Lately, I have started a thread on Digitalpoint announcing that I will do free website reviews just to make my life easier and get a fast list of websites. Thread is located here.

Now, after I’ve simply browsed some of the websites, I’ve came across Mubin’s blog, which was a “make money online” blog, I can’t get more annoyed when it comes to a blog than money making blogs, but after reading the first post, I got pretty amazed, the guy really has talent when it comes to content, well.. he caught my eye, so today I’m linking to his article saying that you should never ever provide complete&private site information to “buyers”.

Fair enough, I am sick of how many times they said they will purchase one of my own websites for a mid $xxxx value, and after exposing information, they backed off and kindly asked me to wait until they make that much amount of money so they can buy.
I also had a guy today on DigitalPoint asking me about the same site I own, if I sell it, he demands* information!

Mubin’s post: Thinking About Selling Your Site? Take this Advice

In my daily routine after drinking some PEPSI (I preffer it rather than coffee) I’ve came across some videos with Joel Comm talking about adsense, I gave it a try and well, they are pretty interesting.

*You might learn something, so watch!
Bookmark this post as you might probablly not have the time to watch all the videos and they are GOLD

Adsense secrets video #1

Adsense secrets video #2

Adsense secrets video #3

(Read the entire post here…)

Check it out

HostGator suspended my account for a few hours..

Okay, let’s set up some things streight, I’m nowhere rich, I just have the internet web development/design as a hobby and I do it for plesure. I’m 18 and well, took a bit to make 60$ to pay for 6 months of hosting (I used to be hosted for free by Dr|Puppet for a long time *shouts*), so after I have purchased hosting from HostGator, believe me, there couldn’t be any better offer. I bought 6TB of BW and 600 GB of HDD for 10$/mo - Know any better offers? I didn’t at that moment, and I’m still satisfied by the offer/price ratio.

I am sending newsletters to all the MyLOL members that have the [X] Recieve message from administrator, like once a week or two weeks, and well, I have sent many emails since I have been hosted by HostGator, the thing is, my last message was fatal..

ISSUE: I was sending more than 200 mails / hour as the mailTOS said, therefor I got suspsended. Fair enough, but how did that happen?

It all comes with my internet connection problems I had recently, and well, I had “accidentally” refreshed my newsletter and voila 2×6500 members from a shared account, with a small 1 second throttle. *BOOM* Fatality, like 500% more than it was permitted. Now the problem also comes from the fact that mylol has been growing quite shocking from 5000 to 6500 (1500 members) in a very short time, and whatever is over 5000 members will require a dedicated server to send newsletters/massemails.

ISSUE to come: I have stopped sending newsletters, stopped the script, and well put a big H1 tag with “Warning, this is bad” on my admin section, just in case I get too passionate about writing a new one again. The thing is, the server also sends mail(); everytime a user does some specific functions (such as share comments/vote photos/send messages) and that just can’t be turned off, I’m glad for the moment I’m okay with it.

How I got out of trouble? : The boys at the support team are indeed great folks, I explained myself calmly *I typed like 90 words / minute but still.. no “OMFG” “PLEASEEEE, I BEG YOU”* and they understood, requested not to happen again and they placed all my sites back up. Thank you!

How many hours of downtime? : 2hours

Revenue problems? : Minimum, the most I make by selling direct flat ads, so just a few bucks got burn.

There is only ONE thing you can learn from this entire post: Always, but always check the TOS twice, the hosting services are absolutely great, but there are some limitations according to “some type of websites”, mail limits and server resource usage.

A few hours ago, I have contacted the support department about a new website I’m lunching soon and if it’s 100% TOS valid, they responded very fast and most of all very rationally as some of the website functions might reflect as image hosting site, which is not true. Thanks!

Here is my Christmas wallpaper gift for you, have a Merry Christmas and a happy new year! *fireworks*

Marry Christmas in 10 languages:

English - Merry Christmas!
Danish - Glaedelig Jul!
Dutch -Vrolijk kerstfeest
Brazilian - Boas Festas!
Romanian - Craciun fericit!
French - Joyeux Noel!
German - Frohe Weihnachten!
Portugese - Christmas Alegre!
Spanish - Feliz Navidad!
Swedish - God Jul!

Guys, as I promcied, we’ll have some really great interviews and website reviews that, hopefully will inspire some of you, or at least will burn the desire to do the same with your $0.10/month website *blushes*

I’m starting this interview section, with a very close and old friend of mine, I call him sTaG since the days we use to talk on IRC, he goes by a differite nickname online, maybe you have seen him around DigitalPoint, but we’ll find out more about him in the interview below. *Clap clap sTaG*

Gamecheats.eu

Scorpiono: Hello old friend, we’ll start this interview by showing up your online nickname which is:
Zehrila: usually its Zehrila

Scorpiono: Does it have any personal meaning?
Zehrila: it just means poisonous

Scorpiono: Name?
Zehrila: Call me Rez

Scorpiono: Age?
Zehrila: 24

Scorpiono: I know the answer, but are you male or female?
Zehrila: Male

Scorpiono: Describe a bit your usual activity!
Zehrila: I am just an ordinary person who likes to do every that thing which a normal human being does but cross limits some times when i am with friends. Internet has recently become my main activity. Browsing around the net searching for cool/new technologies is one of the things i like to do most while i am in front this magic machine computer. Apart from that rest of my times is spent exploring the ways to promote my site or product.

Scorpiono: You got to be very transparent on these questions.. we want to give out exact pieces of information here at my blog, Scorpiono.com
Scorpiono: Websites (Ordered by traffic)
Zehrila: Gamecheats.eu is my only and main site. Luckily it has been growing in terms of traffic ever since i started it an year and a half ago, current last peak was 30k uniques this

Scorpiono: How many hours devoted to your work per day?
Zehrila: I was spending too much time in promoting t his site an year ago, submitting to directories and every possible place where i could get a free link
Scorpiono: ..and nowdays?
Zehrila: ..like 30-40 minutes a day.
Scorpiono: ..talk about autopilot, heh!

Scorpiono: Stuff you do daily on the website, like maintainance?
Zehrila: Not much really, i just check if site is loading smoothly and delete few spam posts from forums if any.

Scorpiono: What was your first succesful website
Zehrila: GameCheats.eu obviously..

Scorpiono: Highest visitor peak (don’t count traffic buying/link baiting)
Zehrila: 30,000 uniques in single day.

Scorpiono: Webmaster related forums/portals do you visit?
Zehrila: Digitalpoint, Namepros, Acorndomains, Dnforum and Sitepoint.

Scorpiono: The niche is..
Zehrila: Gaming

Scorpiono: Go ahead and describe the website..
Zehrila: Cheat Codes is a sub category of gaming, you can say a very remote category but competition among cheat sites is fierce.

Scorpiono: Where did the idea came to create such a site?
Zehrila: Well it might sound funny but thats what it is. I was trying to register a gaming domain and had been using DP keyword tracker tool and found this keyword Game Cheats and so i registered this domain gamecheats.eu because it had alot of searches.
Scorpiono: Talk about lucky, I just got my Sergiu.name recently by accident..

Scorpiono: Average traffic your getting?
Zehrila: 24k uniques per day

Scorpiono: Traffic sources.. we eat all the info we can get.. so who gives you power?
Zehrila: Google then comes yahoo and msn
Zehrila: 85% of traffic comes from search engines.

Scorpiono: Best website referral ?
Zehrila: Cheatserver.com

Scorpiono: Let’s talk about revenue, PPC/PPI/PPA?
Zehrila: PPC
Scorpiono: Why so?
Zehrila: PPC converts and performs better than other sort of ads on contextual gaming sites.

Scorpiono: Revenue sources?
Zehrila: …Adsense > Vibrant > BurstMedia
Scorpiono: It’s good you marked the best ones, some visitors running the same niche might find this useful

Scorpiono: Avg revenue per month?
Zehrila: hmm bit sneaky..well around 3-4k dollar a month.

Scorpiono: Main marketing strategy you went for?
Zehrila: Dedication towards your goals.
Zehrila: Follow the rules set by search engines, stay up to date with changing technology.

Scorpiono: Sites you look up to?
Zehrila: A complete PSP and a PS3 portal.

Scorpiono: Goals to achieve in the future?
Zehrila: Premium Adsense Publisher

Scorpiono: A final word, for our visitors?
Zehrila: Make targets and hunt them. Don’t lose hope what so ever. Browse web forums and interact with other webmasters to stay updated.

Scorpiono: Well, thanks alot mate, hope we did something useful for the webmasters community here..
Zehrila: Cheers!

Website review for Gamecheats.eu

Let’s begin with some screenshots I took, even though you might want to check the whole website out.

Website design
The website has a professional unique design, centered layout, with a good navigation system, so from the perspective of the Designer-Scorpiono, I see the website as a 8/10.

Coding
Going to programming, the website grabs the cheats by a crawler which makes the site’s value rise up, autopilot functions are indeed very good for a big website.

Doctype: < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> - this makes me think, why not STRICT?! My coder codes only strict, of course some of the functions have to be made thru javascript, but it’s fine as long as it validates, so let’s see.

XHTML Validation: This page is not Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional! Result: Failed validation, 21 Errors » Ouch!!!

CSS Validation: Sorry! We found the following (1) error

Search Engine Optimization

Semantic coding for SEO: Yes - most part of it it’s done..

Backlinks: 362847 (woot!!)

Alexa ranking: 45,708

Let’s take submitexpress’s META tag analyzer:

Title: Title meta tag contains no errors.
This tag contains 11 characters.
——————————————————————————–
Title relevancy to page content is excellent.
The Title relevancy to page content is 100%.
——————————————————————————–
Description: Description meta tag contains no errors.
This tag contains 150 characters.
——————————————————————————–
Description relevancy to page content is fair.
The Description relevancy to page content is 79%.
——————————————————————————–
Keywords: Keyword relevancy to page content is very poor. However, this is not necessarily bad if you have a lot of content. The most important factor is to have your keywords on the page a few times.
The keywords relevancy to page content is 56%.
——————————————————————————–
Robots: Found no robots meta tag.
This tag is not really required but helps spiders to index the web page.
——————————————————————————–
Author: Found no author meta tag.
This tag is not really required but helps for your (company) name recognizing.
——————————————————————————–
Web page analysis.
This page contains too many URLs.
This tag contains 119 urls. Some Search Engines have problems with more than 100 urls on a page.
——————————————————————————–
The size of the web page.
The size of the web page is 32055 bytes.
——————————————————————————–
The web page load time.
The web page load time is 1 seconds.
——————————————————————————–
Your site displayed on a search engine page.

Game Cheats
Video game cheat codes for PC, XBox, Playstation, Xbox360, PSP, Dreamcast, GameBoy, Mobiles, DVDs, Playstation 2, Ps 3, Wii and many more game cheats.
http://www.gamecheats.eu

Overall: 8.75/10
Design: 8/10
Coding: 8/10
SEO: 9/10
Traffic: 10/10

How lucky can I get?
My first name is Sergiu, checked it, and voila, available (that was 1 month ago)

Sergiu.name redirected to Scorpiono.com

Digitalpoint forum, a great name amoungst webmasters, I was skeptical if big webmasters are “wasting” their time on the forums until I have found that big names in the industry, including Jeremy and some big web directory owners do. I bet there are more out there, especially those with tons of post counts.

Did I learn anything from DigitalPoint?
Definetly!

Did I learn any SEO from DigitalPoint, since it’s what I like?
No, absolutely not, the questions in the SEO section are dumb, and they contain either “Should I use - or _ in my URL for SEO?” either “If I get 10,000 Pr8 backlinks, will Google eat me ?”.
I have learned way more from Brad Callens free newsletter and seochat.com, than DigitalPoint. That’s a fact!

Did I had any trades/link exchanges/sellings on DigitalPoint?
Yes, this is where the honey is, the fact that you can create some bindings with other webmasters, most of them are great guys and very cooperative if you know how to talk or negociate your way up. I have made alot of partners on DigitalPoint, I have sold flat advertisments in 3 days more than I’ve done on Google Adsense for the one month (here goes my bad CTR for Google again). I highly recommend you start making yourself heard in the community and meet people.

I’m pretty sure you know that DigitalPoint is owned by Shawn Hogan, if not, check out his blog, not very related to DigitalPoint, but it’s a personal blog so who can blame him for being off topic? Never met him (as in having a chat) but I’m pretty sure I might ask him for an interview someday.

We’ll talk more about digitalpoint in the near future for sure, meanwhile drop a Hi! if you have an account

I’m pretty sure that, if you have surfed the internet for more than a month now, you have came across some offer that contains:

1. “incredible!”
2. “awesome”
3. “top 3 in the world”
4. “awarded with gold”
5. “HUGE success”
6. “Price $1500 $1250 $810 $530 $20 buy it now!”

Yes, these words are 80% of the number of words in a sales letter. I’m maybe exagerating with 5-10%, but still.. I’m not an expert in marketing, but I call this the “HUGE” factor. I’ve seen it at John Reese, ShoeMoney, Brad Callen, Joel Comm.. if you are familiar with the online marketing, those names will ring a bell. If not, well, I’ll discuss about them a bit, and you’ll see some interesting details, even if you know them.

John Reese
The most annoying “HUGE” factor for me, came from John Reese, and here’s why. I had a “huge” respect for this guy, he’s an internet-made-millionaire, that says alot, and whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it great, and if it’s not great, it’s better than any of us reading this maybe right? Does it matter how he does it? Of course! We need to guide ourselves by looking up up up, on the top of the internet marketing podium (if we want to run an online business of course, no need otherwise).
So from what I have seen on his blog, he talks about this amazing super cool product that’s called BlogRush and most of the bloggers know it, because Reese is a genius when it comes to Viral Marketing (word of mouth). He lost me because of all the boombastic words, about how great is blogrush and how it can help millions of trillions of bloggers to get huge amount of traffic. I hate it when they talk this way, but it doesn’t matter, most fall for it, and that’s the gold rule to learn from this, it’s working, otherwise people like the ones mentioned above wouldn’t have used it! (Duh!)

ShoeMoney

From what I see at Shoe, he’s well balanced and presents a product or website the way it really is, without too much of the “amazing”. The thing is, I see Jeremy so excited when it comes to PubCon, SEO Conferences, SES that makes me believe he has something of the “HUGE” factor deep inside his weaknesses to participate anywhere to mediatize the ShoeMoney brand. He will remain one of my favorite online marketeers!

Brad Callen

This is the guy that got me into SEO, indirectly. His sales letter for keyword elite sunk me, and well, I applied for the newsletter. I started to recieve daily .pdf files about differite SEO tactics. They were quite useful, and thanks for letting the sales letter fool me, maybe if I had a paypal by that time (Romania wasn’t allowed when I visited it) I would have bought keyword elite instead check for it on torrents (*blushes*)

Joel Comm

Joel Comm and his extrodinary reality show “The next internet millionaire” - oh really? Well, the idea is unique, and congratulations. Unique in the way of making it an online reality show about web masters, marketeers.. I don’t watch it, because I usually get bored fast, it relates to advanced methods of making money and from my point of view it’s not really teaching too much. Great to watch when you have nothing else to do, sorry Joel, the “adsense secrets” had a better success right? Prove me wrong!

I design wallpapers when I’m requested by friends (mostly by my girlfriends), I have many more made but I just selected a few, not necessarely the coolest ones, but the latest.

I will dedicate a post for each wallpaper from now on, check this out more often!

To make sure you don’t miss anything, check the Wallpapers tag.

Updated 15.May.2008*: