Web and Technology

New ExoClick advertising and affiliate program

July 24, 2007 by Tricia

I just joined a new Adsense like affiliate program. It’s called ExoClick.

Have you been using Adsense? Have you had much success with the Google Adsense program? If the answer is no then you might do better with ExoClick. Like Adsense the ads are in the Pay-Per-Click format although the ads are not contextual. The ads that are displayed in your chosen ad blocks are based on the keywords that you’ve entered when setting up the code and the category that you’ve chosen for your site.

There are a number of different horizontal, vertical, box and skyscraper ad blocks to choose from. You have to choose your own colors and there’s no drop down color list to choose from so have your image editing program open in order to play with different colors (and to know the codes for such colors). Otherwise setting up an ad block is easy. Pick your colors, border width, size of ad block, a category for the ad, keywords if you want a specific type of product to be advertised in your ad block, and they decide whether adult ads can show or not.

I created this 300 X 250 px ad block in the category Blogging. I didn’t chose any keywords:

Obviously I could have used slightly darker lettering for this ad. I’ll fix it shortly.

Along with the basic ad blocks you can choose from categorized web portals, search boxes or monetized domain parking. I’m not 100% what that last choice is just yet.

What I also like about ExoClick is that it has a great affiliate referral program. The links that I’ve added to this post are affiliate links. I’d really appreciate it, if you are considering signing up with Exolinks, if you’d sign up through my link. I’ll get a 5% bonus on lifetime earnings of those who signup under me.

While most programs pay monthly or even every sixty days Exoclick will pay weekly if you meet the minimum quota which is $10. You can receive payments by PayPal or check.

If this sounds worth trying you can If this sounds good to you, you can sign up with ExoClick directly. Just register and you’ll immediately be able to begin creating your first advertising blocks.

I’m back – did you miss me?

July 24, 2007 by Tricia

I’m back!

Well ok I’ve always been here, but I’ve spent the last few days staring at the same “account suspended” or “this site can’t be reached” message that you have see if you’ve attempted to visit any of my or my husbands sites since sometime Saturday morning.

I’ve had some terrible hosting problems over the last month. My “Former” web host was telling me that I had CPU resource issues and I spent a good portion of the last month trying my darnedest to figure out what might have been causing the problem.

If I had a problem I feel that I likely fixed it, however I’m not sure I ever did after what that company did to me on Sunday! They set up a VPS hosting account because I’d agreed to temporarily move to Virtual private hosting until I could fix my problem. I said to them several times that the move was temporary so I only wanted a monthly account.

What did they do? They set up a two year package that cost close to $650!

When I got in touch with Lunarpages on Monday – the only time I could talk to a real person since they don’t offer telephone support on the weekend, I got that stupid bill sorted out and reverse and totally canceled my account.

If they can’t read support email that says “No, no don’t set that. I want more information first” in reply to their $75 per hour service charge to move my account from shared hosting to VPS hosting, and then making the mistake? of billing me for two years, and then not saying sorry or trying to even cover for themselves by saying it was a mistake … well no, I don’t want to do business with that kind of company.

I’m still going to go carefully over my sites to make sure that I don’t have a CPU resource issue, but in the meantime I’ve moved to what appears to be a good web hosting company – Host Gator – and my sites should be running smoothly from here on in.

I apologize to anyone who’s been waiting for me to write a post about their site or company during this time period. I will be working on all past requests shortly.

Now if I can just figure out how to get my primary domain out of the url of my other domains I’ll be happy. I think I’ve got to take a look at the redirects on my domains. Grrr

I’m tired of human created comment spam

July 20, 2007 by Tricia

A couple of days ago I wrote a post about comment spam. I find it really funny that every time I write a post lately about buying a home or real estate or travel that someone comes along and promotes – literally promotes – their own website in the comments.

They try to disguise it by tucking their link to whatever they are talking about but since comments from first timers are moderated here it doesn’t get by me.

Watch, I’m just going to place this link for Denver CO real estate and see what happens. My bet is that within 24 hours I’ll have at least five people come along trying to leave a real estate based comment. Well … maybe that won’t happen since I’m calling them out in this post, but that’s what has been happening. It’s ridiculous!

FusedNetwork offers several web hosting options

July 20, 2007 by Tricia

I think that just about everyone who’s stopped by to read this blog or a couple of my other blogs in the last few weeks knows I’ve been having some serious issues with my current web host.

I’m currently looking for a new web hosting company so that I can perhaps put half the domains/sites I own on the new hosting site to split up my accounts and their load on shared web hosting servers. Hey – it might work – for a while anyway.

Having said that I’ve been taking a serious look at a number of web hosting companies. FusedNetwork.com is said to have Quality Web Hosting. Let’s see what they have to offer shall we?

They have four different shared hosting accounts. Shared hosting is when your account is placed on the same server as a number of other accounts. Shared hosting is pretty much all that the average individual website owner or blogger needs if their site has low to moderate traffic levels.

Each shared hosting account offered by FusedNetwork offers a certain amount of diskspace to store your files, a certain amount of transfer (this tallies how much traffic your site can have per month), e-mail accounts, subdomains, MySQL databases, and FTP accounts. The amounts of each of the above varies with each account.

For example, the hosting packages are numbered, #1 offers a website owner 1024 mb of diskspace, 10GB transfer, 100 email accounts, 25 subdomains, 3 MySQL databases and 10 FTP accounts for the low cost of $9.95 per month or $107.46 per year. The highest priced shared account, #4 offers all of the above but in larger amounts for the price of $19.95 per month or $215.46 per year.

Setup is absolutely free for all of the shared accounts.

The shared hosting packages come with all of the standard extras which include C-panel for easy management of your account, directories and domains, web stat packages, script support such as PHP, and mail packages.

FusedNetwork doesn’t seem to offer Virtual Private Hosting (VPS) but they do offer 3 different Dedicated server packages that range in price from $200 to $400 per month.

The company seems dedicated to offering quality service and support.

One thing I like to find when I’m looking at a hosting company is a forum. You can learn a lot by reading a hosting forum prior to purchasing an account. You can also ask pre-sale questions on a forum as well if you have any concerns that haven’t been answered on the sites pages.

Visited FusedNetwork.com and see which package might suite your needs if you’ve been looking for your first or a new web host.

Anti-virus program slows my computer

July 20, 2007 by Tricia

My desktop computer is so slow right now! I’ve got two Firefox browsers open, my email program and Norton anti-virus is currently scanning my whole system for bad guys.

The antivirus program is a hog. I have no problems when I normally have two browser windows open, my email program and sometimes even adobe photoshop … but start up Norton and forget doing much anything else unless you want to do it very very slowly.

It slows my laptop too, which is newer and faster than my desktop PC so I know it’s the Norton’s antivirus.

Does it slow your computer down too? Do you do regular system scans for virus’?

New ExoClick advertising and affiliate program

I’m back – did you miss me?

I’m tired of human created comment spam

FusedNetwork offers several web hosting options

Anti-virus program slows my computer

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