need the Toolbar Buttons extenison.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2377

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software, Information Management, Reviews, Thunderbird , contacts sidebar, duplicate remover, extensions, lightning, mozilla, task management, Thunderbird

Some Great Adobe AIR Applications. Already!

Following on from yesterday’s post, What Is Adobe AIR, today I’m going to take a look at some Adobe AIR Applications.

There’s a lot being written at the moment about how to create applications with AIR, but there’s not so much being said about what applications are being built and which ones stand out from the crowd. This is natural in the pre-launch phase. Adobe have to persuade the developer community to adopt AIR or there won’t be any applications developed.

But even at this pre-release stage, I’ve been surprised at the quality of the applications that are available. I think this reflects one of Adobe AIR’s key selling points. We already know how to build AIR applications. They use the skills we web developers already have and add some desktop jazz.

For me, one application in particular stands out above the rest and that is the Google Analytics Reporting Suite created by Nicolas Lierman of Boulevart in Belgium. Now I’m not sure if I’m just being biased because Belgium is my recently adopted home, but I think this really is an excellent application that sums up why AIR will be successful.

Filed under: Adobe Air, Benelux, Free Software, Reviews , adobe, Adobe Air, air, airpress, analytics, bee, kuler, wordpress

Free Fridays #7 Jing Project

I came across a great screen capture project the other day called Jing. It runs on Windows and Mac OS X and is incredibly easy to use because only the essentials have been included in this programme.

You can use Jing to capture screen shots of your computer screen or make videos of what you see on screen. This is a great way of creating a video tutorials, discussing changes to web sites in fact showing someone how to do just about anything online. Screenshots as created as PNG files and you can add arrows, text and highlights to the image to explain the image.

Video is created is SWF format (flash) and there is no delay between creating the screen capture and the file becoming available for use. Audio can be recorded as well if you have a microphone.

Whether you are creating video or a screenshot, one of the nice features is that you just drag a box of any size over the area of screen that you’d like to capture.

Share Your Creations Online

The great strength of Jing is that once you’ve created your screenshot or video you can easily upload it to an online location ready for sharing. The URL where the file has been shared to is immediately available for you to paste into an email or chat programme.

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software, Reviews , camtasia, Free Software, jing, jing project, screen capture, screencast, techsmith, video cast