Posted by Ruddy on Feb 25, 2009 in
Chit Chat As one of Apple reseller business owners and as someone who use Alienware laptop, I want to share my personal experience with these two brands. Alienware and Apple is like hell and heaven. Of course what I mean “hell” here is Alienware and what I mean “heaven” is Apple. Alienware customer support is probably the worst I’ve ever dealt with, it’s even worse than Nokia customer support. While for Apple, it’s probably one of the best.
Despite we don’t have official Apple tech support here in my country, I’m always satisfied with their customer support whenever I need repair. One of my friends ever shipped his MacBook for repair, it had lots of scratch everywhere. When Apple shipped back the laptop, it looked like a new one! They replaced almost everything within one week. You can count on Apple support, really. Lots of my friends told me they extended their AppleCare because of this cool support.
Compared to Alienware, obviously Apple is 100x better. Alienware took more than 3 weeks to repair my Area-51 M15x and they are extremely not transparent. Every time I called them and I asked “can you tell me what’s the problem with my laptop?”, they kept silence. They didn’t want me to know the exact problem of my own laptop. They were even late in shipping back my laptop simply because the replacement CPU was out of stock. Can you believe that? Alienware repair depot in United States doesn’t have enough replacement CPU? My guess is, they had lots of complains so everybody sent back their laptop for repairing.
Alienware also won’t ever answer your question unless they have to. They will only answer when you ask for the tracking number (when they ship back your laptop) or when you ask “what took you so long?”. Other than these questions, they will just ignore you. I heard lots of Alienware bashing everywhere JUST because of their poor customer support. But well, at least I have got my Area-51 M15x back and now it’s working perfectly…
Tags: alienware, apple, laptop
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 23, 2009 in
Web Hosting Well, as I said in my previous post, there are lots of stupid people and bad companies on the internet no matter how “legal” they are. Well, I have met various of bad people but one of the worst is LunarPages. I won’t give them a free link here but if you are curious about them, just go to lunarpages.com. Don’t be fooled with their cool design.
I have made probably 3 posts about LunarPages and I created all of these because I’m totally pissed off. I had a shared hosting account for my new website with them. Recently, I moved the server from shared hosting account to their VPS hosting plan. But you know what, suddenly they suspended my account with one excuse: I haven’t paid my bills.
This is totally ridiculous because they never sent me any notification/warning regarding this bill. EVERY web hosting service I’ve worked with like Liquidweb always sent me at least 3 emails to notify me when my hosting account almost expired. But lunarpages never told me anything and suddenly they deleted my hosting account. What made it look even more ridiculous is, they never answered to my questions regarding this bill.
Yep, earlier I have created a support ticket asking about various things including “when to pay for this new VPS account” and also “How much should I pay for this VPS account because earlier I’ve paid for 12 months shared hosting account and I only used it for 1 month?” But surprisingly, they always skipped these parts. They answered the other questions but they skipped these questions. You know the end of this story. They suspended my account without notifying me and also AFTER they skipped all of my questions regarding this bill.
*Last Update: After talking with them, my problem finally is really settled. Looks great! They admitted their mistake, they gave me compensation, and I changed my mind about them.
Tags: lunarpages web hosting
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 21, 2009 in
Chit Chat Well to be honest, I’m not that interested in social websites. I don’t know why but it’s just my nature…but since I know it’s important to build relationship on the internet, well I think start from today I’ll try as best as I can to spend some of my free time in social websites. Maybe I’ll start with Facebook and Twitter 
and probably other cool sites such as Digg later as well (never really digged something, only read the popular news there)
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 18, 2009 in
Chit Chat I never called myself a perfectionist but I know how to be creative. I know how to do new things for myself. The first time I got involved in internet marketing business, it was a huge pain in the ass. I only had $10, a super slow PC, and internet connection. What did I do? I was just learning and trying my best. I can only smile right now if I remember those days. The days when everybody underestimated me.
Well, let’s go back to the topic. Internet is extremely fun, you can always do new stuffs whenever you want to. I have few friends who also have started their own business but their businesses are not related to internet. I think what they do is not fun at all. It’s just the same daily routine. On internet you can make new websites anytime you like, what kind of niche you want to be involved, and make money as much as you can. The best part of it is, you can make your businesses run automatically after you successfully market them. That’s the biggest fun of working online.
Just like me. The first time I created my affiliate site was fun because it was something new for me. But although I have been making lots of money from that site, I got bored. What I did then just create new websites, try new niches, experiment with new things, etc. Fortunately, that site is still making me lots of money because as I said earlier it runs automatically. 
However, internet is also full of stupid people. Scams, hypes, and duplicates are just everywhere. I’ve been scammed twice and I was really fucked up. If I ever met these scammers in real life, probably I would have already punched them and made them pay for what they did to me. But that’s life. More particularly, that’s internet. You can’t trust everyone.
Well, what more interesting about internet is when someone made success, people will follow him and copy EXACTLY the same methods like what this guy did. It’s just nature of our online world. One of my successful affiliate sites which has been ranking pretty well in Google natural SERPs is just one example. Lots of people are copying the site, several of them even fully copied the design and just twisted the words so Google won’t detect their sites as dupe. This is funny. Did they even know what’s the meaning of “creativity”? Welcome to the internet world where some people are just stupid 
Tags: internet stupid people
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 16, 2009 in
Marketing Different from SEO, you can’t never make your adwords or facebook ads campaign automatic if you work without employees. You always need to observe your campaign, see if something goes wrong, and edit your campaigns’ cost per click. You always need to do these stuffs if you want to maximize your profit from adwords and facebook ad campaigns. I’m talking about advertising campaign for e-commerce/affiliate websites, not brand exposure here.
The reason is simple, because sometimes (no matter how superb you are in adwords) Google slap your campaign. Well, I don’t know but from my experience, it looks like Google slapped affiliate sites quite often compared to normal e-commerce websites. So it looks like we can’t just leave the campaigns running by themselves if we are affiliates. If you ever read somewhere on the net about how to make huge sum of money from adwords by working 30 minutes or less every day, it’s almost a lie. They lied so they can make money by providing “dreams”
Did I say “almost”? Yes. Almost. Actually it’s possible but you need to know the trick. You can’t do it if you are on your own but if you LET someone else to work on your adwords campaign, you don’t have to monitor it anymore. It’s up to you if you don’t trust someone else to manage your adwords and facebook ad campaigns, but for me it works. You just need to do some extensive experiments.
Now how to find these people? Through elance and guru.com. Go find some adwords/internet marketing specialists who have at least 2 positive feedbacks and 0 negative feedback. Contact them and tell them you are interested to communicate with them. Usually I ask for their messenger ID and I chat with them. You have to interview them and let them prove they are really worth it. Unfortunately, you can’t “judge” them if you never had any experience in adwords…
You must understand how the adwords and facebook ad algorithms work. You have to know how to make your campaign profitable and then COMPARE it with these adwords specialists’ method. You ask them in details how they think they can make your websites profitable. If needed, you can even tell them one of your successful affiliate/e-commerce sites, then ask them how they can make it get even more success in adwords/facebook ads.
From most of the specialists, I’ve found 3 real pro specialists. I did some experiments with them. I tested their service and see how they managed my ads, how they tested their ad copies, how they reduced/increased CPC, etc. 2 of them did their work very well and made me more money although I have to pay their service for certain amount of fee. I must say if you have at least $10K per month for adwords and facebook ad campaigns, try them. Although they are not cheap but in the end you’ll make more money and what better is, they can make your campaigns automatic. However, usually these specialists’ work was kinda slow at the start.
Tags: advertising, adwords, e-commerce, facebook ad
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 13, 2009 in
Web Hosting Remember my earlier post about how unstable Lunar Pages server is? After chatting with them, they explained they had a DDos attack to their server in San Diego. But I still don’t understand, how could my website suddenly going down again? Another DDos attack? WTF is that….I really do not appreciate a web hosting like this. Down twice within the same week…WTF is that? I would rather move it to liquidweb, far more stable and faster.
Tags: lunar pages web hosting
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 12, 2009 in
Chit Chat 
Today we won’t talk about internet stuff. I want to talk about something more important….Lionel Messi!
I mean, can you believe this kid? It just seems he can’t stop scoring. I’m a fan of soccer despite I don’t like Barcelona. But Lionel Messi is something else. You can always see his magic anytime (either when he plays for Argentina or for Barcelona). He has scored lots of goals, has sent lots of assists, and of course dribbled past lots of defenders.
To be honest, I believe Leo Messi is the best soccer player I’ve ever seen. Even better and more consistent than Zinedine Zidane. Plus he’s still 21 or 22 which mean he’s not even near his golden age.
I can only hope I would be “Messi” of internet world one day :P.
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 10, 2009 in
Marketing People said link exchange is already dead but you need to think twice before you say so. If you are such a noob who only know how to do reciprocal link exchange or resource page link exchange, I can make sure you won’t be at the top of competitive keyword’s natural listing. Everybody knows reciprocal link exchange, I guess. How about resource page link exchange? It’s something that most people offer. For example, someone at DigitalPoint sends you a PM, it looks like this:
Hello dear, I can give you link from my biz opp website:
http://www.domain1.com/resources.php
http://www.domain2.com/links.html
http://www.domain3.com/resource-links.html
Please reply and tell me about your websites’ PR and where you can place my links.
Ever got this kind of private message or email? This is stupid but people are still doing it. So what we need to do then? The answer is easy. Find in-content links, as always.
If you have one website, let’s say a business opportunities website, then you have to create one dummy site/blog so you can give backlink from this dummy site to your link partner. Personally I’d suggest you to create two dummy sites so we can do more tricks. Of course before you can give backlink to your link partners, first you need to build incoming links for these dummy sites. It’s going to be an intensive task to do but it’s worth it in the end.
You can find link partners everywhere, start by doing manual job (emailing the SEO people) and also by contacting forum members. Although most of people on the forum are totally rubbish (they don’t have quality sites) but sometimes you can find superb link partners. The ratio maybe is less than 5%, it’s like you send 100 PMs and you only get 5 good link partners. But as I said before, it’s still worth it.
Of course you can also start a new thread inside relevant subforum (for example in Digitalpoint, create a new thread inside link exchange subforum). You’ll receive many PMs although maybe not all of them have good and quality websites. Remember one thing, you have to look professional. Don’t send any email/PM like the above example but tell them how to do in-content link exchange. Tell them you are looking for a real deal, a link with anchor text inside their article pages.
In-content link exchange actually is similar to paid blog post (I’ve given you the example - SEO case Study I), but the difference is you have to give backlink to their websites from your dummy sites. Sometimes I even give backlinks from my real sites and in return I get backlinks to my dummy sites. But of course you can’t just link to everyone, you have to know what you are doing.
Personally, I don’t really care about PageRank. Usually I did link exchange after I checked my partner’s incoming links. Usually I checked how many backlinks they have for their sites and I also checked how many outbound links do they have in a page where they will give me backlink. If they have no outbound link at all in the page where they will give me a backlink, I will definitely take the offer.
This is also a grey hat SEO technique but it works until today. You can build your own network by creating 9-10 websites if you want and link each other but I’m too lazy for that. When I was still actively build links through the above link exchange technique, I felt I’ve spent too much time for that. So since the last few months, I even never trade anymore links with new partners. But believe me, if you do this technique and the paid links campaign I told you earlier, you’ll be on the top of Google (unless Google changes its algorithm).
Tags: internet, Marketing, SEO
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 8, 2009 in
Marketing I’m gonna talk about SEO today. Search Engine Optimization is one of the main reasons why I can earn money from my affiliate websites. Of course I won’t rely on SEO for my upcoming websites (including Hymoo) LOL. But I just wanna share what you might don’t know about Google and SEO.
OK here it is.Go to Google.com and type a competitive phrase there “diet pills”. I’ve been observing about this website: consumerpricewatch.net (sorry but no FREE backlink to this kind of website from me…). At “diet pills” and related keywords, you can always find consumerpricewatch.net at the top of the natural listing. Maybe he’s not always at the first position but at least he’s always at the top three.
Am I impressed by the content of this website? No. Personally I believe he’s working directly for the diet pill he recommended. The last time I checked his website, he was recommending Orovo and it was a direct link (not affiliate link). So it must be something. I don’t believe if Orovo or other crap diet pills really work. After all, every supplement in this world is overrated. They are produced to fool you.
So if consumerpricewatch.net is not a good and honest diet pill review site, how the hell can he stays on the top? Simple. Paid links! You can check his backlinks using backlink analyzer tools like Yahoo Site Explorer or whatever you want. I’ve come into conclusion that he has SO MANY backlinks from irrelevant blogs. He contacted the blog owners through paid link service providers (or directly, I don’t know) then he told those bloggers to create a post about “diet pills”. Of course inside the posts, these bloggers gave backlinks to him with his targeted anchor texts like “diet pills”, etc.
Usually people told us to focus on article marketing, directory submission, blog commenting, 3 ways link exchange, etc. But only several of them believe paid links are still having big impact for search engine optimization. Well, I don’t know what will happen in the future since I don’t work for Google but I know consumerpricewatch.net IS JUST one example that proves how effective paid links are.
Of course if you are not stupid enough, you won’t buy blogroll links or links inside resource pages. Try to buy in-content links inside unique articles and vary the anchor texts. Obviously they’ll help. Even from unrelated blogs and websites, they are still helpful as long as the posts related to your anchor texts.
To make everything clear here: I’m NOT the owner of that website. Consumerpricewatch.net is owned by someone else and I’ve been observing his SERPs because it’s quite interesting. He relies on paid links but he has been staying on the top of Google natural listing for competitive keywords since a long time ago. This is not kind of black hat SEO because I’ve seen websites with this kind of campaign always stay at the top of their targeted keywords.
If you ask me how I did it myself, I usually bought links for my affiliate websites through Digitalpoint. I also ever used some services like TLA or buyblogreviews but most of the websites listed there are totally crap. Digitalpoint forum, however, is a little bit different. You can find lots of link sellers and negotiate with them about the price.
Well, I don’t focus on my affiliate websites anymore. So to be honest, the last time I bought a link for my website is around 1-2 months ago. But I’m telling you, this is one of the golden keys to the top. I’ve experienced it myself and you can also analyze the competitive keywords on Google. Some websites “buy” their way to the top and they know what to buy and what to avoid. Do not buy blogroll links and links from directories. Buy in-content posts instead.
By the way, it is very easy to detect in-content paid links. If the anchor text looks like targeting keyword, it’s 90% paid link. And if the post is very irrelevant to the blog niche, it must be paid link as well.
*PS: Wait for my next post. SEO Case Study II: Link Exchange and Networking.
Tags: internet marketing, paid links, SEO
Posted by Ruddy on Feb 7, 2009 in
Chit Chat Remember when I said Lunar Pages server sucks a lot? Well, they finally asked for forgiveness and gave me one month free hosting for compensation. They explained someone launched DDos Attack to their server in San Diego. After thinking for a while and told them to change my dedicated IP address, finally I chose to cooperate with them.
As I said earlier, I only host one site in one webhost. The site that I prepare with Lunar Pages will be launched next Monday. Probably I’ll let everyone know. We are also busy in developing Hymoo and because of some issues, we must delay its official launch date a little bit longer. I also hate this but in the end it’ll be a very cool site. Hope so
Tags: lunar pages, new website
