Google Ad Planner Publisher Center was launched earlier this year but I did not really take a good look at it. Now that Google introduces some new ways to reach advertisers, things are getting much more interesting. Publishers are now able to claim sub domains, share more Google Analytics metrics, delegate site ownership and display an Ad Planner Badge.

Basically advertisers are now able to take a good look at your site or blog before they decided to advertise on your blog. When you place your blog under Google Analytics and link it to Google Ad Planner, advertisers will be able to take a good look at your blog performance. Information like page views, unique visitors, total visits, average visits per visitor and average time on site will be display via statistic or numbers. Besides that you’re able to write a detail description regarding you blogs in terms of topic to write and types of advertising offered. Google basically trying to connect advertisers and publishers closer so that advertisers can see clearly where their advertising money is spend on.

It seems to me the only benefits that publisher gets is more exposure to advertisers. That seems to be good news but there is one thing that I’m worried about. That is how much money we will earn if advertisers go through Google Ad Planner Publisher Center and place their advertisement on our blog. I just can’t stop thinking how many % Google will take from the advertisers and how many % are left for publisher. If that is the case, perhaps we might just as well offer our own direct advertising method as an alternative for advertisers. Advertisers who found our blog can either advertise through Google or contact the blog owner directly for a cheaper bargain. Sounds good? I think Google will eventually do something about it if a large chunk of profit is lost. Well, let’s just see what Google do next.

One thing for sure, you’ll definitely gain lots of benefits if you own a blog under Blogspot. Google owns Blogspot. That means Google has total control of the blog hosting under Blogspot, the traffic, analysis data and AdSense earning. In order to encourage more users to Blogspot, Google definitely will share some reasonable benefits to those that are using Blogspot. I’m guessing we’ll be hearing things like “Blogspot rank better and getting lot more traffic then own domain.”

This year 2009 is almost end. Christmas is just a month away. That means long holiday is almost near. Do you prepare to take a long rest in this holiday? Well, before you do that, there are couples of things that we should take note. First, people around the world are getting their year end bonus during this period of time. Second, this is the time when people spend most of their money for season celebration and greetings. That means if you have a product to sell, December is the best month to do promotion.

When people have money, the question you might want to consider is “How do you find them and persuade them to purchase?” When people don’t have money, no matter how good your products, they still can’t purchase. If you’re able to produce a good product, you still have to pick the right time to promote and sell it. Normally the best time will be during special dates or when people have more money to spend. So when is the best and right time? The only time that people normally have money to spend is beginning of every month when salary is out and year end bonus collection day. Bonus collection day normally drops at the end of every year together with December salary day. As for special dates, below is a list of dates when most people will spend more money than ordinary day.

• January 1st New Year Day


• February 14th Valentine’s Day


• March Easter


• May Mother’s Day


• May Father’s Day


• October 3rd Thanksgiving


• October 31st Halloween


• December 25th Christmas

A season promotion discounts with coupons might just be a great way to sell your products. I’m sure right products with right selling time makes a good profit, definitely. Don’t say I don’t remind you, get it?

I was looking for some SEO related Wordpress plugins for my blog lately. Thinking that there might be some new SEO Wordpress plugins available that might help increase traffic. It turns out most of the existing SEO Wordpress plugins still topping the chart for the most SEO favorable plugins. Now let’s check out which SEO Wordpress plugins that you already installed or have been missing.

The first SEO Wordpress plugin definitely belongs to All in One SEO Pack. This is the all time favorite for me and I think for most bloggers too. The plugin contains lots of features including canonical URLs, fine tune page navigational links, built in API, SEO integration, nonce security, automatically optimize titles for search engines, generates META tags automatically and many more.

The second SEO Wordpress plugin is Google Sitemap Generator. This is also one of the plugins that I’ve been using for some time. The plugin generates XML sitemap which help search engines to index your blog better. The plugin notifies major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask every time you publish a new post.

The third SEO Wordpress plugin is SEO Friendly Images. Whenever I upload an image to my blog, I try to give it a good title so that search engine might capture it. This plugin automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. You blog will gain more exposure if you have lots of images uploaded.

The fourth SEO Wordpress plugin is Simple Tags. I never did use tags until lately I found this plugin. The plugin is able to tags and link tags for all the post that I’ve written automatically.

The fifth SEO Wordpress plugin is Antisocial. This plugin basically is adding nofollow to links that shouldn’t get credit.

The sixth SEO Wordpress plugin is Redirection. This plugin is very useful when you’re migrating pages form an old site or blog. It also served the same when there are changes within directories during Wordpress installation. The plugin basically manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors and tidy up any loose ends of your blog. This plugin helps in maintaining the connection that you built when making changes to your blog or fine tune your blog.

The seventh SEO Wordpress plugin is Sitemap Generator Plugin. This plugin basically creates sitemap that is visible and clickable for visitors. You can create a customized sitemap by having it categorize, multi-page generation, permalink support, post dates and many more. You can do it all form the option page at Wordpress admin panel. I always wanted to add a visible sitemap to my blog but did not find a suitable plugin until now. You’ll see a sitemap page in this blog soon.

The eighth SEO Wordpress plugin is Related Entries. This plugin basically list out related previous post based on keyword matching. It helps your readers in finding additional related content that might interest them. It makes your blog more users friendly.

The ninth SEO Wordpress plugin is Automatic SEO Links. This plugin helps to insert links to the word within the post. This plugin comes in handy when you forgot to place a link to a particular word. It will search and insert the links to all the word matches in the post. It is also very useful when you’re trying to change links within several post.

The tenth SEO Wordpress plugin is Broken Link Checker. This plugin monitor for broken links and notified on blog dashboard. In times, some of the links that you place in post might go down. Instead of leading your readers into a dead end page, you can update the links or direct them back to the blog main page.

That’s the top 10 SEO Wordpress plugin that I think we should consider install. Some of the plugins above is new to me and I’ll try installing it and giving it a try. What is your top 10 list of SEO Wordpress plugin? Feel free to share it. This post is meant to search for the best SEO Wordpress plugins available.

Google AdSense seems to launch the limited beta version of the new interface for a small group of Publisher. The new interface includes features based on 3 requests from publishers. The 3 requests are “provide insights to help make more informed decisions about the sites”, “offer more control over the ads that appear on the sites” and “help manage account more efficiently”. It seems that the new Google AdSense interface will looks more a less the same as Google AdWords interface. Graphical formats will be available instead of just figures.

It’s good to have the new AdSense interface but still if we want to increase our Google AdSense earning, we still have to go back to the basics. That is to write more good quality content and drive more traffic. Other additional action is just for the purpose of fine tuning the earning. As a publisher, my first goal is to maximize my earning. I rather spend more time on writing good quality content and drive traffic to my blog.

Now let’s look at the new Google AdSense interface form Google or business point of view. The first thing that comes in my mind is that with this new Google AdSense interface, Google will gather more information from publisher. Is that good or bad for publisher? We just have to wait and see. But I do know for sure that the information gathered will be used for Google AdWords as well. The intention is to find the right and best sites or blogs for advertisers. Google makes money when only advertisers make money. Google AdWords has to help advertisers make enough money to continue advertise on Google AdWords. As for the publishers side, Google has to make sure they pay publisher enough to keep on using Google AdSense. Google just has to control the balance between AdWords and AdSense to maximize profits. That is why if you really want to success in making money with Google AdSense, then don’t try to outsmart them. You might not earn a lot in the beginning but as long as you keep on writing good quality content, in long term basis you’ll earn a good portion of money from Google later.

P/S: Just don’t put all your eggs in one “Google” basket. You definitely must create multiple stream of income.

Once in a while it’s best to check out things and see what’s new, especially things that related to our blog. I’ve just update my blog to the latest version of Wordpress, so next I decided to check out .htaccess. It might not be something new but as long as it helps to improve my blog, it’s worth try it out. Below are few of the methods that I found out about .htaccess that is useful.

The first and most basic thing that we use .htaccess is to redirect non WWW to WWW. Take for example http://www.toasteggme.com and http://toasteggme.com, we want all the page rank juice and page indexed in just one address instead of two.

<code>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^toasteggme.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.toasteggme.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</code>

If you choose to redirect WWW to non WWW, here’s the way to do it. By the way you just have to write’ RewriteEngine On’ into the code once.

<code>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.toasteggme.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://toasteggme.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</code>

If you need to redirect dynamic URL’s with parameters to single static file, this is the code.

<code>
RewriteRule ^earnmoneysignup.jsp?id=(.*)$ /moneymaking.htm [L,R=301]
</code>

The dynamic URL http://www.toasteggme.com/earnmoneysignup.jsp?id=1234 will be redirected to http://www.toasteggme.com/moneymaking.htm

If you like to redirect all files from a folder to one single file, this is the code.

<code>
RewriteRule ^earnmoneyproducts(.*)$ /moneymaking.php [L,R=301]
</code>

All the requests to the folder /earnmoneyproducts will be redirect to /moneymaking.php

If you like to redirect viewers who received a 404 error to another page, this is the code.

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

The benefit of having the above redirect is that viewers won’t get lost if they arrive to your website with an invalid URL.

Apart of trying to get the attention of search engines, we need to consider the usage of .htaccess towards the benefits of our readers. In my opinion the main function of .htaccess is redirect. I suppose we should direct our readers around our blog so that they won’t stuck at “page not found”. It is the work of keeping our blog in a more organized condition. After several years of blogging, we need to reorganize the old URLs to the new URLs. Some of the links or URL that we place several years before might expired or deleted.

There are some other .htaccess techniques that I did not mention. The above methods are the ones that I used for my blogs for SEO purposes. Feel free to check out the links below for further information.

The above information is taken and base on the reference from
.htaccess, 301 Redirects & SEO: Guest Post by NotSleepy | Seo Book.com
Basic .htaccess tricks for SEO and convenience | Blog | Econsultancy

This is my first post about making money using Twitter. The first Twitter advertising network that I found is RevTwt. Before signing up RevTwt, I did some checking on the response of bloggers or publisher who tested out the service. It seems that RevTwt is not well accepted. Anyway, I still decided to sign up and have a closer look at the site so that I can write a review about it.

There are few ways that you can make money from RevTwt. Basically you need to have at least a Twitter account with lots of followers. In order to let RevTwt posts ads in your Twitter account, you either provide them your Twitter username and password or use Twitter Oauth to give them permission to post ads. For security purposes I think it’s better to use Twitter Oauth. The first type of ads that you can choose is CPC – cost per click. Generally you get paid when your followers click on the ads. The second method is CPT – cost per thousand followers. That means you get paid on a fixed amount based on the number of followers you have. Plus the ads must stay on for at least 72 hours. The third method is CAP – cost per action. You can apply this ad in anywhere as you only get paid when a user completes the required action given by advertisers. The fourth method is to use the shorten URL service. When readers click on the shorten URL, ads will be shown in a transition page before arriving to the actual page. You get paid if readers click on the ads. This method can be use anywhere other than Twitter too.  I think the shorten URL ads method is a good idea and it might become popular later.

Besides that you may also earn some money by referring others to RevTwt. You’ll get 20% of their earnings for life. Other than that the site also expanded their service to popular social network community Facebook. You may post the ads same way that you post at Twitter. All you need to do is allow StatusCash application into your Facebook so that they can post ads on walls, status and news feeds. RevTwt also partners with Twitter Greeting so that ads can be shown along with the greeting cards. You’ll get paid when your friends click on the ads that come together with the greeting cards you send.

There are many ways that you can make money at Revtwt but there are couples of things that you need to take note. Minimum payment is $20 using PayPal. You might need to work hard for the payment if you have less than 2000 followers. Please take note that most of the ads required clicks from US. That means if your followers are mostly from countries other than US, you might not earn much.

I have to say you need to have more than 2000 followers in order to actually make money with Revtwt. Plus your followers need to be from US too. The highest click that I’ve seen is about $0.15, which means you need to have at least 200 clicks to reach minimum payment. You may try it out but I think Revtwt is suitable for certain people with lots of followers. Just remember not to post too many ads as you might considered as spammer.

Lately I happened to check out the usage of robot.txt to search for any help on SEO optimized. Robots.txt also known as The Robots Exclusion Protocol is a set of instruction created for web robots or spiders. The search engine crawler will look for robots.txt where pages to indexed and ignored are defined.

If you have a blog and trying to locate your robots.txt file, most probably you won’t find it. That’s because in order to allow full access for all web robots or spiders, not having a robots.txt is a way to do it. That is why our blogs still get index even without a robots.txt. If that is the case, do we actually need to add robots.txt file?

It is said that robots.txt is use to avoid issues like duplicate content getting index. The intention of having robots.txt is to help improved page index and getting higher page rank. If you don’t really understand how robots.txt works, it’s better to not to touch it as it might do more damage than help. I did some study and research on robots.txt for some time and still couldn’t quite get it myself. If you still insist on trying it out, get the PC Robots.txt Wordpress pluin. What it actually does is creates a virtual robots.txt that is east to edit and manage. Once activate, you’ll be given a default robots.txt that disallowed a bunch of spam-bots and some standard Wordpress folders and files. Feel free to mess around with the robots.txt. You can always return to the default setting by reactivating the plugin. You can do all this right from your blog admin.

You can easily get information on what you can put into the robots.txt file but there isn’t any post telling what configuration is best for SEO. I guess it’s up to us to try it out. Here’s a post form SEOmoz that I think is good to check out as it explains how robots.txt affects link juice.

P/S: After trying out robots.txt myself. I think it’s better not to do anything about it. If you guys found it differently, please share.