Toronto Affiliate Marketer & SEO Consultant Lorne Fade

Often I get asked what the best way is to find the best expiring domains, and what are the best sites to look for them on. Up until recently I didn’t really have much info for anyone asking me about domains. But all of that has changed. Namejet is a what many may call a domainer’s dream, with some of the best domain auctions, expired domains and available aftermarket domains.

For any of you who are new to domaining, when you dont pay your domain renewal fee, your domain will expire. When your domain drops it enters a dead time in which the original owner still had an opportunity to revive the domain. If the owner of the domain fails to do so, then there is a number of “drop services” that usually pickup the domain for themselves or prospective clientel. Some of these include Snapnames, Pool, and NameWinner.

So the domain aftermarket, which is comprised of drop catching services and/or backorder services whatever you wanna call it, is primarily used by domainers to catch profitable domains that may be dropping. But these services can also be useful for someone looking to startup and needing a decent domain name to start from.

So why should I use NameJet?

Well first of all NameJet is backed by eNom and Network Solutions one of the biggest domain registrars on the net. Snapnames used to have a monopoly on this market because of private contracts with Register.com, Godaddy and Network Solutions. However the times have changed, and we are no longer in this type of monopolistic rule, and as a result, with their clean interface, NameJet has instantly become a force to be reckoned with.

Best Features of NameJet

• Currently there are over 100 dot com domains at auction which mostly all have zero or few bids. Since NameJet is a new name that is not yet well known, this allows for newcomers a great opportunity to get in there and grab some domains before even some of the most successful domainers.
• You are able to add domains to a “watch list” with no need to outright bid on them, which means you can monitor an auction right up until the close and get it for a near steal of a price.

Overall I think NameJet is a definitive up and comer in the domain game. I was able to test them out the past several days and picked up two domains (jokebang.com & pokergrit.com) which I think are killer domains and have great opportunity to make money. So go ahead an check em out, just be sure to stay away from registering domains with them, because at $30 a pop it can get quite pricey.

I often get sidetracked with the multitude of projects I undertake and forget about the real earners that made me most of my money so im going to take a second to reflect on blackhat SEO.

Simplified, Blackhat is valid usable content generation, usually automated.

There are generally two methods you can go about doing blackhat seo, first is spamming other sites with links or generated content… And the second is to generate content, and tons of it. Autoblog’s, comment spam, email marketing, message boards, and social networks (myspace, facebook, youtube etc.)

However if you spam sites with your chosen keywords in order to rank higher in google, you will see a short term jump in rankings, but this will be gone in less than a month due to google’s algorithm picking up on those spammish links you’ve been dropping or automating… which leaves you back at square one. Your not gonna keep buying the bitch drinks if she aint going to put out. So the best method for doing this, which has been tried and tested, is to generate comedy/humor websites based off of feeds and databases that have several entries so that the output is relevant to the keywords for titles and meta tags. I setup a site similar to this and spent less than $50 and in about 2 month’s time I had earned almost $2000, blackhat at its finest.

Personally I don’t think people should sell SEO, but practice it on their own and learn. SEO is an ever developing realm, with the algorithms constantly being updated and changed.. The top blackhats stay ahead of the algorithm either by getting the code or by guessing which methods would go undetected. There are many outdated methods (keyword stuffing, invisible text, doorway pages etc.) that used to make a lot of money, and in order to stay ahead you have to constantly be on top of what works.

While blackhat SEO is unethical, if used properly in moderation (key word here) you can make a pretty penny, and at the same time not get penalized by the search engines as long as you stay within some very specific boundaries, and dont get greedy.

TNX.net is a marketplace for webmasters both looking for publishing tools as well as advertising. Webmasters are able to choose their advertisers themselves while placing links that are relevant to pages on their site.   The price of the links is very reasonable and you are given the ability to promote hundreds of keywords with just a few clicks.  TNX pays out on a monthly basis for their publishers network in a very convenient fashion through either paypal, check, wire or bank transfer.

They also have a variety of advertiser tools to make your paid links look natural for Google, with a link generator and a simple cloak script you can accomplish a very easy affiliate link.   They offer an affiliate program for which you can also make a pretty penny off of referrals to their network.

In terms of ease of use, the site is very easy to navigate and the admin panel makes it extremely easy for both advertisers and publishers. You can automatically place tons of non-recip links to your site as well all through their system.  As an advertiser you can get some of the lowest prices on links anywhere.  I think it was around $10 a month for about 10,000 static links to your website, which may or may not be accurate, but even still it is a good deal.

For SEO consultants and specialists, you can apply for their program and get discounts up to 50% off which goes well beyond any other text links marketplace out there.  There are minimum requirements for joining the TNX marketplace, however they arent that stringent and you should be able to meet the standards.

Overall TNX is a great system to assist website owners in attracting visitors and clients from search engines and relevant websites.  It helps to reduce the dependency on search engines, as well as improve quality of the search results for those websites that join the TNX system.

Another year is upon us and we are all looking to upgrade and update our blogs. So when it comes to wordpress, what plugins will make your blog stand out and which are best?After blogging for over 2 years, and writing a few plugins myself, here is my list of the best of the best wordpress plugins. 15 Top notchwordpress plugins, guaranteed to make your blog if anything, a little nicer than it was before.

Show Top Commenters – A great way to get your readers more enthusiastic and develop more discussions, by displaying their name & number of comments they have left recently to your sidebar.

Akismet – Intelligently blocks spam comments. Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not.

Bad Behavior – prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots.

Google XML Sitemaps Generator – creates a sitemap of all articles on your WordPress blog. Helps Google and other search engines index every article you write.

SEO Title Tag – Optimize your wordpress title tags for search engines. Enabling you to edit the title tags of posts, pages, category pages, tag pages etc.

Related Posts – Will show a list of posts related to keywords of your choosing in current posts. A nifty plugin to bring back older posts.

WP-Notable – displays a series of icons below each post allowing your readers to easily submit you to many different social bookmarking (Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Facebook, Youtube, etc.) and networking sites.

WordPress.com Stats – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.

AdSense-Deluxe – is a WordPress plugin offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.

Global Translator – Translate your blog into multiple languages in a search engine friendly way.

Feedburner Feedsmith – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.

InstantUpgrade – A plugin that will upgrade your version of WordPress to the most recent version (or any other version) with a click of the mouse! If you hate upgrading WordPress, this plugin is for you.

Gregarious- A social bookmarking plugin that integrates the Share This plugin, the Digg API, and a slick AJAX interface. Gregarious is so easy to setup, it requires no template edits!

404 Notifier – This plugin allows you to see how much of your traffic is getting 404′d and what page(s) they are trying to access. You can retrieve this data via an RSS feed or email.

Manage Multiple Blogs – Otherwise known as MMB, this plugin allows you to manage all your wordpress blogs from one session, eliminating the need for 500 tabs and logging in to each admin panel repetitively. A definite must for any blog owner who is trying to administer more than 5 blogs.

We knew it was going to happen. Digg users try to game the site by copying articles and then passing those said articles off as their own work. Also users engineer written works in the Digg user base to increase popularity and thus forth increasing traffic to their site.

While other Digg users have gone off to forums such as DP and sitepoint in “Digg-trades” whereas they can gain a vast amount of diggs for relatively cheap or for returning other users’ diggs. (.30 each for 50 diggs in the current example)

However unethical it may be, it is being done and these “Digg Gamers” are taking advantage of the tremendous amounts of traffic sent from digg. Even with the traffic not being the best in terms of monetization (Digg users tend to know not to click ads, and will only do so by accident most times), it is still traffic, and that means return visitors and maybe future sell’s for you and your affiliates.

An article I read over at SEOmoz, titled “The anatomy of a Super Digg” explains exactly how he gamed Digg users with viral articles written simply for the basis of gaining quick readability and interest.

Over the coming weeks I am going to attempt to “game” Digg with some viral marketing and some catchphrase titles, I may use the Digg systems used on the forums however I am afraid I may be penalized by Digg for using these unethical methodologies… only time will tell.  If anyone has any experience with using Digg-trades please let me know how it went for you.

I finally got around to setting up Gallery 2.0 setup and integrated with their wordpress plugin, so hopefully we will be fully integrated by next week. For now I have a lot of tweaking to do, so until I get everything integrated you can go here and check out the gallery as it stands now.