If you’re a tech head like me then choosing the right bits if kit to take with you traveling is a very important decision. I like to be wired into the world and well entertained when I am sitting on a 12 hour train ride or some hotel room on a stopover – it makes the time pass much faster and I can actually get some stuff done. But what should you consider packing for your trek and how can you possibly fit it all in?

As with any type of packing for travel, selecting which pieces of technology to take with you should be determined by weight, size and utility. Less is more! That means taking the smallest and lightest of everything you need.

If you want some computing power on your travels, then a laptop would be the obvious choice. But do you need all the computing power that a laptop can give you or could you escape with just using a tablet or a PDA? When you are lugging around 6 pounds of laptop for miles and miles, the thought of a nice little 200 gram PDA become mighty attractive. If word processing the main reason for taking a computer then consider a PDA with a fold out keyboard. You will be thankful for the weight and space it saves. Alternatively some tablets are more powerful than many laptops and offer the same software options so that might be one other consideration.  Read more...

There is a great potential in product funnels as used in mailing lists to earn you money.

But they have to be set up correctly – something most of the advice I’ve gathered from articles on the web don’t do.

Let’s cover some basics. 3-4% of the people you contact (or opt-in) will buy anything you put in front of them – so the bigger your list, the more income you will make.

80% of your total income will come from 20% of your public – more or less. (And this means 64% comes from 4%, 51% comes from .3% – at least on paper.)

As people don’t find things to be of value, they will drop off/opt-out.

With a poor conversion factor, you will probably wind up with 50% or more of your list being that 3-4% and so this will skew your data. High opt-outs, few purchases will give you a steady income – as long as you keep creating new products for these “buy anything” public. You are then in maintain mode for this small niche – and your income is pegged.  Read more...

1) Before you start, you must find the right keywords. If you optimize your WebPages for the wrong keywords you will fail on your campaigns. Try to avoid the highly competitive keywords such as “Work from home”, for example. You can’t beat millions of competitive websites. There are two Great free tools for finding keywords: http://www.goodkeywords.com and overture suggestion tool: http://inventory.overture.com
2) The page optimization easy rules you must follow are these:
a) Put your keyword in your title tag, for example we will use the keyword “self improvement software”  self improvement software
b) Put your keyword in the heading tag – self improvement software
c) Bold with tags the keyword inside your text.
3) Mention your primary keyword at the very top left and at the very bottom right hand side of the webpage. A trick you can use is to include this in the copyright information line at the bottom of the website. This would be a good example: http://www.selfimprovement.com – A self improvement software.
4) Use the image tag with your keyword. Be careful.  Do NOT fill the tag with many keywords.  It will be considered as spamming and search engines will ban your site.
5) List your site in Google in 24 hours. Yes, you can do that by many ways actually. There is no need for waiting 6 weeks in order for your site to be indexed. You can do it in 24 hours by:
a) Purchasing links with big page rank from other websites like: http://www.textlinkbrokers.com (paid solution)
b) Creating your own Blog for Free to http://www.blogger.com and Google will crawl your site in 24-48 hours max.
6) Next step is to search for the Top 1 site on search engines for your keyword. Study your competition and check what they are doing right. First check the tags and optimization rules they follow and then check the websites that are linked with it. You can do it by going to Google and typing in the search box: link:http://www.competitorsite.com. In this way, you will find the website’s link partners and you can contact them and trade links, especially those with high page ranks.
7) Avoid the spamming techniques like hidden text (having same color text with page background and human eye can’t see it), too many keywords in your title tags, description tags and keyword tags. They will not help you in your ranking, plus your site is in danger of being banned from search engines.
Link your website’s pages together. Don’t have them just standing in your web server. Search engine robots follow links and if your pages are connected, they will crawl the whole website and index all your web pages.
9) You can follow these procedures manually with no cost at all. It will take you more time though. If you want to automate all your search engine campaigns then an excellent tool for that is http://www.seoelite.com

A lady emailed me yesterday very upset over the fact that her friend’s Internet Service Provider (ISP) wasn’t delivering important email messages.

This lack of delivery caused a real problem for the two of them with ruined plans, missed appointments, and just plain inconvenience.

If you don’t use email, this might not sounds like a “big deal.”

But this problem of non-delivery has dramatically affected the way businesses use email and is now about to reach epidemic proportions for consumers using email.

To put things into perspective, imagine if every time you dialed a friend’s phone number you had no idea whether it would ring or not.

Now imagine how frustrated you would feel over time if you kept dialing the same number and it never rang for you, but others could get through and your friend’s phone number never changed.
That’s exactly how you’ll feel when your personal emails start getting blocked for seemingly no reason.
The problem of legitimate email messages not getting through stems from the uncontrolled and unstoppable onslaught of spam that currently grips the Internet with seemingly no end in sight.  Read more...

People have more flexible time due to wireless network. Thanks to the invention of wireless. People can now work from home while taking care of their kids or doing house works. No more stress from traffic jam anymore. Is this great?
Well, there is something you should realize. Working from home while using a wireless local area network (WLAN) may lead to theft of sensitive information and hacker or virus infiltration unless proper measures are taken. As WLANs send information over radio waves, someone with a receiver in your area could be picking up the transmission, thus gaining access to your computer. They could load viruses on to your laptop which could be transferred to the company’s network when you go back to work.

Believe it or not! Up to 75 per cent of WLAN users do not have standard security features installed, while 20 per cent are left completely open as default configurations are not secured, but made for the users to have their network up and running ASAP. It is recommended that wireless router/access point setup be always done though a wired client.

You can setup your security by follow these steps:  Read more...

RSS is growing at a lightening speed. What was once only known as a “techie tool”, RSS is becoming a tool that is continuously being used by the general population. Along with the good comes, the not so good. And while some have mentioned the emergence of RSS spam, where content publishers dynamically generate nonsensical feeds stuffed with keywords, the real concern relates to security. While an annoyance to the search engines, spam in RSS feeds pales in comparison to the possible security concerns that could be in RSS’ future.

Security Implications Related to RSS.
As RSS gains momentum security fears loom large. As publishers are quickly finding innovative uses for RSS feeds, hackers are taking notice. The power and extendibility of RSS in its simplest form is also its achilles heel. The expansion capabilities of the RSS specification, specifically the “enclosure” field which has launched the podcasting phenomenon, is where the vulnerabilities lie. The enclosure field in itself is not the problem, in fact the majority of RSS feeds do not even use the enclosure tag. The enclosure tag is essentially used to link to file types, things like images, word documents, mp3 files, power point presentations, and executables and can be thought of in similar terms to email attachments.  Read more...

Fortunately for the Mac users, the Adware and Spyware industry is still, as of 2005, heavily focused on the PC users. Adware and Spyware developers are particularly found of targeting PC users through DILLs and ActiveX controls, and can therefore only attack computers running Windows. This does not mean that Mac users are completely blessed from Spyware and Adware. There are several Spyware and Adware software capable of infesting Mac, and every Mac user should take a look at the Adware and Spyware removal programs available for mac. In 2005, Symantec caused a lot of hullabaloo in the Macintosh community when they warned the mac users about how the OS X operating system was rapidly becoming a target for virus developers and hackers. Symantec cautioned computer users not to relay on their mac alone to safe guard them from spyware infestations. You can no longer assume that you mac is immune from viruses and spyware. The need for free mac spyware removal programs available online is growing rapidly and we will hopefully see a lot of new free mac spyware removal programs on the Internet soon. Since Spyware is still a smaller problem for mac users, the number of available free mac spyware removal programs is currently much smaller than the number of free Spyware removal programs for PC.  Read more...

Spyware can be a real time waster. It makes its way onto your machine, usually without you knowing it, and eventually becomes a problem which causes you stress, costs you time and money and possibly leads to even worse consequences if not dealt with quickly. Learning how to eliminate spyware before it becomes a problem is critical for every computer user today.

Spyware is written with the intent to intercept or take partial control of your computer without your informed consent or knowledge. While the name suggests it is created to simply spy on you, spyware also refers to software that subverts the operation of your computer for the benefit of someone else. While the motivations of those who write software like this is beyond the scope of this article, it is important to at least understand that spyware certainly does not exist for your benefit and you should take regular steps to remove it.  Read more...

Web development is moving so fast that it is very difficult for the amateur or beginner to master even the basics.  Some businesses, especially the larger ones, obviously  pay a specialist company to build a website for them, or to employ their own IT consultants.  This makes good business sense.

However, for the small, home-based business it is a different story.  Most people can perhaps afford to pay someone a one-off fee to design something which looks professional and does the job, but if it is a website which needs frequent updating – and most do – this can be a problem.

Self-build websites are only part of the answer.  Once you get on to submitting your site to search engines, choosing keywords, placing directory entries, it is a real minefield, and it can take up far too much time for a small business.  Equally, when such a business is struggling to get going, it cannot afford to pay regular sums to have someone do it for them, especially when there is no guarantee that the results will be satisfactory.  Read more...

Mac and the OS X are very stable and reliable. However, if you want your Mac to work perfectly you have to maintain it properly. Most of the errors and glitches that happen to your mac are caused by incorrect permissions table. Mac OS X as a UNIX based system has a UNIX way of handling the files. UNIX as a multi-user system has a special way of manipulating file access. (More about file permissions you can read here). When the new software is installed on your Mac or you did some other system tweaks, it’s very likely that permissions will mess itself up so you wont be able executing applications or it may happen that your mac is acting weird. The easiest way of fixing permissions is by using Mac OS X “Disk Utility” which can be found in /Applications/Utilities folder.
Fixing permissions is recommended before and after installing any software to your mac as well as installing any software updates. There are various software available on the Internet to help you keep your Mac maintained and in a “good health”. Software such as Onyx or Cocktail are doing a great job by not only repairing and verifying permissions for you but also cleaning the internet history,cache,temporary files and running optimization scripts.  Read more...