Advanced Web Ranking is another great piece of software made by the same people that make Advanced Installer. Advanced Web Ranking is a keyword research tool to help businesses and individuals use search data to improve their online marketing campaigns and web sites. As well as delivering critical information such as keyword analysis, keyword suggestions, search engine ranking, and results of your SEO efforts (such as google site ranking), Advanced Web Ranking allows marketers to determine what keywords attract the most visitors to their site.

Advanced Web Ranking provides a useful and inexpensive toolset for analysing search results for your web site, and it’s interface is complete with all of the features needed to make thorough assessments of your target keywords, although it is geared a little more towards the professional web developer than the average Internet user. There is almost no setup to get the software working on your web site, you simply install the software and begin telling it what keywords to watch for your website on a variety of search engines.

The software runs as a background process on your computer and will generate reports for you at whatever frequency you prescribe. It does require your computer remain on with an active Internet connection. I recommend installing it on a desktop computer that you can leave running. The software can be used to monitor unlimited sites and unlimited keywords, but the one limitation you could run into is bandwidth limitations with your ISP or API limits with the major search engines. But for all of these issues Advanced Web Ranking provides ways to split your bandwidth across multiple proxies and multiple API keys with the Search Engines. You can also run the software through proxies if you have access to external proxy servers. This can even enable you to get search results localized to another part of the world.

Advanced Web Ranking can help you enhance most aspects of online marketing — from selecting great keywords to optimising web site design. By acting on the information provided by the software, businesses of all sizes can attract more visitors, convert more prospects to customers, and improve the overall return on their marketing investment. Advanced Web Ranking is simple enough for businesses new to seo software to get started quickly, and sophisticated enough for the most advanced online marketers. All reports, charts and graphs are viewable directly through The installed software, and you can also generate reports in various formats and they can be personalized with the most important data for your particular needs — perfect for firing off important data to your marketing director or boss. Of course, you can also email reports. Advanced Web Ranking supports all of the major online search engines and hundreds of other smaller search sites.

For Pay Per Click advertisers, Advanced Web Ranking can also track and report your sure position in the ad results. Advanced Web Ranking runs on your same computers or servers, so it can support the traffic demands of any site, from those with a few visitors a week to many millions. Much as they have done with installers and link monitoring, Advanced Web Ranking has made SEO effectiveness tracking very easy. Free online support and updates are available for a term included in your purchase price (usually 12 months). You can’t really go wrong.
Link: Advanced Web Ranking

So we used it for the first time this week.  A simple and small credit card swiper for the iPhone.  It is small device that plugs into an iPhone or iPad and allows you to use their iPhone app to swipe and receive credit cards.  If you run a boutique or sell produce on the corner, this is a quick and easy way to start taking credit cards.  The setup on their website: squareup.com is easy and free.  Even the swiper will be shipped to you for free. Your only cost is the 2.9% or so transaction fee.

Interesting how the social media and web 2.0 world evolves and changes.  Websites and services come and go.  12seconds.tv joins the list of great services that have shut their doors.   Other sites that have a paying user base have been shutting down their free service.  Ning can no longer be used without at least a minimal monthly fee.  And there are other blogging services that have started to drop their free blog services.

This whole world of free social sites and services could change in coming few years.  Facebook has recently started to say that they are a profitable company, and youtube hopes to be profitable by the end of the year, but twitter still isn’t making a net profit.

But one thing is for sure, the internet is a place where you can come up with very creative ways to make money.  Think about it, there are millions, even billions of dollars that are being made by companies and people simply by you using the internet.  You don’t even have to use your credit card, or even spend a penny.  Just by using the internet you are bound to be generating revenue for somebody.   You are supporting all of these online companies, whether you click on a sponsored search result, happen to view a sponsored tweet, see a short ad at the beginning of a youtube video, or even just update you facebook status.

Tranferring a domain away from website.ws to another registrar can be a huge pain. But if you are tired of paying $10 a month for your domain then these are the steps for transferring a domain from GDI:

1. First you need to get an authorization code from GDI, there is no way to instantly access this code, you need to send a message to GDI support.  To Contact GDI support, login to your website.ws account, find the “Request Support” link in the left navigation, click on the category “Domains”, then scroll to the bottom of the page and find the link to “Contact Support”
   
2. Ask GDI support to send you the “Transfer Authorization Code” for your domain. Within a few hours (or days….) a GDI support rep should email you a long authorization code.
3. Now you can go to your new registrar of choice.  (I use Unlimited Hosting by Spatical Company for all of my domain and hosting needs).  When you start the transfer on the new registrar they will ask for the authorization code you received from GDI.
4. Next the new registrar will send an approval email as shown on the contact details of the domain.  At least in my case, this was not my email address but a website.ws email address, something like othertld_support@website.ws  If you don’t receive an email from your new registrar to confirm the domain transfer, then the same may be the case for you.
5. Once again contact GDI support, this time tell them an email has been sent to them for the approval of a domain transfer.  Ask them to forward the email they received to you so you can click the link to approve the domain transfer.

Good Luck!

A couple of interesting sites to record here as an archived bookmark
CMS systems:
Website Baker
Big Ace

And some free for non-commercial use icons:
Icons

Have you been looking for ways to get more twitter followers?  Here I will give my findings on one website touting the name of followers itself in a tricky way:  http://followe.rs

Followers (followe.rs) Stats:

• A search on digg reveals that it has actually been dug 427 times as of today, but most users just digg their own affiliate link, so the diggs are probably not getting a lot of attention, since no one digg is getting any significant number hits.
• A twitter search on topsy shows that links to followe.rs have been tweeted 7,649 times.  With the automated tweets that followe.rs sends out each day, that will continue to increase, but it isn’t surprising to see that the top results for followe.rs on topsy appear to be unique tweets that users have written themselves.

For the history, 82 days ago sitelogr reported these numbers:

World Rank:	#38,878
Estimate Value:	$38,507 USD
Estimate Income Per Day:	$53 USD
Estimate Visits Per Day	17,583
Hosting Country:	United States
Website IP:	204.51.247.83
Alexa Rank:	39,806
Google Pagerank:
Google Index:	17 links
Yahoo Index:	15 links

As of today Jan 17, 2010 it reported slightly different results.  It appears the overall traffic to followers (followe.rs) is has decreased in the past few months, which is reflected in the lower Alexa rank.  The Google pagerank and links indexed in Google and Yahoo have both increased.

World Rank:	#68,504
Estimate Value:	$27,060 USD
Estimate Income Per Day:	$37 USD
Estimate Visits Per Day	12,356
Hosting Country:	United States
Website IP:	204.51.247.83
Alexa Rank:	69,224
Google Pagerank:
Google Index:	29 links show google links
Yahoo Index:	22 links show yahoo links

Followers (followe.rs) Reviews:

• Syed gave it a thumbs up on his blog, all though most of his content is just taken from the followe.rs website.
• A user on the social media group forum reported having great success with followe.rs, after a few days using the system he was already showing a potential earnings of $380.  Dwayne’s results are probably not “normal” results for affiliate commissions, but most users agree that it does definitely get you more followers.
• Terrie recommends upgrading to Pro if you are serious about making money with followers.
• Josh shared his quick thoughts on followe.rs.
• Dave gave his results, and Rob also shared his opinion on his blog.
• I saved the best for last, imreportcard has done a great job of only providing useful reviews and comments. The review for followe.rs is the most thorough and informational that I found.

Followers (followe.rs) on social media websites:

• One user posted a sort of sales/info video on metacafe.
• Youtube is full of videos ripped from the followe.rs website and posted be various users. But particularly interesting is the one by krishloop who has managed to drive 6,226 views to his video
• Another user created their own facebook group for followe.rs and have been able to get an incredible 37 fans!

That is everything I could find (that had at least a little bit of worth showing).

Current expired domains with traffic. Domains to buy now: http://tr.im/buynow

AMEX ad

On some client work for a client I have been helping them turn this animation into an animated gif from it’s flash form.  To get the smooth animation in Flash we first turned the fps (frames per second) up to 31, then I exported each frame by exporting the movie as a jpeg sequence.  Then I also exported the animated gif from flash, (but didn’t get the a very clean picture). So I replaced each frame in the animated gif with the exported jpeg frame, then customized the palate to really keep clean the important pieces.  Also, Fireworks seems to do a much better job of dithering the flat image then Flash can do with all the layer information it uses.

I have added a new website to my list of my Steven Hansen personal online presence: Steven Hansen, Pro. I have added it as a sort of resume.  I hope to add any of my works online or offline to the site.  It has been sort of a debate of whether to publish those sorts of things under the company name or myself.  In the end I will probably do some of both.  Adding it to my personal site gives me a good spot to send possible employers, while adding it to the company site gives it a better flavor for potential clients.

afraid.org – FREE dns

and

django – python website framework

jquery plugin I want to try soon – http://media.brianbeck.com/shared/javascript/jquery-ahover/demo/demo.html

and another jquery form validator – http://shugartweb.com/jquery/form