August 25, 2010 0

Turkey: the holiday

By richedmonds in Personal

Spending two (that’s a 2 by the way) weeks in sunny, hot and ran down Turkey, I came back on the 8th of this month as a bronze God, ready for magnetism pulling of every single beach babe in the world. Instead, I came back to England, to rain, and to work (I love my job really, unlike majority of employed citizens). Was it an enjoyable two weeks? Yes, excursions were great and the resort was good. Would I go back? Definitely, mainly for one reason alone.

We stayed at the Grand Kurdoglu Hotel (Otel in Turkish – I’m learning!), which is a four star, equivalent to a three start hotel in England. Their website is horrible, I love being in SEO you look at website completely differently to the norm surfer. On the other hand the hotel itself is nice, looks good from the outside and the main lobby is well presented. Rooms are okay too, the hotel in a country like this is only a base after all, right? You want to spend as much time at the pool, beach or other sites as possible.

Hotel KurdogluFood is edible, yet not enjoyable. Drinks are free (water, soft drinks, beer, Raki, Gin and a few others), which is always nice on Turkish Night or a party. The WiFi (using it on my phone) is complete crap, cutting out or not working at all and if I forget to close the connection my side the router still believes I’m connected until they clear it after a few days. The pool is great, situated across the road from the hotel itself, it is perfect for people to engage in volleyball and other activities.

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August 24, 2010 0

Adbrite or nobrite?

By richedmonds in Advertising

Adbrite logo crossed outIf you’re not familiar with the Adbrite advertisement network, then you really should come out from underneath that giant rock you have been cowering under. Being one of the larger advertisement marketplaces on the net to date, they offer attractive potential income for websites with big traffic. Is it worth the bother, or is Google’s Adsense a more effective solution?

The first time I encountered Adbrite was back in 2005, when I first began entering the money making sphere in desperate attempt to even out the cost in running a few discussion boards (I was both jobless and in secondary school at the time). While forums are fantastic at generating page views, they lack the strong chance of click through to really rake in the income from any advertising campaign.

Receiving a whopping estimate of around five pence per thousand impressions, things weren’t looking so bad with 10K + impressions being smashed per day (it was helping me feed my sweet addiction and the odd video game). I was, however, a long way off living the millionaire “working from home” dream that many people share these days. I needed to rethink my plan of action and possibly consider other networks to potentially receive a better payout.

Moving onto Adsense and  a few other options, I found only Adbrite and Adsense itself to provide me with a comfortable CPM (cost per impression), which was a slight pain in the rear end as these two networks are the ones I was trying my best to avoid if you will. Compared to Adsense, Adbrite lacks in looks. If we were to compare them as two operating systems, Adsense would be OS X and Adbrite would be a dated Windows 95. The reporting feature is horrid to look at and navigate, with no graphs or presentations available (BlackLabelAds is part of Adbrite and is their adult marketplace).

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August 24, 2010 0

Creating a fresh start

By richedmonds in Personal

I have been repeatedly asked to sort my categories out on my blog and I have agreed every time. There is, however, the fact that I really can’t be bothered to spend a whole day moving posts into categories and hardcore tag like a mad man. I then thought for a moment “Why not clear out the trash, start from scratch, and ensure every post is incredible?”, and so it begins.

Welcome to richedmonds.co.uk v3 (or is it v2? I’ve lost count), if I were counting how many times I re-created traygon.com, then we would be hitting double figures with ease. For this version of my site, this will be the final one with no more renewals – I have to make this work. Moving on from my old design chosen, I am going back to the power of Woo Themes and using one of their excellent choices.

Pen and Paper

Starting a fresh beginning...

So what can you expect from me this year and for the future? For starters, I will be publishing insightful posts into my life, along with helpful articles about server management, social networking, forum administration, and much more. As I’m British you will need to expect some crazy rants (already happening on my Twitter account) about anything that annoys me beyond the “outer rim”.

I will be re-posting many posts from my backup that were found to be both successful and regularly searched for. Unfortunately, I will be keeping all my old RuneScape articles in my backup file, apart from possibly the “How to create a RuneScape clan?” post.  Apologies to those who enjoyed my rants, rambles and sick humour covering the MMORPG, if you wish to complain at me then by all means do so. I’ll most likely laugh at you.

My feed has remained the same, so if you are already subscribed to my blog then fear not; you will continue to receive updates from my full feed. If you are not a subscriber, you can enter the realm of supremacy by clicking the big orange button to the left of this post in the sidebar.

Photo courtesy of zezodedo.

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