TechVirgin.com » Web Services

Google Affiliate Network Review

Shamim — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:42:28 +0000

Are you surprised that Google has its very own affiliate network? I know I was when I came across it. This is not something Google came up with overnight. The affiliate network originally came from Performics which was acquired by DoubleClick. In turn, Google bought out DoubleClick and eventually inherited Performics which got renamed to Google Affiliate Network.

What Is An Affiliate Network?

An affiliate network is like a virtual store selling products to your website visitors. But instead of manufacturing products you are selling a retailers products and taking a cut off the profits. An affiliate website can be seen as a middle-man which is diverting web-traffic to a particular location. But instead of blindly paying for clicks the advertiser only pays when the visitor buys something. This is also known as Cost Per Action (CPA) advertising or performance-driven advertising.

Google Affiliate Network is completely separate from AdSense or AdWords and as a website publisher you must submit a separate application even if you already run Adsense. The bar for admission is not very high and the rules for eligibility for a website are quite vague. Google requests that you ”are an expert in driving and converting visitor traffic” and manage a site that” attracts a desirable audience” in a particular niche. Of course you will also need to be able to test different affiliate advertising offers and promote the ones that have high conversion.

Google has to keep its reputation of high quality. This is reflected in some of the advertisers participating in the program. There are no Cash4Gold or Rich Dad schemes. Some of the partners in Google Affiliate Network are Verizon, Kohls, Citibank, Office Max and Barnes & Noble. So you might be thinking another day, another affiliate network polluting the internet – what’s in it for you? Well, Google has something called AffiliateVIP status which will give you access to exclusive promotions, deals and help you stand out with the advertisers.

Google Affiliate Network – The Application Dashboard

The Google Affiliate Network dashboard can be over whelming at first. There are four major tabs – Home, Links, Advertisers and Reports.

Home Tab: This is the default view which gives you a snapshot overview and status of all the promotions that you are following and advertising on. It gives you the most important stat that drive any affiliate – Earnings Per Month (EPC) broken down for the past 3months range and for the past 7 days. I also gives you the Network Rank within the Google Affiliate Network. The higher your rank the better your chances of landing some exclusive promotions directly with the advertisers. On the left column on the page you also see some basic stats such as total number of advertisers you are promoting, total impressions, visits to the landing page, conversion rate and amount earned. There is also a big prominent block of hot promotion listings which highlight several good deals that might interest you. The top header of the page also has links to payment data and any messages you might have.

Links Tab: This page shows the latest text and image ads based on the advertisers in your network. Most ads have a tracking URL along with a Creative URL which makes it very easy to copy and paste it on the webpage where you wish to run the ads. Each link also shows detailed description if they are included with the ad by the advertiser. It also provides a quick link to the landing page which will help you write effective ads titles and descriptions. Links tab also has a sub-page showing product RSS feeds and Hot Promotions section.
Advertisers Tab: This is where most newcomers will spend a majority of their time selecting advertisers and products.
Reports Tab: The reports tab allows you to run performance data over certain time periods for one or all your advertisers. If you have a particular report that you run often then there is a way to keep Saved Reports.

Google Affiliate Network has a lot of great advertisers who have tons of products. More importantly almost all the products have certain coupons and discounts that make the job of all web promoters very easy. Overall Google Affiliate Network is worth a shot.

Review: Mozy – Simple & Affordable Online Backup Solution

Shamim — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 06:10:11 +0000

Over time computers have become fast, efficient and a storehouse of knowledge, documents, pictures and media. In fact if something were to happen to our computers we generally pay hundreds of dollars to recover the data that was on it. Physical hard drives crash all too often and when you need it the most. That is why all IT professionals understand the need for backups. But most backup software is expensive; require some knowledge and experience to set up and also requires additional hardware (such as an external hard drive) to backup computer data. In most cases people with limited computer experience give up due to the complexities of setting up a backup. Out of this necessity Mozy has carved out a market for themselves.

Mozy online backup hits all the right buttons – it has a web based intuitive interface to control your account, simple and easy to use software and a free version with 2GB space. In case you have more than 2GB backup data then they also have an affordable subscription. It is this combination of features and affordable pricing that exploded Mozy’s growth. Just ask the million customers that have already signed up. And many more are enjoying the peace of mind.

How Does Mozy Work?

Mozy has a simple process to backup your data. There is a small program that you download and runs on your computer with an easy to use interface. This is used to select which files and folders you would like to backup. The program then encrypts all files and backs them up over your internet connection. This process is secure and painless. The backup process can even be automatically scheduled to run at specific times (such as 4AM everyday) so as not to interrupt your work.

Security: For the technical crowd, the data is transferred over the internet over SSL which is the same encryption used to protect your credit card information when buying something online. On Mozy’s servers your data is protected by 448-bit blowfish encryption to prevent unauthorized access.
Bandwidth: The Mozy application can be configured to use only a certain amount of bandwidth without affecting your computer’s performance. It will also give you an estimate of the amount of data you have selected to backup and how long it will take with each setting. You can also configure Mozy to only use very little bandwidth between 9AM and 5PM and use more after 5PM.
Advanced Settings: There are a few very advanced settings in the application which allow you to define only certain sets of files in a folder to be backed up. Such as all files with the word “Alice” or all pictures with the name “Birthday” in it should be backed up.
Virtual Drive: Another very nice feature is the ability to add Mozy as a virtual drive on your computer. This basically means you can copy (or cut) and paste any files or folders directly on to the Mozy virtual drive and it will be copied over to Mozy’s servers. This is especially helpful if you do not prefer to use the backup utility.
Restore Files: In order to restore files from Mozy to your computer simply select which files and folders you would like to restore and where you would like to save them on your computer. Mozy does the rest. It will instantly start downloading all your files securely to your computer. If you would like to restore a single file to a previous version simply right click on the file and click Restore to bring up more options. All changes to files backed up with Mozy will be automatically saved for the past 30days. This means, if you writing a new chapter for your book every week then all the changes are chronologically saved and can be recovered independent of each other. In case you lost your computer Mozy has a step-by-step utility which will restore all files as it appears on the Mozy backups on to your new computer.

How Do You Know Mozy Is Safe?

Mozy is trusted by more than a million customers who use it to store their most important documents, pictures, financial papers and anything else that you can store on your computer. It is used by individuals and businesses alike to save their most important files. To give you an idea of the amount of data already being backed up by Mozy take a look at the comparison with the Library of Congress.

What if you backup a lot of data with Mozy and then decide it is not the best fit for you? Well, Mozy is one of the few places which let you delete your account online without any hassle with a couple of clicks. There are no long queues and no one will try to persuade you on the phone to upgrade your plan. Within 24 hours all your data will be completely deleted from Mozy.

Home Users VS. Business Customers

There is a difference between MozyHome and MozyPro subscriptions. The Home is overall designed for laptops and desktops at home. The Pro plan is mainly for servers, databases, file shares, centralized backup management for multiple servers and 24hour phone support. This is a very logical distinction between the Home and Business customers and should not have any confusion.

The pricing is also different for MozyPro. Unlike the flat $4.95 for MozyHome, the Pro version costs $3.95 + $0.50/GB per month for workstations and $6.95 + $0.50/GB per month for servers.

What’s The Catch?

The only catch with Mozy is the 2GB limit for its free accounts. Many users will never need to go over that limit. But if you have lots of videos and tens of thousands of pictures then you will need to get the $4.95 unlimited plan. And by unlimited I really do mean unlimited – there are no restrictions for disk space or the number of files or folders.

Verdict

Backups are an essential component of the computer world. Computers and hard drives fail at an alarming rate and there are very few easy to use, affordable backup solutions for average home computer users. Mozy has the backup infrastructure and 24×7 support available to provide enterprise level data backup for the regular computer user. It is feature-rich, easy to use, affordable and free. It is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED and preferred backup solution for anyone with a computer. Get a free account now!

How To Get Official LinkedIn Badges

Shamim — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 03:25:41 +0000

LinkedIn is a very popular professional (and semi-social) networking website that has received much attention in this current economic environment when hundreds of thousands of people are losing their jobs. LinkedIn has been instrumental in helping people expand their professional network and aiding their job search. LinkedIn also provides a handful of badges, buttons and image links that you can put on your blog or website. The process of getting your own personalized one is a bit tedious and makes you jump through a series of links.

If you haven’t done so already head over to LinkedIn website to sign up for an account. After logging in click on Account & Settings link on the top right of the page.

This will bring you to the Settings page. Click on Public Profile.

On this page click customized buttons which will take you to a list of various designs.

Finally you are on the Promote your profile section which has all the goodness. Select which button/badge design you prefer and copy the HTML code next to it. Paste this code on your site where you wish to display your LinkedIn personalized link.

How To Watch Netflix Movies on Windows 7

Shamim — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:03:25 +0000

Netflix is an awesome DVD rental service. But the reason Netflix is one of my favorite services is the streaming functionality for hundreds of movies and TV shows. The quality is superb and the Netflix player automatically adjusts for changes in network speed. There is no software application that you are tied to – just one ActiveX pluign installation and you can enjoy as much video as you want. But the default Netflix player is tied to Windows XP, Vista or Mac operating systems.

So what happens to all the Linux and Windows 7 users? Well, without a workaround we are out of luck. Fortunately we have Silverlight to thank for. Go to Netflix Silverlight option page for downloading the plugin. Once downloaded plugin will activate and you will receive a similar confirmation page.

The last step required is to enable Silverlight player for Netflix media. Go to any movie or TV Show page on Netflix and you will receive a popup for confirming that you would like to enable the player. Click Enable and you will be off watching Netflix goodness in no time.

Top 4 People Search Engines

Shamim — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:51:30 +0000

Personal information is available at everyone’s fingertips at an increasing rate everyday. Privacy advocates are alarmed by this but law enforcement are using this to great benefit. This article explores the top 4 people search engines that anyone can use to track down old contacts or look up the identities of friend and foe.

1. Pipl

Pipl (pronounced “people”) is a simple to use people-search engine with an easy to use navigation. By default you can search for anyone using their first and last names along with a city and state. One click away you have the option to search by an email address or an online user profile name or even by phone numbers. Before you start plugging in all your contacts phone numbers in the search field, keep in mind, most cell phone number listings return results from NumberInvestigator.com, ReversePhoneDetective.com and USSearch.com which you need to pay to access. However Pipl does a good job of locating the company which owns the phone numbers. So what makes Pipl unique – according to them “Pipl’s query-engine helps you find deep web pages that cannot be found on regular search engines.” In all the searches I conducted with Pipl the results were accurate and very close to the real identities.

2. Spock

Spock is another people search engine with amazing results that will definitely surprise you. Unlike Pipl though, Spock is not free. You only get a tease of the results that await you if you fork over the $19.95 a month or $5 for a day trial. Spock seems to be a more exhaustive database which also includes school records which almost gives it another dimension. Spock has the ability to restrict results to certain predefined sources which include – Friendster, Hi5, Live Spaces, MySpace and Wikipedia. It also has some built-in filtering options such as results within a certain age group and returning results with pictures only. But the cost factor behind Spock might limit its growth since most users would simply opt for a free alternative when they wish to look up some old forgotten friend.

3. Wink

Wink is another people search engine which you need to pay for to access detailed results similar to Spock. The homepage of Wink proudly displays that it is the “world’s largest people search engine.” However in my testing I have found it to be anything but. Powered by PeopleFinders.com, Wink does return a lot more results that either Pipl or Spock. But the results are not correlated by person’s name or some other characteristic. For example in my testing I looked up a person who I know has moved from one state to another and Wink found 2 different people with the same name listed under each address but with vastly different ages. Age should have been between 20-30 and it was reported as 51. Wink does offer the ability to search by name, location, school, interest, career, groups and distance. But before I pay to see the results that Wink offers I would test the same queries on the free search engines such as Pipl before forking over $1.95 for each report or $19.95 for a monthly subscription.

4. ZabaSearch

ZabaSearch is powered by Intelius and is surprisingly accurate to name and phone number lookup, including cell phone records (creepy). It successfully correlates results even when someone has multiple addresses or names listed in separate states. But the drawback to ZabaSearch is paid results. It costs between $0.99 to $4.99 for single results and about $39.99 for 10 reports together. Similar to Pipl and Spock, Zabasearch is able to successfully search by names across all the states. However a unique feature to ZabaSearch is the listing of relatives or the name you are looking for. Including family in results is debatable – it might be an invasion of privacy and unethical. However listing related family members in the free results helps you accurately identify and possibly contact the person who you are looking for.

How To Write A WordPress Blog Post Using MS Word 2007

Shamim — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:52:58 +0000

MS Word 2007 is a fully featured text editor from the Microsoft Office family of products. But Word 2007 is so much more than just a word processor. There are hundreds of features, several templates, sections and pre-built themes and layouts. You can also write highly customized articles for your own WordPress or Blogger blogs using Word 2007.

First thing to do it to link your Word 2007 installation to your own website. To do this fire up Word 2007. Click the MS Office icon and click New.

In the new pop-up dialog box click New Blog Post and click create.

This should have brought up a new window called Register A Blog Account.

Click on Register Now on the window and select your blog provider. If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog then select WordPress. The fill out the details as shown below.

After your settings are accepted you will get a confirmation stating registration successful. From that point onwards you are ready to publish posts directly to your blog from MS Word 2007.

There is a separate option if you would like to host your pictures on your own website and domain. In the Picture Options pop up specify the provider as My Own Server. The Upload URL should point to the directory (or folder) where all other images are being stored. You can also specify a different location for uploaded images via Live Writer. Just remember to set up the permissions for anyone to view and access the files under that folder. In case of a WordPress blog the uploaded images are stored in YOUR-WEBSITE/wp-content/uploads/. The source URL is the address of your website where your images would be displayed on. For example: for TechVirgin.com the Upload URL would be http://techvirgin.com/wp-content/uploads/ and the Source URL would be http://techvirgin.com/.

Still running in to problems setting up Word 2007 with WordPress. Take a look at Word Help for more details and answers.

How To Make A Webserver With XAMPP

Shamim — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:37:52 +0000

XAMPP is a software package that allows you to emulate a hosting provider’s environment. It is a all-in-one package consisting of Apache, MySQL, PHP and a few other goodies. XAMPP runs on all major Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems and has pretty much the same functionality across all platforms.

XAMPP Installation

To install XAMPP in Windows head over to the download section and grab the xampp-win32-version-installer.exe file. The installation is very straightforward. Prior to install just make sure your dont have any other conflicting programs using port 80 on your machine. (You most probably don’t.)

If you try to install XAMPP on a Vista machine you will see a warning popup. You can ignore it – I am running XAMPP on Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit and I have not seen any reduction of functionality.

Proceed to install XAMPP and sit back and relax. The process takes about 5 minutes.

Once the install is completed you will see a XAMPP icon in the taskbar.

Click the icon once to bring up the XAMPP Control Panel. From here you can easily go in to the settings of each individual component and stop or restart MySql, Apache and other services. Make sure that the services are running.

XAMPP Configuration

To configure XAMPP to your liking launch your favorite web browser and point it to localhost or your own machine. XAMPP gives you access to tools like phpMyAdmin, Webalizer, PHP Switch, Mercury Mail and FileZilla FTP .

All the website files are located under the htdocs directory under the default installation path of XAMPP installer. In my case the program installed under C drive and website files are located under C:\xampp\htdocs\. If you install a local copy of WordPress or Joomla or Drupal or anything else then you can create several sites under their own sub-directory.

How To Install MODx

Shamim — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 14:18:56 +0000

MODx is a well rounded, mature content management system or CMS with tons of built in features. In a previous article I wrote about MODx and mentioned some of its unique abilities. Combined with the ease of use MODx came in the Top 5 in my list of favorite CMSs. But there is one small drawback before MODx is ready for mass consumption. cPanel Fantastico does not offer one-click install for this CMS. But have no fear, I’ll walk you through the simple process.

Create Database & User

Creating a database for MODx to use is the first step. In the cPanel screen scroll down to Databases section and click MySQL Database Wizard.

Follow the prompts to create a new db and user called modx. In the permissions/privileges screen remember to select All Privileges.

Download MODx & Upload

MODx is free to download and use for anyone under the sun. Head over to their website and click download. Download the ZIP file to your computer which you will need to extract to a folder of your choice. I would recommend 7Zip for unzipping files. Once unzipped you need to upload all the files to folder you created on your website. You can create a folder and upload the files using a free program called Filezilla. Once all the files are uploaded go to the next step.

Installation

Now that you have uploaded all the necessary installation files we can begin the install. Point your favorite web browser to the directory where you uploaded the files – such as YOUR_SITE/MODx directory. You will see a webpage similar to the below screenshot. Continue following the prompts and you shoube be all set with your new MODx website.

TechVirgin.com » Web Services

Google Affiliate Network Review

What Is An Affiliate Network?

Google Affiliate Network – The Application Dashboard

Most Commented Posts

Review: Mozy – Simple & Affordable Online Backup Solution

How Does Mozy Work?

How Do You Know Mozy Is Safe?

Home Users VS. Business Customers

What’s The Catch?

Verdict

Most Commented Posts

How To Get Official LinkedIn Badges

Most Commented Posts

How To Watch Netflix Movies on Windows 7

Most Commented Posts

Top 4 People Search Engines

1. Pipl

2. Spock

3. Wink

4. ZabaSearch

Most Commented Posts

Top 3 Online Backup Solutions

Mozy

Carbonite

IDrive

Most Commented Posts

How To Write A WordPress Blog Post Using MS Word 2007

Most Commented Posts

How To Make A Webserver With XAMPP

XAMPP Installation

XAMPP Configuration

Most Commented Posts

How To Install MODx

Create Database & User

Download MODx & Upload

Installation

Most Commented Posts

Top 10 Content Management Systems

10: Nucleus CMS

9: Textpattern

8: Dokuwiki

7: XOOPS

6: Mediawiki