The video below gives a quick but slightly dated example of just how easy it is to publish a basic web page to the internet or to an account on a hosting plan.   A hosting plan is essentially the collection of files on the internet where you can upload web pages or files for other people to see through a browser.

This particular video is slightly dated.  Mozilla no longer supports the program referred to in the video called Composer.  This has pretty much been replaced by a new program that includes and html editor known collectively as The SeaMonkey® Project. 

Filezilla is also referenced and this program is still available and widely used by many web designers.

Whether you want to build complex websites or something simple for your mother, or maybe something that will earn you a few bucks offering information on diet pills.  These are some of the first tools of the trade that you will need to become familiar with.  Keep in mind there are many different tools that will help you achieve the same result.  These are just two free and very common tools to help get you started before you consider possibly spending some money for a more complex tool, which may or may not really be necessary depending on what you intend to do with it.

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.

Google is killing their product referral programs after merging with DoubleClick.  This program kill includes Google’s Adsense and Adwords referral campaigns which used to pay people about $100 for a successful referral to the Adsense and Adwords program.

This likely represents a couple things:

• The Doubleclick business model is superior to the home grown efforts of Google.
• Growth for Google’s Adsense and Adwords programs is likely on the decline
• Now that everyone already has Firefox, there is no great product referral program for this Google Platform.
• I tried running some pet supplies ads on a dog related site for several months and despite multiple configuration attempts, I saw not a single ad conversion on Google’s program despite success with other ad campaigns.

Here’s some details from Google

    * Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit:
www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork.
    * AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AFC ad units.

If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August.
We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is
retired:

    * Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your ad space.
    * Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on your desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign information

If you upload videos to any or many of the free video sharing services such as YouTube or Revver, you maybe wondering how many people will ultimately see your videos?

Well TubeMogule those amazing gurus that developed a way for people to upload the same video to many of the sharing services through one upload has gathered up a great deal of data crunched the numbers, paid a statistician to tell them what was what and programmed a very simple little tool that can help you predict just how many people will view your video over its life cycle.

Simply plug in the number of days since you published the video, then enter the number of views that it has already received and it will calculate the predicted number of views the same video will likely get over the entire year.

The tool is designed to predict videos that are not one offs, such as a home video of your kids playing on their new swing sets.  This is targeted more towards videos or producers that have some level of following and will likely get at least 1,000 views out of their video in a year or better.

In our Previous Article, Scan Those Flyers Before You Fly from Your Next Web Conference, we promised to provide you a tip that would help you save time if you took our advice and scanned conference flyers and information before you flew home (saving money on your baggage and saving all of us money on future flight prices).

So here’s the tip

When you scan those flyers in there are two simple tools that can make all of that information on those flyers indexable so that you can find it in a quick search from your computer without having to do a lot of work yourself.

The tools are OmniPage 16 and Google Desktop.  Google Desktop is free and odds are you probably are already using it.

OmniPage 16 costs about $150, but can be extremely useful.  It is basically an Optical Character Recognition program.

In the old days, you could run documents through a scanner and the OCR would convert those pdf images generated into text.  These days in addition to generating a word or text document from a scanner, you can also do that with a digital camera!

The program recommends a digital camera of 5.0 megapixels, but I have generated text documents of 98% accuracy using a 3.2 megapixel Cannon elph.  I do recommend a better camera, but if you have an older camera, just make sure your resolution is maxed out, and that you try and fill the image with the document or text. 

These days there are even a few camera phones that are offering 5.0 megapixels, so you could potentially see a day, where you could snap the picture with your camera phone, email it to yourself and run the image through the OCR when ever you like.

TIP The program does have a great function that scans all the files in a bin.  So if you hit a trade show and walk away with a few hundred pictures of flyers and things, just have your computer run through the files in a bin some night while you are sleeping!

This is also one of those tips that anyone that attends conferences can utilize.  Web developers tend to be up on the latest software and technology, but this can work whether you work on the internet, or in consumer electronics or even if you are a drug rep attending the latest weight loss drug convention getting wired on Phentermine in between dinners wining and dining medical professionals.

Here is an extremely useful tip that WILL save you money during your next conference.

This tip can really be applied to any conference or trade event.

Before you pack all those flyers and information packets up into your suit case, be aware that all that paper will make your bags heavier and will likely force you to either check your bags (and pay one of those new fees that range from $20 – $100 dollars) or it will increase the amount of fuel the airlines burn flying you and your stuff to your next destination which will drive airline rates up in general for you and for everyone.

There’s a simple technology fix to this problem.

Scan that stuff in to your computer!

Its never been easier.  For one thing, the easy convenient and low tech way to do this is to simply take a digital picture of all those pages.

You can do this one page at a time or set your camera on the highest resolution, layout all those flyers on your hotel bed, and take a single picture.  Then later on down the road you can crop the individual items into single pages.

Alternatively, before you even carry that stuff back to your room, making your back, shoulders and feet groan, ask for a digital copy at the booth, or take your picture at the source of the offending handout provider!

If you are made out of money and you do like lugging lots of stuff around then I’m sure you will be just fine investing in some Johnston and Murphy luggage and organizers and paying a small fortune to fly a dead tree or two around the country in your bags.

But I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that when you get that paper pile back to your home or office that it will just sit there for a while until you ultimately recycle it anyway.  In my next article, I’ll share a complimentary tip to make the scanning of this paperwork actually useful for you in addition to a money saver. 

If you are a web designer or blogger or working on becoming one, you probably have by now set up more than one Firefox or Internet Explorer toolbar on your system.  You may have two or three, but there are a few browser toolbars such as the new toolbar from Yahoo! that can help bring you more traffic and that can also make your site more valuable.

Why do Search Engines Offer Toolbars?

First you have to understand why search engines offer free toolbars in the first place.  They do it for 2 reasons:

1. To help you use their search engines more often
2. To gain information about what you are looking at on the internet even when you are not searching

Now, that second one is the item that can bring you more traffic!

Search engines gain information from a number of areas including things such as analytics code that sit on websites.  Absent analytics code they often rely on free toolbars. 

If a search engine can not see the activity that is taking place on your website because their analytics code is installed on your site, then they can not give you credit for the traffic you receive.  Running your browser with their free toolbar installed however can give them the ability to see what is going on when you view your sites and when your readers view your sites when they have the toolbar installed.

You do not even have to have the Toolbar turned on all the time.  I run toolbars from Google, Yahoo!, Alexa, MSN and 10 other companies.  I usually only have 3-4 running at most at a time.

So give it a try, encourage your readers and visitors to try the toolbar as well.  Let Yahoo! see how popular your site is and this will help you increase your ranking within their search listings. 

Example:  Maybe you run a small business and have a website and a blog where you sell TV stands and tv wall mount fittings.  Offer your visitors and customers a free toolbar or contact us and we can help you set up an unrelated landing page to offer them a free toolbar.  Then when they visit your site or your blog, the search engines will be able to see the traffic successfully landing on your website from the Toolbar gathering metrics.

If your sites importance is invisible to Yahoo! or any search engine, odds are it is not going to rank well at all.  That means fewer referrals from natural search, fewer visitors and readers and less business in general.

So try the tool bar out today and start helping yourself get some more traffic.

Fitness for the Occasion wrote a nice article discussing how to fight Spam Blogs through their hosts when they steal your own content.  In this article, Web Hosting: Allowing Spam Blogs, Dan (Fitness) talks about his efforts to fight spam blogs through HostGator and GoDaddy.

He seems to have found more success with GoDaddy as compared to HostGator, which is probably not terribly surprising given the size of GoDaddy.

Dan mentions his efforts to fight off blogspot splogs which were not successful. 

I personally have found that it is possible to report Blogspot splogs directly to Google, but Google does seem to work at their own speed and sense of urgency.  On a lighting website that I worked as a copywriter, I found that several of my articles were getting splogged all the time.  One article that covered Seagull lighting of all topics, seemed to get picked up and spread around about 23 different sites.  Now, initially, I didn’t mind as the site owner was looking to spread the word about their products, but soon the splogs started to get the facts completely mixed up, backwards and false and so we ended up going after the batch of them with mixed results.

The normal path for people to address these issues is through the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) at http://www.copyright.gov/.

This weekend I’m heading on a road trip to recruit college students and teach them how to become pro-bloggers. The goal is to help them understand how pro-blogging works, how they can earn money working as bloggers, how they can develop excellent business experience setting up and running their own business in Internet marketing, Blog Advertising and Internet publishing. Along the way, I’m hoping that as they learn these items, they will also be able to get some experience working with domains and hosts and in so doing they might give us some new fresh insights into hosting companies and hosting service providers.

So right now I’m actually literally on the interstate driving down the highway using voice recognition software known as Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 9. It’s a great piece of software and I highly recommend it especially for bloggers. This is definitely a tool that I will encourage new bloggers to try or at least experiment with.  Years ago when I was a teenager, teachers encouraged me at the time to try the radical concept of composing by writing on a computer keyboard.

That proved to be a terrific skill that I have honed over the years, and now I’m hoping to help people hone a new skill in learning to compose with their voice using voice recognition and DNS9.

In the global economy, the mobile professional carries many hi-tech tools just to keep the competitive advantage over their competitors.

Following are some of the tools that I carry in my black bag:

• High end laptop with max. wi-fi scheme;
• Secure Digital SD Card;
• Portable hard drive;
• Data compression tools;
• Backup software
• DvD software;
• Pdf reader;
• Data encryption software;
• Digital Camera;
• High End Mobile Phone;
• Portable Color Scanner; and
• Global Positioning System (GPS).

People asked me, “why do you carry so many tools!? My usual response is: “… ‘Proper Preparation Prevent Pissed Poor Performance’. It is better to go into a situation, over prepared than other under prepared.

As a mobile professional, I have collaborated with many people with many types of collaboration software. Because everyone is different, I have to adjust to the technical needs and capability of the different individuals

Following are some of my favorite collaboration tools:

• Hushmail (www.hushmail.com) for confidential messaging
• Web Ex (www.webex.com) for video conferencing and on-line meetings
• Skype for long distance calling
• BoxesOS (www.epazz.com) collaboration software for bringing a small business together.  They offer a total hosted solution and a free 30 day trial that can be setup with existing software and systems.

It does not matter what tools you use. It is more important that the tool you utilizes works well and you have the skill to use it.
If you are mobile professional who has many clients, it is important that you have the best toolset that accompany your client base.
In a future article, will touch on other tools that are necessary for the mobile professional

 So once you have a domain and a hosting plan what do you do now?

Fortunately, many hosting plans come with a number of packages that you can install straight from the plan to get a simple website, forum, blog or eCommerce site up and running for free.

Eventually, you will need to do some customization on the actual code.  This is not as difficult as it may sound, but you will need the right tools to access your files or to start learning html or PHP.

There are many free to cheap text editing tools out there that can do the job.  I’ve tried many of them myself, but ultimately, I ended up going with Dreamweaver (actually a bundle including Dreamweaver – Studio 8).  However, you do not have to spend a few thousand dollars to get some great capabilities.

UltraEdit13.10a is available as a free download for 30-45 days and you can buy the software after the fact for about $45.  You could use notepad even, but there are a number of tools in editing or text editing programs that will make your coding life much much easier.

Read more on: 

UltraEdit 13.00a: The Consummate Programming Editing Tool at Top 10 Tech Software