I would say that almost all “serious” amateur webmasters use adsense (or something very similar). And of course, you want to bring in as much revenue as possible. Over the years I’ve made a fair amount thanks to Google, and have worked out what works and what doesn’t. (Tips after the jump)

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Techcrunch is ranked at #468 at the time of writing according to Alexa. They have been going for only a year or two, have over 150,000 feed subscribers (according to their Feedburner pic), and make hundreds of thousands of $.

Making a site as popular as Techcrunch is probably the dream of almost all webmasters. I was talking to a friend about this, and we were talking about how they became so popular.

So… how did they do it? And more importantly, how can you copy them to follow in their footsteps?

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There are no real ways to know for sure how many people go to your site from bookmarks, but a couple of ways

• (the usual) take a high %  (or even 100%) of unique WITHOUT any referrer data (that also are not a bot)
• Make a “bookmark this” link, but make the bookmarked url something like “http://example.com/?camefrom=bookmark”. Then just do something like

• if ($_GET[’camefrom’] == “bookmark”)
  {
  // +1 to your stats thing counting bookmarks (database? etc)
  }

Making money from Myspace is quite easy. It used to be easier but they have cracked down on spam.

If you want to make sure they (probably) don’t remove your profile, make it look as crap as you can. Search for myspace layouts, put everything, glitter graphics, songs, the works. Upload a picture of an attractive girl, get a few friends, get some comments etc.

Now you have a few methods to make some money:

• Use the groups thing to make a group in your niche. Collect people who have a similar interest to what you are promoting/selling into a group. Use their search function to find people. Only bother adding people who are actually interested or at least your target market in/for your product.
• Get lots and lots of friends. Use auto adders (Google for them, most you have to pay for). Don’t do too many at once. If I were you, I would set up 5-10 accounts now, occasionally login add 5-10 people. After a couple of months after it looks like you’re a regular user (not a spammer) then start mass adding. Don’t do too many, they do remove profiles that spam friend requests. Once you have all these friends, then send bullitens or send messages/comments saying something such as “Hey, talk to me on here”, here being a webcam site such as IMLive (affiliated link, through their company Pussy Cash. You can even get around $2 per free sign up there - it is easy money) etc.
• Leave lots of comments with affiliated links. Ringtones etc. Make it seem you are not a spammer.

A good way to get people who are interested in your product, is to do a google search like site:myspace.com “your keyword”

You can also get a load of backlinks, by spamming links on comments.

Let me know in the comments for your thoughts etc on spamming myspace.

This is the first in a small series of posts about some very basics to webmastering. This one covers programs that allow you to connect to your host via FTP and upload your files.

FTP stands for “File Transfer Protocol” and is very popular for transfering files between computers. There are many FTP programs - some 100% free, some have free trials, some cost a bomb. But you don’t need to spend money to get a good FTP program. We will only cover FTP programs for windows (Win 2000, XP, Vista), as chances are if you use linux, you won’t be needing these basic guides…

• Smart FTP - this is what I personally use. Download smart FTP here. It has a very easy to use interface and is very easy to connect to more than one server at once. Uses an explorer like interface, with drag/drop ability.
• FTP Commander - This is another great program (that I used before using Smart FTP for all my ftp needs). Has some great functions like resuming broken downloads etc. http://www.internet-soft.com/software-download.htm
• Ace FTP - I used this for a while, it very easy to use, and also has drag/drop ability! Get it at http://freeware.aceftp.com/.

PS - Merry christmas :).

(My personal excuse for doing this, on Xmas Day - there is nothing on tv ;) )

Update - I’ve had a few comments about this. I guess we all think the best FTP program is the one we use every day! So check out the comments for their views, and leave your own if you think there are better ones! I haven’t used any of those mentioned in the comments, so I won’t cover them here.

Howdy

If you want to do a cron job, but don’t want that email giving you the result, such as for example when doing a wget command, do this:

wget –quiet –output-document output_filename http://www.urltoget.com/

It will still email you with errors, so if you want it to never email you, add this:

>/dev/null 2>&1

to the end of it.