So… I truly thought I was prepared for my dad to pass away, but it was such a reality check when I looked at it with the perspective that I am only 42 years old (which IS still young!) and both of my parents are now gone. We lost our mother in February 2007 to a rare disease called Wegener’s Granulomatosis. For her, it attacked the kidneys and she fought a tough battle over two years. She had just started preparing her body to accept a kidney transplant and was …

Well… we knew it was coming and very late on Thursday, January 17th, 2008, my father waited until most of us left his room, took his last breath and said goodbye in his own way. It was all very funny the way it happened… Several of us had been in his room all day, knowing that his departure was imminent. The booklet provided by hospice was truly a roadmap to the completion of his circle of life and the signs we read about… were right in front of us.
At 11:30 PM, …

I’ve not seen alot of discussion about lately – but at some point on Friday night or early Saturday AM (Jan 11-12th 08) there seems to have been a Google PR and backlink update. I use the google toolbar in my browser as a quick reference guide when I visit sites… it is a good “quick glance” measure for checking page cache etc.  On Saturday AM, I notiuced several of my BANS sites having PR1 and PR2 so I jumped over to a few datacenter PR tools and sure enough, there …

As I was reading the PC mag earlier this week I stumbled upon an article about reading and contributing on the web… The majority of people, including power users, who browse the web do so by reading only and never really contributing their knowledge or thoughts. The magazine had the ratio at something like 95% of Internet surfers are readers only… imagine if more of us actually started blogging about our own skills and shared them with the world!
It made me realize that only about 10% of my time is …

Earlier today, I was reading at one of my favorite places… www.ShoeMoney.com. While I am nothing more than another anonymous visitor to Jeremy, his insight and thoughts will occasionally get me to not only think outside the box, but daydream about the possibilities of success!
Today, he wrote a piece about getting value out of scrapers. Until I read the post this afternoon, I had not even considered anyone would want to copy content from this site. Guess what… I was wrong! Scraping is the practice of copying content from one page and …

It’s been a few busy days for sure! I flew back home again on Tuesday and spent several hours in the airport reading the new PC World magazine that offered the opinions of many technology industry leaders (Bill Gates, Michael Dell etc)  on what the next 25 years would bring in the world of technology. I can’t find the article online, but if you find yourself stuck in an airport, pick up the January edition… it led me to register a few more domain names (my favorite pastime lately)
Today will be the …

Well… in just one day of posting an inbound link from a couple of highly indexed sites, the Cobra Mustang site saw 4 additional search spiders come in overnight, 2 were listed as unidentified bots, Yahoo and Alexa were identified. So, now that I have started the main categories, where do I go next?
First let me reiterate one of my main goals for ALL websites, not just this one or any other BANS site. I want to do as much as I can each day for the first week, in 1 hour a day …

Hi All -
It’s a Saturday afternoon and I’m bored while waiting for the playoff football games. Whats a person to do except try to help anyone who may be having a hard time optimizing the default Build a Niche Store category tree! I apologize if I skimmed over it all too quickly during the Build a Niche Store Process series and these next few posts will be very specifically focused on how to take your category tree from the most basic BANS setup into what you REALLY want for your niche store, …

Hi Everyone -
Well… as my luck would have it, I loaded up the car (02 Mercury Mountaineer) this morning, kissed the wife goodbye, heck, I even kissed the dogs! I get out to the driveway and go to get into the car… dead battery! OK, not a big deal, I will just jump start it and get on my way, after all, I have not driven this truck in about 2 weeks and its perfectly normal for the battery to struggle on a cold morning. I got it jumped pretty easily, but the battery …

Hello Everyone and Happy New Year!
Not much has changed in respect to the situation with my fathers health. His health has gone from bad to worse and we are just trying to pull together as a family and surround him with love and care during these last days. I came home just before Christmas to be with my wife and children (7 of them kids running around) through the holiday. Tomorrow, I will be heading back to Massachusetts and staying as long as needed. The break was definitely needed…
So… what has 2008 got in store …