Allan Gardyne’s weekly newsletter included an ad from Jounce.com this time. If you’re into affiliate marketing and looking for a faster way to find relevant products to promote, check this out. It’s FREE to use.

From their ad…

Jounce Inc. has built the first truly advanced affiliate marketing search portal! Online marketers now have one click access to over 10 million affiliate offers across hundreds of networks for free.

http://jounce.com

Cheers,
Gary Harvey

It’s official. Google has added “site speed” to the long list of factors it pays attention to. And here’s confirmation of this. Google Webmaster Central

Site speed is the time it takes your web page to fully load, so what’s making your site load so slowly?

Here’s a tool that will check your page load speed for free and identify the factors you can work on to make your site load faster. Zoompf.com

At the moment, this site loads extremely slowly… which you probably noticed. Looks like I’ve got some work to do but I already knew that.

For a final comment for now, let’s not overlook the fact this is only one element among many that affect where your site appears in the Google SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). Content and links are still the big hitters in this ball game.

– Written by Gary Harvey.

UPDATE: GTmetrix.com will also check your page and let you what’s making it slow, with links for more info about each issue. Free too.

Lightspeednow.com offer a speed test with an easy to read results — and it’s also free.

Do yourself a favor and enter your URL into one of these speed testing sites. You could be in for a shock. I know I’ve got some work to do.

I just received an emergency email warning of a new deadly computer virus called POSTCARD FROM HALLMARK.

But… from what I turned up in one minute with Google, IT IS A HOAX.

The email I received is copied below. Whether Ian del Carmen actually sent it, I dont know. Could be a fraudulent misuse of his name and email (that’s called spoofing, I believe).

Either way, if you do a Google search you can quickly see that this same wording was doing the rounds as long ago as 26 Feb 2008. That’s nearly 2 years ago.

***

While writing this post, another marketer has fallen for it and blasted out a copy of the same Ian del Carmen email that I received. I’m on his list too — that’s how I know.

How many more will fall for this?

***

Thought for the day: Before passing on well-intentioned alerts to your friends or subscribers, do a search for some of the key words in the message. It can save you having to scrape egg off your face later.

***

Here is the email:

HUGE VIRUS COMING! PLEASE READ  FORWARD! Read the rest of this entry

Greetings… with yesterday’s news. Because yesterday I launched PageOneWithGary.com

The new site is about how you can make more sales when you have a higher search engine ranking. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be sharing many strategies and tips as well as offering to directly assist business owners who want help to get their sites onto the first page of the search engine results.

I love the new WordPress template I found for the site. It has a delightfully exuberant feel… just like the feeling you get when your site appears on page 1 of Google^TM.

– Written by Gary Harvey

What is CopyGator ?

This is a free service designed to monitor your RSS feed and find where your content has been republished in the blogosphere. We automatically notify you when a new post of yours is copied to another feed, we also build an overview page you can view to see how/when/where your content is being duplicated, quoted or plagiarized. This is an entirely free service and is powered by the feed spidering power of ://URLFAN.

http://www.copygator.com

By the way, there’s no connection between Copyscape and Copygator, that  I know of — apart from the obvious similarity of name.

And here’s a tip from me. Many times a marketer wont mind if his or her stuff is being reproduced elsewhere because, knowing that might happen, he’s included a link in the article — along with the unlinked domain name. That way, unauthorized content re-use still helps you.

Cheers,
Gary Harvey

An elderly gentleman and his wife were invited to their friends home for dinner one evening. He was impressed by the way the host preceded every request to his wife with endearing terms such as: Honey, My Love, Darling, Sweetheart, Pumpkin, etc. The host couple had been married almost 70 years and, clearly, they were still very much in love.

While the wives were in the kitchen, the old man leaned over to his host, ‘I think it’s wonderful that, after all these years, you still call your wife all those loving pet names’. The host hung his head. ‘I have to tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘Her name slipped my mind about 10 years ago and I’m scared to death to ask the cranky old woman what it is.’

**

Thanks to Ken Leatherman for sharing this. We laughed and laughed at this. Must be getting on a bit ourselves…

Gary Harvey

QUALITY HOSTING AT A DISCOUNT PRICE

I’m now using JustHost to host some of my sites, and I’m very pleased with their service.

If memory serves me here, they guarantee a response within an hour but so far they’ve outdone that every time I had a question or an issue needing their input.

I found them polite helpful and informative. Plus they’ve got everything the typical site owner is looking for.

The current discount cuts the price nearly in HALF. CLICK HERE

* Unlimited domains
* Unlimited bandwidth (= unlimited traffic)
* Unlimited disk space
* CPanel and all the usual features.

Nice.

Best wishes,
Gary Harvey