This is some seriously old stuff right here, but in my efforts I was not able to find anywhere online that had the basic information on customizing adsense ads. Everyone has taken the party line of “just use the color pallet” well that dose not work unless you are using one of their 30 colors. Finally I was able to piece together the information I needed from old sites of mine. So here is the break down.

First off, you need to use the OLD adsense code. I made a new add and pulled the new code and I just could not get this to work. Maybe its just me, but it didn’t work. Back to the old code.

<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “pub-0000000000000000″;
google_ad_width = 200;
google_ad_height = 200;
google_ad_format = “200×200_as”;
google_ad_type = “text”;
google_color_border = “FFFFFF”;
google_color_bg = “FFFFFF”;
google_color_link = “000000″;
google_color_text = “444444″;
google_color_url = “444444″;
//–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js“> </script>

The above code will make a 200×200 ad that looks normal. But as you see I have given the correct options on changing the link, bg, and text. These fields accept html color codes and you can put any color you want. If you want ads of a different size just change the sizes and change the ad_format to match your sizes making sure to keep the “as” at the end of it.

This is some seriously simple stuff here but I had to post it since Google totally failed me in finding this basic information in the first place.

Since I am sure many of you want an update on my progress with LFE I figured I would post an update on my status.

As of right now my challenge has been a total failure, but this is not the fault of LFE. I had one specific site that I had just started and it was going to be the target of all of my LFE work. The offer had a high payout and I had already seen a bit of income from it. All I needed to do was rank and thats where LFE was to come in.

The problem I ran into was some serious trademark protection as complained about in Is Your Trademark Protection Out of Control? the site just happened to have been the target of this retarded trademark protection. Even after I attempted to comply to the restrictions they put into place I was still banned from the program for having a 301 redirect from the old site to the new one. I attempted to explain this to them but they didn’t care much and that was it. In two days time 3 weeks of my efforts had been destroyed and a fair bit of money along with it.

It was that day that I lost my new found drive to keep working. I had finally gotten back to some serious work and was getting into the groove of things when it was crushed. Rather than picking my self up from this mess and moving on I fell back into my old rut and started wasting time again. For the last two weeks I have been working on and off very little. I tried a few campaigns and they broke even, I couldn’t get them into profit. I checked stats and made sure accounts had money and other than that I haven’t done much of anything. Two weeks were wasted away with Global Agenda on Steam. To further beak me down during this time I found out that I was getting 0.01 per click on my eBay pages due to CPC.

Finally last night I got some good news my first bit of good news this month. I managed to get back into the program I was banned from via a private network that they ran. I have totally removed any chance of any trademark BS this time but the lack of a keyword domain is certainly going to hurt my chances. Better this than nothing though. At the same time I did this I decided to go back and check some of the other things that kicked my ass this month. My eBay CPC was now at 0.25 since I removed one under performing domain and even more good news when I checked adsense and saw may sites were starting to hit their $1.00 a day goal.

Some light has finally shown up at the end of the tunnel and I am grasping for it. Trying to get my efforts back in order and optimize what I can to help try and keep the ball rolling. I now have more targets for LFE and finally some ideas are coming back. Today is building and optimizing but tomorrow I will certainly be finally putting LFE to use.

It has been a few weeks now since I switched from FireFox to a build of Chromium. I made the switch since I use my macbook for most of my daily tasks and firefox was just becoming more and more unstable with each update. Pages would take forever to load and the “thinking” icon was up near all the time. The switch was easy but one of the things I missed the most was my seo tool bar from firefox.

The good news is that just the other day when I did my OS reinstall I found SEO Quake for chrome. Its a bit different from what I was using in firefox but its been pretty cool to see the seo stats of all of the sites in the sers when I search for a term. As far as I know this is the only fully working SEO addon for chrome but its doing a great job and is making the move from firefox that much easier.

Don’t have chrome yet? If you are still on the fence you really need to check it out. I use Chromium a open source build of Google Chrome. All of the benefits of Chrome and none of the Google data capture and spying. You can download and compile the source your self from or you can grab the latest compiled trunk release. Try it out and you will see why people are making the switch to Chrome/Chromium.

I have been in this industry for 3 years now. I have worked for Inc 500 companies, small time operations and now for myself. Something that I have always had a problem with is online trademark violation. I find that many companies are just going overboard when it comes to what they will allow you to use to promote their products.

One of these companies running on CJ has just given me the boot from their program and retracted all of my earnings. This is a loss of about 2k and a few weeks of time. So what happened?

Lets call this company “Widgets” for the sake of this post. My first attempt at promoting this site was with a site called WidgetsCoupons.com a highly searched term. The company freely mails out these coupons to affiliates each month to help with promotions.

A few weeks go by and CJ contacts me about my trademark infringement and demands I fix the problem and gives me the terms again.  Yes I know I was breaking them by having “Widgets” in my domain but it was just for SEO reasons. I never claimed I was the company or had anything to do with them other than trying to promote the use of the coupons.

So I get a new domain, one without the term “Widgets” in it. I write them back saying I was sorry and everything had been fixed. I received an e-mail back thanking me and I move on. A few weeks pass and I have worked on the site even more. Suddenly I am presented with an email once again from CJ stating I am banned from this campaign and all earnings are being retracted from its sales.

They gave no reason this time, just stated that I was banned and could never run it again. I am waiting on a reply from them but having read their terms once again the only thing I can see is meta tags.

That’s right. CJ has listed in their terms that you cannot have the term “Widgets” in any meta tags on your site since that is trademark infringement.  This is where I feel things are getting out of hand. How can you ask people to promote your products and basically say that you cannot put the term “Widgets” anywhere on your site.  I say anywhere since my site was auto generating its meta tags based on the content of the page.

So because my page was about “Widgets” my meta keywords, and meta description both included the term. I was there by breaking the rules according to CJ and removed from the program.

I have two degrees in business and I understand the reasons behind this but many companies are just taking things to the extreme. They are so insecure with their online presence that they are afraid their affiliates will out rank them or some how confuse their customers. But in doing so aren’t they just hurting them selves more though a reduction in sales? If I make a site saying how great “Widgets” are and how everyone needs to buy them and then send that traffic to the “Widgets” home page. Isn’t this in fact helping the business make more sales?

Companies need to realize that affiliates are not the enemy. The whole reason you have an affiliate program is to gain marketing and sales. Affiliates should be seen as partners in your marketing efforts. They should be afforded just as much use of your trademark as you would if you hired a marketing company. By crippling us you are only crippling your selves. Allow us the use of your logo and brand name, we are not all scammers and fraudsters.

Last night at about 11PM I bought Link Farm Evolution just like I said I would. I grabbed it a bit early so I could get it installed and running before the first of the month.

First impressions so far are that its super easy to install. This took all of 5mins you simply upload the script make an sql database and then go to the install script. Once it dose its thing you are all set up.

The next thing I did was set up some catch all e-mail accounts for the program to use. They have instructions for this on their site so that makes it easy. You basically pick a domain name, make a catchall email, create a sql database and put a php file in the root of said domain. LFE automatically goes to this script so it can’t be renamed which kinda sucks.

I was really lazy with this at first since I didn’t quite understand how it worked. I thought I could just make catchalls all over the place and then forward its mail to another catchall. I mean if all the “activate me” emails went to the same account it should be much easier right? Well yeah but the php script that lfe uses can’t work this way. You actually have to set up each domain with its own database and php file.

I learned this lesson after my first test of 500 blogs when I never got any emails and lfe never activated them. This is one of those times it was better to follow the instructions and not just assume it would work. I had to go back into LFE and delete all of these blogs since I was never able to use them. So only time and captchers were wasted in my mistake. I have since fixed this problem by making proper catchall domains, which I hope will work much better this time.

In case you were wondering LFE come with a remote repository of wpmu and pligg sits that you can grab rather than scrapping your own. Mines busy right now so I can’t give exact numbers but its like 5k wpmu and 5k pligg sites. Lots of these sites are from other countries, or have special requirements. Like one site said I couldn’t make a blog there since I did not have a .edu email. This is due to the fact that all of these sites were just scrapped from the serps.

What pisses me off though is that there dose not seem to be a good way to weed out the bad blogs. There is no button to delete them from the database on failure. So I will have to manually weed them out. This is probably one of the major causes of the blog creation problems most people have. “I told it to make 500 blogs, and it only made 200!” etc etc.. If you never remove these bad hosts from your list they will always error. This will take time but I hope to have a decent working list by the end of the month.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have about the program and ill try to answer as I find them.

EDIT: I just finished a run of 500 blogs. Many failed and I started to copy and paste a giant list to week out the one that failed. 30 fucking mins later I go back to try and find and remove them and every site I paste back into find is gone. So I do believe that LFE automatically deletes out bad wpmu’s when they error.

Looks like GoDaddy is having a huge sale for the superbowl and is offering 0.99 cent .com’s! So load up and use coupon code BOWL2010 to take them down to 0.99.

I just launched a few seo sites and have done my initial linking for them like I do for all of my sites. One of the niches is doing very well and pulled in some very good money the last two days. So I figured this would be a good time to touch on the importance of campaign reinvesting.

Campaign reinvesting is when you reinvest any profits made by a new campaign back into the campaign. This of course is pretty basic shit that everyone should know and if common practice for PPC campaigns. But it also should apply to any SEO sites your doing, since when working with SEO you need to be constantly adding new links and content to keep you rankings.

The thing to work on is the mentality of how we pay our selves. Often at midnight I will check though stats and say to my self “Nice, I made X amount today.” This in some ways is correct but also a horrible way of doing things since it leaves out any reinvestment you need to do.  It is much better to think “Nice, X campaign made X today.” as this keeps the idea of it being your money out of your head.

So what do I do to reinvest cash back into SEO campaigns?  The most common expense I have is outsourcing.  I have a list of people I go to when I need link building done, I have a list of content writers, and so one and so on. It is always beneficial to spend 100% of a site’s first weeks of earnings back into the site.  This way the site will gain more and more traction and should make you more money.

Each site I build tries to follow these lines.

Week 1: 100% Reinvestment

Week 2: 100% Reinvestment

Week 3: 80% Reinvestment

And so on.  Of course this all depends on the site and situation. Often I also use a new sites income to invest into some other part of my business rather than the site its self. This is how I acquire most of my programs and scripts such as WFReview, LFE, BANS, etc.  Often these scripts can even be used on that they were funded by which makes it even better. It is much easier to drop $200-300 on a program if you stop thinking about it as being your money.  Just remember that it is not your money until you accountant says so.

I was recently going though projects and decided to check up on my comment killer wordpress plugin. Sales have not been all that great and it really didn’t get the attention it needed marketing wise. But the product is sound and has really saved my ass on countless wordpress installs.

So in an effort to get the plugin out to more people I have lowered the price to $2.00 for the plugin and unlimited use. I really can’t think of a better way to spend two bucks I hope this new price will allow more people to try out this amazing plugin.

If you have no idea what I am talking about or want to order CommentKiller you can learn more at http://www.commentkiller.com/.

So I know that I have been working on this project for a good while now. I am nowhere near my goal but I do have more money making site then when I started. When I first started this project I had a lot of sites in mind and a good number of domains just sitting there doing nothing. I had started to build them out and was going at a pretty good pace until I ran out of steam and things started to crawl. I stopped working on the SEO sites and started to get back into the fast stakes PPC game.

With 2010 a new year and decade I have decided to renew my efforts in my 1,000 site challenge, but I have modified the terms to just as many sites as it takes to make 1,000 bucks a day. Also no PPC campaign can be a part of it, as that will make it to easy. I want natural ranking sites that will make money with minimal effort. The idea still seems sound but will of course always be at the mercy of the search engines.

Now one of the major problems I was running into was that I did not have the capacity to build links for all of these sites as fast as I was building the sites themselves. Despite my skills as a site builder I wasn’t getting anywhere in the serps with out incoming links. I have a few link networks, sites, and services for link building but it was not enough to keep up with demand for new sites. This is why this time I have added a second smaller challenge to help support the first one.

I am planning on trying out a few programs for link building using various seo methods. The first of which will be Link Farm Evolution(LFE). I have had my eye on this script since it came out but it has been kept pretty low key by the people who use it. It hasn’t been as widely promoted across the affiliate scene so reviews of it are hard to find. What I have found has been good and the methods behind it are sound.

So with this in mind I will be buying LFE and challenging myself to earn the cost of the script ($297) within the 30 return period. I will be making new websites and promoting them with LFE in the hopes that I will be able to get these new sites to rank well enough to cover my costs. Depending on the amount of revenue generated by this method I will decide on if I will return the script and get my refund or if I will keep it and just work harder.

To give myself some set up time I have decided to purchase LFE on February 1st since this simplify matters and give me time to pick my targets. I will post updates and tips as they occur and I will report my final revenue at the end of the challenge so stay tuned.

I just got an e-mail I was not expecting… it looks as though WFReview has been sold once again to a new owner. Last time it was sold the new owner wasn’t able to keep up with it and it fell back on to nick the orignal owner. Here is the e-mail.

Some of you on twitter (http://twitter.com/wfreview) might have already

heard the news, but Nick is passing the torch. He is still going to be

around and a part of our community but I will be in charge.

Nick and I are very excited about this change, especially because I have 8

years professional experience with programming in PHP and 6 more with Ruby

on Rails. I have written a book about programming for O’Reilly

(http://bit.ly/5FGkTh). I LOVE to program, and I am very good at it.

I am excited to start diving into the code for WFReview. It is a very good,

quality product and it should not be very difficult for me to add

enhancements quickly. I have been reading all the forum posts and getting a

sense of what you guys need and want, as well as checking out my

competition. In fact, I have so many enhancements lined up for the next

release that it is not even going to be WFReview!

The upcoming release is called WF Review Ultra! Here are some of the

upcoming features.

Game changing features

* central UPC dataset – append data from separate sources about the same

product to the same post

* expire post on a specific date – use custom CSV meta to set the date and

have the post moved from published to deleted

* content spinning

* adlib support

* much easier installation

* bulk redirecting affiliate links through cleaner internal links

* custom data to posts

* THEMES!

Better CSV Imports

* Import .gz files straight from CJ

* Much smarter CSV import, no longer worry about many of the format

issues

* assign the imports to a specific user

Better User Interface

* ability to choose different stars within the UI

* comparison tables

* the ability to sort posts by price or overall rating

* improved commenter names, choose a percentage of male/female

* improve commenter name data to be more realistic

* pre-populate comments from CSV

* avatar support for commenters

Better Editing Support

* no longer need cron to run scheduled jobs

* delete and rename templates

* warn before saving a template with the same name as an existing

template

* one-off post ratings

Better Developer Support

* disable loading the css and google api call on pages where the script

isn’t active

* ability to use “last rated”, “highest rated”, etc. as a function instead

of a widget so you can use them as hooks in a custom_functions.php.

With so many changes, this plugin is going to revolutionize your review

sites and it will work so much better and faster that we think of it as a

new plugin entirely.

Though it is a new plugin, it will be available to all WFReview users for a

upgrade price of only $49 FREE, more than half off the retail price!

On top of that we will be releasing the long anticipated Premium Placements

plugin!

Here are the timeframes I am working with right now.

By January 15th, release the Premium Placements plugin

By February 7th, release WFReview Ultra

By March 7th, release the first 3 WFReview Ultra themes

Thank you for your patience and understanding during this transition

period. I look forward to helping you all achieve great success with your

projects.

-Lucas

As one of the biggest if not the biggest advocate for WFReview I am happy to see the new owner is capable of taking this script to a new level I am also worried that it will not happen and that this will just be a repeat of what happened last time. When I get the new script I will be sure to post a review.