As memory prices for hard drives, external hard drives and other storage devices plummet it strikes me that it might be time to reconsider the cost of backing up websites and servers online remotely.  There are definitely benefits to having a backup in a distant geographic area in case a major catastrophe knocks out a server, an communication system or even a large area.

That said, many backup decisions are primarily made for local reasons.

What do we do if our local server crashes or gets fried?

For this type of situation having an online backup service can be expensive and can even be bandwidth intensive causing backups to be run at times that might not be conducive to other business functions.

These days terabyte backup drives are often times cheaper than paying for a month or quarters worth of online backup.  Plus they are small and compact, not like the old days of tape drives that could be extremely bulky.

In fact, even if you want to maintain a geographical distance between your stored information and your live system, a low tech way of achieving the same result with backup drives can be easily achieved by using fedex.

The security of sending backup drives with potentially sensitive customer information would definitely be a concern that should be considered, but with bandwidth levels still relatively low in many areas of the United States the cheap pricing of back up drives might make this choice an option worth considering in the right circumstances.

I’m leaving Blogworld tonight and had the good fortune to talk with TechSmith, the makers of Screencast.com Video Hosting today. 

Not like its hard, they cover all these new media shows.  These guys are everywhere! 

. . .  They should be they have software that is absolutely necessary for bloggers.

So my question was simple.

Can I upload a video from Camtasia that has clickable link hotspots in the video to ScreenCast.com?

Answer, Probably so!

The internet was shaky in the show, while I was talking with them, so they couldn’t demonstrate, but it seems to have everything to do with choosing the ‘ExpressShow option’ to publish and not manually uploading files from your computer after Camtasia has automatically generated something.

So if you put together a screencast or even a video on how to strap in Britax car seats, you can edit in Camtasia and put a hotspot over the image of the car seat with a link to the company offering them.

I’ll test this for sure, when I get home, and report back here with more details  . . .

If you have devotedly work to build a page rank, I have some good and bad news for you. Page rank is dead. Google has been killing it for over a year now. It was once the cornerstone of Google’s empire, the mythical thing that enable Google to associate value with its own ads, which they sold by the millions and billions.

While Google has basically been working to hide, dismiss, and destroy a drink across the Internet in hopes of protecting its own business. The problem is that in doing so, they have been hiding the value from potential advertising customers. If an advertiser cannot see the value of the mythical metric like page rank, then they can make buying decisions based on page rank.

So all the metrics have been built up over the last decade or so surrounding the concept of page rank, are rapidly going out the window.

That’s the bad news, it’s the type of change that we all have to deal with. The good news is that it doesn’t really matter anymore. Essentially we’ve all been forced to evolve past the concept of page rank, and start to focus on results.

It doesn’t matter what page rank value might be assigned to a site, but it does matter what that particular site can do, can achieve, and how it can be done. We’ll have to dig into all those important metrics behind particular websites performance, and stop paying attention to some generic assignment of value from a third party like Google.

It’s no coincidence that this is all happening while Google is working to increase its monopoly over search engines and advertising related to search engines. Google is rapidly marching towards a point where we’ll be under severe scrutiny and review and probably lawsuits from the US Justice Department as well as European Union. Google seems to think that they can get out of these lawsuits and reviews by simply explaining things better to people. That’s an egotistical way of building a strategy, and it’s not likely to work. The same strategy never work for Microsoft in the 90s, and is not likely to work for Google now. This opens the door for people to actually come in and do business on the Internet and start to find ways to ignore and bypass Google. If we are no longer to pendant on their fictional metric of page rank, and are tied up in the embattled legal quagmire with the US Justice Department and the European Union, this will open the door for more competition for companies that can provide metrics, and answer the questions, “how is my website performing today?”

Google used to provide a short answer for that question, but they are rapidly moving out of the business even though they don’t seem to think so. They are hoping to keep control over everyone and over the Internet. If regulators and government step up and stop the monopolistic actions of Google, they will lose that control and we will all then be free to do business on the Internet without them.

So the next time you search for MP3 players, or Sarah Palin, or Britney Spears or whatever on the internet, you might actually be taking one step towards a future that does not include a Google Monopoly.

One of the best ways to save money on domains, when it comes to registering domains, renewing domains, or even keeping privacy protection running on domains, is to bulk up on domains. When it only costs a few dollars to register or renew a single domain, you are not going to get a lot of attention as a customer nor are you going to get a very good deal if you only own a single domain.

However if you own hundreds or thousands of domains, you’re going to get a lot more attention buying domains in aggregate.  You will be a more profitable customer for a domain registrar, like buying promotional pens in bulk or office supplies from Sam’s Club.

With Go Daddy.com you can save about 50% off of the normal rates for individual domains, if you work with domains in has gone bulk.

Retail shoppers already know the secret – buying in bulk can add up to HUGE savings. But did you know the same principle applies to domains at GoDaddy.com? You can register your favorite Top-Level Domains in bulk and save up to 53% OFF our already-low regular prices. Plus, you can save time by searching for up to 500 domain names at once on our bulk registration page.

So how do you bulk up on a domain, or a bunch of domains when you only really need one website?

In reality, you probably don’t need to, if your sole focus is that one single website. However if you are trying to build up a portfolio of websites or even have a small interest in this activity, you can purchase and register a number of domains, and build out just enough to earn you enough money to pay for their individual registration and hosting fees. These websites only need to earn about $60 a year to accomplish this goal, maybe less if you have a really good hosting deal or your own server.
Once you have that accomplished, you can bulk up into the best ratable deal package for domain registrations that you can find. Just keep those websites running enough to pay their own way, and enable you to get a bulk registration discount!

Maybe you have thought of this before or maybe not, but there is some very good reasons why you should include affiliate links and banners with in your feed. Many of your readers will come to your website or to your content via an RSS feed. They will not always read your content on your actual site, and if your site earns money from affiliate advertising, then you are missing out on some potential sources of revenue related to this content.

You need to place your affiliate banners and links within your feet and here’s how to do it.

It’s very simple, all you have to do is include your affiliate links and banners within your actual article.

I repeat, put your affiliate links and banners with in your website article.

Today it is very easy to organize your articles in ways that affiliate links and banners do not take away from the actual contents. They did not have to be placed in there in a way that looks like an eyesore or distract your reader from reading the actual content.

You can wrap text around banners and images, and float those images to the right or to the left or even in the sensor of your content.

You can even set up templates or zones within your content where these banners and images can be placed on a regular basis along with captions to help promote conversion on those links and banners.

Starting this month, at Softduit.com, they will start to show people through a series of tutorials how to achieve these types of results using a number of different content management systems and free software tools that makes it very easy to edit content but more importantly placed advertising or affiliate links throughout that content in a way that doesn’t detract from the content.

So if you’re not already taken advantage of this methodology, or if you haven’t figured it out for yourself, or if you have a you’re still looking for some additional techniques for ways to optimize your efforts, get ready to put on your monetization cap and head over to Softduit.com.  You’ll want to focus on the Advanced Section.

I just received a coupon offer from Godaddy for this fall.  The offer is basically 25% off main registrations or renewals. That put the actual registration price of $7.49 per year. If you pay attention to prices, that doesn’t sound like too much of a discount. However, domain registrations have been creeping up in price over the last year, and that same old rate is actually somewhat of a discount compared to other rates at other registrars are going up.

So if you’re looking for the latest coupon code from Go Daddy.com, the code is gdp0907r for this particular deal.

Trust your Web site to the world’s #1 registrar with this special offer: Register or renew as many .COM domains as you want for 25% OFF, just $7.49/yr!*
BONUS: Act now and get FREE Private Registration, an $8.99/yr value. Private Registration protects you against identity theft, helps reduce spam and more by keeping your personal information — name, address, email and phone number — out of the public database.

 

Personalized Email, Online Photo Album, Quick Blogcast, Hosting and Web site builder and more. Everything you need to create your own Web presence is included with your domain!
So grab one name, grab 100 – there’s no limit to the number, but there is a limit to the time! This special 25% OFF* sale — plus FREE Private Registration ($8.99/yr value) — expires September 30, 2008, so order now! And don’t forget that you can lock in these savings for up to 10 years with our multi-year registration option

So there you go, like I said, it may not be the greatest deal, but that is likely a sign of the times.  Maybe the dipping economy will serve to scrub out some of those sites out there pitching everything under the sun from supplements to skin care products to whatever.  The barrier to entry into online business is getting a little steeper and taller.

I am thoroughly pissed off at Google. They bought Feedburner last year pulled a Microsoft on the service. They have completely blocked other feed reading services on Feedburner feeds.
When a person visits my websites, and tries to subscribe to my feed, they used to have the option to select from many different feed reading services.Now, thanks to the monopoly that is Google, they get a big fat two options! Google homepage or Google Reader.

Hey Google! I’ve got news for you. You Suck and Monopolies are Evil. Go wad that up with your mission statement and smoke it.

Nice timing too by the way. Google was just reported to the Justice Department by the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) ~ see http://adjix.com/5ew4 for their monopoly/oligopoly ad deal with Yahoo!. No point in not throwing some evidence of decreasing competition in past transactions like the Feedburner purchase on the fire.

btw good luck finding that Washington Post article in Google News, got buried pretty fast, you’d have better luck NOT finding diet pills in a gas station than finding serious articles about Google’s monopolistic issues in Google News . ..

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