New Plugin for Wordpress – US National Debt Clock Widget

By admin | March 1, 2010

I have just released a new Wordpress plugin. This plugin makes a new sidebar widget that displays an American National Debt clock.

There was significant talk around the net a little while back when many US debt clocks around the world all of a sudden needed an extra digit (when the debt hit 10 Billion US dollars). Its a frightening number really, when you also consider that since 2007 the US national debt has climbed at an average of 3.87 Billion US$ per DAY. Thats something like 45 000 US$ per SECOND.

I have seen some of these clocks on sites around the net, but I could not find a good one that would easily work with Wordpress. So I wrote one :-)

If you have any sort of financial oriented web site then you may find this little widget quite a nice addition to your pages.

You can see a working demo example in the right hand sidebar on my forex trading site here.

If you would like to grab the US National Debt clock widget for Wordpress for your own site then the page with all the information is at http://www.psp-tubes.net/wordpress/us-national-debt-clock-plugin-widget-for-wordpress

Topics: Recommendations | 1 Comment »

Automated Social Bookmarking Software – The Key to MORE Traffic with LESS Effort

By admin | October 3, 2009

Automated social bookmarking software – for many web site owners this has been a pipe dream for a very long time. Nowadays the dreams are starting to turn to reality.

As a webmaster you will have realized by now that the key to your online success is TRAFFIC. A completely rubbish web site that gets lots of traffic will be more successful than the best designed site in the world that gets no traffic. Plain and simple … TRAFFIC = SUCCESS.

A couple of years ago traffic was easy. It was mostly about “on-site optimization”, things that you do to the HTML code on your page/site. Basically the process was to bang up a page, sprinkle it to death with your keywords, and the search engines of that time would give you good positions.

Nowadays, its not so easy.

If you want to get any kind of ranking by Google then the key to the game is backlinks (or incoming links). This is known as “off-site optimization, the things that you do on other peoples sites to gain credibility for your own site.

There are a lot of things that you can do in terms of “off-site” optimization, to increase your number of backlinks that point back to your site ..

In order to maximise your traffic you need to do each and every one of these … and to make matters worse you have to do it for every single one of your main keywords … over and over and over.

Can you see the amount of work involved in doing all of this ?

The key my friends is AUTOMATION … work smarter, NOT harder.

I want to tell you about how I personally am automating some of these traffic methods.

Its called Traffic Bug … and it is a social bookmarking service (its actually MUCH more than this) that takes all of the time out of submitting to social bookmarking sites, directories, search engines, and RSS directories and aggregators.

It does everything for you on complete auto-pilot. This even includes creating all the social bookmarking accounts that you will need if you had to do it yourself … you don’t even have to do that.

MASSIVE TIME SAVING is the result. Time that you can well spend on research more niches, building more sites, or writing more articles (if you are not already outsourcing this).

This is how it works.

  1. Log into your Traffic bug account.
  2. Press the “Add new website” button.
  3. Give your new project a name.
  4. Fill in some details, like the URL of the page that you want the software to submit, and your RSS feed URL (if you have one).
  5. Provide up to 6 “titles” for the software to randomly choose for your submissions.
  6. Provide up to 6 “descriptions” for the software to randomly choose for your submissions.
  7. Decide on your “aggression factor” … how quickly do you want the software to post to the all the bookmarking sites, choosing from “low”, “medium”, or “high”.
  8. Finally … press the “GO” button.

You can then log out, and you will know that Traffic Bug is automatically making PLENTY of social bookmarking submissions for you, as well as submitting your site to major directories, and RSS directories, and search engines. All while you go and do something else.

Here’s the beauty you may not have realized about this software yet. Each of the mini-sites that you create for yourself (be it on Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger, Wordpress, etc etc) each has its own unique URL, that you have to promote as well. Otherwise people cannot find them to view them before they can follow the links to your main site. Did you just notice that your submission tasks just multiplied exponentially ? You have to social bookmark, and directory submit, each and every one of your mini-sites and all of your published articles as well.

Not a problem for Traffic Bug. Just load up each and every mini-site, blog, article, etc that you have written, and let Traffic Bug do ALL of the submission grunt work for you.

I cannot stress enough how easy I have found this software to use … and, according to Traffic Bugs measurements it has already saved me 2097 minutes of work (and climbing quickly). Its not joking !!

How do you lay your hands on this handy little tool ?

Simple. Shoot across to Traffic Bug and sign up.

The full service costs $24.97 per month … but there is a FREE trial.

By signing up (which does not cost you a single cent … you don’t even have to enter any payment info), you will automatically get 11 days to evaluate the complete fully functional system.

You have got nothing to lose.

Now, I can hear you saying to yourself … “Hmmmm … $24.97 per month…”.

Lets put that $24.97 into some perspective. If you make 10 new promotional URL’s a month (and you should be doing WAY more than that), be they Squidoo lenses, Hubs, or articles. Doesn’t matter what they are, each has a unique URL that needs promotion of its own.

Traffic Bug currently submits to 31 social bookmarking sites. To do the same you would need to make 10 x 31 = 310 social bookmarks. That works out to 8 cents per bookmark.

Can you log in to a social bookmarking site (you need to create the social bookmarking account first if you don’t already have one .. more time and effort), and make a bookmark entry for 8 cents worth of your own time ?

And, that does not even include the directories, search engines, and RSS directories it also submits to at the same time.

Save yourself both time and frustration, and work smarter, by acting now and grabbing yourself this very cool automated social bookmarking software.

Until next time …..

Topics: Free Traffic Methods, Paid Traffic Methods, Recommendations, Traffic Generation | No Comments »

Monthly Bandwidth Allocation Doubled for Hosting Clients

By admin | October 2, 2009

Just a quick post to inform all of our hosted clients that we have doubled the monthly allocation of bandwidth on both of our hosting packages.

Our network provider have HUGELY increased the capacity into our Chicago network operations center, and they very kindly doubled our server package for free, and we have now passed that completely onto you for free as well.

If you were on the 10GB/month package you now have 20GB/month, and if you were on the 20GB/month package you now have 40GB/month.

This is effective from yesterday (the 1st October 2009), and all packages have already had their allocations altered on the server.

We would like to thank you for hosting with us. We know you have an unbelievable number of other options, and we really appreciate your very kind support.

Topics: Server Info, Uncategorized | No Comments »

How to Show eBay Auctions in Wordpress – The Quick and Easy Way with phpBay Pro

By admin | June 18, 2008

How to show eBay auctions in Wordpress is the subject of many emails that I receive from my clients. Most of my users are non-technical. They start researching this subject and quickly see “scary” words like API, RSS and XML.

Instantly they hit a mental block, and dismiss it as too difficult.

I am telling you here today that there is a SIMPLE way. It does not require you hiring a propellor-head, techie type, nerd boy, computer expert.

The solution is called – phpBay Pro.

It is quite simply the best solution I have ever seen for easily displaying auctions on your WP blog.

The software presents itself as a WP plugin. The installation is trivial even for a non-technical person. If you know how to use your FTP software, and you know how to install a WP plugin then you already have all the skills you need to successfully get this running.

The documentation bundled with the script is very comprehensive, and also includes some instructional videos that have been put together by Wade (the software author).

There is also a very active phpBay private community forum where many of the users get together on a daily basis to exchange ideas on different ways to use phpBay, and to maximise the profits from using it. Wade is always around as well, and fixes any problems you may have very quickly. I swear the guy does not sleep.

What I love about this script is that you can integrate it completely into your own theme very easily. The other solutions that I have tried (including the popular BANS script) forces you into using a very generic type theme, and most BANS stores all look very similar. I am sure it would be very easy for Google to detect these cookie-cutter type site footprints, and to reduce their rankings in the search engines.

phpBay works completely differently. Its not possible for any of the search engines to detect that your site is using an eBay script as it leaves no footprint at all.

Using phpBay Pro, all it takes to display auction listings is to add a single line of text into your post, or your page, wherever you want the auctions to show.

Here is an example of a phpBay command that will display a nicely formatted block of 12 auctions of used golf balls on your post – [phpbay]used golf balls,12,”",”"[/phpbay]

Thats all there is to it. No worrying about RSS feeds. No fighting with your WP theme files.

The above example is a very simple one, and as you learn more about phpBay Pro you will make use of many of the other more advanced features that the script offers.

If you are interested in making some money on the internet then all you need to do is -

  1. Sign up for eBays Affiliate program here.
  2. Buy yourself a copy of phpBay Pro here.
  3. Build yourself a few niche stores.

I paid $49 for an UNLIMITED license. This means that you can use the script to build as many sites as you like. It also includes a lifetime of free upgrades.

My software paid for itself within 5 days of putting my very first site online.

Now you know how to show eBay auctions in Wordpress quickly and easily.

Topics: Recommendations, Site Tips & Tricks | No Comments »

Back Up Your Web Site – This is Critical

By admin | March 7, 2008

*** This post is intended for everybody ***

Backup your web site is critical. Its common sense I know, but I also know its human nature to think “it will never happen to me”. Sods Law says it will :-(

Disk drives are mechanical … and they break.

We do an automatic, global, daily backup of the entire contents of our server … ie. all websites. This is necessary if we ever have a hardware failure and our disk drives crash, and we have to restore everything.

I do not do backups of individual sites.

Keeping a backup of your site is your own responsibility as a webmaster.

Read the rest of this entry »

Topics: Server Info, Site Tips & Tricks | No Comments »

Keyword Research Tools – Your Choices are Critical for Your Pages to Succeed

By admin | March 5, 2008

Keyword research tools are what I would like to cover today.

There is debate in the internet marketing community as to which comes first, keyword selection, or niche selection. Do you find nice keywords first and then find the market and build your site around them, or do you find a niche with a nice hungry market first and then research the keywords relating to that. Personally I am in the latter camp.


But, most of you already have a web site in some particular niche, so I am going to jump straight into how to select your keywords.

You should be steadily adding new content (ie. pages) to your site all the time, even if you only do 1 per week that is fine (thats 50+ pages of new content per year, it adds up steadily).

Why ? Well search engines love content.
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Topics: Free Traffic Methods, Recommendations, Site Tips & Tricks, Traffic Generation | No Comments »

Pingoat for Fast Site Indexing on Search Engines

By admin | February 28, 2008

Pingoat, a very weird name for a very handy service.

If you have built websites then you know that you can wait absolute ages for your site to appear in the search engines. Thats the old web. Nowadays, it is possible to have your site spidered by search engines very quickly and easily.

In the case of Google it is possible to have your site visited and spidered sometimes within minutes. This does not mean that you will appear in their index within minutes, but at least they have spidered you and you are in their queue for a full indexing.

Using this exact method I have had a new web site of mine appear in the index, and be getting organic search traffic, within 24 hours.

The method uses a technique pioneered by the blog industry … called “pinging“.

You can use this method for any web site though, not only for blog sites.

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Topics: Free Traffic Methods, Site Tips & Tricks, Traffic Generation | No Comments »

Peel Away Ads – Highly Effective Advertising on Your Web Site

By admin | February 25, 2008

Hi Everyone

Its been a while since my last post, so today I would like to share with you something that I have recently found, and that I think will help just about any site.

One of the hardest things to do with your web site is to quickly capture your visitors attention, and to get them to take some sort of “action”. That action could be something like getting them to click on an affiliate link, navigate to your products page, view a “special offer”, etc.

Visitors have developed “ad block” over the last few years, and they literally filter out the adverts on your site almost instantly and unconsciously. The only thing they still see is something they are not used to seeing yet.

Enter the “peel away ad“.

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Topics: Free Traffic Methods, Recommendations, Site Tips & Tricks | No Comments »

The robots.txt and favicon.ico files

By admin | January 8, 2008

This post is intended for everyone.

These are 2 little known files that the huge majority of webmasters forget to include in their web sites. I think the reason why most people forget about them is that they need to be created manually … none of the HTML editors that I know of create them automatically.

ROBOTS.TXT

The robots.txt is a small text file that you load into the root folder of your website ie. the same folder where your homepage is stored. Its purpose is to tell a search engine spider what it can and cannot index within your site.

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Topics: Site Tips & Tricks | No Comments »

WebMail, and other Mailbox Options

By admin | December 19, 2007

This post is intended for our Linux hosted sites.

Today I would like to show you some other features on your mail server.

One of these features is Webmail … which may be especially important to you at this time of the year when you may find yourself away from home and your own PC/email.

Note .. If you are not using your email addresses in your own domain name then you really should be. It creates much more of a brand awareness in your clients mind if your website and email addresses correspond.


Mail boxes, aliases and email forwarders are all configured from within the “email” icon in your server control panel.

There are some other functions that can be performed on each individual mail box. To access these functions you need to navigate to the webmail interface for that mailbox.

All email boxes can also be accessed via the web … perfect for when you are not at home.

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Topics: Server Info | No Comments »

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