Internet Marketing 2.0

Well it’s been almost a month since I’ve posted anything to my blog… but for good reasons. For one, we finally finished moving into our new place. It is a lot quieter, but we still ended up having to deal with a few major annoyances. On one hand, the people below us constantly slam their door and at night they snore so damn loud you can actually hear it through 3 inches of concrete flooring! On the other hand, I can open the window and hear the ocean from where we live… and that muffles out the snoring a bit. I guess the only way we are ever going to be completely neighbor noise free is when we get our own house.

In between getting moved into our new place, doing our taxes and juggling 50 other things… as most of us tend to do these days, I did find some time to check out a few internet marketing type products and services. I had gotten an email from the creator of StoreStacker, Scott Trimble, seeing if I was interested in promoting Store Stacker. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to particate in that JV since I was in the middle of relocating and had my hands full with other things, but I did end up having a few real good email conversations back and forth with Scott. He is a real cool guy and it was nice to throw ideas back and forth with each other. I ended up buying a copy of StoreStacker for myself and plan on integrating it into my social networking site that is just about ready to launch. Read more

Just a few updates for anyone that comes across this blog before I have a
  chance to clean it up a bit:

1. My cartoon image is being worked on, so that along with a few more minor tweaks and I’ll be finished with the layout and design process of my blog.
2. I’m moving to a quieter location this month (March 2008). The photo of the ocean is about 1 block from where I’ll be living.
3. The whole process of moving will most likely slow down my progress a bit in launching my social networking site and adding content to my blog, but I should be back on track by the 2nd week of April. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get a lot more work done, including begining recordings of podcasts that will be added to my blog.

So, Im really looking forward to April, because by then I’ll be moved into a nice, quiet location where I can begin adding real content to my blog along with a podcast and preparing my internet marketing social network for beta-testers and initial launch. Till then…

In my last post, I mentioned a few easy ways to speed up and increase the performance of your WordPress blog. If you applied the tip about Gzip, one additional benefit besides reducing load time, is that it will also reduce your bandwidth usage to some degree. Also, the Gzip with php tip can be applied to any php script and not just WordPress Blogs. Hopefully, if you downloaded the browser add-on for FireFox called Yslow, you were able to determine other possible issues that might be slowing your Word Press blog down. Yslow is a good overall tool, and like the Gzip tip, Yslow can obviously be used to analyze any website you wish.

My final tip is a bit more advanced. Being able to apply the following speed tweak for your WordPress blog will depend on what type of hosting account you are currently using and what hosting company and platform your running. If your on just a shared hosting account, you probably won’t be able to use this performance tip. If you feel that your at a stage where your blog really needs this performance increase, then you may want to upgrade your current hosting plan from a shared hosting account to either a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or a dedicated server.  Just being on a VPS or dedicated server alone should obviously increase the speed at which your blog and other sites run, but with the following tip, your sites will load significantly faster.  I guess it really boils down to how much traffic your expecting on your blogs and if you are truly ready to take that leap.

If you move up to a VPS or dedicated server and are not comfortable with compiling and installing files in a Linux server environment, you may want to contact the support department of your current hosting provider to see if they can do this for you. If they can’t, it may be time to find a different hosting provider. If you want to check out the Hosting Company that I’ve been using for about  2 years, go here: Web Hosting   I can’t say enough good things about them… they have practically bent over backwards for me anytime I need help with my websites… even the really advanced stuff.  Now for the Advanced tip… Read more