My blog is a big bag of bullshit. And I don’t promote it much. People who read my blog often know that very well. I write complete bullshit. Nobody cares. I know that. But my blog does manage to get visitors once in a while because of the few tech stuff that I have in here. Linux buffs like my blog. Select posts if not the whole blog.
Well, Im not the worst. I do know a lot of people who write more bullshit that I do, and keep their blog on the top of the searches. How is that done? SEO. Search Engine Optimization.
Doing it manually is a tough job. It would take a lifetime to optimize one blog manually. And I have 27 blogs, and only 1 life. How do I still stay in business? I have a huge array of seo tools installed in my computer and servers, without which I would have been just another stupid software engineer working at some stupid company making a few hundred thousand rupees a year.
If you must run a newsletter, say for promoting your Outer Banks rentals to a regular list of subscribers, you will need a server. And if you have a server, always headache comes free with it, and server administration costs a lot of money or a headache. Trust me, I have been thru that for about 3 years of my life, and have come out of it. One important threat is that the spam monitors of the web might block your ip or your domain for various email servers even if you be very careful in sending out emails and picking the members of the mailing list. It is a tough job.
Have you heard of google groups? Just start a google group, put in all your email ids in there, and send mails to them. If someone doesnt like to receive mails, he will nto complain or try to get your domain blacklisted, but he will use the unsubscribe option below the mail. This is the most legitimate way to send out huge numbers of emails . And above all, its google’s servers, and they will do the worrying about maintaining it. And it is a completely free service. Why spend hundreds and thousands of dollars in buying paid mailing solutions when you get it for free?
Windows sucks. It should have had no entry in the Server market, but unfortunately the 15% loosers who use it have given it a 15% market share. Well, thats besides the point. If you use Windows and if you wish to access your linux server’s shell, you need to use putty. But if you are on linux like me, all that you would need is is a terminal window with which you can access shell or telnet as you like.
Putty is an opensource exe that you can install on your windows computer. It is available for linux also, but it is better to use the terminal on the linux server. With the IP and the ssh port you will be able to connecto to the server and do all the shell operations that you will need to. Well, shell operations are only needed for higher level server operations such as migrating a database and stuff. Technically putting up a simple website offering acne treatments shouldn’t be a tough job as all that you need for it would be plain html.
If you are not used to shell, and if you think it is something like dos, you are completely wrong. The linux shell has a very wide range of commands that a Dos user could never imagine. With linux you can make the comptuer do a lot of things that you can never make Windows or Dos do. And if you are stuck to Windows PC, you will need putty to experience the power of the linux shell.
Powerful as a blog may be, it is quite vulnerable to spam attacks as well. You have a section called comments below your blog post, and people can write what they like. Luckily wordpress allows you to moderate any comments that are posted on your blog, and therefore you can make sure that no spam comments that promote websites that sell pharmaceutical delights on your site. Though there is Askimet, some comments in my blogs do manage to get into the waiting for moderation area and I am having to mark them all as spam.
And sometimes spammers find a good way to attack your blog and byepass askimet, I dont really knwo how that is done, and I dont wish to specialize in that in any ways, and marking them all as spam one by one is a tough job. A real tough job. I will not find time to do this from the office, so I have to do it at home. And when you have too many comments, you would not want to miss out the good comments and mark them as spam as if you do so you will no longer get a comment from that user again. It is a tough job. Well, with the help of a good computer monitor, a keyboard and a mouse, and ofcourse with good computer desks the job should be simple. Think of the other Indians who use their dining tables as their computer desks and sit at awkward positions to use their keyboards and mice that would probably be at the same level of the base of the monitor.
The US economy is falling. They are holding meetings there to find ways to fix the issue and try to possibly save the country from disaster. But the USD price against Indian rupee is shooting UP. Straight up. About untill 2 months ago, the USD price was INR 39, and now it is 47.5. Looks like in a few weeks it will cross the 50 rupee mark after a long time.
Good for people who do export of goods or sell services and get paid in USD. But what about people like me who buys services from the US? We have to pay more now, and unless we get business from outside India things will be quite difficult for us.
Goods such as weight loss pills will always sell. But what about the extra GB that people might want to host their blogs? Definitely people will look for options to cut costs, and thats a loss of business for us. Clearly means that we need to bring in more clients and again have to face the costs of client acquisition. Gonna be a real tough job.
