The nation’s first rehab center for Internet and gaming addictions opened in Washington.

The center pulls addicts away from their computers and reconnects them with nature.

Some researches say that Internet addiction and drug addiction are similar.  Not everyone agrees.

The retreat costs $14,000 and “addicts” spend 45 days in therapy.

Popularity: 1% [?]

It’s pretty easy to install a WordPress blog these days, particularly if you have Fantastico in your control panel of your hosted site.  Through control panel, you can have your blog installed within minutes.  With WordPress’ easy-to-use plugin and template functions in the administration panel, you’ll have all of the plugins and free templates you want, installed with just a few clicks.

I have to say, WordPress has become so user-friendly that it’s rare that I use HTML programming any more.

With all the freebies out there, why bother buying blog templates?

If you install a free template (and there are many good ones), it takes a bit of skill to modify the template to suit your needs.  For instance, you might want to change the font, add some banner advertising, and so forth so that your site does not look like everyone else’s blog that is using the same theme.  A lot of times, I find the fonts that come with free templates difficult to read and generally spend time changing them.

These edits can be done from the “Editor” function of your Appearances menu, which gives you access to the CSS stylesheet and the individual pages.  If you know what you are doing, it is not too hard to do … but it can be time consuming.

For those who are either not technical or who don’t want to spend a lot of time messing around with templates, Affiliate Themes is a fantastic resource.  I’ve been using it over the last week and am thrilled with how easy it is to use.

Once you’ve installed the template software, you can access a dashboard that lets you configure the layout, fonts, header, and just about anything that can be edited to create your own unique blog appearance.

There are six basic layouts that come with the theme, all of which you can change to your liking on the fly.  If you are selling affiliate products, the template comes with landing page style front pages as well as review pages.

I found Affiliate Themes to be well worth every cent simply for the time it has saved me.  It comes highly recommended by John Reece, John Chow and other successful affiliate marketers.

Which brings me to my next point.

Not only is Affiliate Themes a blogging template, but with your membership you receive some excellent affiliate marketing training materials from the experts who are making tons of money online.  I personally like to listen to podcasts while I work, and the ones that are available in the Affiliate Themes’ resource center are awesome.

Sign up for their newsletter because they send a special code that will give you a 15% discount.  The video on that page gives a nice overview of what you can expect with the theme.

Popularity: 1% [?]

One of the fun things about Facebook is that friends from many years ago find you and you reconnect.

But do you want friends and family to read all of your marketing and business wall posts?

If you are using Facebook to promote your business, I think it is a good idea to set up what is called a  “Fan Page” instead of a friend page.  To do so, you’ll first need to sign up for an account at Facebook (which is where your friends and family will contact you).  Then, go to this page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Fill in your business information and you’re done.

Once you have a page set up, add information to your wall such as news, specials and so on.

Every marketing effort helps!

Popularity: 1% [?]

If you’re religious, do you pray?  Well, it seems like there is a growing trend for “technological prayers.”  I welcome anything new in the tech front and can appreciate the creativity of the people who make them.

But praying?  I don’t know.  Something about it seems phony to me.

The latest is an iPhone application that, in all honesty, is pretty cool looking.  You text a message to a rabbi who then prints out your prayer and sticks it on the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

This iPhone application is similar to a “Tweet to God” Twitter service which basically does the same thing … people send “prayer tweets” that are printed out and placed on the Wall.

Perhaps one of the more entertaining applications that I’ve seen is a computer software program that says your prayers so you don’t have to do it.  For just a few bucks a month, you can download the prayers of your choice (i.e. Muslim, Catholic and so forth) set your computer to recite them, and go out and have fun … knowing that just in case you will never make it back, your prayers have been said.

Phony or not for religious believers, the people who are designing these applications are certainly the type who think out of the box.  They deserve some success for being so innovative.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Personally, I don’t put any stock in this, but it’s interesting enough to pass along.

The “Web Bot Project” claims that it can make prophetic predictions based on Internet search activity.  The latest?  Well, the world will end on December 21, 2012 (12-21-12, for numerology people).

Google Hot Trends Report

Google’s hot trends shows that there is an increasing interest in “2012.”    There’s a big movie about to be released that is titled 2012.  The next presidential election will be in 2012.  Religious and New Age people are talking about the end of the Mayan Calendar.  There are many reasons that people might be looking up the year 2012.

2012 may be turning into a popular keyword.  But does that tell us that the end of the world draws near?  No way!

Popularity: 1% [?]

The Niche Rockets forum is buzzing over one of the coolest pieces of software ever introduced that will make your article marketing efforts amazingly easy.

The Magical Article Writer and Submitter Software will spin 1000 unique articles within minutes and submit your unique articles to over 700 directories on the fly.

There are a lot of article spinners out there that you can find, but what I really like about this program is how it cuts on submission time.  For instance, the submission software easily signs you up for over 700 directories and handles your confirmation emails within minutes.  Once you have an article ready to go, it submits a unique version of it to all the relevant directory categories on a schedule that you specify.

You have just got to watch the video to see what I am talking about.  This is a huge.

Right now, there is an introductory price of only $80.  That is a once-off fee.  There are no monthly charges.  I have paid more than that monthly for services that are nowhere near as easy to use.  In fact, after I’m done writing this post, I am going to go cancel some memberships I have.

If you think $80 is too good to be true, then become a member of Niche Rockets, where they have a special discount that delivers even more savings.  The Niche Rockets link is a special discount from NotGuru that will save you over $40 a month.

With a 100-days-left-in-2009, the Magic Article Rewriter and Submitter software will easily let us get 365 days (or more) worth of work done in weeks.  It’s awesome.  I can’t recommend it enough.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Wow, how time flies.

Sometimes, I think I’m still somewhere back in 2001.  Have I accomplished some things?  Sure.  I’ve achieved a number of goals.  But I have a long way to go.

Today, an email advertisement arrived announcing that there are only 100 days left for the year 2009.  It’s time to get busy with marketing efforts for the holidays … and catch up on some paperwork.

How will you spend your remaining 100 days of 2009?

Popularity: 1% [?]

I’ve always been of the opinion that when it comes to promoting a site for search engine visibility, commonsense must always prevail.

Content is very important when you want to get a decent ranking in Google.  So are links to your page.  According to Google, your site’s ranking in Google’s search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you.  The linking guidelines suggest that you should not engage in obtaining:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank;
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web;
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”); and/or
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank (explanation here).

Google recommends that the best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community.  They do understand that you cannot control other sites that link to you.  If you are having trouble with your site not appearing in Google’s search engine index, the staff at Google says that you can apply for reconsideration.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Technorati has issued its report on “The State of the Blogosphere,” which  reveals that traditional Internet media sites and blogs are slowly losing their distinctions.  The 2009 report is based on last year’s survey results.  Over 133 million blogs have been indexed by Technorati since 2002, and a whopping 900,000 blog posts are made every 24 hours.

One out of three U.S. bloggers are college graduates.  Globally, the majority of bloggers (almost 70%) are males who are under 45 years old.

Interestingly, the majority of bloggers do not live near the largest metropolitan areas.    Most are a solo act, but they do invest money in their blog in the form of paying for content.  About half of the blogs  attract over 1000 unique visitors per month.  The average income was $75,000 for those blogs that had 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.

Technorati will issue a summary of its findings in October.

Popularity: 1% [?]

When it comes to submitting your articles, Article Marketer delivers.  With its pay-just-once lifetime membership fee (or other levels), you can submit unlimited articles … for unlimited backlinks, that keep building and building over time.

Articles that are submitted to the service are reviewed by the service’s staff to ensure quality.  They won’t let junky, spammy articles through the system.

Once approved, your article will be slowly dripped into distribution with their content management system. What’s amazing about the distribution system is that an article will be submitted for years afterward.  For instance, here’s an article I wrote back in 1996 … and recent submission dates:

From the members’ area, you can click for reports that show how many times the search engines are picking up your article.  You can choose from Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask.

Article Marketer gives you tips and tutorials, as well.

As affiliate marketer extraordinaire Ewen Chia says, “”With Article Marketer, you leverage and maximize results while reducing and minimzing the effort and the cost! Why do all the work when you can have someone else do it for you? It’s the lazy man’s way to do article marketing!”

Article Marketer offers the only “Lifetime” Membership in the industry.  However, there are other membership levels as well.  If you are looking for an easy way to build up your site’s popularity, check it out.

Popularity: 1% [?]