Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock
Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

Mid-2008 Walmert and Dell teamed up in an experiment across 15 of their Dallas-area super centers to create a competitive answer to Best Buy’s Geek Squad. The experiment was called “Solution Station.”

The experiment is old news, but I think it is interesting that there has been no mention of the effort since its launch.

Google searches for “Solution Station” only bring up spammy sites and a few press releases dating back to the project’s launch. Normally you at least find a few complaints online, but there is not a single one.

DLLs or Dynamic Link Libraries were introduced with the Microsoft Windows 95 operating system to ensure effective usage of system resources and disk space. These files comprise program executables that can be loaded and unloaded when required. There are hundreds of DLL files on your computer. Some of these are shipped with your Windows operating system and some are registered later when you install new software and device drivers.

With such a large amount of DLL files on a single computer, a very small issue can give rise to several DLL errors and put your PC in DLL hell. Let us have a look at some of the common causes of DLL errors and the steps you can take to resolve them.

As I explained in yesterday’s post, Akismet banned me from posting comments on WordPress blogs because of my use of a trackback spam tool I tested out a few months ago.

After some searching, I found one other blogger who suggested simply contacting Akismet if you feel you were wrongly blacklisted.

While I definitely deserved some punishment for trying to exploit the trackback system, I had been “clean” form spam-like activities for a long time and had been working diligently for months to restore my blog’s honor in the eyes of Akismet.

Could a simple email be the answer I had been looking for?

In fact, it was. I used the contact form on the Akismet website to submit a “I have a support or feature request” service ticket. I was completely honest in my email where I explained what happend and asked for the penalty to be lifted.

A few months back I started experimenting with Jeremy Schoemaker’s Shoemoney Tools suite. In particular I tested out the Related Blog Post tool. While the other tools in the set are invaluable, this one caused me some serious grief because I failed to fully understand what the tool did.

As a result of my lack of understanding, Akisment banned me from the WordPress comment system. Anytime I attempted to leave a comment on another blog, it automatically went to their spam folder. It even treated my own trackbacks to other posts on this blog as spam in my own spam folder!

It should be pointed out that the tool does come with a warning that reads “Be careful with this one,” but I did not heed the warning.

I was taking a lazy Sunday looking over my Google Analytics data from 2008 to see what kind of posts brought the most organic search traffic.

I dropped the calendar back to January ’08 and did a traffic source search. I was surprised to see what turned up. Here is a list of the top 6 most frequently visited pages on this blog through organic search in 2008:

I first met Joel Comm on the set of The Next Internet Millionaire, and I have to confess, I knew nothing about him. He was just some guy with a funny little goetee (we nicknamed it “The Comm” on the set).

Joel inspires me because he is the true essence of an entrepreneur. He is always looking for opportunity and is always finding it in the cleverest places.

If you have been following the Apple v. Psystar saga over cloned Mac computers you might get the impression that Psystar is just trying to make a buck selling inexpensive clones of a popular Apple computer system.

But according to legal filings, Apple thinks that Psystar might be part of a “Pirates of Silicon Valley” style assault on Apple’s future in the computer market. And they might be right.

If the door is legally opened to those who might want to make Mac clones, large manufacturers like Dell, HP and others would be racing each other to deploy Mac clone systems at breakneck speeds.

This end result is what fuels the conspiracy theory that some other person, persons, or competitors are providing aid to Psystar to keep their legal options alive. Some sources believe that this support is the reason Psystar has been so belligerent in the face of resistance by Apple.

My friend Steve from Podnutz.com called me up the other day because he heard that Schrock Innovations was about to launch a data recovery service center.

We did a phone interview about what goes into creating a data recovery center and how data recovery pricing structures work. You can listen to the 53 minute interview here.

We would like to sign up 50 or more affiliates in February. To accomplish that we are thinking about paying commissions around 40% of the total recovery charge for every paying referral the affiliate sends us. To give comparison, other recovery companies with affiliate programs pay between $25 and $100 per referral.

Based on our pricing structure, affiliates can expect to make between $240 and $800 per referral. Considering that our data recovery center is charging less than 1/2 of what other similarly equipped centers charge, we should get off to a pretty good start.

The most basic explanation is that Google sees hyphens as spaces, and interprets them in the same way a space is used to separate two words.

One of the best explanations about how this works was written on Guru of Search where he posts that Google considers hyphens to be spaces in a domain name. If you start thinking of hyphens as spaces separating keywords as well, you can begin to select domain names that will have a slight edge in the search engine results positions (SERPs) over some of your competitors.

The first post was targeted toward things that I accomplished as part of Schrock Innovations. This post will be more focused toward personal and internet marketing accomplishments.