Monday, April 30, 2007

Payperpost Opportunities Sparse?

A couple of months ago when I first joined Payperpost there were a large number of opportunities available. However now even though my Blog would be better ranked than what it was before there seems to be a distinct lack of opportunities. The last 5 or so times that I have logged in there have only been one or two qualified opportunities.

Has anyone else noticed this or they just not giving me much love right now?

Tommorrow I post the full summary of Aprils Results along with an update of who the 5 top referring Blogs will be also whats been happening so far with the Blog Traffic Competition and more info about some of things that have been achieved this month. Its certainly been a good one!

Sponsored Post - Concert Tickets

Do you like going to live games or concerts? Well I certainly do and although I have not had too many occasions in my past where I have bought concert tickets I have certainly purchased my fair share of sports events tickets.

There are some great sites out there where if you actually have an event that you would like tickets sold for you can do it all online. One such site is Great Seats.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Making Money Fast - How this Blog is Doing it

Firstly some background, 7 or so months ago I started an exponential growth experiment with the end goal of earning 1 Million NZ dollars online. In the first month I earned $36 US dollars and by using an exponential formula realised that by increasing by 20 percent a month after 30 months of doing this I would be pulling in a whopping 7000 US dollars a month and be well on my to achieving my goal.

I work full time and are studying a Degree at University part time, also to top if off I have a young demanding family. Having no time is not an excuse - it is a cop out. This has to date been as much about time management as it has been about making money however I am pleased to say that after 7 months we are not only on track but literally blowing the targets out of the water.

For April the Million Dollar Experiment Down under has really ramped up - we have pulled out all stops in an effort to start proving exactly how much money can be made online. We are trying to Make Money Fast - no more dreaming about how much might be made - the readers of this site want to know whether they can do it to - and there's now enough content on this site to give you a plan to follow. Within the next couple of weeks I am putting together a chain of articles from previous posts that will help you get to where I am - faster as you can learn from my mistakes.

My tally so far this month is already over $250 US and we still have a couple of days to go. last month as a comparison we made $129 US Dollars - its pretty goddamn exciting as the dream starts to materialize.

Here's a glimpse of this months graph, more details will be in the month end summary in a couple of days with a breakdown of active vs passive as well as key realizations that have been made in recent weeks that have really started to help especially in regards to search engine optimization.

Good luck with your own endeavours, if you have any questions about how I am doing it feel free to ask by leaving a comment. You may want to subscribe so that you don't miss some great updates over the next couple of weeks.

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Saturday, April 28, 2007

Google Page Rank Underway

I first got wind of the latest Page Rank Update on Kumikos Cash Quest . It seems that the April 2007 update is indeed in progress.

Now why this is of particular interest to me is that I predicted in a competition that Kumiko was running that she would end up with a Page Rank of 5. Lets check out whats happening on the Google Data Centers for Kumikos site and see if we are in with a chance.

Theres is a tool at this site http://oy-oy.eu/google/pr/ that queries a number of Google Data Centers and its easy to see that somethings going on. Luckily for me it looks like my guess at this stage was right on the money.

Next thing to do was of course to check my own site which already has a PR of 4 however unfortunately for me it looks like its staying there for another 3 or 4 months!

Good luck with your Ranking Updates.

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Featured Post - Condo Hotels

If you are looking at buying, renting or selling Condo Hotels there is a great site that handles it all online. The Condo Hotel Marketplace has all manner of properties and a range of resources and "How to" articles that can assist you with your property. I liked their article that describes the best ways to advertise a property. Its called Tips for Writing a Successful Property Listing.

Friday, April 27, 2007

Make Money Fast B-Ladder of Bloggers

I saw the latest Web Revenue Blog Rankings: April Update with all the big names on it and thought "Why isn't there a similar ladder for the mere mortals?" anyway I thought I could kick one off and if there is enough interest in it, competition could be fierce.

So anyway this is what I am going to do, I am going to create a ladder that will get created Blog by Blog on this very Post. There will be a maximum of 30 Blogs allowed to enter in the initial phase however I will extend this if enough interest is shown. Blogs will be rated on Technorati Ranking, Alexa Ranking and Google Page Rank. A combination of the three will be used to calculate the overall ranking of each site. Worst case scenario you get a link to your Blog from this site and its a free link at that.

Conditions of Entry

1/ Must be a "B Level Blogger" No Blogs with more than 1000 unique visitors a day to enter.

2/ Must be the ranking for your Blog only - E.G if you have a website with a Blog as part of it we only want to know about your Blog.

How To Enter
To enter you need to leave me a comment with ...


  1. Your blog URL

  2. The Anchor Text you want to be linked to your Blog (this is also an opportunity to Plug your Keywords)

  3. Alexa Rank

  4. Technorati Rank


  5. Google Page Rank

If any of these are not provided your Blog will be ignored. This may be updated on a monthly basis however for now its just a one off.

So who wants to kick it off? My Blog is currently number one on the Make Money Fast B-Ladder who can knock me down.

Thanks Brian our current Number 1 Blogger - I wonder if anyone can knock him from the top of the ladder or is his blog going to lead the comp? Remember you can be anywhere on the ladder and as your rankings increase you will rise monthly.


Make Money Fast B-Ladder



1 Home Business

2
The Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

The full ladder is below click to enlarge.





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Sponsored Post - Prescription Drug Addiction

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Thursday, April 26, 2007

What is a Blog ?

We all can easily find out the dictionary meaning of a Blog by heading to a site like Wikipedia and typing in "What is a Blog" but does that really describe it. I think if you asked 10 different people they would all probably answer it differently.

Source: wikipedia

A blog (short for web log) is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

That's how they describe a Blog and I guess in its simplest form its correct however here is what a Blog is to me.

1. Something to do when I am bored
I don't know how people survived before the Internet, and I am not sure how I used to spend my time before I started Blogging.

2. A way to communicate
I've got a lot of stuff to say, I have recently discovered, what better way than to launch it into cyberspace and tell the world.

3. Another method of making some money
Its starting to become possible to make a few bucks and sometimes more out of a Blog. This month this Blog alone will have earned me around $200 dollars and that's pretty good money for doing something that you enjoy. Most hobbies you have to pay for - this one pays me!

4. An experimental Platform
I use this blog as an experimental platform and have picked up many valuable skills that I can use on my other Websites. There is nothing like having a blog and trying to increase its popularity for giving you a good grounding in SEO and Internet Marketing Skills.

5. A place to Advertise
I shamelessly use this Blog to Advertise my other websites - sorry!

6. A place to store all your digital photos
Obviously not this site, however I do have a blog where I just post photos of the kids, its an online photo album that I can share with everyone or anyone.

7. Somewhere I can improve my writing skills
I am really starting to enjoy writing articles and something must be working because when I do a spell check these days there is rarely a mistake - my writing and spelling must be improving all the time.

Well that's all for now - what is a Blog to you? It would be great to hear your perspective.

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Sponsored Post - Diet Pills

If you struggle with weight and exercise is not working for you it can become extremely depressing. It is a fact that some people simply don't burn off calories as easily as others. Isn't annoying seeing a skinny person that can eat everything they want and not put on an ounce of weight?

If you are struggling to lose weight you can consider
diet pills, they can help speed up your metabolism and get things back on track.

Sponsored Post - Catholic Bibles

I am not a Catholic however in some ways I married into a Catholic family so its probably about time that I familiarised myself with catholic bibles.

It seems that there are a wide range of Catholic books and bibles available and you can buy them online. The site I am looking at now is called Getfed and they even have an affiliate program if you are interested. If you had a Blog with a Catholic slant this would certainly be worth investigating further.

The MasterMoz Directory - Link site with a Difference

I love being asked to write a review on a site related to what I Blog about anyway and The MasterMoz Directory is one of those. The thing that I really like about this site is the way that links are continually checked for accurate content (i.e related to the category they have been submitted to) and also if you find a site that doesn't really fit into the category that you are in - as long as you have your facts right they will do something about it.

Heres a quote from the site to explain what I mean...

Websites that are listed on MasterMOZ, are continually monitored by the peer members of the categories they are listed in. If a listing is found to be inaccurate, the listing must be edited by the owner/author within 15 days or it will go off-line.
I decided to submit my site to the directory. Signing up for the site is easy, I like simple signup forms that don't ask for your life story and this site has an easy one. Member name, email address and password - once you have registered they send you an email to confirm you are who you say you are. One thing to be careful of is to check your spam folder - I found the confirmation email went straight in there. (I am a user of Gmail.)
Now that your account has been approved you need to locate an appropriate directory from the main page and then find the sub category that best suits your site.




For my Blog I submitted it to the Internet Blogs FAQs, Help and Tutorials category - it was just a matter of browsing to that category and then clicking on submit listing. Another great feature that I was impressed with was the feature where you just type in your web address and the system automatically picks up the title and description from your site.

Once you have entered the rest of the information about your site thats it, your site is added and you can now view it which looks like the screen shot below. There are links out to your Alexa rating, Backlinks and Visitors to the Directory can rate your site so there is also a social networking side to this directory.


Submitting your site to directorys is a great way to increase your search engine rankings, the more sites that link to you makes you more "popular" in Googles eyes. So its a good idea to submit your site to Directorys like MasterMoz.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Google Pagerank Prediction Review of Kumiko's Cash Quest

There are many posts around with Bloggers and Website owners wanting to predict what PageRank they are going to be come the next update - but the truth is that unless you know whatever complex formula it is that Google uses to work out Page Rank then its an educated guess at best.

Kumiko's Cash Quest has a competition going to predict her PageRank and I guess its time that I entered this competition. I am pretty sure that Kumiko's site will end up with a PageRank of 5.

Kumiko and myself have been on the money quest path for around the same time, I think I started a couple of months before her and she was one of the first sites that I exchanged links with.



Things that Rock about her site
The best things that I have seen on Kumiko's website in the 5 months or so that I have been reading are...

  1. AGLOCO Will Not Make Money Online! Ever! Linked to by some of the big names of the Blogosphere this article was probably responsible for really putting Kumiko's site on the map. How ironic that Agloco are still making excuses and forever delaying the launch of their toolbar. I can proudly say I never signed up! (maybe it was because I took heed of this great article)
  2. 6 Lessons Britney Spears Can Teach You About Blogging the Britney Spears Post this was just after the Agloco one, 2 super article hits within a couple of weeks, awesome.
  3. Kumiko has great photoshop skills, check out some of the images in her posts that she has created - all this takes time and effort.
  4. Kumiko is not afraid to say whats on her mind, some of her posts are a bit controversial however I think thats great - it certainly keeps me returning to her site.

Things that don't rock
I don't really have any negatives to say about Kumiko's Blog shes cool - if I had to say one thing it would be to much Pink!

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Sponsored Post - Yacht Charters

Sailing was something I did a lot of as a youngster, however I seldom get much of a chance to sail these days.

I don't think I would ever buy a boat myself as it would spend to much time sitting around doing nothing - and losing money at the same time.

If you are in a similar situation the best idea is to work with a company that can organize yacht charters for you.

Sponsored Post - Beat that Addiction

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Of course there are far worse addictions than smoking, like alcoholism, cocaine, heroin and many more. If you know someone that needs help please assist them to make contact with a
drug rehab clinic.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

How to add a Favicon to your Website or Blog

Have you ever seen the little icons that some sites have in the address bar and wished that you could have one for your website or Blog? Well now you can. This article will explain how to create a Favicon easily online and how to add it to your website or Blog. We also have a special set of instructions for Blogspot (Blogger) blogs.

How to create a Favicon
Firstly you need to create the little .ico file that will be used on your site. I have a favourite online site that I use for simple text favicons and that is what we will use today. Of course you can also create your own graphic and use that instead.

Head to the site Favicon Generator and enter the text or initials that you would like to use. Of course space is an issue however for our favicon we are going to use One at the top and Mill at the bottom. For the border and the background we will use the colours from this blog. (to get the colours from your website or blog it is very simple if you use the colorzilla plugin for Firefox. )

Have entered the words, just need to add the colors

Now with the colorzilla firefox plugin it is just a matter of hovering the mouse over a color on your page and it will tell you the html code for it - very cool tool. Once I have added the colors it is now time to download the favicon.ico file and I will just save it on my desktop for now. It is important to rename the file before or after you save it otherwise it will not work on some sites that already have a favicon.ico file. I am going to call mine onemill.ico

Applying the color combinations to the favicon.


Ok if you have followed the process so far you now have a little ico file saved on your computer. Now there are two sets of instructions, first set is for those with a regular hosted website where they can upload this file via ftp to their site.

Regular Website or Blog - Hosted on your own Domain
Using your ftp or file transfer program transfer the favicon.ico file to the root directory. Now on every page that you wish the favicon to show (normally included in the header file for your pages) add the following code. This should be directly after the head tag. (favicon.ico should be replaced with whatever you called your ico file. If it is your own domain the name favicon.ico may also work ok.

Blogger/Blogspot Hosted Blog
If you have a blogspot blog like I do we need to first find a home to host our favicon icon. I use the http://pages.google.com option because its free fast and easy. Head to the site manager and upload your favicon. My address for my favicon is http://robstgeorge.googlepages.com/onemill.ico . Now we need to dig into our Blog template and add the code that will point to this file that we have uploaded.

If you prefer to cut and paste here it is, however you will need to remove the spaces around the <> signs.

< href="'http://robstgeorge.googlepages.com/onemill.ico'" rel="'shortcut">
< href="'http://robstgeorge.googlepages.com/onemill.ico'" rel="'icon'/">

Now after you saved that you can refresh your browser and chances are you may not yet see it! Favicons are funny things and if a new visitor arrives at your site, they will see it, however you may need to remove any bookmarks you have to the site and clear any caching of temporary internet files before you can see it. You may want to try it on another computer or another browser just to check your work.

The finished sample...

I hope you found this tutorial of value, please feel free to link to it if you would like to share it with the readers of your blog. You can subscribe with the link below if you would like regular articles like this sent direct to your email account.

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Sponsored Post - Forecasting Software

Forecasting is the process of analyzing current data that is on hand, looking at current trends and predicting future trends. Then making forecasts based on this information. Most companies involved in this process rely on forecasting software to assist them in this process.
If you are wondering the "what ifs" when it comes to rolling out a new product or service this kind of analysis can become very important and can give you some idea of what to expect.

Sponsored Post - The Big V word

If you have ever been a little embarrassed about visiting your Doctor and asking him (or her) for a prescription of Viagra you can easily buy it online, and it will be sent out to you in a discreet package.

This would I would imagine to be one of the most sought after keywords on the internet, certainly a challenge to get your site ranking onto the first page of Google.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Make Money Fast by writing "How To" Articles

In the last month or so I have written a few How To articles including...

These are great for picking up search engine traffic. There are a number of Bloggers out there who are looking at improving their blogs and they will type their question into Google. If you have written an article about it chances are that your blog will show up.

Also this is a good way of working away on improving your sites, and by documenting it you can create great content at the same time.

Content = Traffic

Traffic = Money

One way to find great search engine ideas for a "How To" article is to use the Digital Point Keyword suggestion Tool and Type in "How To"

Now are you as surprised as me that 830 people a day are searching for the phrase "How to tie a tie" , I am embarrassed to admit to you how close to writing that very article I was! However even I had to admit that it would be a struggle to even distantly relate that to this website.

There are also 164 people a day asking "How to Kiss" and believe it or not 22 people a day asking "how to lose a guy in ten days" is that some kind of aspiration?

Of course with the Digital Point Keyword suggestion tool, you can also choose which country you want to search on.

When I tried the same search on Netherlands it became apparent that they have some kind of Pet Problem... why else would 21 people every day be typing in "How to clean pet urine".

When you are a Kiwi like me, we love to make fun of Australians. (also we like beating them in sport) so last but not least I wondered what Australians were looking for in the "How To" section.

Surprisingly Australians don't even seem to be asking this question except for one or 2 a day. However one question did pop up more than once a day and this was "How to last longer in Bed" !!

If you don't believe me go and check it out yourself. Keyword Suggestion Tool

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Sponsored Post - Address Plaque

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They range from small plaques for your letterbox to large post held signs that can be placed on your lawn or grounds.These plaques are made in the USA.

Sponsored Post - Market Research

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If you fail to understand your market, it may be very difficult to deliver to them what they are looking for. Failure in business is often attributed to poor market research.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Blogspot Title Tags how to Remove Blog Name from the Beginning

The theory of Title Tags we are discussing applies to all websites and Blogs, we show how to fix this behaviour in the Blogger Templates, however if you use Wordpress here is a great little SEO Title Plugin that you can use.

You may have noticed that when you post an article via your blogger dashboard the default title tags append the Blog name to the front of the title. This means that if you have the title "5 ways to Make Money Fast" the actual title as the search engines see it will be...

The Million Dollar Experiment heads Down Under: 5 ways to Make Money Fast

"So what" I can hear you saying - well the facts are that search engines take the title tags very seriously indeed, and they start at the beginning with the first few words being the most important ( or supposedly most relevant ) and then it drops after that as I have illustrated below.

So as you can see we are wasting most of our prime real estate with the title of our Blog and unless you are really famous it is highly likely that any search's that are going to be relevant to your site are more likely to be picked up in the title of your actual Post so we are going to change our Blogger template so that this comes first and the Blog name second.

How to change the Blogger Template to Show title of Post before Blog name on Single Posts
We need to edit the template so head into your Blogger dashboard and click on template then edit html to get access to the code that we need to change. Once you are in there you need to follow the instructions on this post Changing the Blogger Title Tag. All it involves is cutting and pasting some new code.

It worked for me, check out how the title now sits...


How to change the Title of your Main Page
Now this may seem so obvious that its ridiculous however what are the key words that you are using in the main title of your blog... all I had was The Million Dollar Experiment Down Under. Now this was great for people searching for the "million dollar experiment", I was ranking 2nd only to Steve Pavlina for that - however not to many people really search for that on a daily basis. So I have now added the keywords that I am concentrating on to the beginning of the Title. If you look at the main title of my page now it reads Make Money Fast - The Million Dollar Experiment Down Under.
To change this yourself go into the blogger dashboard click on Settings , then Basic and simply add in your keywords to the title of your Blog.

I would advise that you give it a shot, it can only help the search engines pick up on what you are really writing about. Make sure that you back up your template first!

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Saturday, April 21, 2007

Sponsored Post - Golf Clubs

Being a once a year golfer I managed to avoid buying any clubs for a couple of years however it soon got to the point where I needed to purchase my own golf clubs. Being a novice golfer it was difficult at the time to know whether or not I was buying the right clubs for me, however the deal ended up being a good one. I still can't hit the ball very well though! Need a lot more practise.

Sponsored Post - Pen

A pen is a nice gift idea, I am not talking about a basic pen here I mean a tasteful packaged up premium pen. They can also be a great promotional give away that can mean that your companies name is constantly being displayed in front of potential customers. The only pens that I am not to keen on is the old style pens where the ink could sometimes leak out and ruin the paper that you were writing on - or your clothes!

Million NZ dollars Weekend Links

What a week, the technorati favourites exchange is ramping up and if you are looking to boost your way up the technorati rankings check out our post Time for another Technorati Boost - lets do it or if you can't be bothered reading about it and just want to favour our site please do here.

Traffic, Traffic & Maybe a Bit more Traffic is an interesting article by fellow Kiwi Shirlene about generating traffic to your site - some good tips there and traffic is something many of us could do with a lot more of!

Shoemoney finally has another uber internet marketing guru snapping at his heels, check out this hilarious site (which I actually saw mentioned on the shoes site) BootMoney.

Basic SEO mistakes that I made - Don’t make them yourself the Sir Blogger site ( yeah yeah I know its one of mine) has a post pointing out some obvious SEO mistakes that can easily be made when putting together a website.

Enjoy the weekend, try to make the most of it - and a word of warning don't make the mistake I made today and tell (normal??) people you are making money blogging, they may look at you like your a weirdo!

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Thursday, April 19, 2007

Submit your Site to Free Directorys - Bloggers Toolkit Series

One of the methods that I have been using recently to promote my various sites is to submit them to free directories. Now when I first started to do this I played a little bit of hit and miss as I was searching for them on Google and was often disappointed to find that not only did the site require payment, but I was probably in for a lifetime of spam as well!

Bring on Mr-SEO - I had recently been listening to a number of great pod casts regarding Search Engine Optimization and in one of his pod casts Joe mentions a directory list that he has on his site that has been built up over time. It lists directories that are free to submit your site to and they don't even require a reciprocal link.

Now you have to be very patient when doing this as it can be a time consuming task submitting your site to directories however long term it should pay off, so just get on and do it. If you have multiple sites its quite good because you can submit a number of them at at once.

I suggest starting a spreadsheet and recording which sites you have submitted to along with any other relevant information. One of my colleagues is starting at the bottom of the list and working up, I am working my way down.

Anyway heres the link if you want to go and do some work ... submit to directories some of the sites that you will be submitting to have some pretty decent page ranks. Remember its not quick, you need to submit a fair bit of info in some of the directories so put aside an hour or two and work your way through as many as you can.




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Sponsored Post - Orlando Vacation

Vacations are very precious for those of us that work full time. There is no better time to spend time with family and friends - time that you may not normally have as modern life is extremely chaotic and busy at the best of times. Why not take some time out and go on an Orlando vacation.

Sponsored Post - Computer Memory

Back when I bought my laptop just over a couple of years ago it had 256MB of RAM and that seemed more than sufficient at the time, a year or so later I upgraded to 512MB and now that struggles to keep up with the applications that I run.

Most laptops now come out with at least 1 gig of computer memory - how times change.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

What has Paris Hilton got to do with Poker? Google Zeitgeist - Bloggers Toolkit Series

Another tool that I have been planning on writing about for a while is the Google Zeitgeist Page, now I had not even heard of this until recently however to sum it up in one sentence ..


Pulling together interesting search trends and patterns requires Google's human and computing power together. Search statistics are automatically generated based on the millions of searches conducted on Google over a given period of time - weekly, monthly, and annually.


Thats all well and good but what can we do with this information and why is it included in the Bloggers Toolkit series?
Well I guess I need to direct you to fellow fast money maker Mike for an example of this, look at his little experiment Kate Middleton And Making Money With Zlio . By adding in a sample "experiment" paragraph about Kate Middleton and her recent split with Prince William, he is (after looking at his stats) pulling in a decent amount of searches as that is one of the topics of the moment. I certainly look forward to the write up that he does outlining the results of his little foray into celebrity gossip.

There is another site as well you can check out http://50.lycos.com/ and this shows the search movers and shakers over the last month or so, well worth a visit and quite surprising seeing that Poker is number 1, then we have Paris Hilton, Spyware, Disney and Naruto rounding out the top 5. Obviously if you can cunningly disguise these into your posts somehow you may be able to drive some additional search traffic to your site.

I will of course leave that to you to figure out how to do yourself!


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Monday, April 16, 2007

Sponsored Post - Hoodia

Hoodia gordonii cactus is the plant with the wonder ingredient that curbs your appetite and helps you to slim.
You can buy it in pill format and it is claimed that this can aid in the never ending battle that many people face against weight gain.
If you are looking to lose weight these pills may help you however I would also advise that you try and live a healthy lifestyle and get plenty of exercise.

Sponsored Post - Cordless Phone Battery

It is often difficult to know where to start looking when you need a new cordless phone battery however there is a website that specializes in finding and supplying batteries for Cordless Phones.

To find the battery that you require it just a matter of selecting the manufacturer and model of your phone, selecting the relevant battery which is then added to your shopping cart and will be shipped off within 1 - 2 days.

Make Money Fast Method of the Week - Sell a Banner Advert

You can Make Money Fast by selling a banner advert to an advertiser for a set fee per month. I have personally done this on my Job Search sites and the most I have sold a one month banner for at this stage is $30 NZ.

You need to strike at any opportunity, in this case someone emailed me about placing a job advert on my site - however my site is actually for job seekers to place adverts not employers. Anyway I told him this however offered him the opportunity to place a banner on the front page of the site for $30, and also offered him a cheaper alternative on another site that didn't get quite the same traffic mentioning of course that this would be placing the advert directly in front of the exact kind of person that he was trying to target.

The advertiser quickly accepted the offer so I whipped up a paypal link and posted a payment page on my site, where he could then go and pay directly to my paypal account. This worked like a dream, he paid, sent me a banner and then I placed it on the site.

About a week later I had a similar experience on another site, and successfully sold another ad link however it was only for about $15 dollars.

You can then send them a reminder after a month along with a link to renew the payment, or simply remove their advert and dedicate the space to another form of advertising.

Its all about thinking on your feet, and making the most out of any contact potential advertisers make with you - sometimes they are few and far between so don't be shy!

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Sponsored Post - Blinds

Its a fact that blinds can make or break the interior of a house, also they are a lot easier to deal with than curtains (less prone to damage from your own and visitors pets and kids as well!)

They are easy to clean, quick and efficient to operate and come in wide variety of styles, textures, and colors, to blend into the ambience of your home.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Sponsored Posts - Address Plaques

If you have a house that you are proud of you consider getting an Address Plaque, these plaques not only enhance the look of your property they also show that you have pride in your home.

These plaques are made in the USA and range from small plaques for your letterbox to large post held signs that can be placed on your lawn.

April Exponential Growth Target Already Accomplished!

Today I got paid US$45 from payu2blog for some of the posts I have been doing for them. It did 2 things...

1/ Finally tipped me over the $1000 NZ Dollar mark oh yeah!
2/ Meant that for this month we have already achieved our budget of $110 US dollars. (actually we are about 30 cents short, but close enough) - we are not quite halfway through the month so that in itself is fantastic.

I know that you as a reader may have seen an increase in sponsored posts over the last few weeks, and this is mainly because I am cranking through about 7-10 "assignments" that payu2blog.com are sending to me each week. Now this company does not really let you pick and choose assignments they just fire a weekly list at you and from what I can gather you pretty much sink or swim.

Anyway this to me is not a problem really because I want to see how much money I can make from this blog and I am assuming that you as a reader would as well - these posts only take 5 - 10 mins as its really just a key word that you are given that you need to link in an article of minimum 60 words. I see it as a quick advert after a post. My method of doing them is I sit down for an hour or so and churn through them writing up each small post and saving them as drafts. Then when I post an article I slip them out around it. This means whenever a visitor hits my site they are greeted with an article and not a sponsored post.

I have also changed the front page of this site to only show 2 posts on the front page. I will try and add some of the more popular category links to the sidebars in the near future.

As you may know if you are a regular reader each month our target is boosted by 20% each month and in 30 months we will be earning $7000 US dollars a month. Currently we are in Month 7 - so next month we are going to have to find $132-04 - from what I have seen to date I can't really see it being to much of a drama until we hit the 300 - 400 US mark, then its going to start getting a lot harder.

However even in saying that the first month I only earned about US$36 so US$110 would have seemed like a huge target. That in itself is the beauty of exponential growth - it kinda creeps up on you and if you have already achieved one amount its not to hard to crank it up another 20 percent.

Anyway heres the skinny for this month to date...

Budget for this Month $US 110.03

Active Income $87.50
Passive Income $22.14

Total month to date $US 109.64

Total Earnings to Date $US 689.58 or $NZ 1014.09



I hope sharing this with you helps you realize that you to can earn $100 US in a couple of weeks part time. The more popular your site gets the more opportunities appear to show themselves... or as someone famous who I can't quite remember at the moment says...

The harder you work the luckier you get...

No weekend links this week unfortunately, I would like to have a good excuse except I just plain forgot!

I will however leave you with a great tutorial on Blog Link Building from Entrepreneurs-Journey.com


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Sponsored Posts - Water Bottle Filter

If you drink a lot of water and don't want to keep buying pure water there is an option available where you can purchase a filter that is portable and fits into your own water bottle.

If you are looking for a water bottle filter there are a number of options that you can choose.

The ones I looked at ranged from $7-95 to $29-95 for the military grade bottle that can process more than 200 gallons!

Sponsored Posts - Telecom Audit

If your organization is concerned that it may be paying more for telecom communications that what it should be - or even over and above what was initially agreed to with the supplier it is time for a Telecom Audit.

In any medium to large organization and even some smaller ones, control over communication spending can easily become out of hand.

Friday, April 13, 2007

Make Money Fast - An experiment in Choosing Words

Previously we have looked at tools that show the popularity of certain keywords. What you can do is ideally try and find a set of key words that are popular yet don't have every man and his dog trying to optimize their sites for it - then start to build them into the content of your site, plus hopefully get people to link to your site with the keywords as the anchor text.

I have decided to try a little experiment that will hopefully make money fast for me at the same time - firstly lets go and check out our new phrase on the Overture Keyword selector tool to determine how popular it is - have you guessed what three words I am using yet?

And remember these keyword results are just from yahoo, so we can probably multiply it by 3 to get a more relevant picture of how many people are searching for these words.


Now we need to do a search on Google and see how many results one gets for carrying out a search such as this. Quite a few 47,200,000 actually.



However what I liked about this is that the first page of sites didn't really look that intimidating, and by that I mean there is for example an ezine article, a wikipedia article and a couple of lame looking sites. Not really a site dedicated to the art of Making Money Fast which is probably all it would take to get up there.

So just to recap we have found some reasonably popular words , and we have done a search on Google and theres millions of page results which makes the task a challenging one.

Now the next thing we need to do is track our progress. We need to know where our site currently ranks for this term. Then we are going to keep checking back and rate our progress.

For this head to Google Rankings (note you will need to get your Google API key first ) and lets see where currently the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under ranks for the key words "Make Money Fast" ....



As you can see currently we are not ranking for these terms at all, so this will be an interesting task to see how long it takes.

Of course if you would like to assist and link to this article it would certainly be appreciated.

Good luck, let me know how you get on and where you rank for your chosen terms, please think of your own terms however - we don't want to be fighting over the same words!

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Sponsored Posts - Vacation Home Rental

One of the best things about working is vacation time, most of us take a decent holiday at least once a year, and for myself I like to head to the beach.

Maybe you like camping, or staying in a vacation home rental apartment, however whereever you decide to stay the best things about holidays is relaxing and spending time with family and friends.

Sponsored Posts - Las Vegas Real Estate

It is said that the sun shines in Las Vegas 340 days a year. Compare that to where I live and it certainly sounds tempting. In fact the more I read about Las Vegas the more tempted I am to sell up and move there ASAP!

Las Vegas Real Estate ranges from the affordable to the unaffordable (unless you are a movie star!) , it really depends on what kind of budget you have and how big a house do you really need?

Thursday, April 12, 2007

The Blog Traffic Challenge - Lets get ready to Rumble!!!

On the 18th March I joined the Blog Traffic Challenge over at the Can I Make Big Money Online website. The plan is that you clearly state that you wish to double the traffic to your blog over the next 3 months and then set about achieving that goal.

Now George who instigated the challenge has managed to achieve it in 4 weeks, this is a fantastic result and should be an inspiration to the rest of the participants - who are listed on this Squidoo Page.

I decided for my own challenge that I would look at the total traffic for March, and then try and double this by June. Here is the graph of my visits in March. An average of 43.58 which isn't that great really considering the time this site has been going. (hence why I am doing this challenge!)


Below are the methods that I have been using...

Posting articles more regularly
The more articles that you post - theoretically this should convert to more numbers.

Visiting other sites more often, and leaving comments and participating in things going on.
I often say you have to give before you will receive, so following this formula I try to get around as many sites as I have time for, see whats going on and comment accordingly. Also its important to participate in challenges or memes, or whatever is going down at the time.

Doing more sponsored posts
Hah - you think I'm crazy, well not so, this blog is about making money remember, when you see this months results it will start to become apparent as to why doing more sponsored posts could help raise the traffic to this site. People want to know how much money can be made from a blog - and I plan to show them.

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Sponsored Post - Home Furniture

When looking for Home Furniture it is important that you take your time and make sure that you shop around and do your research very carefully.

I would never recommend buying furniture for someone else because it is such a personal choice. If your furniture is starting to get near the end of its life, it is time now to think ahead and start looking.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Time for another Technorati Boost - lets do it

Most of us had the pleasure of experiencing the boost that the Z-List gave us up the Technorati Ladder. For me personally it shot me up from about position 80,000 to around probably 20,000.

Well our friend Maki has done it again and this time its all about Dosh Dosh’s Ultimate Technorati Favorites Exchange: An Interactive Experiment this is where we favourite each others Blogs on Technorati under the theory that if you get about 100 or so Blogs favouring you it should be show time - and with any luck you will be pushing the top 100 or so most favourite blogs.

If you are interested in participating, please favourite me here leave me a comment saying you have done so along with your technorati user-name and favourite link. Then head over to doshdosh.com and do the same. That way you will be picking up a couple of favourites in one hit. Then of course you can blog about it on your site and let the blogosphere do the rest!

Its all about giving - the more you give the more you will get back.

Sites that have favourited the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under so far from this Post..

DoshDosh thanks Maki
Can I Make Big Money Online thanks George
Affiliate Programs thanks Matt
Million Dollar Project thanks Grant
Home Based Business thanks Brian
Make Money Online The Quick and Easy Way! thanks E J Cooksey
Valkrie Angel thanks Valkrie
My Online Collections thanks star500k
i Thought, therefore i Blog thanks Betshopboy
ShadowScope thanks Richard
azazil.net thanks Gary
Mike's Money Making Mission thanks Mike
hottnez.com thanks grzegorz
daveolsen.ca thanks Dave
techjunction thanks Joel
walletrehab thanks Chris
How to earn money blogging thanks Daryl
digital phocus thanks Brendan
Manilla Mom thanks Maia
GarryConn.com thanks Garry
//engtech thanks anonymous
Can't Coach That thanks Coach McGee
Blog Fyais thanks iszo
DannyDang.com thanks Danny
Mr Gary Lee thanks Gary
gauravonomics thanks Gaurav
loca lingo thanks tanguy
The Rojak Blog thanks apogee
Fortune Watch thanks Robin
rishiraj.info thanks Rishi
Computer Mobile Corner thanks Santa
Digital Information Technology thanks Atul
Healthy Web Design thanks Dawud
Tans Blog thanks Tan
Klamath Design thanks Linda
Serendipity thanks Sharique
Know the World thanks Lazy Genius
SMS Today thanks...
Hacked Gadgets thanks Alan
Shakeroo's Gold thanks Shaxx
Life in the Fast Lane thanks Deb
Medyasyon thanks zz
Making of An Internet Entrepreneur thanks Maria
Voteboob - Vote On Boobs!


if I have missed you please let me know via a comment, and keep those faves coming!

Sponsored Post - House Painting Ideas

When it comes to household general maintenance I must admit that if I can - I run a mile. Although I am probably a lot more capable than what I let on ( to the wife!) I would much rather pay someone to do the work - I realize however that many of you enjoy renovating your own place so why don't you check out these House Painting Ideas

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Can I remove the NavBar or not?

I have often thought about removing the navbar from the top of this site, however the jury is still out as to whether that would violate any terms and conditions from blogger.com.

I thought I would try and settle the question once and for all - so lets check it out. First of all a search of Blogger Help has this to say...

Unless you publish your blog via FTP, the Navbar cannot be disabled.

Well you might think that is fairly cut and dry however the confusing thing is that it is not worded very well and is open to mis-interpretation because it says that the Navbar cannot be disabled whereas it can very easily be disabled. Check this post out by Kumiko for specifics on hiding it if you are that brave.

A search of Google whilst by no means definitive would normally show up anyone that had been banned for removing it and I can find noone although lots of people seem to talk about whether or not it is against the blogger.com terms of service.

So in summary if decide to remove it and you got banned it would likely be the first case, so it is unlikely. However it would be nice if Blogger.com could clarify the simple question... Can we remove our Navbars or not?

Another question you may want to ask yourself is that as Blogger.com are letting you host your blog on their servers for no cost at all , and don't really smother your site in any advertising whatsover, isn't only fair that you display a small Navigation bar at the top that lets people search your blog and others? Also it makes it easy to log into the admin panel of your site.

My suggestion is leave the Navbar, Blogspots been good to me - if someone doesnt want to view my site because of it thats to bad.

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Sponsored Post - Grandfather Clocks

There is nothing like the tick tock of old grandfather clocks to set the ambiance of a classical home environment.

Well the good news is they are not extinct yet! You can still buy Grandfather Clocks and they are not as expensive an addition to the family home as what you might imagine.

The ironic thing for me is that I only ever saw clocks like these in my grandparents houses as a young child, so thought that they were called grandfather clocks because my grandfather had one. However after research on the Internet it appears they are actually called that after a song called "My Grandfather's Clock"!

Monday, April 09, 2007

Setting Up an Advertising Page for your Site

While watching a screen cast on Yaro's website it hit home to me that I really needed some kind of advertising page set up for not only this site but potentially all my websites if I want to sell text links and other forms of advertising direct.


The concept is quite simple, you produce a page with the "packages" that you would like to offer and then produce a link via your paypal account so that a potential advertiser can easily pay for the particular advertising option that they would like. In this Blogs case I am offering text links on my "new" left sidebar for $10 per month, anchor text of the advertisers choice and also offering Sponsored Reviews for $25.


Some people probably cant be bothered dealing with it themselves and would prefer to do it through a 3rd party and that's OK, however I would like to not only promote this Blog via 3rd party sites but also directly as I can see this being quite lucrative further down the track.


You can view my new advertising page here, I will also try and create a obvious link for it somewhere around the top of the main page. I would recommend that you set this up on your site if you are serious about monetizing it.


At the top I have placed some basic statistics about the site, then below I outline the key features of the packages on offer, this will get added to over time.


It will be pretty exciting getting my first link or Sponsored Review through this advertising page, I will be aiming to provide service that is second to none.



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Sponsored Post - Video Conferencing

If you are sick of travelling to meetings you may want to consider video conferencing as an alternative. There are many advantages to this method of online meetings, including no jet lag, time savings and of course money savings.

One of the advantages of the Megameeting.com solution is that there is no software to install, its all browser based which certainly makes things nice and simple.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Blog Makeover - Adding another Column how hard can it be?

Its time to beef up the screen real estate of this blog, one way of doing this would be to add another column to the left of the Blog and maximize it for larger screens.

As a help for other bloggers that want to do this, I will document the process as I go. So far this Blog site just uses the basic Rounders template along with a customized header - which I unfortunately did not document when I modified. (there are however plenty of tutorials on the net for changing the header on Blogspot templates, just do a simple search)

I'm going to use Kumikos tutorial Hacking Blogger Beta: Building a Three Column Template, Removing the Navbar and Adding a Picture to the Header as a basis for this change. Why? Because shes cool and her blogs still in one piece after adding a column to it!

Grab yourself a cold drink, block out any interruptions for the next 30 mins 60 mins and lets do it!

Step 1 - Backup your template.
The first thing to do is backup your template, at least then if you stuff it up with a bit of luck it will be possible to resurrect your site before you started messing with it!



To do this go into the settings of your blog, click on Edit HTML then Download Full Template


Step 2 - Find the current sidebar and create your new bar from it.
Following on Kumikos tutorial we now need to find text similar to this. Mine is slightly different to the text on her site, and depending on your template it may be different as well, but it should say something like...

#sidebar-wrap


{
width:240px; float:right;
margin:15px 0 0;
font-size:97%;
line-height:1.5em;
word-wrap: break-word;
/* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow:
hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE
sidebar float */
}


We now need to copy this code, change it a little to reflect the new name and float position of our left hand sidebar. If you just want to copy and paste here is the new code.

#leftsidebar-wrap
{
width:240px;
float:left;
margin:15px 0 0;
Font-size:97%;
line-height:1.5em;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for
long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long
non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}


Step 3 - Widen the width of the site
Now currently the site is set to a width of 740px, we know that the other sidebar is 240 px, and the main wrap is set to 485px. What we do here is subtract 485 from 740 and we are left with 255px, this is what we want to widen the site by - below is the new code if you want to copy it and paste over the existing.


#outer-wrapper
{
width:955px;
margin:0 auto;
text-align:left;
font: $bodyFont;
}

Step 4 - Now add the Div settings into the code
You can simply paste this above the existing main-wrap code.... you will need to edit the widget id or remove it all together to add your own.


<div id="'leftsidebar-wrap'"><br /><div id="sidebartop-wrap"><div id="'sidebartop-wrap2'"><br /><!--xml:namespace prefix = b /--><b:section class="sidebar" id="leftsidebartop"><b:widget id="HTML8" title="Bloggers Toolkit" type="HTML" locked="false"></b:widget></b:section><br /></div></div><br /></div>

This was a bit more difficult than I expected and for a while there I had big gaps and a sidebar that was about 4 foot off the bottom of my screen! But this kind of stuff always happens when you mess with templates, so you just need to be patient and keep working away at it, and if all else fails restore from backup.

The End Result
Here is our 3 column rounders template! If you try this yourself and have any grief, I cannot promise to help you but will give it a shot so feel free to ask any questions.




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