Happy Halloween!
To those who celebrate it, happy halloween!
To those who celebrate it, happy halloween!
Note that this is not a paid review post or some sort along that line. I was merely amazed by the creativity here and was compelled to write about it.
So I was doing my usual random surfing on the web when I saw this theme.
My initial reaction was, “Wait, is this a wrong screenshot?” Then I looked again and thought, “What an awesome theme!”
Let’s face it. Not everyone is a hardcore blogger. You might make a post or two here and there during the week. It is certainly not updated to really call it a blog or a face of you. However, you might use Twitter intensely to really draw your day out completely. Maybe it is some other social networking site like Facebook. Then, this is where this Visiting Card theme kicks in.
I only took a peek at the demo, but was instantly amazed by its potential power. Now, if you modified this page to your taste, wouldn’t it be an awesome online business card for you?
Just a thought. I rarely make posts like this, but I was just too dazzled by this theme, I really had to share it.
I’m sure all of you know that directory submission is like Online Marketing 101. No, let me take that back. Online Marketing 100. It doesn’t even deserve that extra 1 at the back. It’s so basic and all new webmasters should exploit this to initiate those search engine spiders to crawling all of your site.
Every day, I try to do about 10 submits to new directories that pop up here and there for more of the newer sites. This takes me at maximum, about 15 minutes, so I don’t have much problems with it. However, I also do buy manual directory submissions ranging from 100~5,000 submissions ranging across various PRs to keep the back links increasing.
Awkwardly though, just a few minutes ago, it struck me that maybe I was wasting a lot of time. After all, isn’t time = money? Let me explain to you why.
Assuming that you don’t have a quick routine that I use to get the sites submitted manually (you can ditch the auto way as that’s unethical in my opinion), the entire process can take quite a while depending on how many sites you have. Now, couldn’t you use that time in a better way to actually promoting your site aggressively through other means? If not, how about producing some content? Directory submissions, in my opinion, may just not be as great as it seem to be.
I was a directory owner a few years ago, and I’ll be honest with you. Most directories suck because the owners aren’t exactly big promoters of their directories. Take a group of a random 100 directory owners. See how many of them consider their directories as their biggest projects. More than likely, not one will consider their directories as their biggest projects, considering the number of newborn directories out there.
I’m sure you know how link farms are just slapped by Google. Other search engines don’t like them. I don’t like them. You don’t like them. I don’t want this blog to be listed beside a real estate blog as much as that real estate blog doesn’t want to be listed beside mine. Why? The niches are completely different. Same thing with most directories these days.
How many times do you see a specialized directory accepting a certain niche? Not so often. Same with RSS directories, bidding directories–you name it! Most will have the “General” tag on them. Isn’t this just a nice way of organizing your link farms? Sure there are super quality general directories, but also see if they accept all sites. They don’t–they have some standard.
How many times do we see random domain names used to build directories? Nearly all the time. Chances are, these directories built on random domain names are bound to have a short lifespan. Wouldn’t you be mad if you spent all day submitting to 500 directories. You check the next week and see that 100 of them just got deleted?
I’ll stop my ranting here to separate my post now. I think I’ll write a Part 2 on this matter on finding some solutions for us helpless directory submitters. Whoo… this was a short post. Just blazed by it.
Anyways, let me know what you think. Are you just as upset as me on how this directory niche is headed towards?
So in addition to my post about how my web host was killing my content, I felt compelled to write a post on choosing the right web host.
Without a reliable web host, there really is no way you can run any website. It is the “house” of your site and it can make or break your site. So, let’s cut all this introduction and get straight to the points.
It is important to know what you need. Yes, web hosting companies these days do give plans like unmetered space and unmetered bandwidth with unlimited everything. Although it never hurts to have so much, the question is, do you really need all that? When you search for web hosts, you should always search for quality web hosts and thus, you want to find a host that is willing to give you what you need for an appropriate price, not a host that is willing to oversell. So, make a short note. How much resources (space, bandwidth, databases, etc.) do you need?
Note that websites (or blogs) are not made in a month. You need to have the money to fund your hosting for at least a quarter. Sure it isn’t so hard to get a website making enough money to fund its hosting, but as you never know what can happen, I always believe that you should have at least three months’ (a quarter) amount of money to fund into your hosting account. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should order a quarterly package (as I explain about later below). However, what is important here is preparation. How much are you willing to spend per month? Multiply that by three and are you willing to invest that amount into your hosting?
Customer review is extremely important. Especially with recently established hosts, it is even more important. Make sure that you do your research on various sites. Google “your-web host review” and you should get ample amount of results, assuming that the hosting company has been around for at least a couple months. Make sure you read them all and make sure that it is a reliable company. Also, don’t fall into the traps of fake testimonials!
You know how people say that first impressions are extremely important? Well, you should apply the same thing when viewing web hosts. When you visit their site, how do you feel? Is it some cheap free homepage? Is it unique and professional? Often, serious web hosts will have seriously professional homepages.
Although you may not need support, you still want to make sure that they are there in case anything goes wrong. Especially with the economy not doing so well, many web hosts are changing ownership (like mine recently), and many are cutting the number of support and sales reps to save money. However, you need these people ready for you regardless of how much you may or may not need them at the moment. Some of the things you can do to make sure that your hosting company has the people are:
Something you don’t want to fall into is the annual special trap. Unless this is a company like HostGator, which has been around for like ages, you really want to test the hosting company out first. The best way to doing so is going monthly first. I believe you can really get a taste of how the company is if you stick around for around two months. So, the first two months, pay monthly and see how they are. If they suck, you can always get out without losing more. If they are excellent, drop them, and then sign back up with them with their annual plan to receive any annual specials they have running for that month. 
Something you must always be cautious of is that not all web hosting companies are immortal. Yes, even my favorite, HostGator. My sites with the Gator have some downtime. I have some sites with ScarabWeb and they have downtimes too. All hosts will have some downtime that is unavoidable. Therefore, you don’t want to get a big hosting package and then host all your sites there. Get a couple to start with to make sure that you you at least have some sites online all the time.
Starting to get a decent idea on choosing a web host? I know this is like Building a Website 101, but hey, an extra article online never hurt for newcomers. Anyways, choosing web hosts can be an arduous task as there really isn’t that perfect web host. Below are some of my recommended hosts that I have been with, enjoyed, and can recommend.
So it has really sucked this month for this blog. The hosting company that ahnternet is hosted on (not HostGator) decided to change ownership. Well, all those drafts and posts I had written vanished, appeared, vanished, appeared, and so on. Hence, I decided to go on a hiatus with all the sites hosted with this host.
As I value uptime and cannot afford all my sites to be down simultaneously, I spread my sites over multiple hosting companies. Unfortunately, this ownership change affected the productivity of ahnternet very heavily.
Within the next two days, I’ll be talking about choosing the right web host to prevent problems like this. As much as your site is important, your site being up is also very important. Hence, look out, as I’m sure it’ll help many of you guys (especially any on budget hosting) quite a lot! 
What’s up? I’ve been a bit busy with summer school work (as usual), but also a brand new project that I’ve recently decided to try out. Because it is still in its development stages, I won’t give out any details on it yet; however, in the coming weeks, when I see it start making some profit, I definitely will. It is a niche I have yet to try out, but it is a fun little niche that doesn’t take too long to manage, and… anyways, we’ll see.
However, today I just wanted to bring up this thing about working upfront. One of my biggest sources of income is actually consulting. I’ve been in the web industry for a long time and while I do make money blogging, marketing, designing, and the sorts, aside from marketing, consulting is probably the biggest source of income for me.
How and why? The secret is that I go and find people to help. Usually it isn’t so hard, and depending on the difficulty of the subject, I charge people from free to whatever they wish to pay me. Recently, I met a person looking to start-up their “money making life” on the web and promised a low-XXX fee for consultation, which would include everything from the moment you login to GoDaddy to coding support. Now in regards to the payment, I had three options that I usually propose:
As my client was a young, yet aspiring person, and he was still worried about all the Internet scams that go around, I proposed to him a pay after work option.
So I began the week about telling him on how to setup a domain, get a host, WordPress, and SEO and advertising tips to get his blog/site known to both search engines like Google, and normal visiting people. I ended off the week with telling him about coding the backends of WordPress and giving him an in-depth step-by-step tutorial on monetizing the blog with multiple companies.
At the end of the week, I have not only worked quite a decent amount of hours just for this client, but also for lost a lot of hours with the client now showing up on time. In addition, what happens at the end? Well, the title is hinting at you.
After being notified that he is gathering the funds, he then goes off to claim the useless-ness of my consultation. Okay, I’m alright with the last part as I really have nothing to say if I didn’t teach him anything, although our sessions and his plethora of questions seem to question his assertion. Then, all communication with him stops. I give up on trying to receive my due payment and send him a clear message that I have given up and will leave the payment up to him and his morales in business.
At the end of the day, I lose out money wise, but I feel that I gain morale wise. People, if you’re looking to do business, stick to your words. While money is important, there are a lot more things important than money; I personally feel social relationships tops green by far as I know I have received millions of dollars of worth information thanks to the people I have developed a business relationship with.
Anyways, rant for today, finished.
Were you ever in such a situation? Do you know ways to prevent such events? I’m sure my readers are interested and so am I, so please feel free to comment.
So the end of my “academic” week is here and I just tried to visit Digital Point and what do I see? “Upgrading forum software.”
What?! Shawn Hogan actually drops by and works on this forum? Are we in for an era on Digital Point where we actually have Shawn around?
So I talked about the Moonfruit contest last week and mentioned how viral Twitter can be. Well, let me say this first though–only if you do the right stuff will Twitter campaigns be viral. This actually is quite hard. Why? The biggest reason behind it is because anything you do with originality will catch the eyes of many. As I am not exactly a machine that spits out original contests and campaigns you can do with Twitter, I won’t force myself in that route. However, I will share with you all on some of the things that has been done before that help get your site out there in the Twitterverse.
This is a no-brainer that you should do. Although Twitter is rapidly growing to be a service that pretty much everyone uses (like Facebook), it still is dominated by people with some degree of website building background knowledge. If you have a half-decent Twitter page with timely updates, getting a click from your fellow Twitter users through the Web field is not hard at all.
If you don’t have it in right now, set it up straight away! You are definitely missing out. If you don’t know, in your Twitter account, click “Settings” and then fill out the “More info URL” field.
Let me be honest with you. I have not tried this technique myself, but I strongly believe that it is a fail-proof strategy. Recall all those free wordpress themes? Well, if you examine closely, all of the free themes will have some sort of a link back to the original theme creator. That’s right, they are giving themselves back both a do-follow link and exposure on your blog (if you use a free theme). Well, why can’t it not be done with Twitter backgrounds?
Twitter backgrounds (at least the ones I’ve used) tend to be 1600×1200 pixel. If you are a whiz with Photoshop or even Paint, you can create some dazzling backgrounds for fellow Twitter users. Then, as you are interested in promoting your brand, you can put a small logo on the top-right corner of the background. However, a thing to note here is that you should definitely lower your logo’s opacity, so that you don’t kill the design.
Remember the Moonfruit contest I talked about yesterday? Well, you can do that too! A quick overview on how the contest would/should run for your maximum exposure and benefit would be:
This seems to be the strategy Moonfruit took and it seems like it is flawless, at least until Twitter puts a restriction on this. However, I doubt such restrictions would come into play anytime soon, so I guess you’ve got some time to try this out if you are thinking of running a contest in the near future.
This is also a no-brainer. You SHOULD get the same name on Twitter as you have with your domain name. In my case, I have Twitter.com/ahnternet for this blog. Had @ahnternet been taken, I probably would have registered @ahnternetcom or something along those lines.
I tweet about my random day to day things @Static, and although a good portion of my followers are highly concentrated on that Twitter account, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t use @ahnternet. Whatever gets posted on @ahnternet, I can always just re-tweet on @Static to give whatever I’m tweeting, maximum exposure.
So we all know how Bit.ly, Tr.im, Cli.gs and the likes are pretty nice tools that let you track while also redirecting your visitors. However, I believe that you can really make yourself stand out by just giving a direct link to the post. What am I talking about? Let me give you an example, in the case you are using WordPress.
So the URL of Twitter Is REALLY Viral is:
http://www.ahnternet.com/2009/07/16/twitter-is-really-viral/
Obviously, that is way too long for Twitter’s 140 character maximum. However, what if you setup a redirection through your hosting control panel so that a URL along the lines of:
http://ahnternet.com/t/1
redirected to the post above? I believe that is an exposure right there. Fortunately, if you are using cPanel (which most hosts use), Awstats will track that link too similar to what URL redirection services provide. Okay, so this way can be a little bit annoying, but if you have a redirecting routine setup, it shouldn’t take you more than a couple minutes. Are you not willing to invest a couple more minutes to receive much more exposure to your site’s address and brand?
I have only recently started to aggressively use Twitter. Hence, I’m probably not the guru that you need in the middle of the night if you are trying to do something on Twitter. However, I feel that my experience on it so far helps me confidently state that these tips are fail-proof and Twitter 101. Exposing your site’s address and brand simply cannot get easier.
I’m the type that won’t just end it with this post, so I’m going to go ahead and try these out tips myself too (especially the contest one). Of course I’ll write a follow up post. However, I have a darn good feeling that all five of these will benefit you brilliantly.
What’s your view on this topic? Think I was completely off? Was I spot on? I’d like to hear what you have to say, so comments are more than welcome!
I’m sure you all know of Twitter. I’ve got a few accounts on it (actually an account per site) and I’m sure many others have it too. It is supposed to be a place where you update everyone on what you are up to right now. If you are my follower (you should be!) I’ve been tweeting this last week with the hashtag #moonfruit. Well, if you didn’t hear about it (you probably did if you use Twitter), then well, Moonfruit was giving out 10 MacBook Pros randomly to people tweeting with their hashtag.
One of the requirements of putting your name in the drawing lot was following @moontweet. When I first found out about this and tweeted my first #moonfruit, there was ~3000 followers. With the drawing part of the fun now over, @moontweet has ~43,000 followers. Yeah, a new 40,000 followers in seven damn days!
Twitter is undoubtely extremely viral. John Chow and Shoemoney has shown us. Moonfruit has shown us too. Hence, I have really stepped up my Twitter “abusing” to get something out of it.
What’s the point of this post then? To make you come back tomorrow to check out another post on Twitter. I’ll be discussing how you too can get your brand out in the Twitterverse.
Oh how I’m so glad that this week is over. My last week has been hectic since starting summer school in Yonsei University in Korea. I’m right now taking:
Everyday for homework, I am required to read ~200 pages of material and take notes on it. The following day, I am required to take a short quiz on the reading, so I can’t afford to just read over it really quickly to get it out of the way.
Hence, my blogging frequency for this blog has dramatically dropped–definitely will be changing for the coming week with a great article about Twitter. Anyways, tune in, subscribe, give me some love, and I’ll repay you guys.
