It has been such a long time since my previous post. Enjoyed my life, wasted months, and now is time put things on track again. Tones of stuff in my mind, but too little time to do . . . .

I think one of the very first thing that I need to do is to upgrade some of the blogs, including this one, from the outdated version to the latest version 2.7.1, get a new design, etc.

I’m also exploring joomla, and thinking of implement that for some of the sites, which is a major effort.

I’ll be launching some online campaigns to test some of the current web 2.0 phenomenals.

The list go on and on . . . .

Just created a facebook group for Setia Tropika Residents.

I was inspired by 2 things during last Saturday.

1. I saw a western guy carrying 2 backpacks, each of them is like 70+10 little type. At that moment I told myself that may be he really need such big bags to go around. Soon after him, I saw a lady with a small bag and a baby pram, then followed by their kid. Wow…. so cool to go backpacking with your 5 year old kid right?

2. Watch Kong Fu Panda, very funny, and inspired by this phrase from Master Wu Gui:

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift, that is why it’s called the present

Again….. reminded me to enjoy my life while I can.

Types of innovation

Technological Innovation
- Remixing old new ways (mountain bikes) or inventing new technologies
Business innovation
- Supply chains (Walmart), processes (Toyota), business models (Dell), brands (Nike)
Product/service innovation
- Products (Skype), marketing (Apple), services (Salesforce.com)
Design innovation
- Look & fell (Apple), emotion & experience design (Idean)
Cultural innovation
- Leadership (Linux), organization (Google), transparency (Seismic)

Eric Schmidt – Google CEO
Virtually everything new seems to come from the 20 percent of their time engineers here are expected to spend on side projects. They certainly don’t come out of the management team.

Just read this presentation not long ago, some of the items are worth to be referred back again and again, I’ll put some of them to share with you guys as well. I may put them into different posts, and I’ll just cite the author here :

Expansion strategies

1. Create an API (Application Programming Interface)

2. Distribute source as Open Source (eg. Sugar CRM)
3. Create developer ecosystem (eg. Amazon)
4. Create browser plugins (eg. del.icio.us)
5. Create plugins for other platforms (eg. blogging)
6. Create embeddable widgets (eg. Meebo)
7. Advertise on Google Adsense (eg. everyone)
8. Utilize SEO (search engine optimization)

Example of revenue

1. 40% premium memberships

2. 42% Google Adsense
3. 10% selling one ad directly to advertiser
4. 5% text link ads
5. 3% referal money from amazon.com and linkshare

Minimal self funded startup costs, focus on a specific community, value created to the user base through a clever combination of services driving repeat visits and premium subscription, viral growth, advertising revenues and eventually(hopefully juicy) sponsorships.

Finally my 40 inch Samsung Series 5 came. Worked with the contractors to mount that on. I chose a lower position for the TV, suit my height, and which is the same height as previous TV as well. 1080 is suitable for normal TV program viewing also, satisfied. Still not able to test my HDMI DVD player as I can’t find DVD with good quality to test lol, how sad.

The waterfall that I designed not function as intended yet, the water does flow beautifully, but I think water will leak into cement and become lesser over time. I should have make a plastic container to hold the water instead of cement one. Still think of a way to rescue it without heavy modification. Else I will have to hack the wall, redo the piping and flow again….arg…..

Nice plastic roof for middle section of the living room, it give the good lighting, but it can be abit hot sometimes because of the direct sun light.

Nah…. Not like those make money blog or get rich blog that always got lots of tips to share, I am just an ordinary webmaster that would like to try different ideas in order to maximise the income.

My latest attempt is here :

Isn’t it a perfect combination? A nice and useful ads that blended into the design, not only can achieve good CTR, it can complement our content as well. Got the Adsense ads?

As part of the celebration for moving to new house, I decided to have a small BBQ at home. This is to mark a milestone for all busy weekends since moving in as well. Over the weekends, we got our main door with auto gate fixed, we got our sofa, dining table, tv console, coffee table, bed frame, and wardrobe from Rustica, phone line partially fixed, etc. The other 2 major outstanding stuff are the oven(i got lots of things to blog about it), and fish pond.

We got this BBQ pit almost 10 years ago, and just unboxed and fixed it not long ago. It was a free give for our 29 inch Phillips TV.

Some of the foods that we prepared : cocktail hotdog with cheese, sotong ball, sotong, kampung fish, prawn, chicken wing, etc. Not a lot of variety but is enough for 5 of us. We got dessert, lots of beer, coke, and red wine. The red wine was Coyam from Chile, pretty nice

Anyway, today I wanted to buy standing fans, one for dining area(to share with study room), another for second floor’s living room. I can’t find the Mistra standing fan, so just get 1 Panosonic standing fan first, coz can’t stand the heat while eating. While I was looking for the Mistra fan from other shops, I ended up bought a TV back. This was kind of unplanned, but I always wanted to buy that model, just either now or later. Arranged my 40 inch Samsung Series 5 to be fixed next week

I’ll be happier if I never see Series 6 before, anyway, I should be grateful.

After months of waiting, months of preparation, months of hard work, finally I’ve moved to the new house. There are so much to talk about, but not at this moment, coz I’m very sleepy now. Just wanted to post some pics that I took since the early days. Will be blogging more about that .

A few months ago, google announced that landing page load time will soon be incorporated into Quality Score.

In short:

Why are we doing this?
Two reasons: first, users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.

And it means:

After the one month review period, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.

Basically the the shorter loading time, the better position and lower minimum bids you might get. May be is a good news for web hosting companies as well?? LOL

I’m wondering will this affect Adsense users eventually. Say if my site has shorter loading time, isn’t it give Adwords users a better platform to show their ads as well? Should I be rewarded as well?

Register here to get access to exhibit hall and a set of keynotes

ad:tech – 26/27 June 2008
ad:tech brings together brand advertisers, traditional & interactive agencies, portals, on-line publishers and technology providers. With the rapid growth in technology and use of digital media, ad:tech offers an unrivalled opportunity to discover new practices and technologies, and to learn how many of the great names have utilized the net, built brand recognition and immersed themselves in digital technologies. Companies are realizing the meaning of ROI on ad spend like never before.

Exhibiting companies

• .FOX Networks
• 88DB.com
• Acronym Media
• AD2ONE GROUP
• adma
• Admax Network
• Aktiv Digital
• Charged Media
• ColorZip Singapore
• dgm Asia Pac
• Easy Ad
• Eyeblaster
• Friendster
• Google, Inc.
• Hong Kong Association of Interactive Marketing Limited (HK)
• i-POP
• Innity Sdn Bhd
• Internet Industry Association of Singapore (IIAS)
• Interwoven
• m.Net Corporation
• Marketing Institute of Singapore (MIS)
• Nielsen
• NTT Resonant Inc
• Omniture
• Premiere Global Services
• Recruit.net
• RedHat Media
• SEMPO
• Singapore Press Holdings Limited
• Sivrin Technologies
• StrongMail Systems
• Verztec Consulting Pte Ltd
• WebDNA
• XM Asia Pacific Pte Ltd
• Yahoo! SEA

Venue

• Suntec City Convention Center

See you there !!!

This scheme has been around for quite some time and many webmasters did make quite abit of noise when it launched. Personally I didn’t feel much, may be because the reduce in revenue is not significant enough, that’s why I have not really spend time study what is Adsense Smart Pricing. Yesterday I decided to browse around for some information because some of my experiments caused the Adsense earning to be down and the reason seems to coincide with what other webmasters are speculating.

Explanation from Adwords Team:

Google’s smart pricing model has always provided better placement for better performing ads, and reduced the cost of a click to the least amount possible to stay above your competitor’s ad. And now, with no change in how you bid, Google may reduce the cost for a click if that better reflects the value it brings to advertisers like you.

How smart pricing works
We are constantly analyzing data across our network, and if our data shows that a click is less likely to turn into business results (e.g. online sale, registration, phone call, newsletter sign-up), we may reduce the price you pay for that click. You may notice a reduction in the cost of clicks from content sites.

We take into account many factors such as what keywords or concepts triggered the ad, as well as the type of site on which the ad was served. For example, a click on an ad for digital cameras on a web page about photography tips may be worth less than a click on the same ad appearing next to a review of digital cameras.

Google saves you time and hassle by estimating the value of clicks and adjusting prices on an ongoing basis. With improved smart pricing, you should automatically get greater value for clicks from ad impressions across our network, all with no change in how you bid.

Explanation from Adsense Team:

1. Many factors determine the price of an ad

More than conversion rate goes into determining the price of an ad: the advertiser’s bid, the quality of the ad, the other ads competing for the space, the start or end of an ad campaign, and other advertiser fluctuations.

2. Clickthrough rate doesn’t affect advertiser return on investment (ROI)

The percentage of clicks that convert for an advertiser is the most important factor in an advertiser’s ROI, so it’s not only possible, but common, to have a low CTR and a high advertiser conversion rate. It’s also possible to have a high CTR and a low conversion rate. Don’t remove the AdSense code from your site just because it has a lower CTR – it may be one of your best converting sites.

Although Adsense Team clarified that CTR is not one of the factors that will affect the pricing, I think there is still come co-relations. Imagine if a website with all sort of traffic but none of them can convert into ads clicks, then something much be wrong, and even they can be converted into ads clicks, the sales conversion for advertiser will be low as well. For example if traffic came from low quality source, eg link farms, new blogs, MFAs, etc, and the visitors are less likely to be interested in any form of advertisement, not interested in buying anything etc. Even if webmaster manage to convert them into a valid Adsense click, advertisers will be very unlikely to convert them into any form of sales.

Apart from CTR, I think factors like

• Traffic quality(search traffic is good)
• PR of the site
• Content of the site, site relevance
• Size and age of the site

will affect how you get smart priced as well, these factors sort of become rules of google dominated internet world? I believe how your site ranked in SEs also affected by similar factors.

One important information I gathered is : smart pricing will affect the whole account, not by site, not by channel, is the whole Adsense account. So if you want to put Adsense ads into some new, not performing sites, you might want to think twice. I just removed the ads from most of my not performing sites as my earning really drop after I added Adsense to those sites. I also remove extra ads from some of my performing sites for another experiment –> to boost the CTR, and also I try not to display ads with lower bid as my visitors might click on them instead of ads with higher bid.

Hopefully I can boost the CTR in 2 months time. Anyway, I’ve removed Adsense from all not performing site except this blog, as I find that the ads are pretty relevant and useful.