CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” A CAPTCHA is a challenge-response test that websites use to ensure that a response is not being generated by a computer.

For instance, Google has one on its Keywords Tool page. You can enter a search term but before you get any results, you must prove that you’re a living, breathing person by typing in a slightly distorted word or camouflaged letters and words.

The objective of using a CAPTCHA program from your point of view as an affiliate marketer would be to prevent computer-generated sign-ups to your opt-in list or computer generated sign-ups to your blog posts or computer generated entries to your guest book, etc.

With the enactment of the CANSPAM Act of 2003 you’ve probably gotten a bit more concerned about your opt-in list, especially. The penalties for SPAMMING are stiff and you want to be certain that those who opt-in to your list understand that they are, in fact, opting in.

You’ve probably gone to the double opt-in…most of us have. When a user opts-in your autoresponder sends an email and the user must confirm that he IS opting in by clicking a link in the email. The double opt-in works…no doubt about it. There’s also not much doubt that the double opt-in decreases subscriptions considerably.

It’s been proven that just writing blog posts on a regular basis serves to send traffic to your website – and a significant amount of traffic! Websites with active blogs simply generate more traffic than similar websites without blogs.

Of course, business blogs should have some kind of at least general structure – the type information that is presented. But that isn’t a hard and fast rule. If your blog is generally focused on products, that doesn’t mean you can make a blog post about changes in the industry itself.

There are three types of blog posts that seem to generate more traffic than others:

• Industry Business News
• Industry People News
• New Products

The Google gurus and engineers have been busy. Google announced not one – not two – but three enhancements to help users input searches more quickly and easily.

Google Suggest Tailored to Regions in the U.S

Pandu Nayak, a member of Google’s technical staff said, “Last year we launched localized Google Suggest by country, offering relevant popular search queries tailored for different regions. However, just as people in the U.K. often look for different things than people in U.S., we’ve found that people in Seattle tend to look for different things than people in Dallas. So last week, we rolled out a version of Google Suggest that is tailored to specific metro areas in the U.S.”

The “Nine Nations of North America” is a book that was written in 1981 by Joel Garreau and Google has apparently based the newest “Google Suggest” on that author’s observations.