Should You Build Organic Traffic or go with Pay Per Click Ads?

Here is a story that caught my attention over at Digital Inspiration via Google Reader. Normally i would “star” it, but this time i click on the “send to” feature of Google Reader and sent this article to this blog. Honestly is these legal? Anyways i liked the story cause it explain organic and pay per click traffic. Enjoy the read and visit www.labnol.org for more great articles.

Should You Build Organic Traffic or go with Pay Per Click Ads?: ”

There are two routes to get your brand’s website on the first page of Google Search results:

1. Organic Traffic – Your site appears naturally in Google search results because you have some compelling content with a little bit of SEO. Building a site that ranks well in organic search results requires effort and time but the traffic cost is absolutely zero.

2. Pay Per Click – When your site has a problem getting “organic” traffic for certain keywords, you try to buy that traffic through SEM (Google Ads). Unlike organic traffic which is free, here you have to pay each time a search visitor clicks on your link on the Google page.

Google Search Results Page

SEO vs. SEM

So should brands spend money on Pay-per-click advertisements to make their site visible in search engines or should they invest that marketing budget in building organic ranks for their website via search engine optimization?

Well, here’s a clue. A new report suggests that search visitors who land on retail websites by clicking on sponsored links are more likely to buy stuff than those who come via clicking on organic results.

And there’s more. The report also suggests that visitors who come to a site through PPC ads are more likely to spend more on that site.

If we were to apply this finding to our example above, Orbitz and PriceLine have better natural ranks in Google for the query “airline tickets” but the traffic to Yatra and MakeMyTrip could be converting better.

Should You Build Organic Traffic or go with Pay Per Click Ads? – Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

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Mafia Wars Autoplayer Firefox Extension Update

The autoplayer has just been updated from 0.9.9 to 0.9.10. To check what’s new for this version just go to StevenD’s script page over at Userscript.org.

Link: [Facebook Mafia Wars Autoplayer Firefox Extension 0.9.10]

Screenshots:

Facebook Mafia Wars Autopalyer Firefox Extension part II

Last time i was talking about how to convert Facebook Mafia Wars Autoplayer userscript to Firefox extension. So now i’m providing a link for anyone who stumble upon this blog and wants to try out the autoplayer and doesn’t want to do the compiling and stuff. Remember this is cheating and you may get ban for using this.

link: [Facebook Mafia Wars Autoplayer Firefox Extension]

Special thanks go to the creator/contributors to this fine script

 StevenD
 CharlesD
 Eric Ortego
 Jeremy
 Liquidor
 AK17710N
 Fragger
 <x51>
 CyB
 int1
 Janos112
 int2str

Screenshots of Mafia Wars Autoplayer Firefox Extension on Ubuntu 9.04:

Facebook Mafia Wars Autoplayer Firefox Extension

I’ve been playing Mafia Wars on Facebook for almost 2 weeks now and i’m quite addicted to it. Searching tips and guide gave me tons of info on how to play the game. I found out that there are autoplayers for the game. You can go to userscripts.org search for mafia wars  and what you will find are smorgasborg autoplayer scripts for you to automate your game. By the way this is cheating and you can get ban for using these scripts.

In order for the scripts to work you need to install greasemonkey add-on for Firefox from there you can run the mafia wars script you selected.
Personally i don’t like using greasemonkey thats why when i find useful script such as StevenD’s Mafia Wars Autoplayer script i try to convert/compile them to a firefox extension by using Arantius.com script compiler .

Here is how i did it :

1. get the source code of the script you want to use
2. go to http://arantius.com/misc/greasemonkey/script-compiler
3. insert detail and paste the source code then compile
4. save the xpi file
5. drag and drop the xpi file to your  firefox browser

StevenD’s Mafia Wars Autoplayer has lots of options but i don’t use all of it. I only use auto heal, protect property and  auto bank.

Feeling Dumb

I just feel like a dumbass today. A customer bought a Logitech Quickcam Chat for Skype a couple of days ago and she complained that the webcam/quickcam doesnt work. So we had our foot soldier retrieve the said item. Before sending the item to our supplier i tried to check first if she’s telling the truth. I hooked it up to my laptop installed the driver which i have to download it first because she forgot to put the cd inside box. Once the driver was installed and the quickcam applications running all you can see was a blurred image. I messed around with the setting with no luck. I thought maybe i need to update the drivers so i did that and still no luck. But i wasn’t giving up yet, i figured maybe my laptop is the problem(i know thats why i’m feeling dumb) so i installed the driver to another computer updated drivers and it still blurry. Then i got another stupid idea maybe it will run if i installed Skype, maybe it was meant to run on Skype only. So i Downloaded Skype installed it and still with the same result, blurry images.

This time i totally given-up. I figured it must be a lens problem. So i went to our supplier gave him the quickcam. He set it up on his computer to check on it and like before its still blurry. Then he ask me if i tried adjusting the focus ring… then it hit me like a train.. FOCUS RING!!!! WTF why didn’t i thought of that!!! it was just out of focus thats why it’s blurry.

The good news is our customer was happy because it wasn’t really broken cause all the while she thought that she might have broken it in her haste to use it.

How To Remove A Magnetic Security Tag

 

I was surfing the world wide web when I found this very helpful How to for removing a Magnetic Security Tag. This would have been handy for me last Christmas werein the bag i bought has its magnetic tag still attached to the bag. I have to go back to the store which is a 3 hour drive from where i lived and the traffic was such PITA!

To remove the tag you just need to get a very powerful magnet. The easiest way to get these magnets is from your computer’s Hard Drive. When I say Hard Drives I mean busted hard drives not the ones your using right now. You can go to a computer repair shop and buy them non-working hard disk or if your a good actor/actress ask for one for free. A warning though; make sure to keep your ATM cards and Credit cards away from the magnets as the magnets will definitely erase any data stored in your cards.

Once you have the magnet it’s just a matter of making the magnet touch the security tag as shown in the images below and voila the tag is removed.

[via ziza.ru]

What was it that the Terrorists hate?

Can’t Live Without Google

I have been using Google products service for quite some time now and I just realize that everything I do revolves around them. For instance last night I found out that one of my Yahoo email account (I got 2 yahoo mail) has POP3 access. So what did i do? I went to my Gmail account and set it up to access my Yahoo Mail. This got me thinking, I realize that every time i get a POP3 or IMAP access I instinctively setup my Gmail to access them. If they don’t have POP2 or IMAP i set them up to filter and foward to my gmail. Even my Mom’s email is forwarded to my email.

I used Google Reader a lot as in I check on it like 100x a day. I like it so much that it kinda ruin net surfing for me. I don’t get to see websites anymore, I wouldn’t know if a sites updates it looks unless I get to read it from their RSS feed. I used to visit Lifehacker.com or Downloadsquad everyday but when I learned how to use Google Reader I don’t get to visit their site anymore unless i’m looking for a specific info.

Other Google service that i used often:

Google Maps. Maps is very helpful when I need to send out our in-house messenger to deliver some item to our customers.

Picasa/Picasaweb perfect software to organize my photos store online. Oh and its also available for Linux.

Google Apps for managing  domains. I like it a lot because I get to use a very familiar interface when accessing email which is gmail. I don’t get to worry about setting up email client because you can access it via the web. No more “AHHH I FORGOT TO BACKUP MY EMAIL” scenarios for me.

Google Docs spreadsheet is what I usually used.. I do a lot of product listing and price computation for our company.Very handy for times I need to check item inventory and i’m outside without my laptop.

Blogger.com, Youtube.com, Calendar, Web Search and especially Adsense these are other service I can’t live without. No need to explain here.

Of course i’m just exaggerating the “I can’t live without it” part.

What have i been doing?

Wow its been a while since i last posted here kinda been busy with work and all. February was a frakkin doozy, Valentines week was fun and tiring at the same time. We got tons of orders and we only got a handful of complaints.

But after the controlled chaos that was valentines day i got sick and also my family. We bought food from three restaurant to celebrate a belated valentines day. The following day i got a major case of diarrhea or diarrhoea (which ever spelling you prefer) i was practically in the bathroom the whole frakkin day. My mom and two brothers got sick too. I wasn’t able to go to work for 3 or 4 days.

What else have i been doin? Aside from the usual uploading of new products to sell online, i am also creating a website, an online store again but this time i am doing it the old school way. I’m talking pure html and css code via notepad. No fancy smancy CMS. I feel like I’m in highschool again hehehe. Why am i doing it you may ask? Well the boss wants me to do it for the sake of SEO and stuff, who am i to argue. But honestly doing the site is lots of fun.

What else… I was surfing the net for a e-commerce plugin for wordpress when i found craftycart it was exaactly what i needed. It was nice but my boss wanted me to use pure html so i have to put it in the back burner for a while. Using craftycart for a while got me thinking, can i create an online store using blooger. The answer was yes. So i made one using paypal, you can see my experiment here. Did some blogger tricks to make it look that way. One of the tricks or tips i used was using the conditional tags and Blogger buster’s article on conditional tags “Display Elements only on Home, Item or Archive Pages in Blogger” was a big help. Right now I’m thinking of porting CraftyCart template to blogger and use simpleCart(js) + paypal as it’s shopping cart. That is if i can make some time for it.

Thats all for now, Cya!

Get Free Domain Names

These free domain names are more of a free URL redirection that look like and sometimes act exactly like a paid domain. So instead of getting www.somedomain.com/YOURACCOUNT/WHATEVER you get www.YOURDOMAIN.co.cc.

Listed below are three URl redirection that I use or recommended to friends.

Dot TK – Renaming The Internet
Dot TK is one of the well known free domain services, Dot TK ( .TK) is the the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand located in the South Pacific. I have been using Dot TK for 3 to 4 years now. There are times that the service is slow and sometimes unreliable. There are also pop-up ads and frame ads . If you don’t want ads and want full control of your domain you’ll have to shell out $10 a year.

Domain Name Example: www.YOURDOMAIN.TK

.CO.NR Free Domain Name – www.YOU.co.nr !!!
Using .CO.NR gives you a www.YOURDOMAIN.co.nr. Dot NR (.NR) is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Nauru. CO.NR is not the ccTLD registry for .NR they are just the administrator operator of the CO.NR domain. Registering for a free account gives you the following features namely: free URL redirection, free URL cloaking, free path forwarding, meta tags support, favicon support and no banners & no popups. Although its free and like they say there are no ads, there is a catch… you have to link back to them which is just fine since its free.

Domain Name Example: www.YOURDOMAIN.CO.NR

Free .Co.CC – supports for CNAME, A, MX, NS records!
This has to be the best Free Domain name service out there. Aside from giving you a free domain you get to have full DNS control and domain management like you can change your CNAME, MX, A and NS records. That means you can use Blogger.com’s custom domain by pointing or mapping your CO.CC domain to your blog. The .cc is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an Australian territory. CO.CC is just the Administrator and Operator of CO.CC domain name.

Domain Name Example: www.YOURDOMAIN.CO.CC