Using Social Networking Websites to get Traffic

Each one of us is a user of some sort of a Social Networking Website. Let it be facebook, myspace, orkut or any other. These websites have high ranks in the list of top internet websites and get billions of page views from millions of users. Myspace alone has 110 million users and facebook has over 70 million users. The reason why I’m telling you about this is because I am going to tell you that how you can benefit from these websites, moreover they are all free to join. So now you have no problem in joining them even if you have not.
First thing that you should do is become an extremely active user, let your friends list blast, and add people on a world-wide basis. meet new people, and develop friendship with them. Make yourself extremely famous among masses. Update your profile frequently, put your pictures so that people really visit your profile and send you messages. Try to add friends who themselves are pretty famous. Now that you have dozens of friends and a big network, you talk about your website or the website that you are promoting. Always remember, do not copy/paste stuff, and while you’re telling people something like your website, talk like you normally talk to them. Give them suggestions over their profile and in the end try to mention your website, probably asking them to give comments over it.
Always try to send them messages that are visible by all, because you never know some one curious enough might just come and click your website’s link in your friends message book. Never spam, I think I just made my self clear. The reasons being that firstly, you might get banned from the website, loosing all your friends and your network. When you spam, you are trying to force others to click the link which will make them feel as if it is a scam trap. Just leave a link at the end and leave them on their own to click it.
Update your profile frequently and also leave a link of your website on your profile page, this does not mean that you put it in capitals and give false information for them to click on it. You might say something like this at the end:
” By the way I am a user to a website that is really helping me earn money, message me if you want to know more information about it or you can just see it for your self:
http : // visit this . com
Thanks a lot for your time. “
Something like this could be at the end of your profile’s about me and make sure you remain active on the Social Networking Website. The more the people see this, the more clicks you’ll get. I hope now you understand that how you can use Social Networking website in getting traffic for your links. Best of luck and I hope you’ll leave a comment to this article.

How to Grab Attention in the Blogosphere

There are more than a million blogs in the blogosphere, where there are about 40 categories which means there is a chance that there are 25000 blogs talking about the same thing that you are. It’s hard to differentiate when all are talking about the same thing, but there are some ways how you can lift yourself from the base and hit the top. I firmly believe that getting attention in the blogosphere is the key to success.
Once you have people’s attention, you’ll get traffic, subscribers, incoming links and lastly you’ll have the golden opportunity to make money. The type of attention that I’m talking about is that most bloggers know you and your blog, know that you have some valuable ideas to share with others and most importantly they know that you exist! It all starts with one little spark and ends up with an ever-lasting blazing fire of traffic.

Be Unique

Use the average blog theme, copy/paste articles, use concepts or strategies that have been yelled by hundreds of bloggers for years, copy the blogging style of others and you’ll get nowhere. Every blogger and I mean *every* blogger needs to be unique in order to succeed, some most classical examples of bloggers who are extremely unique than the others include Internet Marketing Sucks and IMwithJoe. For example, if you’re in the niche of Search Engine Optimization, be unique by discovering new things. You’ll probably attract a lot of visitors and incoming links.

Show Yourself to the World

After I open a blog, the second thing I do is go to the About page and read about the person which gives me a perfect image of him/her. So put up a few pictures and write something unique about yourself, your reason for blogging and most importantly a few links to your profiles on Social Networks. When you start a personal friendship with other bloggers, there are countless advantages that you can avail.

Be Creative

Creativeness can be seen anywhere, your articles, your blog design, your way of talking. Moreover, creativeness is the base of marketing and marketing leads to your content being in front of more people. I’ll make it simple, be creative and leave the rest on others it will gain exposure in the blogosphere it self. In my opinion the most creative blog is Daisy the Curly Cat.

Be Active

Be active in the blogosphere and you’ll grab attention. Make a bookmarks list of about 50 famous blogs and comment on them regularly or probably be the first one to comment. Send Pingbacks through posts to other bloggers. Guest Post on other blogs. Have other bloggers talk about you by either having them write about you or adding you to their blogroll.
It is attention which is the ultimate success to any blog, once you have attention in your niche you’ll be attracting visitors by all means with next to no effort on your part. It all takes a few weeks of hard work, but using your smartness to do the hard-work is the quick and easy way.

Traffic Exchange - A great source of Traffic

Traffic exchange is basically a platform for those who want traffic, they do so by visiting each other’s website, but not through giving links to each other. Everyone makes an account, sets up his website for traffic and then surfs the websites of others which are displayed in a frame. To me traffic exchanges are a great source of getting good visitors to the website.I am currently using two traffic Exchanges which I would advise others to join as well. They are the most easy to use. They are TrafficG and Fast Free Way.
You usually have to visit each visit for 15-30 seconds. After this you have to complete a human verification, this is to prevent bots from accumulating traffic. After this you will be paid about 0.5 visitors in the case of fast free way. So for every two websites you visit, you get one visitor in return, which is not bad at all. According to this after 30 minutes you can get 60 visitors to your website. They also have contest like referrals contest and clicking contest in which the winner gets free visits.
If anyone of you is lazy enough and cannot view websites to get visitors, then you can also purchase visitors, fast free way offers 1000 visitors for $10.00 . You can also save this money, if you can visit websites your self, this choice is yours. When you refer people to the website you get 20% visits to your website for the visits your referral has earned. This way you can get even more visits to your website.
So anyone who wants free traffic can click on Traffic G and Fast Free way to join them

Google Pagerank Update!

This is a quick post as I just happened to notice by ‘mistake’ that my pagerank had changed. First I thought it was an error, but no, google has just released a pagerank update yesterday. The last pagerank update just came out at April 1st and I was among the April fools expecting a pagerank upgrade.
I didn’t blog that update because I felt pissed because I didn’t get an upgrade in the pagerank. But I suppose you would’ve guessed it, yeah my pagerank just upgraded from PR2 to PR3. Moreover, I now have over 20 pages which are PR2+ and about 5 which are PR3+. So I feel really blessed by this update.
Everyone was expecting an update somewhere near the start of July but this was quite a surprise. I’m excited and some will be happy while others will be sad. Check your pagerank now to know which category will you lie in. Keep your fingers crossed and don’t be too dis-heartened by this update because even I have over 15 mini-sites and not even one of them got an upgrade in case you don’t get an upgrade.

Has Live Search Lost It’s Market Share?

Despite the fact that Live Search would be one of my last choices while using search engines but yesterday I accidentally happened to check my search position for some keywords that my blog ranks for, on Live Search as well. I saw that my blog ranked on the first page for each one of them which was quite a big surprise for me.
All of those keywords (combined) have been searched on google at least 600,000 times on an average and even if Live Search gets 1/10th searches this amount, which is 60,000, it could still get me at least a few hundred hits a month. The weird thing is that I hardly received 10 hits from Live Search in the last month which brings us to one of the following conclusions:

1. Live Search has totally lost it’s market share in the Search Engine industry and no one uses it.
2. The people searching on Live Search do not search for the keywords that have huge numbers on other search engines.
3. People come to Live Search by accident or misspelling in Internet explorer brings them there and they search for something really stupid.
4. I’m missing out some really weird prank being played by MSN.

Whatever the reason be, I’m really confused about the potential traffic from Live Search which was yelled in the SEO industry in the past few years, moreover if you were or you were thinking of making efforts to improve your website for Live Search then you can see the result right here. There’s hardly any hope to make money on the internet by running affiliate campaigns on Live Search, unless there is real and legit proof.

Top 5 Reasons To Use Bing

With all the negative reviews coming everywhere about Bing, I thought of doing a positive one. I mean, give the new search engine a chance. Despite the fact that bing.com currently has a compete rank of 818,472 which is even lower than mine but that search engine just launched on 28th May. There are two vivid reasons for people not liking Bing.
Firstly, they still have live search in mind so they think that Bing is no different. Secondly, people have forgotten about searching, they’re too busy googling. So when a new search engine takes on searching, they can’t accept to search when they’re having so much fun googling.
I use Google pretty much every day. Around 40-50 times on an average but that doesn’t mean that I get too accustomed to Google and wouldn’t even have the courtesy to try another search engine. Might sound lame to loyal Google supporters but the following are five reasons why you should give Bing a chance.

#1 - Bing Saves A Lot Of Time

This screen shot became popular on Digg somewhere around 3 days ago. Although the picture speaks for itself, I’ll just say that you don’t see this on Google normally. This is an extreme plus point for Bing users.

#2 - Bing Knows How To Answer Questions

Just because of the small new feature of Bing of being able to display extra information really gives them an upper hand. They really did work on their algorithm which now produces great results if you type in questions. After looking at these pictures below you might say: “Use the define syntax instead”. For your information, the define tag works on both but more than 95% of Google users wouldn’t even know what a define tag is.

#3 - Bing Doesn’t Rely On 10 Year Old Designs

I started using the internet back in 1999. Ever since, I’ve seen Google with the exact same design. They may have added new features every now and then but they have the same faded design. Although I didn’t like their design at first and said “If you ever start a search engine try not to display your knowledge of renewable energy resources like windmills and solar panels“.
I had to change my opinion because that’s dynamic and it changes every day (so far). Moreover, if you hover over the image, at different positions there are some facts that you might want to know. It’s helpful, you can learn a few things everyday. This might be in counter to Google Doodles but I find this one much more useful. After all, this is Web 2.0. you have to keep up.
I’m not saying that Google’s interface is not good, in fact they have one of the most user-friendly interfaces on the web right now because of the simplicity of the design. But some things have to change. Like, when was the last time you used the ‘I’m feeling Lucky!’ button?

#4 - You Don’t Have To Go To Bing ‘Hot Trends’

If you’re an internet marketer, you must be aware of Google hot trends. It basically shows you what’s hot on the web right now or on a more marketer’s approach: It shows you which keywords are being searched the most right now. However, following the idea from Twitter, Bing also shows what’s popular or in other words: Which keywords are being searched the most. Unlike Google, Bing makes it more easy to see what’s popular and more people get to see what’s going on.

#5 - Bing Allows Feedback

“So, Google supporter. When was the last time you got help from google when you needed it?”. Whether that be a search problem, requesting a new feature or whatever, you need to have a feedback form. If you tell me: “Google has so many users, they can’t afford to have a support team answering thousands of mails a day”, I’ll say: “The former number 1 company in the U.S. and the current number 4 company in the U.S. can’t afford to have a feedback form and support staff with that? They have billions in profits every year, squeezing out a million for support will not hurt a bit.”.
Leave that, Google doesn’t even provide a proper contact form for users of Blogger and Orkut. Remember when they disabled my blogger account, and unfortunately I couldn’t even contact them. But wait. I forgot, you actually can contact Google. Why don’t you send them a fax at +1 650-253-0001? Pretty user friendly right?
Now let’s switch the whole scenario to Bing. Even though they don’t have other services yet, they’re providing a feedback form to any user. Moreover, it is at the front page. I found it hard to believe and got to them with a stupid question. I check after 30 minutes and I have a reply. A useful reply to what I was asking by the Bing support team. Can you challenge this?
Hope that helps change the image of Bing in your mind a little bit and you might give it a try. Take a tour of Bing and I’m sure you’ll find it useful to some extent. In fact, it is already catching fire, stat counter shows that it took a jump ahead Yahoo! in the market share and that was because of a decrease in the market share of Google! By the way, I might have sounded biased on Bing’s side but this was not a sponsored review!

Bing takes off better than expected

In case you still don’t know what Bing is, Bing is a new search engine introduced by MSN. If you read my last post about live search then you’ll probably know how I started thinking of windows live search as useless. However, the buzz about Bing started building about a week ago.
Prior to this, a coming soon page was displayed. But yesterday, they released it’s ‘preview’ version. No comments about how it’s working because I’m still not going to use it anyways, although I did give it a few tries. They have kind of jacked up their algorithms and their search is better than before.
But thinking from a marketer’s point-of-view, then here are the facts:

• Live search sent me a maximum of 5 hits per month.
• The search terms were so stupid that made me wish that my website never existed.
• The bounce rate never got below 90%!
• Bing sent me 12 hits on the first day of it’s release.
• The hits were from popular keywords hence giving me useful and targeted visitors.
• The bounce rate is 10%!!

The hits I got from Bing can then again be seen from two perspectives.

1. It’s probably the first day so it did not send me as much hits as it will send me in the future.
2. The buzz is all about Bing. Everybody’s using Bing and there is extra-ordinary buzz about it. Once people realize that it sucks, they might never use it again. Hence, the traffic goes down!

As for the launch, my stats tell me that it is going great :-P. However, the new found success of windows will only be proved once we see a consistent flow of traffic (assuming that we do optimize for bing in the future). My current rating of Bing would be ‘not bad’ from the eye of a search engine user. Although I have no idea why they have windmills on the main page.
Tip: If you ever start a search engine try not to display your knowledge of renewable energy resources like windmills and solar panels. This is a very serious advice.

I’m Using Twitter - I Almost Forgot

I joined Twitter around a week ago. Although I was in strong belief that Twitter was a wastage of time  but still after reading several reports from internet marketers I wa convinced to join it (kind of). So I went on, added my picture, biography, website link.
I found it hard to tweet at first and I still do. Usually, I don’t have something very special going that I’d want to tweet about. So, I decided to go on the hunt to get some good followers. I followed around 300 people and got 230 people following me back which is not bad at all.
After this comes the important part. Was Twitter useful? The only important post that came in between was the last one about Bing. It got tweeted by me and Re-tweeted by two other people. Overall, I got around 50 visitors from Twitter thanks to that. So, this means that Twitter is in fact a great tool.
I was thinking of doing this post a while ago but just forgot about it because I know that many of my blogs readers would be Twitter-ers. So if you use Twitter, you can check my twitter page and follow me and I’ll follow you back. Soon I’ll put up a link to Twitter on the header of this blog. How were your results with Twitter?

And Now, Entrecard Sold!

This is one of the best laughs I had in a while. But I saw this coming as you might remember my post earlier about entrecard. My email address was still in their system so I happened to get an email a spam from entrecard’s owner Graham Langdon.
When you’re not doing good, your system is getting filled with crap and you don’t foresee something worthwhile and most importantly you can sell it off for $1 million+, I’d say that there’s nothing like it.
I would normally just ignore such an email from entrecard but the title caught my attention saying ‘Entrecard has been Acquired by Ziprunner‏’. I can’t say much of how ZipRunner might help entrecard get better but let’s just say that I don’t see things coming in very pretty, rather ugly.

But I’m Still Usng Entrecard

The choice is yours. Graham has leaped for some serious cash and might already me on his way to Vegas in an F-50. You could always test out the new guys and see how well the system works.
If in any case, you think that entrecard becomes better than before a comment explaining that would be highly appreciated.

 

God Forgives But Google Doesn’t

I’ll start off with the facts about Google and their policy for no forgiveness on suspension of Google accounts whatsoever. Please note that the values given below are taken from the account suspension issue since January 2009.

• More than 100 Google accounts are disabled every month for no reason.
• Less than 1% of them are lucky enough to get their accounts enabled again.
• The longest duration of suspension of a Google account that I found was 4 years. Which means: It’s been 4 years since the account was disabled, and Google still doesn’t forgive.
• In my encounter only 1 out of 200 people was satisfied with Google’s official support for Google accounts and their suspension.
• Surprisingly, around 20% of the blogs that had their accounts disabled were about Google or one of it’s product and their hacks, news, etc.
• None of the people who had their accounts’ suspended received a notification from Google.

Now that I built the grounds for the talk let’s get on with the topic. If you’re a regular reader here then you must be familiar with my bad experience with Google in the past. There weren’t many, but one that was devastating enough for me when blogger disabled my account and of course blogger is a part of Google.
What I haven’t shared earlier was that the first Adsense account that I used was shared by me and my friend. We started off with it in 2007 and like a typical greedy teenager my friend clicked his ads a few times.
We got hit on the head with a stone that read, “Your account is disabled”. While  I was taking in charge I thought that it might be a small suspension and I would be re-accepted back. But as I speak of today, it has been 28 weeks since we got suspended from Adsense. We tried re-applying more than 50 times, but no luck.
Turned out that I wasn’t the only one who was bashed by Google on Adsense and Blogger. I mean I would do the same thing if I was in their shoes, but if a guy comes after 2 years and asks for re-instating his account then he might be serious.
What enforced me to write this article was that I recently happened to have a look at the stats for my article about blogger disabling my account and saw that it was gaining increasing visitors from search engines although it has been on top for those keywords for almost 6 months now.
Then, I happened to check on the blogger.com’s official forum and several other webmaster forums and I was surprised to find that there were more than 150 bloggers claiming that their accounts had been disabled for no reason. I had a good laugh when I read this reply by some person:

Ouch! I can see the red rash on your face from the hard slap from blogger. Don’t lose hope and create a new blog elsewhere or on blogger again if you still have a slice of trust for blogger and google. No need to rant about the disabled account. I’ve been roaming on the forums and Google’s contact forms like a wandering dog for a year and a half now to get my 15 blogs back and the dog’s brain tells me that it is as hopeless as a twilight obsessed girl. So please move on…

Another person wrote:

Don’t waste your time expecting a Google worker to come through this. They won’t help you - they don’t help anyone.

Those folks sure don’t sound too happy with Blogger’s support with their responses.
Since I’ve been getting quite a lot of people coming from search phrases like “Blogger Disabled Account”, I was fortunate enough to have a word with a few of those who left comments.
Around 60% switched to Wordpress while the rest just quit blogging! I’ll tell you the most funny part of the whole story, I know spammers inside out. If Google deletes a Gmail account for spam, the spammer will create a new one.
If Google deletes one of their Adsense accounts for click fraud, they’ll have 10 other accounts running in no time. They’re professionals and in my opinion Google tries to take the frustration off by disabling the accounts of innocent users.
The bottom line is, Google thinks that it is acting very smart with it’s account suspension policy but I suppose they would also not know the shocking facts that I listed out here. In case they did, it’s not very nice of them to overlook that

3arn.Net Gets Sitelinks!

I always thought that Google hated 3arn.Net (Despite the fact that it sends me a lot of targeted traffic, lol) until yesterday. I can’t be happier than this. What I had been waiting for since I started this blog.

Juicy Sitelinks!

For me, this is the distinction between an average and an above the average website. Although the notice on google’s webmaster tools about sitelinks says:

Sitelinks are links to a site’s interior pages. Not all sites have sitelinks. Google generates these links automatically, but you can remove sitelinks you don’t want.

Though the only bad thing about Google’s sitelinks is that Google selects them by itself and you basically get no choice to select which ones you want. However, in my case, I have got the best pages on my website on sitelinks.
They only give you the choice of blocking a sitelink that you do not want to show on the google search engine result page, which I would definitely not want or maybe in the future.  Below is a screen shot from this page:

Well one thing that I’ve noticed is that sitelinks change quite often. When my website first started showing sitelinks, it was showing 6 of them. I decided not to block even one of the them because they certainly gave my website clear dominance on the search engine results page.
However, here I am checking after almost a week and now it has left my website with only 3 sitelinks. This is also a very common thing that I’ve seen in websites. In fact, it is very smart to have found two of my best articles on the website. Although I’m not so pleased with the Advertise page on there but I guess it is going to work out just fine.
Here is a screen shot of this page showing this blog with the sitelinks:

It might as well be that by the time that you check this link, the sitelinks of my website would have already changed because I saw a change in them after four days and since it was last updated on 8th November, it might be updated next on 12th November.

How To Get Sitelinks?

I know you might be thinking this for a while and while I’m not an expert on this topic and neither do I know that my advice will work for you or not. To me, the sitelinks have proven to be the links that:

• Are given the most importance throughout the site
• Have the most internal links
• Have the most links to them

These might be the measures that Google’s “Automatic” bot assigns sitelinks to a website for. While this is still a guess, I’m pretty sure that one of those three factors has do play a crucial role for the assignment of sitelinks to a website. In fact, if you know of any other thing that matters or have something to say about sitelinks in general then please do so in the comments below.

Moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com Disappeared?!

Most of you already know about moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com. It is one of the authority blogs in the ‘make money online’ niche. When I entered this niche in 2008, I kept a strict eye to the google search engine result pages.
This website, moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com has been ranking amongst the top 5 for the keyword ‘make money online’ for more than 2 years now. The person running the blog,  Liew Kum Cheng has  been writing for it consistently ever since.
It had around 1-2 new posts everyday. People used to write guest posts on it, even I’ve written a guest post on it last year. I don’t know that when this happened but I just thought of checking out the blog after a long while and got a bad surprise.
The blog no longer exists! Or in Google’s words:

The blog you were looking for was not found.

But isn’t this unfair? I hear you buddy. Remember what happened to me two years ago? In case you don’t, blogger suspended my account with 12 of my fully functional blogs. This isn’t really new. However, I wasn’t expecting this to happen a really popular blog. It was easily getting close to 2000 unique visitors a day, most probably I’m understating.
It was making a lot of money. Being number 1 for the keyword ‘make money online’ isn’t small you know. It made a lot of money. Plus, it was ranking in the top 3 for many other top keywords as well. I tried to check why this happens.
The reason would always be insufficient to call for the action of suspension for the blog as in my case as well. I have already emailed Liew asking what happened. He would definitely be involved in sending a gazillion mails to google.
This would be definitely a big loss for him. My sorrows are with him. All those who are still running on blogger.com, I think that it is about time that you start moving towards your own self-hosted blog.
This loss can be estimated in the $XX,XXX range. Such was the worth of the blog. So, blogger.com is definitely not a recommended choice for anyone looking to get into blogging anymore. The risks far outweigh the benefits. The choice is yours.
Update: The blog is now back up. I don’t really see a difference on it neither have I heard back from the author. I’m just glad it’s back again.

Hey You, Join My Facebook Fan Page!

In the infamous attempt to stalk communicate with my readers and fans, I created this really lean facebook page. It’s pretty basic and lacks much fans now, 38 as of now.
I’ve been getting dozens of facebook friend requests lately and it becomes quite hard to cope with so many readers and fans on my actual profile. I cannot engage in a proper discussion to questions and problems.
I have not yet installed a forum with my blog yet. So meanwhile, if anyone needs any help in making money, you could always head over to the facebook fan page. I’ll try to be active over there.

Why should I join the fan page?

1. If you need help with earning money online.
2. If you want to communicate with me.
3. If you want to interact with other 3arn.net readers.
4. If you’re interested in learning and sharing.
5. To stay updated with new posts at 3arn.net.
6. You’re simply a fan, you don’t need a reason to join.

I have added the facebook widget in the blog’s sidebar, it shows the fan count and gives you an option to become a fan. I know it’s pretty neat. Alternatively, below is the link to fan page.

I need your help!

Yes, you. I need to get more fans for the facebook fan page of 3arn.net. I know I can’t do that alone.
First, join the fan page.
Second, suggest the fan page to friends of yours.
Third, pat yourself on the back and enjoy the warm and fuzzy feeling that you get after doing a good job.
Let’s get this going people. I thank you in advance.
P.S. It is still new, so drop a comment and let me know what you think about the fan page. Any suggestions and recommendations would be great too.
UPDATE: The link to the facebook fan page has been removed due to a boycott on facebook. You can read more about it here.

My take on the Facebook Boycott

As you might be knowing that today we, the facebook muslim community have arranged an organised protest / boycott of facebook for not removing pages that we find offensive. This move has been taken on the page ‘Everybody draw Muhammad (S.A.W) on 20th May’.
This page was reported as abuse classified under hate speech on the first sight by almost any practising muslim who has respect for Islam, including me. We have been reporting this page since 2 weeks to be removed from facebook.
Despite thousands of reports from muslims and even some non-muslims who believed that this was hate speech against Islam, facebook took no action on this matter. That is when we, the facebook muslim community decided to boycott facebook on 20th May to show our strength and our disapproval of the highly offensive act of facebook by not removing those pages.
I am very grateful to the government of Pakistan and the high court who took this a step forward. Instead of us facebook users reminding each other to not use facebook on 20th May. The lahore high court decided to pass a ban on facebook following this incident till the date of 31st May pending action from facebook regarding all of those pages.
All internet service providers in Pakistan were notified on this and day before yesterday, facebook was completely blocked by all ISPs. This is the email I received from my ISP:

Dear Valued Customer,
Micronet has blocked access to www.facebook.com
in compliance with orders of Lahore High Court passed today.
Facebook has been holding a competition to draw caricatures
of the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) and has not removed the
objectionable hate materials despite thousands of emails
from Pakistani facebook community.
This access would remain block till 31 May 2010 or further
orders by the Lahore High Court.
Best Regards

I hold high gratitude for the high court for taking this step. Muslims have been representing a high proportion of the internet users since it’s very start contributing to almost more than 45% of facebook’s users. We are definitely a majority and we cannot have our interests and beliefs insulted like that.
Muslims have been contributing to the internet in all forms (me and my blog is an example) and we are a main reason why facebook is making a lot of money. Losing all the muslim users means losing approximately 45% of your revenue (considering the average revenue per facebook user.
Moreover, facebook is a large business corporation. Any rational business would create about even the slightest change in their revenues while 45% is big enough to bring it down from the peak to the bottom.
I will prove this when I write another post about this in a few days where I will show the loss of facebook’s internet users and possibly revenue generation for them. It will definitely teach facebook a big lesson.

Where this started?

This is the first thing that I researched when I took a notice of this highly offensive page and the event.
A cartoonist, molly norris, did not like the censorship given to a scene in an episode of south park which depicted Prohpet Muhammad (PBUH). She believed that this provided a wrong image to the people of USA.
She decided to give birth to the idea of this day be as a call to freedom of speech and protest against the censorship that was given. This led to the facebook page being created and the whole thing going viral.
It was further ignited from a youtube video by a user by the name of ‘thunderf00t’. This user posted a video by the name of ‘Islam Fail’. This was deemed as extremely offensive by all of the muslim community on youtube. The responses were obvious to be harsh. Then this user went on to support 20th May as a ‘Everybody draw Muhammad (S.A.W) day’. (Nauzubillah)
This originated the whole thing and has resulted in a complete ban on youtube in Pakistan as well as that video had also been reported as offensive on no subsequent action was taken on that matter.
I have also removed the link to my blog’s fan page on facebook. I wouldn’t want to use facebook again until facebook takes some kind of an action on this matter, because if we use facebook, we want our interests to be protected.
I was much busy with my studies, but this is a post that I just had to put on the blog because I couldn’t really keep this inside. This is a thing that everyone should know, whether they’re a muslim or a non-muslim.
If you’re a christian, jew, hindu or even an atheist. Think about this with an open mind and think for yourself whether or not this is a massacre on the name of humanity. Better classified as ‘genocide’ by many. If highly offending the believers of a religion and insulting it is classified as ‘freedom of speech’ by the big internet websites, then we refuse to ever use them again.

Was the facebook boycott any good?

I’m back people and as I mentioned before, I would post on whether the facebook boycott went successful or at least according to what was planned. The main aim behind the boycott was the removal of those offensive pages, which went successful.
Other than that, the boycott was to come from a whole community rather than separated individuals. I’m not sure whether facebook was banned in other muslim countries or not but a big chunk of the muslim community took the initiative of not using facebook that day.
The biggest part of those who boycotted were pakistani muslims. The problem is that there isn’t really a way to check what happened to facebook in those 10 days (from 20th May to 30th May). Any inferences made from analytics programs like Alexa would be inaccurate.
However, considering that alexa is yet the only better check which can give us something on the least. As compared to compete or other open analytics programs. So, considering whatever proportion of muslims that use Alexa, below is the analysis.
Alexa has a small user  base as compared to the general internet population which would make the results extremely biased to the activities of that little ‘population’ of alexa toolbar users. When measuring things on a large scale, we do take random samples however this isn’t random either.
Most alexa users are avid internet users, people who are web 2.0 enthusiasts or webmasters and bloggers. If assumed that this is true, then we can directly deduce that  there are much (much) more webmasters and technology enthusiasts in the world west  (or east) of developing countries like Pakistan and other muslim countries.
Below is the demographic taken directly from alexa showing the distribution of it’s users over countries:

Hence, considering the data provided by alexa we cannot make a very justifiable conclusion. However, just for the sake of curiosity, we’ll put the data to use. So here it is:

• 0.9% of facebook’s users are pakistanis
• Facebook has over 400 million users *
• Therefore, there are 3.6 million pakistani facebook users (taking the minimum of total facebook users)
• 50% of facebook users login everyday (1.8 million users in pakistan’s case) *
• 1.8 million logins a day multiplied by 10 days, 18 million logins (the boycott lasted 10 days)
• Average pageviews per person on facebook are 13.46 (13.46 x 18 million = 242.28 million) **
• Assumed eCPM $1 (no data available on this)
• Therefore, $1 x 242,280,000 x 0.001 = $242,280

* = Source: Facebook statistics
** = Source: Alexa’s page about facebook
eCPM = Cost per a thousand impressions
So, according to the assumptions made and the available data, my approximate of the loss is near 0.24 million dollars for 10 days. Now, we’ll see whether this actually had a difference making impact on facebook overall.
Facebook’s revenue in 2008 was around $300 million, the most recent official data we have available would be of 2009. Facebook made around $550 million in 2009. So, we’ll take this figure into further calculation of the data. In this case:

• $550,000,000 in 365 days
• Average revenue of 10 days = (550000000 x 10 /365 = $15,068,493)
• Pakistan’s share of the revenue (242280 / 15068493 x 100 = 1.6%)

There you are, Pakistan has approximately 1.6% share of facebook’s revenue overall and resulted in a direct loss of $242,280 during the boycott according to our estimates. Please note, this is not the total loss that facebook beared during the boycott and only the loss resulting from the pakistani boycott not other muslim countries.
I’m uncertain as to how many other countries implemented a boycott on facebook nation-wide and how many muslims voluntarily joined the boycott. I’m sure, the overall figure would be more than the double of this because at least a million other muslims world-wide joined in the boycott and the eCPM in the western countries is much higher thus contributing to a bigger loss.
The following are the main variables which can alter the data if the assumptions made are invalid:

• eCPM: I assumed that the only revenue facebook has is that it get’s paid per a thousand impressions from it’s advertisers. They are also be operating a pay-per-click system, but we cannot be sure of the data for that, which is why I used the eCPM. Plus, I’ve assumed an eCPM of $1 which seems quite relevant to Pakistan’s case.
• Number of users: I’m 100% sure that the number of users does not include the facebook mobile users (which represnts 25% of facebook’s users). This would of course add to the total amount calculated, however, no data is available on that.

That’s it, if you’re a pakistani, now you can be a little sure that those days you spent without facebook were of some good. Resulting from the loss (or otherwise) facebook decided to take off the offensive pages.
All is good now, facebook has been open in pakistan for almost 2 weeks now and I’ve been using it ever since it opened. I just hope that facebook continues to co-operate with all portions of it’s user population and respects the interests of all.
I would love to hear to hear your comments on this, and please bear in mind that these figures are an approximate as well as an estimate. Any constructive criticism is most welcome and please consider to share this with your friends.

Was the facebook boycott any good?

I’m back people and as I mentioned before, I would post on whether the facebook boycott went successful or at least according to what was planned. The main aim behind the boycott was the removal of those offensive pages, which went successful.
Other than that, the boycott was to come from a whole community rather than separated individuals. I’m not sure whether facebook was banned in other muslim countries or not but a big chunk of the muslim community took the initiative of not using facebook that day.
The biggest part of those who boycotted were pakistani muslims. The problem is that there isn’t really a way to check what happened to facebook in those 10 days (from 20th May to 30th May). Any inferences made from analytics programs like Alexa would be inaccurate.
However, considering that alexa is yet the only better check which can give us something on the least. As compared to compete or other open analytics programs. So, considering whatever proportion of muslims that use Alexa, below is the analysis.
Alexa has a small user  base as compared to the general internet population which would make the results extremely biased to the activities of that little ‘population’ of alexa toolbar users. When measuring things on a large scale, we do take random samples however this isn’t random either.
Most alexa users are avid internet users, people who are web 2.0 enthusiasts or webmasters and bloggers. If assumed that this is true, then we can directly deduce that  there are much (much) more webmasters and technology enthusiasts in the world west  (or east) of developing countries like Pakistan and other muslim countries.
Below is the demographic taken directly from alexa showing the distribution of it’s users over countries:

Hence, considering the data provided by alexa we cannot make a very justifiable conclusion. However, just for the sake of curiosity, we’ll put the data to use. So here it is:

• 0.9% of facebook’s users are pakistanis
• Facebook has over 400 million users *
• Therefore, there are 3.6 million pakistani facebook users (taking the minimum of total facebook users)
• 50% of facebook users login everyday (1.8 million users in pakistan’s case) *
• 1.8 million logins a day multiplied by 10 days, 18 million logins (the boycott lasted 10 days)
• Average pageviews per person on facebook are 13.46 (13.46 x 18 million = 242.28 million) **
• Assumed eCPM $1 (no data available on this)
• Therefore, $1 x 242,280,000 x 0.001 = $242,280

* = Source: Facebook statistics
** = Source: Alexa’s page about facebook
eCPM = Cost per a thousand impressions
So, according to the assumptions made and the available data, my approximate of the loss is near 0.24 million dollars for 10 days. Now, we’ll see whether this actually had a difference making impact on facebook overall.
Facebook’s revenue in 2008 was around $300 million, the most recent official data we have available would be of 2009. Facebook made around $550 million in 2009. So, we’ll take this figure into further calculation of the data. In this case:

• $550,000,000 in 365 days
• Average revenue of 10 days = (550000000 x 10 /365 = $15,068,493)
• Pakistan’s share of the revenue (242280 / 15068493 x 100 = 1.6%)

There you are, Pakistan has approximately 1.6% share of facebook’s revenue overall and resulted in a direct loss of $242,280 during the boycott according to our estimates. Please note, this is not the total loss that facebook beared during the boycott and only the loss resulting from the pakistani boycott not other muslim countries.
I’m uncertain as to how many other countries implemented a boycott on facebook nation-wide and how many muslims voluntarily joined the boycott. I’m sure, the overall figure would be more than the double of this because at least a million other muslims world-wide joined in the boycott and the eCPM in the western countries is much higher thus contributing to a bigger loss.
The following are the main variables which can alter the data if the assumptions made are invalid:

• eCPM: I assumed that the only revenue facebook has is that it get’s paid per a thousand impressions from it’s advertisers. They are also be operating a pay-per-click system, but we cannot be sure of the data for that, which is why I used the eCPM. Plus, I’ve assumed an eCPM of $1 which seems quite relevant to Pakistan’s case.
• Number of users: I’m 100% sure that the number of users does not include the facebook mobile users (which represnts 25% of facebook’s users). This would of course add to the total amount calculated, however, no data is available on that.

That’s it, if you’re a pakistani, now you can be a little sure that those days you spent without facebook were of some good. Resulting from the loss (or otherwise) facebook decided to take off the offensive pages.
All is good now, facebook has been open in pakistan for almost 2 weeks now and I’ve been using it ever since it opened. I just hope that facebook continues to co-operate with all portions of it’s user population and respects the interests of all.
I would love to hear to hear your comments on this, and please bear in mind that these figures are an approximate as well as an estimate. Any constructive criticism is most welcome and please consider to share this with your friends.

Posted in Internet,  The Net |   20 Comments »

My take on the Facebook Boycott

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

As you might be knowing that today we, the facebook muslim community have arranged an organised protest / boycott of facebook for not removing pages that we find offensive. This move has been taken on the page ‘Everybody draw Muhammad (S.A.W) on 20th May’.
This page was reported as abuse classified under hate speech on the first sight by almost any practising muslim who has respect for Islam, including me. We have been reporting this page since 2 weeks to be removed from facebook.
Despite thousands of reports from muslims and even some non-muslims who believed that this was hate speech against Islam, facebook took no action on this matter. That is when we, the facebook muslim community decided to boycott facebook on 20th May to show our strength and our disapproval of the highly offensive act of facebook by not removing those pages.
I am very grateful to the government of Pakistan and the high court who took this a step forward. Instead of us facebook users reminding each other to not use facebook on 20th May. The lahore high court decided to pass a ban on facebook following this incident till the date of 31st May pending action from facebook regarding all of those pages.
All internet service providers in Pakistan were notified on this and day before yesterday, facebook was completely blocked by all ISPs. This is the email I received from my ISP:

Dear Valued Customer,
Micronet has blocked access to www.facebook.com
in compliance with orders of Lahore High Court passed today.
Facebook has been holding a competition to draw caricatures
of the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) and has not removed the
objectionable hate materials despite thousands of emails
from Pakistani facebook community.
This access would remain block till 31 May 2010 or further
orders by the Lahore High Court.
Best Regards

I hold high gratitude for the high court for taking this step. Muslims have been representing a high proportion of the internet users since it’s very start contributing to almost more than 45% of facebook’s users. We are definitely a majority and we cannot have our interests and beliefs insulted like that.
Muslims have been contributing to the internet in all forms (me and my blog is an example) and we are a main reason why facebook is making a lot of money. Losing all the muslim users means losing approximately 45% of your revenue (considering the average revenue per facebook user.
Moreover, facebook is a large business corporation. Any rational business would create about even the slightest change in their revenues while 45% is big enough to bring it down from the peak to the bottom.
I will prove this when I write another post about this in a few days where I will show the loss of facebook’s internet users and possibly revenue generation for them. It will definitely teach facebook a big lesson.

Where this started?

This is the first thing that I researched when I took a notice of this highly offensive page and the event.
A cartoonist, molly norris, did not like the censorship given to a scene in an episode of south park which depicted Prohpet Muhammad (PBUH). She believed that this provided a wrong image to the people of USA.
She decided to give birth to the idea of this day be as a call to freedom of speech and protest against the censorship that was given. This led to the facebook page being created and the whole thing going viral.
It was further ignited from a youtube video by a user by the name of ‘thunderf00t’. This user posted a video by the name of ‘Islam Fail’. This was deemed as extremely offensive by all of the muslim community on youtube. The responses were obvious to be harsh. Then this user went on to support 20th May as a ‘Everybody draw Muhammad (S.A.W) day’. (Nauzubillah)
This originated the whole thing and has resulted in a complete ban on youtube in Pakistan as well as that video had also been reported as offensive on no subsequent action was taken on that matter.
I have also removed the link to my blog’s fan page on facebook. I wouldn’t want to use facebook again until facebook takes some kind of an action on this matter, because if we use facebook, we want our interests to be protected.
I was much busy with my studies, but this is a post that I just had to put on the blog because I couldn’t really keep this inside. This is a thing that everyone should know, whether they’re a muslim or a non-muslim.
If you’re a christian, jew, hindu or even an atheist. Think about this with an open mind and think for yourself whether or not this is a massacre on the name of humanity. Better classified as ‘genocide’ by many. If highly offending the believers of a religion and insulting it is classified as ‘freedom of speech’ by the big internet websites, then we refuse to ever use them again.

Posted in Internet,  The Net |   35 Comments »

Moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com Disappeared?!

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Most of you already know about moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com. It is one of the authority blogs in the ‘make money online’ niche. When I entered this niche in 2008, I kept a strict eye to the google search engine result pages.
This website, moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com has been ranking amongst the top 5 for the keyword ‘make money online’ for more than 2 years now. The person running the blog,  Liew Kum Cheng has  been writing for it consistently ever since.
It had around 1-2 new posts everyday. People used to write guest posts on it, even I’ve written a guest post on it last year. I don’t know that when this happened but I just thought of checking out the blog after a long while and got a bad surprise.
The blog no longer exists! Or in Google’s words:

The blog you were looking for was not found.

But isn’t this unfair? I hear you buddy. Remember what happened to me two years ago? In case you don’t, blogger suspended my account with 12 of my fully functional blogs. This isn’t really new. However, I wasn’t expecting this to happen a really popular blog. It was easily getting close to 2000 unique visitors a day, most probably I’m understating.
It was making a lot of money. Being number 1 for the keyword ‘make money online’ isn’t small you know. It made a lot of money. Plus, it was ranking in the top 3 for many other top keywords as well. I tried to check why this happens.
The reason would always be insufficient to call for the action of suspension for the blog as in my case as well. I have already emailed Liew asking what happened. He would definitely be involved in sending a gazillion mails to google.
This would be definitely a big loss for him. My sorrows are with him. All those who are still running on blogger.com, I think that it is about time that you start moving towards your own self-hosted blog.
This loss can be estimated in the $XX,XXX range. Such was the worth of the blog. So, blogger.com is definitely not a recommended choice for anyone looking to get into blogging anymore. The risks far outweigh the benefits. The choice is yours.
Update: The blog is now back up. I don’t really see a difference on it neither have I heard back from the author. I’m just glad it’s back again.

Posted in Blogging,  Internet |   21 Comments »

Hey You, Join My Facebook Fan Page!

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

In the infamous attempt to stalk communicate with my readers and fans, I created this really lean facebook page. It’s pretty basic and lacks much fans now, 38 as of now.
I’ve been getting dozens of facebook friend requests lately and it becomes quite hard to cope with so many readers and fans on my actual profile. I cannot engage in a proper discussion to questions and problems.
I have not yet installed a forum with my blog yet. So meanwhile, if anyone needs any help in making money, you could always head over to the facebook fan page. I’ll try to be active over there.

Why should I join the fan page?

1. If you need help with earning money online.
2. If you want to communicate with me.
3. If you want to interact with other 3arn.net readers.
4. If you’re interested in learning and sharing.
5. To stay updated with new posts at 3arn.net.
6. You’re simply a fan, you don’t need a reason to join.

I have added the facebook widget in the blog’s sidebar, it shows the fan count and gives you an option to become a fan. I know it’s pretty neat. Alternatively, below is the link to fan page.

I need your help!

Yes, you. I need to get more fans for the facebook fan page of 3arn.net. I know I can’t do that alone.
First, join the fan page.
Second, suggest the fan page to friends of yours.
Third, pat yourself on the back and enjoy the warm and fuzzy feeling that you get after doing a good job.
Let’s get this going people. I thank you in advance.
P.S. It is still new, so drop a comment and let me know what you think about the fan page. Any suggestions and recommendations would be great too.
UPDATE: The link to the facebook fan page has been removed due to a boycott on facebook. You can read more about it here