IMHO IRL TARFU

(In My Humble Opinion In Real Life Things Are Really Fouled Up)

If you're over 30 you may remember the days when people actually spoke and wrote English. Now, with widespread instant messaging and text messaging, people are learning a new language - acronyms.

Now acronyms aren't new and many of us over the age of 30 were using some of them way back when...

For instance, when I was first learning how to program back in the dark ages before laptops, personal computers and the internet I learned about FIFO, GIGO and EOF. I also learned that file extensions (those are the letters after the period on file names) are also acronyms for the files' type. And while some may have cared about the definition of the acronym used for the file extension, I was only interested in using the file extension to identify which files types I could create and modify and what programming language they were written in.

Now today I'm not going to give you a lesson about the programming languages used on big computers or explain the difference between compilers and interpreters. As online marketers interfacing with the web on a laptop or PC you could care less. Right?

Instead, today I'm going to talk about some of the common file extensions we see and deal with regularly. You see, last week I received an email from a reader who is a beginning online marketer and is still learning about the file types we see, use, upload and download. And since they are having a hard time keeping these file types straight and remembering what software is used to open and edit them I've created the following table. The table doesn't include every type of file possible or list every program you can use to open and edit it. It only lists the common types we see the most and the most common software used. (Where possible I've tried to include the name of free software that can be used.) If I didn't include a file type you think should be on the list please leave a comment telling us the file extension you think should be added and the information about it if you know.

Common File Type Extensions:

Extension	Type	Use
.bmp	Bitmap Image File	Open with an image viewer.Can add text and convert to .gif or .jpg with Irfanview Change size and shape with Irfanview and .html Editors.MS Paint can be used to edit these image files
.cgi	Common Gateway Interface Script	Requires a web server to run and edit with a Text Editor
.css	Cascading Style Sheet	Contains the formatting the contents of a web page. Edit with a Text or html Editor
.doc	MicroSoft Word Document	Microsoft Word or OpenOffice (Writer)
.exe	Windows Executable File	These files run when you open them on PCs with Windows. Can not be edited easily and requires special software.
.gif	Image	Open with an image viewer. Can add text with Irfanview and change size and shape with Irfanview and .html Editors.MS Paint can be used to edit these image files
.html or .htm	Web Page	WYSISWYG* editor like FrontPage, Dreamweaver or Nvu Can use a Text Editor to read and write the html code.
.jpg	Image	Open with an image viewer. Can add text with Irfanview and change size and shape with Irfanview and .html Editors.MS Paint can be used to edit these image files
.js	JavaScript File	A text file with JavaScript code. Edit with a Text Editor.
.midi	MIDI File	Open with Apple QuickTime Player or Microsoft Windows Media Player
.pdf	Portable Document Format File	Read with Adobe Reader Create and modify with Adobe Acrobat or create with OpenOffice (Writer)
.php	Hypertext Preprocessor File	View in a web browser and edit with a Text Editor
.psd	PhotoShop File	Edit with PhotoShop or GIMP
.swf	Macromedia Flash Movie	Can not edit. Open with Adobe Flash Player or with web browser with the Flash plug-in installed
.txt	Text File	Text Editor like NotePad or NoteTab
.wav	WAVE Audio File	Edit with Microsoft Windows Media Player. Can open with any music player.
.wmv	Windows Media Video File	Must usually convert to different file type and use special video software to edit. Open with web browser with the Windows Media Player plugin.
.zip	Zipped File	A file that has been compressed to save space and must be unzipped to edit. All file types may be zipped.

* WYSISWYG - Acronym for What You See Is What You Get

Now the nice thing about using a PC to open and/or edit files is it's point and click operation. If you double click on the icon or file name of the file you want to open your PC will look at the file extension and open the file for viewing with the correct software or ask you what program to use. For instance, if you double click an image file the picture will appear using your image viewing software and if you double click a .txt file the file will be opened with your default text editor. If however you double click a file and your PC doesn't know what software to use for viewing the file like for a .js type file then it will either ask you to select the software to open the file or give you an error.

And if you don't want to just view the file but you want to edit it your PC will help you with that too. Just single click the file icon or name and then do a right-click. You then get a menu of things you can do with the file. The menu is different for different file types. Depending on the software on you PC and the file's extension some menus will allow you to preview, open, open with, edit or edit with.

Now your PC may not know what software to use the first time you try to open or edit a certain type of file and give you an error. However you can fix that easily. Simply highlight the file name, right click and select Open With. Then select the appropriate software from the list of software on your machine like NotePad for .cgi, .js and .php files or Adobe Reader for .pdf files. After you've made your selection from the list and before you click the OK button check the box that says to always use the selected software to open this kind of file. After you've done this your PC will always remember to open .pdf files with Adobe Reader and .php with your text editor so you won't have to.

AISB IRL TARFU but you have to be. You don't have to learn all the definitions for the file extensions you use. You only need to know how to open and edit them. And hopefully now you do.

To Your Success,
Susan

If you found this tip useful please let me know by leaving a comment.

Tags: file types, file extensions, common file types, common file extensions

Things To Sell For Really Big Profits

First let me say that I'm not promoting John Reese's Traffic Secrets 2.0 that was released yesterday. I'm just using it as an example for 1 way to make some really big profits. So if you're like John Reese with a giant sized list, a ton of "super" affiliates and a product or service that sells for hundreds of dollars then you too could make thousands of dollars in just a few days.

Unfortunately more online marketers aren't like John Reese. They don't have thousands of people on their mailing list. They don't have "super" affiliates to push their product. And if they have something to sell that costs hundreds of dollars it's not their own product but they're using an affiliate link to sell someone else's.

So how do these online marketers make money?

Well, they don't make a lot of money by competing with people like John Reese or any of his super affiliates.

Yes, it's possible they might make a sale if they send a mailing to their small list however it's doubtful. You see, they can't move fast enough to create a bonus-if-you-buy-from-me page and fill it with gifts worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. So while their sending their ad to their list, their list is receiving tons of other email for the same product and those mailings all lead to pages offering a lot of extras.

Now before you give up because you can't compete with the John Reeses on the web let me tell you that there are other things to sell to make money. You probably won't make hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few days but you can make money.

And 1 of the things to sell for really big profits is small reports. Small digital reports are only a few pages (7 - 15) in length. They don't cost anything to produce but the time it takes to write them unless you hire a writer. And when you sell them you get to keep all the money unless you've got your own affiliate program and must share with your affiliates.

And because I'd like you to at least investigate the possibility of making money through small reports I'm giving you an ebook written by Jimmy D. Brown. If you don't know who he is he's a very successful online marketer who has been giving away free content for more than 7 years.

"5 Steps To A Big-Profit, S.M.A.L.L.™ Report Business" is only 24 pages long so it will only take a few minutes to read. In it you will see that he is promoting a product. But more importantly you will actually get the 5 steps to making money by writing small reports and you don't need to buy his product to use the steps.

So get your free copy of "5 Steps To A Big-Profit, S.M.A.L.L.™ Report Business", read it and then decide if small reports are a way for you to make money online.

To Your Success,
Susan

P.S. With all the emails about Traffic Secrets 2.0 this week you may have missed those about Russell Brunson's Affiliate Landmine. He's refurbished it and he is now selling licenses that allow you to sell memberships to Affiliate Landmine and keep 100% of the profit. If you sold 500 memberships you could make $19.95 X 500 memberships = $9,975 a month. (The first 100 partners get 500 memberships and then it drops to 300 memberships.)

Membership sites are another thing to sell and make really big money. And with 1 of these licenses you can get 100% of the reoccurring income without creating and maintaining your own.

Warning: This is a super opportunity only for experienced online marketers. If you do not know how to get traffic and write good sales copy then it's not for you. If you do know how to get targeted traffic then check Russell's offer before he sells out.

P.P.S. If you found this tip useful please let me know by leaving a comment.

Tags: things to sell to make really big profits, small reports, membership sites, traffic secrets 2.0, John Reese, Russell Brunson, Jimmy D. Brown, affiliate landmine

President EntrepreneursWebcast.com

Harold's site is featured this week. Let's take a look and see what he's upto.

http://www.EntrepreneursWebcast.com/

To Your Success,
Susan

Tags: featured site

How To Format The Current Date In PHP

While you may think that PHP is an acronym for Perverse, Horrific Programs, it's not. It originally stood for Personal Home Pages but is now used as the name (Hypertext Preprocessor) for a web scripting language used to produce dynamic web pages.

Unlike HTML, the PHP web programming language is not interpreted by a web browser to produce what's seen. Rather, PHP runs on a web server to create web pages. That means you have to upload your PHP code to test it.

Now PHP code may seem like a bunch of tech mumbo jumbo, however using some of it's pre-defined commands allows you to add some dynamic effects, like the current date, to you web pages with just a few lines of code .

Yes, you can display the current date using other methods like javascript:

<SCRIPT language='JavaScript'type='text/javascript'>
var mydate=new Date()
var year=mydate.getYear()
if (year < 1000)
year+=1900
var day=mydate.getDay()
var month=mydate.getMonth()
var daym=mydate.getDate()
if (daym<10)
daym="0"+daym
var dayarray=new Array("Sunday","Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday",
"Thursday","Friday","Saturday")
var montharray=new Array("January","February","March","April","May","June","July",
"August","September","October","November","December")
document.write("<font color='000000'
face='arial'>"+dayarray[day]+",
"+montharray[month]+" "+daym+",
"+year+"<\/font>")
</SCRIPT>

But with PHP you can let the server get and format the current date using the PHP date command. Doesn't this look a lot easier?

<?php
$today = date("l, F j, Y");
echo "$today";
?>

Both the javascript and the PHP code given above will display the current date in this format:

Day-of-Week, Month Day, Year
like -
Wednesday, July 2, 2008

And if you want to change how the date appears you don't have to change a lot of code. Instead you can just change, add or remove the parameters (the letters inside the quotes after the date command) used for the date command and put spaces and punctuation marks where you want them to appear.

Examples:

date("F j, Y"); - July 2, 2008
date("l, g:i a"); - Wednesday, 9:05 am

Now there are 4 important things you need to know before you use PHP to format the date on you site:

1. Like I mentioned above, you'll have to upload the code to test it because your PC and web browser most likely can't run PHP code.
2. The file where you have the PHP code must have the extension of .php. This could be a real negative if you already have your site built in HTML however there is a way around this this rule. (Find out how to use PHP code in a .html file at the end of this article.)
3. The PHP code must be within the tags. If it is not, the PHP engine on the web server will ignore it.
4. Each PHP line must end with a semicolon. If it doesn't, you'll get some cryptic error messages.

If you would like to know all the parameters to format the current day in PHP you can find a complete list of the date command parameters at http://www.php.net/date.

As I mentioned in item 2, normally you must use the .php extension for a file to execute PHP code. But since you may already have your site set up in HTML you need to know how to get around this rule. Fortunately I don't have to try to explain how it's done since you can watch 2 short video tutorials. Just open your copy of "29 Easy and Quick Web Design Tricks - Volume 2" and watch videos 13 and 14. (This video ebook is 1 of those included in the "Ultimate Web Videos" package on the Free eBooks, Tools and Videos page in our members area. If you're not a FriendsWhoCare member you can join us here - it's FREE. )

Learning how to format PHP code allows you to make your web pages more dynamic. And with free PHP scripts you can add things like the current date, countdowns, calendars, your site visitor's country or a news tracker.

So don't think of PHP as Perverse, Horrific Programs. Think of PHP as easy way to make your web pages more dynamic!

To Your Success,Susan

If you found this tip useful please let me know by leaving a comment.

Tags: how to format the current date in php, php command, current date in php

July 2008

This month we were suppose to review Tim's site. Unfortunately his site can't be found so we'll move on to Gail's site and save Tim's until next month.

You can see Gail has put in quite a bit of effort to build his site and is asking for our help because as he says, "I'm really not too happy with it but can't see the trees for the forest." So lets help Gail find some of those trees at: http://www.todaystopmoneymakers.com/

Susan

********************
Review Comments

My Comments -

When Gail submitted his site I sent him an email and stated"It looks like you've set up a directory of online business resources and products" along withthe following comments:

1. While the size of your menu is very impressive it's also overwhelming. You might want to only list your top choices on your home page and create a resource directory page for your menu.
2. For those pages that lead away from your site have them open in a new browser window. Then when your site visitor closes the page your page will still be available to them. (Some of his links still take visitors away from his site but he mentions that on his home page.)
3. Put a link to your home page and your resource directory page on every page of your site to make it easy for your site visitors to navigate. (Looks like he's done that for his home page.)
4. Check your pages for font consistency. I saw a different site font on your ezine page. (This is still a problem and there are now 2 different size fonts on the main page.)
5. While you don't want to use a lot of hype or make false statements, you do need to be bold in your statements.
6. You need to move the Amazon box up since it's not visible when you read your statement about it and most people won't go looking for it. (Looks like he's done that.)

It wasn't until Antony's comment that I learned this was a ProfitMart site. (If you don't know about ProfitMart you can use Gail's link to find out.)

Now since we've had several sites primarily focused around introducing online money making programs, tools and resources and they've had several banner ads on all the site's pages I'd like to share a little general information about sites that consist primarily of banner ads that may or may not have some content sprinkled throughout.

• When most people arrive at a web page that contains no informational content and displays only ads they seldom click on any of the ads and move away from the site quickly. (If anyone disagrees with me please leave a comment and if you know of a site like this that works please share it with us.)
• If you do have informational content on some of your pages like Gail does then put a heading over your menu like "Articles" or "Get Information About" and list those pages with content under the heading. Putting a heading that tells your visitors that you do have information on other pages may entice some of them to check them out.
• It's extremely difficult to get targeted traffic to a site that consists of banner ads for many products and services. Since your site covers many areas of online money making opportunities, tools, resources, etc. and does not contain any information specific to anything it's extremely doubtful that your main page will ever be indexed high enough in the search engines to get any traffic. This is also true for the other pages on your site even though you may have provided content.
  
  Now Gail has overcome this particular problem because when I did a Google search for "top money makers" (without the quotes) I found Gail's site listed #2 on Google which is very good. I also used Google's keyword tool and found that the average search volume for that term was 1,600 a month which isn't bad. So Gail has done a very good job of getting indexed well in Google and should be getting a good amount of free traffic.
  
  
• Although banner advertising is not dead and it does work it must be used sparingly. A few banner ads sprinkled around on your site may get some clicks however the banner ads on a page where banner ads are the primary content usually won't. The best way to use banner ads is on a page that gives useful information about the problem the product or service will solve, offers a solution and makes a recommendation. If the content is written for search engine optimization then these pages will also get indexed better by the search engines.
• From my experience it is possible to make a few sales with those Amazon, ClickBank and Ebay provided ads however you won't make many. Most people don't even look at those ads and for those that do you have to hope that a product they're interested in shows up while they're on your page. People that shop Amazon and ebay regularly go straight to those sites and only go through an affiliate's page if they've been enticed to it by some other form of advertising.
• As Anthony pointed out, when you make many offers all at once you confuse your site visitor so they usually don't take you up on any of them. The only time multiple offers of similar things work is on a directory site. When someone goes to a directory they expect to see many related things. Now directory type sites have been around for a very long time and some of them have done very well. The trick is to pick a type of directory site where you still have a chance to be found since there's already millions of sites offering directory services for just about everything. This is especially true for anything related to making money online.
  
  Since we know Gail's site has been found and should be getting some traffic his site does have the potential for making money. If the site isn't making money then I would suggest you look at what some of your competition has done with their sites and pick up some ideas on how you could redesign your pages with some content and fewer banner ads.
  
  Currently most of your stiffest competition comes from forums and blogs and both of these types of sites provide information and make recommendations. You could also make comments on the blogs to possibly pick up some of their traffic however you won't get a back link to your site since all the ones I checked use the nofollow tag to prevent search engines from seeing it as a link to your site.
  
  
• One of the hardest things to learn about having a web site is that while you're designing the site to make money, your visitors are coming to your site for useful information and don't usually want to buy anything. In Gail's case, his site visitors are looking for "top money makers" and to most that means making a lot of money quickly and hopefully without much work. If multiple opportunities are going to be presented on a single page I suggest that they be limited to money making opportunities on your home page with the appropriate opportunities on the other pages, they be listed in order of recommended and that you write some information about each of them preferably in your own words and not a pre-written ad. Remember, the sales page for each of the opportunities is selling 1 thing and you're writing a pre-sell description telling why it's so good and some of the benefits to get your visitor to check it out. You can have your link to the opportunity or service within the content and possibly show a big banner ad for the top recommendation at the top or bottom of the content. If you want to use other banner ads for some of the other things on that page then use smaller ads and put them in 1 of the margins possibly with a header like "My Recommendations", "Top 5 Money Makes" or "Other Money Making Opportunities."
  
  If you can't use your ClickBank and ebay ads in the margin then I suggest you create a separate page for them and ad the appropriate link on each of your pages for other money makers, more graphic, ezines , ect. opportunities. In other words give your page viewer 1 choice or just a few choices and then the chance to look at others if they don't like the ones you've recommended.

Susan

Tags: site review