DISQUS

I know so many people who have gone with Hostgator, yet my research seems to indicate that Hostmonster might actually be better. I have to help a client make a decision, and this one's beating me up. Oh well, I'll make a decision soon.

Congrats to everyone. Man, I feel like I've been out of the loop lately.

People worry so much about PR; who cares about that? I rarely use the nofollow attribute, and don't worry about it at all. I'm all about the readers; at least I try to be.

How cute! Love babies, as my wife and I never had any, so I'm glad you shared these with us.

It seems that my niche website makes most of my Adsense money, which is fine with me. I'm hoping my newest site will do some of the same. As Sire said, placement and blend seems to be key.

Good article, Peter. I haven't been big on article writing, mainly because I've always preferred to add any articles I write to my blogs instead. I may explore that again, though, as I've started writing articles for other people, and I know they're using some of those articles on these article directories. And Ezine Articles even sent me a mug; can't be mad at that.

Sidebar question; did you decide to stop taking paid ads?

This actually is a pretty good tactic, and what's ironic is that on the day he wrote that particular item, I'd actually just posted a list post. So, I was ahead of the game; didn't make any money, but I tried. lol

I hadn't realized the tanning business was so cutthroat; wow. I hate when people have to trash someone else to get business. I guess that's the way the world goes, but when it pertains to me, a person will only get one chance to do it.

<abbr>Mitch’s last blog post..How To Write Articles For Others</abbr>

Which one? Seems to be a couple of "latest posts". lol

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Hi Ramana,

To be fair, President Obama didn't quite say it like that. What he said was they were mulling over reaching out to "Islamic extremists" who were tired of Al Qaeda tactics, saying that occurred in Iraq with some success.

I'm of a mixed emotion on this one. As a child of a military man of 26 years, I have no doubts that war is needed at times, and indeed, Pakistan has finally realized it and is showing great gains. At the same time, look at what's happened in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and will probably end up happening in Pakistan. You can conquer, but you can't totally wipe out the Taliban or Al Qaeda unless you can find every single one of them, and every single person in the world who has a little bit of sympathy, and kill them all.

At that point, what's to be done? Unlike the Nazis, who were able to blend into many societies easily enough because of their skin tone and the ability to totally renounce their beliefs (which were probably not their beliefs, but everyone likes being on a winner for awhile), these guys aren't even going to want to fit in. Their beliefs just aren't going to let them. Do we give them their own little plot of land and wait them out until they've all disappeared, or do we just wait for the next suicide bombing to come?

Those are some tough things to think about, and one reason why President Obama holds out the possibility that some of them will get tired of the constant war, the constant moving around, the constant fear of being killed by someone else, and maybe, just maybe, will want to talk about reigning it in and living a regular life again.

Yeah, I don't see it happening either, but if there's even the slightest possibility of turning a few people, it has to be out there as an option.

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Nicely written, Asher. Course, now all the rest of us have to do is find those customers! lol

Just asking, but would #8 cover the topic of doing webinars and the like? I'm thinking that would help to greatly improve recognition if people are comfortable being in front of a crowd, and of course have something to say and share.

Okay Sire, how did you happen to get your link correct, but type it wrong in your comment? lol

I've always said that if you do something stupid, even if it's your right, be ready to accept the consequences for those actions. Sure, she went a little bit over the edge, but he decided to take her on and had no idea who she was.

I decided many years ago not to carry a gun because I used to have a quick temper, and that wasn't a place I wanted to go. At the same time, I've also always kept in the back of my mind to never yell at another driver because that person might have a gun, and I don't want to deal with that. Saying that someone else reacted to something means nothing if they happen to kill you.

Earlier on Twitter I posted a general question to my followers, and someone I don't follow not only responded, but he responded with something that, well, I think it quite questionable to own up to. Will he be chased down because of it? Not by me, but one never knows how someone else will decide to respond to something as controversial as what he said.

Well, it was a long time ago, and I remembered the initial panic in the post, so there you go. I bet no one else remembered even that much! :-)

Very good work, Peter, and I'm glad you've moved up. Course, didn't you also give up doing paid posts when you got hit with a penalty, or something like that? I can't remember what it was. But the link building is probably the strongest thing you did. Congrats!

This was brilliant, and I made sure to share it with folks on Twitter. I actually wrote something like this, and I agree with everything you've said.

Sorry for the second post, but I just realized that my blog link was incorrect; well, that makes a nice case for having time to edit a comment post. lol

I guess I'm kind of old school for my own reasons. For instance, it's not quite true that meta tags are no longer valid; it's mainly only true for Google. You didn't mention Yahoo or MSN or any other search engine, but I've noticed that even when I may have low or no Google ranking, I'm usually doing okay on the other two. So, I'd rather be high somewhere, as there are some people who won't use Google for any reason whatsoever, and to me, it's nice being ranked, and highly, in other places also.

At the same time, I understand your point about the meta description, but I think that one depends on what it is you're writing. If I'm writing an article and I begin the article with a story, there's no way Google has any idea what my article is really about. So, the meta description is there to tell people what my article is about, supported hopefully by my keywords and keyword descriptions throughout the article, bolstered, if only for other search engines, with my meta keywords, links, et al, and I still get to tell my story and weave it into the actual point of the article and all is good. However, if I'm writing something more specific, such as how to improve SEO on blogs, well, that might work better by leaving the description alone because there's no extraneous discussion going on.

So, there are really no absolutes either way. But it's a great discussion to have anyway, and I've enjoyed what you wrote and all the comments.

Oh, as a sidebar to Peter, did you decide to drop CommentLuv, or were you having problems with it?

I hate autofollow on Twitter, and it used to really rankle me. Nowadays I just ignore and delete without reading the messages. I think it's lazy; I take the time to look at each person before I sign up to follow them, and I always check out their websites to see what their about also. I don't need a message coming to me inviting me to look at their blogs or to take them up on their "free" item, which is only a way to grab my email address so they can pimp their products to me on the back end. If you're going to pimp me, at least get to know me first; is that too much to ask?

Not only is spam sticking around, it's getting smarter every day. It was always easy to know what was spam and what wasn't, but nowadays you see spam coming in that's almost on topic, very well written, and sometimes when you track it back, something I do to see if it's legitimate, they've actually created an avatar and may have written a post or two. It's scary, but so far, I've caught them all; I hope.

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It's amazing that you've written this post because I wrote one about two weeks ago saying Alexa was back, after not finding anyone else writing about it at all. I like how they changed their algorithms to check more things, even though I couldn't find out exactly what it was they changed. No matter; they're back as a player, even if, partially, we're still a little bit suspect.

Mitch's last blog post..Verify Your States Dispute Laws

Way to go, Peter. Man, I just want to log in one of these days and see that someone actually clicked on one of my Clickbank products, let alone bought one. Anyway, now I have to chase you and Ben. lol

For a minute there, when I saw this in my reader, I thought someone had hijacked your post; whew! Interesting way you blended these things together. I think number four is probably the most important thing to new people, because there are so many things out there that can trip people up.

One of the problems Joel has, though, is that he didn't learn his own lesson for how NOT to use Twitter. During the election season, he was saying some pretty negative and unfair things about Barack Obama, which led me to drop him for, well, about 5 months, until just recently when, for whatever reason, he started following me. When one is in business, and their business is online, one doesn't always get the luxury of spouting what I considered as "tripe" and expect it's not going to hurt their business, nor their reputation.

That's a big lesson for anyone in business to learn; never forget that you never know who's reading what you're saying on Twitter, so be ready to back it up if need be.