Linkbait is the act of adding content to a website with the aim of attracting links from other sites. The content can take a variety of different forms from a unique tool or a breaking news story to a well written article or controversial image.

Sometimes linkbait is intentional but quite often the best linkbait is conceived quite by accident.

My favourite piece of link bait is the Adobe Acrobat Reader software. The download page has over 15 million links and is probably the most linked internal page on the web today.

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No Noise!Welcome to the Podcasting Blog, this week we’re gonna talk about some how to topics, I’m gonna tell you how you can remove unwanted noise from a recording in two different applications and on two different platforms. This week, there wasn’t anything particularly interesting in podcast news, so I decided to just do a how to post.

If you’ve listened to many of my podcasts, you know that I’m a quality minded individual and that I like lot’s of audio tools, mostly hardware. I still think hardware is the best way to do just about anything, but, sometimes you’re in a bind and you need to use some software to get you out of that bind.

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Ever go to get on a computer and the user is logged out, and you don’t know the windows password? Or do you have some access, but not access to a users private files, and you want access to those files?

This quick tutorial will show you the steps to change and reset any user password on a windows computer, and also show you how to protect your computer from people doing this to you!

CHANGE/RESET PASSWORD FOR ANY USERNAME

1. Reboot the computer
2. Right after the bios is finished, hit F8 (or F2,10,12)
3. Select ‘Safe mode’ or ‘Safe mode with networking support’
4. Windows will boot up to the logon screen. Click administrator, 9/10 there is no password.
5. Do, Start->Run->type ‘command’
6. At the prompt, type ‘net user’ which will display a list of usernames. Find the one you are looking for, try ‘net user username’ for them all. Type ‘net user /HELP’ for more info.
7. To reset the password type ‘net user username *’ where username is the username you want to reset.
8. For no password, leave blank.
9. Now, reboot and you can login as that user.

SECURING YOURSELF FROM THIS METHOD

1. Log into your account (must have admin rights)
2. Get to a command prompt and type ‘net user username *’ where username is Administrator, or the renamed administrator account.
3. Give administrator a STRONG password.

I never use windows, but when I do, I re-install the OS on a clean harddrive, and take steps to secure it before I connect it to the net for windows and antivirus upgrades.

One of the first things I do is give the Administrator a password. I also disable the guest account, and give the guest username a password.

Next I uninstall all networking components except TCP/IP. Next I disable netbios in the TCP/IP component settings.

Then I disable some services from running, use ‘net user username /DELETE’ to delete the “SUPPORT� and helpdesk usernames totally, and do a bunch of other stuff.

Caveats: If you are on a pc that does not allow you to boot into safe mode, you can get around this. They aren’t disabling the safe mode from the OS, they are just not allowing it from startup by pressing a function key. All you need to do is reboot, and then when windows is still loading, before the login screen, turn off the computer by holding down the power button for 5 seconds. Then turn it back on and you should have safe mode available. You can try this at many different stages to get to a safe mode.

If you have administrator rights, you can modify your boot.ini file to automatically boot into safe mode, or, preferably, you can modify your boot.ini file to give you a choice of booting into safe mode every single time you reboot. I have a custom boot.ini on every windows I run.

You could also use a linux “live cd� such as knoppix to edit your boot.ini file. But if you are going to do that, why not just use a live cd to reset the password, or retrieve the hashes and crack them with saminside?

See available boot.ini switch options at microsoft support boot.ini switch options
This is meant to be for beginners so don’t give me any grief for how easy or simple this is. Not all of us even use windows. Questions/Comments welcome.

I almost hate talking about this one because I’m not sure I want the competition. Luckily, every niche or industry is different, so you’ll only be competing with me if we serve the same niche. While this method is nothing new, it is very tried and true. The one thing that consistently brings in large amounts of traffic and garners backlinks in the process is the creation of a good tutorial. Make sure the tutorial is somehow related to your niche. Even the most boring of niches can come up with some kind of interesting tutorial. Then do the following:

1. Use lots of photographs and/or illustrations. Document every step of the tutorial with a picture to illustrate the point.
2. Assume the reader knows nothing. Give them details about the process. Doing so helps the reader, makes your tutorial more linkable, and gives search engines lots of juicy text to chew on.
3. If possible, include a link at the bottom of the tutorial to another portion of your site where they can get more information, learn more, or expand their knowledge of the broader subject.
4. Socialize the tutorial. Once written, get it into the social network mix.

Once you’ve gotten good traction with a tutorial, your mind will begin to explode with new ideas. I won’t give away all of the ideas my mind came up with.