I’m Just Sharing

So, what do you think of Stripe Ads? Not sure what I’m talking about? Here’s an example, though I hope it’s not too small to see, from Barbara Ling’s blog:

Anyway, the top bar above her image is a stripe ad. It goes all the way across the page and has some kind of rotating advertisement in it. It’s only one line, and to some it’s obtrusive, and to others it’s hardly noticeable. I have no idea what the click through rates on something like this is, but I know that I’m one of those folks who routinely clicks the red X to kill it, probably because it just irritates me seeing it. I kill it on every blog I come to, so obviously we all know I’m not about to load it here, because I don’t do to people what I don’t really want done to me.

Still, it may be of value to some marketers, especially if it does have a high click through rate. I read about it on Shawn Collins’ Affiliate Marketing Blog, and he also includes a direct link to the page, which you can access here. I guess they have both a free and paid version.

Anyway, if some of you are already trying this, or decide to load it then try it, come back and let us all know how it’s working for you.

Okay, here’s the beginning of how I hope to achieve my goal for this week, and possibly longer. I’d like to introduce a book called 20 Ways To Make $100 Per Day Online.

I actually bought this book last year, read the whole thing, and put some of it into action. I didn’t end up making $100 a day, but I did make some money, which was pretty neat, and if I’d had more time to only work on things in the book, I probably could be making my $100 a day with no problem. I probably need to go back and get into it again.

A few of the ways it talks about making money are: selling items on eBay; ghostwriting; article writing; membership sites; and affiliate marketing. Of course it goes deeper into each of the 20 ideas it gives you, which I’m not going to go into here. One special thing about this book is that each chapter is written by a different person, someone who’s specialty is the topic they’re talking about, which means you don’t have one guy trying to tell you everything about, well, everything.

The price of the book is $27, but I’ll tell you it’s worth it. Not only that, but you’ll then qualify to become an affiliate for the product; nothing wrong with that, if you ask me. Take a look at the site by clicking here and start on your way towards that $100 a day.

Well, of all things, now you can grade just how, well, prominent, your Twitter presence is. There’s a link called Twitter Grader where you put in your Twitter name and it goes through its own set of gesticulations before it spits out a grade for you.

Two weeks ago I ran it for the first time and my Twitter grade was only 59. Suddenly, I started getting more and more people following me on Twitter, and I checked them out and subscribed back to some of them because they looked pretty interesting. I’m not someone who follows everyone who requests it, nor do I just go around following people who don’t seem to either be interesting or have a background I might find interesting.

I’m not going to talk much about Twitter right now because there are so many outlets where one can gain lots of information, plus I’ve written about it before, as well as learn how to possibly use it for business purposes. There’s a little handbook, oddly enough called Twitter Handbook, written by Warren Whitlock, who I interviewed on my business blog, and Deborah Micek, who goes by the name Coach Deb; both are on Twitter, and I believe they have a regular book coming out soon also, all about Twitter.

Anyway, if you’re on Twitter and decide you’d like to follow my bits of ranting and fun throughout the day, you can find me here; happy twittering!

While needing to write a post to test whether I’m going to have a gravatar show up or not, I came upon this post on a blog called Traffikd titled 23 Affiliate Networks For Monetizing Your Website.

It’s a pretty good list, I have to say. I belong to the first two mentioned, Commission Junction and Clickbank, and I’d also signed up with Clickbooth a very long time ago, but have never been back; guess I should see if I still have the password for them.

Anyway, the name of the game is selling product, and these folks have stuff ready to go, whether it’s just banner ads or actual products. I exhibit some of both on this blog, especially something at the end of each post. But I share the above for your perusal.

One of those things I believe is that if one doesn’t have a goal, then one has no idea what it is they’re trying to do. So, this week I have two goals, one for my main business, and the other for my internet business. I’m only going to talk about my internet business here, since it’s what this blog is supposed to be about.

My goal for this week is so simple that I’m surprised I haven’t set it before. It’s simple, yet it’s going to be hard, at least for me, because it’s something I’ve never done. My goal,… I want to make $100 on the internet this week. Yup, that’s it, make $100 measly dollars.

The best week I’ve ever had was around $65. That was the week I sold one of my business products and made some Adsense cash. That one product of mine sold for $60, so just the fact that I made $6 on Adsense was good and bad at the same time. It was good because it’s always good to make money, but bad because, well, I’m hoping to make more than that on a weekly basis, though I’ve been averaging under that; isn’t that a shame? I need to get better at affiliate marketing, for sure.

I’m lucky to have some money put away so that my livelihood doesn’t depend on this $100 I’m trying to make, but the way I see it, if I can figure out how to make $100 in a week, then it’ll be a nice step towards figuring out how to make even more with some regularity. But I’ll tell you what I’m not doing. I’m not writing any sponsored posts, or pay per post. I probably will write a couple of posts about some products I market and recommend, which is different because I only get paid for that stuff if someone buys. One of my friends says we have to find things people want and sell them that. Well heck, if I could figure that one out I’d be swimming in money. Maybe that’s one of the tricks I need to do, ask people what it is they want and what they’re hoping it might cost to get it online, then I can go through all the affiliate information I have to see if I have what they want at the price they’re hoping for, or at least something close. Any of y’all want to play along with that one?

Anyway, it’s my goal; let’s see what I can do to get there.

Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool by Mitch Mitchell

Paul Newman passed away earlier today at age 83. In a world where movie stars seem kind of shallow and vapid, this guy was a man’s man and a humanitarian in his personal life. Talk about your class acts, Newman was right up there with the best of them.

I’ve seen over 20 of his movies, and that’s the type of line unheard of with today’s actors and actresses, who make so much money that they can literally make one movie every couple of years and live extremely well. And what movies! I tell people under 30 that they don’t know what the meaning of cool is until they’ve seen Cool Hand Luke. The Sting was a classic, and, as much as I really don’t like westerns, I’d have missed out on real style if I’d never seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Outside of “Luke”, my favorite movie he ever made, oddly enough one that doesn’t get as much public attention, and yet still gave him an Academy Award nomination for best actor, was Absense of Malice with Sally Field.

Paul Newman was just a genuine guy. You saw it in his movies, then you learned more about it later on with his line of natural food products, with all his profits going to charity instead of into his own pockets. Class and style; they don’t make ‘em like him anymore.

R.I.P., Paul Newman; thanks for the great times and memories.

Paul Newman (Close Up) Movie Natural Wood-Mounted Poster Print - 27" X 38"

I’ve finally gone and done it; I changed the theme on my business blog, and if you’re so inclined you can take at look at it here.

I love the new theme, but of course it has some issues, just like many other sites do. One of the worst things about coding is that, sometimes, it doesn’t work across all browser platforms. Firefox is my browser of choice, and it looks perfect in Firefox; there’s nothing I can do to make it look bad. However, in IE7, I noticed that if one changes the size of the font, it suddenly doesn’t look right. I had to reduce my settings so it would fit properly, and that shouldn’t occur. It also looks bad in Opera, no matter what I do there.

The problem is with CSS, cascading stylesheets, which are great for allowing you to make changes to a bunch of webpages all at once, but sometimes is bad because not all browsers will view it properly. There’s also sometimes problems with PHP, which many people use to create dynamic sites or programs to be used on a website. Right now, for instance, some of the gaming programs on Facebook aren’t working properly in Firefox, and the programmers know it, as they’ve put out the message asking people to use IE instead.

This is a major gripe for programmers, and one of the reasons why many of us who create websites will never fully give up HTML. For all this noise people want to pass through in saying that CSS is a cleaner way to code and will allow search engines to go through your site easier, the other side of the equation is that if the sites look like they were put together by a child then who’s going to stick around to see that the code looks good? There’s one site I manage that was totally created in CSS, and it seems that every time there’s a new browser upgrade of some kind I have to go in and change something in the code to get the site to center again. Frankly it’s irritating, and makes me want to get all of the top guys for each of these browsers together and go an old Three Stooges slap on them. Heck, since I’m talking about it:

In general, I know we’re supposed to be coding for IE first, since it’s still the most prominent browser in the world, but we don’t have to like it.

Let’s hope that this post actually goes through. Over the last four days, I’ve been having serious problems with my host, 1&1. All of my sites have been down more often than up, and I have no doubt that people have been visiting, not getting through, and moving on. I wonder how much money that’s cost me over the last four days.

The thing is, 1&1 is a large hosting company. They offer a bunch of services, but I’ve noticed over the last year outages here and there, but haven’t worried all that much because they’ve been short. This time, though,… well, it’s four days after all. I called four or five times, and on the last call I asked them why they didn’t just move my account to one of their other working servers. The person on the other end said she’d put through a formal request; I can’t believe they had to wait for me to suggest it, and I’m still not sure they did it. At least twice they asked for an email address and said they’d be sending some information as to their progress; never received a thing.

Obviously it’s working right now, but I’m not sure if it’s a permanent fix or a fluke. However, for the first time in 3 years, I’m thinking about moving my account elsewhere. At least this time they did back up all my information; three years ago I lost almost everything when the host I was using at the time totally crashed without any warning at all. It took awhile to recover all the posts for my blog, and luckily I’d backed up all the pages to my business site.

So, along with my friend Kelvin, we’re looking into some new hosts, just in case this is just a fluke and I only get a few more of these posts out. No sir, things aren’t supposed to be like this.

Chocolate Workshop in Your Home - Nationwide

Oh no, not another video! I tell you, there are some folks out there finding this great stuff, and that’s what I’m sharing today.

On the Ambermac blog, she created a post called My Top 5 Internet Culture Videos On Youtube. Out of the five, my favorite, which means it made me laugh out loud, was this one on those favorite things of ours, obviously having a bad day:

Now, some of you may be wondering what’s with all these videos today. Basically, what I’m highlighting is the reason for checking out other blogs. Notice that every video I’ve shared thus far has come from someone else’s blog. What I’ve done while posting these videos is also given a trackback to each one of those folks, and at least one of those folks has stopped by to thank me for it.

That’s

I did say it was video day, right? On Diabetesaliciousness blog, she wrote a post that I’m not going to link back to because, well, some of the initial language is pretty bad and I don’t roll that way. Anyway, it’s a rant that I approve of against a new series of commercials popping up on TV trying to convince the American public that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is actually good for us.

Trust me, nothing can be further from the truth. I can’t even believe I would have to begin telling a lot of people about this stuff, but it’s basically taking a lot of heat for many of the health issues most of us have, especially diabetes. I’m not going to start posting a lot of statistics here; instead, here’s some links you can check out if you’re really interested:

That should be enough for now. And, oddly enough, I didn’t copy the same link each time; all the articles have the same title, and there’s plenty more. So much for originality. Anyway, on the first blog I mentioned, along with her rant was this very sarcastic video, which I present to you now:

And there you go. The biggest problem we have is that it’s in almost everything processed, so you really have to check closely to see what the ingredients are in your foods. I’ve pretty much gotten most of it out of my diet at home, but who knows what I’m eating when I’m on the road. Do the best you can; I’m going to try.

All American Sampler (2) Beef Brisket with Barbecue Sauce Dinners(2) Uncommon Baby Back Ribs with Barbecue Sauce Dinners (2) Bison Meatloaf Dinners(2) Beef Pot Roast Dinners