Posted by admin on Jun 18, 2009 in
hosting If you’re interested in budget web hosting, there’s a good likelihood you’ll be using a UNIX web hosting plan. UNIX web hosting is one of the most common web hosting plans due to its compatibility with Linux, ease of use and relatively low cost.
What UNIX Is
UNIX is a computer operating system that was originally designed nearly 40 years ago at Bell Labs. Over the years, UNIX has evolved and adapted to remain highly useful even today. UNIX is a multi-user, multi-tasking program that operates under a comprehensive philosophy of features such as using plain text for storing data and using many software tools. It is an open system that can be modified and improved upon by any user, which also means there are no licensing issues when using UNIX.
Features of UNIX Web Hosts
Web hosts that facilitate the Linux operating system also facilitate UNIX, which is one of the reasons why this form of web hosting is so popular. This means that most UNIX web hosts are enabled for the LAMP web development program, which uses the Apache web server software, MySQL database system and PHP programming language.
Advantages to UNIX Web Hosts
In addition to facilitating ease of web development, a UNIX web host won’t put too big a dent in a growing online company’s budget. Web hosting on a dedicated server can be extremely costly, but UNIX web hosting operates on a shared server. Multiple users operate on their own individual sections of the server, but since all parties are sharing the server, they share the cost, and the expense to the individual client is considerably reduced.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Tags: UNIX web hosting, web hosting
Posted by admin on Feb 5, 2009 in
Contest Ryan McLean from Smarter Wealth is giving away a brand new Flip Mino HD to one lucky reader. This will be the easiest Flip Mino HD to win because barely anyone is going to enter meaning more chances that you can win.
The Flip Mino HD is the coolest gadget around. You can shoot one hour of video in HD (so you can play it on your plasma) and you can even edit your footage right on your device. This device is so small that it will fit in your pocket so you will never miss capturing a moment ever again.
To enter all you have to do is sign up for Ryan’s newsletter and post about the competition.
Check out all the details of how you can enter the Win a Flip Mino HD competition now.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Tags: Contest
Posted by admin on Feb 2, 2009 in
Monetization Welcome again my blog readers. Today we continue our discussion of monetization methods with today being about affiliate programs. After yesterday’s discussion you should have AdSense on your blog now and today we will add another way to make money from the visitors on your blog. Let us begin.
Affiliate Programs Have a Lot to Offer
They really do have a ton to offer. First of all affiliate programs allow you to make so much more money then by conventional advertisements can produce. Just one affiliate sale can make more then 10x as little as a month’s worth of clicks through AdSense, figuring you get only a few dollars a month. That’s also assuming you make only $10-20 per sale but there are some affiliate programs you can promote that make upwards of $100 a sale.
The two places that I would reccomend you use to promote programs are Commision Junction and Clickbank. These are by far the best programs on the internet for you to have access to many different programs to promote. The difference is CJ is primarily services such as web hosting and other online services but also have some other items and Clickbank has a lot of info products and applications to help you. Depending on your niche one may be better suited for you then the other but you should definitely check out both to see what they offer. Just know that if you are the in make moey niche that your sales could be stolen by people who actually buy the products and get a commission to their own account even though they ordered it through your link. It’s a complicated process that they do it by and I don’t really understand it so just know that you are at risk of losing sales if you use Clickbank products.
Whichever one you use it is easy to implement them into your site. CJ generally has banner advertisements that you can use while Clickbank only has links but you can integrate links into posts and your blogroll. If you have banners you can easily put them onto your site via the AdSense Manager plugin that we used to get our AdSense ads onto our site. It’s just as easy as copy and past like before and them add them wherever you want. That’s all you have to do to get your links onto your blog, either add the banners or place links in your posts or blogroll.
Now we have yet another way to make money from our blogs. This is really awesome because once we have a way to make money then we are more likely to actually get that money that we have been working for. I hope that you guys start seeing some results soon. 
Popularity: 24% [?]
Tags: affiliate programs, Monetization
Posted by admin on Feb 1, 2009 in
Monetization Once again, welcome back to the blog. Today’s post is going to discuss AdSense which I introduced in yesterday’s post but I am going to be going more in depth today. Let’s begin.
AdSense is Really Easy to Use
Like I talked about before, AdSense is an advertisement platform that a lot of webmasters use to make money from their blogs and websites. It’s quite simple to use and implement into any blog or website without having to know how to code anything. The first step is to sign up to Google Adsense. It’s pretty easy, just your regular sign up process. Enter your website information, your account type, your personal information, and then just submit the application. I think that there is a review process for applications but I can’t exactly remember but if there is one it’s minimal, probably about a day.
Once you get your account approved your next step is to create an ad to put on your site. This is also very easy to do with Google’s interface. Simply log in to your account, click on AdSense Setup, and then click AdSense for Content (you can use the other ones but I’m going to stick with this for now), then simply set up how you want the ad to look on your site, add a channel by entering your website name for the channel, name the ad something you can remember it by, and then hit complete. Now you have the code which you just have to put onto your website. Luckily we have our handy AdSense Manager plugin which we previously installed so it’s as easy as copy and paste into the box for the plugin. Once you do that you can add the advetisement wherever you need whether that be on your sidebar or in posts. Voila! Now we have ads on our blog so we can actually make some money!
Now that we have a way for us to make money we are on our way. Your advertisements should start to show up correctly within a few hours once Google figures out what your blog is about and then you will have targetted advertisements for your visitors. This is the first step of monetization but it’s a pretty important one. Now we just have to try and get some clicks Well, until tomorrow, have a good day.
Popularity: 23% [?]
Tags: adsense, Monetization
Posted by admin on Jan 31, 2009 in
Monetization Well hello there guys, welcome back to the blog. Today’s post is all about the practices of monetizing our blogs and the methods we will use to do this. It’s a pretty simple concept and today I’m just going to highlight various methods.
Website Monetization
Now that we have a fully functioning blog with lots of content and hopefully a flow of visitors it’s time for us to place things on our blogs to make us money, as that’s what this is all about. Technically we could have, and maybe we should have, put this into practice before we began promotion but it kind of slipped my mind. Either way it doesn’t really matter just as long as we get some form of monetization onto our blog so that we can get results. Here are the things which I will discuss on this blog.
1. Adsense
AdSense is the ad serving platform created by Google which appears on many websites. You can tell if an advertisement is AdSense because it will say, “Ads by Google” somewhere on it. This is used by many webmasters and is by far the most popular but not necessarily the most profitable.
2. Commision Junction/ Clickbank Products
These are 2 different affiliate programs that allow you to send visitors to buy products and you make a commission on each sale you send through. This method offers a good amount of money to be made but it is also a little more difficult to get sales. Even if you get click throughs to the sale’s site it isn’t guaranteed to get you any money. However, it is still well worth it because when you do make a sale it usually has a significant amount of money for you.
3. Amazon and other Affiliate Programs
If you’re niche has more to do with physical products or other things there you are likely to be able to find an affiliate program for items in your niche. Amazon has a great affiliate program that pays you a percentage on sales and is by far one of the best physical item affiliate programs. If you need an affiliate program just do a Google search with your niche keyword and affiliate program and you should find at least one to promote.
In tomorrow’s post I will discuss AdSense more in depth and then I will also discuss the other methods further. That’s all for today.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Tags: adsense, Monetization
Posted by admin on Jan 30, 2009 in
promotion Welcome back everyone. Today we are going to discuss Squidoo and how we can generate traffic from it. Squidoo is basically a small website for you to use that’s usually used to educate people and we are going to use it to get people to our blogs. Let’s go.
Squidoo Visitors to Your Site
So as I said before, Squidoo is basically a site that allows you to build your own one page websites one whatever topic you choose. These one page sites are targeted on one specific topic and are very easy to make. There’s a good lens that talks about all of this in a crash course on Squidoo that is very helpful for all the basics of Squidoo.
Generating traffic from your lens to your site is actually pretty easy to do. As long as you offer quality content on your lens odds are that people will click to your site which is exactly what you want them to do. When I create a lens I want minimal distractions for my visitors. So I place just content on my lens with links back to my site. That is another thing you will gain from Squidoo, quality backlinks from a high ranking website.
A good way to get people to your site is to offer something for free. Say a free ebook download on your topic. You offer this on your lens and place a link to the signup form on your site. They sign up, you get people on your email list, and you get traffic. It’s a win-win.
Creating a lens is really easy so there’s really no excuse not to be leveraging this for your own site. So sign up to Squidoo, create a lens on the topic of your niche, place links back to your site, and if you have an email list to build send them to where they can sign up. Making a decent lens could take about 30 minutes or so depending on how long it takes you to write up the content for your lens. Also one last bit, I advise that you bookmark your lens in at least Digg so that your lens gets a little bit extra boost. Well, that’s it so good luck on building your lens!
Popularity: 63% [?]
Tags: promotion, squidoo
Posted by admin on Jan 29, 2009 in
Graphics Hello again everybody. Today’s post is going to be about favicons. We are going to be talking more about the look of our site today rather then the content or promotion of our sites. Let’s get started!
Favicons Make Your Site Memorable
In case you don’t know what a favicon is it is that little picture in your browser next to your window of the site you’re on. The best example I can think of is Google’s favicon which used to be this, 
, but now it’s a little different. Favicons bring memorability to your websites because most people enjoy seeing these images rather then a blank image.
Favicons are really easy to create and they are just 16X16 images commonly saved in the .ico format. You can download a tool that will create images in the .ico format or you can just use one of various tools online that will do it for you. My personal favorite is Favicon.cc because it’s easy to use, gives you a preview, and simply lets you download your image once you’re done. Once you have a completed favicon you simply upload it to the root folder of your hosting where you upload your other files. Unless you have a .png or .jpg then you won’t have to edit any code but if you do have one of those then just upload it into Favicon.cc and it will convert it to a .ico so you don’t have to mess with any tricky code.
As alwyas you can do this yourself or you can hire someone else to do it for you. If you are going to hire someone to do it for you then I would suggest that you buy a whole lot of graphics. You might as well purchase a banner, header, ad graphics, and a favicon so you can jsut get it all at once and probably save a little money in the process. As usual you can find people for graphic work all over the place but I usually like to stick with the WarriorForum because everyone there is just so awesome.
Whether you hire someone or not you should create a favicon just because it helps people remember your site and it gives your site a little bit more credibility from your visitors. I know that when I visit a site that doesn’t have a favicon I might think a little less of it, and yes I know this site doesn’t have one yet, but I’m working on it. That’s all for today.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Tags: favicon, Graphics
Posted by admin on Jan 28, 2009 in
Content,
development Well now that we have taken all the steps to where we need to be I am going to start talking about various topics that are important to developing your blogs once they get off the ground. We need to keep up with our blogs so that they don’t die off and our efforst can reap some rewards. So today I’m going to talk about how to oursource your writing so you can focus on other things.
Outsourcing Saves a TON of Time
Outsourcing is the act of paying someone else to do work for you. It’s a simple concept and it saves you a lot of time but it does cost you money. However, if you find a quality person to do your writing or other activities then you will get plenty of quality for your money. In the long run it is always well worth it to spend a few extra dollars for your content because if you buy low quality content you will ust have to spend your time going through and editing it and fixing any errors it may contain. That is really annoying since you basically paid someone for a rough draft of an article. I’m a person that never likes to waste any time so for me I always try to spend a little more if it means not having to edit the article later.
Now that we know what outsourcing essentially means we can find places to get the people to write our articles. There are many places you can go to oursource your writing but one of my favorite places to find writers is the WarriorForum because there are many skilled and experienced writers there that can really help you out. They may cost a little bit more but they are so much better then other writers I have hired. It’s pretty easy to find people there that are available to write content for you. If you scroll down and go to the Warriors For Hire section you can see many offers for content creation. After taking a quick look at the current offers I’d say the average price per article is around $5 but some threads have articles at $3 per and as high as $10 per article. I think that’s a pretty good representation of what you will find there. My suggestion is find one person who you feel will do the best for you, purchase a few articles to see what quality you get and if you like it stick with this person long term. It’s always best to get long term agreements because it builds a relationship and often saves you money.
You don’t have to outsource your article writing but if you are feeling like you are getting too busy to write for your blogs then I suggest you do it. Also, if you start developing multiple blogs at once it becomes quite tiresome to write posts for each one and it is often easier to just outsource it while you work on other things. Whether you outsource or not is up to your but I tell you it will help you out and probably will make you more productive! That’s all for today so I’ll see you guys tomorrow.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Tags: outsourcing
Posted by admin on Jan 27, 2009 in
Basics,
promotion After seeing a discussion on this topic in a forum earlier I decided to take a look at this subject and disucss it here. This is a perfect example of what I talked about before, finding topics to discuss from blogs. Let’s get started.
Does PR Matter?
Well first off PR stands for PageRank and it is a number that Google gives to websites that range from 0-10. 10 is the best and 0 is the worst, but I want to discuss if having a 0 PR site really is the worst. Many webmasters will rank their success by the PageRank of their sites. However, I think this is the wrong thing to think about because PageRank isn’t the only factor of success, and in some cases it doesn’t even affect your success. Too many people think that PageRank is the end all but in fact it really isn’t.
I have seen in many cases that 0 PR sites can actually out rank higher PR sites in Google. It’s a fact that Google doesn’t rank sites in Google based upon their PR, just go search any term and you will see fluctuation between each site’s PR. In my experience I have had sites with 0 PR rank first for certain keywords over sites with much higher PR. In my opinion that is way better then having a good PR because if I don’t get traffic and results with a higher PR then it’s useless to me. Ranking in Google is always my number one concern and it should be yours too.
So basically when you are creating your sites you shouldn’t even worry about PageRank because it’s not worth the hassle to worry. The only time PR is worth anything is when you are selling your sites to other people, but it usually ends up that they don’t understand PR either. Just try and get into Google for your desired search terms and you will see PR follow, just keep working at it. See you later.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Tags: pagerank
Posted by admin on Jan 26, 2009 in
Content Over the past few days we have discussed various ways to promote your website. Today however we are just going to discuss something that I have discovered that cna be really helpful. Recently I have discovered that using the forums that I have been posting on actually allow me to come up with new article ideas. I just want to share with you this information.
Using Forums to Get Article Ideas
The vast amount of knowledge that is on most forums is pretty impressive. Every minute new information is being posted for everyone to see and sometimes this can lead to new ideas for your own websites. Lately I have been seeing that using these ideas I can actually create articles for either my site or to submit to article directories. Some days I just can’t think of what to talk about but when I go to forums I can see what people are discussing. If there is a certain need that I am able to solve then that is one thing I can write about. If there are questions about a topic then that is another thing that I can target. It’s all about answering people’s needs.
Most of the time if a forum full of dedicated followers in a niche will have similar problems or questions. If some have questions then more then likely others will also have questions. That is perfect because we can answer these questions by using our blogs. One thing that I’ve heard stressed a lot is that you should always be trying to solve people’s needs. So if you know of a need make sure you capitalize on that and answer it! It really is the perfect opportunity to use your knowledge to help other people out.
The next time you see someone on a forum ask a question then just jot it down on Notepad for later use. That’s how I do it so that whenever I’m short of ideas I cna just open up my list and pick one to talk about for that particular day. It’s a great method if you are having trouble with ideas and it could be very beneficial to your blog. See you guys tomorrow.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Tags: Content, ideas, writing
