Internet Business Daily

Here’s a video of a pretty cool 3D desktop made for Linux called Beryl. This is just a short video of the features that Beryl has. In my opinion some of the cool effects accomplished by Beryl will just waste processing power/time, but damn it looks cool! I have yet to try it out so maybe it adds some functionality beyond just looking really nice. Check it out:

My blog is starting to come together quite nicely. There are many new features and traffic is steadily gaining.

I Have a Pagerank
After 4 months of writing this blog, I finally have a Google pagerank! I spotted this with my handy Live Pagerank plugin for Firefox. In the bottom right hand corner of the Firefox window, I saw the 3/10 pagerank. Pagerank (PR) is Google’s link analysis algorithm. Entire industries have been created around raising the PR of sites. What all this basically means is that my site is growing.

Traffic Exchange
I have added a few new features to Internet Business Daily if you haven’t already noticed. The first thing you probably saw was the little blue button on the top section of the menu bar that says “blogtopsites”. This is a site that allows you to submit your blog and the more traffic you send to it, the higher on the list your site goes and therefore the more traffic you will receive. I usually don’t like these types of programs but I figure I would give it a go for a while and see how the traffic responds. You can check out the blogtopsites website by clicking on the button to the right.

MyBlogLog
If you scroll down further on the right side you will see a widget from MyBlogLog towards the bottom. MyBlogLog was recently purchased by Yahoo! and ever since then I have seen it everywhere on the web. It’s basically a social networking tool for bloggers and blog readers. If you don’t wanna scroll down to see what it looks like, here is a picture:

Anyone who is a serious blogger or reader should definitely sign up for mybloglog. From a webmaster’s perspective, getting to know your audience is key as well as being able to interact with them through a service like this. There are other websites that provide similar things but there’s a reason Yahoo! swooped them up.

Making Money With Referrals
Another new addition to my site are the referral buttons. Those are located at the bottom of the menu bar above the mybloglog widget. These are good for a few reasons. I am a die hard Firefox user and love to help them any way possible, and if I can make money doing it, even better. The way the buttons work is they pay you a flat amount for a referral. For a firefox referral, you will get $1 depending on the user’s location. The other button I have is a Google pack referral button. This pays $2 per referral based on the user downloading and installing the Google pack and not previously having it. These two are great because I get to promote the companies I like and I make money doing so. The last button is Chitika eMiniMalls, which also pays a certain amount per referral.

Goals for 2007
I have many goals for 2007 including growing both of my current sites, and releasing a few new sites I have in the works. I will hopefully be launching two sites this week, however it may not happen until next week. I will have to start over with these sites and use everything I have learned so far to publicize them and build traffic. I really think these sites will do well and of course I will be giving updates frequently. I have also started a little project with my friend over at geekwhat.com. All I will say now is that we are going to do interviews with very interesting people who will have great advice for young entrepreneurs. I hope for a great year for everyone.

I was recently looking through some of my 5000+ photos I have accumulated throughout the past 6 or 7 years and came across some amazing pictures of Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz is where I went to college for 4 years (UCSC) and graduated with a business management degree. I miss all my friends and the “college lifestyle,” but life moves on.

I would like share some of the most beautiful pictures I had taken while attending UCSC. These are only a few of the many amazing shots I took, because all of Santa Cruz is incredible. Maybe later ill post some of the pictures from bar nights…or maybe not. Enjoy

I have been waiting for approval to the Chitika ad network for some time now with no response. I finally decided to email them and ask what is going on. I was quickly responded to (which I love) and was told that my site had not been approved for Chitika use. Obviously this was not good news so I replied back telling them to check out my two sites: Internet Business Daily and MyGamingSpace and recheck if I would be able to join their network.

Within a half hour they got back to me saying that I had been approved and I was ready to use their ads. For those who don’t know what Chitika ads look like, I put it in this post instead of Google adsense just to demonstrate what they look like. Personally I think they look great and hopefully the CTR (click through rate) and CPC (cost per click) is good enough to justify adding them to my site.

Many people may be wondering why I decided to add another adnetwork into rotation on my site and there are a few answers to this question. First, the only adsense ad to be doing well is the 300×250 in my posts. They have a good CTR and pay very well. The 468 banner on the top was doing second best but far from first and the 468 at the bottom was doing so bad I took it off all together. Other than this post, I will be keeping the 300×250 Google adsense ad but I will replace the 468 at the top and bottom with Chitika ads as long as they are doing well.

Chitika ads are obviously different from other text-based ads from different ad networks. They are somewhat interactive and you can view information about a few products right from the ad itself. Chitika still pays in a CPC fashion so I only get paid when someone actually clicks on a product. The best part about Chitika ads is they look different from Google adsense ads so based on Google’s new rules about multiple ad networks, I can use them on the same page as Google ads.

I am also going to add Chitika ads to mygamingspace.com and replace the Yahoo ads to see how well that does. I will report back with my findings in a few weeks. Till then, you can sign up for Chitika ads and test them out yourself if you get approved.

It was announced yesterday that MySpace is aggressively seeking legal action against spammers on the MySpace network. Recently it was discovered that many spammers including the “spam king” Scott Richter, sent millions of junk messages to members using technology that made the messages appear to come from individual members’ accounts. Not only that, but it was also discovered that some of these spammers used shady tactics such as hiring hackers to get MySpace passwords to spam users’ friends list.

This action represents a win-win situation for MySpace in my mind. I am only a MySpace user because I want to promote my website: mygamingspace.com. I never liked MySpace for this exact reason, I thought there was too much spam and advertisements. Half of the messages and friend requests I receive on there are from less than wholesome looking women who want to be my friend for some reason. This is the main reason why I never setup a personal account on MySpace. Instead I use facebook, which has had zero fake friend requests or messages so far (been a facebook user for almost 4 years now).

Now that MySpace is trying to cut spammers off at the knees, I am starting to look at them in a different light. Until now I never saw them make any type of serious move to stop all the crap on their site. Now not only does MySpace look better for removing spam, but just the fact that they are taking down one of the biggest spammers in the world makes me happy beyond compare. Spam is the bane of my existence. If I accidentally give me email to the wrong person, within 1 week I have to make another email address because my inbox gets filled so quickly.

So just like me everyone else should be very happy about this situation, well except for Scott Richter:). I would like to get people’s opinions on whether or not you think this law suit will affect Scott Richter seriously. The reason I say this is because let’s assume he made $80 million from spamming on MySpace and only has to pay $10 million to get out of the legal trouble, he’s still up $70 million. Hopefully this does not happen. Please comment with your thoughts.

A little while ago I had a post that introduced my first website launch. Since then I have tried many different tactics to build traffic to the site and grow the user base. Many of the methods I used were successful and I would like to share them with everyone in this update.

For those who don’t know, the website I am speaking of is MyGamingSpace.com. It is a flash gaming site that allows its’ users to take the games and embed them into their MySpace page or website. I have been able to boost the number of members from 800 to 1100+ in just over a month or so. The original boost of traffic came from a game that hit the digg front page somehow (diggers usually hate flash games). This provided my site with the jolt it needed to really start to take off.

Digg - More Than a Traffic Spike
Many people think that hitting the digg front page is worthless after the original traffic spike, but “pro blogger” Darren Rowse and I both seem to agree that there is more value than just a simple traffic spike. The amount of backlinks I received was crucial in starting to get more and more traffic. At the time I purchased mygamingspace.com, the site was getting about 500-700 plays per day. Now the site gets 1500-2000 and even 2500 plays on a good day.

Building Links
Beside all of the links I received from digg.com, I have also been able to find many sites that allow link submission with no reciprocal link required. This is a great way to get many free links, which build page rank and traffic. Don’t get me wrong I am not against reciprocal linking but if I added to my page every link I submitted, my site would have hundreds upon hundreds of links on the homepage and obviously that doesn’t work. My suggestion for anyone with a website is to go out and find any sites that allow link submission and get your links out there!

Banner Exchange/Link Exchange

One thing that has seemed to work well is banner/link exchanges. There are many programs out there that provide an easy way for gaming site owners to link to each other and share traffic, which inevitably builds traffic. Mibbi.com has been doing the best for me so far. Mibbi is a banner exchange program that requires I put a 100×100 pixel banner (shown right) anywhere on my website. As people from my site click on the banner and get sent to other gaming sites, I receive points which eventually gets turned into traffic coming back my way. Here’s a screen shot of my statistics from mibbi:

As you can see I have about a 1:3 ratio of generated to received clicks. This means for every one person I send away from my site, I get 3 in return. This is a great ratio for me. I am currently using 3 banner exchange programs and mibbi doing the best by far. Not only that but the owner is very helpful and hands-on. The other banner exchanges I am using are arcadebanners.com (second best) and arcadetraffic.com (trailing third).

I am also doing link exchanges. There are currently 10 links on my homepage some of which are just friends and others are link exchanges. These exchanges are not doing too well though. They require a minimum amount of traffic sent before they start sending traffic back. I am also competing with bigger sites for ranking of my link on these pages.

Some Negative Points
Although I am doing well overall, not everything is positive. I have had some trouble with my ad revenue. There are so many gaming sites out there that the advertiser competition for ad space is very low causing the cost per click to be very low as well. With Google Adsense I was getting something like 10 cents per click and as low as 2-3 cents per click. Even though I have more traffic on mygamingspace.com than this blog, I make more money here because my ads pay so much more per click. I switched over to Yahoo! ads (YPN) and I am doing much better getting as much as $2 per click. Even though YPN doesn’t have as targeted of ads which translates to less clicks, I am still getting more revenue because of the high cpc.

Conclusion
As traffic continues to rise and the member-base grows, I will be able to land better and better advertising deals. I hope to eventually move to an adnetwork like Tribal Fusion who offers much better campaigns to sites like this. As always suggestions for how to build traffic or increase revenue are always welcome. I will have another site update in a few weeks or so but until then you check out some of the games on my site (mygamingspace.com).

I saw this girl perform when the premier of American Idol aired a few days ago. She is scary, but at the same time pretty funny. She definitely doesn’t have any musical talent, she should do something else with her routine though. Check it out:

This is an update to the post AllAdvantage is Back! I somewhat gave up on getting people to sign up with Agloco because after a few weeks of promoting it, I only had a few sign-ups.

Today however, as I was talking to John Chow, he informed me that he had reached 3000+ sign-ups and was still going strong waiting for the release of the program. The first time around John made huge amounts of money, i’m talking thousands from this program and he is hoping to reach that goal again.

This is what gave me the boost needed to start checking my Agloco sign-ups again. To my surprise, I was up to 119 sign-ups as of today! I had 6 direct sign-ups and the rest were indirect. Regardless I get paid for all of them.

For those of you who don’t already know what AllAdvantage was, or the new Agloco is, check out this post. I want to continue getting people signed-up for Agloco so when the client is released, we can all make a lot of money!

I already know tons of webmasters getting on the Agloco train early, such as Tom Ferris and obviously John Chow. I would like to hit 200 sign-ups by the end of this month and I think I can do it with everyones help. If you haven’t already signed-up, you can still do so. Also, you can comment to this post or email me and ill give you more information about the program or signing up. Please feel free to contact me.

**I would like to thank Tom Ferris at security-protocols.com for giving me this article to post. Everyone should check out his website because he is a security genius.

So basically Google may be doing a preemptive strike against arbitragers trying to squat on any domain names including the words iPhone. iPhone is going to make a lot of people a lot of money and Google may be stopping these people in their tracks. Although i’m sure every variation of the word iPhone was taken atleast a year ago, now everyone is getting every possible kind of variation on the word. Here’s what I mean:

Anyways read this article from security-protocols.com and be sure to visit his site and give him credit!

Here’s the article:

So the past week Tom had been doing some research regarding domain names with the word “iPhone” in them. I just wanted to see what people were registering and what kind of sites where going up. So I wasn’t surprised to see that every variation with the word “iPhone” in them had been taken.

I am guessing that Apple (or Cisco?) may have also found this out, and has contacted Google and other search engines to have those sites deleted from their index. So back to my story, when I found out that you can change the wallpaper on the iPhone I had immediately registered themeiphone.com to add to my sister of sites which are also wallpaper specific. Last night I checked my SERPS for themeiphone.com and I was #2 for the keyword “iphone wallpapers” on Google. Below my site were a few others which were also going to be iPhone wallpaper sites. Fair enough, I have always liked competitors in this space.

So today I go to check my SERPS for themeiphone.com and it has been deleted from Google’s index! Now I know for a fact that I was not violating Google’s TOS because the site only had a landing page which says “Coming Soon!”. No doorway pages, 301 redirects to that domain, nothing. So I checked on the other sites which were going to be doing wallpapers and they have also been deleted:

Your search - site:iphonelive.org - did not match any documents.

Your search - site:themeiphone.com - did not match any documents.

Your search - site:iphonewallpapers.net - did not match any documents.

Your search - site:iphonewallpapers.com - did not match any documents.

So I guess the point of my post is that save your cash and do not register any domain names with the word “iphone” in them. Now I know people are going to say, well you shouldn’t buy domain names with a trademarked word in them. Yes this is true, but most companies dont care if all you are doing is promoting the product in a good way.

That was the full post from security-protocols.com. Thanks again Tom.

So here is my horror story from yesterday. From my last post it was obvious I did not want to go to the dentist. I basically have 3 wisdom teeth that needed to be pulled so I made an appointment to get them done yesterday. As I was given my shot to be put under for the surgery, the last thing I remember is the dentist telling me to stop talking.

I never actually realized I was fully asleep, it’s a very weird feeling what happens when given anesthesia. Basically I remember being awake and then the next thing I remember is her telling me it’s over and something went wrong. Here’s where the problem started. She told me that even though she gave me the maximum amount of anesthesia, I was never ‘under’ enough. She told me I kept talking throughout the entire procedure and she could only extract one of the three teeth. After fully waking up and feeling like I was dying for about 8 hours, I was finally back to normal. The tooth didn’t hurt what-so-ever, but the thought of having to go through the procedure again is killing me.

This is exactly why I hate dentists. No procedure like this can ever go smoothly. All I wanted was my 3 teeth out and it to be over, but of course I have to wait another month before I can get the other 2 removed. I just felt like complaining to all of you so thanks for listening. Hopefully you never have to go through this.