History of the Virus aka Word of Mouth Advertising
This is a concept that dates back to the very beginning of language, before there were marketing workshops, before copywriting boot camps, even before the internet, electricity and life as we know it…

There was word of mouth advertising. Human kind has always felt a need to interact and connect, sharing relevant information. Now, what started ages ago with where the best grazing fields are, has advanced through time to sharing files and information over vast networks of infinite electronic space.

Now more then ever man has the ability to connect and share worldwide and as marketers you can employ this ancient method to get your message out and spreading.

Viral marketing is a term that started with the elite guru circles at exclusive lunch meetings, and spread like the plague through word of mouth. Now it has become a common play word for the seminar attending crews across the world’s nations. Basically “Viral Marketing” and “viral advertising” especially online , is a way marketers can take advantage of pre-existing social networks to get a message out there using self-replicating viral processes, that are very similar to the way a physical virus or computer virus would spread.

Taken from the age old “word of mouth concept” the internet has only enhanced the ability to spread to new levels allowing you to harness the power of networks. Now you can reach large numbers of specifically targeted groups instantly.

Get This Free Report from Mike Filsaime, creator of Butterfly Marketing on Viral Marketing. Many of the strategies used in this report can be achieved with a simple, affordable, This information is about to change the way you look at your marketing. All your efforts up to this point are finally going to pay off when you put this bit of marketing genius to work for you.

The internet itself was perpetuated using viral methods, and where would you be today without it. Selling cars? Some of the biggest marketers online are making a killing and investing next to nothing in advertising. -In the meantime, every poor Joe Somebody is trying to make ends meet and pawning the family jewels to buy more advertising.

Viral Marketing Report

Now, like any real-world store or shop, a website needs traffic . In the long run, this traffic cannot be dependent on any one source (like Google, for example). If a doughnut shop depended on the next-door police station ONLY and did no advertising, what do you think will happen to their revenues if the police station relocated? For a business to survive in the long run, they must diversify their sources of income, which in turn means that they must diversify their sources of traffic .

This is the first cornerstone of organic marketing – thinking long-term . The second component of organic marketing deals with the actual methods and practices of marketing – an emphasis on “natural” marketing and search engine optimization. We can use existing market exposure to create popularity, or a “buzz”, about a new product or service launch.

Organic marketing expands to cover “natural” link-building , in which you focus on creating excellent content and providing very useful services and letting your reputation build through “word of mouth” or plain ol’ referrals. Then, as people start linking to your website because your website is unique and very useful, you get your link popularity . Pretty soon, you also get high search engine rankings as more and more people come across your website, find it useful and then link to it.

Therefore, organic marketing focuses on creating awareness, of spreading information – through articles, press releases, excellent content and community participation (think forums and blog comments) – with a core emphasis on providing value to the visitors.

A quick exercise:
Pick one of your websites, and write down at least 3-5 things that you can change in order to provide more value to your visitors. It could be something simple, as adding well-written, fresh content, or providing a free e-book on your industry, or simply by giving advice in an industry forum. If you provide a service through your website, think in terms of giving something “extra” to your customers – a bonus, or doing more work than asked for.

This will take you no more than 5 minutes, but make a point to act on the points you write down – you’ll be surprised at the response from your visitors.

• A long-term view of marketing and a diversification of your website’s sources of traffic and income.
• Natural marketing techniques that focus on getting links by spreading awareness of your website’s quality and unique value .
• Emphasis on providing value to your visitors / customers – through quality content and by “going the extra mile”.

Now that we know what organic marketing is about, let’s match this with search engine optimization – how we can do “organic” SEO and get tremendous amounts of traffic to our websites.

Natural SEO - Content Matters
To start off with, content is king . I’ve said this enough times already, but without content, your website is going nowhere. Make sure your website is regularly updated by fresh, quality content that is unique (i.e. not blatantly copied off from other sources) and useful to your target audience.

Smart Linking Strategy

Focus on topical link exchanges that will genuinely provide value to the visitors of both websites. It might sound like a lot of fluff, but link for link, a link on a general “links” page where you are competing with 50 other links for the reader’s attention is worse than a link on a page where you have:

• less competition
• your link is “contextually relevant” (i.e. it’s part of a larger portion of text about a topic related to your website)
• The anchor text is varied but keyword specific
• With this in mind… Don’t ignore off-topic link exchanges. Just focus your main attention to related links.

Alternative sources of traffic

Article exchanges, press releases, buzz marketing – these are just three of the ways you can build up an array of alternative traffic sources. Not only will you survive any changes in your search engine rankings if an algorithm update pushes your website into the pits, but you will also be building your link popularity along the way.

Articles will build your reputation and readership and give you great link popularity over time.

Press releases (when done right) offer you media exposure – this translates into your website being covered in different news sources (and therefore getting in front of a lot of “eyeballs”) for a limited period of time – valuable traffic that your website can convert into regular visitors / customers. In addition, the news coverage also gets you links from authority sites.

Community Participation

If you were in a brick-and-mortar business, what would be the best way to keep a check on the “pulse” of your industry and build strong business relationships? Trade shows, seminars, industrial expos… all the standard marketing platforms that are available to you.

On the internet, this translates into participating in forums and more recently, participating on discussions on blogs (as well as maintaining your own). Community involvement isn’t strictly SEO – this is more about building your reputation as an expert in your industry. Another benefit is that of visibility – if you are “known” in the industry circles, your advice will be automatically valued, and along the way, other websites will link to you as a source of reliable, useful information.

Referrals

If you offer a service through your website, here’s a simple tactic you can use – ask your customers to refer you to their friends . While you’re doing that, mention that placing a link (along with descriptive content) on their website

Referrals are very, very important in traditional marketing – many SEO experts, copywriters, designers, doctors, lawyers, resume writers, consultants and other professionals work solely on referrals. It builds trust – a referral is a recommendation – and you’re getting other people to do your publicity for you.And of course, in SEO terms, you’re getting an extra link to your website.

This works even if you’re selling a product or just providing content on your website – simply place a note on your website asking your readers to link to it if they like the content (with a product, you can do it in the follow-up emails). You’d be pleasantly surprised at the success of this technique.

Also, affiliate marketing works on the same principle, but with an added advantage – affiliates are more willing to provide you with quality links because they only make money when you do.

The Verdict
In reality, most webmasters doing SEO fail to follow one or more of these simple steps. In fact, almost 90 % or more search engine optimization experts would say that they compromise on at least one of the guidelines listed above. On the other hand – the top SEO experts, the industry leaders; every single one of them preaches from the same book and they all point to the above set of principles as the “best” way to gain search engine rankings as well as the “best” way to get traffic to your site (so you can make money from it).

For most of us an online business is a valuable source of income and in the long run, if you do not take necessary steps to secure that income, you will lose out. And it all starts with sticking to simple steps and putting them into action. SEO, organic marketing, whatever you want to call it – this stuff works. Not because this is some “secret” backdoor into the search engine algorithms, but because when you focus on providing value to your customers and back that effort up with smart marketing , you’ll always win.

Wish You All A Happy And Prosperous New Year!

• Buying decisions are based on emotions - the “needs” of your prospects, and how well you can “sell” your solution to those needs to your readers.
• People have a subconscious BS filter that automatically goes on red alert when they read a sales letter or are the target of a sales pitch. Reasoning with a prospect that already has that mental shield up will only make her resist more - you have to first prevent that shield from getting up, and failing that, you need to use an emotional bridge to get through the BS filter.
• To understand the “needs” of your prospects, you have to get into their heads to find out what they want (as in “a stronger and straighter golf swing” instead of “a better golf club”). Once you have that information, you can use it to write powerful, compelling copy that touches readers directly at their emotional core.

These principles are the essence of salesmanship, whether you are a car salesman, sales director for a Fortune 500 company, a door-to-door salesman or a copywriter looking to make his first big break. If you can’t talk to your audience on an “emotional” level, you might as well pack your bags and forget about making any serious money.

Now that we’ve laid down the basics, let’s get some “advanced copywriting strategies” into the mix. In fact, when you read the rest of this lesson, you’ll be surprised at how simple the advice really is. The hard part in copywriting isn’t in knowing what to do; it’s about making the effort to put your own writing under the microscope and ensure that every word, every sentence that you put on paper is working directly and only towards making a sale. If it isn’t, you’re wasting your time.

Take a minute to consider a hypothetical situation regarding two marketers selling laptops:
The first marketer gives you information, knowing fully well that you’ve come looking for a solution to your problem and not to be “sold”. He’s good at what he does, so he builds your interest in buying his product by sharing with you the experiences which have made a laptop a must-have for people on the move. He allays your concerns on the spot, and has the almost-psychic ability to anticipate your fears about such an expensive purchase by focusing on the long-term “benefits” that you will get out of this purchase.

The second marketer starts off well by using attractive openers to get your attention, but the whole process turns into a long, drawn-out sales pitch where you’re constantly bombarded with feature after feature, without any answers to whether this particular laptop is “right” for you or not (or even if you really need a laptop).

Which one of those two would you buy from? The first one, obviously.

In this hypothetical situation, you’ll notice that the first marketer builds an emotional bridge between him and his prospect, thus breaking right through the BS filter. He does that by “sharing his experiences” - essentially by telling the prospect an interesting, insightful story about how the product is a “necessity” - knowing fully well that the prospect is part of a targeted audience - in this case, entrepreneurs who are looking for the freedom to “take their business ” with them wherever they go.

The “story” is the most powerful tool you can use in sales writing. Instead of forcing your sales pitch down the throat of your reader, you’re telling them something interesting and unique that will be able to help them fulfill their needs (be it a need to lose weight, gain search engine rankings or increase their self-confidence). Instead of going up to your prospect and saying: “Hey, I have something you should buy”, you are saying: “Hey, check this out.” and proceed to show them the benefits of your product, all without trying to “sell” by saying “Hey, you need this, buy this, it’s really cool!”

It’s surprising how many people refuse to follow this line of thought. As people, we hate being “sold” to. It’s an invasion of our personal boundary, and nothing evokes anger like the uninvited sales pitch. It’s the same principle in sales letters and copywriting.

The Best Marketers Cheat Yes, you read that right. All of the top marketing gurus you’ve heard of resort to cheating while writing their blockbuster sales letters. Every top marketer has a secret resource to “help them cheat” - a swipe file, a collection of top sales letters and ads, plus scores of lists contain words and phrases that are proven emotional triggers (review Joe Vitale’s “Hypnotic Marketing” package for an example).

If you write, and you don’t have your own swipe file, I urge you to start one right now. It is by far the most important resource a copywriter can have. Not only will your swipe help you by showing you the right phrases and words to use to invoke emotional responses in your readers, but by studying the work of experts you’ll discover the different strategies you can easily adapt for your own sales material.

The easiest way to start building your own personal swipe file is to get hold of a package like Joe Vitale’s that provides you with enough ammunition of “emotional triggers” in the form of words and phrases to work into your own sales writing. However, the best resource to learn copywriting is to get your hands on sales material written by the experts (Dan Kennedy, Gary Halbert, etc.). These are usually harder to come by, but just by reading up on a couple of these “stellar” sales letters (I’ve given a few links at the end of the lesson) will help you a long way towards learning how to effortlessly tap into the emotional well of your prospect and using proven “guru” techniques to sell your products. There are two more “advanced” techniques that I want to share with you - each of these has helped me enormously in my writing, and will definitely supercharge your sales letters as well.

Copywriting Tips From Gurus In his products and seminars, Jay Abraham repeatedly emphasizes on asking readers and attendees to create and sharpen a 30-second sales pitch within the following scenario:

“Imagine that you were standing in the middle of a large stadium filled to the brim with people. Now imagine that you had 30 seconds to present your product to your ‘audience’, keeping in mind that anyone can leave at anytime if they are not interested.”

How will you get their attention? How will you keep their attention? What can you say to make them “want” to listen to you? The only way to do all of the above is to get inside the head of your audience, figure out what they want and what interests them, and then give them that, tied in with your product. Play to the demand. Once you’re clear on that and you understand that you’re fulfilling a demand (as opposed to selling a product), you’ll be ready to develop your personal 30-second sales pitch. And once you have your ‘message’ ready, it will be the core of your sales material.

What If I Put A Gun To Your Head? Don’t worry; I’m not going Postal on you. In fact, it’s a simple technique I learned from John Carlton that is remarkably effective in helping writers “get started” and break out of the “writer’s block”. Writing isn’t a fairytale (otherwise we’d all be good at it). It takes effort and persistence. However, by following this technique, you can sidestep most of the problems that come up before you start writing.

“Gun to your head” writing gives no quarters - it automatically assumes that you are under a binding, almost lethal deadline and that deadline just expired. Now, you must start writing instantly; no matter what you have in your mind, put it down on paper. Start writing and whatever you do, don’t stop. As if someone was holding a gun to your head, threatening to shoot you if you stopped writing.

It might sound silly, but it works remarkably well for a specific reason - once we start writing, we automatically push our brain into “writing mode” even if it is actively resisting (and subconsciously wants you to watch another football game). You might not write something “good” at the start, but whatever you put down will help your mind clear the rust. Within a few minutes, writing will become a lot easier.

Recommended Reading

As an exercise, I’d suggest you read the following sales letters and analyze how well they use the techniques and strategies that I’ve talked about in this short copywriting series. You don’t have to buy anything that they’re selling, but just reading the sales letters will be time well spent.

Sample Sales Letters:

John Carlton
John Reese
Michel Fortin

PHP is a programming language, but don’t let that scare you if you’re not technically inclined. The truth is, you don’t have to know much to take advantage of some basic PHP features, features that can be extremely useful in your website development. We’re limiting ourselves to “plain” websites here, but if you develop a familiarity with PHP you’ll find that it becomes a lot easier to customize WordPress blog themes and similar things.

How PHP Works

PHP is what’s known as “server-side scripting”. In other words, you mix PHP commands with the HTML tags of a page and when the web server is asked for the web page it first runs the PHP commands and then returns the processed page — not the actual page that’s sitting up on the web server. In other words, if you had this page sitting on your web server:

< ?php echo \"Hello, world.\"; ?>
l>

t for the page would return:

Hello, world.

PHP commands start with “< ?php" and end with "?>“.

r, the PHP commands gets processed on the server, not in the browser. This is different from JavaScript code, which runs in the browser. This is why PHP processing is referred to as “server-side”.

Enabling PHP Support

Almost every hosting service these days supports PHP. If you’re not sure, contact your service. Normally, PHP commands are only executed for pages that end in “.php”, while pages that end in “.html” or “.htm” are sent down to the browser without any processing. But that’s just the default setup. Personally, I prefer to use a “.html” extension with all my files. It looks better and, frankly, it shouldn’t matter to the visitor what technology I’m using to process my web pages.

To enable PHP processing for .html files, all you do is add two lines to the .htaccess file for your site:

RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .html .htm

This obscure syntax says: “forget about the normal processing for .html and .htm files; whenever you see a .php, .html, or .htm file run it through the PHP processor”. Now you’re ready to have some fun.

Using PHP for Common Page Elements

PHP makes sharing common page elements among different pages quite simple. A “common page element” is something like a header, a footer, or a navigational menu that is shared between two or more pages on the site.

Let’s take a footer as an example, because it’s so simple. To create a footer, use a text editor to create a file called “footer.php” — use the .php extension for the command page elements and reserve the .html extension for the actual pages. It would look like this:

	

Copyright © 2006 Your Company

	

You may notice that there are no PHP commands in this file. That’s because the file is pretty simple. But you could put PHP commands in the file if you wanted.

Now in your page instead of pasting in the code above you just “include” the footer.php file:

	


< ?php include 'header.php'; ?>
	
This is where my content would go.
	
< ?php include 'footer.php'; ?>

Actually, the code above also includes a header.php file. So now you can change the footer on every page just by changing the footer.php file, and similarly for the header.

Including AdSense Code

You can probably see where I’m going with this. You don’t have to limit yourself to headers and footers. Any block of code that you find yourself repeating over and over throughout your pages can be included via PHP in a similar manner. Such as your AdSense code!

What I do is create a file for each type of ad or link unit I’m using on a site. For example, I might create a largerect.php file with the AdSense code for a large rectangle format ad unit:

Whenever I want to include a large rectangle in the content I just reference the file:

	
This is some text. I want to place a large rectangle ad unit immediately after it.
	
< ?php include 'largerect.php'; ?>
	
There we go.
	

s pretty easy, isn’t it? And if you know what you’re doing, you can even fiddle with the AdSense code itself with PHP commands — as long as the end result (what the browser sees) is something that would be generated from the AdSense console. For example, a website owned by two people could use PHP to display one person’s publisher ID half of the time and the other person’s ID the other half of the time.

What I’ve shown you above is just the very tip of the iceberg. There are many books and online resources available for budding PHP users. A good place to start is with the official PHP Manual, but I hope this mini-tutorial has helped you.

Originally from An AdSense Blog: Make Easy Money with Google on October 12, 2006, 11:15am

Anyhow, I was wondering if it was possible to integrate AdSense into an Amazon aStore, so I did some experimentation and came up with The HDTV Shoppe (opens a new window).

There’s actually very little direct integration you can do with an aStore. The store itself is hosted by Amazon. In fact, this link shows you an aStore without all the frills of The HDTV Shoppe. You either open your aStore in a new window, just like I just showed you, or else embed it in a site using conventional or inline frames. The aStore is effectively a “black box” that you place on a page of your website. Which means that the content of the aStore is really not part of your site. Which means that the AdSense crawler will only see it indirectly. And, more importantly, which means you can’t place AdSense ads in the aStore content.

So what you have to do is place your ads around the aStore. Look back at The HDTV Shoppe. The main part of the screen, the one labelled “Hot HDTV Sets” and “Search”, is my aStore, embedded into the home page using an iframe. So where is my AdSense?

Take a look at the left side of the window, at the navigation menu. Do you see it? Yes, I’ve used a vertical link unit, something I rarely ever use, but in this case it seemed appropriate. What I’ve done is styled my navigation menu so that the link unit blends right into it. I then made sure to add lots of topical, keyword-laden links to the menu, to have a proper page title, and to make sure “HDTV” was in the headings and in the domain name as well. Although you should do these things anyhow, they take on even more importance when there’s very little content on the page itself — remember, most of the content on the home page is actually nested inside an iframe and is not considered to be part of the page by AdSense.

The other pages on the site, the ones that don’t involve the aStore, are conventional pages, of course, so I was able to add a normal ad unit to them along with a bit of content. I should probably thrown an AdSense search box on those pages as well.

I wouldn’t say this site’s my best work, but mostly I just wanted to show you one way of integrating AdSense with embedded content. You could use similar tricks with Flash-based content, for example, or with embedded videos. Without resorting to keyword-stuffing or dubious blackhat techniques to get the right ads to show.

Originally from An AdSense Blog: Make Easy Money with Google on October 11, 2006, 2:07pm

There is a fine line between over-optimization and spamming, and it is on this line that Google can appear to err. However, this is not a mistake by the search engine – in fact, Google calculates rankings by considering thousands and thousands of different factors – and a lot of importance is attached to average “trends” within the niche / keyword range that a website is optimizing for.

The bottom line is that over-optimization is non-spamming search engine optimization that is misread by Google as being beyond acceptable limits, thus leading to a penalty in search engine rankings.

What criteria does Google use?

To understand why Google can consider certain websites over-optimized, it is important to factor in the criteria that Google uses to rank websites.

When fully indexing a website, Google does not just look at the optimization of the target website; it also compares the website with all the other websites that belong to the same niche / category / keyword range. Through this comparison, Google can then figure out the following:

* Is this website “way more” optimized than the current top ranking websites?
* In the past, have over-optimized websites been discovered as spam websites?
* What are the trends / acceptable limits for well-optimized websites in this niche/keyword range?

Since Google is automated, it cannot do what we do – look at the webpage and determine if the purpose is spam or delivering truly useful information. Instead, the search engine uses historical trends to predict what the acceptable limits of over-optimization are, and how likely over-optimized websites are to be found out as spam.

In other words, your website may be red flagged as being a potential spamming website even though your only fault might be that you were “perfect” in optimizing your website while your competition was left far behind.

Google takes both on-page and off-page optimization into account when checking for over-optimization / spam, and as such it watches out for over-optimization in all ranking factors – your backlinks and your tag optimization (meta tags, title tags, header tags) being most important.

A lot of what I am talking about becomes invalid if one tries any overt search engine spamming technique , such as stuffing your pages with keywords, white on white text (something I talked about in the first few lessons) or backlink spamming (building too many backlinks with the same anchor text in a short period of time.

But it is also possible that you have followed advice and still have your website penalized for over-optimization. The real question then is:

How can you avoid such penalties ?

Avoiding the trap of over-optimization
As I mentioned at the start of this post, search engine optimization can be boiled down to two simple steps:

* Getting it right and…
* Doing it better than everyone else .

In the context of over-optimization and avoiding unnecessary penalties, this rings especially true. If you optimize your website within search engine guidelines and according to proven optimization practices, you have it right. While putting too little time on SEO is a serious mistake, the search for perfection within SEO is a time-wasting and fruitless effort. Too much focus on getting the page structure “just right” can divert attention away from the more mundane but equally more important tasks – such as adding more content or monetizing the website.

The next step is to eschew perfection and find out what your competition has done. Suppose that you are optimizing your website for the term “landscaping”. Which of the following approaches would you realistically choose?

• Go full-throttle on your search engine optimization, spending as much time as necessary to get maximum value out of each word, link and page in your website, so that you can get the highest ranking possible.

• Analyze the top 10 webpages for the term “landscaping” and understand what optimization has been performed on them (natural or artificial). Calculate the number of backlinks, check for authority inbound links – and once you have figured out what your competition is doing, and do exactly the same – only a bit more .

The first approach might mean that you are guaranteed a top position on the search engines, but has two problems – you will waste a lot of time and resources in this search for perfection and more importantly, your website may be flagged for over-optimization. On the other hand, the second approach does just enough to beat the competition – without pushing you or your budget to the limit.

Over-optimization is a phenomenon that is particularly difficult to figure out – how does a SEO expert really determine whether his new website is in the sandbox, penalized for over-optimization or just doing badly in the search engines? While trying to find out the real cause for your poor rankings may satisfy curiosity, you would be better served by following the “second approach” above.

Search engine optimization is a long-term, low-intensity process. You keep building links and adding content, so that eventually your website not only escapes the infamous sandbox but it also starts to rank really well on the search engines. And as for over-optimization – as long you follow search engine guidelines and don’t go too far above your competition, you will be fine.

Over the past week, advertisers have literally been getting booted out of Google Adwords. That includes advertisers who spend more than 5 figures a month on AdWords. I’ve spoken with multiple super affiliates, and they are all in an uproar over what appears to be yet another “affiliate -unfriendly” move by Google.

I can’t say Google never warned us. They announced new algorithm changes in December of last year. But when advertisers started getting kicked out starting a week or so ago, it hit hard - like it came out of nowhere

An anonymous Affiliate Classroom contributor and PPC affiliates complains…

“I had an ad doing 6.7% CTR and have spent well over $150,000 on Google Adwords in the last 2 years – now they’re telling me that I need to increase my minimum bid for 300%! No way!”

So what is Google really up to? Have they gone the way of pure evil? Or is is this part of a larger and more complex agenda?

Well, “I” firmly believe that they are up to something. Very recently our own, Eder Callejas posted that Google is testing the CPA revenue model. Given their latest changes and the sites that have been impacted the most, it seems that Google may be getting ready to do more than just “test” a CPA model.

The first of the landing pages that got the boot were lead generation pages – the sites that are just a small box with an opt-in box on them. Interesting…could it be that Google themselves wants to collect those leads and then sell the leads to us rather than let us just pay per click?

So the 4 main kinds of sites that seem impacted the most are:

1) Squeeze pages (landing pages whose sole purpose is to gather an email address in exchange for a free report)
2) One page sales letter websites
3) Adsense sites (particularly Adsense arbitrage sites)
4) Affiliate sites

More information on their landing page guidelines - https://adwords.google.com/select/siteguidelines.html

Bottom line is, since Google constantly says it’s trying to make the search experience better for their users, it must believe that landing pages provide a bad user experience. But is that true?

Maybe, maybe not. I think it all depends on the user’s intention. A shopper has a different search intention than a researcher. It all depends on the intent of the query. Why punish advertisers for not being able to read people’s minds?

Since affiliates bear much of the cost of lead acquisition, Google’s not just punishing affiliates with this latest update - it’s punishing some of the biggest web-driven businesses in the world.

Of course, as marketers, we’ll find how to get around this. And when we do, I’ll be sure to post it!

Originally by Anik Singal from Affiliate Marketing Blog on July 26, 2006, 11:34am

You’ve got a function which takes a hash value (an associative array) and does something with it’s contents—fairly typical logic for a database-driven application, where rows are common currency. For sake of simple example, let’s say your input is a list of names, each name broken into a hash with the keys “first” and “given”. The question is how will your function cope when the hash doesn’t have quite the structure you’re expecting (like the first name is missing), given a fairly “default” use of the language—no non-standard functionality to make the language stricter…

Perl

Tackling Perl first, here’s a working example…

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
	
my $names = [
            {'first'=>'Bob','given'=>'Smith'},
            {'given'=>'Lukas'},
            {'first'=>'Mary','given'=>'Doe'},
        ];
sub printName {
    my $name = shift;
    print \"Name is \".$name->{'first'}.\" \".$name->{'given'}.\"\n\"
}
	
foreach my $name ( @{$names} ) {
    printName($name);
}

Notice the list of names—the second “row” is missing the “first” key. Running this the output is;

Name is Bob Smith
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at names.pl line 12.
Name is  Lukas
Name is Mary Doe

Note the second line in the output—Perl is complaining about an attempt to de-reference a variable which doesn’t exist. But, after complaining, execution continues…

PHP

The same again in PHP…

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
$names = array(
    array('first'=>'Bob','given'=>'Smith'),
    array('given'=>'Lukas'),
    array('first'=>'Mary','given'=>'Doe'),
);
	
function printName($name) {
    print \"Name is \".$name['first'].\" \".$name['given'].\"\n\";
}
	
foreach ($names as $name ) {
    printName($name);
}

The output is…

Name is Bob Smith
	
Notice: Undefined index:  first in /home/harryf/php/names.php on line 9
Name is  Lukas
Name is Mary Doe

PHP does pretty much the same thing as Perl—complains but continues execution. Of course the error is raised as a NOTICE—many default PHP installations have this error level disabled, meaning you’d get no error message. One other interesting point—PHP is complaining about the the array index being missing, rather than the value being, in some way, unusable.

Ruby

Here we go again, this time in Ruby…

#!/usr/bin/ruby
names = [
            {'first'=>'Bob','given'=>'Smith'},
            {'given'=>'Lukas'},
            {'first'=>'Mary','given'=>'Doe'},
        ];
	
def printName(name)
    puts(\"Name is \"+name['first']+\" \"+name['given']+\"\n\")
end
	
names.each {
    |name| printName(name)
}

And the output…

Name is Bob Smith
names.rb:10:in `+': can't convert nil into String (TypeError)
    from names.rb:10:in `printName'
    from names.rb:14
    from names.rb:13

Ruby, by contrast, halts execution (raises an exception that wasn’t handled) on encountering the missing hash key. Interesting is the cause: Ruby is saying that de-referencing something that doesn’t exist creates a nil value, which you can’t just join to a string, hence the exception—a TypeError.

Python

Finally Python…

#!/usr/bin/python
names = [
            {'first':'Bob','given':'Smith'},
            {'given':'Lukas'},
            {'first':'Mary','given':'Doe'},
        ];
	
def printName(name):
    print(\"Name is \"+name['first']+\" \"+name['given']+\"\n\")
	
for name in names:
    printName(name)
	

And how does Python respond?

Name is Bob Smith
	
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File \\"names.py\\", line 12, in ?
    printName(name)
  File \\"names.py\\", line 9, in printName
    print(\\"Name is \\"+name['first']+\\" \\"+name['given']+\\"\n\\")
KeyError: 'first'

Like Ruby, Python halts execution on encountering the problem hash (dict), raising an exception. Unlike Ruby, but more like PHP, Python is complaining about the missing hash key—it raised a KeyError exception.

So what?

OK—this is a trivial example but I also think it’s illustrative of a common recurring problem and the fundamental philosophical differences between the languages.

While prototyping, you were likely using sample data you’d created yourself and it was probably “perfect” input. But when it comes to putting you code into production, and having it survive a few jumps in version number, real data starts flowing around and functions / classes start getting applied in different contexts (perhaps not by you) resulting this kind of “unexpected input” problem.

And, yes, you should always write tests but when it comes to coarse grained APIs handling complex data structures, there’s always something you’re missing a test for. In fact I’d argue this general category of problem is one of the biggest sources of bugs in “dynamic code”—the languages encourage rapid prototyping, which means those extra 48 lines of code to make it really robust happen much later, if at all. So a language’s default behavior is significant to my mind.

So one dividing line here is whether some kind of fatal error should be raised. Perl and PHP continue execution by default while Ruby and Python halt, unless you explicitly handle the problem. Which is better?

Think there are pros and cons to both. For web apps, at least where non-critical data is involved, having your code “keep on running”, albeit in “half broken” state is often a good thing—it gives you time to address the problem later without users seeing pages as being “down”. At the same time, you don’t know what the consequences of the problem are. In this example they’re trivial and Perl / PHP’s behavior results in something that’s still usable, but I’d feel a lot less confident if it was an operation where data / state is being change—better everything works perfectly or nothing at all, rather than ending up with some kind of inconsistent state—transactions and all that.

The other dividing line here is what the languages are actually complaining about. Perl and Ruby are concerned that the value is in some way bad. Python and PHP are much more explicit, complaining precisely about the missing hash key.

From the point of view of locating the problem in the code later, based purely on an error message in a log file, think the Python / PHP way is better—it tells you exactly what went wrong. Also, specific to Ruby, that it raised an exception seems to be partly good luck—I tried to embed the value in a string, which raised the error immediately. But what if I’d done something acceptable with the nil value—perhaps just assigned it to another value? Probably the exception would show up somewhere but not immediately, at the point I’d de-referenced it—debugging joy I’d imagine (flame me if I’m wrong).

Anyway, just for fun (read: trolling), here’s a subjective strictness ranking…

1. Python (strictest)
2. Ruby
3. Perl / PHP

That seems congruent with Python’s philosophy. I put Perl and PHP vying for the last place because PHP allows you to switch off those E_NOTICE errors—otherwise would have placed PHP as stricter than Perl, for having spotted the missing hash key.

If anyone’s willing, would be interesting to compare the example with IO, Lua and Erlang, where possible (side note: I did get the point—just pressing the PHP buzzer for fun—fascinated to see what Damien comes up with in CouchDB, especially the part about “Distributed, featuring robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution.”).

This article provided by sitepoint.com.

Originally by HarryF from SitePoint Blogs on July 27, 2006, 4:25am

He understood social network marketing.

He didn’t have to do a lot of advertising. He didn’t spend a lot of money on marketing. But he knew where to find customers… where they congregate.

That’s the not-so-secret lesson of social network marketing. Many sites try to get customers to come where they live. Not a bad thing, as it works pretty well much of the time

But social network marketing is going where the customers already are. While there you hope to sell them something you have good reason to believe they already want.

The team in charge of marketing the recent X-Men 3 movie did just that. They developed a portion of the MySpace site devoted to talking about the movie. They attracted a lot of people they already had good reason to believe would be interested. Those people told others. X-Men 3 garnered $122 million on opening weekend. ($400 million worldwide from May 26th to June 21st. Don’t you wish.)

No doubt that money wasn’t solely, or even primarily, the result of exposure and buzz on MySpace. But, as we all know, in marketing every little bit helps. And with the growth of MySpace and social networks in general, that little bit is getting a lot bigger very fast.

Something to think about while laundering that old Pat Benatar T-shirt.

Originally by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine from Affiliate Marketing Blog on July 25, 2006, 8:34pm

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t break down the numbers any further, so we don’t know which AdSense programs are generating the most money for Google: AdSense for content, or AdSense for domains, AdSense for search (it’s probably not big), or the custom/premium AdSense programs for large publishers.

Just as interesting is the “traffic acquisition costs” number, which is the money shared with Google’s partners. At $723 million, this is almost 3/4 of AdSense revenues. I bet some of the larger partners get hefty percentages — 80% or 90% — of the AdSense revenue their sites generate.

What’s even more interesting is that the profit from AdSense — $997 - $723 = $274 million — more than covers the “other costs of revenues” item, which includes data centre costs, credit card fees, etc. This leaves the bulk of Google’s revenue — the $1.4 billion (58%) it makes from displaying ads on its own sites — to cover the other costs in the company, which means most of that revenue is pure profit — over $700 million last quarter!

And people wonder why Google doesn’t crack down more on made-for-AdSense (MFA) sites?

Originally from An AdSense Blog: Make Easy Money with Google on July 21, 2006, 8:17am