We live in a time of instantaneous communication where people are demanding replies to their online correspondence within hours or even minutes, and they don’t want to be hanging on for a reply much longer than a day in most cases. Failure to keep up with the demands of your visitors will send them looking for quicker correspondence elsewhere, most likely straight to your competitors.

Help Center Live is a very powerful communications tool for your web site, which includes Live Help, Support Tickets (an osTicket module) and unlimited FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). You can use this free product to communicate with your visitors through the use of a real-time live help system (messenger style chat), canned messages, support tickets and unlimited FAQ topics. You can also monitor their footsteps throughout your site during their visit and initiate chat sessions, collect visitor information (referring url, number of visits, ip address etc), auto-assign tickets and transfer chat sessions to other Live Help operators.

This product can be downloaded ‘FREE’ from www.helpcenterlive.com, you can also try their online demo.

It also comes as part of the pre-installed scripts on our hosting package. Why not give the Help Center Live a go here, just click the live help link, top left, and drop us a note, or if a support representative is online have a chat. We don’t mind and you wont be bothering us

Firstly we’d like to personally apologize for that last article we posted. If you didn’t get a chance to read it before we removed it, that’s even better. We made a terrible mistake and someone reminded us the harsh way. We’re just glad that we got a chance to nip this at the bud before it caused anymore damage.

Now, the cause of the problem was our lack of time to manage things this week. We have been so overwhelmed with ongoing projects that we didn’t get a chance to write up quality articles for the blog as planned. So we resorted to posting a free article from articlecity.com. What we didn’t realize in our hurry is that the article wasn’t valid, and that it was outdated and even proven wrong. We risked having our readers following what the article suggests therefore misleading them (you). For this we sincerely apologize if you’re one of the few who read the article.

The biggest damage to us came from Nick from performancer.com when he publicized our mistake to the readers of his blog. This made us look very poor and unprofessional. We sincerely appreciated what Nick was trying to do, but we wish he could’ve done it in a more subtle way as not to hurt us.

On another note, Google hates duplicate content, and when you use free articles on your blog you’re doing exactly that. When Google indexes your blog it can mistake you as a splog.

The moral of this is, DO NOT USE FREE ARTICLES WHATSOEVER. If you like an article you read online, cross check its truth, and rewrite it in your own words. Do not fall into the mistake we just did. It can and it will damage you and your reputation. Stay away from free article repositories and stay away from duplicate content.

If you’re a blogger trying to make a side income from blogging, then you have to be familiar with niche blogs. They are blogs that focus on a specific topic, mastering that topic and only, and most of them generate the best revenues.

So why are niche blogs so important to generate income? First off, niche blogs have a lot of posts (articles) on a specific topic. Say you like basketball and you find a niche blog about basketball, it only talks about basketball and everything tied to basketball. It rarely runs off topic and it gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling reading the blog knowing that it’ll inform you and keep you up to date with the most recent going ons in the basketball world. The blog would sell basketball gears, signature jerseys, you name it. Now if this blog incorporates AdSense, this is where the word niche comes in play. With niche blogs, since there’s usually only one major topic covering the whole blog, AdSense would have no trouble finding relevant ads. People would look at these ads and they would be more likely to click since the ads would be about basketball as well. Imagine going to a fashion blog and reading ads like “Create cappucinno in ten seconds” wouldn’t that be a turn off?

dS is and is not a niche blog. We do try to keep things in perspective, “helping bloggers and webmasters build a better web” but our topics range from “quality content management services” to “how to get Google to index you” for example. We do get relevant ads but they aren’t always up to date since our content changes frequently and we have extremely different keywords in each post.

Our tip is, if you really want to make good money from your blog, pick a niche topic and stick with it. If you want to talk about something else, start a new blog. Be the source of information for certain popular topics and you’ll notice your visitors returning often, even bringing their friends and friends of their friends. Nothing beats word of mouth and nothing beats niche blogging.

I’m not saying you can’t mix topic, that can be fun too, only you won’t make as much money.

I had an interesting debate with Alex from soleredemption.com last night about how permalinks affect they way Google index blog pages. He argued that dynamic links are useless, that pages with links like this http://soleredemption.com/?p=20 aren’t being properly indexed by Google. I didn’t have much to say but I did read something about that ages ago, and I’ve always kept all my URLs with permalinks, or permanent links.

If you use WordPress, you can do this easily by chmod-ing your .htaccess file to 666, then from your WP control panel, go to Options - Permalinks and enable permalinks from there by copying-and-pasting the sample structure on that page into the provided field.

Google usually takes a few days if not weeks to come by and crawl your pages. So after you enable permalinks on your blog give it some time to sink and soon you’ll get that extra traffic from Google directly into your archive pages.

AdSense have just introduced a swanky new referral program. New and existing customers will have to agree to the amended terms and conditions before implementing it on their site first though. But when you’ve done that you can be earning yourself some serious cash (rubs greedy hands!). Every time your referrals make their first $100, Google AdSense will give you $100 dollars as well. We’ve already implemented our referral link on the left, just under the main menu options. Unfortunately due to the new TOCs you can only display one referral link per page and they only come in image format, like the one displayed (but not linked) in this post.

US bloggers/publishers are rumored to have an option that also lets them take advantage of the FireFox with Google toolbar download, which pays $1 per download. I’m not registered as an American publisher, so this isn’t an option on my account