I’m Giving Away Over 1,400 Entrecard Credits

EntreCard LogoI’m at home today and a bit bored so I decided to hold a simple contest to get rid of my 1,400 EC credits. Actually, by the time this little contest ends, it will probably be closer to 1,500 credits. My balance as of today is 1,423, but I will transfer my FULL BALANCE of Entrecard credits to the winner when the contest ends on February 10 - so be sure to come back and drop your card over the next few days to help run-up those EC credits that you might win.

How To Enter:

This is not another one of those irritating link-back contests that you’re probably sick of seeing (but it’s close). All you have to do is write a review about either me, my blog, or my website, (one of the three, not all of them) and then post a comment here with a quick blurb about what you decided to write about. No backlink to my site or blog is necessary, although it might be helpful to your readers (again, it’s not required). The only other condition is that your post/review must be at least 100 50 words - (I don’t want you to make yourself or your blog look bad by throwing-up some little lame-ass 10 word post.)

To help inspire you and give you some ideas of what you can write about, here are a few helpful links:

On Sunday, February 10, at approximately 6pm Pacific Time, my four-year-old son will randomly pick a winner and we will announce it in a new post.

Adsense Ads For Firefox Out Performing Firefox Referrals

Firefox Referrals vs Adsense For Content

Many of you know me as The Firefox Referral King, because my website was published by Google as an Adsense Success Story back on 2006. Since then, the sources of my traffic, the type of traffic and demographics of my visitors has changed, and I’m no longer making ~$1,500 $2,000 a month from (only) Firefox referrals. I still make a tidy sum from Firefox referrals, but probably only around half of what I was getting throughout most of 2006.

Back then (and still) I drive a lot of traffic from other pages on the site to my main “Firefox Information Page” where visitors can download Firefox via my referral link. I do this by adding a WordFilter (Drupal.org/Wordfilter) that converts any instance of the word “firefox” or “Fire fox” into a link to my Firefox info page. Anytime a member makes a forum post that mentions Firefox, a link to the download page is automatically created.. I also get a lot of direct traffic to the page, and use other methods to push visitors to the page, but that’s not what this post is about.

My Firefox info page has an Adsense for Content leaderboard across the top that’s always gotten a few (low paying) clicks per day. Beginning in December of 2007 I started noticing something odd - the ePC for those content ads was beginning to rise. More and more often I was seeing an ePC of nearly the full payout of a Firefox Referral, and occasionally even more than the $2 referral payout. It seems that the Arbitragers have been paying more and more to drive traffic to their own Firefox download pages and they are paying dearly for it. As a result, for the last two months or so, the Adsense for Content ads on that page have been earning as much, if not more than the Firefox referrals from that same page.

Realizing that my Firefox conversion percentage has been dropping and that a click on an ad is now virtually guaranteed to pay nearly as much as a full Firefox w/Toolbar conversion, I changed the Firefox referral on the page from a button, to a text link, making it just a bit harder to find. This resulted in an even higher CTR on the Adsense ads and even higher earnings. My next test will be to remove the Adsense Firefox Referral link altogether, leaving only the Adsense ads for Firefox downloads. My guess is that earnings will be even higher.

My point? If you have a Firefox referral ’squeeze’ page with a low conversion rate, try throwing some Adsense blocks on the page and see if they earn as well or better than your referrals.

Do You Love YOUR Web-Hosting Company?

When I first started GrownUpGeek.com it was on a shared-plan from PowWeb.com that cost me $7/month. I always recommend that new webmasters get started on a low-cost shared or VPS becuase there is no sense in throwing a pile of money down the toilet every month when building a new website. Might as well get by as cheap as possible for as long as possible.

After about 6 months, when we were averaging around 5k visitors/day we started to see and feel some of the disadvantages of shared-hosting - SLOW page load times. At peak traffic times, page-loads were as slow as 15-20 seconds. Because the site runs Drupal and is very database/CPU intensive (and a memory hog) it started to become obvious that I needed to move to a dedicated server. If the site was simple static-HTML or a more simple script like WordPress, shared-hosting probably would have been acceptable until daily traffic was much higher, but all those great features of Drupal were forcing my hand.

When I started my search for a dedicated server host I only had two requirements:

1) I didn’t want to spend a lot of money - The website was generating about $1,500/month at that point, but I was nervous about increasing my expenses from $7/month to hundreds of dollars per month.

2) The hosting company needed to be n00b-friendly. I had zero experience running my own server, and I didnt (still don’t) know the difference between a UNIX command and a hole in the ground. Whatever host I choose needed to be able to hold my hand and do anything I could not figure out on my own.

After much research and asking questions at DP Forums and BroadBand Reports, I decided on SurpassHosting.com. Surpass certainly was not the cheapest, but they were far from being the most expensive - and based on the reviews that I’d read, and from what I was seeing in their Support Forums, it looked like they would be able to hold my hand whenever I needed it.

I made the move to the new host and server (was actually able to do it all on my own.) Almost immediately I knew I made the right decision - That first Monday morning after the move page load times were never slower than 1-2 seconds (down from 10-20) and traffic was higher than ever (people weren’t getting tired of waiting for pages to load and hitting the back button), and Adsense earnings were up.

In that year-and-a-half or so since I moved to that dedicated server, traffic has tripled, my Drupal database is 400% larger, I’ve installed more Drupal modules, and I’ve added the blog and two other sites to the server. A few months after the move I upgraded the RAM on the server from 1gb to 2gb, but in the last few months it’s been apparent that another upgrade was going to be needed. Page-load times were getting slower at peak times, and RAM and CPU usage were creeping into the red more times than I liked.

I asked my host if I could throw more RAM into my server, but the (lower cost) model I had was already maxed-out at 2Gb. The only way to get more RAM would be to upgrade the entire server. After about a week of negotiations and stupid questions I finally decided on a new Core-2 server with 4Gb of RAM (upgradeable to 8Gb). They offered me two upgrade options - bring the new server online and I could migrate the sites, DNS, and everything else myself, or, they could shut-down the server and do a complete turnkey upgrade for me with only a few hours of downtime. Me, being the lazy Unix n00b that I am, choose option 2: Do all the work for me.

They took down my old server last night at 8:09PM (just as I had requested), and had the new server online and running by 10:30PM - much faster than they had warned. They sent me email status-updates every 45 minutes or so and afterwards they fixed a few minor issues that I saw, and a few others that I didnt even know about.

This morning the website is blazing-fast on the new hardware, and I’m happy as I can be.

I love my host.. Do you love yours?

Make Your Kontera Links Single-Underlines

WARNING: Do not attempt this without explicit written approval from your Kontera account manager. Using this method without approval from Kontera will probably get you banned. I’m just posting it so you know about it - maybe you can beg your account manager into allowing you to do it.

Kontera in-text linksBy default, Kontera’s In-Text links produce double-underlines - this is so that the In-Text Link Ads can be differentiated from “real” links so they don’t trick or fool your visitors, which might result in poorly converting clicks for advertisors.

Here is a little trick that will change those double-underlines into single-underlines (remember, do not do this unless you have written permission from Kontera):

Add the following line to your Kontera code, just below your var DC_AdLinkColor line:

var dc_single_line = 'yes';

Be sure to add the ; at the end.  Save your changes and re-load your page and all your Kontera links will have a single underline instead of two.  Don’t forget my warning at the top of this post.

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