Dot Com Note

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StumbleUpon is a second generation website that allows its users to discover interesting web pages and sites without doing a search in a search engine. You install a tool bar in your browser and channel surf the web by clicking a button on the tool bar.

You sign up at StumbleUpon website and list your interests. When you click on the surf button in your browser tool bar, you are randomly directed to a webpage that matches your interests. If you like the contents or the website offerings, you can tag the page and give it a thumbs-up. If you don’t like it, simply ignore the site or give it a negative vote, a thumbs-down, if you feel the site has employed some trickery to draw your attention.

You can also use the StumbleUpon tool bar for social bookmarking. When you find a new and interesting webpage, you can tag it and share it with others. Click the Send to button in the StumbleUpon tool bar to send the webpage you are on to a friend in your StumbleUpon network.

It is possible to get a massive amount of traffic from StumbleUpon. If you have an interesting or useful article, blog page, or an entire site, you can include it in StumbleUpon. If lots of StumbleUpon users thumbs up your page, you will get a large amount of traffic in a very short time period.

Besides a sizable number of thumbs-up by StumbleUpon users, there are other factors that help drive traffic to a site in StumbleUpon. The number of StumbleUpon friends, the type of friends and their profiles, the number of sites you have stumbled, and the number of reviews you have gotten in the past all determine traffic volume to your site. Another factor is the broad tagging of your article by other StumbleUpon users.

What are the other benefits of being stumbled besides a short-time traffic surge? Your website will get exposure and many visitors will comeback regularly. If your site is a blog, you will instantly increase your reader base. You will also get numerous backlinks from other StumbleUpon users who run websites.

To increase the repeat visits by StumbleUpon users, your site should have a professional design, in-depth contents, richly blended ads, and a memorable URL.

StumbleUpon users like video, humor, and web 2.0 sites. However, the monetization potential from StumbleUpon users using affiliate or contextual ads like Google Adsense is very low because these users are very fickle and want to click to the next site using the StumbleUpon button in their tool bar.

Like any social network, your goal should not be to use the system for driving traffic only to your site. Stumble other high quality and useful sites for others to benefit from information you posses. Develop a good online social network using StumbleUpon, share websites with others and have fun.

Microsoft’s offer to purchase Yahoo! for $45B to overcome Google’s growing influence on the web is not going away soon. Microsoft will do every thing in its power to acquire Yahoo! because Microsoft is trailing far behind Google and Yahoo in search and ad revenue. Eliminating Yahoo! will kill one competitor instantly. What can Yahoo! do? It has the fiduciary responsibility to share holders that outweighs the desires to thwart the monopolistic ambitions of Microsoft. The solution lies in the merger of eBay and Yahoo!

The market capitalization of eBay and Yahoo! are almost the same. eBay has hordes of cash without any debt but eBay’s earning per share (EPS) is one-half of yahoo’s EPS. These two web-pioneering companies need each other to move forward for increasing investors’ confidence and returns on investment.

As a merged company how can they improve their combined performance? First, they can keep their independent brands that are widely known and very valuable by forming a parent company called bayHoo! An acquisition by Microsoft will lead to Yahoo!’s brand erosion. Microsft is hell-bent to acquire Yahoo! not to preserve Yahoo! brand. Microsoft does not like to have Yahoo! as a household name in the future.

Yahoo! properties attract the highest web traffic. eBay will leverage this traffic through out Yahoo! properties and charge premium fees to eBay sellers for advertising their listings. eBay does not have an integrated listing advertsing service right now. eBay sellers will get more exposure to their products and services.

The eBay store will  merge with the Yahoo! store and bayHoo! will eliminate all duplicate costs involved in maintaining two different merchant solutions that may essentially offer the same services. bayHoo! will use this money to offer more features to bayHoo! store owners.

The generation Y grew up with The Yahoo! Messenger and it is in their every day vocabulary. bayYahoo! will integrate eBay’s Skype VoIP service for video chat in to Yahoo! Messenger and charge users for this service.

eBay’s PayPal is there for conducting all trqansactions. PayPal can leverage web’s most visited finacial site, Yahoo! Finance, to offer more services. With creative thinking, it is possible for bayHoo! to become a very successful online company.

It is the time for Jerry Wang and Pierre Omidyar start talking.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/techbirmingham/503950484/

Google maps product manager, Jess Lee, has posted about Google’s social mapping feature in My Maps. Tagzania also offers collaborative mapping. However, there are few differences in the two offerings.

To enable the collaborative feature of My Maps, you click the collaborative link and add email addresses of people who can add and modify the map. Google will send out invitations to the those email addresses with a link to the map. Once they open the map, they will be able to modify it.

You create My Maps and invite your friends and coworkers to edit your maps. For example, you are planning a hiking trip and identified a few trails and then you invite your hiker buddies to edit and modify the map. Your hiker buddies can add more trails, make corrections to your existing trails by editing the map and changing texts in the pop-up bubbles.

You can also publish the map for the entire world and any one can change that map. I can see the possibility of spams here.

This wiki style collaborative map is very powerful for creating lots of interesting and useful geo-groups, e.g. good Thai eatery in New York, surfing spots through out the world, great beaches in Europe, Buddhist temples in Asia, etc., using the wisdom of the crowd. The possibilities are endless.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gobeirne/243704138/

During the early days of the web when I ran adult sites, traffic was plenty and a few software and scripts made my life easy. Once in a week I visited a few adult webmaster forums for getting all the knowledge and skills I needed to make money online while sleeping. Things have changed a lot. Now the competition is fierce. You need knowledge, skills and hard work to generate a decent online income.

I am lucky that even today my non-adult sites create a decent income but I am sure I can’t retire from my regular job on that income. I need to take some bold steps and make a quantum leap to increase my online incomes by four folds.

I generate a small amount of affiliate incomes, all from clickbank.com, by throwing a few banners in my sites. I do realize that besides traffic, ad optimization by testing and measuring is very important to maximize incomes. However, it takes a lot of time.

I have been spending a lots of time reading blogs about keywords, different channels for affiliate marketing, landing pages, etc. I am also frequenting a webmaster forum (forums.digitalpoint.com) to learn what is going on in today’s online marketing.

I used to wonder why there were so many web directories. I don’t go to a web directory to search for any thing. I don’t know who goes to a web directory for their searches. I even don’t know anybody going to dmoz.com, supposed to be the best in its class, for searches.

Now I know why there are so many web directories. They give you back links to your site for a price and they hawk their services using some thing called PR - Point & Research. Oops, I am wrong. It is Page Rank. Had I known this directory business a few years ago, I would have started 15 web directories. Oh well, I missed my opportunity.

Then there are digg bosses, stumble upon exchanges, publishing articles in 40 blog networks for $10, useless traffic to your site for ranking high in Alexa so that you can sale text links. I did not know that people are selling text links. I thought that only Google did that. And there are a scores of other techniques. Lots to learn. My head hurts.

I am learning slowly but I need to jump start my online income fast. How do I do that? People are generating monthly six-figure incomes from affiliate marketing. That’s what I need to do to become super rich. Gotta go for my forum visit.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jongos/229023255/

The holidays pass very quickly. The four-day weekend is almost over. I have to wake up tomorrow morning around 7AM and get ready for another day at my regular job.

I like my job but sometimes I wonder how long I can continue the routine. I am going no where in my corporate career. I am little too old for planning my career path for climbing the corporate ladder.

The money I bring in from my websites and the income generated from the money I had saved when I was operating adult web sites is enough for me to retire and retire very comfortably in a Third World country, like in Central America, Mexico, India, or Thailand.

The biggest fear of retiring in the USA is the medical expenses. I have to pay at least a thousand dollar a month for the type of health insurance that I get from my company. I should also be ready to drop 4K as out of pocket expenses in case of emergency.

I cannot quit my job when my online income matches incomes from my regular job. What will happen if my online income drops? Can I quit my job when the online income matches my current combined incomes (online income + regular job)? If I can sustain that kind of online revenue for a year, I would be able to quit my job.

I am not an online marketing guru or an SEO expert. I know the basic plot and how to implement it. When I see lots of people are trying very hard to generate even $1,000 a month online profit, I think I am lucky to generate the kind of of money I bring in now by running websites.

I had started seriously thinking about increasing my online revenues substantially in the last few months. I am also reading a lots of blog articles on affiliate marketing, social media marketing, stumbleupon marketing, and what not.

Come new year, I have to focus on one area for generating serious online incomes.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mylerdude/69784024/

Happy thanksgiving everybody. If you are not from the US (thanksgiving in Canada is in October), you may have heard about thanksgiving or you may be completely ignorant about it. It is a national holiday in the US.

Though it is not a religious holiday, it is about giving thanks to God for the things that one has at the conclusion of the harvest season. It is also the busiest travel day of the year.

The thing I like about Thanksgiving is that there are no gift giving, card exchanges or decorations. You just invite family and friends, and sometimes FOFs (friends of friends) to your house, eat plenty and enjoy the warmth of human relationship.

If you want to turnoff your TV and not watch football or Macy’s parade, here are 20 fun things you can do with family on Thanksgiving.

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Only two days left for Black Friday. For the last eighteen years, I have scanned Black Friday ads in the local news paper, delivered on Thursday, for killer deals. But I could never go to the store before 11AM. By that time, Black Friday shopping was half over for lots of people and I did not get a deal.

I am surprised to know that many people in this country don’t know what is Black Friday. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. The urban myth is that retailers were in the red through out the year and made their first day of huge profits on the Friday following the Thanksgiving day. That is the day when their books went from red to black. Hence, it is called Black Friday.

It is one of the busiest shopping day in the US. People start forming lines in front of some large retail stores around 1:00AM in the morning for big sales.

The most popular Black Friday site is www.bfads.net. Other Black Friday sites are: blackfriday.gottadeal.com, www.black-friday.net, www.blackfriday.info. These sites will have all the Black Friday shopping ads of big retailers a few weeks before the Black Friday.

The number of visitors to Black Friday sites increases on the first week of November and drops to almost zero by Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday is the Monday immediately following the Black Friday. It is the online equivalent of Black Friday.

If you want to take advantages of Black Friday, here are a few tips for stress free Black Friday shopping.

1. Know the Black Friday Deals. Get the local news paper from your nearest gas station. It will have all the Black Friday ads of all local retailers.

2. Make a List. Check all the ads and write down the things you need. Don’t get tempted by the deals. If you don’t have any idea how often you are going to use the product, just forget it and save your money.

3. Compare Prices. Check out some price comparison sites like bizrate.com, pricegrabber.com, shopping.com to determine if the deals you are interested in are really good bargains. Also check out this year’s ultimate black friday deal guide.

4. Keep the Return Option Open. Check out the store’s return policy. It is not a problem for most stores and for most items. However, some stores, e.g. Best Buy, will charge you a stocking fee for certain items, like a computer. Most stores have stopped doing price matching for Black Friday deals. If you plan to buy an item a week before and want to get the difference in price on the Black Friday deal, it will be harder.

5. Avoid Cash. Use a credit card for all purchases. If you later decide to return an item, the retailer will credit the purchase price to your card. Retailers generally don’t refund cash immediately for big ticket items. You have to wait a couple of weeks to get a check in the mail. Some credit cards also extends the manufacturer’s warranty. This is an added bonus. Of course, do pay your card in full before the due date to avoid high interest rates.

6. Avoid Crowds. To avoid crowds, you can also check out those items you want to buy in the online store of the retailers. Sometimes, you will find almost the same deal.

7. Don’t Buy. For the last of couple of years, I have been checking out all the Black Friday web sites for Black Friday deals. Though every year I find a couple of deals, I was never successful in making a purchase because either I did not want the item or by the time I went to the store the item was sold out. You can use the same technique and go to the stores after 3PM. All the deals will be gone and you will save your money.

Image credit: engadget

Amazon has launched an ebook reader called Kindle. Here is a Newsweek article about this latest gizmo that Amazon is positioning as a service rather than a device.

Unlike Sony’s eReader, Amazon’s Kindle will have wireless Interent connectivity using the cell phone data transmission technology.

Kindle has a six-inch screen and it uses e-ink for sharp readable pages. The battery lasts for 30 hours and you can fully recharge it in two hours. With a weight of around 10.3 ounces, it will be easy to carry it around in your backpack.

You will be able to go to Amazon site and download ebooks and reviews from there. You can also subscribe to newspapers and magazines and download them to the reader.

One interesting thing mentioned in the Newsweek article is about blog subscriptions. For $1.99 a month, you will be able to subscribe to one blog from some type of Amazon’s blog subscription service.

Back in September, Engadget had posted two pictures of this device. To me, it really looks ugly. I don’t know if it has a color screen or not. Without a color screen, I am sorry, I can’t use it.

And who is going to pay $1.99 a month for a blog subscription? I will not be paying $1.99 a month to read a blog.

A blog should be available for free. However, if Amazon bundles unlimited blog subscriptions via full RSS feeds for $1.99, it may be an attractive deal for me.

Image credit: PageRank

After punishing the text link advertisers with a reduction in their page ranks (PR), Google is going after the PayPerPost bloggers and dropping their PRs to zero from whatever PR they had before. An IZEA blog post by CEO Ted Murphy has this to say:

Once again Google has proved that PR has little to do with blog traffic, influence or relevance and everything to defending their monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising.

Murphy also went after TechCrunch for their sponsored posts and suggested that Google did not punish them because they were silicon valley insiders. Duncan Riley at TechCrunch has posted a rebuttal to Murphy’s claims.

Every business wants to increase their market share to achieve monopolistic strongholds. No business person will say, “Gee, you know, I have too much market share. I will decrease my market share so others can compete.“

The question is, does Google misuses their monopolistic stronghold? And the answer is we don’t have any evidence so far.

PayPerPost (or any such service provider) should not charge the review rate based on a site’s PR. The review rate should be based on the actual traffic the site receives and PayPerPost should provide that information to their advertisers (people who are seeking reviews).

When Google reduces the PR of a site, another site gets a fair chance of ranking high in the SERP. So in a sense, Google is helping sites who don’t participate in PayPerPost. And what is wrong with that?

When a site reaches a higher PR and a higher ranking in the SERP, Google expects it to show some responsibilities. Just because the site has a higher PR, it does not mean that the site has a higher quality than hundreds of other sites that are slightly lower in PRs. And Google knows this fact.

Google’s actions will help sites, that don’t participate in PayPerPost, improve their rankings in the SERP.

Image credit: google adsense click fraud

Becuase your site is an AdSense site and Bob has original contents that help mesothelomia victims. “Just because Tom gets $2 per click for his baseball site doesn’t mean you will get $2 per click for your baseball site”, writes Mark at 45n5.com while discussing inequal AdSense payouts for clicks from different sites for the same advertiser.  According to him, the following factors determine your payouts.

• Site theme

• Traffic geographic origin

• Quality of your AdSense account

• Traffic referral origin

• Traffic keyword origin

• Time of the day

I will not give much weight to the traffic referral origin. Google does not set a cookie using the the AdSense code when a visitor arrives at a site displaying AdSense units. However, if the visitor is coming from a Google  search, then they can track you using their cookies.  

If you have a foreign language website, your AdSense text ads are in the native language if Google has enough ad inventory in that language. In that case, clicks originating from the country where the language is native pay more than clicks coming from other countries.