Wednesday, February 28th, 2007
Dynadot is a great company. Nowhere better to register one's domain names.
Why?
- fair prices
- great backend interface
- fast loading website (for a domain registrar where one spends a lot of time doing repetitive actions, speed is extremely important
- telephone support
But lately Dyandot has been getting a lot of bad press for purportedly selling names their customers are searching for.
When doing bulk seraches for available names, make sure you stay away from DYNADOT. In the last few days I had few names I queried about (that were avaibale at the time) registered by somebody else withing 24-48 hrs. (including some by that notorious serial registrant "Mrs. Jello" from this board).
Dynadot is obviously selling their query logs to the likes of that slimy character, so beware.
Okay, world, take a deep breath. This does happen. Last year there was a domain that I really, really wanted. I'd spent a week thinking about the name, looking at what was available and finally leaped, two days after having queried initially. Bingo, the domain was gone. This was on the .at registrar.
This was not a topical, news type domain name so it had nothing to do with collective consciousness or spiritus mundi.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
Tuesday, February 20th, 2007
Finally a place for good quality outsourcing and coders.
In 5 days I received about 25 applications. Of these 25 applicants, 20 of them had a better combination of skill set and experience than any resume that I have had float across my desk in the last year....My providers are highly skilled, great communicators, detail oriented, affordable, and they WANT TO WORK! When is the last time you went to the university down the street and picked up a developer with those credentials?
I've checked the resumés myself and Adam's right.
oDesk home page
Actually oDesk is more than a place for outsourcing, but a whole system for hiring and managing coders. It's rather techcentric. It's not the sort of thing that a client would enjoy managing (one does need to know how to spec a project in technical terms and how to speak to a developer). It's something for someone like me with one foot in the commercial realm and the other on the technical side. But to be honest I would probably have John do most of the developer management (depending on the project).
The decision about whether I would manage the project directly or not, would probably depend on whether John was already involved in that area of the business. Most of the SEO work is my direct province. To put someone between myself and the end developer would likely not improve matters. Most of the WordPress refinements and CMS (apart from the WYSIWYG editor and even that I've tried to hand off - but developers just don't understand WYSIWYG editors) are John's sphere. I am about to interview amother full-time developer locally with superb qualifications (finally!) this week. But if it doesn't work out or we need still more hands on deck, oDesk here we come! I will probably hire Russian and Ukrainian developers as I speak the language fluently. I don't really want to move to Tomsk (Vienna is quite nice, thank you!) to have to work with them. Without oDesk, you'd feel pretty cutoff. But with oDesk, I can live in Vienna and work in Tomsk a few days a week. Fantastic.
Some things I really like about oDesk apart from the system itself.
- reasonable fees: oDesk takes a flat 10% fee. Small enough that nobody is really tempted to push them out of the middle. In exchange they provide a superb regulated environment.
- transparency - you can get objective tested evaluations of most of the developers and you can even check out their personal sites and contact them off oDesk if you wanted to.
- good design: unlike rentacoder.com, oDesk looks like it was meant to be used by people in attractive offices not tortured coders in industrial parks. As an ex-adman appearances are important to me.
- high rates for the providers. As a buyer that sounds like a crazy notion. But really I don't want to be hiring a developer for $2/hour. Not only would I not feel great about it. He will probably either not have the skills or do a shoddy job. oDesk gives really talented guys in Tomsk (who might like Tomsk - I've been to Irkutsk but not Tomsk) a fair shake at earning something like a Western wages. $10/hour ($9 after oDesk's cut) might not sound like much to you but it's a great wage for a programmer beyond the Urals or in Rumania. Expect to see some international programming stars rise out of oDesk.
I could even imagine that I would consider taking on an oDesker as a permanent programmer six months or year into the relationship. Who knows I might even move the guy to the West if that's what he really wanted and the commercial project justified the expense. Certainly, somebody who was doing regular work for Foliovision over six months would be more than welcome to visit home base for a couple of weeks, partly tourism and partly work.
Vienna is the new Paris! Code for us and see Vienna in style.
By Alec
WordPress |
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007
We are planing to start using article marketing much more often this year for our clients. While the train may have left the station for Internet Marketing or Make Money at Home hype articles, with complete oversaturation of those markets, my sense is that there is still lots of demand for quality, original content in other subjects.
EzineArticles.com seems to be the place to start (and strangely enough they allow affiliate links in articles now).
Beyond EzineArticles, what are the top article directories to submit to?
Here are fellow Canadian (and alas pro article spammer) Jason Potash's own shortlist of top article sites:
- www.ezinearticles.com
- www.netterweb.com
- www.jogena.com
- www.ideamarketers.com
- www.certificate.net/wwio
- www.impactarticles.com
- www.articleavenue.com
- www.isnare.com
- www.goarticles.com
The sad thing is how much people have to be policed. All of these article directories have to have extensive automated anti-spam testing.
What is article spam?
Article spam includes:
- nonsense content (machine-generated drivel)
- duplicate content (stolen content)
- public domain content (doesn't belong to nominal writer)
- misappropriated content (from government websites or Wikipedia for example)
- near duplicate content (machine modified good articles)
The last one is the toughest one to filter for.
After the machine testing, editorial review is also essential. While the article directory owners complain about the resources required for editorial review, it's a little bit of crocodile tears. Newspapers, yearbooks and magazines all need extensive editorial review. Editorial review is just part of publishing. If you don't like editing, don't become a publisher.
On the other hand, automated tools like Copyscape to bring the workload down by rejecting flagrant abuse are essential.
In a nutshell, Copyscape will scan an article or web page and tell you how many other web pages contain substantially the same content.
I've used it to catch other webmasters ripping off my client's websites. Sadly enough, I've also caught my clients ripping off other people's content which they were passing off as their own.
Ironically, it's the people who are most paranoid about having their own content stolen, who are actually the thieves themselves.
I even confronted that same client about the issue - we don't steal content - amazingly enough the client refused to take down the articles or credit them to the source. It should come as no surprise that in the end that same client tried to burn us at the end by not paying their final bill.
Golden rules for doing well long term on the web:
- Don't steal content!
- Do pay your web development and/or SEO company!
By Alec
SEO |
Tuesday, February 13th, 2007
Trying to make money with other people's clickbank products?
It's not as easy as it looks. Here's one guy's experience:
I've been getting my ass handed to me by Google trying to promote "successful" clickbank products. Seems the product owner and one affiliate are making sales but not me even with good ctr and position. Tried direct linking and also landing page. Still no sales. I do believe you that this works, however, for every clickbank product that ranks fairly high it seems there are always other affiliates already kicking it. How does someone like me, a newbie, compete with the dozens of other affiliates, LIKE YOU? How many people can play this game like you and sustain numerous losing campaigns before a winner comes along? So far every product I've picked seems to have a few successful affiliates already, so what makes me think I can beat them (you) if they're more savvy marketers than me? I really struggle with the selection process because it just seems like a roll of the dice
What's hilarious is Andre Chaperon - full-time internet marketer since 2003 - spent a month working on a campaign and documenting. At the end of the day, he managed 18% ROI. He blames it on a mistake setting his PPC prices, but making a mistake seems to be part of the territory. There are a lot of things to go wrong.
For me, it's like chess. A great way to practice hunting big game.
By Alec
Internet Marketing |
