Search Engine Strategies (SES) is the leading global conference & expo series that educates delegates on search engine marketing (SEM), including optimization (SEO) and advertising strategies, tactics and best practices. SES Search Marketing Events provide instruction from the industry’s top Search experts, including representatives of the Search Engines themselves.

I attended the New York show earlier this year, and I was REALLY impressed with the show they put on. I learned a lot, and made some great contacts as well! Now they’ve headed out West, and are getting ready for SES San Jose. which takes place from August 18-22.

Do you want to learn more about a range of internet marketing topics from search-engine marketing to affiliate marketing to social media optimization? Then SES is the show for you. And if you don’t feel like treking out to California, fear not! SES will be in Chicago in December.

Brad The BlogBoy made a post recently about 5 Wordpress plugins that can help drive comments to your blog. I thought it was a great post, and I wanted to talk more about it.

His first suggestion was to install Nofollow Free, a plug-in that removes the no-follow tag from comments left on your blog. Yes, it’s probably an invitation for spammers. But if you’re using Akismet, and moderating all of your comments, then it’s not really a big deal. Spammers will realize that they’re not getting anywhere, and move on to the next site.

Next, he suggested installing CommentLuv. This is one of the best ways you can reward your visitors. CommentLuv pings their RSS feed when they submit a comment, and posts a link to their latest blog post along with the comment.

I didn’t necessarily agree with his next two suggestions - Quoter and Brian’s Threaded Comments. Both are useful on blogs that get lots of comments.. But on smaller blogs, it’s a lot of work to implement them, for very little return.

Lastly, he suggests adding the Subscribe to Comments plug-in. This is a nifty little plug-in that will e-mail you when a post you commented on gets more comments. This works great on smaller sites, but it can get REALLY ugly in certain situations. If you’re expecting a surge of traffic, I recommend that you temporarily disable this plug-in until the worst has passed.. Otherwise, your server will get ROCKED. (Ask me how I know..)

I’ve added Nofollow Free and CommentLuv to Zander Chance.. So leave a comment, see how it all works, and if you like what you see, consider adding them to your blog as well!

Tyler Cruz is back with Affiliate Marketing Challenge 2, once again sponsored by MarketLeverage

This competition has even bigger and better prizes than the last competition, with a total of 16 prizes up for grabs. Also, this time around there are 5 prizes available to be won just by blogging about this challenge. This allows non-affiliate marketers or those who have already previously registered to MarketLeverage under a different referral link, able to participate!

The contest runs until August 14th, but don’t be discouraged by registering late - Last month’s winner entered the contest with less than 2 weeks left, and he was able to take the lead by generating $3300 in commissions!

The Prizes:
1st Place: Dell 22? Widescreen Monitor with Built-In Webcam
2nd Place: Sony PSP + Secret Agent Clank
3rd Place: Mino Flip Video Camera
4th Place: iPod Nano
5th - 6th Place: $100 Prepaid Rewards Card

Bonus Prizes
The top 5 new referrals who sign up to MarketLeverage through his referral link and earn the most money out of new referrals will each receive a 2.0GB USB Storage Pen.

In addition, 5 bloggers who post about this competition will be chosen randomly by drawing and will also each receive a 2.0GB USB Storage Pen as well!

Visit Tyler’s site for more details on how to get started. Good luck!

Evil blogger John Chow is getting smoked by a bunch of puppies!

Daily Puppy boasts 47,847 Feedburner readers, and an Alexa Rank of 21,854. John Chow has 27,185 Feedburner readers, and an Alexa Rank of 43,681. And that’s with John’s 4-year head start!

Apparently, cute puppies are more interesting than bragadocious bloggers.

As I mentioned last week, we decided to move a large number of our websites from a series of shared hosts onto a single dedicated server. Frankly, it’s something that should have been done months ago..

We had almost 50 sites spread across 3 shared hosting companies. The first company was VERY cheap, and overall they provided pretty good service. The second company charged a few bucks more, but they were absolute rockstars, providing 100% uptime for 8 STRAIGHT MONTHS. And the third company was a total nightmare - Their servers were constantly crashing, and they’d try to blame us for their issues.. They were great to deal with for the first few months, but then their service went downhill in a hurry.

All three companies were highly recommended on various web hosting forums.. Having used a LOT of different shared hosting companies over the past 5 years, I can say without hesitation that HostGator is a step above the rest!

These guys don’t mess around. In addition to the great service that they offer, they’ve got 24/7 tech support available - With a toll-free number to boot! They’ve also got live chat and support forums at your disposal, in case you can’t get to a phone.

Don’t just take my word for it - Try them out for yourselves. Right now, you can get the first month of hosting for just $0.01 using the coupon “HGC25″. In addition, if you’re moving a site over from another host, they’ll transfer it over for you at no cost to you! FREE Domain Transfer, FREE File Transfer, FREE MySQL Transfer, and FREE Script Transfer!

So what are you waiting for? Sign up today!

For those of you who don’t know, Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch passed away yesterday. His last lecture, entitled “Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”, has been viewed on YouTube over 4 million times since it was posted on December 20, 2007. Today alone, there have been over 500K views!

Randy Pausch gave his last lecture at the CMU on September 18th 2007, before a packed audience. In this moving presentation, Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.

At 76 minutes in length, it’s a LONG video. But it’s one of the most profound things you’ll ever watch. Carve out some free time, and watch this presentation in it’s entirety. I hope you find it as moving as I did.