• Blend your Adsense ads – don’t put bright red ads on a white, minimalistic page. Like many advertisers say, the best ads are those that people do not realise are ads
• Minimize other links - if your site is only of those small mini sites set up just for adsense (aka “Adsense sites”), don’t give the user too many options. If you list 20, 30 or more site links as well as your adsense ad you are going to get a lot less clicks on your ad than if you only have 1 or 2 links. This can hurt your search engine rankings a little, but it does help increase CTR
• Read Google’s own tips – they want you to make as much as you can, as it obviously makes them money as well. Their page about best ad placement on pages is very handy
• Track individual ad units – use the channel feature to track individual ad units. The more ad units you show, the more chance of low paying ads that are shown. So get rid of any that don’t get a decent amount of clicks (compared to other ads on the same page)
• People don’t think before clicking - this sort of follows on from my first point (blend it). People know that blue (and also underlined) text means links. Making the ads text blue can help (it depends on the target market – I found it didn’t make much difference for tech savvy users).
• Use the wide skyscrapers – these always seem to convert the best. And take a look at any large site that uses Adsense and you will see they use them.
• Use inline ads – these are ad units that are placed so they look like more of the content, than part of the layout. They have a higher (on average) CTR.
• About to make an Adsense site? - aim it at kids, or at least not geeks! It is true… Geeks hardly ever click ads.
• Try making your site hard to navigate – similar to another point above (minimise links). If your site is hard to navigate there is a higher chance people will click your ads (if they are clear). Of course, this is more for those spammy adsense sites rather than any quality site.
• Don’t ignore the search feature – put in the Google search box, and make a bit of extra money if people can’t find what they’re looking for on your site

Use tips at your own risk :)

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?

There are quite a few reasons, but i’ve gathered the top 10 (not in any order)

1. An easy to read and use design
2. Between 5-10 posts a day, always something for readers to read
3. Available in multiple languages, such as Japanese and French.
4. A tech (geeky) subject, and geeks love this kind of stuff, write about it in their blogs etc and thus easily raise the number of hits
5. Some of the best writing style I’ve seen on blogs come from Techcrunch. They employ people worth employing – not idiots.
6. Full time staff employed also will help by not only writing quality posts (see above point) but also helps them get exclusives and find news before other main tech news sites pick them up
7. Review many startups and new products, and get a lot of backlinks
8. Option to subscribe – thus again increasing readership
9. Likely that they bought traffic, like many big sites, to again increase readership and popularity
10. Nice and easy to read posts of quality length, with relevant pictures

There are possiblity other points (such as often getting exclusive news), but in my opinion the main overall point is quality content that people WANT TO read. Of course, content isn’t everything, Michael Arrington is very well connected and when he launched the site he got lots of good backlinks from other popular blogs.

For more information, take a look at his take on how he became popular.

• (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)
  }

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.

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.

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.