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I thought it would be good to spread the word about some Google Adsense changes. Google notified their publishers recently about a change in the referral program. The current referral program is as follows;

- $5 when the referred publisher makes $5
- $250 when the referred publishers make $100
- $2,000 bonus for referring 25 publishers earning $100 or more in any 180 day period

This referral program is being ‘chopped’ and the new referral program consists of just $100 for $100 earned for the referral. This is a big change for Google and has almost certainly annoyed some people. If you did not make much use of the referral program or did not perform well for you, then you will not be affected.

In Other News
- You will hopefully notice some changes to the layout of the blog soon.
- I’ve added a nice smilies plugin, so when you reply you can add some nice smilies to your comments
- Also added is a popularity plugin for the posts, so I can see what you think of what I am posting, It will help me improve the quality of my posts and help me understand what my readers like.

As I was looking over my website, something was bugging me very badly. I have nothing against Google at all, they provide me with the best search engine on the internet to find all I need, I also love Google Adsense very much, as well as other tools which I could spend all day talking about, but anyway, onto my point.

There was something that was displaying on my website that was just niggling me. You like seeing your website the way you want it and when you apply your Google Adsense code (if you do) I see something very ugly indeed. I assume the companies that advertise through Google create their own adverts and submit them to Google to be displayed around the web. On the right hand side of this page you notice a 120×600 advert from Google.

Google chooses what adverts to place on your page and I for sure do not really like this sitting on my page.

You have a style for your website and Google Adsense dumps an advert with bold, underlined and just plain boring text. Also the advert does not have a border so it almost trys to blend in with your page, which I do not want it to do. The other adverts that I have seen show a nice image and are more professional. I could create an advert like that in Microsoft Paint in two seconds.

I’m not usually one to complain but you would not want that eyesore on your page. Google, I know you have the choice to colour scheme text adverts but on images we can not really choose what is displayed. An image a lot more beautiful would be good, after all I want my site looking pretty.

A Few Facts
One thing that was a really big problem when creating my site was choosing my domain. I spent a very long time searching the internet for suggestions. There are currently 96,569,403 domains active, with 562,261 being registered up to 21:43 GMT on the 13th Dec 2007 and is around 6/7 domains being registered every second. Well, that’s quite a lot. Well actually that’s loads! Availability of domain names is being smaller and smaller so when you are choosing your domain, the simple one you want may be sadly, gone.

What TLD?
There are many TLD extensions you can have for your domain (the bit that’s at the end of your website name e.g. the .com bit, the most common being .com which is used for commercial businesses. There is also .net for commercial networks, .org for non-profit organisations, .biz for businesses, the list goes on. It is probably advised that you use the right TLD for your domain as it just wouldn’t look right, but most TLDs do not require you to use it for intended purpose of the TLD.

When choosing your domain you are really going to want to know what you want your website is going to be about before choosing a domain name. A question that I was always asked when I was asking for peoples ideas on a domain name was “What is your website going to be about?” If your company has a specific brand then obviously you want to be looking for a domain related to your company but if you just trying to name your new website then here is what I did.

Keywords = More Traffic
An important thing that I was told was look for keywords, many people search keywords in search engines e.g. website, blog etc. If your domain name contains these keywords, for example thatblogsite.com contains blog and site. Having keywords in your domain is a strong way of driving more traffic to your website. Next let’s keep things simple in choosing your domain, you do not want to confuse your visitors or people when you are advertising it with domain names that are hard to spell or domain names that are hard to remember, it just wont be worth doing the site.

Log That Idea!
Every so often you will have ideas that pop-in and out of your head, it is important to have a domain checker like on GoDaddy loaded so you can perform a quick search. Trust me it will get quite annoying when you think “Oh yes, that’s a brilliant domain I do not think someone will have it” chances are they already have but then again you may have a domain for your website if you find its available. GoDaddy also provides you with suggestions related to your search that you may be interested in if yours is not available.

Generate Your Domain
This brings me onto something else I did, and that was using websites that suggest domains, they may do this by keywords you enter so they can relate it to your website or they will just generate domains to try and find something you like. The image below is the result of a simple search ‘domain generator’. These websites get your mind working as they may provide you with a domain suggestion which you can work around and maybe combine ideas from other places to get the domain right.

Relating your content to your domain is also a thing to think about to. For example this is a blog site and I’ve included the word ‘blog’. This already notifies the visitors that they will probably be reading a website that is a blog.

There are some domain name features that I avoid, these included domains with a ‘-’ in as users may sometimes just forget that its there and this means lost traffic, also talking in a sentence e.g. “My-site.com”, you would have to say “My (hyphen) site.com” which I just do not think sounds as good and is a little extra to say each time, it will sometimes cause confusion. Use of numbers for words is a big no-no in when choosing my domain, I decided not to choose e.g. ‘4′ for ‘for’, as once against saying it will just be confusing, “my website is “tiles4you.com, the 4 bit is the number 4, not the word ‘for’”. A little long-winded, you think?

The important thing about your domain name that it is unique and it fits to what you want, being happy with your domain is very important. Do not be to quick with registering a domain, a common problem is registering a domain name and not liking it in the future, especially days after getting it. Take your time, in the registration process and get it right.

Good Luck!