If post icons are available at your forum then you can use one of them at posting to give a better idea and to gain attraction. Most of vBulletin forums including Digital Point have this right under the post box as below,

Here is a screenshot I took of Digital Point forum home page. See how the question mark icon gives a better emphasis.

Here is how the same post appeared at its category. You can notice that only a few posts contain icons.

This can be got done with a batch file. A batch file allows you to run commands in Windows. These commands can be things like executing a program. A batch file calls MS Dos prompt and executes written commands. So, the commands you write in a batch file are similar to DOS commands.

Don’t worry if you don’t know a single DOS command or haven’t seen DOS prompt before. Getting our goal done is easy. The way I did this worked only in Firefox not in IE. The reason should be tabbed browsing. If you want to try with IE, then go for one with tabbed browsing. Here are the steps,

First open a Notepad and choose a location to save it (desktop would be convenient). Then save it appending .bat to the file name (I saved it as Common.bat).

At the very top, add these lines. Then save and close the file.

Now you should see something like below, where you saved it. Double click it. A DOS prompt will appear and suddenly disappear. Then Firefox will open Google Docs and Google Analytics, two of my most visited sites. I have also set to remember the passwords in these sites so that it saves even more time.

Now lets examine the commands. First line instructs to locate the folder where Firefox was installed. Usually it is in Program Files under C drive. To get the path just locate the folder and copy the address. Then remove the part C: and paste it after cd (cd means change directory) and a space.

Second line instructs to execute firefox with the web addresses specified. Here firefox.exe is the program we want to execute. It will even work without .exe part. Note that there is a space between the term firefox.exe and first address.

And also, all the web addresses you want to open (yes, you can open more than two but ten or more will make it slow) should be in the same line and separated by a space. You can omit (won’t need though) setting the program path (first line), if you had included it as an environment variable.

Even though this is for a competition, I do think these are burning problems newbies have and thank to Darren for influencing me to bring my thoughts out. I have addressed them in my full potential and love to have your input too.

Business Knowledge

This is the first challenge any newbie face. Unless you are a friend of an experienced online marketer, you will have no idea where to start and this is where you get caught to various scams. There are tons of products to teach you how to do a business online. Some may be good. But most of them are complete scams or impossible ventures. How can you distinguish between good and bad when you don’t have background knowledge?

So, you really need to find someone with the knowledge, right? If you don’t know one personally then you can find one or more via online forums. Locate one whose core is online marketing like Digital Point or Warrior Forum. Then simply register and post your questions in appropriate sections.

If you don’t know where to begin or what exactly to ask, just hang around and see what are the discussions going on. Come to a comfortable position where you are confident to post. Almost all forums have a section to introduce yourself. Tell your status here and ask for suggestions. Probably you will get plenty of links from fellow members to study further. Follow them and post again and again when you find something difficult to understand.

Since spam can be injected anywhere, your scenario may not be fruitful like this. But it’s not going to be complete rubbish. Say one person did self-promotion (which is not preferable most of the time) then there will be ten who go against him and show you the correct path.

You may not be able to get all the knowledge you want in this manner. Information you get in this way is not always in proper order which can make you overwhelmed. So, you may want to go for a product. If you have found one then you can ask about it before buying it. You will find members who have already bought it.

If not, you can ask for a good product. Again there can be biased responses but you will be able to filter them with the knowledge you have gained so far. The key here is to spend less money for knowledge because you will always need more money for implementation.

Technical Knowledge

This is similar to business knowledge but once you have a good business knowledge and become web savvy, you will easily overcome this challenge. You will get to know sites like Elance and Rent a Coder where you can find freelancers for any kind of project or/and you will find sites like W3Schools and HTML Goodies where can you learn the stuff from scratch.

The key requirement here is understanding web technologies and how they work. Then you can decide what kind of programming you need for each of your project. And if you don’t know a certain part then you can go for outsourcing. However if you also know little bit of programming then you will find yourself the only employee in most of your projects. Even if you go for outsourcing, you will find this knowledge can save you lots of money and time.

If you ask me, I will tell you to begin with HTML, then move onto PHP and MySQL (will be difficult and time consuming). If you can also add up some JavaScript knowledge then you are very well set. Remember technical barriers can always be overcome when you get web savvy.

What you need to do is keep learning. Don’t wait until the book you ordered from Amazon arrives. You can always find free tutorials. Again spend less money for learning and grow your capital so that you can get a flying start when you find new opportunities.

Competition

If you study SEO little bit, you will find plenty of tools to find your competition in numbers but not in true business value. If you think about the business value, a competitor is equal to you only if he delivers in same quality as you do. If he doesn’t deliver as you do but successful than you then the key is in marketing.

You may not have a budget as your competitors have. But examine yourself. Have you done everything within your scope? If not, list what you haven’t done and move on one by one. If you can’t think of anything missed, think whether you can make your campaigns better and evaluate the true value of each campaign.

Always keep your capital for fruitful ventures. Don’t waste your money in traffic exchange campaigns where only the webmasters visit your web site while you can spend that money in an AdWords campaign where you can get warm prospects. If you don’t have the budget to move on just wait until it grows but keep working on your content, no matter whatever it is. Value is in content, marketing just shows it out.

Competitors mainly fall into two categories, existing giants and fellow entrepreneurs. If you start a business today and thousands of others start businesses in the same topic today itself, six months later see how many of them survive. You will find plenty of others have emerged. But see how many of your fellow competitors exist. One year later, two years later, you will find that number has been dramatically decreased. And the existing set, including you is the giants set.

On the internet, key to become a giant is persistence. Once you become a giant, you will find many ways to fight with other giants since you have that potential. Or, why fight? Just collaborate and see whether you can build something that you can’t achieve otherwise. That’s why you see top names rarely rant each other.

Capital

This is a real barrier. It’s true that you can achieve success with free stuff. But you will find that you can always do better with some money, at least in marketing. What you need to figure out first is what is really needed and what is really difficult to change later on. You will find that it’s branding.

If you buy a good domain name today and couple it with an economical web hosting account and grow your business little by little, you will find that one year later you have gained a significant brand. But if you begin with free stuff today which doesn’t brand 100% yourself and move on to your own territory a year later, you will find some new issues in branding. As I said before try to save money you spend for knowledge and go for better deals. Again you can go into forums and ask for advice.

As my input, I like to give you my $97 DreamHost Coupon Code where you can have a well featured web hosting account with a domain name for $22 in first year (thereafter you will have to pay the regular fee). I don’t want to promote anything here. I just want to point out that by researching and asking from knowledgeable people (forums), you can always go for better deals.

Sometimes you can wait until capital grows and do something fruitful meanwhile. Say you want to publish an ebook but you don’t have enough capital to pay for copywriters, set up the merchant account etc. Then start a blog and start branding and traffic building. Setup your blog in a sub directory and address it something like www.example.com/blog/.

You can also point your home page www.example.com to your blog until you get your ebook out. Give some clues about your product and provide tons of related information. A blog is a great way to crate anticipation and when you release your ebook, you will have a set of willing to buy customers.

You can also be more optimistic and cut some fees. Think whether you really need to hire a copywriter at the beginning. See whether you can write it yourself and go for professional advice in you next improvement iteration, hopefully with some money you earned by selling the ebook.

Persistence

You may already know it and hear everywhere. Persistence is the key. Ask any successful entrepreneur and you will get to know that they have failed more than they have succeeded and their failures have been the base for their success. And their success has brought them more than they lost in all their failures. Getting Rich Quick online is like winning a lottery offline. Online businesses are no different from brick and mortar businesses considering the persistence you need to put in.

It’s ok to do mistakes at the beginning. What you can do from the beginning is sticking to your vision. If you got caught to a scam, the answer is not selling it to someone else and getting him to the same boat. Learn a lesson from it for your next purchase.

Mistakes can take place at the beginning or even when you are experienced. Mistakes are part of our lives. You can’t avoid them always. What you can do is making quick treatments and getting actions to avoid something similar in the future. If you did a mistake, be brave to admit it. People like honesty. You will find that mistakes are the best reminders you can ever have.

It’s ok to take breaks. What’s important is coming back. If you haven’t been on the field, it’s true that you might have lost some value. But you are there, the person your business always like to welcome is there. Do twice more than you did before and you will easily find yourself back in the track. But don’t over do which would take you to another long break. Know your limits and play the maximum.

Remember the example in competition, if you are going to give up on the way then you will never reach that giant level. You have to be there to achieve it. It’s that simple but hard to execute. You just need to practice it little by little. Then you will define your own success!

/an-introduction-to-google%e2%80%99s-webmaster-central/

So, I had to change the post slug to remove unnecessary characters. Now it appears like below. (This would be the same Permalink I get if I had included a normal quote rather than a smart quote)

/an-introduction-to-googles-webmaster-central/

I didn’t create a 301 redirection since the post was new. But if you make this change to a old post which has been referenced everywhere (in other web sites) then you will really need to create one since you may loose visitors and search engine crawling.

When your press releases get spread on the web, more and more email scrapping scripts would capture your email address and send you spam emails. So, if you haven’t created a filter then you would find it really difficult to distinguish between spam and original ones. And when you get about 20+ spam emails daily, it would be a real time consumer.

When a spam email has passed Gmail filters (very rarely) and appears in the Inbox and if it seems spam then the label “Press” next to it assure my decision. When I go to the Spam folder, I see a bunch of emails with the label “Press”, so I can discard them by having a quick look rather than wasting more time to check whether they are really spam or not. I sometimes see emails that addresses me as “Hi Press” making my job more easier.

She talks about Site Verification, Crawl status, Crawl rate, URL removing, Page Rank status, Search Query status, External Links status and submitting a Sitemap. If your site is new, you won’t see all cool statistics in your central. But 10e20 is a well established site and you can see what kind of data lies in each section.

Therefore often webmasters have no idea about what to do and get banned ultimately. One way to avoid getting banned that I can think of is shutting down AdSense for a long period of time when you get your first warning.

If banned from AdSense, you get a chance to make an appeal but as some webmasters have observed, appeals are also handled by an automated bot which tends to reject appeals. So, if banned from AdSense, you have no option other than forgetting it and moving onto other money making schemes.

That’s perfectlyok since you may find some lucrative programs than AdSense. But what if you don’t get lucky? What if you were at the top of your AdSense experiments? What if you had devoted all you time in AdSense and you are pretty much sure you can make money with it in any site? Then you will feel it’s really difficult to live without AdSense.

As you might know, Google records all your data like Payee Name, Postal Address, Web Site URL etc. So, you won’t be able to re-register including any of previous details. All you can do is finding someone you can trust to use his name and address to create a new AdSense account.

You will also have to specify a different web site URL with good content where you can get an approval. If you successfully get your new account then remember not to include your new AdSense code in any of previous domains (where you had used your previous AdSense code) since Google keeps domain details too.

You may not notice higher earning-per-click with your new account at the beginning since now you are a whole new publisher with no history. But hopefully you will get back to same performance or more with the time. When the check comes, you will have to deposit it in your friend’s bank account and get your cash later on. You would also offer him a compensation Here is a story of a person who got banned and got back to the game following this procedure.

“It didn’t just happen overnight though. I received a warning a couple of months ago that invalid clicks were being generated on my ads…but as Google explicitly states in the warning letter - they won’t tell you from where or by who or what you can do stop it. So what could I do about it? Nothing.”

If you hang around her site, you may notice that her posts are quality posts and her income generation is honest. Why would she make invalid clicks in such a revealed journey? Did one of her competitors do that on her behalf? Anyway something has happened. That’s why Google’s automated bot discovered it and sent her auto-generated emails. All these happen while some people continue with AdSense by doing all sorts of unapproved tricks.

Where Is the Problem?

In my opinion its in Google’s reliance on its auto-discovery machine. Why don’t they give data? At least the time period it occurred which then can remind the webmaster to shut down AdSense in such an event. Kumiko says that for her appeals too, she got auto-generated replies which shows no point of appealing.

Why can’t they impose suspensions for certain time periods rather than banning forever? This topic is heavily discussed but it seems Google doesn’t listen. I also started a Digital Point thread to see whether a banned person can re-register with some variation. But the thread says it is impossible.

The only way I can imagine to survive is shutting down AdSense for a long period when getting the first warning email. Although it can be a great tragedy, you don’t have to get it as the end of your business. There are plenty of other money making schemes which sometimes would do better than AdSense and that’s where Kumiko and all other courageous personalities head into.

This may not be preferable in some cases. Luckily WordPress has a way to modify this at its writing panel called Post Slug. Perhaps you might not have noticed it. If the text box is not visible, just click the plus mark at its right and the text box will appear. Just include the name you want there and it will be the new post slug which makes the URL. Remember to follow the mentioned rules of the mechanism.

For an example, the title of this post is “How to Write Descriptive Titles without Making URLs Long in WordPress” but the post slug is “long-titles-short-urls”.