Can’t Get Rich

I never really mess with tags on my posts. I gave up with SEO a long time ago (around the time I got slapped with a PR0), and haven’t really bothered with it since. Well, it’s time for a change. I’ve decided that there might just be something to that whole ‘organic traffic’ thing, so I’ve decided to atone for my SEO sins and try to get this site indexed on Google again. I’ve already gone through and made some changes to my linkbacks, so this site is now 100% compliant with Google’s standards (as far as I can tell). I followed Collin’s instructions on how to get your pagerank back, including sending an email to Google letting them know that I’ve recognized the error of my ways, and humbly requesting a reconsideration. I’m expecting a nice juicy PR update any day now.

That just leaves one thing that I’ve been neglecting - tags. I haven’t added tags to a post in months. I certainly didn’t want to go back through all 240 of my posts, as that would take forever. Luckily for me, someone on Wickedfire solved my problem for me: Tagaroo.

Slow, yet awesome

Tagaroo is a nice little plugin that actively scans your posts and suggests tags. Using it, it only took me about an hour or two to go back through all of my posts and get everything updated. It’s not the most accurate thing in the world, but it does pick up on common themes in your posts, so it saves you at least a little effort.

The only downside that I can see with this plugin is that it will sloooooow your interface down. I’m not sure if it’s because of some coding issue, or that Firefox sometimes leaks memory like a sieve. In any case, it wasn’t a big enough problem that I had to stop using it. I’d recommend giving it a try.

Tags + PR = Traffic?

I’ve got good tags, a decent sitemap, and lots of content. Now all I need is for Google to un-banish me from PR0 hell, and hopefully I’ll be able to attract a little more attention. I’d really like to start ranking for terms like “SEO podcast”, “affiliate marketing podcast”, “blogging podcast”, and stuff like that. Here’s hoping.

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If you’re into affiliate marketing, have a laptop, and live in a reasonably well populated area, then you need to read this thread. It’s brilliant. Since I live in a college town, I’m going to try this as soon as I get a Bluetooth antenna. I really need to get HarveyJ on my show.

Speaking of the podcast, remember back in episode 1 when Nick talked about the guy in high school who went from $0/day to $200/day? It looks like I’ll be talking to him this weekend. He’s a relatively new player in the ‘make money online’ field, but judging from what I’ve read about him, he’ll be climbing into the spotlight pretty soon.

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The company that I work for was acquired by The Planet yesterday, so I thought it would be a good time to talk about different web hosting options. There’s a lot of tech-lingo that’s tossed around when talking about web hosting, and some people don’t seem to understand the differences. Today, I thought I’d go over a few of the many types of hosting, and what to expect from them.

Shared Hosting

This is the most basic (and usually cheapest) kind of web hosting. Shared hosting is just like it sounds: Your website is hosted on a shared server with dozens, even hundreds of other sites. Shared hosting is fine for sites that don’t require a lot of system resources, or for people just getting started online. The downside of shared hosting is that sometimes the other people on the server don’t like to share. Their sites will eat up all the bandwidth/CPU time/memory, and your site is stuck with whatever is left. If you can, always check to see what kind of load your server experiences. For a single-processor system, a load below 1 is ideal. For a dual-processor (or core) system, below 2 is good (and so on and so forth). I’ve seen some shared hosting servers sit at 20+ load all day, and that equals slow load times and 404s. If you’re on a server like that, it’s time to change hosts.

VPS

A VPS, or virtual private server, is a step up from shared hosting. With a VPS, you’re given your own separate sever environment and a set amount of system resources, and they’re all yours to use. The thing is, it’s still not 100% dedicated. Your VPS is still sharing one physical server with several other VPSs, although the resource management rules set in place make it difficult for the other virtual servers to effect yours. A VPS is an ideal choice for someone who has dozens of websites, or a few websites that consume a significant amount of system resources (huge databases, memory-intensive applications, etc).

Dedicated Hosting

You get your own physical server. It’s all yours. There really isn’t much to explain. Dedicated hosting is the most expensive of the three options, but then again, you can do whatever you want with your sever. Dedicated is ideal for people who have tons of sites, sites that get a lot of traffic, people who want to run dedicated game servers, or people who want to start their own web hosting company. Basically, people who want to do whatever they want.

One thing to look out for with dedicated is that it usually comes in two flavors: managed and unmanaged. With an unmanaged server, it’s up to you to keep it online and working properly. If it goes down, you’re stuck waiting until a datacenter tech fixes it. With a managed server, you have one or more admins watching it 24×7 to make sure nothing goes wrong, and when something does go wrong, they leap into action to correct the problem. Obviously, managed servers tend to be more expensive than their unmanaged counterparts, but the uptime is usually worth it.

Clearing things up

I hope this article gave you guys a basic understanding of how hosting works. Nothing irks me more than people who think that each website gets its own individual server (yes, there are lots of them). Educate yourself and avoid pissing off your techs.

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Rejected title - “OnlyAccount.com: Impressive enough to catch my attention.”

I almost never use social bookmarking sites. Stumbleupon traffic is too random, Digg is full of idiots, and I’ve never really used the other big ones. In any case, that’s all in the past now. One of my nice readers sent me an invite to a new service that he’s developing: OnlyAccount.com. It’s currently in closed beta, so you’ll just have to let me describe it to you (although they are accepting beta tester applications, so sign up if you’d like).

OnlyAccount is pretty simple - You create one account with them, and you let that one account manage all of your other accounts at various social bookmarking sites. After adding your accounts, you can add bookmarks, select which accounts and which services you’d like to add them to, and then let OnlyAccount do the rest. Altogether, it’s a pretty simple process.

Step 1 - Add accounts and logins

I’m actually not a member of any of the eight social bookmarking sites OnlyAccount currently supports, so I had to go and sign up for all of them. I picked one username and password, signed up for all eight sites, and then added them all to one of my OnlyAccount users. It turns out you can add multiple users to your OnlyAccount login, but for now I just used one. Anyway, after adding all of that crap I noticed that I’d mistyped my password in six out of eight of them, but thankfully the service has a mass-edit function that made it simple to fix.

Yes, I know mass-edit is a mundane feature, but you’d be surprised at the number of online services that lack it. Anyway, it makes things easier for the user.

Step 2 - Add bookmark

I decided to bookmark my podcast page. I wrote up a title, description, and provided a list of keywords. After that, I selected my user, all eight of its logins (bookmarking sites), and clicked submit.

Step 3 - Wait

All of those submissions got put into a queue where they were processed within 5 minutes. The queue is very descriptive, with status messages and errors just in case something doesn’t work. After processing, it automatically moves your entries to a separate ‘completed’ queue for record-keeping purposes. Very nice.

Basically, I like this service because it streamlines the whole process of social bookmarking. Once you’ve gotten everything signed up for and recorded in the system, it’s cake to blast out your submissions to multiple sites on multiple accounts. In my example, I only used one user and eight sites. While OnlyAccount may not be a huge time saver in that regard, just imagine if I had created ten or twenty users? Thanks to this service, I would have only had to spend a couple minutes of my time creating a bookmark while the system plowed through 80-160 submissions.

Overall, I think this service has great potential. I’d recommend checking it out if you get the chance.

Oh yeah, and don’t create 100 accounts and get it flagged as a spamming site. No need to ruin it for the rest of us.

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I came across two exceptionally clever marketing ideas today. Neither one of them are my own, but I thought I’d share anyway.

First off, a virus

One of my awesome readers sent me an interesting tip the other day - Apparently, his computer had caught a virus. No, keep reading, it gets interesting. He noticed that, when he loaded web sites with Adsense blocks, they were quickly covered up with a second advertisement. After doing a quick virus scan and finding (and curing) an infection, the graphical ads stopped and the Adsense blocks returned.

That has got to be one of the most brilliant viruses (virii?) I’ve ever heard of. You see, people tend to think of spyware and malware when giant flashing popups appear on their desktop for no particular reason, but everybody expects to see banner ads on a website, right? So, why bother purchasing ad space? Just steal it from every site on the net (with adsense code that is). By superimposing your own ads over competitors ads, you have a free advertising vehicle that will fly right under most people’s radar. My hat is off to whoever wrote such a clever bug.

Employ those bums

Brilliant? Maybe. Strange? Definitely. This guy is thinking outside of the box with a program he calls Bumvertising (yes, I know it’s been around since 2005. I just heard about it today, so sue me). Basically, he “employs” a few bums around town. They hold up his sign (in addition to their own) in exchange for food/cash/whatever. Check out his gallery to see what I mean.

I wonder how this idea worked out for him? He’s gotten all kinds of press, both positive and negative, and his forums are a mess of praise, hatred, and spam. What I’m really wondering is whether or not he’s violating any labor laws. Since he’s technically employing them, he’d have to pay minimum wage, deal with taxes, etc. I’m guessing he just took the simple route and did it all under the table.

Still, it’s an interesting idea, one that definitely got him a lot of attention.

Thinking outside of the box

I really need to work on my creativity. Right now, I’m taking a look at all of the resources I have at my disposal (a lot of time, a lot of (gullible) students, and not a lot of money), and trying to figure out how best to use them. Too bad you can’t learn how to be creative.

Oh well, maybe more Mountain Dew will help.

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