My AdSense story

To many people Google Ads might sound annoying but to some, it might be one of their sources of revenue. My AdSense story revolves around my 1st venture with STUPEFY i.e. Connect2Pk.

Back in March 2008, we launched Connect2Pk.com and felt like testing AdSense too. Our business model included free service as well as paid. However, due to some VoIP licensing issues; we dropped the paid idea for some time. Just like any other venture, we started off the project from our own money but wanted the website to generate money so that it can support itself. Trust me; playing around with AdSense is fun! I still remember the early days when we used to get “California Hotel” advertisements on our website. Very soon I realized that we are not going in the right direction and started improving layout and SEO. From few cents in a week, the revenue was enough to support the venture and MashAllah we got much more to expand it! And Alhamdulillah, today Connect2Pk is running 100% on AdSense revenue.

Just like everyone else, I implemented basic techniques like add more pages, blend your ad-units, focus on content and much more. Google does play smart. If you’re not getting much clicks and traffic, don’t expect any revenue. But if you start getting healthy clicks then Google will start displaying more competitive advertisements resulting in more revenue. Yes, that’s the way it is!

Earlier on my blog, I dropped my 2 cents over “Karachi Bloggers Meetup“. Also, somewhere (may be on Green&White) I read that many kids started blogging and put up AdSense to start earning after they heard that two Pakistani bloggers are earning more than $100/day. Well, the key point is that content matters the most to AdSense. Technology blogs usually succeed in making money as compared to personal ramblings. It’s just that, there are many important factors that matter if you really want to earn through AdSense (Google for AdSense tips & go through AdSense blog for basic understanding).

Well, that’s about my 9 months of experience with AdSense. If anyone has an AdSense story to share, I would love to put it up on my blog!

How to start a start-up?

Few days back, I came across an article which had really bold tips for startups/entrepreneurs. Founder of Huddle.net spoke about 20 must-knows in starting up your own business and much more!

• Take advantage of every connection possible
• Design, build, then test and carry on with that cycle
• Focus all your energy on getting the product great
• Never lose sight of what you’re doing..

You can read the complete article at: ZDnet – Student Technology Day: how to start a start-up.

light-Bot

light-Bot, an amazing puzzle game for programmers (: My team-lead just shared this game with me and it’s really fun! (Click here to play light-Bot)

“Programming-style puzzle game. Give commands to your robot to light up the factory. Very soon you will realize though that using the main method on it’s own is not enough and you will have to start creating re-usable functions to achieve the ultimate goal.”

Some green industry blogs!

Today, tons of technology blogs are out there on the internet. As time is passing by, blogging has picked up popularity and Pakistani users have also put up some technology blogs to cover our industry happenings; and they even succeeded in making a good impression about what they were doing. That’s their one side (if you’re in read-only phase). Now if you have ever had a chance to communicate with them, or if you ever have emailed them for a review of your website etc. then you really get to know the reality of what is happening around in our greenish society!

Trust me, top most blogs of our industry are running in a totally unprofessional manner. Most of them have started focusing on quantity and not quality. How many times I have seen a post that quotes from Google blog and they just write up a paragraph or two above summarizing the story. Is that really it, just to earn some bucks per post? :S

One big blunder that I felt was lack of knowledge (especially in a hot field like VoIP). It happened when I asked them to review my website, they denied even after they struggled to read the VoIP laws of PTA. However, 5 months later I am again contacted by another writer from their community to get details about our startup since they wanted to cover our story. I did mention them about what happened earlier and then I submitted my post. 3 weeks later I got to know that my venture won’t be covered again. Tough luck you might say? No, I would say – poor management of the community running the blog!

Hmm, a funny incident also happened. Few weeks back a post was published and the URL pointing to the main website was wrong. I dropped in a comment that there has been typo, so please correct the hyperlink. After few minutes, the post vanished away and was back with the same content & author in few hours but WITHOUT my comment.

Anyway, I always looked up to our industry blogs with great pride. But whenever you get a chance to have your review over there, even top personalities out there would only talk negative about your startup. I believe, talking positive, helping out with reasonable suggestions can help the startups get better only if they share positive stuff from their experience. Unjust reviews and comments won’t lead us anywhere. Last but not the least, I’ve even seen Jehan Ara of P@SHA posting positive posts about ventures on her blog and encouraging the efforts where as on the same side, the community couldn’t leave their green standard!

Make the homepage yours for a day!

Another venture in the row by SIM, a great effort indeed! Asim Imtiaz, one of the brains at TeaBreak.pk has launched TheDaySite.com

Early morning today, when I opened up twitter, I saw a link posted by Asim – and it didn’t say clearly if it was one of his projects but the moment I saw the design, I could feel and tell that its powered by SIM (:

What exactly is TheDaySite, let me quote from their blog:

It lets you have its homepage for a day and allows you to upload an image (with a link to your website) to be displayed on that day instead. The homepage displays just your image for the entire day and nothing else!

Once the day ends your homepage is archived and becomes a part of the Internet Calendar. The day is permanently marked with your name (ofcourse your image) and is destined to be there forever.

The idea seems interesting, layout is impressive (color seems a little dark though) and I hope that the new venture helps Asim to achieve his target. I haven’t checked out the functionality yet  but will  check it soon InshAllah!

Just thought to help my friend in spreading the word!

DAWN (beta) voilates Adsense policy

Yup, the new layout of DAWN website does violate Google Adsense policy on their homepage (click here to view the snapshot). I’ve been noticing it from about a month now and I must say, hi-profile (or at least highly visited) websites of our country should abide by policies or at least read them once before putting up 4 banners instead of 3/page!

AdSense Program Policy
Ad Placement: Up to three ad units may be displayed on each page

My 2 cents for Karachi Bloggers Meetup ‘08

Hmm, Karachi Bloggers Meetup was held last Saturday and I couldn’t make it due to some family commitments. However, I did read all the live coverage provided by Fariha Akhtar at Ideas Hut.

Bloggers on the board did share their experiences and the ways through which one can make money from blogs. But I believe they should also highlight key factors to our Pakistani youngsters to avoid opening blogs just to make money through Adsense; more commonly termed as “Made for Adsense (MFA)”. And trust me; such sites won’t earn you anything except few cents!

I’ll be InshAllah sharing my Adsense experience in the upcoming posts. Stay tuned!

The Re-opening

Yet another WordPress blog? No! I started blogging in November 2007 on wordpress.com after which I tested many self-hosted blogs and even experiemented little dot com ventures using WP. However, I’ve finally planned to merge all my blogs into one so that it gets a little easy for me to manage and blog about technology happenings, web design & development.

Readers who have been following me on axdimensions.wordpress.com and axdimensions.com/pixelnotes can now track me directly through ‘axdimensions.com’..

And yes, twitter freaks can add me at: http://www.twitter.com/axdimensions

Enjoy your stay!