Interview with AdSense Millionaire Markus Frind of PlentyofFish.com (on his Adsense success story, Adsense tips and secrets, Internet marketing, etc)

Markus Frind runs a free online dating site called PlentyOfFish.com and he rocked the Internet world this week when he posted a photo of his latest Google AdSense check for nearly $1 million CAD.

It was a check for 2 months because the first check they sent was so big it was rejected by his bank. (I hate it when that happens.)

I asked Markus to share a few thoughts with us, and he was kind enough to oblige.

You're a one-man show running a very successful dating site. Tell us how you got started.

Back in 2001 after my birthday someone in the office introduced me to online dating sites. I went back to my desk and checked out udate.com and kiss.com and lavalife/web personals. I was bored and I wanted to chat with people. I was really annoyed when I found out you had to pay for everything, I ended up telling the girl who introduced me to the sites that I could do better and make them for free, so I went and registered Plentyoffish.com. All I ever ended up doing was creating an index page and forgot about it. Fast forward to 2003... [Find the rest of Markus' answer over on his blog]

Your site, if you'll forgive me, isn't terribly attractive, it isn't "web 2.0" it isn't even a terribly original idea. Many entrepreneurs today think that without those ingredients in the recipe, they'll never make it. You've clearly proved otherwise. What's your secret and what are your thoughts about what it takes to be successful?

To many people assume an "original idea" is just something that looks visually different then others. I created the first real free dating and the first one that actually worked. Just like Google created the first real search engine that worked. There is no such thing as a secret. When I came home from work I sat down and I forced myself to code for a hour or 2. The enemy was thinking, whenever I paused or started to think I would force myself to type something, its amazing how much you can get done when you just type. There are only 1000 or so sites in the world with massive traffic, and of those mine is the only one that is run by a single person. It's not possible for thousands of people to be as successful as me. For being successful in building sites you need to give something to the surfer faster or better or both. If you want to do pay per click, you just need to be good at picking words to bid on. For that business its just a matter of repetition and fighting boredom. At the end of the day you just need to sit down and DO it. Most people don't.

You've obviously done a brilliant job marketing the site because you have some insane traffic numbers. What do you feel has been your most successful marketing move and why?

It was all viral. My best move was not going out and spending a ton of money, with online dating you need to spend $6.00 for every free member, and most of those leave on the first day and the few that do become active don't stay more than 3 months. So 30% of your membership is turned over per month. There is no way you can make your money back. The site went ballistic in Canada all on its own I really didn't have to do anything.

What has been your least successful marketing effort? Why wasn't it successful?

Radio, too expensive, too hard to buy your way into markets. Yahoo, Match.com and Eharmony and Lavalife are each spending $10 million a month on marketing. How can you even come close to competing with them?

Can you share some of your favorite sources of inspiration and ideas? (e.g. certain blogs/books/magazines)

Never bothered reading books, magazines Just started reading blogs lately outside the dating world. For the most part I treated it as a video game, and defeat isn't an option you just find some way to win.

Any parting advice for other entrepreneurs trying to gain success with AdSense or other "eyeball/traffic"-oriented ventures?

Google pays out $500 million a quarter to AdSense users. That money is going somewhere, and if you look at the top 1000 sites not a hell of a lot of them have AdSense. Statistically speaking those sites that have low numbers of users and high EPC [Earnings Per Click] will make the most money. Build sites that no one else has done before, stuff only goes viral the first 1 or 2 times after that you have to buy your way into a market.

Thanks again to Markus for sharing his thoughts.

from workhappy.net

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MLM Gold Mine Video Vol. 3 -- Part 1+Part 2

"2 Real-Life Case Studies Show You The Power of
Piggy-Backing On The Latest Web 2.0 Trends To Help You Get FREE Traffic To Your Website, Attract *RED-HOT* Targeted Prospects For Your Business, Build A Massive List, And Make More Money Online, Plus...

...16-Year-Old Pimpled-Face Kid With Braces
*Cracks-The-Code* And 'UNLOCKS' The Secret On
How To Create Online Videos To Sell Any Product
or Service! -- A 'MUST' See!" (Just Released 1/8/07)

Click on the 'play' button below to watch my
MLM Training Video #3 (Part 1) right now:

"200 *MILLION* Users Don't Lie... Here's How To Generate Highly-Qualified MLM Leads Using An Overlooked Technique That Hardly Anyone Else In MLM Is Even Talking About!" (Just Released 1/10/07)

Click on the 'play' button below to watch my
MLM Training Video #3 (Part 2) right now:

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MLM Secrets Video Vol. 1~2

MLM Gold Mine Video Vol. 2:

MLM Gold Mine Video Vol. 2:

"How To Find *HOT* Prospects For Your MLM Business Using A Free Website That Gets Over 1 *BILLION* Hits
Every Single Day!" (Just Released 12/29/06)

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Blogging for Dollars (How to Turn Your Passion into an Online Empire)

Michael Arrington is a partying kind of guy. While showing off his home in Atherton, Calif., he boasts about how he crammed 500 people into his one-acre backyard at a bash in February. Then there are the official parties, like the one he threw in mid-August at August Capital, a nearby venture firm. Arrington posted an open invitation on his website at 3 a.m. By sunrise, all 500 spots were taken; the onslaught of traffic crashed his site. "I knew it would be fast," says Arrington, who houses so many out-of-towners in his ranch home that he often isn't sure who's crashing on which mattress on which floor in which room.

Arrington, a 36-year-old entrepreneur behind a long list of unrecognizable startups, has suddenly become one of the rising stars of Silicon Valley. Why? The answer lies in TechCrunch, Arrington's blog about new technologies and companies. In the year since he launched the site, he has amassed such a strong following that he's become a go-to person for VCs and tech execs looking to leak corporate tidbits or announce news. More than 1.5 million readers regularly check out his site. But here's what gives Arrington real distinction: He's pulling in $60,000 in ad revenue every month. That's 10 times what the site was making earlier this year, which was when Arrington, convinced of the potentially monstrous riches ahead, quit his day job as president of a startup to blog full-time.
With Internet-like speed, blogs have gone from self-indulgent hobbies to flourishing businesses. Real businesses, with real revenue streams from real advertisers--not overhyped next big things with pick-a-number valuations based on selling out someday to some overenthusiastic big-media sugar daddy. Boing Boing, a four-person operation that bills itself as a directory of wonderful things, is on track to gross an estimated $1 million in ad revenue this year. The digital-media news site PaidContent.org, headquartered in the second bedroom of a Santa Monica apartment, is set to post even more than that. And Fark.com, a site packed with sophomoric humor run by a lone guy in Lexington, Ky., is on pace to become a multimillion-dollar property. In short, some of the most popular blogs, long the bane of the mainstream media, are themselves becoming mainstream.

What has changed? For starters, blogs today benefit from what might be termed uneconomies of scale: They are so cheap to create and operate that a lone blogger or a small team can, with the ever-expanding reach of the Internet, amass vast audiences and generate levels of profit on a per-employee basis that traditional media companies can only fantasize about.

At the same time, advertisers--shunning old-line media in favor of the Web--are discovering the unique power of blogs. Blogs offer a personal touch in the mediascape; small sites have become our guides to a content-saturated world. As such, their recommendations are highly valued by readers--which naturally has made advertisers take notice. In recent months, big-name companies like Banana Republic and Coca-Cola (Charts) have for the first time run campaigns on blogs, in the belief that blog communities often consist of concentrated numbers of the passionate and influential people all marketers want to reach. Intel bought its first blog ad in March; now all its ads run on blogs as well as traditional outlets. Says Thom Campbell, head of media strategy for Intel (Charts), "The audience on blogs is the cream of the crop."

But before you quit your day job, consider that this isn't easy money, nor is it guaranteed to last. For one thing, the market is small right now: Web ad agency Organic puts ad spending on blogs at $40 million this year. Bloggers are typically selling only about a third of their available ad space at top rates. (The rest goes at heavily discounted prices.) And as with any business dependent on the mercurial ad market, prone as it is to sudden skids, the threat of crashing and burning always looms.

Still, the blogging-for-dollars phenomenon is only in its infancy, and already blog ad spending is roughly twice what it was last year. With overall Web advertising expected to grow by 50 percent to $23.6 billion in 2010, it's certain that more and more ad dollars will land on blogs. For a growing cadre of bloggers, the opportunities to score fat profits from pumping out posts on whatever their particular passions might be are widening--and one consequence could be a radical reshaping of our notions of how to build a successful media company.

The monetization of blogging can trace its roots to late 2002, when Google (Charts) created a revolutionary system that allowed anyone with a website to run ads. The technology, called AdSense, matched ads with a site's content. Each time a visitor clicked on a linked ad, the site's owner got paid (a model now referred to as cost-per-click advertising). For the first time, anyone could be a real publisher with real advertisers, with no need for the big sales forces that magazines, newspapers, and other traditional media employ.

For do-it-yourselfers, however, the revenue stream created by AdSense in its early days was for the most part simply beer money. At the same time, display ads--the banners, buttons, and skyscrapers that had fallen into disfavor with the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000--began to make a comeback on major destination sites such as Yahoo (Charts) and MSN. Marketers pay for those kinds of ads based on a formula known as CPM, which stands for cost per 1,000 impressions.

The promise of these two Web advertising models whet the whistles of wannabe publishers, and among the first was Nick Denton. He bet that he could run sites as low-cost one- or two-person operations and offer advertisers ready-made, easily targeted niche audiences. He reasoned that he could eventually one-up automated systems by handselling display ads for his sites at premium CPMs. But to lure advertisers into uncharted blog waters, he initially gave away ad space for free.

Denton launched his company in New York in 2002 with the media gossip site Gawker and the gadget blog Gizmodo. Gawker Media now runs 13 sites, including such edgy titles as Defamer and Wonkette. Denton recently announced that he's "battening down the hatches" and selling two sites, but his core properties are on a tear: Gawker Media sites clocked 66 million pageviews in June, more than double the traffic they saw a year earlier. Denton won't discuss financial details, but industry experts estimate that Gawker Media will bring in as much as $3 million in revenue this year. Gawker Media's average CPM is between $8 and $10; CPM rates on Google AdSense and competing automated systems are estimated at anywhere from 50 cents to a few bucks.

Another pioneer, Jason Calacanis, provided a big shot of momentum to the blogging-for-bucks phenomenon last October when he sold Weblogs Inc., his conglomeration of 85 sites, to AOL for a reported $25 million. "Everyone in the ad industry took notice after that deal," says Mark Kingdon, CEO of Organic.

All the while, big-picture changes have been unfolding in the background, contributing to today's blogging business sweet spot. By constantly improving its algorithms, for instance, Google engineers have made AdSense a far more powerful placer of more-varied and better-targeted ads; AdSense alone is expected to generate sales of $4 billion this year.

At a more fundamental level, the Web has become deeply embedded in our daily lives, for business and pleasure, in ways no advertiser can ignore. Today 71 percent of American households have Web access; Americans ages 13 to 24 now spend more time online than they do in front of the TV.

As for blogs, they've exploded: There are 50 million of them, and two new ones are launched every second, according to blog search engine Technorati. To some experts, all these developments mean but one thing. "This time, Web advertising is for real," concludes Karen Francis, CEO of San Francisco-based ad agency Publicis & Hal Riney. "And marketers are all looking for new opportunities online."

Trying to provide those opportunities has become the mission of a host of would-be blog entrepreneurs. John Battelle, a founding editor of Wired magazine and the creator of the now-defunct Industry Standard (as well as a freelance columnist for Business 2.0), was working on a book about Google when he had an epiphany: Where mainstream publishers were spending a fortune buying subscriber lists and shoving subscription cards into magazines, bloggers were building huge audiences for free. Yet even popular bloggers couldn't make a living full-time; existing networks like Google and BlogAds weren't paying enough.

Unlike Denton, Battelle had no interest in owning sites. He figured he could simply peruse the blogosphere and analyze Web tracking data to find out which bloggers were already generating heavy traffic, and then serve as a middleman between them and advertisers. He launched his startup, called Federated Media Publishing, last fall with seed money from the New York Times Co. (Charts) and eBay (Charts) founder Pierre Omidyar.

Battelle compares FM's model to a record company. He and his team are the band managers; the bloggers are the bands. The key difference is that bloggers own their content, earning 60 cents of every ad dollar. Like a band manager, FM works closely with its acts, yet ultimately it's up to the bloggers to keep pumping out material. "If they stop writing, the ads go away," Battelle says.

He has signed about 75 of the most popular bloggers of various stripes and hopes to land a few hundred in all. His authors range from tech-oriented guys like Arrington and Om Malik, who writes about telecom on GigaOm and just left his full-time gig with Business 2.0, to Heather Armstrong, whose deeply personal Dooce site is bringing in enough money to allow her family to live comfortably. Her enterprise has a staff of two: Armstrong and her husband.

FM's eight-person sales force has been aggressively approaching big marketers, armed with detailed and persuasive demographics. The data has helped FM steadily boost ad rates on its sites. The average CPM doubled in the past six months to roughly $8. The aim is to get rates between $20 and $30, which, Battelle says, would put his blogs on par with sites like CNET and NYTimes.com. But thanks to the uneconomies-of-scale twist, overhead at FM sites like Boing Boing, Battelle's top act, is almost invisible compared with that of any mainline media concern.

Journalist Mark Frauenfelder founded Boing Boing, then a paper-based cyberpunk zine, in 1988 and took it online in 1995. Four years later he accepted a freelance assignment to write what became one of the first stories about blogs--and afterward decided to turn his zine into one. He discovered the power of building traffic by "deep linking" to specific stories or items on other sites. Other bloggers would return the favor, and the community grew. "I was getting a thousand visitors a day, and I thought, 'Oh, that's fun,'" Frauenfelder recalls.

Eventually he discovered that the more posts Boing Boing put up, the more traffic grew; he recruited three friends to keep the posts coming hot and heavy. By 2004 the site had 20,000 visitors a day, rivaling many mainstream magazine sites. But the team was spending about a thousand bucks a month in Web hosting fees. That's when Frauenfelder called Battelle, a former colleague, and began selling ads for the site. Today, Boing Boing's roughly 325,000 daily visitors make it the most lucrative property in Battelle's stable. Though not all of Boing Boing's ad inventory is sold, the site will gross more than $1 million this year, based on CPMs and traffic. "It's turned out to be a good business," Frauenfelder says.

But Battelle believes an eccentric blog called Fark.com, a collection of reader-submitted links to amusing videos, jokes, and curiosities from all over the Web, could become the most profitable site in mainstream blogdom. Already it vies with FM stablemate MetaFilter for the top spot in blog traffic rankings. Fark founder Drew Curtis made up the site's offbeat name as code for the real F-word when posting in chat rooms in the early 1990s. In 1993, while a student in England, Curtis began sending e-mail messages to friends back home with weird items he found in the news. In 1999 he decided to post them on a webpage.

Fark is incredibly cost-efficient: Almost all of its content is generated by its readers, and aside from Curtis it has just two contract employees, both tech guys. Fark devotees post links to news items accompanied by rubrics like "spiffy" and "dumbass," annotate them with blurbs of text, and open them up for comment. Controversial items about politics, religion, or sex ignite all-out flame wars--and, naturally, boost traffic, which overall stands at 40 million pageviews a month. The beautiful part is that virtually none of the content (pictures, videos, etc.) is hosted on Fark, which simply links to the goodies. This means that, despite its huge traffic, Fark doesn't incur the crushing bandwidth fees that eat into profit at sites like video trove YouTube.

Without a dedicated sales force, however, Curtis had trouble drawing mainstream advertisers. That changed after News Corp. (Charts) purchased MySpace and AOL bought Weblogs, moves that only boosted advertiser interest in blogs. "That hit like a hammer," Curtis says. Within days of the Weblogs sale, Curtis inked a deal with his first major advertiser, the National Hockey League. Curtis recently signed on with Battelle's FM and cut a side deal with Dennis Digital, a division of Maxim magazine's publisher. Dennis approached Curtis because Fark's audience demographic matches Maxim's. Curtis won't disclose his current revenue but insists that he can soon log monthly ad sales of $600,000 to $800,000. Battelle expects Fark to become the first indie blog to earn a million dollars a year in profit. "Fark's going to get there," he says.

Arrington also stumbled into the blog business. He was tossing back drinks at a bachelor party in Belgrade in 2005 when another Silicon Valley entrepreneur called with an idea for a startup based on the new technologies that have come to be lumped together as Web 2.0. Arrington began doing research about the emerging tech trend. He couldn't find one comprehensive source, and as he compiled his information, he decided to post it on a blog. "It was purely a hobby," he says.

People began reading. People began posting. Traffic grew. In addition to building many startups, during the 1990s Arrington had been a lawyer at the Valley's prestigious Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where he worked on IPOs and mergers, and his sources from those days began feeding him information. In March, for instance, he published screenshots of Google's new calendar application before its release. He was quickly contacted by a Google attorney, who asked that he reveal the source of the leak. (He refused.)

More and more people started to flock to TechCrunch to read scoops and analysis about new ventures. Arrington's big financial boost came a couple of months ago when he redesigned the site. He created six small boxes and announced that he was selling ad space. They sold out in a few days.

That's no surprise, considering how affluent and techie his readers are. Thirty-six percent say they spend more than 40 hours a week viewing online content, and even better, they check out TechCrunch multiple times each day. More than a third earn salaries topping $100,000, with 12 percent making more than $250,000. It's a coveted group for some advertisers.

"Sixty percent of our business is from startups," says Jeff Kearl, chief marketing officer for software maker Logoworks, which recently bought a TechCrunch sponsorship. "Arrington's blog is the epicenter of the startup community."

Big brands also want in. Apple and Hewlett-Packard just signed on to advertise on TechCrunch. Intel is planning to run ads on the site, complementing ads the chip giant has already placed on sites like Boing Boing and Gizmodo. A major appeal, Intel's Campbell says, is that a blog's unique interactive properties can vastly increase the reach of an ad, as it bounces around the Web and triggers comment on myriad sites.

Intel's current campaign for its Core 2 Duo chips brags about performance measures, something Intel hasn't done in its ads in years. By running these ads on blogs occupied by tech fanatics, Campbell expects that people will test the company's claims and write about them. "We're going out on a limb," he says. "But I'm always looking for integrity where we advertise. And these authors are passionate about their subjects."

Success stories like Arrington's have helped spur a gold rush-style stampede into the blogosphere. One of the most ambitious efforts comes from Sugar Publishing, founded in April by 32-year-old San Francisco software entrepreneur Brian Sugar with $250,000 of his own money.

Sugar Publishing's mainstay property is PopSugar, a fast-growing celebrity gossip site with 12 million monthly pageviews, an audience that took sites like Boing Boing and Fark years to build. Sugar Publishing doesn't expect to earn a dime until the end of next year, but just two months after it was founded, a Boston-based VC offered to pump in $2.5 million, valuing the company at $10 million.

PopSugar and a new generation of blogs, like Egotastic and PerezHilton.com, have built massive followings in just the past few months by devoting themselves to celebrity gossip. "We create editorial for an ADD culture," Sugar says. His ambition is to drive traffic from his gossip blog to 12 ancillary sites he'll launch during the next two years, all of them aimed at women younger than 35. The projections that Sugar shows investors claim that his small blog empire will bring in $15 million in revenue in 2008 and $40 million in 2009.

Far-fetched? Maybe. But consider this: Sugar hasn't even hired a sales staff yet, but Banana Republic already approached Sugar Publishing and bought out its entire ad inventory for a week in July. The campaign, called "Drop Your Pants," offered customers a discount if they donated pants to charity. It was the company's first blog buy.

"People who read blogs are more likely to recommend products," says Chris Nicklo, Banana Republic's vice president for brand management. "There was an amazing viral explosion."

The rapid march into the blogosphere isn't limited to entrepreneurs and advertisers: Investors are moving in too, including some with lofty pedigrees. Alan Patricof, a highly regarded VC who early on bankrolled the likes of Apple (Charts), AOL, and New York magazine, recently invested in ContentNext, the publisher of PaidContent.org and other blogs run by journalist Rafat Ali. Ali's blogs are logging about 5 million pageviews a month, and he's on pace to generate revenue of more than $1 million this year. And VC firm Softbank Capital just invested $4 million in Arianna Huffington's political and news blog, the Huffington Post, a site also backed by $1 million from Patricof's firm.

Despite all the ferment a critical question remains unanswered: Do blog ads work? Sure, readers can click on ads and view an advertiser's website, potentially even making a purchase, but that rarely happens. Intel's Campbell says the industry standard is a click-through rate of less than 1 percent.

But major advertisers aren't just looking for click-throughs; they're looking to get in front of the right audiences. "Blogs are very targeted, so one would project that ROI is very good," says Publicis & Hal Riney's Francis. "But it's still early. What may get ad dollars today may not get them tomorrow."

Any downturn in the economy and ad market will, of course, hurt bloggers. The sheer numbers of blogging-for-dollars artists charging into the game could also muddy the market and put pressure on ad rates. And profitable blogging is hard work; a solo act like Dooce's Armstrong must post constantly to keep her traffic and ad revenue up. "There are days when I panic," she says.

Still, in some ways the lean, do-it-yourself ethos of blog businesses makes them ideally equipped to deal with business cycle blows. It's far easier to weather a downturn when your costs are next to nothing. Plus, many players are diversifying, even within the blogosphere. "I know that I'm riding the Web 2.0 wave," says Arrington, who points out that he turns down frequent VC offers, some in the $5 million range, because he doesn't want to give up editorial control. Now he's preparing for a day when the wave crests.

He just launched a gadget site and staffed it with a former writer for Gizmodo, which is part of Denton's network and is packed with big-name advertisers such as Nokia and Sprint. He has plans for a gaming site and a site devoted exclusively to analyzing heavy-duty enterprise software. Even as he expands, however, he expects to keep his expenses--now about 12 percent of revenue--at no more than 30 percent.

And occasionally there are bonuses. With little effort, Arrington got dozens of sponsors, mostly Web 2.0 startups and VCs, to bankroll the party he held at August Capital. So after a night of revelry, Arrington had pocketed an extra $50,000. Now that's something to blog about.

from money.cnn.com
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Sony PlayStation 3 (60GB)

Sony PlayStation 3 (60GB)

As DVD playback made the PlayStation 2 more than just a game machine, hefty multi-media features make the Sony PlayStation 3 an even more versatile home entertainment machine. Features such as video chat, Internet access, digital photo viewing, and digital audio and video will likely make it the central component of your media set-up. Still, it is first and foremost a game console--a powerful one at that.

Under the Hood
The PS3 features IBM's "Cell" processor and a co-developed Nvidia graphics processor that makes the system able to perform two trillion calculations per second. That's approximately 320 times more calculations per second than the PS2. Along with the traditional AV and composite connections, it also boasts an HDMI port, which delivers uncompressed, unconverted digital picture and sound to compatible high-definition TV and projectors. The system is capable of 128-bit pixel precision and 1080p resolution for a full HD experience.

PlayStation 3: Tower of power

A sleek new look

With the wireless, motion-sensitive controller

Blu-Ray is the New Way
Sony's PlayStation 3 games are encoded onto the Blu-Ray disc media format, which can hold six times as much data as traditional DVDs. This increase in capacity--combined with the awesome power of its processor and graphics card--promises mind-blowing games once developers have learned how to fully harness the new console's power. The PS3 will also support CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD+R formats.

Sensational Controller
New gamers intuitively move the controller while playing, even though that movement has traditionally had no relation to what's going on in the game. Sony has picked up on this tendency and is using it to bring a new level of control into the PS3. Inside the controller is a high-precision six-axis sensing system that accurately detects fine movements in pitch, roll, and yaw, as well as three dimensions of movement, to control games. This means that future PS3 games will be controlled by the movements of your hands rather than just your thumbs. For example, you might be able to steer a car by holding the controller like a steering wheel.

While the PS3 controller looks much like its Dual Shock predecessors, it will lack the force-feedback vibration since that would only interfere with the sensing system. It uses Bluetooth 2.0 wireless technology and can support up to seven wireless controllers at a time. It's a hot-swappable system, so if your controller is running low on power, just pause your game and connect a USB 2.0 cable. You can continue playing while your controller recharges automatically.

Plays All PlayStation Games
The PlayStation 3 will be backward compatible with PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games, which means you'll be able to play all your favorite games without keeping all the old systems. The console will have slots for Memory Stick Duo, an SD slot and a Compact Flash memory slot. It comes with a pre-installed hard disc drive, which allows you to save games as well as download content from the Internet.

Gran Turismo HD

Resistance: Fall of Man

A Slew of New Games
A whole host of game publishers are already backing the PS3 and several have even confirmed games for the console. At the 2006 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), more than 30 titles were displayed for the system, including Gran Turismo HD, Resistance: Fall of Man, and Final Fantasy XIII. Previously announced titles include Metal Gear Solid 4, Devil May Cry 4 and Tekken 6.

Online
Sony has stated that the PS3 will have similar online connectivity and services as the next generation of Xbox Live. Calling it "an always on, always connected device," SCEI's chief technical officer Masa Chatani said the PS3 would be constantly in touch with a "PlayStation World" network "fundamentally based on community, communication commerce, and content." Technically, the infrastructure is there to make that connection. The PS3 supports 10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T Ethernet, as well as IEEE 802.11 b/g wireless networking protocols.

Sony has confirmed a lot of information about its newest system, but until the PS3 is out on the market, the rumor mill will continue to churn with gossip -- both unconfirmed facts and bogus news. Nevertheless, with a powerful processor, an outstanding graphics chip, and an impressive list of new games, one thing is for certain: This console has firmly placed Sony on the cutting-edge of video game entertainment and technology.

Product Description
MODEL- 98000 VENDOR- SONY PLAYSTATION FEATURES- PlayStation 3 Console- 60GB The PLAYSTATION 3 computer entertainment system unleashes a brilliant, high-definition entertainment experience. Featuring the powerful Cell Broadband Engine, PLAYSTATION 3 system delivers an experience beyond anything you know today. With a built-in Blu-ray Disc drive, PlayStation 3 system invites you to a whole new generation in high-definition graphics and digital entertainment. Whether its high-definition gaming, Blue-ray movies, music or online services, PlayStation 3 invites you to Play Beyond. Includes PlayStation 3, Memory Stick/SD/CompactFlash slots, WiFi, and a 60GB Hard Disk Drive. * Includes a Blu-ray Disc player, the latest in high-definition video, Bluetooth, four USB ports, 1080p video, HDMI (cable not included), and the advanced microprocessor, the Cell Broadband Engine. * Blu-ray Disc (BD) is the next-generation media format that delivers the ultimate high-definition entertainment experience. Just like the DVD format offered a technological leap over CDs, Blu-ray Disc is the next leap forward in the natural advancement of data storage and digital entertainment. - Blu-ray Disc offers more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs and can hold up to 25GB on a single-layer disc and 50GB on a dual-layer disc. - Pristine picture quality with the capability for full high-definition resolution 1080p. - Blu-ray Disc gives consumers a smooth way to transition to high- definition by protecting their DVD investments; Blu-ray Disc players are compatible with DVD so existing DVD collections can be enjoyed on Blu-ray hardware. - NOTE: Video output

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PlayStation 3 60GB System

60GB internal hard drive provides exceptional storage space for game saves, media and more Cell Broadband Engine state-of-the-art microprocessor is more powerful and efficient than standard single-core processors, delivering breakthroughs in fidelity and believability Blu-ray media stores up to five times more data than DVDs, providing a larger canvas for unbelievable graphics and unprecedented interaction; Blu-ray drive also plays Blu-ray movies for a high-definition experience with your favorite films

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How to Make Money with Google Adsense – A 7 Step System

How to Make Money with Google Adsense – A 7 Step System

You’ve probably heard an enormous amount of hype surrounding Google’s adsense program. You’ve probably even got the ads on some of your sites – you may even be making some money from them.

A lot of people are making money from adsense – but very few are making any decent money.

And I mean decent.

Some are earning six figure incomes from adsense alone – no wonder there’s a huge amount of hype. Like anything worthwhile though, it takes time to learn techniques that will make your efforts effective.

Here’s a brief rundown of how I go about creating a wildly successful adsense site:-

1) Find that niche – yeah, yeah, everybody gabbles on about finding that special niche. Finding that market with little competition. I’ll let you into a secret – no market has zero competition but every niche has various untapped sub-niches!

2) Pick those keywords – there are various tools you can use to do this (Wordtracker or the SEO Book keyword tool) but naturally pick those with little competition.

3) Piece together a search engine friendly site. Make it easy for Google and their rivals to spider your pages. Articles should be no more than two clicks away from the homepage.

4) Write original content – enough said

5) Get someone else to write original content for you – hire someone from guru.com or Elance – or write some more yourself, it’s great practice.

6) Place the ads so that the text wraps around them. If they look like they’re part of the text they become infinitely more clickable! Add images to the side of the ads too, but be careful not to have images that would “suggest” to the visitor he should click on the ads. Google will fall out with you!

7) Get traffic. A subject all of itself. I favour article marketing. Write articles on the subject of your site and use anchor text to link back to the site.

…and repeat.

Seriously, that’s really all there is to it. Of course there is some fine tuning to the above system – a few tips and tricks that can improve click-through and traffic. But really, that’s the crux of the matter.

So what’s stopping you? Go out and start building your empire of adsense sites right now!

from formula-too79226.blogspot.com

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Top 10 Adsense Tools to get the most of Adsense

Top 10 Adsense Tools to get the most of Adsense

I would like to jump right into the content of this article-- some of the best tools around for getting the most out of Google's Adsense campaign. First, we'll start off with the tools in order of personal preference from less useful to most useful (since there is really no good way to compare a tool-- its all in how you use it anyway).

#10
Contextual Ads Preview/Comparison Tool
This tool is helpful in comparing AdSense ads to those of other advertisement vendors (Chitika, Yahoo). You also have the ability to customize the colors and view what ads a certain URL would be likely to display. It's a pretty solid tool when planning what type of advertisements you want to put on your page (especially if you are trying to decide which vendor to sign up with).

#9

Blacklist

The Blacklist basically gives you a list of AdWord publishers that have very low payouts. It is a fact that ad space is valuable-- I would rather fill my ad space with 3 publishers offering $0.50 per click than 3 publishers offering 1 or 2 cents. By providing a list of provider domains to avoid, you can filter your ads and have a greater chance of having high-paying publisher ads displayed on your site. According its website, Blacklist works by:"...providing you with list of most commonly filtered websites whose webmasters use AdWords to attract visitors for low price click so they can convert it to high price click on their own MFA (Made for AdSense) site(s). In order to STOP these type of actions going on your sites, all you need to do is to paste our specially generated list to your AdSense Setup -> Competitive Ad Filter list. Your revenue should substantially increase."Nuff said.

#8

AdSense Calculator

This is one of my favorite tools-- it allows you to quickly calculate how much you can make given daily impressions, CTR, and CPC. Although it’s certainly easy to calculate the values yourself, this is a resource you can use to quickly get that info. It computes daily, monthly, and yearly data for both clicks and earnings. From their website:"It also serves as a tool that will allow Google AdSense users to take their current statistics and get an idea of how much they can expect to see daily, monthly and yearly. As well as those who are considering implementing AdSense on their site what results they are likely to see."For those out there who like to speculate ("hmmm, if I had 3000 impressions and a CTR of 2% and average CPC of 30 cents, what could I make...?") this is THE tool for you-- quick, simple, and easy to use.

#7

AdSense Sandbox

"This is a handy little utility if you would like to see what sort of Google AdSense ads are based on content or keywords. "This tool lets you see LOTS of ads that Adsense may be displaying on a site. Why is this good? Simply put, you can look at ads that show up for your competitor's site. And why is THAT good? You can use it to help out your own ad campaign. For example, I know Plenty of Fish (the free dating site with the ugly site design) makes a TON of money from ads. Since my site, UpHook, is in the same general category, I can look at what ads are showing up for them and see if those same sites show up on mine. If not, then I know I'm not really competing against them; and I also know that their ads are probably worth more per-click than my ads. In addition, this also gives me a list of what websites I may be competing against. And keeping an eye on one's competition is a smart move.

#6

Adsense Preview Tool

(explorer)This tool is very similar to the Sandbox. The difference is that you can generate a preview of what ads may be displayed on a page much easier. Rather than visiting a website, you can bring up a pop-up window full of ad samples by right clicking and selecting the preview tool from the pop-up window. The upside: It's easy to access and gives good information (see Tool #7)The downside: It's for Internet Explorer

#5

Adsense Notifier

(firefox)This is an invaluable too for OC people who check adsense stats every 5 minutes. Checking adsense habitually is a painful process—its like watching grass grow. But this handy little extension makes it less of a headache. The Notifier can sit in the bottom of your browser window and displays whatever stats you want-- total clicks, daily earnings, impressions, CTR, etc. Wondering if you made any more money yet? You can find out with a quick glance. It’s highly configurable and can save you bunch of time.

#4

Competitive Ads Filter

Now we're getting to the heavy hitters. This tool is actually part of the Adsense setup manager, so you have to already have an AdSense account to use it. You can use the ad filter to block specific ads from appearing on your pages. Simply give the filter a list of URLs and they are effectively prevented from displaying on your site/blog. This can be useful for a few reasons:

1- You can prevent competition form advertising on your site. This could directly benefit from you by helping to ensure that people stay on your site and not jump on the first ad offering the same thing your site does. Due to the targeted-advertisement nature of AdSense, if you have a service site there is a good chance that your competition will have ads showing up on your site all the time. For example, all the ads that show up on my site (free personals, etc) are for other sites offering dating and personals and matchmaking, etc. For some people this is bad-- but for others it can be a good thing.

2- You can prevent irrelevant ads from being displayed. I mentioned this in a previous blog post-- there are some cases where you want to get rid of ads that don't really correlate well with your site content. Remember, AdSense is just a software system-- it tries to determine what ads to serve up based on some site content. There is a chance that it can guess wrong. And when that happens, you can use the filter to help correct things. Have a site about dogs being cooler than cats but AdSense shows a bunch of ads about pro-cat books? Just chug the bogus cat sites into the filter and you'll be all set.

3- You can block publishers that have low-paying ads. This is helpful in making sure you get the best value for your space. Using the Blacklist tool to get a list of low-paying publishers and plugging their domains into your competitive ads filter can quite possibly earn you more money in the long run.These are all good uses for the filter, however, there is a drawback to using this tool-- if you are trying to filter entire groups of content by using the filter, you will only see temporary results. As more sites pop up, you will likely have to keep updating the filter. This is why this tool is best suited for blocking sites that are in direct competition with yours.

#3

Word Tracker

I know some people who swear by this tool. Although you have to sign up to get unlimited access to the service, the trial will probably give provide enough useful information for you to enhance your AdSense experience. Word Tracker pretty much tells you how often people search for a specific keyword. It can also estimate how many competing sites use those keywords. This is probably the best tool to use before deciding what content to include on your page. If there are a lot of competitors, it may be better to target one of the less-searched-for words. Chances are, you will be able to get indexed higher in a search engine for those terms as opposed to going head-to-head with the competition for the popular words. Obviously, this can drive traffic to your site. Users are more likely to visit matches that show up within the first 2 or 3 pages of a Google search than they are to visit matches on page 87. Why not opt for being indexed in the first 1-50 matches? Sure, you will get less searches overall, but you will be much more visible.According to their website:"Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client's business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors."This tool is can be used for things other than AdSense. However, it just so happens that popular search keywords are also popular AdSense keywords. Go figure.

#2

Overture Bidding Tool

This tool gives you both suggested keywords AND sample bid amounts given a target word. Although Overture is NOT the same as AdSense, the keywords are almost the same as those suggested when signing up for an AdSense account. In addition, I've found that the bids listed are pretty darn close to those offered by AdWords publishers. Using this tool, it would be trivial to build a list of high-paying keywords that you would want to make sure you use in your content.If you ensure that mostly high-paying ads are displayed on your site, you will be getting the most out of your ad space. Think about it-- a user isn’t going to know how much each ad is worth before they click it. They are likely to click on almost any ad that appeals to them. Why not make sure that those ads will pay the most money? Using the Overture bidding tool to get other suggested keywords is also useful-- however, be careful not to saturate your page content with a bunch of keywords. This can make your site/blog look tacky. A few here and there should be enough for the AdSense spider to throw up high-paying ads. Combined with the Blacklist, this is an excellent tool to use as an alternative to the AdWords Bidding Tool.

#1

AdWords Bidding Tool/Traffic Estimator

This is probably the most useful tool out there. The only drawback is that you must have an AdWords account to get access to the information. I would suggest getting AdWords anyway, since it gives you a good idea of what publishers go through and what options they have when creating ads. This bidding tool is THE resource for figuring out what keywords result in the highest paying AdSense ads. It's quite possible that all those pages and blogs that list the Top X-number of highest paying AdSense keywords use the bidding information found through AdWords or Overture. As a site/blog owner, its important to know what words you might want to emphasize in your content. The traffic estimator will take a set of keywords and tell you the estimated average CPC based on current publisher bidding statistics. Knowing that the estimated CPC of my keywords can pull ads paying between $3 and $8 on average, I know that I am in a very good position to make money from my AdSense advertising. Although these CPCs are average values, and I'm sure Google will only show those ads on very well-performing sites, it at least lets me know what I have to look forward to when I start bringing in a larger amount of traffic.

Honorable Mentions:

The Heat Maps

Not really a tool. But for those people who don't know, this can increase your earnings substantially-- especially if you have ads in all the wrong places.

AdsenseAccelerator

I don't really know much about this site, other than some people apparently bought the tool and use it to easily find the best keywords. I'm not big on buying stuff, so I wouldn't really use it. But if anybody is interested in trying (or has already tried) it and doesn't mind paying a few bucks, feel free to let me know if its worth the money. I’ve heard good things about it.

Getting the most out of AdSense hinges upon your ability to optimize. Using these tools can certainly help out. If you have (or plan to have) AdSense on your site/blog then I think its a very good idea to look at some of the tools out there and try to ensure that you are utilizing your ad space in a smart way.

Keywords: Google Adsense optimization high paying most profitable tools adwords traffic blacklist keywords

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