Why I do not shift to a custom domain

If you are seriously engaged in blogging, it is always recommended to have your own domain and preferably Wordpress hosted on it.Many Internet friends and some blogging professionals recommended me to have my own domain.Webtalks is making enough bucks for me to buy hosting and a domain for it.I'm a big WP fan and I too want to join the self hosted Wordpress community.Still there are few reasons that restrict me

• Domain Age.With the blast of links everyday towards this blog (say thanks to templates), I believe Google will put this blog in the Sandbox.Since I'm currently on Blogger, Google counts the domain age of blogspot.com which well is a pretty old one(1999).
  
• Time.As a student it isn't easy to come online everyday.Which leaves me with two alternatives.Either sell off my blog like Rishi did or keep the posts on blogger till I pass out.I'm not comfortable selling this blog as this is connected to my Google Account.So keeping it live on Blogger is the only option(Don't say that I can also delete the blog).
  
• Hosting.Though many web hosting providers promise 0% downtime, still there is a risk.On blogger, I haven't yet encountered any downtime for this blog.Blogger currently gives undisclosed bandwidth to its blogs, so no problems how much traffic I receive when I'm absent

The shift will definitely take place
You read it right.I will for sure move Webtalks to a custom domain.All I can currently tell you is that you'll have to wait a bit for it.I believe by May 2010.Yes I know its long after.But I will continue posting on Webtalks when I'm free.I had already bought a domain (ashtech.info) back this summer.But afterwards I came to know (.info) domains are full of spam, so next time I'll buy a (.com) only

I'm currently looking for a good domain name (.com). If you have any thoughts, feel free to share them in comments.By 2010, I hope it will gain some age and then we'll shift Webtalks to it.

During this period I will go through intensive studying as these 3 years will be determining for my career.If you are an Indian you would be quite familiar with IIT-JEE which is what I'm going to be preparing for.But still I need wishes from all you for cracking IIT isn't possible without your blessings.

Will miss you all.

Do you really need to update blog everyday?

It has been well over a fortnight since I last posted on Webtalks [you can still be with me and my mates at the Ashtech Blog]. It would have been a prediction that this blog did experience a traffic slump, a decrease in feed count and obviously a decrease in earnings.I'll say a big NO to it.There was a slump but nominal one and has fully recovered now.



Instead of decreasing, the feed count is showing its highest yet(125)



As for earnings, Google AdSense team narrowed down the click able region of AdSense which had its effect but not that big. But now, accidental clicks are negligible and hence we prove we are promising :)

Now let me tell how did the poor posting frequency didn't effect my blog

Evergreen Posts As a part time blogger(or I must say occasional blogger) it is essential for me to write posts which are useful to for visitors even though they are reading it after a long time.
For eg, posting about new AdSense feature will not be as effective as a review with your personal touch of that feature.

Give your blog a break. Some of your posts are really good and deserve to stay on the homepage for long, so why to refuse them?

Google Juice. No new pages(post pages) gave Google a chance to index this blog deeply, which I believe it didn't do previously even though having a blast of back links

Be evil. (Just a personal opinion) No new updates I believe would have forced the regular passerby visitors either to subscribe to the RSS feeds, or to forget this blog.Losing such visitors isn't that costly because they hardly click on any of the ads and just contribute towards the page impressions, which hardly matters to a growing blog. If they would have subscribed to the RSS feed to receive the update automatically, I got few more readers.

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Manage Ads: A promising feature in AdSense

Google AdSense, few days back added a new feature in their AdSense program for all publishers.You may be knowing about this feature from a coming soon status message in your AdSense dashboard or from a sneak peek previous post from the AdSense Blog or from a Breaking news post from Problogger still here is a quick definition for it

This new ad management feature means that your ad unit settings (such as colors and channels) for new AdSense for content ad units will be saved in your AdSense account every time you generate ad code. Then, if you'd like to change any of these settings in the future, all you do is make the update within your account -- you'll no longer need to manually replace the ad code on all of your pages. For instance, you can quickly change the borders of all your 300x250 medium rectangles from red to blue with just a few mouse clicks.

As a blogger I think the key lies in experimenting with your Ad slots.For even changing the border of an Ad unit, I had to generate new ad code, parse it and then finally add the script to my XML template.This was a bit time consuming and a hectic process.This feature just makes the same results available with a few lesser mouse clicks.

I found this feature interesting and gave it one of my blog's slot.I always thought that perfectly blended ads performed much better than one having a distinct border and when I tried border for one day, the results amazed me(I only changed the colour pal latte). I saw a good spike in CTR and CPM.

Concluding it...
Likes

• A short and simple process for changing the look of the Ad unit
• Import feature which allowed me to import ads from other channels.
• Preview Ad feature.
  
• A bit short script :)

Dislikes

• It permits to change the colours of the Ad unit but not it's size.
• Once the script is uploaded, it takes around 10 minutes for the Ad slot to deliver Ads.
  

I will be giving more slots to this new feature soon and I recommend you to do the same and experiment.

Site Report for October, Perfomance report of AdSense referrals

Its the first of month again, so here comes my site report.We got 8,037 visitors who get generated 11,452 page views with 81.65% being the new visitors.Again Google organic search brought me the maximum number of visitors with the templates post being the most popular.During this period, Webtalks crossed the 100 RSS readers mark...


Blog Income Report
This time, I can see a good rise in the the Blog income.Here's a report

AdSense : 26$
Template business : 100$
Widgetbucks : 25$ + 4$ + 8 referrals
Reviews : 60$
Other :15$
Total : 230$
This time the earnings have tripled itself from the last month's.I draw three major reasons for that:
-Pagerank export.We got a PR of 5 while many others got slapped
-100 RSS subscribers.
-Alexa Rank in top 200,000

Google AdSense Referrals 2.0 performance Report
As some of you maybe knowing, I changed few Ad units on my site from AdSense to Content to Referral Ads.They have been up for a long time and here is a performance report.

I would say a big disappointment for me. I almost tried everything.The conversion ratio was extremely poor, more then 75:1.Still I got something in store for you if you still want to go with them

• Text based Ads perform better then Image Ads
• Smaller Ad units like a vertical banner 120 x 140 perform better than 300 x 250 Ad units.
• If available, go for Text links.They have a higher CTR.
• Always check the Pick Best Performing Ads Option.
  
• Don't give them the prime Ad Spot.A referral Ad in less visibility region will be ok but you shouldn't neglect them completely.Ideally, a small Ad unit in the lower sidebar.

If I were to talk about successful conversions, I'll say I only received one and Google still has the default limitation on me.

Conclusion-Referral 2.0 Ads sound interesting but their performance isn't up to the mark.Google AdSense team should consider the Referral section again.If you are a webmaster/blogger, implement them only when you have around 100k page views per month to get the best results.

Webtalks Pagerank 5

Greetings.Google today, rolled out the snapshot of current pagerank.This blog is getting a PR of 5 this time.This is a good jump from PR 3 which had been there for quite long.Surprisingly, this time there was no BackLink export, but who cares? Its party time here as I have over taken some top-notch blogs like john chow(4) and dosh dosh(4).


This update is accompanied by the feed chicklet getting into 3 digits.Currently, it is showing 101 readers.Thank you for subscribing to the feed and if you haven't yet, please do so:they are fast and ad free

The secret
Nothing.Avoid too many links on home page.Get relevant quality backlinks.Focus on content quality more than on PR and last but not the least follow Google Webmaster guidelines.

The Webtalks Effect
I'm not going to talk about traffic.Its about a single site wide link on my blog which linked to the domain(ashtech.info), I bought few months back.The result? Its now Pagerank 4.You can check, its not even indexed by Yahoo!

See how powerful my link is?