Wouldn’t it be nice if you could publish a website, and floods of people would find it instantly? This isn’t the case in the real world, and that’s why many have so much trouble with this complex and interesting subject.

With the method presented in this article you could be receiving up to twenty unique visitors daily within one single month. Don’t believe me? Just follow the article and learn how…

Before you publish your site make sure you have a good topic and plan for what and how your site will accomplish its objectives and goals. Choose a subject that you enjoy and know the most about, as this will become your “golden subject.” If your site offers quality content and advice it won’t have any problem attracting new visitors.

As soon as your website is up and running submit it to the major search engines; Google, MSN, Yahoo. It will take a little while before you will be listed, but at least you can get into the search queue for the search engine robots. But before the robots list your site you better be sure you have a wide selection of good quality content…

The next step is to write at least three quality articles about your subject. Make sure they are long enough to actually give your readers good advice. After some time, your articles will get better, and you will become a better writer.

Post your articles on your website, and make sure that they get indexed by Google.

Once this is all accomplished, you can then submit your articles to a couple of the top article Ezines. These places allow you to submit your articles, then people are allowed to use your articles on their websites.

The cool thing about this is that you can put a bio and a link to your site on your articles.

This is what will get you your links, which will in turn bring visitors.

If people find that your articles are well written and that they offer good content, they will put your article on their website. Your article will start to pop up everywhere on the web, and people will start searching for your articles.

At this point, you will start to get loads of visitors, just from you writing a few articles.

You won’t have to worry about getting links because people will start linking to you because your offer great content.

Keep writing more articles, and soon you will have a large database of your own articles.

If you follow this guide, and have determination to make your site big. It will happen, and your web site dreams will come true.

One of the biggest concerns in a webmaster’s life is website visitors. This is one of the most sought after aspects of a successful website; yet it escapes the grasp of many. Here are some key techniques we have used to bring success to our own en devours.

Building your site is the easy part, getting people to visit your site is the hard part. Most people who have a site think that they can submit their site to Google, and visitors will just come flooding their doors. This is not true and it won’t work. The first thing to do when you build your site is to make sure your meta tags are in working order and that they target what your site is all about. Make sure that you have some of your keywords in your title, description, and the body of your page. Search engines love this, but make sure you don’t use to many keywords and a description that is longer than this article. Meta tag optimization is a whole nother topic, and we won’t go into detail here. The next thing to do is to manually submit yourself to the top search engines. Using free search engine submitters don’t always work and most of them are just a scam. If you manually submit, the search engines will like it better. Run a google search on search engines, and you will get a whole list of engines to submit to. After you fix up your Meta Tags, think about the content of your site. Search engines love having good quality content and they rank you higher for it. If your site is just a gateway page with hundreds of links, not very many people will come to your site, and the search engines will hate you. You want to offer something useful to your visitors, something that helps them. Think about publishing some articles, or anything else that your visitors will benefit from. People also love getting things for free. A lot of people will come to your site if you offer a quality service for free. It is just common nature for people to love free things. Dont you? You have now covered the first step in getting visitors, and that is to get your feet wet in the world of search engines. We will now move on to the next step, link exchanges.

Link exchanging is not only a great way to get visitors, but the search engines will rank you better if you have a good amount of links. Having links on other sites is a flag to tell search engines that you have a quality site. It shows that other people like your site, and not just you. This is where I am going to show you my favorite technique for getting link exchanges. First you must go to LinkPopularity.com. Here you will see a little bar at the bottom of the page. You are supposed to enter your own url to check how many people have linked to you, but what I do is enter the url of my competitors. Isn’t that great. You now have a whole list of contacts that your competitors have linked to. All you have to do is contact the owners of the sites about a link exchange, and you will most likely get your first exchange. I have learned this great trick from LinkPopularity and they have a whole article about checking your competitors links. Now that you know where to get your contacts, we must now discuss how to go about contacting them. Before you even think of contacting them, add their url to your links pages. This shows the webmaster that you are serious about a link exchange, and they are impressed by it. Somewhere in your email you can even mention that you have already added their link to your page. Your email about a link exchange could look something like this.

Hello, my name is (your name) and I would like to do a link exchange with your web site. My web site offers (what do you offer) and I thought that we would be good link partners. I have already taken the liberty to add your website to my links page, which is (your link page url).

Thank you for you time,

(your name)

Be sure to be friendly in your email and explain why you would be good link partners. If the webmaster accepts, you will get your very own link on another persons website. You now have a link on someones site, and your search engine rank will increase. After you have done this to as many people as you possibly can, do it some more. You can never have to many links. It makes your site well known to the world, and the search engines will crawl your site more frequently because they find your site by skipping from links on peoples sites.

I hope that you have learned something from this article and that you can maybe get a couple of new visitors because of it. Just remember, it takes patience to get visitors. I mean, you are one in millions of web pages, and that just means you have to work ten times harder than all of your competition to get visitors. In time, if you follow everything here, there is no reason for you to not have thousands of visitors in the next couple of months.

There’s nothing like waking up in the morning and doing your morning routine. Making breakfast, turning on the computer to check emails, maybe watch the news, or grab the trash can from the street. Then after all of your tasks you come back to your computer and find that it is STILL turning on! Okay, well, I guess it usually isn’t this drastic of a situation but everyone experiences a slowed down computer at least once in their “computer careers.”

This morning I decided it was time for some system wide maintenance on my desktop PC. Startup was lagging, execution time was delayed, and numerous other “slow” problems.

I felt that my biggest problem this morning was the fact that it was taking up to 5 minutes just to startup my computer. To remedy this problem my favorite little tool is the Startup tab via the System Configuration Utility window. First of all, you might be wondering whether this Utility Tool is still available in the new Windows Vista. For a quick and easy answer; yes! You can use this same method for both XP and/or Vista Operating Systems.

First find your “Run” program. This is where you will call upon the utility program. On a Windows XP system this can usually be found via Start –> Run. On a Windows Vista system look for Start –> Accessories –> Run.

Once you have successfully opened your “Run” program, type the command “msconfig.exe” into the command line. (type without the quotations)

This will bring up the magical System Configuration Utility program. Now at this time I must warn you that if you do not know what you are doing here; don’t touch anything. This tool controls your BOOT.INI file, your startup programs, your WIN.INI file, and a couple more technically touchy tabs. I repeat; don’t mess with anything unless you know exactly what you are doing. If your ruin things here, you cause troubles with your computer. End of story. Now for the lighter news…

If you select the Startup tab you will be presented with a list of programs with check boxes next to them. If the program box is checked it means that that program loads automatically each time you start your computer. If it isn’t checked then it does not load at startup. The reason for minimizing the amount of programs that load at startup is to speed up your computer when you turn it on, and to relieve some of your computer’s resources. Each program that loads at startup drains a bit of your computer’s processing resources; ultimately slowing down your computer.

Now the good news is that with today’s many resources on the web you can type each Startup Item name into almost any search engine and come up with many websites dedicated to explaining whether or not that program is crucial to startup, or if you can deselect that program.

For example, I deselected the following: ctfmon, MsnMsgr, QTTask, SOUNDMAN, BixFix, Microsoft Office, wcmdmgrl, and a couple more programs. But remember that I researched each startup item to be sure that it wasn’t crucial to my system’s startup.

After minimizing the amount of programs that ran on startup, I increased my boot time from 5 minutes down to 2 minute. That’s something that definitely makes me happy. :-)

Hopefully this little technology blurb has opened your eyes to the value of system maintenance and that you really do have control over speeding up your computer; not all is lost when your computer is slowing down. It just means it needs a little bit of TLC!

It’s that wonderful time of year again; when shopping centers are filled with hectic commotion, every mini van on the freeway has a haphazard Christmas tree strapped to its top, and decorations galore fill every nook and cranny of everyone’s homes and offices.

So liven up your email correspondences, desktops, and websites with this little guide I have put together for Christmas/Holiday Screensavers, Stationery, Clip Art, and other random freebies across the web. They are all listed here to make it easier to find and to help save you time; don’t waste a minute with all of that shopping that still needs to get done!

Screensavers

FreeChristmasScreenSavers.com - If you are looking for a good collection of animated or non-animated Christmas Screensavers or Wallpapers, this is a great place to check out. After checking out their selection of screensavers I found that it was easy enough to download anything I wanted without having to pay hidden fees, etc…The site was sometimes a bit difficult to navigate, but was okay in the long run.

Christmas Screensavers - Hundreds of free Christmas screensavers are all listed on this website. All free and easy to download.

Christmas-Screensavers.com - This site was straightforward and easy to navigate. There were only around 10 screensavers on the home page, but they all looked great.

FreeChristmasSavers.com - Not only did this site have screensavers and wallpapers, but it also had Windows Desktop themes, Ringtones, Smilies, and even Holiday Cursors. A great site filled with tons of freebies!

ChristmasSavers.com - There were some nice screensavers on this site, but the only problem I found with the layout was that you had to be using Internet Explorer to download their wallpapers and screensavers. Not a good thing when you are using FireFox to browse the net. So if you use Internet Explorer, go for it!

Email Stationery (Outlook or Outlook Express is usually needed to use these email stationery packages)

A Cloudeight Christmas - This website had a good selection of stationery, and had a nice Help section for how to install their freebies.

Stationery Heaven - Here there is a good selection of Christmas stationery, as well as many other stationery styles too; in case you want other styles then Christmas.

Clip Art

Free Christmas Backgrounds - You can find some great Christmas backgrounds, borders, lines, and images here. They also have New year’s clip art too. 1000+ images are located here for download. There are some great backgrounds here if you wanted to include them on your websites for the Holiday season.

KABOOSE - Great free Christmas clip art, as well as links to other freebies across the web. The clip art here was very easy to access, and they had some excellent designs.

Christmas Clipart - Black and white clip art, Christmas Icons and more are all located here. There really weren’t very many clip art selections on this site, but enough to keep you busy.

Best-Of-Web.com - About 50 clip art pieces are located on this page, but they are all beautiful and highly detailed. Awesome clip art collection for the Holidays.

I hope you have enjoyed this simple collection of Christmas freebie links, and that it helps you to find fun screensavers, stationery, and clip art to brighten up your emails, desktops, and websites. May you have a wonderful Holiday season and a Happy New Year!

-Smart Boy Designs

The day is going really great; you’ve gotten all of your emails answered, all of your documents filed, dry cleaning is finished - so you have some extra time. What do you do? You decide to clean up your PC’s desktop because it hasn’t been tidied up in quite a while.

Things are going well when all of the sudden you get some foreign error code when you try and delete a certain file or folder. Dang it! Maybe something along the lines of, “Cannot delete Folder: It is being used by another person or program. Close any files that might be using the file and try again.” What do you?

The first step in fixing this problem is identifying what program is using the folder or file and Kill that process. There are many programs online that can do this automatically for you with a click of a button. One such program that I have used with success is UNLOCKER.

Most programs can be closed out of using a program like UNLOCKER, but what do you do when the program is locked because of a crucial PC function like EXPLORER.EXE? These are the simple steps to follow to fix this problem: (this method was tested using Windows XP)

1. Identify that the file or folder cannot be deleted because of the EXPLORER.EXE file. This can be done using UNLOCKER like previously mentioned.

2. Close all programs.

3. Open the Windows Command prompt (C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe) by going to your RUN program and typing “cmd” into the open bar. This will open up your black Command Prompt box. (type “cmd” without the quotation marks)

4. Open your Windows Task Manager. This can be accomplished by typing the text “taskmgr.exe” into your RUN program open bar. (without the quotation marks)

Now this is the point when things are going to get a bit more tricky, so follow along closely…

5. After you have opened up your Windows Task Manager, click on the PROCESSES tab. Here you will see a long list of processes that your CPU is currently operating. Scroll down and find the EXPLORER.EXE process, and then click END PROCESS. At this point you may be wondering why your entire taskbar, start menu, etc…disappeared. This is because you just killed your computer’s explorer interface. Don’t worry; it’s just closed for now.

6. Once you have killed the explorer.exe process, you will be transferring over to the Command Prompt to manually delete the file while your EXPLORER.EXE file is not running. All you need to do is click on the APPLICATIONS tab on the Windows Task Manager, and then highlight the Command Prompt listing. Once it is listed click the SWITCH TO button. This will switch you over to the Command Prompt to manually delete the file.

7. You will notice that the default setting for the Command Prompt is usually going to be set at: C:\Documents and Settings\Owner> (depending on what log in account you are in on your PC). Now to move around in the Command Prompt to different folders, just use the following commands

cd..

The cd.. command will take the Command Prompt BACK one folder. So if you started in the C:\Documents and Settings\Owner folder and then typed cd.. and pressed ENTER, it would take you back to the C:\Documents and Settings> folder. This can be done all the way back to the root C:\ folder.

cd FILE NAME(s) GOES HERE

You can bring the Command Prompt UP to different folders using the CD command PLUS whatever folder you would like to travel to. So if you were starting in the C:\> root folder and then typed CD DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS\OWNER, the command prompt would travel to that folder.

The ultimate goal of this entire process is to navigate to the folder where your nasty file/folder is that won’t delete, and then delete is manually. So if your file was on your desktop, you would probably navigate to the Desktop folder using this path: C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Desktop.

8. Once you have navigated to the proper folder, all you need to do is type the following command into your Command Prompt:

del FILE NAME GOES HERE

9. And that’s it! Once you have deleted your suspect file all that needs to be done is to turn the EXPLORER.EXE program back on again. Just go to your task manager and click NEW TASK. You can then type the command EXPLORER.EXE into the bar and press enter. This will turn the EXPLORER.EXE program back on, and your computer will be running as normal; but without that pesky little deleted folder/file!

Just remember that when deleting objects using the Command Prompt, the item will NOT be put into the Recycle Bin, but will be deleted forever!

(I will re-edit this article for better reading understanding shortly.)