Brent Crouch - My Online Journal

This has to be the most absurd and idiotic thing Microsoft has done to date lately.

Wiki says, Advanced Systems Format (formerly Advanced Streaming Format, Active Streaming Format) is Microsoft’s proprietary digital audio/digital video container format, especially meant for streaming media. ASF is part of the Windows Media framework.

Did you get that? ASF is a Microsoft was developed by Microsoft. It is their audio/video proprietary format. Many camcorders, cell phones, and web cams produce video in this format. Since this is Microsoft’s proprietary format and it is widely used, wouldn’t it seem reasonable to any intelligent human that Microsoft’s Windows Media Player would play the video? Well, if you are using Windows Vista, it doesn’t!
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January 4th 2009 was my biggest day ever for Google Adsense earnings.  I finished the day with $76.33.   I’ve seen a dramatic increase in Adsense earnings since I took my SEO Project site from position 5 to position 1.  I am amazed at how much moving up 4 spots made.

Today is only halfway over and I’ve already earned $46.86. I may have a new record.

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A few weeks ago, I noticed an increase in traffic from one of my project sites TaxLienProperties.net.  After some checking, I realized my site was now ranking #1 for my primary keyword in Google. At first, I thought it was no big deal. I’ve had my sites bounce all over the place and wasn’t sure if my new position would be permanent or not.

Luckily, it was a permanent fix! Three weeks later, I’m still ranked #1 for my primary keyword. Checkout the results.

What gave my site the final push?  There is only one thing I can contribute my latest success to.  It’s a software called Bookmarking Demon (affiliate link).  I started using Bookmarking Demon a few months ago to bookmark my sites.  In total, I have at least 100 new links to my project site that I can contribute toBookmarking Demon.

I started using Bookmarking Demon with some other project sites to see if I got the same results.  I’ll be writing a review about Bookmarking Demon later next week and plan to feature some video of the software in use.

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Google AdWords is the “King of the Hill” in the PPC arena.  Every year, I spend north of $150,000 in PPC ads with 80% of my spend going to AdWords.  For those around  less SEO savvy, (myself included), AdWords is an excellent medium to drive targeted traffic to any site.

To be successful with AdWords or any other PPC medium, you have to keep track of your clicks versus conversions.  Some keywords will convert into sales better than others.  Some will not convert at all.  This data is critical when determining your bid amount and which keywords you target.

When you are offering a product for sale on your site, you have full control of the infrastructure and can easily setup a mechanism to track clicks versus conversions.     I offer a free guide on my site that includes a script for tracking Paypal transactions with Google Analytics.

These techniques work great when you are in full control of the product being sold, but what about driving PPC traffic to an affiliate network like Clickbank.  In this type of setup, you have zero control over the sales process and don’t have the ability to add your conversion tracking code on the “thank you page”.  So how can you track PPC traffic you send to another site?

There are a couple of methods for this.  In my experience, one works best of all, but I’ll share each of them and the final decision can be yours.  These techniques can be easily modified to work with any affiliate or PPC network.
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I’m a sucker for political discussions. I try and stay as educated as possible on current political events. I wasn’t a huge fan of either Presidential Candidate. It was another year where I was left voting for what I perceived as the lesser of two evils.

When I ran across this post, How Much Is NewsMax Spending On PPC over at Dan Thies’ blog, I was sucked right in.

Dan’s post is a good read. While we share some political similarities, it’s clear we have some differences as well. Most of our differences revolve around Obama’s birth certificate and whether or not he was truly born in Hawaii or Kenya as his grandmother stated.
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I did something stupid the other day, I downloaded software from a site that was questionable at best. I should have listened to my first instinct and not done it. If I would have, I wouldn’t have got the computer virus that caused my system havoc.

The virus took control of the administrator’s access on my computer. Even though my account was tagged with admin privileges, I couldn’t access the control panel and I was getting a message on start up stating shell.exe missing or corrupt. I was also getting loads of pop ups advertising everything from Snuggle blankets to online casinos.

Cleaning up this infection proved to be a four step process.
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I’m a Firefox user.  I was very frustrated with Firefox for a while. One of the releases I downloaded was frequently locking up and using all my system memory. It would never fail, I’d be in the middle of an important task and Firefox would lock up and I’d lose my data.

When I opened Firefox this morning, a message popped up on my screen letting me know a new version was available. I quickly downloaded the update hoping that someone much smarter than me had addressed my stability concerns. Much to my satisfaction, it looks like someone did. The latest version of Firefox is working much better for me and I haven’t had a single lock up all day!
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Yesterday, I was searching for some software and Google showed me a listing for the national retailer J.C. Penney.  I was a little curious why J.C. Penney would have a listing for software and when I clicked the link, I was redirected to a porn site!

I’m not sure how this hack works, but the redirects were all on the JC Penney server.  This hack was done on the server itself and wasn’t anything that could be done externally.
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Last night, I built a new forum site at http://www.taxlienstrategies.com/. By this afternoon, I had over 200 posts and just as many members. I’d love to say I’m an SEO genius and had ranked the site for some high traffic keywords in less than 24 hours, but that isn’t the case.

I’m trying out a new software I purchase called Forum Post Robot. (Affiliate Link) The software was developed by David Tang of SrtSoft.com. This is the same company that developed Article Post Robot, which is one of the tools I use everyday.
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One of the most important aspects of SEO is off site optimization. This comes in the form of backlinks from other sites. A backlink to your site is like a vote. Theoretically, the more votes your site gets, the higher you will rank in the search results.

In Google’s eyes not all backlinks are created equal. There are several factors in determining how valuable a backlink will be to your site. This includes the page rank of the site your link is on, the amount of outgoing links on that page, the anchor text, and the subject matter of the site linking to you. (is it related to your site)
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