Innerblogger.com

Silly Paypal…they've made it so hard.

You can easily add a donation button to your website, but first you have to figure out where the hell it is located on the Paypal site.

Here's how:

yeah, they've made it really difficult to locate haven't they…

let's see…

Go to your paypal account, then open the tab called "merchant services"

Then click left side bar "website payments standard"

Then, in the middle of page, click:
"Next step: Learn how to integrate website payments standard"

next page, scroll down to:

"Scenario 5. I want to accept donations."

Integrate now

Then click "go to the donations page"..

(it says you could go there right after logging in but I haven't seen it anywhere…)

OK, now you should be presented with obvious choices…and you're all set.

it's stupid really, why make it so hard..

good luck

A little digression…I responded on NamePros to a question regarding type-in traffic and Overture with Extension, and decided to post an extended answer here.

The domainer's Holy Grail is to have a portfolio of thousands of traffic domains. What does this mean?

A traffic domain is such a domain that has natural, so-called "type-in" traffic. This means that people type the domain name in their browsers when they are looking for information on the Internet. In this case, they are looking specifically for the sort of information that is related to the domain name itself.

Say, you own the domain RedCopperWidgets.com.

Let's assume that Red Copper Widgets are the latest craze in entertainment gadgets. People will be searching the Internet for these things. Now, most people will go to Google and type "red copper widgets" to search for relevant results. But a percentage of people will type "redcopperwidgets.com" directly in their browser address field. This percentage is surprisingly high - it is estimated to be anywhere between 5% and 30%.

Why do people do that? Because they want instant information, they don't want Google to tell them which pages to go to, or don't want to go through all the results to find the information they need. People assume that the corresponding dotcom domain is the place to go for information on red copper widgets. Often they are right, after a fashion. Many times these type of domains are "parked", which means that they display a page consisting solely of advertisements related to red copper widgets. This works both ways: The surfers are happy because they will instantly see links that are relevant to their search, and the domainer will receive a certain payment each time a visitor clicks on one of these commercial links.

This means that whoever owns the domain redcopperwidgets.com is going to make a nice profit by just having registered or purchased redcopperwidgets.com.

Domain registration costs only about $8 per year. Therefore a domain need only make a little more than $0.02 per day to cover its own registration renewals. Anything above that is profit.

The rest is just math. Say you find 100,000 domain names that make just $0.05 in parking revenue per day. Subtract the renewal cost of $0.02, and you have $0.03 of profit per domain name per day. Multiply that by 30 to get about $1 per month. Multiply that by the number of your domain names and you have $100,000 of profit per month, by just letting the domain names sit there without actually doing any work yourself.

Incredible, huh? Not so. There are many domain investors who actually own portfolios of hundreds of thousands of traffic domains, and this is exactly how their business thrives.

If it was easy, everybody would do it, right? Sure - that's why nearly all traffic domains are already reserved. But new trends appear all the time, new gadgets, new phenomenons, and if you have a decent portfolio of names, you could be sitting on the next iPhone.com.

Meanwhile, the smart domainer analyzes the potential of the domain names he/she intends to purchase - from all angles. One way to do this is to check for potential type-in traffic.

One way to do that is to go to EstiBot.com and check the domains with the bulk Type-in Traffic Checker.

Here's how to interpret the results:

Overture with extension (or wordtracker with extension) is used to evaluate potential type-in traffic.

It's not the same as Overture for the keyword.

For instance, lacus.mobi has Overture (for "lacus") of 2,950 per month.

Lacus.mobi has Overture with extension (for "lacus.mobi") of zero per month.

Therefore, the Overture with extension (OVT w/ext) is zero and it is not listed in the EstiBot type-in traffic checker results, because only the ones with OVT w/ext are listed.

This means that people are unlikely to type in "lacus.mobi" in their browser and the domain is unlikely to have much type-in traffic.

This is not a surefire way of determining type-in traffic, but it's the best that's available with the current resources.

Having plenty of OVT or Wordtracker with extension usually means that there is a good chance that the domain will have direct, type-in traffic.

Lack of type-in traffic does not necessarily mean that the domain is bad. It just indicates that PPC parking for the domain is not necessarily a significantly profitable venture. The domain may still be good for other reasons.

I know that many domains that have zero "OVT w/ext" still make a good profit with PPC due to backlinks, and such type-ins that OVT / Wordtracker don't cover - most of my traffic domains have no OVT w/ext.

Therefore, the type-in traffic checker should be used as an indicator only. If the OVT w/ext is very high, it is statistically significantly indicative of a high probability of some type-in traffic. If it is zero, it is unlikely, but not impossible, that the domain has type-in traffic.

Type-in traffic is important, because if you have converting type-in traffic for a domain, the domain will be profitable. Say your domain makes $1 per month in type-in conversions. All you have to do is acquire 30,000 of such domains and your revenue will be $30,000 per month.

Needless to say, almost all such traffic domains have already been registered. Nevertheless, it's still possible to find them, especially in ccTLDs and IDN domains.

OK, you've read (I hope) my entries on Blog Search Engine Optimization and implemented the techniques. But your Google ranking could still use a boost. Let's move on from basic SEO to the deepest, most secret core of SEO techniques that make the difference between an armchair optimizer and a pro.

Basic Search Engine Optimization could be compared to practicing Karate: you need to hone your basic techniques so that the fundamentals are always right, you optimize your blog or website almost without knowing it: The title tags, the XML sitemaps, internal links, robots.txt, meta tags and so on. From this you build up to the more advanced techniques.

But that's just the minimal requirements fulfilled right there. If you really want to stand out from the crowd, you need to go deeper. SEO is hard work, and in order to succeed, you need to look at the big picture.

In this series of entries I shall go over, one by one, the individual steps that you need to take in order to succeed in search engine optimizing your blog or website. What I will write here is universal; it's not limited to Wordpress in any way.

I shall use some of my own experimental sites as examples of successful SEO. Many of these websites are just experiments, and contain limited content. They are my SEO lab. For instance:

VLCD.info - informational minisite on Very Low Calorie Diets. Ranks number 2 out of 108,000 in Google for the search term "VLCD", second only to the Wikipedia entry.
DistanceLearningMBA.org - informational minisite on Distance Learning MBA programs. Ranks number 5 out of 773,000 in Google for the search term "Distance Learning MBA"

Also, as cases I shall present my main sites:
InnerBlogger.com - ranks number 1 out of 841,000 for "wordpress blogging guide" in Google
EstiBot.com - ranks number 2 out of 342,000 for "free domain appraisal" in Google.

So, then, to the secrets. I shall go over each of the following points in separate entries:

• Keyword Analysis
• Internal Networking
• External Networking
• People Networking
• Establishing Trust
• Link Building Secrets
• Content Secrets
• Thinking Outside the Box
• Getting to the top of search engines within weeks

Stay tuned!

Basics of Search Engine Optimization

I've been in the domain name and webmastering game for a couple of years now. It's not making me a living, luckily I have a good day job. However, it's starting to bear fruit now, after 2 years. Some of my websites are getting steady traffic and some are now ranking on the first page of google for their search term. PPC ad income is now sufficient to fund some additional domain and hosting solutions purchases. It takes a lot of work, and patience. Searh Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a tedious business - sometimes you get quick rewards, but most of the time, and especially with any competitive search term it's going to take time and determination.

My little internet business has grown to a point that I enlisted a friend of mine and we started up a little company. The company now owns all my domains and websites. This has opened up new opportunities, as we have some other streams of income, too, that we can use to invest in new domain names and websites.

The problem is, running a company, even a small one, takes effort and also requires some basic understanding of business administration. Actually, even before starting the company I had already wondered whether I should get a business administration degree. I already have a college degree, and a doctorate, too, but that's in natural sciences (neuroscience) - but I have long wondered whether to get a business degree as well. However, between the day job, domaining, webmastering, and family, it has proven impossible to take a year or two off for and MBA degree.

Recently, though I found out that you can actually do an MBA by distance learning. Excited, I registered DistanceLearningMba.org because I figured since I wanted to find out about distance learning opportunities for an MBA anyway, might as well blog about my research and experiences.

As things are now, I have not started the distance learning mba program, but I am definitely considering an online MBA course - and I did learn in my keyword research that this is a valuable search term, with high competition and potential for good PPC (pay-per-click) advertising income. One reason I am writing this blog entry is to educate my readers about the basics of optimizing for a search term, the other being that I just felt like blogging about what's been going on in my life lately.

The lessons learned from this blog entry:
1) Domaining and webmastering have the potential to produce sufficient income to try one's hand at starting a business, but you have to be patient - it's not going to happen immediately. More likely it will take years to just get started for real.
2) Always keep your eyes open for valuable search terms, and for SEO projects you need domains that are pure keyword domains
3) When you want to do serious Search Engine Optimization, link building is the way to go - write blog entries like this, that hopefully provide value to your readers while at the same time advancing your link building project

In this case, I have advanced my SEO project for the distance learning MBA site, and hopefully written a somewhat interesting blog entry at the same time. I enjoyed it, anyway. Hope you did, too.

SEO lessons: Anchor text is important, but it is not all there is to it. You have to wrap the link inside quality textual content that is relevant to the link. Google looks at the text surrounding the link, not just the anchor text itself.

Don't believe me? Just google distance learning mba and you'll see the effects. Another popular search is Distance Learning MBA India.

Now then, another secret is out: How does one produce content for the numerous websites that one has to set up in order to really get going in the business?

Simple: I can truly recommend spending $24.95 to get a quality 400-word search engine friendly article on any subject from GetContent.com. They write it, you own it, copyright and all. It's a great service.

Check out distancelearningmba.org - the content is from them. It has really been a good investment - the PPC income has paid their fee many times over.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to email me or comment here!

Most servers have a php spell functionality already installed. Check with your host whether php has been compiled with "pspell".

You can easily add a spell check feature on your website using pspell.

Here's a very simple script to demonstrate the use of pspell. Try it by creating a new empty file called "phpspell.php" and copy and paste the following code into it. To use it, enter in your browser the URL
http://yourdomain.com/phpspell.php?word=tesst

(replace tesst with any word to check)

This little script will give you the best alternative suggestion for the word.

This is just a simple example. You can get a full spell checker functionality with pspell. Naka Gadjov has made a nice script which I have used with success. Check out his free script to make the most of pspell functionality:

PHP Spell Checker