Eric

Joys of advertising on the internet, is that you can actually advertise for free!  However there is a catch, MSN, Yahoo, and Google all offer promotion vouchers to get so many dollars credited towards your account, the catch is, only works on new accounts.

Some how people advertise on the internet saying they can learn how to never pay a penny for Google Adsense.  I’d really love to learn how that is possible.  After all, just signing up costs you $5.  So how do you get around this.  Every advertiser has to do it.  But I think I understand what they mean, when they say it is possible.

Anyways, for those of you interested, I have some vouchers for $75 towards your sign up on Microsoft Adcenter.  Leave a comment, and I will send it to you…..FREE!!!!

Its a good way to test traffic for free, however, I found MSN’s traffic pretty much sucks.  But can’t complain, thats a free $75 voucher to test traffic.  If you’re ECPC is about $.50, thats 150 free visitors.   Can’t complain with free traffic, now can we?

I’ve read that one of the best viral marketing techniques is posting a video on YouTube. Now I am starting to wonder, is this industry specific? My father own his own business, YamabeRacing.com, and he has posted numerous videos to YouTube, yet his traffic has not really gone up a whole lot. Granted the whole auto performance industry is not as lucrative as it once was, still his traffic did not increase. I don’t doubt the YouTube video posting works. YouTube gets millions of visitors a day. I recently decided to promote an affiliate program I am sure we all know. Diet and Weight Loss Supplements. I was doing some research on YouTube to see exactly how many videos where posted, and how many views they have received. Sad to say, the most I think I saw was maybe 1500 views. And thats pushing it. Granted majority of the videos watched where success stories, and maybe thats what I ought to do. Have a video interviewing some of the success stories, and posting them on YouTube for viewers to see. However, that might get me 1500 hits in a lifetime? I read this post where this guy claims to have received 50K+ hits from YouTube alone, and I’m really curious as to what inudstry he is in. I have to admit, I have not spent a great deal of time into any PPC for this program. However so far I have found the best and most cost effective method was online classified ads. They were targeted, people reading the ad obviously was looking for weight loss supplements and information. Best of all, they were free. But the traffic just wasn’t there. I put up this campaign Saturday night at about 7, and through craigslist alone I only got about 51 measly hits. Not great stats if you ask me, however for my personal freelance advertising, craigslist has worked like a charm. Gotten me at least 1 lead a day. However I was unable to track the other classified ads. One of the things I don’t like about my web server’s stat system, it does not update until the following day. Boooooo. I have created my own tracking system, however, it seriously lacked the time spent on it, and pretty much got it running in 15 minutes or less to accomplish my purposes. I see that this is a quite useful tool and going to build it out more when I have time.

But making a video and posting it YouTube, a waste of time? I assume it really depends on you’re market on the success rate on driving traffic to your site. Who would think to look there for weight loss supplements, perhaps the only way is to find an actual success story and post his/her story there.

So this new program is promoting Hoodia Gordonii. Most have probably heard of it, it is one of the latest fads. I’m surprised to see it was featured on 60 minutes, CBS, Oprah, and other major TV Shows. I am a bit curious to watch what Oprah had to say about it. Seems like an interesting item. Naturally curbs your appetite, and made by grounding up a Hoodia plant, basically a cactus, into a powder. Makes you wonder if this actually works. I’m no different from the next person, I’ve got my fair share of weight and fat to lose. I tried Hydroxycut Hardcore a while back. During Corps School at Great Lakes, IL., it gave me a lot of energy to PT (Physical Training or Exercising). But maybe I didn’t take it long enough to see results. During Field Medical Training Battalion, I didn’t take any supplements and I lost a lot of inches. But since I’ve been out of the military, It seems that the fat as found me again. Guess I should start hitting the gym. I doubt my reserve unit is gonna like it if i show up looking like a little butterball turkey.

Well if any of you are affiliate marketers, I’d love to hear your opinion on the site: http://www.hoodia-diet-supplement-reviews.com.

For my first post I figured I’d write about the W3C validation. I was reading on a forum today where the question “Should I put the W3C validation image on my site?” Most of the responders, as do I, agree that image is horrifyingly ugly. However the question of should you validate came up. It is true that many of your clients don’t care if it validates as long as it works. It was also brought up that huge companies such as Yahoo! do not validate their code.

My opinion, I believe validation should be done, however may not always be plausible. Unfortunatly, Firefox and Internet Explorer render CSS and XHTML very differently. What is built in and works in Firefox, will not always work in IE. Some hacks are necessary to achieve the same affect. Now IE 6+ does not even have support for XHTML. I like to code using XHTML. Unfortunately for me, it will not render in IE 6+.

The problem with this, my clients, as I’m sure your’s, will want the site to return in all browsers. Even if it validates, it really does them little good if a user is returning a blank site in their browser. IE has frustrated me for years because of its CSS and XHTML rendering abilities. Basically, it has none. So it makes you question, is validation worth it? W3C has created certain rules and guidelines to ensure your website will render properly in all browsers. Apparently, Microsoft did not get this memo when creating IE 6+.

However, being a code nazi as I am, I cannot stand code heavy pages that looks like they just threw a bunch of tables together, used Photoshop to cut up the layout, and slapped it together with some tape. I think it is the absolute worse thing a web developer can do. Personally I like super light pages with just enough code to put it together. Granted, creating a true CSS website is not exactly easy to do, it has caught on in the recent years. I was fortunate enough to discover the ideas of Dave Shae and his project on CSS Zen Garden early on in my career. I actually had the opportunity to work with Dave, unfortunately I did not.

Ever since discovering CSS Zen Garden, it has inspired me to create websites in a whole new light. Granted he is for validating your code. And I by no means am against it. I believe it should be done with the exception of certain instances that it is not in the site’s best interest. I think there are many benefits to it besides being able to brag that your site is W3C compliant. Google likes it better, your code to content ration is a lot lower, giving the impression to the search engines spiders that your site has tons of information, design images are where they belong, in the stylesheet and not in the page itself, leaving only the necessary images on the physical page, not to mention, the code is so much easier to work with and readable.

Many in the forum believe that it should be “assumed” that the developer created the site and validated it. From my experience, many developers probably have no idea what the W3C is, or what their validation means. Looking at a lot of theses sites, sure the layout might be nice, but the same site can be done with pure CSS. I’ve been told by many developers “OH you can’t do a pure CSS page with this layout!” Yet creativity has proven time after time, that I can take any design you give me, and I will create an entirely code light pure CSS page with it. So it can be done. But in my recent years, I have not validated as much as I should be doing. However I still believe that all sites should be as compliant as possible, and that it is an important thing to do. Why call a kid a “noobie” just because he takes the time to validate his work. Granted I wouldn’t put the image on my site, but I feel atleast he is headed in the right direction with his web development career.