Giving away 3 Invitations to Use Customized TV, JOOST
I have 3 Joost invitations to give away to the first 3 bloggers who contact me. Joost is the newest technology which lets you customize and watch TV from your computer.
I downloaded it today, played around with it and couldn’t stop thinking, “Wow, these people are impressive.” The interface is dashing and easy to use. The picture’s quality is excellent.
By the way, Joost is the brainchild of the same people who created Skype.
WWW. or Not and Where Is My PageRank?
For over a month, I was baffled seeing my PageRank disappeared on and off, and didn’t know why. For example, just hours ago, I clearly saw the pagerank of 4, and then later 0. This happened over the course of a month until I discovered that the pagerank of 4 showed only with the full address: www.beyondsarajevo.com. Removing “www” reduces the pagerank to 0.
Will this affect your site? According to Dailyblogtips, it does pose a problem: “Having two different versions might damage you in popular lists and social bookmarking sites as well.”
DBT offers very simple yet detailed explanation on the www or no www issue in addition to provide an easy step-by-step instruction on how to do it.
I followed one of the approaches to enforce only one www. version of my site; everything worked great.
Remember that after the change, previous URLs without www. will be invalid. So if you submitted your blog entries, you have to edit the URLs.
Unexpected Revenue Source from Associate Content
That was what I discovered at Associate Content. After spending months reading and implementing SEO (Search Engine Optimization), I finally took up a common advice to write more articles and submit them to Ezines and article directories, creating link back and exposure to my sites.
My first Associate Content’s article is an existing blog entry from my other site which I modified and added more content to meet the 400-word minimum. Then a week later, I received an email from AC offering me money for this make-shift article out of the blue.
WOW! The pay was very little, but it was reasonable given the article barely hit the minimum-word requirement, and I had just started out with AC, with no feed backs and page views for my section.
This revenue source will definitely stay high my list. I see many advantages of writing articles for Associate Content:
1. Time – I don’t have to write anything new. All I need is to modify my blog entries to meet the requirement and submit them as articles.
2. Flexibility – I can write about any topics I like. This last point makes it much more attractive than writing paid reviews.
Check out Associate Content now!
Easy Online Payment with Paypal
If you are starting out or thinking about making money online, you should first open a Paypal account.
What is Paypal? – PayPal is an account-based system which that allows you use your email addresses to send and receive money.
How does it work? – You sign up for an account, supply an email address, credit card and bank information. This registered email is the one you use to send and receive money.
What are the rules and catches? – You send and receive money completely for free with a personal account. However, your senders have fewer payment options to send you the money. When you upgrade to a business account , you still send money for free, but are charge from 1.9% – 2.9% plus $0.30 per received payment, regardless of how your senders fund their payment. (Please go to website to see the current rates.) With a personal account, Paypal charges 4.9% + $0.30 USD (limit of 5 transactions per 12 month period) or 4.9% plus $0.30 USD for card payments received using PayPal on Skype.
Why should you use Paypal? – To simplify your online business transaction. It’s fast and convenient to receive money without the stress of supplying your sensitive banking information. Many online revenue networks choose Paypal as payment options, and some have lower minimums payout if they can pay through Paypal than issue a check.
Examples of how you can use Paypal
1. Bid and receive money for eBay items.
2. Get paid by your ad-nework, review-network, affiliates and other online-revenue sources.
3. Pay for purchase from an online store you don’t feel secured enough to give out your credit card’s information.
4. Pay for and receive money from services/companies/people which only deal with Paypal.
5. Pay off a mutual friend for eating at his party.
I’ve done all the above.
Paypal is available to users from more than a hundred countries. Invoice efficiently and get paid faster with PayPal’s Free invoicing tool. Sign up now!
Book Review – Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
What do crime waves, revolutions and trends have in common? And in what way an idea is similar to a virus? Why did crime in New York suddenly drop in the mid 1990s? Who was the key personality during the American Revolution? What brought about growing popularity of the TV show Sesame Street? What happened before the book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood shot to fame?
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Gladwell defines three agents for change: The Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.
(I) The Law of the Few: a big change can be a direct consequence by actions from a few people, namely the (1) connectors, (2) mavens and (3) salesmen.
(I) Connectors know many different sorts of people who are not only their friends. The people in the connectors’ network, a lot of whom are just acquaintance, coming from different walks of life and process all kind of information and knowledge, ready to pass on to the connectors. Mavens, on the other hand, collect, connect and spread information. They are similar to Experts; however, Mavens share information because they enjoy helping people. The last people in this “elite” few are Salesmen. Salesmen, with their natural charm and enthusiasm, are good at persuading people to take actions, crucial step for change to happen.
Gladwell uses an example of Paul Revere, an influential figure during the American Revolution. A rare example of connector, maven and salesman all rolled into one, Paul was the first person whom the boy spy told about a cryptic message he overheard from the British. Paul, then, immediately alarmed key people in town of the possible attack from the British and asked them to spread the news. In the middle of the night, Paul Revere rode on his horse to other towns to warn his countrymen of an imminent danger and convince them to take action. Had he not had the characteristics of a connector, maven and salesman, history would have been difference.
(II) The Stickiness Factor is the nature of the message, whether it is worthy of the attention and immediate action, whether it “sticks” and makes an impact in your mind.
Again, I will cite the example of Paul Revere. The message about the imminent British attack was urgent, important, thus prompting people to react. Let say Paul knocked from doors to doors spreading message about setting up an important town meeting, he would not have received the same response.
(3) The Power of Context is the environment where the social epidemic takes place. Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.
If people witness a person being attacked and beaten to death, given that they have nothing to worry about their own security, they help or at least get help for the victim, right? No, it depends on the situation, the condition of the environment in which the attack takes place. Gladwell cites the example of 1964 in New York of Kitty Genovese who was stabbed to death in a middle of a neighborhood while many people were watching and hearing the accident. She died because there were many people at the scene, and one expected the other would seek help, in turn no one did. If the scene had been at another location with fewer witnesses, she might have lived. This incident demonstrates the “power of context.”
Spreading a message or prompting a cause requires tremendous insight and understanding of human behaviors and of seemingly small and unrelated incidents in our lives. The Tipping Point , a mixture of human psychology, social events and history, surprisingly, brings about a superb reading which, no doubt, a must read. This book has changed and influenced greatly how I see and interpret things happening in the world.
The book is available in the following formats: paperback, audio download and .
How about a Revenue Stream from Ebay Auctions through AuctionAds?
I saw AuctionAds on Shoemoney’s blog for awhile and kept wondering if I could implement this new revenue stream on my web sites.
Surprise, surprise! About a week or so later, I received an email from Text Link Ads, another monetize source for websites, announcing AuctionAds venture and invited me to join. Without hesitating for even a split second, I jumped immediately at the opportunity.
A joint venture between TLA’s parent company, MediaWhiz and ShoeMoney Media, AuctionAds allows webmasters to monetize their websites from eBay auctions. When visitors click on the ad, they are redirected to the auctions on eBay. Publishers make money each time a user clicks on AuctionAds and then signs up for a new account on eBay, place winning bids or just perform an action.
Example – See an example of AuctionAds in action on PragueBuzz.com. This particular page promotes Bohemian crystals, rare works of art from the Czech Republic. At the bottom of the page, I include AuctionAds code showing Bohemian Crystal auctions from eBay. The ads have been displaying the right products most of the time. However, once in a while, you will see totally irrelevant ads, e.g. computer or electronic gadgets. This is one big issue with Contextual Ads in general though, not only AuctionAds. It is difficult to get the right ads all the time.
You probably know Google Adsense, don’t you? They are contextual link ads which match (or try to match) the website’s content. Similarly,AuctionAds are contextual image ads showing eBay auctions based on keywords associated with the code. The difference between Google Adsense and AuctionAds is that the former is pay-per-click advertising where you get paid from users’ clicking on the ads while the latter is an affiliate program which pays only when users make a purchase or perform some action after clicking.
Implement AuctionAds
1. Image ads – You choose a keyword, for example “Bohemian Crystal”, which best describes either the content of a particular page or the entire site or simply anything you want. Then you generate the code for the ads. Ads are available in many formats: leaderboard, skyscraper, banner, half banner, various sized rectangles and more.
2. Link ads – You target a page on eBay, supply the page’s URL and then generate the code.
I really appreciate the fact that pages from AuctionAds load very fast, which I can not say the say the same for many other affiliate-networks. Getting highly-targeted ads for my sites can be done very easily and quickly.
If you are small webmasters with niche site, you should check out AuctionAds. They most likely accept your sites as they do not reject based on the sites’ traffic. Click here to join.
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