HTNet

And it’s a cheque for US$120.65!

Amazing right?

Read the rest of Got A Birthday Gift From Google »

Remember my minor redesign a few days ago? Let me be honest with you. It was a primarily selfish move. One of the main reason for the changes is that I wanted to see how the skyscraper AdSense unit would perform if I shamelessly label it as Sponsored Links.

Let me be straight with you, when I did that, I was expecting this to be a nothing more than an experiment to prove to myself that people are just negative towards advertisements. I’m very sure that eventhough the ad is placed marginally higher than before (due to the combination of slimming down my masthead and removal of the underperforming Advertlets ads), it won’t get more clicks.

Well, I’m happy to announce that I was wrong! Instead of the poor performance that I expected, the skyscraper ad actually performed 800% better than the previous three days in the old location!

So here are some lessons I learned from this exercise:

• Position is very important. Even minor tweaks can turbocharge your underperforming inventories
• Do not be afraid to clearly label your ads; if people are interested in the links, they’ll click them anyway. Just make sure you follow Google’s guideline on this
• Don’t get too attached to your web site design. You should be brave to shift things around a bit. Remember; nothing ventured nothing gained!

AdSense publishers are now required to comply with something similar to the AdWord program’s Page Quality Guidelines… shouldn’t be hard to do if you’re not running a splog and/or MFA web sites.

Another wonderful news from this update is that publishers can now place up to three link units on a page. Link units are wonderful income generators, and I’m pleased that we can now have more than one of them on a page.

You can get the full scoop from the Inside AdSense blog.

A computer specialist put up an advertisement using Google AdWords offering a computer virus for download, absolutely free! Quoting the Reuters article:

Surprisingly, he found as many as 409 people clicking on the ad saying “Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!” during a 6-month advertising campaign on Google’s Adword, said the IT security expert.

“Some of them must have clicked on it by mistake. Some must have been curious or stupid,” said Mikko Hypponen, head of research at data security firm F-Secure.

I’m sure the ad impression would be around a few million during that timeframe. And only 409 people clicked on the ad. Am I the only one who thinks that this is a good thing? Personally, I estimated that he could have gotten at least a few thousand clicks.

The year 2007 started out with a bang for HTNet. The number of visitors have gone up significantly compared to last year and I’m hoping HTNet will keep this up. Here’s a screenshot of my visitors stats for the first quarter of 2007:

Mind you, it’s not only the numbers that excite me. March 2007 was the first month that I’ve consistently gotten money from AdSense every day:

Not bad for a tech blog, eh! Considering that the odds are stacked up against me. Which leads me to another thing I’m considering.

I’ve always labelled HTNet as a tech blog. Since my free tagging revelation, I think that putting HTNet in that category would be a bit irrelevant. I don’t want to be niched! I want to have absolute freedom to write what I want whenever I want.

Therefore, I’m going to rebrand HTNet yet again, this time I’m going to put less emphasis on the tech part, although I don’t think I can totally throw out technology from the things I write about.

Any suggestions for a more suitable tagline for HTNet? I’m all ears!