I feel honored that Attila came to me thinking I am a famous online figure. Compared to other guys like John Chow (he’s a total douche) and Shoemoney, I’m still a noobie though.

Attila is a gamer. He used to be an editor on some well-known site in Hungary but the site kinda died after seeing increased competition from better sites and online communities. Now Attila wants to do stuff online but he doesn’t know where to start. It seems he has huge ambitions too as he’s already looking into hiring writers and developers.

So how would I go about this? Very simple, very inexpensive!

Choose A Topic

Ideally, you shouldn’t have to look for a topic. You should know what you want to talk about online. You have to be passionate about it and be quite knowledgeable. You are an expert at baking marijuana cakes? Talk about it! You know everything about shoes? Write about it!

There are no limits to what you can talk about. If you are passionate about it, chances are there are plenty of other people like you, and these people can be your audience.

Get A Good Domain Name

First thing I would do is buy a good domain name related to your topic. When buying a domain name, it’s always good to opt for the .com extension. Avoid the .net and .info as they are often seen as spam by search engines. Also avoid numbers and hyphens in your domain name. For example, www.Worst-Domain-1.info is as bad as it can get.

A domain name is about $10/year and it is very crucial as it is going to be your branding for the years to come.

Try to insert some of your main keywords in your domain name. For example, my iPhone blog domain name is www.iPhoneDownloadBlog.com. Those are 3 important keywords. Now when you look for “iPhone blog” on Google, I show up number 2-3, depending on the days.

Get Good Hosting

Good and reliable hosting is hard to come by. I personally use DreamHost. The service costs me about $130/year for unlimited sites hosted and tons of bandwidth and RAM (more than I can use). Their customer service is not outstanding but it usually is fast and good enough.

When looking for a hosting company, it’s important you choose one in your country. For example, in the case of Attila, he should look for a hosting company in Hungary. Now if he wants his site to be global and reach people all over the world, then I would go for a hosting company in the US.

The localization of your hosting company is important because search engines (which get you most of your traffic) look at where your site is hosted and give a lot of importance to this when displaying search results. If you are searching for something in Google Hungary, Google will mostly give you results from sites hosted in Hungary. If you’re in the US, Google will mostly give you search results with websites hosted in the US. You get the idea…

Set Up A Blog

The best way to start an online venture is to create a WordPress blog. WordPress is a free software that you can easily install automatically (depending on your hosting company). WordPress is highly customizable and simple, and it is used by the largest sites out there such as TechCrunch and Mashable (that’s clearly a sign).

I always recommend people to start a blog because it is inexpensive, and low maintenance.

Don’t Invest Too Much

A big mistake people often do when starting something online is that they want to invest too much time and money into it. Some people want to have a great looking site, with awesome features, and tons of useless crap. I say DON’T! Go with the simple basic stuff at first. You won’t have readers or visitors for a while, so why waste time and money on something no one will notice.

Besides, it’s good not to invest in your site at first because chances are you will blog for a week or so and you will give up. Sorry but that’s the reality. I think 99% of people who start a blog give it up within just a few weeks.

Don’t Expect Too Much

This point is related to the paragraph above. When you start a blog, don’t expect to get tons of visitors. People who start a website always think that they are going to drive thousands of visits overnight. Reality is that it will take you months if not years to get decent amount of traffic.

My iPhone blog gets between 15,000 – 20,000 visitors per day, just after a year of being online. This is really rare and it is the result of hard work. I was lucky to write a few good articles that got me some attention but don’t expect to get similar results as quickly as I did.

Content Is King

As I just said above, I was lucky to write a few articles that got me lots of attention and visits, and that is the whole point of blogging. Content is king! People will come to your site for your good content. People will return to your site for the same reason. People could leave your site and never come back for that exact same reason too.

Write compelling and unique content. Google and other search engines like unique content. Don’t copy/paste other people’s articles. Don’t become a news site! Get your own voice! My iPhone blog is everything but a news blog. All other blogs out there (except a few) are just about iPhone news.

Why would people come to your blog to read the exact same things as they can read on 2,000 other sites? People come to my iPhone blog because they know I am an Apple hater and that I like to talk about hacking the iPhone. That’s my voice. I don’t always rant about Apple or write about hacking, but it is my main topic and it is what I am known for.

Be Social

Getting your name and content out is great. There are many ways to do this. You can use sites like Digg, Facebook, etc… Personally, I am social on one and one place only: Twitter. I am on Twitter all day, sharing content, talking to people, and helping other people out. By doing so, I am now being seen as an expert in everything related to the iPhone. People come to me to ask my advice. People recommend me to their friends. I even have famous people like Dog the Bounty Hunter and Alyssa Milano recommend me or share my content!

Another thing to do is to connect with other bloggers. Go to their sites, leave comments, touch base with them. If they notice you, they might start talking about you too. It’s not because they are “competition” that you can’t work with them. I share stuff from other iPhone blogs several times a day. I am not just out there to advertise myself. I advertise myself as an expert that can get people the best information, even if that means sending people to my competition’s websites.

Learn SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is easy. No matter what these SEO experts are trying to tell you, SEO is dead simple. The problem is that it’s very time consuming. Learning, understanding and applying the basics of SEO is very simple and you can self-educate you. Subscribe to a few SEO blogs (like SEO Book, SEOmoz) and get familiar with the terms and all the tricks and tips.

Here is a great SEO guide for beginners. Read everything and learn. Once you know more about SEO, you can apply it to your articles to get extra love from search engines.

Conclusion

Blogging is a great way to start sharing your expertise with others and can hopefully lead to generate substantial income. But it’s not easy and it takes time. Most people who start a blog today will give it up tomorrow but it can be very rewarding to those of us who understand it takes time to create a follower base and be seen as an expert. Good luck.

I freaked out a bit because this ClickBank account is my main money-maker and it is really pays the bills.

The first thing that came to my mind was that maybe this website had been banned from Google. A quick Google search showed me that I was still in the index, however my Google ads were not showing.

I opened my Adwords account and realized that my ads hadn’t been showing for about 12 hours. The day before, I had read how an Internet marketer had his Adwords account banned with no explanation and no way to appeal. I started being all paranoid and thought my account had been banned for some unknown reason.

Looking into the account, I then noticed that Adwords was asking me to enter my credit card information again. Strange! I entered the info several times but it kept telling me it couldn’t be saved at this time.

That’s when all this started to look a little fishy. I tried to chat with an Adwords rep, but again, it wouldn’t let me. I then tried the Adwords help center and after a bit if digging, I found a few other people who had been in the same situation. Reading about their experience, it seemed my account was under review.

I pretty much stressed out all day and all night. The next day, while we were driving from Michigan to Illinois, I took my iPhone and tried to chat with an Adwords rep again. This time it worked and just before my 3G connection dropped, the rep told me not to worry that it was just some random account review.

It made me feel better but it still pissed the hell out of me that Google, who gets decent amounts of money from my Adwords campaigns every day, took the liberty to put my account on hold and review it without even notifying me.

The following day, I had yet another chat session with an Adwords rep and she told me the same thing: don’t worry, it’s a routine review, etc… She also told me that the Review Team had been asked to expedite my case and that she would email me before the end of the day to tell me what was going on.

Early evening, I finally received an email that confirmed that my account had been under review and that everything was back to normal.

I was really glad but I was still very upset that they never deemed necessary to notify me my account was on hold. That was almost 3 days with no Adwords and although it didn’t cost me anything, I didn’t make as many sales as I should have during these days.

It really opened my eyes on how dependent I am to Google now. In 5 seconds, they could kill all my online activity. They could drop all my blogs and websites from their index, they could shut down my email service, they could prevent me from making any money since 100% of my income is from my online ventures.

This dependence is really not healthy at all but there isn’t a whole lot I can do. I need Google to make money. Yes, I can use Bing and Yahoo, but realistically, they are not that great from an internet marketing standpoint.

Do you think you are dependent to Google? How?

How Did I Find Out There Was A Problem?

I check my Google rankings for the term “iPhone blog” on a daily basis. iPhone Download Blog (my iPhone blog) usually ranks #4. Last Monday though, it was nowhere to be found! Doing a search for “site:www.iPhonedownloadblog.com” showed me I had 27,000 pages indexed but again, the homepage was nowhere to be found. Hmm, that doesn’t smell good…

I then went and checked my Google Webmaster Tools account. It usually helps me figure out quickly if there is anything wrong with any of my sites. Usually, everything is fine. From time to time, I get a little error on one or two of my sites, which in most cases can be fixed simply by generating a new sitemap and resubmitting it to Google.

Last Monday, I completely freaked out when I realized that all my sites were showing errors! All of them! I thought it was very strange but I soon realized that my server had been down for a few minutes the day before and I figured that Google must have tried to crawl my sites at this time and was then enable to do it. I simply resubmitted all my sitemaps thinking it would do the trick.

What the Hell Happened?

As a measure of precaution, I checked Google Webmasters Tools again a few minutes later and saw that Google, once again, was giving me errors. The issue was obviously bigger than I thought. I decided to look into the problem more deeply and realized that Google was giving me a 403 error, which means:

The server is refusing the request. If you see that Googlebot received this status code when trying to crawl valid pages of your site (you can see this on the Web crawl page under Diagnostics in Google Webmaster Tools), it’s possible that your server or host is blocking Googlebot’s access.

It was clear now. DreamHost, my hosting company, had restricted Googlebots from crawling my server. I had had the same problem with DreamHost before so it was just half a surprise…

How the Hell Do You Fix This?

The first thing I did was sending a support request to DreamHost. I tried to be kind in my email but I was really furious. I think it’s very unprofessional of them to block access to my server to anyone without even notifying me. A few hours later, I didn’t have an answer yet… DreamHost is usually fast at replying, but I guess they were not that day…

So I sent them a second support request email, a little more spicy than the first one. A couple hours later I received this email:

Hello Sebastien,

I sincerely apologize for this! This was handled incorrectly, and NOT according to our own policy. It looks like a few days ago you wrote in regarding server performance. It appears part of that was actually googlebot slamming your sites. This was blocked to preserve server stability (which is normal troubleshooting), what didn’t happen, and SHOULD have, was that you were not notified and told how to deal with this. I’ve removed the block, but please see the following article:

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Bots_spiders_and_crawlers

There is a way to slow down googlebot without killing your search results OR the server. This is the preferred approach. We obviously don’t want to hurt your sites.

Again, I apologize for this, and if it helps any, it looks like just an IP range was blocked, and whoever was troubleshooting the server wasn’t really *trying* to block google from your site…just an IP that was causing problems for everyone.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks!
Jeff H

Alright, fair enough… What can I do anyway? So this part of the problem was handled but I needed to tell Google everything was back up so it can start crawling my sites asap.

I resubmitted all my sitemaps again. I also wrote a few new posts on my iPhone blog in order to “prove” Google that the site was still alive and doing well. Finally, I linked to my main sites from various other websites in the hope it would help speed up the crawling process.

Googlebots came back and crawled the sites. The next day (on Tuesday), iPhone Download Blog was back in Google’s search results but it was ranking at about #35 for my keyword. I realized that even though it was back in the index, Google didn’t have a cached image of it yet. I assumed that it would come back and crawl the site again and then generate a cached image.

On Wednesday, still no cache! It was ranking slightly better though, showing up on the second page. Still far from what I was looking for, but at least it was progressing a bit.

On Wednesday night, the homepage completely disappeared from the index again. While some may worry about this, I am now used to it and I know what it means. It means that Google has crawled your site again and it is generating a cached image of it. This usually happens when you create a new page. Google will crawl it, rank it, then it will disappear from the index for a few hours, and finally it will come back for good. It’s like Google is hurrying to crawl it, but then takes its time to analyze it and make sure it’s not crap.

I went to bed that  night confident that my site would be back on the next morning when I get up. Sure enough, it is ranking again, as good as ever, this morning. Yeahhh!!! All my other sites are back too.

What’s the Moral of the Story?

Well, the moral of the story is that you should check your sites often, if not daily. You should make it a habit to check your Google Webmasters account to make sure there is no problem. If there is a problem, identify it and hurry to fix it. Google Webmaster Tools is a great help for this and if you haven’t created an account yet, I suggest you do now.

This little adventure cost me about a 40% decrease in traffic on my iPhone blog. Yes, it hurts! I haven’t measured my other sites loss as they are not as important as my iPhone blog. My money-making sites rely on PPC to drive traffic so it wasn’t a big issue for those sites.

I’m still pissed at DreamHost but you get what you pay for… I considered moving my sites to a new hosting company but it would be a nightmare. I have over 20 sites, most of them being database driven. My technical skills are just not sharp enough to do all this by myself. I guess I’ll stick with DreamHost until something really major happens.

Working From Home Made Me Lazy

That’s true, I’m a lazy ass these days… But I’ve got a good reason why I’m lazy though. I wrote 2 ebooks, both of them in a very specific niche, and I sell them through affiliate marketing (on ClickBank to be precise). One of those ebooks works alright, making me a few hundred dollars every week. The other one actually pays my bills, usually generating one thousand dollars per week in net profits.

When I first quit my job, I said to myself that I would develop one new ebook/affiliate program every month. At the time, it seemed like a very realistic goal. Writing an ebook can take up to 2-3 weeks, assuming you know what you want to write about, and putting up a website with a sales letter takes less than a week.

My laziness started to appear when I realized that my 2 current ebooks make me enough money to live pretty well. I’m not the kind of guy who’s going to bust his ass off to make tons of money. However, if I feel the financial situation is getting tight, I will work day and night to make as much cash as possible. I suspect there are lots of people like me in this world. We’re not hard workers; we’re smart workers.

So what do I do all day? Tough question to answer as I’m not even sure myself. I pretty much spend all my day online, reading news/blogs and on Twitter of course! Not very productive at all… Occasionally, I will take a walk to the post office to send back a Netflix movie. I also go to check the surf on a daily basis, and if there are waves, I will go out and surf for a couple hours.

The Negative Health Benefits Of The Internet

I am starting to realize that spending so much time in front of my computer all day is bad for me. Physically, I’m not as healthy as I was a year ago. The most obvious symptom is that I am constantly tired. I get up at 7.30am, and turn on my computer within minutes. One hour later, I will already be yawning. I was in Costa Rica for the last 2 weeks and I just spent a few minutes a day on my computer during that time. My energy level went way up right away as I used the computer less and less.

Another symptom of the perfect “work at home dude” like me is back pain. I have a laptop and I spend most of my time on the couch. It is very comfortable but it’s not a way to work. My girlfriend bought me a nice office chair to go with my desk but I rarely use it. I constantly have this pain in my lower back; nothing a good yoga session with Tina can’t fix, but it’s still a growing problem that I need to seriously take care of.

I think the internet is also making me socially retarded! When I worked at the office, I had to go out of my house every morning, walk to work, talk to my coworkers and talk to clients. In short, I had human interactions, which are vital to your social insertion… What do I have now? Twitter followers and RSS subscribers! It seems a little pathetic to me.

Being Your Own Boss Is Stressful

When I worked for the man, I used to think that working for yourself would be much less stressful because you wouldn’t have to deal with so many frustrating situations and that you could do whatever you want. I was partly right because now that I don’t have anyone to report to and no one to deal with, I have a much less stress to deal with. However, I have a whole new stress to cope with now: the stress of the paycheck!

If you’re currently employed, you probably don’t stress much about your paycheck. You now that twice a month, you will get a nice check for a defined amount you already know. You are paid the same amount every 2 weeks, no matter what (this applies if you’re a salary employee of course, which I used to be). I didn’t worry about my paycheck before. I knew that 2 or 3 months from now, I will still be making the same amount, and it was really reassuring.

Now I stress a lot about my paycheck because it is completely depending on my results. I am constantly looking at my emails to see if I received this magical email from ClickBank with the subject line “CB Sale”, telling me I just made another $40. Sometimes I have good days where I make $400. Sometimes, like 2 days ago, I have bad days where I make only $50. The most stressful to me is when I have a series of bad days. It completely freaks me out, until everything starts working again and making it up for the last few slow days.

Give Me Some Of That Internet Money

I do 2 simple things for a living: I have my affiliate programs; and I write for my iPhone blog. When people ask me what I do now, I just answer: “internet”. This short and simple answer is usually enough to satisfy the person asking you this question. I choose to answer this because I can’t put a real title on what I do.

Sometimes, if the person is genuinely interested in what I do, he will ask me more details. Explaining online affiliate marketing to a non-business savvy person is kinda hard, even though I try to simplify it as much as I can by saying that “I sell electronic reports and I blog about technology”.

A good definition of what I do though is that “I make money online”. I try not to use this term though because I think it sounds very cheesy. When you say you make money online, people think something like “oh yeah, just like the scammy late night commercials about how I can make money online working 4 hours a day”?

My friend Kayle is funny about it and always asks me to give him “some of that internet”, just like in the South Park episode where the kids try to make money online by having a video of Butters on YouToob.

Two Weeks Later…

Well, it’s been about two weeks since I first started writing this post and things have changed a bit. First, I worked on a new website that is now live and generating additional revenues. This website is part of my previous post about how to hit different niches with the same product. This website doesn’t pay the bills, but it’s still extra money.

The second thing I did is trying not to spend as much time in front of my computer. I now get off the internet for a few hours to read a book or a magazine. I am also starting to run! If you knew me, you wouldn’t believe what I just said, but yes, I do run for a couple miles and I kinda like it. It definitely boosts my energy level.

For the last two days, I haven’t been working from the couch. I put my laptop on the kitchen table and work from there. It’s really comfortable and I get to see what’s going on outside.

Finally, in order to fight my anti-social behavior, and after talking to my therapist who confirmed I need to interact with others (duh!), I am looking into participating in a Toastmaster club. This would definitely help me meet and talk with others.

I guess the goal of this post was to bring me to realize that I can’t just sit around all day and do nothing. I have this great opportunity of making a ton of money and I should take it because it might not last long.

Setting up the theme was not as easy as I thought. At first glance, everything was looking great but then I realized that there was a conflict with my All In One SEO plugin: all pages were showing the same meta title: Sebastien Page, which is the blog name. Other meta information (keywords and description) were working fine though. I looked around on the web for hours in search of a possible solution to my problem without finding anything.

So in order to keep my blog as SEO optimized as possible, I had to tweak the <meta> </meta> tags in the header.php file. My meta title nows looks like this:

<title><php if(is_home()): ?>Sebastien Page<php endif; ?> <php if ( is_single() ); ?><php trim(wp_title(“”)); ?></title>

This function basically tells the browser to use “Sebastien Page” as meta title if it is the home page, or else, it will use the post title, tag, category, or archive as the meta title.

I emailed the folks over at FTL to see if they know what my problem with All In One SEO may be and I hope they will get back to me, although I doubt it.

I also had issues with the javascript tags in the sidebar and I had to disable them.

I have to admit that ColorPaper is a great theme but the documentation that came with it was inexistent.

Leave a comment to tell me what you think of this new theme :)

When I saw that, I couldn’t help sending her an email explaining why she’d rather go with @debicarlston. She heard me and changed her username right away. Now here is a more developed version of what I told Debi and why I think using your real name on Twitter establishes you as a social personality that is connected and approachable.

1. You will attract more followers

Using a company name or brand as a username is probably the biggest mistake people do (I did it too when I started on Twitter) but the fact is that people will most likely follow a person rather than a brand.

Which one would you follow: @billgates or @microsoft? Yes, you’d rather find out what’s inside Bill Gates’ head rather than receive special offers about Windows Vista. Your potential followers are the same. They don’t care what you sell, they want to reach you on a personal level. They want to know more about what YOU think, not what you’re trying to sell.

2. You will establish yourself as a professional

Whatever you talk about on Twitter, using your real name will differentiate yourself and establish you as a professional in your field. As I told Debi, in the real life, she is not Director Of Marketing for CrownAir; she is a sharp business woman who happens to do marketing at an aviation company. In the same way, I am not iPhone Download Blog (my iPhone blog), I am Sebastien Page, a guy who knows a lot about the iPhone.

Note that this point is not valid if all you do on Twitter is sending useless tweets such as “going grocery shopping”. Nobody cares about that. Keep this for your MySpace status update ;)

Establishing yourself as a social and knowledgeable persona will get you more attention, raise interest in who you are and what you do, ultimately helping your business if that’s what you’re looking for. As an example, I received several advertising requests for my iPhone blog from tweets that I sent out, even though I never looked for advertisers directly. These people saw that I knew a lot about the iPhone, they went to my iPhone blog, noticed that I got quite a bit of traffic there, and ended up asking me how much I would charge them for banner ads.

3. You will be able to keep this username when you leave your company

Imagine for a second that you are the marketing guy for a music magazine. For the last 2 years you’ve been using the @xyzmusicmag username,  attracting over 3,000 followers. Now imagine that your boss tells you that you are being laid off (or let’s say that you quit, if that can make you feel better).

What would happen to your Twitter username? You have 2 options: First option: you can just leave it to your company. You will lose all your followers and you will have to start on Twitter from scratch. Second option: you can sneakily change your username (Twitter is very flexible on this) to @yourrealname, taking the risk of being sued by your employer for doing that, which would be its own right.

You will never have this dilemma if you choose to use your real name on Twitter as soon as you create your account.

As you can see, there are big benefits in using your real name on Twitter. All this can be summed up in 2 words: personal branding. This in itself could be the topic of another blog post…

Follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my RSS feed if you like what I talk about.

First, let’s see what’s good about Craigslist. To me Craigslist has 4 major benefits: it’s free; it’s a well known website; it is a trusted site; and most importantly, it is one of the most visited websites in the US.

Many internet marketers use Craigslist to make a quick buck. If you’ve been on Craigslist before, you’ve probably seen all these ads such as “Make $12,000 in 3 days”, or “Earn 2K residual for life”. These are ads made up to advertise affiliate programs. From an affiliate marketer standpoint, these ads have very little value because they will most likely be removed in a matter of minutes.

The real deal is to create ads that will stick (which means not be removed) to generate traffic to your site, not from Craigslist visitors, but from Google visitors.

Let me explain to you something you probably know… Google loves Craigslist and it crawls the site many many times a day. When you post an ad on Craigslist, Google will find it in a matter of minutes, index it, and give it much more importance than it actually deserves, putting it on the first page of Google for a given keyword. If one of your keywords shows up on the first page of the SERP, you’re gold! You will get good qualified traffic from this.

Let’s cut the crap. Here is what I recommend to do in order to get your Craigslist ad on the first page of Google:

1. Your ad title should be your main keyword/keyphrase
2. Choose your ad title wisely. If your website sells warts removal cures, don’t just name your ad “warts removal”. There is too much competition for this keyword, so be more specific: “Natural Warts Removal” would be good.
3. Write a very short post description. Just a few words are enough. You’re not trying to sell the people right here; you’re trying to get them to come to your site! A good description for our warts removal site would be: “Our natural warts removal cure will help you get rid of warts naturally without drugs or cream”.
4. Make sure to include your main keyphrase in the description.
5. Include your URL and make it clickable. Not good: www.SebastienPage.com – Good: www.SebastienPage.com
6. That’s it!

Now here is what you shouldn’t do:

1. Do not repeat the same process over and over again with the same keywords. I don’t even recommend doing this over and over again with various titles as the Craigslist community will get back at you by flagging your posts. Just do it a couple times a week, switching ad titles and ad descriptions. Note that ads show up quickly on Google, but they don’t stay for more than 2-3 days.
2. Do not use broad titles!!! As I mentioned above, do not use competitive keyphrases but go after the long tail.

I use this trick on the 3 of my money making sites and I get great traffic for free. Since you’re targeting the long tail, you’re most likely not gonna get thousands of visits. But as we say in French, “10 grams of fine patisseries are better than 10 pounds of potatoes”.

Here is a screenie of my fake ad posted on Craigslist for “Natural Warts Removal” ranking #1 for this search! Note that I posted this ad on Craigslist on 1/16/09. This screenshot was taken on 1/17/09. So by the time you see this, the results will most likely have changed.

Click on the image for a larger view.

I was actually ok with it as I didn’t have the choice. I was kinda pissed though because @franchise was not even used. The person who registered it clearly did it to secure this username but it never gave any status update, didn’t follow anyone and had only 1 follower. I assumed it was like with domain names. First come, first served…

But last week I came across this blog post that actually explains you how to get the Twitter username you’ve always wanted. Here is what I learned from it.

Twitter has a six month rule for all accounts and if the account hasn’t been active within this time period, you can make a request to actually get this username:

An account is considered inactive if it hasn’t been logged into or updated in over 6 months.  Inactive accounts are automatically removed from Twitter.  To keep your account active, log in or post an update.

Pretty handy!

I decided to follow the process to claim the @franchise Twitter username. The first step is to send an email to username@twitter.com amd explain the situation. I received a confirmation email from Twitter within seconds and a few minutes later, I received this email:

Hi Sebastien Page,

We’re working on your user name request. To help expedite the process, please reply to this email and include the following information if you haven’t already:

* your existing Twitter user name and/or the inactive user name you’d like to acquire
* if you’d like the new user name to belong to a new account (if yes, please provide an email address unattached to another Twitter account)
* if you’d like to change the user name on your existing account

Please be aware that if you’d like to change the user name on your existing account, Support will do this for you automatically when the user name is released so it doesn’t get taken. This will not affect your existing direct messages or replies, however, all replies and direct messages going forward must be addressed to the new user name once it is changed.

If your user name request concerns impersonation, trademark infringement, copyright, or another Terms of Service violation, please send your request to terms@twitter.com for help from our Terms of Service group.

More information about inactive user names is here.

Thanks!

Twitter Support

This morning I received an email from the Twitter support team informing me that they had successfully switched my account to @franchise.

That was pretty simple and painless.

This post was inspired by a tweet from Lorelle, my favorite WordPress expert. Lorelle’s tweet was saying “Make WordPress’ search function suck Less” with a link to this post. I had WordPress search issues in the past and found a few solutions and I thought I would learn a little bit more from this post, but I didn’t.

Basically this post was about manually tweaking your search.php file, which improves the WordPress search feature but it still doesn’t make it a good search feature. The main problem with the WordPress search feature, besides the irrelevancy, is that if you have a large blog of a few hundreds posts, then there is not much you can do to speed up the search.

I don’t pretend to be an expert about WordPress (I’m actually far from that!) but I do think both solutions I will talk about in this post are much better at delivering very good search results for your WordPress blog. By “good search results”, I mean results that are delivered quickly, that are relevant to your search query, and sorted by relevance.

wpSearch Plugin

The wpSearch plugin is like having your own custom search engine on your blog. wpSearch is based on “Lucene“, a full-featured open source text search engine. wpSearch is fast, and relevant, which is pretty much everything I need from a search engine on my blog.

To set up wpSearch on your blog, simply download the plugin from here, then upload it, set permission to 777 (very important), and activate the plugin from your admin panel. After activating it, you will have to build the search index database, which may take a while (about 5 posts/second) if you have many posts on your blog. That’s all there is to it. Now check your search feature and you will see a huge difference in the results you will get. The relevancy will be so much better that like me, you’ll want to blog about it ;-)

Adsense For Search

Adsense for Search (AFS) is now my favorite search feature for my blogs for 2 reasons: for one it is the best search engine you can get; and two, you can actually make money from it. Even though I hate Google as a company, I can’t deny that their search algorithm delivers the best you can get from a seach engine thus far.

Now the main concern about Adsense For Search is that you have to rely on Google to crawl your website to index your new posts. Some people won’t use Adsense For Search for this one reason. Yes, you have to wait for Google to crawl your site and index your pages but how much does that really matter in your case? I mean, is it that important to you that your post must be foundable immediately after being published?

Besides, one benefit of Adsense For Search that I have been able to verify on all my blogs is that when AFS is implemented on your site, Google will come visit you quickly and more often. I haven’t done scientific tests on this, but I was able to notice it on many occasions. Most of the time, when I publish something on my blogs, the post is picked up by Google within hours, sometimes within minutes.

To set up, AFS, you will need a Google Adsense account.