I have been doing some experiment with my Bidvertiser ad placements and few days ago, I was able to increase my earnings by over 300%. The ads are placed on a particular niche image gallery site.

The images are displayed on a 728 pixel table. There are four images per row. What worked best for me was to place a borderless leaderboard 728×90 just below the first set of 4 images. I blended in the ad background with the page’s and it worked like miracle. However, this format did not work for text based pages. A 336×280 ad format below the article worked the best for those pages. Now, for the first time, Bidvertiser was earning me more than Adsense from this image gallery.

Prior to this placement, I tried placing a 120×600 skyscraper on the left side of the page. A 468×60 banner under the images. But non of these worked as good as the leaderboard on top. The skyscraper was doing good but not noteworthy.

I have collected a list of free goodies that webmasters can use in order to enhance their sites. Here it goes:

• For thosands of free stock photos, go to www.sxc.hu
• To see how many times a certain keyword was searched, go to http://inventory.overture.com. This is a great tool for finding out what people are looking for.
• For a site to rank well on search engines, you need meta tags. For a free meta tag generator, go to http://www.addme.com/meta.htm
• To submit your site to major search engines, go to http://tools.addme.com/servlet/s0new
• To learn how to make money online from the experts, go to http://forums.digitalpoint.com
• For some nice dhtml scripts go to www.dynamicdrive.com. These scripts will really spice up your site. But don’t use too much of it.
• For free CGI scripts, go to www.cgi-resources.com

I will add more free resources available to webmasters on a later post.

Do you know which sites are the most popular in the world? Here are the top ten as per Alexa:

1. Yahoo.com – What started as a link directory in 1994 by two individuals now reaches the largest audience of Internet surfers worldwide!
2. MSN.com – Started in 1995. Services more than 400 million unique visitors per month.
3. Google.com – No need to introduce, everyone knows about Google.  Services over 3 billion queries per month! The king of search engines.
4. Baidu.com – Baidu is the leading Chinese language search engine. Receives more than 60 million hits per day!
5. Youtube.com – Popular video sharing site. Debuting in 2005, fairly a new comer, now serves over 100 million clips per day!
6. Myspace.com – Social networking website. Over 230,000 people register with myspace per day!
   
7. Live.com – Search portal by Microsoft. Reaches about 140 million visits per day.
8. Orkut.com – Social network service run by Google. Receives about 1.3 million visitors per day.
9. QQ.com – Provider of popular free instant messaging computer program in China. Services over 5.490 hundred million accounts.
10. Sina.com.cn – Leading news and content provider for Greater China and overseas Chinese. Over 230 million registered users worldwide and 500 million page views per day.

Apple has announced that Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista, can damage your iPods. Currently, both companies are working to come up with a solution for this problem. Apple has suggested that iPod users don’t upgrade to Windows Vista until this issue is resolved. This could take few weeks time.

The following problems are associated with Windows Vista and iPods:

• Some songs from iTunes will not play in Vista
• iPods can become corrupted during unplugging from PC, even when using the Safely Remove Hardware feature
• Contacts and Calendar features may malfunction

So, all the Windows Vista and iPod lovers, wait till they can get along until you can use them both together. There are currently 90 million iPod users worldwide!

Among the cheap large screen MP4 players, Glacier stands out to be the hottest. These players come in 1 or 2 gig sizes and weigh only 49 g. Unlike other nano clones which use 2.5 mm earphone jacks, Glacier digital MP4 players use 3.5 mm standard earphone jacks. Below, you will find a detailed review of this player.

Pros:

• Large, clear, 2 inch TFT LCD screen.
• Built in stereo.
• Can use Nokia phone batteries.
• Great battery life, people have recorded upto 12 hours of continous play with powersaving features.
• Upto 20 hours of high quality voice recording.
• Plays audio, videos, games, FM radio, etc like other digital mp4 players.
• Displays text, photos, addresses, etc.
• Re-chargeable battery through USB or wall charger.
• Nice design with very responsive buttons.
• Affordable price, under $60 for a 2 gb.

Cons:

• USB wire is little too short.
• USB cover is hard to open. Needs a lot of force.
• Battery cover is bit loose.
• Hard to insert 3.5 mm earphones in the jack. Needs a lot of pushing.
• Comes with very few games.
• Some people had problems with charging the battery to its full. This is an ongoing problem with MP4 players. Here is a solution in case the battery doesn’t charge completely and shows only half full. Make sure you charge the battery for atleast 4 hours before the first use. The player should be ON during charging (don’t use the main ON/OFF switch to turn the player on/off. Press the PLAY button for a few seconds to perform the same function). Drain the battery completely. Now, charge again for 4 hours. This time the battery should be fully charged. If it doesn’t, drain the battery again and re-charge. Try the wallcharger incase the USB doesn’t do the job.

Here are some tricks for placing Google Adsense ads on your site:

• Place ad boxes sized 336×280 directly below or above articles. These ads receive most of the clicks if your site provides information in text form.
• Remove any borders around the ads. This will blend in the ads with your contents and increase CTR.
• Make ad background the same as your page background.
• Make the link colours of ads same as your page link colours.
• Place link units in the menu bar along with your other navigational links. You may also place a horizontal link unit under your top header.
• You may rotate different ad colours and experiment. Works good for many sites.
• Place a 120×600 skyscraper on the left side of your site, where the menu bar is usually located. However, try to do this for your inner pages, not for the main page. You want your visitors to stay on the site and not leave right away.
• Do not clutter the pages with too many ads. This is very annoying.
• Place a search box on the header and footer of your pages.
• Place an image ad side by side with text ads of same size.
• Avoid using 468×60 ad size. Most of the people simply ignore this size nowadays.
• Use a floating table to wrap around text around your ads.
• Ad channel information for each ad you place. Keep track of which placements are receiving more clicks.

I will post more Google adsense tips later on. Meanwhile, give these a try.

I received the following article by email today. Just wanted to share it with everyone.

There was a one hour interview on CNBC with Warren Buffet, the second richest man who has donated $31 billion to charity. Here are some very interesting aspects of his life:

1. He bought his first share at age 11 and he now regrets that he started too late!
2. He bought a small farm at age 14 with savings from delivering newspapers.
3. He still lives in the same small 3 bedroom house in mid-town Omaha, that he bought after he got married 50 years ago. He says that he has everything he needs in that house. His house does not have a wall or a fence.
4. He drives his own car everywhere and does not have a driver or security guards around him.
5. He never travels by private jet, although he owns the world’s largest private jet company.
6. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns 63 companies. He writes only one letter each year to the CEOs of these companies, giving them goals for the year. He never holds meetings or calls them on a regular basis.
7. He has given his CEO’s only two rules. Rule number 1: do not lose any of your share holder’s money. Rule number 2: Do not forget rule number 1.
8. He does not socialize with the high society crowd. His past time after he gets home is to make himself some pop corn and watch television.
9. Bill Gates, the world’s richest man met him for the first time only 5 years ago. Bill Gates did not think he had anything in common with Warren Buffet. So he had scheduled his meeting only for half hour. But when Gates met him, the meeting lasted for ten hours and Bill Gates became a devotee of Warren Buffet.
10. Warren Buffet does not carry a cell phone, nor has a computer on his desk.
11. His advice to young people: Stay away from credit cards and invest in yourself.

An amazing individual indeed. To read more about Warren Buffet, visit Wikipedia’s page on Warren Buffet

I came to know about these chinese MP4 players recently while looking for a voice recorder. These iPod nano clones from China include quite a few additional features than traditional Apple iPods. Here are some of the things I have discovered about these players:

Pros:

• Much cheaper than iPods.
• Bright 1.5″ LCD screen. Screen sizes can vary according to players. My iPod clone had the 1.5″. It provides very clear 65,000 colour display. Some of these players contain TFT screens which are more vibrant in colours.
• Lots of additional features besides audio playback. Can play .amv format videos, display text files and jpeg images, games, FM radio, acts as an USB flash drive, voice recorder and more.
• Rechargeable lithium ion battery. Lasts upto 4 hours for audio playback and 2 hours for videos.
• Light weight and easy to carry. Fits easily in a pocket.

Cons:

• If you put files beyond the players memory capacity, the files become corrupted and are very difficult to remove.
• .amv video format is good but not as good as avi or mpeg format. This format plays 10 frames per second. Much like how a webcam displays the video on the screen.
• These players can easily be modified to show 4gb of memory whereas the real capacity is 2gb. Many eBay buyers get fooled by this and end up paying more for a feature that doesn’t exist.
• The wall charger for the battery is not so reliable.
• The battery may die out after about 100 full charges as they are not of good quality. The trick is to not use up the battery completely. Rather, it’s better to recharge after it’s about half done so as not to put too much strain on the battery.
• The instruction manuals are very hard to understand. The English used is terrible.

Some tips for those who are planning to purchase a MP4 player from eBay:

• Check out the seller’s ratings. If you see a lot of negative feedbacks, stay away.
• Don’t fall for a 4 gig player. They are fake 2 gig players.
• Read all the features carefully. They vary from player to player eventhough they may look alike.
• Find out if you get a wall charger that will work in your country. Many chargers are just for UK and not North America.
• I have heard good reviews for Glacier MP4 player. It can use Nokia 3650 batteries.
• For a price breakdown, you shouldn’t be paying more than $35 USD for a 1 gb and $50 for 2 gb. These prices are for 1.5″ screens.

While trying out some alternatives to Google Adsense I decided to give Bidvertiser a shot. Below is my review of Bidvertiser.

The sign up process was very simple and the control panel is also easy to use. I had problems browsing through the tabs using a Netscape browser, however, Firefox and IE worked fine. The stats were pretty good as well. However, it seemed that they didn’t recognize a notable portion of my daily ad impressions. For example, if my commission junction ads were receiving 60,000 impressions per day, Bidvertiser ads would be receiving about 27,000 being on the same page!

In order to place the ads, you have to add an url to your account. That particular URL will be assigned a category and all pages under that URL must display the same ads. So, if your URL falls under cars then all other pages of your site under the same URL must display the same ads about cars regardless of their contents. This is a major disadvantage. Plus, the ads are rarely relevant to my sites.

Nonetheless, I made about one tenth of revenue that I would usually make with Google’s Adsense. So, if one of my site was receiving $400 per month from adsense then I was making around $40/month with only bidvertiser ads on it. However, this was much better than my experience with Searchfeed and Clicksor where I was making way less.

When it comes to getting paid, I never had a problem with them. If your account is above $10, you will get paid through PayPal in the end of the upcoming month. They are very timely with payments.

In conclusion, Bidvertiser is a good choice for those publishers who are not able to use Adsense or were banned from it.

Join Bidvertiser now.