June 2007 Archives - Slick Affiliate

Kyle’s Cove Celebrates It’s First Birthday!

By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under Miscellaneous

What a great day! It was one year ago today that I registered this domain and began the process of starting up Kyle’s Cove dot Com. Here is a quick history of my first year with this site.

Back in June of 2006, I was only a few months into my career as a blogger and was running a NFL blog on Blogger called Out of Bounds. A few months had gone by and I realized it wasn’t what I really wanted to write about. The problem is, I was having trouble deciding exactly what I would want to write about over a long period of time.

When trying to determine this blog’s name, I decided that I needed something very general in case I decided to switch what I was writing about. My first instinct was to go with Kyle’s Korner (or Kyle’s Corner), but both of the dot com versions were taken. Cove means the same thing as Corner, so I decided to go with Kyle’s Cove.

This site started out as my own corner of the blogosphere where I could talk about whatever I found interesting, but quickly found that most of my posts were covering technology, blogging, free software, and web browsers. As a result, I decided to make that my niche. Sharing my thoughts on technology, my experiences with blogging, and my knowledge of web browsers and software has taken this site to where it is today.Â Now I’m happy to say that this blog currently has roughly 325 subscribers and gets, on average, roughly 1500 page visits each day.

I couldn’t have done it without the great readers of this site!Â A special thanks to Jason Drohn, who helped keep Kyle’s Cove online last December when financial concerns caused me to briefly take it offline, and to my readers for the comments that help keep me motivated to keep writing and trying to improve this site on a day-to-day basis.

Hopefully with a little luck I’ll still be around a year from now to celebrate this domain’s second birthday!

Technology Talk – 06/30/2007

By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under Technology

Wow, is the iPhone coverage crazy or what?Â Â I’ve always been considered by my friends and family to be a bit of a “gadget honk,” but cell phones have never really been my thing.Â Â It’s either that, the required Cingular contract, or the lack of buttons (I need buttons!) on the iPhone that has taken away any interest I might have had in acquiring one.Â

With that said, I’m proud to announce that today’s technology talk will not cover anything related to the iPhone!Â

Mashable covers a nice new Facebook StumbleUpon application.Â Â I’ve already added this application to my Facebook page and linked it to my account.Â Mashable also has a nice offering of 230+ keyboard shortcuts for top web services that I found useful.
Smashing Magazine offers a huge list of WordPress tutorialsÂ that many will find useful.Â
Nirmal offers great tips on how to create a poll for your blog.Â Before switching to WordPress (where you can just use a plugin), this was something I often struggled with.Â Â He also covers the importance of e-mail subscription services.Â
The Office Google Adsense blog has more information about their launch of referrals 2.0.Â Â I think this is going to be really popular and a great way for people to use only referrals that fit their niche.Â

Blogging Tip: Promote Your Content with FeedFlare

By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under Blogging, Web Design

Have you ever put a lot of really hard work into a post, then sat back and waited for the traffic to come pooring in, only to be disappointed with your relatively unnoticed post? Or maybe some of your best work goes unnoticed, while a post you spent 5-10 minutes writing gets dugg and bookmarked into oblivion. This seems to be the nature of blogging (especially at the beginning), but there are a few things you can do to help promote your content.

Social Buttons – For WordPress users, these are very easy to add. Simply grab a social bookmarking plugin (Share This, Sociable, and Notable will all work) and you’re done! For other bloggers, or WordPress users that want to create a custom look for the social buttons, refer to my post entitled How to: Add Social Bookmarking Links with Icons. Having these buttons serve two purposes. The first, is to remind your readers that they have the option of recommending this post to others, or to save it for future reference. The second purpose is to make it really easy for your readers to do so. If you only go with a few, the three most important are Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. These 3 will be used the most and bring you the most traffic.
Feedburner’s Feedflare – This has a similar effect to the social buttons, except it applies to your site’s feed. If you use a Feedburner feed, you can enable the feedflare feature in your control panel and select which services you would like promote in your feed. Dosh Dosh has created two great posts to help with this, covering 15 Feedburner Feedflares You Should Use and How to Create Your Own Feedflare. Once set up and running, this will allow those that never visit your website to also help promote your content.

If you use both of these approaches to promote your content, you should see a significant improvement over time with the number of referrals from social bookmarking sites and services.

Any I missed? Feel free to add them in the comments below!

Agloco Addresses Revenue and Cash Payouts

By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under Make Money Online

Agloco seems to be one of those companies who you either love or hate. Many people feel it’s a company destined to fail, while others like John Chow seem to believe in it. For those of you unfamiliar with Agloco, a couple of weeks ago I did a post about Making Money Online with Agloco, which covers the basics of what the service is and how the service works.

Agloco addressed the skeptics today, with this really long post about revenue and cash payouts, along with more information about the early problems the service experienced with the release of their Viewbar.

In order to reach profitability quickly (which is necessary to make cash distributions to Members – as I will detail below), we keep AGLOCO expenses to a minimum. Many of you make great suggestions for improvements we could make to AGLOCO, but unfortunately they are not yet in our affordable budget. We have tried to implement the less costly improvements while recognizing that the major changes will have to wait longer. We do hear all of your suggestions, but AGLOCO needs to become sustainable and make Member distributions as fast as possible. To keep expenses low, for example, in the year or so we have been working on AGLOCO, no development team member has been paid for their work (not to mention that some of you have been working very hard to help build AGLOCO as well and have not yet received the rewards of that work either). And with that we are turning our attention to revenue (and distributions to members).

Members often ask when they will be paid by AGLOCO, and how much they will be paid. I must admit that I have a bit of hesitation to address this issue, only because I do not want Members to misunderstand anything I say and/or take it as a â€œpromise or predictionâ€ of what AGLOCO will exactly do in the future. So, I will write the following with the disclaimer that everything I say below, specifically regarding when Members will be paid or how much, is only an illustration and does not constitute a promise of any sort. Capiche? Capiche.

I’m not sure if reading their post has me more assured or uncomfortable with the service.Â Â The release of their Viewbar was definitely a success, but the slow load times with their website and other problems have caused many to lose confidence in the program.Â At this point, most people surf the Internet anyway, so it’s not really costing you anything to use the service and “earn money.”Â If you’re interested in signing up, you can easily sign up here and download the Viewbar.

Do you think Agloco will make it?

Thunderbird to Get Tabs!

By Kyle Eslick | Filed Under Free Software

Since the recent release of Thunderbird 2.0, there has been rampant speculation about the features in Thunderbird 3.0. The most anticipated feature is something that I’m not aware of any other e-mail services having, and that is Firefox-style tabs. I was happy to see today that now it has finally been confirmed that the ability to open messages in tabs has been added to Thunderbird in-development code. Mozilla Links has provided this screenshot showing how the tabs currently look:

How sweet will this be? This is something that will give desktop e-mail users a good reason to finally make that switch from Microsoft Office. I currently use both in some form, but I think I could permanently switch to Thunderbird with this addition.

In other Thunderbird news, the Firefox Extension Guru offers tips on how to access Thunderbird’s About Config.

Technology Talk – 06/27/2007