These days even though my traffic has increased my AdSense Click Through Rate (CTR) remains low. I tried many things to increase my CTR like putting images next to my Ads, implementing Section targetting, blended Ads, placing Ads near content, choosing best Ad format, etc but I did not succeed in increasing my CTR much.

A few days back, while chatting with LiewCF, I asked him for some suggestions to increase my CTR. He quickly gave me some tips which I had not thought of before. I tried some of them and I already noticed my CTR improve. What were those tips?

Below I have listed the tips that Liew suggested to me along with my comments. But please do note that these tips are meant for my site. They may or may not work for you.

Continue reading ‘Tips that helped me increase my Google AdSense CTR’

Microsoft has released the final build of Internet Explorer 7 and you can expect them to push the build by automatic updates on 1st November.

I am currently downloading the 14.8 MB IE setup for Windows XP SP2.

I wonder if we will have to redesign our themes to display well on IE7 final. What do you think?

Screenshot (Click to Enlarge)

Download Internet Explorer 7 Final

Update: I just installed IE7, and the first thing I noticed was that transparent png images on my theme display well on IE now. But my header looks ugly in it and my theme produces a script error when viewed in IE7. It’s time to redesign my theme.

About IE7 as a browser, I liked it…much better than IE6! But I still won’t be using it as my primary browser

I am still waiting for Firefox 2 final

found via Neowin.net

I updated TripleK2 with the latest K2 SVN release 198 and fixed the earlier Sidebar Modules problem. TripleK2 now lets you control both sidebars via K2 Sidebar Modules.

You can view the demo here

Download TripleK2 0.9.2

Ever wanted to download your favorite videos from YouTube but failed to do so? Here’s how you can do it the easy way:

• first find the URL of your favorite YouTube video
• then go to VideoDownloadX.com and paste the video URL into their download box
• now click ‘Download’ and it will open a new page with the download link

Firefox fans can use the Video Downloader extension that allows you to download videos to your computer from YouTube and most video sites.

Also check out the amazing collection of YouTube Tools by QuickOnlineTips.

You may also be interested in:

• How To View Deleted YouTube Videos
• YouTube Downloader
• How To Extract Audio From YouTube Videos
• How To Place YouTube Videos on WordPress Blogs
• How To Load YouTube Videos Faster

I was wondering whether this was possible and a quick Google search cleared my doubt. StumbleUpon allows you to easily import all your Del.icio.us tags into it with just a few steps:

• Visit your del.icio.us XML page and then select File>Save Page As from your browser menu
• Now go to this page and select your xml file
• Now click ‘Click here to Import’ to finish

My del.icio.us page mostly includes my favorite posts of this blog and this tip made it easy for me to link to all those pages in StumbleUpon

By the way, this is My StumbleUpon Page. Please add me as your SU friend

According to Wikipedia, StumbleUpon is a web discovery service which integrates peer-to-peer and social networking principles with one-click blogging. The Toolbar system automates the collection, distribution and review of web content within an intuitive social framework, providing users with a browsing experience which resembles “channel-surfing” the web.

Those of you who has used StumbleUpon (SU) before might have experienced the traffic they can send you if your site get’s stumbled. Also traffic from SU lasts more and can be higher than the traffic send from Digg. So why not encourage your visitors to Stumble your blog posts?

Continue reading ‘How to integrate StumbleUpon to your WordPress blog’

A few people asked me recently why I had removed their links from my links page. The reason is that I don’t do link exchanging anymore. I currently use the Links page to link to my friend’s and favorite sites and some of the sites I had done link exchanging in the past (which I will be removing when they remove my link from their site).

But you can still get free SiteWide Links on my sidebar automatically if you are one of the Top 10 Commenters.

You could say this is a reward for those top commenters- a free sitewide link and some traffic.

Please do note that I often remove promotional type comments. You may however link to your site if it is relevant to what is being discussed on that post. And I hate Spam too!

So start commenting

This is my first style for TripleK2 and is based on the TechnoBlue Theme.

Installation

• Copy ‘TechnoBlue’ folder to the ’styles’ folder of TripleK2
• Go to Presentation > K2 Options
• Select technoblue.css as the K2 Scheme
• Click Update Options to save

Download TechnoBlue Style

Today, AdSense made it possible to assign multiple custom channels to a single ad unit which will enable you to track your ad performance with greater flexibility. Up to 5 custom channels can be added to a specific instance of ad code.

What’s the benefit of tracking with more than one custom channel?

Well, multiple channels can be very useful when you want to track one ad unit across several different metrics simultaneously. For example, let’s say you run a sports website and you’ve placed a leaderboard at the top and bottom of every page. To track the performance of the ad placement, you’ve created two custom channels — ‘TopLeaderboard’ and ‘BottomLeaderboard’ — and regenerated your ad code appropriately.

But what if you also want to compare your football pages and your baseball pages at the same time? With multiple custom channels, this isn’t a problem. Just create two new custom channels called ‘FootballPages’ and ‘BaseballPages’, and add them to the appropriate ad units. Now your leaderboards will each be tagged with two custom channels that let you know which position they’re in (top or bottom), and the type of page on which they appear (football or baseball).

Right now, I don’t think this will be of much use to me, but other AdSense Publishers might find it useful.

Yesterday I visited shoemoney.com and found that it was hacked. Here’s a screenshot of what i found-

While I was trying to read what was posted there by the Turkish Hacker, it redirected to some other malicious site and tried to install something on my PC. I quickly closed Firefox but since then my PC has been slow. Maybe it’s infected now with some Trojan

The hacker was just lucky that I did not even have an AntiVirus installed at that time. My friends who used Opera to visit the hacked site was not redirected to any site. And I though Firefox was a safe browser!