JohnHok.Com

This is one neat technique that most people don’t know about Google AdSense. It’s called ad section targetting. What this allows you to do is specify areas that you want emphasized when the AdSense system is looking for relevant ads to display. This is an excellent way to make your ads more relevant to your site’s content.

How it basically works is you specify the section you want to be targeted with special tags like this:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
This is my content that I want section targeted!
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

That’s all there is too it! You can designate as many sections as you want but ensure there is enough content in between the section targets or else Google may not be able to display the relevant ads or ads at all. You may end up even getting PSAs so make sure the areas you target are content rich.

So here is a recap of my earnings during February.

AdSense: $248.46
Adbrite: $52.51
Text-Links: $10.00

Total comes to $310.97.

Google AdSense was the top performer again for me this month. It has actually been growing since the past few months! February being a shorter month, I was pleased to see that the AdSense earnings still continued to grow pass the previous months.

Adbrite is a nice addition to my earnings. These are mainly CPM ads I put on my proxy. Since they are CPM it doesn’t matter whether the visitors click or not and proxy sites usually get a lot of impressions so I decided to take advantage of this. I only recently added them in March and I am happy with how they are performing. I can put these on the actual pages the proxy load unlike AdSense so it makes for a nice additional income for the site.

Text-link sales or should I say sale. I haven’t been pushing text-link sales a lot last month because on my main site I sell them on, I was still waiting for some of the last orders to expire before adding more. Many are set to expire this month so I plan to push that number up again for March.

Overall I’m happy with the performance of February. My AdSense earnings have slowly been rising and I have found ways to add additional revenue streams for my sites. In the coming months I am planning to put more marketing efforts into my other project so hopefully I can add sales from there into my overall earnings!

As a wannabe Internet mogul, one of my major goals on the Internet is to make money. Money comes from various sources when you are creating online “businesses”. To simply categorize a couple of the more important ones that are relevant to me, are advertising and services.

One of the major issues I face, as a high school student trying to balance school and online businesses, is that time is very tight. Recently, I had to turn down another client who wanted an IP.Board along with its gallery and blog components skinned, simply because I did not have enough time. I felt that I wouldn’t be able to satisfy the client with a high quality product given my very busy schedule.

This is always a tough decision for web developers and designers because it means a missed opportunity to make more money. But you have to take a step back and look at the bigger picture involved here. If you take on too many clients and don’t have enough time, you may end up ruining your reputation permanently. In the online world, your reputation is all you’ve got, so you have to protect it with your life. Once you ruin your reputation, you’ll find it near impossible to make more money in the future through client work, so don’t take the chance at all.

If you, as a web developer, feel that you have too much on your plate, kindly decline the extra work you might receive from potential clients. Make sure to do it courteously though and to keep good relations with the client. You never know, they may appreciate your honesty and come back to you again in the future when you are free to obtain your services.

Many of us have gone through this phase; it’s that time where you have to find some hosting for a new site you are creating. There are just so many bad web hosting companies out there that it makes it hard to choose the best one. I will try to list 5 things to look for that will guarantee the perfect hosting company for you. Enjoy, and don’t get too excited!

1. Disk Space - Make sure they offer over 50GB of disk space. Anything less is a clear signal that the hosting provider is “inadequate”. Clearly, they cannot afford big enough hard drives, so how can you expect them have enough money to run an entire hosting company?! So you need to try your hardest to find the place that will offer you the most disk space for the least amount of money. Actually better yet, if they can offer you UNLIMITED space you should sign-up IMMEDIATELY. This will be the best decision you will ever make, guaranteed. If they can make that kind of offer, it means the hosting company is rich and can afford this kind of hardware infrastructure just for you.

2. Bandwidth - Bandwidth, ah we all love to have enough bandwidth to run our websites. The same principle goes for bandwidth as it did for disk space. You need to make sure they offer bandwidth figures in the terabyte range. Bandwidth is so cheap these days that if your hosting provider can’t provide bandwidth in the terabyte range, what kind of hosting company do you think they are? Obviously a very, very bad one. Even for your very small website you will be creating about your love for cats, you need to make sure you have more than enough bandwidth. You never know when you might get so many visitors that you run out of bandwidth! That is the last thing you want happen to your site, so make sure you have plenty more than you will ever need in probably your site’s lifetime. It’s better safe than sorry right? That’s what I thought.

3. Ranked on Top 10 Web Host Lists - This is another major factor to keep in mind when your on your search for the best web host companies. An easy way to find the best lists of the top 10 web hosts is to Google it. The companies listed on these top 10 best web hosts are the most prestigious ones. Otherwise how else would they have been able to rank so good out of all the web hosting companies out there? Anyways, after doing a lot of intensive research, everything will become crystal clear. You will begin to see patterns emerge as the same companies repeatedly place in the same spots on these top 10 web host lists- which sometimes look oddly the same as well. To save you some trouble, the following is a list I have compiled from my countless hours of research and reviewing the top 10 web hosting lists that I found from Google. Lunar Pages, 1 & 1 Internet Web Hosting, midPhase, Go Daddy, iPowerWeb, StartLogic, and finally PowWeb.

4. Staff - A web hosting company is only as good the technical staff that they have. You have to understand that almost ALL the good techy people have bad engrish. To test whether a web hosting company has good techs you can jump onto one of their live support mediums. I find live chat the most convenient. First, you need to make sure they greet you like this, “Dear Sir” and even when you correct them to say “it’s Madam” they go on to say “Sir, your problem…”. This means that the tech is so preoccupied with the work that he or she has little time to focus on other little tiny things unrelated to their work. They are not easily distracted and most likely are an expert at what they are doing. Also their courteous and proper greeting guarantees that the staff is 100% not outsourced from India.

5. Data Center - Arguably, THE most important factor to keep in mind. Read up on the information about where the web hosting company house their servers. Make sure you find pictures as well. You know how the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. This is the type of things you want to see in a good data center. The first shows the commitment of the company, they house their servers in the CEO’s bedroom. So when a server goes down even during the middle of the night the CEO can initiate a reboot request for you. The second is a little worse (but still good of course). The servers are all alone in that state of the art retrofitted A&P meat freezer warehouse. But look on the bright side. The facility is built rock solid with massive steel beam frame and rebar reinforced 4 inch poured concrete roofs and no windows. The exterior is well maintained and solid brick on block construction. They maintain the pretty little shrubs on the exterior of their building as well! If they take care of their exterior that well, imagine how they take care of your servers! Look though, they even have a guard serviced managed by a duly sworn armed police officer with arrest powers.

Well I hope that now you have a better insight on what to look for if you want to find the best web hosting companies in the industry. Remember, it is vital that the web hosting company fits all those criteria otherwise they are NOT a good web hosting company! I don’t know how many newbies I have talked to these days that have been tricked into thinking a web hosting company is good. So don’t fall for the traps and always be on the look our for these 5 criteria as they will be able to send you a clear indication whether or not your with the best web hosting company out there. If they don’t have these 5 criteria, then just walk away like you’ve never came across the company!

Well the purpose of this entry is simply to give notice to some people who have advertised on the websites that I run. In addition, I am also featuring some reviews of blogs from people who have requested one (yes I’m that generous right now)!

Many of these people are also those who help maintain the bills for my websites so I figured I would give them a favour back; even if it’s a small one.

The Egg Hunt
The Egg Hunt is a very interesting website. It is an easter egg hunt game online! Once you have an account you can login and you get to browse a special page where you can click to find special easter eggs. You get only 50 tries a day though- so be careful where you click. If you find an egg you will be entered into a draw for the contest prize.

BigProxys
BigProxys is one of many “proxy toplists” that have popped up on the Internet. BigProxys has a list of of the biggest proxys (yes, that’s how they spell it) on the web to access sites like MySpace, Bebo, and Facebook wherever the local network is filtering Internet browsing.

Jeffrey Munro’s Blog
Jeffrey Munro runs a blog with tid-bits of tips and tricks that can help Internet users in general. Some of his latest tips and advice are about not opening new browser windows, checking your site load time, and how to increase your site traffic. Definitely an interesting read if this kind of stuff appeals to you.

Ally Web Directory
Ally Web Directory is simply one of many link directories out there. There are a lot of categories but they are all filled pretty much nice and evenly. It has a PR 2 and the only way to get listed in the directory is to purchase different listing packages. These packages range from $19.95-$44.95. I think this is one of the better looking directories out there look wise. Everything is fairly easy to find and navigate compared to some link directories out there.

Sick Scripts
Sick Scripts is what you would expect to find at a site named “Sick Scripts”. They have a directory listing of many different types of scripts. Categories ranging from PHP to MySpace and Ruby on Rails. Sick Scripts definitely has some nice categories but I feel that some of the categories are lacking like blogs, ASP, and CSS.

Real WebHost
Real WebHost is another web hosting company out there. I personally can’t give much insight into the service they provide since I have not personally purchased a plan from them. But I can tell you that they offer a wide variety of services: shared, dedicated, and VPS. It doesn’t look like they oversell a lot, so that is definitely a good thing for some people because it just adds some peace of mind to the customer. Their cheapest shared packages range from $96 per year to $342 a year.

Well that is about all I have for now. Hope you enjoyed the features, sponsors, and reviews I have put up. In one of my coming entries I am going to tell you how you can get YOUR site or blog reviewed by me. If it goes well I’ll keep the little “activity” going, if it doesn’t no harm done. So certainly stay tuned!