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

Not all blogs are making money and not all bloggers are becoming rich – many people quit in the middle because of the simple reason, they don’t know the right steps/approach of profitable blogging.

In this article, i will take you through those reasons or you can call it as mistakes so that in the end, you will be clear with what you are currently doing and what you are not doing !

You Don’t Select the Right Niche.

The very first step in blogging is finding the right niche (or the topic) and the very first mistake: you found the wrong topic for your blog. The niche highly decides the success of your blog and its income.

• For example, you could not make even a cent by sharing your personal life in your blog – instead, if you start focusing on “something where people are willing to spend”, you can definitely make a lot from your blog.

You Don’t Write Often.

Blog has to be live and alive. You have to write often almost every day. This actually adds value to your blog every day and it becomes an information resource sooner which attracts lot of regular visitors. In other words, when you started sharing more information, more people will come to see it. In fact, every new page opens the way for visitors from search engines.

• For example, you should have a writing schedule say, “i will publish 5 articles per week or 10 articles per week”.

If you see most of the tech blogs around (like Techcrunch, engadget, Mashable etc.) they used to publish 10-20 articles per day, think why they are publishing like that ?

You Don’t Write In Detail.

Not only the quantity of articles, it also depends on the “quality of writing”.

With the latest changes in Google search algorithms, it is clear that you could not rank without great content. In fact, detailed content is always appreciated by people as well as search engines. So forget all these conceptions and focus towards your reader – provide as much as useful information to them.

• For example, you can pick a particular (narrow) topic and cover everything A-Z on that topic – this actually adds real value to the reader and people do come back again looking for same kind of information.

You Don’t Monetize It Well.

When it comes to making money, the most important step is: effective monetization. If you don’t monetize your blog, you can’t make money – if you monetize it well, you can make well – that’s simple.

Contextual monetization works the best – i mean, showing the right product/ads to the right people which converts the best. At the same time, don’t over do it and never hurt the visitor with too much of ads.

• For example, you can have income goals say: i will make $2000 per month. Plan for it and start the action immediately !

You Don’t Diversify the Income Source.

Diversification is important for any business to succeed and to survey for the long term. You should not stick to one method of earning, instead when you diversify it, you can drive more profits from various sources and you don’t know how one source of income is potential than another source. Learn to diversify your income source.

• For example, don’t stick to PPC ads (say Google Adsense), instead promote affiliate products from various networks, sell ad space, write product reviews, paid reviews, build your own product etc.

You Don’t Do SEO Correctly.

SEO is the heart of blogging, without SEO you blog can’t grow – this concept is well proved with the Google Panda updates. Most of the blogs are hit by Panda and many lost their business.

SEO has the power to grow and even to kill your blog. So play it safely.

• For example, you should not over do SEO. Don’t build too much of backlinks, don’t over stuff keywords, don’t write on vast topic (write on niche) – keep it natural, it works the best.

You Don’t Attract the Audience.

Building regular visitors to your blog is one of the toughest part of blogging. You have to build trust – attract the audience with great content, great blog design and initiate interaction with them every day.

• For example, you can conduct a contest in your blog, quickly attract new visitors and hold them in your social account (facebook, twitter, G+) or into your e-mail list. This makes them to come back again or you can also ping them to come back anytime.

You Don’t Diversify the Traffic Source.

Like income source, you have to diversify the traffic source also. Not only SEO and search traffic – you can drive visitors from social networks and from other sites (by spreading your blog link every day).

For example, you can have a plan to write 1-2 guest posts every week, plan to build social followers every month by 1k+.

You Don’t Have a Plan.

Blogging is a business. It requires proper planning and you have to strategize the work. Plan everything, your writing schedule, income sources, traffic sources – do experiments, try out new strategies and tweak your work every day.

Blogging is a slow process however, when you plan it well and follow all these tips you can easily make it an agile process. Keep on going, never give up – soon your blog will be making a lot of money.

Good Luck !

image: oliv

In this article, I will help on how to create an eBook App which works on iPad or an iPhone. In general, you need coding skills to develop Apps. For an eBook App, you have to bring the actual content of your eBook into the format suitable for an iPad or iPhone. Basically, Xcode the development platform of App helps the developers to build great Apps suitable for any iPhone, iPad, Mac products.

eBook for iPhone / iPad

You can get all the required tools from Apple’s Developer Tools page right from the IDE, compiler to simulator. Using all these tools, you can create eBook App as you like.

It is okay for a person with developer knowledge to use all these development tools, what a non-developer can do ? There are lot of pre-built solutions available in the market to create eBook Apps which are compatible to iPad or iPhone.

You can get a copy of Xcode script from BuildeBookApp.

• You get the complete source code of App (Xcode script)
• The App will be compatible with iPhone’s as well as iPad’s
• You don’t need an programming experience.
• All you have to fill your eBook content and publish it as an App
• You can also add your own graphics and customize the look-n-feel of your eBook App

One of the best reason to buy this pre-built script: You can cut-down the development cost. Now-a-days, App developers are costlier and you have to pay almost $50 to $150 per hour. It usually takes several hours (50+) to develop a complete working App – even at the rate of $50 per hour, you have to spend $2500 to develop a simple App.

When compared, you can easily get the Xcode script from BuildeBookApp, add your eBook content, customize the look-n-feel and publish the App without much hassles !

Further, you can go through my earlier article which lists down the sites to create eBook online – there are both premium as well as simple packages that you can choose to create regular eBooks (non-iPhone eBooks). The App business (with iPhone/iPad or Android) is already a hot business and there are not many eBook Apps available in the market. If you have the knowledge to write the eBook content, you can simply turn that into a profitable App using this Xcode script.

To begin with you can release your first eBook App and based on the results you can repeat the entire process to make even more profits. If you have not already enrolled into the iOS dev program, you can enroll now.

Major points to consider in Creating your eBook App:

• Make a catchy App Title which should attract the users on first sight
• Solve problems in your eBook and it should help the buyer in some way (providing a better solution)
• Provide enough information and cover the core topic in detail (this definitely, satisfies the buyer)
• Repeat the entire process and publish your next eBook App on same/related topics

Apart from these general points, consider the below App specific things:

• Make sure your App loads faster and it doesn’t makes the user to wait for long time
• Test your App on both iPhone as well iPad devices (not just simulators, better use real devices)
• Ensure your App works with the latest version of iOS (most of the time, we end up with compatibility issues)
• Plan to release new App version (with updates/enhancements) to keep users active with your App business
• Based on the results, you can re-spin the same eBook App into Android Market.

No matter, you sell your eBook on the web for a regular PC/Mac readers or as an eBook App for smart phone users – keep in mind that a problem solving valuable eBook goes viral, wins and makes you lot of money !

• create ebooks for ipad
• how does ebook look in iphone ipad online
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• iPad ebook App Source code Xcode download
• mail (will not be published) app making
• money making online business

Well, then you first thank that this free market capitalism is very helpful in sustaining our shopping habit. At least we have a good big variety of items from various manufacturers that we can choose from today.

The Conventional Mode of Buying i.e. going to a departmental store and buying things from there has always been expensive. You will have to spend on the fuel of on the fare, unless you live in an area where the market is at a walking distance from your place. So the Online Mode of Shopping is a better choice.

There may be other reasons and cause of your budget going down very month but I would try helping you out by telling you how to save money during your online shopping.

Contrary to the investing technique saving doesn’t require any specialized training. One can learn from prior experiences of others and him/herself what was the really cause of going out of my budget.

It doesn’t matter what your monthly income is, you can still enjoy the luxuries of life only if you are a smart buyer.

There are a few tips I would like to give to those who are thinking of getting smarter on shopping like me!

Tip 1: Choose The Best Online Store

When it comes to shopping most of the people become hopeless. What they do is buy whatever they want from anywhere they find. This should not be the strategy. You first have to see which store is the best. Something that I mentioned earlier, online mode of shopping is much better than the conventional one, because online shopping is relatively cheaper than the other way of shopping.

You can see the whole store in just a glance. If on the internet you find the same store you have been shopping earlier too, it will be really good. But if you are not satisfied buy the online services of the same store you then you better hop to the next.

See that other store should have the product you are looking for and secure to do the transaction on.

See this list of famous online stores.

Tip 2: Look For Free Online Coupons for The Products

If the store is a renown one and you have been shopping from it then the next thing you have to see is whether that store has granted coupon code for that particular product on a coupon site? If it has then you better go for it. Buy the product. These coupon codes are free of cost and you can use them to get discounts.

For those who have been shopping on regular basis and were not aware of free online coupon codes they will be able to shop smartly now by using them.

Tip 3: Season And Reason

If you buy something during holiday seasons like Christmas, Cyber Monday, Black Friday etc you will be able to get heavy discount normally on all stores. If you get to find coupons during that time you will be able to save double than normal. Now you have to have a reason to buy something.

If you buy something you don’t need now or even later, you will be wasting money. If you buy something that may be used later (unless it is something that cannot be deteriorated, or doesn’t become obsolete) you will still be spending from your this month’s budget.

Also, you should practice not to over-shop on such holiday seasons.

Tip 4: Find An Alternate

Find a substitute of the product if you can’t find coupon codes of it. Either go for some other alternate product or some other brand of the same product.

Sometimes the alternates are better and cheaper than the products you are looking for.

Tip 5: Hop To Other Store

It is said that a frog of a well doesn’t know what is going on in the world. Therefore I recommend, expend your horizons of online shopping. There is a fair possibility that you may be able to find better products, coupons and even substitutes on another stores that you may not have been able to see staying on shop and browsing through it only.

Bonus Tip: Plan Your Shopping

It is always good to plan your shopping especially what are all the things you “need” to buy and the “budget”. If you are going to shop without a plan definitely your mind wanders here and there, you will think to buy whatever you like. That’s really a bad habit which kills your financial situation very much.

Instead, every month make a budget and allocate a portion of you income for shopping needs – don’t spend more than your plan (but you can spend less than it).

You may feel little discomfort to follow a monthly spending plan because this restricts your buying habit – however, when you are practiced to do planned shopping you will realize how much money you are saving every month !

There are the some of the general tips I think everyone should know before they step into online shopping. Keep in mind, you don’t need to have lot of money to live a happy life – all you need to have financial goals, have monthly budget and never spend more than your income  !

Have a look on this article which explains the relation between earning, spending, saving and how you can build wealth.

image:pandal

In other words, where there is a demand – you have to focus your business there. The business model looks simpler, however when you get into hands-on you will probably get confused and you may not quickly take decisions. There comes the Niche Analysis.

By doing a series of analysis you can quickly filter and decide the profitable nature of a particular niche. Looking into the real statistics and by seeing the audience behavior you can penetrate into a market very well without hassles.

In this article, you will learn how to find niches which helps you to make profits for the long term. Even when you are starting a blog or building a product based business, this article helps you the best. You can always put your comments or questions in the end.

Find Niches by Keyword Analysis.

As I always tell, Keywords are the major source of traffic. When it comes to search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo – they are purely driven by keywords.

• How the people search? What information people are looking? These data helps you to make the best decisions ever.

Click Here to Get Niche Finder

There are lots of tools available in the market to perform keyword analysis and you can pick Micro Niche Finder software here to do it best.

The software is built specially for Niche Analysis. Right from keywords, search statistics – you get all these data in hand with simple clicks. All you have to give the keywords and start the analysis. The tool suggests you the best keywords which are easy to dominate and also you can find profitable audience for those keywords.

By doing keyword analysis, you get to know the market behavior and the audience behavior – if you are seeing lot of demand for a particular set of keywords you can definitely get into the market.

But wait a minute; you have to eliminate the competition before heading up.

Avoid Crowd by Competition Analysis.

Keyword analysis helps to pick the profitable market where there is demand! It is good to have a set of keywords (instead of having only one) by doing the analysis – once done; you have to identify the competition level for each keyword.

The micro niche finder helps you to see the competition level for each keyword as well as the search trends. It also checks for the availability of domain name for those profitable keywords, if available you can quickly get a domain name for the selected keyword.

• I recommend you to pick keyword which is having good number of monthly search volume say 5000+ searches – that shows the market demand.
• If there are domain names left, I am sure that the competition level is pretty low.

Further, once you have identified the keyword you can do a Google search and look over the top 10 pages. Use the SEO Quake Firefox Add-on and analyze the top 10 results – this gives various data related to each domains listed on the SERP.

• The number of in-links, pages indexed in search engines and the domain age are few of the important parameters that you have to check. When you see such low end web sites on the home page (top 10 results) then you can definitely pick that keyword.

You can repeat these 2 steps – Keyword Analysis + Competition Analysis until you find a high demand low competition niche.

Look For Problems & Profitable Audience.

The final step in this process – identifying the problems in the niche and nature of audience. This analysis helps to understand the target “audience need” and their nature so that you can build your site or product according to their needs.

• List down the user problems in the niche by searching the web.
• If you find lot of how-to’s then I am damn sure that there are lot of problems to address. Pick hot problems and make a solution through your web site or product.
• Show your web site or product as a solution to the audience – profit rolls.

Further, you can look into the market on existing products or solutions which gives much better ideas. You can also decide the niche based on the success of these existing products and based on the users comments/reviews available on the web.

Conclusion.

Finding niche is the very first step to build a profitable web site or a product. It is a complex process and you have to look into lot of data.

The tools that I recommend here are:

• Micro Niche Finder – to easily identify a profitable niche which has high demand and low competition.
• SEO Quake – Firefox Add-on to quickly analyze the top 10 results of SERP

However when you use the right tools, you can make this whole process simpler and also take better decisions (use your common sense bit).

image:merigot

Over time any telecommuter can build discipline and focus. The problem is that not everyone has this kind of time. They have to make an immediate impression with a new employer. That means finding ways to stay on task even when it feels impossible to do so. Here are some beginners’ tips from a five-year work-from-home vet.

is this Stay on Task ?

1. Close everything

If you remove distractions from your life, they can no longer distract you. I found this out the hard way early in my work-from-home career. With email, IM, Facebook, and 200-plus Google Reader feeds open at all times, distractions were everywhere. Sure, I’ll start work — just after I zero my inbox and my reader, and oh yeah, ask Mike about plans for the weekend. After all that, yeah, I’ll start work.

Of course, once that’s done the distractions have already started to pile up again. People post to Facebook. Google Reader blogs repopulate. More people email. Worst of all, Twitter wasn’t even around then. Twitter is the greatest time suck of them all, since people update constantly. If you keep dealing with these distractions before you start to work, you’ll never get to your work.

• The only way to get through these distractions is to eliminate them. That means closing IMers and Twitter. Email, too, unless your job requires prompt replies to emails. If that’s the case, make sure that it’s just an email client, and only has work emails.
• That is, don’t keep Gmail open, since 1) it contains personal emails, and 2) it comes with a built-in instant messenger. Keep these things closed while you’re trying to work, or risk getting no work done.

2. Get out of the house

When discussing and reading about the telecommuting lifestyle, I often see people mention the idea of getting out. Working from one’s home can be nice, in that it means no commuting, but it can also be a lonely endeavor. To combat this loneliness, some suggest packing up your laptop and doing some work at your local coffee shop. While I do advocate getting out of the house, going to Starbucks to work is hardly what I have in mind.

Anyone who has worked at Starbucks knows that it’s one big distraction. People are coming in and going out constantly. There’s always something moving. People converse, sometimes in loud voices. It’s quite difficult to sit down and focus when in a public setting like that. I would never recommend that anyone work from a Starbucks, let a lone someone new to telecommuting.

Getting out of the house in general, though, is nice. Treat yourself to lunch once or twice a week. Go to Starbucks and get a coffee. Read a magazine while you’re there. Get your mind off work. Those are healthy activities. Just don’t try to get work done. It’s more distracting at Starbucks than it is at home with all your social media open. Also, go-through these ways to relax after work.

3. Don’t treat it like a normal workday

The normal workday involves commuting, sitting in an office for eight hours, and then commuting home. Right off the bat we can see that telecommuting is not like this. So why treat it as such? So often I see people advise telecommuters to treat their job just like any other office job. But if they’re so clearly different in nature, is that really doing any good?

• Here’s an idea that essentially saved my career: plan your workday to start when you’d normally leave for work, and end when you’d normally get home.
• For example, in my last desk job I left the house at 8, got to work at 8:30, and left at 5:30, and got home by 6. That is, I was prepared to go to work at 8:00. Why not start work at that time, then, when telecommuting?
• Learn these tips to manage your time better.

Trust me, it works wonders.

This isn’t to say you should work the extra hour when you were previously commuting. Instead, use that time to give yourself breaks throughout the day. We all need to get up from the computer, but sometimes we feel as though we need to sit down and work as we would in an office, even if that means staring at a blank screen. Forget that old mentality.

• Schedule breaks every so often, giving yourself 15 minutes to get up and stretch, or maybe read something. (Fact: my daily to-do list always contains an item instructing me to read something.)

Telecommuting is nothing like working in an office, so don’t treat it as such. Use the new environment, and the lack of a commute, to your advantage. Work will be much easier to manage that way.

4. Separate work and personal

Chances are, you didn’t get a new computer to use for your telecommuting job. You’re using the same computer you use for everything else. This can blur the lines between personal and business — and that’s a line that never needs blurring. It’s important to keep the two separate. Thankfully, the tools are there.

• The first thing you can do, and this is the most essential, is to separate work and personal email. Gmail might offer you the ability to receive mail from your work account, but don’t succumb to this temptation.
• Use Outlook or Thunderbird for work email, leaving your Gmail for personal stuff. The same goes for any social media or RSS feeds.
• Have travel plans upcoming? Don’t browse for cheap hotels during work hours. It’s only going to hinder your ability to get work done.

Work during work hours, and do personal stuff during off times. It’s a pretty simple concept, but it’s one over looked by so many new telecommuters who haven’t yet acclimated themselves to life without a boss looking over their shoulders.

The more you blend the two, the worse off you’ll be. It will lead to a lack of productivity, and perhaps cost you your cozy telecommuting gig. That means you’ll have to return to an office. Do you really want to do that?

image: jlovely

• on task

There’s the process of buying a domain name, naming your blog, installing WordPress, picking a theme, and more.

But even before that, there’s choosing a right web host for your blog.

It is the first step of creating any blog, and because it can affect your blog greatly it requires time and attention. It’s not the most glamorous of tasks, but getting it right can save headaches in the future.

Why your web host is important ?

Before we dive into the process for finding a web host, a quick word on why it’s important to find the right one. This is probably best accomplished in list format.

• Anyone reading E Money Making Online has financial motivations behind blogging. If your blog has trouble staying online, it will be exceedingly difficult to make money. Pick the wrong host, and you could be dealing with significant downtime.
• Dealing with downtime means spending time on the phone with the host. That’s time you’re not actively making your blog better and making money.
• The host is essentially offering you data center services, and so you want to make sure that their actual data centers are acceptable.
• As your blog grows your needs will change. A good host will help you grow. A bad host will hinder you and put you offline. That loops us back around to the beginning.

Essentially, picking the wrong host can throw a huge wrench into your business plans. Finding a good host means not worrying about hosting and focusing on what will make you the most money. It’s worth the time and effort to get it right.

Researching your host

It might seem obvious that you should research web hosts before you purchase a plan. Any time you spend money you should do at least a modicum of research, and web hosting is no different. Yet it’s not as simple as running a simple Google search or asking a friend.

• For starters, there are many issues that go into web hosting, and that makes it a personal choice. What works for a friend might not work for you.
• Second, there are so many biased views of web hosts out there that it’s tough to mete out what’s genuine and what’s financially motivated.

The former point is pretty simple. You might have friends who host blogs, and they might have their preference for hosts. Maybe they’ve been through a few and speak from deep experience. You should absolutely ask your friends and acquaintances which hosts they recommend. But don’t act directly on their advice. What works for them might not work for you. Additionally, it’s tough to tell whether their experience was general or isolated.

Additional research will make clear which hosts are best for you.

is this badly hosted ?

Starting with simple Google searches makes sense, but you need to dig deeply in order to find the truth of a host. Many hosts have affiliate programs, which pay bloggers who refer new users. This isn’t a problem in itself, but it does mean that you have to be wary about any website recommendation. If they’re making money off potential sales, they are incentivized to say good things about it. Maybe they use said host and speak from experience. But you have to click around further to know.

On the flipside, many negative reviews can be just as disingenuous. People have a tendency to write scathing words when they feel wronged. And, honestly, there’s not a host out there with a completely clean record. Hosts screw up, as do all humans and companies. That means they’re necessarily angering some percentage of their users, and those wronged users are more likely to write a review than someone who has received quality service.

Reviews should be taken only so far when conducting research. You might find an interesting nugget or two, but no decision should be based solely on reviews, just as no decision should be made on personal recommendations. But now that you have both, you can start to dig into what the company offers.

What to look for in a host

Now that you have your reviews and recommendations in hand, you probably have a handful of hosts in mind. When researching them, though, you shouldn’t necessarily be looking for features that benefit you currently. Most hosts, good and bad, offer basic services. You should be looking for a host that will allow you to grow.

When you first start your blog, you’ll be on a shared server with many other small blogs. Most of the time you won’t experience any issues. You’re not using a ton of bandwidth, so there are little chances of an overload. You’re also not using many resources in general, since your databases aren’t very big yet.

But it’s when your blog grows that the host becomes more important.

Clearly you plan for your blog to grow. Once you reach a certain level your host will move you to a virtual private server. This is still a shared server, but it is shared among fewer sites. When you conduct your research you’ll want to find out prices for this level of service. You might want to also find out how much bandwidth they allow at that level and other statistics, so you can compare them to others.

It might not be of great importance to you right now, but it will be as soon as your blog starts to grow.

You can also take this opportunity to think big and look at dedicated hosting prices from these hosts. It might be a long way off — you need considerable traffic and bandwidth consumption to justify a dedicated server — but it’s always nice to know you can continue growing with a company.

• That’s really the key to this all: finding a host that will let you easily move up the ladder. That will make life much easier now and in the long run.

Changing hosts is a pain

With one of my blogs, I thought we had it right. We found a host that we knew was reliable, from multiple recommendations and plenty of research. In fact, when starting a different project I didn’t go with this same host, and I regretted it. They had quality virtual packages, and we felt we could grow with them onto a dedicated server. Alas, that was two hosts ago.

We actually tried to switch hosts, to a dedicated provider, at one point along the way. That went terribly. We lacked the technical knowledge to make the switch ourselves, and the money to pay someone else wasn’t in the budget. And so we had to eat the three-month contract we had signed.

Still, the need to switch was there, and so in late 2010 we did just that. Things went well enough at first, but eventually we realized that the hosting package we paid for was not sufficient for our needs. That meant we had to pay more than we had intended for the service.

For all this money we were paying, we were told the host would help us optimize the site so we could stay within our bandwidth limits. That never came, and it led to more downtime than we ever imagined. In late 2011, we made yet another change.

I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. It’s a long, drawn-out process that almost always involves a price increase. Moving the site is also a process that necessitates downtime. And yes, chances are you’ll have to pay someone to take care of the move for you — though if you pay your new host enough they’ll probably take care of it for you. We can only hope that this last server move is the right now.

The point is, we never had these problems in our halcyon days. The entry level package was easily good enough, and even our jump to a virtual server worked out well. It’s only when we really started to grow that it became an issue.

• Learn from my mistake: do your research up front so you can stick with the same host for as long as possible. No one wants to make the move, whether they know it now or not.

image:zenia

• how to choose the right blog

Basically, showing the right product to right visitor brings you sale and your blog becomes a profit making machine sooner.

• However, manually converting the keywords into affiliate links is a tough process, it consumes lot of time and energy.
• What if your blog has 100′s and 1000′s of blog posts ? It is impossible to manually convert the keywords into profitable Affiliate links – definitely your head cracks !
• Also, if you want to change or edit any affiliate links then again you have to manually do that by hand.

It is a good idea to automatically convert those keywords into affiliate links and you can do that effectively with the help of AffiLinker Affiliate WordPress Plugin – no matter how many keywords into affiliate links.

With AffiLinker, you can quickly convert any number of keywords into the specified Affiliate Links. You can quickly monetize your existing blog traffic using AffiLinker. Imagine, all your blog posts are monetized instantly by automatically adding affiliate links for the given keywords ! That’s auto-profits, right ?

You work hard every day to write useful content for your blog, your work hard to drive traffic to your blog – all your hard works are wasted – if you don’t effectively monetize your blog.

All your hard work can be rewarded only when you effectively monetize your blog and it should have the potential to make profits.

When you convert the specified keywords into profitable affiliate links, you are monetizing your blog effectively. It creates the way towards making profits for the long term – in fact, you can quickly turn your existing blog traffic into money.

AffiLinker is a WordPress plugin which helps you to instantly convert the given keywords into Affiliate Links – it has the features which puts your blog on auto-pilot income mode.

Why I Use AffiLinker To Automatically Convert Keywords Into Affiliate Links ?

There are few WordPress plugins which promises to automatically convert the given keywords into Affiliate Links. However, with those plugins you can definitely convert keywords into links but do you get chance to control the link placement to maximum extent ? do you get the power to make visitors Love-To-Click Affiliate Links ?

I am now using AffiLinker in my blog and the results are great than before. I am using AffiLinker in a different way: i am not linking to affiliate links instead routing the traffic to my hot money pages by converting selected keywords into links pointing to those hot money pages.

The features of AffiLinker are made with the problems of bloggers in mind, you can also check the list of all features here. Lets see those reasons – why i recommend and use AffiLinker WordPress Plugin:

Keywords into Interactive Affiliate Links.

• With AffiLinker, you can automatically convert the given keywords into affiliate links through out the blog posts, pages and even on comment section – not only affiliate links, it creates Interactive Affiliate Links.
• That means, affiliate link can have Unique styles like Link color, Font style, Link Background color, Link Hover color, Link Hover Background color, bold style, italics style etc.
• All these settings, you can configure for each affiliate link, that means it is possible to configure each affiliate link with an unique style.
• Apart from color and font, you can also choose the underlining style for each affiliate link. There are 9 different underlining options available to pick.

Basically, you can create colorful links that your visitor Love-To-Click every time.

Show Affiliate Link Cloud on Sidebar, Footer.

Apart from converting keywords into affiliate links, you can show the Affiliate Link Cloud. This is a unique feature with AffiLinker which shows the collection of affiliate links same like Tag Cloud.

• There are Drag-n-Drop widget’s that you can place in the sidebar, footer of your WordPress blog.
• You can show the collection of affiliate links either as a Tag Cloud or simply as a link list.
• You can also, enable the Interactive option to show colorful Affiliate Links that your visitors Love-To-Click.

Take control on Link Placement.

When it comes to automatic link conversion, there are chances that your blog gets linked with too much of affiliate links. This happens with most of the other affiliate WordPress plugins. However, with AffiLinker there are options to control the link placement to maximum extent.

Few of the great Link placement options are:

• Add affiliate links to blog posts or pages which are having more than the specified number of word count.
• Add affiliate links only on the specified blog posts, pages.
• Hide affiliate links only on the specified blog posts, pages.
• Enable/Hide affiliate links on comment section.
• Enable/Hide affiliate links on the blog homepage etc.

Further, you can also add no follow tag to the affiliate links and also, you can choose the target window (like where to open, once the visitor clicks on the affiliate link) for each and every affiliate link.

Track Total, Unique Clicks + Referral URLs.

The process of blog monetization never stops once keywords are converted into affiliate links. In fact, the real work starts afterwards – i mean you have to measure the performance.

Do the visitors are clicking the affiliate links (number of clicks) ? and what are all the blog posts, pages from where the affiliate links are clicked (the Referral URLs) ?

• With AffiLinker, you can track the total number of clicks received by each link as well as the unique number of clicks.
• It also gives the statistics on the referral URLs – this helps to know the best performing blog posts, pages in your blog.
• All these statistics helps to tweak the keywords, link style and other settings to improve the performance better than before !

These are the major features that i could see in the AffiLinker Affiliate WordPress plugin – you can effectively monetize your blog by automatically converting the keywords into profitable Interactive affiliate links.

When compared to other WordPress plugins, the price of AffiLinker is cheaper – only $47 and you get Multi-site License to use it on any number of your own web sites. In general, the Multi-site License for a premium WordPress plugin costs $97 but when compared with other plugins, AffiLinker is cheaper – you get Multi-site License in the cost of Single-site License for a limited time only.

image: j4b

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You might think that starting a daily deal website is not a wise idea, especially when you have giants like Groupon.com or Google offers in the market, while another bigwig (i.e. Facebook) has shown some interest by launching Facebook deals in the past (was dropped but you never know when they’ll decide to step in again with an even better program).

It’s true that it will take quite some resources and guts to even think of competing with any of these giants, but there’s one simple strategy that can help you start a daily deal website and still make some money, and that is to start a daily deal website that focuses on the deals offered only by businesses in your city or country. By focusing solely on your local business, you can capture a big share of market, because even though the biggies like groupon.com cater more than 400 regions, they are not equally strong in all of those regions, and there’s no reason why you couldn’t start one that focuses on the local businesses and triumph over these giants.

Following is a simple plan laid out for those who are looking for a nice business idea to make money online.

#1 – Finance:

Starting an online business used to be a low-cost undertaking, but the times have changed, and now you need substantial budget to start with.

• One of the major expenses is going to be the marketing, remember that a daily-deal website should be advertised to businesses and consumers, so you’ll have to spend a sizeable amount on both online and offline marketing.
• Any such website will take quite some time before it gains momentum, which means you need to bear the expenses of website hosting and maintenance, and more importantly the marketing with little or no income coming your way.

So, you’ve got to have the capital in hand.

#2- Plan:

You don’t need to have a very complex plan, but still having some line of action is necessary before starting any business.

• While planning for a discount or daily deal website, you’ll have to decide on both short term and long term goals. You will have to decide if you are looking to cover the entire country or some particular cities, you can also zoom in to some specific type of businesses, for example restaurants.

Answers to all of these questions will depend largely on the size of market and the kind of resources you have. You should also decide if you will be featuring the brick and mortar businesses, or online stores by sharing discounts like diamond.com coupons or autotrader coupons.

#3 – Website:

Once you’ve lined up the funds and resources, the first thing to go for is the website. A daily-deal or coupon website needs to be attractive, colorful, engaging, and at the same time it shouldn’t appear clustered. If you are catering many localities or cities, you have got to lay out good navigation and categories.

• It’ll be good to add some articles or a blog alongside the deals to help both businesses and consumers on how to make the most of discounts and special deals.
• Remember that you’ve got to be equally sincere with both businesses and consumers; inclining towards any of these parties will turn out to be an obstruction.

Learn the steps to build profitable coupon blog.

#4 – Marketing:

Here comes the most important part, as stated earlier, you’ve got to market your service to both businesses and consumers with equal ferocity.

• You can start from targeting the popular restaurants and lure them into offering special discounts. To convince these businesses, you’ll have to prove that your website is not an anonymous entity on the internet.
• In order to do that, you will need to have some sales representative visiting and meeting the owners in person, because the majority of small business owners are not quite familiar with the power of Internet and social media, and you will be getting a cold shoulder more often than not.

It’s better if you can allow the businesses to offer a discount and get promoted on your website for free in the start.

Once you show some results and your website gets established, more and more businesses will be keen to use this platform, and that will be time for you to reap the benefits of all the hard work.

image:gege

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Sell Affiliate Products/Services

The most profitable use of a newsletter is to sell affiliate products/services. In fact, this could easily turn into your major source of income. All equal, affiliate sales pay good commissions and you can make more money with them than with the other ways to monetize a newsletter. There are lot of affiliate marketers who are living life by promoting affiliate products to their large audience on various niches/markets.

The two vital things for your success are a large, targeted subscriber base and offers that match their interests.

If these two conditions are met, you can rest assured that your newsletter will be well monetized. When you show the right product to the right audience, the chances of making sale is higher.

Offer Your Own Products/Services at a Discount

If you have your own products/services for sale, you must include them in your newsletter. Well, the choice of products/services you offer will hardly be as rich as the offers you can get from various affiliate networks but you can’t afford to miss such a great sales channel.

Instead of using affiliates to sell your products, you become your own affiliate. Since you won’t be paying affiliate commissions, you can offer a generous discount to your newsletter subscribers and chances are that if your products/services are good, this won’t go unnoticed.

Include Paid Ads

All those affiliates, who are making tons of money from affiliate sales and sales of their own products/services will regard this tip as a waste of valuable newsletter space. However, if you aren’t that lucky to make a decent amount from affiliate sales, you can consider alternatives to monetize your newsletter.

Paid ads are one of these alternatives. Probably the first thing that comes to your mind is Adsense but unfortunately you can’t offer it because Adsense doesn’t allow their ads in emails, unless it is in a feed. But the world doesn’t end with Adsense, so search for other advertisers who allow their ads in emails and place them.

• Another approach is to find direct advertisers and offer them ad space. Seek for advertisers in your niche and contact them. If your rates are affordable, you will find advertisers for sure. You can charge based on the size of your newsletter subscribers.
• For example, if you have 10K subscribers, you can charge around $100 per Ad space. Don’t hurt your subscribers with irrelevant ads, make sure that your ads are related to your audience and their interests.

Offer Merchandise for Purchase

Merchandise is one more way to make money from a newsletter. You can sell branded T-shirts, pens, caps, mugs, etc. However, in order for this to work, you need to have a very strong brand users would want to identify with.

This is why for the average newsletter merchandise will hardly become a great money-maker but still it is better than nothing. You can also promote seasonal items based on the holidays (say, Christmas special…)

Make Money Indirectly

In addition to the direct ways to make money from your newsletter, there are indirect benefits you can enjoy.

For instance, when you include roundups of your site content and visitors go to your site, they will click ads, buy stuff, etc. and all this will be making you money. This helps to keep your subscribers close to your business and you can ping them anytime to come back to your site.

This is social media era, there are tools like facebook, twitter to keep hold of your audience but still newsletters are more personalized, builds a strong relation between your business and its audience.

The fact that you are running a reputable newsletter helps to establish yourself as an expert in your niche. This might not bring you money directly but it is pretty common for clients to hire experts they encounter on the Net (i.e. by reading your newsletter). This way a newsletter is making you money (i.e. the money the client will pay you when you finish a project for him or her) you would have otherwise missed.

Conclusion

Although sales (affiliate and sales of your own products/services) are the major way to make money from a newsletter, don’t neglect the other opportunities. In today’s tough economy every dollar you make is welcome, so don’t miss the chances a newsletter presents you with.

As an added tip: You can also conduct periodic surveys through your newsletter and understand the audience interests, expectations. This helps to tweak your broadcast with more targeted products and promotions than before.

image: healingsoul

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