Our startup company needed to decide if we were going to write our apps for the 3.0 OS only or support the older OS versions as well. But we wanted to make an informed decision, so I went hunting for data.

Luckily, AdMob has collected a lot of this data in their monthly reports. Here are a few facts that I’ve gleaned.

iPhone OS Adoption

So, what does AdMob tell us?

Overall, about 84% of iPhone OS devices (iPhone and iPod Touch combined) are running 3.0 or higher.

But:

We still see a significant difference between iPhone and iPod touch users upgrades, which isn’t surprising given the $5 upgrade requirement for the iPod touch. 91% of iPhone requests are 3.0 or 3.1, compared to only 35% of iPod touch requests.

Via: iPhone OS Adoption

iPhone vs iPod Touch Paid App Purchases

This actually surprised me! My gut feeling was that iPod Touch users would buy, on average, less paid apps per month than iPhone users. But, clearly, from the data that AdMob has collected, my assumption was wrong. iPod Touch users are just as likely to pay for apps.

Via: July 2009 Metrics Report

So, why does all this matter?

If only 35% of iPod Touch users have the iPhone 3.0 OS, but they tend to pay for apps just as frequently as iPhone users (who are largely on the 3.0 OS already), is it worth ignoring them, just to use Core Data?

In our case, we went with ‘Yes, it’s worth ignoring them’, if only because, overall, 84% of iPhone OS devices are on 3.0. And, over time, that number will continue to get higher and higher, as even the new iPod Touch devices come pre-installed with 3.0.

What would you do?

So far, for the Month of December, the Top Commentators on my website are:

• chovy
• Michael Kwan
• GetRich
• HAL
• Heather in Beautiful BC
• Bernardine Felix
• MLDina
• eddie34
• John – Ottawa SEO

Thanks everyone!

It’s for this reason (and for the fact that I’m near dead-last on the list of Internet Marketing Top Blogs) that I’ve been experimenting with ways of improving my Alexa Traffic Rank.

And I must say, I feel that I’ve been successful. Over the last 2 weeks, my Alexa Traffic Rank has improved significantly.

My Alexa Traffic Rank climb

Two weeks ago, I had a 3-month Alexa Traffic Rank average in the 1,300,000’s.

Last week, that ranking improved to 942,966.

Today, my 3-month Alexa Traffic Rank is listed as 765,305. And Alexa tells me that, over the last 3-months, my ranking has improved by 643,157 positions!

But, even more, my 1-week Alexa Traffic Rank is a startling 240,335!

So, how is this possible?

Everyone knows that a simple, yet arguably inefficient way to improve your traffic rank is to just increase overall website traffic. Hopefully the traffic you’re gaining has Alexa Toolbar users in the mix, otherwise it won’t affect your Alexa Traffic Rank.

The real quick way to get instant results is to TARGET Alexa Toolbar users.

Pointless Analogy

So, for the sake of this pointless analogy, let’s say that improving your Alexa Traffic Rank is akin to working out at the gym and building muscle mass. The only real reason to do either of those two activities is to impress others. I mean, having a great Alexa Traffic Rank doesn’t mean your site is successful and having huge muscles doesn’t mean you’re healthy.

Let’s say your goal was to develop a great-looking, enviable body. You could approach this in two ways. Either use the complete set of gym equipment available to do a complete full body workout. Or, instead, concentrate on the muscle groups that will show off your results much quicker, like your arms and chest.

If you’re goal is to simply impress the average person, then the 2nd way may be a quicker way to your goal.

That’s the same with how we’re going to super-charge your Alexa Traffic Rank. Listed below are 3 easy, quicker ways of improving your Alexa Traffic Rank for instant results.

3 Ways to Improve your Alexa Traffic Rank

1) Install the Alexa Toolbar! This is a no-brainer. With the Alexa Toolbar installed, every time you visit your blog (up to once per day), you’re helping to boost your Alexa Traffic Ranking. 

2) Attract visitors likely to have the Alexa Toolbar installed. This is simple. Head over to Google Blog Search, and do a search for alexa traffic rank. Sort by Date. Now, you’ve got a list of people that have blogged about the Alexa Traffic Rank. There’s a very high possibility that each of these bloggers have the toolbar installed.

Play on their ego: Visit their blog and write a glowing comment about your attempt at improving your Alexa Traffic Rank. I will bet you that every single one of these bloggers will check out your site in return. Bloggers (including myself) love seeing whose linking to them and/or commenting on their site.

And as an added bonus, many of their subsequent visitors, also seeking Alexa Traffic Rank hints (and who also probably have the toolbar installed), will see your comment and hit up your blog too! It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

3) Attract even more visitors likely to have the Alexa Toolbar installed! How? Blog about the Alexa Toolbar or the Alexa Traffic Rank on your own blog! Attract people searching for advice on how to improve their Alexa Traffic Rank (and who also hopefully read this blog post first and already installed the Alexa Toolbar themselves).

Then what?! Repeat Step 2 and Step 3 over and over and over. To help you out, add the RSS feed to the Google Blog Search results for alexa traffic rank to your RSS Reader. Comment on all new posts about the subject. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The cycle continues! And others may use you as part of their own cycle! But no matter, in a few weeks, you’ll be the envy of your blog friends, with a super-charged Alexa Traffic Rank!

The idea is to choose one of Market Leverage’s CPA offers and share how you’d market the idea. From the submitted blog posts, a few winners will be chosen: 1 winner by Zac, and the rest by Market Leverage.

How to Enter This Contest

1. If you aren’t already an affiliate with Market Leverage, sign up for an account.
2. Browse the various campaigns on the Market Leverage website and choose one that you’d like to “promote”.
3. Write a blog post or create a YouTube video, detailing your promotion ideas for the chosen campaign. (Quality and Originality will be two factors that determine the contest winners, so make your posts stand out!)
4. Head over to Zac’s blog and leave a comment on the contest post with a URL to your entry.
5. (Optional) Follow through and actually make some money executing your campaign promotion strategy!

On January 5th, the winners will be chosen. Who knows, maybe it’ll be you!

Below is my entry to the contest. It’s a little tongue-in-cheek, but who knows, it could actually work!

My “Share Your Secret” Contest Entry

The campaign that I would promote is the “Are You Psychic – Mobile Fun Test” campaign, which pays out a decent $8 per lead.

I’d choose this product because of the growing media buzz around fringe sciences, the paranormal, and conspiracies. Just look at some of the new TV shows to hit the airwaves recently: Fringe, The Mentalist, Monk, Psych, and probably a bunch more I’m not aware of.

I’d target the audiences of these TV shows, because I figure that people that enjoy these shows are also open to the idea of ESP, and possibly have dreamed about having ESP or being a psychic.

Two methods:

1) Advertise on Social Media sites like Facebook. Zero in on the favourite TV shows that users list on their profiles, and target users who list the ones I mentioned earlier. Create ads targeting those TV shows and asking the question, “Are you Psychic?” Or, ”Are you a Mentalist?” etc.

2) Advertise on Search Engines using AdWords. This time, target keywords like “fringe tv show”, “fringe tv series”, “the mentalist tv show”, “psych tv series”.

Direct users to your landing pages, with each TV show getting it’s own, customized landing page. Sell the campaign. Rake in the dough.

The Goal
To attain a Page Rank of PR1 within 1 week.

The Reasoning
Although from a search engine perspective, Page Rank may be losing relevance, from a marketing perspective, Page Rank is still a useful and necessary indicator of website authority. For folks offering paid links or posts from their blog, the Page Rank value is not only important, but often necessary even to get the conversation started.

Keith’s goal was to begin using the KickJoey.com domain as a platform for paid reviews, so, attaining a Page Rank was deemed a necessity.

The Result
Unfortunately, after one week, even with some promotion across the blogosphere, his domain remained at PR0. But that never really surprised anyone, considering how infrequently Page Rank gets updated. To be honest, I didn’t think Keith had a chance. I figured he’d have to wait til the next big Google index PR update occurred, if Google ever does one of those again.

Happily, there is a positive ending to this story. After 4 more weeks of waiting, Keith did notice his domain was finally awarded a Page Rank of PR2.

While you might say to yourself, “But it’s just a PR2. Why the fuss?” Why the fuss? Because I can honestly tell you I know many other bloggers who are still waiting for their PR to update after many months of waiting. Is it just bad luck on their part? Probably not.

When asked about the PR2 Page Rank, Keith mentioned to me that he probably owes it to the 4 PR4 backlinks he received while promoting the experiment (and less so to the PR2 backlink that he got from this site, LOL).

Well, there ya have it. A happy ending to the 1-Week PR Experiment.

And if there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that if you’re a new blogger anxious to be awarded a Page Rank, you better make some friends in high places… I mean, with high Page Rank…

I attempted to remedy that by driving targetted search engine traffic to the site via PPC advertising with Findology, only to discover that the Findology traffic was difficult/impossible to convert.

In the end, I fell well short of the earnings mark I set last month when I earned a profit of $718.21.

Gross Earnings
AdSense: $65.53
Affiliate Sales: $230.05
Text-Link-Ads: $85.93
Sedo: $21.45 (My first Sedo earnings payment ever!)
Paid Reviews: $11.45
Total earnings: $414.41

Costs
Findology PPC Advertising: $25.00 (What a waste of money!)
Total costs: $25.00

November Net Earnings: $389.41

October Earnings: $718.21
September Earnings: $335.79

Earnings Analysis 
Compared to my October earnings, my November earnings reflect a decrease in earnings of 46% month-over-month. While that decrease is quite sharp, my net earnings are still up by 16% from September 2008 when I began my renewed efforts in Internet marketing. Considering the search engine traffic issues this month, I’m satisfied with this month’s result, although not happy.

Mortgage Goal
As you may recall, my goal is to earn enough each month through AdSense and affiliate marketing to cover the cost of my monthly mortgage payment. For the sake of the experiment, we’re saying it’s $1500/month.

This month I earned $389.41 profit, which is 26% of the way there. I have until June 2009 to hit my goal, so that leaves me with 7 more months to make up the remaining 74%.

Plans Going Forward
As the New Year is approaching, I’m in the process of developing a 5-step plan on how to further increase my earnings next year. I’ll be detailing the plan here once it’s complete, but in a nutshell, it has to do with setting goals, creating objectives, and measuring success.

If you haven’t heard yet, you can use coupon code 99DOMAIN over at GoDaddy.com to purchase .com/.net/.org domain names for 99 cents!

This is a smoking deal for anyone looking to start the New Year fresh with a new blog/website. Even if all you do is buy a domain for $0.99 and flip it for a few dollars on SitePoint or DigitalPoint, that few dollars is nearly pure profit!

To make the deal even more smoking, as always, if you purchase 5 or more domains from GoDaddy, they’ll throw in free Privacy Registration (a $11 savings on each domain!).

Keep in mind, this is just for 1-year domain name registrations. I’ve got a handful I’ll be registering tonight. Lemme know which domains you end up picking up!

• Tom – Entrepreneur Interview
• Chovy
• Karilyn
• Anthony Ettinger
• Jeff Bowyer
• Stew Babcock
• Annalise
• PuReWebDev
• Heather in Beautiful BC

Thank you for contributing to the site!

As always, we’ll be doing this same thing next month, so feel free to join the conversation and earn a link back to your website.

There were also two new bloggers in attendance, Parm and Moneca, who battled over the free copy of Site Point’s The Website Revenue Maximizer book. After a which discussion between the two, it was decided that Parm would be the lucky Dot Com Pho newcomer taking home the 300-page hardcopy version of the book.

If you’re in the Vancouver-area and interested in coming out to a Dot Com Pho lunch, head over the John Chow’s website and he’ll announce the weekly location near the end of the week each week.

Introduction to Affiliate Link Cloaking

To improve the effectiveness of affiliate links, Internet marketers often “cloak” their links. For example, on my blog, I’ve cloaked my affiliate link to Market Leverage.

Cloaking changes the URL from

http://trendsbiz.com/a.php?a=CD11894&b=25367&d=470782&l=0&o=&p=0&c=4110&s1=&s2=&s3=&s4=&s5=

to

http://www.roryhansen.ca/recommends/marketleverage.php

Benefits of Cloaking your Affiliate Links

This has a number of benefits, including but not limited to:

• Prevention of affiliate link hijacking
• Increased professionalism through attractive affiliate link presentation
• Increased click-thru rate
• Improved search engine optimization, because Google doesn’t like affiliate links

How to Cloak your Affiliate Links

There are a number of high-quality products out there to help manage affiliate links, probably the most notable being the Ninja Affiliate Plug-in for WordPress.  These products can cost nearly $100 to purchase, and while that might be pennies in the jar for many Internet marketers, for those just starting out on the making money online scene, $100 can be a rather large investment. For that reason, this blog post isn’t about those expensive products.

The purpose of this blog post is to show you how you can cloak your affiliate URLs yourself, for free, and in just a few seconds.

To do this, we’ll be using PHP, and in a nut shell, creating a PHP file on your web site that will redirect the user to your affiliate link.

Note: This is a very simplistic example, that does not contain any click logging and should probably not be used to manage more than 10 – 15 affiliate links. If you require a heavy-duty solution, you should consider the Ninja Affiliate Plug-in, or some similar product.

Note 2: To make an even more attractive affiliate link structure, it’s possible to use more advanced techniques, like creating a .htaccess file and specifying your URL format. But, that topic is out of scope for this post, too.

Anyway, let’s get started.

Step 1: Determine how you want your links to look

If you scroll up, you’ll notice that in the example, I decided that I wanted my affiliate links to take the form:

http://www.roryhansen.ca/recommends/productname.php

I’ve used the word “recommends” in the link to further “sell” the link. Many other famous IM’s use this same naming convention. Others have used similar naming conventions, such as:

http://www.roryhansen.ca/go/productname.php

http://www.roryhansen.ca/goto/productname.php

It’s really a personal choice, but you’ll need to decide that now before you proceed.

Step 2: Create a new subdirectory on your website

Using your favourite FTP program, connect to your website’s FTP server. In your base web site directory, you’ll need to create a new directory to store all of your cloaked affiliate link files.

In my example, the new directory I created was called “recommends”. This is what enables the cloaked affiliate link format I decided upon.

Step 3: Create your cloaked affiliate link file

In a text editor like Notepad, cut-and-paste the following code:

<?php
header(’Location: YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK_URL_HERE’);
?>

Replace YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK_URL_HERE with the actual affiliate link for your product.

Save the file using a friendly filename, to represent the product you’re advertising. In reference to my earlier example, I saved my file as marketleverage.php.

Step 4: Upload your cloaked affiliate link file

Again using your FTP program, upload your new cloaked affiliate link file into the new folder you just created.

And you’re done!

So, how does this work?

In your blog posts, you’re now going to link to the new cloaked affiliate link file you just created. For example, you might write:

Click here to sign-up for <a href=”http://www.roryhansen.ca/recommends/marketleverage.php”>Market Leverage</a>.

The code in the file tells the browser to redirect the user to the URL you included into the file.

User clicks on link –> Browser goes to marketleverage.php –> Code tells browser to redirect user to the real affiliate link.

And there you have it, your first cloaked affiliate link.

Happy affiliate marketing!