Blogging For Money

Many websites have very long URLs for their articles, especially more so with blogs that rely on automated permalinks which reuse their titles. For example, a URL can be as follows:

http://www.bismikaallahuma.org/archives/2008/resolving-the-christian-i-know-nothing-multi-problem-in-textual-criticism/

Such long URLs can actually break if you try to repost them in forums or e-mails. So what is the solution? You use a URL shortener, of course! With a URL shortener, the long URL example I gave above can easily be shortened into:

http://7les.com/2bb

Short and sweet, right?

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I have been poking around Aaron Wall’s SEO Book after subscribing to its membership and I’ve certainly discovered some important things which cuts through the hype about it. The fee is $300 a month, which is definitely way overpriced after I’ve checked out the material available. Fortunately, I didn’t have to pay for the full amount and the subscription will be cancelled at the end of this month, so….

I personally feel that unless you are a total newbie or just beginning to start into search engine optimization (SEO) and want to expand your knowledge of the industry, SEO Book is not for you. Its not to say that SEO Book is totally worthless….I am still printing out tons of material from their “Training” programme which are relevant to my current SEO and SEM needs. Their community forum also has some interesting case studies and SEO-related articles that I am printing out for future reference (and simply because I can). However, let’s just say that after being in the industry for 2 years or so, there’s really nothing major in the content that I don’t know already. After all, experience is certainly the best teacher of all, not a closed “elite” community which charges a ludicrously high fee per month for membership.

Since the forum is pretty much completed now, I think the story can now be told. I have started a new webmasters forum at VCTech Network, my company website. My original intention was for it to serve as a support forum and discussion for our online products and services, i.e. our blog aggregator service, URL shortener and PageRank checker, among other things. But since its pretty much close to what webmasters would want to use for their sites anyway, I thought why not expand on it? I’ve always wanted to run my own webmasters forum. Considering the recent spate of incidents involved in me getting banned from webmaster forums, I think that the timing could not be better.

I hereby take the opportunity to cordially invite you to the VCTech Network Forums.

Well this is certainly no April Fool’s joke, seeing that this was widely reported on many tech blogs, including TechCrunch. This has also been confirmed on the YPN Blog. If you are a Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) publisher, you would have received the following e-mail informing you of this decision:

Dear Publisher,

Yahoo! continuously evaluates and prioritizes our products and services, in alignment with business goals and our continued commitment to deliver the best consumer and advertiser experiences. After conducting an extensive review of the Yahoo! Publisher network beta program, we have decided to close the program effective April 30, 2010. We expect to deliver final publisher payments for the month ending april 30, 2010 to publishers no later than May 31, 2010. All publishers eligible for 1099s for the 2010 tax year will have those mailed by January 31, 2011.

Because our content will no longer be delivered to your ad unit spaces after April 30, 2010, we recommend removing all YPN ad code from your pages by that date.

This will certainly be a problem for many YPN publishers who are banned from Google AdSense, the stronger competitor of YPN. On my part, I’ve never used it myself but I have been waiting patiently for YPN to come out of beta (even though it has been 5 years) and go international, however remote it was. Looks like this possibility has now become impossible.

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I need to search for a new web hosting provider because my current reseller UK account is quirky and has been giving me some issues. Looking around for cheap web hosting, I chanced upon Host Nexus, a web hosting provider. It appears that this company is fast becoming among the most popular places for webmasters to host their sites. They are able to offer you various types of hosting packages as per your requirements, such as shared hosting, blog hosting, VPS hosting and even Windows Reseller hosting. They’ve built-up years of experience and very good at what they do. Host Nexus also offers a large assortment of ten different web hosting packages for your to choose from for your site, all ranging from $34.95 annually or as low as just $6.95 per month. The ability to host sub-domains is included with some packages, as well as their their MySQL database offering. If you have no idea where to begin, there are no worries about that. Host Nexus also gives its clients an entire portal site of self-help tools along with its customer service, so you will be able to always find the facts that you need quickly.

With all of the great characteristics and its money back-guarantee, Host Nexus web hosting is a sure winner for sites just starting out or large businesses needing to have a serious host provider.

This is certainly a real blast from the past. Taken at Zoo Negara somewhere in the early 1980s, I presume. No idea how old back then. In this era, computers were just invented and the World Wide Web had not existed yet.

On Thursday, I attended the Google Analytics Master Class (GAMC) at Hilton Hotel which was held for the first time in Kuala Lumpur. According to the organisers, it was previously held in Singapore in 2009 and when they saw that many Malaysians flew in to Singapore to attend the seminar, they thought that it would be a good idea to have the GAMC in both Kuala Lumpur and Singapore this year. Apparently they didn’t expect the seminar to have such a huge turnout. I, too, along with my friend Malcolm had to wait in a very long queue to enter the hall.

Took a photo of myself, since I was bored waiting for the event to start.

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