Archive for July, 2008

How do you archive your e-mail?

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

Of course there are many people out there who don’t feel the need to archive their e-mail but on a corporate level, archiving e-mail and securing it somewhere may be quite a problem.

Personally, many people use whether web based e-mail like gmail, yahoo or hotmail as well as pop3 e-mail which is provided by a web hosting company or their ISP’s. In that case, now that we have a lot bigger webspace than we do in the past, it’s not a big deal to archive your e-mail. If you use pop3 e-mail than you can use e-mail archiving capabilities of your e-mail client like thunderbird or outlook or evolution etc.

If we speak on a corporate level, things may change a little bit. Archiving e-mail on a corporate level may require a certain e-mail archiving software as well as specific network security solutions.

In-house communication is something important to save. If you don’t use your own communication solutions instead of the conventional e-mail than you have to have a system something like gmail (with all the capabilities like archiving, labeling, spam protection, encryption, etc.). Gmail is providing companies with a variety of archiving and search solutions. I am sure that there are a lot of companies that provide similar services as well as network security.

When we sit on our foot at home, we usually don’t think about how big some online communication need how big spaces in server rooms but when you try to imagine the scale, you may start to think about it.

Myths, truth and opinion on pay per click (PPC, CPC) advertising

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

Obviously, I use Google Adsense to monetize several of my blogs. I am not a person who committed himself to make money out of blogging. I just evaluate, appreciate and use it. It is useful. It can pay the cost of my web hosting services.

However, as a geek and a former marketing / advertising worker, I do some research on the web advertising market. I do that research virtually irregularly. You cannot have enough idea just by looking at what I say on the issue. I am going to share my opinion anyway.

When it comes to online marketing, advertiser’s part is fairly easy in comparison to the publisher’s. The online advertiser have reach to many tools and these tools can measure the return on investment (ROI) fairly well. On the other hand, there are many uncertainties on the side of the publisher.

Whatever the publisher does in order to get an idea about what keywords (thus, what topics) to deal with, there is always a great percentage of chance involved.

The publisher can get the hang of keyword value mathematically but what about the order and the timing when and how the ads are going to be published. If you do every work on your part and don’t relay on a third party advertising publisher like Google Adsense or Yahoo Advertising Network, then results would be more predictable. In that case, your business will not be feasible because you will need great marketing budget and effort to promote your ad spaces. Therefore, this is not a solution to a more predictable outcome.

Suppose that you did research in order select a topic for your new website from which you expect advertising revenue. Then imagine that you finally decide on a supposed to be profitable topic. Then you work on your articles or posts and you publish them. You do everything to provide a good placement in search engines and you start displaying related ads on your website.

This is the publisher’s part.

Now, the fact is, any advertiser on your topic has a budget and his budget declines with every click. Since you are not the sole content provider on that topic, there is a great chance that his budget reaches to zero before any advertising are clicked on your website.

The problem is clear. There are no gambling at the side of the advertiser but there is a great effect of chance on the side of the publisher.

All of this information can be gathered in the future, maybe. Moreover, you can mathematically have the information as possibilities or probabilities but never as exact predictions of the real result.

So, this is why traffic and targeted traffic is so important. You have two competition. One of them is the advertisers budget that day or that hour. The other is the possibility of websites publishing something on the same topic. The only way you can have your way out of this situation is working on traffic. Therefore there are still a lot of catch-all websites. If publishing vertically on a certain topic would be the only wise move to solve these problems then we would not see that much website with topics on anything that comes to your mind at the same time at the same page.

Technology blogs dominate the blogosphere

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

I like Technorati. Whenever I look at Technorati, I see the dominance of technology related blogs. The Technorati top 100 consists of blogs which are favorited by Technorati members and the ones receiving the most links from around blogosphere. So these two criteria defines how you can be in the Technorati top 100.

For the majority, having a blog and linking to other blogs from that blog is not part of the everyday life. Many people keeping a blog are people that are not technologically challenged. Most of this not technologically challenged people are very much interested in the web and other technologies.

So, naturally they dominate the blogosphere. They dominate the most important notion of the web: linking.

If you blog about electronic gadgets, the probability you will be linked from other blogs is much higher in comparison to the case that you blog about flowers or decoration or art or real estate.

There is no immediate solution or correction to this. This is a matter of literacy and illiteracy. The more people get used to use the web and blogs efficiently the more we will have an equally distributed and highlighted content about everything.

On the other hand, let me finish this post with another detail in favor of none-technology topics. They are rare. All of them are still a niche. Any none-technology subject is still an area that you can built a web-content providing business and thus you can have advertising profit easier than a technology related blog.

I would strongly suggest to have a blog about a topic which is out of the area of technology. This would really make money.