I think that my blog is in the  majority of the websites on the internet which gets the least number of traffic from search engines, I am not too concerned about the rest except for Google. My daily average usually ranges between 5 - 6 visits from Google (Organic visitors). I believe that it is one of these reasons that my blog did so bad in the google:

1. Not a very high Page Rank (Like 5 or 6)
2. Not much links to specific articles to gain Google’s attention
3. Not a very old domain, google usually finds interests in old folks
4. Some XHTML not nested properly because of some specific widgets

But despite these drawbacks, I think that I have finally got it. On 20th October I wrote an article titled ‘Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Vs iPhone 3G ‘. The first day went past, so did the second and after 5 days on 26th October Google realised “Oh yeah, we almost forgot this article”, and then comes my article into the view. Don’t get too excited I didn’t get thousands of visitors, but at least I learned something. So far from 26th Oct. to 3rd Nov. I have received 70 visitors from Search Engines (All being from Google). Out of these 70 Visits, 62 were for that single article with the top search terms like the following:

1. “nokia 5800″
2. nokia 5800 vs iphone
3. nokia 5800 vs iphone 3g
4. iphone 3g vs nokia 5800

So that means if it wasn’t for this article, this blog would have only received 8 visits in 9 days, pathetic isn’t it? But now I also know why this article got so much exposure on Google. All I did was get 2-3 link backs in an extremely easy way which I did not even know of before I recalled it and that article showed up like this in Google:

The point being that if you get a few trackbacks to an article consider yourself on the road of success. If I can get 68 visits after being at 15th position out of no where, next time knowingly I can get even better results from Google. Next I will also tell you how to easily get a few link backs to any article.

That is 143 drops per day which make up 1000 Entrecard Credits after a week, which can take you a lot of time but instead I am willing to give away my hard work of earning Entrecard credits for something which will require a lot less hard work. To keep it short, you can enter the contest through this every week:

1. Reply to this post or any other recent post with ‘EC’ at the end of the comment ( 1 Entry per comment)
2. Subscribe to the blog by mail and then mail me with it at 3arn[at]live[dot]com, this counts even if you’re already subscribed. (5 Entries per subscription)
3. Review this on your own blog (10 Entries per review)

Here are the three prizes that will be given every week:

1. 500 Entrecard Credits
2. 300 Entrecard Credits
3. 200 Entrecard Credits

Every participant is not limited to one prize, if you have more entries you might even win all three since the winner will be picked randomly. I think that all of that is pretty simple, moreover you can have a maximum of 10 entries per contest so if you have more entries than that, they will be shifted to the next week’s contest. The contest starts every Saturday and ends every Thursday, winners to be announced on Friday. So what’s better than getting ECs for free? Buck up and participate now, you can subcribe to the blog below:

* Spammy and un-neccesary comments will not be counted, if you refer others to subscribe as well just mail me the email address and you will get the entries. You can review this as many times as you want but one review per blog.

Winners from Last Week’s contest(8 - 13 November)

All entries have been randomly picked by random.org, This contest is officially closed!

Well it has been a long time since I started this series and I take pride of myself for teaching so much in this series, well its good to share information because knowledge is meant to be spreaded. Anyways, what I am going to teach today is something that comes between putting ads and earning from them. It is the way how you put them on the page and how you convince a reader to click it without saying a word.

Blending Ads

When I used to use Ad Networks and if anyone of you is an old reader you might be remembering that there used to be this 468×60 ad on the top of all posts, but unlike other people and putting it on a normal background I did something else, since I did not use transparency for the image I created a Jpeg image with the same effect on the image’s background as this main container. On it, I designed a whole another container for the Ad so that the whole container looked as if it was a part of the ad and the container certainly matched with the blog’s theme. I have no trace of the image, and these are the only screen shots I have of that old design with that blending container for the ad. As you can see in the image that the advertisement is in another blue container which gives the ad more of a ‘homely’ look rather than an alien look. Even if you don’t design something like this, choosing the right color can also matter a lot. The most common way to make the ad blend in perfectly with the background are:

1. If there is only one color in the background then make sure that the ad is of the same color s the background.
2. Make sure that the text color is also the same as used by similar boxes on your blog or the theme text color.
3. Try to avoid borders, although they can’t be avoided, setting them the same color as your back ground would make them appear the same as the background.

These are also the extent to which blending of ads is permitted by Ad Networks, and make sure you avoid slogans like: ‘Click Below to Win an iPod’, ‘If you click below God will save a Kitten’ as this is basically forcing people to give a fake click for some other purpose, your main idea is just to attract them to the ad. As you can see below you can hardly make out the ads from the rest of the page because it is so much blended with the theme.

So the basic purpose is to make the ad look like a part of the page that you have made yourself, this can usually attract a great number of clicks for example, when I tried this I usually got about 10 clicks a day on that ad but providing it a background to accompany the rest of the page increased that to 25 clicks despite the sucker ads I got from that Ad Network, which is a 150% increase. There is another image showing nicely blended ads below:

Not much Graphic designing skills are needed for this kind of stuff, and if you ever need to check the background and don’t know it’s code or name, just use a dropper of a program like Adobe photoshop, Restore it down and then drag the dropper from the working place to any color on the screen and it will store the color’s code and then you can access it. This can greatly help you improve the click-through rate of an advertisement and you can try it out if you’re already running advertisements on your blog / website. It is not as difficult as it seems and you can ask if you need any help.

I have no idea whether you have used an encoder before or not, I haven’t. Getting bored a while ago, I developed this program which I decided to use for encoding my secret information and data. This usually best works for information in small amounts, passwords or maybe a paragraph. I have decided to share this with you guys as well, just download the Encoder which is a 24 KB executable file. The picture below will show you the encoder at work.

As you can see, enter any information in the upper text box and press encode and you’ll get your encoded data in the second text box. Whenever you want to decode it, just put that encoded data into the upper text box and then press the decode button and you’ll get your information back! You can also use this while exchanging information with your friend through the internet. If you both have this you can encode and send the encoded information and the other can decode it. The advantage is that the encoded information would make no sense at all and people can hardly guess information because of the special characters. I have designed it, and it is capable of supporting 192 different characters including spaces. Since I work in Visual Basic, the whole program is developed using VB 6. Although this program is super fast but if you put in more than 100 words then it might take a few seconds. Lastly, don’t be scared at all to download this. It is not a virus (I’m not a hacker) and even if you’re using Dial-Up, this would only take a few seconds to download. This can greatly help you transfer data through the internet secretly. Once you’ve tried it out let me know what you think about it and any suggesstions would be appreciated.

iPhone 3G, Apple’s most recent release of the iPhone series has met real competition recently with the new release from Nokia, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic code-named ‘Tube’. Now this is certainly not for Apple Fans because what I’m going to talk about is something that is not might not be in favor of iPhone.

Since it’s release, iPhone has created a new vision in the world of cell-phones. the whole touch system and the applications drove millions of people crazy. But now, things are a bit different. Unlike the golden times for Apple, now nokia 5800 has proved that iPhone is not the only one in the game. Overall, I personally think that Nokia 5800 has been built to counter the growing influence of iPhone and also add all the features that were recommended by Apple users, which now gives them a better choice. So here is a comparison table with features that each phone either supports of does not support:

I think that the results are very clear leading to one result, that until iPhone makes another release with more features Nokia 5800 is to stay on top, not only because of the slick features but also because it gave birth to a whole new concept to all of the cellular companies like Nokia to keep up with the generation. So you still with iPhone 3G, or have you made a little change of mind?