White hat by being a black hatter?

There's always a huge debate about the ethics of white hat techniques vs black hat techniques. However, so many people seem blind to the idea that black hat tools don't have to be used for black hat techniques. Have you ever thought of the simplicity of using white hat techniques with black hat tools?

If a black hat tool can do some cool tricks with articles, rss feeds, etc., who said that you have to have an auto-generated page with nothing unique? Why not use your own articles or a combination of your own articles and ones from article directories that you have permission to use? All of a sudden you're creating a completely white hat site ten times easier with black hat tools.

I should start by saying that there is no easy solution. Regardless of what you do, you will have to work at it a bit. It's not really about hard work vs no work. It's about being smart. You can be smart with minimal work and beat someone putting in 100 times the effort, but you still have to put some work into it.

If you buy a black hat tool thinking that you just have to click one button to get instant riches, you're in for a disappointment. But if you go into it thinking that you can use it for some nice white hat techniques, you're not only saving yourself time, boosting your SEO efforts, etc., but you're also making sure that your site will always stay around.

What are all of these tools? Well, that will have to wait for a future post.

New Video and Audio Feature in GetResponse?

For starters, you might want to check out our review of GetResponse and Aweber. I plan on doing an updated review soon, but I still stand by my old review (since then, there are a few new features) and I'm happy with GetResponse.

Now that I've said that, I just noticed that GetResponse plans on adding audio and video into their autoresponders somehow. I've very curious to see how this turns out, but I have noticed that audio and video has been catching on more lately on several websites.

I'm still a fan of the old text/html method, but anything that can compliment a website or e-mail more might be worth looking into.

I don't like the trend of replacing writing with videos or audio, but it's not always a bad idea to try to do both if you can implement it well. I'm not quite sure of what my opinion is of this new feature that they plan on adding soon, but I'm very curious to see how this turns out.

As soon as GetResponse comes out with this, I'll be sure to report my findings.

Feel free to post your thoughts or comments in the comment section below.

Host Gator First Impression / Review / Coupons!

You should never have all of your eggs in one basket, which is why I have multiple hosts. One of my current hosts that I like is 1and1hosting, which has some of the cheapest deals around that still are of great quality and all the options most of us will ever need (plus some). However, this is just one of a few different hosts I use.

Recently, I've been hearing a lot of good things about HostGator, so I decided to give them a try. They offer several different hosting plans, but I recommend going with their $9.95 plan if you go with them. They're a bit more expensive than 1and1, and they don't include free domain names and the like, but they do have a few very cool features that many hosts don't have.

One of those features is Fantastico, which is a cool tool from their cpanel (kind of like an admin panel for those who aren't familiar with what this is). Fantastico allows you to install tons of scripts with essentially a few clicks of a button. It will create the MySQL databases and all that techie stuff for you, which can save some people hours. Things like WordPress blogs, Joomla CMS, PHPBB2 forums, and dozens more can install within minutes.

Prior to this, even a techie would spend a fair amount of time getting some of these things up. It can all be done from the control panel now with virtually no work on your part. A HUGE plus on my part.

On top of that, HostGator has great support. They have a live support chat, e-mail, and a toll free phone number to use 24/7. I love the live chat support, which 1and1 does not have (they have good phone and e-mail support, though).

I'm very impressed with how good the support is and how easy Fantastico is to use. Fantastico alone is well worth the extra money. HostGator doesn't have all the extra bonuses as 1and1 like free domain names (you can get a domain name for $5.99 from 1and1 anyway and just point it to HostGator), but their support and ease of using Fantastico is well worth the extra money.

In fact, it has saved me hours upon hours already, which probably saves me at least a hundred dollars from having to hire someone to do some of that work. I still like 1and1 also, but I'm glad I got HostGator for some of my more complicated sites.

There are some other hosts that are a bit cheaper than HostGator that offer Fantastico, but all of the others I've tried have slow servers, downtime issues, and so forth (trust me on this) or they're overpriced.

HostGator Coupon: If you use this HostGator link and type in HG10 for the promo code when you order, you'll get your first month for 1 penny.

Heck, if the free domain issue is holding you back, I WILL BUY YOU A DOMAIN NAME that you can have all to yourself if you use this link to make your HostGator purchase. Just use the link and e-mail me at info@iwantpennies.com for me to confirm it.

To summarize, HostGator is still a great deal, despite how some hosts are a buck or two cheaper, but the extra dollar or two will easily be made up for in time and the quality of this host.

Meta tag discussions -- Dynamic Meta Tags!

There is always a lot of discussion about how useful meta tags are. Some experts say that they were once very relevant to search engine results but now they aren't, whereas others claim that they still carry some weight.

I've even seem some people go as far as to say not to worry about them.

I say that everyone in all of the above arguments don't know what the hell they're talking about! Search engines want you to think about your visitors, as they want to bring searchers the most relevant results.

As such, KEEP YOUR VISITORS IN MIND WHEN USING META TAGS!!!!

That's right, you should use meta tags that help your visitors. Don't think about the search engines all of the time, as the search engines are trying to look at it from the visitor's point of view. As such, you should do the same.

Meta tag descriptions, especially titles, often show up in the search engine results. If you do a search for a particular question or topic, I bet that most of you would pass up on a site that had an irrelevant title. Duh?!?!, right?

So having said that, make the meta tag titles and descriptions relevant to what people searching for that page would want. Pay very close attention to the title as well. Meta tag descriptions can often be replaced by keywords and content that the visitor is searching for, but the meta tag titles often stay the same.

Using general meta tags will help, but if you have tons and tons of pages, they all might start to look identical in the search engines. As a result, you should consider dynamic meta tags. These are meta tags that change according to what's in the page that is indexed. You can make it so that titles in the article or page that is being displayed show up as the meta tag title and so forth.

Different websites/blogs have different tools (most free) that can do this for you, so I'd recommend doing a search for "dynamic meta tags" plus whatever you are looking to use them on (like a specific forum, website creator, blog, etc.).

This is an easy way to "set it and forget it," and it definitely has helped with my search engine results.

Tons of sites, a few sites, one site, just blogs???

Every internet marketing out there seems to have their own opinion on what's best in terms of making money online. Some say to have several websites, some say to have hundreds to thousands, some say to only have a few, some say to just use blogs, and some say to only have one or two. Others say to use one method instead of another, while others say that everyone else is wrong with this method and that their method is better.

I honestly laugh at all this because the answer is obvious -- do everything you can and want to. You can focus on a few big sites that are important to you and still crank out tons of smaller sites. You can even throw in blogs, article sites, etc.

On top of that, you can even play around with some techniques that internet marketers and SEO experts constantly argue over -- like duplicate content. You can get a new site up and running with others' articles (from article directories where this is legal and you have permission to do so) and perhaps a few of your own (what I recommend) literally in less than an hour if you focus. Even if you're not good at creating sites, you can get one new site a day like this if you really tried.

If you try all the techniques out there, you'll soon learn what works best for you and what doesn't. Heck, even if half of them utterly fail, you should still be profiting.

Some of the tools out there that some people say are crap have made others tons of money. Other tools that people say are great can often be horrible. But the key is to just do the work and get down and dirty with it all.

Updated to the new blogger!

As many of you know, there are now new blogger accounts that you can get from blogspot.com. I hesitated making the switch simply because I didn't want to mess around with what I had up, but I figured that it was about time ... and it wouldn't let me post any more to the old blogger account.

Having said that, I'll be making several updates over the next while and will soon have a post up on using black hat tools to get white hat results. Or in better words, how to use concepts from black hat techniques to make total white hat sites.

Many people complain about how black hat tools are crap or simply don't work. They're right if they try to use them solely for quick and easy sites, but you can use some of the same concepts that make them work to make a white hat site with a little work on your part. It's not as easy as 1 2 3, but with a little work, you can get great results.

Rich Marketing

I just released my new guide, Rich Marketing, for an exclusive pre-launch. So view my special offer for Rich Marketing! It's only $12 (after the pre-launch, I plan on making it around $37) for a limited time.

Rich Marketing is a new technique of targeting "rich prospects" with virtually no competition. Why fight over a few pennies or even a few dollars with hundreds of thousands to millions of potential competitors when you can grab the "rich targets" with ease?

Rich Marketing will make you rethink things that you've taken for granted in internet marketing and making money online. Rich Marketing teaches you how you don't need tons of visitors to make bundles of cash online. You only need tons of visitors if you're targeting the wrong ones, which virtually everyone is!

I'll teach you not only how Rich Marketing can apply to SEO (with getting ranked at the top for "rich terms") and pay-per-click campaigns like Google Adwords (pay less for more!), but I'll also teach you how you can actually find "rich prospects" waiting for you to find them. You don't need to spend a dime to make bundles of cash with this system.

The philosophy of Rich Marketing is a simple one, but the methods of using it are extremely powerful. You can apply Rich Marketing to almost anything.

So don't delay and check out my special offer on Rich Marketing now!

Is SEO Dead???

Everyone is always concerned about SEO, which stands for search engine optimization. For those of you who don't know what this is, SEO is the practice of trying to make your website "search engine happy" so that you get ranked well. Such practices typically include such things as placing your desired keywords well throughout your site in hopes that you get ranked for it. It also includes such practices as getting good backlinks (other websites linking to you) and so forth.

Well, technically, no, SEO isn't dead. But I beat that many of you would be a lot more successful if you acted as though it was dead and made no difference. Think I'm crazy? Let's think about this for a minute.

Google has time and time again claimed that you should optimize your pages for your visitors, NOT for the search engines like Google. This makes sense, as Google and other search engines want to rank good webpages towards the top that provide a great experience for their visitors. Other than the most basic SEO techniques (writing good, relevant content, good titles, etc.), Google and others don't want to have you worrying about SEO too much.

So why haven't others listened? Plain and simple! Because people want a hard solution that really only has to be an easy one. Most people would rather spend hundreds of dollars on SEO guides that are suppose to magically get your site ranked well, and the SEO experts thrive on this!

Don't get me wrong, there are some great SEO experts out there who can definitely help you, but you don't need them to rank well. If you provide enough relevant content, you WILL get ranked well eventually. If you start up a blog, for example, and try to do roughly one post a day (or at least a few a week) on a topic that you like, you can bet that you'll eventually get ranked well for at least some keywords relevant to it.

You might even be surprised at how well you'll do. Trust me, I used to play around with SEO so much that I'd worry more about that than my visitors. That was a huge mistake on my part. The sites that I tried to use SEO on I'd almost always never get ranked well with. However, the sites that I didn't care much about and just wrote content to have good content for the visitors I'd almost always get ranked well for!

Imagine that! So I now usually just write for my visitors (with a little common sense and keeping the search engines in mind) and almost always see results. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to get ranked well. All you have to do is get busy and get typing!

And by the way, look for a batch of new posts in the next 24 hours from me.