It’s your turn. Start using the MobileMe Calendar beta.

YES! Another Beta acceptance. I’ve been striking with these ones lately. I really can’t wait to start using it, I will review shortly.

Congratulations, you can now start using the MobileMe Calendar
beta. The beta includes a redesigned Calendar web application, calendar
sharing, and easy event invitations.

To get started, sign in to MobileMe Calendar and you’ll be prompted to upgrade. Be sure you’re using iOS 4 or later (iPhone and iPod touch), Mac OS X 10.6.4 and the MobileMe Control Panel 1.6.1 (PC) before upgrading

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ValueClick Media CPM Network Review

August 01, 2010

When I first wrote this article, I was a bit upset with ValueClick’s services, but I learned to work with their team and we’ve come a long way since. Some of the stuff I’ve noted in the article still bother me, but I stopped carrying because I only care about one thing and that’s: Getting Paid. I will be going through this post, and commenting in red anything that I think should be updated, or noted but won’t get rid of my original thoughts.

May 4, 2010

Hi everyone, over the next 30 days I will be examining and detailing the top CPA, CPC, and CPM networks including CJ, Linkshare, ADSDAQ, Pulse360, ValueClick Media. I currently have the upper hand: I have is a domain that receives approximately 750,000 – 1.8M unique visits in a 30 day period – it should be a good place to start making money  - right? Well, to my discovery – not really. It’s not easy making money with CPA, or CPM.

My first review is: ValueClick Media a great and friendly CPM network.

ValueClick Media – A company who claims to be a leader in the CPM Network industry.  ‘Voice Ads’ “You have been selected to receive a free iPod” have you ever gotten those? ValueClick Media has them! – It’s dissapointing, but you can filter them out. In my opinion a CPM network should exclude all bad ads, even to those who pay top notch to be in it.

This evening I had a 300×250 CPM for 0.01 cent about Jesus Chris and converting to Christianity. Fantastic.

Day 1 with ValueClick Media was pretty confusing. I couldn’t get my account activated and had contact their customer support which has been on the phone with me for approximately fifteen minutes but waited for approximately 1 hours for the account to mysteriously activate itself until one of their representatives said “Oh, your account has not been confirmed yet – that’s why it’s not working” – Silly me.

Finally, I’m in the backend, I’m ready to make money. First thing I’m headed towards: Filters – because who wants to have voice ads, massive diet pop up ads on their domain – Still following?.. When that was done I was headed to see what’s running on their site – what CPM as well as trying to build an excel of exactly how much money the company would be making every single month.

I selected 728×90 banner to appear on my site, and guess what? I have both 728×90 banners and 468×60 banners appear within the same code. (See image below top right).

I was about to email ValueClick Media once again, and let them see a 2nd screen-shot which I was about to take and as I opened my domain, I loud noise was heard, saying, “You’ve been selected to receive a Walmart Giftcard..” NO! I’ve filtered those..

Below is a screenshot of ValueClick Media’s back end Filtering Panel (2010)

It really didnt take too long to disable that, I just reached out to a representative who quickly had that removed from my domain.

ValueClick’s back-end panel

Media Management is the area where you see the available campaigns, their CPM, CPC and sizes (468×60, 728×90, 300×250 etc). I started going over one by one – some, It is a bit dissapointing that you have to select one by one but their filtering let’s you bulk-select by category (Casino, Pop Ups, Diet, etc).

  • Overall their back end panel is simple, easy to use, quick to understand and gets a 6/10 stars in my review.
  • Overall support and customer service – after being their customer for almost 3 months now I will say the customer service is definitely 10/10 – they are keen to help, they want you to succeed.
  • The ads that are shown in their site are decent, it really depends on the location you are coming from but they manage to do a very good filling rate.

Nowadays I have migrated our domain to being able to advertise 2x 728×90, 3x 160×600/120×600 300×250 and 180×50 thus will ensure a successful revenue model.

To anyone who is interested joining ValueClick Media I truly recommend it. Just be smart, and you will be able to make really good money by reading their targeted ads, and how much CPM they are offering using SEO content.

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The New Magic Trackpad Review – ‘Let your fingers do the clickin, scrolling, and swiping.’

I’ve been an Apple user for approximately 8 years now. Can’t stay I’m not-satisfied. With the upkeep of great products that Apple keeps providing me I am very much pleased.

After some downtime this morning on the Apple.com website, Apple has revealed it’s latest product

The Magic Trackpad

The new Magic Trackpad is the first Multi-Touch trackpad designed to work with your Mac desktop computer. It uses the same Multi-Touch technology you love on the MacBook Pro. And it supports a full set of gestures, giving you a whole new way to control and interact with what’s on your screen. Swiping through pages online feels just like flipping through pages in a book or magazine. And inertial scrolling makes moving up and down a page more natural than ever. Magic Trackpad connects to your Mac via Bluetooth wireless technology. Use it in place of a mouse or in conjunction with one.

More control at your fingertips.

Magic Trackpad gives you a whole new way to control what’s on your Mac desktop computer. When you perform gestures, you actually interact with what’s on your screen. You feel closer to your content, and moving around feels completely natural. Swiping through pages on screen is just like flipping through pages in a magazine, and inertial scrolling senses the momentum in your fingers as you move up and down a page.

More to touch, more to love.

Your fingers will fall for the Magic Trackpad. It’s made with smooth, wear-resistant glass that feels great to the touch. And it’s nearly 80 percent larger than the built-in trackpad on the MacBook Pro, giving you plenty of room to perform gestures. Because the entire surface of Magic Trackpad is a button, you can click on objects just as you would using a traditional mouse. And Magic Trackpad sits at the same height and angle as the Apple Wireless Keyboard, so you can go from trackpad to keyboard in one seamless motion.

Bluetooth technology.

Magic Trackpad connects to your Mac via Bluetooth wireless technology. Use it in conjunction with the Apple Wireless Keyboard for a cable-free, uncluttered workspace. And if you feel like venturing away from your desk, Magic Trackpad maintains a reliable and secure connection up to 33 feet away from your Mac.

This bad boy runs for $69 and available for shipping right now.

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SEO Tips for Optimization & Architectural ECommerce Based Website.

Every now and then I hop on these freelance jobs that assure me the quality time for SEO research which is described best by my trademarked philosophy tag line

“If you wanted to learn SEO, all you had to do is search“.

This time a year, I’ve been lucky enough to be assigned to a new full-time job in New York City optimizing three very interesting domains that will assure me the continous exploration into Search Engines. Now I know that approximately 75% of my readers are very interested about SEO tips and if the company let me I will even pull hands-on examples to optimization.

The three new projects which I’ve been assigned to optimize are

  1. Retail (E Commerce)
  2. Wholesale (E Commerce with Login)
  3. CMS Website (Hardware)

Very exciting! But before we begin let me summarize these three so you can quickly select which area you are most interested in reading about:

Retail E Commerce SEO – There are many aspects to look into when building a retail E Commerce website, especially with all the niched categories, landing pages and title tags. This post will cover all the necessary tools and tips needed to build a successful SEO optimized E Commerce website. Read more below

Username Protected Wholesale E Commerce SEO – While there might be a debate on which platform to choose for a wholesale, I will always stand by and recommend to create a few landing pages focusing on your wholesale material, and giving an additional back-end user-name and password afterwards. Article coming soon

Hardware Website (CMS) SEO – A regular 5-6 page HTML based website with no PHP or MySQL functions. How to optimize a landing page? Well, that’s a great question. Article coming soon

The journey for Search Engine Optimization for E Commerce site begins.

There are many aspects to look for when building a site, especially a E Commerce site. I’d have to say follow the first moves like I do. I keep a folder which contains 3 different files, they are the site-map validated for the following engines: Yahoo! Bing and Google. Right after I create, I will always generate a site-map, and once the site is completed I will submit it to the following

  1. Yahoo Site Explorer
  2. Google Site-map
  3. Bing Webmaster

(You can also submit to more search engines like Ask.com, but most likely they will find you after you appear in the top three).

Tips for Optimizing E Commerce site

Avoid Manufacturer Product Description – RESIST THE URGE! DO NOT COPY PASTE! Building an online shop might be a pain to generate a lot of content however you should consider it a must. Search engines hold a grudge against Ecommerce based sites. Often times, I agree. Many online stores offer little useful content – if it’s Cellphones, just the main description (weight, color, type) the excerpt which is used includes dry manufacturer product description, poor internal linking and no unique user generated content. Without thinking about it twice Ecommerce sites have unique challenges when it comes to SEO. As much tempting as it is to copy paste – avoid it. Even if you do copy paste, at least write your own unique content around it or change a few words here and there.

Create a SEO Keyword field in Product Database – Sounds confusing? It might just be as well. Just as every product record in your catalog has a name, price, SKU and other attributes, you should also create a SEO keyword field that is displayed in the title tags, meta tags, and preferably the body as well. As you add products to your Ecommerce site, enter commonly search for keywords (use Google Keyword Tool to search Keyword examples and volumes). Remember: not everyone will search by the brand name or item number, so this will greatly help your product pages rank for long tail searches.

All products 2 or 3 Clicks from the Home Page – Look, I’ll keep it very simple for you: The homepage is the highest ranked page in your site. It’s the juiciest highest ranked page, and the first page that an engine looks it every time they go into your site. You don’t want the crawler to have to go through 20 different pages to reach an item.  Keep your product pages as close as possible to your greatest source of PageRank. I’ve seen many Ecommerce sites bury part of their product catalog deep within dozens of pages of categories and subcategories and sub subcategories. This can be accomplished by using SEO friendly rollovers or increasing the number of products per page. I recommend, at least 24 products per page if not 50 and try to not exceed 4 pages of products.

Use iframes for Duplicate Content – If you have repetitive content that must appear on every page, or your product description are not unique, consider placing them inside an iframe with an invisible border. Users will not know that the data technically resides on another page search engines will not penalise you for duplicate content. It’s a win win.

Create a Product RSS Feed: Creating a product feed and submitting it to relevant content aggregators such as Google Base which accepts an XML file like product feed and displays your results for Google Base searches. (‘Shopping’) Product feeds can be a great way of picking up free backlinks directly to your product pages. Including Retweets.

Unique Keyword Meta Tags – Meta tags including keywords and description should be entirely unique on every single product of the page. Though meta content does not directly affect your ranking (yet), unique tags will prevent duplicate content penalties.

Product Reviews – A perfect strategy for guaranteeing unique content is displaying user generated content from customers who previously purchased, or just feel like reviewing a product they’ve seen or used before. Allow your customers to review products they’ve purchased.

Avoid Session IDs in URLs: Many Ecommerce software platforms use cookie-less unique session IDs in the site URLs. Unfortunately, this creates an infinite amount of duplicate content for the Search Engines to crawl. There are always ways to prevent this using an ethical type of cloaking which serves URLs to spider without the session ID.

Crawlable Navigation - AVOID JAVASCRIPT based navigation structures that don’t allow spiders through. If you’re stuck with one, at least duplicate your navigation in the footer of every page with normal hyperlinks. In addition don’t rely on form based navigation such as drop down lists since the engines can’t follow them.

Don’t stuff Keywords in your navigation bar – This is useless and very tacky. Keywords are placed in navigation bars are not as important as they used to be. Instead use keyword rich anchor text pointing to the landing page which is rich with SEO optimized content for that specific landing page.

Optimize your images – I’ve said that before and I’ll say it again. Don’t upload images to your site that are called ’12498172.jpg’ or ‘iphone3333.jpg’ Be specific! People today are searching Google Images, or other Image search engines like crazy. And if they are looking for a specific Cellphone type, such as Nokia N95 they will Google it, and if you had changed ’12498172.jpg’ to Nokia-N95.jpg you will most likely rank for it. Another tip: only use – and not _, &, ~.

Use Alttributes in Links – If you asked me about link alt 1 year ago I would say avoid it, it’s just a hassle. But today it’s a very important aspect of a link, some might say more then the anchor text itself. Always use the link alt=”description”.

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Business Advice in Three Words

  1. Time is money
  2. Learn from mistakes
  3. Don’t act cocky
  4. Learn from others
  5. Nothing is perfect
  6. Stop thinking big
  7. Hire hungry employees
  8. Hire employees slowly
  9. Fire bad employees
  10. Talent isn’t everything
  11. Emotions are bad
  12. Focus your efforts
  13. You’re not smart
  14. Don’t waste money
  15. Listen to customers
  16. Business plans suck
  17. Scrappiness is good
  18. Never stop networking
  19. Don’t be shy
  20. Ask for help
  21. Failure is acceptable
  22. Money isn’t everything
  23. Solve a problem
  24. Be open minded
  25. Motivate your employees
  26. Set realistic goals
  27. Take big risks
  28. Leverage your competitors
  29. Use social media
  30. Business isn’t easy
  31. Work hard everyday
  32. Revenue isn’t profit
  33. Give a lot
  34. Coolness is overrated
  35. Leverage the blogosphere
  36. Press doesn’t matter
  37. Your idea sucks
  38. Attend good conferences
  39. Entrepreneurs aren’t born
  40. Market your company
  41. Agility is important
  42. Don’t be afraid
  43. Diversify your income
  44. Sex always sells
  45. Always use metrics
  46. Don’t give up
  47. Aggressiveness can backfire
  48. Friend rich people
  49. Create a blog
  50. Have smart friends
  51. Hogs get slaughtered
  52. Take a break
  53. Copying is bad
  54. Innovation is good

Thanks to Neil Patel for making this great collection

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The Guide To Buy A Japanese Domain (.jp, co.jp, ne.jp)

At the start of 2008 there were over six-and-a-half billion people on the Earth, with just over 1.3-billion of us on the internet. At the same time, there are almost 100,000,000 top-level domains registered, quite a few of which are held by private citizens. What does this mean to the average person? It means that if we want to protect our brand or our name on the internet, we need to move quickly.

Why not buy a .jp?

Invest in a .jp domain name

Japan is a funny country when it comes to rules. Anything that can be governed, will be governed. This is true with everything from ketchup to nuclear power to domain names. In order to have a .jp, certain conditions need to be met.

Note: Don’t let these prices scare you! Keep reading for cheaper alternatives.

.co.jp [w/Alphabetic Name (¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy

limited to only one per registered business
must have at least one working office in Japan
.ne.jp [w/Alphabetic Name (¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy

can be owned by citizens or businesses
no limit on number of domain registrations
must have a Japanese address
.or.jp [w/Alphabetic Name (¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy

must be a registered non-profit organization in Japan
limited to only one domain per year
.jp [w/Alphabetic Name (¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy

can be owned by citizens or businesses
no limit on number of domain registrations
must have a Japanese address
With these prices, it’s no surprise that people aren’t picking up .jp domains as quickly as we see with other country-specific extensions. But it doesn’t always have to be this expensive.

Buying an IDN Multilingual Domain

Since 2004, it’s been possible for us to purchase Internationalized Domain Names using non-alphabetic characters. This means that if you wanted to buy something like ジェイソン.jp, you could. The advantage here is that very few Internationalized Domain Names have been purchased using westernized names converted to Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, Hebrew, Hindi, Arabic and Chinese characters. That said, with so many people who use these writing systems coming online all the time, it’s only a matter of years before all the common or otherwise desirable names are taken.

Luckily, there are places where we can purchase top level Japanese domains and, as luck would have it, they’re often cheaper than buying the romanized TLDs.

Get TWO .jp domains for $40

JP-Domains, a Canadian company that helps with Japanese domain registration for foreigners and non-residents, currently offers one of the best deals on the web. As of this writing, they’re offering customers two IDN .jp domains for a price of $40 USD. Considering how a single romanized .jp is $99 USD per year, it’s hard to complain with the price. Of course, if you absolutely must have a romanized .jp address, you can buy one for the low(er) price of $69 USD per year.

With the weak US dollar, though, these prices may go up substantially in the near future.

Attaching an IDN to Our Website

We can attach an Internationalized Domain Name to our website one of two ways. We can either forward all visitors to our main site (e.g.: http://ジェイソン.jp will take you to http://www.j2fi.net/), or we can buy the name and then edit the name servers through our account’s control panel to point to our webhost’s name servers. The first option is quite simple, but I’ll show you how to do both.

Forwarding an IDN with JP-Domains

When you click on the “Edit Name Servers” link in your left panel, you should see the same thing on your screen as the image below (click for a larger picture). From here, you simply need to click on one of the DNS addresses.

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Bloginity Networks Names New Executives: Benjamin Tse, Brian Willett.

Bloginity Networks announced today that it has appointed two new executives – Benjamin Tse, as Chief Brand Officer, and Brian Willett, as Chief Communications Officer.

In his role as Chief Brand Officer, Tse will be responsible for maintaining consistency across Bloginity Networks in terms of brand image, marketing and design. Tse’s work will focus on building the brand equity of Bloginity Networks and managing the design and creative projects of the company. Tse is the founder of Sirulian Design Studios and was hand-picked for his skills in website development, promotion and optimization. Tse will report to Daniel Haim, CEO of Bloginity Networks.

[click to continue…]

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New MobileMe Beta Version – Good News

Today I received really great news in the mail:

Congratulations, you can now start using the MobileMe Mail beta.
Enjoy new features such as widescreen view, one-click archiving, and rules that keep your email organized everywhere.

You will see the new Mail beta every time you sign in to me.com. To access your other me.com web applications, just click the cloud icon on the top left of the screen.

You can leave the beta at any time by clicking the Action (gear) button in the toolbar and selecting “Leave the Mail beta.” This will return you to the current version of Mail with all your messages intact. If you have any questions, please read the MobileMe Mail Beta FAQ.

Thank you for trying the MobileMe Mail Beta. Please give us your feedback. Once signed in, you’ll find the link in the lower left corner of your browser window.

Sincerely,
The MobileMe Team

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You may already be using Email Marketing to grow your business. But did you know it has evolved?

Discover how you can use Email Marketing 2.0, the next generation of email marketing for small business, to get the right message, to the right person, at the right time, easily and automatically.

Email Marketing 2.0 is a proven way to increase your response rates and conversions, through smart, automated communication.

Watch the Demo now to get ahead of the curve (and your competition!).

Click here for more information

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How To Change Image Opacity at A: Hover using CSS 3 -Webkit

In your CSS use this for 100%

filter: alpha(opacity=100);
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=100);
-moz-opacity: 1.00;
opacity:1;

And at a:hover use:

filter: alpha(opacity=80);
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=80);
-moz-opacity: 0.80;
opacity:0.8;

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A WordPress Based Q&A That Earns Some CPA Man.

Hey everyone, it’s been quite some time since I last wrote my last article about SEO & SEM. I really base my article on life-events and moments that I have to explain to people certain stuff I better off put it into contextual blog and shoot it out live and have everyone read it as [...]

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A WordPress ‘Related Post’ that displays Thumbnails 70×70, 125×125

After, the longest search of all to find the best ‘Related Posts’ I’ve always ended up with the same plugin: YARRP. Although Mitch (@yarpp) is a great man and developed a text tool that is beyond good. It is not attractive enough. And the guides he provides to Display thumbnails for Related posts in WordPress [...]

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How To Find the POST ID, CATEGORY ID, PAGE ID in WORDPRESS 2.9.2 (2.5 AND UP).

GUIDE: HOW TO FIND THE WORDPRESS PAGE ID / POST ID / CATEGORY ID With WordPress 2.5 being released, the IDs on all admin pages have been removed as it is. Propably due to the fact that the common user dont need them. However, for advanced WordPress Users/ developers those IDs were quite interesting for [...]

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Basic Web Design Tips

Don’t bother with splash pages. A splash page is normally a pointless page people put on their websites as an introduction. The page normally contains some sort of image on with a big click here to enter sign, or sometimes people don’t say anything and just hope you will click on the picture to enter [...]

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The Reason for PHP and MYSQL Popularity

Web site hosting, MySQL and PHP development are like two sides of the same coin. They work in tandem to create dynamic and comprehensive web sites. Having MySQL and PHP programs for our website shall always give a competitive edge to our business. Since, the massive range of flexibility offered by these programming languages assists [...]

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What’s SEM? and SEO?.. SEM vs SEO AKA Money VS Getting it for free.

The question you should be asking yourself is this: A. Do I want 1000-3000 PAID targeted clicks per month? B. Do I want 50,000 FREE targeted clicks per month? If your answer was A. please leave my site and go to hell. Search Engine Marketing VS Search Engine Optimization Let’s begin with the basic – [...]

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WordPress How To Make it load 10x faster with Slow Image Loading

Lazy loader is a jQuery plugin written in JavaScript. It delays loading of images in (long) web pages. Images outside of viewport (visible part of web page) wont be loaded before user scrolls to them. This is opposite of image preloading.

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Choosing the Right Colors for your website

When choosing the right colors for your website you are to make a very serious decision. You can’t simply say to yourself, here’s a great color let’s do it, there’s so much more into that and you must give it thought. Web colors are colors used in designing web pages, and the methods for describing [...]

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New FQL Tables and Features

We’ve recently rolled out four new FQL tables, added a new field to a fifth table, and released new features giving users more control over their privacy on Facebook Platform. New FQL Tables and Features FQL is a powerful, flexible, and faster way for you to get Facebook data to your applications. We’re always looking [...]

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New LinkShare Twitter Tool Helps Publishers Monetize Twitter Feeds

LinkShare, a leading performance marketing network provider, today announced the LinkShare TweetShop Tool that enables anyone with a Twitter following to monetize their Twitter feeds, and easily turn customized tweets into an effective shopping tool. Generally available to publishers in its network, this innovation further demonstrates the company’s commitment to creating applications that are Easy, [...]

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