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Oct142009

Business.com Promo Code 2010

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Business.com Promo Code 2010 Web Directory – Save $50 + $100 Free Credit

Business.com have recently been doing a promo for their $100 free credit on PPC start-up and $50 discount on Business Directory listings.

First of all let me start off by saying that getting a directory listing with Business.com even though a bit costly proves to work very well for SEO. The links that are placed on pages tend to have very little amount of outbound links which gives your link more authority when placed with only very few other links on the one page.

Furthermore because business.com have a pagerank of 7, the inside pages tend to carry a lot of weight. Inside pages where your link will be placed are generally a page rank 4 or 5.

The PPC model in the directory is certainly worth doing as Ad placements are set at the top of the page and get great exposure. Google advertise in the directory as well so this in itself must be worth doing to stand out with the big boys!

$50 Directory Listing Coupon
To save $50 off Business.com directory listings click the following banner:

Business.com Directory

$100 in Free PPC Clicks
Business.com for a limited time are offering $100 promo code for webmasters looking to buy traffic through their PPC program. You can click the banner for the promo here:

Business.com PPC

The Business.com Promo is valid from 2010 all the way until 2011.

Oct132009

Yahoo Advertising Coupon – $25 Credit

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Have you considered Yahoo advertising?

Yahoo Search advertising is a big market according to Zac Johnson who makes around $300k per month as a publisher on Yahoo Ads.

Yahoo! Search MarketingBut how effective is Advertising on Yahoo Search?

Well I believe it should never be under estimated…What I really like about Yahoo search advertising is that when you set up your campaign it straight away gives you suggested keywords and search volume for the month based on similar keywords you choose.

Yahoo is steadily gaining momentum in the amount of hits it gets and although Google still dominates and covers the majority of searches at 62.6%, Bing at 12.7%, Yahoo covers 18.9% (Updated on August 2010) which is a lot of potential search engine traffic to promote your business.

So if you have not yet dabbled with Yahoo search advertising, I suggest you give it a try. At least take advantage of their free credit offer.

Try it out with $25 Free Credit!

They are currently giving away a $25 free credit voucher to get you familiar with it and see how well it does for you. Be sure to let me know how you go and if I can help you with anything once your campaign is set up.

Oh and don’t forget – One thing that is also good when measuring your success is a program called Market Samurai. They now offer tracking for Yahoo, so you can now also monitor your performance based on competition.

Good Luck!

Oct122009

Google Wave

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After 2 years of production in Sydney, Australia, Google have finally announced their new platform Google Wave . There has been alot of interest in getting an Invitation to try it out before release. It is still in beta stage and will be officially ready early next year.

They call it the 3p’s – Product – Platform – Protocol

What is really cool about this product is when you are emailing you can kind of quote each paragraph to comment on each paragraph and it automatically does spell check and corrects words for you.

google wave

What is also amazing is there is an instant messaging type of system within the platform, as you type and have a conversation the user can see that your typing and instead of waiting on the message, you can see what the user is already starting to type before they have clicked submit.

There is also a playback option that if another user jumps in on the conversation or email, they can see what was said previously without having to go back in other emails. Just really a remarkable option.

Another amazing option is the photo gallery tool. I must admit this is going to be a real test on Facebook as most users love Facebook purely for the reason that they can upload all their images. But with the Google Wave it’s so much more advanced as you can drag and drop photos straight onto your email. Once you see how this works in the video below, your mouth will honestly drop.

photo album google wave

This product being open source will be great competition in my view to Microsoft as Microsoft are always clearly after the money. And will kill programs like outlook and any other email programs will totally flop in my opinion. I tell you im certainly ready to move over as soon as they release this to the public, without question.

The Google Wave concept was initially developed as “Walkabout” by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the brothers who developed the software that became Google Maps.

Oct122009

Linux or Windows

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As most internet users are aware Windows is the most used operating system, but Linux is slowly and steadily increasing. It also seems as though Matt Cutts from Google seems threatened by Microsoft’s new search engine Bing.

I recently partitioned my hard drive so that on start up you can login either in Windows or Linux. The reason why I wanted to do this is so that I can run most of my programs in which use passwords and are more vulnerable for attacks on Linux, as linux is known to be pretty hacker safe.

Using FTP on Linux is also a very good idea, as there are loads of password sniffer tools out there on the market that can get into your Windows and if they are smart enough can really do some damage to not only your computer but also your sites and servers.

I recently had an iframe injected into around 100 sites of mine over 4 dedicated servers. Even though im certain 2 of the other servers were not hacked as a result of the vulnerability of my system, I am still taking all precautions necessary.

One think I like about Linux is instead of downloading files from the internet and installing manually as you would on Windows. Linux allows you to run commands and install using their terminal. It’s really handy. I also the Linux system with the Ubuntu theme . The Ubuntu theme reminds me of the simplicity and layout of the Mac. Really nice layout and easy to use.

ubuntu

One thing that I cannot except though with Linux and tend to rely on Windows is using Dreamweaver. For most developers not being able to use Dreamweaver is like not being able to drive a car. So for the most part I am still using Windows and will continue to do so until Ubuntu makes it a bit easy on us developers. One thing I am impressed though is when I recently installed Windows 7.

windows 7

The Windows 7 interface is really sweet! It’s quick and very futuristic, I must say it has a touch of Vista, but without all the complicated navigation runs nothing like it and perform really well and if you ask me is just like XP but more sleek and  sexy. I know Windows 7 was giving away free download trials for 1 year up until a month or so ago, but are still offering 90 day trial’s. Here is also the Ubuntu download best of all it’s free. Give both a go and let me know how you experience these, and which one you find better!

Oct122009

Search Engine Optimization for Bing

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If you are a webmaster you may be wondering ways in which you can optimize you or your clients sites better for the Bing search engine. As most SEO experts are aware, Google has patented their algorithm on links, while Yahoo have patented their algorithm on keyword meta.

So after doing a bit of research over at the Bing webmaster blog I soon discovered that the optimization techniques based on tweaking keywords on-page were not that much different then SEO for google. The few things I found useful to know were that using body text seemed to be the most powerful and would carry more weight in it’s effectiveness on results.

You can see after some optimization I am able to get 2nd from above for the keyphrase “SEO Community”. By default the crawl rate is pretty slow, but you can create a robots.txt file to speed it up.

seo results

Then it was interesting to see that picking the right keywords was also going to be a plan of attack when doing SEO. I always found that the Google Keyword popularity tool has always helped alot. So for the most part once you have brainstormed on your niche and the words you would like to target, you can then define them and find the most popular keyphrases to use based on a tool called Microsoft Advertising Intelligence .

keyword tool

You will need to sign up for an adCenter account before you can use the tool. Although it costs $5 to sign up (As most things cost with Microsoft) It is still recommended. I guess it’s also their smart way of sucking you in to try out their advertising system, which by the way isn’t a bad idea!

SEO Breakdown:

Good Luck!

Oct122009

Ten Year Update for eBay Australia

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From the days where retailers were closing up their retail stores to come online in 1999, eBay Australia was launched by Kerry Packer’s ecorp and started off with 9000 members. Today they have 8 million registered users, and have generated 2.6 billion dollars worth of sales and have sold 173 million items and have recently celebrated eBay Australia Ten Year Anniversary

eBay

“The site has grown from an auction-based sales site with an average of 94,000 listings a month in 1999 to today’s online shopping phenomenon, averaging almost 80 times that number of listings each month.”

I remember back in the day where you could almost sell anything and it would sell, today this is still happening. It was reported that a Nutri Grain sold on eBay today for $1000, just 1 grain of Nutri Grain, how bizarre!

But even through growing times, eBay on the other hand is still cutting back on jobs as stated recently. With 1600 layed off in 39 countries, and 18 of those will also be cut in the land of Oz. They will then be investing in other ventures one company Bill Me Later .

For those of you who are not aware , Skype is owned by eBay but recently in September eBay sold 65% of Skype to a private equity firm Silver Lake Partners for 1.9 billion leaving ebay with 35% shares.