I just got back from a little trip to Cebu, a famous resort place in the Philippines. It reminds me how important it is to relax, take a vacation, get away from the computer.
The resort I stayed in had half an hour of free internet access a day and I limited my self to those 30 minutes. On a normal day, I spend quite abit more time than that at the computer...
Anyway, take my advice; take a vacation. You can do it the easy way. Just find a some hotel recommendations online, pick one that seems to be in a cool are, and go. Or you can try to join something like leisure time promotions. Here, travelers use RCI points to get stays in various timeshare condos and resorts. Companies like Mariott have point clubs and some people love using RCI to trade points and whatnot. Other people complain that using points is too difficult.
Now Leisure Time might actually use the point sto make reservations and everything for you - on their website they sound like a regular travel agency except for the emphasis on RCI and points.
If you're looking to develop websites on your own, you need to know what you're doing but you don't have to prove it to anyone else. If you're looking for a job in the search engine marketing industry you will need to prove something. The best way would be to have a successful track record in the web development business. The second best way would be to get some academic qualifications.
That won't be so easy, however. In American universities, SEO still stands for "Student Employment Office". I haven't been able to find any SEO or SEM degree programs from universities (I did a search including only .edu domains). For example, Collins College offers the following programs:
Associate - Media Arts
Associate - PC Network Technology
Associate - Visual Communications
Bachelor - Animation
Bachelor - Game Design
Bachelor - Graphic Design
Bachelor - Interior Design
Bachelor - Management
Bachelor - Media Arts - Film/HDTV
Bachelor - Media Arts - Motion Graphics/Visual FX
Bachelor - Network Technology
Bachelor - Visual Arts: Game Art
Bachelor - Visual Communications
This shows us that people looking for academic qualifications in the SEO business don't have a lot of choices - it's still the "old school" computer programs that remain popular degree tracks.
Matt Cutts wants to do terrible things to people who sell links. So far we're at 338 comments and counting - quite an uproar!
Has anyone turned in a link seller yet? I swear the next spam mail I get...
The cheapest plan for buying traffic on Quality Traffic Supply.com is $30 for 5,000 visitors and they say that websites using Adsense buy its targeted traffic.
A little math shows us that with this package you're paying $6 per 1,000 visitors. A $6 eCPM with Adsense is cerainly possible, and some of my websites do better. The question becomes how good the traffic is. They claim that the quality is excellent and that all visitors follow contextual links to reach your site (no pop-ups or anything like that). Would this traffic interact with Adsense the same way normal traffic does?
A bigger plan means cheaper traffic: 50,000 Visitors = $200. That means $4 per 1,000 visitors. I have lots of sites that could make these numbers work, even if the traffic doesn't show as high an eCPM as I'm used to with my regular traffic and Adsense.
Should I give it a try? Has anyone else done this?
Supposedly the iPhone will still come out in June but their new operating system will be delayed because everyone is so busy working on the iPhone.
"iphone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price - we had to borrow some key software engineering and [quality assurance] resources from our Mac oS X team," Apple said in a statement.With Apple going all out to finish the iPhone on time, I guess it's time to start thinking about iPhone accesory shopping. You would want to consider a case and a screen protector at the very least.
In a recent Google news alert, I got news from domains that I can't even link to safely:
http://www.online-casinos-us.com/information/family-history/websites/suffolk-family-history.htm seems to be some collection of links on a MFA page on a casino domain.
http://findit05.pochta.ru/089.html is a spammy looking URL that actually redirects to the Google homepage.
Google has to clean this stuff up. Hopefully Matt Cutts isn't too busy with his in-laws to get the Google spam guys on this.
I recently noticed one of my sites down. I checked the web hosting situation and everything was fine. I logged in to registerfly.com and saw the domain was good until 2010 (which is what I paid for by the way). But I couldn't set my nameserver - I got an error message that the domain had expired. That explained why my nameserver info went AWOL. When I did a whois lookup, I saw that the domain had expired yesterday.
Somehow, Registerfly didn't update my domain's renewal date or there was some other problem related to their not supplying ICANN with the domain information. I'm not here to summarize the myriad news articles on the topic. I'm here to help you if you need to quickly move domains away from registerfly.com
First, do a whois lookup. If your registrar is listed as Enom, keep reading. If your registrar is listed as registerfly than I don't know how to help you (I still have 21 domains with them).
If Enom is your regisistrar, call Enom. On enomcentral.com, it says their support phone is:
425.274.4500, Opt #3. The option for expired domains (my domain had already expired so I picked option 1).
Then enom sends you an email with the steps you have to take. You set up an enomcentral account - free. You send them your account username. You send them a pic of your license or other photo ID (if you're not American you may need a passport - I just needed my license) + a screenshot of your registerfly account so they know you own the domain + names of domains you want in your Enom account + the account name on enomcentral.
Once I did that I had to wait a while. However I was able to renew my domain (9.74/year) and get my site back online once it was set up in Enom Central.
If you're curious, I did try to renew with registerfly first. Not exactly renew since I had already paid for another 3 years, but anyway I called support. I'm not sure if they have shut down or what, but I was on hold for 3 or 4 hours. Then I hung up and tried going through Enom. This no phone support issue makes me very nervous about being able to work with my 21 domains still registered with registerfly.com.
If you try to renew through registerfly, and you're still on Enom's system, you would have to approve a transfer. I don't think you want to move away from Enom at this point. Registerfly is in trouble with ICANN and a 4 hour wait for phone support without talking to anyone is pretty bad.
If you still have domains with registerfly, good luck. And wish me luck too! Hopefully this blog entry helps you sort out any issues you have with being unable to renew names through registerfly.
About a year ago I was reading about some words that were fairly new in the English language, words like cartology (looking in people's shopping carts and judging them based on how much beer or tofu you see in there).
Anyway, 2 of the words were right in one of my main niches so I checked to see if the .com names were available. One of them I had to add blog to the keyword and I now rank #5 in Google (8 in Yahoo). The other one I got the actual .com and now rank #2 in Google (same in Yahoo).
Now I'm not saying that I have good SERPs because I have good domain names. I'm saying I got in early. This is my chance to be accepted as a real authority site because I'll be one of the oldest sites related to the keyword. And being one of the currently few sites) means that when someone writes about my topic there's a good chance they link to me because they only have a few choices.
So find new words that relate to profitable niches (I don't see cartology becoming a high paying or high traffic keyword. Don't bother looking for the .com if you think I'm wrong - it's taken. I won't link there because it's some sort of spammy directory that claims to be about maps, but whatever. They have to make money somehow and no one is paying for courses in cartology yet...
http://www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com/ad_network_222.php