With digital photography becoming so popular, it’s hard to find a person without a digital camera. With the idea of Mobile Cameras coming out of age, photography has become a passive hobby for many. With such advancement of digital world, what required next was a place to store and share these. A look at the options available for the users, one will really get lost in the sea of image host. We have every kind of image host available – one targeted at families, one targeted at web administrator and so on. Below is the list of Top 5 image host according to me.
1. Photobucket
Photobucket is an image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing website. It was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and was acquired by Fox Interactive Media last year. It undoubtedly is the most popular of the entire image host and the most successful. The offer two kinds of membership – Regular and Pro Memberships. Their feature includes:
- Upload from Computer, from URL, by mobile or email.
- Free user account has an upload limit of 1mb per file.
- Multiple image upload.
- Advanced Image editing and effects.
- Upload Videos.
- 10 GB monthly bandwidth limit and 1GB upload limit for free users.
- Unlimited Bandwidth and 5GB storage space for Pro User.
The major draw back with these guys is that they don’t have a referral policy, even for Pro Members. Be careful in using Photobucket. It’s the best for sharing family photos and all but if you are looking for hosting images for your website, then looks somewhere else. I used to do that and pretty easily got addicted to them and suddenly found that I am using more than 10GB bandwidth; hence I have to go for Pro membership. Trust me Pro membership is worth it.
2. ShareaPic
ShareaPic offers a sharp contrast to Photobucket. They decided to concentrate on the options Photobucket left open. They offer the users an opportunity to earn from their pics and seriously becoming very popular with webmasters and forum owners. Their album interface may not look as great as Photobucket but still is very cool. They claim to pay 0.22$ per 100 picture views. The also allow you to add your Bidvertiser code to your albums. Earlier it was adsense. Their major feature includes:
- Unlimited Bandwidth.
- Unlimited Storage Space.
- Earn money sharing pictures.
- Add Bidvertiser code and earn money.
- Create unlimited Galleries.
For the webmasters Shareapic offers an added advantage. Their Gallery get indexed in Google search and here is the catch you can use it to increase in links to your site. What you have to do is simply add your sitename along with Gallery name.
3. ImageVenue
The above mentioned file host has strict restriction about the content of the files and in many cases you will find they removing your files in violation of TOS. If you are looking for an alternative then Imagevenue is the place. Actually their performance is too good when compared to the other two but their interfaces are very simple. Major features are:
- Upload option from file only.
- Unlimited bandwidth.
- Unlimited Storage space.
- 1.5MB file size limit.
- Registration not required.
4. ImageShack
ImageShack has been in service from 2003. they offer free as well as paid service. The major features are:
- Upload options: from file, from URL, by email or directly from mobile.
- Max file size of 1.5MB.
- No storage restrictions.
- Bandwidth limited to 100MB/hour.
5. PicTiger
One of the youngest entrants to the image hosting service is Pictiger. It’s one of the most promising among all the new comers. Where Pictiger scores in comparision to other hosting service is its bulk uploading capability. Major features are:
- Unlimited bandwidth.
- Unlimited Storage.
- Upload up to 100 images in one click.
- Advance editing and Tagging of Images.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Top 5 Image Hosting Service
Friday, March 28, 2008
Learn foreign languages at your Desk
For all those who are interested in learning new technologies and languages in the net, this is the most promising of all ventures - LiveMocha. Their homepage described their venture as “an exciting e-learning Web 2.0 startup founded by a group of experienced and successful entrepreneurs based in the
The entire exercise has been divided into 3 groups – Learn, Practice and Share. Learn is the usual option of registering for any of the above mentioned course. In practice you select a partner (community user) who is also looking to practice the language. Using the share option you can help others with your proficiency in the language – by correcting others. I have already started my attempt to learn Spanish and the course structure looks quite good to me. There are four basic courses for each language labeled 101, 102, 103, and 104. The 101 course is aimed at the beginners and is a good place to start your endeavor. Once through with that you can graduate yourself to the other courses which are organized according to the difficulty. LiveMocha is right now in its Beta version and can be expected to add more languages down the path. From the look and feel of it, they are here to stay. I almost forget to mention this –All these come free of cost and without any installation also.
Continue Reading...Thursday, March 27, 2008
Kick The Bot!!!
For those who make their first steps into the Blog-O-Sphere, the biggest question facing them is “How to get the initial traffic?” Most of the cases it’s pretty difficult to get your self in the ever increasing blog crowd. So every one digs hard in their favourite search engine and ultimately is moved into some topics which give an introduction to the term “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)”. From now onwards it is a never ending struggle and search to understand all the factors which dominates search engines. Everyone starts to think in terms of Google and Yahoo Bot and ultimately going to see a good spike of traffic in coming days. And slowly is going to increase and there you are smiling in front of what could be called a very firm first step. Then suddenly you start to see the traffic draining away. Then you dig again all over the net to find why this happened.Most of the cases you will be blinking in front of your Laptop, nothing else seems to work. Then slowly you start to realize that you ignored the most important of all the factors. One factor that is the backbone of all successful innovations – the Users.You designed your blog to welcome Google and Yahoo Bot but never designed it to welcome the audience.
Now you start afresh trying to get quality contents into your blog. Trust me in most of cases it don’t work, because even in your attempts in writing quality posts; you will most probably thinking about “The Bots”. That’s really going to affect your creativity. One of the most commonly used SEO tactic is “Link Baiting”. You link left, right and centre to all guys who have a page rank above you. Actually this is the biggest disaster that you can invite to your site. It takes the credibility of your site from both user and Bots point of view. It good if you get some really successful webmasters linking into your site, but honestly how many of us will be able to do that? Everyone including myself have attempted this and believe me mostly has failed. There are quite a few who succeeded; but even in that succeeded list there are a huge amount of people whose success was mainly the contribution of the articles they put up. It was Patrick Sexton from FeedTheBot.com introduced me to the importance of being loyal to your Audience rather than some machine Bot. It’s a must read for all the new entrants in to this huge crowd. I am not saying that all SEO tricks are evil but most of them are. Ultimately you are not trying to please some Bot. So serve it to the taste of your crowd. It is the most simplest, successful and important marketing technique. Always remember out of all the revenue generated in the blogosphere- almost 90% are done by maybe hardly 10% of the all bloggers. They are all successful not because some Bot found them pretty attractive, but they are considered pretty attractive by a huge amount of net users. When you start writing for your audience, the Bots automatically would find you attractive. And with the past changes made by Google with their Page Rank system – it would be better not to concentrate heavily on the Bots as there algorithm will be constantly changing. In midst of all these constant changes, they will still value quality content.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
How Much Is Your Blog Worth?
Recently I stumbled upon two tools which estimate the value of your blog/sites. Both of them depend on different metrics in calculating the value of your blog. The first one of them is been available in the Blog-O-Sphere for some time. It is Dane Carlson’s domain valuation tool available at his Blog. The tool computes a dollar value for your blog using the link-to-dollar ratio of your blog. So More the links more the value. It looks like he uses the technorati backlink system to determine the number of links into your site. The second one is a website which I recently stumbled upon – dnScoop domain check and value estimation tool. One of the major positive of dnScoop service compared to Dane Carlson tool is that it is not only aimed at Blogs. You can use this service to evaluate the value of your websites also. dnScoop estimate the value of a website/blog by taking into account the following factors – in links, age of domain, pagerank of domain and traffic to the domain. Actually you cannot check the value of your blog if you don’t own the domain name. The in links are calculated based on the Yahoo links and the traffic is calculated based on Alexa.
Put into test both of them gave absolutely varying values. My F C Barcelona blog – All About F C Barcelona had a value of $10 in dnScoop whereas it had a value of whooping $1693.62 in Dane Carlson’s tool. For me in this case dnScoop value is more justified than the latter as only recently I started working on this blog. A value of $1693.62 is a bit exaggerated; it may be because I was able to get some back links from some good blogs in the niche. But the same cannot be said about evaluating my entertainment niche blog Actress Snaps – it gave a $5,645 in Dane’s tool where as it only gave $740 in the dnScoop tool. Now in this case I tend to disagree heavily with dnScoop estimation as I am able to make close to $500 monthly from this blog alone. But then both tools do not take into consideration the fact of how much you earn from the blog. It is basically an indication to the guy who wants to buy the site - about how much he can make from the site. Till a new tool comes in the net which take into consideration the traffic, the niche values etc these two are these best we have.
The below table shows the comparison of Estimated values for some famous domain
| Website | Dane’s Estimation | dnScoop Estimation |
| Makeuseof.com | $1,039,318 | $142,040 |
| DoshDosh.com | $4,593,661 | $1,283,380 |
| Problogger.net | $5,155,379 | $1,849,120 |
| Fcbnews.com | $26,533 | $103,721 |
Continue Reading...
Monday, March 24, 2008
PredictAd a Must Have for all Sites
PredictAd also provides its customers with the monetization option, by which you can display ads along with the auto complete feature. I still haven’t had any great success with this, but then this application is pretty new to the web and they might bring out a much better option in the future. One of the main advantages of using PredictAd is that it significantly increases the page views for your site. Earlier I had a page view value in 1+, now it is almost touching 3. Now that’s a significant change. This is where you should be a little choosy in implementing PredictAd. PredictAd should be considered as another advertising tool. PredictAd provides you with an option of selecting the database from which the auto complete feature will be populated. The most common option to be selected is “General Phrases”. But this may not work for the entire niche. For example, selecting General Phrases will work for this site but may not work for my entertainment niche site ActressSnaps. For instance if a user type “a” in the search box; there is no purpose in showing the options as “apple”,” acne” etc. It would be better to show the option as “amisha patel”, “Anne Hathaway” etc. For this PredictAd provides another Database option “Custom + Learning”, here we can specify a list of keywords from which the auto complete option has to be populated. Only pain you have to take is spend some time preparing a list of keywords or phrases specific to your niche. One of the major things I loved about them is their customer support, they seriously reply to your mails. They study your problems and most cases suggest the best option to resolve it too. Their customer support personal was not ready to let off the issue until it was resolved. The major question which will be every body’s mind will be whether it is a violation of Google Adsense TOS. My firm belief is that it is not as 1) You are not changing any of Adsense Search Code. 2) You are not auto populating the search box, as you are displaying a set of options which will be displayed below the search box. It’s the user who will decide whether he want to select it or not. If you are going to use this along with Google search box, its better to add the code just below the search box code. PredictAd has a very good auto detect feature to detect existing search box in your WebPages. To join PredictAd Click Here.
One of the most innovative service/ application that are available in the Net is “PredictAd. PredictAd provides a search box for your site with a cool auto complete feature. It also can be used along with the existing search box that already exists in your Website or Blog. This can be also used to improve the Google search box result and hence for better monetization. The service is somewhat similar to the “Search Assist” option you will find with Yahoo search box at Yahoo Home Page. My personal experience with PredictAd has been very pleasant, which result in a higher page view and higher average time of users on site. PredictAd offers one more way to drive your viewers into targeted sections. With proper care taken into tweaking this service you can do wonders towards increasing your Ad network revenue; as an increase in page view will surely result in an increase in ad revenue. As studies have pointed out, those who tend to reach to a website through a search engine have a higher chance of clicking on the ads. This is mainly due to the fact that they are there in search of something, rather than being casually brought (like Digg and stumble upon users).
Thursday, March 20, 2008
10 Proven Steps to Maximize Adsense Revenue
Google adsense is an ad serving program run by Google. Google adsense undoubtedly is the king of ad world. It’s the outright choice for most of those who are interested in monetizing their blog. It is the highest earner for majority in the blog-o-sphere. Since they offer contextual ads, they tend to do better than any other network. Majority of the ads served by adsense are CPC (Cost per Click). I have heard that they do serve CPM (Cost per Thousand Impression) ads also, but haven’t seen myself anything about it. This article has been written in taking only the CPC ads into account. These are my own proven ways in increasing Adsense Revenue:
1) Blend It: This is the most over abused and most successful trick we all have played with Adsense code. The adsense code should be designed in such a way that it resembles the blog post. There are certain things which will also work together here. Always try to have the Ad title and the link URL the same colour.
2) Larger the Better: Many surveys and studies around the net have proven the fact that the larger ad units like the “Large rectangle” and “Medium Rectangle” tends to outperform their counterparts. They tend to grab more of the audience attention and hence have a higher chance of getting clicked.
3) Text still rules: Majority of the ads served by Adsense is CPC based. It’s proven that image ads have a lower CTR (click Through Rate) rather than the text ads. So make sure that you opt for text ads rather than text and image ads.
4) Fewer the Sweeter: Everything related to adsense depends on your CTR rate. Adsense have something called “Smart Pricing”. This option let Google Adsense serve lower priced adverts on sites that have poor CTRs, and higher priced adverts on sites that have high CTRs. So make sure to reduce the number of ad units used. Never allow more than two adsense ad units.
5) Together they Strike: The best option is to have only one ad unit on your site. But if you are interested one more unit, always go for a combination of a “Large Rectangle” or “Medium Rectangle” along with 729x5 ad link unit. Adsense ad link unit surprisingly has a higher CTR rate, which may be due to their non resemblance of what is generally considered to be ads. Never use leader board and half banner; of the both the latter is a pathetic performer. You may try the wide Sky scrapper and as a matter of fact do not even try the small skyscraper (120x600).
6) It looks better on the Top: This is one more proven fact that those ads shown above the fold to tend to perform better than that below the fold. So make sure both your adsense unit are above the fold.
7) Stay inside The Post: Let me assume you are going to use either of “Large rectangle” or “Medium rectangle” in your blog. Make sure that you keep it inside the post pages only, may be just below the title. Once you do that always remember to use an expandable post option so that you can take your readers to a place where the ads are displayed.
8) Watch out the Intruder: Since you will be displaying only two ad units, there will be enough space to introduce other ad networks. Make sure that those ad units are not showing very distractive ads like flashing, changing colours quickly. These will take your CTRs to unimaginable lows.
9) Search the Better: Always use Adsense Search option in your site. They tend to pay higher than any other options.
10) If the date tab is being displayed just above your ad unit, please remove it from there. It will actually distract the readers.
Continue Reading...
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Top 2 Best and Cheap Domain Registrar
There are so many advantages in having a domain name of your own. First of all it adds credibility to your blog and your effort. Having a domain name makes your blog look a bit more professional. Secondly it distinguishes you from the rest of the blog crowds. Thirdly it helps your audience, because it’s easy to remember it. Fourthly many search engines give emphasis and rates high the sites which are under their root domain. And finally, there is a hell lot of online application which requires you to own the domain name to use their service.
The plus point of using blogger is the custom domain option they provide. This takes away the worry of bandwidth and storage space as blogger will take care of those. The only thing you need to buy is a domain name. Domain names come very cheap nowadays and it should be a pity if you can’t own one. In this article I am introducing two domain name registrars who offer the most cheaply and reliable solution. The First One:
1) Netfirms
This is the cheapest option available in the market. It costs you $5.95 for the first year and $9.95 for the rest of the years. This is applicable of .com, .net and .org domains only. They have a limit of 5 domains which will be available for a single user for $5.95. Their package comes with a free private WHOIS feature, DNS management service and Email hosted on your domain. They also provide mail forwarding and you can have upto three custom email accounts for your account. For this price they provide 25MB of disk space and 1024MB of monthly bandwidth. Those who are going to use the blogger custom domain will never bother about it. Their only disadvantage compared to the other registrar I am mentioning here is that it takes a few hours before it gets updated in servers world wide. They have an excellent customer support and their technical support documents available on their site are more than sufficient.
2) Name
This is slightly costlier than Netfirms, come on $5.99 is always greater than $5.95. But then their renewals will cost you only $9.55 per year. They offer .info domain at $2.99 and .biz domains at $7.99. But their biggest USP will be that they provide you with a Google Apps account. They also provide good DNS management service and the personalized email is powered by google. They also offer free Private WHOIS feature and other google services like Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google web page creator. Their costumer service is also good and they do answer your mails properly. A Blogger user who is going to use the custom domain feature has to be careful in getting this one work: You need to delete the start.yourdomain.com CNAME first, and then only proceed to setup a CNAME in blogger. They do update the servers around the world much faster.
How to customize feedburner Email subscription widget?
Many of us have been using feedburner to serve RSS feeds of our blogs. Feedburner has a set of handy widgets to help you reach out to your audience. One of them, maybe the most important is Feedburner Email Subscription service. This service is a very handy tool to update your audience about the latest happenings about your blogs. You can activate this service at the Publicize tab in your My Feeds option. There are certain things which you can customize to suit your blog,
1) Delivery Options – Through this you can set the time in which the Email delivery will be made. This option will be very handy, if you have more users from a particular geographic location. If your 50% + users are from US, then you can set the timing in such a way that, this will be the first thing they see on their morning.
2) Email Branding – This is the option where you can customize the way your email looks like. It’s very important that your email body resembles your blog.
3) Communication Preferences – Feedburner provides you with a standard confirm subscription email. This is the place where you would like to innovate and stand out from others. You can add your innovative marketing ideas to make sure that all who chose to subscribe actually does the same.
Feedburner also provides with a standard subscription widget, which you can place in your site, so that your readers can easily subscribe to your feeds. The standard widget looks quite boring and may not fit into the design of your site. Here I am attempting to improve on it so that we can make it a bit interesting.The feed burner code is
<form style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;"action="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverify" method="post"target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=XXXXXX', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true"><p>Enter your email address:</p><p><input type="text" style="width:140px" name="email"/></p><input type="hidden" value="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~e?ffid=XXXXX" name="url"/><input type="hidden" value="Your Blog Name" name="title"/><input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/><input type="submit" value="Subscribe" /><p>Delivered by <a href="http://www.feedburner.com" target="_blank">FeedBurner</a></p></form>
Let me break the code so that you can analyze easily. Before that let us save this as an HTML file. Open your Note pad and Type
<head></head><body>Place the code Here</body>
The first thing we can do is add a background colour to your email form by adding background: #cc0000; just after the text-align:center;" so that the code looks like <form style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:5px;text-align:left;background: #cc0000; " chose a background colour that goes well with your layout. Next you can customize the width of text box by changing width:140px"according to your needs. Now you need to remove this line <p>Enter your email address:</p><input type="text" style="width:140px" name="email"/>
"onblur="if(this.value=='')this.value=this.defaultValue;"/>
<p>Delivered by <a href="http://www.feedburner.com" target="_blank">FeedBurner</a></p>. Now the only factor which may look odd is the button, so next I am going to show how you can customize that. For that modify this code <input type="submit" value="Subscribe" /> to <input type="submit" value="Subscribe" class="funkybutton"/>.For this to work you have to add the following code in the head section : <style type="text/css">
.funkybutton { background-color: #000000; font-size: 80%;
font-weight: bold;color:#ffffff; }
</style>Your form will look like what shown below
background-color:#000000; value if you change it to #cc0000; then submit button color will be red. You also can add a different font on the button for that add font-family:Mistral; this code so that the modified code looks like
.funkybutton { background-color: #cc0000; font-size: 80%;font-family:Mistral; font-weight: bold;color:#ffffff; }
Now how to add this in you Blogger Blog? First add the above modified CSS code i.e
.funkybutton { background-color: #cc0000; font-size: 80%;font-family:Mistral; font-weight: bold;color:#ffffff; }
]]></b:skin></head> in your blog template (To see this click edit HTML option in blog layout option). The modified code will look like .funkybutton { background-color: #cc0000; font-size: 80%;font-family:Mistral; font-weight: bold;color:#ffffff; }
]]></b:skin>
</head>
NB: Do not add <style type="text/css">and </style>tags.Then Save the template and go to Page Layout option and add the modified form code at the place where you want by selecting add page element.
NB: Don’t add the body tags.
#cc0000; to background: url(URL_OF_Your_Image);Continue Reading...
Monday, March 10, 2008
About
Hello Readers,
As the name suggest, this blog is all about the things which I learned through wandering around the World Wide Web. This blog is meant for those who are making their first steps in the blog-o-sphere. As it says "Knowledge is to be Shared" - Here I will be sharing the tricks, the facts and the ideas I learned by my never ending wandering. I would like to share all the handy utilities I have found across the web. But all these would never be possible without the support of each one of you.
All The Best in your endeavor in Blog-O-Sphere.
Varughese Rajan Continue Reading...
