The Real Ryan J. Parker

So I’m in the process of making a transition from my 9-5 job to working from home. I originally anticipated making this transition sometime next year so that I can finish my math degree, but my 9-5 has been forced to reduce its workforce. Unfortunately for me, I was one of those to be reduced. My wife cringes when I say the words laid off, but that’s what they call it. At least it comes with a severance package.

My first attempt at working from home will be freelance programming. This seems to be the best way for me to generate income in the immediate future, so I created profiles on eLance and Guru:

ryanjparker.elance.com
profile.guru.com/994494

So far I like eLance the best, but I haven’t even been doing this a week, so that is subject to change. I’ve had a small success so far, as I accepted my first eLance project on Friday.

To be honest I haven’t heard rave reviews about freelance coding services, as the feeling seems to be that most people want the world at a cheap price. Hopefully I can avoid those sorts of projects.

My plan is to develop one of my own websites during this process, WhichTeamWins.com and work on some open source software. Hopefully I can generate some meaningful income (either directly or indirectly) through those projects as well.

I’m interested in hearing from anyone that has made a similar transition (successfully or unsuccessfully). If anyone has any tips I’m all ears!

A few days ago I noticed about 60 clicks to my AdSense account in a short time span that appeared to be invalid, so I notified Google to make sure they knew that it was some sort of fraud. I’ve heard horror stories of people having some random jerkoff have their account disabled, so I wanted to make sure I didn’t fall into the same trap.

Looks like it didn’t work.

A few hours ago I received the following e-mail from Google:

Hello Ryan Parker,

It has come to our attention that invalid clicks and/or impressions
have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s). We have
therefore disabled your Google AdSense account. Please understand that
this was a necessary step to protect the interests of AdWords
advertisers.

As you may know, a publisher’s site may not have invalid clicks or
impressions on any ad(s), including but not limited to clicks and/or
impressions generated by:

- a publisher on his own web pages
- a publisher encouraging others to click on his ads
- automated clicking or surfing programs, or any other deceptive
software
- a publisher altering any portion of the ad code or changing the
layout, behavior, targeting, or delivery of ads for any reason

…

I run AdWords campaigns and obviously hate click fraud, which is why it’s unfortunate that Google has disabled my account.

So, what are the odds of Google reinstating my account?

Tags: google, adsense, account disabled

Is it just me, or is Google AdWords quality score really just a way for Google to demand people pay a higher price for clicks while they can hide behind a veil of “sorry, your quality score just isn’t high enough”?

Since last month I’ve been running an AdWords campaign for Which Team Wins?, and every couple of weeks I notice some keywords going inactive for search because they’re now priced higher, while quality scores go from Great to OK to (in some cases) Poor.

I’m still pretty new to the AdWords game, but based on a little Googling the only thing I can find is people having the same problem.

My pages are exactly relevant to the keywords I’m targeting, as I want to send people looking for Dallas Mavs stats to the Dallas Mavericks Stats page, but Google doesn’t think the quality is good enough (meaning it’s not relevant to the user).

This is a bit absurd, and I’m going to research more into this problem when I have the time, but for now some keywords are going to stay inactive. In my case I get a strong feeling of price gouging, and I don’t like it.

If you’ve had good or bad experiences with Google’s quality score I’d like to hear what you think, along with any ideas as to why my score for some pages keeps dropping.

Tags: google, adwords, quality score

Every couple of weeks (or so it seems) I come across a blog that mentions the drawbacks of showing your FeedBurner FeedCount before you have a large number of subscribers.

I most recently came across this topic at JohnTP.com and HarpzOn.com, and both of these websites agree with the popular consensus that showing your FeedBurner FeedCount when you’ve got few subscribers actually hurts you.

I don’t know about you, but I can only respond to this notion with:

Are You Kidding Me?

I fully agree with the idea that we live in a me too society, and that by showing you have a large number of subscribers a reader is more likely to subscribe to your feed based on this number alone (this is one of the reasons why I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of Copyblogger sooner).

I don’t, however, buy into the notion that showing your FeedCount when you’ve got a small number of readers will actually hinder your efforts in obtaining subscribers.

If someone doesn’t want to subscribe because I’ve only got 30 or so subscribers then this blog probably isn’t for them. I have subscribed to plenty of small blogs because of their content, not the size of their ego (I mean FeedCount).

This now leads me to the point of this post: Why do you show your FeedBurner FeedCount?

I show my FeedCount because I like giving everyone a rough idea as to how many subscribers I’ve got. When I say everyone I include myself, as I hate having to login to FeedBurner to see this stat.

Why do you show your FeedCount? Do you think that having a small FeedCount is hurting your efforts in obtaining subscribers?

Tags: feedburner, feedcount, hurts, blog, are you kidding me?

If you’re looking to get content ideas for your website consider using SEO Book’s Keyword Suggestion Tool as a starting point.

If you’re not familiar with this tool, it provides a list of related keyword phrases to a keyword phrase you enter, and its primary target is for people trying to find keyword phrases to use in a PPC advertising campaign.

PPC advertising campaigns, however, aren’t the only applications this tool can be used for. By entering your own website’s keyword phrases you can find other keyword phrases people are searching for that will help you come up with content ideas that might be beneficial to have on your website.

Depending on how competitive the market is for some of the keyword phrases, you can potentially attract a lot of free traffic if you can fill a void in information people are looking for.

I’ve used this tool to add to my roadmap for implementing more related content at Which Team Wins?, as I’m currently in a competitive keyword nightmare. Adding some not so competitive content that people are looking for should help the website from a SEO perspective.

I’m interested in hearing if anyone else has had much success using a keyword suggestion tool like this one to come up with content ideas for your website, and I’m also interested in hearing about any success you may have found with it.

Tags: seo book, keyword suggestion tool, content ideas