The latest version of Firefox has just been released.

After some problems with their servers due to the huge number of people trying to download, you can now download Firefox 3.0 here.

They might have set a new world record for the biggest number of download in 24 hours but then again, their servers weren’t working properly. Remains to be seen if they have broken the record.

So get the latest, safest and fastest Firefox now.

My guess is that anyone who’s on the Internet marketing journey or who’s been online for some period of time would have heard of Mozilla Firefox.

While Internet Explorer still rules the browser market, Firefox is in 2nd place with 18.4% (stated in Wikipedia, as of May 2008), and slowly increasing it’s market share.

Many Internet marketers worth mentioning uses Firefox. Since Internet marketers’ businesses are online and browsers are what potential customers access to buy products and services, it’s absolutely crucial that what Internet marketers offer must appear as
intended.

Because Internet Explorer and Firefox are built differently, your websites may appear slightly different too. Any worthwhile Internet marketers doing online businesses cannot afford to ignore nor neglect the slowly growing market of potential customers using Firefox, on the chance that their websites may not appear as intended in Firefox.

I highly recommend installing Firefox and using it to test your websites as they are being built so they will appear to your customers as you want them to be. Imagine…if some images in your website do not appear or the text are out of alignment in Firefox. That would reflect poorly in the eyes of your potential customers in that your websites do not appear professionally done.

There are many other useful features in Firefox that makes it indispensible…at least for me. It has enhanced security compared to Internet Explorer as well as the couple of thousands of add-ons or plugins that expands the functions of your browser. And this list of add-ons are constantly being expanded.

With Firefox, your browser is more than just a browser. For example with certain add-ons, you can turn your browser into a FTP client and upload files to your web-host server or into a screen capture software to take snap shots of your browser content and even edit or add comments.

I’ll elaborate more on these useful add-ons in future posts. By the way, Firefox is free to download and install and the latest version of Firefox is 3.0

Last week, I received my first web-hosting referral check from An Hosting.
I don’t specifically promote web-hosting affiliate programs, except posting a banner in the sidebar of this blog and now writing this short review.

A friend was asking for a web-hosting company and I sent him my An Hosting affiliate link. After reviewing, he selected the cheapest hosting plan at $83.40 ($6.95/month) per year. My commission was $85!
For a $83.40 hosting account, I was paid $85 in commission. I was amazed!
I didn’t read the payment plan and schedule when signing up as an affiliate and thought I would be paid only when my commission amount exceeds $100. So I was pleasantly surprised when I received a check for the $85 commission.

My friend told me he had no problems with the web-hosting account and the CPanel was simple to use. He didn’t have to get any help from support so I couldn’t comment on their service support.

I’m currently using another web-hosting account and would most probably switch to An Hosting, even though I don’t have much problems with my current web-host, HostingBay. I had a few problems but the support was always prompt, always within 24 hours. When this blog was hacked a few months ago, they help me resolve the issue promptly. But I won’t recommend their affiliate program as they recently reduce their commission rate from 50% to 25% and pays after the third referral. That’s certainly unattractive compared to An Hosting.

Hostgator is another web-host affiliate program I’m in. Hostgator seems to be popular among Internet marketers and it’s listed as one of the top web-hosting companies. They have varying commission structure, paying $50 for each referral sale for up to 5 referrals a month. The next step up is $75 for each referral sale. There’s no mention which hosting plan for the $50 payout.

Netfirms is another web-host I would recommend. They have the cheapest domain name registration at $5.95. You even get $1 for domain name registration referral. For a yearly hosting plan of $119.40, they pay a commission of $50, about 42%. Read my experience with their domain registration here.

There are hundreds if not thousands of web-hosting companies, so do some research before you sign up web-hosting accounts or as affiliates. The few mentioned above are some I have some experience with. Of course you should sign as an affiliate with a reputable web-host and not one that’s merely providing the cheapest hosting plans.

An Hosting is at the top for me as an affiliate for web-hosting for the high commission rate (101%) and promptness in payment. Their hosting service should be good or clients would not renew the hosting accounts and they would lose money since they pay more than 100% commission. They pay out $85 to $100 per new referral every 2 weeks. An Hosting also has a 2nd tier affiliate program paying 5% for 2nd tier affiliate sales.

To sign as an An Hosting affiliate, go here.

I would love to hear from someone who knows of any web-hosting company paying their affiliates 100% or more commission rates.

One of the most important factors in search engine optimization for your website or blog to rank well is the amount of backlinks it has.

Backlinks are URL links of your website or blog on other websites. The greater the number of backlinks your website has, the higher the ranking when someone searches for your website’s keywords. Having a huge network of backlinks tells the search engine that your website is very popular and is an authority site where people go to for information. Google loves websites like that because such sites give people what they want. Google in turn, puts such websites on the first page of searches. Google also loves to give what people want and that’s why it remains the most popular search engine.

So to rank well in organic searches (meaning free searches and not PPC-sponsored), having lots of backlinks is crucial.

There are a several ways of getting backlinks:

1. Post meaningful comments to blogs that contributes to the discussion. This allows you to put your website URL link along with your comments.

2. Post in forums that are relevant to your website topic with your website URL links in your signature. Some forums do not allow signatures, so be aware.

3. Exchange links with webmasters of related-topic websites. You want to be careful with who you exchange links. Google uses a ranking system called Page Rank where websites are ranked on a scale of 0 to 10. 0 (zero) being the lowest and 10 the highest. If you are ranked 1 and you link with websites with Page Rank (PR) 0, and if there’s a lot of such low PRs, your ranking may be adversely affected. So its better to get a link from a PR3 website then 10 links from PR0 websites.

4. If you have a blog, you can create a buzz by writing some insightful but controversial topic that grabs people’s attention enough for them to Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious or simply recommend your blog.

5. Joining social bookmarking websites like Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, Squidoo, etc. and having backlinks from them.

6. Writing articles with your website URL links in the Resource or Bio-box and submitting them to article directories. Article directories are websites that contains thousands of articles on various topics. These article directories allow your articles to be published by other webmasters with your website URL links intact. So the more webmasters like your articles, the greater the number of websites containing backlinks of your website.

7. Submitting your website or websites to directories. Website directories are websites that list information on websites and well as the URL. Such directories may also contain information on how to subscribe for newsletters.

This list is by no means exhaustive and there are other ways of getting backlinks.
However, I want to elaborate on the last one, submitting your website to directories.

Having great content on your website or blog is absolutely essential if you want to do well in your Internet marketing journey. Assuming you have great content on your website or blog, you have to tell the world how to find it. Website directory is one of the great ways of doing so.

However, submitting your website/s to directories can be pain in the behind. Doing so manually can take a lot of your time and effort, not to mention very boring. Therefore you should make use of software or submitting services for such purposes.

A new piece of software for directory submission has just launched on 26th May 2008. It is created by the duo, Calvin Woon and Jonathan Teng of IM Buzz Creators. IM BUzz Creators have recently created a bunch of viral, buzz-creating software that has Ewen Chia buying and recommending them.

This new software is called Instant Directory Profits and contains more than 1500 free directories that you can submit your website to. This list of directories is updated every month, so this ensures the directories are up-to-date. The Google Page Ranks, Alexa rankings and type of each directory is listed and can be sorted in descending or ascending order.
There are more than 1500 directories in Instant Directory Profits which are free website submission, meaning there’s no need to pay to submit your website to these directories. Roughly 60% of these directories have Page Ranks (PR) of 3 to 8. The rest are PR2 to PR0.

Each website for submission is categorized as project which you create. It takes about 5 minutes to fill in information like personal details about yourself for creating accounts at the directories, and website information like title, description and keywords. One great feature about this software is that it allows you to create different sets titles, descriptions and keywords and rotate them. This way, your website can rank for different sets of keywords.

At a click of a button, your directory account creations as well as website information are entered into the particular directory. However, as each directory is different in content and structure, there is still some manual tuning of the data. But with this software, your tedious task of directory submission is greatly simplified.

To summarize, Instant Directory Profits has:

1. More than 1500 directories with Google Page Ranks and Alexa Rankings listed. This greatly saves you the trouble of searching for directories yourself. This list is constantly updated monthly to ensure validity.

2. Different sets of website titles, descriptions and keywords which can be rotated so your website can rank for different keywords.

3. Easy and simple filling-in of account creation and website information.

If Directory submission is one of your strategy for getting traffic, Instant Directory Profits is an inexpensive method. If it’s not  part of your strategy, it may be time to get started.

By clicking the image below, you can get Instant Directory Profits with a $10 discount. That’s more than 25% off the normal price!

One of the best forms of viral promotions is by giving away a no-charge report and allowing others to freely distribute it for you.

If done well, a simple PDF report can get extremely viral and drive a ton of targeted traffic and sales to your sites.

But have you ever wondered how to give an even stronger incentive for other people to give away your product for you?

Simple!

By offering them rebranding rights to your products!

I’m sure you’ve seen how most of the top marketers do it.

Rebrandable reports are an excellent way to motivate affiliates and serve as an excellent promotional tool.

By allowing your affiliates to rebrand a short report with their own affiliate links, this will motivate them to give away their own rebranded report willingly for you.

Simply because people like the lazy way of earning money online!

Even if you do not have an affiliate program (which you really ought to have one), you can simply allow your subscribers to rebrand your reports with affiliate links to other people’s products and still achieve the same viral effect for your sites.

The best thing is, I just stumbled upon a really cool piece of software which allows you to create rebrandable eBooks with just a few clicks of the mouse!

Instant PDF Profits offers you the best solution of creating viral rebrandable eBooks.

As the same suggests, it will make all your PDF files viral and profitable.

So hurry and check it out for yourself!

Adsense Secrets is taking me longer than I had expected to finish.
Not that it’s difficult to read but I was trying out the ideas and the many links in the eBook. I was also a bit distracted by Ewen Chia’s Working From Home.

More …

Joel Comm, host and executive producer for The Next Internet Millionaire, a reality show where 12 contestants compete to be the next Internet Millionaire.
He also created a program, The Secret Classroom, where 12 Internet Millionaires were “kidnapped” and “force” to show a handful of newbies how to make a fortune online. Some of the 12 Internet millionaires are Perry Marshall, Ray Edwards, Mike Filsaime, Marlon Sanders, Amand Morin, Mark Joyner, etc.
He also wrote a book, The Adsense Code, which became a best seller and he has just launched the 4th edition called, Adsense Secrets.
It is this ebook which I’ve just bought…for $9.95.

If Adsense Secrets is any good, you will most definitely see some changes to this blog. Hope to finish reading it in a couple of days.
Do check back in a few days for my take on Adsense Secrets.

I’ve been on Joel’s mailing list for quite a while and he uses alot of videos for his websites, one of which is Ask Joel Comm. Here’s where he answers questions from the public using videos. Some are quite amusing but informative for the newbies.

Here’s an update on some of the new features and services being offered on LeadsLeap.
Since the launch, LeadsLeap has been a bit quiet for a while. But that was probably because it was developing some new features for it’s membership.

A “Viral” blog was launched in early March. Why “viral” blog? Basically it’s like a normal blog except there’s a referral effect in that there’s an affiliate link to each post. Any reader that reads the blog through your affiliate link and signs up as a member, is considered to be your downline.

Read an article from the blog here:

How to Increase Your Google Page Rank to PR4 for Free

More …

Ever wonder what type of free gift works best when you want to build your subscriber list using squeeze page?

Would a free report do? Or would an eBook be better? How about software? Not sure?

Then you should go to this blog and read:

What Kind of Free Gift Works Best For Your Squeeze Page?

Over the weekend, this blog was hacked!

But luckily, no permanently damaged was done. If anyone has tried to access The Journey In Internet Marketing over the weekend, he/she would be faced with the word “HACKED” in black background, red text, a disturbing image of a growling wolf facing a werewolf (or vampire) and eerie music.

With the help of my web host, the problem was solved. Some hacker had placed a “index.html” with the above-mentioned content in my folder. Apparently I had made the mistake of changing the folder permission (CHMOD) to “777″. I had changed that earlier because I wasn’t able to previously edit in my Theme Editor.

It certainly wasn’t a good feeling to have when you’ve been HACKED! Never thought this would happen to me but it did. So people with blogs, beware of this danger. This event has spurred me to research on how to secure my blog and websites. Will share what I find out. Be safe!