Free Internet Media

We recently purchased a small e-commerce website, Paintball Guns Shop. We like paintball and we liked the site, so it seemed like a good match for us.

More than that though, we really wanted to test the phpBay Pro WordPress Plugin from WiredStudios.

The results thus far have been quite good. With minimal promotion, the site is receiving good traffic from both Google and Yahoo. The traffic is for product-oriented keywords — which convert well into clicks and sales.

Based upon this success, we plan to build a dozen more phpBayPro web sites this year.

We’ve just upgraded from ASTracker to Site Super Tracker. Both are products of Related-Pages. SST is an upgrade to the earlier product.

ASTracker only supported AdSense content units. SST supports all of the following ad formats:

• AdSense
• AdLinks
• AdSense Search
• AdSense Referrals
• Yahoo Publisher Network
• PeelAwayAds
• AuctionAds

SST is designed specifically for ad tracking. It enhances, rather than competes with, tools like AWStats.

The AdSense portal limits you to 200 channels. SST dynamically creates URL channels and there is no known upper limit to the number of channels it can support.

Google Analytics can be enhanced to track AdSense clicks, but Analytics comes with three serious issues. The first is that Analytics sends all of your valuable business data to Google. The second is that, on a busy web site, Analytics can use up a lot of network bandwidth.  The last, and most important, is that this can slow down page loads and annoy your site visitors.

SST gives you data on every click, including page, keywords, referer, time, and IP address. The page and keyword reports are most valuable to me. They show me what pages convert best and what keywords are driving profitable traffic.

The current cost of SST is $67. For a serious web publisher, it shouldn’t take a long time to generate a positive RoI on that investment.

Find a Job is currently one of our smaller projects here at Free Internet Media. The motivation for the site came from the years I spent working in the employment industry.

Many people just don’t know how to land themselves a good job. A few hours of study and effort can result in a significant enhancement to lifetime earning potential. Where else can you invest one afternoon of studying and generate hundreds of thousands of dollars of RoI (Return on Investment)?

I hope to grow the site in the coming years and to help hundreds of thousands of job seekers find the best jobs available.

I just opened five low priority tickets with NameCheap support. They were all resolved within five minutes — in the middle of the night.

We currently have 141 domains registered with NameCheap. I have recently invested approximately 80 hours transferring our domains from all other registrars to NameCheap.

The reasons for transferring all of our domains to NameCheap were:

• Ease of management. One interface to use. One account to maintain.
• NameCheap pricing is the best in the business.
• NameCheap service is the best in the business.

Some of the other registrars have made transferring domains very difficult. Registrar.com, for example, won’t give you an EPP code over the Internet. You must call them and wait on hold for an hour to receive an EPP code.

When we purchase domains and web sites, our standard process now involves moving the domain to NameCheap. This can be difficult at times, but it is very much worth it in the long run.

NameCheap has earned my highest recommendation as a business partner.

Google made another change to improve the AdWords program.

Previously, a site visitor could click anywhere in the AdSense block to activate an AdSense ad. This caused invalid clicks which artifically inflated AdSense publisher revenue and caused AdWords publishers to pay for clicks which would never lead to sales.

Google just change this behavior. Now, site visitors are only able to click on the title or URL in an AdSense ad block. This will result in far fewer invalid clicks. In the short term, this will reduce publisher revenue. We have seen a 10% drop in revenue due to this change. However, this will improve the RoI of AdWords publishers. In the long term, this will increase the reliability of the AdWords system and the revenue of AdSense publishers.

For a full write-up on these improvements, read Accidental clicks fade into the background at Inside AdSense.

Tactical Calendar isn’t our usual type of project here at Free Internet Media.

Most of our web sites are built around providing static information to our site visitors. Tactical Calendar is a custom-developed PHP application designed to help interested students locate and register for tactical training classes.

The new database lists 43 schools and these schools are now adding classes for site visitors to search and view. Students can search by date, location, school, or type of course.

If the schools can be convinced to enter their classes into the system, this web site will revolutionize the tactical training industry.

I’ve tried dozens of  AdSense alternatives and none of them have performed well enough to bother with — until now.

WidgetBucks is a new ad system which produces contextual ads for products.  We’ve been running WidgetBucks for several weeks now and we have been very happy with the results.

We’re not going to replace AdSense with WidgetBucks, but one of our AdSense blocks was moved to a less visible location to make room for a WidgetBucks block.

You can see WidgetBucks in action at our Tech FAQ site.

Monster Guide is one of our newest projects at Free Internet Media.

The concept for Monster Guide really grew out of frustration with one of our current projects, The Tech FAQ. The Tech FAQ suffers from two limitations: scope and format.

The Tech FAQ is limited in scope to tech topics. That is it’s niche, and inside of that niche it performs very well. We wanted to break out of that niche and help people with every day topics like How to Make Sushi, How to Write a Research Paper, or How to Grow Tomatoes.

The  other limitation of The Tech FAQ was format.  In a FAQ format, every article should be phrased as a question.  It’s a branding thing.  We wanted to be able to write articles that helped people, even if those articles weren’t responses to questions.  For Monster Guide, we’ve started with a lot of “How To” topics, but we aren’t limited to that.  We have more room to grow within the “Guide” format.

And with a name like “Monster”, we have quite a lot of room to grow.

My name is Will Spencer.  I am the founder of Free Internet Media.

Free Internet Media is a web publishing company.  We make content available on the web, at no cost to the reader.   Our content is advertiser supported, meaning that the ads you see on our web sites cover the cost of the design, development, hosting, and maintenance of all of our web sites.

This blog is a place where I will talk about the web publishing business, about Free Internet Media, and perhaps a bit about myself.

Welcome to my life!