It would be a lie to say that I love him, of course I do, but most of all I idolize him for his achievements on the net. I first heard about John Chow through my own blog. Yes, this very blog. Near one of the post, which was related to online revenue, Adsense displayed an advert with John’s blog, offering to teach you how to make money online. Since I couldn’t click my own ad, I just had to copy the URL manually and went to see what is he actually offering.

Well, I was impressed with quite a few things right from the start. First of all, his blog offers tons of articles, tips, tricks for online revenue - free. He is not trying to sell you his ebooks, not begging for donations, or do what other “marketing guru’s” do, trying to get your attention, and then to get you to pay. All you see if free to read, browse and learn. This is exactly the kind of blog I was looking for, for long time now, to subscribe and learn from someone who build himself, built his stable online revenue and shows exactly how he did it and with what network.

I have been visiting his blog for a couple of months now and learnt so many new things, that I never actually thought about. His creativity when it comes to marketing knows no boundaries, makes you smile and wonder how come no one thought about it before, and maybe if someone did, he didn’t blog about it or gave his secrets away, while John does it freely. I particularly enjoyed his “evil” tip to increase subscriptions, and following that tip I embedded some of my links into redirects, another way I was never introduced to before. John updates his blog everyday and practically showers you with ways and opportunities to make money online, so you need to be extra lazy to do not avail of at least one of the ways he is offering you and try yourself with online revenue.

Most of all, I was impressed with his generosity. A rare quality nowadays, I am sure you would agree with me. Not only he gives away so much precious information for free, his blog is also very interactive, and again, the readers benefit from it. For instance, if you write a review of his blog, he will link to your blog (regardless your ranking) and send you a ton of traffic. John Chow dot com has climbed to PR6 upon the recent update, and participating in one of his batches “buys” you a back link that will increase your Technorati profile. This, however, was my sincere review of his blog and I want to use this opportunity and thank him for been my distant teacher and muse.

LiveTrio is probably by far the best tool for keeping in touch with your clients in real time. This piece of software saves a lot of time and money, allows you to communicate with customers and see on your screen right away their IP addresses, names and department. The best part about this chat is that it’s entirely web based, i.e. you need not install any plug-ins of third party software, which may crash your computer.

Is it expensive? Nope, it’s damn cheap, currently $9.95 but it’s a limited time offer but you don’t have to buy blindly, you can try it for free, using up to 5 operators at the same time and see how this technology operates in real time. The main advantage of LiveTrio, in my opinion, is that you can chat with visitors and provide support or sort out the issues while viewing their traffic history, information and other interesting facts about their activity on your site. The public chat has a very pleasant blueish interface while you, the site owner, will be able to handle all the requests on a fully featured desktop application which you can minimize on your desktop tray and stay available online for your clients as long as you are online.

The installation is very easy as well, all you need to do is after you have signed up, place the code in your website either as a classical support button or just a text link in your signature, and that is it, the rest is all up to LiveTrio. The only disadvantage I can think of, is that you will be bound to another host’s uptime, as they provide the service through their host and therefore if, for whatever reason, they experience downtime, your support could be unavailable for a while. But let’s not be negative
This review was sponsored.

Yahoo hosting is considered to be among the best web hosts on the Internet and rightly so. It’s a well established company, with good reputation that provides a highest quality hosting for both professional and beginner webmasters. I just wrote a comprehensive overview of it on Host 2 Get blog, explaining why Yahoo is the best solution.

Up until recently, most of us did know that Yahoo web hosting service is great, but not everyone could afford it. It used to be rather pricy, with 25$ set up fee and pretty high prices for a comparably small disk space and bandwidth. However, now that the competition is tough and big amounts of bandwidth are no longer a luxury, Yahoo cut their prices down. Set up fee was waived, and every once in a while they offer miscellaneous deals.

One of them, is a low cost domain registration, click below for more details.

1.99$ for one year of Top Level Domain registration is as cheap as you can get, and this is only the first part of their on going deal. Don’t forget that you register your domain with a well known and establish company, not one that offers a domain as a bait to get you to sign up with them and pay annually in advance. Yahoo guarantees support and my logic is, they have been around for so many years now, how fat is the chance they would close such a huge corporation down?

At present, hosting prices are cut in 35%! Yes, that is pretty impressive as well, not forgetting you get more disk space and bandwidth then they used to provided before. I’d really recommend Yahoo to both professionals and beginners, you can read more about it in my full review of Yahoo hosting. Beginners get a site builder and all the ready-to-use features for putting a site live online, while professional webmasters get a stable host they can rely on, with excellent uptime and great support. I’d really recommend this company as been both reliable and affordable.

Some time ago I was browsing the web, submitting this very blog to many directories, however, I must say, the task is pretty discouraging. Most of the directories require a reciprocal or a small feel for a submission. It’s understandable as directories want to cover the expenses of promotion and if they have a PR, they want you to pay, roughly speaking, for a back link on a particular Page Rank.

MasterMoz.com is a new directory I came across, which offers a totally free submission and no tricks or reciprocals are required. Quite a few advantages to submitting your website to this directory. First of all, they are aggressively promoting their website and it’s likely to hit a good Page Rank upon the next Google update. This would mean submitting now guarantees you will soon get a totally free backlink from a decent Page Rank. Secondly, as been a SEO friendly directory, which does not list inappropriate websites, you will have a link from a good “neighborhood”, which is yet another important factor in building backlinks. And, finally, the directory is becoming popular (as like I said, it’s been promoted very well) and additionally to the link, you may get some extra hits for your website from MasterMoz.com. Free high quality directories are a scarcity nowadays, carpe diem before they become paid ones

I am going to submit all my websites as soon as I finish this post, because there are about a dozen of URL’s currently in my possession, and it takes quite a while to go through them all and submit one by one… Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining about having a big online empire.

Sponsored review.

Like many programmers on the internet I often find myself in need of an audio converter. Sometimes I happen to download a sound file that comes in a particular format that either does not match your Operating System or your player… or, you use a different player and for some reason the file is not working in the needed format… Sometimes I use audio converters, however, some of them are very expensive, or, if they happened to be free, most of the time they do not cover a wide enough variety of sound formats, which puts the converter in rather useless category…

Total Audio converter, which I discovered recently, covers most of the widely known sound formats such as wav, mp3, ogg, wma, ape, flac, mp4, aac and mpc. It also rips CD’s and has an inbuilt player. Basically it’s similar in nature to Window Media Player, only it can play and convert miscellaneous formats of files. Also, it’s inexpensive, and the value you get for mere 20$ is fairly justified.

Most of today’s websites are still bragging that their site is optimized for dial up connection, and even Adobe Photoshop allows you to optimize images for dial-up connections, so that the survivors of the snail net will also be able to enjoy, but… what for? Does anyone uses a connection below ADSL Broadband? Data transfer is not as expensive as it was before, in fact nowadays you can get a cheap wireless Broadband or high speed connection for your computer.

Most of today’s providers range between 20$ and 100$ dollars, you can see a great list of broadband providers and compare for yourself, especially this list will be useful if you are located in the UK, as the prices are provided in British pounds and show you each provider’s speed, monthly fee and some additional info you might want to find useful if you decide to sign up or switch to a new ADSL management.

Personally, I am on T1 connection, recently upgraded from 700+ mb connection and can say with full confidence that there is no much difference. The surfing speed is practically the same and big downloads still takes long time, if the server I am downloading it from is not super fast. Still and all, I guess it’s better than an average connection. In a few months I am looking forward to switch to WiFi as I heard it’s better than DSL cables, and faster… I hope.

When we come to register a new domain name, then it’s no problem, we just log in to any registrant on the web, input the domain name, if it’s available we register, and everybody are happy. But what if you want something that is already taken? That’s a big problem as after so many years of internet and marketing, it’s save to say that the vast majority of domains is already taken, and we either need to compromise and add digits, words, dashes and hyphens…

Read More from "To register, or to buy a domain?"

As any enthusiastic webmaster, I ceaselessly look for websites that teach you about programming. Some tutorials websites are nice but have a very measly variety while others require a registraion fee to be able to download material.

A few days ago I found a website, which in my opinion is really worth visiting as been by far the best programming resource. Dream In Code is a huge community (with over 20k members) that offers its visitors answers to all the commonly asked questions regarding C/C++, Java, Visual Basic, ASP, .NET, php, ColdFusion, and almost any other programming language in between. Additionally to the help you can get from the experts participating in the community, visitors get access to downloading miscellaneous code snippets, tutorials, and more.

Not only this, but there are also goodies giveaway. Visitors and members with over 500 posts in the community are eligible to  receive a free T-shirt and participate in a monthly drawing contest for a 1GB Thumb Drive. That’s not bad, considering that you participate in a community that educates you free and lifts your programming skills to another level. I’d really recommend to visit Dream In Code and check their exclusive content out.