Yahoo! Merchant Solutions

Yahoo Merchant Solutions is the no. 1 provider of hosted ecommerce in the world with customers like Vermont Teddy Bear and Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Foundation.

Yahoo! Merchant Solutions offers several different plans to suit your business’s specific needs. Get 35% off Yahoo! Merchant Solutions packages + no setup fee (save $50)

Five reasons to open your online store with Yahoo Merchant Solutions

1. Design a professional-looking store.
   No prior experience needed — step-by-step guidance and simple tools make it easy.
2. Easily upload products to your store.
   Use their convenient tools and step-by-step wizard.
3. Track sales, page views and more.
   Monitor your site performance with 40+ reports that give you insight into what customers are doing on your site.
4. Accept credit, debit, and PayPal payments.
   For quick secure payment processing.
5. Drive traffic and customers to your site.
   Enjoy exclusive discounts on search engine marketing campaigns from Microsoft ($75) and Google ($50).

Best of all they have a fantastic 24/7 toll free customer support, which is a great help if you’re not very net savvy with coding or face any other problem.

For most people and businesses looking to sell online, an e-commerce hosting solution like Yahoo! Merchant Solutions provides advanced e-commerce functionality without substantial investment and contracts.  It is truly the best of both worlds.

Employers in all fields today look for candidates who know a bit more than the usual Windows, Internet and MS-Office. They would like you to know about blogging, social media, new media etc. You should be aware of the latest developments, know the difference between a Kindle and an iPad. Its an era of information overload, where each and every employee needs to be tech savvy to survive, or perish to the line of the unemployed.

Learning web skills is an essential component, especially if you work in a media related industry. The knowledge of creating facebook fan pages, internet marketing, web design, search engine optimization etc would certainly hep in getting the word out about the product or service a company or individual has to offer.

Top 5 websites I recommend for learning web development and internet marketing:

1. Digital Point Forums: One of the biggest webmaster forums in the world. Has thousands of people online at most hours..since people all over the world are members. I learnt most of my web skills in the different boards on this forum..starting from adsense to blogging to installing scripts to template design. The forum also boasts of a thrivi9ng marketplace where you can buy and sell products and services.

2. SitePoint Forums: Probably the second most popular forum after Digital Point, but said to be much more professional. Their ebooks and paperback books on web development, design and programming are said to be one of the best resources for specialized web training.

3. Mashable.com: Founded in 2005, Mashable is the top source for news in social and digital media, technology and web culture. With more than 30 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the most prolific news site reporting breaking web news, providing analysis of trends, reviewing new Web sites and services, and offering social media resources and guides.

4. Warrior Forums: A great forum where experienced internet marketers share knowledge on social media marketing, ways generating online revenue and has one of the most active marketplaces where unique and original internet marketing products are sold.

5. SEO Chat Forums: Learn and discuss Search Engine Optimization, the basis of getting ranked high for certain keywords on Google and other search engines.

There are many more resources available online and offline, once you learn the basics from the above, you might get sufficiently interested to start with the advanced stuff. The aforementioned sites will certainly hep with that as well. Many members at Digital Point, Sitepoint and Warrior forums are old and experienced members and discussing things with them can always help you get a head-start on the ways and means. Its easier than learning from books, as its easy to get bored when reading up technical stuff. Learning by discussions in forum boards on the other hand, although slower, is a much more interesting way at getting to your goal.

This is particularly true when you use a CMS (Content Management System) based site, e.g. I am using a blog software cum CMS called WordPress. It is the most popular blogging platform for self hosted domains (more on domain names later in this article). The beauty of WordPress is that you can easily modify it too look like a professional website or blog, with minimum skills required on your side. It is also extremely easy to update, unlike static HTML and CSS based websites.

Building a wordpress powered site is extremely simple, and you can make your own if you follow these steps:

1. Buy a domain name

2. Purchase web hosting

3. Change Nameservers in domain registrar

4. Install wordpress with one-click

5. Add a theme (template) and some plugins

And thats all, you will be ready with  a website of your own that requires minimum maintenance and is easiest to update. Now I will expand upon the steps mentioned above.

1. Buying a domain name

A domain name is simply the address that you want for your website. For example, the domain name for this website is “lughole.net.” The domain name for Facebook’s website is facebook.com and so on. Now you have to decide what kind of name you want and its extension. By extension I mean whether it will be a .com, a .net or a co.uk domain name. There are in fact a lot of geographic extensions for domain names and some people and businesses like to have their domain names cater to a particular region. For example, Google’s website for India is google.co.in while for the UK its google.co.uk.

Where to buy domain names?

When you buy a domain name, you actually register it with yourself for a period of time, which is a minimum of 1 year. You can renew your domain registration just before its expiration or earlier.

There are a lot of Domain Registrars from whom you can buy a domain. However, I would like to recommend the best ones for my site’s readers. So here goes:

- If you are based in United Kingdom, NAMESCO is the best domain registrar for you. Just go to the website, search for a domain you prefer and if its available just buy it. A two-year registration for a .co.uk domain costs 8 Pounds here.

- For US, and the rest of the world, GoDaddy is usually the preferred place to buy domain names. It keeps running discount promotions and has the best rates.

All legal domain registrars are governed by a body called ICANN  – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

2. Purchasing Web Hosting

When you think of buying web hosting, think of it like buying a hard disk – the only difference is that this hard disk lies somewhere on the Internet – and is used to keep your website’s files accessible to people. When you buy web hosting you get two things – webspace and bandwidth. Webspace is of course the amount of space you get for keeping the files, while bandwidth refers to the amount of traffic (visitors) that the site can handle each month.

Where to buy Web hosting?

Buying a web hosting package can get your pockets shrunk if you don’t take correct advice! There are all sorts of web hosting plans available. Many companies will try to convince you to purchase a super expensive plan which you actually won’t need. A wordpress site does not require gigantic resources so its quite cheap to maintain. However, beware of dubious web hosts who sell you hosting for as low as $1 a month. Many are either scams or link farms. Here’s what I recommend

- If you plan to host just one site, you could purchase the hosting from where you bought your domain name – I would only exclude GoDaddy here since it is an expensive host and offers the least freedom for website growth.

- A great place to buy web hosting is FatCow. They have an annual package that saves you a lot of money and gives you a domain name for free when you buy it.  Also, the FatCow hosting has a fairly small carbon footprint as its run on wind energy.

- If you plan to host unlimited websites, then HostGator is the host for you. In fact its great for hosting single sites as well, but FatCow beat it in the annual price package. Coming back to multiple site hosting, you can host unlimited sites with hostgator for $7.95 a month, and that’s a steal.

3. Changing Nameservers

Steps 1 and 2 were really the main steps in the whole process. Now comes the third step, which needs to be followed only if you purchase web hosting from a place different from where you purchased the domain name (actually, this is usually the case).

Your new webhost will have emailed you the DNS settings or more specifically the Domain Name Servers with your web hosing info. Don’t worry its not as complicated as it may sound. These are usually just two or three server addresses. You need to input these addresses into the nameservers panel in the domain management tab of your domain registrar.

Inputting hostgator DNS into Godaddy's domain management

Once you save the settings, the new DNS settings for your domain registrar can take around 24 hours to resolve to your web host.

4. Installing WordPress

Once the nameservers are resolved to your web host, you get a blank website. On this blank website you will now install wordpress. The slow and traditional way is to download the latest wordpress script from wordpress.org, upload it via an FTP program to your web hosting and then install it using MySQL.

However, we can do it faster with just a few clicks!

a.) Login to your webhost’s control panel (they will give you the login info when you buy a hosting), find fantastico or any other automatic script installer that is there in the website control panel and click on it.

b.) From the Fantastico interface, scroll down until you see the Blogs section and just below it, you should see WordPress in the list. Click on the WordPress
c.) Fill in the blanks, e.eg. the user-name and password you want for the site, title and description, email address etc. Then click “install”. Once installed fantastico will give you a summary of the installation process. Click on “finish installation”, and wordpress will be installed on your domain.

5. Adding Themes and Plugins to WordPress

WordPress has hundreds of thousands of developers – most of whom develop themes (templates) and plugins for FREE. They just want credit for their work in the footer of a site and are happy to get donations. You can find a whole lot of free wordpress themes in the wordpress codex.

Installing wordpress themes

- The first thing you will want to do is download the theme or plugin to your computer and remember where you saved it. DO NOT unzip the file, just leave it the way it is.

- Now log in to your WordPress admin panel and click on “Add New Themes” or “Add New” under plugins.

- Click “Upload” in the menu at the top of the page then click the “Browse” button on the next page. This will take you to your computer where you can navigate to the file you downloaded. Select the file by clicking on it, then click the “Open” button, then the “Install” button.

WordPress will automatically upload, unzip, and install your theme or plugin. All you need to do at this point is to activate the theme or plugin and configure any settings that may be available.

WordPress plugins

These are files that add functionality to a wordpress powered site. For example,. this site uses plugins to generate social bookmarking icons under each blog post. It also uses a plugin to generate a contact form on the contact page. The way to install plugins is almost the same as with themes.

I hope this guide is understandable and helps you learn how to setup a wordpress powered site like this one. I am always happy to  guide friends and can offer professional wordpress services on demand.

1. Dont Spam

1. Keep in mind as you find college and university blogs, that you really ought to post highly relevant comments. Go out of your way to provide value when you post comments, or your comments will get killed.

2.: Do not post the same exact comments on every single blog. You want to avoid “blog spam” as you generate your links. If you’re not adding value and your comments are not unique enough, you run the risk of getting banned by Google.

3. Some people might feel that these tactics are “black hat” or “gray hat” search engine optimization
(SEO) but our position is that if you are providing value, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t enjoy links from .edu sites.

2. Find the right blogs

It isn’t enough to know about college and university blogs. You need a weapon to find the right blogs under the right circumstances.

The weapon of choice is definitely Google.

Here are the first two secrets:

site:
inurl:

So, your search query should start like this:

site:.edu inurl:blog

This tells Google to return a list of results that includes .edu sites that have blogs. Last I counted, this
will result in about 842,000 results. Here’s a small glimpse of what you’ll get with the search above:

3. Focus on the Good Blogs

You want the “sweet” .edu blogs. Ones that don’t cause you any pain or grief. Don’t do any work until
you know you’re going to strike gold.

Right now, your search query looks like this:

site:.edu inurl:blog

This is good, but it isn’t great. You want to narrow down your search to only those blogs that allow you to comment on them. There are plenty of closed blogs, i.e., blogs that are on .edu sites but you cannot post. These are a waste of your time. So, you need to adjust your search query to look like this:

site:.edu inurl:blog "post a comment"

This will drop your results down to 400-500K, depending on the day you search. I don’t know why it fluctuates, but it does. In any event, that’s still 400-500K blogs available to you.

4. Remove Useless Blogs

You still need more focus. To do that, you have to remove more garbage. You need to eliminate blogs that force you to log in. You need to ignore blogs where you cannot comment. At this point, you’ve narrowed your search using the following search parameters:

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment”

The problem is that many blogs are not open to comments (i.e., they’re closed). So, you need to add another parameter. You need to add a subtraction parameter to eliminate blogs that are closed to comments:

-”comments closed”

So, as you can see, you are subtracting blogs where comments are closed by using the minus sign as well as the “comments closed” text. But, you’re not done! You also want to remove search results where the blog forces you to register and log in. Do you have time to create an account and log in just to leave a good comment on a blog? No way! So, you need to add another subtracting parameter…

-”you must be logged in”

When you do this, you filter out blogs that require you to register. This doesn’t always work, but it is very effective.

5. Find the right niche

You’ve got just the blogs you care about, but now it’s time for one last trick: finding the right blogs for
your niche.

Here’s the (almost) final result:

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -"comments closed" -"you must be logged in”

We use this trick all the time to find outstanding .edu blogs. We then post high quality comments and we get excellent backlinks.

We also get good traffic from .edu blogs when we post high quality comments. So, if you make the investment, you will get good backlinks (i.e., Google Pagerank boost) but also direct traffic from smart, interested readers on your topic.

That leads me to the next point. You can add another word or two to your search to get exactly the right blog. For example, just add “seo” to the search string and you’ll find .edu blogs that are openly discussing the topic, where you can post your comments and get excellent backlinks. Result:

site:.edu inurl:blog "post a comment" -"comments closed" -"you must be logged in" "seo"


Utilize Google Toolbar

If you’re looking to rapidly fill out blog comments, give Google Toolbar a try. You can rapidly update Googl Toolbar with your name, email address and web site URL. Then, you can focus on your comments on the blog.

If you’re trying to whip through a bunch of blogs then Google Toolbar can help you work magic. However… It is important to post quality comments. If you don’t you’ll get them deleted. Also, remember that there is value in the traffic from the links alone. There’s more to consider than just backlinks.

Bonus: You can quickly determine the Pagerank of the blog using Google Toolbar. This is pretty obvious but it will help you decide if your postings is worth the effort or not.

So, start cranking out outstanding comments on .edu blogs and get the backlinks you want!

Google’s Adsense allows for the advertising of other websites that has the same niche as your site. As more people click on the advertisements on your site and they go to the site of the advertiser, you earn some money. Advertisers will pay for traffic that came through your site.

Google is a name that many web users know by heart. Its years of service have built it a reputation that is one of the most reliable in the internet world. That is why you can be sure that having and using Google Adsense can make you earn extra money.

Why should you sign up for Adsense?

First, because AdSense is a very simple and proven solution that already pays for hundreds of thousands of blogs/websites accross the world!

Also, AdSense is provided to you by Google which not only makes it reliable but also trustworthy. Once you have earned money from Google, you can actually trust them to pay it to you!

Finally, because the ads will be contexual, i-e they will be relevant to the content of your blog/site. This way, your visitors will not be offended for seeing the ads on your site.

The admin panel especially warrants a deserving mention. The dashboard has been completely overhauled, with what wordpress developers call a “cleaner, clutter free panel.”

Of course, prominent wordpressers had stuff to say on this all important release. Peter Westwood described it as a marathon achievment with the following stats:

• In development for 185 days (6 months 3 days to be precise).
• Changes to 364 files with 54008 insertions, and 29136 deletions for more detail you can view the diffstat output.
• Patches committed from over 110 different contributors.
• Over 1300 individual changes made for more detail you can view a complete changelog.

Dougal Cambell talks of his experience in testing the beat version of this milestone release and the fact that complex plugin update problem is solved in the stable release.

Matt and Lorelle enjoyed the WordCamp at Dallas and published the announcement from Dallas itself.

Apparently WordPress.com and MU users will get upgraded within the week.

And hopefully, we wont get another wordpress updates for the next 6 months! Just got to know that WordPress 2.6 is scheduled for an August 2008 release. Frankly, I have had enough of updating to a newer version every month during latter half of 2007. At least, this one is 5 months away.