Abhilash Pillai Website Designer

I can surely foresee a time when GAO will be more popular as a profession rather than just a skill.

If you are still wondering what GAO stands for? is Google Adsense Optimization…

The skills to do so have gone so vast that nowadays webmasters are hiring an expert in the field to optimize adsense on their websites for better revenue. The scope is tremendous as the skills of such engineer affects the revenue of the site directly where adsense is the main source of revenue.

Having worked for years optimizing ads …I see GAO as challenging as SEO is… Which changes with time and its more challenging as like a SEO has little scope of using black hat methods..so is in GAO where you have to follow the google adsense guidelines…

Overall anybody who is looking for a nice profession 10 years from now… GAO looks like a promising option..

So start experimenting with the google ads on your site so you gain maximum exposure to whats works and what doesn’t…

Google is changing fast and so is the methods to SEO your site. Gone are the days when people use to SEO a site by submitting the site URL to huge list of directories to get backlinks and get the site ranked high on the search engine index. Now spiders have got clever.

Not only the speed at which your site will load will be important but also the ability to keep site fresh and connect it through social networks. Tweeter is something which would be considered seriously in future. Tweeting is getting into the search algo and first signs of that is the introduction of Google Latest Live results.

Google even released a video on this and you would be surprised the way it updates the results in real time. So in future you might see results change even after you searched. So its time to take note of this.

Note:

This post got into the google latest real time index within 1 sec of posting. Here is the screenshot:

Showluck.com is a site which calculates your luck on the basis of inputs which you provide. If you want to just try it out just use the following link:

http://www.showluck.com/mind.php?id=555575

Don’t be surprised if you get pranked, that what the site is all about. Its meant to prank your friends and get personal details from them. Try it out for yourself !

Yeah, I know it is pretty late for me to try this out, but eventually its turning out to be the coolest thing I have noticed in Desktop blogging platforms.. The Windows Live Writer. All windows 7 users can download the windows live writer from the Windows essentials pack on the Microsoft site.

It did discovered my wordpress blog with great ease and also downloaded the template styles so as to give me the natural look of the online blog. I did add multiple blogs in the Windows live writer and everything seems too smooth now.

Sample Table created by Live Writer

Creating tables is a breeze…and so will be adding maps…Let me try the maps..

Well it was cool too…however anybody would have loved the google map integration instead of the bing..:D But its not hard to guess why Microsoft didn’t include that. And thats where Microsoft makes mistakes, to appreciate a competitors product if it adds value to your own products.

Coming back to the writer, I just love this… Simply a great product for bloggers. Something really good from Microsoft ! And free too !

Latur – A city which is making fast progress in the fields of education, govt administration, agriculture, industries and also is hometown to political heavyweights like Shri Shivraj Patil , Shri Vilasrao Deshmukh , Shri Diliprao Deshmukh and Shri Amit Deshmukh.

And its also notable to mention the name of Cinestar Ritesh Deshmukh who also belongs to latur.

More info about Latur city and its people will be available at a seperate site called My Latur Pattern – The url is http://www.mylaturpattern.com

Well whether that title makes it interesting or not, it would be certainly on some people’s mind when they look for future career options. There is tremondous difference of opinion when it comes to people who are already working independent regardless of what degree they possess. From my personal point of view it rarely matters, what matter is knowledge and not the degree you have.. If you have the knowhow , the will power and ability to translate ideas into reality then you are bound to succeed no matter you have a degree or not.

Some views from different people:

@sonneti:

You should realize though the whole point of a degree is not what you learn its about having a certificate that says:
Yes I know how to play the game of passing a course
I may also have the following talents
Telling people my grandparents just died when I haven’t handed in my coursework/failed an exam.
Plagiarizing
Sometimes attending almost one whole class per week.
Plagiarizing
Manipulation through either pity or being best friends with all the lecturers!
Plagiarizing
Survive almost entirely on a diet of weed and alcohol
Plagiarizing
Defrauding banks of student loan monies

@knoxgates:
Degree earns you a respect in the soceity which you live.
If you are skilled you can get a high paying job.

@antonio
Degree for sure! Just check out the statistics – people that go to UNI will earn much more in their lives, they get late start though and that sucks. By the time you are out of the University (with a juicy loan that you have to pay back) your buddies already own a nice car and have a steady job that makes them good $$$
15 years later -> they are all bald and fat and live in the projects, while you are bald and fat, driving a Porsche.

@Bighustlah
I have met so many wildly successful people in my life that don’t have degrees. I also know quite a few that DO have a degree. IMO it’s not the degree itself that is helping you. It’s the confidence you project when you have a degree. If you can be confident, it doesn’t matter if you have a degree or not.

@smoov1
It depends. Me personally i think degrees now days are BULL SHIT, college has become big business. I have many many many friends with degrees of all kinds shapes and sizes and all they do is complain about the money they are making and paying back loans. I make at least 4 times more then all of them and I have to admit that I feel dam good knowing that I was one of the only ones from my high school class that never attended college but yet somehow at our high school reunion I was the only one driving a s550 Benz!! Nobody with a degree that I know is even coming close to the level of comfort and success im feeling. Me choosing not to go to college might be the best decision I have ever made in my life! I have been making money online for about 10 years now, and im clocking well into the 6 figures every year consistently just to sit on my ass and my income is only growing!

@jmascis
I have a buddy that never got a degree and still had a very successful IT career. On the flip side, he is always paranoid about not advancing in his company when up against other college graduates.

Time for some conclusion:

Before giving out my view, let me tell you that I do have a degree but not a post graduate one , a graduate degree that too not in the field now I am in but a graduate in commerce. A B.com degree which has very less or no value in India. Some of the better degrees for me to have is something like the M.C.A or BE , something related to the software field. So do I regret not having a post graduate degree ?

Absolutly not ! Why? Because I feel if someday I wish I need a degree, I will get it ). Well its all about the confidence and the need ofcourse.

I never felt the need of a degree because I learnt everything from the internet myself and make a living from an independent owned business where nobody asks me for a certificate.

So my personal view:

If you are planning to work for somebody else or planning to work in a company : – Go for a Degree : Because unfortunately thats how companies and the HR will judge your initial talent.

If you are planning to work independently all throughout your life, have the confidence in yourself to succeed, then it really doesn’t matter whether you have a degree or not. You can keep several employees who have a degree instead :p . Having said that, I would say always go for a degree if you can get it without compromising the knowledge factor. For example if you plan to work independently and you have to attend  the college for long hours to get a degree, then in this case you are compromising the knowledge you were bound to get independently.

I know several people will argue that college provides knowledge too and so and so…but in the region I am from…even though its known for educational values…degrees very rarely impart practical knowledge to succeed, they often provide bookish knowledge to write the exams. Its more of a memory test where you have to memorise the content in the textbooks and write it down in exams.

So If you plan to work for somebody else: Go for a Degree : If you plan to work for yourself : Degree doesn’t matter

And the most important point: Don’t take the degree seriously..What makes you successfull is the knowledge not the degree

There may be a lot of argument regarding this as to which is the best URL structure to use in a wordpress blog. Before that let me explain how the URL structure is tweaked. Its known as permalink in wordpress and you will find it in the dashboard > Settings > Permalinks:

Here you see various options you can use such as http://www.URLHERE.com/2009/09/09/sample-post/ or http://www.URLHERE.com/2009/09/sample-post/

However, the best option to use is a Custom structure: Enter this in the field:     /%category%/%postname%/

That makes the URL SEO friendly by showing the category and post name in the URL. If you wish to remove the word “category” in the category url, what you have to do is just put a dot “.” without quotes in the Category base field below and save the changes.

There are a lot of variations and views regarding which is the best one to use, but in my view this is reasonably the best and the one which I use on this blog. Hope this post helps

Update:(26th Aug 2010) The “.” in tags fields no longer works with the latest version of wordpress. The better option for removing “category” is to edit the rewrite.php file located in includes folder.

In the previous post Blogging as a career : An alternative to jobs , I left out to mention where to buy domains from. I did mention about hostgator as a reliable host in that post but the domain part I assumed as everybody knows.

The best place to buy a domain is www.godaddy.com if you have a credit card or balance in your paypal account. If you are looking for some other alternatives to pay, then you will have to look elsewhere. I do prefer godaddy as the best source to buy domains as their control panel is something very easy to use and a lot of people are used to it, so its easier when u need to transfer domains due to a sale.

For newbies the price may seem high, but the trick is to use discount coupon codes while checking out. The code I use often for .com domains is ZINE3 which did work with my latest domain buy too.

Fed up searching for jobs in a highly competitive jobs market, where there is frequent jobs cuts and salary deductions. So what are the alternatives available? How about starting blogging? Well, lets see what are the options..

What you need for blogging?

A domain + web hosting account. Even though there is a lot of factors which determines the charges for hosting. Lets start with something as basic as a shared plan as hostgator: Recomemded baby plan . So the yearly expenses should work at to $105 or Rs.5200.  Also note that you can use the same host to host even more blogs. So for the second and third site you would only need domain i.e. $8 yearly. I would stronly recommend to start with one and later add two more.

Apart from the hosting and the domain, offcourse you need a PC and broadband connection. Lets calculate the net connection at $20 monthly or Rs.1000 monthly and a further PC depreciation and power charges at $20 a month.

So the total yearly expenditure would be at $105+$240+$240 = $585 i.e. around Rs. 29,250

I know by now you would start rolling your eyes…well blogging is surely not for the soft hearted and impatient guys out there. Its really hard to get results out of your blogs.

Now lets calculate the returns you can expect in the first year..

Before that, I would like to say that blogs do need unique content, atleast rewritten content to rank. Any 100% copy paste would be near to impossible to rank. A reasonable number of posts to start with would be around 4 to 5 a day.

For the first two months, I don’t see a chance for any earnings at all. Thats something which many of you would worry about , but thats the risk involved in blogging. From the third to sixth month I would calculate the earnings to be in the range of 30 to 100 $ per month ( Google adsense). I do prefer to start with Google adsense.  From the 6th to one year term, I would calculate the earnings to be anywhwere between $100 to $300 a month. So lets determine an average earning even though the earnings depend on a variety of factors like the category(niche) of the site and the traffic it brings.

First two months = Nil

3rd to 6th Month = $200

7th to 12th month = $1200

A total earning of $1400.. now thats Rs. 70000

So its a profit of around Rs.40000 a month. Very low , isn’t it? Well, these calculations are indeed at the lower end of the earnings, its better to start with low expectation than to have very high expectations and later feel demotivated.

Some more things to remember while blogging are:

Concentrate on writing for readers than the search engine.

Concentrate on getting traffic to the blog..(not on the earnings)..

Hope, this post clarifies the doubts one has regarding the initial investment and effort required to start blogging as a career. Do provide your valuable comments..

Google has introduced voice search in four indian cities. That means now you just need to call 1-800-41-999-999

You can hear the results read out and even can get it by SMS.  So no need of any kind of browser to search now. Just make a completly free call and search. To add some spice this service is available in English, Hindi and Telugu.

Read Google’s official page here: http://labs.google.co.in/phonesearch/index.html