Here are the things that I learned in 2008, the year that made me who I am right now, been through alot, done alot, earned alot!

Always go for new projects
Even though I had a good thing going, I took a chance and made blueverse and now it’s one of my main incomes! Going for new things is always a good option. Have an open mind about what kind of projects you might wanna take on

Be Cosistent, never give up
I’ve said it over and over again, giving up is not an option! If you are in it to win it then you have to keep pushing becuase sucess is right around the corner, all you need to do is hang in there and keep your hopes up high.

Spend money to make money (sometimes)
Well, it is definitely true, you have to spend money to make money sometimes, for example, blueverse would not have gotten so popular if I didn’t invest 1500$ for its initial theme back in Jan 2008. Loosening up your wallet gives you great results from time to time, but don’t over do it.

Keep an open mind
Money is money, no matter how you make it, whether its blogging, designing, coding, writing, selling..etc whatever you do online you make money somehow, so never consider switching roles from a blogger to a designer as a downgrade or anything because either way you’re getting paid.

Parking domains isn’t all that profitable
I would never suggest doing the whole parking domain thing as a profession after last year, the domain industry, in my opinion had a major fall out, just about any new or creative name that could’ve been a good site/resource was registered and then either parked or put on sale for xx or xxx, it’s not the fact that I’m jealous, it’s the fact that the domain is being wasted when it could’ve been developed into something useful..

Feedburner will always have bugs
Hell could definitely freeze over, we may even have a xmas party there but feedburner will always have bugs, specially in their feedcount, it was like every other week I see a 400 reader drop in my count and get paranoid….until I realised feedburner is just a dog full ‘o’ fleas..but I still love it.

Wordpress is really pro-active
Whether its theme link spamming or vulnerabilities in the script, wordpress will always come through with a solution, they always have and they are really mantaining their record.

Flipping sites is extremely exhausting
If anyone of you is a site flipper you know exactly what I’m talking about, buying a site or even making a small site just to sell it and make some cash is really hard, the work it takes to make sure that it not only works for you but for the new owner as well, is what get’s my nuts in a grind… 

Attention whore sites are the best to work on
Personally if I have a site that requires alot of attention but gives me good results, that would be the only site I’d work on 7 days a week, take blueverse for example, every other day I’m amazed at how far it has come!

Adult (Porn) affiliates aren’t all that good..
Been there, done that. It’s hard work (no pun intended), getting conversions on adult affiliates is harder then selling air purifiers online.

Spending money is fun (for a while)
I earn quite alot for my age, but I spend alot more..so it’s hard to resist temptation when you just wanna blow the last $500 on tech stuff or clothes or gadgets or whatever that may seem god at the time, if you save up that same money, it could come in need one day when you need it the most!

Drunk Blogging doesn’t make blogging fun
Yea, it just makes you write dumb shit that doesn’t make sense, but it seems really deep when you’re under the influence… 

And that’s about it, I’m looking forward to another great year.

The following is a ’sponsored’ review and is completely of my own opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having me review your site, product or service, please view the details on the sponsored reviews page.

Are you a tech-freak who’s into learning the latest and the hottest in the world of science and technology? Then if you want to get only real, informative and valuable reviews of today’s consumer technologies, then you should visit EdwardKhoo.com. You’ll sure enjoy reading about the latest news in the technology scene, and yes, make a better judgment of the present gadgets and IT stuff that you’ve been eyeing for.

Here are just a few pages you should not miss once you visit the site:

Internet news: in this section, today’s internet highlights are given special importance mainly because of their relevance and purpose. As we all know, the internet has served to be a household necessity and has broken down the ideals of communications technology, thus creating a new realm in terms of “connecting people.” And given so, the site has made it a point to provide us with adequate reports of some of the most widely used internet broadcast techniques such as:

Twittermania- if you are a fan of blogging and broadcasting the word to almost everyone all over the world, then you might as well be a fan of Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging system established in 2006 to further aid bloggers with their desire to spread their ideas to other people in the internet. You can now spread your ramblings to your friends and other end users without the need to write a very long post, for just a few words will do to create the big picture. More so, you can track you friends’ writings and comment on their ideas as well!

Facebook Ad Coupons- apart from falling under the spell of Twittermania, you can also work on your social marketing skills and earn more income by placing your links at Facebook Ads. Placing ads in one of the world’s most famous social networking sites has grown to be a trend in the online business, thus it would help you a lot when you have your advertisements placed on Facebook pages. Facebook understands your situation as well as those who also want to make it big in the industry, and because of this they have provided you with discount coupons to reduce your ad placement fees. Now you can save money to allot on your other business needs, and continue to make more friends on Facebook too!

Online Customer Service Support for HSBC clients- if there’s one thing you can rely on Edward Khoo, that’s his keen way of discovering new helpful ideas in the internet. On his site he also features the HRSaccount for HSBC customers. Now, HSBC customers can go through their accounts online via the internet. Only a few banks have this option yet, and this is a great way for clients to browse on their account history, as well as talk to live customer agents for their inquiries. And if you are an HSBC customer, you can now take care of your banking concerns wherever you may be!

VTunnel- at work, most of us usually suffer from limited internet access due to blocked sites. At times we could not log on to Facebook or MySpace due to administrator restrictions, but worry now more, for VTunnel has a solution for this problem. VTunnel is a proxy website that allows you to skip your ISP and connect to that website you want to go to using a different IP address. Now you can easily test your scripts especially when it comes to geographically targeted ads and autoresponders, for your IP is no longer a hindrance to do so.

Wordpress- the author, Edward Khoo, has dedicated a one category of his site for WordPress, the most popular blog software used by a lot of site owners around the world. WordPress has been known for its easy use and compatibility, thus a lot of web designers and site owners prefer to use this software in building their own web pages. In this category, you may learn a lot of about how to utilize your WordPress account, and see which plugins, updates and news you can use to improve your site.

Tech news: are you looking for great add-ons to your video game consoles, or new additions to your video streams? Then the tech section is just for you. Edward Khoo has a long line of articles which should tickle your interest and expand your knowledge when it comes to gadgets and IT.

Mobile Youtube- now, you can watch your favorite YouTube videos on your mobile phone! How? XDA developers have now released an HTC media player which you can run on Windows Mobile so that you can start streaming videos on your mobile phone. This proves to be a great breakthrough for you no longer have to capture those videos and watch them offline; you can now stream and view them right when you want them-even while you’re on the go.

GPS Navigation for PSP- to those who are avid fans of Sony PSP, guess what: your favorite portable video game console can now serve as a GPS tracking device. With the Go Explorer GPS navigation system that can be installed on your PSP, you can now roam around the world without worrying about the directions. This software has already been released in Japan for quite sometime, and it hopes to capture the US and European PSP consumers this 2009.

Buddy Way Phone Tracking Device- finally, a phone tracking device has been invented to help keep you from getting lost! The Buddy Way phone tracking device is a special GPS system designed to work on mobile phones so that you may track your directions whenever you plan to go to an outdoor adventure. In this tracking system, you can map your directions, share the maps to your friends, and even get Google Earth to help you with your tracks. What you will need basically is a PDA phone with a Bluetooth receiver to make the program work, and once installed then you’re ready to go.

This month was quite interesting, I tried out alot of new techniques with Black Hat SEO and ther IM strategies that got me alot more traffic then I usually get, without further delays, here’s the income report.

• Misc Aff Sales - 100$
• Custom Themes - $1000
• Banner - $300
• LinkXL - $300
• Review - $500
• Adsense - $150
• Kontera - $20
• OIO pub - $50

OIO publisher made my life a hell lot easier, selling ads is much mroe fun with it

$2,270

Top Commentors

1. Your Money Online
2. Blogger Templates
3. Affiliate Tips
4. drivelocity
5. insurance leads
6. Technodorm
7. Donny Gamble
8. game-girl
9. James Mann
10. Blog Expert

Feed count

973 readers

Traffic

25,0s2uniques

70,456 vists

Here is to another great month, I hope all my readers are making money, it’s been a great year (2008), time for another banging year!

What is Black Hat SEO? This article is about Black Hat SEO, there are more articles and techniques within this category. View all Black Hat SEO articles.

SEO techniques have grown and expanded so rapidly they all claim to provide fast and efficient results in one’s site. Site owners and web developers have also grown more ecstatic in generating more traffic into their web pages, as this entails more money into their pockets. But we all know that these tricks come and go, and while one becomes ineffective another is born to provide fantastic results. However, we must keep in mind that it’s actually the basic lessons that keep us alive in the business, and we should not underestimate their powers. In this article, we will talk about the power of keywords.

Keyword Fluffing

We have all heard about the different uses of keywords in boosting a particular website’s page ranking. Keywords are used by search engines to direct users to the pages that they have been looking for, while audiences use keywords in order to conduct a certain search. Most of all, site developers use keywords to enhance the popularity of the page they are taking care of, and at the same time come up with some relevance towards the site’s chosen niche.

However, the abuse of keywords became popular amongst a lot of web developers it became a black hat technique. We call this method keyword stuffing, the art of adding a lot of keywords on the content to the point that it already looks spammy. Search engines despise this so much and they have come up with rules towards keywords density. But there is one more technique that involves the use of keywords, and this is called keyword fluffing.

The main goal of keyword fluffing is to tag a site’s individual pages with targeted long tailed phrases. You can do this by generating a search box filled with static results containing an inner link within the right pages. In this case, a search query will produce triple to quadruple long-tailed search traffic. While this is not a common method, a lot of SEO experts use keyword fluffing on the sites they maintain.

How to conduct keyword fluffing

The process of keyword fluffing begins by creating a search box feature on your site. You can do this by using Mod-Rewrite, as this program prints every search result in a separate subdirectory. An example of this would be:

Keyword used: “cat food”
Static page result: www.example.com/search/catfood.html

Next, get some five relevant keywords to fluff your site’s niche. These keywords would have to be the most common words people use in doing search queries so that they would be able to stumble upon your site. You can play with the keywords so that all possible keywords and keyword phrases they will use can be tacked on your site.

The third step you must do is add a small “div” which says “related searches” or the like, and place it at the bottom of each individual page of your site. Then add a link to the search results for the long tailed phrases. An example would be:

Keyword: Cat food
Link: www.example.com/search/catfood.html
Anchor text: Friskies cat food

Among the things you must remember is that the links you will insert should be crawlable by engine spiders and pass the page rankings. You would prefer to have them crawled so that they will be indexed and begin to rank for the individual terms.

The value of “Recent Searches.” To boost more power to your site, you should make sure that the search box of your site has recorded all the most recent search queries. Remove the unnecessary html tags and unimportant words. You can’t afford your users abuse this feature otherwise you will be the one to suffer. Rather, focus on the the ways and means you can make more money from the targeted phrases you can find in the indexes.

The trick behind this method is to play with your site’s present indexing power. It’s always a must not to overdo things or else your work may end up in peril. Thus, you should take all necessary precautions, beginning with waiting until your site has achieved 60% saturation from the search engines.

Among the popular sites that have used this technique is YouTube.com. Well, the developers of the site have already announced that they have already stopped using this method, mainly because it goes against Google’s TOS and as well as it was becoming “unfair to the integrity of their results.” See, keyword fluffing is effective, as it help brought one of the most popular sites into where they are today. Because of this technique, other competitive sites were not able to match YouTube’s domain over the net.

The good thing about keyword fluffing is that you can play with all the keywords based on how your target audiences use them. In a way you also help your audiences know exactly what they want by providing the exact ways they write or say their thoughts and calculations.

What is Black Hat SEO? This article is about Black Hat SEO, there are more articles and techniques within this category. View all Black Hat SEO articles.

Your site’s page ranking depends on a lot of factors such as incoming traffic, popularity and indexing in search engines. And it is evident that a lot of SEO artists venture on techniques which involve link building, keyword research and metatags, as well as spamming and other forbidden methods in order to provide success to their site. But while most of them venture on these aspects, it is quite important to know that the indexing of your site’s pages hold great value. Playing with the indexing can actually boost up your site’s rankings in search results, thus it’s time you learn about link saturation.

Search engines do not actually index all your site’s pages, only a certain percentage of them. It is because they cannot accommodate all the sites created in the web, as they have a saturation limit to follow-otherwise the search engines will crash. You are lucky if 80% of your site is indexed, which rarely happens.

Saturation pertains to the number of pages you have indexed as compared with the number of pages found on your site. Meanwhile, the number of links found in your site’s index compared with the actual number of inbound links is called link saturation. The importance of learning about link saturation is as follows:

• Detect which links could be of great use to boost your site’s page ranking
• Find dormant links and see if they can be used or not

But how do you conduct link saturation?

First, you check out the log files. In the log files you can find the new and old inbound links which search engines have missed. These files are located below the public_html folder, which can be easily accessed via the Awstats confic file at CPanel.

• Open the log file in your favorite text editor and check out where are the referrers and parse them out so you can see a better view of the list of sites linked to yours.

• When you have your link list, it’s time to have them indexed. You can do this by creating roll over sites, distributing the links via blogroll, or come up with a third party rolling site map. You can also use blog aggregators if you are receiving a high amount of links per day, or if you are expecting that a high percentage of your pages are getting indexed.

In order to have the links indexed, you can use mass pings via some Windows applications available to you. You can also clean up your referral link list by removing common referrers such as Yahoo, MSN, and Google.

Second, check the direct referrals. Now that you have removed the common referrals, you should then monitor the new referrals. Here are the tasks you must do:

• Check out if the referral exists at the user display page. If it exists, then have it submitted to ping sites such as Pingomatic so that it would ping all the available services using the user’s browser. You can do it using the following codes:

CGI CODE

if(($ENV{’HTTP_REFERER’} ne “”) || ($ENV{’HTTP_REFERER’} =~ m/http:\/\/(www\.)?$mydomain\//)) {
print qq~~;
}

PHP CODE

if($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] != “” || preg_match(”/http:\/\/(www\.)?$mydomain\///i”,$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] > 0) {
echo “”;
}

These scripts will then check if the referrer link actually exists. If the link doesn’t exist then it will display an invisible IFRAME that delivers the link to Pingomatic. If you want to play safe then you may also check Yahoo, Google or MSN referrers or other unclean referrers you may get from time to time.

If you happen to own an older site and start using this method, then you would be surprised to find out how many links you have already collected. You may first see your own links go triple or quadruple, but they are just a mere illusion so there’s nothing to worry about. You’ve just garnered those links because they were not (and never were) indexed in the search engines. Once you finish the task of link saturation, you will start to notice a significant improvement in your site’s efficiency and accuracy particularly in link saturation campaigns.

A lot of SEO artists have overlooked this technique mainly because they look irrelevant. However, link saturation is very much an important task to do for it not only boosts your site’s page ranking, but also gets rid of the irrelevant referrer links which only hamper your site’s pages to be indexed. Remember that not all incoming links hold value to your site in terms of link building, as they tend to lower your page ranking and exclude a high percentage of your pages from getting indexed, thus you have to monitor which ones can be used and which ones should be removed. Pushing your pages’ relevance up a notch truly helps in improving your site with search engines-so why not do it now?

What is Black Hat SEO?         This article is about Black Hat SEO, there are more articles and techniques within this category. View all Black Hat SEO articles.

In the world of online business, the success of your site doesn’t actually depend on the revenue you earn, but on how popular your site is. You must have a strong support network composed of links and other sites that recommend what your page has to offer. Hence, in order to be on top, you must be extremely popular especially to search engines-as they will be the one to keep you on the top page ranks.

When striving to become popular in your chosen niche, you are thus taught the basic white hat SEO techniques such as link building, as through the use of links your site becomes stronger and more known in the community. You can do this through massive comments to other blogs and actively participating in forums. Most of all, you are invited to join blog communities in order to be known, such as Digg and StumbleUpon.

But we all know that link farming is already a thing of the past, and the only effective way by which we can benefit from links is by hooking up with the top-ranking blogs, otherwise your efforts will remain useless. You wouldn’t want that, right? Hence, if you are becoming desperate to make your site popular over your chosen niche, then you may as well opt to make great use of Digg and StumbleUpon, for they can certainly do great wonders for you. This scheme is called Digg begging.

Why Digg begging? If you are an active Digg user, you may be aware of the need to incur links through reader comments, votes and ratings. Digg and StumbleUpon are the places where most active bloggers and site owners hang out and promote their business by sharing and exchanging of information, news bits and simply advertising the items they have to offer. You can find the most important people in your niche here in these sites, hence you must get their vote onto your page.

Well, you can’t actually get their votes right away, hence, what you must do is yes, beg for them. The term begging wouldn’t go as far as kneeling to those people and ask for their commendations; rather you use a script that would generate votes onto your Digg entries. You can take the easy way out by using a script which you can add at the footer of your entry, and upon uploading your post, Digg and StumbleUpon will be alerted to boost up your site post’s ranking.

Here are the sample scripts you can use:

For PERL:

$sites{’stumbleupon’} = ‘Glad you stumbled upon us. Please leave us a nice review if you enjoy the site!’;
$sites{’digg.com’} = ‘Glad you found us on Digg. Please Digg up if you like!’;

if ($ENV{’HTTP_REFERER’} ne “”){
foreach $key (keys %sites) {
if($ENV{’HTTP_REFERER’} =~ /$sites{’$key’}/) {
print qq~~;
}
}
}

For PHP:

$sites[’stumbleupon’] = ‘Glad you stumbled upon us. Please leave us a nice review if you enjoy the site!’;
$sites[’digg.com’] = ‘Glad you found us on Digg. Please Digg up if you like!’;

if( !empty( $_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’] ) ) {
$data = parse_url( $_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’ ] );
foreach( $sites as $domain => $text ) {
if( strpos( strtolower( $data[’host’] ), $domain ) !== false ) {
echo ‘’;
break;
}
}
}
?>

For Javascript

To bloggers who are using Wordpress, you can also include this script on your blog’s footer so that Digg and StumbleUpon are reminded of your new post.

What you have just done? You have created a command that alerts Digg and StumbleUpon to immediately take notice of your new entry and boost it up in their rankings even if only a few people have checked them out yet. In this process, you get to cheat on the number of site views and votes to your entries, that way they become more popular over social network sites. Because of the increased (yet automated) rankings, you can get more incoming traffic since users would think that you have a truly reputable site.

By the use of Digg and StumbleUpon, you get to cheat on the search engines without bothering them that much, thus you are saved from all the search engine issues and problems commonly faced by other black hat SEO artists. Digg begging has even gained positive reviews among its users mainly because of its efficiency and effectiveness in producing results. Why not try this technique to enhance your rankings on search engines and gain more popularity over your niche? Who knows, this may be your ticket to success.

What is Black Hat SEO?   This article is about Black Hat SEO, there are more articles and techniques within this category. View all Black Hat SEO articles.

Black hat SEO has focused more on the technical aspects of site building, as well as the instant ways on how to earn huge incoming traffic and revenues to your site. A lot of people find them annoying, but a lot of webmasters continue to use them since they tend to be more effective than white hat methods in terms of fast monetary turnovers. And since we are now discussing about black hat SEO, it’s also a must to take a look on the less noticed but equally effective black hat ways you can use to generate more income, among them is scanning for proxies.

Before learning the ins and outs of proxy scanning, it is important to remember that this method is quiet annoying on the part of ISPs. Thus, you should not use this technique especially on a critical server, otherwise you might suffer from DNS refusal. Proxy scanning is not actually an SEO technique, but it can hence be helpful to those who want to pursue more on the forbidden techniques to bring out the best in their business.

First, you have to know where proxies come from. Most of them come in a forms such as: HTTP (connected to port 80), SOCKS4/SOCKS5 (can be connected to any port), and HTTPS (connects to ports 80 and 443).

Proxy servers are used when you want to navigate to sites via invisible mode. Elite/anonymous proxies do not submit your IP to the sites you go to, thus if you want to do some Google search but you don’t want Google to know that you came, then you will have to connect with one of these proxies so they can connect to Google and later on provide you with the results page. Proxies are hence used in doing grunt jobs such as scraping Google listings to creating spam comments and to as much as competitive analysis.

Conducting a Proxy Scanning

Proxy scanning is the process of testing IPs to see if they have another proxy installed. When conducting a proxy scan, here are the things you must do:

• Servers-check and make sure that your server host is not going to flip or abort the connection during port scanning. Your testing software should also not attempt to connect to port 25, otherwise you will be marked as an email spammer-something your webhost provider doesn’t like.
• IP Ranges- when doing a proxy scanning, you are not just merely leeching: you are scanning. This means you have to choose on certain IP ranges. Most IP ranges have nothing on them, thus you have to remove them during your scan. However, it is also important to note that your proxy scanner should run at a minimum of 500 threads/sockets at a certain given time otherwise you will just waste your time and effort since nothing good will come out of your undertaking.

There are also IP ranges which are not dead, and you can find them by visiting this site: http://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=map. It is a helpful map of email spammers activity by IP range. You can also find a long, valuable list of ISPs which contain dirty net spaces, thus you can have more proxies to use.

Here are some proxies you can use:

1. 200.0.0.0-201.255.255.255
2. 60-69.255.255.255-US proxies
3. 80.0.0.0-85.255.255.255 up to 89.255.255.255

• Ports-when choosing which ports you should scan in search of proxies, you should then weigh between quality and quantity. Common proxies are of lower quality, mainly because a lot of people scan there (an example of which is 8080). Another proxy is 6588; it is less common and is thus much faster. You can also check out other ports such as 80 and 3128. Meanwhile, SOCKS proxies have unique ports to which they run on, so you have to be familiar with them first before you try to scan them.

There are also ports in some IP ranges which do not exist on other IP ranges, so watch out for them too.

It is not really recommended for you to scan on port 80 because it will only give you complaints unlike scanning in other ports. Scanning on port 80 also slows down your scanning software because of the high volume of hits.

• Scanning speed- it doesn’t really matter how fast you scan, as long as you use your scanner software’s maximum speed. One of the oldest proxy scanners, ProxyHunter, can scan 500-2000 sockets at a certain time, but afterwards it needs a 2 second connection timeout in order to rest, as well as 30 second data transfer timeout. It is important to be aware of your software’s limitations, so that you will not panic whenever downtime procedures occur.

When you are scanning under a Windows server, scanning up to 3700 sockets may throttle your connects, thus you may be blocked in conducting new connections. In this situation, try to change some lines in SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters found in the Windows Registry. By doing this, you can prevent Windows from throttling your connection, thus no lock-ups will occur.