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Many people were asking if the WesternUnion payments will be free or if they will deduct any amount from the earnings. Google officially announced it today and said “it will be free”. It’s a great news too, because WU service charges are quite high. Up to 15% in some cases, so if you get $100, they could take $15. I guess Google will be absorbing that cost for some time.

Also this payment option is available to these countries only: Argentina, Chile, China (Mainland), Colombia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, or Romania.

Tip: For those who have never used WesternUnion, when you go to bank, ask for WesternUnion and fill up the yellow form (to receive) and not the green one (to send). Sender will be, First Name: Google Inc. Last name: empty

P.S I have been getting my AdSense payments for the past one year through WesternUnion. I was one of the bloggers who was in the AdSense WU beta.

My post about the AdSense payments going to be paid through WesternUnion hit News.com yesterday.

This is one of the benefits of posting something first before the rest of the blogosphere. News dot com was nice enough to mention my blog in their post. That’s a great gesture. Thanks to them. Because, often times I see some blogs consistently copying (rewriting) posts from here and not giving any credits to AdesBlog, eventhough they use AdesBlog as the source of their blogging resources. I won’t be telling the names here, but I think they should take a lesson from the News dot com. Give something and it will come back in one way or another. Don’t be too stingy with little things.

Finally thanks to Zaki for notifying me about this.

Malaysians (and maybe other countries too), another good news for you. Now you can get paid through WesternUnion for your Google AdSense earnings. What does that mean? That means, when Google releases the payments you can get your payments immediately, no need to wait for 10 days for your checks to arrive. And another 30 days for them to be cleared anymore.

In Malaysia, WesternUnion services are available at most of the CIMB Bank branches and in some Pos Malaysia branches (here is the list of branches with WU).

Here is how you set your payment options, go to:

My Account > Account Settings > Payment Details [edit]

After you click [edit] you will be displayed the following screen. On this page, choose Setup WesternUnion Quick Cash option, as shown below.

How much they charge for this?

It’s FREE.

Will the local bank charge anything?

No, they won’t.

What are the steps for getting paid with WU?

After you have chosen, Western Union as the option for your payment. At the end of the month, you will be given MTCN (Money Transfer Control Number). MTCN is a 10 digit number that you need to show when you are picking up your payment from CIMB Bank. You will also need to bring your IC or Passport, and of course you need to know how much money you are withdrawing. Finally, you need to know Google Address.

Again, you need to have these for picking up your payment:

• MTCN
• IC or Passport
• Amount to be received
• Sender’s Address (it’s Google here)

Google Address:
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
USA

Can you withdraw from any CIMB Branch?

Yes you can, as long as you are inside the territory of Malaysia, you can withdraw from any branch of CIMB or Post Office (only some post offices have this, so please check).

Where to get your MTCN?

In the beginning Google used to send it through email. But now it does not. So don’t wait for the email. Just make sure to login to your AdSense account at the end of the month. Go to My Account > Payments History page as shown below.

Then click on the payment details. Make sure you click on the correct month:

Then you will be displayed your payment details like this:

So, good luck! By the way, your money will be available for 30 days in WU system. After which, if you do not withdraw it will be credited back to your Google AdSense account.

Tip: For those who have never used WesternUnion, when you go to bank, ask for WesternUnion and fill up the yellow form (to receive) and not the green one (to send). Sender will be, First Name: Google Inc. Last name: empty

I believe there will be an official PR from Google about this shortly. Update: they did check here.

If you have a website that is optimized for mobile browsers, then you can now make money from your website content. AdSense is now available for mobile phone sites.

To get started:
1) Sign in to your account.
2) Select the AdSense Setup tab and click on AdSense for mobile.
3) Follow the instructions to customize your ad unit for AdSense for mobile.

One restriction: You can have only one ad per page. Still it’s better than nothing.

www.google.com/adsense

Today was the last post for the blog Nice4Rice.com. After only six months in operation, it came to an end today.

Nick, the Founder of Nice4Rice says the main reason for closing the blog was:

1. It was difficult to come up with new ideas for posts
2. The blog didn’t generate income

In his own words:

I would only write something once or twice a week, but it would usually take me hours to make each post, and I’d be thinking about what to write for days. In fact, compared to niche websites, it’s so much harder to monetize a blog - at least in my experience.

Creativity Problem

Coming up with new ideas for the posts has been cited one of the top problems for many bloggers. Criticality of the problem will depend on the level of your passion about the topic that you are blogging. If you are blogging about something that you love, then it will be easier for you to come up with new ideas every time.

Experience and expertise in your own field helps too. If you are an expert in one field, you can always fall back on your vast knowledge and easily come up with a new topic.

I had written a post called “What to expect when you are full time blogger” earlier, while the topic talks about full time blogging, points 2 and 3 in the post applies to Nice4Rice case.

Is the end of Nice4Rice a new beginning for you?

I wish Nick had tried to find ways to keep the project alive. There were successful takeovers before, one of which is netbusinessblog.com, sold by Matt Coddington to Adrian Cooke for $13,000. Now the blog still thrives, since the takeover it has also acquired some 250 new RSS subscribers.

So if there is anybody who has zest for giving rice, maybe you could buy Nice4Rice.com? The new mascot would look something like this ;) (look right). Of course with your face.

I had supported Nice4Rice project from the beginning and had given Nick free PR7 backlink from this blog under “Firends & Blogroll” section. Now that the project is over, I will probably remove it.

INetU Inc., New York Internet and Acens are the most reliable hosting company sites for August 2007, followed closely by Easynet, iPowerWeb and GoDaddy.com.

If you are looking for a good hosting, you might want to check monthly stats for hosting companies from NetCraft. NetCraft ranks hosting companies based on their:

• Outage - percentage of server outage during the period.
• Failed Requests - Percentage of failed requests.
• DNS - This is the Time taken for the DNS lookup of the hostname. This will be affected by the local service provider name server as well as the authorative name server for the hostname.
• Connect - This is the first phase of the http GET request when the TCP/IP connection is setup to the remote server. This time will generally reflect the network latency time as the connection setup does not involve the web application. If the server is not responding or is under very heavy load this time will increase.
• First Byte - This is the time from when the last byte of the http GET request is sent until the first byte of the response header is received.
• Total - This is the time from when the http GET request is started until the last byte of data is received.

NetCraft also used to offer many free information on: Hosting Provider Server Count (how many servers particular hosting company has), Hosting Provider Switching Analysis (how many people switched to particular hosting company from other companies)…etc. Now all these infos became paid, too bad. We are living in information age, aren’t we? Any useful info becomes not-free anymore.