There is so many ways to stalk your competitors but my favorite it a little trick with search engines for example with Google. Lets see where your partners site has been noticed from; First go to google.com then in the search bar put in the exact domain ( for example  internet-home-based-business.com ) then click search. You will then see if you did it right now as I’m righting this: Results 1 – 10 of about 1,270 for internet-home-based-business.com.

Then a list of sites:

internet-home-based-business.com: Internet Home Based Business

internet-home-based-business.com. Internet Home Based Business. Home · About internet home based business · BLOG + WEBSITE = $. Posted in February 6th, 2008 … www.internet-home-based-business.com/ – 57k – Cached – Similar pages

» About internet home based business internet-home-based-business …

internet-home-based-business.com. Internet Home Based Business. Home · About internet home based business · About internet home based business … internet-home-based-business.com/?page_id=2 – 19k – Cached – Similar pages More results from internet-home-based-business.com »

Entertainment Jobs, Film & Television Production

… magazine each month, Business Week should be at the top of your list because it covers everything from po http://best-internet-home-based-business.com … www.filmstaff.com/links/Work_At_Home.html – 27k – Cached – Similar pages

Homebased Business

14 Pages Found, 151 Links Found, 13630 Score, http://best-internet-home-based-business.com · Complete Money Making WebSite Setup Free – Work at home and …
emarketingmatrix.com/links/homebasedbusiness.html – 26k – Cached – Similar pages

 

————————–

The trick is some of the listing might not be the site you are stalking, for example the last listing is referring to  best-internet-home-based-business.com

Which is  another site but also probably worth stalking. Basically just keep this in mind when doing this search if the site just has your domain name in another domain.

 

Seems simple but very insightful and what you might not be doing

 

This Article is written by Charles Yarbrough
charlesyarbrough.com who also runs marketingspot.com

 

At the most basic part of how to work from home on the internet there is three main paths.

1. Find a affiliate or reseller program or find a skill like data entry and solicit your services.

2. Find your own product and put a shopping cart on your website. Paypal works great for this.

3. Provide a valuable content for a subscription fee

There is thousands of other way but I want to focus on the top three.

1 .. First find a affiliate or reseller program or find a skill like data entry and solicit your services. This the easiest of all ways to make money on the internet. I recomend finding something that most people use every month and that you use and have a opinion on. For example mps players, you can find a website that specializes in MP3 players and check to see if they have a affiliate program.

If they do then you should start a basic website, even one page is fine. Do not get a free web page or a page from the business that sells the product. This will be much harder to market and get search engine traffic to.

On your website post something eye grabbing like their lowest price MP3 player. Now add test that has to do with this devise on the page in a attractive and professional manner.

Next you should add a blog on the website, I recomend wordpress for this and DWHS for hosting since they have word press that can be added for free easily and they only charge$3 for a basic website.

Make sure and update your blog 3 times a week even if it’s cut and pasting stuff from the website that you are sending customers to. This will eventually make money if website has a good product, make sure and have a friend or you test the website to see if the affiliate program and website itself works well.

2 .. Find your own product and put a shopping cart on your website. Paypal works great for this. This is actually easier then you think. Even if all you sale is candles or toilet paper if the site is clean, professional, and functional you will make at least some sales.

First find a distributer, in this example lets say a local candle maker. At first you will not make much from the candles because you will not buy them in bulk but this starting process is how almost all business with no start up costs will work.

Next sign up for paypal and use there shopping cart option to add the candles to your website and allow for people to buy them. You will also want to make friends with your local shipping office so you can eventually get a shipping discount.

Next build a blog on your website and update it once a week with stuff in regards to candles. You will also want to sale these products on Ebay and Craigslist.

3 .. Provide a valuable content for a subscription fee. This is done in so many ways I couldn’t cover them all but some are EBooks, News, Groups, Content, ECT.. ECT..

For this you don’t need a shopping cart, just a website with some great sales stuff on it and a company like verotel to manage the members and payments

–

Other things to consider:

Get good hosting, slow or dead web pages do not get customers. We recomend www.dwhs.net for this

Link to you blog from at least your front but even better is every page.

Make sure and add images to each blog post, it makes it less boring.

Think of these words first when making a website: clean, professional, and functional

It’s not that bad to have someone else build the website. PageAlive.com does a page for $100 flat

Be patient, search engines take about three months to list and update new sites.

–

Written by Charles Yarbrough for www.marketingspot.com
www.charlesyarbrough.com

It’s coming to a age where having a website is necessary for all business owners. But who has time to update all the new products and business changes on a daily basis? The reality is the majority of business owners update their web page every 6-12 months. Usually this consists of something they think will improve the image of the website. The part that’s commonly overlooked is that updating your website pages and text at least once a month has huge benefits far beyond any benefit of a slight image change.

By updating the web page once a month it adds credibility with customers and even more credibility with the internet process (Search engines and other websites). Search engines will always list a website that is active over stale, plain, and low text (content) websites. The differance between adding even a little more text each month is huge for how search engines will consider your website in the SE ranking system.

Of course adding jiberrish will not help much, but adding good text based stories, information, and by building more pages you WILL make a huge differance. With that said here is the top 5 reasons to update your website atleast once a month:

1. Search Engines – They see changed and content rich web pages as a active website and will always rank this over a stale website.

2. Other Websites – The internet starves for new original information and by adding it to your website regularly you will have a much better chance to get free one way links to your website.

3. Customers – When customers see a website that is updated and has lots of perdinant information they are more likely to save the page to there favorites and come back!

4. Personal Investment – I’m not big on tricking myself but the more you add to your website and see actual results the more fun it will be to add more content and watch your website grow.

5. Website Quality – Eventually you will notice errors or little ways to clean up and make the website more usable when your actively updating it.

The best way to stay active is to add a blog to your website, www.wordpress.com is a search engine friendly and is super easy for anyone to use. Most web hosts like www.dwhs.net has it available for free by the push of a button. For example www.ocfocus.com You can see how the main website is the front line for the business and just adding a link on the bottom of each page to your blog you can have a easily updatability website that the search engines and your customers will love.

The other option is to have a non-static website, you can so this with blog software or any CMS (content management system) www.drupal.com is a good option for this but might require slightly higher hosting fees to run it.

Written by Charles Yarbrough for www.marketingspot.com
www.charlesyarbrough.com

1/18/2008
Forum Black List gets a needed update ( www.forumblacklist.com ) Since the launch in 2006 www.forumblacklist.com has not been updated. The project ran by President and individual webmaster Charles Yarbrough ( www.charlesyarbrough.com )
was seem to be left aside until 1/17/2008 where the size of the blacklist became over 4 times it size according to the site owner. Other new features include easier deployment
into PHPBB ( www.phpbb.com ).

The site that is kind of a eye sore ( in my opinion ) is now a great defense against forum spam and will knock about 60% of all forum spammers. The only question that comes up
is that spam is an ongoing battle, so will Charles take the initiative to seek out new open ip’s used for spamming and if so will it ever truly be enough to get rid of spam.

I for one hope so and wish the project all the luck.

Good luck,

Tech News KYW
Bob Bicknell

Tons of new tools and articles are now available at Marketing Spot

Great new look and navigation make a must for all self ran marketing programs.

We host with DWHS Web Hosting

So you’ve decided it’s time you got your own web hosting account. Congratulations! Once you start researching various hosts, it can be a scary thing though. So many options and choices, where do you even begin?

The first thing you need to do is analyze your needs. If you’ve never had your own web host before, you might be thinking, “How do I even know what those needs are?” Here are a few of the first questions you need to ask yourself:

• What is my website going to do?
• Do I expect it to require a lot of files such as images?
• Will I be getting a lot of traffic?
• Do I plan to do ecommerce?
• What’s my budget?

There are three key types of hosting out there: Shared hosting, virtual private servers, and dedicated servers, and this is where your big decision will come in.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosts are the type you see advertising all over the web with prices such as “$7.95 a month!”. They will offer you what appears to be insane amounts of storage and bandwidth, which looks great on paper, but you need to realize they don’t expect you to ever use as much as they offer.

The reason for this is they are working on the theory that the majority of their users will use just a small percentage of what they offer, so they can oversell their space. Say a host is offering you 500gb of storage (far, far more than your average user will ever approach), and they have 30,000 active accounts, for them to give everyone that true amount of storage, they would have to have 15,000 terabytes of physical storage. That’s a near impossibility for your average web host company.

They are counting on the vast majority of their accounts to use only a few gigabytes of actual storage compared to what they are offering. This allows them to sell far more accounts, and in theory, sell things they don’t really have. It may sound like they are liars, but it’s really just a numbers game like insurance.

The other trick is that they are going to try to cram as many accounts on to each server as they can. While this normally won’t be a problem for must users, if there is someone on your server who is using too many of the resources, it can slow down your site considerably.

This may sound like a horrible deal now that you know the caveats, but these types of hosts will work for most people. If you’re just going to be hosting a personal blog, or a website for a few family photos and the such, there is no reason you can’t go with this type of arrangement, and it’s going to be the most cost effective solution.

Virtual Private Server Hosting

This style of hosting is definitely the middle-of-the-road solution. Virtual Private Servers, or VPS, works on a similar principle to shared hosting of several accounts on one server, it does offer a greater degree of privacy.

A host will take a server, divide it into completely separate partitions, and then each customer gets control over their portion of the server to play with. Each section can be rebooted independently, and it allows for greater security amongst the accounts sharing the hardware.

The downsides are that you will need to have some knowledge of how a server works, something most people do not possess. The cost will be higher than shared hosting, but you will be able to work in a more stable environment.

Dedicated Hosting

Now that we’ve covered the shortcomings of shared hosting and VPS, what can dedicated hosting do for you?

As the name implies, this is where you get a sever all to yourself. You will have complete access to the root files, the ability to reboot the server at will, and customize it to your liking. The problem is that all of this comes with a price.

While shared hosting has numerous shortcomings, dedicated hosting typically runs from $100 to $150 a month depending on the amount of storage and bandwidth you’re purchasing. You will also be responsible for much of your server’s daily operations, something that is not for the novice web hosting customer.

So where do you go?

For most people, shared hosting, despite it’s numerous flaws, will do everything you need, and you won’t even notice the problems. As I said, if you’re just going to be putting up a personal blog, it’s all you need. And even if you are putting up a ecommerce site, depending on it’s size, traffic, and if your host offers a secure socket for your shopping cart, it may work for you.

VPS and dedicated hosting are going to be more for the serious web masters out there who aren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty messing around in the guts of their server’s operating system. It looks a lot scarier than it is, but considering how important your web site can be to your projects or company, it’s not something you want to jeopardize lightly.

The other thing to remember is that most hosts will let you upgrade for a small fee, most will do it for free, if you decide down the road that you need to go to a larger hosting package. So if you start off with a shared hosting account and you find you are just using too much bandwidth, then you can look into moving up since you are now a proven site that can probably afford a larger budget.

And that brings us to another point in that you always need to read the fine print of any hosting agreement. Just like any contract you enter into, you need to make sure you understand what exactly it is you’re paying for. Recently, DreamHost, one of the largest hosting companies in the world, had to remind their customers that though they offered them a huge amount of storage, that did not mean they were a backup service. Customers got enthralled with the amount of storage they had and started backing up the computers on to their servers. As DreamHost is a web hosting company, they had to remind their customers that files on their system had to be there for their web sites, not as a backups for their personal files.

The final pick

Once you’ve found a host that fits your needs, and their terms of service (TOS) look good to you, how are you sure they are reliable? Like with any major purchase, enter their name in a search engine and see what the results bring you. If they’re horrible, more than likely you’ll find someone writing about them on a blog or message board. Just remember that people who are happy with a service are less likely to write about it than those who are unhappy.

In the end, it’s going to come down to your personal needs. If your a company looking to just inform your customers about what it does, or someone looking to start a personal site, then shared hosting will probably do the trick.

1. Buy a Sheep … on Their Behalf

Do something good for the world on your client’s behalf and purchase something from Oxfam’s Unwrapped service. You can pay to have a poor farmer’s land irrigated, buy books for school children or invest in a fair trade coffee coop. Last year Cyan and I bought cows on behalf of our clients and named them after major projects we’d worked on. It was amusing, heart warming and something that gets your clients talking and mentioning your name at every christmas and new year party they go to.

2. Print some Custom Tshirts

Thanks to services like Cafepress, you can print out custom tees, hats, cups and all sorts of things for your clients. Add your brand or even better, add something quirky, clever or personable like a phrase (”Best Client Ever”, “I Give Great Briefs” …) and even if your client never wears it, they’ll appreciate the thought, the effort and the uniqueness.

3. Print some Postcards

Customized postcards make a great way to say thank you and happy holidays and with Cyan’s list of Six Clever Postcard Promotion Ideas you can easily use a service like Moo and some photos from Flickr or iStock to print out some gorgeous cards even if design isn’t in your skillset.

4. JibJab Them!

If you haven’t seen JibJab yet, it’s a highly amusing way to send an eCard. You paste someone’s head – yours, your client’s, your client’s boss’ – into a card and send them the ensuing animation.

5. Photoshop your Client into a Famous Movie Poster and Mail it to Them

Have some l33t photoshop skills? Just grab a photo of your client and photoshop them into a famous movie poster, alter the name to something humerous and email it to them with a holiday message. For a photographer I know – Marmaras Shoots, I once photoshopped his head into a Matrix poster and retitled it to the Marmartrix, which got a good response. It takes a little effort, but done with someone who appreciates a laugh will be worth the time.

6. Give a Laptop to a Child, Get a Laptop

The one laptop per child project has now officially launched and for $399 you’ll send a laptop to a needy child as well as one to your client’s less-needy child! The laptops are pretty cool, have everything from a web browser to an RSS reader and they run on Linux. The project has to be one of the most innovative charities I’ve seen in a long time.

7. Get an Engraved Item from Amazon … like a Silver Plated Yoyo

When it comes to gifts, even the most common place item is made extra cool with some customization. Amazon stocks products that come with a free engraving including a Engraved Silver Plated Yoyo for $14.95 or a Variety of Other Products.

1) Can you show me a mock-up to help us choose a designer/developer? No.
I fell for this once when I was young and naive. I made no money and wasted lots of time. Don’t do unpaid work for the chance to be paid — this wouldn’t fly in any other industry, so why web design? The best case scenario (though rare) is that you get a job with a client who knows that you’ll work for free when necessary. The worst case scenario is that they don’t pay you, and still use your stuff, knowing you don’t have the legal resources to do anything about it. Most likely though, you’ll just waste time.

2) Can you give us a discount rate? No.
There are A LOT of companies out there that do not see web design as a service worth more than $20 an hour. These should never be your clients. In my early post-college years, I used to value “getting the job” so highly, I would take on an inordinate amount of work for the pay. Let me tell you that it’s not worth it. Ever. Remember, you may be doing this company a favor, but on the flip side, you’re hurting your own future, and your family’s. Nowadays, I give my hourly rate immediately, and it weeds out many potential clients. It’s simple math really — if doubling your rate loses half your client work, then you’re still making as much in half the time. If you do excellent work, get paid for it – there will always be comparable “firms” charging double what you are.

3) Will you register and host my site? No.
Sure it seems like a good idea — free recurring revenue right? Well, maybe… if you can first get them to pay, and then if you can justify making $10 a month for the endless phone support you’ll have to give at all hours of the night. You see, once the client thinks that you are responsible for their email and website functionality, you WILL get called all the time when their email shows the slightest wavering or their website 404s for any reason on their home computer. Believe it or not, I’ve even known someone who had a client call about his cell phone functionality just because my friend hosted his site. Don’t do it…it’s not worth it. Give them a registrar and hosting company and let them sign up themselves.

4) Can you copy this site? No.
Now you may think that I answer “No” strictly from a moral standpoint, and although that is true, there are other equally important reasons. First, if they’re copying a site, they have shady ethics themselves and the chances of you getting paid on time and in the full amount are unlikely. Second, doing this type of work reduces you to a monkey, and although some of your work may be like this to pay the bills, why purposely pursue it? Third, if it’s a true copy, the only benefit you may receive is payment – you really won’t get to use it for a portfolio or example work, and furthermore, this type of client is one you do not want work from in the future.

5) Can I pay for my e-commerce site from my website sales? No.
I hate to be the pessimist, but when I am asked this, I want to tell them that they most likely won’t make any money so they might as well ask me to do it for free. Yes, I know there are exceptions, so sometimes I will ask them about their business, marketing, and revenue plans, which 99% of them don’t have. They just thought that selling t-shirts would be a novel idea for the internet. I usually go into a spiel about having to support me and my family, and I can’t do it with speculative work — I then recommend Yahoo! Shopping or CafePress, and 9 times out of 10, they never get their site up anyways.

6) I have a great idea. Do you want to…? No.
Not much different from #5, but could be a much larger time waster if you buy in. Again, not trying to be a jerk, but if the person adds little to the potential business outside of speaking an idea, then any work you proceed to do is mere charity (which may be okay with you). But to be honest, I’d rather be charitable with my family and friends and make them partners for free versus partnering with a stranger. Trust me, if someone really has a great idea, he will make you partners AND pay you as well.

7) Do you have an IM account? No.
I might give it out if it’s to a person I can trust during an intensive project, but as a general policy, I tell clients that it’s my general policy not to. The reason here is obvious — you have a life and other clients beyond them. Many clients see you as an on-call employee, and this is bad. This is why you quit your day job…

Can I just pay the whole amount when it’s done? No.
I require 50% up front (unless it’s a huge job — then maybe 33%). I need that assurance that they have “bought in” on this project, and that I can plan on the income, pay bills, and eat. People who want to pay at the end are much more likely to back out after you’ve done tons of work.

9) Is there any way you could get this done tonight or this weekend? No.
Once they know that you helped them out one time, they will expect it in the future. Now you might choose to get extra done at night (I do all the time), but don’t start making promises about getting things done at night or on the weekends/vacation. I know a lot of freelancers that charge night/weekend hours as well, so that might be a possible route to take. Because the reason you freelance is for the freedom, right? Right?

10) Can I be sure you won’t use this work in anything else? No.
This is a very sensitive subject because most clients misunderstand it (intellectual property is a tricky subject anyways). In my Terms and Conditions that I require all new clients to sign, I make sure they know that (1) their code has utilized code from other projects which I haven’t charged them for, and (2) I will probably use code from their project on other projects, and (3) they own the code and implementation of the project (finished website), but not the actual code pieces (login system, image uploader, etc.). I pride myself in productivity and speed, and I need to use other code all the time to accomplish this. Not to mention that I sell stock Flash which I may need old code to help build. They’re not paying you to create code that they in turn will sell, so make sure they know that it’s the implementation and not the coding that’s theirs.

There are others I’m sure. Feel free to add your own and remember, it’s the opportunities you avoid that will define your success just as much as the ones you take…

Brought to you by Page Alive Web Design

10) Misspelling a Domain

Back in the glory days of the late 1990’s when I was working for a large Internet agency, the web designers had responsibility for the registration of domain names on behalf of clients. One particular designer had a face to face meeting with a major client, during which the client asked him to register CarTuneCentral.com (or so he thought!). The staffer did a check and was delighted to see the domain available. He made the purchase and proudly emailed the client.

An hour later his boss called him in to his office to say that he’d had a call from a very frustrated client who *actually* wanted him to register CartoonCentral.com. Needless to say the desired domain wasn’t available and the whole office dined on his mistake for months.

9) Letting the Domain Name Expire

Now what type of company would allow their domain to expire a month after site launch? A very large one, that’s who. I’ll save the company some embarrassment and won’t reveal their name but the site was offline for a total of 2 days while they scrambled to pay their registrar, sort out DNS propagation and cover their tails.

Flashing your Cyber Underpants

One of the most common web site management platforms provided by hosting companies used to store the site statistics in a common folder called /statistics/. You could password protect this folder, but the default was to leave it open to the public and so many unwary webmasters unwittingly published full traffic data for their site on the Internet, open to any person who knew where to look.

I learned this the hard way in a public forum from a member who said he had just reviewed my traffic for the previous month and was very impressed. Publishing site statistics for all the world to see is what I call flashing your cyber underpants and I haven’t let it happen again!

7) Publishing Sensitive Company Information

Quite a few companies have been guilty of doing this, including AOL, who published a search data report in 2006 that contained the private details of thousands of AOL customers. Although the report was taken offline within a few days, it had already been mirrored and distributed across the Internet. The fallout eventually led to the resignation of AOL’s Chief Technical Officer.

Although not quite as serious, an ex-client of mine once published a page that had notes on it from the Sales Manager about the best way to strong-arm a customer into purchasing a higher-ticket item. Apparently the web designer didn’t realize the hand-written post-it notes were not part of the web page copy. Duh!

6) Using an Insulting 404 Error Page

I clash with the web design team of one of my clients on a regular basis. Earlier this year, my client completely re-designed their web site and so I recommended they ask their web design team to design a custom 404 error page in case visitors navigated to a page on the old site that no longer existed.

Their web design team put up a message that read:

“404 Error. You’ve obviously typed in the wrong URL. Either that or the page you are looking for no longer exists.”

That was it! No apology for the missing page, no recommendatíon to use the navigation to find what they were looking for, just an insulting message that accuses the visitor of being an idiot. Persons viewing that page would be clicking the “back” button as fast as they could.

5) Taking a Site Offline for Maintenance

I find it fascinating that very large sites run by intelligent people still get taken offline for maintenance on a regular basis. Search engines don’t understand the “Back in 15 minutes” sign and the longer the site is down, the bigger the risk.

If search bots try and index a site while it is down, they will most likely assume the previously indexed pages have expired and drop them from the search index. This means that all your hard-earned rankings could be flushed down the toilet until search engines can successfully re-index your site. Surely a mirror site for maintenance periods isn’t that difficult to set up?

4) Buying a Dot Bíz When the Dot Com Was Available

Ok, I’m putting up my hand on this one. I’m not going to reveal the domain but yes, I registered a dot bíz domain back in 2000 when the dot com was actually available. The dot com version of my domain was bought by Yahoo a short time later and turned into a product site. Ack! My excuse is that, at the time, dot bíz sites were rumored to be the next big thing and all companies were being urged to choose them over dot coms. Ok, I was wrong!

3) Allowing a Customer Complaint to Remain on a Site for 12 Months

When I was working as a public relations consultant, I was given the responsibility of re-writing the web copy of a large real estate client. One of the areas I was asked to re-write was the welcome paragraph on the Customer Feedback page where existing customers of the estate agent chain could login and leave comments about their experience.

While writing the copy, I scanned some of the customer feedback and came across an aggressive message left 12 months earlier by an obviously unhappy customer. She had used some of the most colorful language I’ve ever seen (and some that I hadn’t) and very detailed descriptions of how she was going to take her revenge on the company for allegedly allowing a tenant to destroy her house. Nobody in charge of the web site had even noticed the comment and I still wonder how many potential customers would have been put off from using the estate agent after reading it.

2) Switching a Web Site Off for a 3 Week Christmas Vacatíon

Yes, many moons ago, an ex-client of mine decided to take her entire web site offline (without telling me!) while she was on a 3 week vacatíon over Christmas. Only a month earlier, she had paid me $5,000 to optimize it for search engines.

It had just achieved some impressive top 10 results and all the carefully optimized pages were attracting good traffic when she shut it down and replaced the entire site with a 1 page sign that said “closed until after Christmas”. I noticed the traffic and search ranking declines in her stats and was completely flabbergasted when I found the site gone. Her response when I confronted her? “Why didn’t you TELL ME this could happen?”

And the dumbest web site decision I’ve ever witnessed?

1) Promoting a Domain Name You Don’t Own:

My Alma Mater, the University of Newcastle, have spent thousands of dollars on television advertising here in Australia, marketing their new site for online post-graduate coursework: GradSchool Dot Com. There’s only one problem. The domain for this site is actually Gradschool.com.au. They don’t even own Gradschool.com!

Sadly, this glaring marketing error seems to have totally escaped them and they are happily referring to their brand as Gradschool.com on all their marketing material and throughout their .com.au domain. It’s tragic to think of all the potential students typing in Gradschool.com expecting to find the University program. I see that whoever purchased Gradschool.com has slapped up some AdSense code on it so at least somebody will reap the benefits of those thousands of advertising dollars wasted by the University.

Don’t let any of these web site tragedies happen to you. Make sure that your site decisions aren’t in the hands of dummies!

To help troubleshoot firewalls and give the ability for users to protect themselves we now have a free full service proxy for public access.

www.ezwebproxy.com

If you have any questions about it, please let us know.

This is particularly useful in seeing if your ip is blocked from a firewall. By accessing the blocked web page through the proxy you can see if it’s your local ip or if the website is just not working.