I was trying to move some domains out of RegisterFly. One of them was going to expire soon so I knew it would be too late to try to move out of RegisterFly. The other domain I had a long way to go before expiry. I have tried to ask RegisterFly’s support on how to find my domains’ EPP codes but they are not responding. I searched on Google.com for help and realised a lot of people are having the same problem right now.

I read a post in a forum that mentions you can enter a random number into NameCheap.com’s EPP code verification box and get your RegisterFly domains transferred without any problems. I tried that for 2 of my domains and I am still waiting for the whole thing to process. I am not sure if it is going to work. It seems like RegisterFly is having problems with their EPP code system.

Therefore, if you have domains that are going to expire at RegisterFly, it would be better if you extend your domain with them for another year and move out once that extension is confirmed. My domain transfers have been dragging on for almost 2 weeks and they are not resolved.

Do yourself a favour next time, don’t do business with RegisterFly.

Tagged As: domain+renewal, domain+transfer, epp, registerfly, web+domain

Categories: Internet Marketing | 7 Comments »

This will be one of the last Blogger generators I will review. There is one last blogger generator (Easy Blogger Creator) I am testing and that will be it. After testing these software, I do not think it would be smart to believe you can outsmart Google by posting junk to a bunch of blogs to get indexed and ranked well in their search engine. I have tested out “white hat” methods like submitting a new web site into directories and it works better than the “black hat” blog and ping method.

Furthermore, Google is constantly updating Blogger.com to prevent people from creating zillions of spam blogs. There is one thing that Google can and probably will do to prevent the mass creation of spam blogs is by enforcing email validation. Right now we can get away by entering “dummy email addresses” that do not work. I believe in the future they will turn this on and it won’t make sense to spend that much time to work around their system once again.

Categories: Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

I used to use RegisterFly a lot but not anymore. I like their cheap prices but their system sucks. I wonder why they could not create a better system. Their programmers must be mediocre!

In this blog entry, I will go through some dos and don’ts when using RegisterFly. Should you fail to apply some of these tips I mentioned, be prepared to spend a lot of your precious time fixing them. Time is money, if you do what I say, I guarantee you will spend less time getting their system to work.

1. Do not submit replies to your support tickets if RegisterFly has not replied

I learnt this the hard way. RegisterFly puts you in a queue when you submit your support request. Should you reply to your support request, you will put to a lower position in the queue. I don’t really understand how this works exactly but I think it is very stupid. Other support systems have an urgency criteria for you to select from something like critical to not so important issues. RegisterFly uses a “first come first served” queue system. They push you back to the back of the queue if you reply to your own support ticket too many times.
I highly recommend you pick up the telephone and call their support team directly if your issue has not been resoved in a reasonable amount of time. They seem to get things done faster this way. Please try to be polite to their staff, it is not their fault. It is the fault of the people who created such an inept system.

2. Do not use their “whois protection” service

One of the things that attracted me to RegisterFly was their free “whois protection” service. Don’t use it! Why? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work. I remember I had to enable ProtectFly for my domains one by one because the mass update form doesn’t work!

Simply enter RegisterFly’s contact information and address in your domain’s profiles to get a “fake ProtectFly” profile. Alternatively, enter some “dummy data” and save it. Whenever you need to update your domains’ information, load it up and mass update all your domains at once. Sometimes their mass update tool does not work and you will have to update them one by one. You have been warned!

3. Create multiple RegisterFly accounts to organize your domains

I highly recommend you create multiple RegisterFly accounts to organize your domains. I use multiple accounts for the different groups of web sites I own. It is so much easier to mass update information and get support for my domains this way. You may “push” your domain to another RegisterFly account quickly and easily. This is one feature that I am very proud of RegisterFly because I have not experienced any screw ups here.

4. Always fund your account before purchasing domains

It is not a wise move to enter your credit card at the end of the domain checkout process. RegisterFly is famous for charging you for error purchases. What that means is you pay money even when the order did not go through. If you do not wish to go through lengthy chargeback and refund procedures, simply plan how many domains you wish to purchase and deposit the exact cost of those domains to your account.

One more thing… Do not use PayPal as a checkout option. I thought using PayPal during checkout means that my PayPal money will go into RegisterFly’s PayPal. My PayPal money went into my RegisterFly account instead and I had to do another order to complete my initial order. It is like paying for an item with an ATM card and having the cashier withdraw cash from your ATM card via their cash drawer and you return that cash to them. Does that make sense to you? What a waste of time!

5. Call them up if you are using a totally new DNS

If you wish to create your own DNS for your web sites, don’t use RegisterFly. Get another domain registrar to do this work. You cannot trust RegisterFly for something as important as your DNS domains.

Sometimes your web host might assign you with DNS RegisterFly has not seen before. When this happens, RegisterFly will give you an error when you try to link that DNS to your domains. I find the support staff too slow on these issues. Simply call them up and tell them to add your DNS to their “registry”. This will allow RegisterFly to let you to use this DNS for your domains. Strange I know… but this is how they work.

Conclusion

I might have more issues to bring up but this is all I can recall at the moment. I rank RegisterFly as my second worst online experience after some other major issues with some other lousy merchants. I do not recommend RegisterFly as your domain registrar of choice because the wasted time you spend fixing your issues will cost you more time and time equals to money, therefore you are wasting your precious time and money on them when you could get better deals for your domains elsewhere. If you must use RegisterFly to save money, I recommend following some of all of the tips I mentioned in this blog entry.

Tagged As: dns, domain+name, domain+registrar, domains, registerfly

Categories: Internet Marketing | 18 Comments »

According to Google AdSense’s Blog Opimization tips, this is how you should layout your blog for best results with Google AdSense…

I followed the second example and moved the link unit up to the top of the page above all the blog entries and just below my menu. I tried the link unit on the just like the first example and it did not work very well for me so i removed them. Through my Google AdSense AdLogger logs. I highly recommend AdLogger for your Google AdSense tracking needs. It is free and open source. I bet some of the paid Google AdSense trackers are modified versions of AdLogger.

I might try the 120 x 600 pixel skyscraper ad on the right hand side of this blog. Google allows a maximum of 3 ads on your web sites. I do have 1 more ad to place on my site if I choose to. Some people recommend putting 3 Google AdSense ads on your web site while others do not. Whatever you have read about optmizing your sites for Google AdSense still requires testing to verify if it works positively or negatively on your web site.

Tagged As: google+adsense, google+adsense+optimization, google+adsense+tracker

Categories: Blog Updates, Google AdSense | 2 Comments »

I have been rather quiet lately and I have been hesitant about posting new content to my blog. Why? Because most of the products I have been testing are crap and I have been through quite a bit of “hell” wasting my time and money on them. I was afraid my tone would not be too positive and it would affect the whole tone of my site with all these negative posts.
I reckon over 80% of the internet marketing products I bought over the last two and a half years are nonsense. That is why you see so many negative reviews on my blog. On one hand, I don’t want to write negative reviews about people’s products because I don’t really like to step on people’s toes. My friend told me if you keep on doing this, you won’t get many joint venture offers. On the other hand, some of these internet marketing products are so crappy I feel I must share my experience with you to add some balance to all the marketing hype (lies) out there.

The worst case scenario is I write a negative review about someone’s product and that person will never invite me to do joint ventures for his products. I am fine with that because he is pushing junk to people anyway. I am not here to be a internet marketing guru who “sells shovels” to people. I don’t care about becoming famous in this internet marketing industry. My bank account will be smaller because of my unwillingness to play along with their marketing hype (lies). I believe I can live with that rather than sending “cut and paste promo emails” to my newsletter subscribers about junk products every now and then.

I feel I am now ready to resume blogging again after taking some time out from my blogs. My next post will be on how to deal with the monster RegisterFly and reviews on 4 SEO tools I tested this week. You will be surprised at which one of the 4 SEO tools is ranked the last in my opinion.

Tagged As: Internet Marketing, registerfly, search-engine-optmization, seo

Categories: Internet Marketing | 4 Comments »

There is no perfect domain registrar on this planet. Over the years I have purchased domains from at least 5 different domain registrars and I have compiled a list below on where I get my domains from today.

.ORG Domains

Reseller Club is my first choice of .ORG domains because they cost only $1.49 for the first year if you are a Reseller Club reseller. You will need to put in a deposit of $199 to open a reseller account. Once you have done that, you may create a customer account to buy domains at your wholesale price.

.NET Domains

RegisterFly is the way to go for .NET domains. During a weekly 48 hour promotion period, you will be able to grab a .NET domain for only $2.99. Check out RegisterFly’s Fly Paper every week before Thursday EST to see what promotions they have.

Unfortunately, RegisterFly’s system does mess up very often and I will go into greater detail about how to use RegisterFly without pulling your hair out in another post. If you can’t get a $2.99 .NET domain from RegisterFly during the promotion period, get it from NameCheap.com at $7.98 instead with the latest coupon code from Domain Name Coupons.

.COM Domains

I choose NameCheap.com for .COM domains because their system is much more stable than RegisterFly. I am tempted by RegisterFly’s $6.99 promotion but for a $1.00 difference, I do not wish to go through all the drama to get RegisterFly to work properly.

.INFO Domains

RegisterFly used to have this crazy $0.60 .INFO domain sale every Friday morning EST. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Now they have increased the price to $0.75. If you’re only buying a couple of domains from RegisterFly, it would be manageable. If you plan to buy hundreds of them, I would recommend that you be mentally prepared to spend a lot of time fixing all the errors you get in RegisterFly’s system.

Reseller Club has caught up with RegisterFly with their “Mega Bargains Month” promotion. They are selling .INFO domains at $0.99. This is $0.24 more per domain than RegisterFly. I highly recommend you to avoid RegisterFly if you do not have a lot of time to burn. Just do a search on Google for “RegisterFly Complaints” and you will get what I mean.

Conclusion

I would normally avoid RegisterFly if I need to get my domains urgently. I used to plan my domain purchases around RegisterFly’s promotion period. Now, I simply purchase it from the alternative domain registrar as mentioned above.

RegisterFly is cheap but it comes at a price of your time. Everything that can go wrong might go wrong when you use RegisterFly. Their system is so crappy it is almost insane! In my next post I will detail how I use RegisterFly to purchase domains to get the most out of RegisterFly and to reduce my anger levels.

Tagged As: domain+registrar, domains, namecheap, registerfly, registrars, reseller+club

Categories: Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »

I have been using Site5.com for over 1 year. I used to have nothing but good things to say about them but in the past 3-4 days my opinion of their service changed dramatically. I have removed the Site5 link in my footer because I no longer endorse them.

They quietly shutdown my web sites without telling me in advance because they were taking up too much resources. I am using a mid-range plan at their web site that allows me to host an unlimited number of domains. I use Site Uptime to check if Site5’s servers down and they were not down in the past 3-4 days. In fact their servers rarely go down. Therefore I don’t think I can claim anything for the “downtime guarantee” even though my web sites appear “blank” in my browser.

If I did not check my web sites manually by entering the URL into my browser, I would have missed this problem and they would continue to treat me as a fool. Their support took over 12 hours to reply to my query and they told me my scripts are using too many “httpd” request and they want me to fix it. I told them I can fix it but not in a day because I need to upload and run them in the browser and since I cannot even access my web sites, I cannot do update my scripts.

This experience has taught me a good lesson in hosting content sites. Get a VPS web hosting plan! That is the minimum plan you need to get to host a hundreds of domains. It will cost about $45 - $50 per month to get a decent VPS web host. I actually have 3 VPS accounts right now and I was planning to move my web sites from Site5 to my new VPS accounts slowly. I need to move out right now to prevent myself from losing more money from Google AdSense.

Here’s some common sense tips before you get your next web host…

1. Search the internet for “company name + reviews” to check out what other people say about the company.
2. Search the forums of the company name to see if there are any complaints and whether they remove the complaints from the forums.
3. Search the internt for “company name + complaints” to check if a lot of people are complaining about the company.
4. Email the technical support staff and not the sales staff to ask them what is their company policy if your web sites grows larger and takes up more resources than you are supposed to use. Do they simple shutdown your web site without notice or give you an advanced warning? The reason why I ask the technical support is get a feel of how their technical support staff. The sales team’s performance can be misleading because they will try to sell you on their service so they might have very fast response times but that does not mean the technical support will be as fast.
5. Email the sales staff to ask them what happens if you decide to cancel your service AFTER the guarantee period. Do they refund you your remaining credit or do they pocket your money?

When I started my first community site, I used a shared hosting plan till my site got too big for them. I switched a couple of web hosts and added a few web hosts to my personal black list because of the way they handle sites that use up too much of their server resources. They are Lunar Pages, HostRocket, HostGator, Site5, and ResellerZoom. You may be using one or more of these services above. If so, you have been warned because they do not seem to have the decency to tell you that your site is using too much resources BEFORE they shut you down. They only tell you that AFTER they shut you down. That to me is plain rude and lousy customer service.

My personal “gold list” of web hosts are ServInt and MadRooster. These people are different, they’ve got class. They will tell you your sites are growing too big for them politely. Their customer support is fast and helpful unlike the others.

Tagged As: madrooster, servint, site5, vps, web+host, web+hosting

Categories: Blog Updates, Google AdSense, Internet Marketing | 9 Comments »

I didn’t realise I have not been posting to my blog for over a month. At the end of last month, I discovered Domain Dashboard, a wonderful software to help you automate the mundane tasks of adding domains to your web host and the tracking of your web sites’ statistics.

Check out my Domain Dashboard review to find out why I give this software 2 thumbs up.

Tagged As: control-panel, cpanel, domain, domain+dashboard, google+adsense, internet+marketing, search+engine+optimization, seo, web+domain, whm

Categories: Google AdSense, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

The blogging universe changes at break-neck speed. I started this blog with Blogger.com till my needs outgrew the limited Blogger engine so I moved it to a WordPress blogging platform.

In the beginning of my WordPress blogging days, I wanted to try out all the different plugins to enhance my blog. I was tempted to add all these cute little buttons to “add my feed to Yahoo, MSN, Google” etc but I didn’t understand how it could help me increase my web site traffic. During my blogger.com days, I even put up a lot of “badges” of the blog directories I belonged to.
As you can see in my blog, there isn’t any “Add feed” or “blog directory badges” anymore. What I have right now is simply 2 links at the footer to my blog rss feed and my forum rss feed. I removed all of them because they are rather ugly, confusing, take up a lot of space, and because I now have FeedBurner to replace them.
Introducing FeedBurner…

FeedBurner isn’t new at all. I ignored it for a long time because I didn’t quite understand how it could benefit me. I used to think “Why do I need FeedBurner when my blog generates an RSS feed for me automatically?”.

Now I know better.

FeedBurner adds a lot of useful bells and whistles to my blog’s RSS feed that WordPress simply cannot do. Now I am able to track the number of people subscribing to my feed, limit the number of characters per feed item, and have my own FeedBurner feed page.

Take a look at some of my RSS feeds. Click on them and you will see a nice FeedBurner page with all those “add feed” buttons and a list of compatible RSS readers. The old feed was simply a XML file and if you clicked on it with your browser, you would see a bunch of meaningless text.

• Vincent Rich’s Internet Marketing Blog
• Vincent Rich’s Interent Marketing Forum

All my RSS feeds are now processed through FeedBurner. I think of FeedBurner as clothes for my “naked” RSS feeds. FeedBurner makes my RSS feeds look good. I highly recommend you to use FeedBurner if you have a blog. Take an hour or so to configure it at your blog. It’s well worth the effort.

Introducing Tagging…

Before I learnt about Technorati tags, the only tag I knew about in the internet world were HTML tags. Technorati tags are similar to HTML tags but they serve a unique purpose.

See those links at the bottom of this post after the words “Tagged As”? Those are my Technorati tags. I am very new at this and I think they are supposed to add this blog post’s link to a Technorati tag page.

WordPress has a built-in pinging tool that activates after you create a blog entry. Technorati.com is one of my ping URLs and after I ping them, they should visit this blog post and see my Technorati tags.

I actually hid my tags in my source code. Simply view the source and you will see some tags at the end of this blog post’s content. I am not sure if this will work with Technorati because I hid them from human eyes but I am sure a machine will be able to read it. The tags are still part of my RSS feed so I don’t think it will be an issue. I’ll have to wait and see.

Introducing Social Bookmarking…

I personally haven’t used these sites. You can bookmark this blog post at some of these social bookmarking sites by clicking on the square icons at the end of this post. I am not sure how these bookmarks will help my blog, I suppose they will help me get some incoming links to my blog when you bookmark this post.

Tagged As: Blogging, feedburner, internet+marketing, rss, tag+and+ping, tagging, vincent+rich

Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging | 3 Comments »

If you missed my previous post on my Major Blog Renovation, please take a look at the “before photos” to see how my blog used to before today. After watching Michael Cheney’s AdSense Videos (AdSense Videos review coming soon), I realised I wasn’t maximizing my blog’s Google AdSense earning potential. Therefore I made the following changes to my Google AdSense ads:

1. I dumped the leaderboard ad at the top of the blog

I wonder why I put this up there in the first place. I guess it was convenient to do so at that time. The clickthrough rates for this type of ad sucks pretty bad because it looks too much like an ad.

What I have right now is the 336 x 280 large rectangle ad you see on the top left of every screen below the post titles. I embedded the ad seamlessly into the content without using any HTML tables. You can resize your browser window and the text around will “wrap” perfectly around the ad. I suggest you view the source code of this page to see how it is done with a simple “div” tag around your Google AdSense code. It’s much easier than using a HTML table and it looks prettier as well.

I had to do a little bit of PHP programming to show this ad only on the the first post of the page to prevent it from displaying an ad at every single blog entry. If you’re interested to know how it’s done, contact me and I will send you the WordPress template source code. You can’t tell by looking at the HTML source code.

2. I removed the Google AdSense affiliate ads

I used to have these square Google AdSense ads at the bottom right of my blog. If someone registers after clicking on my ads and makes $100, I get $100 from Google AdSense too. I also randomly shuffle between this Firefox with Google Toolbar ad and I get $1 when someone installs Firefox with Google Toolbar.

The earnings from the Firefox ad was too pathetic to justify taking up space over there. Furthermore, I haven’t seen any of my sub affiliates make over $100 yet.

I replaced the ads with a tiny 160 x 90 link unit. Check out the “Vincent Rich’s Network” box and you will see the ads over there.

3. I am finally tracking my Google AdSense ads

I didn’t want to pay money to get a Google AdSense ad tracker so I didn’t track my ads for a long time. Then I stumbled on the open source AdLogger script while I was browsing some Google AdSense related forum. I bet some of the paid scripts are actually AdLogger modifications.

I can now track how many clicks were made on my site and which ad they clicked on. The default Google AdSense tracking ability can only track how much money you made on your web site but it doesn’t track which ad or which page the click came from. You can even prevent click fraud by limiting the number of clicks on your ads. If the number of clicks exceeds your desired number of clicks, your ads will automatically disappear to that click fraudster.

The road ahead…

I will have to monitor my Google AdSense earnings and my AdLogger logs to see if my current setup is actually more profitable than the previous one. I am confident the large rectangle will work better than the leaderboard but I have doubts about the adlink unit ad. Only time will tell….

Tagged As: Blogging, google+adsense, internet+marketing, make+money, vincent+rich

Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging, Google AdSense | 3 Comments »