I just received notification of a new advertiser in Commission Junction, a new shoe store named Shoebacca.com. I went to the site, hoping and expecting to see a big grinning Chewbacca pitching shoes, but no such luck. What a shame. Get it together Shoebacca.
OMFG, is Facebook down? Twitter? Oh noes! Check out WebsiteDown.net – it’s basically a url checker. I went looking for a site like this the other day when one particular large site was down all freaking day. It’s clever, simple, and SEO’d pretty well. I don’t think they are going to make any money, but whatever.
As I’ve mentioned before, I hate looking for new domains. The process is tedious and infuriating. But at least now I have a site that makes the process a little better: www.domarama.com. Results are returned instantly in a variety of tlds, which is really nice. Check it out!
I’ll be honest, the whole Shoemoney System bugs me. I signed up a few weeks ago to see what it was all about, and here are my quick opinions:
1. The system was amazingly basic. As in, “there’s this company called Google that you may have heard of” kind of basic. So you waste a lot of time with “training” on what the internet is all about. It drove me crazy.
2. It’s $197/month. That’s really expensive. For that kind of dough you can join a website that provides a nice service, like SEOMoz, Raven, or others. Maybe I’ll review some of those at a later time.
3. Jeremy might have some good ideas, but when I think of him I always think of the old saying about “big hat, no cattle”. He has a good talk, but I feel like he got a little lucky with ringtones, and he became internet famous from that. And from then on out he’s steamed along on being internet famous. I’ve never heard him with any new ideas or thoughts on things that really work online.
4. He has terrible spelling and grammar. I know this isn’t a big deal to many people, but it’s really hard for me to take someone seriously when they can’t spell. It’s a huge pet peeve of mine.
5. When I took advantage of the money-back guarantee, I was treated very rudely by the rep. They were very snarky with me. To me that give some credence to my “big hat, no cattle” thoughts.
6. Jeremy is a little bit black hat. I feel like if he thought he could make money spamming (and get away with it), he would. He just always seems to have had that attitude.
Bottom line, I think the Shoemoney System might be right for some people. Maybe if you can barely turn your computer on in the morning and have no idea what Google and Facebook are, you can give it a go. I don’t know anyone trying to make money online that’s in that boat, though.
Last thing: I’ve never met Jeremy. Maybe he’s a really nice guy, I really don’t know. I think that we go about our businesses in different ways, and that’s fine. The internet is a big place, and there’s room for all of us to make money online. I wish him luck with his business endeavors, and hope they all work out!
I noticed earlier today that I had a few WordPress blog posts ranking in Google, but the title be displayed was in this format: “MonkeyKnifeFight.com >> Blog Archive >> This is the title of my post”. Needless to say, that isn’t very SEO friendly. It’s especially a problem if you’re using an older WordPress theme – they don’t tend to be SEO friendly, either. Luckily, the fix is very easy. Open up the theme’s header.php file, and right near the top will be the title tag. Just replace it with this:
<title><?php wp_title(‘|’, true, ‘right’); ?><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></title>
If a user is on the home page, they’ll the title as “MonkeyKnifeFight.com”.
If a user is on an inside page, they’ll see “This is the title of my post | MonkeyKnifeFight.com”. Snazzy, eh?
Does anybody have any good domain parking solutions? I dumped a dozen of my unused domains on the free Sedo domain parking, and so far in the past week I’ve made a whopping $0.02. I’m not retiring soon on my parking income, that’s for sure.
Any good ideas or suggestions out there?
New press release service PRBuzzer.com is offering a limited time Free Press Release Promo. Check it out!
I learned this sweet tip from Shawn Collins at AffiliateTip.com. You can easily install the WordPress plugin “Pretty Link”, and it acts as a url shortener – and it tracks clicks, too! Here’s a Pretty Link to the plugin:
Feel free to click that link as many times as you want – I want to see how well the stats work. 
Thanks Shawn at Affiliate Tip!
I found this linkbuilding tip somewhere, I can’t remember where. (My linkbuilding text file is nearly 1000 lines long, full of little tidbits I’ve picked up here and there.) Anyway, here’s the phrase in Google:
“add a blog post” <keyword>
For example:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22add+a+blog+post%22+video+games&sourceid=navclient-ff
That leaves you with a ton of results for Ning communities that have been installed on random websites. Why do we care about Ning? By default, Ning installations let you post blog posts on these other sites with dofollow links!
On the first pages of results you get these great sites, all of which you can free make a blog post on:
http://geeks.pirillo.com/profiles/blog/list?pageSize=15
Page Rank: 5
DmR: 5.84
DmT: 6.01
http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blog/list
Page Rank: 4
DmR: 5.25
DmT: 5.36
http://vghvinet.ning.com/profiles/blog/list
Page Rank: 3
DmR: 3.66
DmT: 4.16
http://www.29gifts.org/profiles/blog/list
Page Rank: 3
DmR: 4.92
DmT: 4.94
http://community2.myfoxboston.com/service/searchEverything.kickAction?as=71243&mediaType=blog&sortType=recent&includeBlog=on&d-7095067-p=1
Page Rank: 5
DmR: 3.97
DmT: 4.43
http://www.nanopaprika.eu/profiles/blog/list
Page Rank: 5
DmR: 2.13
DmT: 2.54
http://www.mamasfallenangels.com/profiles/blog/list
Page Rank: 1
DmR: 3.59
DmT: 3.66
http://community2.myfoxdfw.com/service/searchEverything.kickAction?as=78592&mediaType=blog&sortType=recent&includeBlog=on&d-7095067-p=1
Page Rank: 4
DmR: 4
DmT: 4.41
At all those high trust sites you can add a blog post right now, with plenty of dofollow links! One word of caution, though. Don’t spam those sites. Add meaningful content, with just a few of your links. If it gets abused, it gets shut down.
I post about SEO, LinkBuilding, Affiliate Marketing, Domains, Offline Marketing, Monkeys, PHP, MySql, Amazon, Blogs, PPC, Tech Stuff... Pretty much everything.
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