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Geo Targeting – What Exactly Is It?
As the adult industry reaches further and further across the online global community we are beginning to realize the importance of our foreign surfers, gone are the days of shifting them off to a dialer site instead, we find more and more companies actually using geo-targeting techniques to filter and monetize this profitable traffic more but, how does geotargeting work and, more importantly, is it any good? They are the questions we will look at in this article.
GEO::IP – The Basics.
The Geo::ip module is a relatively simplistic database of IP addresses and, the matching country to which the IP address belongs. This means that the GEO::IP module can be used for a variety of purposes including automatically selecting the language and countries of your visitors, for credit card fraud detection, and for software export controls.Geo Targeting – The Basics.
As described above, the GEO::IP module is what drives any and all forms of geographical location targeting system (geo targeting). Geo targeting is the method most commonly used in the adult industry to either send a surfer to a localized version of a paysite or, send them off to a dialer in an attempt to monetize them it works by checking either the surfers browser language, country ip address or, both of these.Putting Geo Targeting To Work.
Despite what most webmasters may think about the complexities of geo targeting and the GEO::IP Module for Perl they are easy to use and implement and, furthermore, there are cost free and highly effective ways of using geo targeting on your sites to monetize your international traffic. Lets look at two easy free solutions for webmasters to geo target their traffic.JavaScript.
Using JavaScript you could add the following code between your HTML <head> and </head> tags to redirect international traffic to a specific url on your server:<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript1.2″>
<!– Begin
if (navigator.appName == ‘Netscape’)
var language = navigator.language;
else
var language = navigator.browserLanguage;if (language.indexOf(‘en’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘english.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘nl’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘dutch.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘fr’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘french.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘de’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘german.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘ja’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘japanese.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘it’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘italian.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘pt’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘portuguese.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘es’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘Spanish.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘sv’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘swedish.shtml';
else if (language.indexOf(‘zh’) > -1) document.location.href = ‘chinese.shtml';
else
document.location.href = ‘english.shtml';
// End –>
</script>Php.
Using .php you can add the following to your sites pages to redirect traffic based on their browser language.
<?
$user_lan = $HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE;if($user_lan==’de’) {
## German
$redir_url = “http://www.germanlanguagepageurl.com”;} elseif($user_lan==’fr’) {
## French
$redir_url = “http://www.frenchlanguagepageurl.com”;} elseif($user_lan==’it’) {
## Italian
$redir_url = “http://www.italianlanguagepageurl.com”;} elseif($user_lan==’es’) {
## Spain
$redir_url = “http://www.spanishlanguagepageurl.com”;## US traffic or Rest of world not defined above
} else {
$redir_url = “http://www.yourmainpageurl.com”;}
header(“Location: $redir_url”);
exit;?>
As you can see from the above two examples, monetizing your international foreign traffic is a relatively easy step and, with the right sponsors to send this traffic to you will be able to reap the profits of countries that other webmasters are not targeting yet.
Geo Targeting – Overview.
When all is said and done geo targeting can be a cost effective way to increase your bottom line profits, whether using a free method as described above or, using one of the many filtering services available on the net you should start to monetize your global surfers. One thing you should also consider however is that far from sending your international traffic to a dialer you should search around and find a good mix of adult affiliate programs with a variety of localized paysites, this in itself will enable you to see just how much traffic you have been wasting by using dialers in the past and, it will also allow you to realize the full potential of your new found geo targeted adult traffic.Article written by Lee
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Why Go Adult?
When choosing a hosting company why choose an adult host over a mainstream one?
Simple, They provide above other things, a better quality of service, affordability and, most importantly, reliability.
Adult hosts face a variety of technical and support issues, this coupled with the points mentioned above makes them a far superior choice to standard mainstream hosting providers. This is one of the main factors why more and more mainstream internet based companies are now turning to the adult business forum to provide their hosting solutions.
Mainstream going adult? Yes that’s right, more and more mainstream companies are turning to our industries hosting providers for the fast speeds, security and, reliable infrastructures they can offer after all, adult sites are amongst the most prolific on the internet on average gaining more daily hits to their sites than mainstream websites so, they need to be cost efficient, not only to the hosting companies but, also to their clients, the webmaster.
Our industry strives on the use of heavy graphics, coupled with streaming media files to secure sales and longevity, this is why the adult hosting companies need to be able to provide not just a single, heavily laden server but tens of them, sometimes even hundreds all producing gigabytes of traffic on a daily basis.
Adult hosting companies are constantly upgrading their equipment in order to improve not just their servers, connectivity but also the smaller things that are often overlooked by webmasters, hubs, routers, switches and the likes along side the not so technical aspects of running a host, The staff.
Along with all of this technical equipment they also need to maintain a high level of technical knowledge, after all, not just anyone can install operating systems capable of running multi-million dollar industries. They need the knowledge to maintain, upgrade, repair and sell their services to the best of their capabilities.
What does this mean to you? Well, we all want to make money and, through the use of faster servers, e-commerce solutions and the technical support your hosting provider can give you, you will be fattening your wallet on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
Adult hosting, quite simply, is the crème de la crème of the hosting world, they offer solid, solutions whether you are starting in the adult industry or, operate a mainstream e-commerce site.
So how do you choose a host that is right for you?
You need to ask some basic questions of the host and, do your homework. Not only should you find out what hosting solutions they can offer you but, you need to find out what their support service is like, how affordable they are in comparison to other companies who can offer similar or the same service. Whilst on the subject of hosting support, before you sign on the dotted line, give your host a call out of office hours, if they answer, then you can almost be certain they are a good hosting provider.
Of course, not all hosts will have 24 hour phone support, however, that said, some offer 24 hour icq support, email support and more.
Another sure fire way to find out if a hosting company is any good is to ask on the heavily traveled webmaster message boards, after all, you are not the only webmaster out there who will have tried this company, if they are no good, someone will know about it and point you in the direction of a reputable host like http://www.webair.com.
Hopefully, this article will have given you some insight into the world of adult hosting companies and, will assist you in making the right choice of host for your site, whatever type of website you might be hosting.
Article Written By Lee
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Message Boards – Getting The Postings
There are plenty of free scripts available on the web which will enable you to start your own online discussion forum.
However, having the most sophisticated and advanced features in a forum does not mean it will be successful by any means. It is the people who post on the forums that make them good not the scripts used to maintain them. This article is dedicated to getting people posting on your forums.
It can be really quiet on your forum especially at the beginning when there are no real discussions going on, this is because people don’t want to be the first to post. They want to see some topics that interest them already being discussed, they want to be able to read through some posts first before having to post themselves. With this in mind, you should also be aware that just because a forum doesn’t seem busy, it can in fact get thousands of hits a day. Lurkers make message boards what they are, and, for this reason alone you should act professionally and courteously when making posts on any forums, one day, you might have to do business with one of these so-called ‘lurkers’ and, if they have seen you in a bad light on a forum, the chances are they wont want to know you. So what do you do to get your message board off the ground? There are a number of things actually and, some of these are as follows.
First of all, make sure the signup process is as simplistic as possible, even better, ensure if the user doesn’t want to register, they don’t have to! To attract people to post on your boards why not get a few of your friends together and start some discussions of your own, you could even register a couple of different usernames so that your forums look busier than they actually are thus cementing the thought that your forums are active and will have worthwhile discussions taking place.
To find some current topics for your forums why not visit some of the other message boards and see what people are discussing, if a topic is receiving a lot of interest, post about it on your forums. This is especially a good idea if your forums are specific to one area after all, if your competitions forums posters are interested in this topic, your forums users will be too.
Another great way to get people to start talking on your discussion forums is to use a contest. For example, currently on European Webmasters we have a content giveaway whereby for each post you make you gain a point and, once you have reached a certain level of points you will be able to download exclusive content sets. If you are going to start a competition then make sure people are aware of it, post some information about it online and get something to giveaway that everyone wants.
One other method to get additional posts is to put up subject lines and links to the topic threads from your main website page. Again, if you publish articles on your site create a link to your discussion forums and invite people to openly discuss the articles in question, not only will you get people posting on your message board but, you will also gain invaluable information from your user as to what they look for and want in articles you write.
If you publish a newsletter, again, this is another great way to build interest in your message board. Simply ask them to post, tell them you are building up a great resource and, you need their help as much as you need theirs to make this happen. If you have provided them with high quality information in your newsletter the chances are they will repay you by posting on your message board.
In conclusion, you should basically try and plug your message board wherever you can by doing the above, create banners for it and display them on your website, place a note in your signature file encouraging people to visit and post if they require assistance with anything. Its hard work but, once you have a few regular posters it will take off.
Article Written By Lee
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Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 1
The last 2 weeks I have had a LOT of webmasters email and ICQ me regarding traffic and, not getting any sales.
So, I thought it would be a good idea to make a step by step tutorial on building your own surfer trap.
Now these are some of the arguments I have heard why people haven’t already built one over the last few weeks…
* To complicated to follow.
* I want surfers returning to my site.
* Don’t have the time.The first two however seem to be the ones that I hear over and over again.
First of all, a surfer trap IS NOT complicated, in fact, it is probably one of, if not THE easiest type of site to build.
Secondly, Why get a surfer visiting your site over and over again if they are not paying for trial memberships? All you are doing is wasting your bandwidth.
Thirdly, A surfer trap can be built over a period of time, my very first trap was built within 1 hour my next was built in a day and my next one was built in a week.
So onto the start of building our surfer trap…
The first thing that I want you to do is to look at the Multi-Site FPA’s that ARS in the marketing section and choose ONE of them.
Download it, optimize the keywords on the FPA, make sure you add meta tags, titles descriptions and Alt tags on all images.
Once you have done this, you now need to search through ALL of the single site FPA’s and download and optimize one for each of the ARS sites that you have on your Multi-Site FPA. (Even the gay sites!)
This should take you 2-5 minutes for EACH FPA, any longer than that and you are doing TOO much work!
Once you have all of the single FPA’s downloaded, optimized and uploaded onto your server that is the first stage completed.
Article written by Lee
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European Surfers – Gold Waiting To Be Harvested
80% Of the internets content is English. 40% of internet surfers cant even read English, let alone understand it. Out of all the countries in the world, German internet users spend an average of 59.2 minutes looking at porn a month closely followed by Norwegian surfers who looked at it 55.4 minutes every month, how many of you have sites catering to this market? Not one of you… I would bet!
Most webmasters that I know of automatically assume, European surfers = Freeloading Bestiality Loving Sicko’s. That’s bullshit! In fact, a larger and larger percentage of European surfers are looking for porn. Sure, they can find it by the bucket load but, lets be honest, Herman from Munich who cant speak a word of English is going to be making a lot more from this industry than Jason in Miami.. WHY? Because Herman has a captive audience, most of his surfers are German speaking after all, that’s the language he makes his sites in, that’s the language of the sponsors he uses and, like it or not, German surfers are proven to be avid porn surfers and, more importantly, Credit Card spenders!
But Wait…Hang on a second, Credit Card spenders? But I thought the best way of milking $$$ out of foreign surfers was to send them off to a dialer program? hmmm…. perhaps I’m missing something??
You are! there are a lot of sponsors that don’t have any sites in English, Germany has a load of high converting AVS sites, why is this? Because they are written completely in German, Spain has a lot of good quality sponsor that work wonders, Why? Again because they are written in Spanish.
You have a lot of AVS, TGP and free sites that don’t make as much as they could, WHY? because you haven’t considered the global market! Let’s be honest here, the big sponsors of this world you use, how many of them say in their terms and conditions, they don’t allow access to German, Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian surfers? Ill bet at least 50% or more of them right? that’s money you have just lost! Sure, you can ship them off to a dialer program and hope they download it, most wont, sure you can send them to an opt-in email program and hope to make some money from them long term, you wont, In fact, European surfers detest having to give any information about them out. Its a privacy thing, they don’t want you to know who they are, so you cant tell their governments who they are, it sounds harsh but, its true.
So How Do I Do It??
The best way to milk money from the European surfers is to treat them EXACTLY the same as American surfers, but, with one major difference… You need to build for their language, get this right and you’ll be laughing all the way to the Bundesbank
But, where do you start, how can you build a site in a language you know nothing about? Simple, do some research, there are places out there that cater to European based webmasters, go to the forums, ask for help, you wont be laughed at, you wont be ridiculed and, who knows, you may just learn something in the process!
Sign up to a foreign sponsor, you can find a lot on our site, most of, if not all of these foreign sponsor will gladly help you out, they have email support in a variety of languages themselves, drop them a line, tell them you need help, Ask for it… It will come.
Now you have the help you need what next? use it, ask everyday if you have to, there are some good translation services available on the net, spend $50 to get an existing site you have that’s working well translated into a foreign language, I guarantee you, its money well spent! Once you have this translated ‘template’ site use it time and time again, tweak it until you find the best converting site you can, submit it to all the foreign search engines around, you’ll soon pick up that its not much different to working your ‘standard’ sites except, you’ll have trapped a larger percentage of internet porn surfers and, what’s more, this is a percentage that YOUR competitors wont have!
Integration..
Is it possible to build foreign sites and English site to work together? YES but, its hard, you have to mimic the responses you have learnt from the trial you did with the first translated site, once you start to see trends happening, build on them, if something doesn’t work, swap it out, put something in its place, even if.. Its a US sponsor. You have the framework, the surfer is in your site, they know what its about, that’s the time to start introducing the foreign (to them) sponsors ads.The Results..
The results of your trial will speak for themselves, you will have tapped into an as yet untamed market, You will have more scope of growth for your business, You will have established a new traffic source, You will be able to reap the benefits. Of course, you need to work for it, don’t expect magic overnight, it just isn’t gonna happen! Remember when you first started webmastering? it was hard work, tapping into the European market is even harder, its like starting all over again from scratch then, realizing you know what your doing but you have been doing it wrong all these years.Article written by Lee
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Niche Marketing – What Is A Niche?
The first step as webmasters we must take to become successful is to discover what our niche specialty is however, many webmasters still do not realize exactly what a niche is.
In fact, from the webmasters I have spoken to it would seem that a ‘niche’ is just another word for the main topics of pornography, Teen, Asian, Fetish, Gay, Straight, the list goes on and, whilst this list is never ending they are all niches in themselves however, you need to look beyond the top level niche and start to develop a feel, a stance of your own as to what niche you will work on for example, Asian Midgets, you probably cant get more niche than that in this day and age however, realistically, the chances of you a) being able to find the content for this niche and b) Being able to find a sponsor are remarkably thin.
That said, if you can find a niche that you like personally, whether that be she-male, midgets, straight or, gay, this will give you a solid foundation to market your sites on especially if you build on your already vast knowledge of what turns you on.
Now, onto breaking down the niche you are comfortable working in..
Lets say for arguments sake that you have chosen to concentrate on the ‘Gay’ market,, within this market (as with any other) there is a remarkable amount of ‘sub-niches’ and, these are what you need to build your business around whether you want to or not, the ‘sub-niches’ of any given adult market is where the $$$ can be earned.
Now using the gay market as an example the first few niches that come to mind are:
Twink’s – Young looking hairless 18 – 20 year olds.
Bear’s – Hairy men over the age of 20.
Hunk’s – Muscular looking guys in the age group of 20 – 30 .
Straight Guys – Yes, that’s right, gay men get off on looking at straight guys.As you can see from the above four examples we can now start targeting our market audience a lot better.
The next thing we need to do now that we have found the niche and the sub-niche we will be working is to look for a sponsor that complements the niche of our choice, this is the hard part. Many webmasters will go directly to the highest paying sponsor and throw links up to their ‘sub-niche’ pay site not even looking at the sites tour or members area. This is a huge mistake, the first thing you NEED to do is to look over the sponsors paysites and, more importantly, the sponsors site tour AND members area. What point is there sending your surfers who are after Twink’s if, your sponsors tour has images of a load of guys over the Twink age bracket?
From this point on and, after you have chosen a suitable tour to send your traffic to you need to build up a flow of ‘niche’ traffic the chances are, if you submit your TGP gallery to an ‘all gay’ TGP that you will receive a substantial amount of unfiltered traffic making your hard work in choosing your sponsors tour worthless.
So how do you choose a traffic source that is right for you? Simple, you need to experiment, start of with your niche TGP’s, Top Lists, Links Lists etc and see what happens, how much traffic are you being sent from your chosen traffic source and, more importantly, how much of this traffic is actually clicking through to your sponsors tour. Once you can get an idea of what traffic you are being sent from what traffic source you have won more than half of the battle already.
Record EVERY possible detail about your traffic sources that you can, how much traffic they send a day, how many visits your sponsor gets, how many sales you made, what content you were using etc, etc.
Once you have a working list of data to use you can start to abuse and filter your traffic like you would have not thought imaginable, if one of your sponsors has a higher payout on Bear traffic, then you instantly know what traffic source gives you traffic for that niche and, you can utilize that information to your benefit.
The most important thing to remember however when marketing a niche is that you need to have patience, you need to use a process of trial and error and, more importantly, you need to experiment, just because TGP A sends you 100,000 hits of Twink traffic one day, it doesn’t mean you will get the same quantity of niche traffic the next.
Article written by Le
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Seasons Greetings For The Adult Surfer
How do the national and, international holidays affect our sponsors sales? More than you would think especially if you can offer your surfers something ‘seasonal’ when they hit your site. However, that said, when should you start planning for these holidays and, more importantly, how can you ensure that once you have implemented your seasonal marketing campaigns that they actually work?
Seasonal Marketing – The Basics.
Seasonal marketing is, in effect a method of changing your marketing approach around different times of the year to affect both the volume of sales you make and, more importantly, the uniqueness of the product you are offering your surfers. A good example of this is at Christmas time, many of the sponsors will provide their webmasters with banner with a holiday feel to them, perhaps using scantily clad men in Santa outfits or half naked women in elves costumes. By offering a seasonal marketing approach to your site surfers you actually increase the chances of making a sale.Holiday Porn.
One of the best ways to offer your surfers a fresh marketing angle is to ensure that you plan for all of the major holidays throughout the year in advance so for example, as mentioned above, Christmas is a big holiday as are, New Years, Easter, Thanksgiving (US), Independence Day (US) and, Halloween. By building sites specifically for these holidays you are increasing the chances not only of building your sales but, of gaining additional traffic that you might otherwise lose out on. It has been said certainly over the last four years i have worked in the adult industry that many webmasters experience an increase in search engine traffic searching on keywords such as ‘Christmas Porn’ and, ‘Ghost Porn’ around the various holidays, build now for next year and, when the holiday season arrives, you will be one step ahead of your competition.Seasonal Marketing Overview.
As already mentioned the holiday season especially Christmas time, can be a great way to gain additional traffic, not only from those surfers specifically looking for Christmas Porn but, also the newbie adult surfers who have perhaps only just got their first computer on Christmas day, by adding to your collection of seasonal porn sites year after year you will not only learn a lot about the way the various holidays and seasons affect your sales but, you will also be able to profit from your surfers in a way that not many other webmasters do.Article written by Lee
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Doorway Pages
A doorway page is built to rank high for a particular keyword or search phrase. When your doorway page is visited by the searcher it simply has a “click me” button which links to your web site. The major search engines accept these pages as long as the end result does provide what the searcher is looking for. If you are discovered to be using doorway pages for irrelevant keywords you can expect to have your entire domain unlisted. For instance, one of our doorway pages is built to rank high for the search term -Adult Content—which is quite acceptable because when the searcher gets here he can find links to adult content providers from our site. If however, he couldn’t find links to adult content then we would risk the wrath of the all powerful search engines.
Once you have selected your keywords and phrases (about 50 would be the normal) you need to build a doorway page for each keyword and ideally, for each major search engine. All the major engines look for different keyword density in the text, title and description so you need to do some research by doing a search using your chosen phrase or keyword and studying the top 10 results at each engine (if you can spot them, study high ranking doorway pages).
Make notes of how many times the phrase or keyword is used in the title, description and body text. Is it used in header text etc? Once you have built a picture of what your doorway page should look like you can build it using your favorite html editor. Once you have done one for a particular engine the other 50 or so pages can be done by simply replacing keywords for keywords. After you have done a page for each keyword move on to the next search engine. Remember that your body text is not important but make each page unique or it may be considered spamming. It is your keyword or phrase density that you are attempting to get right. The page, when visited by a person, will be recognized for what it is, simply a link to the real content so don’t worry too much about what it looks like. When a search engine spider visits the page it is only interested in counting the keyword density in your body text.
As you have probably worked out there is quite a lot of work involved. 50 phrases or keywords=50 pages X the top 8 search engines= 400 pages. In reality though, you are only creating 8 doorways, 1 page for each search engine. For all the other pages you simply have to substitute the keyword for the next and alter the text around so as not to finish with 50 identical pages. OK, nearly finished but the next step is crucial if your doorways are to work.
Put all your pages in a folder on your server e.g. Mydomain/doorways/. Then create 2 more pages that have a link and a small description to each of your doorways (200 on each) and to each other. These are called corridor pages because the spider travels down them, visiting each page linked off them. Call these 2 pages index and home and place them in the folder with your doorway pages. Then place links to these two pages from your main index page so that a spider will be able to find them and list all your doorways. Submit only your index page and your 2 corridor pages. Do not submit your doorways to the engines.
Ideally, and if you can afford it, you should set up a new domain and host for your doorways. This isn’t essential but it does have benefits. These are: If you do get over zealous with your doorways and an engine does ban you for spamdexing at least your real site will be safe. Engines rank sites higher if they have lots of links to them from other domains. You can put your most important keywords in your new domain name, which will increase the ranking of the doorway pages containing those keywords.
Now all you have to do is wait for the engines to update their databases. We have had the best results with Google.
Article written by Lee
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Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 6
Stage 6 already!
Only 2 more stages to go after this tutorial until you have a fully functional surfer trap!
Ok as promised in the last tutorial, we are going to implement the table pages you hopefully made in our last tutorial.
You now need to signup for ANOTHER counter code. Use the same counter as you did last time and, again, make sure the URL you send the traffic from the counter to is your main Multi-Site FPA surfer trap page.
Ok, you have the new counter code, what you should do with this is place it on every one of the niche table pages we made yesterday. Nowhere else except on these pages.
Once you have the counter code placed you now need to go back to our consoles, what we are going to do is make these HTML table pages into a secondary console from off the first pop up that we get when a surfer visits any of our FPA’s.
What you should do is enter the following coding in between the <head> and </head> tags of the niche pop-ups ensuring that you choose a DIFFERENT niche to the one of your original consoles:
<!—— BEGIN CONSOLE CODE ——->
<SCRIPT language=Javascript>
<!–
var exit=true;
function exitcnsl()
{
if (exit)
open(“http://www.yourdomain.com/tableconsolepage.html”, “tables”,”toolbar=0,location=0,status=0,menubar=0, scrollbars=0,resizable=0, width=800,height=600,top=0,left=0″);
}
//–>
</SCRIPT>
<!—— END CONSOLE CODE ——->You need to edit the figures for width= and height= to reflect the size of your table, ideally the frame of the console should be around 3 or 4 pixels either side of your tables.
Ok now once you have added the above to your existing pop-ups you now need to add the following to the newly created table consoles between the <head> and the </head> tags:
<SCRIPT language=javascript>
self.blur();
</script>What this will do is once the first console loads, it will immediately load a second console but, this second console should be ‘hidden’ behind the main window that is displayed. We have created a blur console.
We now have one last thing to do with this ‘blur console’ that we have just created.
Go to the HTML coding for the table ad console and add the same JavaScript to that page however, this time you DO NOT need to use the self.blur section of the instructions or, change the sizes of the console that pops.
Instead you need to add the following to the <body> tag:
onUnload=”exitcnsl()” so as an example your body tag may look like this:
<BODY BGCOLOR=#000000 onUnload=”exitcnsl()”>
Now you also need to alter the location for the console that will pop this time, you have a choice, you can send the console directly to the ARS POTD program or, you can send it BACK to your Multi-Site FPA page, at which point the surfer will be able to select another niche or leave your site.
Now remember, this surfer trap IS aggressive however, every time one of your counter codes load both from the FPA’s where we implemented them AND on the newly created table consoles we are gaining extra traffic.
If you have ANY questions at all please do not hesitate to post on the forums and myself or one of our administrators will assist you.
Article written by Lee
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Typography Know How
Our web sites are nothing without content, and most content is comprised of simple text. Many web designers neglect to pay attention to their typography, and it shows. Proper typography varies based on where the text is and what purpose it serves. Although there are no rules etched in stone, there are a few general techniques that should be followed. Although some of these tips may seem elementary, many of them are not followed.
Headings.
Clearly, headings should be larger, by 1 or 2 font sizes, than your body text. You may consider bold, but be cognizant of the letter width. Arial Black, for example, may create letters too fat for your taste. When using colors, be sure the colors contrast well with the background color of your site. Black and dark gray do not contrast well, while black and white (or light gray) work quite well. Sometimes, even a simple color change can create useful headings.Also be sure to cascade your headings. A main heading, for example, would be larger than subheadings. This effect creates a sense of emphasis and flow to the information.
Do not italicize your headings. Italics are meant to underscore particular content, but since the text is a heading and of larger size anyway, italics are redundant and often make the text difficult to read.
Fonts.
The default is Times New Roman, which works fine, but many think it is boring. I have experimented with Arial, Georgia and Verdana, and have found Verdana the most readable font face available. This is a personal preference, but fonts should be restricted to the above four to ensure compatibility between all users of your web site. If your user’s browser does not support your font choice, their browser will revert to its default. Since browsers have increased support for CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, whenever possible, use CSS to define your fonts, rather than HTML’s <font> tag. Also, be sure to keep your font sizes large enough for visitors of all ages and eyesight’s.Stress Styles.
Avoid using all capital letters within your text, as it makes it difficult to read and implies you are shouting at the reader.To stress words within your body text, decide on a format and stick with it. Some choose bold, while others choose italics or underline. My personal favorite is italics, but any of these can work well. Be careful when using underline, however, as it can be mistaken for a link. In addition, do not overuse these stress styles.
Entire body text should not be bold. Bold, like italics, is used to emphasis words, and usually an entire body of copy should speak for itself in regularly styled text. I like to use CSS to space my body text out a little to increase readability.
Article written by Lee
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