Making MoneyMaking Money - Making Money

How to Make Money With Clickbank
March 28, 2009 at 10:51 am
Sherman Choo asked:


Clickbank is a network that connects both Sellers and Buyers. Clickbank is one of the easiest place to make money with, both as a seller as well as an affiliate. If you have a book or digital information that you’d like to distribute, instead of going through a publisher, that would cost you a few thousand to publish , you can sell your product and how-to info through clickbank.

To be a successful affiliate takes a little practice. For someone dedicated to earn a living with Clickbank, it only requires about 45 days for someone completely new to learn the ropes.

Here are a few things to look out for when working with Clickbank.

How to make money with clickbank tip #1:

When selecting a product, be sure to choose one that pays you at least 50% commissions. Clickbank products payout anywhere from $12 to $28 to $99.

How to make money with clickbank tip #2:

Clickbank products offer solutions for a range of problems. If you’re good in golf, clickbank offers digital information on how to improve ones golf swing. There’re also products that teach you how to use Google Adwords, or how to learn photoshop. By presenting the right products and helping the audience locate a Clickbank product to their problems, you can easily earn $900 to $1000 in your 1st 30 days.

How to make money with clickbank tip #3:

Be sure to check a sales merchant’s page for sales leaks. Some merchants have a mix of 2checkout as well as Clickbank merchant processor on their sales page. This is not good for you as a clickbank affiliate. Sales that occured by the payment processor not of clickbank will result in a loss of comission for you.

Hope these tips help you be successful with Clickbank.



Powered by HI-RanK Promotion
How you Can Make a Difference With Earn Money Online Survey
March 28, 2009 at 10:06 am
earn money online
Alan Lim asked:


Make a Difference in Products Available on the Grocery Shelf

When you earn money online survey, not only are you benefiting from the venture because you make money with each survey you finish, but you are benefiting by having products available in your local store that you had some input in developing and creating. You can state your opinions about products as to taste, texture, flavors, as well as the prices you are expected to pay for them. Earn money online survey is a win-win situation for everyone that is involved.

Have Fun While You Earn Money Online Survey

To earn money online survey is not difficult to do. You don’t have to do research or spend hours typing on the computer. You don’t have to make telephone calls or even leave your house. Lots of people enjoy earn money online survey. They are usually fun, fast and easily completed. It can be fun for you to choose your merchandise when you have accumulated enough points, and think how it will feel when you see a check or transfer of cold, hard cash to your account. You never know if you will win one of the many sweepstakes you will be entered into when you earn money online survey.

Use the Products That Various Companies Will Send

One of the best parts of earning money online when you participate in market research surveys is receiving products that require your input. Often you will receive a product that the company wants you to try out at home for specific period of time. These products may be food or household cleaners or any other product that they trying to sell. You get to try them before they are available to the average consumer and see how you like them. After you use them, you will be required to give your opinion on how well you liked or disliked the product.

Work from Home and Earn Money Online Survey

Lots of stay at home moms are looking for an opportunity to work from home so they can be there for their children. Earn money online survey is a perfect way to be home with the kids, make extra money and have some say in the products and services you use. Everyone complains that no-one listens to them and this is an ideal way to get your voice heard. You can work in your pajamas while they kids are off to school, you can work in the evenings when they go to bed, as well as any time you have the chance. When you participate in paid surveys you don’t have to conform to any sort of schedule or timetable. When you work, it will be entirely up to you.

Most everyone has a computer, and instead of just using it for pleasure you can use it to make extra money from home simply by giving your thoughts and opinions to those who are more than willing to pay you for it. This could be just the opportunity you have been waiting for.



Powered by HI-RanK Promotion
Where to Look for Online Business Building Tips
March 28, 2009 at 9:36 am
Good money tips
TJ Philpott asked:


Looking for online business building tips to improve your own internet marketing efforts? Every successful internet business is always on the lookout for newer and better ways to gain an edge over their competition.

With access to the internet you have at your fingertips an encyclopedia full of tips and tricks on which to advance the growth of your internet business. The answers are right there, everyday, you just need to know where to look and what to look for.

By visiting websites across the internet and within your niche you can pick up invaluable information and ideas helpful to your business. Always try to target sites that are ranked well or are noteworthy for one reason or another.

Here are some key points to focus on when observing any site in order to gain useful information to use for your business:

MONEY MAKING STRATEGY

When looking at the website of any successful internet business site you always want to note how they earn money. Is banner advertising utilized and if so how prominent is it. Note the placement and frequency of use within the site along with the size of any banners used.

What about the overall content located on the site. Is there a lot of ‘hard selling’ involved or is the approach more subtle.

Take note of the use of any hyperlinks found and click on them to see where they may lead. How well do they relate to the theme of the website they are linked to?

WEBSITE LAYOUT

Is the site easy to navigate, is there a site map available and does the website layout make sense? Are there any unique design ideas that you could use for your internet business. Remember some of these sites pay good money for their designs so take advantage of this.

GRAPHICS

How are graphics used if at all? Does the site use graphics for hyperlinks and do these graphics follow the overall theme of the website itself.

Take note of the headers and footers at the site location to see if the company logo is displayed or is it perhaps more thematic to reflect the nature of the product.

FONTS

This is an important aspect for any site since the visitor is expected to read the content. Some fonts are actually easier on the eyes than others, such as Arial and Georgia, so take note of the font type and size. Does this website used more than one letter size within the text and are the fonts consistent throughout the site itself.

SITE TONE

Looking around the site do you notice a particular ‘tone’ in which the website conveys its message. Is it an aggressive ‘in your face’ approach or is it perhaps more playful and humorous. Try to understand what it is that makes the site stand out and appeal to its visitors.

Visiting various websites for online business building tips should result in a considerable accumulation of useful information from which you can benefit. By simply knowing what to look at you can improve your own business based upon the success and experience of others.



Powered by HI-RanK Promotion
5 Winning Attitudes You Need To Earn Money Right Now
March 28, 2009 at 7:49 am
Earn Money
Mario R. Churchill asked:


You have the requisite knowledge, skills, and abilities to succeed and yet, you’re still earning a pittance. If this sounds sadly familiar, what you need is a definite change in attitude to have a brighter future.

Take Risks If You Want to Earn Money

The word “risk” itself is sometimes enough to strike terror in people’s hearts. The word “risk” usually represents fear of the unknown and some people would rather not confront their fears - even if they’re offered the greatest rewards - when they can always choose to stay in their comfort zone.

If you want to earn money right now, you need to develop the courage to take risks. But be sure, of course, that you don’t get foolhardy and just leave your future completely in the hands of fate. Be daring, but don’t forget to act smart.

Be Eager to Learn If You Want to Earn Money

You can never be too thin, too rich, or in this case, too smart. There’s always room for improvement and having a sincere keenness to learn will allow you to not only earn money right now but to continue doing so in the far future. Never allow yourself to think that you already know everything there is to a certain business because when you do, that’s the time you’ll stop improving, and this gives your competitors a chance to sneak up on you.

Be Passionate If You Want to Earn Money

To earn money, you have to find something that you can care for and grow with for the rest of your life. Even if you’re earning lots of money right now from a job that you certainly don’t love, it will always ultimately end in your defeat. If you want to earn money right now and continue doing so, you need to find a job or business that you can be passionate about and never lose interest in. You - and your business - must evolve together if you wish to start and continue earning money.

Be Thrifty If You Want to Earn Money

Wealth isn’t just produced by making money. In fact, that’s just a part of it. Wealth is more importantly and mostly produced by knowing how to save money as well. You need to really understand the value of money if you want to start earning it right now. And if you do understand it, then you’ll also understand the need to be thrifty. Don’t spend if you don’t have to. Don’t spend if you can’t afford to. These are painfully simple rules to live by, but most people end up ignoring them because the opposites are sometimes just too sinfully tempting.

Do Right If You Want to Earn Money

Playing fair and square may be the long and hard road to accumulating wealth, but rest assured that it will deliver on its promise and it will end as you desire. Ignoring ethics and morals, on the other hand, may be rewarding at first but you’ll still lose in the end. If you want to earn money and continue doing so, you need to understand that a business can’t exist alone. It needs the help, support, and trust of its clients, suppliers, distributors, retailers, employees, and everyone else that it interacts with - but how can that be possible if the company doesn’t play fair?



Powered by HI-RanK Promotion
How to Start Making Money on the Internet – Starting From Scratch
March 27, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Good money tips
Jason B Han asked:


The high profiles internet markets did not start off with a list of 1,000,000 people for them to pitch to and advertise what they had to sell. They were also thinking back then (like you) how to build such a list from scratch; it’s impossible. But doing it makes it possible.

They start out writing content themselves as they cannot afford the cash to pay experts to write content for some hungry profitable niches. Some of them are still doing it because it is simple and the fastest and almost free to start making money on the internet. Do you still believe that it takes a lot of money to start making money on the internet? Tell yourself, you can start making money on the internet by starting to do it now.

What is different for you, however, is you can have the same results and better profits and best of all, in less than half the time to have the same huge profits that these successful marketers make. You might have a few hiccups but with the simple and highly effective advice, you can succeed in making money from the internet in a few days. But if you are experienced, you might learn the tips do a few changes and get more profits coming in a few hours.

How can you make money online? Learn from the experts, make money and re-invest the money on more stuff which would make you even more money. With small successes and more tools, you can learn better and more effective techniques and test a new niche market faster to make good money. Then you should expose yourself to some of the Internet Marketing (IM) events and learn from other successful Internet Marketers, They will teach you good tips and even offer to promote products for you in exchange that you also promote their products.

There is no reason why you cannot do it. If you start today, you can learn how to start making money on the internet and actually make money on the internet all in a few days.

Stop asking “how can you make money online”, and start with a few of the simple strategies. Find a good niche market with Google, build a website and drive traffic to view, click and buy your product.

And most importantly, never give up. It is alright if you didn’t make money in the first few months. This is just a learning process. There is always a hurdle to overcome. Once you overcome this hurdle, everything will start to become much easier.



Powered by HI-RanK Promotion
Why Your eBay Business Needs PayPal
March 27, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Dropshipping tips
Daniel Westfield asked:


While it seems like a no brainer, there are still dropshippers who neglect to use the leverage that PayPal brings to their eBay business. In today’s online marketplace, this feature is seen by many as a necessity, and without it, dropshippers leave a large percentage of their potential profits on the table.

Even before eBay acquired PayPal, the two companies were used hand in hand by both buyers and sellers on the internet. Today, as one company, the two interact more than ever, and accepting PayPal payments is absolutely crucial for your eBay business. If a dropshipper neglects to accept PayPal as a means of payment for his or her items, he or she makes it much harder to create a steady income stream from dropshipping, and achieving Powerseller status becomes a much more difficult task.

PayPal makes eBay transactions incredibly easy. Because many PayPal accounts are already funded with cash, most eBay buyers don’t even see the money that leaves their accounts. This smooth, easy payment process encourages sales. Those who use PayPal prefer to use it over credit cards or personal checks, because it is much faster and easier for the buyer. Therefore, if you do not accept PayPal payments in your auctions, you are likely to be passed over by perspective buyers, and they will buy from someone who accepts PayPal payment even if the price is higher. Yes, many will pay more for the luxury of paying via PayPal. Therefore, if YOU are the one that accepts this type of payment, and your competitor does not, you may even receive a higher price.

However, if you neglect to accept PayPal payments, there were no doubt be less people bidding on your item, which naturally decreases the amount that you will receive for you product. Also, remember that people are sometimes more likely to bid on items that already have several bids, and accepting PayPal can encourage this idea to work in your favor.

Using PayPal is also beneficial to you because it allows you to receive payment much faster and, therefore, gives you the green light to ship sooner. Faster shipment means the potential of receiving a better feedback rating, and it snowballs from there. PayPal also allows you deposit the funds directly into your bank account. You could literally sell an item on eBay and have the money in your hand in less than an hour.

If you insist on only accepting personal checks and other slow methods of payments, you will not receive as many bids. In return, you will not get as much as you could for your items. You will make fewer sales, and payment will be slower. In return, you will receive fewer points for positive feedback, and your growth will be stunted.

If you want to seriously compete in the eBay marketplace and use dropshipping as a means to create a stream of income, implementing PayPal into your business is not only necessary, but absolutely essential to your success.



Powered by HI-RanK Promotion
The Best Affiliate Business Promotion Tip of the Day
March 27, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Guy Mendelson asked:


u can make any sales, you are going to need to get traffic if you have an affiliate marketing business. In this article, let’s talk about the best way to promote your affiliate business, so you can make more sales.

1. The first thing I want to suggest is that you get your own website or blog for the product that you are representing. Generally sending traffic directly to a replicated affiliate website is not a good idea for various reasons.

The other thing I suggest you do is create a landing page that you can promote for the express purpose of building a mailing list for future follow. You will need an auto responder to capture the names and email addresses of your visitors.

This is a couple of setup items that you will need, but really can make the difference in succeeding or failing with your affiliate marketing business.

2. When it comes to getting long term traffic it is hard to beat article writing. You can submit articles to various article directories such as Ezinearticles.com and derive a couple of benefits from them.

One of those benefits is the traffic that comes directly from the articles via your resource box. The other benefit is the search engine rankings you can enjoy from having an article published at Ezinearticles.com. Search engines seem to love them, as well as a few other directories and this is free traffic for you.

The other thing to do with your articles is to post them in your blog and submit the blog post to some of the top social directories. This again serves the purpose of creating traffic from the social directory as well as search engine bait for additional search engine traffic.

One article can end up giving you a tremendous amount of traffic. However, I understand that there are people who do not like to write articles. Should this eliminate you from using article marketing?

The quick answer is no! You can hire people to write 300-400 word articles for you for somewhere between five and $10. You then do the submission process and can create a traffic machine that gives you long-term traffic well beyond what you could get running a pay per click advertising campaign.

This is certainly one of the best ways to promote your affiliate business. I would encourage you to look into this further and give it a try. Many affiliate marketers are earning great money and using article marketing to advertise their affiliate business.



Powered by HI-RanK Promotion
How to Earn Money Online in 7 Easy Steps - Free and Effective Strategies
March 27, 2009 at 9:42 am
earn money online
Richard van Beek asked:


fford to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for marketing firm to bring in customers to your website? While these companies promise their services will bring results, what they do for you may or may not prove as effective as doing it yourself. You, equipped with the right knowledge, can achieve success with internet marketing and not spend extra money beyond your internet connection.

First, let us clarify what “free” means. We are using this term to describe marketing techniques that do not require you to spend additional money, but they do involve investing time. If you are able to come up with the time, it is quite possible to avoid spending money to market your business. Read on to find out marketing strategies that show you how to earn money online in 7 easy steps.

Step 1: Decision.

Decide what kind of business might work for you. If you are new to internet marketing, it is usually recommended that you promote existing products as an affiliate. This allows you to gain experience in making money online by marketing the products of others on your website. Also, as an affiliate you can be paid by check and avoid the fees associated with setting up a merchant account. Note: regardless of whether you decide to sell something that is your own or someone else’s, it should be in an area in which you already have some knowledge and interest. Your expertise will be very important in the marketing of your business, as is choosing the right niche.

Step 2: Website.

Find a free web hosting service and start building your website. If your need help building pages, there is free software for that too. Developing your website will be heavily dependent on your marketing decisions, so you will need to focus on the next phase, marketing, while your site is still under contruction.

Step 3: Autoresponder.

Find a free autoresponder to pair with your website. An autoresponder will automatically send an e-mail or series of e-mails to everyone who sends an e-mail to a certain address or registers at your website. This helps ensure that no matter how many inquiries you have, there will always be some sort of reply and follow up.

Step 4: Keywords.

Devote your attention to finding and optimizing keywords for your site. There are free tools to assist you with both keyword selection and search engine optimization. The point of these is to include words on your website that will be in demand by a select group of people who are searching online for what you have to offer.

Step 5: Articles.

Write informative articles that relate to your field on a regular basis. It costs nothing to submit articles to most directories. People who read your articles may be interested enough to follow a link at the end of your piece that leads to your website.

Step 6: Blog.

Develop a free blog and post to it on a weekly basis, or even more frequently if you can. People are drawn to honest, informative blogs and those you win over as readers are more likely to link to your main website.

Step 7: Forum.

Visit forums that relate to your area of business. Learn what questions people are asking to stay current in your ideas of what people want to know. Then add your insightful posts to the forum to get your name and link to your website out to that select group of people.

When you are trying to get your business up and running for free, you may have to make some initial concessions like having someone else’s banner ads displayed on your website. But since you haven’t had to put down any cash upfront (as an affiliate), whatever money begins to come in can be simple profit. Get your start by understanding how to earn money online in 7 easy steps, and then grow from there. Once you are making money you can allot some of your profits to upgrade your website and software. Whatever you can do to make your site look and operate even more professionally will increase its power of attraction.

Seo BacklinksSeo Backlinks - Seo Backlinks

Google Pagerank Algorithm Explained March 28, 2009 at 10:34 am

Sutocu asked: Google uses the PageRank algorithm to rank pages in their search engine results. The algorithm is based on analysing link structures: each link can be seen as a vote by a page for another page it links to. It is necessary to have a basic understanding of how PageRank works to be able to optimize web sites for the Google search engine . History of PageRank PageRank was invented by Larry Page at Stanford University, and named after him. Page began the project in 1995, and worked on it with Sergey Brin. The project then lead to the prototype Google in 1998. Google Inc. was founded to manage the Google search engine, which used PageRank. Currently the trademark PageRank belongs to Google Inc., but the original patent for the PageRank algorithm is assigned to Stanford University. Google has since grown to the largest search engine in the world, with nearly two thirds of searches made on Google. The PageRank algorithm is still one of the factors taken into account in Google’s search engine result ranking, and it is constantly followed by interested search engine marketing specialists around the world. The PageRank Algorithm A good analogy for the PageRank algorithm is that each link is a vote for the target page. This link structure of the web is analyzed recursively, so that the value of each vote depends on the PageRank of the voting page, calculated from the votes in the previous iteration of PageRank. When a new page comes into being in this link structure, it will only get a PageRank value once other pages link to it. Each link will give some PageRank to the new page, the amount a single link gives depending mostly on two things: the PageRank of the linking page, and the number of links on it. The more outbound links a page has, the less weight each of them will have. The actual algorithm used by Google is, naturally, more complicated then this. That algorithm also takes into account page topics. Pages with the same, or related topic that link to each other will carry more weight with their links than completely different pages that link to each other. It is thought that raw PageRank data exists as a floating point number for each page. These real time values are constantly updated by Google crawlers. The visible PageRank value that can be seen on the Google Toolbar is on a scale from zero to ten. This is exported from the real time PR data approximately once every three months. On Google Directory the PageRank is reported as an eight unit measure, which is also periodically compiled from the real time data, though less often than the toolbar PageRank is. In Conclusion The voting analogy describes the PageRank algorithm fairly well, but, though Google may claim so, it is not a completely democratic system. The weight of each link depends both on the PageRank of the page linking and the number of links it has. To improve PageRank, more inbound links, preferably from pages with high PageRank, must be acquired. Powered by HI-RanK Promotion

Advertising With Promotional Clothing March 28, 2009 at 9:30 am Neil Tipping asked: Sometimes advertisements garner a negative reaction from their intended audience because that audience feels like they’re being asked to make an investment of their time on behalf of a company who may not be offering anything in return. Smart advertisers know that getting one’s message across and making a memorable, positive impression often depends on there being something given for something gained. Promotional clothing is a great way to accomplish the tough task of effective advertising. For manual laborers, durable work clothing that insulates from the elements is something that’s always appreciated. Such a garment is not likely to go unworn because it carries on it a brand name or a logo. In fact, such displays have become somewhat fashionable over the years. Business people always find a use for promotional clothing. Whether a shirt appropriate for casual meetings is emblazoned with their own logo or with that of a reputable company of whose products they make use in the course of their work, it tends to get noticed by their clients. Carrying one’s own logo has obvious advantages. Visibility is the greater part of effective advertisement and getting a prospective client to notice your logo will likely put it in the front of their mind when they make a decision regarding whose services they choose to engage. For organizations throwing charity events, promotional clothing is not only useful to the participants, it provides a way for them to show off their philanthropic tendencies after the event has concluded. Oftentimes, advertising the charitable organizations towards which volunteers put their time, effort and money is meaningful to them, making wearing a garment that carries the organizations logo personally important to them as well as potentially beneficial to the organization in question. Advertising of any sort is intended to project an image. If a business makes its money providing outdoor adventure tours, a hat or a durable jacket makes this association. Sports jerseys, whether they are emblazoned with the logo of a franchise or with that of another organization, are always appreciated. Promotional garments that are designed for casual use takes advertising out of the business world and puts it in the presence of people who are on their off-time, typically the toughest audience to reach. Most orders of promotional clothing can be made in large or small quantities. One useful strategy to save money is to order enough to accommodate one’s employees and some extra to be given away as gifts to clients. Giving away such items when tending a booth or kiosk at a public activity is very popular and leaves a great impression of the company as one that seriously wants the business of the potential clients with whom they make contact. Whether the garment is intended to advertise a company, a charity, a sports team or a political cause, promotional clothing provides an affordable, useful way to accomplish all these ends and one that is likely to be appreciated, and put to use, by those who receive such gifts. Powered by HI-RanK Promotion How Real SEO Analysis Works March 28, 2009 at 8:53 am Michael Murray, Vp Of Fathom Seo asked: If you’re serious about SEO, you need to know how to analyze the information you uncover. A decade ago, businesses were wondering whether they need to be part of the Internet. By the late 1990s, plenty signed up and did the basics like placing keywords in the META data. Unfortunately, that’s all some companies do - pick out keywords that may or may not be appropriate and pack them into the META keyword data set that search engines pretty much ignore. Proper analysis requires sound thinking and judgment in many areas. We’ll focus on two major ones - Top 300 and page caching. Top 300 What’s the Top 300? It doesn’t sound too valuable unless your biggest customer of the last 10 years actually traveled that deep into the depths of search engine information overload. Actually, any number will do depending on your interest. Start with your 10 favorite search terms (or carefully targeted search terms). To track your growth, think big. If you’re ranking No. 292 one week and then a week later, you’re No. 154, you know you’re on the right track. Too many SEO managers make the mistake of tracking the Top 30 results and miss out on the wonderful fact that they’re already No. 31. Don’t be poorly informed. Page Caching Google is the best for this because of how fast it continues to reindex pages. Create your own Google Cache Calendar - a Word or Excel document will do. List your strategic pages - say about 10 for starters. Apply the Top 300 rule, check your rankings and record the cache dates. Over time, those dates form patterns that can help you determine when Google will return next - enabling you to time your next set of SEO updates. If you’re not in the Top 300, you can still get some perspective from the page cache analysis if you’re still planning to optimize a given page. It’s easy to find the page - if it’s in Google’s index. Just enter the URL as your search phrase or find some unique text from the page and search for that string of words with quotes on each end. Either will result in a top SEO ranking and you can grab the cache date. The bottom line is that you need to track you’re progress before making changes to the strategic SEO pages Powered by HI-RanK Promotion Article Marketing Tips 101: Using Articles to Generate Free Traffic March 28, 2009 at 4:20 am Dave Rope asked: Whether you run a website or a blog, traffic generation will be one of your primary goals. How do you go about increasing traffic to your site? If you search online, you will find countless gurus that have the magical solution and promise to bring 10,000 hits to your site. I say “hog wash”. It’s clear that these gurus are not interested in you and only want to sell their ebook or software using as much hype as they can. Traffic building is done by preparing a marketing plan and putting it into action. If you want instant mass traffic, then look into pay-per-click advertising. If you want to create a residual (and sometimes viral) network of backlinks that will generate free traffic for as long as you want, then you should seriously consider: Article Marketing. Why is article marketing a great solution? Because it works and it’s free traffic. Every article that you create can be submitted to many different article directories. Each submission results in a backlink to your site which will bring in free traffic immediately. This means that, not only will you benefit in other ways from submitting your article, but you will receive incoming traffic quickly. I personally use automated submission to submit my articles to hundreds of sites to maximize on this effect. Remember that not all automatic submitters are created equally and some are much better than others. To find out which ones are better, click on the link in the bio box below. Another benefit of doing article marketing is better search engine positioning. Google uses a form of internet democracy to determine how relevant your site is. Each link that points to you site counts as one vote towards your site. The votes are not equal though and are based on the origin of the link. A link coming from a higher PR website will be worth more than one coming from a lower one. Also consider that a unique backlink is worth more than a reciprocal link. For a list of the best sites to submit to, check out the resource box below. Article marketing also has a viral aspect to it. When you submit your article to directories, they become available to other publishers. If a publisher chooses to use your article, they must keep all backlinks intact. This results in many more backlinks, all from a single article. If a major publisher picks your article to run, then your in luck and your site will benefit from a huge increase in traffic that will trickle down. Best of all, once you submit your article to a directory, it is there forever. You don’t need to repost it like you would a classified ad, you just publish it and forget it. You don’t even need to be a great writer to use article marketing successfully to generate free traffic. If you can write at a 9th grade level, you can use article marketing effectively. If you really don’t want to write, you can hire someone else to do it for you and it’s not very expensive. Article marketing can even be used for offline business and will help build your business’ brand and credibility. It actually works very well for offline businesses since so few business owners use this type of marketing. Powered by HI-RanK Promotion Adsense Tips - Adsense Help - Adsense Techniques March 28, 2009 at 2:44 am Phillip Booker asked: Copyright (c) 2008 Phillip Booker It goes without saying that we all need more traffic to our websites. This can be achieved in numerous ways. I’d like to explore once specific traffic source a little deeper. Although it maybe prudent to mention a few to start with, some will be obvious and some will be not so obvious. Natural search engine rankings, advertising, articles, blogs, newsletters, rss feeds, videos, joint ventures, press releases, social bookmarking, social networking and the most important ingredient that should run through the whole of these is quality. One of the areas, blogs, has always been a grey area for me personally, until I discovered a few important facts. Perhaps I knew them, but when put into a certain context they meant more. Allow me to explain further… We all have been told that within our strategy we must link a blog to our website; in fact as many blogs as we can muster the energy to do. So yes I’m sure we’ve all gone out and made ten blogs. As a consequence of such effort we have seen very little traffic. So as a natural result we’ve returned our attention back to our websites, made them bigger and better and sat back and waited, checking our adsense revenue a few times a day. Despondency sets in and we can’t see the wood for the trees. So what’s going on? First we must remember that blogs get regarded has having more value than a ‘normal’ website. We know this to be true as we see them ranked above most websites. Yet our own blogs on typical blogging sites never seem to get anywhere in the rankings. There is an important distinction here to. A blog on a ‘blogging site’ will also rank higher than a blog on a normal - mywebsite.com website Should you wish to test this theory out, put the same content on your website with a Page Rank of 4 and then put the same content on a blog with a zero page rank. The result sadly is that the blog could well rank above your own website. That said… It would appear we are working ‘upside down’ on our efforts. If we put 2 hours of work on our blog, rather than our website per day, we may get the blog to a page rank of 5 quicker? In doing that, we achieve backlinks to our own site from a better page ranked site. Plus if we have adsense on the blog we are killing two birds with one stone. I am only half way through fully testing this theory and it may require a further six months, but all the evidence suggests that this will work. If we have a website that sits nicely in a niche, then to have a blog or two back-linking, will only increase our websites inner page ranks and they will appear higher in the search engines. As we add content to our website, tweak a little and add it to our blogs. The end result will be a page rank of 4 for our website and a page rank of 5 or 6 for our blog. When this happens, funnel the links back to your own site and it should nudge the page rank up one notch. The blog of course should be ’subject’ relevant to your own site. Food for thought! Powered by HI-RanK Promotion Backlinks From Forum Participation March 27, 2009 at 7:28 pm Lee Roshan-Nahad asked: Ranking highly in the search engine results is very important in generating high traffic to your website/blog. In addition to having good, relevant content on your site one of the best ways to increase your search ranking is to get high quality backlinks to your site. A backlink is simply a clickable link that directs to another website (yours). The most powerful backlinks are one-way backlinks. One way backlinks are best; these are when a site links to your site but you don‘t reciprocally link back to them. Putting backlinks in forums is a great way to go about doing this. These links can generate direct traffic to your site, as people browsing the forum click your links in addition to raising your search engine ranking. You need to be careful when using forums in this way. Do it wrong and you will be branded a spammer and most likely get your forum account closed. If done properly however, it can be a powerful and easily used tools to add to your repertoire. Locate Forums Relating To Your Niche: “Relating to your niche“ is the key term!. You want to be sure to find forums related to your niche - the topic of your website. Probably the easiest way to do this is to type in your niche into Google with the word “forum” after it. Let’s say you have a blog on healthy living. You’d type into Google “Healthy Living Forum”, or something similar. There are two basic reasons why you want to find forums that actually relate to your niche.. First, the search engines will usually give more weight to links pointing to your site if they come from sites centred around the same niche as your site. Secondly, you are far more likely to come across parties that are interested in your site by placing it in the appropriate forums. Join The Best Forums: After finding the forums you want, you need to decide on which ones you should join. Click the links to visit about half a dozen of the top search results. You can usually browse through forums without having to sign up, only when you actually want to participate, do you need to join. If you land on a forum that won’t let you view unless you join, forget it and move on. Its only really worth your while to join popular forums so take a look at how many members there are in each forum you visit. You also need to make sure those members are active. Go into one of the more popular forums categories and scan down the list of threads to see when the last posting was made. This information is usually in the right hand column of the forum threads table. If you see a lot of posts made in the last 24 hours, you’ve found a forum with lots of active members. A popular forum like this will attract the search engines and therefore your links will be picked up quite quickly. Search engines tend to love sites with lots of frequently updated, relevant content. This is the ideal type of forum. The last important step before joining a forum is to make sure that it allows you to add a “signature” to all of your posts. Jump into one of the more popular threads on the forum. Scroll down and look at the posts to see if anyone has a signature showing at the bottom of their post. There will usually be a horizontal line after the body of the post and some text and/or links underneath it. Often people just have a quote or witty saying, but sometimes they will have links as well. Not everyone will have a signature, but try to find some members who do. Signatures are crucial, because this is where you are going to put the links to your site. When you find a forum that fit’s the bill, follow the steps to sign up. You only need to find a few to begin with, you can always find more later on Your Signature: Log in to the forum. Once there go to your profile. Often this will be called ‘User CP’ or ‘User Profile’. In this area you can edit things like your avatar, your bio and preferences. Look for the part that says something like ‘Edit signature’ and click that. You’ll see a text field where you can type in the text you want to appear beneath all your posts. This is where you’ll put the backlinks to your site. Forums use a special kind of code to allow members to format their posts. It’s called BBCode and it’s quite simple to use once you get the hang of it. Copy the examples below and change the URL and text to your URL and some catchy keyword-rich text. Paste the code into you signature box and save it. Link to your website or blog with this code: Learn how to start [url=http://www.onestep4income.net]Coin Collecting[/url] the easy way. You can see in the code above where you need to edit the domain to be your domain. In this example, ‘Coin Collecting’ will be the anchor text for the link. This is where you want to put your keywords. Almost all forums will allow you to have a link in your signature. If you want to make your signature bold, just add the bold tags around it like this: [b]Learn how to start [url=http://www.onestep4income.net]Coin Collecting[/url] the easy way.[/b] Most forums will allow you to bold the text in your signature. If you add the bold code and your signature still doesn’t come out in bold then it’s you know the bold formatting is not allowed. Some forums will also allow you to change the color of the text, although the anchor text will come out as the default link color, usually blue. Here’s how you change the text color: [color=red]Learn how to start [url=http://www.onestep4income.net]Coin Collecting[/url] the easy way.[/color] You can also combine formatting. This would make your signature red and bold (except for the link text which will usually be blue bold). [color=red][b]Learn how to start [url=http://onestep4income.net]Coin Collecting[/url] the easy way.[/b][/color] One final tip for creating your signature. Less is more. If you make your signature look spamming people will treat you like a spammer. You don’t have to use up all available lines in your signature. Make it short, sweet and to the point. If you post great content and people are interested they will click your link. Step 4: Participate! The first three steps were all preparation. Now you get to start creating backlinks to your site! It’s simple, just participate in the forum. Post good content, ask questions. Try to help people out by answering questions. Be nice, be helpful. Every post you make will give you a backlink to your site. The higher the quality of your post, the more powerful your backlink will be, at least in Google. Because Google looks at the text surrounding a link to determine the relevancy of a link having good content in your posts is much more valuable than having a post that says something like, “great post, I agree”. If you simply participate in the forum and try to be friendly and helpful chances are your content will take care of itself. That’s it. Have fun. And remember, you can change your signature any time you want. You might change the text a bit from time to time to find out what generates the most clicks to your site. Use This Method To Build A Powerful Residual Income With A Legitimate Online Business Powered by HI-RanK Promotion How To Market Your Website Using Keyword Marketing March 27, 2009 at 6:42 pm Gwyn Estember asked: Choosing the right keywords to market you website is what keyword marketing do. Keywords play an important role in internet marketing. It is what leads search engine users to your site. Keyword marketing is a technique or strategy that can improve your search engine rankings. In putting up a new website, you sometimes take for granted the use of keywords, especially by newbies to the marketing world. You don’t realize that the right keywords on your website will improve your search engine rankability. You may not understand fully how important the use of right keywords for your website but your goal is to have those keywords and other related keywords within your site. Keywords are words or phrases you type in search engines like Google when you want information on something. Suppose you understand the importance of keywords, you think all the possible keywords that would relate to your product or service and put that in your website. Example your website is about bags. You can place keywords like, “sports bags”, “school bags”, “cheap bags” and any other variety. But the problem is people don’t use these keywords when they search for bags. It is a good idea to simply think of the possible keywords but you’re actually risk loosing many potential customers. So better do a keyword research for your website. Keyword marketing helps you define keywords and phrases bringing many visitors to your site. It helps you determine which keywords and phrases are most often typed in search engines. When you’re in internet marketing, the challenge is how to put your website in front of people who are searching using particular keywords and phrases. Through keyword marketing, you target your customers by keywords. The goal is to achieve top rankings of your website in the actual search results. The advantage of keyword marketing is the potential to reach the right people at the right time. For searchers, they enter keywords or phrases into a search engine to find information they need while for website owners, they use keywords to put their website on top for those keywords. The basis of all search engine rankings is keywords. So your keywords should have an impact on a website’s position within the search engine results pages. When search engine first started determining the relevancy of a site they place a larger emphasis on these tags. So avoid using the wrong keywords for your website, always check the relevance of those keywords and avoid long lists of keywords. Search engines may just find your website irrelevant to the typed keywords by researchers, no matter how good its content. You might be loosing a lot of money investing in online business because your website is rarely seen by searchers and gaining nothing from it. Powered by HI-RanK Promotion Web Traffic - 7 Great Ways to Drive Web Traffic to Your Site March 27, 2009 at 5:15 pm Jackie Lee asked: Internet. Business. Profit. To fully integrate all of these words into a successful merging you will need another word. Traffic. Every article you will find about making your site or company successful would always include the importance of generating traffic. So, we all know that in the core of it all, traffic is the most essential thing to a successful internet based business company. Aside from ensuring that you have a great product to sell, and you have your company’s internal organization well taken core of, it would be time to get to the nitty gritty of things, generating traffic. If you already have a site and you want think that you’re not getting the traffic that you’re supposed to be getting, then its time to reconsider. If you are contending in these very competitive business, you should always be a step ahead of your competition, increasing your traffic flow should have been done starting yesterday. Timing is essential, that’s an old adage known to everyone. But with generating traffic, you should always be on your toes and be a day ahead of everyone. Never think of today and tomorrow as a starting point for making your site traffic laden, it should always have been yesterday. To help you out in generating more traffic for your site, here are some seven surefire ways to increase your traffic starting from yesterday. 1) Invest in good advertising with search engines Google’s Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture provide great advertising schemes that are very truly popular and assures great traffic. Although with this surefire way to increase your traffic would cost some money. While some would shy away from spending money to increase traffic, it is imperative in this case to do so because Adwords and Overture is the top surefire way to increase your traffic. You could see for yourself the success this search engine advertising methods have reaped rewards for so many companies. Lots of site feature these advertising system and many have signed on to reap the benefits. Do not be left behind. Every penny is worth it with using Google and Yahoo’s advertising. 2) Exchange or Trade Links with other sites With exchanging links with other sites, both of you will benefit from the efforts both of you do to enhance your sites traffic. When one site features another sites link, they could provide one another with the traffic one site generates. The efforts are doubly beneficial because it would seem like both of you are working to generate more traffic. The more links traded with more sites the more traffic could be expected. 3) Use Viral Marketing Viral marketing allows you to spread the word about your company and product without any costs or if ever low costs only. This is a marketing method that can be quite sneaky; you can attach your company’s name, product or link to a certain media such as a funny video, entertaining game, an interesting article or a gossip or buzz. With this method, people get infected with the creativity and entertainment of the medium that they will pass it on to many people. 4) Search and use proper keywords or keyword phrases for your sites content Search engines look for certain keywords that they would show in their results page. In doing so, having the right keyword and keyword phrase is a high requirement in ranking in high in search engine results. You could write your own content or you could hire someone to do it for you. 5) Write Articles that can lead traffic to your site Submit articles to sites that would contain the same subject that your site deals in. If you sell car parts write press releases and articles about cars and car parts. Attach your sites description and services at the end of the article as well as the link. 6) Join forums and form online communities Capture a market and show your expertise and credibility. When you found a good foundation for your site, people will trust you and your site and will pass on to many people their trust. Traffic will certainly increase because they know that you can provide what they need. 7) Lastly, Offer newsletters. Offering free quality information in your newsletter will help you get traffic. Not only will your subscribers come, but they will tell others about you. You will gain word of mouth traffic. If you add a share this with friends button in your newsletter you can also start getting some viral traffic. Driving traffic is the most important thing you can do for your site. With no traffic you have no possibility of making money. Driving traffic can have a steep learning curve, but if you put these methods into practice you will have traffic coming to your site in no time at all. Powered by HI-RanK Promotion Google Pagerank March 27, 2009 at 5:12 pm Marius de Beer asked: What is Google Pagerank exactly? I get asked this question alot of times by my clients. I am still amazed sometimes at the ignorance of website owners. And, since I own a hosting company, I deal with website owners on a daily basis. I think it’s time to set the record straight on the whole PageRank topic. Why Google? If you own a website, and make your living off it, then the Search Engines are the all seeing, all knowing gods of your universe. And Google will be the chief cook and bottle washer in this equation. Some useless, but interesting facts about Google: Google processes about 20 Petabytes of data per day. (A petabyte (derived from the SI prefix peta- ) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quadrillion bytes, or 1000 terabytes. IE - 20 Billion Gigabytes of data per DAY…) At last count (March 2006) they handled about 91 Million searches/day If you do a little research into PageRank, you’ll be amazed at how obsessed everybody is with it. And for good reason as well. Everybody wants a larger one. Everyone has ideas about how to increase it. (Some of them good. Some of them not so good. Others are just plain reckless and stupid.) Let me explain what it is, and how it works. It’s no surprise then that Google is the leader in the search engine world at the moment. So where does pagerank come into play? What it is Firstly, when it comes to PageRank, there are three things you need to understand right from the start: Everyone thinks that PageRank is important. Nobody admits that PageRank is important. (Unless they have a high one) Everyone is always interested in the size of everyone else’s Pagerank is one of the many factors Google takes into account when it returns the results for a search term. It’s Google’s way of indicating how important a website is. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one. PageRank is determined by an algorithm, and the main factor of this is algorithm is the amount of websites linking to a specific site, and what THEIR PageRank is. You can basicly look at a link from site A to site B, as a vote from site A for site B. The higher site A’s PageRank, the more this vote will count. PageRank is measured from 0-10. On face value, sites can be sorted out into three categories: PageRank 0-2 - New websites that are just starting out. Websites that have come to terms with the size of their PageRank and have given up trying to increase it (but secretly hope it’ll still grow over time). Bad boys who have broken the SEO rules (and there are a lot of them). PageRank 3-6 - Established websites that have proven they can perform. Niche websites that have a big enough PageRank to do what they need it to do. PageRank 7-10 - In order to compete with this PageRank, one needs to develop other techniques to establish your own area of specialist expertise. How is it calculated? This is the Algorithm: PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn)) The way Google determines a page’s PageRank with this algorithm, is however a topic for a entire post, which I will do indepth at a later stage. I will give you the shorthand version though: a page’s PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a “share” of the PageRank of every page that links to it) where “share” = the linking page’s PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page. This unfortunately also means that the more outbound links there are on a page linking to your site, the less PageRank value your page will receive from it. As you can see this is quite a complex calculation. The PageRank of the individual pages in a site also plays a part in the final PageRank for a site. Also keep in mind that, while calculating site A’s pagerank, if site B is linking to site A, site B’s PageRank will be taken into the calculation. If site A’s PageRank increases due to this, and site A links to site B, so will site B’s. This in turn means that the vote for site A from site B will be worth more, and the whole process starts from the beginning again. (How’s that for numbers crunching?) The equation shows clearly how a page’s PageRank is arrived at. But what isn’t immediately obvious is that it can’t work if the calculation is done just once. 40 to 50 calculations are needed, and this is precisiely what Google does at each update, and it’s the reason why the updates take so long. Note that when a page votes its PageRank value to other pages, its own PageRank is not reduced by the value that it is voting. The page doing the voting doesn’t give away its PageRank and end up with nothing. It isn’t a transfer of PageRank. It is simply a vote according to the page’s PageRank value. It’s like a shareholders meeting where each shareholder votes according to the number of shares held, but the shares themselves aren’t given away. How can I increase my PageRank? SEO Make sure your site is Search Engine Friendly. Make sure your META TAGS are in the correct format, so that you don’t get penalised on account of it. (This will also be the subject of a future post.) CONTENT By increasing the number of pages on the site, it increases the amount of PageRank the webmaster can play with. If those pages point (or link) internally then it can increase the PageRank of those pages for instance. Just be carefull not to create useless pages with no PageRank value, as it will affect your PageRank negatively, for obvious reasons. ADVERTISE Advertising your website is a core piece of your strategy. However, to really increase that PageRank, you need incoming, permanent, links not occasional pay-per-click ads or banners that can change day-to-day or week-to-week. Ways to do this include, writing high quality articles that get published on a number of sites (the author is still working on getting that one right), being active in fora associated with the subject of your website, and forming a group in one or more of the social websites. LINK I cannot stress the importance of this enough. Build links to other websites, and have them link back to you. (Called reciprocal linking). The more links pointing to your site, the better for you pagerank. Build links from sites with a higher PageRank than yours, if you can. Actually, this SHOULD BE YOUR GOAL. Powered by HI-RanK Promotion The Value of Pagerank March 27, 2009 at 4:30 pm Cliff Posey Jr asked: ne of the most overrated factors in the world of search engine optimization is the value o pagerank. According to most expert articles about SEO, a site’s page ranking holds great importance especially when one wants to make a lot of money online. It is because your page rank entails not just your popularity as a website following a certain niche, but as your site’s substance and functionality in catering to your audience’s needs. There are many views and opinions that revolve around the value of pagerank. While a lot of people rely on their pagerank to track the performance of their business, some experts meanwhile say that PR is just one of those SEO myths that only help boost competition among different websites. But how exactly important is your site’s page ranking? Yahoo Answers has some points which you have to consider: Traditionally, it is the pagerank that plays a big part in establishing the overall value of a website. All websites start from PR 0, and eventually rise to the top, i.e. PR 10. The increase of your page ranking depends on how well you market your site in your chosen niche, and be gaining more incoming traffic to your site. You can get more traffic by following the different SEO techniques such as link building, keyword optimization and the like. If you have an ecommerce website, then tracking your stats and pageranks greatly important since you need more clients to serve and support your business. However, the internet business has grown and ceased to be a popularity contest, and these days you no longer need to have a popular site just to incur profit. You can find some insights in Yahoo Answers that stress the value of a site’s functionality and target, organic traffic, as they are the ones that bring in more money to your site. In this light, you don’t actually need big traffic, as long as your visitors sign up and subscribe to your site’s goods and services. There are also some sites that don’t do well with high PR. Rather than helping them succeed in the business, they only get lower profits due to the random traffic they receive. Unless they cater to general masses and are supported by sponsors (and can afford to be free sites), these sites would only lose more income, since users would only visit their page and not do anything of monetary value. This can be an SEO myth for some people, but there are actually isolated cases that prove true to this kind of occurrence in the internet business. In ecommerce meanwhile, page ranking is always included in one’s site statistics. This kind of site needs high page rankings in order to be known in the business, as it not only needs subscribers as well as partnerships with other business sites. If you want to put up an ecommerce site then you should be able to understand the technicalities of page ranking, as people still rely on this factor with regards to tracking the performance of their sites. The value of page ranking can be an SEO myth for some experts in the online business, but still a lot rely on PR in evaluating their sites. Yahoo Answers has a lot more differing opinions about this subject, so why not go and check them out to gain a better understanding of the value of PR. Powered by HI-RanK Promotion Article Marketing Guide for SEO and Website Promotion Traffic March 27, 2009 at 2:59 pm Gabriel Killian asked: Getting traffic to your website is no easy task. This is true especially when lack of experience holds most of us back from obtaining our true Internet marketing goals for making money online through a successful Internet business. Article marketing is a proven method for creating large amounts of traffic to a website or blog and creating long-term and gradual increased website rankings through organic search engine marketing. In other words, Search Engines, readers and website publishers all LOVE articles, so if you can provide for all three of these entities, then you have a literal gold mine at your finger tips. So what are some great tips for article marketing and website promotion that most people miss out on? Below are a few highly practical and highly effective article marketing and web promotion tips to create tons more traffic, sales and conversions. 1. Write, write, WRITE! All too often Internet marketers will create a bunch of 5 minute websites, write 1 article and submit it to a few different places. They then get a decent amount of traffic, then get lazy and quit. This is great if you are looking for short-term results, but if you are looking for success over the long-haul, then you need to consistently write, write, write! Don’t stop at one or two articles. If you are serious about creating long-term success and wealth online, then you shouldn’t ever stop promoting. It is often said the most give up when they are only a few inches away from success and really, that is the only difference between you and your competition. 2. Write, but write quality information to solve a dilemna. Don’t write just for the sake of writing. Put a lot of thought in every article and use the keywords you want to rank highly for. Nobody wants to read junk, so make sure what you write is actually worth reading, or it won’t be read. Writing to solve a problem is by far the most effective way to get a hungry audience online. 3. Your title should say exactly what it needs to say. Make sure your article title not only catches the attention of a potential reader, but also contains all the appropriate key words and phrases you want to be associated with in the search engines. 4. Make sure that the links in your resource box make your article worth while. Think about where you are sending your readers. Are you using anchor text? Are you using an auto responder on your landing page? Are you providing your readers with a great place to go after they read your article? These are all very important questions to ask yourself before publishing your article to various places. 5. Submit, change, submit. Every so often, I use a method of writing my article, submitting it to a few websites, then I alter my article, then I submit some more and repeat. This helps make my content a little more visible on the search engines by providing a larger amount of unique content. Article submission websites appreciate this and the search engines will too. It may take a little longer to do, but who said this was going to be easy. 6. A great way to change up article submission is to manually submit your articles half of the time, then use a paid submission service to do it the other half. This ensures a wide range of website you are submitting to as well as makes sure your articles are getting to where they need to be. Consider doing this as part of your article marketing strategy. 7. Make your readers happy, offer something free in the resource box! This is a great way for an article marketer to get traffic to their website and become memorable by giving something away completely free. Do your readers a favor and do so. These are great ways to not only help you, but give your readers, the search engines, the article websites and web publishers great content that benefits everyone. Powered by HI-RanK Promotion All About Google PageRank March 27, 2009 at 12:36 pm John Simms asked: PageRank (PR) is Google’s way of measuring the quality and relative “importance” of your website to searchers. It’s purpose is to give web surfers an idea of the importance of a website. PageRank is measured on a scale of 0 to 10. Your PageRank depends on the amount of web pages that link to yours, and the PR’s of each of those pages. It can take up to three months for a new website to be assigned a PageRank - depending on when Google decides to do the Google Update, where all websites’ PR’s are reviewed. A thousand links from pages with low PageRanks can eventually achieve as high a PR as that from a few web pages with high PR’s. Some website owners research the value of a potential link partner’s PR before deciding whether or not to link with them. It’s true that a web page with a high PageRank can pass on a high PR to you, but this can be offset if the page has too many links on it, because the PR is distributed proportionally to all the web pages it links to. A page with a low PR may be worth linking to. The website may be very new and you will have to wait for the Google Update before the value of linking with that website can be determined. Never link with a website merely because they have a high PR - consider the content of the website and it’s relevance to your target market as well. Misconceptions Addressed: A High PageRank does not mean you will rank at the top of Google’s results pages; it merely means that your website is well established on the Internet and if it is listed in the Google Directory, www.directory.google.com, it will be listed above similar websites with a lower PageRank. It is debateable, but the only true benefits of a high PageRank is that visitors that come across your site and see on the Google Toolbar that you have a high rank may perceive you as a more professional business and that you are more likely to receive more hits from the google directory.

The Latest from Boing Boing

SuperTouch art blog, Cheryl Dunn art show and Redneck Sushi Posted: 27 Mar 2009 10:24 PM PDT Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger Jamie O'Shea, for ten years editor of the genre-defining visionary arts magazine, Juxtapoz, probably the largest circulated art monthly in the world --I mean, hey, they sell it at Whole Foods-- is now an internationally known creative director and the editor of a new online blog called SuperTouch. SuperTouch is great --kind of a nice hybrid of PAPER magazine style party pics/gossip and the artistic fare seen in O'Shea's former mag, a cool mix. I was happy to see a post there about my pal Cheryl Dunn's "Spit and Peanut Shells: American Pictures" show at The Country Club gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio. Cheryl's wicked cool and her website is one of my favorite artist's sites. If you are in Cincinnati, check her show out. And finally, this is redneck sushi:

Rings made from crayons Posted: 27 Mar 2009 09:42 PM PDT These Crayon Rings from Timothy Liles are lovely and would be fun to draw with, though at $50 for 10, they're probably too expensive to give to the kids. If you had a ring mold, though, you and the tots could have a fun afternoon melting down the crayolas, pouring them, and making your own set. Crayon Rings (via Geisha Asobi)

Daniel Pinkwater's new novel The Yggyssey online -- MIGHTY IS MY W00T! Posted: 27 Mar 2009 09:27 PM PDT O frabjous day! Daniel Pinkwater has put most of the text of his news kids' book The Yggyssey: How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There online, along with audio of him reading the first chapter. Pinkwater may be my single most favorite writer in the entire world -- he's certainly the writer who had the biggest impact on me, through novels like "Alan Medelsohn, the Boy From Mars," collected in his 5 Novels omnibus. Mr Pinkwater, if you're reading this, I owe you one. I owe you several. And I can't wait to read this book! When I got home from school, my room was full of ghosts..._again!_ They were being invisible, but I could feel the cold spots in the air. "Did I speak to you ectoplasms about this, or did I not?" I asked the empty room. Silence. The ghosts were dummying up. "Rudolph Valentino! I can smell your lousy cigar!" There was a faint smell of cigar smoke, the trademark of the ghostly Valentino, so I knew he was among them. And my bedspread was rumpled. Probably they were sitting on my bed, playing cards. "Look, you spectres--this is a young girl's bedroom, not a club! Why do you have to hang out here all the time? You have an eight-story hotel to haunt. There's a complete apartment reserved for your personal use. Why don't you stay there? It's the nicest one in the whole building." The Yggyssey: How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There The Yggyssey MP3 link to Pinkwater reading chapter one (via Neil Gaiman) Previously: Daniel Pinkwater serializing new fiction online - Boing Boing Young adult sections in bookstore -- a parallel universe of little ... The Pantheon of Idols is - Boing Boing Salon article about author Daniel - Boing Boing

Reuben Margolin's kinetic wave sculptures Posted: 27 Mar 2009 09:12 PM PDT Kinetic artist Reuben Margolin was featured on a recent episode of MAKE: television. He uses salvaged wood, metal, cardboard, and other recycled materials to create massive mechanical wave sculptures. Absolutely incredible work.

Preposterous AIG TV Commercials Found! Posted: 27 Mar 2009 07:51 PM PDT Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger Try this shit on for size: Next, the inevitable remix! Thanks Russ Gooberman!

Fake Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin Posted: 27 Mar 2009 07:25 PM PDT Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger Have you ever been walking around a 99 Cents store and seen a bottle of cheap cologne with a sticker on the box that reads: "If you like "Calvin" you'll love "Kevin!"? Apparently the same sort of thing applied to crooner/goofball double acts in the 1950s. Ladies and gentlemen, meet ersatz Martin and Lewis, Sammy Petrillo and 'Duke' Mitchell. There is not very much information about these guys online, but these four links, to the Wikipedia entries for Sammy Petrillo, Duke Mitchell, an interview with Sammy Petrillo, and an interview with "Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla" director Herman Cohen are probably all you'll need. Thanks Tara McGinley!

Boing Boing Video + Offworld Live @GDC: Keita Takahashi on Noby Noby, Konami's Hideo Kojima, Jane McGonigal, Games + Music, and more! Posted: 27 Mar 2009 10:53 AM PDT Today is the final day of Boing Boing Video's live coverage of the 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, with Killscreen TV + Offworld. We're streaming live video around the clock on our new Ustream channel. Tune in for conversations in our BBV@GDC studio with hosts including Matty Kirsch from Killscreen TV and Xeni from Boing Boing, visits from fellow Boing Boing bloggers, and the following special guests today, Friday March 27, 2009, the final day of GDC: * Keita Takahashi, creator of Katamari Damacy, talking about his most recent game, Noby Noby Boy (note: previously recorded on-site at GDC) * A planned interview nearby with Hideo Kojima, CEO of Konami. He's the creator of the recently released Metal Gear Solid Touch game for the iPod touch and iPhone (it's currently available on the Apple App Store). He's doing a talk at 3pm at the San Francisco Apple Store, if you're in SF, you should try to go! * In-studio visit by game developer and researcher Jane McGonigal, whose amazing GDC talk Cory blogged about here. * Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music, talking about music and video games, and hopefully demoing some music-making gizmos! * Vlad Micu, "Videogame Visionary" from the Netherlands * Alice Taylor, game researcher, blogger, and developer, of Wonderland and Channel 4 * Tracy Fullerton of the USC Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab For BB Video + Offworld's complete video and blog coverage of GDC09, visit offworld.com/gdc09. Chat room after the jump, or you can hop directly to our Ustream page to view chat + video stream side by side. (Special thanks to our live stream host Ustream TV, to Wayneco Heavy Industries, and to our transportation provider at Virgin America. Video Crew members in the house this week: Jolon Bankey, Wes Varghese, Derek Bledsoe, Xeni Jardin, and Killscreen TV's Matty Kirsch and Allison Kingsley).

Open Rights Group benefit with me and Charlie Stross in London, May 1 Posted: 27 Mar 2009 03:51 PM PDT Charlie Stross and I are doing a benefit talk for the Open Rights Group on May 1 in London, entitled "Resisting the all-seeing eye." Hope to see you there -- Stross is a ball, and ORG is a damned worthy cause, especially in this era of ubiquitous surveillance. From technologies like PGP and Tor to the arguments that will convince people - friends and family as well as media and politicians - to watch out for their digital rights, this event is your anti-surveillance 101. Cory Doctorow - science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist - and Charlie Stross - science fiction writer and former programmer and pharmacist - will share how and why to control your data. The event will be moderated by Ian Brown - academic, activist and Blogzilla. The entry price is either joining Open Rights Group - by handing door staff a completed form (link to PDF) - or making a one-off £10 donation on the door. Please register for tickets here. Drinks will be available, as is The Three Kings - a local pub - to continue the debate. What: Doctorow and Stross: Resisting the all-seeing eye When: 1830, Friday 1 May 2009 Where: Crypt on the Green, St James Church, Clerkenwell, Clerkenwell Close, London, EC1R 0EA - Map Event - Doctorow and Stross: Resisting the all-seeing eye

Game-design lessons from Disneyland Posted: 27 Mar 2009 11:48 AM PDT Today at the Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco, I saw an outstanding talk on the lessons for level design to be had in the design of Disneyland. It was presented by Scott Rogers, Creative Manager at THQ in Los Angeles, who taught himself level design for Pac Man World by thinking about the experiences he'd had on many visits to Disneyland. The talk was full of lively insights and fun facts about both Disneyland and game-lore, and Rogers was a great presenter. I took copious (for me) notes and photos of most of the slides and I've just put them online (Rogers says he'll put the slides up in better form shortly, I'll link to them when he does). * Walt invented lots of "moving people around" tricks that are useful in level design e.g. weenies (landmarks that draw guests towards certain locations) * Good navigational points for open worlds like GTA * Provides "picture spots" to stop and think, "Wow this is cool" -- Athens coming into sight in God of War * How Weenies Work * First weenie is the castle -- you walk down linear Main St, and as you reach the hub, more weenies open up, the fronts of the lands, prompting the player/guest to choose where to go * As you go further, more weenies open up, the rivers, treehouse, Matterhorn, Space Mtn -- peeking over the horizon, giving a tantalizing glimpse * Enhancing Weenies: * Draw players towards goals geographically and visually * Change altitude to enhance drama/scale * Make player backtrack/change direction to give more information * Switchbacks can do this * See ratchet and clank games Notes from the talk Slides from the talk Scott Rogers' homepage

Nathan Wolfe, "Hunting for the Next Killer Virus" - TED video Posted: 27 Mar 2009 10:01 AM PDT From the TED archive, a new video: Virus hunter Nathan Wolfe is outwitting the next pandemic by staying two steps ahead: discovering new, deadly viruses where they first emerge -- passing from animals to humans among poor subsistence hunters in Africa -- before they claim millions of lives. Armed with blood samples, high-tech tools and a small army of fieldworkers, Nathan Wolfe hopes to re-invent pandemic control -- and reveal hidden secrets of the planet's dominant lifeform: the virus. TED Talks: Nathan Wolfe (thanks, Jason Wishnow)

Man sentenced for vacuum sex Posted: 27 Mar 2009 09:39 AM PDT Jason Leroy Savage will go to prison for 90 days for having sex with a vacuum at a car wash in Thomas Township, Detroit. From the Associated Press: (He) must also submit to drug testing. The 29-year-old from Michigan, was sentenced Wednesday at Saginaw County Circuit Court. Savage pleaded no contest to indecent exposure last month. Man caught in vacuum sex act gets 90 days

Cabinet of Curiosities of Bonnier de la Mosson Posted: 27 Mar 2009 09:14 AM PDT Morbid Anatomy's Joanna Ebenstein visited the Cabinet of Curiosities of Bonnier de la Mosson, a magnificent 18th century collection of marvelous natural wonders now installed in a library attached to Paris's Museum of Natural History. The actual cabinets themselves are absolutely incredible! From Morbid Anatomy: This collection is discussed at length by Celeste Olalquiaga in a piece entitled Object Lesson / Transitional Object which ran in a 2005 issue of Cabinet magazine. Here is an excerpt from that piece, which discusses the original cabinet of Bonnier de la Mosson at great length: Hidden away in the endless folds of Paris’s Jardin des Plantes, the Cabinet Bonnier de la Mosson stands as a unique manifestation of the intersection between aesthetics and science. Dating back to 1735, this luxurious cabinet, amassed and exhibited thanks to a family fortune based on the procurement of regional taxes, has the rare quality of combining the atmospheric mise-en-scène of the preceding Wunderkammern with the organizational intent of the later cabinets, producing an original blend of system and fantasy. Considered by many the richest and most imaginative French cabinet of the early eighteenth century, this curiosity cabinet was housed in the hôtel particulier, as the city residences of aristocrats and royalty were known, of Joseph Bonnier de la Mosson (1702-1744), located in the now extinct rue des Dominiques... Cabinet of Curiosities of Bonnier de la Mosson

Web Zen: Zoo Zen Revisited Posted: 27 Mar 2009 07:57 AM PDT squirrel messenger unidog wiggles dog wigs dancing chicken owls daily mail picnic frog inner city snail counting sheep squeek the squirrel hamsters in hats uni the hedgehog Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Artistic and scientific anatomical models from Anatomy Tools Posted: 27 Mar 2009 06:34 AM PDT Yesterday, I blogged about the photos I'd caught of some beautifully detailed artist's anatomical models on sale in the dealer's room at the Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco. I ended up going back later in the day to buy one of the models (they brought their "slightly irregular" stock to the show and are selling it at half off), and I got to talking with the staff about their wares. It turns out that they're on something of a holy mission to introduce high quality, affordable artistically rendered anatomical models to the fields of science, art and medicine, replacing the standard, multi-thousand-dollar, low-quality anatomical models with sub-$500 versions that are much better rendered and easier to grasp. But these are more than teaching aids or artist's reference -- they're absolutely drop-dead gorgeous sculptures, created by a Bay Area artist called Andrew Cawrse. The more I look at the model sitting here on my desk, the more enthralled I am with it, and the more clever grace-notes I spot in the various cutaways that make clear a thousand myriad elements of anatomy (and I had to laugh to discover that the cross-sectioned penis is attached by a magnet, so it can be removed by customers who aren't allowed to show penises in their workplaces). Freedom of Teach/Anatomy Tools

Artist paints herself having sex with each president of the USA Posted: 27 Mar 2009 06:19 AM PDT Artist Justine Lai's new project is a set of oil paintings of her having sex with every president of the USA, in order. In Join Or Die, I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order. I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by addressing their public legacies and private lives. The presidency itself is a seemingly immortal and impenetrable institution; by inserting myself in its timeline, I attempt to locate something intimate and mortal. I use this intimacy to subvert authority, but it demands that I make myself vulnerable along with the Presidents. A power lies in rendering these patriarchal figures the possible object of shame, ridicule and desire, but it is a power that is constantly negotiated. I approach the spectacle of sex and politics with a certain playfulness. It would be easy to let the images slide into territory that's strictly pornographic—the lurid and hardcore, the predictably "controversial." One could also imagine a series preoccupied with wearing its "Fuck the Man" symbolism on its sleeve. But I wish to move beyond these things and make something playful and tender and maybe a little ambiguous, but exuberantly so. This, I feel, is the most humanizing act I can do. NOTES ON JOIN OR DIE (Thanks, Frank W!)

Wil Wheaton teaches his son to slay dragons Posted: 27 Mar 2009 11:46 AM PDT Wil Wheaton is leading a kitchen-table game of Dungeons and Dragons with his teenaged son and some of his son's friends, and documenting the campaign in his blog. This is absolutely charming, a heartwarming tale of our proud geek heritage being passed down through the generations. D&D was the first thing to capture my attention as thoroughly as reading had. I remember just falling head over heels for it -- the miniatures, the painting, the storytelling, the dice, the paraphernalia, the social circle. It was all I could think about for years. I haunted the downtown D&D stores like The Four Horsemen and Mr Gameway's Arc (which had a full-scale replica of the bridge of the Enterprise on the top level!), and hoarded graph-paper like it was going out of style. Reading this brings it all back to me. As John Rogers notes, "They are, in the end, about a father sitting down at a kitchen table, for hours, teaching and telling stories with his son." He looked up at Nolan and their other friend. "If I get behind her, I can get out of reach of her claws, and I do all kinds of cool stuff when I'm flanking someone." Yeah, this kid is really into being a rogue. They agreed that he could go for it. I decided that this was incredibly difficult: DC 20. "Make an athletics check," I said. Then, "are you sure you want to do this?" But the die was out of his hand. It rolled across the table in front of him and landed at the edge of the map: 19. "What's your athletics bonus?" I said. "Plus 1," he said. "Well, I can't believe you pulled it off, but you did it." "YES!" He said, with a major fist pump. "Let's see if the Dragon hits you, as you leap away," I said. She rolled a four. "As you crouch down to leap away, she looks down at you and snorts contemptuously. She slashes at you with her left claw, but when it snaps closed, you've already lept through her grasp! You lock your hands around the neck of this statue, and spin around it, tucking your feet in and avoiding the wyrmling's bite. You let go of the statue, somersault in the air, and land on your feet behind her." "That was so cool," Nolan said. His friend and I both nodded. I realized that I was having a lot of fun visualizing the action in my head, and describing it to them all as evocatively as possible. and so the campaign begins... (Part I) and so the campaign begins... (Part II) and so the campaign begins... (Part III) and so the campaign begins... (Part IV) a few thoughts and lessons learned from behind the dm screen

New York Times warns that new financial rules could "wreak havoc" -- 1999 Posted: 27 Mar 2009 06:03 AM PDT From the 11/5/99 New York Times: "CONGRESS PASSES WIDE-RANGING BILL EASING BANK LAWS By STEPHEN LABATON": ''Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,'' Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. ''This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.'' The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation's financial system CONGRESS PASSES WIDE-RANGING BILL EASING BANK LAWS (11/5/99)

Classic Gutenberg project books read aloud by Roy Trumbull Posted: 27 Mar 2009 05:56 AM PDT Roy Trumbull, a talented reader, is working his way through the best of Project Gutenberg's texts, reading them aloud in a podcast called "Story Spieler." He's got a lot of classic science fiction, Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary" and lots more. Roy read some of my work aloud and did a fantastic job with it, and I'm really enjoying listening to his work on these stories, too. It's a great way to mine the past for some of the great and forgotten works of literature. Story Spieler Podcast Podcast feed Previously: Craphound reading -- new podcast - Boing Boing

Printing a ukelele on a laser-cutter Posted: 27 Mar 2009 05:49 AM PDT The folks at NYC Resistor laser-cut this sweet little flying-V ukelele, designed with open source tools. It's just a half-size prototype. but there's some there there for sure. 2) With the help from a kind friend, I got this file into the proper format for printing, stuck a sheet of 1/8″ x 24″ x 12″ plywood into the laser, and then hit the “GO” button. Just before you hit that button, you are required to shout “FIRE THE LAZZZZOR”, just so people know, well, that something magic is about to happen. 3) After about twenty minutes of laazzzoor (which costs me $20… $1 per minute of laser use), out came the piece of wood, from which I could easily pop out the various parts of my new uku. From there, some simple wood glue and human hand pressure produced the outcome seen below. Open-Source Ukulele Proto Uno Lazzzzored FTW! (Thanks, Nathan!)

Plush anatomical knee Posted: 27 Mar 2009 05:29 AM PDT Becky Stern has followed up her plush model of her damaged femur with a complete, anatomically correct plush knee. Go Becky! She adds, "I used elastic to give the ligaments realistic stretch, and even gave it the capability to dislocate, just like my real knee. Built using anatomical models and the pictures my doctor took from inside my knee during surgery as references." Plush Knee (Thanks, Becky!) Previously: Embroidered MRI slice - Boing Boing HOWTO knit a skeleton cardigan - Boing Boing Copper bandaid - Boing Boing Vicodin earrings - Boing Boing World's creepiest ski mask - Boing Boing