Did you get the dreaded Google Adwords slap last week? I did.

By slap I’m referring to having a good percentage of your Adwords keywords going inactive unless their minimum bids are raised from let’s say around .25 to well over $1 and sometimes even as high as $10, which is what i got whacked with. If you are trying to get low-cost clicks, good luck. If you are low margin, again, good luck. Basically, if you get slapped, good luck!

This isn’t the first time Google has hit me. They did it back in March, and I guess they …

If you have read some of my prior posts you know I’m a big fan of registering your domains at Namecheap.

Godaddy may have a lot TV presence (with Danica Patrick and Amanda Beard as their pitch women) but they also have a lot of garbage you have to wade through to finally checkout on their site, and Network Solutions, well don’t get me started.

The place for my domains is Namecheap, and each month they offer a special coupon code for new domain registrations. And the May coupon code is MAYFLOWERS, which gets you nearly a buck off …

If you are a seasoned webmaster you no doubt know the power and importance of proper search engine optimization (SEO). But SEO is not that easy a skill to conquer, and a confusing one at that. Much like getting opinions from doctors, query five different so-called “SEO experts” on the best practices and you’ll likely get five different answers. And so it is.
In my mind, securing a strong ranking in the Google search positions means coming to terms with the Holy Trinity of High Rankings, that is SEO, link development and content. There are many methods for rising up …

I shouldn’t post this, but I am going to. What the hell.

I’m sure many of you, especially those of you landing on this page via search, have used one of those cable laptop locks when you are traveling. I’ve used many, from the key to the combination. They seem to work well, but thing is that I lose the key or forget the combo. Anyway, part of the trials I figure.

So most recently I had a Targus Defcon CL lock get jammed on me while I was in an overseas office environment. I knew the combo, that wasn’t the …

Thanks Google, thanks for March Madness. For those of you not hit, or slapped, by the mighty G this month with elevated, outrageous $10+ minimum bids for your precious keywords, you can stop reading. If you know what I’m talking about, good luck.

Every so often Google updates their Adwords quality score algorithm and in doing so crushes the campaigns of many an affiliate marketer by finding fault in their method, and forcing them to pay 10 to 20 times their current bid to remain active.

Unfortunately, looks like The G ran another such update last week wiping out a few …

I’m not into the whole domain name scene/industry, but I’ve often used Network Solutions (NSI) when researching domain availability. Even though I don’t ultimately purchase domains from them, I like their interface and I trust that no one is hiding behind the entry box ready to steal my ideas. Or so I thought.

Yesterday, after I found a couple good domains via NSI I immediately went to my main registrar Namecheap – I don’t use NSI as they charge way too much – and added some funds in my account (I was running low), entered the domain names …

Direct linking to your merchant’s affiliate is back in vogue again. The lazy man’s method to making (or trying to make) a quick buck, linking directly to a merchant site from a paid ad on search engines, was disallowed by the likes of Google and Yahoo.

Well, not anymore. Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) announced last week that it will now allow publishers on its network to direct link to their merchants without the need of any landing page.

From the February 14 Commission Junction Newsletter:
“After more than six months in the making and much customer feedback and testing, we are …

I’ve been using Mozilla’s Firefox as my web browser of choice for quite a long time. And I’ve always been pleased by the performance and its options.

That is until recently, when suddenly the damn thing doesn’t block any pop-ups! It almost feels like it encourages them!

Problem is that under “tools” and “options” I have the block pop-up windows checked, however what I’ve found is that every time I reload Firefox the option becomes unchecked.

I check it again, and sure enough on reload it resets back to unchecked. Very strange and very annoying.

I did some digging and it turns out …

One the most important and often overlooked ingredients in creating a successful website is link building; that is getting other websites to link back to yours. Conventional link building techniques have focused on asking for links, trading links and purchasing links off other websites.

But let’s look at some quick ways you can get links back to your website for free without too much trouble and without begging.

1. Aboutus/Wikipedia – If the site hasn’t already been included in AboutUs, just add you site information and you are set. Wikipedia gets a bit more trickier. See if you can …

So what’s this thing called a Google Sitemap? Simple, it’s a map of all the pages on a website, by URL. Almost like a street map only in that a sitemap is an XML file containing the layout of your website, with links and all. The intention is to provide search engine spiders like Google and Yahoo an easy roadmap of your website by giving “directions” on where to crawl and index.

Creating a sitemap is pretty simple. If you have a small website – under 500 pages – visit http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ for free …