How does AssociatedContent.com succeed to pay you, where do they take the money from? As you have noticed on your live article page, there are advertising banners in and near your article. That is how they make money. And if you look closer, you will see that they are using AdSense to deliver relevant ads with your articles.

If you didn’t know AdSense(+AdWords) is an advertising network from Google, the most popular one at the moment. So AssociatedContent.com shows ads from Google on pages containing your articles and they are able to make money from that, and from the money they make they are able to pay you. Now the tricky part in this thing is that they will make a lot more from those ads than they will pay you. According to AC for 1000 views of your articles you will receive $1.50. Usually Google will pay you approximatively $0.2 per click on their ads and if we take the click through rate of 3%, we’ll obtain 1000*3%*0.2=$6 (I’ve taken the worst cases, because there are cases when a click may be valued at even $3, so $0.2 is the worst case for an article directory website). So AC will make $6 and pay you only $1.5, that’s 4 times lower. That is just an example, but i am sure they are making much more than i estimated.

A solution? A solution would be to find an article directory which allows you to have you own ads displayed on your own article pages. It’s much more credible to get paid by a settled company like Google than by AssociatedContent.You will have the chance to earn much more than with AC, trust me.

Another thing i don’t like on AC is how they call article writers, they call them content producers. In my opinion it’s too roughly said, article writers are not slaves or something else.

Note: I do not try to blame AssociatedContent for how their payment system works, because for someone it may work better for others worse. It is my own point of view I’ve made after a small analysis.

A good article directory offering the possibility to earn money directly via the Google AdSense program is MintArticles.com. There are some testimonials on the Internet about people who made $2 with just some tens of page views(not thousands). Not so much, but it’s better.

What i din’t like in GTA IV is the car camera chasing problem. At corners you have to use your mouse to see where you are driving. I mean the camera is not fixed and i wasn’t able to find a setting for that. Another thing i didn’t like i t as the low FPS. My specs are:

Athlon X2 Dual Core 5200+ running @ 2.6GHz
RAM 2 GB @ 664MHz
ATI Radeon X1950GT 512MB
1280×1024 screen ( i use this resolution in the game)
MAXTOR 7200RPM 320GB

It doesn’t matter how i try to change the graphical settings, the game’s fps won’t get higher. The FPS problem is best noticed when aiming with a gun, because of that you can sometimes shoot near the target. Still there is no fix for the FPS prob. Next thing i don’t like it’s the shadows. I don’t know why, but i changed the shadow density settings to the maximum and i still see the shadow as many dots, like in an old game.

I won’t criticise this game anymore, because i don’t want you to change your mind about GTA IV (if you like it), but i will definitely not buy this game. I was expecting more from it, don’t know what, but i think it’s missing something to make it better than the previous GTA’s.

GTA 4, NFS Undercover they both disappointed me, unfortunately…

SERP - search engine result pages (or search engine result position). This means the position of a web page in the result page returned by a search engine. Lower serp is better.

Spider - this is an automatic crawler of a search engine which search for new pages or updates the existing ones. Also known as web crawler, search bot, web robot.

Dofollow - this is an attribute to the href tag, which instructs the search bots to follow this link and possibly modifying the PageRank for both linking page and the page linked to (this refers to the Google search engine only).

Nofollow – this is an attribute to the href tag, which instructs the search bots to follow this link (or not to follow it at all), but without modifying the pagerank of any of the two pages (the current page and the page linking to).

Google Analytics – a free website statistics tracking service from Google. Works perfectly for small and large websites. It has plenty of useful features (a must have).

Yahoo! Analytics - a free website statistics tracking service from Yahoo!. Currently this service is in beta status and it is not available for the public use.

PageRank, PR - an algorithm invented by and for the Google search engine, which gives to every pages a mark from 0 to 10, depending on different factors (popularity, usefulness, age of the web page…). Web pages with higher rank tend to rank better in the Google search engine results pages.

AJAX – Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. This is a popular method nowadays to retrieve information from the server without reloading the whole page. The process runs in the background and returns the result from the server, which is then analysed by a JavaScript code and then it is displayed on the page or whatever else.

Blog – short form of “Web Log”. This is (usually) a script which you may install on your server and then easily you can write different things you like and let other people read that. It differs from a forum, because usually a blog is maintained by 1 or 2 people and is not available for registration to the public. The public may comment your posts only.

Anchor Tag – This is a tag of the hypertext markup languages used to link to web page. (example: <a href=”http://google.com”>Google.com</a>). From this tag the search bots extract the information about new sites (or updating the existing ones) by visiting the web page from the href attribute (in previous example it is http://google.com).

Alt Attribute - This is an attribute of the hypertext markup languages used to display some text while an image is loading or in case it fails to load, the alt name will remain in the place of the image. This attribute is used by image bots (search bots that look for images, not for web pages in general).

MFA – “Made for AdSense” websites. Such websites contain usually no useful content (sometimes it will contain automatically generated content) but are filled with lots of ads. When a user comes to a such website looking for something, he will find no useful content, but ads only, so he will click on those ads to continue looking for what he needed, but the owner of the MFA website will be credited some money for that click. MFA websites have been tolerated by Google in the past, but now they don’t.

Link Farm – websites which contain lots of outbound links and little or not useful content.

Alexa Rank – Alexa will assign to each website a position, depending on the traffic which is made on that website. Alexa takes the necessary data from a toolbar installed in the visitors’ browsers, so only information from those who have this toolbar installed will be taken into consideration. That is why Alexa it is thought to be an inaccurate ranking service and must be used just for curiosity.

CPC – Cost Per Click. You will find this term when working with advertising networks. It means how much you will get paid for a click on ads/links… on your pages.

CTR – Click Through Rate. You will find this term when working with advertising networks. It the rapport of the number of the clicks and the total number of impresions (how many times ads have neen displayed on a page)

Landing Page – a web page showed to visitors accordingly to what the visitors searched (or where they came from) with the purpose to increase the chances of the visitor to sign up for/buy a service/product.

PPC – Pay Per Click. Advertising network type where an advertiser pays a publisher for the amount of clicks the publisher got from the ads on his web pages. (example of PPC advertising networks: AdSense, AdBrite, Bidvertiser, YPN…)

SEM – search engine marketing. This is the process of increasing the popularity of a website (web page) in the search engine result page, be it from buying backlinks on other high ranked web pages or including the website in a high ranked paid directory.

Static website – website that doesn’t change in time. Such website are usually build only from static webpages with the hypertext markup languages (html, xhtml…).

Dynamic website – website which changes in time, website powered by forums, blogs, portals… Usually such websites are build using server side programming languages (PHP, ASP…).

SE – Search Engine

Web 2.0 – the new generation of websites. These are mainly based on members, so they usually are social websites, communities interested on a specific topic, informational portals. We also call a website to be web 2.0 if it has new generation features like content taken with AJAX, fancy colours and design…

URL – Uniform Resource Locator. This describes the location of a web page, document, media…

Backlink – a link from an external website pointing to one of your web pages.

W3C- World Wide Web Consortium

Blackhat SEO – the technique of doing seo, by doing something which comes in contradiction with the rules of the search engines. This technique may give quick results, but it is very risky. Search engines don’t like to be fooled, so if they detect a website to practice this type of activity they will ban it.

Whitehat SEO – the technique of doing seo correctly, without breaking the rules of the search engines. This method is slower, but it is safer and may give better results in time.

But i noticed a thing. All these comments are made on 3 posts only. The first 3 posts i have posted since i have opened my blog. In the mentality of a spammer, these posts should have the highest PageRank and so on, because they are the oldest ones, so they’re value. I thought of doing an experiment. Something i should have made long before . I have disabled the possibility to write comments in these posts. As i expected the number of spam comments has considerably decreased, with about 70%. I do reccomend you to do the same if you want to save time on moderating these comments.

To use it you should first of all enable it if it is not enabled. To check if this feature is already available go to Start>Turn Off Computer and press Shift key on your keyboard. You should notice how the “Stand By” button changes to “Hibernate” . If it doesn’t it means the feature has not been enabled yet.

If “Hibernate” is not enabled to you follow the following steps, else skip this paragraph.
Go to Start>Control Panel>Power Options>Hibernate(in the upper tabs)>Check “Enable hibernation”>Apply the changes. Note: to use the hibernation feature you need to have some free space on your hard disk, depending on your RAM capacity. If you have 1GB of RAM you should have a little bit more than 1 GB of free space on your hard disk and so on, because when you put your computer into hibernation, this will actually store all the information from you RAM onto the hard disk, so when you next time boot your computer this image will be loaded into the RAM again.

Next, i will show you how you can quickly put you computer into hibernation with a simple combination of keys. So will need to create a shortcut on your desktop:

1. Right click on your desktop>Select New>Shortcut
2. In the input field copy and paste the following, without the quotes “%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe PowrProf.dll, SetSuspendState”
3. Click next
4. Give this shortcut a name. I named it “Suspend”
5. Right click the shortcut and put the mouse cursor into the “Shortcut key” field.
6. Now think of a combination of keys you will use to suspend your operating system. Just do not think about something like CTRL+Z or Win Key+D as these shortcuts are already used for other purposes. Instead think about something like ALT+CTRL+SHIFT+something else. I came up with the following combination ALT+CTRL+SHIFT+-(from the numpad) . I can put my windows into hibernation with my eyes closed, lol.
7. Apply your changes.
8. Now we need to choose a proper icon for this shortcut. To do that click “Change Icon”>Browse and select your preferred icon. I have attached the icon i am currently using.
9. Forget about the shortcut on your desktop (you could even put it somewhere far far away into your documents) but do remember the combination of keys you have chosen to suspend your OS.
10. Now execute your combination of keys and we’ll see you next time you log into windows again

With this feature you will not only save a lot of time “shutting down” your computer or starting it, but you will also save a lot of time from opening all the applications and all the documents you were currently working with, this is what i call ergonomics.

Here’s the icon for the shortcut (right click and save it or click me)

Palette->Local(Adaptive); Colors->256; Forced->None; Transparency->Checked; Matte->Custom->Color of the background your image will sit on; Dither->None.

To detect the color of the background where the GIF image will sit on, i used a little applcation called ColorPic.It’s free and works very well.

How does it work? Well Google AdSense is a program for website owners. It means those who have administrative rights on a website may enroll into this program, copy & paste the code for the ads to be displayed and then voila, when a visitor clicks on the AdSense advertisement, the publisher (the webmaster who created and manipulates the Google AdSense account) is automatically credited with some amount of money. The cost per click is not a stable value, as random ads are displayed, which have different prices. But beware! If you decide to take part in the Google AdSense program as a publisher, do never try to click on your own ads! Doing so you may risk (very certainly) to have your account blocked. And also, do not try to include your website in some sort of traffic generator systems, because Google does not allow ads to be run on websites with artificial traffic. Usually Google will be kind and send you an email (i once got one ) telling you that your website has some suspicious activity and asking you to do something about. The second email won’t be .

But where does the money come from? Well, Google has another program for advertisers called AdWords (AdSense is for publishers; AdWords is for advertisers). Those people who are interested in promoting some kind of program or service or something else may enroll into the Google AdWords program. Then they will set a campaign for something, create an ad, set the price and allocate some money for that ad and then when everything was done, the ads will start showing on the publisher’s websites. From here you already know what happens.

Why choose Google AdSense? There are many positive arguments that make Google AdSense to be the best choice for both advertisers and publishers. For advertisers: it is easy to choose the best keywords and prices for them, because Google has it’s own Keyword Tool which is one of the best or maybe the best one, as the Overture has been closed; many publishers use AdSense to monetize their websites, so with AdWords it is easier to reach a bigger audience, which means more possible customers; ads will be shown only on those pages containing the same keywords as your ads ones, that means advertisers will receive more traffic from interested people in your product/service, without the money being lost on invalid clicks. Now for publishers: Google AdSense will show only those ads which are related to your web-page’s content, that means you have a better chance to have more clicks which means more money; AdSense does not allow ads with improper contents (p0rn, warez or any other harmful material), so your website is safe to use for all type of audience; AdSense is the most popular advertising program on the Internet so costs per click are the highest, that means you will get more money with AdSense than with other advertising networks; recently Google added a nice feature to manage your ads within you administration page, that means no more useless time spent on changing all your code in your pages manually; and finally the Google Checks: they are always sent on time and it’s a joy to see them in you mailbox

Where do i start? If you want to become a publisher go there , if you want to become an advertiser go the other way .

So i hope you enjoyed reading this post and if you decided to enrol in any of the two programs, i wish you success.

1. First of all i did a backup of my current Wordpress backup plugin. Then I downloaded the latest version from PHPMailer download site. It’s on SourceForge.
2. I have unzipped the downloaded archive and uploaded class.phpmailer.php and class.smtp.php to my blog/wp-includes/ folder. Don’t worry the original files on your server will remain untouched, because the original ones are class-smtp.php and class-phpmailer.php .
3. I went to my administration panel>Plugins>WordPress Database Backup>Edit. Now i copied all the contents of the plugin(contained in the textarea) in a special PHP editor (Dreamweaver), i suggest you to do the same as it will help you with the next step.
4. Somewhere at lines 894->901 you will find

   if ( !is_object( $phpmailer ) || ( strtolower(get_class( $phpmailer )) != 'phpmailer' ) ) {
   			if ( file_exists( ABSPATH . WPINC . '/class-phpmailer.php' ) )
   				require_once ABSPATH . WPINC . '/class-phpmailer.php';
   			if ( file_exists( ABSPATH . WPINC . '/class-smtp.php' ) )
   				require_once ABSPATH . WPINC . '/class-smtp.php';
   			if ( class_exists( 'PHPMailer') )
   				$phpmailer = new PHPMailer();
   		}

5. Change that block of code to

   if ( !is_object( $phpmailer ) || ( strtolower(get_class( $phpmailer )) != 'phpmailer' ) ) {
   			if ( file_exists( ABSPATH . WPINC . '/class.phpmailer.php' ) )
   				require_once ABSPATH . WPINC . '/class.phpmailer.php';
   			if ( file_exists( ABSPATH . WPINC . '/class.smtp.php' ) )
   				require_once ABSPATH . WPINC . '/class.smtp.php';
   			if ( class_exists( 'PHPMailer') )
   				$phpmailer = new PHPMailer();
   		}

6. Now find this:

                           $phpmailer->ClearAddresses();
   			$phpmailer->ClearAllRecipients();
   			$phpmailer->ClearAttachments();
   			$phpmailer->ClearBCCs();
   			$phpmailer->ClearCCs();
   			$phpmailer->ClearCustomHeaders();
   			$phpmailer->ClearReplyTos();
   			$phpmailer->AddAddress( $to );
   			$phpmailer->AddAttachment($diskfile, $filename);
   			$phpmailer->Body = $message;
   			$phpmailer->CharSet = apply_filters( 'wp_mail_charset', get_bloginfo('charset') );
   			//$phpmailer->From = apply_filters( 'wp_mail_from', $from_email );
   			//$phpmailer->FromName = apply_filters( 'wp_mail_from_name', $from_name );
   			$phpmailer->IsMail();
   			$phpmailer->Subject = $subject;
   
   			$result = @$phpmailer->Send();

7. Change that to :

                           $phpmailer->IsSMTP();
   			$phpmailer->ClearAddresses();
   			$phpmailer->ClearAllRecipients();
   			$phpmailer->ClearAttachments();
   			$phpmailer->ClearBCCs();
   			$phpmailer->ClearCCs();
   			$phpmailer->ClearCustomHeaders();
   			$phpmailer->ClearReplyTos();
   			$phpmailer->SMTPAuth = true; // enable SMTP authentication
   			$phpmailer->SMTPSecure = "ssl"; // sets the prefix to the servier
   			$phpmailer->Host = "smtp.gmail.com"; // sets GMAIL as the SMTP server
   			$phpmailer->Port = 465; // set the SMTP port
   
   			$phpmailer->Username = "username@gmail.com"; // GMail username (including @gmail.com)
   			$phpmailer->Password = "gmail_password"; // GMail password
   
   			$phpmailer->From = $from_email;
   			$phpmailer->FromName = $from_name;
   			//$phpmailer->IsHTML(true);
   			$phpmailer->Subject = $subject;
   			$phpmailer->Body = $message;
   			$phpmailer->AddAddress($to, "");
   			$phpmailer->AddAttachment($diskfile, $filename);
   			$result = @$phpmailer->Send();

8. Don’t forget to set your details in the last block of code you changed: your Gmail username(with @gmail.com) and your Gmail username password.
9. Now try to see if the script sends the backup to your email. If it doesn’t or if you get errors revert to your previous, original version of the Wordpress backup plugin.

Don’t forget to set Wordpress plugin to backup your database daily and send it to your email from the plugin’s settings. That way you won’t lose your blog in case it gets hacked and you will save a lot of time from rewriting all your posts.

That’s all! Hope you enjoy it!