Beware – Domain Name Protection Scam

A month ago, I receive the following letter. At first I thought that someone wanted to buy one of my domain names and seriously searched for tips on how to deal with it. Eventually I found out that this email was one of thousands of scammed letters sent out ot trick people into paying for some bogus company to protect the domain names they are currently have.

You can find out more here.

Dear CEO,

We are the domain name registration organization in Asia, which
mainly deal with international company’s in Asia. We have something

important need to confirm with your company.  On the Mar. 25, 2008, we received an application formally. One company named “Company.” wanted to register following

Domain names: through our body.After our initial examination, we found that the keywords and domain names “beyond sarajevo” applied for registration are as same as your company’s name and
trademark. These days we are dealing with it. If you do not know this company, we doubt that they have other aims to buy these domain names. Now we have not finished the registration of Jiedeng company yet, in order to deal with this issue better, Please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,
…

Make Money from Blogging – 5 Monetizing Methods

By Cindy D. | Published 03/14/07 | Make Money from Blogging | #1

1. 5 Monetizing Methods
2. Brief Explanation

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5 Monetizing Methods
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Okay from what I’ve learned, currently there are 5 ways to make money from blogging.

1. Direct advertisers
2. Get a blogging job
3. Sell products through affiliate links
4. Place contextual ads on your blog (Google Adsense)
5. Get paid by reviewing products or websites.

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Brief Explanation
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#1 Direct advertisers – Advertisers pay you to place their ads on your blog.

#2 Blogging job – You get a job as a regular
blogger. Blogging job pays a bit low and requires a lot of commitment.
However, it’s a different story if you write for a popular blog. I
heard that political bloggers can earn a lot of money because they are
required to update news and write story almost hourly.

#3 Affiliates - Affiliate means to direct your blog’s traffic to online merchants and help them selling their products. For example, I sell tea pots online (haha b/c you are English). So I set up an affiliate program which you join. As a tea lover/drinker, you talk about tea and tea products, the joy of drinking and etc. And somewhere in those posts, you mention tea pots, so you place either my site’s banners or links to my products. If I sell products to visitors coming from your blog, I will give you a commission, either a percentage of the sales or a fixed price.

#4 Google Adsense – You’ve probably seen Google’s
ads every where on the net. If you don’t, let do this: google
something, let say “blog.” Now, do you see a vertical bar on the right
side? These are Google’s ads which are shown based on thecontent of
your search. Advertisers pay Google money for every single “click” on
these ads and every “impression” (ads appear on a site or search
result). This is Google’s core business; they make a lot lot lot of
money. Google has this program called Google Adsense. Once you join
this program and display them on your blog/site (s) along with your
content. If somebody clicks on these ads, you make money. The entry
requirement for GA program is rather low. If you have a site or a blog,
you can join. But beware that a click is only worth a few cents. (The
clicks will have more value if you have a specific and targeted blog.)
However, unless you get a lot of traffic–thousands of visitors per day,
you can not make very much money with GA. You probably make about two or three dollars or less per month.

#5 Review websites and blogs – You get paid for reviewing website and products. For beginners, this might be the best choice.

WWW. or Not and Where Is My PageRank?

For over a month, I was baffled seeing my PageRank disappeared on and off, and didn’t know why. For example, just hours ago, I clearly saw the pagerank of 4, and then later 0. This happened over the course of a month until I discovered that the pagerank of 4 showed only with the full address: www.beyondsarajevo.com. Removing “www” reduces the pagerank to 0.

Will this affect your site? According to Dailyblogtips, it does pose a problem: “Having two different versions might damage you in popular lists and social bookmarking sites as well.”

DBT offers very simple yet detailed explanation on the www or no www issue in addition to provide an easy step-by-step instruction on how to do it.

I followed one of the approaches to enforce only one www. version of my site; everything worked great.

Remember that after the change, previous URLs without www. will be invalid. So if you submitted your blog entries, you have to edit the URLs.

Big Progress on PragueBuzz

I’ve finally sat down and seriously working on my travel site about Prague and the Czech Republic; only then I realized how much work needed to be done. I set up this site last September and did almost nothing beside uploading sporadic posts. Geez! What was I kidding? And I wanted to have the one-stop travel and gossip site for Prague.

So for the past two weeks, I’ve busted my butt off to gather materials and fill up PragueBuzz with a lot of useful and cool content. At least for now, PragueBuzz can be considered a real travel guide. Phew!

Monetize – Not only that, I discovered and implemented a new monetizing source and number of super-relevant affiliate products provided by Viator. I promoted and wrote about this company before but have not found it to be useful until a few days ago. Plus, they have a really nice travel blog.

More meat – PB is nowhere near completion. I need to add more basic information, sightseeing guides and tips (the meat) instead of draining up all my brain power on adding the sizzle and the spice, aka. non important stuffs.

Recruit the first writer – I put an ad on Craigslist seeking writers and bloggers who want to contribute to the site. Two replied. One, a beer buff, has sent me four interesting articles.

Promotion – I just submitted PB to b5media to get more exposure. I think my chance is okay since there are not many blogs in the Travel channel.

That’s it for now. Back to work on PB.

Tags: PragueBuzz, Prague, Travel Blog, Travel Guide

Testing Partial-Feed

Starting from the beginning of March, I will test publishing only partial feed on one of my blogs (not this one) to see if the number of page views and visit change. The other Internetters have been debating about full-feed/partial-feed for awhile, so I want to see if some of the claims apply to my blog. For example:

->Full-feed: More feed subscribers but fewer page views and visits as people just read from their feed readers.

->Partial-feed: More page views and visits because the readers have to go the site to read the posts (if they want). However, this technique might discourages subscribers and even lower the page views if the post titles are not attention-grabbing. People are lazy, so they might not bother to click on the link to go to the site all and eventually stop reading => lower page views anyway.

The test will run the test for a month.

Keotag to the Rescue

I’d been bitching for months that I couldn’t find new and interesting topics for my blogs and almost folded one of my most beloved blogs after leaving it idly for months.

Okay, not blogging too often gave me more time to surf the net. During one of those stumbles,–I was surfing with Stumble Upon–I discovered amazing Keotag. This wonderful tool has changed my blogging experience dramatically, and it will do the same to yours.

You enter a keyword, and Keotag performs a search on many popular news and social sharing sites today: technorati, del.icio.us, google, digg, reddit, bloglines…

Even better, you can subscribe to the search results and see all sort of interesting news related to your searched keyword delivered to your RSS feed reader.

Now, instead of being worried about the lack of topics and news for my blogs, I rather feel overwhelmed by the bulk of it.

Also I read a post on John Chow in which he said something like if you really want to blog, you will find enough information to write about.

I absolutely agree. I stopped blogging for a while simply because I didn’t want to do it anymore.

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Tags: Bohemian Biz, Keotag, John Chow, Blog Block

Someone Please Help! I also Have a RegisterFly Mess

Two weeks ago, my boyfriend complained that he had a problem with Registerfly. He was pretty upset being charged twice for one renewal. He tried to complain but got no result. So two weeks ago, he asked for my domain name registrar to transfer his domain name there. And he did “successfully”; at least we thought it was. I read an article today about Registerfly and its ongoing technical problem beside horrible frauds. It sounds serious.

But…I couldn’t find the original post about Registerfly so I googled for registerfly and came across a few more negative reviews from people who found themselves in this domain name mess. This grievance caught my attention and the name ENOM was just two/three lines below. My we-are-lucky-so-sorry-for-you attitude started diminishing, so I went to whois.net (whois.com was not functioning) to lookup my bf’s domain name.

Oh oh! My suspicion was confirmed. His domain was associated with ENOM, which connects to RL.

If he successfully transferred the domain name to Go Daddy, the information should look like this.

This domain name will be expired in five more days, and I don’t know what to do. I’m sure he won’t either.

3 Things The New Internet Technology Tells About Human Motivation

2. We are motivated to express ourselves – See Flickr, Blogspot, WordPress and many other blogging sites as well as forums.
3. We are motivated to belong to a community – Know MySpace and Facebook.
4. We are on a witch-hunt for information and make meaning out of them – Google. Tagging.

2 Easy Things To Increase Blogs’ Exposure

I’ve been readings a bunch of blogs, articles and books on how to improve blogs and sites’ exposure. I learned many useful and practical tips but many of them involve a long and sometimes complicated procedure. My memory is limited so often time, I did one a few of those thing or forgot all about them in the next few days.

That’s why when I read this article last week, I instantly put the author’s 2 things on my Blog’s Todo-List.

Do one of the following every day.

1. Add an article.
2. Get a back link.

Now, posting a fresh article and get a link to your blogs and sites are actually a long process and involve many sub-steps. But when you see that you only have to do one or two things, you feel that you can actually achieve them.

#2 can be complicated if you seek advice from a SEO guru as you will deal with a lot of technical jargons. But in the beginning, the simplest thing you can do to get a link to your site is by leaving comments on other blogs. Don’t spam though.

10 Useful Tips for Beginner Bloggers

• Why do you blog? - Ask yourself this question. Will you be in it for the long run? Is blogging for you? What are the high and low points associating with your journey of becoming a problogger? I recommend you to read an excellent series of posts from Entrepreneur-Journey. Is it easy to be a problogger? Steve Pavlina will give you a dose of reality and also a much-needed boost of morale from his Kungfu-style philosophy.
• Blogging platforms – Shop around for blogging platform and choose one which fits your needs. After all you will have to work with this software for a long time to come.
• Write and publish posts - Login to copy/paste posts to your blogs is a thing of the past. Check this list to compare and choose among today’s most popular blog editors.
• Produce quality content - There is no definition on what makes a good post. You just have to experiment different writing styles and keep on writing. Remember, practice makes perfect. You can never know the secrets of producing the most-read posts; noone else does. However, you can learn a thing or two from the pros for tips on writing and how to create killer headlines .
• Update frequency - How often should you update your blogs ? John Chow gives you his insightful (sometime nonsense) advice.
• What types of blogger are you? – If Jung still lived, he would have advised you the same thing. Find out your blogging types . Are you the types of bloggers readers crave after?
• Keep up-to-date with the blogsphere - You read hundreds of blogs for information, for fun, etc. How can you keep track of all of them other than occasionally revisiting the blogs to see if they have new posts? Learn about RSS and use a RSS Readers .
• Fine-tune your blogs - Check out the 10 tools for Webmaster, a nicely written post by Lee Dodd. Though Lee is a website publisher, his suggested tools can be useful for blog publishers.
• Attract more readers – You don’t want to be the only one to read your blog right? Then you should read this list which provides 23 ways to invite more readers for your blogs.
• Avoid annoying or pissing off your blogs’ visitors and readers – You can learn a thing or two from Guy Kawasaki’s “The Top Ten Stupid Way to Hinder Market Adoption.” Change “Market” to “Blog” and “Adoption” to “Visitors” or “Readers.”

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Technorati Tags: Blog, Blog Editors, Bohemian Biz, Listmania, Tips and Tricks