Cheney! Just GO Already!
Apr 25, 2007 Blog General
When a very conservative, very mormon, and very influential student body wants to pull their speaking invitation back from the Vice President, you might just have hit a new low. He’s not official uninvited yet, but he’s close. (And I hope it happens). Cheers Cheney! Enjoy your the rest of your life in Dubai when your term is over, because it’s not just BYU but the whole country (well at least 82% of us) is ready to give you the boot.
Links:
BYU Alternative Commencement
BYU Stop Cheney!
Oppose Cheney’s Speech
MoveOn Bulletin
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The AdSense Dilemna
Apr 20, 2007 Business & Marketing
So, as you may have noticed I added AdSense to this site again. This is always a struggle for me. I’d really not prefer to have AdSense on my personal site but sometimes, financially speaking, I really need to. Typically I prefer to only feature ads from services I use and support, and since AdSense is contextual, there is no way to really vouch for the advertisers being displayed. Nevertheless the fact that sometimes the ads just don’t fit. With a last name like Murphy, expect to see a lot of ads for beds, shoes, Irish beer, and cleaning oils.
Luckily the mismatching occurs mostly on my index and archive pages. It appears a lot of the individual posts are still getting the automagical advertising right. I’m going to test this out for a few weeks and then make a decision of whether or not to keep the ads or take them off again. The timing is right for the test though. With our recent move to a new house and a new baby that will be arriving within weeks, I’ll take whatever ads/clicks I can get. We’ll see if that is the case in the next few weeks if it is worth the minor annoyances or not.
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Traffic On The Cheap
Apr 20, 2007 Business & Marketing
Lately I’ve been finding myself missing the days of SurfWake.com, a popular manual traffic exchange that I once owned (and is now defunct). It was a good supply of constant, cheap traffic. When you have a surplus of visitors in the millions each month you find ways to monetize that traffic no matter what the quality. In my database there were over 100,000 members and I’d say a good 30% of them were active at any given moment. It was great to be an exchange owner whenever a hot new marketing site or affiliate program rolled out. I’d just use my leftover inventory and promote the new program to the point of infiltration. Nowadays when a new program rolls out and I need instant an instant boost, I have to rely on other brokers to buy website traffic.
So here’s the news: I partnered up with a friend in the industry and we decided to have another go at the traffic game. We’re in the planning stages of developing a unique traffic exchange now but will launch in the next month or so.
What is interesting is that I went back into my records and found a lot of my other accounts on traffic exchanges that are still enabled. Back in the early day of manual surf sites, owners would often swap left over inventory with other manual surf sites in attempts to boost each others memberships in a co-op effort. It appears that the residual effects of these previous swaps have been sending thousands, perhaps millions of impressions to a bunch of URLs that are no longer around. I’m in the middle of recovering a few of these accounts and salvaging any remainder traffic so I have some inventory to launch my new network.
This site will be a part-time effort. That’s the great thing about traffic exchanges. Once they are setup, they are very easy to maintain. I know I’ll be spending a lot of evenings and weekends enhancing the scripts with my partner, but for the most part our dev time will focus on new features and not on tedious tasks.
I’m pretty excited about this new effort. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time before I was approached with the offer. So as soon as I heard that my friend wanted to try this business out, I was primed and ready to jump in.
Want to know when we launch our new network? There are two ways to get notified as soon as we do launch it. The first way is this blog. Subscribe to my RSS feed and watch for the announcement. The second way is to subscribe to the industry watchdog newsletter at HitExchangeNews. We’ll be either taking out an ad or doing an interview there once our site is out of beta. Either way, stay tuned and watch for the big update!
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