AVINASH 2.0

Google Launches AdSense Referrals 2.0 – Time to Earn More

This past March, Dan Friedman announced over at Google AdSense blog that the AdSense team has launched a new referrals beta program. Here I’ll just post a few paragraphs of the original AdSense blog post:

Now, with our new referrals beta, you can select products and services from our base of AdWords advertisers. This is good news for those of you who have wanted to use referrals in the past, but couldn’t find a product to match your site’s content. With the referrals beta, you can search for products that match up directly with your site’s content. And you can customize your referral units to match the look and feel of your site, making it easier than ever to find a referral ad that fits in seamlessly with your site’s design and content.

What’s more, Google can help make sure you find and display the most relevant, best-performing referral ads on your site. Simply provide a few keywords to describe your site and your users’ interests, and you’ll see ads automatically displayed that perform best for your site. No more constant updating, rotating products, or guesswork.

As with our current Google referrals, you’ll generate earnings when your visitors click through to an advertiser’s site and complete an action defined by your advertisers, such as a sale or sign-up. Because these actions are often more involved than a simple click or impression, advertisers pay more for these referrals, which can translate into higher earnings for your site.

Yes, I’m writing about the same PPA (Pay Per Action) program that you may have read about on many blogs in the past couple of months. The good news is that they have finally launched this program to all AdSense publishers.

The key benefits of referrals 2.0

• Expanded product inventory:

Referrals 2.0 offers products from thousands of AdWords advertisers, so you can find the right ads for your sites.

• Category and keyword targeting:

The option to refer products by category and keyword. You can narrow down the types of ads you want to display and let AdSense figure out which ones will perform best on your site. Whether you want ads for a specific category, advertiser, or product, referrals 2.0 will give you the control to decide.

• Ad unit optimization:

The joy of ad unit optimization features for referrals. When you create a new referral ad unit, simply select the Pick best performing ads option. The AdSense system will then compare your selected ads to other relevant ads, and serve the ads it expects to perform best on your site.

• Better targeting for pages with multiple themes:

With standard contextual targeting, ads may not match up directly with the text around them if there are a number of themes on the page. With referrals, you can select unique �keywords� for each ad unit to narrow the targeting directly to the theme you want. Better targeting means higher earnings for your site.

• Greater compensation for high-quality traffic:

Since referrals are paid on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, your traffic matters. If the traffic you send to advertisers is more likely to turn into a completed sale or lead, you will earn more with referrals.

• Add your seal of approval:

Unlike AdSense for content ads, the program policies allow you to make specific references to referral ads on your site. If you endorse the product that you are referring, feel free to let your users know. By adding your personal review of the products you refer, you can help your users make more informed choices.

If these points sound cool, you can head over to your AdSense control panel and check the AdSense Setup tab to see if the Referrals 2.0 is already available. If you don’t see referrals 2.0 right away, please check back in a few days, as the feature will gradually become available in all accounts over the next few weeks.

[tags]AdSense, Google, Referrals 2.0, PPA[/tags]

Me, You and the ResizR – Let’s Resize an Image Today

Meet ResizR. It’s a great utility for everybody who does the awesome job of resizing cool images. And the nicest thing is that it’s an online utility so you don’t need to start sweating in advance thinking that you’ll have to download and install yet-another-only-God-knows-if-it’s-spyware-free application on your system.

Take a Look at Its Easy to Use Interface:

As you can see, there are two tabs. The “Local” tab is the default tab and is used to find any picture stored on your local hard drive. In case the picture that you want to resize is stored on your web server, you should select the second tab (From Web). After entering your image location, you need to enter the required width in the “Image Width” area. That’s all. Click the “ResizR” button now. Now ResizR presents the resized image with a message containing your image details.

Notice The Image Details:

The tool seems to be pretty happy, no? Noticed how it shows your original and current (resized) image sizes?

Although you need to upload pics in order to resize ‘em, the image upload speed is pretty fast so you won’t have to wait forever. (Don’t blame the utility if you’re on a dial up connection and trying to upload a big file)

I hope you enjoy this utility. Bloggers are surely gonna enjoy ResizR because they’ve to resize lots of images. Am I wrong?! And about the Me & You stuff, don’t be panic because I’m not going to keep my spy glasses on when you are resizing any image. I’ll leave you alone with this utility..

[tags]Image Resizer, Utilities, Online Tools, Blogging Tools[/tags]

When AdSense Married Rounded Corners

Just a few minutes ago, Peter posted a thread in the v7n webmaster community that AdSense now has rounded corners. I’ll like to thank Peter for posting this thread.

I visited the official AdSense blog and found that they are going round and round and round!

According to the official blog entry:

You’ve long been able to customize the size and colors of your ad units; now, you can also customize the shape by selecting between square, slightly rounded, or very rounded corners.

This new option is part of our ongoing effort to improve the look and feel of our ads. We’re also working to give you even more choices to customize your ad formats while maximizing revenue and user satisfaction. We hope you enjoy the new corner options, whether you choose to go edgy or bubbly.

Nice! While they are allowing us AdSense Publishers to go edgy or bubbly, wouldn’t it be better if they were trying to lower the opacity of “Ads by Google” logo? I’ve noticed a huge drop in CTR since they’ve added that tiny little and er.. nasty logo in the bottom-right corner of their AdSense ads.

Feel free to share your own opinion about this new ‘feature addition’ by Google AdSense team.

Update: I’ve corrected the broken link that was pointing to the official Google AdSense blog. Sorry for giving you guys the trouble! My loss as well, heh. I posted this post on my blog when there were no pingbacks at the AdSense blog but now it’s too late. Anyways, mistakes are one of the signs of human beings!

[tags]AdSense, Google, AdSense Ad Formats[/tags]

Simple Spark – The Web 2.0 Catalog for Power Surfers

Simple Spark is a catalog of cool Web 2.0 applications. Currently, this catalog lists more than 3000 web apps organized in 7 main categories (Media, Living, Office, Organization, Travel, Marketplace and Finance) that contain lots of sub-categories. There is also a search feature that allows you to enter a keyword of your choice (e.g. Design) if you don’t have enough time to browse the catalog.

The cool thing about this catalog is that you have the option to pick web applications of your choice and add ‘em in your own list. This option makes it a lot easier to remember your favorite web apps. You can also review the web apps that you like.

Here are a few screenshots:

Search

I searched for “Design”

As you can see, I’ve searched for the keyword ‘design’ and the system is showing 102 results.

And you’ve the option to browse the catalog…

Application Profile

Bookmarked applications

Visit an application profile and if you like the application, the system allows you to add the application profile in your Simple Spark ‘My Apps’ area or you can simply click any of the social bookmark buttons to add the profile to your favorite social bookmark site.

I’ve got to say, these guys came up with a really simple and neat idea. Feel free to share your own opinion about Simple Spark.

[tags]Simple Spark, Web 2.0, Online Applications, Internet Tools, Tools[/tags]

Apple Launches Safari For Windows

Today, I was reading Roger Johansson’s blog and one of his posts titled “Safari Now Officially Available for Windows” suddenly pulled my attention. Isn’t this a great news for us Web designers & developers? ;)

He posted:

Apple today released a public beta of Safari 3, the latest version of their web browser. It has quite a bit of new features, but the biggest news is that Apple Introduces Safari for Windows.Yep, Safari is now officially available for Windows as well as for Mac OS X.

I think it�s great. Windows users need more browser choices, and with an official Windows version of Safari it will be much easier for Windows-using web professionals to test their work in it.

I just couldn’t wait after reading this post. I quickly visited the Safari Download page and downloaded the Windows version of Safari 3 Beta. I installed the browser on my Windows 2003 Server powered workstation and so far, I’m highly satisfied. The way this browser works is truely awesome.

The beta version of Safari 3 for Windows seems to be pretty stable. You’re going to love the font rendering engine. The anti-aliased texts look so cool (if you use Ubuntu, you already know what I’m trying to say). Firefox fans are going to miss the lack of extensions though (?).

Here are the four awesome Safari features that I like:

• Forms AutoFill
• Built-in RSS – I love this feature! The built-in RSS reader in Safari has become my most favorite desktop RSS reader. For now, Google Reader is going to stay my 1st choice as far as Web-based RSS readers are concerned.
• Resizable text fields – An awesome feature! Imagine you are writing a comment on a blog and you’ve got a lot to write. In this case, you’ll end up scrolling up and down to read your full comment before hitting the SUBMIT button. Other browsers, as far as I know, don’t allow you to control the text fields but Safari lets you resize text fields on any website, just by grabbing the corner of the field. Resize a field and the web page reflows to make room.

  

• Easy Bookmarks – I’m so much in love with Safari’s awesome bookmarks manager. Safari handles bookmarks pretty smoothly and its bookmark manager is similar to the playlist manager in iTunes.

  

And this is a wonderful news for the Web designers & developers who are using Windows family of Operating Systems because now, they can easily test their website designs in Safari.

The official website says that Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2. If we compare Safari 3 Beta and Firefox 2, I haven’t noticed any improvement in page load speed but I can confirm that Safari loads pages faster than Internet Explorer 7.

Get Safari 3 Public Beta for Windows if you want to try it.

UPDATE: After writing this post, I visited more than 100 sites and now, I can confirm that Safari really loads pages faster than Firefox 2.

[tags]Safari, Apple, Web Browser[/tags]

Graphic Design Links: Keys of Success (I)

10 external links for graphic designers.

• How Web 2.0 Logos are drawn (Photoshop) – Hongkiat.com

A wonderful article if you want to learn how to design sexy Web 2.0 logos in Photoshop. This article will teach you how to use Photoshop styles to create stunning Web 2.0 logos.

• Ultimate Web 2.0 Layer Styles for Photoshop – Deziner Folio

An awesome collection of highly useful Photoshop styles. Don’t forget downloading ‘em if you are a Web 2.0 designer.

• Crystal Clear Icon Set – Wikimedia Commons

Tons of icons to download. All for free!

• 77 Vector Buttons hot of the press – liquidicity

Recently, I posted about tons of free vector icons by liquidicity. They have once again something amazing to offer. Yep, this time, they have released 77 stunning vector buttons and you are invited to download ‘em for free!

• Cool Business Card Designs – creativebits

A collection of cool business cards collected from these places.

• Free Photoshop Brushes and Patterns by Brusheezy

Looking for high res, Photoshop brushes and patterns to download? Brusheezy is the place to go. Tons of brushes and patterns to download. All for free!

• Free Vectors by Vecteezy

A daily updated index of Free Vectors available for download by some of the best designers around the world.

• 50 Awesome Logo Design Tutorials – E Logo Design

The folks over at E Logo Design have compiled a list of 50 logo design tutorials that are the best logo design tutorials on the internet, according to ‘em.

• How To Think Like A Client – Vitamin

A wonderful article written by Paul Boag on commercial web design. He points out that when it comes to commercial web design, it�s all about the business case.

I included it in this post because it’s an important read for every designer.

• Freebies Roundup: Icons, Buttons and Templates – Smashing Magazine

The guys over at Smashing Magazine always come up with an awesome list. If you don’t trust me, visit the link #10 and see for yourself.

That’s it for now. I hope you find these links useful because I tried my best to pick only the best lists/articles links.

[tags]Graphic Design, Design Links, Web 2.0, Web Design[/tags]

Split Browser – The Window Cutter for Firefox Users

On June 1st, 2007, Craig Childs over at Lifehack.org posted a list of 17 Firefox extensions that make blogging easy.

Though I was already familiar with the 16 Firefox extensions mentioned in that article, one extension named Split Browser suddenly caught my attention. This is an amazing plugin because it allows you to split your browser window infinitely (depends on the amount of RAM).

USES EXAMPLES:�

Ex. 1) Imagine yourself in a situation when you are writing any article to post on your blog and you have to switch tabs again and again to read another web page. With the help of Split Browser extension, you can split your content area in 2 parts. Now you can easily write the article in the 1st part while the 2nd part is always visible.

Ex. 2) Split your browser in 2 parts. Now you can use the 1st part to surf the web and the 2nd part can be used for YouTube videos. ;)

You can install Split Browser extension by vising this link.

[tags]Firefox, Extension, Add-ons, Split Browser, Productivity, Browsing Tips[/tags]