LinkMoney.org

Archive for August, 2008

You all know that I have been writing about building sites for friends, family and neighbors. It is a great learning experience and gives you a feeling of accomplishment, oh and you can make a little money along the way. Not a bad deal.

So back at the end of July my little friend Penny came bouncing in here and said “Did you hear about the new exercise pill?” What the heck are you talking about?

No, really she said. Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego have been experimenting with some drugs AICAR and GW1516, and have discovered that these genetically affect muscles into a state as if they have just had a strong work out.

You can lose fat without exercise in other words. I told her she needed to set up a website to monitor this news and track and report all the references she can find, because this news is going to go viral. So we immediately set up newexercisepill.com and she has been busy as a beaver doing her reports.

If you search for those three words, new exercise pill, her page comes right up near the top of the search engines. She does have quite a few readers and subscribers but does not use an email signup, but I think we should. Now we are watching the search term Exercise Pill to see if her site can come up near the front of the pack. It was back around 400 of a half million when we started checking and has been slowly moving up.

I told her that the more she becomes known and people realize that this is a miracle break through in science and not just a joke, that she should become the authority site.

What do you folks think? Should Penny be doing anything different or just keep on reporting as she finds news on the Exercise Pill ?

Wow! Miguel Alvarez’ MarketingFactor website is holding a contest called the Blog Boost and is giving away several thousand dollars worth of prizes to four lucky individuals on September 20th.

You should visit the site and all you have to do to be in the drawing is to sign up to the MarketingFactor email newsletter, which is a great idea anyway because Miguel knows what he is talking about.

There are other very simple ways to add more chances to win by earing extra drawing tickets, such as to Friend Miguel on FaceBook, follow him on Twitter, etc.

You will gain a lot of very good information that you can use to optimize your site and all types of Internet Marketing tips when you read Miguel’s Blog at MarketingFactor.

You want to create a logo for free!

This post should be renamed “How to Make a 125 Banner.”

Ok, no big deal you say right? Making little button ads that link out to a website somewhere is a piece of cake. Easy stuff, no big deal. Well it is a big deal to me because as I have said before I HATE programming!

It was only nine months ago that I decided to veer life’s course toward learning how to make a little moohlah off the Internet. I had been hearing all these fantastic claims of millionaires being created from nothing more than putting ads on their websites. I had been publishing stuff for free on the web for over ten years. It’s my turn dammit!

Well that’s a joke. There are many people that do make a lot of money, but it is not by slapping a couple of AdSense groups of ads on your favorite website and then sitting back to light up a stogie. It’s a Hell of a lot of hard work.

I put in at least 10 14 to 14 18 hours per day, EVERY day of the week, trying this, tweaking that, reading mmo Blogs, learning the domaining game, writing, writing and writing. If it wasn’t fun, I would NEVER work this hard at a real job.

A few months ago I couldn’t have told you the difference between a <b> and a <br> in HTML code. Not because it was that difficult to learn, I just never wanted to, or had a need to…

So here’s the deal. When I first started reading Garry Conn’s Blog about six months ago, I was struck with how common sense this game could be. That’s if you don’t let it overwhelm you. Those of you who know Garry, and if you are reading this I can’t believe any of you don’t know him, well he is occasionally a tiny teensie weensie bit opinionated. That’s just part of his charm.

Early on I asked Garry how to learn enough HTML to learn how to make some slight code changes in WordPress themes or plugins, when needed. He gave me a very positive reassurance that learning that crap was EASY! He he he. Needless to say he got me. It isn’t easy, it’s a damned struggle.

Well today I am a Ninja coder ready to do battle. Not really but I always wanted to be a Ninja something or other. So you know those little 125X125 pixel button banner ads that are all over everyones websites? I HAD to know how to make one.

So for those of you that want to create a logo for free, here is how I did it. Maybe some of you will laugh and call me an idiot for doing it this way, but it worked for me, and if you need to learn how to create a logo for free, then it will work for you also.

First you have to find an image you want to use and then you have to crop it to some size that is workable. I have an old version of Adobe Photoshop that still works good enough for me, so I took part of my banner at the top of this Blog site, the lovely Carribean beach, and I cropped a chunk of it to about 400X400 px so I could see what I was doing with it.

Then I was going to use WORD to just type out the visible label that you can see which says LinkMoney dot org, and then paste it over the image as a layer. Well I decided I had absolutely NO idea how to do that, so I used the “T” text tool on photoshop to type that label in the cloudy sky of my image area. OK, so now I have an image, with a visible label.

Now how the Hell can I insert the magic code that makes your mouse pointer turn to a little hand and then allows you to click on the image to go to somewhere else? Well I used a search on Google which was something like “how to create 125 banner ads.” None of the sites gave me the exact info but I started to get the picture that hey, why not go and look at some and see how they are already set up on your own sites?

Great, now I’m getting somewhere… Er, sort of.

Well I realized that there were two parts to the code. One was for locating the image itself, and one for where the link should take you to. Now when I looked at some of the buttons using the mouse right click and “properties” I have on my own websites, it really was not very clear because the codes all seemed to be very long and like CRAZY stuff. I can tell you now, that is because those images and links are on the advertisers own websites or sites that they have designated to keep track of some very specific stats.

The easiest way is to make it work on your own website first. I have about a dozen sites that are doing nothing, nothing at all because I just don’t have enough time to write content or to do any promotions with them yet. I’ll get a Round Tuit soon enough.

So I uploaded my image as a post on one of these dormant sites and then started playing with the link code.

You have to use the href command first. That’s the sound my Dad used to make when he would come into the dark room where my date and I were on the couch. So that little command is the one that is going to take you to another location. Here is what I ended up using for the first command line:
<a href=”http://linkmoney.org”> (Which will bring you to this website.)

Then I had to decide where to park my image because that would be permanently in the code and must always be available. You could just park it on your own computer somewhere, and call it up, but then your computer would have to be on all the time. No good. Your web hosting company probably has some storage space for files or images that comes with your hosting package, but I didn’t want to bother to dig into how to do that.

(Note: Since I wrote this post several months ago it has become my most popular of all, thanks to you readers. I did learn that it is very easy to go into your WordPress root and create a folder named “images” then upload all images to that folder and when you want to use them just link to them in the html code.)

So I said to myself, self ! Why not one of the photo hosting websites? They’re all over the place. I had an old account at HELLO which was part of Picassa/Google, but too late. Google has shut HELLO down. So I set up a quick account at photobucket.com and resized my image now to 125X125 and uploaded it to photobucket.

Below each image in photobucket there are some little pieces of html code that allow you to copy and paste images into your posts or emails at will, and I also was able to doctor that code up a little to be able to work with my new 125 ad.

So here is the secod part of this code.
<img border=”0″ src=”http://i457.photobucket.com/albums/qq295/LMDO_photo/125copy.jpg” width=”125″ height=”125″
</a>

What that all means is the img (image) src (source) is located at photobucket with their identifier and jpg extension. Then just for good measure I stuck a couple of dimension commands on there. Not sure I had to do that or not, but I don’t argue with success!

It worked, the damned thing worked, woo hoo ! (Ninja speak)

So now boys and girls, you are going to see that little ocean beach scene all over the place.

You can do it too!

Now if you have any questions, you have my permission to ask Garry and he will very politely tell you that “that crap is EASY !”

I’m Rich !

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pss: 125 Exchange free traffic.

psss: Create a logo for free!

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Hey you can’t win the Lottery if you don’t play!

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I’m Rich !

First off, this is about me, but I do NOT do any of the aforementioned things.

However I made a major snafu recently, late at night, that has changed my latest plan to become the next Kevin Rose. Hmm, wonder if he ever did?

Any way here’s what happened. I had this idea of setting up a social circle, you know friends helping friends, wink, wink. Sort of a you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Well this crashed into a not so happy ending, (pun intended.)

I was going to set up a site where registered mail list members could post their site or article url and then other members would hump it, oops, I mean help promote it with various social networking tools. I wanted a cool name, so during the night I got up thinking about it and said, something like “social.”… Easy to remember…. Hmmm…

Eureka! I got it. “sosso dot com”! It’s cute, rhymes sort of with social, easy to remember, and I could get it out as a Buzz word. You know what I mean?

Great! I had just read a Blog about how NAME dot com was the cheapest registrar and so I went there and bought it and a dozen other domains all in one day. Then I read another Blog about how great Hostgator was, and though I have sites on three other domain hosting companies already, I wanted to try out Hostgator.

So I said to myself, self, this is going to be HOT! He he he… Can’t afford a private server, not yet, so I purchased the high end shared account for 13 bucks a month, with the first month only costing a penny. Pretty good deal right?

So I set up sosso dot com as my primary account on Hostgator and then read the instructions on how to point the DNS on NAME dot com to my shiny new hard disks at Hostgator. Did that and saw the warning that this may take 24 to 48 hours to resolve. No problem. It isn’t like I don’t have anything to do in the meantime.

So I checked it the next day and the next day and it still had not resolved. What’s up with that? Forget it, I’m already into a dozen new projects, will fix it later. Well that was August 3, 4 & 5. Now this morning I said I’m going to find out what the Hell is wrong.

I checked sosso again and it was coming up on a GoDaddy parked domain website. Huh? This didn’t have anything to do with GD, or so I thought. I checked again with Hostgator tech support and they said it was NAME’s problem. Checked with NAME but had to wait two and a half hours because they don’t get out of bed until 9am mountain time, and they don’t offer 24/7 phone tech support.

Finally it turns out that I did not OWN sosso. I owned a domain named “sossol.” Naturally I got a little testy and said what do you mean, I registered sosso. So sorry, we only have sossol.

I finally figured out what happened. Remember when I said I did this during the night after I had woken up thinking about it? Take a look at where the “L” key is, right next to the “O” key. I did not purchase the right domain and it was ALL my fault! Turns out GD had registered that name years ago, and it was not even available.

So here’s my point boys and girls. Make absolutely SURE just what you are typing during domain registrations and hosting setups. If you screw up, it can’t be fixed. Now I just went through the procedure of taking sosso off my Hostgator account and setting up a different domain as my primary account. It is mostly done but has been a few hours and there is still a little more BS that I have to do to get the damned thing working.

So point number two is. I did this totally clean, honest! Other than being sleepy I should not have made such a stupid mistake. I wonder what people do that have a few beers before going through this procedure?

Oh well, I only lost about a half a month’s worth of my first penny right?

I’m Rich

(New info:  Here is a new website where you can purchase currently owned

domain names for sale.)