Alternatives to Adsense

Are you one of Adsense's publisher who, like every other publishers these days, feels that Google didn't give you enough profit? Apart from increasing traffic, one thing you can try to increase your 'salary' is to use another ads afilliates company. You can use all the codes from all the different afilliates and see which one is giving you most profit. As I myself haven't tried all the afilliate companies in the world, below is a short list of my favorite companies:

• Adbrite
• Text Link Ads

Adbrite is one ads afilliate that is probably also well known beside Google Adsense. The rules in Adbrite are pretty much the same to Adsense, but it is known to give more tolerance especially to us bloggers; so you might as well give it a shot. Sites within the Adbrite network include some international websites, such as Yahoo! and eBay, and this is a prove that Adbrite will really pay you for your work (not a scam).

Text Link Ads may be quite an unfamiliar name to your ears, and it is because it hasn't done so many advertisings. But not to worry, because this program will give you monthly income eventhough there is not a single click done to their ads, really! Unfortunately, registering your blog is another thing, they only accept high quality websites. Their requirement includes having a minimum PageRank of 4 and a high volume of visitors daily (based on Alexa Rank). But once you got your blog accepted, raking dollars is a snap, you just need to link to the advertiser's site and keep the link valid for the whole month and BAM!... the money is yours. Note one thing: the higher your PageRank and the more visitor open your blog, the higher your income is. I've seen some PageRank 6 and 7 demanding around $200 to $350 a month for one mere link (imagine if they have 10 links at once: $3500)! Yes, this program allows you to set your own price, although it isn't a good idea to ask very high unless you got some popular blogs with you.

If you have any suggestions or want to add more to the list, feel free to comment on this post. Happy earning!

Disclaimer: I didn't wrote this to get all Adsense publishers to rebel; this post is written for informational purposes only.

SEO Checklist (part 1)

Everyone wants to rank high in all search engine, and that is no longer a secret. To have your site sitting on the top of the search results IS a lot of hard work that usually takes years to accomplish. Now what I have here is a simple to-do list that could improve your site in search engine's eyes. If anyone is quite familiar with SEO, then you may have known some (if not all) of these onpage optimization:

1. IMPORTANT! The first thing you should do is to find yourself a targeted keyword on which you would like to optimize your blog. A simple example is when you have a cooking blog, don't optimize your blog for the search term 'food' because you'll be competing with millions of websites (my search in Google today for 'food' results in 856,000,000 sites, and that's quite a competition). Instead, opt for something like 'make your own dessert' which only results in 1,700,000 sites (compare that to 856 million...). Once you got a keyword or two, let's move on.

2. Make your title as short as possible while maintaining your targeted keywords. So 'Blogging Tips, Tricks, & Tutorials' is so much better than 'Many blogging tips that could make your blog looks nicer and attract more traffic to your blog'. Short titles will make each word in it be valued more by search engines.

3. Emphasize your keywords by bolding, italicizing, and underlining. Words like these: 'blogging tutorial' or 'blogging tips and tricks' will make it more noticable to search engines. Note that you must do this method in a normal (ordinary) way; you can't just bolden or underline every word in the sentence as this could be considered as a fraud/spam website trying to gain attention from search engines.

4. Using <h1> tag for your keywords can be a big boost. <h1> tag is a header tag. It can be considered as a tag to make the title of your blog or website. For those of you who are familiar with html, you sure can go through this step with no problem; but for those who doesn't, here's how you do it: type <h1>your-keyword-here</h1>. If I type <h1>Blogging tutorial</h1>, the result would be:

Blogging tutorial

Note that the most favorable place to put this is at the top of the page, like this blog (the big 'Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials' at the top is made using a text gadget with the <h1> tag).

5. Use your keyword sparingly; don't overload a page with so many of your keywords in unappropriate places (eg. one paragraph have more than 20 'cooking' keyword in it). Search engine will think that this site is a spam (again). Use it only when needed.

Well, that's all for now folks, but remember that part 2 is yet to come. So do your best with these right now but DO NOT expect to get the 1^st position in search results all in a sudden. These tips are technically proven to raise your position but again it depends on how you implements it.

Stay tuned for part 2; subscribe to this blog or follow it for the best convenience.

Subscribe via email

Today's tutorial is on how you can let your readers subscribe via email (like that one on the right side of this page). What you need is simply one FeedBurner account; to register go to feedburner.com. Now let's begin.

If you had just created your account, you must now burn a feed first. (Feedburner users who already have their feed activated can skip this step.) To burn a feed, simply type in your blog URL in the provided "Burn a feed right this instant" box and hit 'Next'.

At this point, if you are a Blogspot user (which I assume you are), Feedburner will identify 2 (two) feeds on your blog, Atom and the RSS feed. You must select either one to continue; don't hesitate as it will make no visible difference. Click Next if you have finished deciding.

What you'll do next is to name your feed and also pick a URL. Fill in the first blank with your feed title, your blog title will suffice. Fill in your desired Feedburner URL in the second blank; keep it short as you don't want to confuse your readers. If you're done hit 'Activate Feed'.

You are done now and will be returned to your Dashboard. Click the feed that you have just created. You should see the statistic of your feed. To make people subscribe via email, click on the 'Publicize' tab, then the 'Email Subscription' link on the left side of the page.

After you hit the 'Email Subscription' link, click on the 'Subcription Management' link right below it. Now scroll down a bit and locate the html code for that feed. Copy it. Go back to your Blogger dashboard and click on Layout > Add a Gadget. Choose Html and paste the code you copy earlier. Position the gadget to wherever place you want and click on Save. Finished! You should now see the email subscription box similar to the one on this page :)