Get Keywords and Internet Marketing Niches

Monday, April 23, 2007

Get Keywords is my latest project. It's a site that gives you suggestions on different niche and keyword ideas, either for your latest AdSense site or for an Internet marketing campaign (or for anything else you can use it for!).

For every word, there's the daily search count in both Overture and Wordtracker and different search terms to consider.

If you find a keyword you like, just click the 'bookmark' icon in the left hand menu and if you want to receive an e-mail everytime a new post is made to the site, click the 'subscribe' by e-mail link.

Labels: adsense, misc

Importance of renewing your domain name

Sunday, April 22, 2007

First, imagine the worst - you've spent time or money or both building up the reputation and popularity of your website and the domain hasn't been renewed...what happens...you lose all your hard work. There are periods where you can get your domain back even if you don't renew on time - the length of time depends on the domain in question. It may cost you more than just the renewal fee though.

The first rule is to keep your details with your domain registration company up to date. If they cannot contact you about renewals, you will have to remember to do this yourself.

Secondly, don't keep putting it off because you don't have time to do it at that second - a renewal takes less than five minutes.

If you employ a web designer and part of their brief is to purchase domain names on your behalf, ensure they register the domains in your name, not theirs.

And if they do the renewals for you, check that you have paid their invoice in time. Better still, ask them to enter your e-mail address as the domain contact and you can do the renewals yourself. If they won't do that, make sure that you aren't paying too far over the odds for the renewal - a domain name costs between about $8 - $15 per year for .com (or £5 per two years for a .co.uk).

If you part company with your designer ensure you get all logins and passwords before this happens - don't let them hold you to ransom. Any web designer that won't automatically give you all passwords and logins should be avoided.

See:
1and1 (UK) - cheapest domains ending in 'uk'
1and1 (US) - cheapest domains (must be US or Canada resident)
GoDaddy - cheapest domains (no geographical restriction)

Labels: domains

Save multiple attachments in Outlook 2003

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

If you're used to using Outlook Express where it's easy to save multiple e-mail attachments in a few clicks, changing to Outlook may come as a surprise. Using the same method to save your attachments results in...nothing! You can't do it, just save each attachment one at a time.

However, there is a really quick solution - Microsoft just changed the way of saving more than one attachment. With your e-mail visible in the preview pane, go to File > Save Attachments. All the attachments will be listed but there is a 'Save All Attachments' option at the bottom of the list. Click on this, choose the folder to save to and click 'OK'. Done!

Labels: misc

Free service puts music to your pics and vids

Monday, April 16, 2007

Fliptrack is a web 2.0 (you know, one of the new breed of sites you can interact with) site that "allows users to create musical slideshows with their photos and hit music. Photos are synchronized to the beats of a song like a music video or movie soundtrack. It is free and legal to share creations." You can use the service online, or you can download the Fliptrack tool (Windows only at the moment).

Good idea or what? No longer do you have to worry about being caught out for using unlicensed music. And Fliptrack has music you've actually heard of - Barenaked Ladies, Fedde LeGrand and many more. In return, your video will have a small 'Fliptrack' logo in the bottom left hand corner.

Once you've created your video or picture show, you can choose to keep it as a private video for friends and family, or you upload and share it on Fliptrack itself or on many other sites including MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, Blogger, Facebook, Piczo, Bebo and Dogster. For the sites I've just listed, full instructions are given on how to do this.

Labels: internet, pp

Free toolbar builder

So you've seen the Google toolbar, the Yahoo! toolbar, and in fact a whole host of others. Wouldn't it be nice though to be able to offer your website visitors a free toolbar of your own? It can remind people your site exists, and help increase the traffic to your site.

A company called Conduit allow you to build your own toolbar to offer to people. You can brand it with your own news, offers, alerts, podcasts, RSS. Add a popup blocker, multiple search engines, weather, chat, radio player and multilingual versions and you've got a powerful customised solution to adding 'sticky'* content to your site, even when your visitor is elsewhere on the web.

Conduit says their toolbar is completely safe with no spyware, adware or malware and that you can create a toolbar in 15 minutes with their easy wizard.

*sticky = visitors will come back as they like what you offer!

Labels: biz, internet, misc, resources

Guest article: The Best and Easiest Google-Friendly Change to Your Web Site

Sunday, April 15, 2007

No matter who you are or how much you pay for web site advertising, free search engine traffic is probably responsible for a big part of your business. So why make your web site so hard for search engines to figure out?

Luckily, it seems like in the recent years people have paid attention to SEO, moved their sites over to CSS, abolished "table" and "font" HTML tags, started using the H1 tag around their titles... and in general, moved the main content of their site as close to the top of the HTML document as it can go.

"But Robert," you tell me, "I have a bunch of fancy JavaScript and CSS at the top of my site that I don't want to get rid of."

That's ok, you can keep it. Just stash it away in another file. By that I mean... if you were lazy and included your CSS right in the HTML document like this:
<style type="text/css">  </style>
Copy all that text out and delete it from the HTML page.

Remove the "style" tags and the "" stuff. Open a new text file, paste the text from the clipboard in, save the file as "layout.css" then save and upload to your web server.

Now, back on your HTML page, place HTML code like this:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.example.com/layout.css">
When someone loads your page in a browser that tells them to look to the URL http://www.example.com/layout.css for the CSS info. But when the search engines crawl your site they will see a nice, clean, simple layout.

You can do the same thing with JavaScript. Say these are your "script" tags:
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">  </script>
Do the same thing, copy the JavaScript code but NOT the "script" tags themselves or the "<!--" or "--)". Erase the original from the HTML page. Paste the stuff you copied into a new text file and call it something like: "functions.js"

Upload functions.js and in the spot you had your JavaScript code use this:
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.example.com/functions.js"></script>
One important thing to remember is that NO JavaScript code can be placed between the "script" tags if you use the "src" parameter like that.

So remember: use H1 tags, use meta description tags, and use CSS, but make sure you include your JavaScript and CSS stylesheets in separate files otherwise there's no point.

Article by Robert Plank
http://www.AffiliateBattlePlan.com

Labels: seo, webdesign

Free PHP MySQL website hosting

Friday, April 13, 2007

When searching for free website hosting with no banners or ads, I came across phpnet.us and signed up for an account. It isn't cPanel based, but the control panel "Advanced Hosting Control Panel" is very straightforward to use. The FTP upload is a little slow, but this seems a small price to pay. On signup, you choose a subdomain to use but you can setup your own domain name to work with PHPnet as it gives full setup and nameserver details.

The spec they offer is:

300 MB free web space
80 GB free monthly bandwidth
Fantastico type script installer
Control Panel
3 x MySQL database
PHP enabled web space
No maximum file size
All file types allowed
Free FTP account
Catch-all e-mail address
Free sub domain: you.phpnet.us
No forum posting required
No setup fee
Instant activation

For testing websites, or if you're not ready to commit to a full hosting package, this looks like a great solution.

The immediate drawbacks I can see are no cron jobs (Don't know what I mean? Not a problem for you there then!) and there's no mention of uptime.

Edit - there is a 468x60 banner that appears at the bottom of most pages. You can't get rid of them entirely, but with a little spacing at the bottom of your page, or editing your stylesheet, you can minimise their impact.

Labels: domains, hosting

Gambling for PC users

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Following on from yesterday's post on Poker for Mac Users, today is the turn for PC (Windows) Users. Lucky Nugget Casino is a site aimed at players in the UK, Canada, US and Australia.

Online gambling is a growing phenomena and as long as you see it as entertainment, rather than a way to make money, it can be lot of fun.

Lucky Nugget have a £50 monthly match which means that for every pound you play a month, they will match it up to £50 in free credits. That's up to £600 per year! There is also a player rewards program with cashback and auction points.

No download is actually required - you can play the games online but there are restrictions on the browser you can use. Firefox is my browser of choice, but to play I have to use Internet Explorer. I haven't tested it on other browsers yet.

The site itself is simple to navigate and the list of games is huge with all the games you would expect, plus more that I've never heard of. Video Poker, Craps, Blackjack, Triple 7s Blackjack Baccarat, Roulette, Video Slots, Pai Gow Poker, Poker, Red Dog, Scratch Games, Sicbo and Keno, to name a few.

Labels: pp

Poker for Mac Users

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Although I do blog about web programming which is operating system independed, a proportion of my blog is aimed at Windows users. As an occasional poker player (just for pretend money!!) I know that many poker sites work by you downloading their software before you can play, but this usually excludes Mac users. Introducing Mac Poker Online - a huge resource site for poker players who own a mac not a PC. The site is well designed, and the only criticism I have is that if anything, there is too much information to take in!

I found the best starting page to be the Mac poker sites, as there is a very comprehensive list of suitable poker rooms - sites where downloads are necessary, sites where they're not and a big list of sites for emulators. The site owner has also ranked the sites according to fourteen different factors (see "How we review...") to enable you to quickly choose a suitable site.

Another feature I like is the list of online casino bonuses - there are plenty of incentives to join different casinos, but it's nice to see an at-a-glance list - both 'refer a friend' and joining bonuses are listed. Each casino in the list has a review as well - what more could you ask for?

Labels: pp

The perils of a free website

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

I've recently had a client come to me for a site redesign. A few questions later and I ascertained that he was unhappy with the current design - it looked clumsy, was not user friendly and the company were only interested in helping him until they took his money.

When asked how much he'd paid for the site, his reply was surprising... "Oh nothing, but I do have to pay £35 per month in hosting fees!"

So what's wrong here? Firstly, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Secondly, I charge my clients £25 per year for hosting (if you're interested let me know and I'll give you the name of the company).

For the five-page site which left him open to large amounts of spam (through exposing his e-mail address) and very few visitors (due to the poor design etc...), he effectively paid £420 per year. The same site with LittleFish Web Design but created to far higher standards? £325.

Excuse me whilst I blow my own trumpet..!

Labels: hosting, webdesign

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