TechCounter - TechNews, Money & SEO

For people not tech savvy or making money online using their Blogs, making money from home with a computer and internet access is a very good option to earn some money on the side by getting paid to browse the web and do paid offers.

Fummo is an advertising company which offers such promotions where you can earn money by doing simple and free offers. You can also earn money by using their search engine and surfing the web using their surfbar. You can also make money of referrals where you can make $5 per referral when you get a friend of yours to sign up using your referral link or referral ID and earn 10% of any paid offers they might complete.
There are no limitations on how much money you can make on Fummo. Seems like a good enough deal for people wishing to make money from home.

The downside, you have to view advertisements. NOTE: You do not have to click on any advertisements that are displayed which would be illegal.

So, join fummo and invite your friends also to join under you and get $5 from each your friend!

Popularity: 20% [?]

I previously blogged about displaying your email address as an image to prevent comment spam on your blog. The downside with that popular utility was that it only displayed your email address from a known ISP such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc. But how about something that you would like to use for your own blog such as ryan at techcounter.com Well, I first thought I could code it up but why reinvent the wheel. I had Google search pretty hard for it though to find a good source. Turns out there exists an email image button generator or rather a text to image generator.

Using this Email Image Generator, you can display any email address as an image for you to use on your blog or website and help reduce comment spam greatly.

You can choose your font, font size, the color of the text as well as the image background to generate images that match the theme of your blog. You can see it in action in my contact page.

To generate an Email Image for your blog

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Popularity: 21% [?]

A Website Directory is something that specializes in liking to other web sites and classifies and categorizes these links. Unlike search engines which bring back results to you based on keywords, a web site directory lists websites by category and subcategories. Web Directories allow blog and website owners to directly submit their blog for inclusion and have editors for reviewing new submissions.

Some of the most popular web directories are Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project(DMOZ). Every search engine recommends these two web directories in particular and once accepted, you gain trust in search engine eyes not to mention the high page rank of those incoming links. All this could result in higher search engine placements for posts on your blog and an increase in page rank which in turn would allow you to monetize your site even further. Oh, also the increased traffic to your blog by visitors to these directories.

Directories have various types of listings, often dependent upon the price paid for inclusion:

* Free Submission - there is no charge for review of the site
* Reciprocal Link - the site submitted must link back to the directory in order to be listed
* Paid Submissions - a fee is charged for reviewing the submitted link

* No Follow - there is a rel=”nofollow” attribute associated with the link, meaning search engines will not follow the link.
* Featured Link - the link is given a premium position in the category where it is submitted
* Featured Homepage Link - the link may be listed on the homepage of the directory.
* Bid for Position - a recent innovation (2007) where sites are ordered based on bids

Yahoo! Directory and ODP are very hard to get into. I know of a website which in spite of having a high Page rank and high traffic did not get accepted into ODP for over 14 months. I have listed some of the website directories out here which will help bring more traffic to your blog. The name of the website directory along with its page rank is shown here. The list starts with a Page rank 8 directory and lists page rank 7 and page rank 6 directories.
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Popularity: 17% [?]

One of the biggest issues having a blog is dealing with comment spam. Email harvesters crawl your blog like search engines and find and extract email addresses from web pages. An Email address always contains an @ symbol. These email harvesters do a pattern search for a combination that looks like abc@xyz.com in the HTML source of your web pages. So how to keep your email address visible to humans and your blog visitors but keep them invisible to email spiders.

One of the best methods I find is replacing the email message from text to an image. This results in your email being visible to your blog visitors but invisible to spam bots. There are many other ways which you can use to prevent your email from being spammed and how to hide your email address from spammers.

For now, I will share with you an E-Mail Icon generator which creates an Image Icon of your Email Address. You can use this email image for displaying your email address in your blog.

Some of the example email icons

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Popularity: 16% [?]

Google AdSense gives you the option to block competitors ads on your Blog using their Competitive Ad Filter, part of Google AdSense. Google allows you to enter upto 200URLs in here. If you don’t publish ads through Google Adwords, you might be under the impression that hey, I don’t need to use this filter. But you are definitely missing out on additional revenue. Have you ever checked your Google AdSense account and see ad impressions that resulted in a revenue of 1 cent to you? I certainly have. What happens is that you end up losing a valuable visitor to your blog for 1 cent and that too , the ad they click on isn’t of much use because they most likely just clicked on a Made For AdSense (MFA) site ad.

What is a Made for AdSense site?

Have you ever been to a site where there is absolutely no content and all you see are ads, Google AdSense Ads, Yahoo ads, ads ads and more ads. These sites contribute a lot to the internet junkyard and provide no value except to get web visitors to click on advertisements. These MFA sites offer a low CPC rate which takes brings them traffic at a very lost cost. Then these sites make money off the visitor to your blog by serving ads with a higher return.

Implementing the Competitive Ad Filter in your Google AdSense Account

You can prevent these MFA sites from serving ads on your blog or website by using Competitive Ad Filter in your Google AdSense account. When you block these sites, you end up with higher paying ads on your blog.

To get the URL of the site you wish to block, you can use the Google AdSense Preview tool. The Google AdSense Preview Tool is a better option as it prevents you from accidentally clicking on the ads. You can use a different method to find the URL of Flash based ads as the AdSense Preview tool does not work for such ads.

Another excellent site is Ads Black List. This site will generate a list of sites which you can use to filter. However this is a paid service. My firm is responsible for managing many sites.

Here is a list of 200 URLs which I have refined over time and which you can copy and paste into your competitive ad filter.

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Popularity: 19% [?]