Zone Alarm

Tagged - traffic

The secret to getting LOADS of traffic… This is not an advertisement

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

book

You want to know the secret? THERE IS NO SECRET. Any site that says there is a “secret” is lying. How you get traffic is very obvious.

  • ADVERTISING, ADVERTISNG, AND MORE ADVERTISING
  • SEO – SEO is very important for driving targeted traffic to  your website, continuously. This is where quality content comes in. If you have good ranking in search engines, you’re all set. You won’t need to spend a dime. It’s very difficult to get good rankings, however and it’s best to start with ADVERTISING.

That’s about it. There’s no real “secret”. If you have a lot of money, it’s quite easy to setup a high traffic site. Right off the bat. Just use something like adwords. However, there are some services out there for those of us that don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on advertising.

  • Entrecard – You’ve seen me talk about this before, it works to a certain point. I’ve gained some readers from this service :) You also get a chance to connect with a lot of different people that blog. You’re not alone. I say entrecard is worth it.
  • Adgitize – I haven’t tried this personally, but I know it’s probably worth the $14 a month. I did some poking around in TechByPC’s traffic stats on ProjectWonderful, and I saw it definitely was hauling in some traffic. (TechByPC you can have me remove this if you want)
  • ProjectWonderful – Cheap advertising, you just have to know how to work with the system. You can get 100s of clicks very cheaply if you know how to work with it. Finding sites that are within your target niche can be difficult. It’s best  to try and find new sites that were just listed that have high traffic – ads are very cheap at that point.

You see ads on my site. I’m not doing this to annoy you. I’m not doing this to make money. So why are they there? They’re there for my own advertising. I can make a very small amount from having these ads there (except entrecard) and that money goes to advertising for this site.

Conclusion

Getting traffic can actually be quite easy. If you have thousands of dollars laying around you don’t know what to do with. I notice that a lot of blogs exist only because they’re trying to make money. I hope they’re ready for disappointment, because to make money you have to have traffic, and to have traffic you have to spend money.. Yea it doesn’t make much sense. Let me know if I missed anything. I know this isn’t on topic very much, but when you’re trying to promote a site all the time you blog about it as well. :)

Entrecard – What you should know

Friday, December 19th, 2008

You should know that people that are doing 300 Drops a day (like myself :D ) are not manually clicking through entrecard. Some have lists of people made up for their drops. My method is a little different, and I think maybe a little better, I don’t know. Timing is also important, the best time to drop is 12AM eastern. I don’t do this all the time, but I do it when I can. I need sleep just like everyone else :)   Depending on the times of my drops, I might just do today’s or I might do today’s and yesterdays. This is because when I drop at midnight, I know I won’t be missing anyone that dropped me that day. When I drop at 4PM or so, I would be missing people that dropped me the day before. Below is a short tutorial to show you how to get 300 drops done in about 20 minutes.

NoScript

NoScript is a plugin for FireFox that blocks all scripts on pages. You have to disable script blocking on entrecard.com and amazonaws.com

noscript

Next, you have to MAKE SURE that temporarily allow top-level sites by default is clicked. It was blocking entrecard still and I wondered why, this option makes that problem go away.

noscript2

Firefox Settings

Go to Tools>Options>Content and add exceptions entrecard.com and amazonaws.com to the “Load images automatically” option. Then disable that optioin. Also uncheck “Enable Java”.

firefox1firefox2

Linky

Linky is a plugin for firefox that allows you to select links from a page. First, what I do is go into my drops inbox and select all the people who have dropped me. Then I use linky to open all selected links in tabs.

linkylinky2

I also drop randomly a lot, so I just go into campaign, select all the links in “New” , “Cheap” , or “Random” for about 12 rows. The only issue I have with that is I have to manually uncheck the details link, but I’ve been thinking about making an autoit script for that. The amount of tabs you can have will probably depend on how much RAM you have in your computer.

Note that I still browse blogs and drop comments after I’ve dropped my cards. I highly doubt anyone who drops 300 cards is doing everything manually, that would take an eternity :) I wouldn’t have anytime to blog or work on my site.

Let me know if I missed anything, this should be very similar to other guides out there, but I use linky instead of some other things people do. I have to thank nukeit.org for linky, I believe he mentioned it in one of his blog entries.

The Alexa Traffic Rank

Saturday, December 13th, 2008

From what I can gather, the Alexa web site traffic rank or trend means diddly squat. Alexa has everything to do with their toolbar. If your visitors don’t have this toolbar, it wont have any effect on the rank of your site. I have added the widget, but I’m contemplating removing it. Alexa should make you add a small widget, kind of like the topblogging widget. This would collect the amount of unique hits, instead of just Alexa toolbar users. I don’t know, personally I don’t care about my rank on Alexa.

The fact is, many people are manipulating their rank on Alexa, which means that their rank is bogus anyway.

RoyalSurf & Brief ramble about trojans/virii

Saturday, December 6th, 2008
Trojan Horse

Trojan Horse

I don’t recommend this. I was using IE on it (Don’t exactly remember why, I hate IE) and there must be a new exploit of some sort for IE. I visited a certain site and zonealarm freaks out about ~.exe trying to become a startup item. I denied that, then denied access to the internet & trusted zone. I then searched for this file and lo and behold it was in the system32 folder. In case you don’t know, most virii/trojans hang out in that folder. I could not delete it nor could I end it’s process, since it was not added to a startup item I decided I should reboot. I then disconnected my modem, went into system32 and deleted it. Then I proceeded to do a full virus scan with nod32 & zonealarm. Nothing came up, so I guess I made it out alright.

I would have liked to analyze this file, but I would have to setup a vmware machine and play with ollydbg and I wasn’t really in the mood to go that far with it. Of course, I suppose I could have analyzed it with IDA Pro, but alas I didn’t bother since I wanted it gone. I was kind of interested in whether it was a trojan or a downloader for adware. Could’ve dropped it into one of the various online virus scan sites as well I suppose.

looking at milw0rm it looks like there are quite a few IE exploits. Still, most of the sites on RoyalSurf are shady and I really would not recommend using them.

On the flip side, I highly recommend ZoneAlarm, because it has saved me a few times from being infected. I usually don’t have issues with infections, it’s rare but it happens. I wonder sometimes how everyone else gets along with out getting infected with anything.. I think I read somewhere that most Windows PC’s were infected with one thing or another.

So many ways to disguise a file and hide it from virus scanners. Packing, hex modification etc, and with a nicely packed trojan, spliced onto a regular exe I can’t see how a normal user would notice. On top of that, they’re often disguised as FireFox.exe or IEXpore.exe or a system process. So, even if a user bothers to check out running processes, it’s unlikely they’ll see it.