That Web Man

Don’t you just hate people who sign up for a paid listing service on a website you run - £25+VAT pa - and then when you finally get around to billing them for just one year (nearly four years later), these wankers try to claim that we never told them it was chargeable.

Now it gets worse when they are supposedly IT and computer consultants who claims to be able to - let’s say - work with your PC and Assist Online maybe and they forget there’s such a thing as the Internet Archive Wayback Machine which shows clearly that the site has always plainly stated it’s chargeable.

Never let the facts get in the way of an argument, eh?

One of the things that amuses me is receiving a telephone call from companies trying to get us to advertise with them, either in print or on a directory web site.

Print

We’re an Internet design company. If we want to find goods or services, we go to Google. If we want to buy a car or something, we try eBay and as a really last ditch effort might pick up a local freesheet. I suppose people buy the odd copy of Exchange & Mart from time to time, but I don’t.

I can’t remember the last time I used a phone directory either - especially in relation to goods or services - but my wife did recently, I must admit, when she was looking for a local gardener.

So why would I waste money advertising a company whose services are largely location-independent?

Especially when it’s not even peanuts we’re talking about: a full page ad. in one edition of Yellow Pages specific to one local area would cost me £4,900 + VAT!

Internet

That’s one area where again the web design company doesn’t pay to advertise - our site and those we do for our clients manage that all by themselves.

How much would a “Local Sponsored Listing” on yell.com cost? Between £900 and £3,150 for a year, it would appear. We charge our clients around £100 for global coverage for their entire website content, publicised free of charge on a monthly basis to the major search engines.

It beggars belief sometimes…

One of my long-term clients was kind enough to send me a cheque this week for two small invoices, so that it arrived within the payment terms … which is nice.

I didn’t get a chance to pay it in yesterday, so I was planning to nip out to the bank today. Fortunately Mrs Web Man spotted that the cheque hadn’t been signed … doh!

The client has now agreed to pay by BACS this time and hopefully they’ll continue doing so in future to save time and effort. We’ll see.

So that post about adult affiliate marketing and more particularly, the affiliate programs’ links and banners got me thinking: why not go for a full-on site featuring both affiliate advertising, free affilate-provided sample pages and even free content by way of RSS feeds?

And that’s exactly what I did, adding in some regular posts as well as some free YouTube content provided again by their tagged RSS feeds.

As usual, DreamHost got me set up in an evening and I put some banners in place and syndicated some RSS feeds. One of them, though, is refusing to release its formatting so I’ve had to ruin the design by giving the posts a white background so that the formatted black text can be read. Pain in the arse, but the support bods at Traffic Cash Gold are trying to help out now. Affilate links are coming from TCG as well as Adult Pay Master and the Lady Sonia franchise.

Anyhow, fill yer boots with pr0n at Glamorous Matures.

On the subject of advertising, two of the main earners on the Internet are gambling sites and adult sites.

Google’s AdSense program, however, does not allow their use on sites featuring “pornography, adult or mature content” as well as other prohibited sites. So the alternatives to such ‘legitmate’ advertising programs are adult affiliate advertising programs, but which to use?

Well if you follow that link, you’ll come across a very interesting blog entry from Matt Peskett in February 2007. He mentioned just how professional Traffic Cash Gold is.

Now at this point, I should confess that I operate a web site featuring adult content. And why not? It’s not pornography: it simply combines my creative side by way of web design and photography, my business side by way of seeking to make some money doing what I enjoy doing and my personal side by allowing me to indulge in what else I enjoy…

The earnings from running the site aren’t exactly massive at a little over $500 since I started it up late last year, but then again it isn’t a full-on, XXX site either so the membership fees are a very modest $13.95 a month for those that continue past the initial $9.95/21 days taster. Modelling fees and location costs have actually more than used up the revenues (let alone the domain names and hosting on top of that), but then again it is a great way to spend a day so I’m not complaining!

So anyway, last week I signed up with TCG and placed three small banner ads. in the sidebar of the samples page on my site so as not to make the rest of the site look too tacky. And I already have one $35 referral fee! So it’s a start and another $35 to go towards the next modelling fee…

The main source of traffic to my site is a channel on YouTube which I started in February 2007 and to which I post a video from the main web site every few weeks (I currently have 11 videos showing there). As of today, it  has 908 subscribers, the channel has been viewed 81,073 times and the videos themselves have been viewed a total of 832,193 times. If only I had been paid a buck or even less per view!

You’ll perhaps have noticed that over there in the sidebar are some adverts provided by Google’s AdSense program: they are based upon the content in the page where they are shown and if a visitor clicks through one of them, I get paid a few cents depending upon what the advertiser is willing to pay Google through their corresponding AdWords program. I run AdSense ads. on all my personal blogs and personal sites and I also serve some on one page of one of my businesses’ sites.

I’ll never get rich from displaying Google Ads - I reckon to average less than a dollar a day but hey, $300 a year is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick - but I had noticed that revenues had been falling.

Now the positioning of the ads. over there in this particular sidebar isn’t that good from a layout perspective as most of them are “below the fold”, i.e. you have to scroll down to see them.

Google helpfully provide a useful guide on positioning their ads for maximum exposure/benefit in their AdSense Help Center. There’s a dedicated page for positioning for blogs too.

So as something of an experiment, I changed the positioning and added another set of ads to two of my sites: one a business listing site and the other a blog-based site for a community project I am involved with.

The results have been surprising with both sites performing significantly better since taking into account Google’s suggestions. My advice? Give it a go if you’re serving the ads.

Not signed up to earn money through AdSense? Click on the AdSense button in the sidebar.

This morning I received an e-mail from my hosting partners telling me the client’s domain names had been renewed and that they’d had a call directly from the non-paying client demanding to know when it would be back up.

By 10.00am, the .com had been renewed and the site was serving up the hosted pages again - the .co.uk had never stopped doing so.

I had also received an e-mail from the client which as a postscript asked if the cheque had arrived. Needless to say, it hasn’t…

I billed a client back in November for some site updates during October and for the renewal of his two domain names (a .com and a .co.uk) together with another year’s web hosting.

This was due for payment a week later…

Now this client has a history of being a slow payer. The company I use to host his domains and site - I am a reseller rather than paying for the necessary infrastructure myself - has to wait for me to pay them too, so they now don’t renew domain names until I have paid, billing me a month before they are due for renewal and these days looking for payment on invoice.

So by today, my invoice was already three weeks overdue for payment and I got an e-mail from the hosting company telling me they’d had an e-mail from him over the weekend as some e-mails to him had bounced. Hardly surprising, given that the .com had expired a week ago and the .co.uk four days ago.

I popped him an e-mail this morning to tell him what was going on and then at 6.00pm tonight got an irate phone call from him demanding I renew them! It was apparently my fault for not reminding him.

I politely pointed out that the invoice states what the payment terms are and gives both cheque and BACS payment details. I also pointed out that the covering e-mail gives a date when payment should be made by, just in case people can’t work out when “today plus seven days” is.

Clients, eh?