breednet

So I started using TrekPay a few weeks ago, and here is a short review.

First of all, if you want to get rich, go to college and get a job. If you want to spend maybe 5 minutes a day and make a dollar or 2 per month, sign up for TrekPay. It is cool in that you just need to give them your PayPal ID and you get paid once your balance hits $5.50 USD.

The web interface is dead simple, just go to browse/search when you login to start surfing for credits. There are also no time limits, but you do need to look for and click any TrekPay images you might find (so far I have only seen one).

The bad thing about this site is there is no way to translate your credits to $$. This is done on a weekly basis, however there is no published conversion table saying 100 credits = $.08 or something. I am currently at around $1.58, so I have also yet to get paid, so I can’t comment on the timeliness of getting paid via PayPal. This does look like a cool concept, so try it out and give it a shot.

If you are interested in signing up for free, click the banner below.

Just came across an interesting article here that finds that Bing search users have a much higher click rate than other search engine users.

From the article:

“Bing users showed a 50% higher ad click rate than Googlers, so at the time our preliminary conclusion was that Bing’s success was being driven in a big part by Microsoft’s huge, expensive advertising blitz.”

While Google still dominates with 84% of search traffic, this is certainly noteworthy.

FYI – Chitika is a pretty cool ad system that I use on my site. First of all, only users who arrive via search engine can see the search sensitive ads. You can click the link below to learn more about Chitika or sign up for a free publisher account to begin hosting ads on your web site.

For my first in a series of random reviews, I have taken some time to conduct a mini, informal experiment on websites that promise free traffic generation. Many of these sites involve you actually “browsing” through their interface, and pausing for anywhere from 8 to 30 seconds before going to the next programmed site. The whole purpose behind this is to accumulate “credits” so you can then join the fun and get someone to see your site in their “browsing” session, and hopefully click on your site, find it remotely interesting, or whatever.

For each of the sites that required “browsing” to generate traffic, I “browsed” for approximately 100 pages, so I could get a feel for rewards, bonuses, experiences, etc.

The following are a list of sites that I reviewed, as well as my unbiased, non-paid opinion:

FreeViral – Ok, so I did a quick Google search and registered here. Stuck a banner and an annoying-as-hell pop-under page, as well as a text link in my blogroll. I get a few hundreds hits a day and 0 referrals in 48 hours. This site is beyond a waste of time, I dare anyone to prove otherwise.

RoyalSurf – I have to start off with a slam on this site – if you are looking for a site that is compliant in IE 3.0 on Windows 95B, you have come to the right place. Seriously, 1996 called and wants its crappy GIF files back. Anyway, the good thing about the browsing experience is new pages load faster (7-9 seconds) than any other site, which was good. When I looked at the Google Analytics results, I only had 4 hits from royalsurf.com referrals. Not impressed with the results. Moving on.

Traffic-Splash.com – Next up is traffic-splash, which made me immediately want to pack up the family truckster and head to a sunny beach in Florida. Too bad it is mid-November. Anyway, I found my second website that I am sure would be able to render just fine in my old Pentium 120 running Windows 95B and either IE 3 or Netscape Navigator 4. The time between pages was almost as good as Royalsurf, so that was impressive. I also got about 12 hits from traffic-splash, so it seemed to work. The GIF file cheesy graphics still make me want to cry, and I thought I heard a Jimmy Buffett song or 2 in a MIDI file in the background.

Trafficswarm – While using the previous two systems, I saw some pages for Trafficswarm, and was thinking “boy these guys must be good.” Well, mixed is more like it. I liked the text link layout of the “browsing” experience, but there is a 20 second wait between clicking links, which is good for allowing pages to load, etc. but bad for building credit. I received about 10 hits from trafficswarm when I let it cut loose on my target site, choosing 3 different URLs (home page and two different articles). Not terribly impressed, moving on still.

TS25.com – Traffic Syndicate 25, ok this looked good from the start. Dead simple registration, easy to naivgate site, very simple and clean layout (no late 90s GIF files, they actually use a random unique number match to move to the next page in the “browsing” session). When you build up credit you can have up to 3 simultaneous traffic campaigns. The hit ratio looked to be the highest from TS25, where I had 53 hits. Wow.

ilovehits.com – this site is stupid, stupid, stupid, and so are you if you waste your time here. Don’t.

startxchange.com – linked with and partners with ilovehits.com. Keep on walking.

Bottom line, all of these programs were pretty lame in my experience. For the time investment, I just did not see the payoff. I am sure there is a payoff if you set up a few accounts and wrote a click bot, but I am sure you would probably get shut down pretty quickly. The traffic generated well over 90% bounce rate across the board (and 100% on some networks), so it is mostly folks just clicking through your site, and certainly not clicking on articles, enjoying your content, clicking ads or buying anything. I really don’t feel like writing a click bot (or using one) for the limited payoff of marginal traffic with 90-100% bounce rate.

I think for my blog and the few hundred hits (less than 1000/day on average) that it gets daily, I am going to stick to working on good content and social networking and social bookmarking through Digg (where I get ~25% of my referral traffic anyway), StumbleUpon and Delicious. I am also going to dramatically change my ads around and probably reduce my ad presence, and make it way more targeted.

Hope you found this helpful.

Our household has recently (within the last 2 years) replaced a Windows Desktop and Laptop with a 20″ iMac and 15″ MacBook Pro. My oldest daughter has gotten very familiar with the Mac User Experience, and I had a spare Dell D610 laptop that I gave her. I went round and round with OSX86, but I really wanted to get something stable that she could rely on that was actually supported, so I settled on Ubuntu.

There are two very good guides available here and here for turning Ubuntu Hardy and Intrepid into Mac OS X (thanks to maketecheasier.com). This transformation is largely done through the use of the Mac4Lin GNOME theme. I mostly followed the Intrepid guide for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), but I made one key exception. I had some difficulty in getting the splashy Debian package to install, so when you get to that point, run the following command:

sudo dpkg –force-overwrite –install splashy_0.3.13-3ubuntu1_i386.deb

I also found some very cool Microsoft Office for Mac icons that I put in the Home directory under .icons/scalable directory, and used them on my dock. I also updated the Update Manager with the Apple Software Update icon as well, which is part of the Mac4Lin Icons theme.

The end result will hopefully look something like this:

Google Adsense is the current leader in content-sensitive web-based marketing. However, Google is not unlike a “black hole” when it comes to how they determine who can join their program, how their program really works (i.e. pays you for hosting their ads) or why you may get your account suspended. Searching around the Internet, a lot of bloggers and webmasters are beginning to rebel against the Google “Wizard of Oz” strategy and look for alternatives. There are tons of stories of people who just cross a certain dollar amount (usually, $10 or $20 USD) and get their accounts suspended. Unfortunately, I see Google making many of the same philosophical mistakes of Microsoft 15-20 years ago. History repeats itself.

I recently had my Google Adsense account suspended (which is why this site went ad-free for the last 7-8 days), and received the following email:

Hello,

The Google AdSense Team

So, in a nutshell, too many visitors clicked on my ads and Google Adsense didn’t want to write a check. BTW, my Adsense account was active for about 30 days and was at about $11.60 or so. I have searched and read up on Google Adsense shutting down accounts as they cross the $10 barrier, as to not pay small site blogs, etc. (like this one). All of this being said, I went on a quest to find an alternative to Google Adsense.

What I found first was a great site at http://www.rosswalker.co.uk/adsense_top10/ that lays out the top 10 alternatives to Google Adsense. There is also a link to top alternatives to Google Adwords too. I ended up researching Adbrite, Clicksor and Bitvertiser and settled on Adbrite.

Adbrite is incredibly easy to use (just as easy as Adsense, maybe easier) and I like the fact that advertisers get to bid on your adspace. When I copied up the 3 ad zone code snippets, it took less than 24 hours for an advertiser to begin advertising on my site. I also like the inline text-based rollover search and plan to integrate that soon as well.