Aren't you just sick and tired of all the money-making scams online? I know I am! Fear not, this isn't one of them. Here's an open and honest blog about my journey from being just over broke (JOB) to achieving financial freedom on my own terms. Here you will discover my take on what works and what doesn't in generating revenue from affiliate programs and advertising networks.
Friday, 3rd July 2009
If you use twitterfeed to sync your blogs with your Twitter account, you could easily integrate tweetmeme retweet counters by adding the code “RT @tweetmeme” to your twitterfeed feeds.
Once you have added the tweetmeme retweet code to the prefix field of your twtterfeed feed, you tweets will be counted by tweetmeme.
This saves me a lot of time so that I do not need to manually post my blog posts to Twitter with the tweetmeme retweet code manually.
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Tagged As: Social Networks, Social-media, Tweetmeme, Twitter, twitterfeed
Monday, 25th May 2009
I have been applying what I have learnt from the Twitter Traffic Machine for over a month now. When I started on 10 April 2009, I had 2258 followers. After using the tips and tricks in the Twitter Traffic Machine for 2.5 months, my followers have risen to 4024, at the time of this posting.
My followers have increased by 1766 in 45 days. That’s an average of 39 new followers per day. A lot of people are promoting the Twitter Traffic Machine on Twitter with an ad that goes something like “Thanks for the follow! Would you like to get 16,000 Followers in 90 days and make money? http://bit.ly/………”.
I doubt I would get 16000 followers in 90 days and I don’t really care. The “make money” portion of the Twitter Traffic Machine is to promote the eBook in your automated Twitter message to your new followers. That’s great for the author but if do not wish to promote his eBook on Twitter, you could promote something else.
Some of the tips in this eBook are pretty common knowledge for advanced Twitter users. I did learn a few new things about Twitter and Twitter tools that I …
Wednesday, 29th April 2009
The Keyword Research Pro keyword research software is one of my favourites but I have to tell you there are some major bugs in this software and the customer support is terrible.
The problem with a lot of keyword software is they grab data from Google.com “illegally”, which means they do not use the legitimate way of getting data from Google through APIs. You may get a lot of Google stats from the Google AdWords API but it isn’t free.
What happens when you program a software to simulate searches? You’re getting results from your country and you will eventually hit a “Google block” on your IP address for making too many searches. Google isn’t stupid. They know it is virtually impossible for a human being to search a few thousand times in a short period of time.
I thought the software could simulate USA searches if I selected USA as the source but it does not work. The main problem for me while I was trying out the Keyword Research Pro was the number of ads and results returned in the software. I searched from a Thailand-based internet connection and the number of Google AdWords ads was close to zero for most …
Tagged As: Google search, google-adwords, keyword research pro, Search Engine Optimization
Tuesday, 28th April 2009
1. Magpie
Magpie is an ad network for Twitter. They’ll post tweets to your Twitter account on a predefined ratio of tweets to ads. You could select to post ads as often as 1 ad after you post 1 Tweet or as spaced out as 1 ad after 200 Tweets. This is all done automatically for you so you don’t have to do anything.
Magpie’s ads come in pay per view, pay per click, pay per sale and pay per lead. You may choose to manually select the ads you wish to post to your Twitter account or let Magpie handle it automatically. Another great feature is to prepend the Magpie ads with a custom text like “ad:”.
2. Twittad
Twittad does not post Tweets to your Twitter account. Instead, it displays a background image to your Twitter account. Twittad calculates the estimated monthly ad cost of your Twitter account and you may edit that amount to whatever amount you think your Twitter is worth. The more targeted followers, the more money your Twitter account is worth to advertisers.
Mine’s worth only $265.71 per month with my 3000 or so followers at the time of this posting. Maybe my Twitter account would …
Tagged As: Advertising, Advertising network, Cost per action, Magpie, Pay per click, Social network, Twittad, Twitter
Tuesday, 21st April 2009
I was searching for mosquito screens in Bangkok on Alibaba.com when I noticed this “sourcing trends” link at the bottom right of the search pages. That link leads to Alibaba’s Latest Sourcing Trends page, which isn’t listed in their main navigation for some strange reason.
You’ll get a huge list of the hottest products on Alibaba.com. This is great information for people who are looking to sell products online or create a new mini site on these hot products.
Alibaba has another page called the Trade Trends. This is listed on the home page’s left menu. This list displays the products with rising demand and the top 20 hot products of every region or a certain country. The list of countries is not very extensive but they’ve got quite a few Asian countries, a few European countries, Australia, USA and Canada.
I’m going to add Alibaba to my Maverick Keyword Researcher application soon. This information is too good to ignore.
Wednesday, 8th April 2009
The Market Samurai keyword software has been hyped up a lot since it was closely promoted on the 30 Day Challenge site. It currently retails for $147 but you may get it at $97 or $127 some time after your trial. I did not purchase Market Samurai because I tried the trial and I wasn’t really impressed with it to invest $97 to $147 of my money into it.
Here’s why…
Market Samurai has a lot of formulas and new jargons that you have to get used to. Almost everyone who is remotely familiar with SEO would know what search counts and search results mean. The search counts are daily numbers and not the usual monthly figures. Market Samurai calls search results “Search Engine Competition” or SEOC. There is this “Phrase to Broad Match Ration” or PBR, which is the ration of the number of phrase matches of your keyword to the broad matches of your keyword. I am not sure how they decided that was a good indicator.
I find these new jargons extremely confusing and I have no idea how they decided that the value of a niche can be calculated by the estimated Google AdWords CPC and Google AdWords daily …
Tagged As: Cost per click, Google search, google-adwords, Search Engine Optimization
Friday, 3rd April 2009
I am writing this short review of this old keyword research software as a series of keyword software reviews. Most of these keyword research software are crappy because they do not provide you with accurate statistics from Google or they do not give you all the data you want.
You need a Google AdWords account to retrieve Google.com’s statistics. You would assume that the information you get from the software would be similar to what you would get if you check it out at Google AdWords, right? Unfortunately, there is a bug with Keywords Analyzer 7.68, which is the latest version at the time of this post. This software has been around for quite a few years and it is disappointing that it still has bugs like this.
For this example, I did a search on the keyword “acuvue”, in quotes for Google’s phrase matching. Keywords Analyzer gave me 550000 searches and 791000 search results. This made the KEI extremely high. There is something seriously wrong here.
I did a check for the keyword at the Google AdWords keyword tool. What I found was the …
Tagged As: google-adwords, Pay per click, Search Engines
Friday, 3rd April 2009
Micro Niche Finder has been around since last year. It seems to be relatively popular but I do not find it very user-friendly and useful for me. The videos on the Micro Niche Finder web site are really great. They are so good that they give you the false impression on its true worth.
The thing about Micro Niche Finder that bugs me the most is it cannot display the search counts for imported keywords from a text file. You only get search counts if you enter a search term in the search field. Other than that, sometimes, the Brainstorm and Hot Trends features do give you the search counts. I keep getting “Dig This” for my search counts. If you click on it, you will see a list of related keywords that may or may not display the search count for that keyword. This is extremely frustrating. What’s worse? Sometimes you see weird ***** in the search count column. Overall, the search count is quite pathetic and there is no reason why it cannot be improved.
Another thing that bugs me about …
Tagged As: Cost per click, Google, google-adwords, Keyword, Micro Niche Finder, Microsoft, Web search engine
Thursday, 26th March 2009
I just had an idea for an internet marketing related product. It is going to be a web application for mining keywords from sites like Google, mySimon, Shopping.com and some other web sites that provide a list of popular searches.
Since it will be a web application, it will be cross platform and you may run it on your own web server or computer. This isn’t something that will replace all your keyword software but it will complement them very well.
Most keyword analyzing software requires you to input a list of keywords to find out more stats about them. This is where I will offer a solution. Most keyword software aren’t doing what I am doing to get niche ideas and hopefully I can fill this void.
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Tagged As: Google, Keyword, mysimon, Shopping.com, Web server
Thursday, 26th March 2009
I have only been out of Singapore for close to 2 months and there has been a lot of major developments in Singapore.
Let’s face it. I am a chicken. I dare not fight this government head on. I know in my heart Singapore is not where I want to be. If I don’t want to be there, I have no motivation to fight for my freedom in my own country when I can get it from another country.
Tagged As: Democracy, Singapore, Wall Street Journal
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