W-Shadow.com

As you may remember, I’ve been running a little AdSense experiment on this site. Here’s a brief summary for new readers: The core motivation for the experiment was to test the prevalent assumption that people coming from search engines are the ones most likely to click on ads. To this end, I used a little [...]

Way back in March, I conducted a little AdSense experiment to see which type of visitors (direct, coming from internal or external pages, or arriving from search engines) were most likely to click on ads. It turned out that internal visitors – that is, people coming from another page on the same site – were [...]

Last week, I announced I would be conducting a little AdSense experiment to gain insight into how often different kinds of visitors click on ads. Today, I will present the results. The core motivation for the experiment was to test the prevalent assumption that people coming from search engines are the ones most likely to [...]

As you might have noticed, the query suggestion feature of Google Search usually only comes up when someone wants to expose and make fun of all the silly things that people search for. Today, I’m going to show you how you that it can also be put to a more practical use – keyword discovery! [...]

If you frequent technology news sites, it’s easy to get the impression that AdBlock Plus – the popular Firefox extension that can block most forms of online advertising – is a big deal. Any news article, blog post or forum thread that happens to mention advertising will inevitably get several comments expounding the benefits of [...]

In this post I will explain what the “Viralogy.com script” thing mentioned in the Broken Link Checker survey was all about, discuss the user response and attempt to verbalize my rather unclear thoughts on the issue. Viralogy Script About two weeks ago, I received an offer to bundle a social media tracking script from Viralogy [...]

During the last few months I have been working on an improved premium version of my popular link cloaking plugin. And now, on this unquestionably glorious day, I finally deem it sufficiently polished and bug-free to be ready for public release. So if you do affiliate marketing and want to protect your commissions, go check [...]

Behold, today I present you my glorious plan to save the world! Well, this post is actually my attempt to answer a burning question : “How can we download stuff for free and ensure that musicians, actors, programmers and other people who create stuff still get paid?”. It’s a longish, wistful rant on intellectual property [...]

There’s been some controversy about the ethics of using Adblock. Webmasters want advertising income, users want a better browsing experience. Yadda yadda yadda. I can certainly sympathize with both sides of the debate – on the one hand, I hate intrusive ads as much as anyone. On the other hand, this site is mainly ad-supported. [...]

Over the last few days I’ve been tweaking my AdSense ads and trying to improve their relevance, with good results – last Sunday was the highest-earning day for this site since… well, since ever. There was no large increase in traffic, so it’s really because of the changes I made. Here are some tips that I figured out from my experimentation…

When I use my GTrends SE tool to find good niches, I sometimes stumble upon valuable niche keywords that I can’t use myself. I simply don’t know enough about the topic and/or don’t think it’s interesting enough to start researching it, so I move on to other ideas. Since the unused kewords aren’t doing anyone [...]

Do you… Don’t “get” Twitter, Facebook and the like? Consider “normal” an insult? Typically only lurk in forums and rarely or never post anything? Are generally out of touch with popular trends? Feel article writing or this “blogging” thing are unnatural for you? Have no idea what the mystical “other people” want? Don’t really care [...]

It’s Hard To Be an Expert On Something You Don’t Care About Many whitehat strategies require that you create unique, quality content. This doesn’t come naturally to most people when they know next to nothing about the niche they’re moving in, or just aren’t interested in it. On the other hand, mixing RSS feeds and [...]

If you haven’t heard, the Thirty Day Challenge was a huge “event” happening throughout August 2007; the basic idea – how to make your first $10 online without spending anything. By the way, I’m truly sorry for not posting about it earlier – for some inexplicable reason I kept delaying. Maybe the topic just seemed [...]