RoyalRadande.Com

Don’t make the same mistake I did. On Tuesday, I spent over $300 on adword traffic to a page that was not available. I don’t know what happened. Everything was working fine for the past month, all of the sudden, this page was no longer available and everyone that went to it received a 404, page not available error message.

I found out about the error when I logged into my ebay account to see that impressions and clicks were down. At first I thought nothing of it since eBay tends to be slow when it comes to reporting impressions/clicks. I then logged into my adwords account to see how many people had clicked on my ads, and the number was way above what ebay was reporting. I decided to test one of my landing pages, and lo and behold, I received the famous hostgator 404 error page.

I contacted HostGator to let them know what was going on. It seemed as if something was wrong with the rewrite rule. I don’t know how that could’ve happened. I didn’t log into my account or make any changes to it in a few days. Things are back up and running normally. 

To protect myself from losing money like this again, I’ve signed up for a little service called Montastic. Montastic is a free website monitoring tool that will alert you via email when your site’s down it’s back up. Montastic will check your site every 10 minutes.

Thank You to Mark Wielgus from 45n5 for replying to my frantic twitter messages and for referring me to Chad from cdfnetworks.com’s “Don’t forget to monitor your landing pages” blog post!

Landing Pages Landing Pages, site monitoring

I mailed my 2007 tax forms and payments today. It’s such a wonderful feeling to know that for the first time in 3 years, I’m not going to be on any payment plan with the IRS. For the last 3 years, I’ve been on some sort of payment plan with the IRS for not completely paying off my tax obligation. I got myself in this situation because I either wasn’t putting away enough for taxes or because I was dipping into my tax savings when times got hard. The bad thing about owing the IRS money is that you owe them money. The good thing about owing the IRS money is that if you’re willing to pay, they are very flexible and will work with you in order for you to pay off your debt.

I remember the first time I realized that I was going to owe money to the IRS. I thought for sure that I was going to go to jail for not paying my taxes in full. I think I was around $18,000 short. I can remember nervously freaking out at the thought of owing Uncle Sam money; it really scared me!

When I called the IRS to let them know that I didn’t have all of my tax money, I was very surprised when the lady on the phone told me that I can pay over time. She asked me a series of questions such as how much I could afford to pay each month and when I wanted my payments to be due. In the end we agreed on a fixed amount. The agreement was that I had to make my payments on time, each month, and I also needed to pay the next year’s taxes in full. If I broke any of those terms, they could’ve placed liens and garnished my wages, etc. Lucky to say, I paid them off in time!

The next year, and the year after, I was in the situation! I was in the same situation because each year, I would use my income to pay off my previous year’s tax liability. And for a while, I really though that I was going to be like this forever! Luckily for me, it wasn’t the case. I was able to pay off all of my tax and I still have money saved for my 2007 taxes.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t let myself be in this type of situation again, ever. To help me keep my promise, I’m putting away 35% of my monthly affiliate earnings in a special business checking account. I’ve also started making quarterly tax payments. Making quarterly tax payments will help me out because I won’t be tempted to use the money when times get hard. I will also not get penalized by the IRS each year!

So if you’re in a similar situation, remember the following:

• If you owe money to the IRS, talk to them. The worst thing you can do is pretend as if you don’t owe, or as if the it will go away if you don’t think about it. It will follow you until you pay it off. Call the IRS, talk to them, explain your situation. They will listen to you and work with you to pay off your liability.
• Make quarterly estimated tax payments. If you’re self employed and are paying a lot in every year in taxes, the IRS expects you to make quarterly estimated taxes. If you don’t make them, expect a penalty.
• Put away a good percentage of your affiliate earnings for taxes. Don’t do what I did and use your tax money to help family, friends, or yourself when times are hard.

Personal taxes

Twitter is a great tool that allows you to post updates and network with people. You can post updates via instant messenger, sms, the twitter site, or from any of the twitter clients that are available. It is a great concept; follow a bunch of people, when ever they update, you get a notification of the update.

How do you twitter?

There are many ways to twitter. You can post updates via sms, twitter’s website, instant messenger, or one of the twitter clients available. My personal favorite is instant messenger.

At first I tried twittering via SMS; it was a great idea until people started updating more often. Getting hundreds of text messages per day gets annoying! My favorite way to twitter is via GTalk. This is great because I get updates as they occur via instant messages. I also use Gtalk on my phone, so when I’m away from my desk, updates are sent directly to the gtalk client on my blackberry.

Twitter Tips and Commands

To start receiving updates, simply send on and you will instantly start receiving updates from the people you follow. To stop receiving updates send off

On - turns on twitter updates

Off - turns off twitter updates

If you’d like to get a person’s last update, simply sent get username (username being the person’s username) So if you wanted to my last update, you’d send get royalradande

Get username - gets the person’s last update

To follow people on twitter, simply use the follow username command. Once you follow someone, you will automatically start receiving updates from that person. For example, to follow me on twitter, send follow royalradande.

To stop following someone and no longer receive their updates, send leave username.

Follow username - follow a person on twitter and receive their updates

Leave username - stop following a person and stop receiving their updates

Other Commands

Stats - shows you statistics about your twitter account. Such as the number of people you follow and are following and also the words you’re tracking.

Track Keyword - when you track something on twitter, you will receive a message when ever an update contains the keyword you’re tracking. You do not need to be following a person to track keywords. So for instance, if I wanted to track my name, Jonathan Radande, I would send track jonathan radande, and when ever anyone using twitter included the words jonathan radande in their messages, I’d get updated.

Similarly, you can stop tracking keywords by sending untrack keyword.

Direct Messaging

Sometimes there’s a need to send direct messages. When you send a direct message, nobody but the person you’re sending it to receive it. You can only send direct messages to people who are currently following you. To send a direct message send D username message. This will send a direct message to the user.

These are all the twitter commands I know. If you know of more commands, feel free to comment.

You can follow me on twitter.

Other twitter