Earlier on this week I had read an article describing how Google has recently started dropping websites PR due to paid links being located in the websites yet Google themselves offer pay for link services. Right off the bat that hits a nerve with me. So then I started to wonder why do they have such an issue with this? I’ll tell you the only reason I could see is money. The more sites that run their own advertising campaigns the less money for Google and in an event like this we all would get the idea that they want a monopoly and would ultimately phase every one of us out if they had their way about it.
So now with thinking about this and the ramifications that will come with it we take a look at our own advertising methods. We ourselves run our own advertising campaigns and we do sell links and other space on our websites. The reason we handle most of our advertising in house as we do is this.
How many times have you gone to a website and found that they have advertising running on it and low and behold guess what that advertising on your (family oriented) website is showing. Viagra!!! Or some form of adult content that believe it or not is against the TOS of the advertising agency in the first place yet the ads still show. This is not entirely the fault of the advertising services since the good ones do offer an adult filter, which however never really works either.
So now with all these issues with using Google and other services like theirs we have had to drastically limit what shows with the adult filters and even had to remove some advertising agencies advertisements altogether. So now what do we do with all the negative results and loss in revenues? Simple we sell our own advertising. We offer it for less than it is worth ultimately giving the advertiser a huge deal since we eliminate the middle man and price our links below their worth.
And now you may wonder what is the point? That is simple.
A: We get to monitor specifically who is or is not allowed to run advertising on our website making the ads that do show much more relevant than they would be using a 3rd party.
B: We get an accurate record of what ads were clicked. This is serious here. According to our records for clicks on ads there are ad services that owe us a heck of allot more than they have record of or plan to make payouts for.
C: We control the look of the ads therefore we are able to stop them from breaking our pages layout and causing validation errors.
Now after reviewing why we handle the majority of our advertising in house and not finding any issue with it since it is no different than an advertising block purchased in a newspaper which the biggest ads or the ones in higher read areas cost more then the ones that are read less or in the back of the newspaper we made the decision to continue with our methods as they have been and worked for us and if Google and or any other search engines have an issue with this may they be forewarned. Stop while you are ahead or suffer the consequences. We the people of the web are what made you and we can break you in less time then it took you to get where you are now! Oooooh, sounds like a threat… Well it is not, it is a solid promise. At this point we do not really even give two cents about pr or traffic ranking. That is all made up nonsense anyway. We have been receiving a minimum of over 1000 viewers for a slow month on Asylum-ET alone and the majority are not coming from any of the big search engines anyway. Instead they come from online communities that send us traffic that want to find us.
Just the same though after taking a look at this and then going to Google to read their page about pr and then also noticing that our pr has not dropped but instead spiked up not only on this website but 3 others as well which we use the same methods on, I think it is safe to say that the person(s) who wrote the article where way off base and yes their website may have lost some pr but it had nothing to do with selling links directly.
What is very well likely though is that it could have had something to do with just whom these links were sold to so I recommend doing as we do and do not just sell links to anyone. You should only offer them to those who have relevant content and purpose. I mean seriously this is our whole purpose for being here at Asylum-ET.
We are working to give viewers a place they can come and find entertainment related items such as bands or djs so unlike some of our competitors who have a dui lawyer link right next to your entertainment businesses listing we have entertainment related listings only. Also by being selective of who you allow listings to the value of your listings goes up because they are not diluted with irrelevant garbage.
Recently I had been out of work in desperate need of any little bit of money I could scrape up. I had been searching high and low to find something when I happened upon Scriptlance.com
I was so excited to find a website like this that appeared to be legitimate and user friendly. After about 30 minutes from the time I signed up I found a job that I placed a bid for $75.00 on. I think it was a day later I was awarded the bid on it and my work commenced. I completed the project in an extremely short amount of time and the Webmaster who needed this work done was so impressed that he even threw in a $25 tip so he paid me a total of $100. Not to bad. Or so I thought. So here it is over a week later and I still have not seen payment from scriptlance who is holding my payment.
When I tried to make a withdrawal the website told me that I would have to wait 7 days since I have a new account. For what purpose is really beyond me except for this one thing. They want to hold your money as long as possible since for every day it is in their account and not yours it is interest in their pockets at your expense. I contacted Scriptlance and 3 days later I finally get a response asking me what method of payment I would like to use. That’s it. Nothing else so it is as if they did not even really read the email I sent them but rather just browsed it and saw oh “payment issue” and didn’t read anything else. So I sent a reply telling them to please use paypal.
It has been a few days since then and I have yet to hear back from them. I dropped them another message in their support ticket area yesterday and have not received a response from that yet either. I have noticed that the website now says that payments made via paypal take 3 days to process. I personally use paypal as a payment gateway and I have never seen such a thing in all the payments I have sent and received. After all this I decided I had better go back and take a very close look at their TOS to find out what the deal is. So what do I find in the Terms of Service? Something altogether different from everything else the website has told me.
The TOS states “New members cannot withdraw funds within 30 days of their first project payment.” If I had been aware of this in the signup process I would not have even bothered with signing up. After dealing with Scriptlance over the past few weeks now I have to say that my review of them would be that the website looks inviting but it appears to be a one man show and the one man just can not handle the workflow that running a website such as this requires. They appear understaffed and their professionalism when it comes to expediently processing support requests or anything else for that matter seems to just be non-existent. I would not recommend using the services provided by this site and furthermore the webmaster that I had done the work for and myself will never use this website again after this.
I have this friend who always gets me going on the Mac vs. PC kick. He is still a bit in the newb phase of using Macs since OS X is his first experience with the Macs. My first computer experience dates back to about 1992 or so using Win 3.1 and since then I have used every OS that M$ has released. My first Mac experience was with what I like to refer to as the byte cruncher using OS 7.5. Why byte cruncher? Well it always sounded as though it were eating bytes for breakfast every time you would walk away from it. So now I should get on with my story. This friend of mine, he speaks ever so highly of his experience with Mac and has every bit of harshness towards M$ products complaining of the blue screen of death and driver issues. I have a PC that I paid a base price of $600.00 for and then added a few hundred in parts I already had and a few new ones.
I installed Windows XP 993 days ago now do the math, that’s just a bit shy of 3 full years on one install. Never have I had to run a system restore or any such bothersome routines. I manually update and weed out the updates that are unnecessary for my system, run a reliable ant virus and so on. As for crashes and reboots, only if I intend to crash it does this machine crash and reboots well that depends on the user and what they install but all of mine have been scheduled and have gone with very little down time as an effect. Speaking of downtime how about the flipside. Would you believe me if I told you that up until the show I just played at requiring use of this machine so therefore requiring it to be shut down this Windows XP machine had 4.5 months of solid uptime.
Unbelievable as it may be it is easily obtainable. Get your configurations right and don’t mess with things and if you do make sure you know what the heck you are doing and even then mistakes can be made. 99.9% of all issues with a ANY computer be it PC, Mac or whatever are what is referred to as PEBKAC and for all those who are unaware of what that means it is simple. Problem exists between keyboard and chair
A while back we made a post to inform everyone of the new framework we intended on using here on Asylum-ET. We created a new domain to use as a test bed for the framework. So far it has been about 2 months that we have been running the new domain with this new website in place and so far it has gone rather well. There are still a few little quirks and details to be worked out but it is functional and we encourage all of our users here that are in a band or are dj’s, caterers or photographers to stop over to Entertainment Tonight . Org and sign up for a listing as soon as possible. Come and check us out and let us know what you think.
As soon as we see a large enough response and are able to decide if the framework is just right then we will be putting it into place here as well.
So this post does not strike you as odd, I am the admin here and yes I am a Reverend as well so with that said today I was looking through the bible to prepare a reading for a wedding this weekend. While I read it made me think of some of the past posts I have made like the recent one about the state of the world today. I cannot help but to constantly wonder what causes a human to think they are doing God’s work by killing. Killing in the name of God they say so proudly. Now correct me if I am wrong but is pride not one of the greatest of sins? Anyway what I found was this little passage in the bible that makes my beliefs ever more prominent.
1 CORINTHIANS 13:4-8a
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude.
Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.
Love never ends.
What this says to me is that God is the one who has shown and given us all love, it tells me that He is not a spiteful, arrogant or resentful God. We are men
Recently my uncle Kenny D. Shaw asked me to take a look at his upcoming children’s book and after sitting with one of my daughters and reading it from cover to cover we both decided it was surely a great book and looked forward to its upcoming release. It is now about a month later and the book is finally here as with an optional cd to accompany the book.
The idea for the book originated from a poem written by a Donald L. Slater. Donald came to my uncle Kenny and asked him to record the poem. The outcome of the recording was so uplifting to the two men that they decided they could play their part in making the world a better place by writing a children’s book with beautiful pictures of gods creations on display and the words from the poem. All of this and a cd to go along with it for families to use as a tool to instill love and togetherness into their children before mainstream music and media gets their claws into them.
You can find out more about the book titled It’s a brand new day and purchase it by visiting It’s a brand new day.net
Global Warming, Genocide, Terrorism, War. That is all I hear about anymore. I must say I myself am seriously sick of it. Is this all really called for? Are we really that ignorant a species to not realize we are only killing ourselves and not so much ourselves but our children? Just think they will have to spend 50 years of their life or better cleaning up our mistakes if they are actually still alive and able.
You know the thing that bothers me most about it all is this. Global Warming. They try to blame society for use of products such as hairspray. Although I am sure that is not very good for the environment I am sure the missile and bomb tests have a far greater effect than the whole of us and our damaging products yet they still go forth with them.
Now we see flash floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and tidal waves in places that it was unheard of. Who is to blame for all of that? Well all of us for not doing anything about our terrorist countries that we reside in. Yea that’s right I said it so shoot me, it will only further prove my point.
Of all things I hear the other day that the Russians are reinstating their air force and tactical training and boast about the money they have to drive another arms race, which brought them in range of our airspace. Is this necessary? It has been about 15 years since any such thing. Have they been attacked, harmed or otherwise ill-treated? Not that I am aware so why now. Ill tell you why. Greed! Greed for money, Greed for power and the strong urge to DIE! Other than that there is no reason outside of pure ignorance and disregard for our own kind.
Start a movement, bring the masses together and put an end to it once and for all and no I do not mean by bombing the shit out of the planet. I mean get together. Grab a neighbor. Enjoy the presence of life because we are borderline on not having it and our governments don’t give a rat’s ass. They will be all hidden away in their copper lined caves while everyone else sits out here and vaporizes. Do you have children? Imagine sitting at the table for morning coffee as your child plays in the back yard. Next thing you see a flash of light and your kid turn to ashes split seconds before you follow. Yea that’s what I am looking forward to aren’t you?
So to close I have one more thing to say. Smarten Up!
This post is in regards to online advertising methods and the websites/companies that provide services to website/blog owners for earning money to make posts and or other advertisements. I am growing more discouraged with these types of programs as time progresses.
It seems that the programs all have there TOS and it is very easy to violate it without even thinking much of it at all. After I have experimented with a number of these different programs I have decided that there should be some guidelines that website/blog owners should follow as a rule of thumb and it may just spur these advertising affiliates into better practice.
Think of your website/blog as a newspaper. If you open your local newspaper you will see advertising for at minimum 30 companies many even being competitors all on the same page. These newspapers on an average are read by a percentage of the town or cities population. The small little 2-inch by one-inch ads can cost upwards of a few hundred dollars a week to run.
The online advertising affiliate programs and such expect that you will provide them with a minimum of a 200-word post or article describing their service or goods. They expect that you will do this for them for $20.00 or less and leave the ad active for 30+ days. Not only do they expect you to do this for pennies but they also expect that their ad will not be on the same page or near any other advertisement.
Well first off I don’t know about anyone else but in my city there are 58′000 people and assuming every one of them read the newspaper my website still reaches double that amount in a month at least. Now that it is obvious that we have a greater reach than a newspaper why is it that we get paid chump change?
After thinking about all of this I have decided that I do not go looking for affiliates. They look for me. If they want a post, great they will get a post and a good one at that. If they want to have a full page ad so be it they can have that to but we are talking about real estate here so the more ad space the greater the cost. Unlike a newspaper though we do require some level of decency and proper business practice for the companies we advertise for. If we decide a company is not up to our standards we are not about to tell our viewers that they are reputable. We will also not run advertisements for any program or affiliate that requires us to not have more than one ad per page or anything even close to that kind of tactic so if you are one of these you might as well not bother or you may want to change your TOS before contacting us. Before I go the last thing I must state is that we refuse to run advertisements that require us to remove internal links from our posts. What this means is that if my site has a page named kwidget and in an advertisement the word kwidget is used, the website will make it a link to the kwidget page on my own site. Think about it. If you go to Wal-Mart or the like and go to the shampoo isle what do you see? Sum 18 different brands of shampoo. What do you think would happen if Suave decided to contact Wal-Mart and tell them they could not have their product in the same isle or on the same shelf as any others. Well Wal-Mart would likely tell them well pay us more or we stop carrying your product since it is an unrealistic request. Anyway that is just a few of my thoughts on the matter and what we are doing about it. Hopefully others will follow and show the advertising world that we are not a joke and you wont get our prime real estate for nothing.
OMG so maybe one more. This has got to be the absolute worst video I have seen in 30 years. You know how they say even bad publicity is good publicity. Well this video surely disproves that and then some.
Hello everyone. The weekend is coming soon and we will be taking a bit of a vacation. Before we go though I was browsing some videos of dj’s using samplers and so on. After reading a local dj businesses hits on dj’s who don’t use turntables and have other methods of mixing it up I decided it was about time I respond to that. So here is a video of a dj who by the way is just playing around. Boon Doc is his name and you have got to checkout his skillz for yourself now.
