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

…or are you headed towards a path of mediocrity?

A couple of months ago I performed very poorly on a Calculus II test that I spent a lot of time preparing for, when in reality I ended up preparing in all the wrong ways.

This ended up being an eye opening experience for me, as I came to realize that the things I wanted to spend the most time on (like preparing for the Calculus II test or studying on my own time with books like this book or this one) was being wasted away to things that, over the long haul, won’t make the kind of impact on my life like educating myself on these topics will.

One of those things was this blog (along with a few other web projects) that could be something good one day, but are instead taking away from what I need to be focusing on.

All of this thinking was driven home by Seth Godin’s latest book, The Dip. This book talks a lot about quitting, but in reality it’s a book about becoming the best at what you want to do. If you can’t become the best at what you’re doing or you won’t put in the hard work necessary to push through the dip, then you should quit and focus on something that you can become the best at or will put in the hard work necessary to push through the dip.

For me, this dip is a conglomeration of things, but most notably it’s a small area applying probability theory, statistics, neural networks, etc. to sports. This blog won’t help that. A few other projects I was working on won’t help that. I’ve got smartcapper.com and whichteamwins.com for various aspects of this, and I expect these to be my only focus for some time to come.

I’d like to hear your thoughts, especially if you feel you’re on a path to mastery or not, and if not, how you can fix it.

Also, from now until next Thursday, May 31st, I’m going to take everyone that comments on this post about their path to mastery and randomly select someone that I’ll send a copy of The Dip to. I got a free copy from Seth as he selected my question as one to answer over at Personal MBA, so I want to share the love.

I’ll make a new post about this tomorrow in case people see the title of this post and don’t realize I’m giving something away, so feel free to spread the word.

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

Geo-targeting is something I’ve wanted to figure out how to implement, but it’s also something I’ve had no need for.

That changed, however, when I was accepted into AzoogleAds publisher program. Azoogle has offers for both the US and International markets, but most offers are targeted to one or the other–not both. As such, to show multiple offers on a given page or website based on the user’s country I’ll need to implement a little geo-targeting.

The only website that receives any noticeable international traffic is Smart Capper. The handicapping tools receive a lot of non-sticky search engine traffic, so I’m going to use Azoogle to try and monetize that traffic.

The top three traffic sources I’m looking to monetize are the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada.

To do the geo-targeting for these locations I first tried to use hostip.info’s IP address database. I quickly realized, however, that their database is far from complete (it had no idea where I was located). As such, I needed to find an alternative.

The alternative: MaxMind’s GeoIP API.

To use the GeoIP API, you must have one of the GeoIP databases. MaxMind has a wide range of databases to choose from, but I chose their free GeoLite Country database, as I only need to get the user’s country, and 98% accuracy is fine for my traffic.

Once you’ve got the database of choice and the GeoIP API for the programming language you’re using, all you have to do is make the correct API call and you’ve got the information you need.

As an example, you can use the following code to get the country code for an IP address using the GeoIP API with PHP:

// include GeoIP PHP API
include("geoip.inc");

// open the GeoIP binary database
$gi = geoip_open("GeoIP.dat",GEOIP_STANDARD);

// $ip is an IP address
$country_code = geoip_country_code_by_addr($gi, $ip);

// Country codes:
// http://www.immigration-usa.com/country_digraphs.html
echo $country_code;

This made geo-targeting very easy, and based on the other databases MaxMind offers, they’ll be my first choice if I ever need more detailed information.

If you’re in need of geo-targeting and not sure where to start, then I hope this post has helped make things easier for you.

Tags: geo-targeting, maxmind, geoip