My Daily “Must-Visit” Web Site List

Posted by Arnold Aranez

Now that I’ve officially entered into the foray of social media applications, I’ve noticed that I’m spending more and more time on the Internet. Recognizing the additional time consumption, I am determined to make sure that things do not get out of hand.

To do this, I need to list down all the sites that I visit on a daily basis and then prioritize the maximum time I should spend on each. I’ll address the latter in a future post.

Here’s my list:

My Daily “Must-Visit” Web Site List:

1. Alexa: Traffic Rankings for my 3 blogs
2. Google Adsense: Advertising revenue - it’s nice to see how these figures update almost real-time.
3. My Blogs: Mr.Gadget Australia, Arnold Aranez dot com and Gadget Loop (new site)
4. Kontera: Another advertising revenue website
5. Affiliate Websites: Clickbank
6. Plurk: Social media website that acts as a micro-blog with graphical timeline
7. Twitter: Micro-blog which I post a couple of announcements per day
8. Stumble Upon: Social bookmarking tool
9. Digg: Social bookmarking app
10. Google Gmail: Check in to read and reply to mail a couple of times a day
11. Technorati: occasionally pop-in to see how my Technorati rank is progressing
12. Facebook: Social media app to keep in touch with friends and family

Now that I’ve identified the top websites that I visit daily, I now need to time-manage each to make my day more streamlined / effective. Would love to hear of any tools or techniques that other people use.

How many sites are your “Must-Visit” website list?

Popularity: 7% [?]

7 Tips to Improve Your Stumble Upon Experience

Posted by Arnold Aranez

2008 has been the year that I have delved more into online social media apps. The two main reasons for this was curiosity and to connect with like-minded ‘internetty’ type people. I currently dabble with 5-6 Social Media apps daily - one of these is Stumble Upon.

What is Stumble Upon?
Stumble Upon is a social bookmarking online site that allows you to share websites with friends using the Stumble Upon browser toolbar. If you like a website you’re looking at, simply press the “Thumbs Up” button; if you don’t like it, “Thumbs Down”. If it’s exceptional or you’d like to add your opinion on the site for others to see, press the review button to leave a comment.

The name “Stumble Upon” is derived from the ability to Stumble through websites that are filtered via keywords/tags/categories that you have selected. For example, some of the categories that I have opted-in for are technology, science, internet and photography. So when I press the Stumble! button, it will show me websites that other people have bookmarked that are in these categories.

For me, this is more efficient than finding a website, then having to copy and paste into an email - with Stumble Upon I can do this all within a browser. It also provides the extra advantage of keeping a history of your favorite sites and sites that you liked.

The Benefits of Stumble Upon
I must say that the Stumble Upon experience has been very rewarding; I’ve connected up with similar minded people and discovered some amazing websites. It’s also given me an avenue to promote my own blogs a little too.

My Stumble Upon Statistics @ Aug 2008
Even though I signed up last year, I’ve only been actively using Stumble Upon for 3 months. My current stats of today are:
- Likes 1,920 pages
- Likes 94 videos
- Likes 136 photos
- Has 158 fans
- Received 40 reviews

The tally above is evidence that once you’ve started Stumbling it hard to stop!

7 Tips for New Stumble Upon Users / Stumblers
I’ve asked a couple of my good Stumble friends to help me compile a list of tips for newbies. This list was created to make your Stumble Upon experience as rewarding and effective as possible from the onset.

1. Don’t spam others with your own website content: this advice was consistent amongst all my friends - nobody likes spam of any sort, regardless of how good it is. Keep promotion of your own site to at max 1 per day. Even this may cause others to block you so be careful.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 60% [?]

6 Ways that I Make Money Online Via My Blogs

Posted by Arnold Aranez

I’ve been blogging for almost 5 years now, but it is only this year (2008) that I have actually seriously looked at leveraging the Mr.Gadget blog pages to earn decent advertising revenue.

There are two main reasons for the lack of work in this area:

1. Most focus in the past was on increasing sales through the web store section of my website
2. World of Warcraft

Now that sales are taking care of themselves with additional staff on board and I’ve quit playing WoW (1st Dec, 2007), I now have more time to devote to other areas of my site such as monetizing our thousands of blog pages. Until recently it was an untapped resource.

Where To Get Information on Making Money Online? - Go To the Experts
With terms such as “six-figure blogging” and the million or so pages out there about “making money online”, I felt a bit daunted and overwhelmed with my next challenge. However, when in doubt, identify and refer to the experts. In this case, there are two guys in particular who provide superb information on ways to make money online : Darren Rowse and John Chow. Both are renowned for creating comfortable livings for themselves from the proceeds generated by their websites.

On the footer of each of their sites are lists of ways they create revenue online. I investigated each point on their lists and came up with a list that worked well with my style of blog.

Ways I Make Money Online
So after around 6 months of installing, testing and tweaking here is the list of money makers that are now earning me around 4-figures a month and I can recommend them to you. They are ordered by highest to lowest income per month:

1. Google Adsense: Even though I’ve been using Google Adsense for almost 5 years, it’s only this month (August 2008) that I have truly had time to optimize the code which has resulted, on some days, in triple the revenue I used to earn. If you don’t have it on your site, sign up and give it Google Adsense a go!. Tip: See my post on how I doubled my Adsense revenue with only 2 hours of tweaking over one weekend.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 30% [?]

10 Tips on How to Reach Plurk Nirvana and Still Have a Life

Posted by Arnold Aranez

Two weeks ago I hit the highest stage attainable in Plurk - Nirvana. To reach this, you have to have a Karma rating of 81 and above. While many of you are already mumbling thoughts of “he has too much time on his hands”, “no life” and quite possibly “loser”, I accomplished this in just under 2 months with very minimal impact on my life. I’ll share 10 tips to helping you reaching this top level of Plurk further down.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 44% [?]

5 Simple Tips To Double Your Google Adsense Revenue

Posted by Arnold Aranez

This year has been very fruitful. In particular, the advertising revenue for the Mr.Gadget website is now doing 4-figures every month, which is very pleasing since I only opened advertising slots in May this year. While far from being a 6-figure blogger, I can now comfortably pay for my daily-latte-fix without negatively affecting my personal budget.

Having sold all advertising slots for the next 6 months, I thought it was an opportune time to take a closer look at Google Adsense revenue again since it was my the first advertising programme I signed up with. I installed it over 4 years ago with acceptable, not super, results.

Here’s my graph of earnings over 4 years (2004 - 2008):

As you can see, revenue has been up and down over the years never clearly breaking the $10 mark at any point. However, with a little over 2 hours worth of tweaking on the weekend, you’ll see that August 2008 improved remarkably; where we are hitting over $20 a day now.

How did I achieve the significant increase in Google Adsense revenue?

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 44% [?]

Learning from my Digg Effect Failure

Posted by Arnold Aranez

Earlier this week I wrote a post on the “10 of the most annoying things about the iPhone 3G“. Having written an article on the Top 10 things I liked about the iPhone 3G and having a bit more time to play with Apple’s new wonder, I thought I’d give a rounded view to someone interested in buying the phone. Before I knew it, I had hit the 1000 word mark, which is quite long compared to my average blog posts - normally around 100-200 words. I was passionate about the topic, which most of the time reflects in one’s writing and ultimately positively affects the overall feel of the post.

Minutes later, domfosnz, an active Digger, submitted it to Digg. Through the magic of promotion and networking, it slowly garnered enough votes to make it popular enough for the front page. This took around 200 Diggs to get there. I’ll write more on methods to get website pages front-paged in the weeks to come as I have only been active on Digg for a month and still experimenting.

What is Digg?

For those who don’t know what Digg is, it is one of the world’s most popular social-bookmarking sites where users can ‘digg’ (positive vote), ‘bury’ (negative vote), comment and submit website pages. Logically, the website pages that attract many diggs in a short period of time are deemed as newsworthy and propelled to the front page (sometimes referred to as “fp”) of Digg.

How many users does Digg have?

Two sites estimate (listed in ref below) that Digg has over 2.5 millions users; you can imagine the amount of traffic a website would receive even if a small subset of the total Digg population visited a front page Digg story.

This is the Digg Effect : the massive wave of visitors rushing through the internet to check out a freshly front-paged website link, where most of the times, even the most robust servers crash. A website can receive between 20,000 - 100,000 visitors within a couple of hours. To many, having this amount of traffic is both a dream and a nightmare.

Yes, My Server Crashed

To be quite honest, I thought that my website was sturdy enough to handle the Digg Effect. I have a dedicated web server (my website is the only one on the server), dual quad-core Intel processors and 2GB of RAM and SCSI drives hosted by one of Australia’s premier web hosts. Yet, if you read halfway through the first set of Digg comments, you’ll see people complain that my website was pictureless and the Digg mirror site kicking in. This is the point where my server crashed.

Digg Effect statistics

As for the number of visitors I received via Digg, it ended up being close to 35k new visitors. Around 30k more than my usual daily traffic.

What I’ve Learned from the Digg Effect:

1. Diggers don’t click on ads as much as my usual traffic: I predominantly use Google Adsense ads on my site and normally pull in around $10 a day. On this particular day, I ended up with around $14. This shows that Diggers are usually more focussed on reading the content to which they were directed to rather than be distracted from ads.

2. Need to install some form of caching for Wordpress: there are a couple out there but WP-Cache seems to be the one of choice. This makes static versions of pages which eases up the load on the servers which would normally have to perform queries to present blog pages which are database driven.

3. Be ready for a barrage of comments from Diggers: some are applicable however there are many that aren’t. This is the Internet and you’ll get passersby who don’t even read the post in it’s entirety and make random remarks. Most important thing to remember is don’t take it personal. Be happy that you received more traffic that will have good long term benefits such as more incoming links to your site and more exposure.

4. Always do spelling and grammar checks before publishing: I do this most of the time, but I forgot to do it for this one as I wrote it quite quickly in between meetings. Always, always do a spellcheck and get someone with superb editing skills have a readthrough. I deserved all the flack I received for the minor mistakes I made.

Surviving the Digg Effect

For those who think that they’ll experience the Digg Effect soon or want more ideas on how to better prepare for it, read Ivan’s excellent article entitled “Surviving the Digg Effect”.

Digg Effect References:

• How Many Users Does Digg Have? #1
• How Many Users Does Digg Have? #2
• What is Digg?
• About Digg
• What Digg Means for Servers

Popularity: 49% [?]

Mr.Gadget Live Ustream.TV Show July 28/7/08

Posted by Arnold Aranez

In this show I talk about the Altec Lansing Nobi Portable Speakers, 10 most annoying things about the iPhone 3G and the Sumajin Headphones!

Join me every Monday 8:30pm AEST!

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/mr.gadget-live

Popularity: 34% [?]

The Perpetual Website Enhancement Cycle

Posted by Arnold Aranez

One of the key indicators of a website’s success and its ability to generate income is the amount of targeted traffic it receives. What is targeted traffic? This refers to the traffic you receive that is related to the niche or market your website is aimed at. For example, if your website is about horses for the purposes of selling horse products and gadgets, getting traffic from people doing searches with the keyword “dogs” on Google will be of little value. If you don’t know what the aim of your website is, please take time to do this now.

My Mr.Gadget website is aimed at selling gadgets in Australia. If you do a search in Google for “gadget australia”, you’ll see we are (hope we still are at this time of reading) number one for this search result. This took many months of research, tweaking and hard work.

In order to increase your targeted traffic you need to understand what keyword, websites, sources are bringing you in traffic. Based on your understanding of this, you can then tweak or optimize your website to attract even more traffic and therefore increase your website revenue. Ka-ching!

Coming from an IT background, I like to break things down into simple forms to understand a concept. Understanding your website traffic is part of what I like to call the Perpetual Web Enhancement Cycle. This is a structured process flow that describes the installation of a metrics tool through to highlighting the re-iterative nature of website tweaking. I believe that all successful websites follow this general flow with some modifications here and there.

Here is the Perpetual Web Enhancement Cycle presented in a flow diagram:

Step 1. Install a Website Traffic Analytic Tool
Like any close friendship, you need to spend time and effort getting to know your companion so you can truly get the best out of each other. This is exactly the same with your web traffic. How does one do this? First things first, install a website traffic analytic tool (WTAT). As the name suggests the primary role of this tool is to gather information on the traffic that comes in and out of your site.

Popular Web Traffic Analytic Tools To Try Out:
- Sitemeter (Using this now for 2 sites)
- Statcounter
- Google Analytics
- Urchin
- AWStats

Step 2. Burn in WTAT for 30 days
Once you’ve found a tool that you like, give it 30 days to gather information on your website. Most of them will ask you to install a script on each page to trigger data collection so make sure you follow all the prescribed steps. After 30 days, you’ll have a workable data set.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 73% [?]

Another Arnold Aranez iPhone 3G Video

Posted by Arnold Aranez

My friend Chris, who was also camped the iPhone 3G with me, sent me this video that features us (later in the video) talking about the things we were looking forward to in the iPhone.

For those impatient to see me in 6 layers of clothing, tired due to 45 minutes of sleep and sipping on a large latte, zoom on down to 2:43 of the video!

In case you missed it, here’s the article that I wrote on the Mr.Gadget website that talks about the 10 things I like most about the new iPhone 3G.

Popularity: 56% [?]

New Version of Wordpress (2.6) Now Available

Posted by Arnold Aranez

If you are considering starting up a blog, I would highly recommend that you use Wordpress. It comes with everything you need to start a blog and is expandable with the options of adding widgets and plugins. I started using Blogger 5 years ago and just moved to Wordpress in December 2007. Since then my traffic has increased as was able to apply more SEO (search engine optimization) techniques to my Wordpress blog than Blogger.

A new version of Wordpress has just been released today. So whether you have an existing blog or commencing one, make sure you update/grab this version from the Wordpress Website.

The main enhancements of Wordpress 2.6 are:

1. Ability to use previous versions of draft posts/pages
2. Improved “Press This” button functionality: allows you blog on other web pages quickly and incorporate their images and text.
3. Inclusion of image captions
4. Preview themes before your audience does
5. Gears functionality: caches image and CSS files on your PC for faster performance when writing

Below is a video of the changes in Wordpress 2.6:

Wordpress is a great blogging foundation. We’ll write more on growing this blog and optimizing it for search engines in the upcoming posts.

Popularity: 48% [?]

« Previous Entries