eBook & Internet Publishing News
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ScriptRocket.com is our web site where we offer a number of powerful PHP scripts that you can use on your web site(s). These include:

• Piranha Feed - A script for quickly integrated automatically updated content from Amazon.com to your web pages. It also allows visitors to search Amazon without leaving your site. And all product links are tagged with your Amazon associate ID, allowing you to earn commissions from sales of these products.
• CBRocket - A ClickBank search engine for your site - it can also display context sensitive advertising links. With this script, the links are coded with your ClickBank nickname, allowing you to earn commissions from them.
• Top Site - start your own top sites list (other webmasters will send you traffic for free).
• Polls - Create your own web polls.
• Click/Counter Tracker - an invisible page counter and advertising tracking script.
• Feedback Form - Get feedback from your visitors
• Essential Scripts - A collection of scripts, at reduced price, containing Top Site, Polls, Click/Counter Tracker and Feedback Form.

Anyway, while don’t often raise our prices, consider this post as advanced warning that we do intend to make some price rises on most, perhaps all, of the ScriptRocket products in the very near future. The new prices will should come into effect some time on Tuesday January 15th 2008^*. In short, if you want to purchase any of these products at the current (cheaper) prices, please do so on or before Monday January 14th 2008.

^* Although this is the planned day for the price changes, there are a few technical issues that we need to deal with… it’s there is a very small outside chance that the implementation of the changes may take slightly longer than we expect. Don’t bank on it though!

It’s an ICANN rule that domain registrants have current correct contact information, but what happens if there is a mistake in your contact info? Say, for example, you changed email address but forgot to update the email address in your domain registration record?

Well if you registered with GoDaddy, it seems that they might just take your domain away, even though it’s bought and paid for, and is yet to expire. That’s what happened to the owner of FamilyAlbum.com, after he failed to respond to an email requesting that he check/update his contact information. GoDaddy’s response is here.

To add insult to injury, the information available suggests that GoDaddy made some money reselling the domain in question via a back-order (this is where a person can order an already registered domain with the hope that the current owner will abandon it or let it expire), and if you visit FamilyAlbum.com now, you’ll see a GoDaddy parking page (which I’d imagine GoDaddy makes money from too).

My own question about GoDaddy’s response is this: They apparently feel that if you don’t respond to email for some period (the exact period isn’t clear from the news story, but it appears to be 8 weeks or perhaps less), that they are entitled to take the domain back - but what if the domain owner is sick? Or vacationing? Or climbing mountains in Antarctica? Because, remember not every domain owner is using their domain to run a business. ICANN requires valid contact information, but, as far as I know, doesn’t specify a time limit for how quickly domain owners must respond if contacted.

And of course the obvious one: What if the registrar’s email(s) requesting that it be checked/updated accidentally landed in the domain owner’s spam folder, unnoticed? What if the contact info, including address, phone number and email address, are all valid and current? Could you lose your domain for failing to update that which is already fully up to date?

The other thing, that is already being speculated about, is whether a malicious person could do something like this (perhaps targeting GoDaddy registrations, because he knows they will cancel registrations with incorrect email addresses):

1. Extract email addresses from domain records in the WHOIS database (not necessarily for every domain, but perhaps for domains which are 1 or 2 dictionary words, domains with high Google PR, etc.)
2. Email each address and see which email addresses bounces
3. For domains whose email address bounces, back-order them, then email a complaint to the registrar (GoDaddy in this example) complaining of invalid contact information

Or an even more scary scenario: What if the malicious person who wanted a particular domain, simply mail bombed the domain owner (sending so much email continuous to flood his inbox and guaranteeing that he can’t respond to email). The malicious person would have to keep this up for a while…. but, if he did…. could he acquire a domain name by guaranteeing the owner won’t be able to receive/respond to GoDaddy emails?

iPower is offered .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, and .us domain registration for $2.95 for the first year. This seems like an excellent deal to me, and their web hosting offers seem pretty good value too.

But that’s not the best deal I’ve seen recently. That award goes to Dotster who are running a happy hour on March 22nd, between 1pm and 2pm Pacific Time. During the happy hour, they’ll be offering 1,000 coupons for $1/month hosting (normal price is $8.95/month for this particular hosting package), and it includes, among other things up to 2GB of storage, and hosting for up to 50 domains.

Our new site SudokuReview.com incorporates a feature allowing webmasters to syndicate a daily Sudoku puzzle on to their web site. The puzzles update automatically, they’re easy to add to your page, an excellent way to attract regular visitors - and best of all - they’re absolutely free. Details here.

I recently wrote about midPhase’s 2 months of free hosting deal. Well, I received an email from another hosting company today, PowWeb who are offering a range of exceptional deals.

In fact, PowWeb have a choice of 3 special deals on their $7.77/month hosting plan (which includes 5,000 Megabytes storage, a massive 300Gb/month transfer, and a bunch of features). All PowWeb’s deals also come with a free domain name and setup.

1. Either buy 1 year’s hosting - and get 2 months free. I believe this deal ends at the end of October.
2. Or, buy 2 year’s hosting - and get 2 years free. I believe this deal also ends at the end of October.
3. Or, get $5 off any package by entering code "sept05" at the check out. Hurry up if you want this deal - it ends 30 September.

Well, I guess I’ve potentially opened the floodgates and now I’m going to receive email from other hosts about other special deals they offer - in the expectation that I’ll write more stories on those lines. While that ain’t gonna happen - this is going to be my last story about hosting deals for a good while: let’s get back to eBook and Internet publishing!

midPhase is offering two months of free hosting (and the chance to win a car). To get the free 2 months, all your have to do is enter a coupon code (see below), when ordering. midPhase’s plans include 5,000Mb of storage, CGI, PHP and MySQL features, $100 of Overture credit, and unmetered^* bandwidth. The prices start from US $7.95 per month.

^*If you look at the small print at the bottom of the midPhase’s site, it says "Regarding Mega-PHASE, Pro-PHASE, Windows and Windows Pro customers: Some sites may not qualify for Unmetered Bandwidth. In the event that a website does not qualify, the website will be allocated 65-75 GB of bandwidth depending on the package."

That looks like a very good deal to me, even if you don’t qualify for unmetered bandwidth.

Oh yeh, the coupon code - it’s "twomonthsfree". Go to midPhase and sign-up now if you want it. I understand this offer will be ending fairly soon, mid October - I think.

Imagine, you’re selling your eBook or downloadable product using ClickBank. You think you can improve your sales letter (and thus convert more of your visitors into customers), but you’re not really sure whether your changes will be improvements or not. So you need to test. Now you can find all sorts of complicated software for split testing, but if your web host supports PHP, I can show you a dead easy way to do it, that doesn’t cost a penny.

1. Imagine your existing sales letter is called index.html, first rename it to index1.html
2. Next make the variants of your sales letter. called index2.html, index3.html, etc. (at least one, but as many as you want)
3. In each of these variants, include a sales link to sell a different ClickBank product. For example, index1.html sells ClickBank product 1, index2.html sells ClickBank product 2, etc.
4. In your account, you can set the thankyou pages for each of your ClickBank products to the exact same URL (after all the customer will get the same product regardless of which particular sales letter they see). You can set the price of the products to all be the same, or if you’re split testing different prices, vary the prices between the products.
5. And now the clever bit…. you create a PHP script that displays each of the different sales pages at random.

Start Notepad, and enter the following:
<?php
$npages = 2 ; // change 2 to the number of sales pages you have
$n = ( time() % $npages ) ;
include ( ‘index’ . ($n+1) . ‘.html’ ) ;
?>

Now save the file as index.php (if you are using a version of Windows prior to Windows XP, you will need to type the name in the Save As dialog as “index.php” including the quotes, or else your file will be named index.php.txt).

Now upload your index.php to your site.

If you visit your site’s main URL, you should now see one of your sales pages loaded at random. If you click Refresh in your browser, different pages, should randomly rotate in (sometimes you’ll get the same page, sometimes you’ll get a different page). But the chance of any of the page being loaded is the equal.

And the result? As you run it, you’ll be able to see which version of the sales letter performs better, because its corresponding product number will occur more often in your ClickBank stats.

What should/could you test?

• Different headlines
• Different colors
• Different sales letters
• Different prices
• Different guarantees

Vary one thing at a time, and eventually you’ll find the sales letter which converts best, and therefore makes the most money for you.

This post was sparked by a discussion on our forum. Of course, everybody’s opinion is going to differ, but here’s my 2 cents…

If you are publishing and expect people to read on their computer (web pages or most EXE format eBooks), I personally would never use Times Roman. The reason is that many traditional fonts looking either jagged (older Windows systems) or fuzzy (new Windows system) at smallish sizes on screen - well at least to my eyes. Read this article to understand why.

Another consideration for on screen publishing, is if you use exotic fonts, that you have on your system, users may not have them on their system and the page can end up displaying totally different on their systems.

Verdana is probably the best choice for on-screen, as it’s clear even at small point sizes in this use (it was designed specifically for on-screen use), and is available on pretty much all Windows PCs. Unfortunately it does tend to be wide (meaning it’s not always suitable for packing into a menu or small space) and doesn’t look so great at larger point sizes. This is one reason why a lot of web pages use Arial.

If you are printing the eBook out, or expect people to print out, then choice of font is much more flexible, because prints are usually much higher resolution. I actually kind of like Times Roman in this format.

A general rule of typography is not to mix too many fonts.

Traditional wisdom is to use a Serif typeface for small text, and a Sans Serif typeface for headlines etc. You do see many print publications (even broadsheet newspapers!) breaking this “rule”, and even more professional online publications breaking it, but it’s still a good rule of thumb if you’re totally lost about what design to follow.

Disagree? Comments? Head on over to our forum and tell me what you think.

This is a pretty basic question, but one that a lot of folks don’t know the answer to… it’s quite possible to even be a very successful webmaster or even an SEO expert and not have the faintest idea what this blogging craze is all about.

In this piece I’m going to concentrate on the commercial aspects of why blogs are important - rather than the fact they allow non-technical people to publish news/information web sites (which is another important aspect of blogs)

First the basics: A blog is kind of like having your own news web site, where you can post stories using blogging software (rather than creating HTML pages manually).

Most blogs allow you to have visitors participate in discussions/comments after each story, although this can be usually turned off if you prefer. We’ve turned off comments on this blog.

So why are blogs important for promoting your site or online business?

The key things are:

1. Blogs have an RSS news feed. This allows people with newsreader software/services to pick up (”subscribe”) and other sites to pick up and potentially even republish (”syndicate”), your latest stories.
2. Blogs have a “ping” mechanism. This notifies various services that you have posted a new story and allows them to quickly (often immediately) spider it and add it to their indexes. This is in contrast to the traditional SEO marketing method where you have to wait (often weeks if not months) for a search engine spider to periodically visit your site, and hope that it spots changes and indexes them.

Compare our main company site - www.ans2000.com versus our company blog - blog.ans2000.com.

There are three important differences to note:

1. The pages at www.ans2000.com are built by hand using HTML. Whereas the pages at blog.ans2000.com are built using the blogging software. Notice the calendar, archive functions, the organization of stories into categories in the blog? All that stuff is maintained totally automatically by the blogging software whenever we post a new story. We don’t even have to do 1 second’s worth of work to get these features.
2. Notice the RSS buttons (”chicklets”) on the blog. They allow people with newsreader software/services to subscribe and be notified of updates to our blog.
3. If you click the top “XML” button on the blog, you can even see what is in the RSS feed (which is what news readers and syndicators use). It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to the average person looking at in a web browser, but news readers and syndicators can understand all that code and those funny XML tags, and make use of them as noted above.
4. You can’t see it, but when we post a new story via the blogging software and hit “Publish”, the blogging software automatically notifies (”pings”) a whole of bunch of services that our blog has been updated, telling them that the new story should be indexed as soon as possible.