My family and I went to the Vesta Home show a few weeks ago. For those of you who don’t know it’s a twice a year showing of open homes where you can look at what the home builders are doing in regards to new home construction. The open homes are for sale and are filled with several home decor items like art, rugs, lamps, candles, sofas, pictures and more. Anyone who owns a house or is planning on building a new home should make the trip. This years show is in Arlington, Tennessee and is from October 10 to November 1. Detailed info is here: http://www.mahba.com/vesta/index.html.

There are 8 houses this year and the focus is going green. The houses are smaller than previous years and the price range is $299-354K from several Memphis builders like Signature Homes, Regency Home Builders, Faxon Gillis and more. I enjoyed walking from house to house and looking at the new home accessories. One house actually had a piano playing which was nice. There was even a relaxing Koi pond in the backyard of one house. I really liked the outdoor fireplaces and leisure areas. I guess that’s the “in thing” now. When we build our new house I definitely want to add an outdoor fireplace. There were two homes that had home theaters. I voted for the one with the big red comfy seats as the best home. As usual the man from Henco Furniture was there. I was surprised that his company only decorated one home. In previous years, the decorations were from a mix of designers in each home.  Most of the home decor items were from The Great American Home Store. This year was odd because virtually no items had the price tag on them except for the house that Henco Furniture decorated. I’m definitely going to have to make it down to Henco one of these Saturdays. After the show is over, you can buy home accessories that caught your eye. I remember one year one lady purchased one of the homes along with everything in it. Now that must be NICE!

Well this weekend is the last week of the show, so if you’re going to go you better get to it!

Enjoy!

Gina

Content © 2009 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

I just attended an Adsense Webinar on AdSense for Search: Improve the user experience and generate revenue. This webinar was very short and lasted about 20 minutes. This was followed by the Question and Answer session which lasted about 15 minutes due to the compiling of participant questions. The webinar covered the following areas:

Detailed instructions on setting up Adsense for Search and Custom Search Engine

Reviewing your for search performance within your Adsense account.

Connecting your Custom Search Engine with your Adsense account.

Advanced Features

 - Excluding Urls

 - Refining search results

The host planned on going into more detail about the advanced features but changed their mind. An advanced features screen showed only for a few seconds. It was quickly removed and the host said they’d send a help link for advanced features.

Tips

1) Add two search boxes on each side of page

2) Add your ads on the top and right of the page

3) Host search results on your website

4) Use channels to track your performance

5) Customize your search engine to match your site and add your logo

6) Experiment with different layouts

They also gave the examples of a few websites who were implementing these tips and earning from it. Yell.com, Maps of World.com, Sparkle Box and FinFacts.ie.

Using those tips can help you to obtain the maximum amount of revenue from Adsense for Search.

Enjoy!

Gina

Content © 2009 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

I buy a lot of music cd’s so I thought I’d add a part of my blog to review the cd’s that I buy.

I’m loving Shinedown’s Sound of Madness CD. I first heard them on VH1 with their Second Chance song. The singer Brent Smith can really sing and he’s from Knoxville, Tennessee. Another plus. I tend to like Southern singers. :)  Shinedown does a lot of acoustic versions of their songs and the live performances almost always sound like the recording studio versions.  I’m not going to lie, if I hadn’t heard them before I saw them I probably would not have listened to their music.  The group kind of has a dark, gothic, tattoos, rock look about them which is not usually what I like. So it’s true you can’t judge a book by it’s cover.

This album is great! Very balanced with both ballads and rock songs. The lyrics are very deep. Music is awesome. Favorites are Breaking Inside, Call Me, If Only You Knew, Second Chance, Sound of Madness, Devour, Sin with a Grin, What a Shame and Cry for Help. And not in that order. It’s hard to say which I like best. It would probably be a ballad though.

I wound up buying all 3 of Shinedown’s CD’s. Favorites off of those cd’s are Burning Bright, Save Me, Crow and the Butterfly, 45, and Energy. Sound of Madness is definitely worth a listen and I recommend it.

Here’s a link on Youtube to listen to Burning Bright, one of my favorites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIAF1tXFsuc. It’s not a video though, just made by a fan that has pictures of the group.

Enjoy!

Gina

Content © 2009 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

Ebay is really starting to suck. They have been making a lot of changes lately.  Some good, some bad. This latest change that irks me is where they take auction listings and show them at the beginning and end of pages. This is ridiculous! If you were not interested in an item at the bottom of the first page you still won’t be interested in it on the top of the next page. Now it takes even longer to get through the auction listings and to find what you are really looking for.  When something works, sometimes you just need to leave things alone. I hope they are just “testing” this and will get rid of it soon. It won’t be soon enough for me!

While I’m venting, I also don’t like the fact that when you search eBay for particular items they come back with 0 results but if you do the same search on Google, eBay items do come up. What’s up with that? Hmm, I’ll leave that alone, that’s another post…

Gina

Content © 2009 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

I received an email from Yahoo Search Submit stating that they would be shutting down their paid inclusion program as of December 31, 2009. Yahoo! will provide a pro-rated refund to Yahoo! Search Submit Basic and Express advertisers for the unused portion of their annual fee in January 2010.

I had several urls listed in Yahoo using this method. I guess they couldn’t keep it up and want website owners to pay the $299 annual listing fee to be in their directory. A few years ago I did pay the $299 listing fee but my website never came up in the search results. I thought that was what I was paying for. My website only came up when someone browsed the Yahoo directory and nothing else. That was pretty much zero benefit for me and definitely not worth $299. I won’t make that mistake again. On the other hand Yahoo Search Submit placed your website in the search result listings and refreshed your page every couple of days for $50/year. That was a valuable service that will be missed. This probably marks the end of paid inclusion.

Enjoy!

Gina

Content © 2009 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

Fall is one of my favorite times of the year. I love it when the leaves start turning colors. Have you noticed lately how some pine trees are changing colors too? On the way to our cabin there’s a group of pine trees in a river that changes to a burnt orange color. Last year I thought the trees were dead but they are still there and turned green earlier in the year. Now they are back with burnt orange color. Weird but pretty! I’ll see if I can post a picture.

If you like to party in the fall, following are some free party invitations that will help you be on you way…

Halloween Party Invitations

Halloween Dance  Party Invitations

Dead  Movie Star Halloween Party Invitations

Dead  Rock Star Halloween Party Invitations

Harvest Party Invitations

Harvest  Celebration Invitations

Hay Ride Invitations

Oktoberfest Invitations

Pumpkin Carving  Party Invitations

Fall Party Invitations

Enjoy!

Gina

Content © 2009 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

I’m thinking about attending the Content Revenue Strategies Conference and Expo (CRS). It’s going to be in New York City on November 5th. There will be sessions tailored to small and medium sized publishers. There are two sessions, the first being a lecture discussing recent product enhancements. The second which I am more interested in will be the AdSense Publisher Forum, an open Q&A session where attendees can ask questions directly to a panel of AdSense team members. That should be interesting.  More info is here: http://crsconference.com/ny/CRS/

If you register by Friday, you can get in for $295 using an early bird discount and coupon code CRSGoogle for $100 off of admission. Sounds like a pretty good deal. I’ve never been to New York before…

Gina

Content © 2009 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

I’ve been very busy lately designing new web templates for my website. I have about 100 new web templates that I’ve been working on.  Most of the web templates are targeted at service industries such as janitorial, pet sitting, roof repair, dry cleaners, electrical company, concrete contractor, tile contractor, garage door contractor and more. There really are too many different industries to name. I didn’t know that there were so many service industry web templates that I didn’t have until I sat down and took notice.

Designing web templates is the fun part of the website design business. You get to let your creativity run wild and play with colors and photos..sizing and resizing images. For my web template customers I always slice the graphics and create the html pages for them. I want my templates to be as easy to use as possible for beginners.  You pretty much have to paste your text in the content area and maybe add your site name on a graphic for my templates.

After the initial designing of the web templates, I have to create a thumbnail image of the home page and inside page as well as a thumbnail image to upload to my website. After that I create the product numbers and finally write the descriptions for each web template. This is definitely what takes the most time. I find the more accurate and fun the description the greater chance the web template has of being sold. I have a web template search engine that I add all of this information to before the new templates appear on my website.

I expect my new web templates to be added to my website late next week. If you want to see the new ones added, check this link for the newest templates:

http://www.hooverwebdesign.com/cgi-bin/templatesearch.cgi?action=viewnewest

Enjoy!

Gina

Content © 2009 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

As you know, I am still trying to figure out better ways to monetize my website. Adbrite didn’t work out for me so now I’m trying out Chitika. Chitika is an affiliate program similar to Google Adsense but the difference is it only shows the advertisements to traffic from search engines and then only to U.S. and Canadian based website traffic. Chitika has a lot of different ad sizes to choose from besides the standard ad sizes. They also payout using PayPal.

I received an invitation to join Chitika from one of their staff a few weeks ago. So far it looks promising. I’ve added it on just a few of my website’s pages to test it out.  Chitika is now on pages where the revenue from Adsense wasn’t where I thought it should be. I deleted Adsense from those pages and placed Chitika ads. What I like about Chitika is the fact that they have little pictures that go with each ad. I believe these little pictures will grab my visitors attention and help them to notice the ads more.

I’m not really happy about the cost per click. I’ve done some research on a few webmaster messageboards regarding the cost per click, and it seems they pay about .11 per click to everyone. For me this is right on target but I have received as much as .12 per click and as little as .6 so I guess it varies.

Another positive thing is the staff has been very attentive to helping me tweak the ads for my website. I’m going to keep Chitika on my website for at least another month to see what kind of revenue I can make with it. I do hope it works out.  If it doesn’t work I will most likely try to sell ads directly to advertisers. You should try out Chitika along with me. Let me know how it works out for you.

Enjoy!

Gina

Content © 2009 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com

I’ve added the following new free business award certificates on the website:

Certificate of Completion Award
Certificate of Appreciation Award 
Honorable Mention Award Certificate 
MVP Award Certificate 
Diploma Award Certificate 
Sales Award Certificate 
Certificate of Participation Award

I’ve also added several new printable day planner pages. They are great to keep your day organized. Check them out here:

http://www.hooverwebdesign.com/free-printables/free-printable-day-planner-pages-template.html

I’m also busy working on some freebie car show invitations:

http://www.hooverwebdesign.com/free-printables/car-show/

Enjoy!

Gina

Content © 2009 Hoover Web Design http://www.hooverwebdesign.com