Do you using credit card?

Advantages

• you using “the banks money” – big advantage, especially for the business which growing fast to help own cash flow
  
• 1-2% money back, fly miles, points,… – excellent especially for business if you buying for some other ones (assisted shopping,…), or you paying expenses which you must pay in any way (fuel, computers, office equipment…). There are many good credit card, which returning more (5 – 10%) for the fuel, food, office equipment. Good is too, that you clam your point if you buy over the Internet – you must pay for hosting and domains in any way…

Disadvantages

• high interest rate – it’s so high, that some banks using to fool you the MONTH interest rate. They wrote “Only 2% per month”, but its 1.02^12 = 26,8% per year!!! Do NOT count is as 2*12!!! Big disadvantage! If you need a loan do NOT, again DO NOT use credit card, use some standard loan with normal 8 – 12% interest rate!
  
• year fee - if you don’t fulfill requirements
• high penalties for everything – overdraw, later payment, … – which may destroy you, if you are little lazy or slovenly person

Catch

• you forget to pay once in the grace free period and they have you! You are doomed and paying high interest rate for next year!
• they sending statements too late, so is easy to forget or don’t manage to pay in time! They wanna force you to pass the grace free period and to fall into high interest rate!

Secrets

• Money back are not free – you think that you will “save” 2% if you have a money-back. You will NOT. It’s NOT a bank money! In reality the shop giving to the bank 3-4% of his income! Example, if you buy something for a 100€, the bank pay to shop only 97€! So fact is, that the shop must increase the price by the 3-4% (on the Internet 3-10%). So you paying MORE! If you have 2% cash back, you are still 1% in minus, because shop rise the price by the 3%!
• Bad exchange rate – If you buying something on the Internet or in foreign countries in different currency, most banks will add 1.8-2.5% up the exchange rate. The biggest bastards ordered VISA/ECMC to add other 2% more, so the bank get 3% from the shop plus 2 – 4.5% by the exchange rate = 5 – 7.5%!!! Isn’t it nice? You get your 1% money back, and they got other 6.5%!!!
• Psychology 1 – debt is heavy - Each debt is a big steal ball on a chain, it will hold you back. You wil think about it everyday and it will hurt you. You may not decide in any minute to go to the other side of the Earth, you must simply pay your debts…
• Psychology 2 – paying via cards not pain – Do you wanna know, why every shop accepting cards? They must pay to banks, so why they doing it? It’s because when you paying via coins and banknotes it HURT you, so you controlling your expenses. But if you paying via debit card you spending psychologically NOT your money, but some “freaky” numbers in the bank and you buying MORE, you have lover barrier to buy expensive good. And with credit card you internally think,  that you spending “banks” money, this barrier is almost zero! This is proved by serious researchs, trust it! It’s in your subconscious mind, you can’t change it! You may only decide to have or not to have credit card!

Why to NOT buy fancy domain names from the speculators without type-in traffic?

Before minute I had a big discussion with one domain speculator. He offered in one forum his +- 200 domains, the list look like as:

• spanish-keyword.cz   12345 Kč (cz is i Czech republic top-level domain, BTW we do NOT speak spanish or french, but czech language, so register spanish/french word in .cz  is useless)
• french-keyword.cz   12345 Kč
• czech-keyword .com/biz/net   1234 USD

I told him, that this domains has ABSOLUTE NO VALUE!

The real value is only in domains with type-in traffic! If you have domain with the type-in traffic you getting HIGHLY TARGETTED traffic for FREE! Which may save your ass in the market. You are not forced to propagate the domain and peoples coming and coming in for free each day… For me it’s no value in some domain if there is NO type-in traffic!

Everyone may choice some spanish word and register it in the dot cz domain space the domain name will be probably free. So why to buy this domains without type-in traffic? It have no sense! You may buy them himself for 8 USD and “saved money” spent on the propagation (which is the must in any way, if you have a domain without type-in traffic…).

The real value are ONLY in the domains with type-in traffic! The peoples chosed it.

If you wanna buy something look for the bargain like:

• good-domain.com, 150 type-in traffic each day (keywords “good domain”), price 10k USD
• good-domain2.com, 450 type-in traffic each day (keywords “good domain2″), price 5k USD

But don’t buy domain from the speculators without type-in traffic only for a a fancy name! This domains without type-in traffic have NO inner value to the time when you will propagate them. And if YOU will must propagate them, YOU are the one, who someone must pay for the increasing in the domain name price (NOT benefit the speculators which sell names without inner value)…

How to “monetize” web pages?

Do you need money to pay hosting, domain and “beer” fees?

1) Use Google Adsense. This is the “classic one” advice, but it’s a really good one. Google will put to your page text advertise which will be based on content and you will be payed based on the clicks to this advertise.

2) If your page have Google’s Pagerank or good Alexa rank you may sell HardLinks.

• You may sell HardLinks by yourself, if you are the experienced one, but it cost time (manual placing of the links plus accounting simply need a few mins…)
• Other choice is to sell hardlinks via service as is WhyLink. This is a good one service, they paying you 50% of the profits via PayPal each month as the clock. Simply register at this link: http://www.whylink.com?aff=39037 (they will buy me 13 beers , but only if you will make some money ) It’s pretty easy to use this services. Plus you may use this service on the adult pages too! Adult webmasters really LOVE to buy hardlinks, you will made a tons of bucks!
• The third service, which I wanna reccomend you is LinkVehicle (50% profit, PayPal payout and accepting Adult pages too). It’s a new one service for selling hardlinks, but a GOOD ONE! They manually evaluate every page via their Google Pagerank and Alexa (WhyLink using only robot) and setting HIGHER price!!! LinkVehicle paying usually 4* more!

Conclusion: If your blog or any web page worth something, bucks from this services will not only pay you hosting and domain fee, but you will take other “passive income” (defined by Kiyosaki) which simply rock!

Does your “robotic slave” – your WWW server working? Does the “spice” the traffic flow? Does you making the money when you sleeping?

If you running the Web based firm this are the key questions! If your server is down you losing money and it’s ridiculous, that you must not know it ! Server may crash every night when you sleeping, when you are on the vacation or only for few mins in random intervals (which may indicate the beginning problems of the overloading or bad configuration of the operation system/Apache/PHP, …)!

You may monitor if your web working fine via several services. I suggest you to do it!

I’m recommend you a Pingdom which I’m using myself.

• Pingdom is free for one server (you may create more accounts…, but if you like it pay for him)
  
• monitoring uptime - you will see when was yours server offline – with the monitoring period of 1 minute!!! FOR FREE! Other free service offering for free only 5 or 10 mins interval usually
  
• monitoring response time (in milliseconds) – will help you to analyze, if your pages loading quickly and if your changes on the web affected the page loading speed too – very useful information after every change in PHP and MySQL (HTML almost never affecting a speed)!
• everything is in nice and clear graphs plus in tables
• Pingdom will send you a email (free) or SMS (you must pay for it) for every outage (when he start and end). You may configure the number of “down cycles” – he will notify you only with serious crashes. Very useful, I set it to 5, he will send me email after 4 mins of downtime and not after every “butterfly glitch”
• you may configure more contacts for crash notifications – I’m suggesting  you to setup email forwarding to your mobile phone (if your mobile operator supporting it) so you will will be notified after every server crash via SMS and for free
• weekly and monthly uptime emails reports saving a lot of time – you must not log-in to the administration…

How it look like? Very good! This is a uptime report from the one of the my servers which had the serious problems for four days (it was not my fault, one of the my content supplier, which was included in my page had serious problems).  Pingdom monitored this outages good, I tracked where the problem was, AND CORRECTED IT !!!

Other free server monitoring service is UptimeRobot it’s not as cool and function rich, his interface is simply, but it working for free for up to 50 servers. So why not run in together with Pingdom as the “backup” monitoring solution… It will cost you nada .

Conclusion: Server monitoring via this services together together with monitoring of load and memory usage by top in Linux shell are the absolute basics how to run “WWW firm” and not piss off your customers.

You will track problems (outages, overloading, bad response time…) early, solve them myself and you will NOT receive some email from the your customer why your service not running… BTW many customers will send you nothing and you will see direct impact only in your income…

From the February I’m using Dropbox (online place to store and synchronize files) to store my files. To the February I used the USB flash which i switched between my desktop and two notebooks.

I know Dropbox from the 2008, but I firstly afraid about the security and not used it. But now I’m simply amazed by his synchronization feature, I must NOT now switch my USB flash between computer’s, Dropbox SYNCHRONIZE my data! This is so comfort way.

More Dropbox remembering the changes for all files for last month (in the free version). So when I something screw up, I may go to his web administration and REDONE that my changes. Very very useful . I’m backuping each day or once per month and Dropbox remembering EACH change. It’s simply amazing!

Do you wanna get Dropbox too? I collected few tips, how to increase your free space on the Dropbox, so you will save some money… It will help to increase you storage space from the 2GB to the 4-19 GB.

1) sign-up via my referral link (extra 250MB): http://db.tt/PLaX915

2) integrate Dropbox with Facebook, Twitted and get a 5*128MB storage space free: https://www.dropbox.com/free

3) extra free Dropbox space for the users (you will get not 256, but 512 MB per referral and you may claim max plus 16 GB). Sign up you edu email at: https://www.dropbox.com/edu If your school is not “on the list” (or you are not from the USA) ask for the adding of your school. The link is down on that page.

4) pass all quests in the “Getting Started” (the first tab in the your Dropbox administration) and you will claim a nice 256MB extra.

Conclusion:

Right now Dropbox backuping, synchronising my files and my space rising. Beautiful and very useful service!