Last week I had some adsense problem with this blog and I had to search for some template tricks to solve it. On my quest I came accross many interesting template hacks for blogspot platform which I am listing here for all my readers comfort. Feel free to experiment.

1. Make your latest post your blog's landing page. This trick redirects visitors from homepage to most recent post. Link
2. Category. For basic category function check my old post. For more complicated methods you can read this article.
3. Author comment highlighting hack. external link
4. Expandable post trick. If your post is very long and you wish to have "click here to read more" kind of link to your blog then this trick is for you.
5. Archiving posts with latest post on top of a drop down menu.
6. Trackbacks by Haloscan. Much needed feature that Blogger seems to ignore. One little warning, this hides all your old comments and I didn't like the look either, so removed it.
7. Previous Post Hack. As the name suggests, add a link to the your previous post.

Thats all for now folks. Actually I have few cool hacks for you but I haven't tested them yet. So you have to back come some time later.

Wow! I took a week's break from all worldly matters and more then half of things around me changed, its amazing how much can happen in just seven days! As far as blogosphere is concerned seven of the most happening events in last seven days:


7. NETGEAR WiFi Phone for Skype
6. Canon considers halt to film camera development
5. Interns? No Bloggers Need Apply
4. House Committee Approves 'Net Neutrality' Bill
3. Google AdsBot to assess your landing pages
2.Yahoo, eBay form Web advertising alliance
1. Google introduces Video Ads.

ps: of course this list is not complete and I might have missed many more interesting news :-) these

On may 19th Darren Rowse of problogger wrote about Adsense video program, just like all other post from Darren this was also very motivating article. In Darren's own words - "(I) came across a product that I wish I'd stumbled across in my first months of blogging" and "Michael earns over $19,000 USD per month using AdSense (that's more than $600 a day) and has obviously spent a lot of time researching how to get the most out of the ad network." I never trusted such "get rich quick" products so on reading the article I told myself that why a respectful blogger like Darren Rosse is writing about it. On reading the comments from old visitors to his site I found that I was not alone in doubting such product, one Andy Merrett also wrote a comment (cynical?) expressing similar doubts.

But Andy was out numbered, corned and was called an ass and finally was made to apologise (for his mistake??). Anyway Andy took others' advice, bought the product and reviewed the product. He concluded his review by stating -

"This course is not for even moderately competent AdSense users and website publishers. If you are an absolute beginner, with no website, no content, and no way to generate revenue, then you will probably get a lot from this information.

If you've read a few free Internet marketing sites, looked at successful websites, and are confident in testing on your own site, then I don'’t think you'll find much here to help you."

But of course, even a broken clock shows the right time twice a day and if its been recommended by A-list bloggers then I think a new adsense user can learn a thing or two from it. You might quote Brian and say that the product is backed with NO RISK, 100% Money Back Guarantee, so you have nothing to loose. But how true is that ? Even if you spend two hours watching those videos you have wasted twice what you could have earned in an hour doing regular work (note that you are not suppose to skip any videos). Then there is an issue of your blog's credibility. If such product doesn't delieve what they (and you) promised then how many readers you expect would go through all the trouble of ordering and getting refund for your next referred product.

Like Brian wrote recently - money is not in being on the A-list, money is in fan list. So if you don't want to loose your royal readers you should give enough importance to the things that affect your readers.

Life is full of high and low moments, while I was spending my last couple of days trying to figure out why google ads are not getting displayed on this blog and getting no results what so ever, my hard work that I put in creating and running this blog finally got recognized and I was awarded this week's SOB : Successful and Outstanding Blogger award by Liz.

Liz is the owner of successful-blog and SOB concept was started by her 30 weeks back. And this is how she puts it:

The idea was that anyone who took the discussion back to their blog would let me know. Then I would give that blog recognition on Successful-Blog for extending the conversation into the blogosphere–making the community larger, the dialogue bigger, all of us smarter, better and our businesses stronger. Most folks forgot the part about letting me know. So I kept watch and found out on my own.

She is very hard working, is't she? There are eight other winners of this week's SOB awards and I am going to go check them all today itself. If you are also interested in winning this award then I would suggest you to do the same and even if you are not interested then also its going to an interesting read.

Week 30 SOBs

---

---

Today I noticed something strange on this blog. Google is not showing any ads on it. Its not that I make a living out of google adsense revenue but not displaying any ads for no reason is a matter of concern and so I decided to do little investigation on my own.

After checking each and every post one by one I zeroed on this post. Its highly unlikely that Google is not displaying ads because of some banned words because I can see ads on this post.

This is what I did to correct the problem:

• I tried to see if there is any problem with my browser (firefox), so checked with IE and even with Digital point's Sandbox tool, but still couldn't see any ads on my blog.
• I tired removing all negative words , nothing happened, still same blank space.
  
• I tired to remove whole text, still nothing happened.
• I even wrote couple of keywords just in case google doesn't displays ads on blank pages.
• Finally I posted my problem on Digital Point Forum.

This post is causing lot of problem to my main page and if this issue is not solved soon then I have no option other then to delete this post.

updates: I have mailed to google adsense team and explained this problem. I believe they are going to reply me back in next 48 hours (and hopefully with a solution). In the mean time I am trying to do modification to template so that the problematic post's effect can be neutralized.

updates 2: Temporary solution: Since the problem was with one post so I thought that if the blog homepage could be redirected automatically to the latest post then my work would be done.

So after searching the net for couple of hours I found this small blogger template trick which did the work.
ps: Google Blogger search doesn't seems to work as efficiently as google search even for blogspot.

final updates: Today after I got reply from Adsense team, I must give it to the team for being so fast and prompt, I expect around 2 complete days for them to reply back but they beat my guess by full 5 hours (and to top that I mailed them on sunday!).

Anyway here what say wrote back:

---

Hello Jack,

Thank you for your email. When I reviewed
http://blog4bloggers.blogspot.com, I noticed that targeted Google ads were
appearing on your site. However, if you're still having trouble viewing
the Google ads on your computer, there are a couple steps I'd recommend
taking:

1) Please try clearing your browser cache and deleting your cookies before
trying to access your site again.

For more information, please see
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=23767
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=35730

2) Please also make sure that JavaScript is enabled and any ad blocking
software is disabled. For more information, please see
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=10036.

If you're still unable to view the Google ads after following steps 1 and
2 above, please reply to this email with a detailed description of the
problem and I'll be happy to investigate further. Specifically, could you
please provide responses to these questions?

- Can you send me a screenshot showing this problem?
- What browser version are you using?
- What operating system version are you running?
- What is the exact URL that is causing you trouble?

We appreciate your cooperation.

For additional questions, we encourage you to visit the AdSense Help
Center (http://www.google.com/adsense_help), our complete resource center
for all AdSense topics. Alternatively, feel free to post your question on
the forum just for AdSense publishers: the AdSense Help Group
(http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help).

Sincerely,

Abc
The Google AdSense Team

---

With the help of small trick I was able to correct the problem temporarily, maybe the team just checked the homepage (as they still asked me to send the exact URL) but still I checked the URL in question and found it to be working properly, maybe google takes some time to make changes (initially it had some words like w a r and b o m b that I deleted later). Well I must say I am satisfied with Adsense team's reply and I would advise you all to be careful when using such words in your news articles.

You can write the headlines for search engines or you can write it for people (if you are not sure what's the difference between two then read my last post Headlines - do they matter in SEO world?). Today I am going to list out some points that everyone should keep in mind before writing a headline. Without wasting anymore of your time here they are:

DOs

1. Use short words and meaningful words, but avoid abbreviations unless its very common like NASA or US. Try to use short synonyms for long words.
   
2. Use "Active Voice". Active voice is when something does some something (actively). Passive voice is when something is done to something. for example DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN is active while TRUMAN IS DEFEATED BY DEWEY. This is the most important point one should keep in mind when writing headlines because it not only takes less words then Passive Voice and hence less decoding but it also feels simpler and keeps the "verb and object" order.
3. Use Present Tense to convey a feeling of immediacy.
4. Use figures only when its necessary. Avoid them if you can. This may sound little difficult to believe if you read too much into SEO. But like I said in my last post, you have to decide whether you are writing for search engines or your visitors.
5. Headlines should be written from a neutral point of view. As the name suggests, the neutral point of view is a point of view, not the absence or elimination of viewpoints. It requires views to be represented without bias.
6. Be Accurate and specific but try not to make it dull.

Don'ts

1. Avoid repeating keywords. It not only makes the headline long but also looks confusing in eye of visitors (both human and search engines). Use synonyms and try to rephrase the sentence.
2. Avoid contrived headlines.
   
3. Avoid exclamation marks. Use strong, accurate verbs to drive your point home.
4. Avoid Articles and verbs like 'to be', 'is' and 'are'. This is done to save space and improve action.

Writing headlines can be lot of hard work but remember that most of the successful writers spends more then half of the time on writing headlines out of the total time they have for an article.

MAN WALKS ON MOON
DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN

Name one similarity among above statements(answer is at bottom of this post)
What is the difference between "good headlines" and "attention grabbing headlines"? While former just tells you about the quality of the headlines but the later tells you "how good" is it.

You can write the headlines for search engines(SE) or you can write it for people. You may ask whats the difference between two. Well the difference lies in how your pages gets indexed in SE, look at the permalink of this post, what do you see? All the words that forms the headline goes into this permalink which is why it becomes very important from SE's point of view to from a keyword rich headline.

On the other hand when you write headlines for readers you don't try to pack in as many keywords as possible but you tries to make it interesting for your readers. They can be short and snappy.

The best path is the middle one - include 1-2 keywords and try to make it interesting and relevant to the post.If you have really catchy but totally irrelevant headlines, they would attract the visitors but won't be able to convert them into your frequent visitors.

answer: these are some of the most famous headlines of their time.

source wikipedia

Finally I won Liz's link love. It was not easy for a me, had to try twice, but with some help and guidance from ever sweet Liz I finally won (I guess). The Game was simple - Liz posted her link lust list on one of the three blogs, and all you have to do is find who linked her back. It just like treasure hunting with a twist. On winning I get to suggest one blog of my choice which gets linked by Liz's successful-blog, I picked heavenlyankh for its fresh look and touching posts, I am sure this would bring smile to andrena face over at heavenlyyankh.

And yeah, I almost forgot to tell you about my link lust -
1)Seth Godin - I like the bald pic in his blog, no seriously its one of the finest blog out there.
2)Liz - for being so caring.
3)Mike of simplenomics - for speaking his heart - always!

Google trend is old news - well anything 2 days old in blogosphere is old. From the day one I got hooked to this smart tool released by google recently. For some its no more then just another tool to find most search words but if used smartly it can be of great help in deciding your future business plans.

Click here to see some more interesing search results(external links)
Good and evi l
God and google

Google Adsense has recently changed its adsense policy. The changes are mostly in ad placement section.

According to this new changes (actually backdated policy by 2 months to march 14th)-
A single referral button per product may be placed on a page up to a maximum of 4 buttons, in addition to the ad units, search boxes, and link units specified above. Referral buttons are considered to be ‘Google ads’ for purposes of these program policies.

Click here for rest of policy or here for rest of the story
Also checkout Google's Quality Guidelines

There is a new trend catching up in the blogosphere, no its not about link leak virus or a new google tool, its about poetry. Yes! more and more bloggers are writting poems with high paying keywords. The bloggers got this idea after reading a list of high paying keywords at CyberWire.

YankeeFrog have aready started a series based on such poems and DigitalPoint forum members have started threads where they are posting their very first creations. Read similar post at Boingboing.net.

Maybe I should also give it a try (bear with me :-)


Three little piggies, went to countrywide car race
they had to win money, for mortgage refinance

One litty piggy met with an auto accident
car accident lawyer said - "it was a wrongful death"

Two little piggies hired a Personal injury attorney
to milk the insurance company of its money

no sir! two little piggies didn't get single dollar of america
cos' little dead piggy had peritoneal mesothelioma

Jack

As they say - All's well that ends well.

Darren and Mike have made peace. No blood bath or hard feelings what so ever. Looking at Darren's replies you should give him benefit of doubt that when someone as busy as Darren who gets tonnes of mails daily have to write a post then its very linkly that details like who has written such posts recently might not come to his mind.

Darren also have a point when he said that "I’m not sure I got 3 emails, 2 emails, 4 emails or whatever. I do remember getting at least one and I do remember thinking that it wasn’t something that fitted with the rhythm of ProBlogger that day (I try to limit numbers of types of posts - get the mix right). After that I promptly forgot about it." Doesn't this happen to you all the time. Sometimes something important comes to your mind while you are doing some other work and so you decide to write in down as soon as you finish it, but in few minutes it totally vanishes from your mind.

We should not think of this whole issue as a weakness of blog community which is fighting over credits and back links but we should think of this as its strength to solve any kind of issues peacefully and as Mike puts it "Darren and I have not resorted to name calling, ugly adjectives, profane words,etc. Nor have we gone into sheer attack mode. Please try to handle your difference with dignity, respect, room for the other persons opinion and forgiveness."

Darren gives Mike link leak credit in his Link Lusk post's update and we all get on with our lives.


Related posts
Two big cats fight over spilled link-love

It's not even 9 hours since my last post on google health where I wrote about google health features, it's interface and six categories, and google health has already changed its look even further. As Of now Google health have For new categories - Condition info, Drug info, For doctors and info type and each category again have 4-5 lables like Symptoms, side effects, patient handouts and support groups.

It seems that they are in real hurry to launch Google health. Check out the Google Co-op Page for current face of google health and similar new launch from google. In last 9 hours or so they have added 11 more labels takes it to 19 and I have a strange feeling that this page is going to be hot-spot for coming days with changes taking place every couple of hours. Well I plan to keep you updated with here on B4B none the less. So keep coming back.

old post
Google to launch "google health"

It really breaks my heart seeing two top bloggers fighting over credit for link love. The issue is - should Darren of Problogger (why no link from me today?) give credit for his new post on "Link Lust" to someone who genuinely deserves it or should he claim the whole idea as his own?

Mike Sigers of simplenomics.com insists in his emotional post that Darren should give the credit to rightful person, not because its going to benefit him but because that's the only right thing to do.

Even though Darren is my favorite blogger and I have learned a lot from his blog but here I must say that Mike is right and Darren is plan wrong. I have followed Mike's blogs (especially link leak virus series) very closely and I saw how he and Liz tried to spread this nice message across blogosphere. I was there when they submitted link leak virus entry to wiki and I was there when their submission got deleted.

Irrespective of whatever comes out of this fight the damage has already been done. Blogosphere would discuss this for long time. What we write here remains long after we are gone.

Recently I have started seeing an image verification option whenever I tries to publish a new post here on blogger.com. In the starting I thought it to be some sort of new feature and never bothered to check it (frankly I don't feel comfortable clicking anywhere just before publishing a post). But day by day it was getting really annoying to enter all those letters so I decided to checkout.
To my surprise I found out that it was not any feature but a check to control spam blogging. But what's spam blogging? According to blogger.com

As with many powerful tools, blogging services can be both used and abused. The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.


But from when have Link Love become "link spamming"? Or is it something else that I am missing. Anyway I have filled a small form and now waiting for the blogger.com's reply.

Related post
"Link Leak Virus" - Problogger's gift to blogosphere

Even when "Google Finance" is not able to make its mark on the internet, there is a strong rumor among bloggers that google is going to launch "Google Health" - a health related search engine that would give competition to Yahoo Health and MSN Health.

Google Health interface would have six categories - treatment, Tests/diagnosis, symptoms, Causes/risk factors, alternative medicine and "from medical authorities".
It is going to further divide the readers into two sub-groups - "For Patients" and "For health professionals"

As of now all this news is unofficial and only when Google makes its official announcement we can truly know how much of this is facts, but one thing is clear - Google, Yahoo and MSN is not going to leave any stone unturned to win the world wide web.

Go on, enter "cold" in google search box, see the top results and then come back here and tell me what u think about it.

You may also find these post interesting
Song of Money

While Darren of problogger fame plays a joke on his readers by posting a "newspaper photo" of a local newspaper "The Age" covering sale of his blog for 5 million dollars on front page using this nifty tool; Brian, of copyblogger, explores new (old?) methods of making money from blogging - from fan list.

These two incidences happening next to one another have made me think about the future of websites in general and blogging in particular. While Google and Yahoo are fighting over the control of online advertising market, most of the small fishes are struggling to make their ends meet. And now that google has decided to jump into high paying romance, video, finance and real-estate the profit scope for smaller players has reduced further.

I am worried about this whole situation, have you given it a thought?

A group called explorerdestroyer has taken the war against Microsoft's Internet Explorer in open and this time their weapon is Google's adsense program. This group of open-source activists has begun a controversial campaign to encourage Web surfers to switch from Microsoft's Internet Explorer to the open-source based Firefox browser. The plan? Pay Web site owners $1 for each user they convert to Firefox. The tactic takes advantage of Google's AdSense Referral program.

How it works: you need an adsense account to get started. After getting the account you can download a script from the explorerdestroyer website and install it on your site. When you install the script on your site, you can decide how much force you want to use to convince your users to switch away from the dark side. You can choose between 3 settings: Gentle, Semi-serious and Very-serious:

Level 1: Gentle Encouragement
Visitors using IE see a message encouraging them to download Firefox (with a download link) running across the top of the page.

Level 2: Semi-serious
Visitors using IE get a friendly splash page encouraging them to download Firefox. There's a download link, and a link to continue on to your site.

Level 3: Very serious
Level 3 will not allow people using IE past a splash page. This level is very useful for sites that are not IE6 compatible. And there's never been a more important moment to switch people to Firefox

For more information visit explorerdestroyer

After Microsoft's last week announcement about its ad platform's "exclusive targeting features" which allowed registered users to select "whom, what time of day and to what geographic location" their ad would be shown, Yahoo! has announced that it will be rolling out a "completely redesigned" search advertising platform in the third quarter of this year.

This new platform would enable marketers to more quickly launch search advertising campaigns across the search giant and its distribution network, "and help better overall return on their search advertising investment."

Related posts (external links)
Yahoo Is Unleashing a New Way to Turn Ad Clicks Into Ka-Ching, New York Times
Yahoo unveils overhaul of online advertising, Financial Times
Yahoo’s New Search Advertising System, Search Engine Journal
Yahoo to Disclose Details of System For Keyword Ads, Wall Street Journal

Just like any new adsense publisher I also did many mistakes which was against TOS. After so many days I started believing that I know everything that has to know about adsense TOS. But today only someone pointed out one of my mistakes that I was doing unknowingly. Though I didn't make any profit from it, but non the less it was like paying with fire.

From my past experiences and knowledge I am listing some common mistakes that publishers do knowingly and unknowingly so that you can also learn from them.

1. Clicking on your own ads - this is least common now that people are aware.
2. Asking your friends to click on your ads - people stops 1 and start doing this.
3. Making a small group to click on each others ads.
4. Downloading firefox, picasa and other products by referral on lab computers.
5. Placing images pointing to the ads - like arrows, pen, pencil etc.
6. Placing ads and images next to eachother WITHOUT any gap between them.
7. Choosing only image ads to display and then placing similar looking pictures next to them.
8. Asking your visitors to use your referral to register adsense account thinking that you are promoting them and its not like pay-per-click ads.
9. Using scripts to increasing traffic.

These are the most common mistakes a newbie is likely to make. Though this list is not complete by any means and there are many other google terms and conditions like not placing ads on adult, gambling sites, or placing similar ads from others. But this post focuses the methods that people implement to cheat knowingly or to make more money thinking that these are some great tricks and tips.

Feel free to suggest any more that you might have seen or done in past.

PS: I didn't get banned finally, just corrected some mistakes today.

Yahoo drops MySpace publishers - what cr#*, thats old news.

Yes I know that its old news but do you know why they did it? They did it because .. shut up you mo#$n!! we know why they did it.. because "the traffic quality" was not good, this is really a cr%#y post, "I am going home".

Ok wait.. just one question - do you know what YPN publishers are doing now to avoid getting banned? They are using all sort of GeoIP targeting and phpadsnew mumbo-jambo to target YPN ads only to US visitors... so what, thats smart thing to do. other visitors are useless.

I don't think thats correct. Look at Technorati tracks - more then two-third of posts are from non-englishing speaking bloggers. Yes, english is not even most used language of blogosphere, its Japanese. No wonder you won’t make much money by showing ads ONLY to US based visitors.

And according to a recent report China expects 100 million bloggers by the end of year 2006.

Yahoo sees huge potential for growth in India. According to Jerry Yang, founder & chief, Yahoo, internet in India is in nascent stages. He says that "we see internet growing beyond the one billion users and lot of that growth will happen in India. And it’s not just more numbers, but the kind of applications, companies come out with. The game has just begun here.”

Mike Sigers of Simplenomics has started a new phenomenon - "Link Leak Virus", but before I talk about it let me tell you that its a good way of spreading link love in blog community.

Link Leak Virus is already spreading like a wild fire and bloggers are dropping it here and there like bad habits. If you have your own site or blog and you feel interested in link leak virus then maybe you can also be part of this Link Leak Virus and it might happen that those three of among your links would spread it even more wider in blogosphere.

Here how you can be part of link leak phenomenon - take any three blogs/sites of your choice and drop links on your next post. Why three? In Mike's own words - "since all good things, except wives, come in threes, like my three daughters".

Anyway I have dropped three on this post and lets see how this chain follows.

Related post (external link)
What is link leak?

We all know that we have to reach that 100$ earning to receive our first check. In the banking world, that is called a "float" and according to some experts $100 minimum earnings float is HUGE and guess where does all that money goes - in google's pockets.

Most of the sites that starts never reach that 100$ mark. Millions and millions of sites gets stuck at 60-70% only. If you believe the figures, google is getting about 3.5% of its revenue from this practice, it doesn't sound much, is it? Well with number of blogs starting every day this figure adds up to $267 million in the first quarter of this year and if same trend follows then google is going to earn $1.068 billion in one year.

But here is the juice. If you happened to read the fine prints of google adsense TOS then you can find the part where google talks about sending your money in 12-13 weeks time IF you terminate your google adsense account and inform them with an email at adsense-support@google.com. There is a small catch here too, your earning should be more then 10$ for this to work. But that threshold is fairly achievable

Now go get your money back!
If this blog helped you in any way please let me know! Everyone needs motivation!

Jack

Google is regularly experiemnting with its referral products. It was hardly a week before when google introduced "text link refeerals" for its all products like - google adwords, google adsense and google firefox and now it has introduced a new referral for its publishers - Picasa.

"Picasa is a Windows application that allows users to find, edit, and enjoy the pictures on their computer in seconds. Picasa also makes advanced editing and picture sharing simple with fast one-click fixes." And not to forget that its totally free.
What's in it for publishers?
When a user downloads and installs Picasa through your referral, Google will credit your account with up to $1.00.

I am using this software from long ago and I can say that the best feature of Picasa is its ability to send batches of pictures from you computer without the hassel of attaching and resizing. With my gmail account it takes be couple of clicks to send 20-30 pictures instantly.


If you decide to take a tour of Picasa click here (external link)

According to a lawsuit filed this week, Yahoo is charging advertisers for "premium" ads that are displayed on typosquatter sites.

The complaint alleges that by placing ads into illegal platforms such as spyware programs, [Yahoo] wrongfully collected high search engine advertising fees for ads that are actually shown in contexts that are worth far less, if anything. It is well known that spyware advertising is much cheaper than search engine advertising.

Typosquatters runs web sites with domain name which are very similar to more famous genuine sites hoping that someone would make a mistake of mis-spelling the domain name and visit their web site. Such sites does not contain any content and mostly works as parked sites hosting ads only.

Related articles (external link)
Washington Post

I don't know about rest of you but yesterday I saw this for the first time and I felt like sharing with my visitors.
When I first saw familiar smiley jumping on my screen on this very blog I thought - wow! google adsense is now showing animated ads too. And to my surprise i noticed that it was non other then our beloved yahoo messenger's ad.

I wonder what YPN advertizers would think of this ad.

Yesterday I discussed this on DigitalPoint and cldnails suggested that "Maybe somebody created an ad campaign and instead of having the target url their website, it's an affiliate link." and that its highly unlikely "that a corporation like Yahoo is using a competitors service?"

He had a point and so I decided to do some research before commenting anymore on the topic. I went to google and started entering random combination of yahoo related words like yahoo, mail, messenger etc.

Steve of www.stevepavlina.com has recently written a very informative and long article on How to make money from your blog. The one thing that I liked most in his article was a reference to Alex of Milliondollarhomepage fame who became millionare in few months time with his clever idea of selling pixel for hosting ads.

Alex was in his 3rd year of college and was in need of money to pay for his studies. This is when he came up with the idea of selling one pixel for a dollar as ad space. It was a combination of new idea, great thinking and planned marketing that made it a huge success.

But just with like any other great idea even as soon as news of Alex's success spread on the net, many such similar sites came up over night selling pixels at a discounted prize. Many forums also came into light to support such sites. But while Alex's idea was fresh, most of these sites are no more then a shameless copy, no wonder they are struggling to sell even fraction of their pixel even after many years. Most of these sites are started by lazy people looking for easy money. They don't want to put in any hard work and that's the reason that most of such sites are down within few months of time.

This leads to another discussion of whether the pixel advertising era is finally over. I personally believe that just like google took the idea of search engine and to it to a different level by putting in hard work and implementing innovative ideas, pixel advertising can also work given that it have some freshness to it, and not just a copy for making easy money. Selling for a discount is not a solution. Great idea works, not cheap copy.