Thanksgiving, Themes, and Thoughts: Friday Round Up

Hah! Back for Thanksgiving Friday! Sorry to say I didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving… In Taiwan, it’s not a holiday, and in the UK Thanksgiving is much earlier!

Google BUYS Content – hardly!

Google comes under the microscope in an article in BusinessWeek. Unfortunately, the writer doesn’t seem to understand the difference between AdWords and AdSense. Anyway, here’s my comment on the story, just in case BW doesn’t publish it.

It seems your author doesn’t understand that Adsense and Adwords are two sides of the SAME coin… Adwords are purchased by advertisers on (amongst other avenues) publishers’ websites (who use Adsense). Unfortunately, with ctr rates dropping with recent changes, and increasing dissatisfaction over being NOT paid for impressions, etc.. Many smaller publishers and blog owners are removing Adsense altogether. It’s likely to be a trend that continues, too. Esp. as Google is now behaving more like a Gorilla towards those smaller publishers and bloggers who try to find alternative ways to finance their bloggings. heck, most bloggers would starve if they had to rely on Adsense earnings….

Does your blog have a TOS?

Many blogs just don’t. Mine doesn’t. But I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that I should… I think the TOS should include Privacy issues, IP issues, Commenting Policy, Copyright Issues, … and what else? What else would you include? Comment some ideas for me. I do have a Disclosure Policy, but that may no longer be enough… Here’s WordPress.com’s TOS.

Advertising: Where can you see InvestorBlogger dot Com?

InvestorBlogger’s advertising budget hasn’t been particularly great. In fact, in the last three months, I’ve spent the grand total of $85.00 on advertising on Michael Kwan’s site, on CashQuests, and now on JohnCow’s site.

These sites are all excellent for different reasons: Michael Kwan’s review was really pointed and detailed, and helped my simplify the design (I admit the current theme looks ugly!), but I’m still looking for a theme that I can make UNIQUE; CashQuests has generated 50 visits for my site from the link there, that’s 30c per view, though the bounce rate has been quite high; and now, I’m trying out John Cow’s website by having a link there (it’s more expensive than CashQuests, but we’ll see…).

I am reluctant to try for AdWords with this site, simply because there’s already quite a lot of competition. I think my money would be better spent on other advertising routes.

A New Theme…

After the theme emergency last month, when MistyLook simply stopped working, and upgrade didn’t work either, I had to hastily adopt this rather plain looking theme. I’ve been looking at Magazine/Newspaper type themes recently, as this is how my blog seems to be going… Over the weekend, I’ll be trying a theme a day… Let me know in the comments if you like the theme or not. Here are a couple of interest from JustinTadlock who is teaching in Korea at the moment…

Happy Holiday, and remember to give thanks for all the good things you have, and once you start to list them, you’ll find that there is a lot!