By Christopher Kyalo
Some folks may think that self-publishing began with the invention of the PC (personal computer) and others may be convinced that it has really taken off with the arrival of Adsense.
It is important to understand what self-publishing is and its’ enormous potential to fully appreciate and indeed take advantage of Adsense. Actually self-publishing (the act of producing and marketing your own writing) is as old as America. It is an American tradition that is very much part and parcel of the American dream. Ben Franklin was one of the first Americans to self-publish and many others have followed since. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn was self-published. As was Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Tarzan series amongst a host of other popular classics that would never have existed without the authors ignoring publisher’s rejection lips and taking the bold step of publishing their own work.
There are thousands of other examples from recent times that we can mention here but the point is that a few important developments in recent times have only helped to fuel the power of self-publishing but did not trigger off this revolution. The personal computer put a very powerful publishing tool on the desktop for the first time allowing the easy setting of type and design for publishers at a tiny fraction of what is cost previously.
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Making Money
By Martin Lemieux
It is no secret that Google and Yahoo are on a continuous battle to win our hearts and get everyone to convert, but is converting someone really a matter of the quantity or the quality?
Let’s take a look at some top key searches and compare them with some search engines online. I will outline a few things for each search result:
1) Search Engine
2) Number of results found
3) Quality & content of the top 10 sites
4) What you find going beyond the first 10 pages
Each section will get ranked out of 10 points for quality (information taken on August 26,2005).
Starting with my all-time favorite search term: “INTERNET MARKETING”
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By Jim Edwards
If you are looking for an immediate increase in your website traffic, and you don’t want to shell out a lot of money for pay-per-click search engines, I’ll let you in on a secret that has helped me make many sales and build large lists very quickly with zero cash up-front: it’s called “OPT” (Other People’s Traffic).
Other website operators have the targeted website visitors you need right now - you just have to convince them to funnel some of it your way. Your mission is to find people who can refer you their traffic either for a percentage of the sale, a flat fee, a trade for services, or on a per-click basis.
NOTE: I prefer to pay people a big percentage of the sale - as much as 50% - because it has the lowest risk for me as the merchant. I only pay when a sale is made and, therefore, I make it well worth someone’s while to work with me. That’s the whole idea behind a successful affiliate program.
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By Lois S.
Many start-up web hosts in their desperate attempt to get hosting business from you have plenty to hide. Here are some of the things they will never tell you. For some start-up web hosts, service does not exist. Low cost or budget web hosting services are the ones most likely to fall under this category. Some will not provide any information about their service while others will proudly announce that they provide 24/7 service. This is quite often not true.
Many of the low-cost web hosts have little experience in web hosting. A good way to find out about the level of service is to get the service telephone number and use it before you sign on. This should tell you a lot about the level of service you should realistically expect from the host you want to use.
The other common truth amongst many web-hosting enterprises is that they lack experience. Ensure before signing up that the company that you are going with has reasonable experience. How long has your host been in business? You do not want to be part of a start –up experiment for an important service.
One other thing you will need to be very careful with when using low cost or budget web hosts, is the fact that some of them are involved in many different businesses and not just web hosting. Ask what other businesses or projects your web host handles before signing up with them. You want a specialist not a generalist whose resources and time are bound to be so stretched that chances of you getting reliable services are very slim indeed.
It is also a fact that some small low cost web hosts do not offer the promised bandwidth. They should not advertise one thing and end up providing something else.
The best way to protect yourself from most of these nasty surprises is to go for a short term contract to begin with. You can for example start off paying on a monthly basis. That way it will be easier to change hosts when you discover something you don’t like.
Lois S. is a Technical Executive Writer for http://www.websitesource.com and http://www.lowpricedomains.com with experience in the website hosting industry.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/
By Mike Makler
Extra, Extra Google Now Gives you feedback. By Creating a Google Sitemap using free online tools you can get Google to crawl your site within 24 Hours. As an Added bonus after Google Crawls your site they give you feedback about any problems they encountered. To take advantage of this amazing service from yahoo just follow these 4 simple steps.
Step 1 Get a Google Site Map Account
In order to create a Google Sitemap account just cut and paste the below URL in your browser and follow the simple directions
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login)
Step 2 Create Your Site map
You can create your Sitemap either as an XML file or a TXT file. XML is the PPreferred method since you can give Google more information about your Web Site. You do not need to know XML to create a Google Sitemap. Not with this free web based tool. Simply go to the below web site type in your domain and it will automatically spider your site and create a Google Site Map for you. http://www.sitemapspal.com/
If You prefer to use a text file simply following the below direction taken directly from the Google Help File (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/other.html)
Google accepts simple text files that list URLs. As the text files contain only a list of URLs, Google prefers that you use the Sitemap protocol so you can provide additional information about your URLs. The text file must follow these guidelines:
The text file must have one URL per line. The URLs cannot contain embedded new lines.
You must fully specify URLs as Google attempts to crawl them exactly as provided.
Each text file can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs. If you site includes more than 50,000 URLs, you can separate the list into multiple text files and submit each one separately.
The text file must use UTF-8 encoding. You can specify this when you save the file (for instance, in Notepad, this is listed in the Encoding menu of the Save As dialog box).
The text file should contain no information other than the list of URLs.
The text file should contain no header or footer information.
You can name the text file anything you wish. Google recommends giving the file a .text extension to identify it as a text file (for instance, sitemap.txt).
You should upload the text file to the highest-level directory you want search engines to crawl and make sure that you don’t list URLs in the text file that are located in a higher-level directory.
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