eAction

Blushing today I must confess an error. I am sorry. I’ve been alternating this eAction blog week by week with the Linux Learning Curve blog. Early this morning I took my Dad to the city for a CT-scan. In my mind I knew when I got back I’d have to catch up here, but somehow I thought it was the LLC blog’s turn this week. Lo, when I got home and checked the files I see that I’ve already given LLC two weeks in a row, and skipped the eAction blog/ezine last week.

Okay, I’m done slapping myself. I have had things like Dad’s terminal illness and family communications on my mind, but don’t think that’s a valid excuse. .. Oops, I was going to assume you forgive me, and to go onward. Help me to do that instead.

If you’ve been holding off on listing your web pages in the social bookmarking sites until I can say whether they work, I’ve got a progress and news flash for you. Yesterday, while searching for something else, I found a link in the search engine to my bookmark at Deli.cio.us, entered just last week. So apparently that effort is paying off. It’s a dull routine of copy-pasting the links and info, but my method, once I got a long list of URLs and their title, description and keywords lined up, is to open two bookmark sites at a time, and to copy and then switch window and paste into one, switch window and paste into the second one. When done, save each, and go back to do the next one.

Extra tip: Could one of your kids do this for you if you have a long list of URLs to promote?

Is your “free” website with an unregistered domain not making you money, even though you’ve put all kinds of work into it?

Another friend and I were discussing things that don’t work in a web business, and in that dialogue, I realized that certain points are true and need to be re-stated from time to time so that they register with newcomers. Well, more experienced online marketers need this review too.

If you hope to make any money online, focus on a site about your own passion and get a chunk of your knowledge into a digital form, an e-book or software so you can market your own thing.

Choose affiliate programs in line with your theme, but treat them as bits of decoration you put on your site. Don’t hold your breath that you’ll make lots of money with that until your site is getting thousands of visits a day. That’s when the affiliate programs start to pay off, when 10 out of 1000 click on one of those little ad links each day and one of those 10 buys. That’s when you’ll be glad you signed up and instialled your coded links.

If you are just starting out with a new site, work AdSense into all your pages. That will bring you income before any of affiliate checks ever arrive.

The final and most important key is to build a good site with sought-after information, and with carefully crafted meta tags (title, description, and keywords) and see that the search engines know about it. Once they do, you can focus on corresponding with all your new clients and customers!

This is where SiteBuildIt shines. The system to which you subscribe annually, guides you through the brainstorming of a good theme and finding content for your site. Then it automatically submits your pages to the search engines, and keeps doing so at whatever frequency each SE permits. In no time you have those high traffic figures.

Don’t believe me? Check out their success stories and if your computer is able to see U-tube videos, you should probably be able to handle the both goofy and serious “I Love my SBI!” short videos. People are coming up with the craziest ideas, and in SBI they work! Yours should too.

I really ought to become an affiliate of GoDaddy too, as I keep referring people there for the best bargains on domain registrations. There is the matter of resisting all the extras they want to slip in with your order,.but if you can be strong and stick to just what you are prepared to pay for, you’ll get some decent deals.

I can recall when I first learned about domain registration in 1999 and it cost over $70/year! Yes, really! Now mine all all under $10 at GoDaddy, and get this, yesterday I registered a domain for a client at GoDaddy, thinking it would be a mere $1.99 US like last time I checked, and guess what - it was only 99 cents!

Yes, it’s possible to have a registered domain - if you’ll settle for a .info - at just 99 cents for the first year! (It may be a February only thing).

Warning: If you accept their default setting for 2 yr at checkout you’ll pay over $11. (Meaning, .99 the first year and $10 the second). Just change that back to 1 year, and go for .99 now, and see if they don’t have another special on next year.

If your site does well and makes you money, then next year buy up your domain name in other extensions like .com, or .org, or whatever. Make this first one a re-direct site that turns traffic to the newer one.

oving right along here towards installing Linux… we have to pause to consider which method we’ll use. Much of this may be determined by the type of computer and internet access you have.

1. You can download a wide variety of choices in Linux systems, and if you have a CD burner, you can burn the CD or DVD, and then use that for your installation.

2. If yours is an older computer and doesn’t have all these features, then you can buy a installation CD and use that. This turns out to be the most popular way to do it. Even if you don’t have a full installation CD, you might get a LIVE CD that has just enough on it to go online and fetch the rest of the files as the installer program needs them. It takes longer that way, but if your line is steady, you can do that.

3. It is possible to download and make a bootable floppy diskette. If you have the computer connected to go online, that will allow you to get the installer program started, and it too, will go fetch the rest of the files from online.

The one note I’d add to both 2 and 3, is that you need to have a list of exact URLs ready to tell the installer where to go to get the files. When I tried it, I had only one URL and it wasn’t working, and I had no way of trying others because I hadn’t prepared such a list. It meant I had to crash everything, go back online and find that list of URLs first.

Now, if you wish to have both MS Windows and a Linux system on the same computer so you can make the transition more gradually, that is possible. I’ve done that too. It’s called dual-booting, or mutli-booting. But you need to know a few points before you start.

MS Windows will NOT cooperate on the same hard drive if it is not installed first. If you already have it on the hard drive, and if there is enough free space on the hard drive, some Linux systems will just install themselves on the free section. BUT you should make a thorough back up of everything in your Windows system in case you make a mistake in the partitioning stage, and accidentally wipe out all your Windows system. I’ve had that happen too!

Most die-hard Linux fans will try to discourage you from dual-booting with Windows. Most people trade in their old car when buying a new one, they don’t keep the old one and drive it some days to make the transition gradually.

It can happen that you have some Windows-only Program with a lot of data that you are not ready to handle from some unknown program. Maybe Quicken with all your financial records, or Brother’s Keeper with all your genealogy databases? In that case a dual boot is a good idea, especially if you haven’t got two separate computers.

Even then, it would be best to have the Windows system on one drive, and your new Linux on another, or a virtual drive, while on the same computer. We’ll mention this again when we get to the partitioning lesson.

For now, if you’ve decided on the method and whether you will go for a dual boot or straight Linux, then it is time to access your BIOS (or CMOS on the older computers) and make a simple little change to tell the computer to look on the CD (or floppy) drive for the booting information.

When you power up, or re-boot your computer, you see this line at the bottom that says, “Press DEL to enter setup”. Quickly, before it is gone, click on the DEL key in the numeric pad on your keyboard. You will move about the menus here with your Tab and arrow keys. Click to enter the Bios Features Setup. Then find the menu item that says “Boot Sequence.” With your + and - keys on the numeric pad, you can cause the CD drive, or the floppy drive, if that’s what you’re going to use, to shift to the top of the list. That’s all you need to accomplish. Navigate to the “Save and Exit” button, and click that. (Very often that’s F10).

Now put the installation disk into the drive, if you haven’t already, and reboot the computer.

Brrr! the boot disk will come alive. Now hang on - the installation ride starts!