How To Twitter Like A Normal Person

Twitter is a great way to communicate and meet new people with similar interests. If you run a business you can leverage Twitter to help promote your brand but it can all seem a bit overwhelming.

By now everyone knows what Twitter is but lately it seems like it's filling up with spammers and people are just plain doing things wrong. If you're just getting started, or if you're having trouble getting the results from Twitter it might be because you're not coming off like a genuine person.

I've had some fairly successful Twitter accounts (this one is new) and I've learned a bit by helping others and spent time examining how some businesses found success with Twitter. I'd like to share the key points I learned that can help you promote your company through Twitter including some Do's and Don'ts of business tweets.

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Updating Old Web Applications

The past few days I've been working on some websites that I wrote years ago. Part of the motivation was to add new features but there were also some bugs that developed when external APIs changed or in some cases disappeared.

Some of it was painless, other parts had me banging my head up against the wall.

I thought I'd document some of the problems I ran across and some of the things that have helped make the update process easier.

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What Happens When You Stop Blogging?

Many of you know what it's like. You start a blog and you have every intention of posting to it regularly. then after a while you start to lose interest in blogging.

You don't want to fill your blog up with the same old stuff everyone else is posting and slowly your posting frequency goes down to zero.

There are many of these sleeping or zombie blogs out there. I've had some. Heck, this one is one that I thought I'd be posting to more.

I also have another blog that was fairly popular but circumstances changed that prevented me from writing articles regularly for it.

Or, even worse things might have happened? Maybe you really did pass away. Well, not you personally or you wouldn't be reading this.

So what happens when you stop updating your blog?

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Why I Don't Use StatCounter To Track AdSense Clicks

A lot of people have been using services like StatCounter to track AdSense clicks as well as for gathering other information about their website visitors.

StatCounter is the most popular free service that offers the ability to track AdSense, Amazon and other affiliate ad clicks but I don't mean to single them out. I think it's a bad idea in general to give access to information about your site's visitors and what AdSense, Amazon or other affiliate ads your visitors click on. It is something that could potentially reduce your earnings.

Not many things in life are free and it's hard to imagine a company is giving you access to their service and not getting anything out of it. They have servers and bandwidth to pay for as well as salaries for their staff.

StatCounter claims that they make their revenue through advertisements on their website, they do not put ads on your site and you can even have their tracker hidden so it's not visible on your website. But is StatCounter getting more out of the deal?

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Moving beyond Shared Hosting

You worked hard building your website, and it has paid off! The amount of activity on your site has far exceeded your expectations, and as a result, you need to look for more advanced hosting options.

These days, you have a lot of options including Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Servers and Server Colocation.

If you're confused about which option to choose, this post should hopefully clear some of that up.

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How To NOT Start A Start-up

I saw this video the other day while searching for some information and I was absolutely in shock! While I have to say it's pretty cool to have that in your garage, and I myself have some older servers that I use to mess around with, this is the wrong way to start your start-up's data center.

I can't think of a single reason why anyone would do that. Some of the servers look like P3's and P4's. There might be some very old Xeons in there. Looks like they were picked up used. If you're thinking of doing something similar don't. In the rest of the post I'll go over the details on why with a better alternative.

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Put your CONTENT above the fold

For years now people have been suggesting that you make sure to put your ads above the fold. Above the fold means that users won't have to scroll down the page to view the ads.

People have been taking this advice to heart. Too much so in many cases. It's an ordinary day, you have a question and you turn to your trusty friend Google to help answer it. You click on the links in the search results and page after page all you see are ads, until you scroll down a bit. Then maybe you find your answer or maybe not.

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How to tell if a domain is blocked by Google and what to do about it

Search engine traffic is essential to most websites and Google is the biggest search engine out there. If your domain, or a domain you're interested in purchasing has been banned by Google, it can devastate your business.

In this post I'll cover ways to determine if a domain you own, are interested in purchasing or one you just bought may be banned from Google search results.

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