Common sense compells countless “responsible people” not to go out in a snow storm but the same logic applies for less dramatic snowfalls. Wichever, people tend to shop less when the snowflakes are covering up the town.

But what are all these nice folks doing, if they’re not shopping?

They could be doing anything, from shovelling snow to surfing the web and that’s it gets interesting for the Google AdSense folks who basically expect more visitors when it snows but in the end, it’s just not that simple.

Even if more people are likely to get stuck behind a computer screen for a prolonged period doesn’t mean they’ll be clicking more ads. Actually, they might be clicking LESS ads because their day is likely a bit more hectic than it usually is since more snow means more work, more (travel-related) delays and in some cases, added expenses.

That might work out good if you’re operating gateway pages towards “cheap winter tires” or “turbo ice delocker” but if your web destination are about anything unrelated to the white veil of snow, it’s probably going to be a below-average day and you’ll be earning less PPC money even though more people are theoretically “stuck” online.

Clicking pay-per-click ads occurs when a visitor believes clicking such a link will provide some outstanding insight into an issue… any issue!

Anyway, Google AdSense isn’t nearly as lucrative as before they made their changes in February of 2009 but hey, if you can manage a few bucks a day, that’s more change in your pockets and that’ll all for the best.

So the next time you look out the window and see that’s it’s white everywhere, don’t necessarily get you “publiser hopes” too high because people might be busy, elsewhere than on your web destinations.

Tags: tags, ppc, pay-per-click, revenue, money, payments, lucrative, google adsense, adsense, hard drive, snow, shovel, snowflakes, house, home, internet

Over half the online users use it daily to find what they’re looking for.

If you happen to be using a service like DomainSponsor, Parked or Sedo, you’re likely to see your domain name banned from this powerful search engine, not to mention others like Yahoo! and Bing.

You see, landing pages are some of the lowest value pages which users can come across and it’s going to be bad for business for any search engine to display these pages as their primary results… or even in their “inner pages” results. So most search engines just ban automated landing pages and the domain names that lead there.

That’s why you need to get off the landing page train because it’s basically going into the proverbial wall.

Not so long ago, you still got some search engine visitors to your landing pages but not anymore, those days are over. Just go check your “landed pages” with this tool and see how completely banned your landing pages are, with Google. Be warned, it’s not going to be a  pretty sight!

Spend as many hours as necessary to build up forums, blogs, social networks, directories or other services, for each one of your domain names but don’t leave them with the landing pages providers because they’re destroying your ability to derive search engine traffic, from them.

In some cases, you may be able to eventually get listed again with several search engines but that’s not a sure thing as you’ll need to setup a very convincing web destination for that to happen.

While landing pages have been an attractive solution for a while, it’s just not a good deal anymore.

Not getting search engine traffic will likely kill several times the revenue potential you’d have by developing a worthwhile web destination associated with each of your domain names.

Be smart and get off the landing page parade now because the more you wait, the more you’re likely to suffer from a nasty wall-t0-wall ban, from almost every major search engine out there, including Google.

Why are people so hard to draw to your web services?

There are a variety of reasons why getting total strangers to use your still nascent web service is the digital equivalent of moving a mountain but the following come to mind…

• just about every kind of web service already exists, elsewhere;
• similar web services are already offered at little or no cost;
• millions of nice folks stick to a severely limited selection of web services (and say they’re happy with their “online comfort zone” as it is);
• trying a new service makes most people nervous;
• language and cultural preferences issues hamper your growth.

…and countless more reasons we could add but here’s the thing, if you’re going to succeed with your new web service, you can’t even think about these things.

You actually need to focus on getting over these hurdles but that’s easier said than done as the first days, weeks or months of launching a new web service can be very hard on your self-esteem when very few people use it (compared to what you had initially envisioned).

So, you ask, are there any magic tricks to get people to use your web services?

Yes, if you’re insanely rich, you can buy your way into more mindshare with a pay-per-click campaign or a banner ad run on a complementary web site. Perhaps a banner exchange with other web developers could work well but that’s harder to do as all sites aren’t always “equal” for that kind of trade.

You may also resort to mailing lists, either bulk or fine tuned but the later take a lot of time to compile so that can be a frustrating experience.

Another path is to just add quality —and unique— content until the search engines eventually pick up your web service and make it visible to people looking for resources like the one you offer. That’s probably the surest shot among all because adding value to your web service makes it that much more appealing.

By building up your web service over time, you take it to the point where it can’t be ignored anymore because it’s completely unique and that much more useful to your target audience. That’s something anybody can but it takes both time and effort to produce a web service or destination that will be both sought and remembered.

The search engine optimization crowd will probably feel there’s not enough emphasis on “the power of search” but whatever web service you optimize, it needs a solid foundation to last at the top of seach engine results list. So SEO should come only when you web service is sufficiently mature to compete with the “Top 10″ of any market segment because that’s where most of most valuable clicks occur.

But it’s entirely true, the tech part is easy compared to turning strangers into members and freebie leechers into paying customers.

If you have other tip and tricks to get people to use your web services, please, share them with us all.

Their business is lead generation and like other similar operations, they appeal to web publishers using the lure of higher payouts “per action” but here’s the catch: to get a perfect stranger, visiting one of your web properties, to “convert” through one of their “actions” is no easy feat, unless you know how to play Jedi tricks, or something.

So even though a few dollars per conversion might seem like good money, you need to keep in mind that you’ll be peddling all sorts of dating, money and weight loss offers to thousands upon thousands of your visitors, for free… because they’re most likely NOT going to “convert”.

Consider this…

Would YOU actually go to some weight loss program “signup page” and provide your name, address, email, phone number and valid credit card number (yes, a credit card) to some company you’ve never heard about?

Probably not, right?

Well, why do you think your visitors would be so dumb as to want to do that?

Seriously, the “signup now and you’ll see how good we are” jingle doesn’t work anymore but with some savvy “spam fighting” bravado wording, perhaps Copeac will convince both web publishers and advertisers that they’re “the answer” they’ve been waiting for.

You see, Copeac really wants to make “an impression” so, to make the whole thing sound more serious, web publishers actually get called by an “affiliate manager” who basically judges the “applicant”, over the phone, to help qualify them as “good” or “not so good”. It’s worth what it’s worth but that call usually comes out of the blue, at weird hours and several weeks after the affiliate applied. Maybe some web publishers have been luckier but quite a few obviously haven’t.

Some web publishers like Copeac’s promise to pay on a weekly basis but that’s ONLY if you make $1k per week!

Now, some web publishers can actually have some of their web properties geared towards “converting” total strangers to fill out forms in order to eventually, say, lose some weight but in “real life”, most web publishers don’t try to funnel their web visitors into buying stuff they wouldn’t likely touch with a ten foot pole, themselves.

In other words, web publishers with a conscience might want to stick with more alternative revenue generating activities.

As a rule of thumb, if you wouldn’t sell something to your mother, protect your good karma by not selling it to strangers who, for an instant, trust your web site.

In many ways, your visitors judge you both on your content and on the quality and relevancy of your advertisers. If one or the other seems off, you might lose these people, forever. Now, it’s your call to try to sell “signup conversions” to everybody coming across your web properties but if that kills your credibility, good luck spending years rebuilding it.

Getting paid “per action” is the best deal EVER for advertisers because they only have to give money out when they’ve hooked a “customer” who has been kind enough to provide a valid credit card.

For web publishers, however, it’s the worst kind of advertising possible because for the few who may (some day) signup (and “convert”), untold numbers of “unconverting” visitors will have been shown the flashy ads… for free.

If some web publishers think they can pay their mortgage with that kind of advertising model, may they be blessed but for all others looking to do things differently, there are alternatives. Many of them, actually.

In a nuthsell, that’s why no —or very few— web publishers should waste their time, with Copeac.

That’s right, people, Facebook isn’t as friendly or “cool” as they claim to be.

On the one hand, the Facebook service invites you to create a profil, build up pages and join groups but what happens if you’re asking to connect with too many friends or post several [non-spam] messages in group boards, in a short period of time? Well, you get warned, which restrains from participating in “your community” furthermore until they decide you’ve “learned your lesson”. Then, if you wish to exchange information actively again, you can get your account deactivated.

Now, losing your account at Facebook means that you can never log back in again with your email address of contact data, which forces you to forge an alternative identity to connect back with your “friends” and “groups”.

That’s very scary.

Why?

Because Facebook has all the tools in place to repress free speech and freedom to associate.

Right now, if you post between 10 and 20 messages in various groups you’re a member of, you’re likely to get warned.

If you’re actively campaigning for a cause, it’s NORMAL to post between 10 and 20 message on various like-minded group boards but for Facebook, that’s seen as ABUSE and their “monitoring system” locks up your account, akin to a digital prison.

And the scariest part is that Facebook can lower the “abuse and threat” threshold to just a few message a day, if that suits them. So if a civil emergency were to pop-up and you’d want to warn everyone of soemthing big coming their way, Facebook would NOT be the place to do it because they track and penalize those who use their system too “actively”.

Nobody knows for sure how the decision to warn a user happens.

Like all such “threat detection management systems”, the “recipe” to pinpoint the “abusers” is private and therefore, cofnidential. However, countless users have been warned and deactivate so their experience speaks volumes about the real consequences of using Facebook too much — even though nobody know exactly how much is “too much”.

For all these reasons and others, you need to think up alternative ways to connect with “your community” that doesn’t involve going through Facebook.

It’s easy for you to join and use Facebook, that’s a given but it’s a dangerous proposition because the moment you’ll need to communicate actively with the people who matter to you, like in a crisis, that digital “control matrix” might restrict you from doing so, if it’s in their interest to do so.

Since a growing number of serious publications are identifying Facebook as a CIA front, everyone should be very concerned about this huge digital holding ground which can morph into a prison, in the blink of an eye.

That’s a fair proposition but it’s even more attractive once you learn that their “kind of contextual ads” can be installed alongside those from Google’s AdSense program… because, in fact, they’re NOT contextual.

For those who haven’t seen Chitika ads before, this is what they typically looks like…

You’ll notice that their service will offer ads which are relevant to the search query a visitor might have entered, just before accessing the web publisher’s web site. This makes their program especially interesting to those who master the search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and therefore get a lot of search engine traffic.

Chitika is basically a “set and forget” kind of system.

The web publisher gets his own advertising zone code, installs it in his web pages and voilà, contextual ads can then be “served” to every visitor, based on his interests.

Interestingly, Chitika isn’t just presenting itself as an AdSense “companion”, it’s also stating that it can be an outright replacement for the Mountain View giant’s advertising service. It’s a realistic statement for many reasons…

1. Chitika has many more advertisers now than when it first started;
2. Technologywise, Chitika delivers on both the speed and precision fronts;
3. The huge ad blindness problem affecting Google’s AdSense ads doesn’t seem to be affectng Chitika’s ad zones, yet or at least, not in the same measure;
4. Web publishers who got kkicked out of the AdSense program still need to generate revenue with their web properties and Chitika may be the answer.

Web publishers of all sizes are able to register and use Chitika to make money with their web destinations.

This is very good news for anyone looking to make money with their visitors without having to charge them a membership. Development, domain names, hosting and promotion all cost money and it would be foolish to think that “good karma” alone will pay for it all. Web publishers need a service like Chitika to bring in the money which can ensure the success of any web property.

The ads formats can easily be adapted to your web sites’ formats and you can customize the colors to fit your design. It’s fair to say Chitika has grown into a very professional service which delivers quality pay-per-click ads whcih are almost always accompanied by little pictures, which might help explain their very high click-through rate (CTR).

So don’t wait and open up your own Chitika account and see how much money you can make with your web sites.

Every single thing you do on Facebook is stored for near-immediate analysis and archived indefinitely without the right, for you, to know exactly what those archives hold, regarding your historical use of their “service”.

Orson Well’s Big Brother, in his book “1984“, was childsplay compared to the level of mostly cloaked tyranny Facebook brings about.

Each time you post a message, even a mere blurb or reply, you’re scrutinized and “evaluated” by computer algorithms with a wide set of limitations regarding what you can say, how many times you can say it and of course, who you’re allowed to say it to.

Facebook is nothing short of a control grid.

If you want to stay free, you better find alternative ways to gather online with likeminded people because Facebook, despite its friendly facade, is a huge spying system where nothing is left unchecked.

As soon as you want to participate in many groups, Facebook quickly tags you as an abuser.

Imagine if you had anything of significant importance to tell the entire world — Facebook would systematically prevent you from saying it to more than roughly 5 or 10 “groups” and would probably go as far as cut off your account because your side of the story is deemed “abusive use of their service” even though you’re using the network in a perfectly legitimate way.

If you want to build bridges which can’t be cut off by Facebook, network elsewhere, period.

You may think Facebook is just a joke but it’s not. It’s meant to isolate you within the little (or big) group of “friends” you’ve managed to build up and the system presents everyone else as a potential threat to your privacy while they’re spying on you, all the time. Isn’t that utterly ironic?

Whatever you post on Facebook, keep in mind that it’ll go through some artificial intelligence system and everything you say there can and will be held against you, when whoever has access to that data think it’s time to make a move on you.

Please people, be very careful with Facebook, it’s way more dangerous than it looks.

If so, you’re probably one of the many hard working web publishers who respect their visitors enough to actually take their time to provide them with information pieces they’ll want to bookmark, namely because it’s not available anywhere else.

Original content is what visitors want because reading the same thing twice just doesn’t seem like a productive use of their time.

But producing uniqueness is both time intensive and costly.

So…

Some web publishers —either lazier or smarter than those who produce their own content— go to ebay and other venues to buy private label rights (PLR) articles for a rather small fee so they can have the “right” to re-publish them in their own web properties.

Those articles are typically burried under tons of flashy advertising because the only goal for the web publisher is to “convert” its visitors to a pay-per-click or affiliate sale. There’s little to no intent to genuinely inform the visitor and even less effort to actually validate what’s being exposed in these “fast food articles”.

Take following title, for instance: “Articles Are The Quickest Way To Your Customers Wallet” which is the title of an article included in one of the many PLR article packages, available online. In a Google search for that title, over 25k results pop-up and the same content is presented in a variety of blogs, forums and [article] directories.

Does anyone really believe that by mimicking over 25k other web sites, they’ll become “an authority” on that matter? Of course not. Web publishers owe it to themselves to aim higher than that.

There also exist test scamblers which will rearrange the wording of articles so that some search engines don’t know it’s the exact same “base article” that everybody else is using. It might help for a short while but all search engines eventually catch up with those who abuse their resources by tricking them into thinking their content is unique while it’s not (even though the wording might be… “unique”).

So here we are.

At the point where digital content can be easily reproduced, published and massively distributed, across the world.

Will web publishers continue duplicating other people’s content “ad infinitum” or will they roll their sleeves up and start publishing content people actually want to read as opposed to content they already read, elsewhere?

It’s a big question and nobody knows the answer, for sure…

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So, to make your life easier, here are the most useful links from their list and you’re welcome to share your own findings (by simply leaving a comment)…

• Musicslu — Music you know about;
• Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 music downloads — the “good side” of Amazon;
• CD baby — amazing underground music;
• VideoLAN — Play your videos, on any OS, for free;
• Miro — Free video player;
• Naxos — Classic music;
• Rhapsody — Millions of songs and lyrics;
• Skreemr — MP3 search engine;
• Jamendo — Free MP3 downloads;
• Baen — Free books in electronic format;
• Learn Out Loud — Audiobooks, podcasts and free downloads;
• LibriVox ) Large collection of free audiobooks;
• TellTaleWeekly — The spoken word made accessible;
• Project Gutenberg — Access mountains of quality information, for free;
• 4Flix.net — DRM-free video for iPhone, AppleTV, iPod and more;
• Creative Commons — Flexible contracts to distribute content;
• Zunior.com ) Digital music store;
• Bleep.com — High quality music downloads;
• Magnatune — “Not evil” online music store.

I would’ve also added eMusic but their customer service is sooo bad that I’m not interested in sending you there. They offer DRM-free music but everything else is a pain to deal with.

Take back your rights and fight DRM by choosing where you get your digital goods. Send the DRM-lovers a strong signal that their digital prison isn’t what you’re in the market for.

Also, keep in mind that independent artists and publishers in your area might be making some excellent content so don’t forget to help them too, as long as they don’t DRM their stuff.

If you’re into anything electronic, you’re bound to have bumped into DRMed content, at one point or another.

The basic intent of DRM is to limit people’s use of digital content, wether it’s for books, music, video or any other type of content, even video games (such as those from EA, notoriously bent on DRM).

When consumers purchase such digital goods, they assume they own whatever they paid for but that’s far from being the case if they’re “protected” by a DRM scheme. In fact, the person who purchased a DRMed song might not even be able to transfer it to another device so if the first one breaks down, it’s almost impossible to “save” the content that’s already been paid for!

The “entertainment giants” are heavily sponsoring the current DRM push. They feel that by adding a layer of “protection” around the content they sell, they can ensure it’s only used for its intended purpose.

Obviously, this is a major drawback from a consumer’s perspective.

Since DRM adds digital shackles to purchased content, it’s safe to say that people are paying to be restricted in their use of what they paid money for, which in many ways is a fundamental nonsense.

Smart consumers aren’t the only ones pointing out the relative idiocy of DRMing content. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has launched a well presented campaign against DRM and their arguments are rock-solid.

DefectiveByDesign.org is a broad-based anti-DRM campaign that is targeting Big Media, unhelpful manufacturers and DRM distributors.

The campaign aims to make all manufacturers wary about bringing their DRM-enabled products to market. DRM products have features built-in that restrict what jobs they can do.

These products have been intentionally crippled from the users’ perspective, and are therefore “defective by design“.

It would be very naive to think the price of content will go down because of DRM. In fact, the price of paid digital content has remained stable or on the rise. Furthermore, the DRM implementation’s price is factored in every single “protected” piece so consumers actually pay to fund their own “content prison”.

• What’s the use of buying something if you’re not buying the right to use it freely?
• Do consumers really want a future where any type of content they purchase is both artificially and systematically made to be severely limited, in its use?

You need to think about these things before you waste your money on content you can’t use (as you intended).

Wherever you read “protected”, regarding digital content, you can safely assume some type of DRM scheme is being used to make your life more complicated, expensive and frustrating.

As such, DRM really does renders digital products defective, by design.