are these people so stupid they use their real email address when they comment spam on my blog? good one.  Nice comment. good old aadmoronicdesign.

 I do like a challenge, and after recently watching an excellent presentation on facebook marketing (and how to make money from facebook apps) I decided that I was definitely going to publish a facebook application before *everyone* is doing it in my preferred niche. It is trend setters that get paid, and the early bird catches the worm, or so I have been told.

At my request, one of my buddies with some ASP.net savvy developed the application together to my spec (he had developed a vaguely similar application after I showed him the videos I link to above). We decided to go 50/50 on the venture incidentally.

The Experiment: can we make any money from a facebook app?

The Application:- "my poker schedule for facebook" allows the user to share their poker playing schedule with their contacts (whether the event is live or online). User simply enter the location, date/time as well as the poker room if the game is online.

If the user chooses to enter poker events which they plan on entering into the application, an affiliate hyperlink is displayed to contacts with the same application installed. If somebody decides they wish to join you, or sign up to the poker room in question and deposit, we get either a CPA or revenue share (for life!). Similar applications might include what you are reading (perhaps with an affiliate link to purchase that book Amazon, for any interested parties), or a What Video Game I am playing Facebook App.

This is what appears in your profile once you add an event to your schedule:

Tracking Facebook App Stats:

The Facebook developer application can be added to a developers profile. This app offers access to  a facebook developers discussion board, and most importantly, statistics which pertain to that developers facebook applications. After 24 hours, our application has 63 users. We can see if any of our contacts added/removed the app, and people can leave feedback / feature requests on the application "wall" (which is linked to from the app itself).

Third party tracking sites are available such as adnomics: Facebook Analytics and Marketing, which allow you to compare your app to other popular apps and which can offer estimated valuations as to the worth of your facebook application, should you wish to sell it.

In any case, this is a cheap and cheerful experiment - I’ll blog up the stats in the coming weeks/months and hopefully I’ll deploy some more mainstream applications in an attempt to acquire and retain a greater volume of users in.

It is my opinion that the more socially interactive the applications are, the more installs and long-term use they will get - however seasonal and gimmick applications no doubt have explosive marketing potential (which or may not be be realised - depending on whether advertisers are given enough advance time to purchase the apps in question).

It sound easy doesn’t it? Can you forsee yourself putting a facebook application together in the next 6 months? How will you make your money? CPC? toolbars? CPM? Selling ads? The scope is endless.

 [Digg This article]

Facebook is a "social utility" that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

Developent and mass distribution of applications

How to make $1,000,000 a week from facebook Apps

When asked how many (of the 100+ facebook developers) people in the room were currently making more than $100 a day from their app a handful of people raised their hands. Bailey then asked how many people THINK they could make $10000 a day from an app?  Then he gets straight to business, opening up an application on facebook which has millions of users and has made its creators very rich.

Bailey states that toolbar downloads are as very good source of revenue, and cites "good causes" (such as Cancer, in the case of the Pink Ribbon Application) as lucrative means to gain customers - the key being to market something which doesn’t feel too much like and advert. Watch the presentation on Youtube:

Jason Bailey presentation Part 1 | Jason Bailey presentation part 2

Google recently launched a new feature in its Google Maps - which allows street level mapping. Yes that’s right - you can rotate 360 degrees, zoom and so on - if Google maps has data for the region of interest. Google have provided a short introduction video to this new Google maps street level feature on youtube.

While this might seem like a nice idea for a multitude of reasons (planning trips, virtual sightseeing and provision of more data for meshups to name but a few) - it certainly broaches some privacy and decency issues. Who screens these images? do you expect to see results like this:

 (Okay, as it turns out - this guy is just fixing his car tyre!)

What do you do when you are snapped coming out of a strip club, and immortalised by Google street level mapping?

Would you be happy for your street/house to be visible to all on google streetmapping? Personally I like my privacy and would be none too amused to get snapped outside a den of ill-repute ("I was just walking past that club dear- I swear"). I shall reserve judgement. What do you think? Google Streetmapping Good or bad?

Alex Tew’s dollar-per-pixel advertising page (The million dollar homepage) raised over a million dollars in just a few months
The million dollar homepage sold pixels in order to make a poor student his target of $1,000,000.

Million Dollar Pubes adds a novel twist to the million dollar homepage idea -
have you guessed yet? yes - can purchase a pubic hair for $200, and get a free 10x10 pixel advertisment on the homepage.

this is a screenshot of how the homepage today:

Stats

Oh I love site stats (especially other peoples!) - and this site shows them on the top left of the homepage.

        Visitors: 5622
	Clicks:	  511
	Pubic hairs sold:10
	Remaining:4990

Yes that’s right. folks - roll up, roll up. Get your pubes today. So far an encouraging 10 pubes have been sold. If I told my mother that people are buying pubes on the internet she would not believe me! (Hey - this could be a lucrative business - is pubes.com registered yet?…)

Buying pubes is not a new phenomonon - in fact in South Park -05x04. “Scott Tenorman Must Die”, spolied Eric Cartman gets duped into buying pubes, and is dumb enough to believe there was a pube fair where he could easily make.. yes- you guessed it - “a Million Dollars”.

The idea.

The about page yields some interesting blurb:

To keep up my desired smoothness requires ongoing and time consuming maintenance which has increasingly become a frustrating chore. Therefore, as a long term solution I have recently decided to have laser hair removal in order to get rid of my pubic hair for good!

Buy pubes, get free advertising

for each of my public hairs that your purchase you can also place a 10 x 10 pixel advertisement on the homepage of MillionDollarPubes.com, with a short accompanying description & direct link to your website.

Wow. This girl (or Guy!!!) is a sales whiz! Poor Eric cartman didn’t get a free 10x10 pixel advertisement! This sounds like a great deal! If you are looking for link love, you may be dissapointed - while the images can be hyperlinked, a redirection script is employed so getting linked from the site will yield no PageRank juice benefit for your site.

Word of mouth is bound to make those pubes (I mean pixels) quite a commodity. What do you think? Do you expect to see any big corporate names on the page or will they stay well clear?

Just like on the million dollar pubes page, I shall end this post by saying that upon leaving a comment on my blog…

you will also have the option of whether or not you wish to receive my pubic hair in the post….

Well it looks like a Google pagerank update is underway finally. I am quite excited about this , for a number of reasons.

1- I have launched a few fire and forget sites and seo’d them quickly and forgotten about them. They are ranking nicely for my chosen keywords in the serps and a bit of google juice is an indicator of how well the seo techniques employed on one site compare to those used on my other sites… oh and a good pagerank doesn’t help when you want good linkage..

2- I have been trying to rank well for the phrase “uk gambling” n google for a while, and to get the site in question ranked at least pagerank 5. This has turned out to be a complete barsteward of a task (whereas getting other sites above that mark has been trivial).. I am still convinced that google makes some words harder to rank for [and get pr] than others..

This time I am hoping for the illusive Pagerank 5. (the site in question has gone from PR4 to 0 today, so something is going on!). The higher the pagerank on the site, the more scope for getting better linkage and making more money.. so fingers crossed..

please be nice Google pagerank update..

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.

Do Irish Web Designers care about accessibility?

Recently I did some quick research to evaluate the levels of accessibility awareness and/or compliance of the top 15 ranked entities for the keyphrase “web design Ireland” on the Google search engine.

Results?

The results ?

Feck web accessibilty, let’s make some cash.

Using the w3c Validation Service Tool (W3C Markup Validation Service is a service that checks Web documents in formats like for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards.), a pinch of experience and a coffee, I briefly examined the
15 web-sites.

out of the 15 sites examined, only 3/15 sites passed the w3c Automatic Validation tests- in fact most sites contained more accessibility barriers than any automated tool can check for.

Accessibility Problems

Some sites had serious problems which included:

• inaccessible forms
• missing alt-text
• no textual equivalents for non-text content

Amusingly One site which failed validation miserably had a large logo on the homepage touting w3c compliant design, however none of their clients sites seemed to validate to the automatic checks of the validator either. Click the links below to visit the validator page for that site if you are interested in seeing the results for yourself!)

Sites Examined

1. www.redflystudios.com[passed automatic checks]
2. www.activeonline.ie
3. www.ketec.net[passed automatic checks]
4. www.zephyr-ireland.com
5. www.webtrade.ie
6. www.multimediaireland.com
7. www.redsky.ie
8. www.equinox.ie
9. www.webpagedesignco.com
10. www.clickstream.ie
11. www.erigena.com[passed automatic checks]
12. www.allirelandweb.com
13. www.nevada.ie
14. www.2bscene.net

(the remaining 1 website was parked)

Accessible web design in ireland

Accessible web design has a long way to go in Ireland it seems… Developers need a good kick up the arse if they want to call themselves professionals. Another factor which feeds the problem is the general lack of client awareness regarding accessible web design. Hopefully this will change soon.

Is it worth paying less (or often more!) for an inaccessible site? It really shouldn’t cost any more or significantly more to have an accessible web-site built- after all any good webmaster will follow current best-practices.. right?
At least for now you won’t get sued for having an inaccessible web-site! What do you think?

Evil Blog Promotion Techniques

By erigena, published 21st March 2007

Blogger John Chow identifies and discusses a number of “evil blog promotion methods” to increase the popularity of your Blog.

These “crafty methods” involve a range of tactics including exploiting special offers from text-link companies, link trains, and clever viral marketing.

Below is a summary of Chow’s evil (and not so evil) blog promotion techniques.

• Sponsor a Wordpress Template -
  Sponsoring a Wordpress / Blog Theme - If the theme is popular, you can expect a lot of inbound links by paying for a link in the footer of the template/theme
  (Not really evil, but is good viral marketing).
• TextLinkAds bonus exploitation - Use the TextLink ads.com Link Buying Starter Kit
  + redeem your $100 coupon for new advertisers. Buy the minimum of $125 of links (for a real cost of $25), and receive a bonus $25 if you are
  a publisher on Text Link Ads and refer yourself.
• Review for Review - The website ReviewMe sometimes has a 50% coupon code available.
  It is possible to exploit this offer in order to secure a free site review and $25, via some crafty bonus shuffling.
• The Tech Link Train - Tech Link trains involve adding a blog url to a
  “train” of existing blogs, and encouraging others to take the list, post it on their blog, add to it and pass it on.

Some of these promotional methods are dubious on a number of levels, however undoubtedly employing some of the above techniques could help increase your blog ranking and the number of visitors it receives.

resources

• John Chow
  - John Chow dot Com -a blog that helps you make money online. Chow also offers link to your blog if you review his blog.
• SEO Glossary
  - A glossary of common search engine optimisation terms.

Best Blog Promotion Techniques

published 21st March 2007

Some or all of the following techniques may be employed to promote your blog. Blogs need exposure and readers, and having a good readership and good search engine rankings can monetize your web presence. If your blog rockets in success, you could make your living as a career blogger.

Following the steps below will help you improve the number of visitors and subscribers to your blog, as well as boosting your earning potential.

Submissions

Submit your blog to the search engines, blog directories and RSS feed directories (free tools are available which will
assist you in this task!)

Target

Target your niche: You have to be an expert on something, you need to specialize in one field, and
keep abreast of happenings in the world of that niche; this is your professional duty as a `blogger proper’.
If you do this, other bloggers are more likely to link to you, resulting in desired cross promotion.

Networking

Build a relevant network for your blog. Network with other bloggers in your niche area. Post comments on their blogs,
and add relevant blogs to your blogroll to increase the chances of a reciprocal link.

Get “The Scoop”

Getting “The Scoop” is getting and publishing the news first! This means that you are likely to be cited when others later blog about the same event,
as well as by other news channels.

Quality

Without this, content your blog will sink like a Zeppelin made of lead. Articles should
target your chosen niche. If you are a poor content writer you have the option of buying articles or using a “ghost writer”.
You might find it useful to target your content / articles to use long tail keywords [1] to drive
more traffic to your blog (try Hittail [2] if you want to find popular long-tail keywords for your site/blog).

Fresh Content

Search engines and humans alike enjoy fresh content. In fact, many say that “content is KING!”. Strive to publish something
relevant and new on your blog daily or at least twice a week.

Marking up for Search Engines

Your content should include relevant keywords, occasionally in bold or italics, and used in header tags.

Comments

Comments - Take the time to reply to your comments (this will increase the chances of converting each poster into a subscriber),
and delete spam comments.

SEO

Good Search Engine Optimisation is essential. Having your own
domain, containing keywords which are relevent to your niche is a good idea. Your own web-hosting is essential to allow tweaking of your
blog software. Customise your blog software to enable seo-friendly urls, pings, trackbacks and other useful blog functionality/plugins.

Unique design

Design - Break away from the norm! Give your users a unique experience - abstain from using unmodified blog templates. If you
are not technically savvy, don’t worry - hire a good web designer to do it for you.

Syndication

Syndication of content is trivial with RSS feeds.
People can subscribe to your content, it can be syndicated on other sites or viewed on RSS readers like google reader, yahoo, feedburner etc.
Track how many users you have subscribed to your feeds, and use this information later.

Article Directories

Article directories e.g.Article Dashboard [3] allow you to submit your articles which they
syndicate, and which may also contain a footer link to your blog / web-site. This is a good example of viral marketing.

Linkbait

Linkbait is essentially content placed on a web page (an article, blog post, picture, or other form of e-media) - designed for the specific
intention of gathering links from as many different sources as possible. Linkbait is usually timely, current and controversial.

Press Release

If you are doing something newsworthy or likely to turn heads, a press release can give you a lot of exposure.

Trackbacks & Backlinks

Linking to authority sites is a good idea, and linking to authority blogs / posts with trackback enabled
will result in links to your post.

Blogburst

Blogburst [4] is a blog network which syndicates content.

Give it away Give it away now!

Competitions may be a good way to encourage users to subscribe and participate more actively with your blog. Any competition
which involves subscribers posting links to your blog is extra chocolate sprinkles. Big names in your niche may donate prizes in exchange
for some free exposure on your blog / site.

Interviews

Attempt to interview specialists or celebrities in your niche area, This can generate hoardes of traffic to your blog from the blogs
or websites of the influential individuals interviewed, as well as from other sources.

Blog Networks

Forums

Forums relevant to your niche can be an excellent source of targeted visitors (if you are permitted to advertise your blog in your signature
or profile). Some forums have a blog aggregator plugin which will show users a link to your most recent post. If you use a forum, you can
ask the forum administrator to install such a plugin.

PPC Campaigns

You can drive traffic to your blog using adwords, Overture, adbrite or other PPC engines if you want
fast targeted traffic, and have some money to spend on promotion.

If you employ some or all of these strategies, in 12 months you will have a popular blog with a good number of subscribers, prominent search
engine result page rankings, as well as a large earning potential.

Resources

1. Long Tail Keywords

   - Long Tail keywords explained.

2. HitTail
   - Find long tail keywords for your site / blog.
3. Articledashboard.com
   - Article Dashboard.
4. Blogburst
   - The Blogburst Blog Network.
5. Search Engine Optimisation Ireland
   - Irish SEO Experts