One of the biggest competitions running in the blogosphere is the “Blogging Idol” competition that is being hosted by DailyBlogTips along with a few sponsors. The idea? Essentially, this contest is focused on being the better blogger. Whoever owns a blog and manages to raise more RSS subscribers in July than anybody else will get themselves a nice $1,500 cash prize. The final count is 108 entries, gunning for the big prize.

One the official contest launch page, there is a listing of everyone in the competition (including myself), along with their progress to date with a comparison to the first of the month. I decided to join this contest not because of the $1,500 incentive, but just because I could. Sending a quick email to Dan Scocco, the owner and contest moderator, was simple enough… and I could track my performance against my peers. I wholeheartedly support Dan and most of the other competitors, but this thing has begun to reek of a scam fix-job more than anything I have seen this year.

Why Is Blogging Idol a Joke?!
Before you raise your arms and start voicing your anger that I could possibly demean the competition, hear me out. I absolutely love the idea of competing to see who is the best start-to-finish blogger out there with some win-win competition. However, a lot of the methods being used to juice RSS numbers just aren’t fair and shouldn’t be judged as such. I’ve broken things down into three main reasons why I feel that Blogging Idol has become more of a scramble for numbers than a case study of blogging: a flawed premise, an open participation and unreasonable competitive practices.

1. The Overall Premise is Flawed
To decide who wins this competition, it was decided to go with the most dramatic increase in RSS subscriber numbers. From the get-go, we should be a bit uncomfortable with the notion that all progress will be thought of only in terms of subscriber numbers. Granted, I feel that RSS is the best method to show growth in a blog’s popularity. However, feed numbers are extremely volatile and can be manipulated with ease. I don’t like being the whistle-blower, but the whole thing is flawed from the get-go.

I get the strange feeling that people are using this to their advantage in manipulating their results. Let’s take an example from the actual competition where I suspect cheating is involved. The two front-runners to this point are Romeuy.com and StockMarketIndia.net. In both cases, the blogs appear less professional than typical industry standards, have excessive advertising, and little to no active comments. In fact, in the case of StockMarketIndia, I found 14 straight posts with no comments whatsoever! Romeuy leads the pack, boasting a gain of 241 subscribers in just one week… one week. With an Alexa.com rank of 406,606 and just one post in July, I simply can’t see this as legitimate. Not far behind, StockMarketIndia has seen a boost of 167 readers in the same time period with little to show in terms of actual traffic. Now i’m not saying either of these bloggers are fudging numbers, but the $1,500 prize creates quite an incentive to do just that.

A lot of the growth that is represented in RSS subscriber numbers is completely valid. There are, however, cases like the two mentioned that seem to be outlandish at best. I may be poking fun at our top-two blogs, but the fact remains that there is a huge mismatch in many cases between subscriber numbers and traffic growth. The solution? This contest should be a mix of RSS subscriber growth AND actual traffic flow.

2. Unprofessional Blogs Are Allowed To Participate
My main concern is not with people faking stats, it’s the fact that the enrollment was completely open… Blogging Idol didn’t take no for an answer. I have absolutely no problem with newer bloggers with under 50 subscribers entering the contest, my concern is with blogs that are riddled with poor content and excessive ads. The problem is that without some barriers to entry, a lot of competitors in Blogging Idol don’t have legitimate blogs to grow.

The problem? A virtual kamikaze RSS-attack can be undertaken by blogs that have no reputation on the internet. A simple interview/application process could have taken the trash out of Blogging Idol with relative ease. If things didn’t pass standards, certain entries could have been barred. The problem with this, is that blogs are essentailly demeaning themselves with begging for rss readers that it is hurting the blog’s reputation. By throwing things like a free link for subscribing out, small-time or unprofessional blogs are able to pick up dozens of RSS readers without batting an eyelash. Blogs that are more reputable in the competition such as The University Kid or Elite By Design cannot do this, less they risk reputation.

In effect, I think that it was in poor taste to allow anyone and everyone into this competition. While second-tier blogs are able to throw free advertising and other gimmicks at potential readers to artificially boost their numbers, top-tier bloggers (who should understandably be better at blogging) are unable to step down a level to grovel for fear of flooding their websites with excessive linking or content.

3. Unreasonable Anti-Competitive Methods Are Being Used to Win
The Blogging Idol isn’t a competition to decide who is the best blogger, it has become a contest of who can gain the most RSS subscribers… which isn’t what this should be about. I’m all for blogging contests to rally some interest, or guest posting on other blogs to expand your network. There are plenty of tricks of the trade to get people over to your blog. The problem lies in doing things like offering free text links for subscribers, soliciting people on social media, encouraging standing readers to double-subscribe with email and spamming feedburner links in public arenas.

The methods being employed by certain Blogging Idol competitors are anti-competitive in nature. What I mean by this is that people are offering unreasonable incentives to subscribe that will boost numbers for the short term, but cause a fall in the long term. I’m not about to break down and spam a subscription link to people on my mailing list, and doing so is a way of gaining subscribers… not readers. The difference between a subscriber and a reader is that a subscriber is simply a number, a reader is someone that actually uses your website for information.

These types of unreasonable anti-competitive practices focused on boosting RSS numbers could effectively have been stopped with the previous two solutions I have mentioned: an application process and an additional judging parameter.

Bottom Line: It’s a shame that one of the better sounding blogging competitions is being scored in such a manner, because it really undermines those blogs out there that have an established reader base. The way Blogging Idol has decided to rank winners is allowing for unfairly incentivised subscriptions and the propensity for cheating the system with such a large cash prize in the headlights. Rant over.

-The Net Fool

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This post is meant for educational purposes only. I have not ever used black hat methods to drive revenue/traffic and do not openly endorse the actions described in this article. Furthermore, I propose black hat strictly in the short-term.

A lot of people ask about black hat SEO as a means toward outsized short-term gains. Many consider black hat to be unethical, but I feel that it is important to understand the inner-workings of websites. The reason people want to hear about “black hat” methods (as opposed to “white hat,” or more ethical) is precisely this… it seems illegal. I want to assure you that most black hat methods are completely legal, just unethical and frowned upon by major networks.

What Is Black Hat SEO?
We need to start with a basic question, what exactly do I mean by black hat SEO? Essentially, this is a phrase that describes using “unfair” techniques to drive results in search engine listings among other things. Most typically, the traffic or artificial clicks that you gain from using black hat methods are extremely temporary… used for short term gains. There is always the risk of being banned from networks like YouTube, Google or StumbleUpon, so caution and patience are always recommended.

Many successful bloggers have used black hat methods at some time in their careers. It seems that you are almost foolish if you shun the techniques altogether, so I encourage you to keep an open mind. I believe that we all need to be willing to step down from our pedestal sometimes, as there are cases that white hat is just too impractical to cut it. With an open mind, let’s have a look at some black hat SEO techniques for making money online!

Popular Black Hat Methods
There are literally hundreds of variations in black hat techniques, as the phrase is applied to anything in business that appears unfair or shady in nature. I want to have a look at some of the more traditional methods, though I might explore particular methods in-depth in separate articles on theNetFool.com.

Keyword Stuffing
Stuffing keywords is a bit like spamming a search engine. To keyword stuff is to take a targeted term phrase, let’s use “make money” as an example, and repeat it excessively throughout your page in an attempt to maximize your search engine ranking positions (SERP). You can have the targeted term reflected in your page, meta tags, alt, titles, links and more. Though it may be considered slightly “old school” as there are many filters nowadays to defeat this practice… it is very possible to achieve a degree of keyword stuffing that won’t get you banned and will help your search engine rankings.

Doorway or Gateway Pages
Some webmasters have been able to manufacture so-called “doorway” or “gateway” pages that are little more than invisible pages that are only seen by search engine spiders and are used to increase SEO ranks. By heavily optimizing a website page for a search engine, it is very possible to artificially boost your SERPs while redirecting real visitors safely to your website before they know any better.

Google has been known to support the growth of these artificial gateway pages by redesigning their algorithm to favor overall trust over actual content… letting black hat professionals exploit previously established websites for high placements. There are even services like The Content Solution that automatically generate loads of keyword-rich content, supposedly desirable by search engines.

Cookie Stuffing
The practice of cookie stuffing is one of the more easily mastered black hat SEO techniques on the web that involves secretly embedding a cookie into a visitor’s web browser without them ever knowing about it or even having to click a link. In other words, you can use a fake image in a forum signature and have every view of the image count just as if someone had clicked it. Devious, eh?

People (like myself) like to keep the actual method of cookie stuffing on the down low. I am not going to tell you the method, nor will I respond to any email requests. I will however, summarize the general idea.

Cookie stuffing happens everywhere, a lot more than you would expect. By using it, you can effectively get thousands of false and undeserved affiliate impressions to a banner you have visible on a website. This is one of those methods that can be illegal if worked to an extreme degree. The average web surfer won’t have a cookie notifier enabled, so it is generally pretty easy to score some free clicks from embedding your own (especially if done through flash software).

What is essentially being done behind the scenes, is some clever work with an .htaccess file on a remote server that redirects all views of an image to an affiliate link. This referral link is in fact exposed, which makes it risky. However, you can effectively go about stealing sales money away from deserving advertisers if you are using cookie stuffing to re-route things in your favor.

Invisible Text
Not as advanced as stuffing keywords, using invisible text is one of the more simple techniques thought of as black hat. Essentially, “invisible” text refers to writing up lists of keywords on particular websites in the color white, or the background color, so that they cannot be seen on the page (without highlighting, of course). By using invisible text, it is possible to feed through lots of rich content to search engines and users. However, this technique is becoming more easily detected every day.

Black Hat Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Management
We think of PPC campaigns as having rules. Some rules help you run more effective advertising campaigns; others will actually set up competitive barriers. Black hat PPC management is the art of doing away with the rules set up by networks to gain competitive advantages.

There are several ways to exploit PPC campaigns to gain an edge. The first is to remove the requirement of direct url’s for your ads. To do this, we need to set up a layer between us and our affiliate network so that it is possible to make changes to the target link without losing revenue. You can also do things like use a non-budget-function strategy to optimize your earnings or cloak PPC editors to covertly apply pop-up ads to your campaigns. Try this article to explore PPC black hat further.

Comment Spam
If you run a blog or have ever commented around the blogosphere, you know exactly what I mean when I refer to comment spam. We all see the irrelevant messages with complex “names” that look like they were written by a two-year old. These comments are being automatically generated for the purpose of collecting backlinks to other websites being promoted. By dropping massive amounts of comments, it is possible to boost SERP rankings and traffic by making Google think you own an established and rooted website.

There are many scripts that people use to seek out blogs that have comments easily available (no word-verification, dofollow, etc.). Here’s one. Whoops . But seriously, these comment spam generators have their days numbered with the flurry of spam-defeating blockers like Akismet that store logs on anyone found to be spamming. Use at your own detriment.

Why Is Black Hat So Unfair?
A lot of the times, black hat doesn’t actually void terms of service. However, more often than not it is considered an unethical practice that will get you banned nonetheless. A lot of these methods do not follow the rules and regulations of major search engines… as they attempt to artificially sugar-coat hastily made websites. User experience is key, and if you want to maximize your user base in the long run… white hat is the only way to fly as you will eventually get noticed.

Tools You Can Use At Your Own Risk
The guys at Digerati Marketing have composed a zipped file that contains a dozen or so known black hat tools that can help anyone interested get a foothold in the industry. This package is publicly available on their website. And while I don’t want you using the tools inside, it might not be a bad idea to see what other people are doing by having a look.

Bottom Line: Hopefully you now understand the advantages and pitfalls of black hat SEO techniques that are being used all around the internet. If you are trying to establish and maintain a successful and user-friendly website… you would be a fool to invest in black hat methods. However, many have found great success by employing a few of these techniques to win over some short term success.

-The Net Fool

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Foolish readers,

Happy Sunday! I’m writing this right now from sunny (and humid) Connecticut, enjoying a nice long weekend courtesy of the 4th of July. This week was a killer in many ways, but with the emergence of the Blogging Idol competition that I am half-heartedly supporting… let’s press on!

As always, I’m going to use today’s post to reiterate some of the best posts that I have found from the week ending July 5, 2008. With a lot of talk circulating around the blogging world as two major events have just recently launched… let’s get to the brighter spots and put our profits in the fast lane.

• Mixed Market Arts - Creating Effective Landing Pages
• Uber Affiliate - Top Affiliate Challenge Sucks
• Court’s IM School - Three Keys to Serious Freelance Writing Income
• Caroline Middlebrook - Social Bookmarking Can Kill StumbleUpon Traffic
• The University Kid - Build a List and Make More Money

There were a lot of posts this week that were, well, redundant. Namely those circulating around the Top Affiliate Challenge (which I’ll get into later). These are what I feel are the “best of breed” selections for the week… and there’s definitely quite a lot to learn by looking into the five.

Stock Market
This week was my worst week to date, without a doubt. The stock market is looking more and more like a bear market, to the point that we have now officially crossed into bear market territory (-20% from old high). Sure, crossing into -20% territory technically shouldn’t be any more significant from being down 19%… but investors tend to take the symbolism a lot more dramatically than it should be. Because of this, the U.S. as well as international markets have been absolutely clobbered.

Fortunately for me, NVidia (NYSE: NVDA) decided to pre-announce lower than expected earnings… and were down over 30% on Thursday (I jest). Things could have been worse, as they were the smallest of my holdings. Yet this in combination with the rest of the market being down did a world of hurt to my finances. At this point, I strongly encourage all investors to hold/sell into November of 2008. I simply don’t see things picking up, and would ONLY recommend buying commodity-related stocks like oil drillers and mineral miners. Things surely are messy!

Blogosphere
The blogging world was definitely quite interesting this week. With the launch of two major projects, a lot of people are in a frenzy to put out good material… which is definitely a plus for all of us. The first project is called “Blogging Idol.” In this contest, about 80 bloggers (including myself) have signed up to try to boost RSS numbers more than anyone else. The prize is $1,500 from a few sponsors, and has really raised some eyebrows. If you haven’t subscribed to my feed, go ahead and do that to support me! The fact remains, I feel that too many people are using cut-throat methods that are borderline blackhat in order to artificially boost their numbers to win. I really don’t think this is fair, and it’s sort of self-defeating in my mind.

The second competition that went live this month was the much-hyped “Top Affiliate Challenge,” a contest with a dozen or so affiliate marketers in Nebraska, trying to make the most money to win. This contest is sponsored by Azoogle Ads, but has really turned into a joke. Everyone from the contest that I have talked to is unhappy being cornered in a rural environment (no offense to all you Nebraskans) with little to do than pour thousands of dollars into a contest that really isn’t going anywhere. First of all, bloggers are unhappy that the website loads slowly, to the point that it takes hours upon hours to load a simple 30 minute episode. Other than that, the rules and regulations are twisted, the camera work is poor, and the competition in general is boring and un-educational to say the least.

The Week In Focus
I really can’t do a whole lot of planning until I get back from Connecticut. As it happens, I am writing this on Saturday to launch on Sunday just to keep up . Despite the fact that I think the Blogging Idol competition is weak… I do want to give it a solid run, so I am going to give you all a few great money-making strategies this week. I know that a lot of you appreciated my “Speed Up Your Blog” post (18 comments!), so I may put up another useful post on another way that you can improve your website’s performance.

I would have loved to make this week a video post, but since I am away with no internet connection (using an internet cafe right now), that really isn’t very practical from my standpoint. Perhaps I’ll give a stock market run-down one day of the week. I know that a lot of that goes over many of your heads, but I like to simplify things for the blogging crew while satisfying my stock market junkies to keep everyone happy. Besides, the economy is the most important thing right now, and everyone should be somewhat educated on what is happening in the markets all over the world.

That’s all she wrote… stay bullish on the net!
-The Net Fool

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If you’ve ever been interested in making money online, chances are you know of the affiliate marketing programs out there serving aspiring entrepreneurs worldwide. Fact: a slim 5% of marketers gain 95% of the revenue there is to make in this business. Harnessing the power of marketing is the biggest potential source of web revenue, bottom line.

It’s a shame that the industry has dominated for years by four players: Commission Junction (the “Google” of internet marketing), Shareasale, Linkshare and Performics. However, looking back on first quarter 2008 results shows that there is now a fifth player… snagging a whopping 17.5% of top marketers according to  a recent study done by MarketingSherpa.com. Who is it? Pepperjam. And when the CEO of this company, Kris Jones, contacted me personally about a review… I knew this high-flier was for real.

How Pepperjam Stole The Show
How exactly is it that a 5-month old internet marketing wannabe steals 17.5% of the total internet marketing industry away from the likes of Commission Junction and ShareASale? When I read this recent MarketingSherpa report on the first quarter, I was stunned. What’s more impressive is the customers that Pepperjam services. They’ve got big-name contracts with companies like Pet Meds, Roca Wear, Playboy, Countrywide Financial (bless their hearts) and even the Washington Redskins.

Even with these big names in hand, it’s tough to make the case that Pepperjam is actually going to be able to compete with these big dogs long-term. They are still a long way out, but growth has been impressive knowing they’ve only been around half a year. Biggest driver for second quarter earnings? Ebay has now signed on with Pepperjam, switching out of a relationship with Commission Junction. Will this boost them up over a 20% market share usage among the pros? We’ll have to wait to see.

Safety In Numbers
Pepperjam was one of the first affiliate networks that I ever used, mostly due to their very proactive marketing campaigns early on. I have since switched over to Market Leverage because of their awesome support, but looking back on PepperJam’s website I can see that they have made quite the face-lift. Their old website featured a dark color scheme, which wasn’t too welcoming. Along with a new look to their website, They’ve got a more active campaigning approach that I really enjoy. Considered an authority by Forbes, CNN Money, Business 2.0 & more, and now established as “one of the top 5 major affiliate networks in the United States,” you should check Pepperjam out.

Personally, I like sticking to my numbers… as you are much less likely to get burned on payment by a major company. This fact is a major part of why I am re-recommending that you sign up with Pepperjam. There’s nothing wrong with joining multiple networks… heck, the best in the business do it! In the first quarter of 2008 alone, Pepperjam launched an astonishing 175 new advertisers… making it the fastest growing network in the United States.

But How Are Internet Marketing Company’s Compared?
MarketingSherpa.com broke rankings down into four categories for judging: merchants/advertisers in network, customer service, technology and payment. What was very interesting is how little the best affiliate marketers seem to care about customer service. Apparently, most of the biggest marketing companies have been rated “average” by the clients. This leaves a lot of room for smaller “infant” networks like Market Leverage and Pepperjam to break into the rankings by providing over-the-top customer support to those that want it… and I gotta say I like the attention.

One thing that you can get from Pepperjam that you can’t get from a bloated market authority is a personal touch. PepperJam assigns each account with a unique associate to guide you through your campaigning. But you can really talk to anyone you need, as I’ve even talked with the CEO of the business. I like the personal touch. I might not be the most advanced internet marketer, but I think that everyone appreciates being treated like one.

Bottom Line: The growth Pepperjam has experienced over the short 5-months since their creation is quite impressive. By signing on with some big names like eBay and NetQuote, it’s clear that they might pose a threat to the traditional industry heavyweights. I want to encourage all of you to sign up with the fastest growing affiliate network in the U.S., there’s a lot of upside from a quick registration.

-The Net Fool

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Is your blog or website a big clunky mess that always seems to load slowly? It’s not just you, the load time on your blog can absolutely destroy your “curb appeal” and bring down your blog’s value. After experiencing outages here at theNetFool.com, I’ve decided to switch web hosts. However, there are plenty of tricks you can apply to get some oil back in your site’s gears, and start seeing more traffic.

Suppose you have a brand new house in the hills worth $5k after appraisal. That’s a pretty nice chunk of change, but it just so happens that there is a lot wrong. Maybe you are lazy, maybe you just don’t care, but the outside paint is chipping away and the lawn is dry and full of weeds. It’s amazing how simple curb appeal can tarnish the value of an otherwise great asset. This same story holds true with a webmaster that is running a website covered in weeds. Being on a faulty server or free hosting account is going to bring down the value of your blog. People simply don’t want to wait more than 3 seconds for a website to load anymore, so having the large files, the cheap hosting and the repetitive coding is going to hurt.

Ditch Your Free Web Hosting!
There is a reason why I am switching web hosts. Currently, I’m on a server that has too many users, and goes out all the time (as you’ve probably experienced) as a result. This was okay for starting up, but I’ve put up with it for far too long. Hosting is all relatively cheap nowadays, so I am going to go for that nice 100mbps connection when I choose a web host. It’s a bit amazing how many people will choose based on price, not quality. Speed is important, as you don’t want a car just because it’s shiny… check out the engine first!

Free or cheap-to-a-fault web hosting will catch up with every blogger sooner or later. A few outages, and Google can totally miss indexing you, which is going to hurt your search engine rankings. Loss of visitors from outages or slow performance is probably the single biggest toll. Again, the majority of readers don’t like to stick around to see a massive blog load all the way through. Discounted hosts can be a death sentence for an aspiring webmaster, but there are many good deals out there. I recommend: Host Gator, 1and1.com, GoDaddy.com, BlueHost.com and DreamHost. With current deals out there, nobody pays sticker price. I could get a 2-year “Baby” plan at Host Gator down from $214.80 to $121.84 by applying a 20%-off coupon and buying a package through my own affiliate link.

Test Your Website’s Speed Now!
There’s a lot you can do outside of switching hosts to speed things up on your website. Simple optimization techniques can make an enormous impact to how fast your blog will appear. iWebTool’s Speed Test is my favorite, so go ahead and enter in your blog along with some professional website’s that you’d like to match. Chances are, you can see some big improvement just by taking some simple steps… so let’s work on getting you “up to speed” (oh man, please excuse my humor).

Optimize Your Images
The single most important step in tweaking your website’s speed is to optimize your images. With Adobe Photoshop, it’s pretty easy to get high-quality images that look identical to the big master files, though there are plenty of other programs that can do the same. Try the Online Image Optimizer or JPEG Wizard for free optimization on the internet!

There’s a big debate as to which image types are the best to use: GIF, JPG or PNG I’m a sucker for the ultra-low file size offered by JPG images, but it’s recommended to only use the extension for photos. GIF and PNG are great for web-images (like navigation bars and spacers), so what you choose is up to you. Never, and I mean never, put a BMP file up on your website.

Typically speaking, images are the bulk of the loading process. If you can cut the size of your images in half, you are going to see a dramatic boost in your page load time. All the images in my blog posts are set to 60%-70% JPG quality… so clearly you don’t need perfection to entertain your visitors.

Optimizing Your Coding/Content
There are thousands of tips and tricks that people swear by in juicing up the speed of a website with coding. I’m not going to waste your time on petty things that don’t show up in the end-result… so let’s hit the top five ways to speed up your website:

1. Use CSS (cascading style sheets) for your designs
   - Adding a CSS style is an effective way to load images and work to reduce repetitive code in your template. Having things set up in an external .css file can be the best way to jump-start your blog. Check out this free CSS cleaning tool.
2. Enter image size proportions (height & width) in your code
   - A lot of people simply forget to add the height and width tags to their images. By having “<img src=”x.jpg” />”, you are forcing your server to do extra work to figure out the size. Why not tell it from the get-go what you want? “<img height=”5″ width=”20″ src=”x.jpg” />” is a lot more efficient and will load your website much quicker.
3. Use external scripts, don’t try to pack it all in!
   - Never try to include all of your scripts in the coding on one file. It’s much better to save all of your scripts individual, and link them in later so that they can be cached in the browser for faster speeds. If you are using the same script over and over, why not load it from one spot?
4. Use a backslash in your links
   - List all of your links with a backslash “http://www.thenetfool.com/”. Without the slash, you are making the server figure out whether this is a file name, a whosee or a whatsit… when all you want is the directory!
5. Avoid “tables” and repetitive html code
   - If your website is contained in one big “<table>” tag, be wary. Websites generally won’t load until the server processes the whole chunk of code inside. Instead, try cutting things up into smaller tables, or use “<div>” to clean it up.

With these tricks in hand, you can significantly improve the loading time of your website. You’d be surprised what some simple organization can do to your speeds… and your traffic will jump as a result!

Are Your “Caching” all this?
If you want to have your whole website run a lot more efficiently, why not experiment with a WordPress plugin like “WP Super Cache” or “WP Cache” to load all of your files quicker from the get-go? Cache services like these can help initial downloads load faster from your server. In addition, people viewing multiple pages are going to see much better performance if things on your website are being cached in their browser effectively.

The plugins mentioned above attempt to do many methods of caching all at once. If you’d like a more exact process, check out this great cache guide from arnebrachhold.de. Using a cache to have your files more easily manipulated is a popular movement, as is using .gzip compression to mash down the file sizes of your content. As far as compression goes, a lot of that is technical mumbo-jumbo that I don’t want to five into. If you are interested in .gzip, check out this reference guide!

Bottom Line: Why settle for a $5k house, when with a few updates (faster loading speeds) you can have a full $1 million? I’m a current offender of this rule, which is why I am electing to upgrade to a faster web host. Try experimenting with optimized images and optimized coding to get your blog running faster and more efficient than ever before, and keep your visitors happy!

-The Net Fool

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