Ashutosh Nilkanth's Blog

There are numerous articles on how to go about earning revenue from your web site or blog. There are several online services and programs that let you monetize from your web site or blog, but for a self-starter it is often hard to make the right choice.

So I’ve collected some really effective techniques, which will guarantee you some additional income for your web site or blog. So far, in my case this secondary income has been good enough to pay for hosting, bandwidth and ISP costs; but if your web site is able to generate good traffic then the figure may easily be upto several thousand dollars each month (Markus Frind who runs Plentyoffish.com – an online dating service, earned $900,000 in just two months). Ain’t bad now, is it? So here are some tips, tricks and hacks which can help any web site or blog owner kick start their online income:

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100 Tips to Cut Small Business Overhead and Reach Profitability

Here’s a clever service I stumbled upon during my morning browse. Gadget Theft have setup an online service where you simply register your device (iPods, USB Flash Drives, Digital Cameras and others), and install their agent files in the root of your device. If your device is stolen you simply log into their system and flag it as lost or stolen. The next time the lost device is plugged into a computer it will attempt to “ping” back to Gadget Theft and provide critical forensic data regarding the system it is plugged into. Nice!

I must confess, the quality of consumer broadband here in India is not at all comparable to global standards. With a massive IT, BPO and backoffice technology infrastructure; a household consumer would expect to have a decent internet connectivity. But the average speed-to-cost ratio is unacceptable.

Speedtest.net is a really cool broadband speed testing service. Their global broadband stats reveal that Japan leads the speed space (average last-mile speed of 9333kbps/3232kbps), with Sweden, Latvia, Romania and USA following. The average speed in India falls way short to 412kbps, while that of the Asian continent is up to 2134 kbps.

Back here in India, gone are the days of ISP monopoly, and there are several players in the market now. I’m using MTNL (of the largest telecom/ISP), and they recently announced 2mbps upgrades for all their customers. Until now, I used to crib about the frequent erratic connection and high costs. After this 2mbps upgrade (on restricted monthly bandwidth plans only) by MTNL, I took the Speedtest again, and the results are impressive …

While wireless internet is still relatively new in India, I discovered that there are some FON nodes around!

I’m archiving my test results and I’ll compare them once I return back to Australia.

What’s common among these websites: Digg, MSN, Orkut, Reddit, Wikipedia, eBay, Blogger and Flickr. Besides being some of the most popular, they are also prone to the excessive bandwidth consumption. And believe it or not, if each one of these web sites was “Gzipped”, then everyone could potentially conserve 65-75% bandwidth. See this example report. That’s a potential bandwidth saving for the web service as well as the end-user.

So what is Gzip? It’s a utility which compresses data. Gzip can also be used for Internet data compression. Gzip is widely available as a filter for both Windows (and this) and Linux web servers; and it is integratable in web programming languages like PHP and ASP.NET (and this, and this).

This blog as well as my web projects (like Feedity) are Gzipped for bandwidth conservation. Then what’s stopping the popular websites from making use of Gzip and serving compressed pages to the audience? There are different theories to this cavet. First, the CPU usage associated with on-the-fly Gzip compression of web pages may affect server performance (I doubt that being the case in clustered load-balancing architectures, like most of the popular websites have). Second, there have been reports that Gzipped webpages which have JavaScript/AJAX functions break down. The key question is that whether these factors are greater than the expected savings on bandwidth?

Never-the-less, Gzipping your website is an ideal practice for small & medium scale web applications.