visnum

21st century started with contextual advertising and since, many people are trying to gain an income from that. Sometimes it looks like snake oil business, sometimes it looks like treasure hunting. Some people / companies made great money from it while the majority of people could not pass a certain level of income.

If you dream about having some extra dollars or finally go solo with the help of your website / blog then you have to know and understand a couple of things and you have to be patient. So what are those key points?

When it comes to programs like Google Adsense, blogs look like very successful and people usually think that they should have a blog to achieve the material success from such programs. That’s irrelevant. The success of blogs come from sustainability. Successful blogs keep themselves updated several times in a day and this brings search engine visibility. Why? Is it because they update regularly? Not only that. If you update any website regularly and add meaningful articles to it that doesn’t only mean that you are updated but also means that you are growing in quantity of articles. The more pages you have, the more search engine visibility you will gain. This is simple to understand. If I have one page on a certain topic and it is usually found from search engines with certain keywords than this means I can have a decent traffic. If I have a couple of good pages than I would have several decent traffic. If I have thousands of pages in my website, than it is near sure if not hundred percent, that I will have at least tens of pages which would get quite well amount of visitors from search engines.

However, I am not talking about a random success. I am just telling that you don’t know exactly what will attract your visitors and you have to be willing to track your successful pages about why they have attracted so many people. Is it the topic? Is it the advantage of low search engine competition in that area? Is it because you have used good keywords in an optimum level of quantity? You have to look and think about those factors.

And what about page rank? I have a blog post that is #1 in the search results among 4.810.000 results. The page rank of the blog is 3 and this single page’s page rank is 1. What about that? The moral of the story is, don’t get obsessed with page ranks. This is not the only example that I can give you. I have many single pages that rank within the top ten results on Google and most of them have a page rank of 1 and others do not have any page rank assigned at all.

Moreover, what do you imagine when you hear the word page-rank? There are tens of Google search pages in tens of different countries with domains accordingly. This is one factor, a variable. Another variable is that any web page can be found in search results via very different keywords. Example: you reach this page on Google while looking for successful blogging and you are in France, using Google.fr and somebody else is searching for page rank effect on contextual advertising income and finds this page and she is in China. Another reader does a search for “success” and don’t come up with this page because it will be the 18th million result.

So, can you get that? Imagine a web page with a page rank of ten and that doesn’t mean it will show up in search results in every search related with that page. Therefore, don’t get obsessed by page-rank.

Let’s go back to income / search results relation. The page that comes first among 4.810.000 results do not have any effect on my adsense income (I didn’t create a channel for this single page, maybe I should create and check but I know this because said blog is not very profitable either. This is because of the low traffic). Because there aren’t any related adwords client to evaluate this page. Thus, people come and go to the web page and they don’t really see a hundred percent related ad on the page. If they would see, they would most probably click on them.

So, success comes when:

1. You have a meaningful article on your page.
2. You can be found among search results and you are in a relatively decent position, let’s say your page comes up between #1 and #50.
3. The search terms are related with your topic of your article.
4. There are enough adwords clients that need to show their ads on such a page when it is found with such keywords.

The above scenario is the most profitable scenario for keyword advertising, in my humble opinion. Of course, you would also make money when a user comes to your page via some different way (that is not with the help of a search engine) and clicks on your ads. The more ads and the page are relevant in context the more you will earn.

Other scenarios would include that there are several web sites linking you properly on the subject of your page and people come from those links. At this time, it is also important how they link and what the linking page is about. If your page is about flowers and it is linked from a web page which is about bees then this would not be as profitable as a related search engine result.

Then how do I go about creating profitable pages on the web? Find something that would help people doing their job in hand. You can write how-to articles about anything you can be sure of yourself. If this helps people than you will gain visibility.

So, keep in mind that what I tell you here is not about being a famous blogger or web author or content creator. This is about being found via search engines and thus getting clicks on your ads because everything is in harmony: search terms, the subject of your article and the advertisers subject. So, being Robert Scoble is something else, it would create a benefit, an added value when somebody reads Scoble writing about a web conference and while reading he or she finds an advertising about what she needs and clicks on it. Because in this scenario, there is fame included. The advertiser know that quite a few people with a need and want to buy a geeky product would read Scoble. See that this is also something contextual but in that case, Scoble does not need search engine visibility. He can also gain page impressions via direct traffic (that is somebody opens her browser and types in his blog’s address). Also, be sure that Scoble made this fame by working hard about blogging. His blog is full of useful information if not knowledge.

These are some key factors that you have to understand if you feel like trying problogging.

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.

Nowadays, I have the feeling that computers we use now are far more different from the ones we used to have in the past. By past, I mean something like 10 years ago.

Today, we use computers for nearly everything, but the most different usage in comparison to past is about multimedia.

I can’t think of a camera, phone, etc. that can’t talk to my computer. There is no movie that I can’t see in my computer. I do graphical work, photo editing, sound editing with my computer that can be done only in specialized electronic devices in the past.

And with the computers in the past, usage was mostly either scientific or close to scientific. When you have a periodic table of elements software than that was fitting to the fashion for a computer 10 years ago. When you have a software that helps you keep track of the coordinates of some stars, that was fitting to the fashion for a computer 10 years ago.

Today, we use computers with no sense of the old excitement about computers.

I am not a nostalgic person. I am not going to say let’s go back and use computers for just some nerd purposes. I love my computer today and I love the things it can achieve. All I am trying to say is that human mind is capable of creating helper objects for them and the limit is human mind, not the physical world.

It is not the physical world that changes into something else when you do an important discovery, it is just your own mind of expanding, seeing, figuring out of what can be achieved with what we have as some basic rules for the universe for ages; for millions of years.

Computers, especially my notebook… Thanks God we have them!