Well peeps, I promised we will have an interesting contest in Lorelei Web Forum when the year starts, and I keep my word.

Here you have a chance to win either 30$ hard cash paid via paypal, OR, annual subscription to DeviantArt.com. Your choice, if you win.

The contest is open for everyone to enter, and, you can make as many entries as you wish. The more you make, the bigger are your chances to win, right?

Click here to read more details about the contest

Good luck, looking forward to see you participating!

Dear readers, (in case there are any), I want to wish you all a very Happy New Year! Hope the new year will bring to all of us a lot of happiness, joy, health, luck, love and success.

Like all the people, I am going on a tiny 2-days vocation, probably won’t be online at all. Coocking food, buying presents, cleaning my room a bit (though I should have started in October, if i wanted it clean on New Year’s eve, hehe).

Hope you will have a great time over the Holidays! Cheers!

Before the end of the year it’s always a lot of fuss, and when I am busy I don’t have many creative ideas. However, I decided to spare some time and make a few wallpapers especially for toptut.com. Using my most beloved “grungy” style and a few good looking girls pulled from sxc.hu. Hope you like it. I followed someone’s advice, who is precious to my heart, and placed the mini picture on the left side, instead of the absolute middle. Enjoy!
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Princes in Pink Wallpaper
FULL VIEW / DOWNLOAD THE WALLPAPER HERE - 1200*1024

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Miss Yellow Wallpaper
FULL VIEW / DOWNLOAD THE WALLPAPER HERE - 1200*1024

When I first heard about Emir Pilavdzic’s project - adsblacklist.com, I was a bit sceptical. Even though I did hear some positive feedback on the results, I had my own reasons not to trust his filter. First - his previous website was banned, together with his entire AdSense account, so naturally you want to ask - “he got banned himself, how trustworthy are his advices?”. Secondly, those who know how AdWords advertisers’ bid works, know that MFA (Made For AdSense) websites cannot possibly get through irrelevant keywords with a low paying bid. Lastly, even if we assume that low paying keywords somehow did bypass the high paying ones, and got displayed though your code, filtering them will result in other irrelevant ads displayed, and even if the bid for them will be higher, what’s the use, if on a tutorial’s page you have an adverts for digital cameras? How fat is the chance that they will be clicked? These questions worried me and I decided not to give up to the massive “Filter-mania” and leave the ads the way they are, but…

Then, a week ago, I have received a warning from AdSense, where they asked me to commit some changes in one of my websites in order to comply with the TOS (it has nothing to do with a filter, just the visual appearance). Since I was already about to make massive changes I thought let’s look into this whole MFA sites thing again. I noticed that some URL’s indeed point to totally pointless and unrelated websites. It was obvious that some advertisers just spam the high paying keywords, creating these “contentless” websites just until their first payout, then disappear and make a new site, on an .info domain. Why .info? Because they are dead cheap, additionally to all.

Anyway. After asking for an advice on a few webmasters forums and receiving my blessing, I added 160 urls to my filter. Some were generated with a bit of help from adsblacklist.com, others collected from my own experience.

The result:

• The amount of clicked halved, together with the revenue. I am serious.
• Some ads are now totally ineffective (i.e. non-related to the content).
• I still do get .01$ clicks.

This is was my objective impression after 2 days, and I was already about to delete the entire filter list, but then I stopped and thought that one week of lower revenue won’t hurt me, let’s leave it for a week and see where and how it goes. I can’t say that my CTR changed, neither did eCPM. The only change I noticed was that if beforehand i could roughly estimate the earnings judging by the CTR / eCPM, now I cannot, as every day brings its own surprise.

The bottom line is, I run AdSense on over 12 websites, most of which are related to webmasters and tutorials, however some deal with art, history, freebies, articles, SEO, and other services. None of the sites were specifically targeted for HPK (High Paying Keywords) so maybe I can’t complain about having 1-cent-clicks in the first place, however, I can say with full confidence that filtering low paying adverts did not increase my revenue at all. I know I am going to raise a riot here; so many people are thanking adblacklist.com with tears in their eyes for 200% increasement in their revenue… I believe it may be effective on some sites, but it was not on mine. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Emir and his project, on a contrary, he is doing a wonderful job, all I am saying is that it is not a magic stick that works for everyone. I’d be curious to find out why I did not accomplish any boost myself, though I am guessing it has to do with the keywords in the first place.

Just from briefly going over the BlackList I can undertake that this list would work best for Travel, Hosting, Education, Topsites, Search, Directories, eCommerce and Online Revenue. Try it, maybe it will do wonders on your account. It is not against AdSense TOS, so don’t have any doubts there. Myself, I did keep the ads filter on because it prevents my visitors from been redirected to some garbage websites without content. At least now that I have tried and found out that filtering MFA sites at best keeps my income stable, I wouldn’t envy those happy webmasters who had the guts to try and proudly announced a “mere” 400% boost in their clicks cost.

Go to any webmasters forum, enter the SEO section and see how devotedly people are working on Search Engine Optimization. Making the site bot-friendly (XHTML, CSS, WAI-AAA), amount of indexed pages seems to have an unjustified extra weight and this whole meta tags and keywords density fuss sometimes crosses the line. Is it really that important? It is, if most your traffic comes from Google and other SE, but if it isn’t? You need thousands of pages that has been aggressively promoted for years in order to be ranked high enough.

The thing is, if your website deals with something unique, something that has little (if at all) results in Google, you will show up upon every search anyway, however, if your site deals with popular keywords (which are normally the high paying ones), such as “SEO” (110,000,000 results in Google) or “Digital Cameras” (97,300,000 results in Google) or better off - “Free Software” (1,090,000,000 results in Google. Only), where are you exactly in this list?
Just imagine making one more site about free software… Do you really believe you will make it to the top 10 results? Or even top 50? Ever?? The competition is absolutely inhuman, the money invested in back links and promotion are immeasurable and no matter how perfectly your website will be optimized for SEO - you won’t get more than a few hundreds of visitors from SE’s. It’s a fact that most “average” websites (I mean we are excluding MS, Apple, CNet, Download.com, and some others of that rank) do not benefit from more than 20% - 30% of traffic from SE. Most websites have even less. A lot less.
So, does SEO worth dedicating hours to?

This is one of these small forum signatures I made for posting in this blog. Not because of I am so generous, I just need to staff this blog with content.
Here it is, some pop art mixed with space-like atmosphere. Hope you will like this mixture:

To Download the free .PSD file, click here - complete_psd_sig.zip

After you have finished making a tutorial, made sure it’s original, interesting and worth massive exposure, all you need to do is to submit to the major tutorials databases and enjoy massive traffic.

Don’t forget that in order to be accepted in most databases, you need:

1. To host the images / illustrations on your own server, or on the same server the tutorial is posted on (such as DeviantArt). Hosting images elsewhere or on free servers will result in declining your tutorial.
2. You have to provide a thumbnail of your tutorial (small preview) 40*40, 45*45 or 50*50 dimensions, depending on the website you are submitting it to.
3. The tutorial should be ground breaking. If they already have something similar in their database - you will be declined.

So, getting started. Where to submit?

• good-tutorials.com - PR7 - will send you massive traffic, though it’s very hard to be accepted. This is the only database site who demands a preview image .jpg format (optimized, below 5k).
• tutorialized.com - PR7 - will also generate massive traffic for your site, though visitors will see tutorialized’s frame above your site (on which they will be able to rate your tutorials).
• pixel2life.com - PR6 - large database of tutorials of all kind, the only website who will notify you by email regarding every tutorial you submit weather it was accepted or not, and provide a reason, if declined.
• pslover.com - PR6 - one of my top 25 traffic generators, though the only inconvinience is that the thumbnail has to be 45*45.
• tutorial-index.com - PR4 - not much traffic will be generated in total, but easy listing.
• tutorials-db.com - PR 0 - another newly born database, no much traffic but easy listing as well.
• pixelgroovy.com - PR 4 - despite the average traffic generated, I like this database, it’s cosy and not hard to get though.
• tutorialvault.net - PR 5 - the traffic they will send you is small though you easily get a backlink on a PR5 website.
• tutorialkit.com - PR 6 - Very had to be accepted, only exclusve tutorials will be listed, however, don’t be sad if your tutorial was not appreciated by tutorialkit’s editors, the traffic they deliver is measly (a few clicks a day).
• tutorialmix.com - PR 0 - Easy and fast listing, though as a rather new database they will not be very benificial for your overall site’s ranking nor traffic.
• capitaltutorials.com - PR 5 - Not the kind of traffic you will feel in your stats, but I’d recommend to submit anyway, this site’s pages are very well indexed in Google.
• xtreme-pixel.com - PR 5 - Again, this site maybe will not send you too many visitors, but PR5 free backlink worth it.
• tutorials-expert.com - PR 0 - excellent database that provides a fast submission, not a lot of traffic, though the site is getting gradually promoted.
• tutorial-search.com - PR 0 - comprehensive database with easy listing that will deliver avarage-size traffic to your website.
  

That’s about it I think. You can also try listing your website in rnel.net and photoshopdepot.com .

Even though some websites, as I said, generate small traffic and little exposure, if you take the time to submit all your tutorials to each of them, alltogether you will gather a good amount of daily visits and a successful submission to all of them (means if they all have accepted your tutorials) can guarantee you a steady traffic of a few thousands of unique visitors daily. Good luck!

Even though there are only a few simple steps, this tutorial is more advanced users, in my opinion. Today, you will learn how to take an ordinary photo and turn it into an artistic sketch on a rough canvas.

The purpose of this tutorial is to use all the filters that highlight the main lines of the photo and turn then into a flat line upon a one-colour canvas.

1. For the start, open your photo. It does not have to be black ond white like in our example but it must have a good contrast.

2. Go to Filter >> Artistic >> Photocopy and set these settings for photocopy effect.

3. After clicking “OK”, go again to Filter >> Artistic >> Cutout and apply these settings for a smoother cutout effect:

This should give your image, which was turned to a photocopy, more visible edges and wil outline the main curves of the photo.

4. Go to Image >> Adjustments >> Brightness / Contrast and dramatically reduce the brightness.

5. Duplicate the Layer, so that you will be able to apply layer styles.

6. Go to Layer >> Layer Styles >> Bevel and Emboss and apply these settings for emboss and then for texture. This will give our canvas a feeling of rough texture, as if it was really drawn on paper.

The Texture emboss filling is what important here:

7. Flatten the image, and now let’s give it a warm hue. The easiest way is to go to Image >> Adjustment >> Photofilter and add a default warm filter 81.

8. Last thing is very simple yet in my opinion shouldn’t be skipped. When an artist is making a sketch with a pen, he is often smudges the edges, trying to give the canvas some more depth… we will do the same here, only without getting the hands dirty. So, for the final touch, go to Filter >> Artistic >> Plastic wrap and set these settings, using any pleasantly light colour.

That’s it, here is your result…