Notes from an Internet Publisher

ADVICE ON CURING A SICK PC

noreply@blogger.com (Steve1943) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 03:26:00 +0000

Does your PC run as fast and reliably as when your first got it?
Almost certainly not!

Most PC problems are symptoms of :

Hardware resource bottlenecks
Windows Registry clutter and damage
Incomplete or damaged software installations
Invasion by virus or spyware

HARDWARE RESOURCE BOTTLENECKS

Resource bottlenecks arise mostly from the phenomenon of "software creep".

Successive updates of software are larger and more resource demanding than their predecessors as functionality, ease of use, and security safeguards are enhanced progressively.

The hardware that once happily processed the original version of your operating system and applications is no longer capable of processing the increased workload without delays.

The solution is to analyze your resource usage - the 4 key variables are

CPU cycles (GHz);
RAM (Gb);
Hard Disk Storage (Gb); and
Network bandwidth (Mb/s)

Free desktop widgets providing real time graphical logs of utilization of the four resources above have proven quite sufficient for me to reliably pinpoint the bottlenecks on my own systems. Unfortunately Yahoo has recently withdrawn their best ones. Can any reader suggest replacements?

Hardware is cheap now - especially RAM and hard disk.
The immediate performance boost from additional RAM or an extra disk costs very little and will extend the life of your system. You can even install them yourself - it's really simple.

CPU's cost much more to upgrade significantly and often require a replacement mother board.
Best deferred as long as you can manage (unless you are a keen home builder).

Network capacity is often out of our hands but I always subscribe to the fastest broadband on offer. So many doors open when you can rapidly store and retrieve your data on-line in Gigabytes - it's a whole new world of freedom and flexibility.

The combination of broadband and Google Gears (and the like) is going to revolutionize the way we compute and ultimately could even deliver us from the tyranny of Microsoft. And there's an amazing amount of online storage capacity available free of charge......

WINDOWS REGISTRY CORRUPTION

Amazing statistic for computer buffs - over 95% of the world PC users suffer from performance degradation and system unreliability as a result of Windows Registry clutter and damage.

Mostly this arises naturally through the ongoing process of adding and removing software over the course of time. The uninstall process rarely removes all traces, leaving a debris of orphan entries to clog the search mechanism and worse.

As the clutter builds, the search overhead grows geometrically, and the PC stutters and becomes sluggish and unresponsive.

Registry clutter is quite easy to fix with an automated Registry Cleaner.
This is a scanning and repair utility - widely available for $20 to $30
Registry Cleaners are often bundled now with other performance tuning tools and offer a cost effective means to defer hardware upgrade.

You'd think that Microsoft would have issued an automated Registry Cleaner by now wouldn't you? Perhaps they just don't like to admit the problem!
The manual Registry editing tools bundled with Windows are far too dangerous for us lesser mortals to play with and are best reserved for experienced PC technicians.

Which leaves a massive market that the automated Registry Cleaner software vendors hunt in like a pack of hungry sharks.
However, be cautious, there have been many examples of abusive selling and many products that do more harm than good. The new Wild West!

My new website http://PcPundit.com has plenty to say on the topic.

INCOMPLETE SOFTWARE INSTALLATIONS

Usually the result of registry damage or false positives by anti-virus or anti-spy software.
Simplest solution is to uninstall then re-install the software - this is effective 9 times from 10.
If you have problems of application incompatibility, your supplier may have some advice - otherwise you'll just have to research the allergy by trial and error.

MALWARE DAMAGE
In case you don't know the term, "Malware" (malign software) is the collective term for Viruses, Trojans, Worms, Spyware, Adware and the like.
The only good solution to Malware is prevention.
So reach for your wallet and grit your teeth.

However, do beware the growing problem of false positives - especially with anti-spyware.
Take frequent registry backups and suppress suspect items through reversible quarantine rather than deletion.
Do NOT blithely assume that anti-spyware is always correct in its malware identification.
There is a lot of software around that is benign in one context but which can be used abusively in another.
As with spam filtering - it's getting to the point where the cops sometimes cause more damage than the crooks!

This article is an extract of the materials in my new website - http://PcPundit.com
I'd much appreciate your taking a look and advising me of any improvements you recommend.

Steven Henderson
Publisher, PcPundit.com

Hopefully inoffensive seasonal greeting

noreply@blogger.com (Steve1943) — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 17:36:00 +0000

Happy Solstice, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanza

Sorry for the delay...but my lawyer has only just approved the following Holiday Greeting:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday(tm), practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all . . . and a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make our world great, and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform, or sexual orientation of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms:
This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal.
It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting.
It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher.

This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.

Enjoy...
Steve

Technorati : politically correct seasonal greeting

LESS IS MORE WITH ADSENSE

noreply@blogger.com (Steve1943) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 16:11:00 +0000

I made a (for me) surprising discovery about Adsense recently - less really is more:

a) I'd been advised by a respected SEO mentor that the presence of Adsense deprecates your page quality ranking with Google (irony or what?), so to go easy.

Usually, I take SEO advice with a healthy pinch of salt until I can test it empirically, there is just so much reported wisdom that is not substantiated by scientific observation.

Unfortunately, I couldn't test this hypothesis statistically right now - there's just too much else going on. In particular, the addition of many new inbound links - which tend to swamp the effect of on-page factors.

So instead, I tracked and analyzed my individual ads' contributions - and found such a skew in their performance that it was a no-brainer to cull the weaker brethren.

b) There is a psychological phenomenon called "ad blindness".
Apparently the more ads we are exposed to, the more likely we are to ignore ALL of them. This understanding motivated me to cull the weaker ads ruthlessly, and sure enough the total clicks and revenue improved.

c) Following the "minimalist" concept a little further, I also experimented with substituting link ads for text ads. To my surprise, I scored more clicks and revenue from a links banner at the top of the page than I did from an ad banner in the same position (whether text only or text/image mixed).

d) On the back of that discovery, I eliminated an eBay shop window which was earning pennies - and the Adsense clicks went up yet again!

e) Most significantly of all, my affiliate ad clicks also increased when I cut down the Adsense - and that means real money. I earn $25 to $100 commissions on those, AND the possibility of repeat orders, which puts the Adsense pennies firmly into perspective.

Maybe I should eliminate the content next, so there are NO distractions at all!
Sadly, many a true word spoken in jest there - it's a devious but effective black hat tactic....

Bottom line:

1) Track and test for yourself - even very simple tests can reveal valuable insights.

2) Treasure your credibility like gold (which it is).
Nobody listens to folks forever pitching - you gotta give before you get.
So cut back on what you sell and stick to offers that you KNOW are good 'uns.

3) Adsense is a last resort best used to monetize a failed site until you can sell it.
If the traffic is good, then you will do better with the following options:
a) selling your own products
b) selling good affiliate products via Clickbank, Commission Juncrion etc.
c) selling the traffic for higher returns (CPA offers, link sales, private PPC deals)

Technorati : adsense, advertising income, monetization
Del.icio.us : adsense, advertising income, monetization

Article Writing Will Never Be the Same Again

noreply@blogger.com (Steve1943) — Sat, 26 May 2007 13:11:00 +0000

Here's an article I recently published at EZine articles,

http://EzineArticles.com/?Article-Writing-Will-Never-Be-the-Same-Again&id=577904

which will interest those of you who use Article Marketing to create traffic. And if you don't already use Article Marketing - you should start - because this kind of traffic is very high quality and long lasting.

SUMMARY

Good articles are dead easy to recognize but a whole lot harder to create. New software automates internet research and helps synthese findings into an article draft ready for final editing. All in under 15 minutes.

ARTICLE

The internet marketing world is agreed on one thing at least - that an original article with solid informative content remains a sure fire way to (a) develop your reputation as expert in a niche and (b) drive TARGETED traffic to your website.

So why don't we all profit from that common knowledge?Simply because, good articles are dead easy to recognize but a whole lot harder to create.

Have you ever needed some articles written fast for your website or article marketing campaign?Ever found yourself in front of a computer screen wondering where to begin?

Ever found a great keyword but don't know enough of the subject to write an article?Ever spent hours searching the internet looking for enough solid information for a quality article?

The fact is that coming up with original articles can be a long painful process, soaking up time you'd prefer to devote to other productive or more enjoyable activity - the classic example of "sweat equity".

So as an author yourself you can well imagine my reaction to a circular promoting some new software that automates the research drudgery and then helps sift and arrange the results into a quality report? That would produce - not the rubbish produced by "spinners" - but the kind of true quality that will enhance our reputation - even in topics we are new to. And would reputedly do all this in under a quarter of an hour?

Despite all the usual scepticism of marketing hype, you'd have to be interested, wouldn't you? Particularly, if the author was already known to you for producing the goods to back up his claims.

Well in this case I already knew and trusted the author (Jonathon Leger) of "$7 Secret" fame. He's a no BS techie kind of guy who always over delivers on his claims.And his $7 Secret has changed the face of IM ebook publishing in a matter of weeks - on pure merit and viral distribution.

So - I rushed to download Jonathan's "Instant Article Wizard". And guess what - it actually works!

I'm not going to waste time here describing IAW because Jonathan has prepared a couple of videos (the first a brief overview, the second a case study) which demonstrate IAW in action. So watch the videos and judge for yourself.

Warning - when you've watched them you'll probably head for the ($67) order button before the second video is even finished - I certainly did. There was nothing to lose except a few minutes of my time thanks to the PayDotCom guarantee of automatic refund if not satisfied.

I downloaded IAW and had my first article produced inside an hour - including the time to install and try out all the features.

Sorry if this sounds like a sales puff - it's not intended to. It's just that I'm excitied about this development because it's headed in the right direction - of improving rather than degrading quality. It's using computers to enhance productivity and creativity to produce quality work.

This shift to quality is so much healthier than the trend to superficial rubbish stemming from "Made For Adsense" spinner type tools. And I believe most true authors will share the view that quality is the direction we should all be headed.

You can see Instant Article Wizard software in action at http://4mostip.com/presents/InstantArticleWizard

Viral Marketing for Dummies

noreply@blogger.com (Steve1943) — Tue, 15 May 2007 23:48:00 +0000

Have you ever been drawn to the idea of what viral marketing might do for your business by finding new, qualified prospective customers ?

But didn't go further......perhaps, like me,because it all got just too complicated?

If so, listen up because this will interest you -

Clickbank expert Harvey Segal got fed up with Google forever changing the traffic generation ground rules (both SEO and PPC). He decided that to continue to rely so heavily on such fickle sources of leads was plain bad business - so to hedge his bets he developed an alternative.

Harvey developed his own viral marketing campaign that anyone can participate in without all the usual complication. And it's a peach.......

Basically, he does 99% of the work and then allows you to keep 100% of the profit which is $10, for giving away his ebook (which as we all know is a lot easier than selling a great product for $10). For details see:
http://4mostip.com/presents/SuperTip

Downloading the ebook is a no brainer because you don't even need to give up your name or email address to download this free product - which clearly explains the whole concept.

Only if you want to re-brand and go viral, will this cost you $10.
Whether you do or not, I still highly recommend the book as a very interesting and educational read.

Actaully, you probably will want to go viral when you see how simple and effective it is AND learnthat you will NEVER be asked for a refund!!
Harvey even underwrites that risk.

Harvey has so completely and cleverly automated the system that there is nothing for us to do except advertise a single affiliate link.

He's systematically removed all the reasons for inaction except "too lazy to take the money"! Anybody can be earning in under 30 minutes.

If you are just starting out or even a seasoned internet marketing professional you will love this one. It's going to be a great moneyspinner - and it deserves to be. Check it out at:
http://4mostip.com/presents/SuperTip

Web 2.0 is made for the little guy.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve1943) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 16:51:00 +0000

Web 2.0 is made for the little guy. I've been slow to appreciate the importance of Web 2.0 in internet marketing. Especially for the smaller guy.
But now that I'm finally starting to "get it", I'm bursting to pass it along!

The traditional WorldWideWeb has been search engine dominated. Despite the power of Google and similar browsers, it is still difficult, frustrating and wery time consuming to assemble an informed opinion on any major topic of interest.

Secondly, the search engine higher rankings are dominated by big outfits with the resources to develop and optimize the information content of their sites. The little guy is progressively being squeezed out of the first 3 pages of search results (folks rarely go behond page 3). Similarly, Pay Per Click advertising is being progressively priced out of reach.

So the stage is open for a new human driven and human scale approach to organising information called "social networking" or Web 2.0.

Specialist sites like Squidoo, My Space, Technorati etc. allow groups of private individuals to contribute their two cents worth on every topic under the sun - either directly or by cross referencing to their own articles, blogs and websites. The Web 2.0 host sites then do a great job of indexing and correlating the resulting info with search labels called "tags".

When these data sites are mined with a query to get the dope on, say, "expresso machines" or "generating web traffic" - you are steered to discussion and documention threads that discuss the topic, in detail, and from many points of view.

The information result is like capturing a cross section of all the blog articles on earth to see what they say globally about the queried topic. Through posts and link exchanges in Web 2.0, even very small players can raise their visibility greatly.

Some very savvy, informed folks are counselling that Web 2.0 will be the phenomenon of 2007. Additonally, we should also factor in the development of RSS feeds (text) and podcasting (the audio equivalent of RSS).

You are advised to do some quick research on Web 2.0 and RSS very soon. These new technologies are already being packaged cleverly to be accessible and easy to use.

Most importantly, they can drive mucho new traffic to your site - quickly, easily and very cheaply compared with the classic alternatives.

Steve Henderson

Free Gift + $1 Niche Content Websites

noreply@blogger.com (Steve1943) — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 11:44:00 +0000

Here's a little gift for you today - something I find
rather useful in my daily life.

It's called Promo Buddy and helps keep track of my promotions,
activities and resources, tools, media etc etc.

Promo Buddy is an integrated set of 36 databases (FileMakerPro) -
designed by internet marketers for fellow internet marketers.
They are well thought through and easy to use.
RRP is $97 but to you NIL - I can't get the price down any further, sorry!

After Roboform and Edit Pad and MS Office, I rate Promo Buddy
among the most useful applications software I have.

a) if you don't already use Roboform to keep track of passwords
and fill out forms on-line then you really should -
Download your free Roboform Lite version here

b) Edit Pad is the Rolls Royce of text editors
Download your free Edit Pad Lite version here

c) Gates doesn't need my help to market Office!!

The catch? Here it comes......and it's not so bad,
as you'll soon see.

To download Promo Buddy you need to join to subscribe to
the Frank Bauer's mailing list. BUT he won't abuse it and you can
cancel at any time.

Promo Buddy is yours to keep anyway.

Frank offers some great package deals on Adsense niche content sites.
The sites are complete and ready to upload with accompanying PLR articles to publish to pull traffic.

Each website comes with on-line translations in 12 languages,
which multiplies the revenue potential.

When I tested the first site, I had my copy branded, uploaded and operating in under an hour,
including learning the system from scratch. The next took under 10 minutes.

The content was good quality information* for an easily targetable, highly competitive niche.
Keyword Elite showed excellent Adwords keyword value ($8.18-$10.22),
so I anticipate good Adsense (or similar) income.

Here's the link - Niche Content Websites

Enjoy,

With best wishes,

Steven Henderson
www.StevenHenderson.com

PS Nevertheless, to pull organic traffic, all PLR content should progressively be re-edited into your own style until it appears unique to the search engines. "Unique" means rating 70% or better in one of the unique content testers you can easily Google.

THE VALUE OF TIME - GET ORGANIZED

noreply@blogger.com (Steve1943) — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 22:26:00 +0000

Copyright (c) Steven Henderson 2006

This is the first in a series of occasional articles on time management and personal productivity.

Observing newbies hack away typing and correcting URL's and finding forgotten passwords, it pains me to think of the time they are wasting quite unnecessarily - both theirs and mine!

Well, my time is pretty valuable to me. And if you want to make money, you had better start thinking similarly about yours. So with that in mind, today's topic is a little software gizmo called Roboform.

Roboform very conveniently stores (in a secure encrypted file) all your website URL's and passwords that you expect to use again.

So now when you want to go to a website - you click up your Roboform "black-book" from your system tool bar - click on the name of the website you want to go to and KAZAM - you are in.

A second useful function is that Roboform stores your personal details in a data base and automatically fills in online forms for you. Just select your right mouse menu command "Fill Forms" and it's done.

Most common functions either happen automatically or are called from your right mouse menu.

Storing your passwords and personal details in Roboform is MUCH more secure than leaving them in your browser for the hackers to enjoy. In fact, Roboform's security is sufficiently good that I prefer to keep my bank and credit card details in Roboform than anywhere else on my PC.

Roboform comes in a free "Lite" version or a PRO version for a few bucks.
The Lite version has full functionality but is limited to 12 URLs.
The PRO version is unlimited which is just as well because I have over 400 URL's stored!

There is a variant available which lets you keep your Roboform data file and programs on a USB stick so you can carry it around with you to plug and go wherever you are.

The "Lite" version is still useful because it can store your more commonly accessed sites - which often account for a good percentage your total log-ins.

I recommend you get the "Lite Version" - try it out for real with your most commonly accessed sites. And when you get fed up with kicking old sites off to make space for today's favorite - you'll know for yourself if and when you need the PRO version.

Until you use Roboform, you can't appreciate just how much time and exasperation it saves.

Follow this link : Download Roboform Here and watch your BP come down nicely!!

Best wishes,

Steven Henderson

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