Show Your True Website Colors
Ever notice how some sites have colors that work really well together? Even if the design is simple having colors that are coordinated can do wonders for the overall look and feel.
However, if you’re like me you may find yourself “color-challenged.” You know what looks good — you just can’t pick the colors on your own.
Here are two GREAT color programs to the rescue:
http://www.degraeve.com/ – This site not only has a very nifty online color picker, there are a lot of other very interesting and cool utilities like an business card maker, an icon generator, and a fun site translator.
http://www.colorschemer.com – Super cool software that’ll make you the look like a fantastic color schemer. If you got $50, well worth it.
Finally, a nice thread on Google with lots of links to color information. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=290239
Free Affiliate Link Cloaking
I recently started promoting an affiliate product and I was fortunate enough to get a #1 ranking in Google. I noticed that while I was getting good clickthroughs I wasn’t getting any sales.
It made me wonder if I was getting the short end of the stick either from link bypassing or link hijacking.
I was using a simple php redirect that I had seen on one of the forums. You simply put this code in a php file which will redirect the user to the actual site along with your affiliate ID.
< ?php
$redirect_url = 'my affiliate url';
header( "Location: {$redirect_url}" );
?>
This method seems to work OK. The one problem though is that it reveals your affiliate ID in the address bar. It will look something like: www.yourdomain.com/?your_affiliate_id
Some people who see that will chop off your affiliate ID — that’s what they call link bypassing — and so you would miss out on your commission.
Another method to use is revealed on this site: http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/web1/affiliate_link_cloaker.htm
Actually, this site dissects how a popular affiliate link cloaker works so that you can implement it yourself. It can hide your actual affiliate ID by using frames. Here is an excerpt from his site.
How Can I Do It For Free?
Follow these steps:
1. Get the “Model Page” code in the box below. The easiest way to do that is to put the cursor in the box, then type Ctrl-A (to select all) and then Ctrl-C to copy it all to the clipboard.
2. Paste the code into your own page to create the basic page. Once this is done all you need to do is to change the title and the URL.
3. Change “–TITLE’–” to whatever title you want.
4. Go to tokira.net/unicode or fantomaster.com/fantomasSuite/shadowCoder/fascodersv-e.cgi
5. Use either of these two pages to translate the URL you want to cloak from “normal” characters to HTML Unicode. (For example, you can type “http://www.Amazon.com” in the top and get the cloaked characters at the bottom.
6. Put this cloaked URL in place of –URL– on your page.
7. Voila. You are done. You have created a cloaked page.
And here is the actual HTML code to use for your own cloaker. Change the [ ] to <> in your code.
You can add lots of blank links after the comment to discourage people from figuring out your affiliate ID which has been obfuscated with the unicode converter.
[ !-- !STOP! WARNING: you are not authorized to view this
Code - Close your text editor immediately -- ]
[html][head][script]window.status = ‘ ‘;[/script][meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us"]
[title]–TITLE–[/title][/meta][meta name="keywords" content][/meta][meta name="description" content][/meta][/head][frameset border="0" frameborder="0" marginleft="0" margintop="0" marginright="0" marginbottom="0" rows="100%,*"][frame src=--URL--" scrolling="auto" frameborder="no" border="0" noresize][/frame][frame topmargin="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" frameborder="no" border="0" noresize][noframes][body][/body][/noframes][/frame][/frameset]
I’m using both methods on my site to see if it makes a difference.
Best Hosting Sites
Here are my thoughts on web hosts:
When I first started out looking for web hosting many years ago, I went for the ultra cheap. I just had one site and I couldn’t afford the $40 / month prices that popular companies like Hostway were charging at the time.
So I ended up using a company called DirectNic. They were cheap for the basic hosting — I think something like $5 a month. The problem was that they would nickle-and-dime you for everything like having extra email addresses. Also, they didn’t offer any phone support. You could email them and they typically would respond within a day. Because uptime for my site wasn’t super-critical the slower response was OK for me. It was the tradeoff that I assumed came with cheap hosting.
After a while I got tired of paying for every add-on and I switched over to HostGo. They were about $10 / month although they didn’t charge for each email address and they had a lot of webspace and bandwidth. Plus I could administer some of the features using cPanel. They only offered email support although I was used to that already.
The next step up for me was hosting that allowed multiple domains. I found two hosting services for about the same price. The Prime Host and WestNic. They were basically doing reseller hosting and that was cheaper for me because I could have lots of websites for almost the same $5 / month price I was getting at Direct Nic for just 1 domain. Both The Prime Host and WestNic also only offer email support.
Since that time the industry has matured and I’ve settled on hosts that typically use a cPanel interface, have reseller plans, and now I’m also looking for phone support and extra IP addresses if they have it.
Today, here’s my list of good and bad hosts that I’ve used or have heard about from VERY reliable sources:
Good List
HostGator – www.hostgator.com. They used to be on my Undecided List and I’ve moved them up the to Good List. Uptime is good and I haven’t had any issues with them shutting down my sites.
HostMonster – www.hostmonster.com. Cheap and reliable. Just the way I like it.
PowerVPS – www.powervps.com. I’ve heard only great things about this host, although they are a step up in price for me. $45 / month is a bit steep although for $4 more you can get an extra 4 IP addresses so perhaps it’s cheaper to use them rather than 4 different cheaper reseller plans. Also, for $45 / month you get great support and a Virtual Private Server which is better than shared hosting on my reseller plans and right below a dedicated server. All the benefits of a dedicated server at a reduced price.
SLHost – www.slhost.com. Competitive with PowerVPS at about $45 / month as well. Good reports on this host. I see lots of discounts so the true price may be closer to $35 / month.
Bad List
I can honestly say that you should avoid these hosts!
The Prime Host – www.theprimehost.com. They were my first cheap reseller host. However, I’ve come to realize their support is awful and I don’t have to live with it. I can get better support for the same price. They’ve shut down my sites before without any email notice. I don’t know how many times I would email them a question and they would either answer only half of my question or give me a totally useless response. They are the worst of my bad list.
Host Go – www.hostgo.com. I’ve decided to move away from this host. $9.95 / month is too much to pay today for single domain hosting and no phone support.
DirectNic – www.directnic.com. Too little support and not enough features for the price.
WestNic – www.westnic.com. They are borderline problematic like The Prime Host. I’ve had a site or two shut down from them and later unsuspended after I sent them an email. I still have sites with them and I plan to slowly migrate my sites to another host.
Host Nine – www.hostnine.com. I used to love these guys when they first came out. After about a year, their uptime and support collapsed so I moved my sites over to HostMonster.
Undecided
Reseller Zoom – www.resellerzoom.com. I’ve had OK service from them so far. A few people have had problems with them. No phone support. I might stick with them for a while because they are so cheap. Budget reseller plan for just $5 / month.
For higher end hosting you can check out offers here. Expect to pay about $40 – $50 per month for this type of host. However, you can expect great uptime and phone support.
Emotional Marketing Value Leads to Headline Riches
Saw this link on one of the forums. This is an interesting site that will analyze your headline for it’s Emotional Marketing Value (EMV). http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/
By the way, the title for this post got a 71.43% EMV rating. Pretty good!
Checking for Duplicate Content
Whether you write your own articles or get Private Label Rights (PLR) content, it’s always good to see if there are websites with duplicate content.
Use these tools to check the net for duplicate content.
http://www.webmasterlabor.com/tools/checker/ – You can specify a URL, local file, or copy the text into an input box. You can then have it pattern-matched agains Google, another URL, or the checker’s own database.
http://www.copyscape.com – You specify your website address and this tool will check other websites to see if there is any duplicate content. Quick and easy.
The final low-tech way to check for duplicate content is to simply do a search on a sentence or two from your text. Pick something near the top of the page that has some kind of unique phrase or sentence structure. Be sure to try other search engines besides Google since it is often slow to index pages. Better yet might be to try one of the meta-search engines like metaspy.com or mamma.com.
11/27/07 – Update. Copyscape seems to be the copy checking site. However, here are some second tier companies that also check for plagiarism.
http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker
http://blog.outer-court.com/quotefinder
http://plagium.com
http://www.articlechecker.com/
The Secret To Getting Indexed
Interesting posting on how one guy gets indexed quickly.
One Way Text Links
This site allows for one way text links. Some are free and some are paid.
MSN Live Search Link Submission
Add your website here for MSN Live Search indexing.
Yahoo Linkdomain
A cool way to find all the sites that link to any page on a domain is to use the Yahoo linkdomain directive.
Here is an example:
linkdomain:www.zomoca.com
Be sure not to have any spaces after the colon.
This can be used to check out who is linking to your competition.
The Mother Lode of SEO Tools
A great list of SEO tools!