Dot Com Note

AdSense has introduced a contextual ad service for mobile website operators. However, your webpages should be mobile compliant to display AdSense ads on mobile devices. Google suggests:

If you don’t currently have a mobile website (and chances are, if you’re not sure, then you don’t have one), you can create one by rewriting your existing website in a mobile markup language, such as XHTML, WML, or CHTML. You’ll also need to make sure the layout of your website is properly formatted to display on mobile phones.

Only text ads are available now and they come in two sizes. The single size ad shows one ad and the double size ad displays two ads.

If you have a website that offers something to people on the road, you can make some additional money by making your website available to mobile users.

A list of some mobile websites is available here. Check them out to get ideas about the look and feel and contents of mobile websites. The W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Checker is here.

BlogRush is a blog post title link (BPTL) exchange widget. The widget has five BPTLs. For five BPTL impressions on your blog, you get one BPTL impression on a network member’s blog.

If another blogger becomes a member of the network using the widget displayed on your blog, she is in your downline. You get one BPTL impression for five BPTL impressions she offers.

With one person in your downline, your two-person network offers ten BPTL impressions and receive three BPTL impressions.

What happens when another person joins your downline? Let’s say your immediate downline recruits the third person. You get three, your immediate downline gets two and the last person in the downline gets one BPTL impressions, a total of six BPTL impressions. And your three-person network gives 15 BPTL impressions. Now you get the math?

Like any multilevel program, if you are the first mover you can reap enermous benefits. Sgn up if you think it is a good traffic exchange program for you. Whatever you call it, I still consider it a traffic exchange program.

Are you tired of submitting your posts to digg and reddit? Are you upset that you only got a few diggs on an article that you spent hours researching and writing? This happens to many bloggers.

AjaxNinja says to stop submitting articles on the most popular sites like digg or reddit and he recommends submitting to niche sites. You can find a list of some additional social media sites here.

Sphinn is another digg clone. People have reported good returns on investment on the site. I checked out a few stories and found zero dugg stories had made it to the home page of Sphinn.

Write a powerful headline. CopyBlogger has three articles on how to write headlines that attracts social media crowds like a magnet. You can read the the three articles here, here, and here.

Create contents to touch your readers. We live in a sea of information. If you are like me who subscribe to hundreds of feeds, I know you are flooded with posts every morning.

My take on content is that your readers should feel the urge to visit your site to get new insights. You should also provide information that is buried in a dozen websites. It will be like a one stop shop for information in your niche.

I like Jonathan’s My Money Blog. This guy is honest, down to earth, and he is full of practical ideas. He has opened up his financial life to his website visitors and he preaches ideas that he practices to save and make money. His famous series is how to make money using your credit cards.

Today in my RSS reader I saw his post about money back rebates and how a San Jose Mercury Reporter had dug out 1,300 unopened rebate forms from a dumpster. You can read the full story here.

I also hate rebates. I am glad that BestBuy is offering more instant savings and has moved away from their infamous rebates. Other electronics and office supply retailers are slowly following BestBuy’s direction. I have never received any money from my rebates. I will either forget to submit it before the due date or forget to follow up after their ridiculous six to eight weeks waiting period.

If the retialers are sincere about honoring rebates, they will move to a complete online version for redeeming rebates. Staples offers electronic filing and tracking of rebates but I don’t know their turn around time.

Hey, this is an excellent startup idea. Develop a rebate redemption application, pitch it to a few angel investors, and work with retailers by offering two weeks turn around time for cash back to the customers.

I am sure somebody has thought about this idea before but retialers are not interested in redeeming a large percentage of rebates. The unique selling point of a rebate clearing house is how low its rebate redemption rate is.

A college kid collects a million dollar by selling pixels on a web page and the gold rush begins. Forums spring up discussing a new wave of advertisement on the web. Thousands of sites with hundred of variations hawk pixels on their web pages. Advertisers fall into the trap.

Today, the Alexa traffic rank of milliondollarhomepage is 48,000. It will continue to decline. Now a new wave has started with wikis. Advertisers are rushing to buy pages without realizing the value of these sites. And moron reporters are also falling into the trap. These sites will suffer the same fate.

Why do you visit a website? Besides making a purchase, you visit a web site to get information or accomplish some tasks, connect with your friends or express your feelings. The pixel sites only offered a page full of pixels. Do you want to stare at pixels? Do you want to stare at the home page of a paid wiki site to check out some random pages?

The Wikipedia is the largest storage of encyclopedic knowledge with more than 1.4 billion words in 253 languages. And it continues to grow. There are niche wikis on travel, history, politics, etc. Even your 12 year old daughter knows where to go online for her homework assignment help. There is no reason to go to a paid wiki site.

Advertisers, wake up and ask yourself why visitors will visit one of the paid wiki page that you just purchased from somebody who thinks his invention is the next best thing since slice bread. It is even ridiculous to call these sites as wiki sites.

These paid wikis are not even wikis. Wikis are online collaborative applications that allow users to add and edit contents collectively. Wikis are online repository of information where topics are linked together for a user to navigate all related topics.

Advertisers, what you are paying is a free MySpace page for $100. I give credits to the creators for touting free MySpace pages as wiki pages. You can go to Squiddo and start creating your free Squiddo lenses or article pages. You will get a better return on your investment because Squiddo pays to popular lens creators.

Look at your paid wiki pages. It looks just like the home page of paid wiki sites, with their logos, menus, site names etc. The page even doest not look like your own page. A better investment will be to pay $60 for a your own domain name for 10 years and redirect a Google Blogger account to your domain. You will be able customize the look and feel of your blogger pages.

If you really want to pay $100 for a page, ask the following questions. Do you get a page that you can customize to the extent you want? Does the site have a model that will bring visitors for a reason other than staring at the site’s home page? What does the site give back to its user community?

Now you have it. Chase the gold rush with these paid wiki pages, and you will end up without any gold. Prospect the web and you will find gold nuggets.