Well I joined Twitter today.  I'm reading quite a few blog entries recommending using social media in our internet marketing efforts. I'm not sure if it's valuable or not at this point. Your welcome to check out my Twitter account. I hope to find out what the fuss is all about. More to come.

Sunday, January 27, 2008 5:44:55 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  internet news

Domains are eligible for a refund for 5 days after their purchase.  Domain tasting is the practice of placing Google Adsense on the newly registered sites.

Google announced yesterday that it will begin blocking Adsense ads from the domains that are repeatedly refunded and repurchased.

Apparently the practice is endemic.  According to Wikipedia, "In April 2006, out of 35 million registrations, only a little more than 2 million were permanent or actually purchased. By February 2007, the CEO of Go Daddy reported that of 55.1 million domain names registered, 51.5 million were canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period expired and only 3.6 million domain names were actually kept."

We have to welcome cleaning up some of the spammy practices on the web.

Saturday, January 26, 2008 12:24:49 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  internet news

I received a Hallmark ecard today.  It was html & had links back to the hallmark site.  Everything looked real, except the link to get the card was an IP to card.exe. An obvious virus. One would think that large companies like this would track these people down.  It has to be destroying the online card business.

I know I very seldom click on these unless I absolutely know the sender, but many people must, or they wouldn't bother sending these things.

I'll take my greeting cars in the mail thank you.

Friday, January 25, 2008 1:42:13 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  internet news

We are releasing the beta of The Affiliate File Cabinet.  It's software to store the information you collect as an affiliate marketer.

You can store...

• Affiliate merchant information
• Website information
• Domain names
• Web hosting company information
• Domain registrar information

All the information will be in one place. Easy to find and use. It uses simple copy & paste to enter data. Best of all it will only take a few minutes to learn how to use The Affiliate File Cabinet.

Download it for free at: http://www.affiliatefilecabinet.com

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 8:27:27 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  internet news | web businesses

I ran across an article on web browser shortcuts this morning.  It contained some information that I found valuable.  It was at Coding Horror. It describes some shortcuts to use in your web browser.  Since this is the application most of us use more than any other, I thought I'd pass it on. It's not for the techies, they probably already know about them.

There are 5 shortcuts you may find useful.

1. The middle mouse button, aka the wheel, will open new tabs and close them when clicked.
2. You can navigate to the address bar with alt-d.
3. Navigate to the browser search box with ctrl-e.
4. Use alt-enter to open links in a new tab.

Along with these, I'd like to pass along some really handy windows shortcuts. I've run across a large number of folks who don't know about these. They are extremely useful.

1. Ctrl-x will cut selected text.
2. Ctrl-c will copy selected text.
3. Ctrl-v will paste text from a copy or cut, that is data in the windows clipboard, to a text box or document at the place your mouse cursor is.
 
RC

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 12:13:49 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  tips

Six months ago or so, I learned about Foxit from my son Dustin. I'm passing this along because I've found this program has lowered my frustration levels so much. We have all used the Adobe Reader to read pdf files. It loads slowly, prints poorly, and crashes often.

Check out Foxit! They have a free download at http://www.foxitsoftware.com.

Saturday, January 12, 2008 9:58:52 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  

Network Solutions has developed another way to ripoff internet users.  It's called "front running". It's the practice of registering a domain name when somebody does a search to see if it's available. It turns them into the exclusive holder of the domain so they can charge more for it.

They have changed the policy. Now they only front run the domain if the search is done on their home page. What a seedy company.

Thursday, January 10, 2008 1:25:16 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  internet news

I started developing websites in 1996. I wrote some software that I was selling over the net at the time. I had a simple 5 page site that was not particularly optimized or well marketed. Over time, the business flourished in spite of itself. I hooked up with a marketer, and by 2000 we had sold over a million dollars worth of software.

The business changed. SEO, search engine optimization, became the standard. The search engines became more and more competitive. Social networking and blogging grew to astounding popularity. As connections to the internet got faster, videos and other large bandwidth users became viable.

The web today is nothing like the web of the 90's. It is faster, more interactive, and easier to access. Most people research all kinds of things on the web. It's become such a major resource that I for one, can't even imagine doing without it. My wife even spends time on the search engines researching things she has questions about, and believe me, she is probably the most anti-technology being on the planet.

You need to keep up with the changes in website development. Yet you may want to stay back a bit from the cutting edge. I've always called it the bleeding edge because of the effort involved understanding and using new and buggy technologies that don't have good documentation as yet.

Staying back a year or so, gives the newest technologies a chance to mature. That way you won't waste your time dealing with technologies that aren't ready for prime time. That said, you do need to be aware of what's coming. When the tools are built to use the new stuff easily, you'll be ready.

That said, it is disastrous to get too far behind. You need to gather up, and use new technologies, and ideas as they become reasonably easy to work with. You should keep an eye on your competition. Often, they will point the way to new directions you should be traveling.

A good way to keep up with what is going on in the internet is to subscribe to a few rss feeds from sites like Slashdot. There is a lot of noise, and you can't believe everything they say, but they do keep up with the newest technologies. Another good feed is Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim. It's fairly general and self-serving, but he has a nugget from time to time that is valuable to the internet marketer, or website owner.

There are many resources on the internet to help you stay current. You need to spend some time every day keeping an eye on advancements.

Friday, January 04, 2008 10:10:21 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  web businesses