• Google Base integration
• Scheduled DV logs cleaning options
• Google Website Optimizer Integration

and more, its pretty slick, i sound like an advertisement - but im not, its that great.  Here is a fancy little video showcasing the Google Website Optimizer options within 1.1.7.

Full 1.1.7 Patch Notes here.

An Internet regulator has approved the creation of the .tel domain, the company that proposed the domain announced on Monday.

Telnic, which proposed .tel to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 2000, said the domain will give individuals and businesses a naming and navigation structure for Internet communications.

The idea is for people to use .tel as a way of communicating directly with the person or company behind a particular Web site, using technologies such as voice over Internet Protocol, e-mail or Short Message Service (SMS). Telnic used the examples of AdamSmith.tel or Hertz.tel.

“The .tel domain offers the first genuinely different use of domains since .com was first created. It will provide seamless integration of existing methods of communication, with emerging technologies like voice over IP,” Telnic’s chief executive, Khashayar Mahdavi, said in a statement.

“The days of needing to remember several telephone numbers, numerous VoIP or instant message identities and other points of contact for our social and professional networks are over. By leveraging innovative DNS (Domain Name System) technology, the .tel domain will allow anyone to publish and control, in real time, how they can be reached,” Mahdavi said.

Telnic, whose mission includes developing a text-based naming and navigation system for Internet communications, hopes to start awarding .tel addresses in 2007.

A similar initiative, called ENUM, already exists. It uses an architecture based on the Domain Name System to resolve telephone numbers to domain name addresses.

Last week ICANN rejected the adult-oriented .xxx domain, a move that was welcomed by adult industry insiders but criticized by the European Commission, which accused ICANN of bowing to pressure from the U.S. government.

Sunrise Registration (Trademark Holders Only)

Pre-booking available Now to December 3, 2008
Sunrise Registrations open December 3, 2008 & continues until February 2, 2009

Landrush Registration (Open to Everyone at a Premium Price)

Pre-booking available Now to February 3, 2009
Landrush registration opens February 3, 2009 & continues until March 24, 2009

General Registration (Open to Everyone at a Standard Price)

Pre-booking available Now to March 24, 2009
General registration opens March 24, 2009

source: CNET

Now I don’t rely on internet marketing and advertising as my sole source of income, if I did I would barely be able to afford the cost of cable internet every month, ha! While I do make a fair amount, I haven’t seen any decrease lately in sales due to anything outside of the time of year (my niche is a spring/fall type niche). Recently I’ve actually seen an increase in sales and income, but this could be due to the revamp of my site and the focus on SEO, but none the less, this proves that if you still work at it you will be able to pull money.

So don’t worry when you see articles like this one stating that internet advertising is in decline, focus on what you are doing and don’t stop working at it. Things will get better around the world and industries will thrive again, so why not get in on it now when other people are getting away from it.

source: Tech Crunch

A dot com domain costs anywhere from $6-10 per year, depending on what GoDaddy promo codes you can dig up, where a dot info domain runs you $1.99 per year. I was trying to save money but had I known that meager $4-8 for the year would have had me pulling in much more money I would have done it right the first time.

Earlier this month I decided it was time for this .info site to get a makeover and a new domain. It was starting to become cluttered with ads that didn’t need to be there, information that nobody clicked on and so forth, plus it was out of season and I wasn’t making a lot of money. First thing I did was secured a brand new .com domain for the website, making sure to use a good keyword. After that was secured, I got a different layout going and setup everything how I wanted. I did a few tests to make sure everything was going well and setup all the plugins and other stuff I needed. Everything was done, I switched the RSS subscribers over the new site, the twitter feed, all I needed to do was make a post on the old site letting people know that we’ve moved and then start updating the new site instead.

Keep in mind that I hadn’t been making much money on this site over the summer, it’s off season for this niche. As soon as I turned on the new site and started making posts there I was getting a ton more visitors than I normally had gotten. I was coming up way higher in SERPs and getting more click throughs which in turn was generating more revenue. I also had more people signing up as followers on twitter and subscribers to my RSS feed. I was certainly happy with the way things were looking.

It’s been about 13 days since I’ve launched the new look/domain and I’ve made more this month than I did all summer. I can’t put a finger on exactly what caused the massive change in visitors, but I’m pretty confident it has to do with the the SEO tactics I’ve implemented as well as the dot com domain. People seem to trust a .com more than a .info. The site is also not cluttered with ads anymore, although there are still a few minor issues I have to fix. Overall I’m amazed at the turnaround of the site over the past few weeks and it seems as though it’s not slowing down.

So my advice to you is if you’re going to start up a website and are debating between a .info and a .com due to the cheaper price, I would always go with the .com (.net if you absolutely have to). Just from my personal experience this month I can tell you that you will regret it if you go with the lesser of the two.

I recently signed up to receive a free subscription to Website Magazine which is dedicated to bringing you information on Website Success. I’m actually impressed with the first issue so far. This month it has a lot of good articles on how to manage your PPC campaigns as well as some alternatives to Adsense. If you’re just getting into this kind of internet marketing it’s a good place to start.

You can get your free subscription over at their websites http://www.websitemagazine.com unless you live outside of the US, then it’s $49/year, sorry guys. It’s definitely an interesting magazine and although you can find most of the information on other websites and forums, it’s nice to be able to have something physical that I can take into the bathroom to read instead of having to lug the laptop in there, which is kind of gross.

Website Magazine

Let me sum it up in one sentence for you, Magento is a pretty hot situation.  Yes, I just called an open source, e-commerce solution a “hot situation.”  It has EVERYTHING the big dogs have, countless shopping cart features, multiple shipping addresses per cart, all kinds of reporting, individual product ratings, suggestions, up-sales and cross-sales, its basically wonderful.  It also is a breeze to customize when it comes to layout.  There are several places to procure fancy themes and plugins, some cost money and some don’t, but when you are getting the expensive part of this set up for free, you can part with some green to make the site look fancy.

Time to go play with the wonder that is Magento, Ill post more impressions tomorrow after I’ve become a bit more savvy with it.

Wordpress can be used in two ways,

1. You can setup a free blog at Wordpress.com which will give you a web address of http://yourblog.wordpress.com, which you can have any domain forwarded to. This will allow you to have free hosting for your blog if you don’t want to spend the money right away.

2. You can download the Wordpress software from Wordpress.org and install it on your own hosting server. This will give you full control over all aspects of your new site. This is the method that I would recommend.

Once you have the Wordpress site setup and ready to go, before writing any content at all, figure out how you want to go about getting traffic to your site. At this point you should not be focused on making money, it will only discourage you when you don’t. You should already have some idea about what the site will focus on, since I’m assuming you either bought a domain or registered a free blog based on the topic you will be writing about. This article is obviously focused on bringing organic traffic to your new website using SEO and a few effective plugins for Wordpress.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which is the method of bringing visitors to your site by targeting keywords so that people can find you via the search engine results pages (SERP). This is going to be our focus. We want to have as little up front costs as possible for this example.

First thing you should do is download an install some plugins for Wordpress.These are the ones I use, there are many of them out there that do similar things.

1. All-In-One-SEO Pack - This plugin is a must, if you install only one of these, install this one. What this plugin does is automatically generates meta tag descriptions, keywords and titles for all of your posts and pages. I had issues with some of my older sites where every time my website came up in the SERP they all had the same description, the meta description I had manually typed into the header.php of the site. That’s not what you want, you want all of your pages/posts to have different titles, descriptions and keywords, which is exactly what this plugin will do for you, all you have to do is remember to enter this information on each post before you publish it.

2. Google-Sitemap-Generator - A sitemap is basically a map of your site. It is an xml file that has links to all your pages that you submit to the search engines and they use it to crawl your site more efficiently. What this plugin will do is automatically generate your sitemap everytime you post something new and it will let the search engines know that you’ve made changes to the site and to send the spiders back. Between this and the first plugin I mentioned, as soon as I make a new post I’m already getting hits from people searching for those keywords. The new posts get indexed almost immediately by Google.

3. Sociable - This plugin is not necessary for SEO, but I always install it because it gives your readers a way to share what they’ve read on your site. You can see this plugin in action at the bottom of every one of our posts here. “Share and Enjoy” is what Sociable is doing. It allows you to select from a number of social networks and when people click on these icons it automatically takes them to that social network and fills in most of the information for them. This gives your readers the opportunity to promote your site for you. It takes 2 seconds to setup and can only help gain readers.

Once you have these 3 plugins installed it’s time to focus on your content. Everyone in the industry will tell you that “Content is King” and they are right, but not just any content, unique content. Don’t just steal articles from other websites and repost them on yours. For one, search engines will see duplicates and they don’t like those, especially if it happens alot. 2. Chances are you won’t rank higher than the original person that posted the article. If there is an article that you feel your readers need to read, take a snippet of it and post it as a quote on your site, but then write your thoughts and feelings about it. So don’t steal content and claim it as your own, that’s a big one.

Another big one is to post frequently, but don’t wear yourself thin too fast. I’m guilty of this myself on this very website. When we first started Internet Gangsters, we posted pretty much anything we could think of. So in like 2 days we had almost 10 posts and day 3 we couldn’t think of anything to write about and the site sat dormant for a while. If you want people to keep coming back to your site you need to update frequently. Now I’m not saying to write every single day, unless of course you have enough ideas that you can do that forever, but I would shoot for 3-5 good quality posts a week, but don’t let too many days go by without a new post, every other day is a good starting point (1-2 a day is ideal if you can manage).

Write content yourself. I know there are places where you can hire extremely cheap writers to help out, but you get what you pay for. I have a friend that is a writer for a living and she finds it absurd how little people charge to write articles online. If you’re going to pay people to write, be cautious because the content you could be getting could be stolen from somewhere else or just horrible quality.

So those are all good tips when getting started, but when it comes to actually digging in and writing articles here are a few tips that I’ve found helpful.

1. If you’re using the All-In-One-SEO plugin the first sentence of every post is what is going to be put into your meta tags as the description for that post if you don’t fill in the information in the options below that specific post, so make sure that you get the point of the article across in the very first sentence. It will also use your “tags” as meta keywords if you don’t fill those in as well. Try to incorporate some keywords that relate to the post in that first sentence as well.

2. Use keywords in the titles and throughout the post. You may think they are getting redundant after a while, but search engines like them. Just don’t go overboard, but be conscious of them as you type.And as for the titles of your posts, search engines like the header tags (<h1>, etc) that you should be using in your CSS for the titles, so this will help.

3. Just because you understand something doesn’t mean that your readers will so make sure you explain things if you think they could be confusing.

4. Use paragraphs and the “more” feature. Nobody likes to read a post that extends the entire length of your website and doesn’t use paragraphs. The more feature will add a “click to read more…” button at the bottom of your post so you can keep the homepage clear of really long articles. Paragraphs will make it easier for a person to read if an article is broken up a bit.

After you’ve written your content and you feel as though it’s unique and well written, use sociable. Nobody every said that you had to wait for your readers to submit your articles to social networking and bookmarking sites. I would recommend Digg and Reddit to start. These will get you some traffic, but if the articles are creative or unique it’s hard to keep these people coming back so make sure to keep up with the content.

To sum up, don’t think about making money at first, don’t get discouraged if nobody seems to be reading or comment, write frequently, write unique posts, focus on keywords. You should be able to pull in a couple hundred hits a day after a while, but don’t think that will make you much money. Focus on content and when you reach the thousands of visitors a day, then start thinking about possibly monetizing your site.

P.S. Stay away from shoppingads.com, they were good before a larger company bought them out and now I don’t seem to make anything off of them.

Lesson to be learned here: Think before you name your company. Pick something inline with the others in your industry.

I have added it to a few of my sites so far and replaced a lot of my shoppingads.com banners with TTZ banners. So far I am pleased to say that it is working out well and I am going to add these banners to a lot more of my sites in the near future. So if you feel your site can generate some cash from banners that promote products, then check out TTZ Media.