As an incentive to our new customers, we’re offering $100 in free Google advertising! To get started, contact us for a free estimate on revamping your web presence. Once you sign up we will start a Google AdWords account for you and apply your free $100 coupon.
I decided it was time to upgrade our modem and wireless network and settled on a new Motorola SB6121 and an Asus RT-N53.
The modem isn’t anything too exciting, I was just looking for an upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0 from the old Surfboard modem. The RT-N53 is a little more interesting, including an upgrade to true dual band, 4 separate networks across the 2.4GHz band and a very interesting design.
I’ve used GoDaddy for domains and SSL certificates exclusively over the years. I’ve put up with their terrible support and hideous website to stay with the slightly lower prices. But when I really thought it through I was saving less than $15/year!
When they finally came out in support of SOPA legislation I decided it was time to move our domains over. I looked through a few different registrars such as NameCheap. I didn’t find what I was looking for until I stumbled upon iwantmyname.com.
IWantMyName is about as basic as a domain registrar can get. Their user interface is simple, easy to use and there are no advertisements (…GoDaddy). I emailed them twice for simple support questions and they fixed my issues quickly.
Our sympathies to Glenn Horowitz, an MS patient in Nashville. He’s looking for donations to outfit his Honda Element for wheel chair access.
So for the past few weeks we’ve been researching backup solutions for Linux based servers. Our host provides us with snapshots of the server each day, however, that doesn’t allow for recovery of just a few files from a site, or individual database recovery. We had a few requirements for the backup solution we would eventually choose.
It has to be cost effective
We wanted to keep the total sum of our backup solutions to under $20/month. Our current server snapshop backup solution costs us around $10/month, so that left us with about $10/month as a budget.
It has to have great customer service
Because we would be setting this up ourselves I wanted something tried and true, with the customer service to back it up.
After researching, we kept seeing RSync.net pop up in our searches. RSync.net is basically an offsite, platform agnostic, file system you can access server to server. They tout that there are no licensing fees, setup fees or contracts.
Priced at $0.80/GB for the basic plan meant they would meet our budget. As a note, you are required to purchase at least 7GB of storage per month, so the minimum plan basically works out to be $5.60 for 7GB of monthly storage.
I went ahead and put an order in for 10GB/month, at a cost of $8.00/month. Later that afternoon I had a very detailed welcome email from them in my inbox. The welcome email gives you login details for your account, connection details for SSH, rsync, scp, sftp and WebDAV. It’s really well detailed.
At one point I needed to ask a few questions about creating the backup script. I wrote a quick email to them, and I had a prompt and complete response back the next morning. They seem eager to help and I have no doubt they would help with anyone setting up any type of system.
I have nothing but good things to say about RSync.net. It’s a perfect example of a business who knows what they do and they do it extremely well.
Yes, we know it’s in an unfinished basement, but that will change soon as well.
Our first purchase for the office, new Ikea chairs and desks!
Recently I was doing some work on a client’s account. This client is heavily involved in the content network, and is quite successful. My usual routine is to manage the content network sites we are bidding on. Occasionally, when trying to exclude a site, I would receive an error like this:
[hl-lightred]Placement URLs must be provided in a valid URL format[/hl-lightred]
I double and triple checked the list to make sure there wasn’t any URL that would be throwing Google off. The list was perfect. [hl-yellow]As it turns out, AdWords only allows you to exclude URL’s that are two levels deep.[/hl-yellow] For example:
If you need more options, read through the AdWords exclusion support page.
Well, this is tough. From the research i’ve done, I don’t think it’s possible (please leave a comment if I am mistaken). For most clients this isn’t an issue, the ability to use two folder levels should be plenty. I am sure there are some users out there who would benefit from having the ability to go deeper though.
It’s amazing what a good combination of content publishing, SEO tools and Google’s crawlbot can accomplish. We published the site two and a half days ago and the crawlbot has hit the site almost 150 times.
It seems as if Google has started rolling out an updated version of the location targeting settings. From what I can tell quickly, it looks like a huge improvement, with a small learning curve.
One large limitation of the old system was that it didn’t display all the outlines of shapes you had created. You had to click on the area to see the shape, and you could only view one at a time. That has changed and you can view all your target outlines at once. It’s a really nice upgrade to quickly see what your coverage map looks like.
As you can see from the photo, we use several custom shapes to target locations in this campaign. As noted in a previous post, Google is removing the ability to use AdWords custom shapes. You’ll see under each custom shape it says, “Featured Removal Planned”.
There’s a slight learning curve in choosing a location in the new system. Usually you could just select from a list of countries and drill down to a state, metro or city. Now you must type in a state, metro or city and Google will auto-suggest what it believes you are looking to add.
All in all it’s a really helpful and welcome change. It’ll make geo-targeting in AdWords far more efficient.
