Can’t tell you how much it means to me that the last tweet that Rexanne did was a retweet of something I posted. This Tweet is exactly a year old today.

Affiliate Summit and Shareasale ThinkTank – vinnyohare.com/affiliate-summ…

— Rexanne Mancini (@Rexanne) May 21, 2012

She was such a lovely woman that made everyone around them a better person. I would like to think that she is in a better place laughing that she was mentioned in this post. Although it has been almost a year since we lost Rexanne it is amazing how many times she pops up online. I get a reminder of her almost every two to three weeks or so. One of her email accounts was hacked and it sends email every once in a while. I smile every time I get a spam email from Rexanne. I think it is her way telling me to get off the computer and go out and have fun.

She also makes appearances on Facebook when I go to invite people to like a page or something since she is still in my friends list. She will also pop up on sponsored stories if she had liked a page in the past. Once again it makes me smile. I am sure I am not the only one of her friends that this happens to.

Thanks Rexanne for making me smile more often, Miss you!

Nothing like a Tweet from Matt Cutts on a Friday afternoon on a Holiday weekend to ruin some peoples weekend.

@dannysullivan your call, of course, but the internal team here has taking to referring to the upcoming release as Penguin 2.0.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 10, 2013

Actually Matt and Danny Sullivan are having a fun conversation about what the updates name is going to be. I see it as a non issue. If you are relying for traffic from the search engines you are doing it wrong. I am looking forward to seeing my search rankings go up as the clear out some more crap.

I actually love it when they do updates as it gives you an idea of what they want usually. I also enjoy seeing all the blog post that pop up blaming Google for a loss of business. Your business should be able to with stand a Google update. It is out of your control where they rank you (If that even matters anymore).

This weekend the webmaster forums and blogs will all be doing their best posting about Henny Penny SEO the other “The sky is falling” things and what they think Google is doing. They should be focusing on making their sites better.

It has been about a month since Hurricane Sandy decided to flood our town of Broad Channel and all our neighbors houses.

As you can imagine the emotions we have had are all over the place. With these emotions in play you have to make decisions about rebuilding, if you want to rebuild and other stuff.

While I have been tearing apart the house for the last month or so it only feels like 3 or 4 days since the Hurricane came. Luckily for us we had a plan in place to go to the next door neighbors house if the flooding got bad. Our neighbor has a second story house and while his first floor was destroyed with water his second story provided us shelter in some crazy weather.

I am sure the details of what happened during the storm will come out better when we do a podcast on this as I have probably times and dates mixed up.

I have to say that the little town we live in really got a lot closer and I never thought that would be possible as everyone knows everyone. There is only about 1000 homes on our island and I have been in my house for 44 years. I have neighbors that are here much longer than me.

Everyone was in the same boat when it came to this storm. We all had no power, nothing to eat and an uncertain feeling about the morning tide that could bring a second flooding.

We decided to wait until we had to leave before we actually made the move. The space between the neighbors house and our house is connected by a back deck that is a few feet higher than the sidewalk. We watched the water come up over the sidewalk and with almost 2 hours until high tide we knew we were in trouble.

While our house isn’t up high on a foundation it never gets water from the tide. Well I shouldn’t say never, it got an inch of water during the no name nor’easter in 1992 I think. Since we evacuated to my brothers house in Syracuse for hurricane Irene last year and didn’t get any water we figured we would wait this storm out. My mistake!

There were signs that we should have left. The weather channels Jim Cantores face when the mayor decided not to evacuate should have been a sign. When I saw mr Wilsen who has been in my town for his whole life say he was leaving while being interviewed before the storm on the tv by Channel 11 news I should have said let’s leave.

By this time it was too late, where could we go? The hotels were already filled and they would be in the same boat as us with no power. This storm was so big that unless you got a full day head start you would still be in the path.

Trying to find a place that could take us and our cats seemed to be an impossible thing. Our only resort was to take shelter in the neighbors house on the second floor.

As the tide was coming up I felt sad that there was water in the house, then I felt glad we were safe. The emotions were all over the place but knowing we were safe was the main thing. As the tide came up we could yell across to the neighbors houses and exchange a “We are alright” with each other.

The next few hours I was on my iPad which was connected to Debbie’s iPad and able to get online. I was posting pictures of the water coming in and since there was nothing else to do we took some videos.

Then it got real in a hurry! The water was coming from the east side. I have never seen this before. The ice machine from the deli on the corner went by as if it was a toy. The machine had to weigh over 500 pounds. Soon after that an empty boat came by so fast it could have pulled a water skier.

The winds were picking up and we were waiting to lose power. From our second floor we could see that something was burning over in the Rockaways but we couldn’t tell what it was. Later on we would find out it was the town of Breezy Point. Whatever we had going on here I knew it was much worse where those fires were.

I snapped a few pictures but I let Debbie do most of the picture taking. For some reason I just didn’t feel like taking pictures. I was too busy thinking about what was happening in our house next door and worried if the house we were in was strong enough to handle the winds that must have been over 100 mph. It was by far the strongest winds I have ever seen.

The light show that the telephone poles were giving off were scary. They would light up for a minute or so and then burn out. I was sure there were downed wires in the water in front of our house.

Our neighbor Joe was busy trying to get our attention letting us know that he thought the house we were in was catching fire. After scrambling through the house we realized it was the wires leading to the house next door to use were arching and smoking. Nothing like throwing throwing fire into the mix of all that was going on.

The rest of the night was filled with watching the wind and updating Facebook which for some reason was still working until the water started to go down. We were amazed that they didn’t cut the power. With the stuff burning all over the city everyone in town was thinking the same thing the next few days.

I was wondering about how many people they would find dead in their houses. Our town is filled with older people that have been through every type of storm and most have always stayed. Most live in single story houses like us and wouldn’t have a place to escape to until it was too late. Luckily this didn’t come to pass as no one perished in the flood from our town.

I started to think about where my family was. I knew my mom was on the 3rd floor of a neighbors house and she was ok because we spoke on the cell phone a few times. I knew my brother joe and his family were at the firehouse which has a second level so I knew they were ok. Brother Eddie was going to a hotel out of town so I knew his family was ok. My brother Danny was the only one I didn’t know about but being he is the fire chief and was probably out working his ass off during the storm and he would be ok.

With the water receding my focus came to getting some much needed sleep. We knew that there was going to be a high morning tide and we needed to be awake for that. Since the wind was still strong I didn’t have the feeling to go outside or into our house to see the damage. In the back of my mind I guess I didn’t want to see it.

I am not sure if I will be adding to this or not. I can see me doing a day by day post covering the first few days.

To raise awareness I usually change my site colors to pink for the month of October. Although it makes some of my sites look crazy as pink isn’t part of the over all color scheme it is the least I can do to raise awareness.

This year I am also walking in the Avon walk for a cure for breast cancer in my hometown of New York City. I will be walking 39 miles over 2 days through the streets of NYC. You can make a donation to the Avon Walk for Breast cancer here.

Here is a short video which gives you all the reasons why I am walking with the affiliate marketers give back team.

Well I gave it a gallant effort of 30 blog post in 30 days but Life got in the way on day 20. I picked up some sort of flu and was sick so I couldn’t go on posting. Actually doing a blog post was the last thing on my mind as you can imagine. Guess it was God’s way of saying “I don’t think so Vinny!”

While I am better now after not being able to eat for 2 days, I have compiled enough stats from 20 straight days of posting to get a good handle on what I would have seen if I had posted for 30 days. That blog post will be the next one. I can tell you that I learned a lot about what people like to read and what people like to share. Your blog isn’t about you it is about your subject at hand.

Once again I will be attending Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas in January 2013. If you are on the fence about going take a look at this video filled with industry veterans.

I hope to see you out in Las Vegas for Affiliate Summit in January.

Today we had all new Internet lines run into our office. For the last 3 weeks or so we have been having intermittent connection to the Internet. We had the cable company come after checking our lines and change the modem. All was starting to work right and then we had some issues again.

Today’s repairman made no exceptions when it came to making sure we were done correctly when he left. From the time he arrived he let me explain the problem and he came to the conclusion that we run 100% new wires all the way up to the pole outside the house. I took the time to help him and he appreciated it. He went on to tell me what the previous repairman did and the shortcuts he took.

He went on to explain to me that his bosses will be driving by in a few days to make sure that he did the job correctly and he wanted to be sure they could just look from their car and know he did a good job. He was proud of the job he did and he knew it. He also knew that I appreciated the work he was doing. He didn’t want to bother cleaning up the guys mess that was before him. He changed everything so that he knew it would work and he also didn’t want to come back and fix it again. He is also sleeping well tonight knowing that my Internet is working. It is the same way with building websites!

Build Your Website Right

I am constantly asked about changing websites once they are built. For some crazy reason I get asked by affiliates if they should go back and change their websites every time there is a Google algorithm change. If there is something I hate it is going back and making changes to existing pages. I frankly see no reason to change pages to try to keep up with Google or any search engine for that matter.

I have one person (Yes you Sharon) that always ask me if she should go back and change page whenever I tell her something that is wrong with one of the new pages she shows me. It is usually something so minor that it isn’t really that smart to waste enough time going back to change all the pages on your site. It is actually not a good idea to have all the pages optimized on your site the same way anyway. One change of the algorithm and all of your site becomes dead. No one wants that!

I would rather spend time developing new pages and moving on then looking back. I suggest that you do the same.

A few months back I was lucky enough to take part in a Kickstarter project. My friends The Dollyrots started a Kickstarter project to get funding for their new album. I am sure they were sitting around saying that $7500 would do the job and wondering if they would ever reach that level. Something happened that they didn’t expect, they raised $33,124. They did this by offering fans the album early along with some up close personal items from the band. Watch this video and you can see the passion they have. I think the fans have more passion for their music then they knew.

The reason they raised this much money is because they are passionate about what they do and the fans know it and feel it too. I have been following the band since 2007 and have seen them live more times than I can count. They always take the time to greet any fan before and/or after they perform and say thanks for coming. It reminds me a lot of Richard Petty who is famous for signing every autograph for a fan that asks for one.

We have had their album for a few weeks now and I can’t wait to see the band when they play here is a few weeks. I have all the songs memorized since I have been playing it for a while now. I feel like I know something the rest of the world doesn’t yet. Kind of cool being an insider. The new CD came out today and I encourage you to buy it on Itunes – or Amazon.

The band is also using social media very well. Follow The Dollyrots on Twitter and you will see exactly what obstacles the band face while on the road. I love the late night visit tweets after they have had a few beers myself to fast food places. I can say that I feel proud that I showed them what Twitter was and now they have over 5000 loyal followers waiting on their every tweet. Their passion comes out in the tweets as well as the music when they are on stage playing what they love to do. Here is the first single off the new album.

Help the band out by using the social media buttons below and help spread the word about their new album.

When you start making websites over and over you always seem to make the new website with lessons taken from the other websites you have built before. It makes total sense but sometimes you have to consider the niche of the new website before applying all the things you think need to be on your new site.

For example you may make sites that have a pop up to capture email addresses. That is fine I have used them and although I hate them as a user in some niches they work great. My latest site it wasn’t working as planned so I sat back and wondered why. I emptied my cookies and loaded my site as if I was a first time visitor. When the pop up came up after 30 seconds I found it really annoying since I was in  the middle of reading an article when it popped. I then went on my phone and did the same thing and when the pop up loaded it blocked out my whole screen and I couldn’t even exit out of it. Total fail on my end.

Also on my latest site I had an Adsense ad after the post. I have this practically on all my sits as it seems to work great because after the user reads the page they need to do something and having four blue links to click on seems to be a good thing. On this site the Adsense wasn’t getting many clicks at all per 10,000 views. I think it got 2 clicks and made me 10 cents, not exactly going as planned. I knew I needed something in that spot and I knew I needed it quickly as I am sure Google looks at your overall conversion. They say they don’t but I would bet they do.

I decided that since the site was new I needed to build out the newsletter list. I logged into Aweber and created a 300 x 250 looking newsletter sign up box and placed it after my post. First day I got 15 subscribers within the first hour. Since then I have been getting a new subscriber almost every hour. For a new site this is pretty good. I will probably change a few of my other non performing sites to this method. If I didn’t think outside the box this never would of happened. Of course I still have to figure out out to monetize the site better.

Right now the site is using Amazon for its only affiliate program links and since there is no Adsense on the site the users are visiting Amazon more. My conversion rate went up by 1% since the switch. I wasn’t really thinking that Amazon sales would be benefited from removing the Adsense but it has.

When you are making new sites try not to rely on what is working on your other sites. It may not be what is best for your site, or your users in the long run.

I was just looking through my stats and this question came up in my server logs. My first thought was if you spent the time to think about it and type that long-assed question in my search box then you probably already know the answer.

YES it will. Buying traffic on Fiverr may be a good short term strategy but Google will eventually see what you are doing and your site will be penalized and found at the bottom of the search results. While Fiverr is a good place for some things I wouldn’t be caught dead buying traffic or buying backlinks or link wheels or anything like that.

I use Fiverr to get logos, and maybe get some videos made. You would have to be crazy to use a site like Fiverr to have anything done off page for a website that you care about. Think about it for a second. Say you buy 50 backlinks, all of them are on garbage sites and 50 other sites have the same backlinks as you. Sometimes they are the only backlinks a site has. How easy is it for Google to go in and see these backlinks and realize that they were bought links. It is simple!

Odds are I would be able to see that you bought links or even worse link wheels from Fiverr and I don’t have the expansive knowledge that Google has in its arsenal. Unless you don’t care about the site you are building and only want a 3 week boost for your site then you can buy traffic from places like Fiverr. I have nothing against them but using it to get traffic to your site is not sensible.