Month: July 2008

Categories
Affiliate Marketing

RevResponse – A different Type fo Affiliate

I have a confession – I am not very good as an affiliate marketer. For one I won’t promote anything I don’t actually use myself – and for two most of the stuff I use is free – so no commission – like Q10 Retro Text Editor.

So its taken me a while to check out RevResponse – and I only really have because I saw a write up from people like Terry’s – Make MoneyOnline and Grizz’s Make Money Blogging In fact when I clicked through I realised that I recognised the site – I had used it before as a consumer so it must be good!

So what’s RevResponse and why do I like it? Well is different, its useful – and its FREE! How good is that? Here’s how it works – RevResponse has a wide range of business and professional magazines on offer – for FREE – yes no catch. You do have to fill in all the contact information and for some offers you have to reside in the right country, but if you are eligible you receive the magazines free.

For you greenies: no trees dies – these are e-magazines – so they are delivered straight to your inbox in pdf format. And the range of topics is impressive not just finance and business but utilities, food and beverage, packaging, to transportation and travel. They really do have a full-range of options.

For those of you not resident in the US check towards the bottom of the main pages on the left for “International Eligible” to avoid frustration.

And yes: if you do click through and sign up I do get a small commission – but you’re not paying it so its all good!

Categories
Article Marketing HubPages

Knol: Competition for Squidoo and HubPages

Today Google launched their new service Knol. Speculation has been that Knol is an attempt of Google to take on Wikipedia at first glance I think Knol is actually closer to Squidoo or Hubpages.

Knol appears to be ambivalent on the commercial appeal of the site. Wikipedia has been robustly and adamantly non-commercial- deleting any page which is “commercial” in even the broadest terms. Knol of the other hand specifically allows knols that are about a commercial subject.

Knol even has Adsense and allows authors to keep 100% of Adsense revenues: but the placement of the single Adsense block is far right and below the fold, about as bad as you can get.

Knol seems to have a bit a flawed launch too. Some features appear to be glaringly missing: you can tell exactly how many versions of your knol that you have saved but there is no statistics and no way to link to Google’s Analytics.

Although they claim to want international authors: the only way to become a verified author is to have a US address associated with your credit card or phone number. I have a verified Adsense account – why is that not good enough for Knol? It’s not like they are ever going to add my New Zealand credit card to a database anytime soon!

Its also totally unclear as to what the advantage of being a verified author: though only verified author’s appear on the surprisingly static front page of featured knols.

Read my full review of Knol and Hubpages here


Categories
Free Tools Search Engines Tools

Where to publish your best content

I’ve been focusing very much on learning a whole lot more about SEO and winning the Google game to get myself ranked. One of the “light-bulb” moments I had as that content isn’t king and writing good content is not, in its self, enough to make you money from your own sites.

Another of those “oh God its obvious now” is that content is important: but not so much own your own site or your target money maker. Instead your best content should actually be in guest blogs, or articles or hubs or lenses that you write elsewhere. Why? Because these backlinks sites serve too purposes:

  • to get backlinks;
  • to drive targeted traffic to your site.

Now sites such as Quassia basically provide just a backlink, no traffic. However sites such as ezinearticles or hubpages can provide qualified traffic looking for whatever you are selling.

Categories
Free Tools Freelance Writing Tools

Q10: A Retro Text Editor

OK I guess this is kinda going to show my age. I learnt to type on a typewriter: not


Newsletter
Originally uploaded by emsef

even an electric one. I had a PC before there was windows. The first word processor I used was WordPerfect 4.2. What you got with WordPerfect: you got a black screen and a blinking cursor: hit crtl-C to copy ctrl-V to paste and F7 to spell check. Remember?

Well recently I have had a few problems focussing on writing: I typically have a Firefox browser with 6 or 8 or 10 tabs open, several other programs, 5 or 6 documents open, and a directory or 2!

Surfing the internet, while I was supposed to be writing, I found something rather cool: a simple text editor which eliminates distractions – sound familiar? Remember in the old days when you could only run one program at the time: well just like that!

Well Q10 (cryptic – think scrabble) is a back to the future text editor. It is a “full-screen” editor: that’s right no tool bar, no windows bar nothing: just you and a black screen. I am absolutely amazed that it actually does make a huge difference: I do focus better with out see all the other buttons available. The help is on F1, you can still alt-tab to other windows if you need to check another file or web page but it so much less distracting than actually being able to see the tool bar!

It gets better, there is typewriter sound effects too, which I thought I would immediately turn off: but I didn’t because its kinda nice…

There are a couple of versions available: I chose the one with a spell check, but even then the whole download is tiny, you can add the files to a thumb drive and take it with you, in fact you could even fit it on a floppy disk if you could find the matching drive! You can also set the file encoding, a target number of words (handy if you are writing an article), change the font and colour settings, and it supports quick text allowing you to replace given character combinations with whatever you specify. Q10 also creates files in plain text which is really handy if you are uploading to a site which need text or html such as ezinearticles.com or even for uploading simple files to sites such as Hubpages

Oh and how much is this little marvel cost: zero, ziltch, nada: how cool is that! Download Q10 here