The Online Home of Peter Claridge

January 31st, 2006

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Just been out to see Munich with one of my lovable housemates. It’s a pretty slick film, and unusually for a Speilberg film it doesn’t try and pull the heart strings, however he does fall into the trap of slightly over doing it when it should be finished (remember the half hour of pointlessness at the end of AI, anyone?!).

Overall, I quite enjoyed it, I wouldn’t say I was blown away by it, but its definitely an indepth, thought provoking piece of work. In places it does seem to drag on, but the action soon comes back…and in places it’s very gory, for example you see someone sweeping up the brains of a dead on a TV screen within the film.

I’m still in two minds about whether it portrayed the Israeli’s or Palestinians in a bad light. It concentrated quite heavily on why the Isreali’s were doing what they were doing and it showed all the gory details of the Palestinians killing innocent Israeli’s, but there’s only passing reference to the 200 or so Palestinians killed by Israei air attacks shortly after the Munich massacre.

Incidently, if anyone is interested in knowing why there is so much tension and conflict between Israel and the Arab nations, check out this link Israel Information.

Basically the Israeli state was created in 1945 at the end of the war. The land was “given” to them by the British, in a move that angered the Arab nations.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

January 28th, 2006

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Talking to various webmasters, it is apparent that Google Adsense program has not been paying well this month. Pennies are being earned where once it was dollars. One unfortunate fellow tells me that he is seeing a 1/3rd less Adsense earnings in January than for all other months.

Even on my sites I’ve noticed a definite down turn in earnings. The funny thing is, I’m getting more clicks and impressions than ever, but the click value has plummeted, sometimes to 5 cents or less.

This is not good for Google, when they have the likes of Yahoo Publisher snapping at their heels. For those that are not aware, Yahoo Publisher is Yahoo’s version of AdSense. You put Yahoo code on your website (the code looks pretty much the same as Googles) and it servers up contextual ads based on the website content.

Seeing how Yahoo have a good two years catch up to do, the obvious way to achieve this is to pay webmasters more than what they would be earning if they used AdSense. Us webmasters are fickle fellows, if company X is paying more than company Y for the same thing, we’d head over to company X in our millions.

So, is it worth signing up to Yahoo Publisher? I have a friend who certainly thinks so. She runs the incredibly popular Halo 2 movies directory called Halo 2 Spy (don’t ask me where the ’spy’ comes into it). It basically is a massive directory of movies that gaming nerds have made of themselves playing the xBox game: Halo 2.

It’s incredibly popular and receives thousands of page impressions every day. When she was using Google Adsense she was recording hundreds of clicks a day but only earning a handful of dollars.

She heard about the Yahoo Publisher program and decided to give it a go, and what do you know? Her impressions and clicks remained the same but her earnings went up 3 fold. Is it because Yahoo was serving up better ads or are they just paying more per click? I couldn’t tell you the exact answer, but the fact is, they are paying more. Much more.

Unfortunately at the time of writing the Yahoo Publisher is only open to US residents (for payment), but it should be around soon for those of us in the rest of the world. So probably we’ll start seeing less of “Ads by Gooooooogle” and more “Ads by Yahoooooooo”.

Posted in Articles, AdSense, SEO | 1 Comment »

January 13th, 2006

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So, it’s the end of the week, and what have I achieved?

I have finished off the back end members area for megatoolkit.com (and we’re *still* waiting for Paul to finish the sales page, can anyone say fixmyebooks? (private joke)).

We have programmers working on megatoolkit because the mod_rewrite function wasn’t working correctly and people couldn’t see the sales page (which was not too much of a problem because Paul hasn’t done it yet!). Also we had to stop letting people sign up with out paying (not good when you have over $15,000 worth of downloads in the members area!).

I have set up a new travel website and will be adding content to it over the weekend and promoting it via SEO Elite.

I have also spent some time promoting abcHYIP doing lots of off page optimization so that I can be ranked number 1 for ‘hyip scripts’. I found out that MSN already ranks me as number 1 for HYIP scripts here:

HYIP Scripts

Which is nice!

I also discovered that MSN ranks another one of my websites, PayPalPages.net is ranked number 4 for it’s primary keyword ‘Paypal merchants’ here:

paypal merchants

Yahoo also gives similar results, but there is no love from Google

Next week will be another busy week. I pray to the webmaster gods that Paul will have finally finished the sales letter for megatoolkit.com.

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »

January 11th, 2006

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Today was a much less boring day than yesterday. I managed to get through all my jobs on Business side of things and was able to spend some quality time on my own personal websites. At the moment I’m creating a new firesale on abcHYIP.com where I’ll quite literally be giving away source code access to over 10 different HYIP related software. I’m hoping it will recover the cost of the new script that I’ve had developed.

Since I’m also a bit of an SEO freak, I love optimizing websites and getting them to the top of Google, MSN and Yahoo for various keywords. I’ve bought some software called SEO Elite which costs $167 and it’s worth every penny!

Just an example of how well the software is working on my sites:

1. Core Exercises
This site ranks #5 (out of 23m results) on Google for primary keyword ‘core exercises’ see Here. It’s also ranked #6 for ‘core workouts’.

2. VOIP 101
This site ranks #3 (out of 7m results) on Google for primary keyword ‘voip 101′ see Here. It’s also ranked #6 for ‘core workouts’.

3. HYIP Guide
This site ranks #10 (out of 500k results) on Google for primary keyword ‘hyip guide’ see Here. It’s also ranked #1 for ‘hyip 101′.

4. Free Online Flash Games
This site ranks #3 (out of 4m results) on MSN for primary keyword ‘free online flash games’ see Here. It’s also ranked #5 for ‘online flash shooters’.

I have many more sites that are highly ranked, at one point I was top ranked for ‘hyip script’ on google, but I lost that when I stopped working on abchyip. But I should get that top position back again soon

My #1 tip for improving your rankings (besides buying SEO Elite) is to get as many good link backs as possible. However, don’t go out and buy 5000 guaranteed link backs, that’s just guaranteed to get your site banned in Google.

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »

January 9th, 2006

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I think that there are few things more tedious in this world than website design and development.

Sure, it has it’s highs - the first sale for instance. But actually sitting there hour after hour doing things like checking the links are all working, or adding images or creating a list of products is just so boring and tedious.

I have spent my day doing the latter as part of the members area on megatoolkit.com. There are well over 150 products in the members area for download, and each product has to have a small image 70 pixels in width which links to the corresponding zip file for that product, a title which also links to the zip file, information on how big the zip file is, what kind of rights the product has (user, resell, master resell or private label), and a short description for the product.

This seemingly simple task involves unzipping the product, finding a software cover, copying it to photoshop, cropping it and resizing it and saving it as a JPG to another folder. Then have a brief read through the sales page to find out what the product is, before coming up with a short description. Probably about 2-3 minutes work per product.

After you’ve done 10 products it gets boring, after 20 products it becomes tedious, after 50 products you have seriously lost the will to live.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this, maybe I have to get it off my chest or else I’ll explode. Or maybe it’s because I want people to start appreciating how much work goes into a seemingly simple website, I don’t know.

Hopefully any other webmasters out there can empathise with my problems.

But whatever happens, megatoolkit.com will be massive so it will all be worth it in the end.

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »