Make money online, Making money ideas, news and reviews

Yahoo Services at their Best

2008-11-14T16:59:00.000-08:00

I have not written in this blog for quite some time (because of work overload mostly) but this incident was too funny to keep it to myself.

A few years ago I registered a few .com domains with yahoo small business at a promotional rate of $4.95/year (or around that price anyway) . Last year (I don't remember exactly) when yahoo announced their regular prices I decided it was time to part from their services so I initiated the transfer process which was completed within a few days and all the domains were working properly on their new "registrar". It was obvious to me that the no other action was needed on my part. I was wrong ...

Last month I received a yahoo email that my one of my domains was suspended because I had failed to pay their $34.95 annual registration fee !!! Had they not noticed that the domains had been transfered elsewhere ? Of course they had the other domains completelly transfered out of their system. Wasn't this automated ? I initiated a transfer and part of that process was Yahoo Domains sending me an email to confirm that the transfer had my consent !!! (and wasn't fraudulent)

Anyway I went along and logged in my control panel in order to cancel the service but since they considered my billing obligations past due, no action was allowed - except I believe entering a new credit card number. Because of this I decide to send them an email explaining the situation so it can be resolved but this lead to a few emails back and forth in what appears to be a total miscommunication between me and the YAHOO email support . I will let you enjoy them ... still in doubt whether the responses were coming from a human being though ...

Original message

This is an automated notice. Replies to this address will not be received. If you have questions, please contact Yahoo! Customer Care. For your protection, Yahoo! will never ask you to provide your billing information via email.

Dear G Kontopoulos,

Your Yahoo! Domains account is past due and has been suspended. Although we have previously sent past-due notices, we have not yet received payment for your account.

Amount due: 34.95

Service period: 10/19/2008 00:00:00 to 10/18/2009 23:59:59

The Yahoo! ID associated with this account: xxxxxxxx

The domain name for this account: xxxxxxxxx.com

To update the payment information on file for your account:

1. Go to the Service Summary page at https://billing.yahoo.com to view a list of your active services. Services with past-due payments will be marked with a past-due alert.
2. Click the "update your payment method" link in the past-due alert.
3. To edit the payment method you are currently using to pay for your service, click "Edit." To switch to a new payment method, click the "Add a new payment method" link in the upper-right corner of the page. Be sure to click "Continue" to save your changes.
4. Once you have updated the payment information for your service, we will attempt to charge your payment method using the new information.
5. Verify that payment information has been updated for your service by confirming that the service is no longer in past-due status. When you return to https://billing.yahoo.com, you should see your service marked with the word Active.

To update payment information for additional services, return to the Service Summary page at https://billing.yahoo.com and repeat the steps above.

If the information on file in the billing center is valid, you may need to contact your credit card issuer or PayPal to correct the problem.

If you are having problems updating the information as instructed above, please visit our online help center or call our toll-free number at (866) 800-8092 between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. PST, Monday through Friday, excluding holidays.

We appreciate your attention to this matter.

The Yahoo! Billing team

My response

I have been receiving emails about my domain registration
expiring and unpaid bills but xxxxxxx.com and any other domain that I
had with yahoo has been transfered to another register almost a year ago

I am trying to cancel the plan but it does not let me

Please correct this in your records

Please correct this in your records

Their response

Hello George,

Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Small Business Support.

As per our records we see that your domain xxxxxxx.com is still active
with Yahoo!, kindly cancel your domain online and if you are not able to
do it online kindly contact Yahoo! Customer Care Billing 1-866-562-7219
to force cancel the domain.

Please do not hesitate to reply if you need further assistance.

Regards,

Shankar
Yahoo! Small Business Support

For assistance with all Yahoo! services please visit:

http://help.yahoo.com/

My Response

This is the second support request

xxxxxxx.com was successfully transfered to
another account outside yahoo domains 1 year ago
(using the accepted transfer method all registrars use)
and yahoo had accepted the transfer
I thought it was obvious that the
yahoo domains will not bill me again about it ??

Please cancel the account for xxxxxxxx.com

I am trying to do it with the web interface
but it does not let me

The previous person instructed me to contact
customer service and I am (email support)
since I am neither in the US nor do I have time
to spend on the phone for something I consider trivial

Thanks

Their response

Hello,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Customer Support.

To better serve your needs we now provide care for billing related
concerns exclusively over the phone.

Please call us at 1-800-318-0870 Monday through Friday from 6AM to 6 PM
Pacific Standard Time, and a customer care representative will be happy
to assist you.

If you prefer to go online where you can view all billing, payment, and
credit card information, make payments, or update your services anytime
day or night, please go to

http:// billing.yahoo.com .
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,

Yahoo! Customer Care
For assistance with all Yahoo! services please visit:
http://help.yahoo.com/

MY FINAL RESPONSE

You people just don't read the email

well I am considering this issue FINISHED

here is our previous conversations
Please don't contact me again about THIS !!!

TNX - not as good as advertised

2008-06-29T06:49:00.000-07:00

I have talked about TNX before in what it seemed like a praise of them. Its been six months already since I first tried them out and I have used them extensively all this period and I have drawn some conclusions which I would like to share with you guys.

The system in theory is pretty effective but in practice it has many pitfalls. First of all for those that don't know TNX let me just say its an easy way to get one way backlinks to your site. Of course there is a price to pay for this. You create your ad campaign, you choose what types of sites you want it appearing on and then you can potentially get thousands of backlinks withing days. So far so good.

In my experiments with TNX this my conclusions:

Not clear backlink benefits

I have tried to get links from relevant sites (chose themes/categories specific to my site's theme) in order to get the maximum benefit. After trying it for 6 months its still not clear to me if there were ANY benefits with ANY of the ad campaigns that I did. I am not drawing a definite conclusion here since this was not a controlled experiment and I was actually trying to get cheap links from PR0 pages. Thus, other people might have actually got good results with TNX and high PR links.

Google can probably detect irrelevant links

I have also tried selling links through this system. I tried this with one site on which I had it on for about 2 months. The links that were appearing on the ad spaces were more often than not irrelevant (not same category as my site). Google probably took notice of those links and penalized my site with PR drop from 4 to 0. But that had also a snowball effect on the money that I was getting for each link sold on the site. PR4 links were worth more than the PR0 links. Thus I decided to stop selling links using TNX. Another side effect of this drop was the unwillingness of other webmasters of exchanging links with me (because of the PR0).
If the system would not allow links to irrelevant sites than this probably would have been avoided and maybe this is something that the developers of TNX should take into consideration for their next update.

You could be charged for links dropped

I recently was doing a back check on some of the links that I "gained" 3 months ago and discovered that most of them were reported "by the system" as "NOT FOUND". After a brief discussion with the support of TNX I realized that EVERYONE has to manually visit each campaign and DELETE the links that are reported "NOT FOUND". Here is the part of the relevant discussion.

Why am I being charged for links

Date: 2008-06-27 23:39:17

Name: Giorgos Kontopoulos

Message:

that don't exist !!!
This is ridiculous

I just checked today for the first time and

most of the links Even your system concludes "not found"

Almost 90% of the links are "NOT FOUND"

EVEN when I go and check and there are no links there !!

What I conclude is that for 3 months now I am paying
for NON existent links

I demand this issue be resolved,
And I demand half of the link sales (at least)
to be credited back to my account

I am seriously thinking of refunding the money
and leaving from this network

Seriously disappointed
Giorgos Kontopoulos

Date: 2008-06-28 03:59:24

Name: Alex

Message:

Dear Giorgos,

You are more than welcome to delete any link that has a "Not found"
status and get a full refund of points spent to cover its cost.
It does not matter when the link is deleted, as long as it has a
"Not found"status, you are entitled to a full refund of your points.

>>I am seriously thinking of refunding the money and leaving from
this network

I think you just need to ask more questions so you have better
understanding of the TNX network. In case you decide to get a
refund and leave, please re-open this ticket.

Regards,
Alex.

This is clearly something that the system ought to be able to do on its own. It would be a full time job otherwise if one had anything more than 1000 links with TNX, and had to continuously check if the links that were acquired automatically HAD to be CHECKED manually for their EXISTENCE.

Those are the major reasons that have convinced me that TNX was no more for me.

Have you guys had any experience with TNX ? What did you think of the system ?? Any successes ?

Earn money as a freelance link builder

2008-02-20T06:55:00.000-08:00

It is probably apparent to most of us by now that link building is an essential part of improving your search engine position and consequently the traffic search engines send to a site. There are numerous free link building techniques but one of the most beneficial is link exchanges. You find sites that are relevant to your site's theme/subject and exchange links with them. Those links have the potential of sending targeted traffic but are also valued by the search engines (including Google) more than other links because of their relevancy factor.

Link exchanges are time consuming.
A successful link exchange includes finding a relevant site to your theme making the necessary contact with the site's owner or webmaster (usually via email) and communicating the willingness for an exchange and then placing the actual link and making sure that the relevant site places a link to your site. Not all contacts result in link exchanges because not all site owners understand or care for the benefits of such exchanges. Thus the process become

Why Link exchange freelancers ?
There are lots of SEO companies and web consultants that offer link exchanges as part of their SEO services. They either have personnel specializing in link exchanges or they outsource some or all link exchanges to freelance link builders. If you have not thought about it before, anyone can become a link builder and do link exchanges.

What can you expect ?
What is expected of you is to have a good command of the English language (preferred language of communication) and be able to write an enticing sentence and get relevant sites to exchange links with you. Having some experience on why and how linking works will help a great deal to find the relevant sites or you could otherwise be exchanging links with sites that google would not find valuable and the companies are not willing to pay for. Most SEO companies will have a minimum requirement of the potential link partner's site to have at least PageRank of 2 on homepage and that the page where the link is to be placed to be crawled at least once a month (can be determined by the Cache date of the page).

3 way link exchanges
Most clients needing SEO services will not be willing to place links on their sites and essentially they want 1 way links. Most SEO companies overcome this limitation by offering links to potential link exchanging sites from their directories. This essentially makes the whole process a 3 way link exchange. A link building freelancer will have access to those directories and place the links there; links to the sites that have confirmed willingness to exchange links that is.

How much can you earn ?
Different companies are charging their clients different prices depending on their experience and niche of client, but anywhere from $0.50 - $10 is probably about right per successful relevant link. The closest the theme/subject to the client's site, the better the PR of the homepage or the link page or the better the crawl rate of the link page can drive the price to the high end of the range.

Its sounds easy !!!
And it is in theory but if you are not at ease with searching for relevant/similar sites or sending lots of email communications and receiving only a fraction of answers it can make this an overwhelming task.

If you are looking for ways to make a buck, hope you find this useful.

PS1.
I am also in need of a link building freelancer/partner
I am also offering web and seo services to my clients and I am in need of someone willing to take over this part of link building. My customer's list does not allow me to offer too much money per link for this service but, I am willing to work with an inexperienced person and teach him the ins and outs of successful link exchanging. Only requirement is that this person has a good command of the English language. Serious offers please send me an email (I am sure you can find it here or on geoland.org) or post here and I will be notified of the post.

PS2.
I know its been some time since the last time I wrote something for this blog but I usually do write about stuff that I find interesting and I didn't find any recently.

TNX.net text link ads

2008-01-04T01:57:00.000-08:00

TNX is a new text link ads broker/network that has been gaining momentum lately. On the surface it looks like most of the text link systems but deep inside its quite different.

Any website owner with at least some pages with higher PR than 0 can register as a publisher. Upon registering you should include the TNX code into your site's template and let the system crawl your pages (which could take up to a week) and then you are ready to sell text links. TNX does not serve sitewide links. Instead each page can have up to 4 unique links from advertisers.

Advantages over other similar systems

Individual page links are sold and this means more money for the publisher and greater text link benefit for the advertiser.
The advertisers select pages based on their theme/subject and value of PR and not based on the actual URL. The system does not allow the advertisers to know the actual site that their links are placed on and this helps prevent fraud (i.e. google paid links reporting etc)
The publisher has the opportunity to approve or disapprove advertisers on each and every page (up to 4 links per page)
The advertisers have at their disposal a wizard that can help them easily create many different text links with slightly different anchor texts.
There is a referral program in place that can help a user earn more money.
As of 01/04/2008 there are 39 125 Registerd Users with a daily growth of +0.28%, and there are 31 201 403 text link ads sold so far

If you are a website owner interested to know how much you could be making there is an income calculator on their homepage. You can enter your websites URL and a rough estimate of your pages PR and get your site's maximum revenue from selling TNX text ads.

If you are an advertiser you can try the system for free. Register here and get your free 5000 TNX points by posting on this thread.

GamerClix ads review

2008-01-04T01:33:00.000-08:00

I have been experimenting lately with different sources of revenue for my online games site and I have come to install the GamerClix ads above each individual game (i.e. above pac man).

The system is very flexible and easy in setting up and running. Anyone who has used adsense in the past would find it a breeze to work with. You can use the system's "code wizard" to choose from a variety of standard industry ad formats and change the colors to match your site style and end up with the javascript code that you can "copy and paste" into your html template. This makes it a perfect candidate for an adsense alternative but, not quite. GamerClix is still in its infancy. Not too many advertisers have signed up and as a consequence the same ads are shown over and over. On top of that I have experienced that the few clicks that my ads received have resulted in no revenue which is quite puzzling but, its only been a week that the ads are running so I am willing to give it one more week to see how it goes.

In my opinion the only disadvantage is the luck of advertisers. The GamerClix team should probably set an affiliate program (which is lucking right now) in place and entice the users to refer others to the system in order to get a critical mass of active advertisers and publishers.

Make money selling text link ads

2007-12-26T16:44:00.000-08:00

The reason why people buy links should be obvious by now to most of you. As a summary some buy links for the traffic it can bring to their site, some buy to increase their PageRank and some buy to make google see them associated with a frequently searched query phrase. If you want to read more on this please visit my post on selling links.

Some people that have been around for some time might have noticed the recent crackdown by Google on paid link publishers and advertisers. The internet community has divided itself in two camps because of this, one that is welcoming such actions from google and the other one that is calling them hypocrites. I am not here to point fingers at neither camp. The truth of the matter remains that links are still being sold and bought but not out in the open anymore.

If you have a site that has either good traffic or a nice PR then you can certainly find link buyers for it.

Depending on the traffic on your site, your PR or the theme (niche) of your site people might be willing to pay from $1 to a few hundreds dollars per month for a single link.

How do you find advertisers/sponsors for your blog ?
The easiest way that I have found is through the webmaster forums. Lots of people visit places like DP V7n and WMT on a daily basis to post their links offers or find such offers. In most forums you can find such deals in the "Buy Sell Trade" Business section.

For easier browsing the abbreviations used in the trade forums are WTB (=want to buy), WTS (=want to sell) and WTE (=want to exchange) so one can easily find niche specific offers using the appropriate abbreviations and the niche topic using the built in search (i.e. WTB travel).

Text link broker services
Finding your own advertisers is probably the most profitable way to sell links but it is time consuming. If you want to be free from the burden of finding advertisers for you sites there are professional services to do just that for you.

The way this usually works is:

you submit your site for inclusion
you copy and paste a code snippet in your sites pagess
your site is evaluated to see if it is worth to display any text links
after approval it is entered in a directory of publishers for prospective advertisers to see and purchase links
when advertisers are interested you get a notification and approve their links which are automatically displayed on your site
if you reach the minimum payout for the month you can withdraw your money with paypal or other means

This is just to give you an idea of the process. These steps are not always there, and each text link service will have their own step by step guide to set them up.

I have tried numerous text link brokers in the past, some have not accepted my sites, some have not delivered any advertisers and that is why its worth to try a few and see which ones are working for you.

The two automated link selling programs that I have used successfully in the past are Text Link Ads and Direct Link Ads.

What services have you successfully used ?

Bloggers/Writers: get $$ for guest blogging

2007-12-22T11:31:00.000-08:00

I am looking for guest bloggers for this money making blog as well as my web design blog

Why do I need guest bloggers ?
I don't have time to post very often since I only post unique articles (not copy and paste)

How will this work ?

Be a webmaster, designer, SEOer (other related field worker), or have ideas on how to make money on the internet
send me unique article(s) that can fit well in geoland.org or here (There is no real guidelines other than being original and yourself and your articles are inline with the rest of the blog's)
if you get 2 or more articles posted in a month I will pay you $10/per article minimum. I can probably give more if they are exceptional articles. The monthly period is not a strict requirement either.

As added bonues you also get

my friendship (priceless ;-) )
2 permanent links to your blog on every article that you write,
get exposed to my regular audience 50-100 uniques a day on each blog

The articles have to be unique and thoughtful, please don't waste my time and yours sending me articles that took you 1 minute to write or are just copied and pasted from elsewhere.

Hope I covered everything that needs to be said, but if you have more questions please post them here.

GiorgosK.
_________

Real People make Real money on the internet

2007-12-12T18:31:00.000-08:00

Jim Westergren is a well respected SEO professional in the DP forums. He is also known for running his company seo-fusion.com which apparently was sold recently for $157,700. We had a chance to chat with him about SEO, seo-fusion, the sale, the future, and Jim as a person. Here is what he had to say:

-Jim when and where were you born ?

1982, Malmö Sweden

- any studies ?

Until age of 17, then I left school to do more important things in my opinion

- any other work experience (other than seo-fusion) ?

From age 17 to 22 I worked in an international organisation in Denmark. It was very tough but I learned a lot. I learned for example that you are yourself responsible for everything that happens in your life and that you are totally capable of doing anything, it is all in the mind.

- when did you discover the internet ? what did you use it for ?

1997 or something I guess. At that time it was mostly used for school to find information. I made my first web site in 1999. Then from end of 1999 to end of 2004 I had no access to internet. At end of 2004 I discovered Google and was totally hooked.

- when and how did you discover you can make money off the internet ?

I learned how to do web sites and so I started a small company offering web design. This was in 2005.

- when and why was seo-fusion conceived ? who was part of it ?

On the Jan 13th, 2006 I opened up that site and blogged about it
. I had bought the site from a person on DP. At that time it was only me and partners. Later on I got a few employes in Sweden. seo-fusion.com represented the english part of my company.

- what did seo-fusion help its clients with ?

Link building

- what was your workday schedule like ? (days/week ? hours/week ?)

Impossible to say. Some weeks I didn't so much other than work and some weeks it was more relaxed.

- how many clients did you get over its existence ?

This is a bit hard to answer depending on how you count. We had over 200 clients using our Directory Submission and perhaps 20-30 clients that bought link building packages.

- how much was seo-fusion making per month, at the beggining and before the sale, what where the expenses ?

When I started out with the company part time I charged $15 per hour. In it's high peak after about 1 and a half year me and my employee grossed around $30.000 a month.

- why was it sold ? how much ?

There is a lot I could write about it but I can say that it is a combination of many things that culminated me to do what I did. Some of these things are in order of magnitude: Wanted to follow my writing dream, not having a life outside the internet, having almost no friends in real life, a complicated big religious conflict, Googles campaign against link selling, the inability to service more as all resources was used up, the services became less effective and gave less results, the pain of always being behind and having backlog, the urge to find a girlfriend, my fathers dominant personality and much more (read about the whole story here)

$157,700 USD

- where did Epiphany find out about your willingness to sell seo-fusion ?

They read this article and contacted me. They were one of my biggest clients who was resellers. They needed the services to continue and so they bought everything. So I didn't even write anywhere that it was for sale.

- was seo-fusion a good experience overall ?

Yes, was a great experience and I learned a lot.

- what where your hobbies before/with/past seo-fusion ?

People, travelling, discussing, reading, writing, thinking, philosophy, metaphysics, personal development, learning, astronomy, sci-fi, future speculations, games, internet, internet marketing, movies, music, history, science

- what things do you do for work lately ?

I am planning my own web site projects that I will invest in, invest some in the stock market and continue work as a internet marketing consultant for bigger companies.

- will you continue in the SEO field ? any details ?

I will continue as a consultant for SEO and internet marketing and I am actually right now negotiating with a big company in Stockholm Sweden. If they accept my offer then I will work for them for some weeks and then part time externally. Otherwise I am not doing so much SEO except for my own web site projects.

- what would you advise people that want to make money on or from the internet ?

You earn a lot of money if you help companies make more money. Don't think about money in the beginning, make something that people really want. Study personal development.

- Is there anything that you would like to share with us ?

At the end of 2004 I returned to Sweden with no education, any kind of money, experience or friends. I sat down in front of my computer to learn web design and SEO and today 3 years later I have a company with assets worth over $300K and I personally own 90% of the company. So IT IS possible!

To read some more, you can see:
http://www.jimwestergren.com/second-annual-report-my-success-online/
http://www.jimwestergren.com/first-annual-report-my-success-online/

Here are 2 great forums:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/forums/
http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/

Make money with Auctions: site review

2007-12-07T19:43:00.000-08:00

I have always wanted to learn the ins and outs of people making money with auctions. I have been hearing stories every so often about ebay and how people are always selling and buying stuff there but I never had the time to learn about it.

According to successwithauctions.com that promises to teach you how to make money online for free the idea is simple

buy low, sell high and take the difference to supplement your income
...
Think of it like having a neighborhood yards sale, you can sell old items that are just laying around the house or forgotten about in your attic. You can find unused items from your neighbors and friends, or buy a product online for cheap

Ebay alone has grossed $44.3 billion in sold merchandise last year. Other sites that can handle public auctions for their users are Half.com, uBid.com, ShopGoodWill.com but there are others.

What do you need to start making money with Auctions ?

A credit card, debit card, or other pre-paid card
Computer with internet access
Product - Buy low and sell high

Definitely the most important aspect of this kind of business is how to buy low and sell high. This is the part that needs some creativity and that what determines the real winner. For example if you have a hobby that you not active in anymore and the equipment is just rusting in a storage area think about auctioning it.

The sites main focus is auctions but it also has lots of material for anyone who is interested in earning a living from home with subjects such as affiliate programs, eBooks, paid surveys, blogging, newsletters etc.

Furthermore it has articles on How one can start a Home based business and it includes necessary information on business licensing, startup financing, business software, how one can start their business website, and even articles on positive business thinking and how one can set short and long-term business goals.

Make money writing and distributing articles

2007-12-02T10:02:00.000-08:00

Webmasters need backlinks
One of the ways webmasters can get one way backlinks to their websites is through article distribution. There are on the internet lots of websites that would hold articles written by different kind of authors and are usually called article directories. These authors give their articles for free distribution in exchange for the recognition and 1-2 backlinks to their website which is usually put in their Bio box at the end of each article.

Most webmasters are not good at copywriting
The article directories in order to include the articles, require that the articles have some proper syntax and should be nicely written. Most webmasters are not famous for their writing skills hence the need for copywriters for article writing. The better an article that you can write the easier is to be accepted in the article directories. Thus if you are a freelance writer and you can't seem to land any gigs in any of the "find a freelancer" places you can try posting at the webmaster forums content writing sections.

Add value to your service; Distribute the articles
You can additionally distribute the articles to article directories for an extra fee. The more directories you submit to the more you can ask for because the more links the webmaster could get. The way this variation of article writing works is pretty simple. You write an article for a topic related to your customer's website and you use links to that site in your author's Bio box when you distribute it.

A few article directories you can start with


EzineArticles.com
GoArticles.com
ArticleDashboard.com
SearchWarp.com
ArticlesBase.com
iSnare.com
SelfGrowth.com
Buzzle.com
ArticleCity.com
IdeaMarketers.com
ArticleAlley.com
Web-Source.net
SelfSEO.com
Amazines.com
SearchGuild.com
ArticleSphere.com
BusinessKnowHow.com
PromotionWorld.com
ArticlesFactory.com
ExcellentGuide.com/article
ContentDesk.com
ArticleCube.com
AfroArticles.com
ArticleBiz.com
www.articlesrevenue.com
articles-heaven.com

Or you can search the internet for more article directories.

I am warning you though, distributing articles can be a pretty time consuming task. You could certainly get article submitter software that could help you get it done faster.

Automated article distribution
It recently came to my attention the online service of Article Marketer. A writer can use this service to distribute any number of articles to more than 10000 possible publishers affiliated with Article Marketer. The advantage is that you don't have to do the distribution yourself. You only write the article choose appropriate categories insert your Bio details and the distribution is automatically handled by the system. On top of that article marketer's human editors are checking your syntax, grammar and clarity of your articles before they get distributed and allow you to correct your mistakes.

The service has a free option that promises to distribute the articles to about 20% of those publishers. I am currently using the free service to find out how effective their distribution is and I will probably be reporting the results soon.

If you are a copywriter, article writer, press release writer I encourage you to post your service website in the comments since I am sure your services might be needed in the future from visitors to my site (and me probably)

My Hosting misfortunes

2007-11-28T00:22:00.000-08:00

This blog is still hosted by blogger.com and I can't complain since I am not paying a dime for it. Apart from this website I have a bunch of other sites (client sites mostly) that need some paid hosting. In the last 2 months I was forced to change 3 hosts and my experience I am going to explain here. I am not going to get much into the details (not any technicalities) of what exactly went wrong but I do want to point out wrongful attitudes in their part, since I was very surprised myself (when I found out).

doorhost.net
I think this is a one man show, a reseller of ihsystem.com systems it seems. I have been hosting with this company since 2003 but back then the reseller account belonged to some other person. The support was always very responsive trying to find out what has gone wrong and all was solved within a matter of hours at most. Some time in the beginning of the year I think, the ownership changed and the hosting experience has turned bad since that time. I noticed that the doorhost forums stopped being so active. That my support tickets went unanswered for weeks and the deciding point was when all my sites were down for a 5 days and still my support tickets were bouncing back saying that the email of the recipient was full. Could not find even a telephone to call this company/guy to support me. I tried through the listed number for ihsystem.com and I did get through to the guy behind doorhost but even that was a disaster. Something was wrong with the line and had such noise and we could not hear each other. It took us about 5 minutes for me to tell my main domain on the account and for him to tell me another email that I could send my support ticket. What a nightmare I remember!!!

powweb.com
A hosting for hobbyists as some person that is still hosted with powweb described them. The truth is that what attracted me to them was the huge amount of hard disk space they provided and the allowed bandwidth that both seemed unlimeted at the time. Well it turned out that the servers themselves were really very fast. Static pages were running to what it seemed lightning speed. But when it came time to do a database query they were quite often not responsive. From what I realized later on there was no usage policies in place (never mind enforced programatically) as to how much resource one could use. I was very often on the live chat trying to see what the problem was.

The incident that lead to me cancelling the account was some time in October that I would see my site loading slowly for some days and then one day it was not responding at all. As soon as the live support came to answer my call 40 minutes later the site was loading OK and the support guy (it was a woman actually) assured me that there was nothing wrong with the site (duh I knew already). I told her to see if there was anything wrong with it and all she said is that they are doing some sort of update (updating their database servers) that did not know how long it would take. Not even a rough estimate in hours, days, or months ?! when I specifically asked her about one!!

The powweb community forums is full of customers that seem to be defending powweb. Now I realize they are probably just resellers that are gaining enough, and have to defend their business ... I used to post often there and I would describe the problems everytime I encountered one. People were helpful lots of times but they would be very offended when talk was done about powweb's services or failure to actually provide quality services. Today I went to check the post related to that last incident and to my surprise ITS GONE! Of course it was a bad testimony of how "well" powweb is running. I would have quoted some parts from that post but oh well. If you search their forums on any given day you will see a few"slow mysql" comments.

resellerzoom.com
Their service was excellent for 1 1/2 year that I was with them. Around September an email came that said that the prices would have to be raised in order to continue to keep the same level of quality in the services provide. The price increase was not much so I went along. Some time in October all my clients sites were all down. The support tickets were usually answered within a few minutes but this one time the answer was late (in a matter of hours). The support person informed me that the sites were all OK. So it was a never ending back and forth of emails (probably 20 in count) and 3 days of painless frustration before the issue looked like it could be solved but the lies and the wrongdoings were such that I had to cancel the account.

On the first day needless to say I was checking the site from every possible place on the planet using the remote traceroute services provided from http://www.traceroute.org/. Still the support would tell me that everything was OK. I even put friends to look my domains up from other parts of the world and they all confirmed that they could not be reached. The problem is temporarily fixed and I rest assured that everything is OK. Next day when I check again I face the same problems. In the meantime my clients are calling and sending emails asking of what the problem is and why they can't use their emails. Luckily for me the Greek networks were running slow at the time and I presented that as my excuse. I speak with a manager on email and I offer to upgrade my service to a more professional hosting package if that would solve my problems. All I ask is 15 days of trial to make sure its worth the money I am going to be paying for it. I rest assured that I can get 15 days for free; I still had about 10 days until my other hosting service with them expired. Account gets setup the next day (3rd day of trouble) and running smoothly (different servers, more powerful, triple the money that I would be paying though), but also my paypal account gets charged a little while later. Looking at the support forums I realize that they are having RAID rebuild troubles for the last 2 days on my original servers, and no one bothered to inform me on my support correspondence. I talk to the manager about that and why I was charged early and he tells me it payment was automated and could not stop it. I don't like this bull!!! I ask that all my accounts get canceled and pack my stuff and go. I was lied to twice and I had no hosting for 2 days; I don't think I could trust them anymore.

Just for the record I have to say that all of these companies have actually refunded the money of my unused services without much hassle.

I am finally with mediatemple.net and very happy. They do have a resource limit enforced and monitored in a way of GPUs. 1000 GPU is the least processor power one can get with media temple's gridservice and that is equivalent to running a continuous 10% load on one processor for one month which I am satisfied with.

They charge $20/month but with a "Special offer code" kirupa07 the price can decrease by another %15 which can brings the monthly cost down to $17/month. If you decide to pay in advance for the year the price goes down to $14.16/month after you apply the "Special offer code".

You can check the speed of the servers by checking two of my sites that run on them http://www.gamesonline4free.net and http://geoland.org.

Get more updated Media Temple Special Offer Codes

How to make money online ?

2007-11-13T16:32:00.000-08:00

Looking at my stats today (that I had not looked for some time) I noticed that for the last 20 days quite a few people visited this very blog looking for how to make money online. This site can be found on the second page of google results for the query in question so it was no surprise. It was no surprise either that most of them left immediatelly (bounced back). People are looking for a magic formula to make money online it seems !!!

The title of this website reveals that this site is NOT about making big loads of money in any short period of time even though you could but, I am not promising it. I am just presenting ideas on how I have managed to generate some revenue and ways to improve on those ideas. I personally have managed to make enough part time money from my ventures to keep me going ... the forecasted revenues are also good so that is giving an extra boost to my endeavour...

To those that are looking on how to make money online I would summarize my thoughts as follows:

find a subject that you are passionate about or at least one that is not going to get your bored in a month from now
think what you want to build and what is the demand for that
learn how to build it or hire someone to do it for you
Get a proper domain name
Get some cheap hosting (for starters at least)
build it
promote it
monetize it (put ads or affiliate links or your products on it)
analyze the stats
ask questions/read/learn impove it
cycle back to promotion until you get it right

Once you are comfortable with this an updating and revising your site is a breeze then you can focus on building another site

All this is usually quite involved and it needs some time investment and some patience

The more you put into your projects the more they might give back to you. Maybe not from the first months or the first year but they will.

If you have found yourself in a position of loosing your faith about making money of the internet you can consider on a recent discussion on DP on how to make $100k in 5 years in this thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=525344

Make money with domains

2007-10-28T18:20:00.000-07:00

Domains cost anywhere from $1.99 to $30.00 per year (most domains, .com, .net ...) when bought from a domain name registry ... some domains though have privately (or through auctions) sold for much more than their owners have paid for them !? For the record I am just stating that sex.com was sold for $14Million. why is that ? because not all domains are created equal ... .com .net .org .biz and a few others are easier to remember and more "valuable" to have ... some vocabulary words are also easy to remember and are also "valuable" ...

I am not really an expert to talk about what is valuable and what is not, take a look at what sells and at what prices on domain name journal or find lots of more information on the namepros forums.

Here is my take on domain names and the business of buying and selling.

Lets say you wanted to the same: buy some great domains in the hopes of selling them for great price later.

The idea is simple. Buy a domain and put it for sale at one of the auctions (sedo.com, afternic, tdnam.com, moniker.com etc) and wait for someone to buy it .... well the idea is simple but the odds are not in our favor. Why ? For once most of the sort names have been bought, I believe all the dictionary words have been bought too and now its the turn of two or three word phrases to become extinct (for some strange reason, domains with numbers are not much sought after ?!?) ... second you have to think of the costs involved ... surely one .com domain costs around $8/year (that is how much I pay at least) but if you are planning to do it seriously one domain wont do. People buy portofolios of what they think are great domains (in the thousands) in the hopes of selling one or two to get even or make a profit ...

Well no matter how many domains you want to buy do some research before you buy. See the trends using the google trends, check the search frequency of some of the phrases or keywords you are concentrating on, you can use one of my tools search engine queries estimates which is based on the overture keyword database.

After you have in your posession some domains you have a few choices while waiting for them to be sold.

You can post them on auctions and start advertising your willingness to sell the domains.
You can park your domains and get "some" money if people hit on the ads while visiting your domain
You can actually develop them into full fledged sites.
Can rent your domains or partner with someone else that develops them, while you keep full ownership of the domain

Each one has its own advantages.

If you have a domain that everyone would be intrested in buying, the first option is probably enough; soon enough (with a not much advertisement) you can probably get a good deal.

Parking is not for all domains; if you domain does not get type-in traffic (type-in is the traffic are the people that think of a search query and instead type it with a .com or another extension at the end) then parking it won't be of any value. Most parking companies actually forbid you from linking to your domain while its parked.

Developing the domains is probably the choice of domains that are not so "hot". You can do it yourself or have someone do it as a partner. No matter how its done you should never give your domain registries passwords away to someone that you don't trust; learn how to assign DNS settings yourselves, its not that difficult.

Some closing thoughts:

Most "good" sort/keyword rich .com .net etc have already been bought: focus on country top level domain names if it makes sense.
Buy a name that even if you are stuck with, you have some idea on how to develop it into a website; As a matter of fact you can always develop your newly registered domain, a developed domain will most probably be bought for more than an underdeveloped one.

Looking for guest bloggers

2007-10-12T16:11:00.000-07:00

The time spend in writing articles on this blog is becoming very scarce lately thus the need to call for anyone interested in guest blogging once in a while ... and I do need a fresh voice in this blog ...

Only requirements are:
Be someone who is related to the field of making money online and be able to write original stuff and not just copy and paste from other sites and be inline with the rest of the material in here ...

If you think you have this just:
- Post or PM me some original work that you have done
- and/or send me the article that you want to be included,

Why would you want to guest blog here ?
1. Can be my friend (priceless )
2. You will get 2 permanent links at the end of each and every article that you write,
3. site might be PR5 soon
4. Can actually pay a bit of money if you become a regular poster ($$)
5. get exposed to my regular audience

Hope I covered everything that needs to be said, but if you have more questions please post them here.

LAZYSEO.com: Automatic Directory Submission That Works!

2007-10-03T16:04:00.000-07:00

Another scam !!

Well this is not exactly a scam but a case of a service that does not deserve the price of $19.95/month that it sells for; it does not even deserve 1penny if you ask me ...

The person behind the service though is a big scum ... let me explain.

I first encountered that service in may of 2007 on the v7 forums and it sounded like an interesting deal. I would pay $20 a month and then I would automatically submit all my sites and my client's sites to more than 300 directories with a push of a button. This part is true; you can actually submit as many sites to all the directories included. The problem lies in the fact that the service does not have very detailed categories for the user to choose from ... it only has top level categories and very few secondary/sub categories. Minor problem you might say but, apparently it was not minor at all. If you ever submitted to any directory you would know that the top most reason submissions get rejected is submitting in the wrong category. As a result of this non detailed automatic submission I received 300 or so emails rejecting my submission ...

Well to clear things up, nothing so far was/is a scam, lazyseo.com is just a worthless service.

The scam lies in what followed my failed submission ... (stick around for the finale)

Once I discovered that the system was not worth anything I decided to at least send a support request so maybe the tech people could actually include a more detailed category structure and have some luck with any subsequent submissions. 2 or 3 support requests and a few PMs (personal messages) on the V7 went unanswered !!! Such a newbie I was, I forgot to actually cancel the service through the paypal interface before the beginning of the next billing cycle so I was actually charged twice for the receipt of those 600 rejection emails ( I submitted 2 sites altogether)

As soon as the 2nd subscription took effect on the beggining of the new billing cycle I realized how dumb I was ... I called up paypal and explained that it was only a few minutes that the subscription had been in effect and that I did not intend to use that service ... but I only ended up spending some more money on that phone call ... (paypal customer service could not help me)

I finally decided to contact the person that I actually paid my $40 to. Katherine Keleher. I did verify that indeed this was the person the domain was registered too.

Katherine Keleher
4 Seafare
Laguna Niguel, California 92677
United States
gobulldogs@cox.net

I send an email explaining that I had only used the service twice (for just 2 sites the whole month) and that I did not intend to use it anymore and that I thought that I deserved as a refund the whole second month + at least 1/2 of the first month's fees. Two emails were needed in order to get her attention (Katherine). On the second email she answered that she did understand my position and promised that she would issue a refund on the transaction as soon as the system allowed her too. Bullshit!! I confirmed with a paypal representative over email, that no such kind of restriction existed on the system in general. In the end she could have issued a payment to my account if she indeed wanted to refund my money.

You got to live and learn. Be warned.

Directory submission service scam

2007-10-01T15:07:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I don't have the time to do my own submissions but this time I was just lured by the fact that 1500 submissions to free directories would only cost me $20 ; This $20 would save me lots of time so I could focus on other stuff that I had neglected recently ... the deal was spotted on DP and there was no way I would miss it.

The story
The thread was created by TheZer0Group and was new (5-10 posts), so I thought to myself that the guy is a new kid on the block so he is offering this nice deal in order to get some customers that will leave a good comment on the thread. So without wasting any time I send the money and the details of my submission. The thread started to gather some questions from potential buyers but the answers coming to think about it did seem professional answers but I did not suspect anything at the time.

The story continues with one day passing and no sign of any submission emails from any free directory. I usually setup email filters on gmail for each submission that I do so I can easily spot the progress at any time; and so I did for this project. The next day I send the guy a reminder PM that I did not see anything and he confirmed that my submission order was next in line ... actually an hour later I did receive about 7-8 email confirmations refering to the submission in question ... so this together with the fact in the thread it was mentioned that the orders will not be done all at one shot help me rest assured that everything was going OK.

Next day I did not receive any email confirmations so I decided to send him a second reminder that read that if he did not intend to do any more submissions he should refund my money. Without answering my PM he probably did a few submissions more, since later on I did receive a few confirmations of submission. I was assured again that maybe I had mistaken the guy for a fake.

The following two days I did not see any confirmation action in my email and I send a couple of reminders by PM to theZeroGroup ... but I was too busy running other choirs to notice that I did not receive any answer. The fifth day though, I was sure that there was not going to be any more submissions and that I had probably lost $20.

I posted a message on the thread asking if other customers had there orders completed and people started slowly realizing that this was a scam.

Disputing the service on Paypal
My immediate reaction was to start a dispute on paypal and see if I could get a refund from that scum of a person. On the paypal dispute form mentioned that the service was incomplete and chose the category to be services, and added as reference the thread in DP and mentioned that I did try to get in contact with this person but without any success ...

A few minutes later I did receive what seems like an automated response

Our investigation into your claim is complete. As stated in our User Agreement, the claims process only applies to the shipment of goods. It does not apply to complaints about the attributes or quality of goods received. Therefore, we are unable to reverse this transaction or issue a refund.

So no refund for quality of goods received, that is what a bad service amounts to.

The moral of the story
If it sounds too good to be true it probably is (as ishan mentioned on the thread). One more thing I learned from this is paypal does protect the seller of services and we should be aware of this when paying for services through paypal.

I should close this by saying that the details of this person (as paypal has them recorded) are:

Name: William Jones (unverified)
Email: williamindia @ safe-mail.net
I doubt that he uses this email in general and I doubt that this is his name. But who knows maybe someone knows a little something about this person ... or maybe he tries to pull this off again under the same personal details ...

DirectoryCritic an excellent service

2007-09-28T10:21:00.000-07:00

Directory Critic is a website where one can find free and paid web directories rated by people who have submitted to them so anyone can take advantage and submit their own websites to the best directories (or directory submission services could use them to build their lists)

Why should we care ?
I was browsing on one of my favorite webmasters forums lately and I noticed a thread that was advertising an 8000 free directory list giveaway. Since its free I thought I might as well give it a try. The number of the directories was by itself a big plus (8000). When I finally imported the list to my favorite submission program I discovers that withing the first 120 "entries" I tried to submit only 10 where really directories, most had vanished, other had changed to paid only, and others had become adult content sites. Not only that, but the ones I finally managed to submit did not send an email confirming the submission ...

Today I had the urge to submit to a few more directories but I would not try the long list of crap which I had already erased BTW, instead I copied the first 200 free directories from the directorycritic site and started submiting ... I submitted about 50 in a matter of 30 minutes; all were free and to my pleasent surpise almost all send an email confirmation back. I actually had one accepting the submission and listing my website in a matter of 15 minutes .... wow

Thanking directory critic and LinksInn
After such a good service I received; I decided that I needed to give something back to the directory critic and to in particular to the LinksInn web directory that was so fast in accepting my website. I actually went to give them a rating.

In my opinion the rating was unnecessarily long process which made me wonder if I would ever rate a directory again. I am not ungreatful at this great service, I am just wishfully thinking what if the details of my submission (name, email, url submitted, url where my site is listed) where sort of automated and just the actuall rating was available to us ? Lots more people I assume would go through the process of actually submitting a rating and in turn the service provided by directory critic would be of a bigger value.

Thanks directory critic

Creating a game site, things to avoid

2007-09-20T01:39:00.000-07:00

Its almost 4 complete months ever since I launched Games Online 4 Free and lots of people have asked me how is it going ... so I figured an update was worth it. Well this post is not really an update but some things new game site owner should pay attention to.

Look for the latest version of the script that you are using, avoid hackers, I learned the hard way.

I installed the AVarcade as was mention on the original post but soon I was attacked by some annoying hackers due to some bugs in the code. The site would be attacked 5-6 times a day and it would be unusable for hours until I took notice. I used a temporary solution to deprive privileges from the database user so anyone getting admin rights on the script would not have update or delete privileges on the database. When the update to the script came out and I patched the code I reverted the privileges back to normal.

Make sure the gamepacks you installed don't have any objectionable games in them.

I've had google warn me that if I kept serving google adsense ads on my Hentai Puzzle games my account would be suspended. Of course the games where nothing more than girls striping on completion of the puzzle but since the google team found them objectionable other might find them too so I decided to delete the games anyway ...

Don't be impatient, traffic does not come from the first day.

I have had steadily less than 100 visitors and 300 page views per day for the last 4 months. Lately that number has gone up to more than 200 visitors and 600 pageviews, which is not huge but I know that things are improving. I figured: all the directory submission that I did 4 months ago, only started getting approved lately and google started recognizing it as a game site (due to the anchors texts that I used) and started having better positions in the SERPs. So just build as many backlinks as you can and the traffic from the search engines will rise in due time ...

Make money paypal ?

2007-09-20T00:52:00.000-07:00

Lately there has been lots of searches for make money paypal that end up here on this blog. Google send me this traffic probably due to an earlier post warning to paypal users.

Those visits got me thinking nevertheless ... how can you make money with paypal ? (assuming that is what people where searching for).

You can't!!! Paypal is just a way to send or receive money. Paypal of course makes money with every transaction but we can't unless of course its a scam.

Search the internet for paypal scam and related phrases and quickly found this post and this having people claim to be making thousands of dollars in a very simple way.

The scam goes like this:
The scummer gives you a few paypal emails that you send a few buck$ to.
You put your paypal email at the end of the list and you drop the first .
You post that message to as many places as you can and try to convince others to send money to that list ...

So not only this is a scam, and the initiators would get some $$ in their paypal accounts, people believing in it would start spamming forums and bulletin boards in order to get their message across ...

Want to earn $190 cash + $500 in bonuses

2007-08-02T22:31:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled on this forum that it just started a competition that gives $699 in prizes to one lucky winner. What the winner has to do is just post as many relevant posts on the forum. Spam is not accepted only relevant thought out conversations are ...

How does it work?
Every time you post you get $0.02 and every time you start a thread you get $0.05. On top of that for each referral to the forum you get another $0.05. The winner will be the one with the most money in their account at the end of this August; There is only one big winner that will get the prize but all other users get to keep the money they generate and withdraw it to their paypal account as soon as they reach the $10 payout limit ....

If you want more information check out the details of the competition.

The competition started in the begging of August and will last until the 31st of August, so if you are sitting around doing nothing you can give it a try .... register here

Quick reminder to unsuspected Paypal users

2007-07-11T01:06:00.000-07:00

I have been receiving these emails lately once a day it seems.

Take a look at two of them:

Security Center

Military Grade Encryption is Only the Start

At PayPal, we want to increase your security and comfort level with every transaction. From our Buyer and Seller Protection Policies to our Verification and Reputation systems, we'll help to keep you safe.

PayPal is committed to maintaining a safe environment for its community of buyers and sellers. To protect the security of your account, PayPal employs
some of the most advanced security systems in the world and our anti-fraud teams regularly screen the PayPal system for unusual activity.

Recently, our Account Review Team identified some unusual activity in your account. In accordance with PayPal's User Agreement access to your account will be limited. This is a fraud prevention measure meant to ensure that your account is not compromised.

In order to secure your account we may require some specific information from you. We encourage you to log in by clicking on the link below and complete the requested form as soon as possible.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=login-run

Ignoring our request, for an extended period of time, may result in account limitations or may result in eventual account closure.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. Please understand that this is
a security measure meant to help protect you and your account.
We apologize for any inconvenience.

Sincerely,
PayPal Account Review Department

PayPal Email ID PP4392
*Please do not respond to this e-mail as your reply will not be received.

-----

Dear valued PayPal member,

It has come to our attention that your PayPal account information needs to be updated as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to reduce the instance of fraud on our website. If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and update your personal records you will not run into any future problems with the online service.

However, failure to update your records will result in account suspension. Please update your records on or before July 10, 2007.

Once you have updated your account records, your PayPal session will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.

To update your PayPal records click on the following link:
http://customer-200-79-24-3.uninet-ide.com.mx/LOGIN/update/online/

Thank you,
PayPal Update Team

The second one is easily discarded since the address it sends you to is not paypal.com

But the first one is a little hard to realize because it can trick you that the link goes to paypal.com but if you hit it takes you to paypal.us. DON'T BE FOOLED

I have received these emails from: no-replyy @ gmail.com, news @ gmail.com, account @ gmail.com, tp-verify @ gmail.com make a note of those adresses and also make a note that paypal is not supposed to be sending such emails AT ALL.

Upon receiving these emails you can send them to spoof @ paypal.com in hope that paypal can do something about them

This technique is very old and for anyone interested in reading more about it, its called phishing

Get a free PR4 link

2007-06-19T12:28:00.000-07:00

I just discovered the next milliondollarhomepage.com ?

Nah just kidding!
But for all of us that have always wanted to put a pixel ad on MDHP we can settle for a pixel ad on pixel ad site.

Why would you want to put your link there ?

Its a free link
it only takes a minute
Can actually change the image or the link or the title at any time
you a get a PR4 link

it not bad for a free link
enjoy

Directory submission software review, Website Submitter

2007-06-13T00:32:00.000-07:00

On a previous post about creating your own submission service I briefly talked about submission software such as IBP Arelis and submiteaze that could help get the job done faster and create reports of submissions.

I recently received the codes and passwords to the website submitter software from the company that owns it and I gave it a try. It was very nice gesture and I thank them for it. This is a brief review in my sort usage of it but keep in mind that its not a paid review.

What does a directory submission program supposed to do ?
Have a database of free or reciprocal directories that the owner can easily cycle through and with a press of a few buttons fill in the directory forms and submit his/her websites.

This program's specific features and strong points are:

takes you directly to the submit page of each directory if possible
It has a database of more than 3000+ directories included
Can add your own directories to the database
Can report a bad directory directly to the developer
Ability to choose directories to submit by PR or subject from a easily filtered database
live PR of directory displayed when submitting
automatic picking of category (not always succeful)
works with javascript enchanced submit forms
works with all the directory scripts I have tried (phpld, indexscript, indexu etc)

If you want to see the website submitter features as the the owner company describes them.

Some of the areas the program would need some improvement sorted by importance:

Better matching of the category, even specifying more than one keyword and upon finding more than one matches the user gets notified to chose among the different matches
Need more than two status choices (submitted, failed) I propose adding "don't want to submit"
Ability to change attributes of any directory in the database, like the option to select a few and mark them submitted (in case one has submit to them manually)
automatic picking of category is not always correct, search is looking for the word specified on the setting of each project, but stops searching when a match is found (a second match usually exists and might be more appropriate)
Already filled out forms should not be changed on reload of submit form (in case of a mistake form reloads and at times some fields are changed by the software)
incorporate shortcuts for freequently done tasks (i.e. let enter act as a form submitter)
make a loading indicator more visible (the text on the bottom statusbar is not noticeable)
ability to add labels on directories, our directories and the included directories and search with those labels

Overall it is a very nice software, recomended for anyone that is doing this kind of work on a day to day basis, saving them a lot of time.

But don't take my word for it; just try it. Download the trial version install it, watch the this video for an introduction and judge for yourself.

Create a game site

2007-05-27T16:17:00.000-07:00

Recently I was talking to a friend developer and he revealed to me that he had build a "free online games site" over a year ago and that today it was generating for him over $500/month from adsense.

Using my own search queries estimation tool or any other keyword suggestion tool you choose (overture, seobook, keywordtracker etc.) one can search for "games online" and see that there is an awful lot of searches on that and related terms. More that 2Million searches on the query "game online" alone for this month (according to the inventory of overture). People indeed do want to play flash games online, that is what this statistic tells us. Imagine how many other individualized searches (for specific games ...) go on that do not make it in the statistics.

With this in mind I actually decided to setup a game site with free flash games for myself with over 2200 games.

I know that the competition is actually pretty big but still I want to experiment. Google shows a total of 466 Million pages on the term "game online" but if you divide with the average of 5000 pages an average game site has nowadays the number becomes something more manageable. Only 93200 game online sites exist as of this time. Not a big deal ;)

How do you build a game site ?
Well for those that want to try this enterprise there are some scripts ready that come with games preinstalled. Some such scripts are the gamescript, flashgamescript, and AV arcade among many others. The scripts cost from 49.99 and 69.95 respectivelly for the first two and AV arcade is free to setup but it costs $20 for a bundle of games. So you are bound to spend some money to get started. Most business online or offline need some initial investment don't they ?

If you are serious about doing it you better have some nice hosting space as well since each game is 1 Mb in size on average. And you better have some nice bandwidth if the traffic does actually come your way.

To tell you the truth I installed the AV arcade for free and then searched for collection of arcade games on the digital point forums but it did take me 3 days only to download the games to my PC and then upload them to my server. Then I designed what I think is a decent template on it and started doing some link exchanges in order to get some ranking on the search engines.

I did actually spend some money (after all) buying some nice hosting with lots of space and bandwidth since I did not want to choke my other sites.

The results remain to be seen ...

PR0 to PR4 in 4 easy weeks

2007-04-25T13:54:00.000-07:00

I know lots of webmasters and SEO gurus that say that PR (google pageRank - the little green bar on the google toolbar) is not worth that much but everyone is using it as a measure.

Webmasters refuse to exchange links with you if they think your PR is inferior to their website's PR. Lots of programs (reviewme.com ...) could reject your site because of low PR, some directory owners display the list of sites ordered with PR.

So ... here is some simple steps you can follow to get your sites PR higher than it is and maybe get some extra traffic while you are at it.

Post your link in forums using signatures and/or places that allow website reviews, put the site url in the signature with your target keywords for titles
Submit to free and/or paid directories (in general the younger the directory the easier would be to get accept it in it)
If you have other sites put sitewide links pointing to your new website. If sites are totally unrelated subject, put the links in the footer with small letter (the link still counts).
Put your link anywhere you can, without becoming a spammer (everyone hates spammers)
Find some high PR sites and pay for a link if you have to. There is lots of projects on the internet that accept donations as low as $50 and they put your link in a high PR page. For example moddle donations page has a PR of 6 http://moodle.org/donations/.
Using your link in comment posts. This won't necessarily increase your PR but it could give you a few visitors if nothing else.

I established my tag cloud world experts network in December of 2006 and in less than a month following these rules I succeeded getting its PR from 0 to 4 and that is the reason I am writing this post.

For the record world experts net has been almost abandoned, unfortunatelly due to lots of things in my head and currently looking for ways to rebuild it into something new.

So no matter what some say, PR is in our lives and its worth something. I can describe it better with a metaphor, you don't need an Armani Suit but if you wear one people look at you differently. But, PR by itself is not going to get any money for your site, but having it will help get some extra attention, or better deals.