Happy Valentine's Day 2009 - Love & Money

Hello lovestruck readers and Happy Valentine's Day 2009! Today's the day when people profess their love for each other or in some cases their love for money. Whichever your situation may be, The Monetizer wants to spread some love on this sweet, sweet holiday...

You may have already noticed that the big G has a red-inspired Google logo theme today, and clicking that theme will take you to Valentine's Day search results. There you can read about the history of Valentine's Day, which many know is based on Saint Valentine and is mainly a holiday for lovers to express their love for one another...

There's also an interesting article within those search results from San Francisco Chronicle regarding Valentine's day and lovers spending less on each other. One individual in the articles notes that he's changed his 2 day Valentine's day holiday into a 1 day celebration. Basically he can't justify buying $100 worth of roses when his neighbor recently lost his job. According to the article V-day spending will drop about 4.8% this year, going down to $28.6 billion. Some of those who will be feeling the tightening budgets will be hotels, restaurants and flower services. Read the full article here at SFGate.com

But you can still share the love this Valentine's day and weekend. The Monetizer has found some cool deals online you may want to utilize. One is the Free Breakfast that IKEA is serving customers from February 13-16th each morning until 10:30AM. It may be too late to take your sweety to a V-Day breakfast, but Sunday and Monday could be your Valentine's day breakfast celebration. There's also several compelling restaurant deals so you can still take your sweetheart to a great meal. One example is TGI Friday's Buy One Get One Free Entree deal, just print the coupon out here. If you have Texas Roadhouse in your vicinity, they are offering a Valentine's Day deal of 2 entrees for $29.99 complete with 2 made-from-scratch sides! The choices include Baby Blossom, BBQ Chicken & Ribs, 12oz. Ribeye Steak and 12oz. Prime Rib. John Chow eat your heart out! (not literally) But nothing says I love you like a good plate of ribs or a nice hunk of steak. Texas Roadhouse's deal extends through Sunday February 15th with details and pictures here.

Now how about some mood music for today's lovefest? Amazon.com is offering Dean Martin Love Songs MP3 Album for just $2.99 today only! Even better, Let's Get It On by Marvin Gaye is FREE!. So you could technically just loop that track all day long if you really want to save money, however The Monetizer doesn't recommend it! You may want to purchase your lover a sweet iPod Nano to go with the music as well...

No matter how you choose to spend Valentine's day whether it be wining and dining your sweetie, watching romantic movies, or counting your money made online, The Monetizer wishes you nothing but love for Valentine's Day 2009!

Domain Purchased & Wordpress Setup

Recently, The Monetizer ran into a bigtime issue (potential scam) with a website called Regfly.com. They supposedly sell domain names with privacy protection included, but after a week and no sign of the domain I purchased in WHOIS, I submitted a dispute to my credit card company. See "Beware of Domain Scams!" for more info on that. That's all pending, but in the meantime I decided to take advantage of the free domain deal offered by BUY.com and GoDaddy, mentioned in my previous post. I bought a cheap DVD and then within 48 hours received my code for a free domain name (free for the first year) from GoDaddy. After some careful consideration, I took the plunge and used my coupon there to get a domain.

Right after my domain purchase, I immediately pointed my DNS (Domain Name Servers) to my Hostgator hosting account. With Hostgator's baby package you can host unlimited domains under one account for $10 a month, which is a great deal. Even cooler, you can set up Wordpress very simply through Hostgator's control panel. For a great tutorial check out Courtney Tuttle's Internet Marketing post: "Finalizing Hosting and Installing WordPress".

So within less than an hour I was able to buy a domain name, have it registered and set up hosting with Wordpress. Now all I have to do is choose my Wordpress theme, install plugins and transfer the Blogger blog stuff to Wordpress. Since I've been a longtime user of Blogger and barely scratched the surface with Wordpress, I'll detail my further adventures in an upcoming post. As mentioned above I recommend, consult Courtney Tuttle's Marketing School for a great video tutorial on setting up all of the above for your blog!

Buy.com's Free Domain Name Deal

The online retailer Buy.com
is currently offering customers a free domain name from GoDaddy.com with any purchase made at Buy.com. Once you've made your purchase and checked off the GoDaddy checkbox on their banner, you'll be emailed a redemption code for a free domain name within 48 hours after your order. So if you've wanted to test out or start aging a new domain name for your blog or website over the next year and don't want to spend too much, this is quite the deal. Of course you will have to spend some money, but you can find a few items at Buy.com that are under $10 with free shipping. You may even have been eyeing a certain electronics item that can be found at Buy.com. Now's your chance to buy it and also get a domain name to start aging it for Google and other search engines!

One example of an under $10 product with free shipping is these snazzy looking iFrogz headphones. Pick em' up for yourself, as a gift, or shop them off on eBay if you can!

Or if you're a DVD Sci-Fi/action movie fan, The Matrix 4 Film Favorite collection is $10.95 with free shipping. You'll not only get the movies but a new domain name for yourself. Shop around the site though as they have all sorts of goodies from music to DVD's, computer equipment, books and video games.

The GoDaddy/Buy.com free domain offer will expire April 1, 2009. Makes sure you check off the checkbox on the GoDaddy banner for a free domain when you're confirming your purchase. Follow this link for more instructions on Buy.com & GoDaddy's free domain name deal or visit Buy.com
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Beware of Domain Scams!

First off, apologies for no recent posts here at The Monetizer blog as its been a busy time! The Monetizer recently "took the plunge" so to speak and purchased a new domain name (for another blog venture) and then the baby hosting package with Hostgator.com. The issue so far hasn't been with Hostgator at all. Their customer service has been exemplary and prompt. Hostgator's been recommended by many fellow bloggers as the host company to use as they allow you to host unlimited domains on the same account. The main issue has come with the domain site, Regfly.com, and their questionability as a valid company.

This past weekend I became inspired to buy a domain name and didn't do my full homework. Lesson 1, investigate any online company as best you can before paying up. I did a search for domain names with privacy, and regfly.com came up in the search. Upon checking out their site, it seemed like a legit business and the deal seemed great. A domain name for just $9.99 with WHOIS privacy included. For anyone who isn't familiar with WHOIS.net, it's a registry database where you can find out the owner (registrar) on any domain name. Basically when you buy your own domain name, www.yourdomainname.com, your name, address and phone number go into the WHOIS database, and is public info. (For anyone with a website who wasn't aware of WHOIS, go check it out and see what info's available on you!) Luckily, you've got the option to protect your privacy, but it's usually costly. For example, I believe GoDaddy charges an additional $7 to $10 a year for this protection, on top of the $10 domain charge. Regfly's deal seemed great as you got the domain and the privacy all for $10. But like they say "if it seems too good to be true, it probably is".

Regfly was quick to process my order, and send me the official confirmation by email. They provided a live account there which I can log into and check out the domain name. The problem is that the domain name isn't in the WHOIS database after 4 days, meaning that anyone can still buy that domain, yet I've been charged for it. The other problem, regfly.com has very poor customer service. Their "customer support ticket system" has been a slow affair where you type out your problem and wait for them to respond. They responded to one question I posted with an answer asking me for more info, then closed the response so I couldn't respond to their inquiry. Very fishy.... Basically, I've opened a second support ticket now stating I expect the domain name to be in WHOIS within 24 hours. If I don't see this, I'll definitely be disputing the charge on my credit card. To further add to this, I did some Google searches on regfly.com today to find some other customers posting on forums with similar issues to mine. Friends, beware when you go looking for a good deal online for hosting, domains or any other product/service. There's some great deals to be fished out, and also some scammers waiting for us to bite!

In another update, ShoppingAds.com has finally payed The Monetizer straight to Paypal! They are a program of their word, so be patient if you've hit the minimum payout level there yet haven't seen a payment. They typically will pay on the 26th of the month, although my payment was postponed and I received it about a month later.

Here's to your success,
The Monetizer