Google adsense for beginners

Regular readers of skinflakes, may have noticed the appearance of adverts on our site. To some people this is a crime against blogging. But writing a blog takes time and is free for people to consume, so we have no problem putting relevant adverts up on the site that aren’t too annoying. Skinflakes is still in its infancy and and our current aim is to increase our traffic. At this point I will suggest that you forward the contents of this blog to someone you think might find it interesting. But back to the the subject of today’s blog. Google Adsense - a service that allows you to create tailor made averts for your website which are relevant to your content.

Why do I want adverts on my website? Well you may not but Google Adsense provides you with an easy way to generate money from your website.

If you look at the adverts carried on the skinflakes site they are for goods and services related to social media - things that are likely to be of interest to people reading our blog. No dating agencies adverts, pornography, or phishing scams just links to other relevant websites.

When people click on the adverts it generates a tiny bit of cash for us. Which whilst we are not ready to give up our day jobs just yet some bloggers report that they make a healthy living from the advertising revenue generated from their blogs. Steve Pavlina a high profile blogger.

For example, claims to earn $1000 a day. So how do you go about setting Google Adsense up?

Register with google for an adsense account, if you already have a gmail, blogger or igoogle login you can use this:

1. Click on the sign up button in the top right hand corner of the page
2. Enter your contact details including the the address of your blog or website
3. On the Adsense set up menu click on the type of ad you want to create - probably best to start with Adsense for content. Alternatively Adsense for search can be used to create a search box on your sites that will generate relevant adverts along with the results of a search.
4. Select on the ad unit button. Personally I like to limit the advert to text only but select the option that suits your site.
5. Select the size and colour of your advert. When you are happy click “continue”
6. Adsense will give you a box of code that has all the information needed to put the advert on your website. Copy this code by highlighting the contents of the box and pressing “ctrl c”
7. To paste the code into a blog on blogger – sign into your blog and go to the dashboard
   
8. Select the layout tab and click on the add gadget box. Scroll down until you reach a an option add html code click on this past in the code “ctrl v” and save.
9. You can reposition your adverts by moving the boxes around now that you are back in the layout page.

Another way of making money from your blog is to join the the Amazon’s Associate program. This gives you the opportunity to select products you think are relevant to your site. If people click through and buy the product - you get a 5% cut of the sale. For those serious about making money from advertising Skinflakes recommends that you check out Steve Pavlina’s epic “how to make money from your blog” article and subscribe to the Problogger RSS feed for more information.

Email alerts for beginners

Watching the BBC show, [spooks] CODE 9, this week; I thought it odd that some of the characters were using personal digital assistants (PDAs). The series is set in 2012 and given the declining sales of PDAs; I suspect the humble PDA will be largely obsolete by then - even if London is destroyed by an act of nuclear terrorism.

The declining sales of PDAs is largely down to the popularity of other portable tech- namely smart phones like the Blackberry and now Apple’s iPhone. Using smartphones, people can communicate in a whole set of new ways via text message, picture message, videocalls and instant messaging, as well as through social networking - using mobile internet or by email. The PDA or pocket PCs as some became known have fallen by the way side as people are unwilling to carry several electronic devices where one will do the trick.

Apple’s decision to combine mobile phone and ipod in the glorious iPhone saw this trend coming as many modern phones have perfectly acceptable mp3 players and indeed cameras. Now that we have high speed mobile broadband these devices are genuinely making the internet mobile and look likely to kill of stand alone mp3 players as well as the PDA.

If you are one of the increasing army of people using email on your phone it is well worth looking taking advantage of email alerts to keep you up to date with the latest information on the web. Whilst some news sites such as the news.bbc.co.uk allow you to set up alerts based on your interests, many smaller sites do not offer an email alerting service. There is a way round this problem - a free web service called sendmeRSS allows you to set up alerts from any site that has an RSS feed.

RSS feeds as discussed in a previous entry allow you to be constantly updated on new stories. If for example you want to be updated by email when a new skinflakes blog is produced simply follow theses instructions:

How to create email alerts from RSS feeds

1. identify an RSS feed that is of interest eg http://feeds.feedburner.com/skinflakes
2. go to http://www.sendmerss.com
3. type in the address of the rss feed of interest
4. type in you email adress.
5. go to your email and verify you address by clicking on the appropriate link
6. every morning you will see new emails generated from an RSS feed

Another way of creating email alerts is to use the google alerts service which allows you to recieve daily emails based on searches in google news. This can be a very useful way of media monitoring for small companies that can't justify the expense of media monitoring.

A flake aside ...

As mentioned in our last post, Bill Thompson delivered a good knock out blow to the web expansion doomsayers in a recent article both on his blog and BBC Online. Bill is one of the web's most astute commentators and well worth following ... and his latest post now has its own skinflakes comment and link.

As Skinflakes explained in an entry recently, commenting on other well established blogs is a good way to boost your Google rankings and spread your message - but please dont be an arsehole of colossal proportions and churn out a pure bit of promotional gumpf.

More from skinflakes soon on Facebook and Digg - remember to leave comments or email in if you have any subjects you`d like us to take on from the beginners perspective here at Skinflakes.

Tiny URL for beginners ...

If you look at most films, newspapers and books, it is clear that a lot of people like nothing more than a good apocalyptic nightmare where society is torn down by hurricanes, revolutions, superbugs, tidal waves, volcanos or, my personal favourite, a giant marshmallow man in a sailor’s hat.

The web has had its fair share of calamitous predications in its short lifespan; the most recent being that it’s rapidly expanding size (i.e. in terms of users, bandwidth uptake etc) is about to cause everyone’s computer to explode in their faces. Fortunately there are plenty of on the ball commentators around to install some sanity, like Bill Thompson, whose article for BBC Online this week dealt with some of the major myths raised by the “expansion” doomsayers.

However, while the internet isn’t about to detonate, the rising levels of online users are causing quite a few spin off problems as the demand for web space spirals upwards – a phenomenon that recently resulted in Icann expanding the number of top level domains available to companies, organisations and countries.

A small but irritating side effect is that web links or URLs are becoming increasingly long, simply because the web needs new addresses to assign to the rising number of pages that are springing up on a daily basis. For example a link to a Problogger article that we added on our Twitter feed today runs to well over 70 characters:

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/08/28/a-downside-of-getting-to-the-front-page-of-digg/

Besides being as ugly as a boxer after a knock out, longer URLs create a host of niggling, yet collectively serious problems for those looking to promote a website or a particular webpage.

They are harder for people to remember, meaning that your customers or members are unlikely to recall what to type in, if they are like the rest of us and forget to scribble your page title down. This might be one of the reasons why some research has suggested that short URLs have a higher click through rate than their more expansive cousins.

Even if you don’t buy this research and reason, it is a fact that longer links have a tendency to “break” when copy and pasted into an email. The sender wont be able to spot this problem, only the recipient will know when they click on the link and it doesn’t work. This will obviously slow down your communication, mean you have to repeat send an email (fingers crossed it will work) and on top of that get a sharp pain of frustration in the front of your head.

And if youre a blogger or poster, trying to comment and thereby promote your site (see our advice on how to boost your Google rankings), may become difficult because a lengthy link takes up too many characters in a comment box. This is especially the case if youre using more sophisticated micro-blogging sites like Twitter, which restrict you to 150 icons.

So, how to get round this problem? Well, to use the skinflakes mantra, there are free, easy to use services that can help you shorten your URL links.

A good example is TinyURL, a website that allows you to cut the size of your URL to a smaller number of digits. This will make it easier to remember, unbreakable and allow you to squeeze a promo for your site into that tight comment box. There is no restriction on how you use the link - it is yours once it is entered - and it does not alter the content or performance of your page or site. There is also no need at all to speak anyone vaguely technical, as today`s how to guide demonstrates.

How to … Tinyurl:

1. Log onto TinyURL.com
2. Enter the URL of the webpage into the “Make tiny URL” tab.
3. Click on the tab … and its done! You will be taken through to a new page with your cut
down URL.Click on it to make sure it works and then feel free to distribute it as you wish to
who you wish.

Podcasting for Beginners

Podcasting has moved into the mainstream - statistics fom emarketer show an incredible 18.5 million people in the US downloaded a podcast in 2007 and the BBC’s World Service's Global news has over 1 million monthly downloads.

The huge surge in people listening to podcasts is largely a result of the global success of ipods and itunes and the fact that large broadcasters like the BBC and NPR have embraced the technology. Most large radio stations and many newspapers now produce high quality podcasts most of which are free to download. For any one thinking of producing a podcast it is a good idea to checkout the competition - Podcast Alley and itunes are probably the best place to start.

Last week we discussed how to produce your own mp3 files using a USB microphone and Audacity. The next step is, of course, to make it available in a form that allows people to subscribe using programmes like iTunes and Juice.

All you really need, to turn you mp3 file into a podcast, is a link known as an RSS feed . This will allow people to subscribe to your podcasts so that they will receive all future episodes direct to their desktop or mp3 player. Creating your podcasting feed is the subject of today’s how to.

How to podcast

1. Upload your mp3 to your website – if you don’t have a website don’t worry just sign yourself up to a service like yahoo geocities or 0catch which will allow you to upload some mp3 files. It is important to note that free web hosting accounts like this will have limits the amount of storage space eg the amount of mp3 files you can upload.
   
2. Find out the web address for your uploaded mp3 usually the address of your website followed by the name of your mp3 file eg www.podtastic.com/pod1.mp3
3. Open an account in blogger and create a blog - each new entry should correspond to a podcast.
4. Write a blog entry that describes the audio file followed by a link to the podcast.
5. Post your blog entry.
6. Register for an free account in feedburner this will allow you to create a podcast friendly feed and get statistics about who is subscribing to your feed
7. Create a podcasting feed. All you need to do is paste the web address of your blog into the "start feedburning now" box. Remember to tick the “I am a podcaster “ box
8. You will have to select one of two feeds to burn – select the one that ends in rss.
9. Edit your feed title and web address and activate your feed.
10. To find out what clicking on your podcast feed looks like - click on the rss symbol next to the title of your feed and you will see how easy it is for people to sign up to your feed using a range of different application including itunes.
11. Submit your feed to itunes and podcast alley.
    

Google rankings for beginners

Besides having more money than anyone bar God, Google is still the top beast in the internet search engine jungle. According to new research published last week by Pew, around 59% - 61% of all USA based web searches in June 2008 were made using Google. Its competitors are being left very much in the shade– for the time being anyway.

Getting a foothold on the web’s premier site is therefore incredibly important – and it’s also crucial that your site is as far up Google’s search pages as possible. As Red Cardinal reported in 2006, only 15% of users look at the second page of their Google search, less than 1% go to the third page. After that you’re into a serious number of 0.0 digits.

But how do you make sure your site is prominently placed?

Most people believe that Google’s page rankings are based purely on keywords and hits. It is certainly true that both of these are important, but they are only two of a melee of factors that are drilled through a complicated formula to produce the search results that pop up on your screen. Other elements include the positioning of keywords on the webpage (i.e. in the title, main body of the text, etc), how often a site is updated and the number of times a page is linked to by others sites - and the value of those linking sites (to see how far you can push your head before it explodes – take a look at this page for the specific page ranking formula).

Tapping into this complex array of determinants is not simple, not least because a lot of the factors rely upon on external popularity (hits/links) that beginners have to encourage from scratch.

However, its certainly not impossible. After less than two weeks, Skinflakes is already registering on the first page of the Google search for its name. Today`s how to guide gives you some basic tips on how to get your site in a position to climb the Google rankings.

But I`m not going to tell porkies. It’s not easy or certain that you`ll get your site highly mentioned even with our guide until you have a bit of popularity behind you. So, its worth being a little bit cheeky and using some backdoor approaches that allow you to piggy back your site onto more established sites. You won’t achieve a direct link, but as current search engine results for skinflakes and skinflakes blog on Google demonstrate (have a scroll down) you can get your site mentioned a couple of times prominently on that crucial first page.

Here are three quick and sneaky tips:

1. Comment on established and well viewed sites. By engaging with other sites that are highly valued (i.e. well linked too, well visited) and leaving a reference to your site you are likely to be thrown up early on Google searches. We recently commented on an interesting Graham Jones article and left our taglines – hey presto within a day we were on Google’s front page for skinflakes searches. Be careful not to abuse this though, make sure you have something to say about the article – certainly don’t just do it for pure advertising sake – or the moderator will quite rightly kick you into touch. A further spin off of commenting in this way is that people will hopefully want to find out more about you by visiting your site and keeping tabs on your other comments.

2. Create a RSS reader page. Putting together an RSS reader pages with any of the main RSS feeder providers will also boost your chances of heading into that first page. You can learn how to do this from last week’s entry and you can sign up to our pageflakes page here.

3. Create an Amazon booklist. Amazon is obviously one of the most visited sites on the web and by creating a list of recommended books through a profile page, you also increase your chances of being highlighted by Google. Simply go into your profile (make sure it contains a link to your site), create a relevant list of books and submit to Amazon. Again, don’t abuse this, make sure the books are relevant to your site and that, well, you’ve actually read them ... Read the skinflakes recommendations here.

How to ... basic tips to boost your Google rankings

1. If possible, choose a distinctive name for your site or blog. Don’t just call it “My blog”, “John Smith products” or employ any other common terms that are likely to already be in use. Something well used, means more competition and a harder climb up those rankings. And anyway a distinctive name will make it easier for people to remember your website.

2. Make sure your site name is mentioned as early on as possible in your web address. If there is any text in front of the web address – say http://www.infoskinflakes.com/ - then the “info” will be taken as a main tag for the page, hence potentially lowering your ranking.

3. Ensure that the keywords that people are likely to type into their search are mentioned first in the title of your webpage. Hence don’t write “Press release: Skinflakes – new mobile phone launched by Skinflakes”, instead title it “Skinflakes mobile phone launched – Skinflakes press release”.

4. As we have done at the top of our blog, write down the keywords that describe what your blog or webpage is about as both an introduction tool and so that Google latches onto those words and associates them with your site. Promience in the text is a key thing Google looks for.

5. Update the content of your site regularly. Google does scan how often a site is refreshed and uses this as an indicator of how active and current it is – rewarding the most active with higher page rankings.

6. When you have completed a post – get it distributed so people can link to it. Use social bookmarking sites such as Digg and social networking sites like Facebook to spread it. The more people who see it, visit it and link it, the higher your page and site will go in the rankings.

Recording Audio Podcasts for Beginners

I hate the term podcasting. Not because I have anything against iPods or have a problem with the millions of podcasts downloaded each month. It is just that it is such a lazy uninspiring term to describe a technology that gives us all the power to broadcast audio and video to a global audience.

Audio and video media files have been available to download long before the term podcast was coined. Podcasting describes the way in which the files are distributed. People subscribe to a podcast and every time a new file is produced it is automatically downloaded to a person’s computer and in some cases transferred to their portable media player, be it an ipod or mobile phone.

So assuming you think you have something interesting to say – how do you go about creating a digital audio file?

All you need is a computer, a microphone and some audio editing software. The Samson C01 USB podcasting pack which retails for around £100 is a great way to get started. It contains a studio quality condensing microphone, stand and software that will allow you to produce studio quality recordings. It really is good enough to record music demos if that's your bag.

If your budget won’t stretch to this or if you just want to experiment before you commit, the Logitech basic USB mic on a stand retails for under £10.

Another even cheaper alternative is an analogue microphone with a 3.5 mm jack, these are even cheaper and will work on most computers, but be warned they are notorious for picking up electrical hums. If you have a laptop with a built in microphone then that will be as good as a cheap plug in microphone.

For software you can’t really go wrong with Audacity - a free programme available to download from http://audacity.sourceforge.net It is a really intuitive bit of software that works like a tape recorder on your computer but also gives you access to a range of simple editing features.

The process of distributing your audio file will be covered in future blog entry. But for now here is a guide to producing you own mp3 recordings.

How to record an audio file on your computer

1. Download audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/ note there are versions for windows Macs and Linux.

2. You will also need to download LAME MP3 encoder – this little download allows you to turn your audio files into mp3s http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/

3. Plug a usb mic into your computer – asuming it should be plug an play unless your computer is out of the ark

4. Run Audacity

5. Press the record button and talk into your microphone. You should see sound waves jumping up and down as you talk.
   

6. If nothing is recording try playing with your audio settings- go to windows start menu/settings/controlpanel/sounds and audio devices then click on "audio" tab and then adust the volume in the sound recording section

7. If you want to cut a bit of the recording out - then simply highlight it with your mouse and press delete.

8. When you are happy with your recording, click on “file” and then “export as an mp3”. You will probably be asked to locate the Lamemp3.dll file. Simply show Audacity where you saved it and you should be able to save your file as an mp3.

9. If you want to change the quality of you mp3 files click on “edit” and “preferences” you should then select the “file formats” tab and adjust the mp3 bit rate – the higher the number the higher the quality and file size.