WTF *Nix

Have you found yourself wondering why you are overwhelmed? There is so much material on the Internet regarding Internet marketing. If a person tries to digest all of it at one time, they will will experience a bad case of online marketing indigestion. This is not a good feeling to have. I have had these feelings before as well.

The solution to this issue is to narrow your focus on one niche. You see it is much easier to become an expert in one area rather than two or more areas. I have made a decision to devote my time to making money on the Internet. There are countless ways to make money in this world today. You can make money in real estate, the stock market, by owning your own offline business and in numerous other ways. But the people who really do well in this world financially are known primarily for one thing. Bill Gates in known for Microsoft. Warren Buffett is known as a stock expert. Donald Trump is known for real estate. I am sure that they have other things that they focus on now but they are known as being experts in a certain field. What do you focus on? Many things or one thing? I am willing to bet that if your answer is many you are in a state of Internet marketing disconbobulation. Find something you like doing and become an expert at it. The trick is to find something you like doing that is profitable financiallly. This is the secret to making money on the net.

If there is a market for your product, you can sell it. Do a search on Google and see how many results your area of focus will bring up. If you use keywords, you will get better results. The more targeted the results the better. It is easy to develop a product when you are an expert in that area because you know something that your buyers don’t. You are the expert and they are not. They will pay large sums of money to acquire your expertise.

As marketers we must understand that our time is extremely valuable and the more we focus on too many things, the more time that is wasted. This time could be better spent focusing on one niche. It takes time to learn what your niche market wants. After you learn what they want, give the people what they desire. If your child wants a piece of pizza and you give them fish that would cause sadness in their hearts. They may cry and be upset with you. In the same way, if you give your target market something different then what they are asking for they will remove themselves from your list or no longer associate with you.

So use your time wisely and learn what your target market wants. Once you have determined what they want, if you do not already have a product created to meet their needs create one. Remember what they have told you and use the desires of their hearts as your blueprint to create an excellent information product.

Your job as the expert is to provide the answers to the questions that your target market is asking. You answer their questions with your products and you will be seen as an expert by them. You can also become qualified as an expert by creating a blog about your niche market. You can have your readers post their questions on your blog. Answer their questions on your blog and they will also begin to view you in a different light. This will prove to them that you care about what they have to say. People buy more easily when they trust the person they are buying from. A blog is a great way to create an atmoshpere of trust. You can also build a great deal of rapport with your market in this way as well. You can get to know your market on your blog and they can get to know you. An excellent method to implement to accomplish this is simply to be open with your life. Talk about your family and life on the blog and you will find that your market is more likely to talk about their family.

You now have a number of concepts to implement in your Internet business right now. The key is to go out and do them. You will be greatly rewarded if you do. One niche can indeed make you rich.

Until I tried it, the whole 2.0 thing seemed like a joke to me. But the switch between the Google, Yahoo, MSN search engine Web 1.0 war and the environment of Web 2.0 is drastic.

For those of you who remember using a card catalog at the public library, the change is similar to the one you experienced using a computer to find a book for the first time. No endless cabinets of cards to hunt through. No misplaced cards that meant you wouldn’t find the book you were looking for that day. Every book in the library accessible from one keyboard.

In 2.0, knowledge is fast. It moves at the speed of the keyboard and web form. A story from New York hits the West Coast in the time it takes a web page to refresh. And when a network build on speed puts a premium on those sites and bloggers that can get information first, news hits even the gardening forums before it even reaches the cable news networks.

This is drastic transition in the evolution of the speed of knowledge. With the invention of the printing press by Johann Guttenberg in 1440, the rate at which knowledge spread become quicker. Word of mouth was no longer the only way to receive news. Afterwards came mail, newspapers, television, and 24 hour cable news. Each a leap forward from the past form of media.

Then came the internet. Within a few short years, knowledge was accessible from everywhere with a few clicks of the mouse. We can now store more information on our hard drives than we can find at the local library.

Now, with web 2.0, the filter and wait time of search engines is taken out. Some might say that this cuts down on accuracy, but with time, I think it will improve accuracy. Search engines try to guesstimate what searchers want by applying an algorithm to what they type in the form. With the new animal, people are the algorithms.

When I started building my library of musical tastes, I usually discovered new music through people that listened to the same type of music I listened to. If we both listened to Pink Floyd than I might take the chance and listen to some other music they suggested to me. This is a much more effective way to find new information than with an algorithm. Let people be your algorithm. Let links be distributed through the lateral route of tastes, themes, and interests rather than the direct route of search engines that require a user to know almost exactly what they want to find before they search.

There is also a time element involved. Some search engine results are just old. They aren’t what you are looking for. Some engines literally make sure links are aged before they are given the status they deserve.

In 2.0, a hour is a long time and a month is a lifetime. When searching through tagged sites or feeds, a site may gain 100 links to it in an hour by taggers. A traditional search engine can’t keep up with this. This type of link growth would have to be run through filters to check for spam or other tactics to artificially increase it’s rank. And still, the baby gets thrown out with the bath water a multitude of times.

Traditional search engines base all of their ranking systems on the votes of people who know how to build websites or at least post to forums. This is not very balanced. Sitting at the computer screen, you can assume all you want, but step out in the real world and just try to talk to anyone about HTML. Then you realize these are unheard internet votes.

Tagging and other web 2.0 technologies have brought a little more balanced to the system, giving those, whose tech savvy stops at bidding on Ebay, the internet right to vote. And when I finally got the chance to check it out by spending the last few weeks in the stream of web 2.0, I realized my whole vision was a little short sided. Sitting in box, typing code all day can skew your version of the world. Judging the needs of an internet audience by the whims of an algorithmic internet program can skew this vision even more.

Web 1.0 is Plato’s cave, only shadows of the true internet traffic flow. As Web 2.0 technologies become more mainstream, the traditional search engine will have to adapt to a more democratic union between “internet land owners” and those who only surf but probably make up a greater part of internet users.

Until next time…

I’ve had many people asking and requesting of me to provide them a PHP Contact Us form, well here you go… Hope this helps someone out. Just whipped this up for the newbies. If you got a better way to doing this for the newbies feel free to share as well

< ?php

if(!$_POST) exit;

$email = $_POST['email'];

if(!eregi("^[a-z0-9]+([_\\.-][a-z0-9]+)*" ."@"."([a-z0-9]+([\.-][a-z0-9]+)*)+"."\\.[a-z]{2,}"."$",$email )){
$error.="Invalid email address entered";
$errors=1;
}
if($errors==1) echo $error;
else{

$values = array ('name','email','phone','concerning','message');
$required = array('name','email','message');

$your_email = "james@example.com";
$email_subject = "New Message";
$email_content = "new message:\n";

foreach($values as $value){
if(in_array($value,$required)){
if( empty($_POST[$value]) ) { echo 'PLEASE FILL IN REQUIRED FIELDS'; exit; }
$email_content .= $value.': '.$_POST[$value]."\n";
}
}

if(mail($your_email,$email_subject,$email_content)) {
echo 'Message sent!';
} else {
echo 'ERROR!';
}
}
?>

MySQL Functions for PHP

mysql_affected_rows — Get number of affected rows in previous MySQL operation

mysql_client_encoding — Returns the name of the character set

mysql_close — Close MySQL connection

mysql_connect — Open a connection to a MySQL Server

mysql_create_db — Create a MySQL database

mysql_data_seek — Move internal result pointer

mysql_db_name — Get result data

mysql_db_query — Send a MySQL query

mysql_drop_db — Drop (delete) a MySQL database

mysql_errno — Returns the numerical value of the error message from previous MySQL operation

mysql_error — Returns the text of the error message from previous MySQL operation

mysql_escape_string — Escapes a string for use in a mysql_query

mysql_fetch_array — Fetch a result row as an associative array, a numeric array, or both

mysql_fetch_assoc — Fetch a result row as an associative array

mysql_fetch_field — Get column information from a result and return as an object

mysql_fetch_lengths — Get the length of each output in a result

mysql_fetch_object — Fetch a result row as an object

mysql_fetch_row — Get a result row as an enumerated array

mysql_field_flags — Get the flags associated with the specified field in a result

mysql_field_len — Returns the length of the specified field

mysql_field_name — Get the name of the specified field in a result

mysql_field_seek — Set result pointer to a specified field offset

mysql_field_table — Get name of the table the specified field is in

mysql_field_type — Get the type of the specified field in a result

mysql_free_result — Free result memory

mysql_get_client_info — Get MySQL client info

mysql_get_host_info — Get MySQL host info

mysql_get_proto_info — Get MySQL protocol info

mysql_get_server_info — Get MySQL server info

mysql_info — Get information about the most recent query

mysql_insert_id — Get the ID generated in the last query

mysql_list_dbs — List databases available on a MySQL server

mysql_list_fields — List MySQL table fields

mysql_list_processes — List MySQL processes

mysql_list_tables — List tables in a MySQL database

mysql_num_fields — Get number of fields in result

mysql_num_rows — Get number of rows in result

mysql_pconnect — Open a persistent connection to a MySQL server

mysql_ping — Ping a server connection or reconnect if there is no connection

mysql_query — Send a MySQL query

mysql_real_escape_string — Escapes special characters in a string for use in a SQL statement

mysql_result — Get result data

mysql_select_db — Select a MySQL database

mysql_set_charset — Sets the client character set

mysql_stat — Get current system status

mysql_tablename — Get table name of field

mysql_thread_id — Return the current thread ID

mysql_unbuffered_query — Send an SQL query to MySQL without fetching and buffering the result rows.

Function: rand — Generate a random integer

Description

int rand ( void )

int rand ( int $min , int $max )

If called without the optional min , max arguments rand() returns a pseudo-random integer between 0 and getrandmax(). If you want a random number between 5 and 15 (inclusive), for example, use rand(5, 15).

Note: On some platforms (such as Windows), getrandmax() is only 32768. If you require a range larger than 32768, specifying min and max will allow you to create a range larger than this, or consider using mt_rand() instead.

Parameters

min

The lowest value to return (default: 0)

max

The highest value to return (default: getrandmax())

Return Values

A pseudo random value between min (or 0) and max (or getrandmax(), inclusive).

Changelog

Version Description

4.2.0 The random number generator is seeded automatically.

Examples

Example #1 rand() example

< ?php

echo rand() . "\n";

echo rand() . "\n";

echo rand(5, 15);
?>
The above example will output something similar to:

7771

22264

11

See Also

srand() – Seed the random number generator

getrandmax() – Show largest possible random value

mt_rand() – Generate a better random value