I found a 50% discount for the popular screen recording software BB Flashback. The catch is you have to donate money to DonationCoder.com to be able to access the forum post with the discount code. There was no minimum donation policy when I joined but I am not sure if this will remain the same in the future.

I tested the BB Flashback discount coupon 3 days ago and as you can see it is still valid. The original price is $199. I consider this the best value for money screen recorder. If you can’t afford to buy Camtasia, BB Flashback is the next best thing available.

If you are on a tighter budget, you may want to consider getting BB Flashback Express. There are no editing features in this version and it lacks some other features of the normal version. At only $19.50 after the 50% discount coupon, this is a real bargain!

I won’t do a review of BB Flashback because Donation Coder has already reviewed most of the screen recorders available in the market today.

Tagged As: BB-Flashback, BB-Flashback-Express, Camtasia, Discount-Coupons, Donation-Coder, Screen-Recorder, screen-recording

Categories: Internet Marketing | 2 Comments »

I thought my 1st generation 512 MB iPod Shuffle was dead since last year. I must have left it in my drawer for at least 1 year. Today, I decided to try my luck to see if it can be revived so that I could use it during my run a few hours ago. I suspected my iPod Shuffle had a firmware problem because I remember this was my 3rd iPod Shuffle. I had it replaced twice within a year. This particular iPod Shuffle went dead very shortly after I got it replaced and my 1 year warranty expired at about the same time too.

I don’t like the iPod Shuffle because it seems really fragile. Moreover, it does not have a screen to display my MP3 song titles and I hate using the iTunes software. Nonetheless, I wanted to see if there are any fixes for the infamous iPod Shuffle 1418 error in iTunes 7 since the last time I tried to fix it.

I downloaded the latest version of iTunes after waiting a long time for the download page to load up. Apple must have improved iTunes because they no longer separate iTunes and the iPod software. I used to have a lot of crashes when I plugged in my iPod but I was surprised to see my iPod was actually detectable. Unfortunately, I still received the 1418 unknown error when iTunes tried to update and restore my iPod Shuffle’s firmware.

Just when I was ready to throw in the towel, I did a search on google for “iPod Shuffle 1418″. I realized I was not alone! I saw a web site called 1418Hell.com (down at the moment) that was dedicated to this bug. I scoured Apple’s web site to find the iPod Reset Utility and it took me some time before I finally found a working link to the Windows version.

Here are the official iPod Shuffle Reset Utility 1.0.2 download links:

• iPod Shuffle Reset Utility 1.0.2 for Mac
• iPod Shuffle Reset Utility 1.0.2 for Windows

I ran the iPod reset utility and it fixed my iPod in a matter of seconds. I then launched iTunes to update my iPod Shuffle to the latest 1.1.5 firmware. I was lucky to have some battery life left in it and I loaded my jogging playlist and put this tiny “chewing gum stick” into my pocket. The best thing about the iPod Shuffle is it’s size and weight. It is so much more comfortable having this in my pocket when I run instead of my newer Creative Zen Microphoto MP3 player.

To all 1st generation iPod Shuffle owners, I hope you find this page and bring your iPod Shuffles back to life!

Tagged As: 1st-generation, iPod-Shuffle, iPod-Shuffle-1418-Error, iPod-Shuffle-Reset-Utility, MP3-player

Categories: Vincent's Updates | No Comments »

I did not plan on adding on to my previous Google AdSense competitive filter post but I encountered some weird bugs that everyone should know of, including Mr Google.

How To Accidentally Destroy Your Competitive Ad Filter List

You may run the risk of wiping out your entire competitive ad filter list when you REFRESH your browser in the event you see a screen like this:

In the mini screen shot above, I encountered a blank page while I was adding new links to the competitive list. I thought Google was having some problems with their server so I clicked on the refresh button to reload the page. BIG MISTAKE! Do not refresh your browser when you see the screen above. Click on the back button instead! I have alerted Google about this bug but I doubt they can recover my list.

How To Create a Competitive Ad Filter List the Right Way

Google recommends using the c from an Internet Explorer browser. Once you have installed it, you will see a new menu item titled “Google AdSense Preview Tool” when you right click on an empty space on any web site.

This is a sample of the AdSense Preview Tool. What you need to do is check on the ads you don’t want and click on the “Show Selected URLs” link. The default geographic location is set to “Auto”. If you want a more thorough list of ads to block from your web sites, try selecting ALL the countries available to generate loads of unrelated URLs.

Instead of copying and pasting the URLs directly into Google AdSense, I recommend that you create a backup copy of the URLs in a text file in case your list gets wiped out like mine.

I like to use EditPlus to create text files because it has a nice sort feature that helps me sort my URLs according to their alphabetical order and remove duplicates. I usually remove the “http://www.” text from the URLs and include only the domain name in my list. Some web sites have subdomains and you may want to include the subdomain if you plan to allow other ads from it’s domain.

How Google Contradicts Their Own Policies

Google allows you to filter their ads but they do not guarantee that the ads in your filter list will be blocked from your web sites. This Google AdSense FAQ says, “Please note that Google does not commit that all ads for the websites that you add to your competitive ad filter list or ads containing objectionable content will be prevented from display on your site”. This doesn’t make sense to me at all!

My Open Letter To Google AdSense

Please consider these new features in your next Google AdSense update to allow Google and all your wonderful customers to make more money together.

• Integrate Google Webmaster Tools with Google AdSense to verify ownership of our web sites so that we may block ads for a specific channel, web site, URL.
• The competitive ad filter list should be unlimited instead of the current 200 limit.
• The crazy bug that wipes out the competitive ad filter list should be eradicated.
• Google AdSense should allow their webmasters to define tags that related to their web site and tags that do not relate to their web site to improve the relevance of the Google AdSense ads.

If more and more people bug them about these changes, they might relent and implement them soon. So please do your part and tell Google AdSense to listen to their customers and make a change.

Tagged As: Competitive-Ad-Filter, EditPlus, Google AdSense, Google-Webmaster-Tools

Categories: Google AdSense | 3 Comments »

I just downloaded and read Social Media Daily by Michelle MacPherson. Overall, I think it is a very good guide on social web sites. However, I need to point out in my Social Media Daily review about the theoretical benefits and the work required to get this social traffic to your web site.

Tagged As: Social-Media-Daily, Social-Media-Daily-Review

Categories: Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

If the Google AdSense sites that appear on your web sites are very well targeted for the content of your site, you won’t need to use the competitive ad filter. However, if you have web sites that do not get the right bunch of ads, you should use the competitive ad filter to block those untargeted ads from your web site to increase the chances of getting a more targeted ad.

The big problem with Google AdSense is they consider ads you wish to block as “competition”. Personally, I do not think of them as competition but annoyances. Once you enter a domain name into the competitive filter list, it will get blocked throughout your account. All of your web sites will not be able to display these ads.

As you can see from my competitive ad filter list, I have disabled some useless “Oasis spa” ads and other holiday related ads. If I create a web site about holiday topics, I will not be able to have these ads on my holiday sites even though they are targeted to my site’s content. Heaven knows why Google can’t create a “site specific ad filter” instead of the current filter system.

There used to a method of disabling advertisers on your sites based on the estimated bids the advertisers are paying. When the Overture Bid Tool was still working, some webmasters used to run a check on their Google AdSense ads’ advertisers on Overture and disable the lower paying advertisers. This would increase the chances of the higher paying ads to get displayed on your sites. Too bad, we can’t do this now…

Tagged As: Competitive-Ad-Filter, CTR, Google AdSense

Categories: Google AdSense | 2 Comments »

I know I should have “claimed by blog” on Technorati but I could not be bothered until today. Let’s see what happens….

Now that I have claimed my blog, I get my very own page on Technorati. I wonder what difference does this make.

Tagged As: Technorati

Categories: Blogging | No Comments »

I was very disappointed to find out only 6 of the 22 bookmarking sites OnlyWire claims to post to actually work with their service. Check out my OnlyWire review to find out which 6 social bookmarking sites work and which ones don’t.

Tagged As: OnlyWire, OnlyWire-Review, social-bookmarking

Categories: Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

PayPerPost is a blogging advertising network. They pay you to write about advertisers who list their products or services in their directory. I am not 100% sure about the blog requirements but here’s what I know at the moment:

• You need a blog with at least 20 posts in the last 90 days. Therefore, you cannot simply create a new blog and blast 20 posts to qualify. You need a blog that is relatively popular and active to get accepted.
• You will need a PayPal account to get paid.
• You have to post a “disclosure badge” to show readers that your post is a sponsored post.

You can make money with PayPerPost in the following ways:

• Blog about a product or service in their directory.
• Refer people to the PayPerPost network. Your referrals get $15.00 once the their first blog posting is reviewed, approved and then finally accepted 30 days late.
• After you have referred a new member to PayPerPost, you get paid $7.50 if they signed up through a “Review my post” PayPerPost link.
• Advertise your blog with the “PayPerPost Direct” badge to tell prospective advertisers your blogging rate so that they may contact you to blog about their products.

PayPerPost does not enforce you to say nice things about the products and services in their directory. It is totally up to you. However, I am not sure what will happen to you if you write negative reviews about some of their products. There will be lots of opportunities in their directory that will have almost nothing to do with your blog’s target audience and I hope people do not “sell out” by blogging about something totally unrelated to their blog’s main topic just to make a few dollars.

You’ll see more and more bloggers put the following banner at the end of every post. If you sign up and get approved by PayPerPost, you have to option of reviewing this post to make money while I get $7.50 as described above. As of now, I still cannot find anything suitable from PayPerPost to promote on this blog… I hope you can find something suitable.

Tagged As: Blogging, make-money-blogging, PayPerPost, PayPerPost-review

Categories: Affiliate Program Marketing, Blogging, Internet Marketing | 3 Comments »

Froogle.com is now know as Google Product Search. If you look at the bottom of the page, you should see a list of random keywords like:

This keyword list changes every time you refresh the page. I discovered that Keywords Analyzer gets it’s keyword source from this keyword list when you use the “brainstorm” feature. I thought this keyword list was really great at first until I created a little PHP script below to grab all the possible keywords into a text file…

What I did was to keep on checking the site for new keywords. I did it for a couple of hours and grabbed a total of 954 unique keywords. I came to the conclusion that this keyword list is a gimmick! Google doesn’t update this list of keywords. My script returned 954 unique keywords last year and it Google is still returning the same old 954 unique keywords this year!

I contacted Google to find out if they have some sort of API to retrieve the latest search keywords made by their users. From what I found out, there isn’t such a service yet. Therefore, if you see any keyword research software claiming they have Froogle (Google Product Search) keywords as one of their sources, you might as well just download the 954 unique keywords from my blog!

Tagged As: Froogle, Google-Product-Search, Keywords, keywords-analyzer

Categories: Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

There has been great improvements in the XML Sitemap industry with MSN (Moreover.com) and Ask.com now accepting XML sitemaps to improve the indexing of your web sites.

How To Create Sitemaps

If you are using a WordPress blogging platform like mine, you should download and install Google Sitemap Generator beta version 8 and the Yahoo Sitemap converter script as soon as possible. The Google Sitemap Generator script now pings to all the search engines I mentioned above.

For non-WordPress web sites, you may require a PHP script like the XML-Sitemaps.com Sitemap Generator script to generate an XML and Text file based sitemap for you automatically. This script took me about 2 weeks to get it right. I bought the script when it was version 2.5.3 and I could not get it to run on my site properly due to memory leaks and other bugs with the script. During the same time, other customers were also experiencing similar problems and we started to complain to the author about the crazy amounts of memory required to run this script. Finally, the author fixed some of the memory issues and released version 2.6.0 at the end of July and everything has been running smoothly for me ever since.

Read my review of the XML-Sitemaps.com Sitemap Generator if you would like to learn more about this script.

How To Ping the Search Engines

You could use the free service or software at the Search Engines Sitemap Submitter to submit your sitemap to Google Sitemaps, Yahoo Site Explorer, MSN (Moreover.com) and Ask.com at the same time. The scripts mentioned earlier will have a ping option for you to automatically alert most of the search engines once your sitemaps have been generated

How To Create Google and Yahoo Webmaster Accounts

You will need to create a Yahoo and Google account to access their webmaster tools. Yahoo has a Yahoo Site Explorer area while Google has a Google Webmaster Central area for webmasters. After adding your site to your accounts, you will have to upload a special “HTML verification key” to your web site to verify your ownership of your web sites.

After you have verified ownership of your sites, you may submit the URLs of your sitemaps to Google and Yahoo. Unfortunately, MSN and Ask.com do not have webmaster portals yet. As a result, I have no idea if my submissions to them are working or not.

The Art of Timing Your Sitemap Submissions

I personally use sitemaps to try to boost the indexing of my web sites after most of my web pages have been indexed. For example, if a web site of mine has a total of 20 pages and 10 of them have been indexed by Google, I submit my sitemaps to try to get the search engines to index the remaining 10 pages. I do not use sitemaps for a totally new web site because I am afraid Google or the other search engines might think of me a spammer. This is purely speculation on my part and I may be wrong.

However, I do know that if you have a black hat web site and you inform Google of all your spammy black hat web pages with sitemaps, be prepared to have your site black listed immediately and disappear from Google.com. Sitemaps are the “kiss of death” for black hat web sites but if you’re a good webmaster that creates valuable content for the internet community, the search engines will literally “eat up your site” and index most if not all of your web pages after you submit your sitemaps to them.

Tagged As: Ask.com, Google-Sitemap-Generator, Google-Sitemaps, Moreover.com, MSN, XML-Sitemaps.com-Sitemap-Generator, Yahoo-Site-Explorer, Yahoo-Sitemaps

Categories: Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »