Agents of Value

Most people that want to buy domains just go to GoDaddy and start typing in different combinations of domain ideas. They get frustrated when all of the obvious domain names they want to register are already taken, and end up settling for a name that they don’t really love for their new website project. It’s true that millions of domains have already been registered. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that lots of domains expire every single day. In fact, as of January 2012, about 70,000 domain names drop every single day. This means that a great name that you might want may suddenly be available one day, after having been registered for years. Here are a few tips about buying dropped domain names: Dropped domain names will have a new registration date after you register them. That’s different from prerelease domains which can be back-ordered through a service like NameJet. This has some advantages and disadvantages. It means that the domain has a fresh new life, separate from whatever the previous [...]

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Did you ever wonder about the people behind Agents of Value? Who is the virtual assistant sending you that SEO rankings report every week? Who’s the graphic artist that continues to come up with fresh new designs day in and day out? We thought it would be interesting to shoot a few videos showing some of the great people that make Agents of Value one of the best staff leasing services in the world today. Jennifer, project management virtual assistant Adrian, graphic artist Special thanks to Jen and Adrian for participating in this project. Also, I’d like to give a shout out to our Makati based video production team, Florie and Ian, who organized everything here – conceptualizing the ideas, signing up the talent, organizing a shoot, and finally producing the videos. Nice job! Subscribe to our YouTube Channel to stay up to date with new videos from Agents of Value!

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Ever since the days of the Google Panda update, more and more online publishers are returning to their roots, to focus on publishing well written, objective content. Publishers with too much low quality, filler style contents got hammered, and lost lots of their traffic. So, webmasters do have an strong incentive to filter through their content and buff up the pages that are lacking in quality. But if you have a big WordPress site with lots of pages and posts already, how can you go back and objectively decide which contents are good, and which ones are low quality? There are some WordPress plugins out there already that ask the reader to give a 5 stars rating, after they’ve read the post. A perfect example is the very excellent GD Star Rating plugin. The user interface is very simple, and intuitive. Recently, we started noticing that most pages on Wikipedia have a ‘rate this page’ feature at the bottom of the page. They specifically ask the reader to rate the page based on very Google [...]

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When your application supports uploading humongous amounts of data, eventually you’ll be faced with the need to consider database scalability. What happens when users upload too many photos, music or videos and you have many visitors trying to access the same photos, music and videos simultaneously somewhere? My current CakePHP project came to that point. In addition to dealing with a massive amount of data, we also have several back-end scripts that prepare reports. While those reports pull a chunk of data out of MySQL, it can lock the table, and cause all the other programs trying to upload new data to have to wait. This resulted in our application being unresponsive at times, and a less than great user experience. Master Slave Replication, With Cakephp The first step I took to reduce this risk is to separate the ‘writing’ from ‘reading’. The team built two similar databases servers with one being synced to the other every time. This is called master slave replication. The source serves as the master database where all the updates [...]

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I’ve been buying domains through GoDaddy auctions for a while now, and I’ve started to develop some strategies around how to be more effective at winning these auctions. First, in case you’ve never seen the results of a GoDaddy Auction, you can check out a few recently closed auctions here. You should be able to see the closing price, closing time, and a bidding history. . Here’s my bidding strategy for GoDaddy auctions 1. Mark your favorites as watched. Once you identify the auctions you’re interested in, click on the blue ‘eye’ on the auction listing page. 2. Mark the auction expiration date and time on your calendar, with a reminder. I use Google Calendar for this. 3. Login to the godaddy auction website about 10 minutes before the auction is set to expire. 4. Set your upper limit, and place your bid for the domain as close to the expiration time as possible. Here’s why I do it this way 1. The most important reason to follow this bidding strategy, is that you don’t [...]

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