February 6, 2010 by homeschool10x
Wouldn’t it be nice to know what phrase is the magic one to build your site around? I have hypothesized that the following Homeschool Info is packaged up properly to bring the right traffic to our little website.
Time4Learning’s Use with other Curricula
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February 3, 2010 by homeschool10x
If you have any involvement with the public schools in Florida you probably know more than you ever wanted to about the FCAT. You’ve watch the struggles to prep for FCAT Vocabulary, FCAT math, FCAT writing, and general FCAT test preparation. One first step, is to be sure that you understanding FCAT instructions.
To understand the FCAT instructions, students need to master a certain vocabulary. For instance, the FCAT may ask students to “Summarize the author’s thesis and identify the facts that she cites to justify her opinion…
FCAT Reading Comprehension
The FCAT reading comprehension sections are a significant portion of the language arts. A strong vocabulary really helps with reading comprehension. If you during the FCAT, the student cannot understand words or must rely too much on context clues or word roots to guess at meetings, they are unlikely to succeed.
FCAT Writing Sections
The FCAT writing assessment is for fourth, eighth, and tenth graders. A strong vocabulary is one of the criteria by itself and having a strong vocabulary improves writing fluency helping the students to focus on essay structure and coherence.
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February 2, 2010 by homeschool10x
Most people think of Google as a monolithic intelligence. That’s probably not true, most people don’t think about Google at all. But of those that do, few think of breaking down Google. Google in fact has about a dozen major data centers around the world. And, there is a Google for many, perhaps most, countries and languages. For instance, hablamos de google espagnol. There is not only a spanish language google, there is a google.mx (Mexico), Google.es (Spain), Google.co (is that Columbia), maybe a Google in Spanish for the States, and probably a lot more. The fact is, I don’t know. But, I’m interested in keywords and vocabulary and language working to help me so here is a list of keyphrases representing pages that we’ve built to help foreigners, ESL-types, who want to learn English, find our site. I shoulda done one in Haitian…
Build Vocabulary for ESL or TOEFL Tests
Construcción de Vocabulario
Impara il lessico inglese
Apprendre le vocabulaire Anglais
Λειλγιο ΕκμaOηoης Αγγλικwν
Lernen SieEnglisch-Vokabular
Naucz się Angielskich Słówek
Изучайте Английские Слова
İngilizce Kelime Dağarcığını Öğrenin
Вивчайте англійські слова
Научи думички на английски език
Lær Engelsk ordforråd
Lær Engelsk
Invata Vocabularul Limbii Engleze
Naučte se anglická slovíčka
Utöka Ditt Engelska Ordförråd
Leer je Engelse Woordenschat
ללמוד אוצר מילים באנגלית
تعلم مفردات اللغة الانجليزية
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January 19, 2010 by homeschool10x
Trying to do well in the search engines is tricky since I’m a for-profit effort and there are massive .edu’s. Granted, Google doesn’t necessarily prefer .edu’s but I suspect they have a strong preference for them.
Lets take, for instance, the question of educational game websites. There’s a blog about educational games, there’s a conference about serious games, and there’s a whole vocabulary building site that uses games.
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December 4, 2009 by homeschool10x
I was reading a forum (V7N) which led me to a very professional blog. Their topic was five hints on using adsense. It reminded me how useful I have found blogging to be to help me learn and think through some of my challenges. So I’ve started a series of posts on revenue trying to improve my thinking and revenue.
Lets get specific and look at my educational kid games website. Its the top site for learning games for kids and is a top site for the more general learning games. An astute reader will note that I’m also pushing it up for educational games. The traffic is good.
We recently improved the revenue by framing the ads. Previously, the content was in gold frames and the ads were just sitting there. So we experimented by putting everything in frames. Now I’m drinking margaritas by the beach. Actually, not but the point is that it helped.
We could mix the ads in more with the content but I think that might hurt the site.
One obvious problem with the site is how often we take visitors to other sites. For instance, the entire preschool section takes them elsewhere.
One thing that works well is when we bring other sites to us. Youtube videos under science songs does this well. I wonder if I can talk SpellingCity with their vocabulary games into doing this…?
Advertising ad placement. The banner across the very top of the page is no longer very effective. We’ve learned as an audience to discount it. Similiarly, I find the big skyscraper down the side doesn’t do very well for the amount of real estate it takes. The best designs mix the advertising in within the content. This explains why the 300 x 250 is now so popular.
The best Mondrian design that I’ve seen for harvesting clicks in the kids market is primarygames.com
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December 4, 2009 by homeschool10x
I have some sites that I monetize through advertising. I’m starting a series of posts to collect my thoughts on optimizing revenue. This will just be an overview of list of issues or posts to come. I might edit this in the future as I think of new topics.
Page design. Where to place the ads? Disguised or highlighted? Big, small, few, many?
Industry specific sizes?
Sources of ads, what networks?
What approach? CPM, PPC, PPA or affiliate? Sell by the month, quarter, or year?
Adsense – ads, search, and link ads.
Stickiness versus revenue.
General versus specific networks. Tribal Fusion, ValueClick, Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, Adsense, Adify,
Admanagers.
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December 1, 2009 by homeschool10x
I write a number of blogs on a few different topics. I’m thinking of starting a new one. The idea is that I’d like to keep a blog that deals with the issues that the head of a small (3-100 people) online business manager must deal with. Unlike all my previous blogs, I’d like this one to be well-organized. So, prior to starting it, I thought I’d take a few minutes and define my tags or categories. In short, I’ll try to get organized.
Marketing: SEO, PPC, Email marketing, Online advertising
Revenue: subscriptions, Advertising
HR: benefits, management, communication,
Operations: credit card processing, support, hosting, registering, backup
Strategy & Finance:
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October 19, 2009 by homeschool10x
We are a pretty savvy organization with a few people who spend hours a week trying to discern some truth from Googles analytics. The reality is it’s really hard for us to find much real truth from analytics.
1. We have some flash pages. Somehow, google fails to track people through the iframed flash pages so our data is inaccurate in cases where people look at our demos. Of course, the demos are key to our sales pitch.
2. Often, we can’t reproduce the same historical data two times. I don’t know why. But given how much human error there is in pulling these reports, we’ve started requiring all significant findings to be verified by researching it multiple times. Somehow, Google’s sampling technique seems to provide data that varies by 25% and 50%! At first, I didn’t believe but we can reproduce variations with all of us watching it on the big screen. Same analysis, just different results. Weird.
3. How goals set up in Adsense PPC and goals set up in Google’s analytics for CPC related to each remains a mystery to us. We’ve never been able to reconcile the data from the two systems.
We’ve talked to Google’s people who call us periodically (we’re a big enough adsense buyer to get random cold calls from Google newbies) and so far, we’ve not much any real progress on these issues.
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October 18, 2009 by homeschool10x
Here’s the fact. The green bar labelled google page rank is a little bit useful and can be very misleading.
How is Google PageRank Useful?
1. It is a good indicator of the general position with Google. Green means ‘go.’ No green, means that it is either a brand new site or a problem site. It’s time to study it.
2. Communication. When Google went on their kick to stamp out paid links and link advertising, their way of communicating with websites prior to dropping their position in the search engines was to drop their visible page rank. I know people’s whose page rank went from 6 to 0. All of a sudden, they were paying attention to the guidelines.
How is it Misleading?
As best I can tell, the visible Google page rank is a simple count, arbitrarily time-delayed of incoming links. It counts SPAM links, multiple links on a page, multiple links from the same domain, and totally irrelevant links all the same. As such, it is often not at all correlated to the real weight that Google assigns to that page. But, being lazy and it being there with the Google name on it, we often all fall into the habit of relying on it. Shame on us.
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October 1, 2009 by homeschool10x
I’ve been very interested to learn about the different approaches to education in the states and how many different sources of info there are on learning about them. I found a good list with homeschooling info on almost all of the states. Here:
State Homeschooling Info
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