Georgie Casey

Google have announced adsense for mobile so I decided to test it out on my ringtones WAP site which gets quite a lot of page impressions, 11 million in August though that includes the actual media files which obviously can’t have adsense on them. Went into my adsense account and created the mobile code to place on my wap site in my scripting language of PHP and WAP format of WML. Google gives you PHP code which sets a few global PHP variables and then tries to require the necessary code from the Google servers which is a bit of a problem as I disable PHP being able to fopen URLs for security reasons.

So I grabbed the code Google was trying to require and it seems like simple PHP that sends the request to the Google ad server through another fopen and echos the output. I changed the fopen code to a cURL request and just echoed that and it seems to work fine for the time being. But if Google ever change the code that I just downloaded there could be problems. I’m surprised they used fopen, if I was coding it I would have used a fsockopen function which is nearly guaranteed to always work no matter what settings the user has.

The only ads I’ve seen on it so far are for some kind of dating site. CPC is about the same as on the WWW site but CTR is fairly low, I’m guessing because the ads aren’t very targeted yet. Looks good for the future though. Google move first again.

Here’s the code I copied and pasted into my WML pages minus the publisher ID’s

$value) {
if ($param == "client") {
google_append_url($google_ad_url, $param,
"ca-mb-" . $GLOBALS["google"][$param]);
} else if (strpos($param, "color_") === 0) {
google_append_color($google_ad_url, $param);
} else if ((strpos($param, "host") === 0)
|| (strpos($param, "url") === 0)) {
google_append_url($google_ad_url, $param,
$google_scheme . $GLOBALS["google"][$param]);
} else {
google_append_globals($google_ad_url, $param);
}
}
google_append_url($google_ad_url, "dt",
round(1000 * array_sum(explode(" ", microtime()))));

return $google_ad_url;
}

$ch1 = curl_init(google_get_ad_url());
curl_setopt($ch1, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$google_blah = curl_exec($ch1);
echo $google_blah;
?>


Why is the adwords api so expensive? It should be completely free, don’t Google want us to use their system. Wrote a php script to add loads of keywords and ran it on a test run to insert about 3000 keywords with a seperate adgroup for every 2 keywords, so 1500 ad groups. I knew the API costs money but I thought it would be miniscule. $80 that run cost me! I feel like ringing Joe Duffy.

I register a few .ie domains and am always wondering what’s the cheapest. Couldn’t find any comparison on the net so I went through the Table A list of companies on the IEDR site. Table A companies have registered over 500 domains. If any of the other companies sell cheap, contact me.

So I tried to register for each company and got to the point of entering a credit card and took note of the price. For other companies that I couldn’t get to the register page for some reason or another I took note of their listed one year price and any VAT. CSC Domains Inc, BT Ireland, Eurokom and IE Internet all had no listed price and no register page, they asked you to contact them directly. NetNames UK gave no specific .ie price and when I tried to register one their system crashed. NASK TESTING PDN site was down when I checked.

All prices are including VAT even when the site says nothing as I’m presuming they all charge it. Ignore the tailing zeros, the prices are floats in the MySQL table. It’s for one year registration and immediate transfer to external nameservers. If I’ve any information here incorrect about your company, contact me and I’ll fix it. So here’s the list starting with the cheapest:

Update: Added ICCM Hosting 19 Sept

ICCM Hosting	29.030000	Not listed as a reseller on IEDR site. Appears on registration form that you have to use their hosting.
Letshost.ie	30.240000
Hosting 365	31.400000	Claim free parking.
Switchmedia	34.070000
Digiweb	36.300000
Blacknight	54.450000
Darklie-SCE	54.450000	Cheaper if you host with them
Webhost.ie	59.290000	Claim free parking
Web World	59.290000
Host Ireland	60.320000
Elive	66.550000	This price is including VAT because it says nothing about it on the site and if I had to guess I’d say there’s another 21%. Register form was down when I checked. They’ve some bullcrap about managing your DNS services being an extra E10 a year.
Eircom	67.000000	Got to where you enter your CC, and the price was still this so I presume no VAT added even though I presumed there would be
UTV Internet	78.650000
Irish Domains	84.000000	2 different one year prices exclu. VAT, I picked the cheapest. Reduction per year if you register longer than one year. Claim free parking. You have to ‘request info’ to get your domain, can’t do it yourself.
Register.ie (Novaro)	84.700000
Hosting Ireland	84.700000	Claim free parking
Magnet Business	119.790000	Doesn’t say anything about VAT, presume it has to be added on so I did to get this price. No register form, have to contact them. An extra E175 to point domain to a different host….

Yeah buddy
I passed the adwords exam about a month ago and finally have spent enough to be adwords qualified, which is about 750 euro. Pity I only made back about 500 euro.. oh well, still learning. Might help me get work experience for my college course but I was already saying I was qualified on my CV, haha. The ringtones vertical is what I’m doing and it’s pretty much saturated so I might move onto something else. I was doing stuff for an Irish company as well but the volume is just so low restricting to Irish IPs. We really are a small country.

Google give ya a page that certifies your status. And a logo.

Curious as to what seo firms actually do for clients. If I was doing it I’d take a look at the site and identify the keywords that will convert best with keycompete and real PPC data which would probably be the most accurate.

Then get these keywords in title,h1 tags and site copy. Fix easy problems like duplicate content, domain name canonicalisaton (sp?), mod_rewrite for dynamic pages and have good internal link structure.

After that it’s all about links and how to get them. Each site and niche is different so youd have to check all backlinks on competitors, see if you can get these links as well. And basically do what you can to get authority links, link bait, contact authority webmasters. But the easiest method would be to buy links from sites with low pr that stay below the radar.

That’s all I can think of, it does seem very basic. What’s the secret sauce that allows firms to charge thousands?

As we all know, affiliate marketing is predominately a Yank thing. Loads of ringtone offers on networks only take US customers and accept US IPs. If you’re international, all you get is this offer isn’t for your area and you’re turfed off to some crappy converting offer like mortgage leads or something.

So I geotarget on my site and don’t show ads to international customers that will let them leave the site. I use the free Maxmind geolocation service and a simple include script. eg



";
}
geoip_close($gi);
?>


You always want to test to see if this works because something always goes wrong as we all know. You can use one of those US based proxy sites to test it but that can get messy with javascript and iframes. So I signed up for an account with findnot proxy service. It’s only $15 a month and fairly speedy. And it works through PPTP so it’s piss easy if you run Windows XP like me.

Giganews has obviously just bought a lot of hard drives cos they’re retention is now 200 days! With the continual increase in daily posts to usenet, they must have some server farm to hold all dat warez. All they need now is a web based system like Easynews that automatically unrars music and movies and they’re the clear winner in usenet providers.

Easynews global search is the only reason I still have an account with them, it’s so handy. They give you thumbnails of movies and everything. It’s great for finding individual songs. Come on giganews, copy the easynews system and I’ll be a customer for life.

Some hacker group decided to take down millnic media, an affiliate network which accepted myspace traffic. Do they’ve anything better to do with their time. What about all the affiliates that weren’t sending myspace traffic?

The tracking system works every now and then but leads don’t seem to being counted. Ah well