Archives for March 2008
An Update And Committing Myself to Twitter…
Some of you may have noticed that the posting schedule here has been umm…..light lately. While I’ve tried to maintain a posting schedule here of at least twice a week, circumstances have required most of my attention to be shifted towards some of my other projects that I’ve tried to get up and running.
Most of my blogging time has been committed to maintaining Hack WordPress because it brings in about 85% of my online income. For those that enjoyed my discussions on domaining and developing domain names, I’ve moved most of these types of posts to their own spot over to Slick Domains, which is the business name I operate my domain profile under. Lastly, for anyone else that has Celiac Disease (or knows someone that does) and has an interest in reading about that kind of stuff, I’ve launched a site called Gluten Free Resource. This site will house all things related to Celiac and living Gluten Free, including recipes, restaurant locations, etc.
So, that is what I’ve been up to. I’m hoping to resume my regular posting schedule here in the next couple weeks. I’m planning on discussing more of the usual topics, including Firefox 3.0, niche blogging, affiliate marketing, etc. If there is anything you want to get my take on, please post it below.
In the meantime, I’m going to be making an extra effort to keep my Twitter account up to date for anyone that wants to keep up with me. I know I wasn’t a big Twitter fan before (and its still slowly growing on me), but that has changed a little. Now that I’m managing so many things, I’ve started to really see the value of Twitter. If you’re interested, you can follow my Twitter updates from my profile page. Also, if you have a Twitter account, please post your details in a comment below so I can follow your updates as well. 
Make Money Online with TNX.net
If you are like me, you probably spend a lot of time each week looking for ways to make money online. One company I recently checked out TNX.net. TNX is a fairly new text link advertising platform designed to bring together both advertisers and publishers by offering an easy way for advertisers to get links and for publishers to make money selling links. Depending on your situation, you can actually advertise your site/blog and generate additional income at the same time, which we’ll talk about a little later. First, lets look a little bit at TNX.net from both the advertisers and publishers perspective.
Advertising with TNX
Setting up an advertising campaign is not very difficult with TNX. They provide an easy to use Ad Campaign Wizard, which is designed to make it easy for advertisers to set up their advertising campaign. With this wizard you can control where you advertise, including location, website category, Google PageRank, and Yahoo Backlinks. Once you’ve established a budget to work with, you can then figure out how many points you can purchase within your budget using their advertising calculator.
Once you’re ready, you can easily load your advertisement on to the TNX registry in one of two ways. If you have a large campaign, you can upload a text file containing your advertisements. For advertisers wanting to launch a smaller campaign (wanting under 2000 links), you can use the provided form.
Publishers earn TNX points simply by placing the provided code to display TNX text link ads on their webpages (usually in the sidebar). As text links are displayed, the publisher acquires TNX points. Each month you can take the acquired points and turn them into money in one of two ways. You can either sell them directly to TNX for a fixed price, or you can negotiate with other publishers to sell the points directly to them at your price. There is a minimum payout of $5.00 and all payments are made each month via Paypal.
The cool thing about earning points is that you can turn in part of your earned points for cash, while still reinvesting some points into advertising your website with TNX.
Other cool features:
- Find Relevant Links - TNX allows you to control who advertises with you so that you can make sure you only display relevant links.
- Earning Calculator - Get help estimating how much you can make with their earnings calculator. This calculator takes into account your Google PageRank and link popularity.
- Code Choices - TNX.net gives you the choice of using Perl or PHP code, with a variant PHP code available for caching advertisments (to reduce bandwidth and server loads).
TNX Affiliate Program
If you are interested in making money online, but aren’t interested in buying/selling links, you may want to look into the TNX affiliate program. While many similar companies have a set payout per referral, TNX gives a higher percentage back (13.3%) by allowing you to earn TNX points based upon the earnings of the people you refer.
Sound good? Ready to sign up? You can register for your free TNX account on their registration page, or check out a current promotion for 5,000 free points (to be used for advertising).
Other useful resources:
How To: Converting Kontera to Single Lines
In the past we’ve talked a bit about Kontera, which is a company that sells in-text advertising. I’ve used Kontera in the past and had some luck with them, but I found over time that it wasn’t enough income to warrant how much it annoyed some of my readers. Therefore, I ended up removing it.
With that said, I know a lot of people still continue to use Kontera as a way to make money online. If this sounds like you, you may consider making a small adjustment to your Kontera code to only display a single line, instead of the double lines people use by default. This should help your ads to blend better with your website.
In order to do this, all you need to do is make a small adjustment to the code:
var dc_single_line = 'yes';
Disclaimer: As with anything like this, you’ll want to contact Kontera before trying this to confirm it can be used for your account. This way you are not at risk of having your account banned. If your links are not underlined, there is a good chance you will get approved.
Monitoring Tech Advancements Over the Past 20 Years
It is always fun to take a look back at the past and see how far we’ve come, and that is especially true in the world of technology. Remember those huge computers that provided an amazing 640KB of RAM? Back in 1988, you’d have to take out a second mortgage on your home to get performance like that!
PC World got sick of people complaining about the price of an iPhone, so they decided to take a look back over the past 20 years and see how far we’ve come. After combing through this post you’ll probably appreciate the “cheap” prices we pay for todays technology.
Collection of Paypal Tools
Ahhh, Paypal. One of my favorite online services. What originally started as a companion for eBay to oversee the auction payment transactions has since developed into an almost all purpose tool for exchanging money online. Blogs use Paypal to receive advertising payments, domainers use it to buy/sell domain names, and many affiliates use it to make/receive payments.
With Paypal’s expanded services they offer come several new Paypal tools, which were recently covered over at MakeUseOf.com in their post about 9 tools Paypal users should know about. You’ll find all sorts of great tools, ranging from WordPress plugins, mobile services, and more!
Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 1 to Arrive Next Month?
If you’ve been following this site for awhile, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of the Thunderbird project. The software is free and very comparable to Microsoft Outlook. Ever since I first heard about Thunderbird 3.0, it instantly got my attention with the tabbed e-mails feature they were working on. Truthfully, over the past year I’d kind of forgotten about it because all Thunderbird news seemed to be bad news.
That all changed today when I began reading a post over at Ars Technica that Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 1 is due sometime in April. While it looks like the calendar integration (Lightning) will not be included with this release, there should be some good stuff in store for us.
Anyone else looking forward to this release?
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