The author replied to say he would exchange, but wanted to conduct the exchange via his new link exchange system, Lavalinx.

I was pretty skeptical about another link exchange system, having found others overrun with really low quality sites.

What is interesting about Lavalinx is its ability to triangulate link exchanges between different pages.

Furthermore you can automate link exchanges by inserting some PHP code into your site / blog, so that when you approve your link exchanges (via the Lavalinx control panel) they are automatically inserted into your site.

You can also configure multiple pages for your link exchanges making it easy for site owners to exchange contextual links, i.e. you are not trading links of spammy “Links” or “Friends” pages.

To get their ball rolling Lavalinx are offering 500 free account’s on their system, after which they will move to paid subscriptions.

I have already traded 5 links with this system and have probably declined another 5-10. That may not sound a lot, but they currently only have 100 members, when they get up to 500++ a lot more exchanges will take place.

Furthermore, I did not have do do anything to get those link exchanges… just signed up and waited for the requests to come in, so even this small number has made it worth while joining.

Also, they were decent exchanges… relevant sites of a reasonable quality, and the fact that it is to become a subscription based service will hopefully keep it that way.

I hope Lavalinx works out, partly because I got a free account, but mainly because it would be a really convenient service, particularly if you want to launch and back-link few small sites for SEO purposes.

The person I was speaking to at Lavalinx also mentioned that they have secured further investment for their product, and plan to develop their system further, something Ill have to keep an eye out for…

They still have some free accounts available if you want to try Lavalinx for yourself.

StockXchng has been around for some time but really seems to have come into its own over the last year.

They claim to be the “leading free stock photography site” currently listing 313484 free images with 400 – 500 new images being listed every day!

They have over 25000 photographers submitting images and a lot of them are very good!

I have found a number of good free images suitable for use in banners etc.

There are premium or paid images listed too, starting at $1 per image. These are actually hosted on a sister site StockXpert are to a very high standard.

If you are prepared to pay one or two dollars for your images then istockphoto.com is also a very good source of stock images, with a much larger selection than stockXchng / StockXpert but alas, no freebies.

A problem few seem to address is how to get good back-links for a niche blog.

The problem with getting back-links for niche sites is that it is hard to find other relevant sites to get links from.

If you are doing niche properly, then by default there will be very few specialized sites like yours out there, and finding them can be problematic.

If you do blog searches on Technorati for example, you will find hundreds of spam sites, but very few of value. This is because search engine spammers use automated blogs to hit huge lists of long-tail keywords.

If you search Google then you will mostly find old static sites, but your chances of getting links from those sites is almost zero. If you refine your Google search to look for specific blogging platforms you will find what you are looking for, but you will need to develop specialized searches for each blogging platform, and going through the results list is time consuming.

There are Firefox plugins and other cheap software tools you can use to make life easier, but even with these products finding the right sites can be a slow process.

However, as I have been fortunate enough to be given a copy for the forthcoming release of Comment Hut to evaluate I now have a solution to this probem

Comment hut will search for blogs on WordPress, Live Journal, Drupal and Type Pad, as well as two additional platforms that have not been formally announced yet You can search one or all of these platforms for your niche terms.

Furthermore, Comment Hut will ONLY return URL’s with ‘commentability’, i.e. only blogs on which comments are enabled.

It also allows you to set the minimum PR (Page Rank) of sites to be returned, so, if you only want to look for PR 3+ sites, it will do that for you.

The fact that it allows filtering by PR in itself acts as a spam filter, as spam sites almost invariably have no PR.

Once you have your list of URL’s you can export it to file, or just click the links in the page. There are a couple of export options, (Exel or HTML), again allowing you to click the list to open URL’s.

You can then order the list by PR to prioritize the sites you want to target, then go off and start commenting.

You can just leave link bait if thats how you want to play it. Personally I prefer to take the time to build collaborative relationships with other bloggers, working with them to mutually boost our SERPS on a given phrase.

The only things that seem to be missing from Comment Hut are the ability to search the mySpace and Blogger platforms. Though there are two new platforms available in the forthcoming release, mySpace and Blogger are not among them. That said, with the number of results it does bring back, you will have plenty to be getting on with!

As a little test I thought I would do a search on “fear of flying” as Mitch at harpzon.com is doing a case study on a site in that niche.

Above you can see some of the wordpress URL’s returned by comment hut along with their PR. In total I was able to find 118 PR3+ links containing the search term “fear of flying”. I have been through the lists and found a number of sites which are directly discussing fear of flying (as opposed to mentioning it in passing) that would make the best sources of backlinks. If you want you can check the list here.

The current price of Comment Hut is $97 which seems a little expensive, however, with products like this you have to remember that economies of scale are not working in your favor!

You can get the demo version of Comment Hut free, which will search wordpress blogs only, and return just 10% of the results… this gives you an idea of what it can do, but is in no way representative of the results the full version delivers…. there is a huge difference between the demo and full versions.
Also, to get the free version you have to supply a mail address… if you do this be aware that these guys do run mail campaigns and you will get periodic mail shots from them.

So, is it worth $97? Well if you are serious about niches then my honest opinion is yes it is.

I am no stranger to advanced Google searches, even so, this product is a real time saver and helps hook you up with others in your niche very quickly.

Whether you get your $97 back is down to how well you select your niches in the first place, and how many sites you build!!

I have no doubt that I will squeeze $97 back out of this software pretty quickly (I reviewed this software for a reason ).

If you have any further questions about Comment Hut both Paul and Stewart are very approachable guys and are contactable via their site.

For the record there are no affiliate links in this page, and after getting my grubby paws on the evaluation copy I was free to say whatever I wanted about it….

What WP-Omatic does is scrape RSS feeds. It does this on a CRON job, so you can schedule your scrape to run every hour. You then set which categories scraped content is put into… and before you know it you have your very own automated blog!

The current release creates a duplicate of the original rss feed, so, when your target feed / blog updates…. you rip their content shortly afterwards….

Now, this is not a very good plan as you will start upsetting people, and Google will recognise the duplicate content… however, if this plugin reaches maturity it will have re-writing capabilities, so that links or keywords can be replaced.

Furthermore, it would be possible to incorporate a thesaurus into this kind of plugin to extend the rewriting capabilities….

Where this is going is… that you can scrape and rewrite other peoples content automatically… just build a blog and leave it churning out unique content all by itself.

The down side to this is that the rewriting process means articles become less readible and stop making sense, and a lot of pages get dropped by Google shortly after indexing, but, given the fact that the posts take zero effort to create, the fact that some get dropped is not a major concern.

I should point out that when experimenting with this I only ripped my own feeds… no-one elses!!

I recently did a site for someone who had paid for a template, which, whilst ok was only as good as the average template available from the Open Source Web Directory.

I have seen a few people ‘reselling’ templates for commercial companies, and to be honest think they are wasting their time. I don’t believe these businesses will exist in a few years time, certainly not for static templates.

The reason? Traffic and exposure is a commodity easily exploited with a free template. I recently wrote about a free template I found, the authors of which claimed to have around 200k templates in use around the world. They generate a lot of interest in their activities by distributing a small number of good quality templates.

There are now thousands of free templates available, designers are competing to get you to download them, for free!

Similarly, there is a growing industry in WordPress templates with many free designs available, though, there are still relatively few high quality functional designs available.

For those that are successful, i.e. produce a good template the exposure they get is invaluable. Take this site for example, the template it uses has over 40k downloads, and at the bottom of the page you will see a link back to the author.

So, that is how web designers make money with templates, they get free publicity, showcase their work and get paid commissions for high value bespoke work.

On the other site, it is possible to make money deploying these templates. Many are complex and require an understanding of CSS and (XX)HTML to be able to work with them.

On top of that, building static sites is a bad plan as they are so difficult to maintain, which means you also need PHP to be able to chop the site up into constituent components, and then javaScript to add some tricks as required.

This is an opportunity for deployer’s of templates and software to earn their crust, and is really how I see the market going, deployment and configuration with a much smaller design / development element.

Why not build the site from scratch?

Well why re-invent the wheel, using templates gives the following advantages:

• Lower cost to the customer
• Faster turn around
• The ability for the customer to choose a ‘starting point’ from thousands of free templates

There are already a number of companies making good profits deploying open source applications and templates. I have done this myself.

If you are going to do this, in my opinion you just need to be honest, tell the customer what you are doing, let the price reflect you are using a template as your starting point, and leave the back-link to the original author.

I have seen a few people claiming to be designers, checked their portfolio and realised they are using other peoples templates, not good when their customers find out!

I spend a lot of time typing, at work and home, typing E-Mails, Blog Posts, letters and documents, programming, using chat clients… a lot of button pushing!

I learned to touch type around five years ago before starting a University Degree course. Typing was not taught when I went to school, but I realised what a benefit it would be to learn, as degree’s involve a lot of writing!

Five years later it is still a major benefit to me… anyone who has ever used a chat client to talk to me will testify to the fact that I push out 10 words to their one (not always a good thing!!), and I am still working on other stuff in between!

I decided to write this post after someone at work commented on how fast I was typing and I realised that I have only met one person who can out type me, that person was a PA to a company director with professional typing / shorthand qualifications.

So, what does touch typing mean?

• Make use of all digits on both hands, not just your index fingers!
• Looking at the screen, or document you are copying from, not the keyboard.

The benefits of touch typing are two fold:

1. You will be able to type at least twice as fast!
2. As you are looking at the screen (not the keyboard) you are able to concentrate fully on your work, it is far easier to get into a creative flow if you can touch type.

I taught myself to type using an old copy of Mavis Beacon, by Old I mean pre 2000. The graphics were really poor, and the commentary was really annoying. I muted the sound on my computer and spent two hours a night using the CD ROM for five consecutive evenings.

After those ten hours I had learned the keyboard well enough to type without looking at the keyboard, however I was still typing a lot slower than I had been using my previous finger and thumb method. I think this is where a lot of people fail when leaning to type in this way, they learn the keyboard, but …. old habits die hard.

You have to force yourself to use the new methods you have just learned, if you do this, within a couple of weeks you will be working faster than you ever have before, and will continue to do so for the rest of your life!!

It really is one of the most useful self taught skills I possess, there is no way I could get as much done without being able to touch type.

You can get an old (used) copy of Mavis Beacon for less than five dollars (£2.50) on Amazon! If you use the CD properly, and force yourself to use your new found skill, it may well prove the best $5 you ever spend… really!

Now I thought I would add a post demonstrating why Alexa is worthless!

I was looking at some of the “Movers and Shakers” on Alexa, and saw a site “LookSearch.com” had fallen through the floor.

The site in question is an MFA site containing nothing but Ads. It has no PR.

Looking on Alexa’s wayback machine I can see it has been that way for some time, after the domain was put up for sale….

Below are their Alexa stat’s for the past 3 months:

As can be seen above, it all started with an almost vertical rise in traffic, and ended with an almost vertical fall!

Having looked at the site it is difficult to believe this traffic is genuine. 25 countries are listed in the stats, making this site very popular in almost every corner of the Globe! (apparantly!).

I would love to know how they did this, I have been told that proxies do not work too well, but clearly the people behind this site have a good method of rigging Alexa.

Whether it benefited them in any way is another matter, after all, it appears they have given up on it….

These questions rarely seem to be asked by with regard to small semi professional sites.

Whilst it is possible to insure business sites under umbrella policies, it is very difficult to insure a small media site for example.

I have not found any insurers who deal specifically with this kind of insurance, but would be intereseted to hear from anyone that has.

The fact that insurance for websites is not widely available is understandable, valuing and setting a premium for a website would be a nightmare.

• Revenu’s are un predictable
• Fraud is a definate possibility
• What exactly are you insuring?

Information is difficult to value due to its abstract nature, what is your content really worth?

Furthermore, there is the fact that it is extremely unlikely you would lose the whole site, most servers backup and fail over as a matter of routine, and the worst disasters can usually be recovered.

So, what you would really be covering for is loss of revenue during down-time. Depending on the length of downtime, you may lose regular visitors which is another cost (I would like to see someone come up with a metric for that one!).

Another aspect of concern to media sites is the risk of law suit, Google and youTube being the ultimate example!

However it is relatively easy for small sites to fall foul of copyright law and most bloggers sail close to the wind in this respect, recycling and quoting relevant articles. Again, the potential cost of this is impossible to predict.

Furthermore, it is impossible for insurance companies to ascertain the reliability of the insuree, will they manage their data and content responsibly, or are they a bit of a wild card?

It will be interesting to see if there is any growth in this area, but personally, I doubt it!

• A Cheap Linux Compatible WiFi Card

Most laptops now have wireless built in, however, if you have an older machine you would be well advised to buy the Edimax card above.

I have used this card for two years, it is vastly superior to a linksys card that would have been twice the price (had it not been bundled with a router).

I originally bought the Edimax WiFi card as the Linksys card did not work with Linux.

The Edimax card works out of the box on Ubuntu and Debian, you do not need to install a driver (as you do on windows).

My only criticism of this card is that it protrudes a lot out of the side of the laptop, but for less than £15 delivered you cannot really complain.

Edimax also do a PCI card for use in a desktop which also works well with Linux.

The reason these cards work with Linux is the use of the Ralink Chipset.

Before buying my WiFi card for Linux, I researched the chipset to see if it would work on Linux, now more of them have been sold you can simply read the customer feedback on Dabs.

So there you have it, Wireless Ubuntu, Wireless Debian, Wireless Gentoo, in fact Wireless any Linux Distro for peanuts

Be careful, there are hundreds of people who will take your money in return for an all singing all dancing site, myself included but, without careful planning it will be nothing but a white elephant.

To sell online you need to compete in one of two areas

1. Price, you need to be significantly cheaper than the high street (and competitive with other online retailers)
2. Niche, you need to offer products not easily available on the high street, i.e. become a specialist

If you cannot compete strongly in one of these areas, forget it.

Then you need a marketing strategy, do not underestimate the cost and difficulty of this exercise. You will need both an online and offline marketing strategy, both of which can be expensive.

Both on and offline you will need to consider advertising costs in magazines, on websites or using technologies such as Adwords.

An online store is not like a physical shop, there is no ‘passing trade’, it is an extremely competitive industry and good search engine rankings are difficult to achieve, and take time to establish.

You need to consider payment gateways, on this note never store customers credit card details on your site (which a lot of open source applications have the facility to do). To store credit card details you really need to employ a security specialist, and if your reading this, the chances are you cannot afford one.

A famous example of what happens when you store credit card details on a site is a story of Playboy dot Com, whose customers received an E-Mail, containing their personal details and credit card number, informing them that the aforementioned credit card details were circulating the criminal underworld, and making some useful suggestions on how Playboy dot Com could improve their security .

A stunt like that would put most companies out of business.

In a nutshell, if you store credit card numbers on your site you will become a target for hackers, and they are good, way ahead of most of the people deploying E-Commerce sites, so leave that side of things to the professionals running payment gateways (Protx is a good one in the UK).

Then you need to consider shipping costs and packaging, what shipping options you will make available to customers. Most couriers factor weight and size into their shipping costs. This means knowing what your products and packaging weigh, and in some cases the volume too.

You need professional images of all your products, not a good photographer, find out how much that will cost too. There is little point in putting up a nice site if the images are poor.

Consider the time it will take to load (with the weight and shipping options), describe and price your products. It is not sufficient to give a brief description.

1. You need to explain products properly to customers
2. Google will not rank your site well if it has poor product descriptions

If you have an existing retail business, you need to reconcile your on and offline sales / stock. Integrating offline systems with your online store can be difficult, and consequently expensive. The alternative is to manually reconcile the systems, i.e. run two stock figures and keep jumping between them to keep them the same. Your online customer will not be happy if you have to mail them to say ‘I just sold my last one in the shop today’.

I think that’s enough for the time being, there is a lot more which I will post shortly…