Feed It Forward: Free $10 Restaurant.com Gift Card
Nov 30, 2008 Free Stuff
What’s the catch? It’s for your friends. And you can give up to three per day. Cool, huh? Makes taking care of Christmas shopping for that crazy aunt easier…
Don’t worry, if your friends are really friends, they’ll send you one as well.
All you have to do is go to the Feed it Forward site and sign up (yes, it’s free), enter three names (and email addresses) and Restaurant.com does the rest.
Happy holidays!
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Making Your Blog More Social With Twitter Tools
Nov 28, 2008 Blogging, twitter
I’ve been playing around more and more with trying to make this blog more socially acceptable. OK, maybe I said that wrong…what I meant was that I needed to try to get this blog to make use of social networks.
For a while, I’ve had accounts at Facebook and MySpace (both personal and for my…er…musical project) and more recently, Twitter. As a Twitter user, I’ve seen that other bloggers had some cool things going on, like posting a tweet whenever a new blog post was made. That seemed like a great feature, so I figured that I should do the same. The problem was that I was manually posting tweets, which means that I was working more than other bloggers to accomplish the same thing…and that sucks. Not to mention that since I’ve finally figured out how to time stamp my posts (so that something gets blogged when I’m on the road with my job), I wasn’t able to send a ‘new post’ tweet when things got posted.
And that’s when I started to look for a plug-in that would do the job for me. I think I’ve found one that should do the trick.
Twitter Tools is a great plugin made by Alex King which can help integrate Twitter functionality into your blog…or something. Forgive my crappy sales pitch, I’m fighting off a cold…yeah, like that’s an excuse…heh.
Anyway, Twitter Tools (which can be downloaded here) lets me post tweets whenever a new post is eh, posted. I can also post tweets from my blog (while working on it…heh), feature my latests tweets on my home page, and even automatically make a blog post out of compiled tweets. I’m probably forgetting some other features of this tool, so you should just give the thing a try.
I’m not an SEO genius, and I usually ignore blog tweaks and stuff that sound complicated. I tend to like the ‘quick and dirty’ methods for things (which is no substitue for hard work). But hey, I’m not about following every single blogging rule…
So go check out Twitter Tools and get your blog twitterpated. Or something.
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Tags: social networking, twitter, twitter tools
Encouraging Rebellion
Nov 24, 2008 Funny
This past weekend we had a garage sale here at the infamous garage. After the cash was split between the two parties, my wife came out with about $75 bucks (we didn’t sell everything) and I gave her the $5 I made of my one sale. Not too bad.
But do you know what the best part was?
Some kids from the neighborhood were looking around at the miscellaneous computer junk I had out there, talking about computer stuff. They were all around 12 years old, give or take.
I heard some wise words of wisdom from one of them.
“Vista sucks!”
Right on! A smart kid! So what did I do to reward this knowledge?
I gave him and his friend each a copy of Ubuntu Linux.
Yeah, I’m a nerd. What have you done to encourage learning and education in YOUR neighborhood lately?
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Tags: ubuntu linux
AcoBox: Free Images for Your Blog
Nov 21, 2008 Sponsored Posts
I know, I know, I probably do not use nearly as many pictures on this blog as I should. I’ve been meaning to do that, but with the short amount of time that I have to work on the site and the desire to deliver content over aesthetics (which should be totally obvious) it tends to slip my mind. I do need to work on it.
With that in mind, I’ve found a new site that features free, high quality images for your website or blog. AcoBox is a new service that allows you to hot link their content, which is intended to be used as blog pictures by you, the ever-searching-for-the-right-photo blogger.
What does this mean for you? Simple: less footwork trying to find the right photo, and you can save your precious bandwidth for something more important - your blogs traffic.
Well, what about licensing?
No problem AcoBox photos are all optimized and properly licensed for public use (so you do not have to worry about those pesky cease and desist orders). Oh! One other feature that I find pretty awesome is that they can allow you to select the size of the image you are using! That’s pretty awesome for people like me who are just too lazy to tweak the image link by hand…
AcoBox is a nice program with an easy to use site, and it’s loaded with cool pictures for your blog. I recommend checking them out. Hey, I did it, you should too!
*Sponsored Post
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Tags: acobox, blog pictures
Why Spend Money to Make Money?
Nov 16, 2008 Blogging
“It takes money to make money.”
How many times have you heard this in the course of your online money making career? Do I even need to ask that question? We all know that it’s a common mantra that is used far too often. For me, it’s almost nauseating to think that there are people out there who believe that this is a set-in-stone fact of life. There is no law (unwritten or otherwise) that says that you must spend any money in order to put cash into your pocket. Sure, investing in a plan can be a good thing, and there are plenty of ways to make your money work for you to put a nice fat wad of bills in the storage space on your right (or left) butt-cheek protector. But to believe the false statement that you MUST spend your cash to make money is an outright lie by someone who simply wants you to invest in THEIR program.
Are you serious? I think you are lying…
When I started this blog (about a year ago), my goals were simple: make some money without investing squat. To be fair, yes, I have purchased a couple of domain names, but really that’s all I’ve spent in this whole venture. But I can tell you this: I earned the money I used for the domain names from this blog BEFORE I invested any of that on anything. That’s right! I was able to make money online without investing one red cent! I’ll be honest, it wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to do, since I didn’t know anything at all about what methods I would use to pull it off. I had no decent hosting, no domain name, and no clue about where to find programs to make money. That’s when I decided to get sneaky and Google my way to the cash.
In the beginning…
I knew that no matter which method I used to make money, I would need a website or a blog. In the past, I had built several sites (none of which were very fancy, a couple of which were a touch on the darker side of the internet - no, not those kind…they were ’security sites’) but after much consideration, I decided to give WordPress a spin, since I had been hearing great things about it. The problem was that I couldn’t afford to pay for hosting, so I set up a blog on WordPress.com. I found that it was very easy to learn to use, and that I could get some really awesome looking designs for my blog without having to hack away at HTML all night (as I had become accustomed to doing). The problem, as I would soon find out, was that they didn’t allow sponsored posts or many different forms of moneymaking.
Learning to adapt…
Well, crap. I had the blog, but I had no way (that I knew of) to make money without getting banned from WP. Then, as luck would have it, I noticed something on a few of the other blogs that I was reading that were also hosted on WP:
*this is a sp0_s0_ed post (or some variation of that text string)
That was a bit odd…why would they be changing up the words? Then, as the gears in my head figured it out, I realized that it was to HIDE the fact that they were getting paid while still indicating to their readers that it was a paid post. This is where the lightbulb appeared above my head.
I started checking the web for good programs that would pay me to make posts on my own site. The first two that I found were ReviewMe and PayPerPost - and I promptly signed up for both sites and patiently waited for that first paid post to come around. When I took the first offer, I made my post and used the obfuscation trick that I had seen, and submitted my post for approval.
It worked.
That was a cool feeling. But what would happen if WordPress.com caught on?
Eventually, I got to the point that I was thinking they wouldn’t really care. I mean, they hadn’t cared yet…so I decided to stop the obfuscation of the ‘I make money with this post’ stuff. Pretty soon, I received a warning asking me to remove the post.
What could I do? I was waiting to get paid…and I sure didn’t want to lose my blog to the rules of WP. My old hacker nature got curious…I wonder if they check these posts by hand…so I re-wrote the disclosure, complete with obfuscated characters.
It worked again.
Wow. I mean, really…checking posts for compliance with a script? That’s so free hosting-ish…
Armed with that little bit of knowledge, I proceeded to make paid posts on my WordPress.com blog…carefully.
Eventually I moved the blog to some better hosting that was donated by my brother in law, and then the whole ballgame evolved…which I will cover in another post!
Be sure to stay tuned to learn how I made even more money without investing a freaking cent!
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Tags: advice, making money online, Money, no investment, paid posts
