Category Archives: ReviewMe

SEChecking for your keyword rankings

I wouldn’t normally give something like this any exposure, or even any of my time, but while I was rooting around the ReviewMe clearing house I came across the site SEChecking that was offering a Search engine positioning service for a scalable fee starting at $19.95 per month, rising to $49.95 per month.

What this company claims to do is to monitor your position in Search Engines and send you daily reports based on your rankings. For this they charge the fees dependent on how many keywords you’re keeping track of.

Now what bothers me about this is you can do exactly this for FREE with services like Digital Point or even Web CEO. $50 per month seems a lot of money for something that can effectively be had for free elsewhere.

It doesn’t help their credibility when you view their blog and find just the two half assed posts on a default WordPress blog skin stating they’ve just started. This all looks a little too much like a cowboy operation to me. A Whois sees that the site is run out of the Czech Republic too.

Even the FAQ fails to instil any confidence that the site can actually deliver what it claims as it only has two points:

How many pages are scanned in search engines ?
Now there are scanned the first 10 pages (100 results) in search engines.

How often do you scan search engines for changes ?
Every day! Time of scanning is between 0:00am and 6:00am.

Seriously, I’d advise you to avoid SEChecking, there are far more trustworthy and cheaper (read free) options out there.

GPS Tracking’s what I need

You may remember from my blog that my pride and joy, my car, was stolen in July 2006. I fought tooth and nail to get the thing back to the point it almost consumed me, and did consume this website; it’s a veritable homage to the quest.

If however when my car was stolen I’d actually had some form of tracking installed, like I’m considering now that I have it back, there wouldn’t have been an issue. GPS tracking is now inexpensive and a real solution to people like me who are obsessed with their cars.

Land Air Sea

LandAirSea Systems are a leading GPS tracking provider used by private, commercial and even government clients. This means they have the technology and the coverage to ensure that when my car next goes for a drive by itself that I’ll know where the sucker is.

One of the key benefits with this system is that it’s compatible with Google Earth:

The Data Can be downloaded and view in Google Earth simply by plugging the Tracking Key into the USB port of a computer

What I also like is the fact that the magnet used is so small it can be placed under your car seat, and it’s water resistant. Though of course if my car ends up in the sea, knowing where it is won’t help me much.

This YouTube video should help to show how incredible this product can be.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

I’m seriously considering this. If anyone so much as touches my car or even jokes about touching it after what happened I tend to attack them physically.

Stick that Sucka!

Recently I had a batch of custom stickers made up for the Chav Car website YourCarIsShit.com. I got these stickers at a knockdown price (read free) because I knew a nice chap in the print industry. If however you don’t know someone who can help you out like this and you require some good quality Labels, you can always try one of the many online print companies such as Frontier Label, Inc.

Frontier Label

As with most companies offering a printing service online they have a quoting system where you can enter your detailed requirements in order to get a price.

One of the difficult things about dealing with printers is knowing all of the specific details with regards to preparing your files for printing. How to package them properly, embedded fonts, bleed areas etc. Luckily this site has a help section to advise you on how to get your artwork ready for them to work on.

Frontier Label also offers instant online tracking of your order, meaning you’ll always know the status of your order… so long as you have an Internet connection. I always do of course!

Of course the proof with any printers isn’t in the price, it’s in the quality of the printing. There’s no point saving money on a cheaper printer or using cheaper stock if the quality lets your company’s image down. Frontier Label have a section of the site where you can order a free sample pack to see just what sort of quality you’ll get from them.

See Ricky Hatton live in Vegas for $1,200

On Saturday December 8th Manchester’s own Ricky Hatton is going to beat the living snot out of latest US hype Floyd Mayweather Jr in Las Vegas. For months now this fight has been hyped up on UK TV, press and even in Manchester itself, but how the hell can we get to see it live in Vegas.

I’ve found a website offering tickets to the fight, but they’re starting at $1,200 each! SourceTix.com usually specialise in Theatre tickets, but also sell tickets to loads of different events from concerts to WWE Wrestling events, and of course major Heavyweight boxing matches.

Personally this seems like a lot to pay for a ticket to see Ricky Hatton knock some guy around for a few minutes, but if you’re desperate to see the fight live, these guys have tickets.

The reason I was looking at their site however was from an Internet Marketing perspective.

One thing I found funny in a not so funny sort of way was their obvious use of key phrases for SEO. They’ve blatantly been reading up on SEO, or had an SEO company involved. The homepage at the moment features 11 examples of the phrase ‘Trans-Siberian Orchestra’ and 5 of those are text links!

That’s some over use of a key phrase.

I hope they don’t get penalised for spam because of that lot.

Make free logos with logo design software

A striking logo is the key to the branding of any company, or indeed any blog; such as MrDaz.com! The caricature in our logo was created by Aled Williams, a rather spaced out Welsh designer. A useful person to know if you need a logo or two, if however you don’t know Aled you might want to find a cheaper solution to creating your logos.

This is where The Logo Creator comes in. It’s a piece of logo design software that allows you to easily, and with little or no design ability, create impressive logos for your company. The software comes with an extensive logo design library that you can manipulate yourself, and edit to produce your own logos effortlessly.

There are 7 different packages for you to choose from, focusing on sectors such as Corporate, Travel or Sports. The website offers you the chance to view the quality of the logos before you part with any cash as well, so you know exactly what you’ll be paying for. The best bit is of course the price. The software and the bundled logo designs come in at just $29.99 each, that’s just £15 Sterling.

Alternatively you could buy the Mega Pack which includes all of the different packages and 380 professionally designed logos for you to edit for $189.95.

You needn’t worry about compatibility either as the software is available for both PC and Mac.

Rent a garage in London

As a follow up to a previous review where you can rent parking spaces around the UK; have a look at this part of the same website where you can find garages for rent around the London area.

Now I’ve always been interested in this aspect of making money as often buying property to let can be out of some people’s range. Buying garages to let however is a little more within the price range of more of us. Unless of course you happen to live in areas such as London! I saw a garage in little old Bristol sell recently for over £70,000. What’s become of the world? Surely there are cheaper ways to park your car?

As it seems there aren’t, and in London where space isn’t so much at a premium as it’s gone altogether finding a garage for your prized Bentley Continental GT can be a tricky affair. Luckily with this website you can track down London garages via their search facility for as little as £100 per month. Many of the garages are just a short walk from the local tube station.

This seems an excellent idea for those of you looking to keep your motors protected in the London area, and an even better idea for those of us (and I include myself in that) considering making money from parking space and garage letting.

Video Conferencing with AccuConference

Having to communicate with recently with friends in different parts of Europe over the web I’ve had to rely on MSN and Skype. Skype tends to freeze the camera and has a very poor image quality whereas MSN Messenger is temperamental, crashes and often won’t connect.

Neither can really be relied upon for communicating with friends, let alone for business. A more reliable and professional solution would be a Video Conferencing application such as AccuConference. They offer video conferencing for as little as 15 cents per minute

Video Conferencing

If you’d like a demo of the service they can arrange one for you, plus they also recommend a selection of hardware peripherals you could use with their system.

The main advantage with video conferencing is that you can save time and money on travel times to and from your meeting, and of course never worry about forgetting to take any information or equipment with you. If your meeting is in Germany and you’re in San Francisco, that’s quite a saving of time and money!

Video Conferencing Screenshot

For those of you out there, like myself, that always look at a site like this and think; how could that make me money? Well, they’ve also got an affiliate scheme with 3 separate methods of earning revenue. The best in my opinion being the first method which earns you 5% of your referred customer’s monthly spend.

Share your Thoughts with Thoughts.com

Would you like to be the next Mr Daz? Well, when I say that I don’t mean get married, divorced, lose all of your transformers and have your car stole. No, I mean start an online Blog Site.

If you’ve wanted to write on a website with your very own blog, but you’re not very computer literate (or just illiterate if some of my commentators are anything to go by) and you don’t know your HTML from your DIY you need not worry. There is a website that will give you very own blog, for free.

I know, there are actually loads of websites that do this, one very large one owned by Google, but for those of you that like to avoid the big G you could try Thoughts.com.

Thoughts.com allows you to air your views on a variety of subject matters and to become part of their community of bloggers. Your own personal blog is offered with unlimited bandwidth so you don’t need to worry about becoming too popular and receiving loads of traffic… a common problem for me 😉

You can also upload photos and videos to share on your blog as well. It does all sound very similar to MySpace and Facebook yet doesn’t have the same clean interface. You do get your own personal page though where visitors can leave you feedback, view your photos and read your blogs, like this one for Janie Jeffers.

It’s worth giving it a look if nothing else, every Facebook started somewhere.