There are several resources that I’ve learned a lot about domaining. One trusted source of mine is my friend, John Motson, the guy behind DNXpert.

If you’ve been a reader of MeAndMyDrum for a while, you may recall me mentioning his book Domaining Manifesto, an ebook that’s packed with all sorts of tips and wisdom about the domaining industry. It’s especially good for beginners, but even the experienced can glean some benefits from it, too. It teaches you how to go about finding a domain, buying or selling one, what you want to avoid, and lots more.

John emailed me recently to inform me that he’s giving away Domaining Manifesto. Yes, you can get this book which used to sell for upwards of $47 for FREE by using this link. But it’s only for a limited time.

He’s got something cooking in the weeks ahead. And if I know John as well as I think I do, it’s not going to be anything less than impressive. Afterall, not only does he crank out domaining news at a break-neck pace, but he’s also one of the ones who first held those mega prize contests you’ve seen over the past year. This guy knows how to get people’s attention and delivers the goods.

Go grab your free copy of Domaining Manifesto now before he takes down the link!

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Here are a few that I’m currently using.

Superstars
Up til now we’ve only had the yellow stars to add to messages. Well, this feature gives you a few more choices: blue star, red star, red bang, and green check mark. Now you can put a little more meaning behind these icons and make your inbox a little more productive.

Mouse Gestures
I don’t know if this conflicts with other mouse gesture plugins for Firefox (it may just depend on how you have them configured), but this is a very cool feature enabling you to move forward and backward when reading messages. Just right-click and hold and then drag left or right to go to previous or next, respectively. Drag up and you’re taken to the inbox. Very fast and easy to use.

Mark as Read Button
Tired of fumbling for the “mark as read” item in the dropdown menu? Yeah, me too. This nifty features gives you an easy-to-access button along with the others at the top so you can quickly mark your messages as read.

There are a total of 25 enhancements. Others that I haven’t tried, but show promise are: forgotten attachment detector, quote selected text, hide unread counts, and signature tweaks.

Check them out and let me know what you think.

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Okay, just kidding, but you get the point, right?

Seriously though, this is a service that means business by offering you things like:

• A web-based file manager that’s very intuitive
• Drag-and-drop and keyboard commands
• More sharing options
• Link or embed your content from other sites
• Download your content for burning to CD/DVD
• Hookup to social network accounts: Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Picasa
• Create slideshows

Not too shabby.

There’s one other online storage service I found recently (high five to Big Ben Patton) called File Savr. They’re offering a special deal of 250 GB. And if you sign up before September 15, you can get it for free for life!

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The only times I mention contests here on MeAndMyDrum is when they’re big. And the one I have to tell you about now is BIG!

It’s being held by Keith James Lock of KeithJamesLock.com. The grand prize list is worth $1,900. And get this: all of it is going to one person!

• $83.88 Value - 1 year GoDaddy Linux Deluxe Hosting Plan that allows you to host unlimited web sites.
• $1.99 Value - 1 domain name registration for 1 year. Choose between .com, .org, .net or .info
• $29.97 Value - 3 domain name registrations for 1 year. Choose between .com, .org, .net or .info
• $270.00 Value - 1 Traditional Blog setup, 1 Review Site setup, 1 BANS (Build A Niche Store) site setup
• $97.00 Value - 1 BANS license
• $39.00 Value - 1 custom landing page and unique article for any niche from LPCreations.com.
• $29.95 Value - 1 RoboForm password manager/form filler license.
• $20.00 Value - 1 T-Shirt from GroovyTs t-shirts.
• $30.00 Value - 1 All-Access-Pass for 1 year from Animoto.com.
• $689.00 Value - 1 BANS theme AND matching Wordpress theme and upgrade of BANS site to BANS/Wordpress blog combination from TheNicheStoreBuilder.com.
• $30.00 Value - 6 keywords from TheSocialMillionaire.com.
• $497.00 Value - 1 copy of SpeedPPC - PPC Marketing Campaign Builder Pro Version.
• $37.00 Value - 3 premium BANS templates from IanFernando.com.
• $50.00 Value - 1 hour consulting with the author of TheUniversityKid.com - Young Entrepreneur Blog
• $35.00 Value - 1 BANS template (theme) and 1 custom header image from DesignerNiches.com who offers affordable Build A Niche Store templates.

The contest ends in a couple of days. But on second thought, take your time, in fact, don’t even bother entering because it would lessen my chances of winning.

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I’ve heard good things about the Flip video camera. They compact, easy to use, and have great features making it easy for a video novice to quickly make a video and upload to your favorite video sites.

I’m beginning to see more and more references about Market Leverage, too. They’re clearly trying to increase awareness and I’d have to say that they’re doing a pretty good job of it. It seems like I find a blog everyday that either is advertising it or blogging about it. I’ve already signed up with them myself and eager to see what my partnership with them will bring. I plan on writing more about them myself, so I’ll give you my own perspective on what you can do to make money online with them.

Turning focus on The Net Fool.

Jim’s off to a great start having established his blog back in October of 2007. He’s a student of finance at Penn State University which explains his interest in the topic. That’s so important, too. If you’re not interested what you blog about, then it makes for a difficult time.

In addition to finding information about stock markets and finance and such, you’ll find some blogging tips as well. He has an interesting take on what to charge for paid posts. You’ll learn the pros and cons for over-charging or under-charging to write your reviews. For those of you considering doing paid reviews, I think you’d do well to read his post.

So about the contest.

It’s easy to enter and as it seems to be the norm these days, there are a number of ways to obtain more chances to win. The easiest way is to subscribe to his feed via email. I’d encourage you to visit his post for more details.

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Save your stuff
When you want to save something, you can click on the icon provided in bottom-right corner of your Firefox browser. But there’s an even better way to do that by way of a keyboard shortcut. Find something you like? Just press CTRL+Spacebar and you’re done! If you have more than one tab open and you press CTRL+Spacebar+Spacebar, the information is saved AND the tab closes by itself.

View your stuff
When you’re ready to read the stuff you saved, you just right-click on that icon in the bottom-right and select “Your LaterLoop” and you’re swiftly taken to your list of saved links (click here for a sample). While there, you can mark things with stars to indicate that you want to do something with that bit of information later. You can even use this on your iPhone and other smartphones.

I posted a while back about another Firefox add-on called ReadIt Later. I haven’t been too pleased with it lately. Either it’s faulty, or perhaps the data it has saved for me has become corrupt because I have maybe a dozen or so saved articles, but it doesn’t allow me to go through them. I’m giving LaterLoop a try for now.

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I’ve found some nice choices for you to consider that I’d like to share with you, which are all FREE!

Writer: A simple name with a simple interface. Pictured above, you can see that it’s distraction-free enabling you to just focus on your words. One of the things I look for in a text editor is word count and this one has it — and I don’t have to select the text first! I also like the choices of colors to make it easy on the eye. The toolbar lights up when you roll over it with your mouse, but then fades after a few seconds.

You can also save your files online (create a free account), send the files in a number of ways (even to your WordPress blog), download it or convert it to a PDF. This is one of my favorites.

Q10: This one is a software download and loads very fast. Plus it maximizes on your screen by default — another distraction-free interface. Once I discovered that F1 gives you a list of the shortcuts Q10 offers, that really opened the door for me to know how to tweak it. For example, you change change color combinations, search and replace, go through a list of recent files, spellcheck, and you can even toggle the tiny toolbar on and off if it’s just too much for you. Other features are included as well. So go check it out!

DarkCopy: a very slimmed down version of the previous two choices is DarkCopy. It, too, offers an easy-on-the-eye interface which is green text on black background. No other choices for colors though. No other bells and whistles, so if you’re in a hurry to find only a text editor, this is one to keep in mind. You can download your file and choose to do a full-screen.

Notepad++: this one here is my old standby. Actually, I do use it quite often; it depends on my mood. By far, this one has a plethora of options, including recording macros and all types of plugins. It’s great for coding. Among the basics are line numbers, word wrap at a width you determine, hiding lines, moving chunks of text by a simple keyboard command, and so much more.

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I’m in the car right now writing this to you or to be more accurate I’m having a service called Jott type it for me. It’s actually dictating what I’m saying right now on my cell phone. And after I’m done what it does is it sends that information transcribed all ready to me along with a voice message that I can get to my email. So all I’ve done is copy and paste this information into my Wordpress post to show you what the whole thing looks like and to see how easy it is to use.

Okay, I’m home now and continuing with my writing using WordPress.

Jott is a free online service designed to help you communicate with others easily. Not only can it dictate your words, but it can also send that information to people you want, plus it will send you reminders for tasks.

What’s more, the email that it sends, not only contains the message as text, but it also attaches the voice recording. All you have to do is call up the toll-free number and you’re greeted with a normal sounding voice (as a opposed to a robot), and it asks you to whom you’d like to Jott. If you’ve entered someone as your contacts in your account already, just say their name and it will confirm your request and allow you to begin recording.

When I found out about Jott, I could see the potential at making things a little easier for people on-the-go or who just have a lot of information to deal with. It’s pretty handy, actually. With the exception of two words in the quote above, it came straight from Jott’s transcription of my voice. The changes I made were really my own fault and probably had to do with the way I stopped in the middle of a sentence. But who cares — just think of when you have the need to write something down, but don’t have something to write it on. Just call up Jott and you can send it to yourself or someone of your choosing.

Go on, give it a try!

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First, the search count (see figure above; click to enlarge) is the most obvious, telling you how many times your term has been searched on in the past 30 days. I know, there are plenty of other tools that tell you that same thing, but read on.

Next is the column called “Broad Match Count“. This is the “noise” I was telling you about earlier. A good number is around the one million mark, give or take. When you start getting into the two million range or 700,000 range, then MNF is telling you that either there’s too much noise (high numbers) or the signal is too weak (low numbers). Just know that the higher or lower you go, the less value your term has. And third is the column to the far right, which is Strength of Count or “SOC“.

All three numbers combine to tell you if that term is worth shooting for. And when I say “shooting for”, I mean it’s telling you the likelihood of your blog being called up in the Google search results provided you use the term wisely in your post.

Let’s say your seach term is “paint”, just like in the figure above. When you search for a term, the only numbers you get first are the broad match counts. Remember, those are the noise numbers — the less noise, the better chance you have at being heard.

I sorted on that column, then I checked the boxes next to the three terms you see highlighted. I chose these to demonstrate the broad match count. Checking the boxes allows me to do a search count on all three in bulk instead of doing them one at a time. (Be careful though, if you do too many too often, then you could get your IP temporarily banned by Google — but only temporarily. Besides, Micro Niche Finder will remind you before you go too far.)

So the numbers get better as we move down the list, making “paint library” the most attractive of the three (the numbers get better further down the list, but I’m just going to focus on this one for now). This means that that term was searched on 1,050 times in the past 30 days, and with a broad match count of just over one million, not too bad. And better still is the SOC, which is six. That green ball next to the six is telling you that this one’s a go.

Let’s think about this.

With the term being searched on 1,050 times in 30 days, this tells you that you’re looking at potentially 1,050 visitors to your blog or site in a month who just might click on your ads or subscribe to your RSS feed. Using this example, you’re looking at about 35 visitors a day in one month (possibly new visitors at that). Are you beginning to see the power behind this now?

Now, if I were to click on the 1,050 for the term “paint library”, I’ll see this:

I can see exactly the number of combinations used for the terms “paint” and “library”. This is useful to me because I can get a feel for other terms that might interest me or be better than the ones I started out with. Naturally, the higher the number next to the terms, the better. In this example, 780 is still a little low for me, but if I wanted to and if the numbers were higher — like in the thousands range — I could start the process over again on one of these terms.

There’s even more you can do with Micro Niche Finder. Watch what happens when I click on the actual term “paint library”:

I’m shown a pop-up with other powerful features. For example, I can do numerous types of Google searches. I can do a marketplace search on the term, which means I can see if there are any products I can sell based on that term. This makes sense because if people are searching on “paint library” they’re more inclined to buy products that have to do with that topic.

But out of all these features, my absolute favorite is the DomainTools Lookup. So, right from Micro Niche Finder I can initiate a domain name search on the search term I entered and see if it’s already taken or perhaps for sale.

I could go on, but now I want to tell you how you can save $30 if you buy Micro Niche Finder right now.

James Jones, the maker of this software, is currently selling this powerful tool for $67. In just a few weeks he’s going to raise the price to $97. But since James is a cool guy, he’s going to allow you to buy the $67 version now and you can upgrade for FREE!

If you want to tap into untapped niche markets, you need an edge to be competitive. Micro Niche Finder can be your edge. Click here now to access free videos demonstrating more about how MNF works. Then make your purchase.

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This comes on the heels of much speculation that Google will be releasing further news about their much anticipated G-Phone (a.k.a. Google Phone), which we haven’t heard about in quite a while.

They’re calling it the G-String?

Simply put, it’s a lanyard (with optional case) that can be attached to the iPhone or any phone for that matter, so that the user can display it proudly around their neck while also making it easier to access. It will, of course, have the Google logo on it (see enclosed photo).

Gmail has become part of our lexicon, but calling this the “G-String” is a bit risky, IMHO, what with its sexual undertones. It definitely has strong buzz potential; I’ll give Google that.

What’s Google up to?

News of Google’s G-Phone has been hush-hush for a while now. This is clearly a clever marketing tactic to generate interest and excitement.

Google spokesperson, Ima Nottaheré, had this to say about their controversial strategy:

Since news of this leaked out sooner than we had anticipated, we decided to accelerate our plans. The major players in the industry have cut their rate plans and continue to give away free phones. By trying to sign people up to multi-year agreements, they’re making it less likely we’d pull customers away from them. They’re underestimating the power of the Google brand.

Come to think of it, I have seen more promotions dealing with cooler phones being given away. In fact, I just bought a Samsung BlackJack II a couple of weeks ago.

Ima went on to say:

Our product development team asked some of us to wear a G-String around the office as a test. I had trouble getting used to wearing a G-String, but we worked the kinks out quickly because we didn’t want anything slipping through the cracks.

Google has not committed to a release date, but industry experts are predicting early May. Until then, they have set up a G-String waiting list so that you can be among the first to be notified.

The first 300 email addresses will get their’s free. Go to the list now!

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