Yes, another site.

I have braces. Well, not the “classic” type anymore (wore Damon braces for 7 months on my lateral teeth), but Invisalign (those plastic buggers you put on your teeth and expect them to get straight

I have done a lot of reading all these months, came up with a site for the Romanian orthodontics patients and now I started a blog like site about Orthodontics for the international public. It’s called Orthodontics Today (cheesy, I know) and I’ll write there articles about this topic. And my own experience too.

Didn’t get to do too much styling .. made some changes in the theme and now I am submitting to social networks. Let’s hope someone will find my articles useful.

From time to time I need images for my sites or for my clients’ designs. I like using StockExchgange most of the time (a free photos site). Still, sometimes I need a better looking image and I come to stockexpert.com for that image. The good thing is that the images would cost 1 USD, a small price when we think about the hundreds of dollars we can get for a design.

I have been using the site for 1 year I think and was able to get some pretty decent images for 1 USD. All with a nice resolution (just good for web): 800×600 pixels.

Some weeks ago I downloaded one again for a new design and was shocked to see it’s a smaller one. Yes, it’s just 400×300 pixels (half of the ones I was able to get all this time for the same price). I thought I did something wrong, but then, after another download I noticed the increased price.

So, the same image I’d get for 1 USD now comes for 2 USD. 1 dollar for a small image, maybe it’s a tad too much. Or maybe we just have to settle for this till we find something better.

Do you have any ideas? Is there a better service?

I know you got sick and tired of hearing the same thing: “content is king”, but let me tell you ONCE again, you have NO idea how true this is. A good site is important for us because of the GOOD UNIQUE content, because it’s useful and we need all those informational articles in order to be able to understand a topic and gain as much knowledge as possible.

A good content is now one of the most sought for commodities on the web. People pay good money for unique articles, for re-writing (when they can’t hire professionals or are just too cheap to pay for something good, but they still want to fool the search engines into thinking the content is original), translations and many other options.

Most of the bloggers and article writers who create unique articles are already in a huge advantage: they create something original that draws people in and can also bring in revenue from advertising or any other money making plans. And still, I am shocked to see how many such good bloggers are too lax when it comes to protecting their own content.

Even if a unique article is just 5 minutes of work to you, its value is HUGE. Because it’s UNIQUE.

I started creating articles 6 years ago with a Karate site for the Romanian people who were into martial arts. In just weeks I saw my work being copied by others. I got mad and demanded for the duplicated plagiarism to be deleted. It was. Sure, I got some response like “yeah, you’re so mean, why can’t I use the article too?”, but I knew I was right. I am mean indeed, but that unique article that’s too good to be stolen, is also good to bring ME traffic and revenue in time and establish me and my site as an authority.

In some months I started a webmaster project (forums with unique articles) and got even more interested in creating content and also protecting it as much as I could. There are tens of articles I wrote and tried to make them interesting and useful. Sure, I am not a professional writer, but this didn’t stop my visitors from learning something from me and be able to improve their web design skills.

From time to time I still have people who steal content from me or try to scrape my blog articles. My content, even if copied partially, can bring some traffic to them and revenue. They do try to steal our content to make their sites content rich and earn money from our work. I still have to see such content thieves who have NO ads at all on their site (since most try to fool us into thinking they are just good samaritans and wanted their visitors to get more knowledge blah-blah-blah). Sure, with Adsense all over the site and tons of affiliate links. All with my own articles. Cute!

So, maybe it’s time for most of us, (good or bad) content writers, to realize the IMPORTANCE of our content. For our site that would have more visitors, a good image and why not a good revenue and for ourselves too since all our articles do have VALUE. In this case the value is for our site only. We don’t have to pay tens of dollars for an original article, we have it created in few minutes by our talented minds. The others, who can’t create articles are invited to PAY for a unique article and we’d surely provide them with the best article we can create.

But our work is ours and will be used ONLY in our projects. As Google gets more drastic with duplicate content and as the content market grows each day, a good unique article is like a jewel that needs to be protected. Even if some think I am mean, I don’t allow re-publishing. UNDER NO CONDITIONS. I don’t care what site you use, I don’t care how much of my article you are using. You can’t do this.

What can a visitor do if he/she really likes one of my articles? The same I do: I just link to it and write a nice short personal presentation recommending it to my visitors. I do promote that good article and still don’t steal the content another author created.

Maybe it’s a good idea to be “mean” and try protect that king. We don’t want other sites (stealing our content) to get better traffic than we do, we don’t want others to earn money from our work. If it takes you and me 5-10 minutes for an article, this doesn’t mean it’s worthless. It means we might type fast and just have the ideas flow. The fact we don’t spend 5 hours into making an article, doesn’t mean the article has no value. And this value, even if sometimes we fail to understand this, is big enough to attract others to use it for their own profit.

What do you think about this? How important is your own content to you?

There is no need for us to discuss about the importance of being present online and about the fact many forums in your niche are an excellent place for you to get noticed. We don’t talk about SEO friendly links to your signatures (since most forums have nofollow on them), but we can get some excellent TARGETED traffic, not to mention a good possibility to BE NOTICED.

For many years I have build my own “brand” in the online communities and till this day a good part of my traffic and even some excellent deals have come from these forums. What have I done to establish myself in these forums?

1. Have the SAME USERNAME in all of them.

Yes, in order for the people to recognize you, we need a name they would see over and over again. In time this name will make them thing about “quality, intelligence, tact etc.”, all the things we are careful about when trying to establish that brand.

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OK, class, we’re a bit naughty today, so we’ll have a nice blog entry in the “tips ‘n twists” category. Advice in a bit more weird way …

I think it’s a good idea to start with an explanation about the inspiration of this awesome article you’re about to read. I was browsing 2 of my Martial Arts forums and had to validate some accounts. I had a free IPB license on them and this was the only way I could keep those awesome guys posting porn and Viagra at bay.

As you can imagine I am sick and tired of them and so far I have to personally validate each email account and try to see if there are spammers or real members.

After another pruning I got the idea for this article. Don’t think you can have issues only in forums that have admin activation. In some you might need help since you didn’t get the activation email or you didn’t know to check for it in the spam/junk folder of your online email account. Doh … Might happen too.

Here are some tricks to NEVER pass my activation. Hope they help and you’ll never use them (or .. do what you please :D) Read the rest of this entry »

The web is filled with UNLIMITED bandwidth and space hosting offers and so many think these are the best plans. Many would rather go with a “fishy” hosting firm that offers this than get a smaller accout on an established hosting company. Why? Because UNLIMITED is what they’re attracted to. It this unlimited thing real? Should we really care about this that much? We’ll see in this article.

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The last week was a hectic one. Not only did I have to work a lot on some projects, but I had to take care of some unpleasant business too. It was late in the afternoon when I got a message from my good friend Adriana. Something like: “Hey, a kid stole your template from MyBB.ro .. see what you can do about this”.

I was already breathing heavily when I got to the site .. and looked at a thread. The teen who did this, even bragged about the fact he was able to mimic my style on his personal forum. He was good. Those of you who create skins know how hard myBB is to skin. And still, the kid made a duplicate of my skin in few hours. God he was good.

People say that imitation is a form of flattery .. well, when you see someone copy-paste your hard worked UNIQUE skin for a forum, believe me flattery is the last thing you feel. Let’s see how I was able to deal with this.

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I was answering in a webmaster forums to a topic created by a prospective forum owner who wanted to know about ways to get FREE forum hosting. I replied with some information and this made me think about an article for us here too.

Weird as it might seem, this entire project was started in the winter of 2004 ON A FREE subdomain. My first article (that’s no longer available, since I changed my opinions) was about FREE hosting and why we shouldn’t bother with a paid solution.

Back then the free hosting was a good idea, it did have some pros for this: you can start your career and not worry about succeeding, you can experiment at will for free etc. The cons in time showed their ugly face though: most of the time you will work hard, want to move and then lose PR and traffic, there are all kinds of limitations, most of the time free hosting is not quality etc.

Now I have realized something more: FREE is NOT FREE.

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