Happy New Year 2009

It is time to bid good bye to 2008, the year that started promisingly and ended disastrously. Year 2008 will be remembered for the financial crisis in United States of America and its after-effects everywhere in the world. This year will also be bitterly remembered for one of the worst terrorist attacks, in Mumbai, that took India and the rest of the world by grief.

On the positive side, United States of America elected Barack Obama, the first African-American to become the President of America. China staged a wonderful and colourful display of Beijing Olympics 2008. Singapore won the right to host the first Youth Olympics Games. Singapore also hosted the first F1 car racing during night.

Hope we will have a better year in 2009. Though the outlook looks bleak now, let us all pray together and hope that it will improve. As we all know, every year is the beginning of new hopes.

Forget about SEO, blogging, Adsense, Entrecard and similar terms for a day and enjoy the advent of New year. Wishing everyone a Very Happy and Prosperous New Year 2009!

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Google Adsense vs Other Advertisements

Google Adsense is undeniably one of the highly used monetization methods for blogs. But, day in and day out, you could see articles supporting Google Adsense and articles that stand firmly against Google Adsense. What is your take?

As a beginner, most of us know only about Adsense. To be honest, Adsense is the driving force behind me and many other bloggers when they started off. It is true that we have so many choices now. Just to quote a few: Adbrite, Bidvertiser, Clickbooth, Project Wonderful and so on. The advertisements from Adbrite and Bidvertiser looks almost similar to Adsense. But, how about their performance? Do you get better returns from them?

Do you use Google Adsense?
With these questions in mind, I ran a poll on this blog titled "Do you use Google Adsense?". The following graph displays the results of the poll:


Neither the poll has any scientific background to support the pattern nor the people participated in the poll are representative. But, the pattern of advertising is in similar lines to what I expected. One quarter of the bloggers are clearly supporting Google Adsense while another quarter have completely dumped Adsense out of their blogs. But, one-third of the bloggers are running both Adsense and other advertisements on their blogs. I am not going to discuss anything about 20% of the bloggers who have no advertisements on their blogs.

Further Discussion on Google Adsense
I will stop there now. But, I will come back with my views in my next post. In the meanwhile, here are some questions for your thought:

1. Why do you think Google Adsense is the best? Or why do you think it is not?
   
2. If you have stopped using Google Adsense, why?
   
3. What other modes of advertisements are you using? Why did you choose them? How do you find them?

Please feel free to add your views or thoughts different from the above lines. I will use some of the interesting comments in my future posts as an example to discuss. Of course, you will get a link back to your blog if I use your comments for my discussion. Please subscribe to my feed if you like this post

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Say No to Sponsored Posts

I have decided to put an end to writing sponsored/ paid reviews. In fact, I had not been writing any paid posts for the past six months. I also recommend my readers/ other fellow bloggers to stop writing for payment. To start off, I have removed the affiliate links to paid posts site from my "Money Makers" list on the side bar.

Why "No" to Sponsored Posts?
I am not going against any particular company. But, generally, I lost interest in the paid posts arena. I had built up this site from scratch and went up to PR4. But, now it stands at PR0. But, you may ask, who cares about Google PR? Many of us, including me, have argued that we can survive without Google. Let us acknowledge, friends, it is not easy to get traffic without the help of the biggest search engine.

I had been ranking in the front page for many keywords, but Google slowly de-indexed me from the Search Engine Results. Now, I had to work hard for each and every visitor. Yes, I am still getting considerable traffic through other sources like Entrecard, BloggingZoom, myLot, and so on. But, I have to earn each visitor. To get a visitor from Entrecard, I have to drop a card. You cannot survive ever this way.

While I am still getting some money through affiliate links for sponsored posts site, I felt it is not right to sell something which I don't like myself. You might still see posts related to Smorty, PayPerPost and similar sites here. But, I will remove the affiliate links eventually so that no one goes through me.

Believe me, Google is All. If you want to survive in the blogging world, play by the rules of the biggest search engine. Otherwise, the chances are high that you will perish.

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