1. Text-Link-Ads Not Google-able

Text-Link-Ads is one of the biggest text-link broker. Site-wide text-links cost my advertisers around $25-$30 greenbacks a month here, and I get to keep half of it while TLA keeps the other half as commission. Not much, but a nice petty cash to cover all my hosting expenses. Thank you sponsors, although I cannot say I actually endorse the sites that bought links here.

The other day I googled their name and got a shocking response.

They cannot even rank with their own name, and they have to buy AdWords campaigns to get into the search result. It cannot be the case where TLA is not well optimised for search engines (they rank #1 on Yahoo! and MSN Live), especially when the very nature of text-link-buying is search engine optimisation!

Well, only one explanation makes sense to me — Text-Link-Ads got sin-binned by the almighty G.

Let us not talk about Google’s motive. It MUST have everything to do providing search users the best experience and has NOTHING TO DO with forcing advertisers onto AdWords. But now they have killed the chicken to scare the monkey, and it does make other webmasters running much inferior sites wonder, should I buy links to game the system?

2. ReviewMe Articles Become Supplemental Results

ReviewMe, whom I reviewed and earned a few bucks, is a paid review broker. Too scared to anger the almighty G with paid links? How about links right inside the content so the PhDs in the Googleplex will never detect?

So I was trying to search for the ReviewMe reviews I have written for Oz Bargain Blog. Here is what Google gave me:

Do you see what I see? Every reviews I wrote, ALL FIVE OF THEM, are in supplemental result! The above screenshot was taken last month before the recent PageRank change, and all above articles are out of supplemental index by now. But the fact that Google has identified all ReviewMe sponsored articles I wrote, and the rest of my site is indexed well — that really scares me.

After all I have merely passed my engineering bachelor degree and I am clueless. The PhDs might have their ways to figure out the paid articles and penalise them accordingly.

So I quickly cancelled my ReviewMe account. No more paid review from me. So long, and thanks for all the fish. (Oh, the real reason could be that writing good reviews is just too time consuming and I am lazy, but just want to use Google ruining my monetisation plan as excuses…)

A few observations so far:

• It is quick and slim. It uses around 18MB after bootstrapping to a blank page, which is a tiny bit smaller than Opera 9. I won’t mention how much Firefox uses.

• Everything looks like it is on a Mac. Every widgets, default fonts and UI elements have Mac’s look and feel. Good thing is that it is how Safari developers would like it to look like. Bad thing is it is inconsistent with the rest of desktop.

• It is not registered as a regular window, so my virtual desktop manager of choice does not work with it. D’oh.

• I managed to hang it, i.e. not responding to any input and refuses to redraw itself, after 20 minutes playing with it. I guess they can excuse themselves with that “Beta” tag. Firefox is only a tad better in this department as well.

• Functionality is pretty limited in comparison to Firefox and Opera. Worse, Safari for Windows does not yet have many plugins like Safari for Mac. Good thing is it is less likely to catch bad-ware this way, but I doubt many developers will want to use Safari as the main development platform though.

• Key binding is not always inline with Firefox or Internet Explorer. That is annoy.

I am still keeping it on my system so I don’t need to fire up my old Mac to check whether some HTML pages I made is working properly for the Safari users. Webkit is certainly an impressive rendering engine, and I am hoping a better packaged Drosera and Web Inspector will be available on Windows soon — that will definitely makes Safari a more welcomed browser amongst the web developer community.

We arrived at 10:30am, and like all other public services here we waited and waited. We were then led into a small dark room, with all the equipment and stuff. Anna was pretty excited when the images started showing on the screen, but I guess it wasn’t what she has expected and was bored (and a bit scared) after two minutes so I have to take her outside.

It was amazing seeing how life is formed. We’re not first time parents, but still amazed. We actually asked about the gender, but baby #2 was a bit camera-shy so there’s still a lot of uncertainty there. I guess we just need to come up with two sets of names. We have pretty much decided baby girl’s English name, so we just need to come up with 3 more names (English & Chinese).

Seriously, naming your computers is sort of fun, but coming up with a name that is meaningful, Christian, easy to pronounce (for the grand parents), not all other kids that we know are having, and amongst the ones we like — it’s an exciting but not an easy task. We have only 5 months to nail those names down…

… whereas I only have less than 2 weeks to do my tax return! I have only taken the first step (installing etax from ATO). I should try to wrap my mind around it tonight.

* * *

A small website that I hacked up two weeks ago — Australian Pharmacy Price Comparison. Sorry for blowing my own trumpet here (I guess that’s what the personal blog is for). It basically lets you search pharmaceutical products on several Australian on-line pharmacies and chemists, and list them by price, so you can buy from the cheapest store.

Site is done in PHP and bots are in Python.

It’s also sitting on a new .com.au domain that I bought. I applied for an ABN so I can applied for a .com.au domain, so I can host the site on my overseas VPS. No business plan yet.

* * *

How easy it is to make a Digg-like site? I’m thinking of getting one up quickly, and so far these are the options:

• Pligg — nicely implemented Digg clone in PHP. Functionally rich, lots of users, but does not appear that easy to “mod”. Smarty? Why Smarty when PHP is already a template language?!
• DiggClone — turns me off when the last entry in CHANGELOG is last year. Didn’t even bother to check it out…
• Akarru or Scuttle — hacking existing social bookmarking scripts looks like a possibility. At least these guys have done it.
• Drupal with Vote Up/Down, or WordPress with Post Rating plugins — existing CMS is definitely much more hackable. Although they aren’t really “Digg clones” but I guess they still do what I wanted.

Currently I’ve got a Scuttle hacked up doing what I wanted, but inclined to go with Drupal + Vote Up/Down package because of flexibility that already exists in Drupal.

* * *

I think I have spreaded myself way too thin this year. Too many things I wanted to do. Too many new projects. Yet existing work remains the same.

Feel like I’ll be in big trouble if I don’t stop dreaming about new stuff.

Here are the steps:

1. Create the next killer WordPress theme.
2. Add a small link somewhere in the footer that either point back to your website, or some sites you wish to promote.
3. Make sure, everyone knows about it.
4. …
5. Profit!

If the theme is indeed successful, say 200 people downloaded and applied it unmodified on their blogsites, that’s 200 valid worthy links not from massive populated link farms! Wow. No wonder there are so many half descent themes out there, and almost all of them have credit links back to themselves. Shall we shelf this under black or white hat SEO?

Maybe I should not have given up my previous attempt at a theming site?

There are many ways putting videos online. You can either:

1. Upload your AVI/QuickTime/WMV files onto a folder somewhere inside your hosting account.
2. Use a third party video hosting service like Google Video or YouTube.

Personally I don’t like (2). You need to upload your videos to that 3^rd party, and you have little control over how the final outcome will be encoded (bit rate, frame rate, quality, etc). Moreover, there are terms and conditions that you need to read through, let along agreeing to. At the end, who owns the rights to uploaded video?

Being a control freak (well, only over the systems that I need to manage), I have always preferred option (1) by hosting video files inside my own accounts, which has some crazy amount of space and data transfer anyway. Except you don’t get that nice Flash applet which you can embed into your own pages, so visitors can <click> and watch the video without leaving the page. They don’t need to worry about saving onto the desktop, which media player to use, whether codec has been installed, etc. They Just Works^TM — perfect for the grand-parents :)

With a bit of time wasted on research and mocking around, it turns out that you can easily achieve the effect of embedded flash video, and yet host the video files on your own server. And there’s zero penny you need to spend — all can be done via these open source software, FFmpeg and FlowPlayer.

The Basis

Here’s a summary of what needs to be done.

1. Convert the video file into a suitable format for Flash players.
2. Upload the converted file onto hosted account.
3. Upload the Flash player if hasn’t been done.
4. Paste HTML code snippet into the web page.

Flash players can only play video files encoded into the FLV (Flash Video) format, which is also the format used by Google Video and YouTube. To do so the open source way is use the universal encoder, FFmpeg.

FFmpeg

Installing FFmpeg is trivial — at least on my Gentoo boxes :) Make sure appropriate USE flags are used during emerge. For example I have:

  USE="aac amr encode ogg vorbis x264 xvid zlib" emerge ffmpeg

Other Linux distribution? Not using Linux? Err. Good luck.

To convert a movie using FFmpeg, do the following:

$ ffmpeg -i movie.avi movie.flv

It will then convert the AVI file into FLV Flash Video. FFmpeg can also handle many different container types, for example QuickTime, WMV1 (not WMV3 at the moment), MPEG4, etc, so just throw the video at it and see whether it handles it.

There are many command line options that you can use to alter the encoding behaviour. For example if I wish to rescale the movie to 320×240, with 15 frame/sec, at video at 250kbps and audio down-sampling to 22,050Hz at 48kbps, I just tell FFmpeg to do it on the command line:

$ ffmpeg -i movie.avi -s 320x240 -r 15 -b 250 -ar 22050 -ab 48 movie.flv

There are many more options so do check out their manual if you are interested.

There is another thing that we need to do — create a JPEG thumbnail for previewing. This will be displayed in the otherwise empty canvas of the flash player, before [Play] is pressed. For convenience sake, we’ll take the very first frame of the video.

$ ffmpeg -i movie.avi -f mjpeg -t 0.001 movie.jpg

FLVTool2

FLVTool2 is needed to calculate and update meta data in the FLV file. Well, you don’t really need it as you can already play the FLV file spill out from FFmpeg, but because of the missing info, Flash player cannot show the buffering status and current playing position, etc.

I was hesitated to install FLVTool2 because (1) it depends on Ruby which I need to emerge (2) it does not have an ebuild for it. But anyway, having it running is still trivial.

1. Make sure you already have Ruby installed.
2. Download the latest FLVTool2
3. Unpack the tarball, change into its directory, and run ruby setup.rb all as root.

Now just run

$ flvtool2 -U movie.flv

Well, installation is actually optional. You can pretty much run FLVTool2 from inside its unpacked directory, for example.

$ RUBYLIB=lib ruby bin/flvtool2 -U <path to>/movie.flv

Your FLV is ready to go! Upload both FLV and generated JPEG thumbnail onto your web hosting account. Make sure they are in the same folder.

FlowPlayer

FlowPlayer is an open source Flash video player that is light-weight (at around 22kb), and pretty easy to configure. Download the latest version from SourceForge.

Unpack the ZIP will give you the player file FlowPlayer.swf. Upload it somewhere on your website.

Now you need to cut and paste this HTML code snippet onto the web page you wish to show the video:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="[your site]/FlowPlayer.swf" width="320" height="263" id="FlowPlayer">
  <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain"/>
  <param name="movie" value="[your site]/FlowPlayer.swf"/>
  <param name="quality" value="high"/>
  <param name="scale" value="noScale"/>
  <param name="wmode" value="transparent"/>
  <param name="flashvars" value="baseURL=[base URL]&amp;videoFile=movie.flv
    &amp;autoPlay=false&amp;loop=false&amp;autoBuffering=false
    &amp;splashImageFile=movie.jpg"/>
</object>

[your site] is the URL to where you keep the FlowPlayer.swf. [base URL] is the directory where you keep the FLV and JPEG files. For example, the final URL to FLV file will be [base URL]/movie.flv.

Paste that onto your website, or into your blog post, and check whether it works!

Please check FlowPlayer documentation on the options going to flashvars.

Conclusion

In fact those steps can be easily automated with a bit of scripting. I shall be posting more movies on Anna’s website.

If your hosting companies are not very generous quota (i.e. small timers who can’t really oversell), or if you think your video will get digged and slashdotted and become overnight hit, then maybe having Google Video or YouTube to host for you is a wiser idea, just in case a huge hosting bill landing on your credit card statement.

Otherwise, you might choose to host those videos on your own account, and regain a bit of control.

• Simple one column layout. White background, dark gray fonts, and nothing fancy.
• Bigger text font. Probably better for those who do not have 20-20 eye sight, but it also looks better with a wide one column layout with no sidebar.
• Fixed 728px column. That’s about 50 pixels wider than the old theme, so I can fit a 728×90 leaderboard across the top :)
• Breadcrumb at top. I find them helpful for navigation, also tells the visitors where they are.
• Extended footer. All the guts on the sidebar (actually I did not even have a sidebar before!) are now moved to multiple columns in the footer.

Everything else pretty much retained from the old theme — quickies on the home page, gravatar integration, etc. I am still tuning the layouts and fixing bugs, especially those browser incompatibilities.

It was fun. It was rewarding — maybe not in financial terms but more of “beating the system”. It is exhausting — yes it does take time to read, write and tinker with small details. Despite my previous dislike of banner ads, I think I now have a better understanding on how the whole thing ties together, and will continue to put those little text ads on this site (if Google permits).

First of all, here’s a chart of impressions verse earnings over the last 12 months. Sorry no actual number but feel free to guess what they are :)

Things I have observed after running AdSense for 12 months on two hobby sites (playground and bargain blog):

• Figures don’t just go up. Yeah, the first few months are pretty much going up and up, but then it stalls, went down a bit, and up again. A bit like a roller coaster ride than highway cruse. Many reasons contribute to this.
• It eats your time. I don’t write very fast (although it did make me write faster). Nor did I think fast. So when you are busy — church, work, family, etc — you have less time working on websites, thus produce less traffic, thus less people click, thus less income. But things ain’t that simple.
• Google is a mysterious blackbox. Most of the time I just have no idea. Why some clicks pay more than the others. Why some pages have better targeted ads. Why some pages rank better thus bringing more visitors. Google is mysterious — and it is not a good thing if your income depends on it.
• It won’t replace a full-time job. At least in my case, it never will. It pays peanuts in comparison with my day time job, and I do not see how I can actually make decent money even if I work full time on it. Probably I just don’t exactly know how it works, yet. Or maybe I just don’t have any quality stuff to write.
• Still a nice pocket money. Especially when you are blogging anyway, and the extra pocket money from the big G is just enough to pay for all my hosting (currently 2x VPS + 2x shared hosting), my ADSL connection and all phone bills. No complain :) Can’t bring Vivian to eat lobster too often though :)
• Content is *not* everything. You still need good original quality content though — diary style blogs don’t really work. However, a good informative piece of article does not always lead people to advertisement, and most of the time you need to work out psychologically “why do people click on ads”.
• Attract visitors in “spending mode”. Thus organic traffic is good — people came in search of “something”. Review a product positively is important, and I suspect I can never be a good marketer as I am always too critical on things.
• Traffic! Traffic! Traffic!. After looking at my statistics over the past year, eCPM goes up and down, but always within a range. Therefore in order to increase the earning, you definitely need more traffic. My traffic is pretty much organic, and 80+% from Google. I guess there’s more to work on.
• Niche! Niche! Niche!. Well, traffic is important, but each niche is different — they have different advertisers, and they attract different visitors with different views on banner ads. This site is a mix bag of things. Bargain blog does well as visitors are usually in “spending mode”. FuCoder.com does very poorly (0.x% CTR where x < 5) — I guess programmers don’t click on ads, thus I just take them all off.
• Ad position is critical. Moving the skyscrapper to the left-hand side on bargain blog helps. 3 fold!! Too bad that I don’t really have time tinkering with the ad format. Nor am I a fan to blend the ads right inside the content (way too ugly). Still, AdSense heatmap works.

Well, I am sure there are lots more that I have acquired though this exercise. Except I cannot all share here as it’s almost 12am and my brain has SpeedStep to 10% of the performance. I’ll add more onto the list, if I remember.

Anyway, here is a little preview of what it looks like now:

Basically when you click on the marker it will reveal a little bit more information about the person. Currently there’s only name and your Gravatar generated from your email address. Btw, Sui — you are not from Singapore are you?

To see it in action, click here. You can use all the Google Maps controls to navigate around. Dots will be added when more accounts get approved with latitude/longitude info filled in. As you can see so far, Taiwan — 2. Singapore — 1.

(For the technical inclined, markers are pulled through via HttpRequest, and backend is implemented as Python CGI with web.py. Somehow it runs very slow on DreamHost.)

But one thing wasn’t done right…

Tim stuffed up the Grimmo’s world map! Dots just seem to land at random places across the ocean! Obviously they did not teach you how to do PowerPoint slides in PhD, but never mind. Here is a little project that I meant to do but now finally found an excuse to get it done.

A world map to track people/ex-members in FOCUS. So that in the next Unichurch Together, it would be easy to whip out a map with all dots in the right places.

I decided to use Google Maps to implement this map, store locations of individual on database, and pull those out to populate the map using HttpRequest. I haven’t done any coding, but that should be pretty straight forward — Google has done all the hard work. However, there lacks one thing.

I need your location. Actually, I need your latitude and longitude of where you came from, where your “home” is. I need them to be in the database before I can populate the map.

(Note: and by the way, for those in FOCUS who are reading this blog entry — congratulation! You have been chosen as alpha tester of Scott’s little project. Don’t you feel special?! :)

But how do I find out what my latitude and longitude is?

I realise that not everyone carries a GPS system where ever they go (except maybe Thomas). However Google Maps and Google Earth provide excellent ways to obtain the latitude and longitude of a city.

1. If you haven’t, get Google Earth — and there’s now a version on Mac OS X as well, so you “Different Thinkers” are not discriminated.
2. Type in your home city in the search box, and hopefully Google Earth will bring you there.
3. Now, at the lower-left hand corner there’s your latitude and longitude. Note that down. You don’t need to get the exact street and exact block, but please do if you are particular.

For example, I grew up in Tainan, Taiwan, and Google Earth gave me the following image.

And at the lower left hand corner the latitude is 22.9999, and longitude is 120.1900.

Next, you need to get an account on the FOCUS website. I have opened up the permission so it is now possible to create accounts on the FOCUS website, but it still require manual approval process. After your account has been created, you can edit your profile, where there are fields you can put in latitude and longitude of your home location. For example,

As you can see in the example, I have placed my “home” location into corresponding fields.

I am looking for around maybe 20 people from different cities across SE Asia to give me enough data to work on. The final map will be here which is pretty empty at the moment. Hopefully when more and more people returning home from FOCUS, the map will be populated and covered with dots (at the right spots!) all over the world.

To cut the story short, I basically have little hope in rescuing the old FOCUS gallery — yeah the 5+Gb photos we have accumulated since 2000. Probably all gone. <sob>

I guess it is then about time to re-start another FOCUS Gallery project. This time was different — back in 2000 I was probably one of few in FOCUS who has a digital camera, but now it seems every other person has a 8MP DSLR handy in all kinds of events. Instead of having me (and selected few) who upload all photos, I want to change how FOCUS Gallery works.

Something more community driven. (Okay. Because I am lazy.)

How it works now is:

1. Go to the all new FOCUS Gallery website.
2. Click on “Register” at the top-right-hand corner.
3. Put in your details — make sure you put in your “Full Name” and “Email Address” properly, because every registration will need to be approved.
4. Once I approve your account, you’ll receive an email confirmation Update: Gallery does not automatically generate a confirmation email, but I’ll email you instead.. You can then log back into the Gallery using your username/password.
5. At the top right hand corner there will be another link “Your Album“. You can add photos, create sub-albums (recommended for getting organised), and start uploading photos to them!
6. Once in a while I (plus other volunteers, anyone?) will organise the FOCUS Gallery by creating links to your albums.

Basically, registered users get an on-line gallery to store FOCUS-related photos. Initially it will be 200Mb per account (or until my hard disk space ran out). I am also enforcing all photos to have maximum resolution of 1600×1600 — good enough for 6″x4″ prints and on-line viewing, and not too big to blow up the storage.

How does it sound? Those who tracks this blog via FOCUSer.net are my beta testers :) Also note that FOCUS Gallery is currently hosted on my home server (one with big enough space to host a multi-user gallery). However it is extremely slow as 7 year old Pentium III has really shown its age. Maybe I should set up a “new server fund” :)

Also a note for those who are uploading photos — you can upload to Gallery 2.1 site using both Windows XP publishing agent or Gallery Remote, and both are way faster than filling up the web form. Give them a try.

• Custom Signatures: Church staffs should put church website address inside email signatures to raise awareness and might attract more “click-through’s”. I guess it also means a “professional looking” email signature. I have received enough business emails during the day and I know it meant business by just looking at the colourful HTML signatures with image attachments (+ page long disclaimer, of course).
• Church Website: Make a modern looking website with lots of media and up-to-date items. Sermons, MP3, blogs, etc. That’s the whole point of Andrew’s article — get more visitors to your website.
• Google: Make your website easy to find by the search engines, because organic traffic usually translates to repeated traffic. There is also no point to have a beautifully designed website that cannot be found on the Internet.

I think the whole point of having a church website is to use the web to create a buzz about your church. However, sometimes the strategy is buzzing up the church website instead. To create an effective and functional church website, we need to ask how can a church website help a Christian church to grow?

I won’t touch on that one. But I will look at what Simon also has pointed out on his blog, which Andrew has mentioned at the end of his article:

Did I mention better-than-free? I have two words for you: Google AdSense.

Looking at Asian Bible Church‘s website, Andrew has indeed practiced what he has preached. Just on that single page, there appears to be:

1. AdSense for Content 336×280 block right underneath the main heading
2. PayPal Donation button below the main content
3. AdSense for Search below links to other stories
4. Amazon Associates affiliation link at the end of the page.

Wow.

Buzz, or Business?

Even after putting my technologist’s cap on, I still think “church” itself should be the “core business” — that includes evangelising, preaching, pasturing, etc. Whereas “church website” should be designed in the way to aid this core business, instead of being diverged into a money making machine. I still believe that the website should be there to sell the church, instead of being a direct service provider itself (unless of course, your entire church is Internet-based).

By putting large advertisement banner right next to the content, it does make your visitor wondering, hey, what is the core business of this church? When the buzz has evolved into its own business, it would only further confuse your customers and prospects, hmm I mean visitors searching for local churches.

Affiliating with, Whom?

This is mainly addressing contextual advertisement, i.e Google AdSense, which is also Simon’s concern. Basically Google looks at your web page, trying to figure out what it is about, and then place text or image banner ads that are related to your web page. Publishers, i.e. owner of that website, gets paid by Google when a click on the ad is registered.

The problems here are, for a church website, that

1. What Google thinks this site is about.
2. Whose ad would Google put on your site.

Regarding to (1), it is not hard to provide enough hints to Google, and it gets right most of the time. Simon has suggested section targeting, which personally I do not find it works, nor did Simon I guess as AdSense ads on his site are usually unrelated. However I did hear reports that it works brilliantly for some.

Now, the tricky part is, whose ads would Google put on your church website? Take Asian Bible Church for example, with the 4 ads on the big rectangle, one is a newsletter for youth ministry, one has free Bible study resource, one has resources for pentecostal church emphasised on healing, and finally a dating site, which is completely unrelated to Christianity.

Worse, when I use the AdSense for Search tool, and typed in the keywords “Asian Bible Church”, and it came out with one big ad at the top directing you to a website arguing that eternal hell does not exist in the Bible. A heretic site occupying the top spot on Sydney’s St. Andrew’s Cathedral?

Are these the websites that you want your visitors to go to? Are these websites that you want to be affiliated with? I think with contextual ads like Google AdSense, it simply tries to automatically create affiliations between websites with minimum involvement from respective webmasters. Those visitors who see these well-blended ads might think that these are the links suggested by the site’s webmaster, which is not always the case. Dating service a new venture at Asian Bible Church? I don’t think so.

I guess it works okay with product review sites. In my conclusion I can say I prefer Widget A than Widget B, but I would not mind to see advertisement of Widget B on my page — after all it is just a matter of opinion. However, if I am the manufacturer of Widget A, there is no way I want to see Widget B advertised on my company’s product page. AdSense usually don’t work that well this way, if the website is directly assisting your core-business.

Which is the case of church website — it is there to sell the product, i.e. the church. It is not a “review” site, where coming to this church or going to that church might just be a matter of opinion.

Moreover, when truth is concerned, it is not just opinion anymore (unless you are “everything is right” kind of liberal). When the eternal damnation is right there in the Bible and one of very significant teachings of Jesus, I do not think I can affiliate with anyone else with “other opinions”.

So Much Distraction!

Alright. Assume that Google is super smart and has done all the contextual guessing right. It also holds conservative Christian theology and will only present you the “right kind of ads”. But would you still put the ads there?

One question I guess that needs to be asked by all church webmaster who is thinking about AdSense — what ads do I want to see here? And honestly, besides those who you are really affiliating with (sister churches, related ministries, etc), I really do not think anyone else should have that premium spot.

Again, the function of church website is to “sell” the church, but ads simply provide a quick exit for the visitors. Believe me, many Internet users actually have not yet discovered the Back Button, and once they have wondered away from your website, you lost one web visitor, who is potentially a visitor to your Sunday service! A big skyscraper or a big rectangular ad block just provide too much distraction to lure visitors away from your church website.

That again, is a big No against advertisement on a church website.

Cheating the Game

Here is another tip for those who are thinking about AdSense — good paying ads are usually the ones that target visitors who wish to spend. Someone wants to spend money (buy something, hire a service, travel, etc). He searched on the web, landed on a website with good related information, and the ads are just there providing convenience for him to spend his money.

In that regard, “Christianity” is probably not a good paying keyword. Most advertisers just want to provide free services, and they are not willing to spend lots on AdWord marketing. Therefore, if someone insists a good return from AdSense on his church website, he either has to:

1. Write something else that might trigger good paying keywords.
2. Cheat the game by encouraging more clicks.

(1) is again diverging the website from church as core business. (2) is the one that I sometimes worry about. Hosting costs money, ministry costs lots of money, and I can see the picture that “clicking” is somehow encouraged as a mean to support the ministry. Even if it is not suggested by the webmaster, your Christian visitors who do not understand how CPC-ads work might also get that impression. Regulars might drop by every now and then and click on multiple random ads, counting it as part of the tithe towards weekly church giving.

Consequence? Two weeks later the webmaster found out his AdSense account banned due to click fraud. Not good.

Conclusion

I believe church website can be a buzz for the church. It helps to sell. It brings public awareness. We actually have people coming to our church because of our website. However, I do not think we should change the church website so it becomes a business itself. It confuses visitors. It is not part of core business. However, what about just making enough to sustain the ministry?

Should I have Google AdSense on my church website?

A big No. It is very difficult to control who will advertise there. It is distracting. It will not do well monetising your church website.

Should I have Amazon Affiliates on my church website?

It is easier to control what you want to sell with affiliations that pay on conversion. However, even if you get Amazon to show all kinds of ESV Bibles, it is still (1) stray from church’s core business (2) won’t do well in Australia. Maybe it will be better to have something equivalent to Amazon in Australia, so your local visitors can be more interested to purchase through your affiliation link.

I still don’t feel “right” to have Amazon on a church website though. I think the best approach is — create a separate church affiliated website that does not directly try to sell the church, but can provide useful information in order to attract advertisement.

For example, having a separate blogsite that reviews Christian books. Link to the main church site can be all over the place, and the site is also fit to sell advertisement for book stores.

Should I have PayPal Donation button on my website?

Giving to the church is encouraged, however sometimes I am not sure whether we can just put a PayPal donation button on the church website, without further explanation.

I think for churches with special needs, a fund raising program with PayPal donation and a page of clear explanation will probably work. For example, a church might say that it tries to raise $2,500 for a new projector because it will be very useful for student ministry.

But just having a PayPal button? That only spells out “Money Gimme Money”.