Catalin Ionescu: The Blog

Promoting affiliate programs can be a very effective way to earn a few extra bucks. If you tried it then you are very aware of the limitations and sheer amount of work required by the traditional approach, isn’t it?

Like you, I’ve wasted countless hours doing grunt manual work, and guessing what works and what doesn’t, all while cashing in next to nothing. Does it sound familiar?

However - if done right - promoting good affiliate programs is a sure way to earn much more than a few bucks. Top affiliates routinely get 10,000’s of dollars, per month. And they don’t sweat on it like you and I do. I’m sure you’ve heard about it, right?

Now is your chance to break out of the rat race and unlock your true potential, just like I did when I started using WordPress Affiliate Pro.

Keep on reading and discover just a few of the benefits this powerful system has for you:

1. Instantly add 1,000’s of affiliate links to your blogs without touching a single line of HTML code and without editing your posts. Just imagine how much time this feature alone will save you.
2. Easily promote new products with a single click of a mouse. It’s all about results, and less work for you. Work smarter, not harder!
3. Increase your income and click rate with hidden, customized affiliate links. At the end of the month it’s all about how much money you put into your pocket.

4. $0 stolen commissions with virtually untraceable affiliate links. Stop affiliate thieves dead in their tracks.
5. Stop guessing what works and what doesn’t. You can easily see at a glance with laser precision what to change and where, optimize your blogs with a few mouse clicks, and watch your profits explode.

You can immediately apply everything you see here and much more with this amazing system and the help of the step by step videos found in the members area.

And the best part is you don’t need to learn PHP, HTML, MySQL or other “techie” stuff to harness this incredible power WordPress Affiliate Pro has to offer you. If you can point your mouse and click on a button you can immediately put it at work for you.

This system is 100% compatible with AdSense, and you don’t need to make any changes to your blogs to get advantage of this breakthrough technology. Call this plug-and-play!

But will this system work for you? There’s only one way to tell, and that is by taking it for a risk free test drive. Do it now.

What the heck is NOODP, you ask? In this article I’m going to show you a little known meta tag, recently introduced by major search engines, that allows you to control exactly what they display in the search results for your website. This can make all the difference between customers clicking on to your website or your competitors.
But first, a bit of backgound information that lead to the need of having the NOODP tag in the first place.

ODP, the Open Directory Project, also known as DMOZ. One of the largest human built directories. Some webmasters praise it, others say it’s crap, and even some more don’t really care about it. Should YOU care?

ODP is perhaps one of the most controversial sites when it comes to your SEO linking strategy. Packed with high PR categories, it’s strength was even more emphasized when Google decided to use it as a base for their directory.

Not to mention that countless other websites copy parts of it for their own directories.

So, what does all this mean? It means than IF you manage to get one of your websites into ODP you’re almost guaranteed a large number of links all pointing back to your site automatically.

But Google also uses ODP for another purpose other than for filling his own directory. It pulls the title and the description used by ODP to describe your site and sometimes uses it when displaying search results.

Even if you do have filled the meta description tags for your website, there are cases when Google’s algorithm decides the ODP data is more relevant and will display it.

Now this is all fine and dandy if somehow you managed to have a great description there.

Unfortunately most often than not ODP editors edit what you’ve submitted in the first place so you end up with an anost description that doesn’t fit the bill. Or perhaps you’ve slightly changed your website focus, say instead of dog training you now do dog breeding.

Anyone who tried changing the ODP description can tell for sure it’s a bit of a pain. Not only you’re usually stuck for months until your category editor bumps into your request, but also you run the risk of having your website completely dumped from DMOZ if the editor happens to dislike what he sees.

Luckily search engines now offer an alternate route where you’re back in control. Simply insert one little meta tag in your page header and 2 out of the major 3 search engines guarantee they’ll list your meta description instead of ODP’s.

This tag was first introduced by MSN Search and little ago Google decided to support it too.

Welcome to the NOODP tag.

The way this tag works is it tells the search engines to dump whatever description your site has in ODP and use whatever your meta description tag says. Now this may sound complicated at first, so here’s an example to let you know what I mean.
Let’s say you have a website about dog training that you somehow managed to get into ODP. Let’s say the ODP description says something like “Site that attempts to teach you 3 ways to train your dog but fails miserably.” Perhaps the category editor also owns a dog training website, or perhaps he didn’t like yours. The reasons don’t actually matter but the fact is you’re stuck with a boring description that, let’s face it, kinda’ sucks. What do you do now?

Well, thanks to the NOODP tag, all you have to do is enter 2 lines of text on your pages. First one is the meta description tag, where you write your super cool description. For our above example we could use something like “The best dog training on Earth. How to teach your dog to obey your commands in 5 days or less.” This sounds better, doesn’t it?

Now all is left is tell Google (and MSN) to use your meta description instead of ODPs. To do so, simply add a second meta tag, that is the NOODP tag. Just copy the following line, paste it in your web page in the head section and you should be all set.

Just wait until Google refreshes it’s index, typically between a couple days and a couple weeks, and you should begin to see your description being served in the search results.

Have fun playing with the NOODP tag, you’re now in control. And don’t forget to report back how it went for you.

Hot Points – A blog by Go Daddy CEO and founder Bob Parsons
The add/drop scheme. How millions of .COM names are used but never paid for.

Makes for a darn good reading. Mind you, compare ($500K+) with what an average guy is able/willing to invest into making his online living…

DoFollow (WP Plugin) - Kimmo Suominen
"This is a plugin for WordPress. It will disable the automatic rel="nofollow" attributes added to external links. You may want to do this if you have good spam filtering for your comments, or if your blog is moderated. Optionally you can also set a comment age limit for adding the attributes."

This seems perfect for awarding people who take time from their busy schedule and write a line or two on your blog. They'll get back a bit of Page Rank from your blog through the back link, which may be enough motivation for many to start typing.

Mind you, the NoFollow attribute was introduced by Google et al. as a means to fight spam comments. But it may have done more harm than good, as blog spammers have always found ways to elude it. And it ended up penalizing honest bloggers who happened to like one of your posts, took the time and efforts to contribute and now would like a little something back - a link to their blog perhaps?

The DoFollow plugin helps you take back control of your blog, by removing the NoFollow attribute that is automatically added to all outgoing links in comments. It's common sense to pair it with an automated comment spam filtering solution (Warning to wanna be spammers: I prefer the manual way though, brain is harder to fool than a Bayesian filter).

The comment age limit option in the DoFollow plugin helps you make sure that no spammer who happens to slip through the filters will be rewarded a back link by the time you notice and clean up.

It's a win-win situation for both. Viral. Content building.

Do you think the DoFollow plugin should be enabled by default on the entire blog? 

Coming straight from the Google HQ, this is actually a gem about what PageRank really is worth for these days. 

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » SEO advice: url canonicalization
"Normally if you don’t see crawled snippets and only see urls, it usually means that it would help to have more links to your site. More PageRank helps to get more crawling."

Now, this isn't exactly hot news, as many people knew about - and have actively used - inbound links from high PageRank pages to ensure timely spidering. During my experiments I've been able to get brand new websites noticed and indexed by search engines, especially Google and MSN, in 12 hours or less with just two or three inbound links from PR 3 - 5 pages.

But it's somewhat comforting to know PageRank is still used for something other than a distraction, if you know what I mean

A few days ago I mentioned what looks like a good way to make lots of money by buying expired domains. Some of them may come with a bit of traffic, a few may even have a good Google PR.

After watching the undergoing auctions at a popular expired domain broker, I can tell you people are jumping on them like crazy. And some are paying top money for good web real estate.

Deciding to get my feet wet on the expired domain auctioning, I placed two bids of $60 each - the minimum bid one should place to be eligible to move on to phase 2 - on two domains that were just about to be deleted in a few days.

A day later I received an email letting me know both were successfully acquired by the expired domain broker. Both had at least 20 people interested in purchasing them, so we moved into phase 2. The auction.

Any hope I had of landing on any one of these two domains was shortly dismissed. It was quite exciting to see the auction unfold from the initial bid of $60 to reach hundreds within hours. But at the same time it was soon more than I was willing to pay for any of them.

Three days later, when both auctions ended, first domain was sold for $1,000. And the second one for $10,001. Yep, that's right, ten thousand and one US dollars for a single expired domain!

Well, so far we've all heard rumors about domains being auctioned and sold at fabulous prices, but now I witnessed it first hand. If this domain will be sold back for a million in a few years, I could tell my children I had the opportunity to become a millionaire but decided to pass.

In case you're curious, the $1,000 domain was adn.net. The $10,000 domain was vpn.net. Agreed, both are short, nice, catchy. And I wouldn't have minded paying 6 times the price of a new domain name to get any of these. But $10,000? No sir, thank you.

And I wonder… besides the "readability" of a short domain like these two when - and if - they're spelled out, is there really another benefit that is so big and that may be worth paying a premium just to grab one of these?

If you think about it, the amount of work one should put into creating and promoting any website, be it on a premium domain like vpn.net or on the much longer how-to-create-the-best-vpn.net, is roughly the same. One still has to write (or buy) good and attractive content. One still has to submit the website to directories. Even the link exchange process is the same, no matter how many characters are there in the domain name. So unless you plan to read it loud quite often or can afford to pay a premium just for the privilege of having an email address that looks like coolguy@vpn.net, your 3 letter domain looks as good as any other more affordable 10+ letter domain.

I mean, it's not even a very popular brand that you're buying now and hope to sell it to the brand owner for an even bigger price next month. It's just a sleek looking domain.

If you come and think about it, for the very same $10,001 one paid for the privilege of owning vpn.net you could easily get 1,020 other new domain names of your choice each priced at $9.8. If you're really cheap and go for the lowest possible price, you can get even more. Think about how many keywords you can target with 1,000 websites, each on it's own domain. Even you were to invest only $1,000 in domain names - and that's over 100 brand new you would get - you could use the remaining $9,000 to buy good content, to manage and to promote all 100 websites. In a few weeks you could end up with 100 money making websites, versus just one.

Heck, just stop and think for a second. Owning over a thousand websites or a single one, for the exact same cost. What would you choose? Even if each one would be making just $1 per day, that's $30,000 per month! You would get your initial investment back in just 10 days!

And what do you think is more easily reachable: one website making you $1000 per day, or 1000 each making you $1?

So, what's the gain? Just the prestige of writing a short email address on your business card?

It may be just me being blindsided, but I fail to see the whole point of this. Agreed, it can be looked at as an investment, and domains such as this are almost as good as real estate property. They can be sold in the years to come, and for even bigger prices, but to whom? If you place yourself in the position of someone looking to buy a new domain, would you be willing to pay $100,000 for a domain like vpn.net?

If your answer was a yes, I'd like to know why. If your answer was a no, I'd like to know why.

What's your take on it? 

Ultimate Tag Warrior 3

Ultimate Tag Warrior is a multi-headed hydra of a plugin. It allows you to add tags either through the Write Post page in wordpress in a tag box, on posts using an AJAXy box, and in posts using special syntax from external editors […]

Once you’ve got your tags entered; you enter a realm of interesting ways of doing things with your tags. […] At the simpler end, you can automagically have tags included at the top and bottom of your posts without making changes to themes.

Think about coupling this with the Related Posts plugin to get a really powerful tool.

But… if you don't mess with links or change Permalinks on a daily basis you shouldn't be having 404's in the first place, should you?

And if you do need to change Permalinks or update the page/post slugs, see how you can actually benefit from it and increase your Google PageRank as you go.

Related posts for your 404

How would you like the ability to display related entries on a 404 page? It would be really handy.

This plugin displays related posts depending on which page tried to be accessed, and it does so by attempting to match the keywords in the requested URL - basically the post slug - with the keywords from other post slugs.

You might need to tweak your Permalink structure to make it work.

I have a really neat idea for a plugin that will actually take into account tags and even keywords from other posts when displaying related ones so it's not relying on a certain Permalink structure to work. Let me know if you're interested, and I might squeeze it in one of these days.

Subscribe2 2.2.2

Now that's a very neat plugin. Allow your users to be receive an email notification whenever someone adds a new comment to a post they're watching. It's pretty much like a "subscribe to thread" for forums.

And here is another plugin that does the same thing. 

Think of it!

This is an extremely powerful tool that makes your users coming back again and again to your blog. Viral. Free. Automated. What more can you ask for?

A must for serious traffic building!

The more I think about it, the more it seems the gap between blogs, forums and regular websites is getting thinner day by day. We want to publish more information, faster, in a more user friendly way and let everyone know about it and interact with us.

What would be an appropriate term for the mega-websites of the future? Information vortals? Hmm…

Forget condos and strip malls. Domain names, the real estate of the Web, have been delivering far greater returns. How some of the savviest speculators on the Net are making millions from their URL portfolios?

Read all about it in a very well documented article: Masters of their Domains.

It makes a pretty good reading, so I won’t spoil your pleasure by dissecting it here. Just one key phrase to keep in mind: “type-in”. Or was it cash-in?

Technorati : buy domain name, domain name, online opportunity, speculation, web real estate