Would you like to win $25 and other news!

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This week has been a rather quite week for my blog with a large jump in traffic (thanks to Stumble, though I’ve done some L-O-N-G posts, on a number of good topics. Here’s a quick recap if you missed them:

The titles are self-explanatory so you can pick and choose. The *two most popular stories brought over 60% of my traffic this week, and that doesn’t record those who read the stories on the front page of the blog or via feed.

Win $25 in my competition!
One post that seems to have got overlooked is my little competition. So I’m plugging it again here! Shameless!

In other news, Carnival of Making Real Money is about to publish #4 tomorrow, so you’ll be able to see what I’ve been editing. I’ve chosen 22 wonderful, informed and inspired articles out of the submissions. I’ve had to tighten the criteria for the Carnival a little, though! If you’d like to submit, visit the submission page.

Get more publicity for your website!

If you are looking for a Blog Buzz or would like to be added to the Friends of InvestorBlogger pages, please drop me a line at investorblogger @ gmail dot com.

Buying Advertising

Of course, if you wish to purchase some advertising on the blog, I’d be happy to provide banners, links, reviews, and top spots and so on. You can simply use the same form and inquire.

10 Blogging Tools: Speed up your blogging with these tools – Qumana (part 1)

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Blogging has gone crazy with the 70,000,000 plus blogs out there… But for a long time the tools for managing blogs were pretty basic. Now that’s no longer true. I’ve been compiling a list of the tools out there. I’ve tried most of them at one time or another with varying results. Blogging software is becoming increasingly common as people blog straight from their pcs via applications. On the scene there are now an increasing number of quality applications that you can use on Windows 98/XP/Vista. But first…

What conveniences do blogging applications have?

Well, quite a lot. You don’t need to fire up your browser, log in, click on write, save and post… it’s all available in one or two screens that you can just start, and enter the post. It works in ways most like a regular Word Processor package, and many of the buttons and tools look and behave much like that, too.

Moreover, you don’t need to log on the Internet to post, as you can save your posts offline, then login, post away and go offline again. Blogging Tools offer a lot of convenience for presenting your blog posts, provide spelling and photograph management, media integration, and so on… But not every application covers every point, so you may need to focus on one or two applications that cover most of your needs. So let’s take a look at #1…

Qumana

First on our list is Qumana which is an interesting and flexible choice. It also offers bloggers an interesting alternative to Adsense. The interface is very similar to those who use WordPress as you can see:

qumana screenshot 0

All the basic elements are there, including adding tags, categories, pings, trackbacks, future posting, etc. You can also modify the text styles as well as the size. Additionally, it is supported on both Windows and Mac. You can also add notes and links to a pad for future reference, called ‘DropPad’ which you can use by clicking and dragging them to the pad area. This list is taken from their website:

* PC & Mac
* WYSIWYG editor, as easy as email
* Clean interface with easy-to-understand buttons
* Spell check with ‘as you type’ option
* Insert keyword ads in one click, with preview – make money easily
* Technorati tagging
* Customize ad design
* Source view option to edit HTML
* Save posts as drafts, or edit old posts, from the Blog Manager
* Easy image uploads and image alignment
* DropPad – gather links, text, and pictures by dragging them to a desktop pad
* Offline editing
* Multi-window editing
* Seamless posting and cross-posting
* Trackback & pinging

It also supports a large number of blogging platforms ncluding Blogger/Blogspot, Drupal, LiveJournal, MovableType, MSN Spaces, TypePad, and Wordpress, amongst others.

Several Ways To Monetize Your Blog with Qumana

As mentioned, Qumana also has an integrated ad browser which bloggers can use to generate revenue. Qumana allows you to insert ads without leaving the blog application. You can also modify the ads within the browser, thus:

qumana screenshot 5

There are only a couple of things I don’t like about Qumana: it’s not easy to edit pictures visually; it’s not particularly media friendly apart from pictures (though there is an alternate application for that), and it seems difficult to ad non-qumana ads to your blog posts… If you are not interested in generating revenue from your blog via such in-text ads, or you use a separate service like Adsense, then this product may not be what you are looking for. If you’re interested in using Qumana ads, but have a preferred blogging tool, then you can try their Firefox and IE tools.

Next week we’ll be taking a look at #2 in our series… so till then.

Adsense: Would the real clicks please stand up?

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It’s Friday again, thank goodness…! So what’s in this round up?

Adsense: Big White Elephand

First, Adsense again. I’ve blogged on using Adsense on a number of occasions in the past year: Why it is a waste of time; canceling your account; and being banned from Adsense. What I didn’t know was how much a waste of time it really is for most websites.

“…one suspects they (Adsense) are even taking legitimate clicks and counting them as invalid“

Today, though I was looking through my MyBlogLog stats because I noticed that this week I’d been stumbled a number of times and nearly doubled my recent average in terms of stats (Analytics own figures). I only have the ‘free’ package, but that was enough to confirm my worst fears. Take a look:

adsenseless

It’s quite small, but Adsense generated the most clicks that day (nearly 50% of the clicks, according to MyBlogLog… So then I went to compare the clicks on Adsense’s own statistics, and sure enough. I had a similar jump in traffic and page views as the stats showed, but let’s say I was quite shocked by the difference. (ed.) I had no clicks at all. None. Zip.

So who is wrong?

This only leads me to one of three possibilities: MyBlogLog is wrong; Adsense is wrong; or Analytics is wrong. But since Analytics broadly agrees with MyBlogLog stats (in terms of overall numbers). I’m left with the obvious: that Adsense is just not recording all the clicks. This wouldn’t be surprising as we know that Adsense does use statistical and tracking methods to calculate to drop ‘invalid’ clicks.

So, then I went back and checked six days’ worth of data. Then I checked the total number of clicks on Adsense using MyBlogLog. Unfortunately, as Adsense TOS states clearly, I cannot disclose “click-through rates or other statistics relating to Site performance in the Program provided to You by Google”. But I will say this: it seems that a large percentage of the clicks are simply not being recorded on my Adsense any more. Webmaster World has an interesting discussion on this.

Fraudulent vs. Invalid

I cannot know how many of those clicks that Adsense invalided were actually fraudulent, rather than just invalid. I don’t think that even Google knows this accurately. What does surprise me though is that the extent of the false positives is likely to be much larger. In other words, Google may be invalidating a larger number of clicks than you are actually getting, clicks that would otherwise be valid, but for the ‘inaccuracy’ in their algorythms.

Another blogger noted this, too. “I found this article that generally agrees with this: Google feels strongly that the absolute $ amount of invalid click refunds given has stayed the same or declined since 2004, all while advertiser requests have gone up by at least 2-3X. This means there’s a huge amount of false positives, a point I tend to agree with.”

Would the real clicks please stand up?

Now I can see why we aren’t allowed to reveal the actual stats. Google just doesn’t want you to know the REAL truth about Adsense before you activate the program. And that is that Google’s program is largely a waste of time for many small publishers and bloggers. It’s ugly, you can’t effectively control it, you have no choice of advertising, and you’re liable to waste a lot of time tweaking it only to discover that are a large number of false positives. Worse, once you do start generating revenue, it is possible to be banned from the system, which has happened to many prominent bloggers.

For sure, Google has introduced a number of changes in the last few months to its Google program, and is continually implementing improvements for Advertisers and Publishers. What is happening is that the impact of these changes willl increase the quality of clicks for advertisers, but for publishers it’s meaning a decreasing revenue, as InvestorBlogger is experiencing.

So check your MyBlogLog stats for your websites, you’ll only get the top ten clicks, but then you can compare those results with the Adsense results. Let me know via email what you are getting.