Practical Web Programming

Monday, December 31, 2007

2007 Make Money Online Review

It's been more than one a half year since I started my campaign to make money online through Adsense. The seed was planted when a co-worker introduced me to Adsense. Since then I received three payout check. My latest was just last November. And now I'll be passing again the 100 dollar mark, so I'll be expecting again a payout this January.

Goal

My goal to make 10 dollars per day with Adsense last 2007 was not realized but I'm doing fine and my earnings per day is increasing. So I'll just carry out that goal to this year, 2008.

In the effort to increase my earnings, I sorted to other revenue stream like Payperpost and text link ads and I also made good revenue with it, almost 70 percent of my Adsense income last year.

Strategies for the Year

Although I'm doing fine with my revenue, it's still not half of my goal income for Adsense. The problem with me is I tend to "bite more than I could chew". I maintained many blogs and websites that I can't give all of it proper attention. I know SEO a bit, so instead of aggressively marketing my websites, I rely mostly in search engines. So this year, 2008, I'll be marketing my websites more instead of relying in search engines. I'll also divide my time between my website to give more focus to it.

Visual Basic: How To Automatically Drop Down Combo Box

Here's a code snippet on how to automatically drow down the combo box control in Visual Basic 6 without using an API

'-->HOW TO AUTO DROPDOWN A COMBO WITHOUT USING API FUNCTION
Private Sub Combo1_GotFocus()
SendKeys "%+{DOWN}"
End Sub

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

9 More Way To Boost Traffic To Your Website

Here are 9 more ways that you can do to increase more traffic to your website. Read on...

1) Writing a Series of posts like this one, keep your readers captivated by continuing on with a series. Try to be original, if you find out about a new product or service try to blog about it first.

2) Write Product Reviews, I quite like this one. Write honest reviews of other peoples products then ask for a link.

3) Write Lists, like the top ten or top twenty or even top 100 best ways to do something. These attract links like crazy when done right. They also usually do well on social networking sites like Digg or Stumbleupon.

4) Comment on other peoples blogs, try & strike a relationship with other bloggers in your niche or topic. Once you build up a relationship you can exchange links or even ask for them to post about one of your recent entries & vice versa.

5) Write Articles & publish them on article directories. Include links to your blog in the resource box. Make sure & use relevant anchor text like Earn Money Blogging etc

6) Add links to your site on Wikipedia in the relevant section. So for example if your site if about pottery, add a link to your site in the relevant section. Sometimes the links get deleted if they don’t deem your site relevant enough, but sometimes the links stay & give good traffic

7) If you sell a product creating an affiliate program can drastically increase your exposure & also increase your incoming link count. Provided you use an SEO Friendly Affiliate Program.

8) Include options on your site that allows visitors to email articles to friends, vote for articles & generally participate more. This will increase the chance they will recommend your site or mention it to someone else.

9) Claim your blog on Technorati & include an “Add to Favourites” button on your sidebar. The more popular your blog becomes, the more people will add it to their favourites.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Merry Christmas To All

Monday, December 17, 2007

12 More Ways To Increase Website Traffic

If you're struggling to increase traffic to your website or blog, here's another tips I can share with you. Read on.

1. Create A Press Release. Creating a press release about your website will encourage curiuosity and will persuade others to visit your website.

2. Sell Your Product On Ebay. Ebay is a hotbed of shoppers. They’re already ready to buy. Simply put your product in front of them and you’ll get new sales. In this lesson, I’ll reveal the key mistakes most people make when advertising their products… and how to pump maximum profits out of Ebay.


3. Sell Your Product On Amazon.com. Amazon is another hotbed of shoppers. People visit Amazon ready to buy products.

4. Sell Your Product On Froogle. Froogle is yet another little-known hotbed of shoppers. At this site, visitors come with credit card in hand and in ready-to-buy mood.

5. Start A Blog. Google loves Blogs. It’s a surefire way to increase your targeted traffic.

6. Post Comments On Other Blogs. Another way to immediately start driving more traffic is to simply post meaningful comments on other people’s blogs.

7. Write A "How-To" Report. Generate meaningful traffic simply by writing a how-to report about your product or service.

8. Get Others To Promote Your Site For You. Recruit affiliates and other partners and offer them a good incentives for bringing traffic to your websites. Incentives can be cash or free ebooks or services.


9. Write Regular, Impactful Articles. This is one of the most powerful, free strategies you can use to get targeted traffic.

10. Turn Your Ebook Into An Audiobook. This one is really a no-brainer. And it takes just a few minutes. Not everybody likes to sit at the computer and read. More and more, we’re finding that people prefer to purchase audiobooks that they can take “on the road.”

11. Convert Ebooks Into E-reader Format. This is another untapped niche. Traditional ebooks can’t be read on PDAs and other such devices. But the demand is there, and people who can afford PDAs and other such gadgets have money to spend.

12. Get Links From Other Relevant Sites. By trading links with other relevant sites, you can dramatically increase your traffic and search rankings (link popularity is one of the key factors that Google looks for).

Thursday, December 13, 2007

How To Generate Website Traffic Using Free Methods

While there are ways to jumpstart your traffic flows, many sites don’t have the resources that others have to generate more traffic for your site. Well, you don’t have to spend a cent; all you need is the proper mindset and a lot of eagerness. You also must have the drive and perseverance to do hard work and research to generate more traffic for your site.

How sweet it is to have more traffic for your site without spending a single cent. Now it’s a sure thing that many sites have articles that offer tips and guidelines in how to generate traffic using only free methods. Because it is possible, you don’t need to speed a single cent, it may take time, to say honestly, I’m not going to beat around the bush with you. You get better chances by paying for your advertisements, but at least you get a fighting chance with some of these free methods I’m about to tell you.

Take advantage of online forums and online communities

The great thing about forums and online communities is that you can target a certain group that fits the certain demographic that you are looking for. You can discuss about lots of things about the niche that you represent or offer. Another great advantage is that you know what you are getting into and you will be prepared.

Build reputation in online communities and forums

Show them what you are made of and wow them with your range of expertise about the subject, with that you can build a reputation and build trust with the people in your expertise and knowledge.

Make your own newsletters

Provide people with a catalog of your products and interesting and entertaining articles. If you make it really interesting and entertaining, more people will sign up for your newsletter and recommend it to other people. The more people who signs up for your newsletter, the more people there will be that will go to your site increasing your traffic.

Trade links with other similar sites

You don’t have to spend a cent. All you have to do is reach an agreement with another webmaster. With exchanging links, the efforts both sites do will benefit both sites. Every traffic that goes to the site could potentially click on the link of your site and visit your site as well. This works well especially when both sites feature the same niche.

Write articles that could pique the peoples attention

Try writing articles that will provide tips and guides to other aficionados. Writing articles that provide good service and knowledge to other people would provide the necessary mileage your traffic flow needs.

Submit your articles to article directories

When people find interest in your articles they have a good chance of following the track by finding out where the article originated. Include a link or a brief description of your company with the article and there’s a great probability that they will go to your site.

Write good content for your site

Many search engines track down the keywords and keyword phrases your site uses and how they are used. It is not a requirement that a content should be done by a professional content writer. You could do your on but you have to make content for your site that is entertaining as well as informational. It should provide certain requirements as well as great quality.

Generally, internet users use search engines to find what they are looking for. Search engines in return use keyword searching in aiding their search results. With the right keywords, you could get high rankings in search engine results without the costs.

All of these methods and more will drive more traffic to your site for free. All it takes is a bit of effort and extended man hours. Learn all you can about the methods depicted here and you will soon have a site with a great traffic flow without the usual costs that come with it.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

5000 Visitors and Counting

This blog reaches another milestone today. It recorded more than 5000 visitors as of this writing, and still counting. This is because of my Top 25 Explanations by Programmers post which I submitted to Digg last December 8. It was only dugged 12 times, but when aroman07 and wuzetez submitted it to wykop and dzone, the traffic started to soar even higher.

My Sitemeter Log


Traffic from social bookmarking websites is not permanent. It has it's ups and downs depending to how interesting your post is.

Well, I think I ought to write more interesting posts if I want to keep up this kind of traffic. Hhmmm, what's next? (think, think, think)

Monday, December 10, 2007

Is This The End of Agloco?

Today, I received an email from Agloco (I think all members do). Is this is a sign that Agloco is going down.

We would like to update you on the status of AGLOCO's operations. We continue to believe in the AGLOCO concept, but our revenue is currently not sufficient to give Members a meaningful distribution. And though there are increases in membership, the resulting revenue is not enough to support operating costs. As a development team we are unable to continue to use our savings to fund the operations. If any Member would like to pursue continuing the operations of AGLOCO, you may contact us at agloco1@live.com .

We would like to thank every Member for supporting our effort to bring a piece of the Internet directly to the user. We hope that we can find a way to keep the operations going.

AGLOCO Development Team


Accumulated Hours and Members



This is my accumulated hours and network members as of today. I can still remember when I signed up for this. I was hopeful at that time that this will earn me money.

My friends and officemate would be disappointed with this news. I was the one who introduced and invited them to this program. They were also hopeful that this will become profitable.

Well, I just hope this is not going to end like this.

Sunday, December 09, 2007

How To Export To OpenOffice Spreadsheet (Calc) in VB6

Exporting data to MS Excel is relatively easy. But if you are an advocate of Opensource software, you maybe using OpenOffice instead of Microsort Office.

This visual basic source codes show how to export the contents of the MSFlexGrid into OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet.

To test this source codes, open a Visual Basic 6 project add the ff. controls to a form: an MSFlexGrid, a CommandButton. Then, copy and paste the source codes to your project and you're good to go.

Public Sub ExportGridToCalc(grdTemp As MSFlexGrid, _
strTitle As String, _
Optional lngStartRow As Long = -1, _
Optional lngEndRow As Long = -1, _
Optional lngStartCol As Long = -1, _
Optional lngEndCol As Long = -1)

Dim oSM As Object 'Object for accessing OpenOffice
Dim oDesk As Object 'Objects from the API
Dim oDoc As Object 'Objects from the API
Dim oSheet As Object 'Objects from the API
Dim arg() 'Ignore it for the moment !
Dim lngRow As Long
Dim lngCol As Long

'-->SET FIRST THE ROWS AND COLS
If lngStartRow = -1 Then lngStartRow = 1
If lngEndRow = -1 Then lngEndRow = grdTemp.Rows - 1
If lngStartCol = -1 Then lngStartCol = 0
If lngEndCol = -1 Then lngEndCol = grdTemp.Cols - 1

'Instanciate OOo : this line is mandatory with VB for OOo API
Set oSM = CreateObject("com.sun.star.ServiceManager")
'Create the first and most important service
Set oDesk = oSM.createInstance("com.sun.star.frame.Desktop")
'Create a new doc
Set oDoc = oDesk.loadComponentFromURL("private:factory/scalc", "_blank", _
0, arg())
'Get the first sheet in the doc
Set oSheet = oDoc.getSheets().getByIndex(0)

Call oSheet.getCellByPosition(0, 0).setString(strTitle)
For lngRow = lngStartRow To lngEndRow
For lngCol = lngStartCol To lngEndCol
Call oSheet.getCellByPosition(lngCol, lngRow + _
IIf(lngStartRow = 0, 2, 1)).setString(grdTemp.TextMatrix(lngRow, _
lngCol))
Next
Next
End Sub

Private Sub LoadDataToGrid()
Dim lngRow As Long
Dim lngCol As Long

With MSFlexGrid1
.Rows = 11
.Cols = 5
.FixedCols = 0

For lngRow = 0 To 5 - 1
.TextArray(lngRow) = "Header " & lngRow + 1
Next

For lngCol = 0 To 5 - 1
For lngRow = 1 To 10
.TextMatrix(lngRow, lngCol) = "R " & lngRow & " - C " & lngCol + 1
Next
Next
End With
End Sub

Private Sub Command1_Click()
Call ExportGridToOOCalc(MSFlexGrid1, "Exporting to OpenOffice")
End Sub

Private Sub Form_Load()
Call LoadDataToGrid
End Sub

Friday, December 07, 2007

Top 25 Explanations by Programmers...

...When their programs don't work.

1. Strange...
2. I've never heard about that.
3. It did work yesterday.
4. Well, the program needs some fixing.
5. How is this possible?
6. The machine seems to be broken.
7. Has the operating system been updated?
8. The user has made an error again.
9. There is something wrong in your test data.
10. I have not touched that module!
11. Yes yes, it will be ready in time.
12. You must have the wrong executable.
13. Oh, it's just a feature.
14. I'm almost ready.
15. Of course, I just have to do these small fixes.
16. It will be done in no time at all.
17. It's just some unlucky coincidense.
18. I can't test everything!
19. THIS can't do THAT.
20. Didn't I fix it already?
21. It's already there, but it has not been tested.
22. It works, but it's not been tested.
23. Somebody must have changed my code.
24. There must be a virus in the application software.
25. Even though it does not work, how does it feel?

I think I'm guilty of some of this. (^_^)

See also:
10 Type Of Girls in the IT World
Drawbacks of being a programmer

Never Give Up

A funny yet inspiring picture that I found from the net. I wonder which of the two will give up. (^_^)

Thursday, December 06, 2007

Make Money Online with SponsoredReview

Here's another way to make money online from your blog, SponsoredReviews.com. Like PayPerPost, SponsoredReviews also offers bloggers a chance to make money from there blog, doing reviews about products, services and websites by advertisers.

How Much Can I Earn?
Good question. With SponsoredReviews, you set your own price. Depending on the size of your readership/visitors and the quality of your blog posts, you can earn anywhere from $10 to $1000 per review. If your blogs is big in terms of visitors and pageviews monthly, you might be able to get even more.

Payment Period
You will receive your outstanding earnings two weeks after your review is completed via PayPal. So you need to sign-up first to PayPal before joining SponsoredReviews. You can check your payment history and a summary of your outstanding earnings on our site at any time via your control panel.


Also For Advertisers
SponsoredReviews is not only for bloggers, but also for advertisers. If you want to launch a new product or service, create buzz about your new website, get constructive feedback from bloggers and build high quality links, you can also do it here.

Monday, December 03, 2007

Uncommon Ways to Increase Website Traffic: Blog Comments

Blogs are everywhere today in the Internet. In fact there are more than a hundred millions of blogs today and more than a hundred thousand are being built everyday.

Blogs has a comments section, except it the owner disables it. Bloggers use comments to interact with each other and use it to make a "connection" to thier readers. Others use it as a medium to ask for a link exchange - as I have done and still doing. And many more.

So What's in a Comment? How Can I Gain Traffic From It?

Most blogging engine, especially Wordpress, allows you to put your name, email address and your website link in the comment section. Others like Blogger, only allows comments and the default link to you profile. But regardless what blogging engine, you can put your links in the comment area.

See below for some benefits you can gain from commenting to blogs.

1. Search Engine Optimization

Search result ranking of search engines like Google, is based on many factors. One of them is the number of links and anchor text consistency to a website. The higher the number of link and the consitency of the anchor text, the higher you go up to the search result page.

One good example is the word "here". Make a google search of that word and you will see that the number one in the result page is the Adobe Reader Download. There is no connection of the word "here" with Adode, but since most website owner use the word "here" to direct their users to the Adobe download page, Google's search algorithm think it is relevant to the website and so puts it to the top.

2. Exposure
One way to increase your traffic is to make others know that your site exists. Putting your link in comments is one way to do it. This really works as some visitors are curiuos about the blogs visitors and they are enticed to click your link.

3. Connection
As I said earlier, you can make a connection to other bloggers by using comments. Once your connections are stablished, it becomes easy for you to promote your other websites to other bloggers.

Summary
Commenting in other blogs is a good way to promote you website and to letting others know that you (and your website) exist in this virtual world. It also helps you form connections with other bloggers.

Two important notes is to always use the same anchor text everytime you put your link. And to be sensible always in your comments so that blog owners will not delete it.

Sunday, December 02, 2007

TV, Source of Information and Violence

Television is really a powerful form of communication. With millions of people watching the television everyday, no wonder TV ads are so expensive especially during primetime. There's the news, drama series, home shopping and a lot more . Remember the as seen on tv products or services? Well, as the name suggest, they all first seen on TV.

But do you know aside from being a source of knowledge, TV is also a source of violence? According to statistics, the average child will watch 8,000 murders on TV before finishing elementary school. And by age eighteen, the average American has seen 200,000 acts of violence on TV, including 40,000 murders.

Well, if you are serious about protecting your child against violence, you should limiting the TV viewing time. Just my two cents.

Uncommon Ways to Increase Website Traffic: Community Websites

Community websites are common these days. Some very popolar are friendster and myspace and there are thousands more out there which slowly becoming popular also. Doing a Google search will literally gives you hundred of thousands of it.

Most, if not all, community websites allows you post bulletins and blogs and to message anybody in the community. Community websites are not only good for socializing and contacting your old friends and colleagues. They are also a good traffic source for your website.

Imagine if you can post bulletins and you have thousands of members/friends in that community. That's automatically thousands of backlinks to your website as well. If your members/friends are targeted, which means their interest is the same as your website's theme, there is a big chance that they will read your bulletins and click your link to your website. And if you write good posts, they will surely come back for more, maybe for weeks or years, and chances are, they will tell their peers about your website and the process will repeat itself - a powerful viral marketing technique.

Tips When Joining a Community Websites:

1. Pick Between One to Three. Don't join all the community websites out there. That will too time consuming and difficult to maintain. Pick and join only the top three websites.

2. Regularly Add Friends. Keep in mind that the more friends you add, the more potential traffic to have for your websites. Regularly add friends to your profile.

3. Join Groups of Your Interest. Joining groups within your interest and website's content will keep your friends targeted. And they are more likely read your bulleting posts.

4. Don't Spam. Don't post bulletins that are of no value and don't overpost. Make sure that your post will help or inform your friends of something in one way or another.

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Computer and Coffee

I'm a big coffee drinker, I admit that. I guess aside from a computer, coffee is another tool for a programmer. Especially if you lack sleep, sitting there in front of the PC without a cup of coffee is like sitting in your bed. (^_^)

At the office I drink two to three cups of coffee. We have coffee makers but I like 3-in-1 coffee instant coffee more because homemade coffee gives me hyperacidity.

At first, drinking more than two cups of coffee worries me, after I read the health benefits of it, I hungry for more. Here are some benefits of coffee: lower your risk of diabetes, Parkinson's disease, colon cancer, lift your mood and treat headaches.

PC Clean-up

It's really good to have your tool storage always organize and handy because you'll never know when you will need them.

Today, I cleaned up my home personal computer. Problem is, I can't found my paintbrush that I use to clean up the inside part of my PC and the keyboard. I can't remember where I put the last time I used it. I may have put it in other place and forgot to get it back and return to my storage. I'm an organize type of person but sometimes forgetful. I ended up using just the vacuum cleaner to clean my PC.

It's been almost two months since the last time I cleaned my personal computer. My blogging and effort in making money online campaigns really took most of my time that I forgot to pay attention to the tool I'm using, my beloved PC. Good thing that PC don't have feelings. (^_^)

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