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Well, today I woke up to 5 of my websites missing any content what so ever.  The only thing that was showing was the the header of the sites.  But with some of the browsers I could not even get this much to show up.  At first I thought, man someone just hacked the hell out of my sites.  But looking at the sites closer it just looked like the database connection was not active.  So, I proceeded to call godaddy.com.  It just happens that all of these sites were hosted with godaddy.  I spent at least a half an hour with their customer service reps going back and forth.  But, they could not find anything that was wrong with my connections.  So, I decided I needed to start playing around with my site and found that the wordpress admin area was running without any flaws.  So, the database was up and running to my dismay. 

Their goes my database theory..  I started messing around with my plugins and de-activating plugin and activating plugin and finally I got some life back to the sites.  I found that over the weekend something changed to the tune that my plugins were not working anymore.  Because the plugins were not working no content was being loaded.  This took me about 3 hours to find out.  So, I proceeded to trying anything and everything to try to get the plugins to work again but I was not able to.

This really pissed me off.  What could have changed to stop my plugin from not working????  I just could not figure it out.  As a result I decided to move 2 of the sites to a new hosting server.  Thus, getting off of godaddy..  I guess this mishap gave me an excuse to move the website, as I did not like the hosting that godaddy was providing. 

What was your worse hosting experience?  What did you do to solve it?

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So you got your website up and running. You hired an excellent web designer to craft a perfect home page and satellite pages that will really draw in the visitors and inspire them to buy. You have a beautiful catalog of products with detailed descriptions. You have a section dedicated to the services you provide with praises from past customers. And you have the best online shopping cart service out there so that you customers can buy from you with no hassles and next day shipping. That’s great! Now where are your customers?

Driving traffic to your website is a much discussed and much misunderstood venture. There are a million theories out there that claim to drive tons of new visitors to your site daily. There are services that say they will increase your traffic by an enormous percentage if you will only pay them their small fee over a period of fifty years. There are so-called experts who will place your pages on all the best search engines on the net. They claim that with this kind of blanket exposure, your traffic numbers will explode within days.

But the only sure-fire way to draw productive traffic to your website is through targeted marketing. The important word to notice here is “productive.” You can draw hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site every year by hosting a giveaway of some kind. Services that search the internet for freebies will have people clicking a link to your site like crazy. But these people are not there to buy anything from you … quite the opposite. They are empty clicks. There is nothing productive about this kind of traffic. People looking for free stuff will rarely make you any kind of money. And that’s what you’re after, right?

So target your marketing to the people who really want to buy what you have to offer. How? Start by trying these basic steps…

* Hire an experienced copywriter. The copy that is on your site makes a world of difference in the sales you garner from the internet. Most important to targeted marketing are the keywords found in your title and the metatags in the website’s code. An experienced copywriter will know how to determine the most effective keywords and place them strategically in your site’s copy. If you cannot afford a copywriter, do some research and talk to your web designer about inserting metatags.

* You can enroll in pay per click search engines. Obviously, google.com is one of these, but most of the most popular keywords are already taken. If you can think of some original phrases that people use to search for your products or services, you can post your ad next to the text that comes up when people search for that phrase. Every time someone clicks on your ad to go to your site, you pay google.com a nominal fee.

* Submit articles to free ezine sites. This is especially helpful if you are a service provider. You can write, or hire someone to write, an article for you about your area of expertise. Give some free tips, offer your experience, and be accessible in the text. Then at the bottom of the article, you get a link to your website advertising your services. Every time someone publishes your article in their ezine or newsletter, they must use your web address at the bottom.

These are just a few of the many ways to ensure you get “productive” traffic. Empty clicks are just that … empty… and your wallet will stay that way, too!

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I would like to start of by saying I am sorry for not posting as much as I should have last week.  I have been going through a few headaches this past week that have diverted my thoughts away from putting up anything that would mean anything meaningful to anyone.  If your interested here is a highlight.

I have been going through a little of network hell in the past 2 to 3 days.  You see I have always had a wired network for my computers but my wife and I decided to get a refrigerator this week that has a wireless access point to upload pictures.  But come to find out every time I configure the refrig to my netword my router got blown away.  Which blew away my whole home network.

Next I went to program my XBOX 360 system with wireless access.  Come to find out that I did not have my media server configured on my system.  I still have not figured out how to do that.  So, thinking that my router was not able to handle the broadband needed to connect to the refrig and my XBOX I went out today to purchase another router.  I almost purchased the same router as I had before.  Come to find out, the router that I had, which was on sale the cheapoo guy in me, was not a very good router.  If your in the market for a new router I would not recommend the Linksys WRT54G model.  For a wired network it is great.  But, for a wireless network it has issues.  I switched over to the Linksys WRT54Gs.  I have not had any problems as of yet.  My wife has hooked up the refrig already and when the kids go to bed I will hook up the XBOX.  I still need to figure out the media center junk.  Vista headache next..  Anyways, I wish I could show you all the other linksys devices that I have gone through in the last 4 years.  In front of me now I have the linksys router BEFSR41.  This tropper last for a while.  I was able to get 3 years out of that one.  But it finally burned out on last year.  Then there is the wireless b router BEFW11S4.  This baby did not work out of the box.  I never got any time on this one.  Last but not least the Wireless G router WRT54G.  It still works but has a sucky wireless network.  It is also on sale at this present time at bestbuy.  Don’t get it…  Spend a little more money and get a better router that will last a little longer than that one.

Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G Router

Price: Too low to display undefined

Lowest used price: $25.00 USD

Linksys WRT54GS Wireless-G Broadband Router with SpeedBooster

Price: Too low to display undefined

Lowest used price: $52.03 USD

This is just a little of the hell that I have been going through this weekend.  But, I hope to start off fresh this week and start on a new subject that I hope will bring you and yours more joy…  Till tomorrow…  Peace….

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After 3 year it seems that it is time to get a new computer.  I believe tha I have struggled long enough with the emachine that I have been using.  To date I was using a emachine T3990 box with a intel celeron D processor.  The box came with 80 Gigs and 256 MB or ram.  Wow, that sucked!!!  But when I brought it I thought it was just enough for me to last for at least 5 years.   Boy was I wrong.  It has XP installed on it and in the last month it has started to get very sluggish and it would print out blank pages on it’s own.  It got so bad that I would spend 2 to 3 hours on it and all the virtual memory would run out and I had to reboot the machine.  Thats 2 to 3 times a day!!  I also found out that I could not play DVD’s on the machine because it only had a CD R/W drive in it.  Boy, did I get a clunker.  But, the machine did help me to put out a number of projects that are still paying off.  So, to my last machine, I sulute you and say thanks for the years of service.

As for my next machine, I took some time to see what was on the market.  I am a big PC guy and I don’t have a lot of experience with apple.  But, I have to say that there latest iMac is a goooood machine.  I checked it out for about a week and I was very impressed with the hardard and software provided.  The only problem that I had was that I have software that I did not want to replace with migrating to apple’s system.  I know that I could have created a dual boot system with windows and apple.  But, to me that would have been a headache in the making.  But, if it would have given me a machine that would last for 5 to 6 years I would be willing to do it.  As for a PC, I did not want to deal with vista.  I heard a many horror stories with the system.  I also felt that I would have to replace all of my software going with a PC also.  Unless, I built my own system with XP.

All and all, I decided to go with a PC a gateway GM5664 Phenom with a 22″ Widescrren HD LCD screen.  Boy, is this system fast.  It is by far the best system that I have ever owned.  And I have to say I love it.  I found that the old software that I was so worried about installed on the vista operating system.  So, I did not have any problems in that area.  I had to upgrade my office suite.  I was runing office 2000 on my old system and I was told that would not install on vista.  I do have office 2003 but I can’t find the product code.  So I had to drop $200 dollars into office.  I guess that is not bad.  As for hard drive space, 1 tarabyte.  I think I won’t fill that up.  If I do I am a bad man ;-)!  The only new hardware that I need not is a camera and a print server.  Oh, an it came with a all in one flatbed canon photo printer.  Just what I wanted..  With this type of computer I better pump out some good content.  Till next time..  Two fingers in the air.. PEACE…

If this post helped you or even gave you an idea please scratch my back with a tip. I sure would appreciate it.  This post was brought to you by TTZ Media. Make money online by running TTZ Media ads.

Don’t forget to visit www.marketassociate.com and comment on new posts! For the month of January Top Commenters will be rewarded with a link from this site and a $25 dollar gift certificate to Bestbuy!

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I truly admired Martin Luther King Jr.  The vision that he had, how close he was able to get to God and to see and carry out the vision that was given to him by God.  He paid the ultimate price so that people like me could pursue the kind of life that I am able to cherish.

With this post I want to remind people that though we have come very far in this nation we still have a long way to go.  Racial tension is still a place of hurt in this nation.  Rights are still being taken away because we as a people do not vote.  We are like sheep that have no direction.  People that need to be told what direction to go and how to pursue that direction.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a visionary that had a dream that one day this nation will treat everyone equal.  It may seem that we have accomplished this dream but there are still people that work hard to take away that dream from people of color (minorities).  So, if you have time, please listen to Martin Luther Kings Jr speech.  It is still relevant in this time and age. Though not as strong, though not as apparent, it is still here. We still have work to do.. Continue the work…

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