I’ve been on the smartphone bandwagon for years now. I bought one of the first Palm’s to hit the stores, followed by the Tungsten, followed by various versions of the Treo and I’ve now been running on a Palm Treo 500v for over a year.  Over the years, my only non-palm phone has been the Sony Ericsson p990i, which wasn’t all that bad.

One of the reason’s I stuck to Palm was Palm OS, which ofcourse is now history. My biggest frustration with the Treo 500v has been it’s speed and functionality. It works like a clunky windows machine would work in the early days, which means it crashes or freezes and becomes extremely slow at times. The time to open an application is too much time for a mobile device, and of late my Palm has certainly been trying my patience.

I’m thinking about getting a replacement, but alas, there is much choice in the market and not enough experienced information out there to make a decision. The new Palm looks promising. Blackberry has always ruled the business world, but iPhone is fast catching up for both business and leisure.

As a hard-core business user, I need something that can handle all my email, wifi, web browsing and mapping needs without choking or slowing down the device. Blackberry is the unparalelled leader on the email side of things and over the years the one thing that always made me go for a Palm has been the QWERTY keyboard, which is something that Blackberry shares in common with Palm. This is possibly the only department the iPhone is lacking in.

So, the million dollar question (not quite, more like £200-£300) question is which is it, the Blackberry Curve or the iPhone 3G S. Well, both operating systems seem genuinely reliable. Blackberry is also fast developing its applet store to compete with the iPhone. The Blackberry OS also looks to work smoothly and looks great, although it’s not as flashy or as graceful as the Mac.  I’d personally prefer a Windows Mobile device, and I had given some serious thought to the Sony Xperia X1, but the lack of speed in windows devices simply turns me off.

With reviews floating around, it seems pretty clear that the iPhone is the device of choice when it comes to browsing the web or using maps, or getting other apps.  The only department the iPhone falls short in is the keyboard.

Here, however, is where the iPhone makes up for it.  As someone who has to frequently travel on London’s dismal but loved Underground, I very much like the idea of having to carry only ONE device for my music, video and phone needs. That’s a plus, provided the battery can survive me a comfortable 10-12 hours.

I’ve also considered Google Android phones, but their limitation to T-Mobile hasn’t done much for them.  The iPhone seems like it’s fast becoming the winner, but somehow that Qwerty keyboard attachment is hard to part with.

Suggestion or advice, anyone?

Here is something that your SEO consultant or marketing firm will never want you to know: there are 2 parts to SEO. And here’s the second part of what your marketing or SEO consultant will really not want you to know at all: most SEO consultants and marketing firms do, respectively, one half each. This is a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, but since I don’t spend a whole lot of time doing SEO for any of my own websites or businesses, well, I haven’t really had the motivation to pen (or in this case, screen) the issue. Now that I’m done sorting out some of the basics that I consider more important than issues like SEO and PPC marketing for a business, I’m coming back into this rather messy affair.

I can name many of my clients who consistently spend hundreds, if not thousands of pounds and dollars every month in trying to get their SEO to work. Let’s get one thing out of the way before we have the marketing folks butt-in: SEO is not the same as PPC, so let us not confuse the two. PPC optimization, although similar in some regards to SEO, is a different line of work. There are no, per se, two parts to it on a macro level, although I think you can break up PPC into two different parts if you want to get a view from the inside out.

So, what really are the two parts of any SEO campaign? Well, let’s see…

The Technological Part

If you have a marketing firm that claims they’ve got SEO down, this is the part they are most likely not doing. I personally know firms who are spending 5 figures of Great British Pounds Sterling every month in an attempt to get their SEO up and running in addition to a GBP 20k+ Pay per Click bill, but SEO is just not working. The content may very well be right because that’s probably what their SEO provider is OKAY at (not brilliant, just OKAY), but the reason that Google or Yahoo don’t give them any importance is simply because their pristine, apparently clear and clean-cut looking design isn’t so clean when you look at the source code. It’s rampant with violations of W3C XHTML and CSS standards, javascript errors, lack or misuse of meta tags, and many more to name a few. What’s worst is that these chaps still haven’t figured out what they’re getting wrong, and it’s not all their fault.

To develop their mammoth online project, they hired a technology consulting giant like Sapient, but got a possibly unqualified employee to manage the relationship. So, in essence, the code produced is not particularly garbage, but it is something most decent developers wouldn’t feel heartache about trashing. Second, the XHTML and CSS interface was developed by an idependent party which, it seems, specializes in developing interfaces that work toward the stern purpose of being non-standard compliant. The SEO company has no clue why their magic doesn’t work and the reason why that’s happening is because they don’t fully understand the business or recognize or realize the techological or technical faults that are holding the company back.

It’s the same old issue: marketing firms become web development and web 2.0 software consulting firms, create garbage product, but sell it hard by throwing money on PPC and Out of Home Advertising (OOH) and all their client seem to think they’re doing  a great job, without actually realizing that they could save a huge amount of money spent on PPC every month by simply streamlining some of the technology issues involved in SEO.

I’m not going to go into what it is that you need to do to get the technology right; at least not in this article. What I do want to do is illustrate the benefit of having the technology issue resolved. Let’s be clear on one thing: with the right age and domain length and correct coding, etc. (i.e., fullfilling the techincal requirements of SEO), you’ll certainly land yourself a higher Google PageRank than a website that foscuses solely on cosmetic appearance and writing fancy content but misses the boat on writing Google friendly code. If your competitor has done this part right and you’re relying on your good old marketing man to provide you with SEO services, when somebody does search for your keywords you will end up getting the small corner to the right that google has reserved for AdWords, where as your competitor, even if he doesn’t have the right kind of content on his website (which is valid to  a search term), is getting a good 80% of the screen. Who do you reckon your potential customer will click on, someone Google thinks is providing valid content or someone Google says is paying money to ‘appear’ to provide valid content. Maybe not all clients work like that: I sure do.

The Marketing Part

Okay, this is the part where you need to not listen to your SEO consultant, who knows the technical aspects of what Google, Yahoo and MSN like to see, but has no clue about how to sell. Remember, most technical people suck at selling. They like to brief and give information, not make the effort to pretend like they care about your business and sell you their skills. Hence, that’s what you need to use them for.

I can’t stess the importance of getting this part right. As much I bash marketing firms for getting the technology part of SEO wrong, ultimately, selling lies at the heart of every business. No sale means no business, so get this right!

Here is an example of how companies get this wrong: Fix all your tags and content on each page, so that when google does list you organically, people at least land on the correct page. Not landing on the correct page means you’ll never make a conversion from visitor to customer. The first part giving yourself the ability to appear in the 80% portion of the screen of a Search Engine by getting the technical portion right. The second, is to strengthen the credbility of the visitor who trusts the judgment of the search engine to list you in their organic listings by giving the visitor what he or she is really searching for.

Once there, the content needs to be right. Don’t hire a car salesman for this unless you are selling cars. You need a short, sofisticated form of copywriting, not those long sales letters that eBook copiers and MLM scammers have used and misused and abused over the last decade.

Here is the most important thing you need to take away from this article. Don’t believe everyone you see on Google or Yahoo’s first page. Most often than not people will show up and stay there until the next crawl when the search engine realizes that a certain website has cheated. So, look for decent history when picking a provider. Also keep in mind that not all businesses that do SEO spend resources on SEO: they don’t need to. They get their business from other resources like management consulting. In fact, that’s how some of the largest contracts are signed, by consultants know nothing except for how to close a deal.

Lastly, there are very few companies out there who can do SEO and PPC right at the same time and score both on the marketing and technological front. It’s the same reason why marketing guys are horrible at using technology AND the same reason why your IT guys can’t sell for shit. Get your technical SEO person to liaise with your marketing team. That’s how you can results out of your Search Engine Optimization efforts.

Lastly, always remember this simple piece of advice: you get what you pay for and here is why: opinions are free, consultations are NOT. Which one are you looking for?

That’s right, I just called DMOZ, the Open Directory Project (ODP), a demon.

There was a time when I had great respect for projects like the ODP and how effectively they actually were, and although I have recently seen articles from some ODP editors / moderators defending what they do on ODP, well, I think that the DMOZ Directory is fast loosing its charm.

Yes, as per the basics of SEO, backlinks are great and very helpful.  Backlinks from sites that have a high PageRank are very valuable, and better yet, in Google’s books, sites that are built with the open source or volunteer framework in mind are even better. However, there is no way that I will believe the argument that, quite frankly, a vast majority of DMOZ editors are, well, infact, rogue.

Despite how seriously some of them take their work to be, I can’t help but think that there are others who simply fob off every request they simply because they can. George Carlin would have called these chaps the likes of George Bush: monkey faced pea brained folk who project their insecurities on other users of the internet.

In all fairness, I haven’t submitted a lot of websites to DMOZ in the past 12 months, but those that I have haven’t gone through. Agreed, maybe I was sloppy with some of my submissions, but I can tell you that some of them weren’t quite as sloppy and were in full compliance with the ODP guidelines. Better yet, I don’t know how the ODP goes by qualifying people who apparently have the right to determine whether or not your website is in violation of copyrights? They’re probably not and take the play it safe approach.

Of course, ODP has other issues: some websites have 30+ listings with some very irrelevant descriptions. As with all volunteer organizations, though, the quality of work and the product diminishes, which is what we are seeing with the ODP. They don’t pay attention to standards compliance or any other criteria, just what they think may or may not comply with their guidelines, most which many of their editors probably don’t understand. I guess that’s the kind of work you get from free volunteers.

But low and behold, this is not all bad news.  Back in the day, ODP was vital to get a listing on; it is not anymore. You can try, but I wouldn’t pull my hair out worrying about why some ODP editor cannot read english and figure out the relevance of a particular website to a certain category.

There are hundreds of other directories on the web: granted they are not as effective as DMOZ (and the ones that are charge money), but then you can get links from other high ranked websites too.

Yes, the internet is not fair, and probably neither is Google’s support of DMOZ. But then you’ve got to live with what’s out there, right?

Oh and this site is not listed on DMOZ. I’m not even sure what category to put it in. Anyone have any ideas?

Okay, so this month I’ve finally crossed the $100 mark in Adsense earnings. It’s been a long journey, after just a little over 2 years, my earnings reached US $100, at an unusually low rate of earnings per click of $0.16.

But here is the kicker, $ 57 of this $100 I’ve earned has come in the last 6 months, and i’ve been publishing adsense ads since March 24, 2006.

So, how have the earnings gone up, and as you can see, they doubled from February to March, and I think they should be hitting $ 25 this month, at least that’s where it seems the earnings are headed.

So, how did I get here. The truth is, like many, I’d given up on earning any adsense money at all, but that I am getting some traffic, crossing 13,000 unique visitors last month, there is something I would like to share with everyone about how, at least, I’m driving traffic to the web site, of which adsense revenue is a direct result.

Content, quality of content. You have to have content that is relevant, engaging and that invites people to come back to the web site. HP QuickPlay may be the primary traffic driving factor for this site, but lately I have diversified the content, and I now get over a thousand visitors a month here looking for information on accounting certifications, or shopping cart software, or simply people who enjoy whining about London, New York, and other odd topics. In addition, I think adding Polls has been of substantial help.

Here is a tip I’ve read elsewhere: if you focus your content on high paying adsense ads, which primary include financial institution ads, insurance, loan-related ads, etc., chances are you can get paid over a dollar per click. I’ve had days with more than 30 clicks where I’ve earned all buy 90 cents, then I’ve had days where I earned over $3 with just 3 clicks, and ultimately, the high revenue is driven by the kind of content. As the content becomes more diverse, the ads diversify too, and if you make your content diverse in a certain field, the ads change accordingly.

But I’ve seen blogs that have lost quality in content with aim to getting the high paying adsense ads, and I don’t hink that’s worth it. Ultimately, even if most your traffic is from search engines, you won’t see it increase if your content is useless.

There are hundreds of ways to monetize your website, and hundreds of website that cater to monetizing your website. However, since the topic of discussion here is solely adsese, here is an article that discusses on how to increase your CTR using adsense: http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/03/increase-google-adsense-ctr-by-500/. It’s a well written article, that gives you rather decent guidance on how to go about placing adsense ads on your page. Ultimately, you don’t want your ads to be disruptive, because that will cost you readers, and google is working on cracking down bloggers who post ads inside posts, since you get clicks by mistake and it makes for untidy, frustrating, and a painful experience for the user.

Now, if you are interesting in trying out other things and truly developing a passive income from your website and by doing other things, well, here’s a comprehensive website for you to visit: http://www.livingoffdividends.com/2008/04/04/how-i-made-2667-in-passive-income/.

Happy blogging!

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Lots…

Last few days I have kept pretty busy, and I think it’s going to get like that, but I’m going to work Asifism.com into my schedule too.

I’m currently setting up a new business (more information on that will come soon). I’m also in the process of working out with a franchise issuing organization to purchase an accounting/bookkeeping franchise (more information on that will follow too). In addition, I am studying for CIMA and actively working on DesignerPottery.com (http://www.designerpottery.com/blog). I need some help on this, so if this even remotely sounds like something you can help out with, please visit the blog and give me insight, feedback, or simply contact me for how you can help.

Of course, business is my priority. As part of marketing my accounting/bookkeeping consultancy, I am launching, in conjunction with VAFTA Solutions Limited (http://www.vafta.com) an accounting blog, which will start with me completing the second part of the accounting software article, where I will discuss and compare various accounting software. Consider it a QuickBooks Vs. Peachtree Vs. Sage Vs. Microsoft Office Accounting. Oh, and for the record, Sage sucks. Don’t buy it if you can avoid it. Get Quickbooks or Peachtree or Microsoft Accounting. They’re all three about 10 times better than Sage.

Basically, this new blog/section is about the following: many modern accountants/bookkeepers are able to use accounting software, but really, when you have a complex issue at hand, you always need to go back to your basic T-Accounts, i.e., the debits and the credits. I’ll start off with the basics, and as I study for CIMA, I’m also getting a refresher of all the basics. In addition, and this is probably going to be extremely productive and useful for some accountants or professionals, as I embark upon this journey to discuss accounting in hopefully an unambiguous way, unlike any other damn book (published by CIMA or Gleim or Kaplan or anyone else), I will point out the differences in the way the accounting is done under US GAAP and the way it is done under UK GAAP / IFRS. This itself is a bit of gap bridging activity for me, since almost all of my practical experience is US GAAP driven, and now I have to adjust to the IFRS. Please note that the differences arise at the basic level, and are carried through to the final stages, and there are problems if you hold a reluctant frame of mind about how the accounting needs to be done. Consistency past borders is hard to find in this profession, and that can get frustrating.

In addition, I will discuss some of the certification processes along the way. I am a member of the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) in the USA, although I never really got a chance to sit for the Certified Management Accountant (CMA) exam while I was there. In the UK, CMA doesn’t mean much, but CIMA means everything for good financial & management accountants. So, I’m indulging in CIMA now, unfortunately, from the basics, and I’ll explain why when discussing the certification.

However, stay put for this new set of articles and lessons in the Accounting & Finance Category of Asifism.com. In addition, these lessons may be reproduced on http://www.vafta.com/blog, but I’m not so sure of that. If anyone is interested in writing on accounting, please be sure to email me at asif[at]asifism.com for more information.

For those of you who come here for QuickPlay. That will keep coming, as will more information regarding it that comes irrelevant. I’ve had some new problems with my HP dv2415, and I haven’t really had time to key that in, but I’ll be discussing that too. More Memoirs of the HP dv2000 series! Please, the offer for the DVB Card/Software article is still on the table, but unless people are serious about it, we won’t be spending time putting that together. Please vote on that:

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In addition, if you have hard success or failure with HP QuickPlay via Asifism.com, please let me know and leave comments on what needs to be changed.

Of course, as I get time inbetween, I’m also dying to give my cynical political insight on things like the triple victory of Hillary Clinton over Obama (in Texas, Ohio etc.). And of course, I’m dying to put down a few lines on Bush backing up McCain, and John McCain being very happy about it. Like anyone cares what George Bush thinks anymore!

Well, that’s all for now folks! Let’s get this rolling!

I recently wrote a small, not so comprehensive post about how my blog went from receiving 34 hits a month to over 5,000 unique hits a month in under a year. I also mentioned that your primary goal, when making money, is NOT to get people to visit your blog and click on your pay per click ads like Adsense and make you money, but it is to provide genuinely relacant and good content with an ultimate goal to drive traffic. Once you get some of that with good relevant content, well, there are much more efficient ways than PPC advertisements to monetize your blog.

What if you got paid to blog rather than get paid if someone clicks on your PPC ads? Sounds more attractive doesn’t it. It should, because maybe, MAYBE 1% of your visitors will click on your PPC advertisements. If you were actually getting paid to blog, you would have two benefits that you wouldn’t with pay per click advertising:

1. You’re blogging on a topic or content someone wants you to blog, which means there is a market for that particular product out there, and that actually means that you’re putting useful content on your blog, thereby inviting more traffic to your blog.

2. Your making money from your blog is NOT solely dependent on pay per click advertising, which can be a nice alternative to you logging in to your adsense account 5 times a day to see whether you’ve actually made any money.

In addition to the above two benefits, your visitors will NOT be bothered by obstructive pay per click advertising banners all over the place, which will make for a more pleasant experience, possibly attracting more traffic to your blog.

I know you’re dying to know what this way of blogging for money is. The good news is you CAN make money from your blog, but the bad news is you CANNOT do it with bad content. You have to be willing to blog, and NOT just to make money. Here’s how to actually make money with your blog, or what can actually being coined as ‘blogged advertising.’

Use Smorty, a blog advertising service.

Smorty is a service connecting advertisers with bloggers. Advertisers can pay bloggers to write opinion posts with links back to the advertisers site. Smorty can tell you who’s willing to pay what. This is something you could attempt as an individual too, but unless you’re someone who gets over 20,000 unique valid and relevant hits on your blog, chances are an advertiser will turn you down. With Smorty, you don’t have to worry about that. Once your blog is approved for writing, you can make money with articles you write on your blog!

This may sound too good to be true to some of you, but it isn’t. And, quite frankly, if you’ve been relying on PPC networks to make you some extra money from your blog, this will sound like quite the pay rate! Check it out for yourself!

I’m aware that there are hundreds of articles out there that tell you how to blog, how to drive traffic to your blog, and how to get rich off of your blog and get an independent income. Well, that’s not what I’m going to do here.

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who has made this site a success, whether or not you came here for HP QuickPlay, you contributed to making this a site where thousands of people come every month. Here, then, before I go on telling you how I accomplished it, is proof that the site has increased traffic on a monthly basis.

Asifism.com is a domain I bought at University some time in 2003-2004, to build some kind of a personal website. From that time, the site has taken many different faces. However, this blog was put up a year ago, and from the 34 visitors I received in February, 2007, I am now expecting the total number of vistors to cross 5,400 for this month. That’s a sharp increase, keeping in mind that this is a unique number of visitors, and is not the number of hits, which, as of this moment, are 14,598 for the month of February, 2008.

You’ve seen all the guides on the internet on how to get traffic to your blog: widgets, domain name, content, advertising, marketing, etc. etc. However, ultimately, your strongest source of traffic is going to be the major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, & Microsoft Live Search. Even your advertising and marketing, be it on forums, blogging networks, or via social bookmarking can help drive an extremely decent amount of traffic to your web site.

But the magic, the key, to getting traffic, is content. You need to have the content that people want. If you have the right content, that is written well, you’ll get listed on the search engines, and your social bookmarking will get visitors soaring onto your web site. 95% of the traffic on Asifism.com has come from search engines, and it’s not because i’ve spent time writing some fantastic articles, but because I offered something no one on the web did.

I spent many, literally hundreds of hours pulling my hair out and trying to resolve a problem that quite possibly had a solution somewhere on the internet, but it was scattered, and scattered all over the place. Before that solution disappeared, I was able to collect and put all the pieces together, and become, at some point, the only web site to offer a solution. Then, I was willing to help out. HP QuickPlay was the product that I spent hours with, and the experiences I had with my HP laptop, support, and software were so horrid, and I figured since I’ve been able to get through, I can help others with it. The idea was not to get traffic, but it worked wonders as you can see.

As traffic relevant to HP grew, I wrote another article on getting deported from the US. Again, this article did well, and immigration and deportation, always being a hot topic in the US got some hits. At one point Asifism.com was listed # 1 on google when someone searched for “US Deportation Facilities,” and people searched for that term because the beloved ICE would move people to facilities without telling friends or family of the deportee.

The social bookmarking thing is new. I have recently started to promote the web site on social bookmarks like BloggingZoom (http://www.bloggingzoom.com), Technorati (http://www.technorati.com), Delicious, Digg It (http://www.digg.com) & Mixx (http://www.mixx.com). Social Bookmarking can be a very effective way to drive traffic to your site, but you’ve got to be crafty and skillful to lure people to your content. It takes practice and time, but it’s something that most people can do.

When blogging, I think the key is to not focus on the making money part. Once you have the traffic going, you can worry about placing your adsense ads or other widgets that can help you monetize; but if you keep wondering about how you’re failing at making money, you probably won’t make it. This article: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/ways-to-make-money-online-with-website/ is a wonderful tool on how to monetize your blog, but it’s phase 2.

Remember, when blogging, quality matters. If you have content that people want to read, that has continuity, people will keep coming back and possibly subscribe to your feeds. That’s key, just like any business, repeat customers do the trick! Scout the internet for what kind of articles and blogs are doing well on the web, and write content on similar things. Alternatively, you can write on something you’re good at and come across likeminded people. Remember, just one or two articles won’t do it. You have to keep plugging away, add more information, and eventually, through a social bookmark or a search engine, the right people will find you.

Concentrate on giving the information people need. That’s the most important thing when getting traffic. This isn’t a detailed article on how to conquer the internet, it’s me, in very simple terms, telling you how I got traffic to my site. If I can do it, so can you.

Folks,

With extensive work underway on the production of DesignerPottery.com, I have set up and launched a designer pottery & ceramics blog to keep everyone posted and upto date about about production, design, special offers, discounts, and to ask anyone who may be willing to contribute to do so.

I’ll be posting to the blog regularly, so please check back regularly for more details and updates. The URL to the Designer Pottery & Ceramics Blog is: http://www.designerpottery.com/blog.

Most bloggers I know will scream (or groan or grumble) if you make them sign up for yet another social networking account. I’m one of those bloggers myself.

But this new upstart piqued my interest because it’s actually beneficial and incorporates elements such as blog advertising, blog promotion, a Wikipedia-type database and, limitedly, social networking.

The site is called Qassia and is a “credit-driven intelligence engine coupled to a cascading tag-based web directory”.

That doesn’t mean anything to you so I’m going to explain.

When you sign up, you’ll get a profile page for promoting yourself. Then you post tidbits of information to the Intel database. You can post anything and everything, from lengthy treatises on quantum physics to what your dog likes to eat.

“What we value is intelligence about the people, companies, and places around you. The people and places do not have to be famous, and the intelligence does not have to be earth-shattering.”

You see, anyone can contribute anything.

Each Intel you post gets you a backlink to your blog and ranks you higher on the web directory.

Each Intel you post could potentially attract advertising and every dollar earned on your posts is 100% yours.

Cool, huh?

It’s now in closed beta, which means you can only sign up by invitation.

But fret not because I am personally inviting you to try it out now!

Here is the magic link: http://anawaz.qassia.com

It’s not limited to bloggers, of course. Anyone with a website you want to promote can benefit from it.

See you in Qassia!

P.S. This article was taken from http://sheylara.com, so called damsel in distress.