The secret research tool everybody has and no one knows about

Most of us know that Amazon is a great place to do trends research: seeing what’s selling well is a great way to mine for affiliate or info product opps. But if you’re researching an article, blog post, or info product you can drill much deeper by actually reading parts of the book online! When you’re looking at a book listing hover over the Click to Look Inside! thumbnail of the book. You’ll then be launched into a special reader that offers (variously) random pages (Amazon calls is “Surprise Me!”,  front matter, back cover, and index–all of which can be gold for the information prospector. Understandably they don’t allow copy and paste. Just jot down relevant information into a text editor or Google Docs. It has the fringe benefit of helping you learn the material better.

Good free favicon generator

Had to blast out  a favicon quickly. DynamicDrive FavIcon Generator is one of those great services that just works. I gave it a .jpg file that wasn’t even square, and it kicked out a perfect little favicon.

An online image editor that actually works

While building a new site I had to throw a logo together quickly on a machine with no graphics editor installed. I was very, very pleasantly surprised by Pixlr, an online image editor that strikes the perfect balance in features. It’s free, it has an adequate feature set, it doesn’t require registration, and, incredibly, it’s stable. None of the other similar products I’ve seen in this realm match that kind of package. I would pay for it, though in the web world I’m sure I’m part of a minority. Try, even if you’ve been disappointed by the others. It may just surprise you.

Claim This, Technorati

I’m pretty sure something awesome is going to happen once Technorati claims me. I’m not really clear about it, but… awesome. Here’s to you, Technorati Profile.

10 Seconds to more video traffic: a Working Webmaster Special Report

Video marketing is new enough that even the pros are screwing it up at an alarming rate. They are forgetting simple but enormously powerful branding techniques that any freshman marketing student could recite in her sleep. If you do any video marketing or plan to, you can easily add about 10 seconds of crucial material at very low cost that could drive traffic through the roof. Check out the new Working Webmaster special report
Did you just fail Video Internet Marketing 101?

Incredible resource for internet marketing newbies

The Warrior Forum is the place for people who want to learn the internet marketing ropes. Warrior Ebbi has been kind enough to create an internet marketing Greatest Hits for Newbies in this remarkable thread. A stunningly thorough, maybe even complete, education on the subject. I am reading it with great interest and I’ve made millions on the Net.

A pig at the buffet: how unlimited hosting plans really work

Wondering what you can really expect when you sign on to get one of those unlimited hosting plans? I am a mass consumer of hosting accounts and have been dealing for years with companies that claim to have unlimited hosting plans. The idea of unlimited hosting is seductive. Like professional wrestling, lotteries, and Las Vegas, it attracts customers who secretly know these companies won’t get deliver what’s advertised, yet who convince themselves on another level that they will be the exceptions to an ironclad rule.

Unlimited means unmetered

If you are shopping around for a client, it is essential that you both have realistic expectations of your hosting provider. Because if your client decides to host an adult or other high traffic site using an “unlimited” plan he will be sorely disappointed when that unlimited bandwidth suddenly gets limited as the latest Paris Hilton sex tape goes viral. (Maybe that’s an unfortunate choice of words…) The best way to put it to your client and to yourself is that the “unlimited” in “unlimited hosting plan” should be replaced by the word “unmetered”. Unmetered has come to mean that the hosting company doesn’t limit you to a particular number. Believe me, though, they can come up with one at any time.

And it only makes sense. I used to be offended by the use of the word “unlimited” when logic dictated that there is of course a limit. We know every rack server at the hosting company has some limited number of hard disks. We know that in the best case scenario, if for example I actually started gobbling up disk space wholesale because I decided to set up an online backup service, that my website’s rack would run out of hard disk at some point. We know that if the Paris Hilton video happened to contain a scene with Paris snogging Beyonce while whistling “Dixie” and proving the four-color map theorem, that throughput would quickly get to the point where it would choke the host’s OC-48 pipes, again making a mockery of the whole “unlimited” thing. So where’s the happy medium? What should we expect realistically?

Ejecting the pig

The best webmaster I know nailed it one day when I got my knickers in a twist over the dread “unlimited” claim and began to slander a web hosting service offering unlimited everything. He asked this rhetorical question: what do you do with a pig at the buffet? If a determined customer waddles into an all–you–can–eat salad bar and decides to stay from lunch until closing time after long after dinner, should the salad bar be expected to put up with him?

Or apply the Golden Rule: if I started a hosting company and offered unlimited (really, unmetered) hosting plans, how would I feel if Geraldo found where Jimmy Hoffa’s body was buried and decided to reveal its location in a web exclusive using my $15/month “unlimited” plan? Likewise, since all these “unlimited” plans are on some form of shared hosting plan (in which multiple customers use the same physical machine), what if you were just trying to get by hosting the local chamber of commerce site and Geraldo moved in next door with his Hoffa exclusive? More realistically, if you write a bunch of inefficient SQL queries in a database app, understand that the hosting provider may start viewing your site as a bottleneck and act accordingly. If you set up a high traffic site that’s mostly static HTML pages, you’ll probably be fine. If you end up hosting multiple Joomla sites for the anime world, understand that running a dozen copies of Joomla in RAM can kill a server dead. On the other hand you could probably run 100 small sites using WordPress to create online brochures for local firms and not run afoul of the admins.

Manage your expectations. More important, manage your clients’ expectations. If you plan to be a pig at the buffet, expect the manager to escort you out at some point.

Free web-based keyword research tools: a Working Webmaster special report

Are people searching for what you think they’re searching for? Every piece of content you add to your site should be “market tested” using keyword research tools. You can multiply traffic simply by ensuring that you use the same keywords that end users expect you to use. See our special report on free web-based keyword research tools.

New special report on sources of truly free graphics, even for commercial sites

Most pointers to free clipart and free images disregard that the images are probably not really free, often leading users to hard sell pages. These royalty free photo and free clipart sites have vivid, fresh content in hundreds of different categories. Read this Working Webmaster Special Report to get truly free images for your site.