Microsoft® and Yahoo! have now received regulatory clearance to form the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

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Yahoo and Google caught serving virus infected advertising is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I never really seem to have had a problem like this but apparently hackers and scammers are using ad networks like Google Adsense and Yahoo Search to serve malicious advertisements which download a trojan virus to the users computer.

I think this is a serious issue and the responsibility falls on Yahoo and Google to sort this out. The comments on the theregister.co.uk seem to try to put it on the person that loaded the bogus ads but I say Yahoo and Google have a responsibility to monitor the ads they are serving and they should immediately ban offending accounts.

Some of the commenters out there feel that the ad server is not responsible for the actual content served but the publisher or website owner is responsible to track this themselves. I say thats crap. I have enoughh to do and to be honest the reason I chose Google or Yahoo as my main ad network is because there is a certain amount of trust that they will provide a good clean service to me and my website visitors. The idea I as a webmaster with over 100 active websites can manage to view all the ads served is silly and ignorant of what some webmasters do.

Both Google and Yahoo need to do something to protect the integrity of their ad serving networks or it’s going to cost them in revenue.

The trojan itself was installed via an infected PDF file that opened and closed when a user clicked an ad. It’s called Win32/Alureon, and it opens backdoor access to infected machines. This is serious business, and it’s hardly the first time we’ve seen “malvertising,” but who’s to blame when it happens? Should site owners who buy ads have to scan them first, or should the big ad networks be responsible?

Read the article here.

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Moving over to Google Affiliate Network is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I got an email a few days back telling me I needed link my Adsense account to my Google Affiliate Network account before some expiration date. To be honest I was unaware I even had a an account with them. It must be very old and something I never used. I assume it was with DoubleClick but I cannot remember ever actually using their services.

I figure it was wort investigating so I tracked down a new password and logged into the account for the first time today. the interface is smooth and at first glance there were lots of advertisers. I had a Commission Junction account that was actually deleted for lack of use. I had some old banners out there that were deadlinked and I figure what better time to clean up some old ads than now.

I’m moving over to the Google Affiliate Network for all my banner advertisements and and I’ll probably even test some ads out in new places on many of my sites. I have a few dozen sites which have little to no advertising on them and it’s about time I monetize them.

I also have a Linkshare account which brings in some pretty crappy returns. I made some money there a couple years back but my performance with their programs has been weak the last two years. I avoided dealing with it and considered much of it to be a result of economic slowdown and a general lack of ecommerce being driven by banners. I’ve never liked banner ads and the fact I rarely click on them seems to make me think no one else ever clicks on them either.

I’ll keep everyone posted on my transition to Google Affiliate Network from Linkshare and Commission Junction. I would love any advice you may have on how to achive best performance with their program and I’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.

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Parking Domains with Google Adsense for Domains is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I have a lot of domains and to be honest many of them have never been used. I used to think it was crap to buy a domain and not at least build a page on it so I had a lot of single page website pointing to some program or maybe just linking back to one of my primary sites.

These domains are nice premium keyword domains with long term value which I am just holding on to and not interested in building some big business under at the moment. I went through a phase there for a while where I was building some splogs or spammy style blogs and using content pulled from various rss feeds to populate articles in WordPress but those got old fast. I came out with a few DMCA notices and very little revenue from the large amounts of useless traffic generated.

Maybe I was using the wrong revenue programs or maybe I wasn’t building enough links but whatever the case splogs were not big money maker for me. Of the domains with no content I actually had a few dozen that were dead sites and pointed to either empty directories on the server because I never got around to building a site or even worse they still pointed at some silly template at the registrar because I never even updated the DNS after purchasing the domains. Some of these go back to 2004 when I bought a load of domains and never built them up.

Every once in awhile someone makes an offer to buy one of my domains and I’ll sell it but to be honest I was looking for an easy revenue program that required nothing on my part. Over the years I had heard about paid parking programs for domains but many of them required you to make a payment to join the program or you had to pay them some huge percentage of revenue that seemed ludicrous to me. I just did not agree that I should have to pay my own money in order to promote my domains with your program. The real value is in the keywords of my domains and if they are generating clicks with no content why should I pay you a portion of that?

I steered clear of paid parking programs and focused instead on content development and revenue programs related to the domain niche when possible. Recently I decided to boost my usage of Google Adsense after ripping the ads out of most of my sites two years ago. I felt the conversions on Google ads was weak and I tried some other niche specific programs but these required to much maintenance and the difference in revenue was negligible. I was making more money but it took me more effort which sucks when you’re lazy like me.

While creating ads for my sites I was reminded that Google offers their Adsense for Domains now and I figured it was time to start better using some of these domains. I moved over just over 100 domains that have been dad or unused in the last two years. None of these was developed or promoted beyond possibly a single page with one external banner and no more than a paragraph of static content that was as stale as any content you have seen. Many of them were still shtml pages designed before I got into PHP and database driven sites.

It was actually pretty simple to move them over and Google of course offers detailed instructions on how to transfer DNS and Hosts records settings based on your registrar so you can be up and running in under 24 hours. It’s Google so we have no issue with trust or payments and they take care of serving up the best ads based on keywords you use and of course the domain name.

In the last week my earnings from the domains has averaged just below $10 per day which covers the registration fees on one domain. If it maintains the same pace for a full year I’ll be able to pay off two years of registration for the whole lot of domains each year until I either sell them or have time to build a new site. It’s not making me huge bucks but it’s not costing me anything as some of those domains were.

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Make huge internet profits and money from home is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

It’s a great sounding title and I wish it was as simple as one single blog post for me to tell you how easy it is to make money from home online but to be honest you’ll need to read a lot more than just this blog and even though our advice is great it’s just a small part of the information you will need to seek internet profits and wealth online.

Making money from home online with powerful programs like those offered at ProfitOnInternet.com are a good way to get started on the road to internet profit and fortune. They aggregate the very best information on how to make money online with programs tailored to your desired internet marketing niche.

With advice on a variety of programs including making money on the web with Google and how to make money working from anywhere in the world they carry a wealth of information and resources for those just getting started on their path to internet profits.

I got my start to internet profits as a webmaster for my own network of websites and when people ask me what they should do to make money online I tell them they should find a great resource that specializes in that field of information.

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Aggregate your social networks with Lifestream WordPress plugin is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

The social web has gotten out of control with most power users having upwards of 10 or more social profiles to manage. Not only do we have MySpace and Facebook but many web professionals have LinkedIn, Digg, Stumbleupon or Reddit accounts to manage. If you like pictures you probably have a Flickr account and maybe you use Picasa for web albums. If you listen to music you may have iLast.fm to go with your Zune card or maybe you’re a simple kind of person and you just have MSN or GMAIL as your contacts manager.

If you are reading this blog then odds are you have all of these and more to manage and bringing it all together in one place is kinda cool. The wordppress plugin Lifestream makes this happen and keeps all your social activity in one location with a few simple clicks. Your social feed can be used as an online resume with a history of everything you do online as a bit of job history for those of us who live and work online.

My Lifestream shows you that I spend much of my time online reading news sites and promoting stories from not only my own websites but the millions of other websites I read each day. I use my del.icio.us account to list my favorite urls and my Facebook account includes links to lots of this as well. I’m looking forward to see what new social networking opportunities my Facebook account brings to me once I start using the new Facebook Connect feature.

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How to monetize your Simple Machines Forum is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I really like WordPress and I’m building a large portion of my business on this easy to use content management system. I started out before we got to version 2.04 but that’s when I really got into it. I have had to update and upgrade many WordPress installations over that time and to be honest it has never been much of a hassle. The most difficult part has been with heavily customized websites and those that use a lot of plugins.

I always wished we had an automatic way to update WordPress and now we do. WordPress Automatic Upgrade is the best plugin ever made for WordPress and a hopeful feature of future additions. The ability to upgrade your software is essential to preventing hack attacks and this plugin makes it so easy to do that I just updated this blog from 2.5 to 2.7 while I was typing the post. I’ll post a couple of screen shots but I don’e have much to say about the steps involved.

It’s all so simple there isn’t much need in like 6 or 7 clicks i was able to backup my database, download the new files and install them and it was so smooth and seamless that all I had to do was save this blog post and then refresh the page. For this site I was told that I need to upgrade to Simple Taggin from Simple Tags and there is now an updated version of Akismet for me to download. The best part is that the new version of WordPress does this in two short clicks and i can now keep my entire blog up to date using the WordPress software and the right plugins.

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My Lifestream is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

Lifestream is a wordpress plugin which allows me to link all of my social networks and the activity in each account to my blog with a page to display a summary of my actions. My Lifestream is published here and contains my Facebook, MySpace, del.icio.us, Mixx, Magnolia, YouTube, StumbleUpon and the many other social services I now have. Just listig them all has reminded me that i need to update a few of my profiles with the latest information.

Whats the reason for this? Well I’m interested in using this blog as an announcement platform for a social marketing service I want to build and I am linking this blog up to all of my social networks. I am hoping to develop a port of this blog to be used for music promotion and band management. I have a number of artists who have asked me to develop an online promotion tool and this is part of that. So look for more blog posts each day with an update of my social network activity. This may be a big part of my blogging on this site for awhile. Enjoy!

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Mozilla not concerned with Chrome browser from Google is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

Mozilla claims not to be worried about the new browser from Google and I bet I know why. It’s a collaboration between the two to knock IE and Microsoft out of the battle altogether.

Chrome is a future browser and Google knows that by building ahead of the curve the can make certain to chop Microsoft before they get a chance to copy with IE9 or IE10.

Microsoft is not prepared for another browser war and Google knows that IE is their strenght for everything from search marketing to social networking and more. Without the overwhelming number of default IE users then Microsof twould not be so powerful on the web and thats what Chrome and Mozilla are teaming up on.

Mozilla can handle the “current web” technologies and Chrome is being built for web apps and Javascript based devices of the future. I think its genius and MS better start playing catch up right now!

Mozilla CEO: No worries about Google Chrome | Open Source | ZDNet.com

Mozilla CEO John Lilly said he has no worries about Google jumping into the open source browser market.

In a blog posted on September 1 before the beta release of Google’s Chrome yesterday, Lilly noted that Mozilla’s Firefox has plenty of competition and reminded the public that the foundation’s primary motive is to keep the web open.

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Google News Alerts for content updates is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I’ve been using Google News alerts for years now and I guess alot of people should know about them but it occurred to me that I should drop a short post on how cool it is to News Alerts for all sorts of things. You can set an alert for any keyword you want and use the email updates for article ideas like I do for each topic I cover in my blog network.

I use the alerts on sites related to Zune and other gadgets, Jamaica and Negril specifically as well as to search for things like my own name, my company name and the name of some other companies that I track. I use an alert to notify me of new links found to a number of my sites and I also use them to track some of my favorite topics such as search marketing, blogging and george bush.

I also use my iGoogle homepage to track some of my favorite subject and the numerous RSS feeds I read for article ideas. It’s helps me organize my favorite content and post articles faster when I’m ready to write.

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