Domain Name Fraud!!!

My mom owns a small family owned business named R.J. Becht & Son.  They specialize in custom made riding apparel.  For many years her web site was serviced at a .com URL and approximately six months ago she changed her domain.  To my disbelief, the old server is using her old domain to pull free advertising for them selves.  If you do a Google search, her old domain comes up first and if you click on this still active domain you are routed to her  old publisher’s site.  They are using her company name which has been in business for over 88 years to hopefully gain business for themselves.  This must tell you something about the character of her old server.  Obviously they cannot obtain enough business under their own name or have enough good standing in their company without having to fraudulently pull off another business.  Isn’t this like cheating on a paper back in the fifth grade?  You feel you can’t do it on your own, so you borrow information from someone else.  Unfortunately, she is not in the fifth grade but an adult (by age) who feels compelled to still cheat if possible.  Now isn’t that someone you would like to do business with?  Someone you can trust for your business?  Besides gladly accepting your money to maintain your site she willingly and knowingly will take any information she has and use it in her best interest.  In today’s society,  we all look to deal with people we feel will do us justice and hopefully do things in our best interest and not take advantage of us or to degrade the trust we have placed in them.

Facebook Advertising Not Good for Every Business

The very popular social network, Facebook, can also be a way to advertise your website and drive your traffic. You can use Facebook like any other Pay Per Click Website where you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. You can actually create a pretty detailed along with a picture thumbnail. Most PPC sites like Adwords or Adcenter will only allow text. After submitting my ads i had high hopes that this would really send more traffic to my site. I mean everyone uses Facebook so it seemed like a good idea.

Well after a week of still waiting for my first click i gave up. I had over 20,000 impressions with not one single click. I know i didn’t get it much time but after having 20,000 impressions with no clicks i couldn’t take it anymore. So i canceled my account and that’s the last time i ever try to advertise with Facebook.

So why is this? CPM and CPC work where relevant traffic is present and that is for sure not Facebook. Now the ability to target with it is amazing. You can narrow it down to gender, age, or even what their interests are, but the problem is that people are too interested in the content of the site and not the advertisements. Markets that may succeed are restaurants, fashion or clothing, and magazine marketing. It is clear though that Facebook is not good for every business.

If Facebook were to one day implement a web search into their site, I’m sure the advertising would be more effective.

Free and Easy Way to Get Leads

Recently i had signed up for my first affiliate and had done a lot of the basic ways to advertise online. I did blogging, posted in classified, social networks, and even participated in forum with my link in my signature. I never really thought about sending out emails until i found the website Free-Leads.net. This is a free and easy way to get thousands of leads for you every month for free.

When you first sign up with them you are considered a bronze level member and get access to 5000 leads for free each month. This is the order of the ways ways you can get more leads.

Bronze Level (Free)
Members get access to 5000 co-reg leads monthly

Silver Level (Refer 5 others that become members)
Members get access to 10,000 co-reg leads monthly

Gold Level (Refer 15 others that become members)
Members get access to 20,000 co-reg leads monthly

Platinum Level (Refer 30 others that become members)
Members get access to 40,000 co-reg leads monthly

Diamond Level (*Refer 50 others that become members)
Members get access to 80,000 co-reg leads monthly

Each month they will also give you bonus leads no matter what tier member you are. My experience has been that they will give you anywhere from 1000 to 1500 bonus leads instantly. Other than referring members to the site to move up, you can pay a one time fee of $99.95 and you will automatically be a Diamond Level member.

Its really simple to download the new leads. You download them to your computer in a zip file and than you unzip it and you will have all of your already in excel. They come complete with Name, Email, Address and Phone Number. Than from there you can easily upload these contacts to your email account. I instantly uploaded all 2500 of them instantly to my Gmail contacts. Than it’s all fun and games from there.

Crazy Change in Price of Flash Drives

Over the years the price and the amount of storage flash drives contain has changed ridiculously. IBM being the first to release the flash drive to the public, released their 8MB flash drive in December of 2000. At this time this would cost you several hundred dollars. At this time this was huge because 8MB was eight times as much as the normal and current floppy disks held. As the outside of the flash drive hasn’t changed much the inside has changed more than you could ever imagine.

Now lets jump ahead almost five years to 2005. At this time they had begun to come out with flash drives of 1 and 2 GB’s, but the price of them were not realistic. In 2005 you were lucky to get a 2GB flash drive for under $200. In this day and age that could buy you a brand new netbook with 100x the storage. For a more reasonable price you could get a 256 or 512MB for 50 or $60s.

Again lets jump ahead two years to 2007. By this time the price of flash drives has dropped quite a bit since 2o05. You can get a lot more storage a lower cost. A 1 0r 2GB flash drive would cost you around 20 to 30 dollars. Around this time is when they started messing around with higher capacities. SanDisk had made its largest flash drive yet and that was a 32GB Flash drive that would cost you around $350. I’ve worked in electronic retail for almost four years so i remember when we got out first 4GB flash drive and we were just in shock.

Today the most common capacities sold are the 4 and 8GB. You can get these at pretty much any retailer for $20. With most 4GB drives you won’t spend more than $10. Better yet you can get a 16 or 32GB drive anywhere between $3o and $50. The biggest ones today are 256GB, from Kingston and they MSRP for around $900. As you’ve seen though most likely “tommorow” we’ll see one bigger.

Its just crazy to think you can get a 4GB flash drive today for $10. When in 2000 you couldn’t get am 8MB for less than $200. So if I’m doing my math right that’s 4096MBs today and 8MBs in 2000. Basically that is over 500x as much capacity for one twentieth of the price. In my eyes this is just fascinating and incredible how much technology progresses.

The Coolest Ipod App in the World!!!

If you have an Iphone or an Itouch there is just one Application you have to get. It’s the Remote Application from Apple. Every since i got this thing I can’t stop using it and telling everyone about it.

For those of you who have not used it, basically what you do is you sync it to your Itunes Library over your Wireless network. It will show a code on your Ipod and than you just type that in on Itunes where you want your music to be played from. Than once you do that you can search through your whole Itunes Library(on your ipod) and play the song on your computer. So basically you could be sitting in bed with your Ipod and select the music that is playing on your Itunes on your computer(I happen to be doing that now).

Now this is where i just become worked up and excited about it. I recently have set up my new Home Theater System and i looked into how i could play my music from Itunes wirelesslly to my system. This is where Apple’s gift to the world Apple Airport Express comes into play. I purchased this little gadget for $100 at the Apple store and you connect it to your Home Theater with a your choice of Audio Cable. Than this will pick up your Itunes library and play the music play on that.

So if you haven’t figured it put already let me explain why this is so cool. You can select the songs to be played on your Itunes from your Ipod and the music playing on Itunes plays on your Home Theater System. So i can be sitting on my couch in my living room and be able to select the music playing through my speakers without moving an inch. It’s just amazing and is a must have for all of us gadget geeks.

WordPress on Your Ipod

Yesterday i downloaded the Word Press Application to my Ipod Touch and for the price(free) I’m pretty happy with its features. First off you can have multiple blogs on your app if you have several different blogs. From there you view all of your comment where you can edit them and approve them or disapprove them. You can also view all of your post’s and are actually able to view them, edit them, and preview just what they’ll look like in the browser. You can even write and submit a blog post straight from your Ipod, which is a pretty neat feature. The last feature is being able to view your pages, but you cant do much more than that to your pages.

I would say this is a must-have appliacation for any Word Press blogger just for the ease of use of it and the fact you can pretty much manage your blog from the palm of your hand. And did i mention that it was FREE??

Best Bang for Your Buck: PPC Sites

After using a couple of Pay Per Click(PPC) webistes I’m here to review which ones work best for affiliators and really drive your traffic up. The three that i used were Microsoft Ad Center, Google Adwords and Yahoo! Ads. I rated them on a scale of 1 to 5 in the categories of:

• Traffic- This being composed of amount of impressions and clicks
• Price- The actual amount that you end up paying for a click
• Features- Neat tools it has or the ability to give you an in-depth report
• Ease of Use- How easy is it to navigate the site and find the things you need

Google Adwords
Google Adwords was the first PPC website I had used and had high hopes for it due to the recognition it got all over the web with it’s high amounts of traffic. Setting up your account was very simple and like the others it had a keyword generator where it would search your URL for good keywords(these don’t always work the best, CREATE YOUR OWN!). As far as price it wasnt too bad at all i had my max set at $0.50 and few main keywords set a bit higher but the traffic just wasn’t there. Google said itself that it is hard for affliates to make much traffic through Adwords unless you have a custom domain apart from the rest.
Microsoft Ad Center
Now this was by far my favorite of the three sites due to its very high traffic and competitive price. For less than the other two Ad Center created almost three times as much traffic. For under a dollar my ads had been in the top four position pretty much all the time. Unlike the others i could search one of my keyword and Bam!! There was my ad. There aren’t as many features in this one like to track your keywords by simply clicking on them, but you can do this by creating a report. It is very easy to navigate and overall is my favorite of these three PPC sites that i’ve used.
Yahoo! Search Marketing
To start off Yahoo was the last one that i used and after some research online had been rated the top PPC Website pretty much everywhere i looked. To start there was a $30 one time fee where the others didn’t have anything near this and was instantly a drawback. Though the in depth information it gave you was a plus. You could click on a keyword and it would show you everything that keyword has done and even showed graphs and different things like that. Though Price Per Click was quite a bit compared to Ad Center. I could have a Top Position on Ad Center for the same price of the min. bid on Yahoo!. As far as navigation it was the worst. To make it simple i couldn’t even figure out how to cancel my account.