This post is a little delayed, but however I wanted to share with you my earnings of the last month! If you compare it with my earnings of November, you could see that I earned pretty much the same…

• Private Sales: $117.25
• Text Link Ads commission: $16.69
• OIOPublisher commission: $47
• Web Design Projects: $100
• Commission Junction: $190

Total :  $470.94

From december, I learned that I work very well with Commission Junction, and althrough I don’t have request my first payment they seem to be very responsable.

In the next months, I will start working with Market Leverage, sharing all my tips and experiences with you. Also, I have planned to create a couple of landing pages that convert and give them to you FOR FREE. So stay tunned, you won’t want to miss this!

To your success. Mr Javo

Hi readers, the last month I was running 2 polls related with my blog. Probably you already saw the results but I’m going to share them with you now:

Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

In this poll I asked you about my new theme, if you like it or not… Perhaps I got some negative replies, the most of the people like my new style, which is very important for me and for my brand. For those who voted against my new theme, I would like to know your thoughts about it and why don’t you like this one…?

Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

In this other poll I asked you about the browser you use because some users reported an error on my blog with IE. So this poll was to verify how many people is seeing this error, in order to know if is a priority or not to fix it.

Well followers as usual, now let’s check the posts of this week:

• Don’t Follow Trends: Set Them! by Dmitry on Smashing Magazine.
• 7 Essential Things You Should Be Doing When Your Blog Is Still Young by Leo Babauta on ProBlogger.
• 16 Ideas For Free Products That Will Double Your Subscribers & Leads by Gyutae on WinningTheWeb.
• Getting Ads Approved On Facebook, A Blackhat Way by Mattaw on MoneyBites.
• Juice Up Your Business with Cross-Marketing by Levi on ShoeMoney.

This week I will post something about a contest that I have planned, so stay tuned! Happy Weekend

PS: How was the black friday!? Cheers!

Hello webmasters, as you know it’s very important to optimize your website for search engines in order to increase its traffic. It’s good to know when you are ranking well, but it’s even better to know the SEO results of your competitors on a certain keywords.

Introducing ExactFactor

That is possible with the help of ExactFactor, which lets you track your site ranking easily on the most used search engines: Google, Yahoo! and Live.

How can you use this tool? Well, basically ExactFactor provides a series of free tools that you can use to:

• Track your site promotion on Google, Yahoo! and Live
• Get progress reports directly to your email.
• Get an email alert when your site position is changed.
• Get an email alert when you overtake your competitor.
• Compare your site position to your competitors.

As you can see, these are some awesome features, particularly those ones related with email alerts, which you will get everything in your inbox without doing a single click. As a difference of the tracking and comparing tools, to use the tools related with email alerts you will need to register an user account. This way, you could stop being a guest, personalizing your email address to enjoy the rest of the features.

By comparing your site with your competitors you can make a SEO analysis and take certain actions in order to get a better ranking. Those certain actions, which can be a change of keywords, meta tags or may be a linkbaiting will help you out to rank higher than your competitors and get more traffic for especific keywords.

The following are some screenshots that let you see the user interface.

User Experience

User Alerts

Why to be satisfied with those screenshots? Don’t waste more time and go to ExtactFactor.com and configure your account to get your free reports!.

What a week! With all the changes of the new theme I have had a very shaken week. Some minors bugs were reported by many of you and I want to thank you for every comment you sent me through the new contact form.

This week I found excellent post everywhere, I have added like 20 posts to my spreading love series of this week but we know that is hard to read 20 posts at once. So, I reduced that list, and now I will give you the most useful:

• The Visual Design of 2.7 by Jane on WordPress Blog.
• Who Will Control Your Data in the Web 3.0 World? by Lidija on ReadWriteWeb.
• Too Much Effort and No Progress? Something Is Wrong There by Daniel on DailyBlogTips.
• How To Get Sponsors: Leveraging Current Sponsors To Get Even More Sponsors by Mattaw on MoneyBites.
• The 3 Strategies of Link Building – Why & How You Build Links by Gyutae on WinningTheWeb.
• Do You Have the Balls to Make Money Doing What You Love? by Paul on InspiredMoneyMaker.com.
• Introduction To Offline Affiliate Marketing by Josh on Affiliate Famous.

Other Interesting things:

• Reader Challenge #1 by Dot Com Dud on DotComDud.
• Flip A Site Contest – Part 1 by Bryan on Site Flip U.
• My Firefox Addons by Stephan on StephanMiller.com.

As you may know, WordPress 2.7 is almost ready for public beta, so in the first article you could see how it will look. And talking about wordpress and blogging, I recommend you to check the post of Stephan, who talks about his interest firefox addons which help him in his blogging work… I hope you liked this round of posts!

Yesterday I had updated my twitter profile! I have upgraded the background image to give it a touch of coolness . Also, I added a poll on the sidebar of the blog, asking if you like the new theme or not… I invite you to give me your vote!.

Now I want to take advantage of this post to remind you to participate in my 2.0 give away! Now it has almost $2500 in prizes and daily I continue receiving emails from more and more sponsors!

PS: Did you noticed that all these posts have long titles? What a weird thing…

In the creation of any kind of website (i.e. blogs, forums…) one of the most important aspects that you need to consider when you are going to design it is related to the interface between the final user and your website. That interface could be more or less amiable depending of the color scheme or palette that you have.

I know that is not possible to everyone to design its own website, so many times the people let their designer to make that choice. If that is the case, you suppose that your designer know about the website colors’ theory, or not? In this post I will give you the necessary tips to help you with the choice of a color pallete for your website.

Color Meanings

Do you know that colors have different meanings? Yes! Depending of the color your website will look adapted according to its niche. But what the colors mean? Let’s check it out:

Red: This color symbolizes energy, action, strength, leadership, courage. This color stimulates people to make quick decisions, is inherently exciting and the more color red the more the level of energy perceived. It draws attention and it is specially used on Marketing to focus the people attention on a particular element. That’s the reason why many people use this colors on landing pages.

Pink: This color symbolizes love, friendship, beauty. This color is a mix of a kind of red and a passive blue, that’s the reason why it represents passiveness, calming the mind and nerves. Also, it denotes feminine qualities, which make it one of the preferred colors of adolescent girls.

Brown: This color symbolizes stability, simplicity, health, reliability. It is the color of earth and people associate it with nature.

Orange: This color symbolizes happiness,  creativity, determination, stimulation. It is quite similar to red and many people use to misinterpret it, but think well about it. This color shares some properties with the red, but if you want to attract the people attention you should definitively use red.

 

Gold: This one symbolizes wisdom and wealth. This is the color of riches, and you could use it if you want to create feelings of success, good health, relaxation or personal power.

 

 

Yellow: Yellow represents optimism, enlightenment and happiness, stimulating metal and physical activity. Like red, this one is also good to attract attention, so this is why you can find landing pages with yellow and red squares.

 

 

Green: Green symbolizes life, growth, health, fertility, endurance. Like brown, this color is associated to nature.

 

 

Blue: This color represents peace, youth, spirituality, trust. This is the most favorite color among people due to it is the color of sky and the ocean, being perceived as a constant in our lives. It is perfect to inspire calming, cooling, depth and stability.

 

 

Gray: This is a monotonic color which represents security, formality, maturity. It is great because it can be mix with any color, but it should be mix with a vivid color if you don’t want to inspire sadness or depression.

 

 

Black: This color can be interpreted by many things, but basically it represents seriousness, conventionalism, Mystery. Black is authoritative and powerful but you should mix it with light colors if you don’t want to inspire death, emptyness, fear or evil.

 

 

Well those are the most basic color meanings, of course I’m not a proffesional on the topic but however you can guide yourself with this article. So once you know the color that you are going to implement on your site, what do you need to do next? How do you know which colors are mixable with it? Well, check out the following resources & tools that I collected for you:

• The Color Wizard 3.0 : The Color Wizard is a color matching application for anyone who wants to create designs with great looking colors. It generates a pallete of colors which look good among them.
• ColorToy 2.0: This is is a Flash based color scheme generator and picker. It generates complementary color schemes based on your inputted color values or randomly, which is much more fun.
• COLOURlovers: COLOURlovers™ is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. It gives the people who use color – whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification – a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.

With the information provided here and with the help of the resources mentioned above, you should be able to choose the colors that combine with your site personality/niche.

Many people think that creating a website and placing ads on it is an easy way to make money online. The only thing they are right with is that certainly, displaying advertising on your website or blog is a good way to make money online, but it’s deeper than they think.

Placing banner ads is like an art, depending of your website you will have more success in certain positions than in others, so you need to try and see what works for you. For our luck, the act of displaying advertising is not a new thing and there are some strategies which you can follow in order to have a start mark.

Before start displaying ads in your website you need to ask yourself some questions:

• What is the user trying to accomplish by visiting my site?
• What do they do when viewing a particular page?
• Where is their attention likely to be focused?
• How can I integrate ads into this area without getting in the users’ way?
• How can I keep the page looking clean, uncluttered and inviting?

Remember that is very important make the visitors feel comfortable in your site. If you place banners everywhere, they will not find content to read and they will automatically leave. So where should you place your ads? Let’s analyze the following heat map:

 

In this heat map you can see that some locations tend to be more efficient than others. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance), which normally are those  placed bellow the fold – banners, i.e. when you need to scroll down to see the banners.

A banner near from rich content tends to be clicked because the reader has its eyes focused in that area. Also those banners which are in the bottom of the content are clicked for the same reason. At the end of the content many websites have bookmark buttons, which make that area a good point to display a horizontal banner.

Talking  about the sidebars, you can see that people tend to watch the left sidebar more than the right one. The reason of this is simple, the most of the languages are read from left to right and unconsciously, the eyes catch better the banners of the left more than the banners of the right.

Remember that is really important to try different positions and banner sizes in order to know what works for your website. Depending of the structure and layout this heat map may not be applicable. In the case of blogs, in almost all of them you can see a sidebar on the right, but in absence of a left bar and due to the blog’s nature the people tend to watch the right sidebar.

So be creative and remember to not disturb your visitors with plenty of banners.