Right?

Not really, it’s not that I am not in favor of spending anything on marketing (in fact it’s quite the opposite); however you shouldn’t start spending heavily, at least before you’ve made the most of all those freely available platforms. Of course, all of these free marketing mediums will take some time, planning, and execution before you can reap the benefits; still it’s better than wasting hundreds on whatever option comes your way.

Let’s take a look at the five reasons why you shouldn’t spend heavily on Internet Marketing.

Reason #1 – SEO is free:

In spite of incessant grumblings and complaints coming from small businesses (about how hard it is becoming for small businesses to rank anywhere near the top) Search Engine Optimization is still a fundamentally free yet wonderful way to get new customers. It’s true that you need to spend some time on learning the nitty-gritty, and then spend even more time on creating content or building links for your website; still optimizing your website doesn’t necessarily require a spendthrift like many other advertising options.

It’s all about following some simple rules of seo and putting some extra efforts in creating good content on regular basis. And when we look at the rewards of getting top ranks for relevant key phrases, they are hard to match, since you will be getting a continuous stream of prospective customers searching at Google, and coming your way.

Reason #2 – Social Media is Free:

There’s a lot written on the grandeur of Social Media, and how you can use the sheer size of community to your advantage. The best part about all this is that social media is free and it doesn’t cost a dime to create a profile and get in touch with your target customers.

Remember that Social Media is not limited to just Facebook or Twitter, there are a lot and lot of websites that you can utilize, for example one of those social deal a day websites or some social networks catering your targeted market. Learn to create social media presence for your business.

Reason #3 – Blogging is Free:

Ok, not entirely free, as you will have to spend some bucks to get a domain and a web host, but launching a blog can benefit your small business in so many ways.

• First of all, you will build a lot of integrity by sharing valuable information related to your business or industry with your customers.
• Second, you will get to learn your target customers more via their feedback.
• Third you will be established as a credible person in your industry, and not to forget that you can add a store latter on to reap the benefits.

Blogging is a fun, it’s simple, and it sells.

Reason #4 – Email is Free

If you’re not ready to use any of the aforementioned mediums like Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, or Blogging, you should at least make the most of the evergreen medium of Email Marketing. You can use the emails to get repeat sales from your existing customers, and you can also use the email newsletters to attract new customers.

It will take time in building an email subscriber’s list, but each new subscriber is an asset and worth the effort and wait. Learn why your business needs an email list.

Reason #5 – Google Places is free:

According to Google, 97% customers search online when they are looking for a local business. The number might change from one region to another (especially in less developed countries), but nobody can deny the fact that more and more customers are now developing a habit of doing an online search and price comparisons before taking the final decision.

So, it’s very important for you to get your business on Google places, which is free. Again, you can’t just stop at adding your business to their database, you will have to optimize your listing to appear on the top, but that shouldn’t cost you much.

So those are the five solid reasons you shouldn’t be spending anything on Internet Marketing, mainly because you have got so many wonderful yet free mediums in the offing.

image:ezypay

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Happy Dreamhost discounts…

Blogs are so powerful that it can back an online business towards growth and building an interactive community around your business. At the same time, you can also build only “blogs as business”. Best example being this blog where you are reading now is build like that – the model is “blogging as business”.

You can blog about anything you know and anything you love – however, when you see it as a business you can’t leave it as “anything”. The blog topic or what we call here as “Niche” matters a lot. The niche decides many stuffs right from identifying the problems, providing your own solution and building traffic around your site. It also decides the amount of money that you make from a niche site.

Indeed, niche sites are profit making always provided you have chosen the right niche and doing the right work. In this article, i will take you through the steps to build such niche blogs right from finding the niche to making money from that niche blog.

Nice chat on blogging (for niche blogs too)

Step #1 – Find Profitable Niche.

The very first step is to find a profitable niche for your blog. This is one of the crucial step however, using the right tools you can make it possible. Basically, you have to identify where is the demand for information. When there are high demand for information on a particular topic, you can easily find more people to visit your blog. At the same time, when you are able to identify such demanding topic with less competition then that’s the gold mine. With less competition, you can easily penetrate into the market and show your blog as a top one.

Have a look on my another article, how to find niches which helps you further in detail (i don’t want to repeat the same stuffs here). To conclude, identify demanding topic with considerably less competition.

As an added note, you should also have interest on the topic you choose because you have to work (share useful information on your blog) about it.

Step #2 – Setup Your Blog.

Once you have the topic ready, you can straight away go to setup a blog using WordPress. You have to register a domain name and web hosting to store your blog content. WordPress is one of the famous content management system which is Open Source and you will find lot of free to use plugins, themes required to build a great blog. Further, it is easy to manage a blog with WordPress, you don’t need to be a technical geek.

• The first step, picking a domain name for your blog. For niche blogs, it is good to have keywords in the domain name. For example, if you take my blog it is having the keyword “money making online” in the domain name. It is required for SEO benefits (see here).
• Secondly, you have to host your domain on a reliable web hosting service.
• You can take Dreamhost service and you don’t need much technical knowledge to setup your blog (you can take discounts from here).

To help you further, i am sharing you the below video on Dreamhost WordPress installation.

Once your blog is up, you can make elegant designs using free WordPress themes – there are lot of free themes on the WordPress directory. You can also search Google for “free WordPress themes” and few sites i recommend to download great themes are MagPress, theme2wp. The next step, install the required plugins to make your blog fully up.

Step #3 – Content + Value Generation.

Blogs are built around content – text, images, videos and the value of content decides the growth.

How far your blog has useful information and how far it helps the visitor decides the success.

You have to write articles on the blog topic indepth, look what people really wants in that topic. You can simply list down the problems in that topic and you can discuss them in the articles. In this way, you can attract the real visitors who are looking for information and slowly, your blog becomes a resource center on that topic.

For example, i have made this blog as a resource center for online business tips for individuals helping them towards making money online.

The demand for information matters, when there are more demand you can easily attract more visitors to your blog. With great content, search engines will become the major source of traffic especially Google. It is a slow process however, once established you can see the real power of search traffic.

Keeping search engines aside, you should focus towards adding value to the visitors every time. That’s it.

Also, learn what kind of content makes money ?

Step #4 – Monetize Effectively (with less Ads).

The interesting step is monetizing your niche blog. For all your hard work, you will be paid back soon and that depends on how effectively you are monetizing your blog. There are variety of ways and i recommend you to go through this article on how to monetize your new blog.

In short, you can promote products related to your topic and you get commission for each sale that you drive. There are lot of affiliate networks available in the market (famous full list here) and you can join them to pick related products.

Read my another article on how to select clickbank products ? that helps you to start now.

Google Adsense is another way of monetizing your blog however, it requires lot of traffic to earn and hence to begin with you can promote products where the commission will be higher, and also you can earn more than Google Adsense. One of the hot advice from every Internet Marketer’s is that, promote products inside the content instead of showing banners or images. That means, you have link to the products so that your visitors will find it easily while reading.

• I recommend you to get a copy of AffiLinker Affiliate wordpress plugin which helps to quickly monetize your blog, it actually converts the given keywords into affiliate links through out the blog.
• You can also track the clicks and configure the style/behavior of each n every link uniquely.

When you want to earn a lot, you don’t need to put lot of Ads instead you should monetize effectively on the right place (that means, monetize within content).

Step #5 – Learn SEO.

When it comes to blogging, one of the greatest and unavoidable dependency is SEO.

Search Engine Optimization plays a major role in attracting search traffic especially Google which is having the major share in search industry. I recommend you to read this SEO tips from Google and also, follow their webmaster guideline’s to great extent.

Don’t over do it and don’t work too much for it, it happens naturally when you focus towards the visitor needs (considering SEO too). Keep in mind that 50% to 80% of blog traffic comes from search engines (in general).

Have social presence through Facebook, Twitter, Google+ around your blog, build an email list.

Step #6 – Rinse and Repeat.

That’s the process. You understood the basics and when you put your hands-on you will face lot of issues/confusions. You can always get help from similar people around there using web master forums like Digital Point, SitePoint, Warrior forum etc. Further, you will get solution for any WordPress problem by just searching Google.

• Based on the availability of time and knowledge, you can follow the same steps to start another niche blog. One of the important thing is you have to keep your blog active always, so have a writing schedule and publish articles periodically on the topic.
• You can read my another article on how to schedule your blog posts which helps to better manage your time and efforts.

Step #7 – Build a Niche Product.

Finally, once your blog starts growing and you are seeing income, you can focus on the future. You can build your own product related to your blog.

For example, if you are blogging about web apps, you can release your own web application for sale Or if you are blogging about cooking, you can release your own cooking guide for sale.

This way, you could build a reputation in the market and people see your blog as a great resource center, this actually builds Trust and they do come back again n again. More information on selling your own product.

Money rolls in every day….

This is a slow process however based on the right effort you put, the amount of time you spend for a blog and the blog topic – decides the rapidness of growth and income….always have a simple plan and stick to it.

You also learn how to brand your blog and market it to great extent.

Good Luck !

image:isaak

1. Make Sure Your Content Is Worth Sharing

This is a fundamental requirement, without which there’s no point in encouraging sharing. Make sure your content impacts readers powerfully; when this happens, readers will believe that others will also be similarly impacted. Ergo, they share.

2. Include Statements That Are Worth Remembering

Be a little outrageous, a little scandalous on your blog; make statements that people will remember even after they’ve left your blog. Humans look for stimulation; edgy information is more often shared than regular stuff.

3. Make Sure Those Share Buttons Are At Hand

People read exciting blogs, experience that initial thrill and the desire to spread the word and then lose interest. Why? The content is not easy to share. Leverage those 3 minutes of hyper-attention and make sure there’s a big Retweet button at hand, along with all possible social sharing buttons

4. Enable Social Sharing In Your Newsletters

It’s not just about enabling easy sharing of content from your blog site but also the content in your e-newsletters. Include links to Facebook, Twitter and all other social spaces you can think of. Use an email service provider such as Constant Contact; they provide a social share bar to enable content sharing.

5. Give Them A Gentle Nudge To Share

Just ask people to share; let them know you want more people reading your content and you’ll be surprised at the response. Be direct; ask for a Retweet if you’ve already tweeted it, or ask users to Stumble or Digg your content.

6. Put Your Content Out There

Keeping your content on your blog site won’t get it out in front of your entire reader base. Put your content out into the social space; post links to articles on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter to get more people reading.

7. Grab Their Interest Using Engaging Titles

With so many blogs out there, you have to use every weapon in your arsenal. Hook those fish with engaging, curiosity-provoking titles and half the job is done. People respond positively to ‘how to’ articles, list articles and ’15 ways to’ articles.

8. Let Your Content Be Easy To Read

Many people just skim headers and content in a few seconds to check readability. This means if your article has long unbroken paragraphs, long boring sentences or unpronounceable words, no one’s going to read it.

9. Don’t Forget To Add A Few Jazzy Images

A picture is worth a thousand words. Not everyone thinks in terms of words alone, which makes a great image absolutely irreplaceable. Place your attention-grabbing pics at the top of the post so the reader gets an eyeful of color at first instance.

10. Make Sure Your Content Adds Value To Readers’ Lives

A reader will share content only if they feel the content presents some value-add to them. Your content should either impart knowledge, or make them laugh, or make them think. Sharing comes naturally when a person is pleased with something.

11. Find Out What People Need And Give It To Them

Conduct a poll and find out what your users want to read in your blog. Focus on making your niche blog a one stop shop for all the content needs your readers have. They shouldn’t feel the need to visit any other blog in the same niche!

12. Increase Your Social Network Size

Do what you can to get more subscribers and followers for your blog. People don’t subscribe unless approved of your content and attitude, and are therefore more likely to share content.

13. Allow Direct Content Sharing From Social Spaces

Make sure you have your own page on Facebook, Google +, Twitter and so on. When you write a new article, post it on all your social pages, and provide easy content sharing options for your followers.

14. Place Bookmarking Buttons In Feeds

Add bookmarking buttons for Digg, Stumble Upon, Technorati and Delicious in your Feeds, just after your article. No matter how many subscribers you have, making it possible to share content via feeds is good strategy. The idea is to make it easy for people to share content no matter through which method they get it.

15. Use The ‘Read More’ Tag

Using up an entire page for just one article is not good strategy, because readers will just leave your site if they’re not interested. When multiple article choices are provided along with the ‘Read More’ tag, users have the option to browse and share.

If are expecting your readers to share your content, you have to encourage and educate them. Get back to your blog, see how you are encouraging, follow these methods now definitely you will see great results…Good Luck.

image:lisa

And this week, eMoneyMakingOnline.COM reached 3000+ subscribers (3059 readers as of today) ! See the below stats from feedburner.

Stats showing 3000+ Subscribers...

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the readers of my blog. I hope i will keep all these readers happy by serving useful information every time.

As a note, on October 2011 this blog reached to 2000 subscribers + it crossed the 1000+ visitors per day mark and now in the next 3 months, it reached to 3000+ readers.

Thanks to Super Popup plugin which increased the reader base as quick as possible, it is a must have free to use plugin. If you are not already using it, give a try !

When this blog was started, there were no one to read and i was simply writing articles for myself. Now this all happening because of Google’s traffic (to great extent) and support from every reader…Thanks to Google and every one !

In between, i am accepting lot of guest posts now-a-days, if you are interested to write, please have a look on the guidelines here.

Believe it or not, that’s how our company, TicketKick all started. Our President, Greg Muender did in fact get three traffic tickets in three weeks when he started college at San Diego State University in 2006. Having the stubborn, think-outside-the-box mind that he does, he thought, “There’s got to be a way out of this.”

Looking for Business Success ?

One ticket in California is expensive enough, and surely three of them very well may have ruined his college experience. Greg faced severely high ticket fines, enormous insurance hikes, a possible suspension of his driver’s license, and a seriously sad start to his college career. So he did some research.

“Just Google It”

Greg found out that the California court system allows you to do a trial by mail, through a trial by written declaration. He researched the laws, found some loopholes, talked to some attorney friends, and contested all three of his tickets through the mail. Two of them were completely dismissed. The third one he was found guilty for, but was still able to take traffic school. He kept a clean record and saved thousands of dollars. Friends and family started coming to him for help with their tickets. He started charging for his help, but only if he got them out of their ticket. That’s when the money back guarantee that TicketKick is so famous for originally started.

In 2009, Greg asked me, his girlfriend to quit my job and come on board to take over the customer service end so he could focus on the business end and legal aspects. We started with two desks in his bedroom. Within that same year, we moved into an upscale executive suite, hired two other employees and our team kept growing.

Within the next two years, our company grew to 7 employees, a team of outside legal and marketing consultants, and is set to break a million in sales by the end of 2011. TicketKick to this day offers a 100% money back guarantee, maintains about a 70% dismissal rate, and offers the lowest prices in the industry, giving thousands of drivers with traffic tickets in a bad economy a big incentive to kick their ticket. Okay, I’m honestly not trying to sell you on our service, but there’s a point to it all.

How We Did It ?

Now, of course, whenever I tell people what I do for a living, they say, “That’s so cool!” and yes, it feels to be on this side of the law. Everyone gets traffic tickets, but we didn’t do it for the popularity.

Greg shares his secrets of business success:

Regarding what has contributed to overall success in building our business in a bad economy, Greg says his key tactics include “providing a service that people really need, good or bad economy. Find a way to take advantage of a bad economy. People always like saving money, and that’s even more prevalent in a weaker economic environment. Providing a service that fills a need, instead of a want, is a great recipe for a stable company.”

A couple of Greg’s mottos include “Just Google it,” when it comes down to finding answers or better ways of doing things, and “I’m a master at finding people who are better than me at what they do, and bringing their skills onto my team.”

Customers First

Our core product as a legal document assistant, of course, is successful legal defenses for the customer and helping them kick their ticket, but it’s not our only focus. Regardless of how our their case turns out, we want each customer to leave satisfied with our service. We work diligently in only hiring the friendliest and helpful team members. The job market’s tough right now, and whenever we post an ad to fill a position, very qualified people with years of legal experience just pour in. We realize, however, that when it comes to customer service, knowledge and experience do no good unless the employee is willing to go above and beyond in meeting customer’s needs. Greg always makes this very clear in our employee meetings.

He says: “If someone calls us looking for the nearest Taco Bell, you jump on google and find it for them. If they ever get a traffic ticket, they’ll know who to call first because we’ve helped them before.”

Point being: Don’t skimp out on good customer service, in any business you’re in, and always maintain good business ethics. Train your employees to do whatever it takes to leave the customer satisfied. Many times we’ll go against our own terms and conditions to leave a customer happy.

Of course, we don’t endorse reckless driving. How does Greg feel about those 3 traffic tickets back in college?

Well, he certainly isn’t proud of potentially breaking any laws on the road, nor does he advocate it. And we won’t get into whether or not he was actually speeding. That’s not the point here. He surely did turn a potentially very bad situation into an amazing business opportunity just by doing some initial research.

We are very strong believers that out of something bad can always come something good, as long as you’re open minded, look for opportunities, and ultimately want to work to help others in some way, and helping people is our passion.

image: lasse

It can be tempting, when you’re first starting out, to do certain tasks in-house that you’ll probably outsource later on. For example, if you have a little bit of design background, you might create your own website. If you fancy yourself a decent writer, you might create the copy for your business’ online store.

Accounting is one of those areas where it’s easy to skimp as a new business. You put off hiring an accountant until some future date, loosely defined as “when I need one.” Yet, this isn’t always the best move.

Here are some compelling reasons why you might want to hire an accountant from the early days of your business:

An accountant can help with entity formation.

For some businesses, a sole proprietorship is perfect. If you’re an independent contractor whose industry doesn’t allow you any opportunity to grow your business beyond what you alone can handle, chances are you’re fine with a simple DBA certificate.

If you’re like most businesses, however, you want to grow. Moreover, you want the tax and personal property protections that can come from forming an LLC or a corporation.

Having an accountant on hand can help you weed through the pros and cons of entity formation in those early stages. She can tell you what makes sense for your business today, as well as what will make sense six months or six years down the road. Not only that, she will help you make the transition from one company form to another in as painless a manner as possible.

An accountant can provide money-saving tax advice.

You’re not a tax expert. If you were, you’d be running a tax business. Instead, you’re good at what you do. While you’re a smart person and can figure out your taxes with the help of some software, chances are that an accountant can identify tax efficiencies that you might miss.

In fact, having an accountant on hand can help you make smart choices from the tax perspective. Because of the complexity of tax law, there are some purchases, for example, that can actually save you money just by making them at the right time.

Your accountant knows what’s going to save your business money on the tax bill. Moreover, he’ll help make sure you’re meeting your tax obligation and not caught unawares with a surprise bill.

In addition, having an accountant through the year will save you money at tax time. Rather than having to try to scramble to get together all of the important financial information you need, your accountant can simply look back through the records she’s created and file your taxes.

Hiring an accountant now minimizes future accounting complexities.

By bringing in an accountant from the beginning, you’re certain the books are done right. The last thing your business needs is to discover, three years from now when you do hire an accountant, that you have a huge past due tax payment.

Beyond taxes, though, accountants can save you from a number of complex and sometimes-difficult situations. Your accountant will help you:

• Work through payroll issues to make sure you’re handling everything in accordance with employment practices and tax law. This is especially useful if you have a combination of employees and contractors at your business.
• Handle regulatory audits for certain fields. Some businesses have pretty steep financial reporting requirements, and a competent and dedicated accountant can help you meet those regulatory requirements.
• Know whether your business is truly making money. Many small businesses start up and the owners think they’re doing great. They buy more equipment, more inventory, and more advertising. Six months in, they’re deeper in debt than when they first started and sales have actually dipped. An accountant helps you understand the real numbers behind your business, and know whether you’re truly being successful.

You’re good at what you do. You’ve got a great product or service, and you’re willing to do what it takes to make your business to succeed.

In order for that to happen, however, you need a system of competent employees, contractors, and service providers. Bringing in an accountant at the early stages of your business just makes sense. It frees you up to do what you’re really talented at: growing your business.

image:zoli

Why Social Media?

In an industry where search engine ranking plays a critical role, a strong social media platform can give an affiliate marketer a big boost. Twitter has gained the attention of both Google and Bing, both of which take into consideration how many times an item is re-tweeted in addition to the original tweets themselves when determining search rankings. Similarly, when someone clicks on the “+1” button on a Google results page – or anywhere else the button appears – Google takes that into consideration when ranking as well.

The Power of +1

These recommendations in the forms of +1s and re-tweets are important factors in search rankings and, as a result, are essential for affiliate marketers. “We are strongly looking at using this in our rankings,” said Matt Cutts, one of Google’s head engineers for search. “When someone recommends something, that’s a pretty good indicator of quality.”

Steps to Social Media Success

Social media can be used to build a following, and that following grows from building relationships and trust among followers. As this following grows and evolves, you can position yourself as a leader whose recommendations are trusted and shared. In this way, a strong social media presence directly impacts your search rankings and, in turn, your profits as an affiliate marketer.

Affiliate Marketing Through Social Media

There are several points to keep in mind when creating your social media presence:

•    Brand yourself – but avoid self-promotion.

Having a strong personal brand takes time and effort, but it is well worth it. Create a persona and be consistent with it. Individuals are much more relatable than corporations. However, avoid the temptation to constantly self-promote. If you have something valuable to offer, let that speak for itself. Followers are put off by relentless self-promotion, but they are more than happy to be provided with worthwhile content.

•    Provide quality content.

This is a golden rule not only for affiliate marketers, but for just about anyone anywhere online. Social media may be all about constant communication; however, quality over quantity still holds true. While you may be inclined to run a large number of niche sites, the more sites you have, the more difficult it is to try to establish yourself as an authority at each one. Stick to the one or two you are most passionate about, and that passion will come through in the form of the quality content your followers are looking for.

•    Build your platform with your target audience in mind.

A solid social media marketing platform generally consists of profiles on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and your own blog. When creating these profiles, not only must you take into consideration the content you’ll be creating for these outlets, but you must also know your target audience. Just because you have thousands of friends doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have greater success. Selecting friends and followers who are truly interested in what you have to say will result in much better returns on your investment in social media.

•    Unleash your inner blogger.

Blogs are a crucial element in any social media platform, serving multiple purposes. Blogs give you the space to express yourself and share your expertise with your followers. Blogs are also a fantastic opportunity to build a community among your followers. You can communicate with them, and they can communicate with one another all on your blog. Taking the time to reply to comments and even comment on your followers’ blogs is all part of the social networking that will pay off in the long run. You will be building relationships with your followers while enhancing your status as a leader. Not only that, your blog will also help improve your search rankings.

•    Be the student and the master.

While becoming an authority, it is always a good idea to learn as much as you can from other affiliate marketers who have knowledge and experience that you might lack. There is always something new to learn, and you can only benefit from learning it. As you build your reputation as an authority, you can, in turn, gain your own affiliates and thus enhance your opportunities for profit.

While it may seem like building and maintaining a social media platform requires a lot of time and effort, your affiliate marketing business can only improve because of it. Building a reputation as a trusted, respected authority will increase your search engine rankings and your revenue, and that is definitely worth it.

This post was written and provided by Christian Willis. Christian has been making a living from Pay per click programs for the last 3 years and is a freelance writer for Clickbooth.com.

image:linked

Here is another scenario that will show you how Google is literally cheating its users. You enter a keyword into Google to check out where your site ranks. And what do you see? Number 1! And then you are brought back down to earth when you search again later, this time not logged in to your Google account, and find out you are nowhere in the search engine reports.

We all know Google dominates the world of online advertising. They are the big Daddy and you can’t do much about that. But are they going too far? Do we need to raise a voice against them? I think we do because a lot of people around the world are getting angry at Google’s policies and have been complaining that Google has gone a bit too far in its domination. You may actually be surprised when you find out how much data Google keeps on you!

Cookies? Cookies Don’t Scare Me!

A person who doesn’t know much about computers will wonder how Google can get so much information about a user. For them, the answer is: Cookies. Harmless as they may sound, they are in fact a very dangerous part of your internet browsing and can pose serious security risks. Most of us do not bother about it and hence let websites create these on our computers. But in the long run, they can be harmful.

A cookie is actually a message that the browser sends to the website you are viewing. It tells the website information such as saved passwords, your identification, whether you have already bought something on the site and things like that. In this way, the websites identify your behavior and many big sites use this behavior to present you with a different part of the website, not the one they would normally show to a person coming to the site for the first time. These cookies are installed on your computer automatically when you submit forms on any website.

The duration for which a cookie may stay on your computer varies. Some are destroyed as soon as you close your browser, some when you turn off your computer while some stay on your computer forever, until you delete them yourself; a task most of us do not bother to do.

The cookies that stay on your computer forever keep monitoring your online activities, the sites you visit and how long you stay on such sites. They sell this information to potential advertisers or companies that can then sell you their products.

Cookies do not harm your computer by themselves. It is the purpose they fulfill that can harm you. They are just there to make your browsing easier. Did you ever wonder who remembers your passwords and who keep you logged in to your yahoo account for two weeks? Yes, the Cookies.

Someone’s Reading your eMail

While Cookies can be harmless, if you use Gmail, you should be particularly concerned about what they are doing to your privacy. Google actually reads you emails. Yes, surprising as it might sound, it is actually true. It searches your mail for keywords and then places ads accordingly.

And it’s not just about your privacy. Your friends that send you emails are also at risk, regardless of whether they use Gmail or not. Google not only scans but also stores the data from your emails. Ever wondered what they might use this data for?

And then they say that they store your data for 60 days and then delete them. However, they have no obligation to keeping their word and according to Electronic privacy Information Centre can easily keep your emails forever and cross reference your cookies indefinitely.

Total Google Integration

At the launch of Google+, you must have signed up for the service to check it out. Were you surprised when you saw all your contacts already added? They actually find the people you chat with often and suggest them to you. Since Google+ is a social network, other people can find out whom you are connected to, and most of you will not like that. Keeping friends on a social network is one thing, but showing people you email often is another. There is a clear line between emails and social network, Google it seems is crossing that line.

This is pretty much the same as that happened with Google Buzz. Google Buzz automatically added your email contacts to your Google Buzz profile. This meant that anyone could see the list of your email contacts. Would you want that? No. And most others also don’t which is why this caused a huge uproar. Google, as always, instructed people to guard their privacy themselves. However, the anger did not subside and Google had to pull out the feature.

Another issue was the re sharing problem on Google +. The problem was that you had no control over what you shared once you had clicked on the share button. This again caused concern among users and Google had to pull off this feature too. While this was not as serious as the Google Buzz debacle, it did clearly show that Google had little to no concern about your privacy.

Google + is pretty clear on its disclosure policy:

‘We will record information about your activity – such as posts you comment on and the other users with whom you interact – in order to provide you and other users with a better experience on Google services.’

Does this concern you? Share your views in the comments below.

Google Street View

As if the Google Buzz and Google + fiasco wasn’t enough, Google came up with the Google Street View. It actually showed a view of your street that could have been taken at any time. Maybe when you were going out for office, maybe when you were receiving your guests outside your home or maybe when you were walkig with your family in the street. This causes concerns to all of us. But what was Big Brother G’s response? They simply said that if you had any privacy concern, you can report it and we will take action. Once again, this response clearly showed that you have to take care of your privacy, Google does not give a damn about it.

What To Do?

So after all this, how do you protect yourself from all this? The truth is, you can’t, unless you cut yourself off from the online world that is simply not possible. I know this sound’s scary, but that is the truth we have to live with.

Regarding Cookies, you can regularly delete the cookies on your computer – here is how you can do that.

Your browser can help you out with cookies as well. There are different settings you can use to make sure your browsing sessions are safe.

Anyone got a better idea on how to protect privacy?

image: Ian

• google watching you

There are a lot of bloggers who make a fair living out of blogging. A very tempting activity, I have to admit. But to get there, there is a lot of work to be done and simply writing content is not always the way to go. Your content needs a little technical help especially if you are using WordPress.

Being the most used CMS out there, WordPress offers a fair amount of plugins that will definitely help you monetize your blog.

1. Smart Ads. This is a very simple to use plugin and what it actually does it automatically adding ads before and after your post’s page content. It features a built-in shortcode which allows you to add custom ads.
2. Ad Squares Widget. This widget allows you to display eight ad squares of 125×125 into a sidebar. This plugin supports AdSense and Javascript and you can add as many widgets as you want.
3. AffiLinker Affiliate. A premium WordPress plugin to monetize your blog instantly. It converts the given keywords into profitable Affiliate Links through out the blog post, pages. You can also show colorful Affiliate Link as a Tag Cloud on the sidebar. There is a built-in tracker which shows stats on total number of clicks, unique number of clicks on each Affiliate Link.
4. SEO Smart Links. This is actually an internal linking plugin. You would ask “what can this help me with in monetization?”. Well, the interesting thing about this plugin is that it also allows you to link to external affiliate offers or even your own sales pages on other websites. A very effective idea I would say.
5. Ad Rotate plugin. This neat little plugin analyses the conversion rate of all your ads and it rotates them according to their effectiveness. You can also see the clickthrough rates of every banner. You can simply insert a bunch of banner ads and test them for …let’s say a month or two and after that you can decide which of them really help and which of them you should eliminate.
6. Yoast WordPress SEO. I really hope that it’s clear for everyone that high quality traffic results in a higher conversion rate in the end. Nothing beats organic traffic coming from search engines. But to get there, you need to optimize each and every post and page of your blog/website to be search-engine friendly. I’m talking about meta tags, page and post titles, keyword placement and density, sitemaps and other such aspects. Yoast’s SEO plug-in makes editing these settings a lot easier by allowing you to do this right after you write your posts.
7. Ad Injection. Simply the best monetization plugin for any kind of ads. It helps you add either text or banner ads. The real innovation of this plugin is the ability to control who can see certain ads on your website. You can control which ads are displayed based on the length of the posts, the referrer’s address, the visitor’s IP address and more. You can also display category-targeted ads for each of your posts, giving a huge boost to your conversion rate by giving each reader category exactly what they want.
8. W3 Total Cache. “What? A caching plugin? I thought we were talking about monetization here, what the deuce is this?” Well, we ARE talking about monetization. Let’s make a quick exercise: Imagine a website which loads in around 20 seconds. Now tell me the conversion rate it has for the ads. Exactly, you can’t. We can’t even think of monetization on a blog that is not optimized for speed in the 1^st place. A classic among the WordPress plugins, W3 Total Cache is recommended by various hosting companies around the world and it deserves the recognition. This little plugin caches every little part of your website  and significantly increases the loading time, saving up to 80% of the bandwidth your website would normally require to load.

I would say, monetizing your blog is an easier task but when it comes to making money, you have to work a lot for your blog. Add lot of useful content, spread your blog link as much as possible, drive lot of visitors then only you can make money from your blog !

You can also check out some other plugins which can really help your blog grow, on my personal website.