Mubin Ahmed says building sites for AdSense is over and done. But you can apply the same skills and build for text link ad services - and maybe make a lot more money. And it’s not just AdSense:

Made for Adsense is dead because if you have a site that is specifically made for adsense ads [...]

Mubin Ahmed says building sites for AdSense is over and done. But you can apply the same skills and build for text link ad services - and maybe make a lot more money. And it’s not just AdSense:

Made for Adsense is dead because if you have a site that is specifically made for adsense ads sooner than later you will get smartpriced. The reason being is that the people that click through on MFA sites are usually doing it as a act of desperation to get off of your site. When they end up on the advertisers page they usually leave it without paying/buying anything. This will lead to your account getting smartpriced or even worse you getting your account banned because of the inevitable “invalid clicks” email. This is even worse for those on the Yahoo Publisher Network, because if your not converting they will make you take down the ads. Your not too good for them, they even made shoemoney take down YPN ads from one of his sites.

Emphasis mine. I think the days of AdSense easy money were something most of us realized had to come to an end sooner or later. That’s why I never bothered with it. For Google to remain competitive, sooner or later they were going to have to make it work better for advertisers than it worked for webmasters.

Mutual benefit is a big part of why text link ads could be a better longterm alternative. It’s not just about clicks. Ahmed says it’s about pagerank passing, and at this point in time I do have to agree that’s where most people’s heads are. And that will cause a bit of trouble down the road when - not if, but when - Google decides to either tank pagerank so no one can have it or find a way to punish other people for using it.

But text links are the oldest form of advertising on the web, long before pagerank, and they’re still here for a reason.

UPDATE: Put your WordPress GTD into a Zoho Notebook, along with your Bloglines and most everything else you need at your fingertips.
I spent a lot of time this week trying out different online and server-side apps to help me get into GTD mode. Nothing was quite right for me, and eventually I decided I needed [...]

UPDATE: Put your WordPress GTD into a Zoho Notebook, along with your Bloglines and most everything else you need at your fingertips.

I spent a lot of time this week trying out different online and server-side apps to help me get into GTD mode. Nothing was quite right for me, and eventually I decided I needed to just pick something and be done.

That’s when I came up with the idea of turning a Wordpress install into a GTD app. Here’s how I did it:

• Install Wordpress
• I created the following categories:
  • GTD: Inbox
  • GTD: Next Action
  • GTD: Reference
  • GTD: Projects
  • GTD: Someday/Maybe
  • GTPD: Project 1
  • GTPD: Project 2 (and so on)
  • Abandoned
  • Done

The logic of my categories might not suit your needs, but I’ll explain it so you can get ideas from it. First, the GTD element: in GTD you have an Inbox for brand new tasks you’ve just thought of. Every day you’ll process the inbox and stick things into more specific sections. Next Action is where you stick the ones you’re going to do something about immediately. Someday/Maybe is the stuff you may do someday, but not immediately. Reference is just what it sounds like. Projects are the various projects that each of your tasks belong to. I added “Abandoned” and “Done” to keep track of stuff I’ve decided not to do and stuff I’ve completed, for future reference.

I made a separate category for each Project. I could’ve made a sub-category, but that didn’t work too well in the tag cloud (more on that later). By sticking the “GTD” and “GPTD” in front of certain things, I kept them grouped alphabetically. Then I made a tag-cloud style “heatmap” with a plugin called catcloud and put that in my sidebar. Now I can glance at the cloud and the categories that have the most stuff piling up immediately catch my eye and get priority treatment. (Alternately, you could use a regular category list and set it to show the numbers of posts in each category).

Here’s how I use it. I open a new post. The title is the task, i.e. “Pick up juice.” I leave the post empty unless I have notes on that - say, “Safeway’s having a sale on that.” I put it in the Inbox category. Later, when I process everything in the Inbox, I change each item’s categories to move them where they should be. When I complete or abandon them, I move them to the Done or Abandoned categories.

Also, with Cat Cloud, you can have it exclude certain categories from the cloud. I set my install to exclude GTD: Reference, Abandoned and Done because those are just going to pile way up with posts over time. I created links to those categories in the blogroll so they’re still easy to access from the sidebar.

If you want to keep the install private even from prying bots, you can put it in a protected folder on your domain or use this wonderful plugin: Angsuman’s Authenticated WordPress Plugin. It prevents anyone from seeing the blog unless they’ve logged in (making it very nice for private blogs or blogs people pay to read, too).

I know people keep posting monster lists of keyboard shortcuts, but seriously: can you ever have enough? Ever since I started showing signs of "mouse fatigue" - the aches and pains related to mousing too much - I can’t get enough of keyboard shortcuts.
You know what else rocks about them? They’re quicker and more accurate [...]

I know people keep posting monster lists of keyboard shortcuts, but seriously: can you ever have enough? Ever since I started showing signs of "mouse fatigue" - the aches and pains related to mousing too much - I can’t get enough of keyboard shortcuts.

You know what else rocks about them? They’re quicker and more accurate for me. Sometimes I miss my target with mouse clicking. Sometimes I struggle with those teency tincy little boxes from hell that people insist on using all over the web. But sometimes I can tab to those babies, then hit enter or something, and my day is saved.

Here’s the latest list I’ve found that actually had keyboard shortcuts I didn’t know.

V7N has decided to tag people and demand that they pay him if they want him not to link to them. It’s a joke based on Michael Gray’s Paid Blog Link Meme in which he links to Matt Cutts and others and claims they paid him for those links. Which is based on the unfortunate [...]

V7N has decided to tag people and demand that they pay him if they want him not to link to them. It’s a joke based on Michael Gray’s Paid Blog Link Meme in which he links to Matt Cutts and others and claims they paid him for those links. Which is based on the unfortunate non-joke that Google wants to discount paid links.

At least now they are being slightly clearer about that: paid links will not get you banned. They will be discounted. In fact, they already are being discounted, if they’ve been detected by algorithms. The only thing that actually changed is they’re asking people to tattle, and using the tattling both to start investigations and to tweak the algo to do a better job of detecting them.

On my own sites, nothing’s changed. My guess is that my paid links had already been detected. They could be the reason I lost a point of PR on several sites in this latest update. On the other hand, I’ve lost PR before and had no idea why. But - and this is important - despite the PR loss my traffic is still steadily increasing just like always.

And yeah, Google is sending the same traffic as always. A bit more each month.

So what’s the big deal here?

SuperAff has found a simple solution for cloaking affiliate links and gotten the designer to write some more code to make tracking the clicks simpler. This is something a lot of us have been looking for for a long time, so - nice job, guys! Thanks.

SuperAff has found a simple solution for cloaking affiliate links and gotten the designer to write some more code to make tracking the clicks simpler. This is something a lot of us have been looking for for a long time, so - nice job, guys! Thanks.

Now this is cool. Yahoo isn’t just telling us to go green and help global warming; they’re making commitments to cut down their own carbon output.
The website has some great interactive tools to give you ideas on cutting back some of your personal carbon output. You can create a plan for cutting down consumption, [...]

Now this is cool. Yahoo isn’t just telling us to go green and help global warming; they’re making commitments to cut down their own carbon output.

The website has some great interactive tools to give you ideas on cutting back some of your personal carbon output. You can create a plan for cutting down consumption, then pledge to do it on their site, and your numbers will join the ticker they have going at the top.

Marketing ploy? Hell, yeah. Who cares? Doing a good thing is a very marketable idea.