Personalized Google Homepage!

Check it out here: Google.com/ig
You may have to have a gMail account to use it… I have an invite if you need it…
I was wondering when Google would do more with their home page.
Some of the options so far are:

gMail InBox
Google News
Weather
Stock Market
New York Times
BBC News
Wired News
SlashDot (whatever that is, lol)
Movies
Driving Directions
Quote of the Day
Word of the Day

It’ll be interesting to see what else they offer down the road. It’s not Yahoo yet, but it’s a good start. I like Google and even before this I use them as my HomePage…

I don’t know why. Something like MyYahoo would be so much more comprehensive and Useful. But I guess I like searching Google and when I go online I’m usually going places via my Favorites menu mostly.

I've been using my gmail account day in and day out and my days won't be complete without going to google. I know most of you too :-) From searching to researching. From beneficial to nonsense.

Anyway, thought I’d give ya a heads up!

Take care and go make a million today.

Read more »

7 Ways to Drive Laser-Targeted Traffic

An affiliate marketer may have all the things needed for him to be able to succeed in a business such as affiliate marketing. He may have the necessary drive, diligence and perseverance to be able to understand how the system works. He may have all the tools necessary in maintaining the business, including a really unique and interesting website which could earn him a fortune if only the whole world could see it. However, all these would prove useless if he does not know how to drive traffic to his website. His business would sink into oblivion together with all the sales, fortune and dreams that he might have realized if he only knew how to do this particular task.

Getting people who matter to see one’s website is a difficult undertaking if he tries to consider the fact that there are rivals everywhere waiting to pin him down. The immensity of the internet as well as the affiliate marketing world has given birth to the fierce competition between affiliate marketers, each of whom has his own great product to offer. With all the websites piling on top of each other, how would one be able to stand out? The seven best ways to drive laser-targeted traffic to one’s own website would help those who are bent on sticking it out with this business wherever it is bound to take them.

The first step in driving traffic to one’s website is by relying on search engines and what they can do for the affiliate marketer concerned. Because they are popular for driving free targeted traffic, they should not be ignored by all means. Having top search engine rankings is vital in building popularity links, and the use of the right keywords is important in attaining this goal. Once a website is on top of the list, it is easily accessible to anyone who wants to see it for himself.

The second way in driving traffic to one’s website is by contacting other webmasters for a possible link exchange partnership. Locating websites that are related to one’s own website is the primary task. Once there, he should be able to establish communication by personalizing everything as much as possible. It is then possible to make reciprocal link exchanges between webmasters whichever way the affiliate marketer prefers.

The third way is through writing one’s own articles. This is an effective way in promoting a website, because good content that are appreciated by readers will lead them to visit the writer’s very own website out of sheer interest.

The fourth way is through joint venture marketing. This is one of the most effective ways of promoting a product or a service. Having a partner through ad swap or link exchange is beneficial to both parties as it allows them to reach a wide customer base in a short amount of time.

The fifth is through joining affiliate programs. Having affiliates to do the work means allowing them to bring tons of traffic to a website. Skyrocketing sales would be realized as a result, and both the affiliate and the website owner will benefit from the situation.

The sixth is by having a list of subscribers that one can refer to every so often, because they are those which would prove to be valuable assets for the marketer concerned. The use of autoresponders and personalized newsletters is one way of keeping track of them all, and holding on to them by letting them know about new products and services is an essential task that should be done by the affiliate marketer concerned.

The seventh is by knowing one’s market through and through. It is important for traffic to be targeted to those who might have a special interest in the theme or topic of one’s website. This way, a solid customer base is going to be created. Once a potential customer shows an interest in a particular website by paying it a visit, one must not waste time in trying to show him that his effort is worth it.

Traffic generating strategies are important in trying to make one’s affiliate marketing career inch forward. It is always advantageous to plan one’s moves in any business that he might undertake. This is particularly so in affiliate marketing. If one knows how to get people to see what he has to offer, then he is on the right track.

Read more »

Classmates: A Popular Social Networking Website

Have you ever wondered whatever happened to your high school sweetheart? How about your best friend who you lost contact with overtime? If you have there is a good chance that you have tried to contact them. Unfortunately, many individuals get married or move away. This may make it difficult to contact those that you used to know. That is unless you join one of the most popular online social networking websites. That website is known as Classmates.

Although classmates is considered a social networking website, it is, in a way, unique from most of the others. This is because classmates focuses on connections that were made in school, whether it be elementary school, high school, or college. Although it is encouraged that you contact those that you know from school, you are able to contact just about anyone on the website. That is one of the many features of Classmates that makes the social networking site worth joining.

The only problem that many internet users have with Classmates is the fact that it is often requires a paid membership. There is a free membership plan that is available, but you are limited with what you can do on the site. Despite the fact that you have to become a paid member to enjoy what Classmates has to offer, it is well worth it. In addition to being well worth it, the membership fee is easy to afford. Currently, there are three different levels of membership that you can sign up for, the highest being only five dollars a month.

If you are interested in seeing what Classmates has to offer, you can easily do so by visiting their online website at www.classmates.com. Once at their main page, you will have to go through the process of selecting your school. Once that has been done, you will then need to create a user profile. This profile is part of what will be displayed on the website; however, once you officially become a member you can add more information to your profile.

With a free membership, you can post your own profile and view profiles from other members. Viewing the profiles of other members, especially those that you went to school with, is easy. Classmates has separated everyone into categories. These categories not only include the schools that everyone went to, but the years that they attended. This means that whether you graduated in 1970 or 2000, you should easily be able to obtain information on your classmates.

Although you can view other member profiles with a free membership, you cannot contact them. To make contact with those that you have lost touch with, you will need to become a paying member. As previously mentioned, this membership is relatively easy to afford. Once you have become a paid member, you cannot not only contact your classmates individually, but you can also send out broadcast messages or announcements to everyone that you went to school with. A paid membership also gives you the ability to use the message boards.

By joining Classmates, you will not only be able to make contact with your old classmates and friends, but you may also even be able to renew old friendships or make new ones. Reconnecting with your old friends and making new ones, what could be better than that?

Read more »

Building Affiliate Marketing Websites The Easy Way

There are some myths in affiliate marketing, which attract a lot of people to it believing they are true. First is they think managing an online business is easy and second, they think that one can make a fortune through online marketing in an instant. Probably not even 10% of those who are into affiliate marketing became rich overnight. There may be some who fortunately achieved overwhelming success in just a short span of time after setting up an affiliate program, but not a majority of them can confidently say they only had luck. Anyone who is successful in this kind of business would say he worked hard to get to where he is right now. Success in affiliate marketing takes time and hard work, but it’s worth it.

If you are planning to start an affiliate program, one of the things you have to consider is having your own website, not just an ordinary website but a professional looking one. How do you build an affiliate marketing website? What are the easy steps to build one? First, you must have already decided on the theme or niche of your website. It would be better if you already have an idea what products or services to promote as this would help you plan the design and lay-out of your web pages. The next thing to do is to choose a domain name and get it hosted. The domain name is a unique name used to label the actual address of your website on the Internet. In deciding what domain name to register, look into the type of products you are endorsing and the theme of your site. Having the right keywords in your domain name would give you better chances of drawing more visitors to your website. Also, choose a top level domain or extension, such as .com because it is more popular. In selecting your web host, consider the security of servers and up time guarantees.

Now, you can start creating your webpages. Don’t be disheartened when you know a little in this field. There are page generation tools and fast launch sites available online; you just have to search for them. Countless online sources could help you build an affiliate marketing website, though you might need time to study and learn the whole process. This is one of the reasons why your site or the products you are going to promote must match your interest. Building your marketing website for the first time would be a lot more fun if you know very well the theme of your site. If you don’t have time to make your own website, you can use templates or purchase readily available websites. The latter, however, is a more expensive option.

Creating an affiliate website on your own would be cheaper and more interesting. In the process of building your website, you may also increase your knowledge in Information Technology and the use of computers, softwares and the Internet. As you educate yourself in these fields, you are increasing your advantage against other affiliate marketers. It helps a lot, though, if you already know the basics in web page development like programming languages and graphics softwares because you can make your site extra corporate-looking, more convenient to use or easier to navigate. Furthermore, if you are knowledgeable and skillful in this area, you can already concentrate more on the content of the page rather than the design.

The key to draw visitors to your website is to have high quality content; thus, the next thing you must pay attention to in building your marketing website is this. There may be several other factors that contribute to the success of your affiliate marketing site, but a good content tops the list. This is precisely the reason why users choose to enter your site. They want to get information and so when they don’t find it, they would definitely go elsewhere. Write interesting articles related to your theme as this would make them frequent your site. If you have already looked for affiliate programs that complement your site, add links to the business sites and other very good informative sites. Links contribute to how well you will be listed in major search engines as well. Also, create pages for the products you are endorsing, but don’t just promote the products by putting hyped-up ads. Keep your readers interested by injecting lots of relevant and useful information. This would make them click the link to the business site and buy the product. Remember that no good content means no frequent visitors, no sales and ultimately, no commission.

Make your site simple yet not without a touch of class in order to make it appear more of a business website rather than a personal website. This would be pleasing to the eyes and more interesting to browse. To help you with the design, you can check some successful online stores to get an idea on how you can make your site look better. Make sure you don’t place too many banner ads since these could distract some site users; and thus, instead of clicking your ad, they might just leave your site and look for other interesting websites. After all, banner ads are not the only means of advertising your products. Now your website is complete, submit its URL to major search engines to increase your traffic.

Grow from where you started. Learn about use of keywords for search engine optimization and apply them in your content. Update your site regularly or add new webpages. Make sure to inform your prospects about the latest updates in your site. You can use newsletters to accomplish this. The Internet offers a huge source of information about just anything, make use of it. Continue to educate yourself on how to improve your website and soon you’ll find yourself successful in affiliate marketing.

Read more »

Part 1: Setting Up Your Blog

Blogging is a lucrative source of profit and blogs are easy to set up and maintain. Imagine a life where you are paid to write on stuff that interests you, whenever you want, wherever you are. The mere flexibility of blogging makes it easy for you to just kick back, relax and go on a vacation whenever you feel like it.

In this article, we are going to look into the profitability of a blog and set up a blog of our own at no cost! Interested? Read on!

First, we need to obtain a blog. There are several options – host a blog on your own domain or get a free blog. For starters, let’s talk about the free blogs. You can obtain a free blog at www.blogger.com or the newer (and better!) www.wordpress.com. If you are a techie, you must have heard of Wordpress, a free blog engine that is robust and infinitely expandable.

Blogger.com is actually owned by Google, so it will be detected on Google’s radar faster and you will be indexed faster. Wordpress.com, however, is a relatively new option so I have no comparison on the speed of getting indexed by search engines. However, Wordpress is better in the sense that it has more advanced features such as Trackbacks and Categories. You can also manage your sidebar links more efficiently (more about this later).

Get a free blog at either Blogger.com or Wordpress . Then, familiarize yourself by posting your first post on your blog and tinkering around with the options and templates.

Watch how to create a blog with Blogger

Watch how to create a blog with Wordpress

Here are a few common “blog-related” words to help you out:

1) Permalink – Permalink stands for permanent link, which is a URL (uniform resource locator) that leads to an individual post that you make in your blog.

2) Trackback – When you post about someone else’s blog post elsewhere, your post will show up in their “trackback” section. This feature, however, is not available with a Blogger.com account.

3) Pinging – Blogging seems to be paired with pinging almost every time either one is mentioned nowadays. Pinging is actually the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your blog is updated, so that the aggregator may show the newest post of your blog on their website. This is a useful way to gaining traffic, which we shall discuss later.

For now, I shall leave you testing out your new blog and the features that come included with it. In the next articles, we shall discuss the many ways we can gain profit from a blog, as well as tips on how to write posts that keep visitors glued and keep coming back for more!

Read more »

Make Sure You're Strategies are In Place…

Do you have a strategy?
From my observations, I see a lot of people online that are moving forward without much of a strategy. Or they are stuck using other peoples strategies and don’t develop their own based on their needs and abilities.
It is very important to understand that those that are teaching you things online, are doing what they know or have been successful with themselves. It it not necessarily the path for YOU or the only path you should take.
I use a combination of strategies… I strongly use the old saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”
I just saw a guy the other day freaking out because Google was wiping out his business… He fell by around 400 visitors to his website per day which crushed his income.
Why? Because he had all his eggs in the Google basket! Google is the type of animal that can make changes that don’t make sense, have no ryme or reason, and simply just happen.
You may think you have control, but you don’t.
That’s why you must diversify. Have a strategy that takes into account these type of things…
Don’t do just one thing… Let me rephrase that… You can do one thing, but make sure that you are covered within that one thing.
For instance if you depend on Google Adwords for 100% of your income, that’s fine. Just make sure that you are not doing just one thing within that. Make sure you are not in one market or are driving traffic one way.
Things are in a continuous state of change online. You must brace yourself for that change.
Make sure you have a strategy and you aren’t just mesmerized by some opportunitiy and you lose sight of the big picture.
This is a business not just a way to make some quick cash… it can be, but generally I think most of us want to have long term results and not live on the edge…
So have some sort of strategy in place for your business that insulates you from the environment.
You should have a short term, medium and long term strategy. Where do you see yourself in 1 month, 6 months, 5 years?
How are you going to get there?
There are things I do to make money now, but there are also things that I am building now that will blossom in the future or offer long term stability.
Just sit down for a few minutes and write down some of your goals and what you want out of this business. After you know what you want and have taken into consideration the environment, map out how your are going to get there…
If you do this, you will not only find stability over the long term, but you will find peace of mind.

Read more »

Social Networking Websites with a Particular Focus

Have you ever thought about joining an online social networking community? If you love meeting new people, there is a good chance that you have given it some thought. Despite wanting to join, there are many individuals who make the decision not to. Are you one of those individuals? If so, is it because you feel overwhelmed? There are literally an unlimited number social networking websites out there to choose from and many are full of members.

While you would assume that it is nice to join a social networking website with a large number of community members, some individuals, maybe even yourself, feel that it is too much to handle. For instance, did you know that MySpace, a popular social networking website, has over one hundred millions members? If that isn’t overwhelming what is? If you are interested in joining an online networking community, but one that has fewer members, you are encouraged to look for social networking websites that have a particular focus. That focus is often on popular topics, issues, views, and interests.

A social networking website that focuses on one thing in particular is often referred to as a specialty social networking website. This is because, unlike traditional websites, not everyone can become a member. To become a member of a specialty social networking site, you must have an interested in the topic at hand. These websites drastically reduce the number of members. Although you will have less community members to socialize with, you will find that more have the same interests as you do. In that, a small number of internet users, with the same interests as yourself, is better than millions of members that you don’t have anything in common with.

If you are interested in finding a specialty social networking website, you are advised to perform a standard internet search. You will want to search using the words social networking site and whatever else you are looking for. For instance, if you are looking for a social networking website designed just for animal lovers, you may to combine the words social networking with animal lovers, pet lovers, cats, dogs, and so on. Whether you are searching for social networking websites that focus on a popular hobby, religion, or politics, you are sure to find that you are looking for.

In your search for specialty social networking websites, it is likely that you will come across Facebook or Classmates. Facebook and Classmates are both considered specialty social networking sites because they tend to focus on high school and college students, including those that are attending and those that have already graduated. Both of these websites work to connect you with individuals that you are currently going to school with or those that went to school with, in the past. If you have already graduated, Facebook and Classmates are great when looking to reconnect with old friends or even make new ones.

Other popular social networking websites focus on religion. Whether you are Christian or not, there are a large number of social networking websites that have a focus on religion. These websites not only allow you to meet other internet users, but they allow you to meet those that share the same beliefs and views as you do. By using a religious social networking website, such as HolyPal and JesusCrowd, you will not have to spend the time searching for those who are the same religion as you, you will automatically be entering a community where everyone preaches and believes the same things.

As previously mentioned, there are a fairly large number of specialty social networking communities that you can find online. These communities are not just limited to those that are for pet lovers, religious followers, or those looking to reconnect with old classmates, as mentioned above. With the way that social networking websites have increased in popularity, it is safe to say that you should be able to find an online networking community, no matter what your interests are.

Read more »