JohnHok.Com

Many times when you go onto a site with Adsense you see the same type of ads over and over again. Over time users tend to succumb to something many people refer to as “ad blindness”. This is when you’ve seen the ad in the same place for such a long time that you eventually learn to ignore them. This happens many times on forums.

I just wanted to share some of my personal tips to combat ad blindness.

Rotating Colours
I just discovered this simple, but useful tip that allows your ads to pick from a random set of colours that you sepcify.

google_color_link = ["000000","FFFFFF","F0F0F0"];

Setting your colours like that in the code will allow your ads to rotate from those 3 colours randomly. Add or remove as many colours as you like. It’s best to change minor things like the URL colour or title colour in a subtle manner. You don’t want your ads to be a rotating block of hyper bright colours like pink or neon green where the background constantly changes between these colours. This will just make your site look ugly. Remember, subtle changes!

Image Ads
Adsense has an option to allow image ads to be displayed. I say, use it! The odd image ad mixed in with the text ads gives the ad unit a nice change. Users might get thrown off by this slight change and might be more inclined to click on the image ad. Also the visual images from an image ad are better at attracting attention from users.

Alternative Ads
Don’t just limit yourself to Google Ads. Use the ad unit you have creatively. Rotate your own ads in there. You can advertise events going on your site or that you are planning. Advertise some of your other sites. If you have one big site and one smaller one, you can leverage the traffic from your bigger site to advertise your smaller one. This way you still get a variety of ads but they still benefit you.

Rotating Position
This is a good one sometimes. Don’t be afraid to move the ad unit around. After all if you move it around, it’s harder for users to get accustom to where the ads are and this is a great way of combating ad blindness.

Well that’s all I’ve got to share with you for now. I hope that you can use these tips and incorporate them into your own sites to hopefully help increase your ad revenue.

Big question is why don’t I do this on JohnHok.com? This blog was never meant to be a means of revenue so I could care less about increasing the CTR on the ads located on this site. Plus it takes extra effort to incorporate these well. Effort that I don’t have just now. ;)

Well I’m here to post the first iReview and I’m here to review a blog that is hosted on Blogger.com called eBay Fanatic.

Right away, when you get onto eBay Fanatic, you’ll notice that in terms of look that it is nothing special. It’s your typical blog but it’s the content where I think it really shines. Everyone knows how popular eBay is and you’ve always heard about all those outrageous things that happen in auctions on eBay. eBay Fanatic is there to point you to all those crazy things that go on at eBay.

I see that there is an entry about this guy named “Steve” who for a starting bid of $500 will give you the privilege of hanging out with him for a day. See? Outrageous things!

In addition to the fun things eBay Fanatic also has a more serious side to it. Since eBay caters to such a wide group of individuals, some who might not be as literate, eBay Fanatic gives many tips to users about using eBay. For someone who has never used eBay before, I find these tips very educational. It’s nice to get insight from someone (who I’m assuming) has had a lot of experience with eBay and it’s nice that eBay Fanatic has decided to share that knowledge with it’s viewers.

If there is one complaint though is the lack of content on the blog. eBay being so big and intricate I would expect to read about a lot of tips and such but at this point so far there is not a lot to read. This can probably be attributed to the age of the blog since it appears to be very new still. I’m sure over time though, with the amount of things to write on about eBay, this blog will be a wealth of information for many people.

Want your own iReview?
All you got to do is leave an entry on your blog telling others about JohnHok.com and how they can get their blog reviewed. You must make sure that you also link back to http://www.johnhok.com or http://www.johnhok.com/2007/03/11/want-your-blog-reviewed referring to this offer as an “iReview”. Then leave a comment on this post and I will get back to you with an iReview. It’s that simple. For more in-depth information about it you can also view the full details on the link where you leave a comment.

Well I wrote about this before but not many people seem to have been interested or at least participated in the offer. So I’m here to repost the details for the “iReview” offer again. I will also lower the number of required participants from 10 to 5.

Update: Taking a suggestion from Ben Cass I will change the iReview offer so that it will act as a review for a review type thing. I’ll see how it goes and maybe make more modifications to this in the future.

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I may not give you a lot of traffic, I may not help your page rank increase by linking to your blog, and heck, I may not even like your blog, but here’s how it goes.

If you want me to give your blog a review, leave an entry on your blog telling others about JohnHok.com and how they can get their blog reviewed. You must make sure that you also link back to http://www.johnhok.com or http://www.johnhok.com/2007/03/11/want-your-blog-reviewed/ in your blog post and reference the review as an “iReview” offer. The review can be as long or as short as you wish!

Once you have done this, leave a comment in this entry with a link to your blog entry and I will post a review with a minimum of 200 words for you. That’s all there is to it. If you have any questions feel free to ask as well. I’m looking forward to seeing your responses and participation.

Well I was away the week of June 6th to June 10th because I had to attend a national competition called Skills Canada. Skills Canada is a competition designed to bring the best and the brightest in the skilled trades industry. It is used as a means to attract and promote the skilled trades in Canada because that is something our country supposedly needs.

The competition is setup so that there is first a provincial qualifying round and the gold medalist from there moves onto the national competition. There are probably over 40 categories in the skilled trades that people could enter in. These range from culinary arts to electronics. I entered under the “Web Development” competition and I won gold for the provincial qualifying round so I got to go to the national competition being held in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan this year.

It was an experience I probably will never forget. First time entering, first individual ever from my high school to enter, and I won the gold medal as well on the national level! I was pretty shocked and surprised because I didn’t really think what I did held up with the competition. The competition itself was an experience. To see how much pride each province had in its members. The cheering and the competitiveness atmosphere was amazing. Also being around people just like you and understand really technical things was really nice for a change.

Throughout the competition they planned different events and entertainment to keep our minds clear from the hard days of work. My competition we had about 14 hours of work spread across 2 days and we were responsible for redesigning an existing site so that it conforms to programming standards. Also to develop an aesthetically pleasing design.

I’m still waiting to get my judging breakdown, so hopefully they will send it. I’m really interested in knowing how they judged my work and it would really give me some good insight on what I could improve on. The bad thing though is they don’t always give the judging breakdown so I’m kind of doubtful.

What happens after this? Well nothing really. I unfortunately found out that every 2 years the Skills Canada competition is used as a qualifying for the World Skills competition. So if I entered a year earlier and won, I would’ve advanced onto the World Skills this year being held in Japan! I did miss out on that but hey, I had an awesome time at Skills Canada nonetheless. Making it that far was more than what I could have ever asked for. And having a medal to prove that your the best web developer for high school students in your nation is quite something in my books. ;)

I wanted to just list some basic “street sense” info for people looking to purchase domains and hosting. The industry can be a confusing one for newcomers but being around and having to deal extensively with domains and hosting for my own sites; I’ve slowly grown a vast knowledge of the confusing industry.

One of the worst mistakes you can make while purchasing a domain is getting it from the same company as your host. You never want to do this because if you cancel your hosting, sometimes you can have problems transferring your domain out. To put it frankly, the hosting company has the power to hold your valuable domain hostage. So ALWAYS go with a 3rd party domain registar.

Some of the biggest and most reputable places for domains are GoDaddy and Namecheap. You should just about ignore any other company as these two will basically fulfill all your needs.

For purchasing hosting, first you want to ask yourself how much space you need and how much visitors do you think you will get. Think up of a rough idea and figure out what options you need like PHP or mySQL. If you already have a host in mind, always do a “background check” on them by finding reviews of the company by previous customers. The best place to look for reputable reviews is WebHostingTalk. Try to avoid those top 10 host sites because they tend to all be fake. Usually forums are a better place to look for reviews as usually customers go to forums to post their real experiences.

Also in the hosting industry you should get familiar with some terms.
Shared - This means that you are sharing 1 server with probably over a hundred other customers. This might seem a lot but if your with a good host they will know how to manage the server so there won’t be many problems. Servers are built to be powerful and can usually handle these big numbers unless you are with a host that is incompetent. Usually for shared hosting, the company is responsible for all the support and mangement of the server.

Reseller - This means that you are also sharing 1 server with a bunch of other customers and possibly even more than with shared hosting. This is because with reseller hosting you have the ability to re-sell your resources. Basically you can act as your own hosting company. Be wary though, usually reseller servers tend to be more packed so you don’t get as many resources as say a shared hosting package.

Dedicated - Dedicated servers are servers that are dedicated to JUST you and nobody else. You get to use all the resources on the server which is good if you have a very high traffic site but the tradeoff to this is, it usually costs more and most of the times you have to manage the server yourself. This can be confusing if you don’t know much about linux. Most companies will offer server management as well at an extra price.

VPS(Virtual Private Server) - A VPS is a term used to describe 1 very powerful server which is basically seperated into a handful of other small “virtual” servers. Basically you are given your own “dedicated” server but not as powerful as an actual dedicated server. VPS accounts are entirely isolated from each other. So lets say “Customer A” has a site that is getting too many hits for his account and it causes his account to crash. All other customers on the VPS will not be affected by Customer A. This is good for sites that are growing rapidly and this is a step below fully dedicated server. Usually VPS are managed by the host itself and the price is quite affordable.

To wrap this up some hosting companies that I would recommend is HostingZoom for shared hosting, ResellerZoom for reseller hosting, PowerVPS for vps hosting, and SoftLayer for dedicated hosting.

Lately I’ve found myself being less and less motivated. Not just to blog but to do other things as well. I’ve lacked motivation to do homework, study, design, program, and blog. Is this normal? I’m going into University next year and the last thing I need is a lack of motivation. University is a pretty big change because in terms of guidance I believe that they leave that mostly up to you to decide. If you don’t want to study, I’m sure they could care less right? After all you’ve already paid the big bucks for tuition.

That’s not the only thing that I’m worried about though. My lack of motivation has lead me to delay projects for my sites and just to stop working on them. Building sites and working on them has been something that I used to always enjoy. So why do I lack the motivation to work on them even though I enjoy doing it? I have no idea.

People get motivation through different means. Through my experience as a webmaster I’ll list some of the sources of motivation that I have experienced.

First for me it was the simple pleasure of being able to see the final product of a site I’ve just built. Seeing how all those long hours and countless nights of work brought together something like a website.

The second source of motivation for me then became the pleasure of watching the site and community grow. To watch it evolve into what it is and to see how much the site has been able to help visitors. Just to see what people have to say about the site gave me the motivation to continue doing the things I did to please others.

Then I discovered money. I saw the potential of making money with websites. Not necessarily just selling products, but just through different streams of revenue. Primarily through advertisements and sponsorships. I saw just how much potential websites had to make money and I capitalized on this for a period. This motivated me to create more and more websites. But with quantity, were these necessarily quality websites? Looking back, I have to admit most of them weren’t. I made one big “hit” and that is Imusion Studio. Imusion has been my most precious site as a webmaster. Imusion was built off the users and not the money originally. Is this what drove it’s success in the early days? Probably. After I discovered motivation through money I neglected Imusion and things started to slow down drastically on the site even though I was making money.

Now the site is sitting at an all time low of daily visitors at around 300+ a day. Most of the traffic is through organic sources still like Google and other search engines but the community is just no longer there. Before I discovered motivation through money, I may have not been making as much money, but I certainly enjoyed building the community and watching it grow. It achieved a daily average of 2000+ unique visitors at that time when the motivation to work on the site was to purely please the visitors and users.

I don’t know really what the point of this post was but it was just to outline different things. If you find something useful out of it, than good for you. If not, than oh well, I’m sure it was a semi-interesting read and something you might be able to apply to your own webmaster ventures in the future. Also I’d be interested in hearing what you use for motiviation whether it be for work, school, or just your daily life! Please share your thoughts.