Peter Vatistas

TuitionU is the 1^st web site that provides the chance to rate and review resources and products in higher education and financial aid. TuitionU’s position is neutral so all providers of content, resource, and tools are welcome to participate and help grow the site. This helps create a true “one stop shop” for higher ed. TuitionU provides immediate answers to questions and access to tools and resources through a wealth of content provided by industry professionals. At TuitionU.com you can find the following:

* Peer to peer ratings and reviews for schools, lenders and much more.
* Talk to students, teachers, parents and industry experts.
* Articles related to higher education and financial aid.
* Blogs, forums, videos galleries, image galleries and of course friends!

Lots of tools can be found at TuitionU like the following:

* Student Loan Comparison
* Private Student Loan Calculators
* Student Loan Calculators
* College Cost Estimator
* Private Student Loan Payment Calculator
* Expecting Family Contributing Estimator
* Planning and Budgeting for College Calculator

I am really fascinated by this higher ed community because you find real information and advice from all sides of the industry. Parents can talk to parents about their children’s school, loans, teachers or even get insight from other students and industry professionals. Students can talk to students, parents, even schools and lenders about their options and needs for higher education.

TuitionU is a win-win for anyone looking to learn more about all aspects of higher education and because TuitionU is non-bias, you’ll always get the best answer - not a sales pitch. Where else can you rate your lender or teacher and know for sure its not a marketing team boosting the numbers? No where!!

Check out TuitionU and see for yourself how this community is really making a difference for everyone.

As you all know I am an avid user of Web CEO for my SEO/SEM solutions company. Although there are a few other tools and applications I use, Web CEO is by far the most powerful and stable application I have ever used in this field. I easily spend the majority of my day using Web CEO for just about all steps of my search engine optimization for all my clients.

Become an expert in SEO quickly and easily:

* Web CEO software package consisting of 12 potent tools to organize your efforts
* Professional Training Course in Search Engine Marketing to learn all the best practices

Web CEO is a full-range search engine optimization software with advanced site troubleshooting and web analytics functionality. Here are a few facts about Web CEO:

The choice of 440,000+ businesses.
Web CEO stands on guard of the rankings of IBM and Motorola. These companies have no right to make mistakes. What about you?

Simple and user-friendly.
Packed with powerful features, Web CEO still can boast an ultra user-friendly interface that turns a novice into an SEO expert right away after installation.

Completely Safe.
Employing Google API and cutting-edge human emulation techniques, Web CEO makes the optimization process absolutely safe for you and your site. Some of the important tools you will find in the package will help you:

* Get suggestions for new keywords relevant to your business and research your own keywords
* Get optimization advice and tweak your Web pages in friendly editing environment
* Create link partnerships
* Keep track of your site’s rankings and links
* Get comprehensive real-time visitor reports

I’m sure your looking at this like I just wrote a sales pitch but if you’ve read my blog before you’ll know I don’t sell a damn thing. In addition to that fact - WebCEO is free! Just download, install and get your rank on.

Download the free edition of Web CEO and get access to the Training Course now!

In addition to Web CEO’s awesome application and training program I totally recommend that you grab the latest copy of SEO Book by Aaron Wall. It doesn’t matter how much you know about search engine optimization/marketing, SEO Book is by far one of the best (if not THE BEST) reference and training materials available today.

That. Just. Happened.

Being that I am an SEO I need to see live stats and information all the time; fortunately for me Firefox has a lot of great tools for free and extremely easy to use.

SEO tools for Firefox:

1. Search Status: This toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar. I use everything this tool has to offer but my favorite feature is the display of site’s Google PR, Alexa, and Compete at the base of my browser.

2. SEO for Firefox: Aaron Wall from SEOBook had this neat little tool developed and I love it. Tons of stats show for every listing in Google’s SERP whenever you search anything. This tool has to be one of the best SEO tools out there and without it a lot of my time would be wasted.

3. Social Media for Firefox: I already posted about this but this tool is worth the time to write about again. You can see my original post here but for those of you SEO/SEM Social Network guys like myself this tool just rocks and is definitely a major time saver.

Here is a list of other extensions I use including a few other SEO/SEM plug ins:

- SEOpen: This tool packs a ton of SEO tools, most I use daily.

- SEOLinks: Neat little tool that shows link stats with mouse over.

- Link Checker: Don’t get caught with broken links again.

- ShowIP: Love this tool for when I swing DNS records.

- ServerSpy: Great extension to show what type of server & version the site is hosted on (i.e. Apache 2, IIS 7.0, etc).

If your stuck trying to think of new ways to generate more traffic (especially recurring traffic) to your website you may want to look into some form of point or reward system. People by nature are competitive and have a drive to win, adding this environment to your site may prove beneficial.

Already there are hundreds of sites on the net that utilize this and many base the majority of their revenues off of it. I am not interested in the systems out their that actually payout to their member base, like a revshare affiliate program, I like the programs that allow you to turn in your points for custom features, better exposure, stickers & t-shirts, and more.

There are several ways to accomplish this, the following is my favorite and the only one I am going to talk about :

- Using an internal affiliate program to provide your members with a unique URL. The more people that click on a members unique URL, the more points they earn. When those clicked unique URL’s turn into conversions, even more points are earned. Look at this very popular gaming site called Outwar, they follow this model almost to a “T” and make hundreds of thousands of dollars doing so.

This method, if not monitored closely and built around a solid TOS, can hurt you as it may be considered SPAM by sites (forums, blogs, etc) receiving these posted URLs. Just be smart about it. That being said, this method can grow your traffic like crazy; let’s say for example that you have 10 members - everyday each member can recruit 10 more people from their unique URL’s and everyday half of them sign up and continue to recruit more members. I’ll let you do the math here but after 30 days your member base is considerably larger and growing! Obviously this is a picture perfect scenario but I hope you see what I am trying to get at here.

If you have a monthly membership fee, and award can be a free month membership or even a more exclusive membership only earned by playing the game. The list goes on and on with things you can provide your members that play along.

Now for you, the webmaster or marketing guy, this will really build your traffic and exposure for your ad campaigns. Hopefully there is something to your site aside from this point system that keeps the members around and is complimented by the point & reward system.

I am currently developing a system like this using an open source ad management application and an open source affiliate program. I will also be using an open source shopping cart for the points to be cashed in at. The reason why I am tying the ad management application into the mix is to provide members with the ability to earn revshare off of ad zones placed on their personal pages (i.e. forum posts, blogs, articles, etc).

The more you give to your members/readers/surfers, the more they will want to give to you - just play fair. Don’t ask form 1,000 sign ups for a t-shirt - you’ll be stuck with 1,000 t-shirts!

Social Media for Firefox has to be one of the best add-ons in my Firefox arsenal. The tool is placed at the bottom of my Firefox browser and gives me immediate access to my favorite social media accounts like Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and Reddit.

For the people who know me - they know that I am a Firefox extension whore and I try everything out there and I keep only what I HAVE TO have. This is on my favorite list of extensions, get it.

Download Social Media for Firefox here and please pass it on - its a tool worthy of exposure (like my blog, LOL!)

I love this tool and I am not sure why I haven’t written about it before. Instead of making changes to your site then refreshing to see the results, Firebug for Firefox allows you to make changes on the fly, in real time with the ability to see the results immediately - no more refresh button!!

I use this tool on my sites to edit, debug, and monitor changes to my HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I definitely thing you should give it a try and make sure to check out the sweet tutorials on YouTube.

Click here for the Firebug information & download page.

Here is a great tool I use a lot to find passwords on my computer and passwords across the network on all computers. SpotAuditor can scan your network’s IP Range using any credentials you give it (Admin rights preferably) and it will spit out passwords typed in or stored from every computer it see’s. Spot Auditor can also reveal visited URL’s, installed programs, and passwords under asteriks (i.e. ******).

Download it for free with the link I provide below and see how helpful SpotAuditor really is! If you’re a network Administrator I would make sure these aren’t sitting on employee computers, big problem!

SpotAuditor Password Recovery Software - Compatible with Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista