The title pretty much says it all. It’s 2 of the most useful AdSense ads tips for bloggers in my opinion. Obtrusive ads have the unnecessary effect of driving away readers after they have found what they needed. Unless you have amazingly great content, the chance of them becoming a loyal reader is rather low when you have ads splashing into their faces – this is not something you want to do to your subscribed readers. On the other hand, you’d want to maximize your AdSense earnings by putting up ads on as many posts as possible.

Ad Injection (WP plugin)

This tiny little plugin, Ad Injection, gets it all. Very useful plugin for you to insert AdSense ads in your blog posts AND set a specific age threshold for the posts to display ads, so freshly published articles won’t have ads to drive your subscribers away. See detailed introduction here: Ad Injection for WordPress.

Just install it from the inventory (upload or install from within your WP administrator panel) and activate it. Go to Settings > Ad Injection > “Random ad (inserted randomly between paragraphs)” and insert your AdSense code there. Depending on how aggressive you are, you can use a variety of ad formats from Google. I used a 468×15 links banner on Health Not. Check out the screenshot below:

By default, Ad Injection inserts a maximum of 2 instances of the Random ad per post. This way, the ads are well blended in the content. What works a few years back with the 336 square ad format on top of the content is gradually dying out in CTR thus click revenues. You should try something new such as this.

Another useful option of the plugin is to set “Only show normal ads on pages older than xx (days) – only for single posts and pages”. This would prove very useful if you want a good balance between ad performance / earnings and user experiences. Only displaying ads on older posts are a pretty good idea for creating a good first impression to those who stumble upon your site.

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Lots of people ask this question and most of them probably made the matter complicated by editing the DNS Zone from WHM in the DNS Functions. But they actually should just do it in cPanel which is A LOT easier.

Just log in your cPanel which manages the domain that you want to add support for wildcard (*) subdomains. Go to:

Domains > Subdomains

And enter asterisk * in the Subdomain and choose the domain you need it added to.

Click “Create”.

That’s it. Now you can access your domain from any random subdomain and it will automatically use the A record of the main domain as their own.

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I’ve been with Aweber for nearly 2 years and they are good. But I eventually decided that newsletter is not my type of thing – there are people who are making big bucks by building and maintaining a high profile email list, but I’m just not one of them. So I left Aweber and switched all my subscription forms to Feedburner email subscription.

It’s actually pretty good. On top of everything, it’s free and A LOT easier to set up. It’s got anti-spam captcha which Aweber lacks – I contacted Aweber support approximately 1 year ago about this feature and up until now, they still haven’t deployed it. The problem with a popular blog is that there are many spam bots waiting to fill every form on the pages. As a result, my list was filled with fake non-human emails which bloated my number of subscribers, thus monthly fees.

It sucks, though Aweber excels in many other regards such as demographic statistics and CTR, etc. If you’ve got a blog and just want to deliver your fresh posts to the inbox of your readers, namely blog subscription, Feedburner is perfect for you. If you want a little more as what an autoresponder does, Feedburner can somewhat help you in this as well, albeit limited in functionality.

Use Feedburner for Email Subscription

Just sign in your Google account and navigate to http://feedburner.google.com and you can start creating your feed right away. In addition to adding a Feedburner custom feed address to your blog, you can also get a email subscription form by “Type your blog or feed address here” and then click “Next”.

It’s all guided and easy to finish. After you have done, go to “Publicize” –> “Email Subscriptions” and click “Activate”, you would then be presented by a HTML code block which is the your blog subscription form that you should put at a prominent place on your blog. Readers can then enter their email addresses to sign up with your newsletter (not newsletter actually, but blog posts notifications). Recommended places to install the email subscription form include: 1) end of the post, 2) top of sidebar, etc.

Use Feedburner as Autoresponder

After you have created your feed at Feedburner, click the feed, and go to “Publicize” –> “Email Subscriptions” –> “Communication Preferences” and there’s a “Confirmation Email Body” that you are free to edit to include any messages or links you would like to show to the subscriber (yet-to-be), such as a thank-you line and the download URL of a ebook you’ve created. After you have made the changes, click “Save” to save them.

Now if anyone subscribes through the Feedburner email subscription form on your blog or website, he or she’d first receive a confirmation message from Feedburner containing things you added just now. It’s exactly like an autoresponder, and it’s free.

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After digging into Magento for a few months and trying to start my own tangible business (I only deal with digital goods as of now), I failed in finding the perfect theme for my store. What I had in mind was a Magento theme much like Thesis for WordPress, the sort of theme that’s simplistic yet powerful, finely crafted and omnipotent (not just for a specific niche). Seemed most of the themes I could find were a bit too frivolous for me, until I found Jake and his Avalanche, premium Magento theme.

Jake was one of a few Magento experts who are true masters of the eCommerce platform. I first discovered Avalanche with awe and thought, that was it – that was exactly what I wanted. With a few improvements it’d be the perfect theme for my store. I contacted Jake immediately with some of my ideas and he got back to me and greatly appreciated my feedback. He adopted and implemented my suggestions the next day. Those were some great ideas such as a mega / exploded menu option for the top navigation. It used to be 3 options, now there are 4 – it’s all yours to choose from in the Avalanche configuration panel.

I bought the Developer License for $399 that night. It was a remarkable experience. We exchanged quite some emails about how to make the theme better. Not every vendor takes customer suggestions so seriously, let alone a customer-yet-to-be; and it’s not every day you find a developer who so vigorously and wholeheartedly keeps refining his product.

The installation was a breeze. Had some minor problems as I was not quite experienced with Magento yet and emailed Jake for help and he got back to me within 1 hour. Every time. That’s the kind of support lacking in the official Magento Go team.

The Avalanche theme has lots of backend options that you can tweak to customize the look and general texts of your store. Cloud Zoom in place. Breadcrumbs are enhanced. Colors, typography, banners, featured products, AJAX quick views, cutting edge CSS3 features and many more.

As of now, I’m very much impressed in all regards, though I’d say it’s more of a theme for digital niches such as technology and electric products. The black and white theme may not suit every customer base (may not yield the best conversion rates in some niches). You need to tweak them a bit, unless Jake can come up with an overall color themes switcher in future updates. For now, we are stuck with color switchers just for borders, links, and action buttons – they are actually pretty nice with gradients, you should try it!

There could be more improvements and I’m sure Jake’s already started working on the next version. By far, I think he’s making the best premium Magento themes.

My 4.9/5 for Avalanche Magento theme.

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A quick notification for my readers. As VeriSign is increasing the registry fee of .com by about $0.5 by Jan. 15, 2012, you may want to renew all of your existing .com domains by then. The name registration fee is on a rise ever since the dawn, depending on your personal finance, renewing earlier is probably better that later.

It’s about to be Christmas so do search for “*registrar* renewal promo code”, coupons, etc. for your registrar when you are renewing your names. Dynadot was kind enough to offer a renewal promo code “HOLIDAYRENEWAL” for $0.25 discount off one year renewal of any .com name. It’s the best chance to renew all your names before the prices increase at the beginning of next year (2012).

Currently the best promo code I can find for Godaddy is “cjc795dom” which is $7.95 for .com renewal. Do share in the comments if you have a better find.

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I was debugging about some mod_rewrite errors caused by the .htaccess file on one of my sites and couldn’t solve the problem myself so I opted for a help thread on the SitePoint.com forum. Turned out it’s not the problem of my mod_rewrite rules in .htaccess but some incorrect file permissions that were causing the trouble.

Dklynn was very nice to help me in this regard and offered a gold advice that I thought I should share with you.

You Should NOT Use <IfModule></IfModule>. Why?

He pointed out that I should get rid of the <IfModule> conditional from the .htaccess file. It’s useless and a complete waste of server resources by all means. No excuses.

Considering the fact that all HTTP requests (including those to trivial assets such as .css, .js, .gif, .jpg, etc., thus each web page download would trigger about 10 or even more HTTP requests) to the Apache web server are handled by the rules in your .htaccess file, I think I should get rid of all such <IfModule> conditionals from all .htaccess files on all my sites, or the server would be doing useless check of “If Module xxx Is Enabled” every time a HTTP request is received…..

With a site receiving 1000 page visits per day, your server would have to do 10,000 such useless checks at the cost server resources and performance.

Many famous 3rd party scripts such as WordPress has <IfModule></IfModule> in the .htaccess file by default. This is to prevent potential errors should the module was not installed on the client’s production site / server. You should try and remove it. If the mod_rewrite and SEO friendly URLs are working, you can remove it without any problems.

This is pure gold advice offered by Dklynn. Check out his site about Apache mod_rewrite.

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These days it seems everything is automated. Some marketers even try to automate the two way conversation of the so called social media revolution, but there’s always got to be a human sentiment and senetient being behind communications. Especially the closer our network interactions become.

However, despite the need for up-close-and-personal two way communication, there are ways in which business, your website, your SME, any brand can be funneled into the new age.

Leads are always the focus of the so called sales funnel, but your whole marketing plan needs to reflect the best combination of automated marketing tactics, along with tools that help humans interact with humans. The infographic below show some clues as to how any business might accomplish this.

The graphic above courtesy HubSpot, shows a clear path for many large and small businesses to engage with better marketing balance. Putting any such plan into shoe leather, this is another story. Check back for more insight into how you can integrate all these tools and strategies, make your blog or outlet as powerful as it can be.

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When I was trying to find an eCommerce solution for my wedding dresses store, I tried Shopify for 30 days and then been a paid customer for 10 days before I canceled my plan (NOT in a negative manner). Have something to say about them so I come up with this brief review, which, hopefully can be helpful to those who are in search of a fine way to build online stores.

What I like about Shopify

1. Beautiful. Anyone who has used Shopify would agree that it’s the a beautiful and graceful eCommerce solution. People behind it are working their heart out. The free themes available for you to choose from for your store are eye-candies, simplistic and highly brandable. They SHOULD make more of them, though. Currently there are only about 10 free themes. If you want more, you’d have to pay. Commercial themes at their theme store cost about $100 – $300.
2. Proactive and personal support. I got emails offering to help from their support team every once a few days ever since my trial sign-up. Friendly, helpful and very personal. Of all the companies that I dealt with, Shopify is the only one that proactively asked me if I needed any help, REGULARLY. WiredTree comes second by asking for my feedback every 3 months. Magento Go comes last by offering unparalleled ridiculous support.
3. Very easy to use. It only took me a few minutes to set up the whole store with an attractive look and add the first product. The control panel was intuitive and texts (tab names, section titles, field names, etc.) were straightforward. I didn’t have to think to do something. It’s simply there when you need it.
4. Unlimited bandwidth. I specifically asked about this offer in one of the emails I exchanged with Chris, my client representative at Shopify, and he assured me that this was as TRUE as it’s promised. I never had the chance to have an online store that got hit by 100,000 unique IPs per day so I don’t know. But I sure like it. Who wouldn’t.
5. Premium yet affordable. While it may seem that a month-to-month SaaS eCommerce solution would cost more than buying a permanent license that could be hosted on your own server, it may not seem so when you scale up. When you hit the mark of 20,000 unique IPs per day and got over 20,000 products in your store, Shopify’s offer of $179 / month for unlimited bandwidth, storage and SKUs is simply irresistible. With licensed shopping cart software that’s hosted on your own server, you would worry about security and upgrade (it can be painful, believe me) which take time and money. However with Shopify, you don’t have to worry about them at all because underneath details are all taken care of. You get a store that’s silently self-evolving without your custody.
6. They refund. This is the single most valuable thing in any business. I was charged for the first month before I realized that I would be charged after the end of the trial period (30 days). After corresponding with my support staff Chris, I was able to get my money back without a hassle.

What I don’t like about Shopify

1. First off, they didn’t make it clear that I would be automatically signed up with paid membership and be charged for a month after my trial period ends. After talking with Chris, it seemed that the terms were in there, in fine print, and I needed to click to open the complete, tedious terms and conditions to find it. Well, I believe it would definitely be much more customer-friendly to get the text in the sign-up page in large print, like what Microsoft did with Office 365 so I know I have to cancel my trial contract to stop them from billing me when it ends.
2. Shopify doesn’t have effective product filtering. Or they probably have it but it takes quite some work to have it up for my store. For instance, the left side “Narrow Your Choices” product filtering at Zappos Women’s Clothing. I asked Chris about this and he said they had it and could give me an example store that had it. He never did.
3. Custom made products that are made to order are not well supported by Shopify. For example, a store that sells custom tailored wedding dresses where customers can freely select any of all the possible combinations of options: “Color”, “Size” and “Belt Color”. With 15 possible colors, 15 sizes and 15 belt colors, there would be a total of 15 x 15 x 15 = 3375 distinct combinations of product options (“Color”, “Size”, “Belt Color”) for each wedding dress. The problem with Shopify is, they treat every product as in the inventory rather than custom made, therefore I have to add all 3375 distinct combinations of product options one by one for each of the products. It’s simply an unrealistic job.

All after all, Shopify is among the top 3 most usable and beautiful online store solutions out there after I tried many of them. I would definitely recommend it to people I know and would very probably use it for some of my future ecommerce projects.

4.5/5.

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Stop! For a minute of break, feed yourself with these very interesting infographics, numbers, statistics and facts about www.facebook.com, the zoo of people. There are also data and survey about other social networking sites such as Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace that are listed in comparison with Facebook for your curiosity.

An Average Day on Facebook – What do People Do?

1. What do people do everyday on Facebook?
2. What are your categories of friends?
3. Engagement with the Facebook platform compared to that of Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace?

Google vs. Facebook on Privacy and Security

1. With the launch of Google+, Google and Facebook now compete in even more areas.
2. Comparison of Google+ and Facebook on income, unique visitors, etc.
3. Privacy checklist and security checklist against Google and Facebook.

Facebook vs. Twitter – Breakdown of Demographics

1. Facebook users gender, income, age, education, location, etc.
2. Twitter users gender, income, age, education, location, etc.

Facebook Random Stats, Funding and Top Likes

1. Facebook is available in 70 languages.
2. 75% of Facebook users are outside the U.S.
3. 250 million photos are uploaded on Facebook every single day.
4. 2 billion posts on Facebook are liked and commented every single day.
5. There are 800 million users actively engaging on Facebook and 50% of them log in Facebook every day.

Facebook’s Criticisms, Missteps and Outright Failures

1. Facebook persuaded millions of people to share stuff about themselves under the guise of privacy.
2. It remembers everything you do and make them publicly accessible.
3. Blah blah blah….

How Many People are Obsessed with Facebook?

1. There 500 million active users on Facebook, which means 1 in every 13 people on earth actively use Facebook.
2. 48% of 18 to 34 year-olds check facebook right when they wake up.
3. Blah blah blah….

A World without Facebook

Yeah, right….

Facebook Generates Business for Companies that Use It.

Businesses are found to get positive results engaging on Facebook with their own pages, by a recent survey conducted among small business owners.

The Demographics of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter

A demographic breakdown of who uses the most popular social sites against the U.S. Population: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter.

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It is vital to have a web presence in today’s digital world. With the large availability of high speed internet providers, it is also crucial to provide content that gets the attention of the visitor right away and makes them want to stay on the site.

Bounce rate is the amount of “single page” visits a site receives and this number must always remain low. The following list outlines ways for a site owner to reduce bounce rate and improve chances for success.

Focused Content

Site visitors will not be inclined to stick around if the content is not focused. It is better in the long run to choose a niche and write about it well rather than be more general and aim for hits. Also, the content should be based in fact and not opinion. The audience can always tell the difference and will also want to see facts backed up with evidence.

Post Presentation

The way a topic itself is presented in a post can make or break a site. The reader’s attention must be engaged from the first word or that person will not stay. Good presentation not only reduces bounce rate but also encourages the visitor to promote the site to friends or other interested parties. Word of mouth is the best advertising and it is free.

The right approach to presentation also promotes engagement through comments, subscribing to the site and sharing the link on social media. A high level of engagement can improve search engine ranking, as well, as site statistics improve with each visitor that doesn’t leave the site.

Good Navigation

Any website can be the most beautiful on the internet but if it does not have proper navigation, it will fail. Inability to find what is needed quickly is one of the top contributors to a high bounce rate. It is frustrating for both the visitor and site owner.

Let’s discuss some benefits of reducing bounce rate.

Conversions

Keeping visitors on a site can result in higher conversions for things such as sales, services, signups, downloads, etc. This can translate to greater PPC, as well. Offering digital downloads is a simple and convenient way to deliver goods, especially with most people using high speed internet providers.

Content Sharing

As discussed above, presentation is king and will encourage sharing of content. A link shared on Facebook or Twitter has the potential to go viral and lead to a huge increase in traffic. This in turn can translate into more conversion and more sharing. Proper presentation is invaluable and can only build upon itself.

Search Engine Ranking

A harsh truth about web presence is if a site isn’t well placed in the search engines, it can struggle to be noticed. Search engines can ultimately take into account a site’s bounce rate during indexing. This is why keeping the bounce rate low is so vital.

The online world is a very competitive place and this is especially true when running a website or blog. Taking some very simple steps to create an interesting presence will go a long way toward long term popularity and profitability.

Blake Sanders is a writer of news and information on high speed internet providers at broadband comparison site Broadband Expert. He also specializes in wireless internet, cell phones, and other technical news.

Note: Photo courtesy of Alaskan Dude via FlickR Creative Commons.

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Making sense is NOT what I’m known for. You are warned.

Success is a shadow of rarity. Try to be rare before you try to be successful.

99% of the people takes whatever they can while 1% gives whatever they can. 1% is a rarity. So they are 100 times more likely to get what they want than the 99%.

The idea of owning something is the source of suffering. It worries you and occupies your mentality, keeping you from achieving more because you are afraid to lose the things you have earned.

One should not try to own something. Owning or getting something such as wealth should not be the overall goal of his or her endeavors. Instead, one should try pushing the limits.

Want to be more financially successful? Don’t think of target numbers, but think about these questions – Why am I limited at where I am now? Why are the few others so ahead of me? What can be done to lift that limit and go farther? What can be done to be more productive or more creative? – And answer these questions by very very specific answers.

For example, I worry that one day I would lose the revenue streams of the many sites I created in the last 4 years, so I spent considerable time each week maintaining and promoting them. While results are slightly better and better by month, it’s ultimately not exponential growth which you would need to be a billionaire. It’s just a linear growth. Linear growth would only get you a millionaire at the best.

And this LIMITS me. It keeps me from getting better.

While these old sites occupy large portions of my schedule, I can’t concentrate enough on projects with “better outlook”. AND because I am dedicating my time to so many different projects at the same time, hardly any of them would eventually roll into an exponential growth at all because none of them are good enough to hit critical mass.

Even worse, it costs a lot when you multi-task.

It’s hard to give up on something you’ve been working so hard to build, because you are emotionally attached to it. It produces little yet you hold it dear.

Stop! Don’t get married to your projects. Move on, when you find out the niche isn’t as good as you thought it would be.

So I found one of the things that are limiting me – multi-tasking on too many projects at the same time. And my solution to this is: I’ll concentrate on one project at a time from now on.

Caring too much about the results would lead you to “copy” what the successful guys are doing, which is exactly what you don’t want to do if you don’t want to be mediocre.

You can do much better when you don’t care about the results than when you do.

Only when you lose you grow.

“Do one thing good, so the rest doesn’t suck. ”

(This line was from one of the movies. Can’t recall the title though.)

There is NO such thing as a saturated niche.

Be stubborn. Don’t seek advice. People are stupid. Don’t listen to them. Do what you think is right. Fail? So what!!

Take care.

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I officially signed up with Magento Go‘s Going Places plan for $25 / month and paid $99 for my SSL to be installed. It’s been 3 days and I wish I had better things to say about them.

And this is my review.

Uptime: 4.7 / 5

It’s too early to tell because I’m only with them for 10 days (in trial for 7 days). Sometimes it’s a bit slow. Magento is known to be resource-intensive. But as of now, Magento Go has been constantly up and responsive for me.

Price: 2.5 / 5

I would have given them 5 / 5 if I don’t have to pay $99 for my SSL to be installed – yes, that’s JUST for the installation service, not the SSL. You have to provide your own SSL certificate purchased from a CA to them. And this didn’t turn out to be very pleasant. I’ll come to that later.

The $1 million stimulus package that they promised to discount the monthly subscription fee by $15 for a year hasn’t been activated for me – and I contacted them about this twice – got NO responses of any kind. Waited nearly 24 hours and still no emails. So I logged back in to see the tickets. You know what I found? The tickets are all DELETED, like it’s never happened before.

What kind of support does that?

So the $1 million stimulus program is pretty much false advertising. Chances are, you won’t get it. Or you will. We are totally at their mercy.

Features: 4.1 / 5

If you are ever building an online store, once in your life time, you should use Magento Go. It simply makes sense.

After trying a few more online store builders, I think I’ll unsay the above saying.

Everything seems good, if not great. There are some parts that can be improved, such as the theming system, backup system, etc.

Their top plan for $125 / month offers a tingling of just 32GB monthly bandwidth. Anyone with decent SEO skills would easily hit that mark in half a year, especially if you’ve got lots of large images for the products. And extra bandwidth are charged $10 / GB. Pretty expensive. AND they don’t even have a bandwidth meter where you can see how much you’ve gone so far. So good luck…My tip is to use external website for hosting the product images.

Otherwise, Magento Go is simply NOT an . Be prepared to pay premium when you are locked in with them.

Support: 0.8 / 5

Appalling. If you are ready to pay $xxx per month for the top plan, you would probably be treated much better. But that’s just a theory.

I opened a total of 9 tickets, they DELETED 3 of them and responded to 3 of them.

They sent a very important message to *my* email. I didn’t receive it. Because that’s NOT my email, not even close. How hilarious is that!

Ticketing system is very hard to use. You would view the message and then click “Back” to return to the previous page to reply to it – if you have to quote something, you click “Forward” to view the message sent to you and then click “Back” again to continue writing. Very user-UNFRIENDLY ticketing system.

I posted a “Problem” message to the collaboration site (a collaboration support community to help dilute the workload of the REAL support team) about how my SSL hasn’t been installed after paying $99 and why my tickets got DELETED in the ticketing system. You know what they did? They changed the “Problem” status to “Question“. You know, it doesn’t look pretty in red.

Quick Facts about Go’s Support

People love interesting facts. Here are them.

• A total of 3 tickets that got NO responses and simply got DELETED:
  1) A request for installing my SSL attached with my certificate files from GeoTrust
  2) A request to be enrolled in the $1 million stimulus package they promised – $15 monthly discount for next 12 billing cycles
  3) A question why my store home page doesn’t display the newest products after I added them in the backend – tried 2 different approaches but none of them worked.
• After I complained about the SSL installation, they claimed to have sent an email to me at yanghit (@@@@@) gmail dot com. Apparently I didn’t receive it. Because that’s NOT my email, nor anything close.
• For me, their support turnaround is about 12 hours, sometimes as long as 3 days, IF they respond at all. (I just recalculated the actual turnaround based on tickets’ and questions’ time stamps)

12 Hours Support Turnaround

Any support turnaround that’s 12 hours or longer is just unacceptable for mission critical sites such as eCommerce stores. Ordinary content sites have an eCPM of about $5 – $50 per thousand visits, however, online stores generally averages $200 – $2000 per thousand visits. Every hour of problem or down time causes substantial loss; the greater the traffic & conversion rate, the greater the damage.

People who choose Go are generally not technically oriented and would require a lot of help along the way. It would be a very painful experience for them should something get haywire yet they can’t get anything done in 12 hours.

Magento Go has got to seriously work on that.

Busted?

They got a final score of 60.5 / 100. Merely passed.

I will keep you updated on my experience with Magento Go. Even though their support isn’t the best in the world, I’d still recommend them to you. Hopefully they can see this review and give their support department a revamp.

I would love to see Magento Go becomes the go-to brand for online eCommerce solution. However, as of now, you would be better off with CE and do your own hosting, if you’ve got some technical nerves. In this case, I would like to recommend the Avalanche Magento theme.

What other folks are saying…

Seems I’m not alone on the bad experiences with Magento Go:

1. http://www.shoppingcartsforwebsites.com/general/magento-go-review/
2. http://www.commercestyle.com/e-commerce/magneto-sucks
3. http://www.magentogoreview.com/list-of-magento-go-reviews~123

Update: I submitted a ticket and a *problem* at the collaboration site asking for a refund of the $99 SSL setup fee and they finally got back to me, addressing a question I asked 23 hours ago. After a few more tickets (each taking 2 – 3 hours for them to respond), my SSL is finally up and working.

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So I’ve tried the Pro version of SEOmoz, an online SEO software application, for a few days and I think I’ve got to write a review. This would turn out to be very ugly.

Many years ago the features that this system brings to the table could have been useful for the SEO novice, but today almost everything that it does, other systems do better. In addition, most of the tools you need to duplicate this product are either free, or very inexpensive.

One of its primary features is that it crawls your website weekly, and lets you know if you have any broken links or other issues with your site. If you have a Google account, you can simply register your URL with them, and use their free webmaster tools to do the same thing, and it does not cost you $99 a month like this product does. Here’s the link for Google Webmasters Tools http://www.google.com/webmasters/.

The next claim to fame that this item promotes is on-page optimization. This is a very simple concept to understand and implement. There are many articles on the internet that you can read for free that will tell you exactly how to do this. And it’s quite easy.

Essentially, it just comes down to using your primary keywords in the title and a description of that post. There are a few other things you will need to do besides what was mentioned above, but not too many. Lots of WordPress plugins have been created to help you in this regard. Simply search for ‘wordpress SEO plugins’. Some of them are totally free while some of them may charge a humble one-time fee which is exponentially lower than $99 / month. And they do the job very well.

Thirdly, it keeps an eye on your competition for you. Great, like you could not just use Google, Yahoo, or Bing to accomplish the same thing. It will also tell you all of your competitor’s backlinks for only $99 a month. If you would like to find out that very same information, there are tons of free ways to do that. Just google.

The final item they would like to impress you with is that the software will continue to improve and evolve over time. Well, for $99 a month it better, because it is pretty close to being useless right now.

The only thing I appreciate is their blog. It’s the best SEO information outlet I’ve seen. No one ever comes close. You would learn a hell lot more about SEO from there in an hour than from any other sources combined in a whole year.

For this review of SEOmoz Pro, the paid SEO productivity application, we give it a big fat zero stars, with 5 stars being the best. What else can we say about this thing, it is pretty much as bad as it gets. There is nothing that it does now, that cannot be accomplished for free with another application, or by researching a few articles on the internet. But if you don’t mind spending a *premium* price for a premium *looking* application, by all means, go ahead and sign up with it.

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Someone approached to sell me a grandfathered .EDU name. I never thought .EDU domain can be traded so I started to research a little bit. Ain’t they owned only by educational institutions of United States?

Turns out .EDU names in existence as of October 29, 2001 were more freely registered and thus many non-educational entities such as individuals and businesses owned them. However, after the management of the .EDU name space were transferred to EDUCAUSE and thus new regulations were introduced on and from October 29, 2001, .EDU names can only be distributed to certified higher educational institutions operating in the United States and cannot be traded or exchanged whatsoever. But the .EDU names created before Oct.29, 2001 remained in the hands of their original registrant. That’s why they are called “grandfathered”. They are out of the current rules but they can still exist.

While you cannot acquire a new .EDU name now – unless you purchase a small local college for couple of millions – can you get a grandfathered .EDU from its previous owner?

The owner / registrant name of the .EDU name must remain unchanged for its lifetime – no matter if it’s a grandfathered .EDU or a .EDU created after Oct. 29, 2001. So is this all a scam or is it really possible to buy a grandfathered .EDU name?

The way to trade a grandfathered .EDU is probably to trade the owner entity. You are not buying the name, instead, you are buying the business entity that owns the .EDU name. I never personally bought such an entity to get any .EDU name so I’m not saying this way would work. From my research, this is definitely a possible way. Quite a few domain name brokers said they knew such sales existed or even engaged in one.

To make sure, I approached the staff at EDUCAUSE.edu and these are the 2 official replies I got:

EDU domains cannot be given, sold, or in any other way transferred to another institution. EDU domains –even those grandfathered – must remain registered to the original registrant.

— Kate, Member Services Representative

Nothing seriously against the idea of obtaining the owner entity to obtain the .edu name. However the second reply from a Senior Policy Director comes much more serious:

Names in the .edu domain are made available to registrants under conditions and policies specified by the U.S. Department of Commerce. In particular they are not "owned" by the registrant and therefore may not be sold or otherwise transferred. The contract included in your most recent message is thus in error in stating "…that this Business Entity is the sole beneficial owner of the domain name xxxxxx.edu, that said domain name is not encumbered in any manner…".

In your original e-mail you said: "Someone approached me to sell me a grandfathered .edu name." Such a sale would be invalid regardless of any attempt to embed that sale within another transaction. EDUCAUSE will not hesitate to disable any .edu name we find to have been sold or otherwise transferred in violation of policy.

— Steven, Senior Policy Director

If you are ever buying a grandfathered .edu name, better make sure to stay low and never let EDUCAUSE knows about the deal. ;)

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I’ve been a happy Amazon affiliate for over a year now and the monthly revenues have been steadily climbing up ever since I started promoting their products galore. The most recent month, Mar. 2011 has ended up making me over $400 in commissions or advertising fees. Attached on the right is the screenshot. Considering I didn’t do much work, it’s really awesome to have a nice side income that’s gonna last for a while – which is the beauty of SEO! Once you done the hard work the right way, it’s gonna last for at least a few years and even grow by itself!

So I’ve got a few tips to share with you if you just started on Amazon to make money.

If you’ve got a blog:

These are tips for people who aren’t technically oriented but blog a lot.

1. Don’t promote a product or widget on a site-wide level. My experience is it almost never works out. Go article level.
2. Add a relevant product at the end of every blog post. It takes extra minutes for a post but it would definitely yield great results. Relevance is the key here. Find the most reviewed and best received product such as a book that carries the information relevant to your blog post. Find the product that best complements your post.
3. Write articles in the mind of promoting one or more of the popular products at Amazon. Do not write to hype how good the product is, instead, write in your genuine tone to solve the readers’ or visitors’ problem and drop your Amazon affiliate links in-between the helpful words, naturally leading them to purchase the products.
4. If you’ve used a product, write a genuine review! People love personal writings. Write a review and be personal. Then link to Amazon page under your affiliate ID.
5. Target micro-niches and go long tail. The smallest product (in terms of price) would make you the most money. Most people who fail in Internet marketing fail to realize this. Small is big.

If you know how to build a website all by yourself:

These are tips for people who develop websites by themselves.

1. Create a comparison shopping site / search engine that integrates a lot of different vendors. Visitors arrive on your page to compare the prices and terms of each vendor (including Amazon’s) and decide where to spend the money – by clicking your affiliate links. This is the mogul approach. It is great but you have to dedicate a lot of time and energy to make and maintain it. I built Dante Books off this ISBN database which is essentially a books directory site with limited price comparison. For now, it leads only to Amazon. ;)
2. Add relevant products to your existing sites. For example, the traffic of a golf courses directory would be very much interested in the golf equipment.
3. Create a review club of certain products. People can come to share their reviews. An online book club would be very fun to create and maintain!
4. Create a rebate site. When customers order under your name and you earn 7% of the deal, give 3% rebate to the customer.

To make the most of Amazon Associate Program or any other affiliate programs:

Some general guidelines in making affiliate programs work.

1. Use a clean, white design with minimum images unless it’s for the sale / conversion.
2. Put content the first thing. Do NOT distract the readers from the content for any reason. Get rid of other ads. Less is more.
3. Blend your affiliate links in the content as if it’s a very helpful and indispensable resource to compensate your point.
4. Write the content within 2-minutes reading time’s length. Use at least one list, ordered or unordered, in each article. Plant at least one affiliate link in the list.

There could be more, but I’ve got to find something to eat now.

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