Archive for February, 2008

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Edit CSS

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

When i first started out with my first website, i knew nothing about CSS let alone website design. So over to the forums, learn’t basic CSS and installed EditCSS. EditCSS is a Firefox add-on where you can make changes to your stylesheet and see the results in real time.

For a beginner there are thousands of free Wordpress and Joomla templates out there, but i noticed that most of the ones i liked, there was just one or two little things i did not like about it and just kept on searching for one i could use.

That is actually what got me into CSS in the first place, i was sick of seeing the same templates over and over again on different websites.

When you run this add on it brings up a left hand sidebar where you can make changes to the CSS of any page and you see the results straight away. ( See picture below )

Say i didn’t like the colour of my left and right sidebar of my template and wanted to change it, but i am not sure of what it will look like, let alone what i am doing to my template!

So i open EditCSS, find the section i want to edit change the colour of my sidebar.

edit_css

Oooops, doesn’t look too good now does it, better change it back.

That change took 2 seconds, not only can you make CSS changes before implementing them on your website and seeing the effect, it can save you time too. At the moment i dont think you can save changes and upload the stylesheet but it is still a usefull tool to help you learn CSS.

Now the evil side come out! Whose website can i change… hehehe

I was going to do Google, but thought i better not.

If you are a beginner to CSS and just want to make changes without worrying about damage to your website, this is just one of a few Firefox CSS addons around, just search here for one you feel comfortable using.

Posted in Website Design | 4 Comments »

Affiliate Marketing

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Well we have finally decided to take the plunge and look into affiliate marketing in our journey to make money online.

And guess what? We think we have found the perfect answer, Neverblueads.com

After weeks of tests and research, we are happy to announce that we got the call. Yes you know that dreaded phone call you hope you never get.

In the past , when we got rejected by advertising companies because this blog is not even two months old, for some reason we were sort of worried about actually speaking to a person on the phone. I think the reason is most companies deal with you by email and it is not so personal being rejected by email, i just hit the delete button and move on, but being rejected by an actually person is more personal.

But Neverblueads actually took the time to call us in Australia and not only asked us about our sites statistics ( which i am sure they could have got from some hi-tech software program ) but asked what our goals are and what they could offer us.

So thanks to Neverblueads.com we can now proceed onto the next phase, try to make decent money online.

The main goal of our website is not only to make money online, but show beginners how to do this with us going through all the trials and reporting honestly on the outcome.

But! We have 4 conditions:

1) As we have never done this before it must be easy so beginners like us can do it.
2) We only want to use one or two affiliate network companies. It has to be a simply process and checking 5 different websites for our revenue figures is just time consuming.
3) Works with Google Adsense. ( at least till we get to the $100 pay out amount )
4) It all must be done FREE.

We shall be starting a series of posts on affiliate marketing and shall be showing you, step by step, how we make money online. We will show you all the methods we use, again all this will be done free. We will be running Neverblueads on two sites, adsenseaddict and our online store zipposuperstore.com.

Signup to NeverblueAds today and Make More Money!

Eventually if all goes to plan we will also use Google’s Adwords to promote the affiliates’ products, but this will be depending on profits raised.

So if you would like to follow our journey and keep up to date with how we are progressing, you can subscribe via RSS or email.

Posted in Make Money Online | 7 Comments »

Zipposuperstore.com

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

Seeing that one of the categories of this blog is website reviews, we thought it was about time we did a review of our other website zipposuperstore.com.

The Beginning

Zipposuperstore was started about 2 1/2 years ago. We are an Australian website that sells zippo lighters online only. Our site is listed on Google.com and Google.com.au pages 1 and 2 for many of its main keywords/phrases, which attracts about 75% of our traffic. At the moment this is our main revenue source, with an average monthly profit of $100 – $150 a month. Adsense was poor to start with and after implementing a few tricks, this is starting to pick up.

First Impression

At first glance zipposuperstore.com is a very plain site, but actually that was our aim. After trying many Joomla templates, it is this one that has really worked out for us. We want visitors to purchase zippo lighters from us or visit our other interesting pages not be over come by flashy ads.

Some of the additions we have used to attract visitors to our site is our zippo collection pages. Zippo collectors can submit their collections to us and we will place them on our site, using Picasa Web Album. We then place them in a sliding picture show, as seen here.
Single pictures of your favorite zippo lighter are also welcome and we will place these in a community folder with your name and lighter info. Sort of like a rotating montage of zippo lighters.

A cool thing about submitting your zippo pics to us, is that due to the search engine optimization of zipposuperstore.com, the title of your page can be anything from say Toms Zippo Collection to Toms favorite zippo, So not only do you get your zippo lighter pictures on display but you also might have your name displayed in a google search for zippo.

Another addition to our site, now not only can collectors email thier Zippo pics to us and we will display them in our Zippo collection area, they can head on over to our Frappr Zippo collectors map and leave their name, a pic and a message in the ’shoutbox’. You can see it up and running here.

Navigation 

Navigation around the site is fairly easy, with only 1 or 2 clicks to display the pages you would like to see. Most of the site is well laid out and is very standard.

zipposuperstore

Here are the some average statistics for zipposuperstore.com.

1500 visits / month
9000 page views / month
5.8 pages / visits
30.68% bounce rate
4:58 avg time on site

While these stats are not outstanding, we think it is ok for this niche. We would love to hear some comments on what others think of our zipposuperstore.

In future posts we will be doing a review on Frappr maps and we will reveal the tips which almost doubled our Adsense income, so if you like to keep up to date with our posts, you can subscribe via RSS or email.

Posted in Website Reviews | 1 Comment »

Make Money With Yuwie

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

Here at adsenseaddict we are always trying something new and believe in keeping our readers up to date with our never ending quest to make money online,

Today we just signed up with Yuwie.com

By using the same format of MySpace, Yuwie utilizes the social scene to promote adsense and advertising, then offers revenue sharing to all its users. What does this mean for the average user? Simple It means that by using Yuwie you can earn money. Sounds simple…that’s because it is simple.

They claim it is the new social networking website that pays its users just for using it. Yuwie.com is 100% free and is similar to most of the other social networking websites, but the major difference from the rest of them is that you can make money online with Yuwie.

“You are paid to do everything that you would normally do on other social networking websites. You get paid to blog, get paid to upload pictures, get paid to update your profile, get paid to send messages, get paid to post comments. You get paid whenever someone else views your profile, views your photos, views your blog, views all your friends, views all your comments. You also get paid when you bring other people to the site. You get paid for every time they use site. You even get paid for the people that you bring to the site”.

With all the “paid” words, you hope you bloody well will get paid. So is Yuwie a scam? From the amount of research i have done so far, there seems to be more positive reviews then negative.

If you sign up people, and they sign up people and so forth, it can add up quick if you put in the effort and visit all your friends and invite new ones to join. From the looks of things you can earn about $0.50 per referral. If you have 100 referrals you can earn $50 each month without doing anything.

yuwie_stats

At first look it reminds me of the old pyramid schemes.

Click Here to try Yuwie free

We will let all our readers know weekly how this is progressing and If you would like to keep up to date with our Yuwie trial please subscribe via RSS or email.

Posted in Make Money Online | 1 Comment »

My Top Ten

Friday, February 15th, 2008

This post is a bit off the topic on how to make money online, but i was going through my record collection today. I was getting it ready to add it my collection website and when i had a thought. ( and yes i do have them occasionally )

With all the lists going around at the moment, i would list my Top Ten Albums that i own. Some are records, yes that’s right, i still listen to records. There is just something about the way a record sounds.

The Top Ten is taken from about 30 albums in my collection and i can only choose one album from a band . I will also add a few of my favorite songs from each album.

10: Credence Clearwater Revival – Cosmos Factory: Looking Out My Back Door and Travelin’ Band.

9: Little Feat – Dixie Chicken: Fat Man In The Bath Tub and Dixie Chicken.

8: Bob Dylan – The Genuine Basement Tapes Volume 4: You Aint Goin Nowhere, See You Later Allen Ginsberg and I Am A Teenage Prayer.

7: Deep Purple – Made In Japan: Highway Star, Space Truckin and Smoke On The Water.

6: The Doors – Morrison Hotel: Peace Frog, Road House Blues and You Make Me Real.

5: AC/DC – Back In Black: You Shook Me All Night Long, Hells Bells and Have A Drink On Me.

4: Pink Floyd – Dark Side Of The Moon:Us and Them, Eclipse, Time and The Great Gig In The Sky.

3: Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin IV: Black Dog, Rock and Roll, Misty Mountain Hop, Stairway To Heaven and Going To California.

2: Johnny Cash – At San Quentin: Wreck Of Old 97, Folsom Prison Blues, Boy Named Sue, San Quentin, Wanted Man and Old Account Was Settled Long Ago.

1: The Band – The Last Waltz: Up On Cripple Creek, Such A Night, Down South In New Orleans, Mystery Train, Evangeline, The Weight ( take a load of Fanny ) and Ophelia.

Other albums just outside the top ten include

AC/DC – Highway To Hell ( RIP Bon )
The Who – Who Are You
Elton John – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Fleetwood Mac – Rumors
Grateful Dead – Skeletons In The Closet
Devo – Q:Are We Not Men? No We Are Devo!
Eagles – Hotel California
Rolling Stones – Paint It Black

In future posts i might do a review on some of these albums, explaining why i like each record. So if you would like to see a review of these albums or future posts, please subscribe via RSS or email.

Posted in My Ramble | 4 Comments »

Trying To Make Money Online

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Happy birthday to us, Happy birthday to us. Adsenseaddict is proud to announce that we are one month old. And no, there will be no contest, so you can continue reading if you like.

The idea behind adsenseaddict.com was basically, boredom and the need for a challenge.

The Boredom Part:
I have been running an online website for about 2 years now, and once it was setup using Joomla as its CMS platform and SEO was done, not much work was required after i stopped using ebay.

Zipposuperstore.com has only a page rank of 1, but is on google.com, google.com.au and many other google site pages 1 -2 for its main keywords/phrases and is going quite well in visitors and sales for this niche. More on this will be explained in detail next post, when we actually do a website review on our own site.

i am hearing the sniggers already :)

The Challenge Part:
This is where adsenseaddict.com was born. Many webmaster forums give advice to beginners to stay away from the “make money online” niche as there are millions of websites out there already, some well established, that you are going to have to compete against.

Well, if i can get onto the first few page of google, completely FREE and starting from scratch, why cant i do it using the make money online niche? Only time will tell i suppose.

I did have a 6 month plan in place before starting this blog website, but since we started using Entrecard.com i think i will have to revise this. At the end of 3 months, my plan was for 2000 visitors a month and to make $0.50US a day from Adsense, but thanks to Entrecard, we have nearly achieved this after 1 month, so now we can apply some of our other methods to try and make money online.

Thanks must also be given to those who have supported us in out first month. I don’t think we would be where we are now without your wonderful insights into blogging and making money online.

If you are also just starting out and would like to follow our journey into making money online, you can subscribe to our RSS service. We will be giving honest opinions and reviews into different ways to make money from your blog.

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Posted in Make Money Online | 4 Comments »

PowerDropping.com Review

Saturday, February 9th, 2008

Having been an Entrecard user for only three weeks, i have noticed a lot of websites take forever to load. These sites are full of videos and adverts that take up to 30 seconds before the site is fully shown.

The answer: www.powerdropping.com

PowerDropping.com is a new site dedicated to helping EC users by providing two main features,
1) To provide a constantly updated resource of the 300 fastest loading websites in the Entrecard community whose Entrecards are positioned above the fold.

2) To reward those websites who both prominently display their Entrecard and keep their load times at a minimum by highlighting them and therefore sending them traffic, Entrecard drops, new readers and new subscribers.

Another nice little addition is the link to purchase EC credits via eBay. If you need to purchase a few credits to get your advertising campaign started you can do it via PowerDropper.com. This is a good way to get your website on the more popular blogs, hopefully making you more money online.

There is also a FAQ section which answers the most popular questions, but if you need more advice on EC you can also visit here for more advanced tips on becoming a power dropper.

powerdropping

Overall the navigation is straight forward and i think it is a very clean website. The colours are not overpowering and blend in well.

PowerDropping.com is definitely one website that i will be bookmarking and is a must for the EC newbie.

Posted in Website Reviews | 4 Comments »

AdsenseAddict

Saturday, February 9th, 2008

This is just a quick update on changes we are making to our blog site to attract more visitors and hopefully start to make money online.

For Entrecard users we have added a special feature, U drop, we follow. If a card is dropped at adsenseaddict.com we will return the compliment.

For those who would like to leave a comment, we have two new features, the first: we have added a “no follow free plugin”. The purpose is to encourage comments by rewarding commenters with “dofollow” links which boosts their rank in search engine.

The second feature we have just added is the “CommentLuv Wordpress Plugin” This plugin will visit the feed of the comment author and attempt to scrape the last post they made and display it under their comment, this way we can encourage people to join in the discussion of our posts and give something back straight away.

The plugin looks for a feed in the default location of your blog, for Wordpress users this will be /feed/ or /?feed=rss, blogspot users get /feeds/posts/default, web-log blogs are now included thanks to Edward De Leau. If it can’t find a feed there then it will search your <head> part of your website for an alternate link (<link rel=”alternate”) and use that instead.

The plugin retrieves your last post at the time of the comment being posted and appends the extra text just before the comment gets saved to the database, this way it doesn’t put any extra load on the database or server other than the effort required add another 60 or so characters to the comment content.

Since we launched adsenseaddict.com three weeks ago, we knew next to nothing about blogging. Thanks to Entrecard.com we have learnt so much and we would like to thank all those fellow bloggers who took the time to visit our site, left a comment or let us be part of your social bookmarking sites such as mybloglog.com and blogcatalog.com.

Posted in Blogging | 5 Comments »

jtpratt.com Review

Friday, February 8th, 2008

Since joining Entrecard.com i have seen numerous sites telling you how to make money online but not actually explaining how they do it. Most tell you join this site or try this ad company while some sites just tell you how much a site made for them.

If you are a beginner and you are interested in how to make money online from home you should check out jtpratt.com

In their latest series of posts, they are explaining step by step on how to set up your own BANS site. Every detail will be covered, and as the owner explains; “I’ll write about how to customize and promote this brand new site and you’ll get to watch whether or not I can make money with “Build a Niche Store”

But i think the description of this website is what drew me in. “Make more money blogging and with niche sites by Learning from My Mistakes”.

Good, better him than me making the mistakes was my first thought.

As i have only been blogging a short time i found www. jtpratt.com a great site for all the latest blogging tips, marketing ideas and general website advice.

Posted in Website Reviews | 3 Comments »

Website Design Tips

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

Now please let me start off by saying i am not a profesional designer, it actually takes me a few weeks of adjusting templates to get it right. But on Entrecard.com i have seen a lot of websites i actually leave before they load.

So having said that, I would like to offer these website design tips,

Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarters of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and make you the most amount of money possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.
i cannot even think about the number of sites i have left even before it loads.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website is cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

I know i am going to cop some hostile feedback with this post, but if you want me to drop a Ecard on your site, please it should load a bit quicker than 10 seconds, if not i will just exit your site before dropping .

Posted in Website Design | 9 Comments »

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