Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

A large part of my day is spent checking and answering e-mails, I suppose in an average day I probably get about 50 genuine messages and maybe 3,000 spam mails! Yes you read right, about 3,000! However e-mail is so time consuming for me for more than just the spam reason, I work in 2 locations, I have a home setup and an office that I work from most days. This can make managing my multiple e-mail accounts a real pain, especially as I like to use Outlook and GMail (Gmail has the most effective spam filters for any free e-mail account I’ve found to date, and I’ve tried a lot).

Up until the last few days I accessed my primary work e-mail from the office using Outlook and used the GMail web interface when I was out of the office. Of course this means that I have to go through and mark-as-read messages that I’ve already dealt with. This is all just a long winded way of saying that POP3 is rubbish if you work from multiple locations or work stations. Google have just answered my prayers though, GMail are to become the first free mail system to roll out FREE IMAP SUPPORT. This is huge, it’s bigger than huge, it’s immense. IMAP allows your e-mail account to be fully synchronised automatically, reply from your mobile and it’s there in your outlook, delete something in outlook and it’s removed from the webmail interface. To mobile professionals or just people that only like to do something once this is an epic step forward in free email.

The scary thing is I have no idea how they can do it. The problem with IMAP is that you have to maintain a connection to the server in order to synchronise, this causes heavy strain on the server and limits the number of users you can have. How Google have scaled this with the millions of GMail users out there I don’t know, if it works it’s going to save me probably 25% of my daily e-mail time so I don’t care. The question is now what to do with all that extra time?

A few people have asked about the software I used to video the recent draw I did. If you didn’t see it I used some screen capture software to show what was going on and who won. Perhaps the biggest name in this area is Camtasia, it’s a very powerful program that allows you to record what’s happening on your screen whilst also recording a voice over. This type of program is perfect for walkthroughs or program guides, both of which are big business these days. However, if you can find a free alternative that works why pay nearly $40?

The software I used was a program called CamStudio (I think it was the original freeware on which Camtasia was based, but don’t quote me on that). There was a major problem however in that the freeware version never had many of its major bugs fixed properly. Luckily somebody went to the effort of having it all fixed and even threw in 1 or 2 new features such as a URL redirect at the end of the video. This makes it ideal for marketing presentations. Cos I’m nice and because I had such a bad day yesterday I’ve decided to help all those people out who did ask and make it available for download. You can get your copy of the best free Camtasia alternative by following the link.

Enjoy and give it a go, the download contains a readme that explains how to get everything working, I strongly suggest that you do read it. Once you’re up and running why not create some short how-to’s of your favourite programs, not only can that sort of content act as great link bait but if you’re a real expert then there is genuine monetery value in producing video guides.

A couple of tips:-

1. Get a good microphone. This is really important, if anybody wants to see how bad a crap microphone can sound then just watch my draw video!
2. Camstudio records in avi format which is then converted to Flash. If you’re worried about the Flash video size and bandwidth it’s possible to have the avi converted and hosted for you on one of the many free video hosting websites (blip.tv is one of my favourites).

(Oh yeah, and before some smart ass asks Camstudio is Windows software, not Mac!)

It’s a serious question, is there anybody out there actually creating content on the internet for anything other than financial gain?

The reason I ask is because as part of my campaign to let people know about the new internet monitoring software I’ve contacted the webmasters of several large parenting organisations, forums and charities, you know, just to let them know. Stupid me thought that it might be of some interest to their visitors/members to know about a free (or very cheap depending on if you buy) program that allows them to keep an eye on their kids. Personally I would have expected responses to vary from being completely ignored to at best “yeah might have a look”. What I wasn’t expecting was to get a response from one parenting charity website that suggesting that they might “push it” for the right price. Err, this is a charity right, concerned with parenting issues? Yet the webmaster is looking for payment to push something whether it’s crap or good? Hmmm, don’t know why but that just doesn’t sit right.

That’s 2 rants in 1 day, I must try and get some sleep tonight. I’ll probably give away some software tomorrow to cheer myself up.

If you are a sensible Mac user you might want to put your fingers in your ears and close your eyes now.

I’ve got a problem with Mac users at the moment, they are damaging my reputation, not on purpose I think but just because so many of them will not read instructions and will not face reality. I sell software, nothing remarkable in that lots of people do the same thing, in order to sell that software I use a service that tracks my sales. As part of all this it also tracks my returns/refunds rate. I should probably add here that my “genuine” return rate is stupidly low (2 in the last 6 months), here comes the big but, but 1 group of users is constantly pushing it up. Mac users.

After the first 3-4 returns from Mac users (“Your software doesn’t work”, followed by days of e-mailing before they actually reveal they are using a Mac) I upped my efforts to turn them away. Requirements went from being “A Microsoft Windows Based PC” all the way to “A Microsoft Windows Based PC (Not for Mac/Linux Users)”. Even my pleas for people to use the free trial (which would highlight such problems) is completely ignored. Arrogant Mac users just assume that every piece of software is written for them, buy the software and then waste my time answering stupid e-mails all to have to waste more of my time processing a refund because they won’t bloody read what is clearly stated on the page that they bought the software on. I wouldn’t mind honest mistakes, I can handle that, it’s the whole “well it should work on my Mac” attitude that really gets on my tits. Why should it work on your Mac, it was written with a popular OS in mind!

There are very good reasons I don’t write software for Macs

1. The amount of time to learn the ins and outs of the OS for the type of apps I write would never give me a return
2. Very low user base
3. Mainly used by kids with no buying power

The truth is that if you’re using a Mac to browse the web you are in a minority. When looking at downloads free or otherwise you should be checking to make sure that they are Mac compatible (again, you are the minority). Don’t assume that things will just work, assume they won’t and look for something that tells you it is Mac software.

If you’re a sensible Mac user then don’t take any of this the wrong way, each to their own and all that. If you’re the sort of Mac user that enjoys buying software that you know won’t work just to kick up a fuss then please take a moment to think about the person at the other end who has gone to the trouble to write the software. There are days that I just want to bang my head against the wall and cry. Thank you.

Kontera is the ad network that provides those little double underlined links that you’ll see scattered around this blog. Quite a few people don’t like them because of the pop-up nature of the ads, personally I’ve never had a problem with them. Perhaps even more importantly as somebody who uses Kontera to make money I’ve found that they have had no impact on my Adsense earnings so it’s a pretty good partnership to go ahead with.

One issue I have had with Kontera though is the payment methods available, or should that be method. For many months they’ve been sending me Dollar checks, this is bad not any because of the horrific exchange rate (can’t blame Kontera for that though) but because I get stung every time I pay in a foreign cheque. The good news is that not only can you now get your Kontera earnings paid direct into your bank account, but they’ll also transfer it in your native currency. For anyone earning more than a few hundred dollars a month with Kontera the savings are going to stack up and besides you’ll also be getting payment earlier. No more waiting for a cheque to turn up.

The new service is available to Kontera publishers in Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom so if you are currently getting a dollar cheque I suggest you check it out. The bank transfer form is available for download from here.

The whole point of the nofollow attribute is to do one thing, to say to Google “Please don’t include this link in any linking algorithm, ta very much”. It’s actually quite handy when it comes to affiliate marketing as it can help not only your website but also the site you are affiliating for, nobody wants to get panalised if they can help it. With this latest PR update I’ve just come across an anomaly that proves for a fact that Google are ignoring the nofollow attribute and not only crawling that link (as many people expected) but also factoring it into the linking algorithms.

A little while back I entered a partnership for a website and became their one and only affiliate, in order to facilitate my traffic the site owner create a mirror of his page under a different folder. In order to avoid any form of duplicate content penalty and just to be polite and not out rank his own site I nofollowed every affiliate link. I’ve checked the back links and other than one splog that has ripped one of my pages I’m still the only person linking into my affiliate URL. I’ve gone through each link in turn and double checked, each link is nofollowed. So how then that my affiliate URL is now a PR3? If Google are paying attention to the nofollow attribute then this should be impossible, yet it’s there clear as day. Unless I’ve missed something it looks to me like Google are ignoring nofollow, why?

I suppose it begs the questions, is part of Google’s trust rank algorithm not to trust webmasters and to crawl whatever they like?

Edit: One final note, ProBlogger has had his PR restored and confirmation from Google sources that the penalty was all about link selling, in that case I’m a bit annoyed, this Blog has never had a paid for link on it, in any guise.

(This will be the last mention of PR for at least 3 months )

Ah well, such is life. First of all I’d better explain my apparent over keen interest in Page Rank. Put simply it’s because I’m a professional SEO consultant and real companies like real performance goals (No matter how pointless). Page Rank is one such goal, Page Rank gives business people who know nothing about the web something to talk about (Kudos to Google for that one), that things are moving forward and that their money is going somewhere. Of course the profit they make online is the most important goal but like I’ve said previously PR is just one more thing for me to check. Cool, so why the PR2 here?

Some Linking Mistakes

It’s a good job this is one of my personal websites because I have made a couple of quite big mistakes with my first jaunt into blogging-

1. Too many links too soon. Over a thousand back links in the first week looks a little suspect.
2. Too many site wide links. This is a major problem with the top commenter plug-in, getting site wide links on several large blogs (that are known link sellers) has serious trust issues.
3. Using the same link text. By using the same linking text on multiple blogs probably 90% of the links here are “Making The Money”, again this doesn’t look very natural.

Overall the linking pattern here is not that natural at the moment, this combined with my posts about TLA (even though I’ve never sold a link from this site) and buying links has probably resulted in a downgrading of my PR. On raw link data it really should be much higher but Google are just not that easy to work out! Chances are I’ve got several months before the next export to correct it so that might be an interesting little case study into how to build a natural linking pattern. Then again visitor numbers, RSS subscribers and earnings are all on the up so should I care? (Who am I kidding, there is professional pride involved here).

In better news every client site has been upgraded and most to a 4 or better (One site was only started the beginning of October!). Of course it means nothing in terms of profit but it keeps them happy and that keeps me happy.

If that all sounds a bit dramatic then I’m sorry but it’s true. If you are running the AdsenseDeluxe plugin for WordPress then there is a chance you could get booted from Adsense.

It’s a problem I noticed on my Blog a few weeks ago, I spent a couple of days double checking things but in the end I found it was an actual problem with the plugin. According to Adsense rules you should only inlcude three Adsense for content blocks on any 1 page, however the AdsenseDeluxe plugin that is supposed to monitor this doesn’t always work. On my Blog it was creating 4 Adsense blogs, on some other blogs I’ve seen recently it’s doing 5 (Angel for example). Whilst Adsense doesn’t show the ads the code is there in the source and that’s enough for Adsense to boot you.

Once you know about it it’s a fairly easy fix, you just need to edit the plugin source code and set a new ad block limit. If you’re running AdsenseDeluxe then I’d suggest you check your pages just to make sure.