Data Center Hub

Here are a few more of the tools I use for web site intelligence. I could write an article on each, but that would take away the fun of your discovery of the tools and their ultimate use in your hands- they’re not all hammers- and best of all, you won’t smash your fingers with any of these internet marketing research tools.

Quantcast can help you determine popularity of a site, demographics of visitors, and also tip you to what other sites visitors of your target site also visit. It can also help you as a site owner to learn your reach better. You may be disappointed to find what your reach really is- but that does not mean you don’t have an effective site. You can still have small reach while dominating for your chosen keywords. www.quantcast.com

Here is a favorite of mine. It is rather tedious to download the root zone files from each registry and run them through a database. If you really want to know what your competition is doing, a subscription to www.domaintools.com and their name server spy feature can help you find out. You can get an alert each time your competitor registers a new domain to their name server, or filter on the email address they use for domains. This is all publicly available data- no espionage going on here, just good old hard research not easily accessed unless you dig through 30 GB of data daily. There are also dozens of other tools on this site; many are free. The name suggestion tool is helpful in finding new related domains.

This one can help you improve your conversions. There have been studies showing eye patterns on web pages typically form the letter “F”- I’ve seen it on my own pages. Try using the heat map and you’ll see. It is amazing how tiny tweaks can improve your conversion rates. One tip I learned- keep your action items “above the fold” as they (used) to say in the newspaper business. www.crazyegg.com

Naturally there are more tools I use- remember: “The first rule of success in business is: never tell everything you know. The second rule is:” If you’d like to learn more about improving the performance of your web sites, head over to avatava.com and contact me. I have been working at this web site stuff since 1994. And so you know; I am not affiliated with any of the above companies other than as a user of their services.

I’ll show you how you can start looking up domains on your local windows machine within a few minutes of downloading Cygwin.

I have a few associates who have a regular need to do whois queries. Many of them go to popular registrars’ websites to look up domains- they are amazed at how quickly I can get to the information they’re searching for. The websites take too much time in my opinion. Whois is a default command line utility in Unix-like OSes, but not on Windows. I’ll show you how to add it to your Win box without being too geeky.

1. Get Cygwin- www.cygwin.org – Cygwin is a suite of command line utilities for windows- without Cygwin I feel like a carpenter without anything but a hammer. Download and run the setup.exe
2. Accept all the defaults, choosing a mirror which seems to be near you. When you get to the “select packages” screen, maximize the box and expand the “Net” section, scroll down to “whois: GNU whois” and click the item in the “New” column- you should see the package version instead of “Skip”. Click “Next” and when the install is done, open a shell under Cygwin.
3. When in your shell, simply type: whois domain.com and press enter. You should see a response from the server in a few seconds.

Enjoy- you now have many more tools available to you- just like a power user!

Gmail is down with error 502

OK Guys, I got the dreaded 502 error on my Gmail account today- funny thing though, my Firefox app still kept delivering screen pops- so I knew all of Gmail was not down. I logged into a server that was 150 miles from my home location and what do you know? Gmail worked from there! So, it appears my home connection kept going out to a dead server. Solution? Simply run ipconfig /flushdns from a command prompt- worked for me! BTW, if you are running Vista, don’t forget to right click on the command prompt icon and choose “Run as Administrator” or you’ll get a message about elevated privileges required. Hope this helps. Later, Bill Laakkonen