Auction Ads have been in the lime light for sometime since March 2007, Recently MediaWhiz acquired the company fully from Jeremy Schoemaker for an undisclosed fee. Auction Ads is an advertising widget that serves relevant eBay auctions based on tags placed by the publisher.

As a publisher with Auction Ads, you are paid 100% of eBay affiliate fees. Auction Ads had more than 5,000 publisher within a week and have more than 20,000 publishers registered in their network.

After giving a brief introduction about Auction Ads, I think it’s really an idiot prove system to use, simple and effective! New Publishers who are looking forward to make money online can now breath on Auction Ads.

The All new 2.0 Design For Auction Ads
If you were a long supporter with Auction Ads and have seen their makeover through the months from the ads that were with poor resolution, distorted and stretchy looking advertising items to the all new refreshing 2.0 look, which will allow better images shown so that you can attract more clicks on your site, given the staff a few more weeks before everything is up!

Worry no more as you will get double the performance than before!
AuctionAds was very confident to say that they have “doubled the size of our hardware infrastructure and optimized it to ensure near 100% uptime of ad serving“. This acts as an assurances to all of us that the problems we faced previous would be eliminated by their dedicated hardware.

Why should i sign up with Auction Ads?
Many people will think Auction Ads President Patrick Gavin paid me to review them, but all i can say is they would not be looking at me because i am not a big earner with them, Maybe if i am John Chow, i might get few hundred dollars for this review or maybe not?
If my memory served me well, i remembered giving them a drop when they were having problems with their servers and now i see the prospect of this program coming back with its assurances with Media Whiz which i see as a way to make more money online, don’t tell me this is not what you wanted “make more money“!

Managing my Auction Ads Account
A little run through on how to actually setup your account which would help speed up the amount of time used to further optimize your ads. Its so simple there is no need to use multiple screenshots for elaborations.

Click on “Campaigns” and start to create a campaign to monitor your click results and impressions made. You can have multiple campaigns going on at the same time, there should be a limit but i have yet to create to that amount so i can’t tell you the limits.

After creating your campaign, lets give it a name “Money“. Click on “Get Code” to setup your ads. There are 3 columns which you need to fill up to create your very first auction codes.

• Ad Keywords: Place your keywords within this box and to breakup keywords leave a “,” in between every word created.
• Ad Campaign: You have created “Money” as your campaign, choose it so that you can track the stats.
• Ad Type: Though after the new implementation with the web 2.0 design, the older design still is around and is still being offered as a choice, why is this so? Let me explain to you later.

Who do i choose? The New or stick to the old ads?
Auction Ads retained the services for the older banners though it brings much distorted picture but the older banners had features to customize compared to the new ones. It really depends on individual pick.

The High and Low of Older Banners

High

1. You have a wide choice of ads sizes that you can chose to fit your site.
2. You have the ability to customize your background,descriptions and links colour.
3. You will be able to blend your ads better on your site.

Low

1. The Ads are showing poor quality pictures which could affect your earnings, better images are require to pull of a convincing purchase.

The High and Low of New Banners

High

1. It gives a much attractive and sleek look which could attract more clicks.
2. There is a cool range of colours to choose for your ads.

Low

1. There is a limited number of ads style i can choice which is the vertical or horizontal style followed by a maximum of 3 ads shown.

You have setup your first hand and have placed it in your blog, but realised most of your ads are not rotating and also you made a discovery that your ads are always having many bids at $0.01, how do you increase them and set a minimum amount to improve your earnings?

Optimize your Auction Ads!
All these tips and tricks were found on Auction Ads Blog which is broken into parts during their updates, I decided to compile it to look good under one post. Here i go!

New Window Open Function
This feature does not look new but it allows your ads to open in another tab or window page.In your own code it will look like this ” auctionads_option=”n”; ” . This means your ads will open in another page or tab.

Rotate your keywords Automatically in one banner
Bored and tired of seeing same ads in every pages, then you can use this function which allows your keywords within to rotate by itself. While Keying in your keywords to “Ad Keywords” add “;” in between every keyword. The code reflected should be like this

“auctionads_ad_kw = “keyword 1;keyword 2;keyword 3;keyword 4″; ”

Optimizing auction prices to make more money
This can be trick, it can decrease the number of clicks on one hand but on the other hand it can help you earn more with just 1 single purchase. “minprice:___ and maxprice:___“. The code will look like this:

“auctionads_ad_kw = “Xbox 360 minprice:50″;” - will generate all relevant items above $50

“auctionads_ad_kw = “X box 360 maxprice:50″;” - will generate all relevant items under $50

Using the best way to convert auctions to cash!
Go back to your account under “Url converter“. Add in a ebay item’s url that you would want to promote or let your readers know about how hot that item is. For example,Brand New Apple iPhone 8GB is up for grab at only $728, would you not want to own a iphone now?

Benefits are way above all and you can outdo your current PPC earnings
Since you take 100% affiliate earnings as a publisher, and you will see that PPC clicks are seriously pathetic, maybe a maxmium of $2/day with 1000/day unless your site brings in tons of traffic, otherwise giving Auction Ads a try would not mean any harm at all!

Plugins, Modules and Widgets readily available

• AuctionAds Joomla Module - Download Joomla Module
• Wordpress 2.2 AuctionAds Widget - Download WP 2.2 Widget
• AuctionAds Easy Wordpress Plugin - Download WP Plugin
• AuctionAds Drupal Module - Download Drupal Module

*Too bad for Bloggers, we don’t have widget readily available for auctions ads, maybe someone would create one one day! Do contact me and i will have you added in this list and contact Auction ads, cause they will give T-shirt to the one who creates plugins or widgets for them!

Give AuctionAds a try, its one of the best program available and signup now to start making money online! Do you have something to share, do share with us a tips that you have used before or comments on this program?

source:www.etienneteo.com/2007/08/make-money-online-with-auction-ads-new.html

Tags: age, Apple, ark, banner, blogger, cd, CLOSED, CMS, code, count, download, Drupal, etc, Free, Hardware, IDE, image, Internet, Joomla, list, memory, Module, modules, Money Making Resources, mount, option, page, PHP, Plugins, PROM, RAM, SEO, server, Tips and tricks, traffic, Web 2.0, WordPress

Recently I received an email from Caroline Middlebrook promoting her free guide on creating mini sites with WordPress, I’m not looking at creating mini sites here but there is some good tips there none the less, especially for people that are new to WP. Any way onto my check list:

• Install CMS Software, in my case this is WordPress so some of these points will be specific to that platform though other CMSs will likely have an equivilent.
• Choose and set your permalink structure, this is the format of the URL for each post. I like to use: /%year%%monthnum%/%postname%.htm as this means posts are grouped (artificially) in a folder per month and are only one directory level away from your sites root.
• Enable Askimet antispam and make sure that you have a valid key.
• Install tracking software, be it Google Analytics or something else. You can generally either use a plugin to add it to your site or add a bit of Javascript to your themes footer.php. I need to find (or write) a plugin that works with the latest code version of Analytics as maintaining multiple themes will become a pain
• Create a new FeedBurner account to track your subscribers and follow the instructions (installing another plugin) to make your feed URL point at the burnt one.
• Install and automate a backup system. A good method is to use the plugin WP-DB-Backup and get the files emailed to you on a daily basis. This is where having a free email account with large storage space can come in very handy.
  • General Options -> Weblog Title - Set to whatever the title of your blog is
  • General Options -> Tagline: A short (sentence) description of the site
  • Reading Options -> Show at most: 8 posts, I find 8 is enough for my blogs (the default is 10)
  • Reading Options -> Syndicate the most recent 20 posts - This is double the default but gives new subscribers plenty to read
  • Reading Options -> For each article, show: Full text - I find showing the full text is the best way to keep subscribers, it does mean you get less visitors to your site but is worth it in other ways. If you use the more tag you’ll need to install a plugin like this for full feed syndication to work.
  • Discussion Options -> Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 1 or more moderation, I go for all other default options but do manually approve ALL comments with links in

Next up is to through the other options and change any accordingly, these are the ones I find are worth changing:

Once your blog is set-up it’s a good idea to keep it running (doh), Vladimir has some great tips on insuring your blog.

I will be adding to this list as I remember, learn and discover new things that I should be doing. If you have any suggestions for the list please let us know via comment.

This post is just about setting up new blogs, I will go into promotion and launching in a future post.

Tags: adding, age factors, Bank-of-America, CMS, disk cylinder, Free, PDF Generator, QuickTime, solaris 8, Tutorial, WordPress

Getting to the front page of these sites is not as difficult as it seems. I have been successful with digg and del.icio.us (and not so much with Reddit though the same steps should apply to it as well) multiple times and have thus compiled a list of steps that have helped me succeed:
Delicious add to del.icio.us

1 Pay attention to your Headlines

Many great articles go unnoticed on social bookmarking sites because their headline is not catchy enough. Your headline is the first (and very often the only) thing users will see from your article, so if you don’t make the effort to provide a catchy headline, your chances of getting to the front page are small.
Here are some examples to start with :-

Original headline : The Two Types of Cognition
Modified Headline : Learn to Understand Your Own Intelligence

Original headline: Neat way to organize and find anything in your purse instantly!
Modified Headline : How to Instantly Find Anything in Your Purse

Here is a good blog post that should help you with your headlines.

2 Write a meaningful & short description
The headline is very important to draw attention but if you want to keep that attention, a meaningful description is vital. The description must be slightly provocative because this draws more attention but still, never use lies and false facts to provoke interest. For instance, if your write “This article will reveal to you the 10 sure ways to deal with stress once and forever and live like a king from now on.� visitors will hardly think that your story is true and facts-based.

You also might be tempted to use a long tell-it-all paragraph to describe your great masterpiece but have in mind that many users will not bother to read anything over 100-150 characters. Additionally, some of the social bookmarking sites limit descriptions, so you’d better think in advance how to describe your article as briefly as possible.

3 Have a great first paragraph
This is a rule that is always true but for successful social bookmarking it is even more important. If you have successfully passed Level 1 (headlines) and Level 2 (description) in the Catch the User’s Attraction game, don’t let a bad first paragraph make them leave your site.

4 Content is king
However, the first paragraph is not everything. Going further along the chain of drawing (and retaining) users’ attention, we reach the Content is King Level. If your articles are just trash, bookmarking them is useless. You might cheat users once but don’t count on repetitive visits. What is more, you can get your site banned from social bookmarking sites, when you persistently post junk.

5 Make it easy for others to vote / bookmark your site
It is best when other people, not you, bookmark your site. Therefore, you must make your best to make it easier for them to do it. You can put a bookmarking button at the end of the article, so if users like your content, they can easily post it. If you are using a CMS, check if there is an extension that allows to add Digg, Del.icio.us, and other buttons but if you are using static HTML, you can always go to the social bookmarking site and copy the code that will add their button to your pages.
Here is a link that should help you add Links for Del.icio.us, Digg, and More to your pages.

6 Know when to submit
The time when you submit can be crucial for your attempts to get to the front page. On most social bookmarking sites you have only 24 hours to get to the front page and stay there. So, if you post when most users (and especially your supporters) are still sleeping, you are wasting valuable time. By the time they get up, you might have gone to the tenth page. You’d better try it for yourself and see if it works for you but generally posting earlier than 10 a.m. US Central Time is not good. Many people say that they get more traffic around 3 p.m. US Central Time. Also, workdays are generally better in terms of traffic but the downside is that you have more competitors for the front page than on weekends.

7 Submit to the right category
Sometimes a site might not work for you because there is no right category for you. Or because you don’t submit to the right category – technology, health, whatever – but to categories like General, Miscellaneous, etc. where all unclassified stuff goes. And since these categories fill very fast, your chance to get noticed decreases.

8 Build a top-profile
Not all users are equal on social bookmarking sites. If you are an old and respected user who has posted tons of interesting stuff, this increases the probability that what you submit will get noticed. Posting links to interesting articles on other sites is vital for building a top-profile. Additionally, it is suspicious, when your profile has links to only one site. Many social bookmarking sites frown when users submit their own content because this feels like self-promotion.

9 Cooperate with other social bookmarkers
The Lonely Wolf is a suicidal strategy on sites like StubleUpon, Digg, Netscape. Many stories make it to the front page not only because they are great but because they are backed up by your network of friends. If in the first hours after your submittal you get at least 15 votes from your friends and supporters, it is more likely that other users will vote for you. 50 votes can get you to the top page of Digg.

10 Submit in English
Linguistic diversity is great but the majority of users are from English-speaking countries and they don’t understand exotic languages. So, for most of the social bookmarking sites submitting anything in a language different from English is not recommendable. The languages that are at an especial disadvantage are Chinese, Arabic, Slavic languages and all the other that use non-latin alphabet. German, Spanish, French are more understandable but still they are not English. If you really must submit your story (i.e. because you need the backlink), include an English translation at least of the title. But the best way to proceed with non-English stories is to post them on where they belong. Check this link for a list of non-English sites.

11 Never submit old news
Submitting old news will not help you in becoming a respected user. Yesterday’s news is history. But if you still need to submit old stuff, consider feature articles, howtos and similar pieces that are up-to-date for a long time.

12 Check your facts
You must be flattered that users read your postings but you will hardly be flattered when users prove that you haven’t got the facts right. In addition to sarcastic comments, you might also receive negative votes for your story, so if you want to avoid this, check you facts - or your readers will do it.

13 Check you spelling
Some sites do not allow to edit your posts later, so if you misspell the title, the URL, or a keyword, it will stay this way forever.

14 Not all topics do well
But sometimes even great content and submitting to the right category do not push you to the top. One possible reason could be that your stories are about unpopular topics. Many sites have topics that their users love and topics that don’t sell that well. For instance, Apple sells well on Digg and The War in Iraq on Netscape. Negative stories - about George Bush, Microsoft, evil multinational companies, corruption and crime also have a chance to make it to the front page. You can’t know these things in advance but some research on how many stories tagged with keywords like yours have made the front page in the last year or so can give you a clue.

15 Have Related Articles / Popular Articles
Traffic gurus joke that traffic from social bookmarking sites is like an invasion – the crowds pour in and in a day or two they are gone. Unfortunately this is true – after your listing rolls from the front page (provided that you reached the front page), the drop in traffic is considerable. Besides, many users come just following the link to your article, have a look at it and then they are gone. One of the ways to keep them longer on your site is to have links to Related Articles / Popular Articles or something similar that can draw their attention to other stuff on the site and make them read more than one article.

16 RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing
RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions, affiliate marketing are all areas in which the traffic from social bookmarking sites can help you a lot. Many people who come to your site and like it, will subscribe to RSS feeds and/or your newsletter. So, you need to put these in visible places and then you will be astonished at the number of new subscriptions you got on the day when you were on the front page of a major social bookmarking site.

17 Do not use automated submitters
After some time of active social bookmarking, you will discover that you are spending hours on end posting links. Yes, this is a lot of time and using automated submitters might look like the solution but it isn’t. Automated submitters often have malware in them or are used for stealing passwords, so unless you don’t care about the fate of your profile and don’t mind being banned, automated submitters are not the way to go.

18 Respond to comments on your stories
Social bookmarking sites are not a newsgroup but interesting articles can trigger a pretty heated discussion with hundreds of comments. If your article gets comments, you must be proud. Always respond to commends on your stories and even better – post comments on other stories you find interesting. This is a way to make friends and to create a top-profile.

19 Prepare your server for the expected traffic
This is hardly a point of minor importance but we take for granted that you are hosting your site on a reliable server that does not crash twice a day. But have in mind that your presence on the front page of a major social bookmarking site can drive you a lot traffic, which can cause your server to crash – literally!
I remember one of the times I was on the front page on Digg, I kept restarting Apache on my dedicated server because it was unable to cope with the massive traffic. I have many tools on my site and when the visitors tried them, this loaded the server additionally.
Well, for an articles site getting so much traffic is not so devastating but if you are hosting on a so-so server, you’d better migrate your site to a machine that can handle a lot of simultaneous hits. Also, check if your monthly traffic allowance is enough to handle 200-500,000 or even more visitors. It is very amateurish to attract a lot of visitors and not be able to serve them because your server crashed or you have exceeded your bandwidth!

20 The snowball effect
But despite the differences in the likes of the different social bookmarking communities, there are striking similarities. You will soon discover that if a post is popular on one of the major sites, this usually drives it up on the other big and smaller sites. Usually it is Digg posts that become popular on StumbleUpon and Reddit but there are many other examples. To use this fact to your best advantage, you may want to concentrate your efforts on getting to the front page of the major players only and bet on the snowball effect to drive you to the top on other sites.
An additional benefit of the snowball effect is that if your posting is interesting and people start blogging about it, you can get tons of backlinks from their blogs. This happened to me and the result was that my PR jumped to 6 on the next update.

Article Directory: www.articlecube.com

Tags: age, apache, Apple, ark, CMS, code, count, Crime, dev, Digg, etc, howto, IDE, Other Sites, page, Passwords, ping, proc, PROM, search, SEO, server, Sites, technology, traffic

 
The TYPO3 Core Team announces version 4.1.6 of the TYPO3 Enterprise Content Management System.
TYPO3 version 4.1.6 is ready for download. It is a maintenance release
of version 4.1 and therefore contains only bugfixes.

A total of 21 issues has been resolved ranging from subjects like Inline Relational Record Editing (IRRE) over Indexed Search (Backend module DBAL compliance) to the CSV export of the list module.

Also, the central command line invocation script cli_dispatch.phpsh which is used to start up things like the Indexed Search Crawler or the Clean Up Tools (tx_lowlevel_cleaner) has been fixed to work flawlessly on Windows systems now. Issues with ignoring extension constraints in the Extension Manager have also been resolved.

For details about the release, see:
http://wiki.typo3.org/index.php/TYPO3_4.1.6

Tags: CMS, content management, core team, enterprise content management system, free cms, typo free, Typo3, Typo3

Wednesday, 26 March 2008

During conversations with clients over the last few months, one key question keeps coming up: “should I use Joomla 1.0 or Joomla 1.5?” In fact, I can trace the first time I was asked that question back to October 2006. Now that 1.5 has officially launched, I tend to point the non-technically minded to 1.0 and those who don’t mind dealing with a few bugs to 1.5.However, until this week I don’t think I’ve found a compelling reason for anyone to use 1.5 rather than 1.0. That may have changed: I’ve had the chance to do some reading about the direction of other projects. I found one theme in common … lots of other projects also aiming to provide a great CMS together with a great forum. Currently its an either or situation. You can have a great CMS in Joomla but you’re stuck with Fireboard. You can have a great forum in VBulletin but you’ll have lackluster content management.

The Forum and CMS Integration Projects

• VBulletin is looking to add blogs and is able to become a portal with vBadvanced and a social networking site with its new features.
• Drupal is able to extend its relatively basic forum with DrupalVB.
• Simple Machines Forum are planning a CMS to add to their forum.
• Joomla has two projects that aim to integrate it with phpBB3.

 

I can see Joomla coming out on top in this battle. Joomla and Simple Machines have and advantage because they will be available for free whereas a full VBulletin installation can easily cost over $500. Joomla then has the upper-hand over Simple Machines because SMF will need to build their CMS from scratch.

 

I’m tempted to think that that a successful integration with phpBB3 will become the killer app that persuades a large number of people to upgrade to Joomla 1.5.

Do you agree? Is Joomla well positioned to beat these rivals? Are there other compelling reasons to upgrade to 1.5?

Update, a Challenge and Free Links

OK, Barrie from CompassDesigns has answered and he thinks that Joomsuite Content can be the killer app for Joomla 1.5.

 

This is my challenge to you … post what you think will be Joomla 1.5’s killer app. Then drop a link in the comments and I’ll add an additional link to your site right here.

Update 2

The developers of one bridge are asking for donations to help finish the project. More at Rocketwerx.com.

Tags: age, ark, CMS, content management, dev, Drupal, Forums, Free, IDE, image, Joomla, joomla 1.0, joomla 1.5, joomla.org, PHP, PhpBB3, Plugins, Portals, RocketWerx