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05.10.2008
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Expat Intelligence is one of FIM’s web sites which is close to my heart, and one which I expect will grow very nicely over the next few years.
Evolutionary changes in transportation and revolutionary changes in communications are making our planet smaller every day. As our interactions with other cultures and governments increases, more individuals choose to leave the land of their births and experiment with new lives in distant lands.
Retiring to Mexico is becoming common for middle-class Americans who want to live the good life on limited retirement incomes. More adventurous Americans are finding new lives in exotic locales like Panama, Costa Rica, The Philippines, and Thailand.
In addition to lower costs of living, many countries provide much better tax systems than the United States. Tax laws vary, but it is possible to legally lower your income tax burden to $0 by becoming an expat.
Many working Americans are finding that their jobs will allow them to work at home. Home can be in Belize almost as easily as it can be in Boise. Belize offers beaches, sun, and some of the worlds best scuba diving. In addition, as an American living in Belize, the U.S. government will let you deduct the first $80k of your income.
These factors, along with many others, are rapidly increasing the number of Americans who choose to live abroad. And that will be good for Expat Intelligence. 🙂
07.04.2008
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We recently purchased a small e-commerce website, Paintball Guns Shop. We like paintball and we liked the site, so it seemed like a good match for us.
More than that though, we really wanted to test the phpBay Pro WordPress Plugin from WiredStudios.
The results thus far have been quite good. With minimal promotion, the site is receiving good traffic from both Google and Yahoo. The traffic is for product-oriented keywords — which convert well into clicks and sales.
Based upon this success, we plan to build a dozen more phpBayPro web sites this year.
24.03.2008
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We’ve just upgraded from ASTracker to Site Super Tracker. Both are products of Related-Pages. SST is an upgrade to the earlier product.
ASTracker only supported AdSense content units. SST supports all of the following ad formats:
- AdSense
- AdLinks
- AdSense Search
- AdSense Referrals
- Yahoo Publisher Network
- PeelAwayAds
- AuctionAds
SST is designed specifically for ad tracking. It enhances, rather than competes with, tools like AWStats.
The AdSense portal limits you to 200 channels. SST dynamically creates URL channels and there is no known upper limit to the number of channels it can support.
Google Analytics can be enhanced to track AdSense clicks, but Analytics comes with three serious issues. The first is that Analytics sends all of your valuable business data to Google. The second is that, on a busy web site, Analytics can use up a lot of network bandwidth. The last, and most important, is that this can slow down page loads and annoy your site visitors.
SST gives you data on every click, including page, keywords, referer, time, and IP address. The page and keyword reports are most valuable to me. They show me what pages convert best and what keywords are driving profitable traffic.
The current cost of SST is $67. For a serious web publisher, it shouldn’t take a long time to generate a positive RoI on that investment.