NeoHide Technologies

Our business began on a partnership road with LinkShare, an affiliate program, a few years back, and perhaps it might be a good time to review the performance within our context.

On our parent site, NeoHide.com, we tested out a few affiliates program (such as Fujitsu), including LinkShare’s very own affiliation. The link was published at the bottom-right sidebar throughout all pages, except those on News Archives directory. The experiment commenced on 28^th April 2007 and lasted more than 3-and-a-half years, till today (31^st December 2010).

The site hit millions of impressions, but somehow the CTR (click-through-rate) was extremely low. The first 2 years saw a result generating an average of 0.25. In 2009, it dropped to an average of 0.1, and the result worsen in 2010, closing at 0.04 (see table left).

As none of the click-through ended up into closed deal; hence, in 4 years, the total revenue earned is $0. The conclusion that can be drawn from here is, do not expect Affiliates Programs to work well, if you have small or medium-based sites. A large site with huge traffic is definitely the win-factor if you’re looking into driving revenue from Affiliates Programs. Secondly, look for products that have high selling price, as most of them pay commission by percentage. Thus, one high-end deal closed easily supersedes multiple small deals.

Having said that, it does not mean site owners should stay away from Affiliate Programs. They can still provide site owners and publishers with a source of income (provided you managed to close a deal). However, avoid clustering your sites with these links, i.e. one or two would be fine.

My experiment tells me what I should be doing next to my website. A quick revamp to optimise for better visibility and conversion. Or otherwise, change to another Affiliate Program for partnership.

As the clock ticks by and email kept sending to remind you to renew your domain name, you cannot help to have the feeling of fear of loss if you don’t renew earlier.

This time, I did it about 10 days earlier; renewing 5 domain names at a go, including these two – Neohide.com and Neohide.org. It also come after the time when GoDaddy announced the price increment after July, but I am not prepared to take the renewal step at that point as I felt it was too early.

Using the promotional discount code that I obtained from Digital Points Forums, the total cost comes down to almost to 20-30% savings! Come to think of it, the move from NameCheap to GoDaddy was a good investment effort.

We have just upgraded our website to run on WordPress 3.0. The latest version of WordPress demonstrates several enhancement to the features and provide several security fixes over the earlier WordPress versions.

Therefore, it is also highly recommended that if you are hosting your site on WordPress, it is time to drive them on WordPress 3.0.

In addition, I have switched to use the new default 2010 WordPress theme (aka Twenty Ten).

Our web hosting server has just upgraded its service yesterday. When I checked into the cPanel, it was noticed that the Server was updated to use Apache 2.2.15 and PHP 5.2.13 on April 30^th, 2010.

Unfortunately, this caused some issue to our hosting service – it brought down the main website, rendering it inaccessible to the public. We acted promptly to deal with the situation and our technicians are on track to get it back up and running within the next hour.

For a period of time, our site has been running on the older WordPress 2.6.x version. Seeing that WordPress developers have been constantly upgrading and fixing the bugs on its latest version, we take no chance at allowing such vulnerabilities to take place on our site.

As such, we took the big step and made proceed with an upgrade from version 2.6.x to 2.8.4.

On the other hand, at our main site, we too performed an upgrade on the CMS engine to keep it up-to-date with the latest Drupal release.

Our hosting server has just migrated our NeoHide account to a new server. During this period of time, you might have encountered some downtime, but I am please to announce that the migration has completed.

During the migration, the IP address attached to the NeoHide domain name will be changed from your old server IP to your new server IP. This will cause a temporary interruption in email, ftp, and the visibility of the website. The window of interruption has taken about 24 to 72 hours, as most Internet Service Providers (ISP) need to take time to clear the cache.

Details of the migration is provided below:

• Migration Date: August 28, 2009
• Migration Start Time: 11:00 AM MST
• Migration End Time: (estimate) 05:00 PM MST
• Old Server IP: 69.89.27.225
• New Server IP: undisclosed

You should be able to experience faster and better performance from our websites.

Thanks and Best Regards,
Keith Neo
CEO NeoHide

Finally, it is about time to review all the renewals of all my domain names. Compared to several other webmasters in the Internet, my ownership of about 13 domain names is considered very insignificant, with about half of them belonging to .ASIA domain names.

I understood the fact that one should never put all the eggs in one basket. However, sometimes it is undoubtedly the most cost-efficient method to do it; which is probably why I stick with GoDaddy since I first started using it, which is about 3 to 4 years back.

Neohide Technologies and its subsidiaries, including but not limited to Neohide.com and Jumboheart.com, are some of the domain names that are almost due for renewals. As such, I took the opportunity today to go through a list of GoDaddy Promotional codes that would greatly help me, and possibly you out there, in getting the best bargain for the day.

Reviews on GoDaddy Promotional Codes

Some of the promotional codes work, whereas others don’t. Digital Point is a source where you can search for great codes for GoDaddy. It is also from there where I get to know some of the usages of these codes. Here are some key points:

• Most promotional codes cannot be used for non .COM domains, for example, .ASIA.
• Promotional codes have expiry dates.
• Promotional codes are normally not applicable on privacy protection.

Having went through a review myself, I have found a couple of useful codes, at least for now, if you intend to renew your domain names.

• POSTER9 – 15% discount on .com domain names
• POSTER7 – 10% discount on .com domain names
• 10NCS699 – $6.99 for .com domain names
• GDR0723Z – save $5 for any order more than $25

Other codes that do not work are not shown here. Basically, having tried a couple of combination myself, I can draw 2 tips here:

1. If you have ALL .com domain names, then use 10NCS699 to get the best price for renewal.
2. If you have other domain names, then use GDR0723Z. However, do note that when you use this code, you can only have $5 saving for each order. Therefore, here’s the trick: separate into several orders, each at least $25 and above, so that you get more than $5 savings!

For the above, I used 2 promo different promotional codes, since I have both .COM and .ORG domain names to be renewed. I’ve grouped a .ORG domain and another domain name to make it more than $25 in one bucket (assuming I’m also paying for privacy protection) to use this code – GDR0723Z. In addition, for the remaining domain names, which are .COM, the first code is used; that is, 10NCS699.

Basically, I had quite a considerable saving achieved!

Best Regards,
Keith Neo
NeoHide CEO

Since 2006, Neohide has undergone several transformation, including engine upgrades from Drupal 4.x to 6.x. Most of the time, we depend heavily on various sponsorships to pay server fees and keep the site running 24/7. In terms of revenue, Google AdSense is one of the main source of income. Other areas of incomes include, but not limited to, Chitika and Ask-Related (powered by Media Jump), both of which are through invitation only during that time of application.

Unlike huge online entrepreneur sites, such as Coolest Gadgets, where its revenue is a 5 figure income, the amount of traffic driven into NeoHide is considerably mediocre; just good enough to pay off server fees. The objective here is simply to optimise the website to increase revenue, based on a good distribution of income sources.

Obtaining reports over the last couple of years, I began to dive into one of the Sponsor site – Ask Related, or Media Jump. It provides contextual links, searches and dynamic contents that relates to the keywords that is configured at host (see sample on right-hand side). Comparing to Google AdSense, it is truly not helping much to keep the site going. Below is the background report.

I began using running this initiative on May 17^th, 2007. Almost three years later, I had more than 10k impressions and close to 800 searches. Due to data confidentiality, I won’t be able to reveal the actual amount earned. What I can say is that, the amount that is generated for the past 3 years, is almost equivalent to what I earn for 3 days from Google Adsense – this is really not cost-effective.

After 3 years of running this program, I guess it is about time to conclude that Media Jump will have to give way for better performing ads. Nonetheless, I do have a disclaimer; that is, Media Jump has not performed well for my sites, but that does not imply it is the same for other sites. You will have to try it out on your own websites to understand the actual performance.

As part of my Site Optimisation Project, I will be looking into areas where revenue-generation can be justified the costs of running the sites.

With Best Regards,
Keith Neo
NeoHide CEO

The end-of-year analysis report for Neohide.com is finally here again. This time we try to be as comprehensive as possible and provide a much detailed report, with the help of Google Analytics, than the previous End-of-Year Statement Report for 2007. Besides the comprehensiveness of the report, we try to make it as simple as possible, in a way, we break it down into 4 different major components; that is,

1. Total Number of Visitors
2. Traffic Sources
3. Map Overlay of Visitors
4. Top Contents for 2008

As far as possible, we reveal some of the revenue information for NeoHide.com, but due to Google AdSense policy, we have to keep data privacy to a maximum.

Total Number of Visitors
The first category is the most important category of all time; traffic! Only with traffic, does it drives revenue. Hence, we take a look at how the performance of the site over the last 1 year for NeoHide.com.

The above figure denotes that the average value of visitors fluctuates about 300 on a daily basis. Along the way, there are a few peaks, but never hit beyond the 1,000 barrier. However, there is one that strikes over 3,000 visitors in the 4^th quarter of 2008.

Generally, there is hardly much improvement shown in terms of growing trend, but the positive outlook that we can derive from here is quality positive content that the site is still able to generate, which hits the roof. The total number of visitors is probably not as much as what a lot of people expected, but it is definitely higher than the previous year.

Traffic Sources
One interesting information to note is where is the traffic source? Is it driven mainly by organic links, e.g. search engines, or direct links from other sites, or even perhaps direct link to reach the website. Here is the result.

Well, many thanks to the help of search engines, e.g. Google, MSN, Yahoo! or even others, more than 3/4 of the visitors were sent across by them. About 18% of the visitors come from referring sites and others from direct traffic and others, etc.

The distribution of the traffic sources is pretty good; as what I would expect. As long as the site doesn’t get in the bad books of the search engines, it does have a very healthy outlook for the next coming year, relying on organic traffics and links.

Map Overlay of Visitors
Where does Neohide.com visitors come from? Once again, let’s get the help from Google Analytics to show the way.

As depicted by the Map Overlay figure above, it is very apparent that the visitors mainly come from United States of America (US) and partially from United Kingdom (UK) and India. The site has originally focus to target the US market, hence it is without a doubt that the distribution of visitors is as shown.

Top Contents for 2008
Undoubtedly, this is probably the most interesting section of today’s post. At least, it will be interesting to know what are the top contents that really attracts the visitors in 2008.

Does the result amaze you? NeoHide has drawn a lot of attractions based on Ubuntu as its main pull factor. Nonetheless, for this case, the top 2 positions are about Ubuntu Desktop Effects. Surprisingly, the front page lies 5^th in the position. So, it seems that our internal linking is far more stronger than its front cover. This will mean more work needs to be done to improve the front page.

Amongst others are side topics which also captured some interesting news, such as topless Cambridge student and Linux command tutorial, such as Tar.gz.

Closing Keynote for 2008
Year 2008 has been really promising and helpful to NeoHide.com; however, we cannot take things for granted. One significant improvement that we had done was to shift the entire site to run on the latest 6.x Drupal engine, as well as powering the site on the later PHP 5 language.

In spite of the economic downturn that affects the global market in the last 6 months, we should still be able to stand strong and withstand the turmoil. This year, 2009, we will welcome with open arms as we proceed to improve the site to greater heights. Last but not least, we’ll like to wish everyone a very

HAPPY NEW YEAR in 2009!!!

With Warmest Regards,
Keith Neo
NeoHide CEO

As you might have noticed, we have made a major facial uplift to our site at NeoHide.com, a completely different theme based on flexible width for the content column. Compared to our previous theme, there is one sidebar less. We hope that the changes made to the theme will help browsing through the site much easier and less complicated, providing readers with ease-of-navigation.

Behind at the engine level, the Drupal CMS has been specially crafted and upgraded to the latest stable version of 6.x. It was only through careful planning, analysis and several backup made to the database and the files that we decided it is worthwhile to perform the upgrade. Our previous version was powered by an out-of-date Drupal version 4.7.11, which does not allow most of the contributed plugins to be used. Hence, this justify the move to upgrade the site to the next major version.

We intended to power the site at Drupal version 5.x, but we found that since we are doing these upgrades at this time and the upgrade to version 5.x has been done quite successfully with little disruption to the operation, it is without hesistation that an agreement is reached to upgrade to version 6.x directly, thereby prompting a huge jump of Drupal versions, skipping the 5.x family. We see Drupal 6.x as the next generation of content management system (CMS) that could potentially enhance our sites in the Internet space. Already, we are thinking and planning of migrating to the next version, Drupal 7!

In an effort to improve readability, we have removed most of the advertisement that has been clouding the previous theme. Some of the non high-paying ads have been eradicated so as to maximise revenue and minimise number of unhappy visitors. In this way, we can take readership as our main priority and promote readers to return for more. The project will take some time to manifest and turn the site into an optimum one, but we hope to do that as soon as possible.

Last but not least, we thank all of you for your loyal subscription and enjoy our new fresh look!

With Best Regards,
Keith Neo
NeoHide CEO