Visual Studio Tutorial

If you are looking for Video Tutorials on how to develop applications on the .Net framework for either Windows Forms, ASP.Net, WPF etc. then I highly recommend Learn Visual Studio.Net.

I have been a member at LearnVisualStudio.net for almost 4 years after I signed up to their lifetime subscription (which to be fair is as cheap as chips)! They are constantly adding new visual studio tutorials in line with the current technology and they have just recently started doing their videos for iPhone also (guess who just got a new iPhone as well! :D ) . Its brilliant stuff and the return Ive had on my tiny investment is fantastic.

I am just currently working through their new videos on Visual Studio 2010, The MVC Framework and Windows Presentation Foundarion. Lots to learn! They have some free starter videos to let you get a feel of the quality they have to offer.

If you looking for a tutorial on the Visual Studio IDE then Keith Elder - a Microsoft MVP, has put together a great video that takes you through the basics of Visual Studio.

The video takes you through what Visual Studio versions are available, its key components, customising its behaviour and also how to change the look and feel using themes.

All in all its a great Visual Studio Tutorial. It looks to be a multi part series so you can subscribe to his videos or visit his blog at keithelder.net to check get further installments.

[DBNETLIB][ConnectionOpen (Connect()).]SQL Server does not exist or access denied Error

Had a totally weird thing ahppen to a sql server today.

I have 2 linked servers and for some unknown reason all queries to the linked server were being met with that error. I removed the linked server, re-added, tested i could connect to the port with telnet - all good.

Check remote connections enabled, checked tcpip enabled. Evrything seemed fine.

One of our machines rebooted with some critical update from Microsoft so wondered if something MS had pushed out may have caused the issue.

Anyhow, we finally fixed the issue but i am still 100% sure exactly what is the problem so maybe someone may be able to shed some light on things.

The way got around it was to remove the liked server and re-add it - but instead of adding it as a SQL Server, it was added using and OLEDB sql data source. After doing that it all sprung back into life.

Now to me that sounds like an issue with SQL Native Client on either the client or server. I wonder if microsoft has done something to some drivers somewhere along the line and pushed it out in a critical update???

Another strange this is i could not add a system datasource to point to the other server either - unless i specified the default port 1433! Totally whacky. The server i was trying to link was a named instance of sql2005. No idea why specifying the port it should have been using anyway worked - but it did!

Hope this sorts you out if you are having this problem. Had me stumped for about 3 hours.

Id be interested to hear your comments if you have an ideas of input. Its gonna bug me until i found out exactly whats happened as it was working fine the night before.

Travis Rice That's It That's All

I am into snowboarding big time - just love it. Unfortuantely im miles from the mountains and get very little snow here (and no lifts!!). I get to go boarding once a year (twice im im lucky) and therefore in the meantime I hit the indoor slope at Xscape and watch boaridng videos.

I've just watched Travis Rice That's It That's All - Travis Rice's latest video, and all i can say is its amazing! What a video. Ive seen a lot of boarding films in my time but this one is truly awesome. After reading up about it, it has taken Travis 2 years to put it together and i can see why.

Everything from the scenery, the boarding and the music is outstanding. It is so well produced. It just makes you want to pack up and head for the mountains! :o)

He is obviously one talented individual who is constantly pushing the boundaries when it comes to snowboarding. With that however, comes priveledges like having a helicopter drop you in the most amazing virgin powder fields you can find.

He is one lucky talented son of a bitch! Very envious. Wish i could do half the things he pulls of in this vid.

Anyhow, if you love boarding then i strongly recommend you check this film out - you will not regret it. Ive just finished watching it and im already wanting to watch it over again! :o) Its that good. Travis Rice That's It That's All gets 10/10 from me - loved every minute of it.

If your in the US/Canada use this link to get to it:



If you are in the UK this is the amazon uk link:



Awesome!

Getting a First Page Ranking Website using Niche Marketing and Micro Niche Finder

I recently put a website together for a client selling a product in quite an aggressive market. After the website had been put together it went live and the client was happy! What happened over the next few days was to take me on a new journey in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and website marketing.

Search Engine Optimisation

I followed all the rules and best practices to ensure the site met Web Standards and Google standards - things such as only one H1 tag on a page, no keyword spamming in the meta tags etc..

I also ensured the site was listed with google and other top search engines and also had automatic sitemap generation based on the content of the pages - so everything looked setup properly for Search Engine Optimisation SEO. I now had to advertise the site.

Marketing Idea Number One : AdWords

I sat down with the client to help him look at advertising the website. We needed to drive traffic to the site and spread the word about his products as effectively and cheaply as possible.

As i had some experience of AdWords this was my initial suggestion for the client and we therefore set about putting keyword lists together based on the products the client sold and the sort of customer he was looking for to drive to his site.

The hit was instant - we had tons of traffic hitting the site and lots of interested customers. The only trouble was the AdWords budget went out of the window quite quickly because of the aggressive nature of the market.

Owing to this i set about trying to find a way to get the site to the top of the organic search lists (which given the market would have been extremely hard). If we could do this we had FREE traffic to the website! Which takes me onto Marketing Technique 2.

Marketing Technique Two : Drive Free Traffic to the Website Using Niche Markets

Through various sources and quite a lot of reading I have discovered a method of getting your web pages ranked on the first page of google for FREE! Yes - FREE! When you see how its done its one of those things that just hits and you think "of course - why didn't i think of that before!".

The way to achieve this, is by using a technique or trick called Long Tailed Keywords to find a niche market. If you don't know what a niche market or a long tailed keyword is then ill explain:

Say you are wanting to market your website and you are selling an iPhone unlocking service for example. If you put the word iPhone into Google you will see something like this:

Results 1 - 10 of about 328,000,000 for iPhone.

328 million pages! Would you fancy trying to get your website to the first page of those results!!? I wouldn't. So how do we go about getting a fighting chance - a Niche Market.

How to Find a Niche Market

Basically, you need to look for something specific within that market to get a smaller target area (the niche).

Again you have to think smart - IPhone Unlocking again turns up over 7 million pages but if you add extra words to the keyword phrase such as

"how to unlock an apple iPhone"

now have a look at the results.

At the time of writing this we now have 342 pages returned from Google with the exact phrase (with quotes around it).

Using the AdWords keyword tool, if you enter that phrase and search, it will tell you the search volume and advertiser competition (AdWords competition). This is currently showing as zero competition and 110 average searches per month.

You now have on average 110 people searching for exactly what you are looking for and only 342 pages of exact competition.

That is a little better than the millions of pages beforehand hey!

If you now work that keyword into your web pages, along with the other related keywords given by the AdWords tool you have a very high chance of getting a first page ranking for FREE whenever anyone uses that search term! Awesome.

You could also run an AdWords campaign with very cheap keywords to target this phase as yet another way of driving cheap traffic to your site.

You think the above techniques are handy? Well I found something that makes this so easy! It takes away all the hard work and issues with using the google tools and also expands your research to other search engines.

Whilst i was investigating and playing around with this technique i came across an absolutely wicked tool that turned out to save me HOURS of work. The tool is called Micro Niche Finder and i cannot recommend it enough.

I will quickly go over the main features that saved me hours in generating the long tail keywords to work into my clients website.

Micro Niche Finder

Micro Niche Finder (V4 is the latest at the time of writing this post) is basically a keyword research tool that takes the leg work out of optimising your web content to ensure you are targeting it to what people are searching for.

You can write a 10,000 page essay page about one of your products but if you are not creating the content that people are actively searching for they will never find you or know about your product = no sales!

The primary market that Micro Niche Finder is actually aimed at is affiliate marketing. Marketing people use it to seek out niche markets and promote products to sell on the Internet.

If it works for someone selling other people's products i thought it must be useful in improving your own website product sales.

The key areas this product saved me time are :

- I no longer had to think of the long tail keywords and niche markets.
- I didn't have to jump from search engine to keyword tool and back again just to research keywords.
- I could research the competition
- I could look at other people selling the same item

In addition to what i used there are an absolute plethora of features in this product that I've not even touched upon yet but am itching to experiment with.

Conclusion

Borne out of looking for an effective way to rank my clients web pages higher in the organic search results and cut down on advertising budget, i have located a tool i can use over and over again in my job to optimise website content for clients.

Micro Niche Finder is an extremely useful tool that i can also utilise for several other things such as affiliate marketing. Ive not really ventured too deep into the subject before but a tool like this makes me want to give it a try - just for the fun of it to see if i could make money online. If nothing else i will definitely learn a lot more about SEO, AdWords and marketing techniques that i can use in my work.

I feel Micro Niche Finder paid for itself on one project but it can be used over and over again.

I am looking forward to seeing what it really can do for me. I will post further findings as i get more experience with it.

Big up to the developers of this tool - pretty simple but massively effective. I may have been able to develop something similar for myself but like a lot of things - it would have taken many hours out of my already busy schedule and for the price its a bargain.

If you like the sound of it follow the link i have put in the post and enter your email address on the landing page. The folks at Micro Niche will then send you a link to the videos on how to use the product - which i tailored to my requirements.