Last Updated: 5/08/08
As I've written reviews and browsed the web, I've noticed that I discover new, useful things (fortunately, free so far) and I've decided to list them here with details on how to implement them, why you should use them, and how it helps you.
Check back for new updates.
How To Add Recent Comments To Your Blogger.com / Blogspot.com Blog:
Why: This will allow everyone to see the most recent comments. It is my theory (not sure if it's proven to be true) that if you display prominently recent "comments" on the front of your page on your blog, it will encourage other people to leave comments (driving more traffic to you, encouraging traffic to you, and creating the basis for a social discussion around YOUR webspace/blog).
This translates to dollar signs for you (hopefully).
Drawback? This will encourage spam but spam comes with increased traffic. Believe me, you WANT to be dealing with spammers because that means your website is experiencing traffic flows of people.
Full instructions are at this website http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/2007/03/recent-comments.html
And thank this person for being so helpful. This is free by the way. (Take a look at this site's recent comments for an example of how Cash Jacks implemented it).
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Social Traffic Buttons:
Read the comments on how to get graphics for these buttons but basically you copy and paste the code listed on this site to get buttons added at the end of every blog post you make. The picture below is a snapshot of what it looks (obviously you cannot implement the code from this picture because it's not showing the complete instructions!)
WARNING: You could really mess up your blog layout doing this so be sure to back up your HTML code!!!!
Instruction Source Link
Picture: 
Use these pictures to add images to your social bookmarking sites. 
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Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Cash Jacks Useful Links With How To's And Explanations Last Updated: 5/8/08
Stocks Finish at Session Low
"[BRIEFING.COM] After descending gradually during afternoon trading, the stock market made a sudden and precipitous drop to fall below the 1400-level. Buying interest returned momentarily in the final leg of trading, but proved unsustainable. All three of the major indices finished at their session low."
Full article source
Are tough times afoot in the US equities market? Financials also lead the spiral down. The dow lost about 200 points, sp500 25.69 points, and nasdaq at a whopping 44.82. Talk about ouch.
If prices get lower, they'll become bargains. If they go even lower, it might cause a panic!
Review: Agloco.blogspot.com
"You must know that in order to make some money , at least you should know what you are talking about and not post just crap in order to increase number of posts in your blog.Many newbies on the internet doesn't even know how to get a free blog online so in this article I will explain step by step what you have to do in order to make some cash from your blogThere are 2 big blog providers online which are
WordPress.com
Blogger.com
- WordPress has a lot of templates and widgets so you can use for your blog , you can create categories and you can even purchase more space and other cool features if you upgrade- Blogger was purchased by Google so the best part is that you can get accepted to Adsense through Blogger. The bad part is that you cannot create categories but you can give Labels to your posts as they were categories (Im doing it)You must know that creating a blog is really simple but updating it everyday with new and unique content is really a hard work (its not so hard if you speak about your favorite niche like I'm doing) So content will be the judger whether you will be a successful blogger or not, if you will update it once a week chances will be very low but if you will post good and unique content every day then you will be in the right road"
Source site
Now this site I found refreshing. It's not excessive on the ads, great contrast and blending, and I even read something useful (which is the source link).
This person makes their money not only from google ads but also selling "link exchange" and creating a little "social network" which prominently displays members and recent comments, which increase the incentive to come back to this person's site.
Also recommends certain free services and gives ample warning as to the drawbacks (legitimate credibility). Doesn't seem like the blog is updated often but it does have helpful hints.
They also mention 7 free ways to get traffic. I myself use technorati and high pr directories, but the other methods mentioned on the agloco site are valid too. Does not discuss digg or delicious anywhere, however.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Market update
"Energy, Financials Lead Market Higher
Always remember, one day market moves aren't indicative of what will happen in the future. Although financials took a beating today, they came back up overall. Can this be the shining light everyone is talking about?[BRIEFING.COM] On Tuesday, stocks got off to a negative start, but eventually ended the day with substantial gains after traders shrugged off record high crude prices, and seemingly bearish headlines out of financials and homebuilders. Specifically, the S&P 500 was down 0.7% shortly after the opening bell, and then steadily climbed higher to finish the day with a 0.8% gain.
Fannie Mae (FNM 30.81, +2.52) said it had a first quarter loss of $2.2 billion, or $2.57 per share, compared with earnings of $0.85 per share in the prior quarter. In an effort to shore up its balance sheet, Fannie is cutting its quarterly dividend by 30% to $0.25 per share and will raise $6 billion in capital. Its shares opened more than 7% lower, but quickly rebounded to finish the day with an advance of 9%. Fannie said that government regulators will be reducing Fannie's capital requirement level to 15% from 20%, which may have aided in the stock's reversal.
UBS (UBS 33.77, -0.54) reported a massive 11.5 billion Swiss francs loss (roughly $11 billion) for its most recent quarter, but the company had preannounced this result so it came as no surprise. UBS did provide some new information, though. UBS is selling $15 billion in mortgage assets to BlackRock (BLK 218.95, +3.55) and plans to eliminate 5,500 jobs by 2009."
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Earn Or Make Money Online Tutorial: Part 3
So, you'll need the follow tools:
Website: Use blogspot.com, myspace.com, and/or facebook.com - Go with what is popular to increase maximum earning potential (more potential customers, more people, right?).
Accounts with adsense, clickbank, and commission junction. Refer to resource links on the right hand side to open an account.
The warrior forum, a forum with a TON of smart, helpful people. DO NOTE that people CONSTANTLY try to sell stuff to you, so be mindful of where and WHO is telling you to do something or buy. Stick to the basics, don't go all out fancy, it's probably a ploy to make you give them your cash.
Utilize the free keyword research tools to make sure your niche market or topic has a big audience:
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
http://keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
These are limited editions of the full version (obviously) but it should be sufficient. You just want to know how big the market is. So, if you were doing say Golf, you want to make sure the number of searches in a month is like say... 3000 or more (meaning 3000 people are interested in golf) and sell stuff to them. People into golf would be interested in ebooks on how to improve their golf swing, golf course discounts, golf clubs, golf carts, you get the idea.
I personally use an advanced research tool because like an idiot, I paid $100 dollars for this when I was barely making money. It's a great tool at least so it wasn't a total waste. For you though, let's not spend money yet; use the free keyword tools.
The criteria you should be looking at is:
1. Number of search results on google
2. Number of searches for that keyword
3. *Important!* Number of GOOGLE campaigns for that particular keyword.
#1 tells you how many websites talk something about the keyword. The more there are, the more competitive. Don't worry, with good incoming links, you should be able to get sort of close to the top of that keyword, and 100's of variations of that keyword (google is a great search engine).
#2 Tells you how many folks searched for that term. You ideally want this number to be HUGE. 10,000, 200,000, Millions of searches. Most likely, you'll have to settle to just 500-1200 searches a month, which is pretty decent.
#3 This shows how many people are bidding and paying google.com for ads on that keyword. If you noticed 8 or more google campaigns, chances are companies are making money. If there are none, then either nobody makes money or it's a secret niche that no one knows about (lucky you). The best way to figure this out is to rank for that niche keyword and test it out, or simply ignore it.
Directories: Search google for "directories" or in the case of golf "Golf directories" and look at them. Find the pagerank of the particular directory page you want to link for and hope it is pagerank 4 or above, 3 minimum. Be sure to download the google toolbar and have the "Pagerank" tool enabled so you can instantly see the pagerank of the directory. Most people get links from page rank 2 or below and wonder why nobody comes to their website. Well duh.
Once you have a directory, submit your website or blog to that directory and get the link from them. You can also use dmoz.org and joeant.com for directories but in my experience, they are SLOW.
Sign up with digg.com and furl.net and submit content to them. It's best to use unique content you created but you can try and get away with submitting duplicate content. A popular method to use is to submit news stories about your topic, airlines, golf sports, chocolate, business and finance, etc. Yahoo, google, and a famous company that furnishes news related stories to your topic would be ideal candidates.
Once you have done all of this, install your affiliate links and adsense ads onto your website and let the traffic roll in and hope people click.
Your results should be fairly quick because you should see traffic (excluding yourself) within 1 week, if not one day after you've established yourself. If you get no traffic after 30 days, something is wrong. The fundamentals are, get links linking to your website otherwise, everything you do does not get indexed in the search engines and you're dead in the water.
For example, if I want to see if I'm indexed, I'd type "cashjacks blogspot" (my url) in google and see if it contains my articles or content. If it does, then good, if it doesn't, either google is still spidering me, or I didn't get a proper link bank.
Earn Or Make Money Online Tutorial: Part 2
Now, if you haven't noticed, this focuses on using two methods, affiliate selling and adsense.
For those who don't know what they are, simply affiliate selling is reselling other people's pre-made products or ideas, and earning a hefty (should be!) commission. For example, I resell an E-book or Computer LCD for $100 dollars each, and earn 75% commission on it, generating sales of $75 each.
The company earns free money with little effort on their part and you spend no money to earn or make money. Sounds simple and easy doesn't it? In truth, it's not. Getting people to part with their hard earned cash is tricky, but it's doable.
Adsense is Google's way of sharing their advertising dollars with you, a website publisher or owner. It's not scientifically proven, but the general, widespread con-census is that Google's Adwords program shares approximately 50% of all its revenues to YOU. So, if an advertiser on Google pays Google $4.00 a click, you SHOULD be getting $2.00 every click on your website. The catch, however is, you might get substantially less or more per click, AND you gotta get people to your website plus get them to click. That's a reality check for you.
So, to start, most people would TELL YOU to sign up blah blah, and yes you should do that BUT first, you should create your own website. But doesn't it cost a lot of money? Doesn't it take a lot of effort to code? What about all that pre-made stuff out there?
How about just signing up with Blogspot, facebook, or myspace and use their blog system? Take a look at this site, notice I'm doing EXACTLY what I'm telling you. And how much does this cost you, me or anyone? NOTHING. A free website! When I first started out, I actually BOUGHT web hosting from Dreamhost, which was great but I was still spending money before I even had a *chance* to make money. BAD BAD BAD. You should spend money AFTER you've made something (or borrowed on credit card, which I HIGHLY DISCOURAGE; the interest will KILL you and I'm not kidding).
Now the pro's and cons that I think are plausible are this: Blogspot has no ads, at all, just the nice little "next blog navbar" on top. Myspace and Facebook offer 100's of millions of users (because it's a social networking site, duh!) BUT a ton of premade ads. You also CANNOT input adsense on myspace and facebook because they disallow javascript due to unscrupulous hackers and villianous criminals/pedophiles (shameful really).
So your best bet is using Blogspot (also known as blogger.com) and have your myspace/facebook accounts (if you choose) to point to blogspot. Get traffic from myspace and facebook, and have them come to your blogspot, or other free website (I'm sure there are others but this is what I use currently).
Do note that there are BETTER and free ways to get traffic, so don't rely on myspace and facebook alone for traffic.
There is a catch to all of this, what will your website be about? Golf? Video Games? Pencils and paper? Dungeons and dragons? Star Trek? With so many topics to cater an audience and website to, it can be hard to choose!
I use to say go with what you are interested in. After all, the saying is "Do what you love, and the money will follow." And there is some truth to that, but if you love an activity that only 500 people in the world enjoy and know about, your market size is 500, which isn't going to make or earn you much money, if anything. You could try converting people into a market, but this is something that only the richest corporations in the world do, and I dare not proclaim proficiency in this, yet.
Create Money Online Tutorial: Part 1
For the sake of simplicity, I'll make this short.
I've earned and continue to earn money online through various websites. A discontinued website was www.richlemongal.com (it no longer exists as I took it down as of late 2007) as I became unhappy with tricking and pretty much scamming people out of money (it's legal but not very ethical).
I also ran a world of warcraft gold farming website (also down) but Blizzard began cracking down on gold sellers, so I didn't want to waste any more time maintaining a non-income producing website.
I would like to tell you how much adsense I earned but it is against the terms of service to reveal how much you earn (it's not highly enforced but I'm not risking getting banned). I did however, earn about $2000 in 2007 alone generating Clickbank sales. Commission Junction, well it's still new to me as I generally enjoy dealing with digital only products (not that CJ doesn't have them).
So, after a haitus and starting up a totally different website dealing with my first love, video games, I've decided to actually make a real change in my life and focus on YOU, the reader. If I was willing to spend hundreds of dollars and time buying stuff that really didn't work or called for unethical practices, it would have been better to buy investments, which I now also do. I also found out that past all the hype and marketing mumbo-jumbo, you really could get things done for free, and in a fairly decent quality, FOR NO MONEY.
Stocks, equities, forex, commodities, futures, are all legitimate (albeit RISKY as hell) instruments of producing wealth. You know the most famous person to do this is Warren Buffett. He says a great many things about how to invest properly, but I think the most important one is this:
BE PATIENT
Fortunes are made and lost because of that get-rich-quick emotion, and I know we've all had it, and in truth, it will never leave you. But you can control it, and bridle it in a way that will not devastate you, your finances, and life. It also applies to turnkey websites because if you are too emotionally desperate for money, it could blind you to reality, making you think a certain "niche" or keyword is too good or bad, when in fact, it's the opposite.
Now, there's nothing wrong with being desperate for money, or wanting to generate an automated income, but try to not let it dictate *all* the terms of your life.
See, notice I don't want to be pushy and tell you to buy *this and that* crap like so many other sites!
Ok, so on to... basics!
How To Use Cash Jacks
Cash Jacks is primarily a make money online site, with helpful information about how to, obviously, earn an income online through some form of automation and little work. It also hopes to encourage people to become investors because investing deals specifically with the idea of buying low and selling high, selling high and buying low (refer to investing tutorials on Cash Jacks Blog, main links), and earning a form of automatic, passive income from stocks and equities, known as "dividends".
This site covers two things, the end of the market day in the United States (Dow closes at 14000 points or whatever) and an analysis and review of various business opportunity websites online.
I use google to search the term "make money online" and check out various websites and write about them. I take note of what the good they have is, and what can be annoying and should avoided on YOUR website.
I use finance.yahoo.com, finance.google.com, and briefing.com, to check out everyday investment news and see what is going out there.
It's also fun to see how other people try to generate sales, commissions, and cashflow and maybe get some inspiring ideas (or laughs, hehe) from other people.
Hey, it's free and potentially rewarding, so why not?
Now that you know what is and how to use Cash Jacks correctly, let's move on to the basics and simplistics of having a turnkey business online that will generate (hopefully) money for you and not cost a dime.
Review: Selfprofit.com
Ok, I had a very confusing time trying to look and navigate this site (This was very likely done intentionally). You can't but help click on some of this site's ads.
Note the blend of colors and links however, it almost seemed as if it was a part of the website (which is very good).
The blog posts are written and posted in reverse order, meaning the oldest posts are displayed first, and I have no idea where the latest posts are. When I clicked the calendar to try and find it, I just wound up getting all sorts of errors.
This is an example of what to avoid when making your own business opportunity / income / retail sales website. Keep it simple, navigate-able, blend your ads and links into the rest of the website. And unless I'm mistaken, your latest posts should be displayed first, not your oldest.
I should also note that this website also uses link directories, so be sure to have them link to YOUR website to help with pagerank and turning your site into the mythical, coveted "turn-key" sales website.
As usual, get the best pagerank possible linking to your website, 3 minimum, 4 - 6 is best, 7 and higher is hard and rare, but it's worth the money (if you don't have money to buy such links, don't worry about it, don't rush things).
Monday, May 5, 2008
Shocker! Dartmouth Students Question Professors?
"Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.
Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that ..."
Full article source
Being skeptical (not to be confused with being cynical) is generally healthy and keeps you in the "real world" (this means stay in touch with reality). Be mindful of your thoughts and always question widely accepted ideas.
Bailout Education Courtesy Of Washington D.C.!
"Congratulations! You and your fellow taxpayers will soon be the proud owners of a multibillion-dollar portfolio of student loans. And a leading Member of Congress promises that this pretty bundle of debt comes to you with no cost and no risk. President Bush apparently agrees.
Recently we told you about Congress's feverish effort to clean up the mess it..."
Full article source
Another fine example of government interference causing more problems than good. When the government tries to fix one problem, "magically" more problems spawn as a result!
