I got some news from fellow webmasters this morning that .COM domains at godaddy are available at .99 cents each. I guess many of you already know this since it has been spread all over the net already. I just thought I’d post it here as well and save some of your money. Normally, you’ll have to spend 7$ + ICANN fee for .com domain (after using certain coupon), but now you can save up to 6 dollars.

I want to buy a domain, how do I register for just 0.99$?
To register a domain name, first select your domain name and go to check out page. On check out page, there should be an option to enter coupon codes, enter “test99” as the coupon code and you’ll see the price decreasing to 0.99$ + ICANN fee, which works out at 1.19$. Just complete the transaction and you’ll see the domain on your account.

You just saved 6 dollars, isn’t that cool?

However, there are some restrictions that apply:

1. The coupon only works 1 time per account.
2. Your account must be old one. You can’t use a new account for this.

Sounds fair. Obviously, if GoDaddy keeps offering unlimited amount of .com names for 0.99$, they’ll be in huge loss.

Anyways, I’m thinking of a nice domain name to register. I don’t want to miss this opportunity. You shouldn’t miss either, so what are you waiting for? go, grab your domain for 99 cents! :p

And about the contest, I’ve already sent entries to some people - may be 25% or so, and will be sending to others after some time. The winners will be announced tomorrow, so please keep checking. Or if you’ve already subscribed, you’ll receive an notification from us.

After about 24 hours from now, we’ll send out all the entries to everyone who has participated in this contest. If you enter the contest after 24 hours from now (It’s almost 12 am here, +5.5 GMT), your entry will be considered as invalid. On the September 2nd, I’ll use Random.org to randomize the entries, take an screenshot and post it here. The winners will have to email us in order to claim your prizes.

Note: The winners will only have 7 days to contact us. If the prize(s) aren’t claimed within 7 days of announcement, I’ll re-draw the entries again and give the prizes to someone else instead.

Anyway, if you’re yet to enter the contest, please do so now. There’s a good chance of winning some cash and domain names.

Lets come back to the topic. In this post, I’m going to share some tips which can get your site indexed pretty quickly; no more than 2 - 3 days. Although I can’t guarantee you that ALL of your pages will be indexed, I can guarantee you that at least some of your pages will be indexed including the home page, if you follow the tips properly. This is surely gonna help many people. May be if you’re doing website flipping, most of the times, you’ll buy a domain, build the site and sell it within a day or so. Obviously, your site will not be indexed so soon and you can implement some of these tips to get it indexed. Getting your site will bring in more potential buyers, so this is definitely worth trying.

Before I start writing my tips, I just wanna say that please follow as many tips as possible to increase your chances of getting indexed quicker.

Create an sitemap. There are many SiteMap generators out there, search on google and find a decent one. Make sure you upload sitemap.xml to your root directory. This certainly does help you in getting indexed pretty quick.

Submit to digg.com. This tip is something which I follow most of the times when I need my sites to get indexed. Try to submit as many pages as possible. If your website has got hundreds of pages, just submit some of your main pages. For me, I mostly flip content sites which have got about 10 pages or less, so I submit all pages to digg. Don’t care about how many diggs you get, just submit your pages and you’ll see your site getting indexed within 2 - 3 days.

Get a backlink from website that has been already indexed. Although this is something what I haven’t done so far, but have heard it works. If you have any other websites which are already indexed on google, you can backlink the site you want to get indexed and it should get indexed very soon. If you’re implementing this tip, my recommendation is to get a backlink to your site from homepage and website which search engines love.

These are the three tips which are coming to my mind at the moment, but there are many other ways of getting your site indexed quickly. However, these should be sufficient enough to get indexed.

If you’re uncertain regarding how to implement them, please leave a comment and I’ll try getting back to you as soon as possible. I hope these tips will help you and your sites to get indexed faster.

I am yet to upgrade this blog.. and several more blogs which I am currently running. I guess I’ll probably upgrade tomorrow or later tonight. I was busy all day in celebrating Independence day and have some things to deal with tonight. If you haven’t upgraded yet, make sure you do so soon.

I am assuming I had mentioned the steps to upgrade in the past, however I’ll mention it again which will be explained in a better way, and anyone should be able to understand it easily.

Step 1 - download WP.

Step 1 is to download the WP files. For example, if you’re upgrading to WP 2.6.1, you’ll have to download its files before you do anything.

Step 2 - Back up your database and files.

The second step is to backup your database and all the files. It’s very important step ’cause if you mess up anything whilst upgrading, you’re screwed! I always backup my databases and files before upgrading wordpress to ensure if the upgrading part has failed, I can always re-install WP.

To back up your database, go to your dashboard > manage > export and export your database. Most of the times, they’re only a few mbs in size or less. After you’ve got backups, make sure you download all your plugins, themes, etc. if you use any. You can use some FTP programs like FIleZilla or FireFTP (for firefox users) to do this task.

Step 3 - uploading files.

Once you’ve gotten your backups of files and databases, upload all the contents in your WP folder which you downloaded to root directory.

Step 4 - install.

After you’ve uploaded all the files, go to http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php and follow the instructions. It takes only couple of clicks after that to finish off the installation.

For more information about the releases, and to know what bugs have been fixed and the new things has been added, please view their official post.

Anyways, back to the topic. I’ve just recorded an video which teaches how to import wordpress databases. If you’re not really sure how to transfer WP sites, this should be very helpful to you (of course, you’ll have to re-install WP on other server and upload the theme files). It’s pretty simple guide and took me about three minutes and six seconds (of which lot of time went on the uploading part..). Have a look at the video :

Make sure you subscribe to my videos to receive more updates. I am going to produce more videos which will contain tutorials - mostly Photoshop and Blogging related over the period of next few weeks or months. Again, if you’ve got some nice themes which will suit this blog, don’t forget to comment here or contact me via email (use contact us page).

As the blog wasn’t updated for so many days, I thought of updating with this post which is very useful for the ones who are finding difficult to get approved on adsense. This has worked me and my friends in the past - in fact, I used the same trick to get approved first time (got banned after that). The idea is pretty simple and straightforward. If you’re finding hard to get into adsense, this is the method for you which should work. It increases your chances by ten times!

The first step is to create an blogger.com account. Just sign in using your existing google account and create a blog. Add some content (Unique content is always better and I only used unique content to get approved. I am not sure if PLR stuff or copied stuff would work), you can hire some cheap writer, or write some articles yourself. Five or less articles should be good enough (I had about seven articles as far as I can remember). Now the next thing is to go to your layout settings and you should be able to find options to add a page element - just click on that, and you’ll see a list of items which can be used as elements. There must be an option for adsense as well, if you click on it, it’ll ask you to sign up for an account. Just fill the form and submit it, and you’ll have 10x more chances of getting approved.

If you still aren’t into adsense and are looking to get in, this is the best method to get in! What are you waiting for? follow the steps and get yourself an account! :p

Anyways, let’s come back to the topic. Since the PR was updated, yesterday I was checking PRs of my friends’ sites. In the meantime, I also checked the PR of some popular sites like Live.com, dmoz.org etc. When I checked the PR of Gmail.com, I was shocked. It shows forged PR if you check using CheckPageRank.net . It does show valid for www.gmail.com but for gmail.com it’s showing forged PR.

It also shows fake PR if you check at DigPageRank.com.

But that’s not going to matter Gmail I guess. PR should mean nothing to them as they get no profit from PR. I do agree that PR has no meaning, but only for some sites though. I’ve got some sites running only because of their PR. PR does matter me some times and I do make decent money ’cause of PR (Not by selling links though, there are some other ways which gives me money). I just thought I’d share this for fun.

Prizes.

There are going to be only 3 winners and here are the prizes.

1st prize.

125$ cash.

2 .COM/.NET/.ORG domain names of your choice.

2nd prize.

100$ cash.

2 .COM/.NET/.ORG domain names of your choice.

3rd prize.

75$ cash.

1 .COM/.NET/.ORG domain name of your choice.

All the domain names will be registered at Godaddy and we’ll require your account details for pushing the domain name. I shall e-mail the winners with what info is required. Oh, and the cash is paid through PayPal. You’ll have to email us your PayPal email id to receive the payments. I shall forward the prizes within 24 hours after I read (It should usually take a lot less time).

How to enter the contest.

There are several things which needs to be done to earn entries. The more entries you earn, the better chance you have to win the contest. Here are some ways which can earn you entries.

Subscribe to our feed via e-mail (2 entries)

Just enter your email, and click on “subscribe”. Please make sure you’ve  confirmed the subscription, if you haven’t done so, the entry will not be valid. This could earn you 2 credits. Or if you’ve already subscribed to our RSS feed, please leave a comment.

Post on your blog about this contest (5 entries).

If you’ve got hold of a blog, and are interested in getting more credits, please make a blog post about this on your blog. The post must be over 200 words at least, and must contain at least 2 links (the homepage of this blog and this blog posts’ url). If your blog has got over 500 subscribers, you’ll get 2 more entries as bonus.

These are only the ways which can be used to earn entries. There’s a possibility of earning totally 9 credits which is pretty cool.

After you enter, please comment on this post with whatever you’ve done. For the email, if you’re not willing to reveal in public, please use it whilst commenting on the “Mail” box. You will then be mailed with your entry numbers.

Deadline.

The deadline of the contest is 1st September, 2008. Winners will be announced on the 1st or the 2nd of September, 2008. Once the deadline has been met, we will use random.org to randomize the entries and the 3 lucky entries will receive an email. I shall announce the winners with screenshots.

If you have got any questions, please contact us . I might need some sponsors for the next months’ contest, so if you’ve got something and are willing to sponsor, please email us.

How much time did it took me?

It took me around 2 hours to search some blog posts (4 times offered and all the times totally different blog posts so I guess 2 hours is pretty low) and some more time to deal with buyers, send them the reports, etc. I usually outsource the work; never do the comments myself. There are many cheap commentators available out there and the lowest I was able to find was 0.10$/comment. I’ve made 50 - 60$ more after I canclulated everything and these 50-60$ has been spent to outsource the work. It’s probably lesser than that, but lets just assume its around that mark. I worked no more than 3 - 4 hours - so 250$/hour is pretty good. I’ve offered it 4 times over an period of 2 months or so.

Do-follow blog commenting is really easy, doesn’t requires any investment either and if you’re looking for some capital to invest on your projects, this could be one of the best ways to get it.

Can I do blog commenting as well?

If I am able to do it, I guess all the readers here can do the same. You don’t need any special skills, nor any investment so this could be easily done. You just have to do some research and spend some time in searching for the perfect blog commentator who can do your work unless you want to do the comments yourself. Jason @ TUK has wrote an amazing article about this here . My trick was pretty much the same (The first time I had searched the blog posts myself though as I didn’t knew any tools like LivePR.info’s internal page rank checker). I prefer to go with SEOJunkie’s tool as the other tool seems to be giving errors whilst searching.

Anyways, I’ll be announcing our Augusts’ contest tomorrow. I do have the prizes ready with me, however, I am still thinking of more which can be replaced or added. If you’ve got suggestions, feel free e-mail me. The last free banner spot is still not claimed, so if you’re looking for free exposure, please send e-mail me with your link and the 125×125 banner. I shall put it as soon as I read your e-mail.

If you’ve any questions about blog commenting, let me know - I’ll try my best to solve them.

I am not expecting much changes to the PR of this blog as I’ve never focused on SEO for this blog. I wanted to do it long ago, however, was busy with lots of projects and never could focus on it. May be this blog could get a PR1 or 2, or may be even remain the same. I’ll be doing some link building stuff after a week or so as I’ve got lots of work to do and will be busy for some days. I am just keeping my fingers crossed and hoping to see some changes in the Page Rank.

Please share your July 2008 google PR update with us (if any of your sites have been already updated :D).

EDIT :

I’ve just noticed that the blogs’ PR has changed to PR2. I was expecting PR2 max. and that is what I’ve received. Many sites’ PRs have been changed, was your changed?

PS : Also realized that this was my 50th post here. It’s kinda milestone for me. Hope to hit the 100 post mark soon.