Daily Archives: June 30, 2011

After working for the State of Texas for 30 years, I retired on Thursday, May 25, 2006, at 2:00 pm. Little did I know that this day would become very significant in my future. For the past six months, I had been counting the number of days until “the big day” when I could go home and rest. I started working when I was 18, and I retired when I was 50! So yes, it was time for a break. I felt that it was time for me to start enjoying life — because you never know what the future holds. At 2:30 pm (just 30 minutes after retiring) my doctor told me that he suspected that I had breast cancer; he wasn’t sure 100%; but it appeared more likely than not. A few days later, it was confirmed. I just sank into this black hole. In June, I had two surgeries, followed by six weeks of radiation. After five years, I finally began to emerge from that hole. In August, 2010, I worked for a temporary agency, on a job that lasted 30 days. This challenge was enough to boost my confidence, and let me know that ” I still had it’.

I started applying for jobs online, but never received a response. The recession was becoming worse, daily. Then I turned my attention to searching for a work-at-home-job. In invested hundreds of dollars, trying to find my perfect job I would receive at least 20 different emails daily, from companies who wanted me to choose their programs. Then one day in April, 2011, I saw a job in which I was interested: affiliate marketing.

Of all the online jobs, affiliate marketing seems to be the least complicated, and most promising. In affiliate marketing you will serve as a human “billboard” for other companies. The foundation for this business is that you will make money by driving traffic (visitors) to other websites. You make a commission whenever a visitor goes to this particular site and takes action. If the visitor buys something, or signs up for something, or clicks on an affiliate’s ad, then you are paid a commission for generating a “lead” (prospective customer) to that company.

There are two approaches to affiliate marketing. One approach is as a retailer who sells tangible products. Tangible products are items that you buy online, and the product is shipped to a designated location. (An example is like buying a book on Amazon.com.) The second approach is, as a retailer who sells electronic products. Electronic products are downloadable; you make a purchase, and you are instantly emailed download instructions. (An example is like buying an eBook on ClickBank.) You simply click on the provided space in the email, and you can download and read the material on your computer screen, or you can print a hardcopy, and read it later.

I chose to start with the electronic products, because it is much simpler that the tangible products: there is no order-processing; no shipping and handling products; no collecting money; no processing returns, etc. Because of these responsibilities, the tangible products have a narrower profit margin. This is another reason why I chose electronic, over tangible — less hassle, more money.

Article source: http://ezinearticles.com/6383502

There are a lot of different ways when it comes to earning money online, but I’m here to suggest that affiliate marketing is the best way to make money online. Consider these three reasons for why affiliate marketing is the best way to make money online.

First off, with affiliate marketing, you can promote virtually anything you can think of and make money from it. This is much of why it’s the best way of how to make money online because you’re literally taking what you love and turning it into your paycheck. This is because there are affiliate programs and offers tied to most niches so there is always something always out there which you can promote. This makes making money fun and much easier to stay motivated while you are doing it. Additionally, it’s much easier when you’re writing about something which you already know about.

Secondly, the harder you work in affiliate marketing, the more money which you will make. There is no limit to how much money you can make, and it’s very simple to replicate your success once you find something which works for you. You can move from one niche into another and apply the same tactics which you used to generate traffic and make money in that first niche to the second niche, so this is an infinitely scalable business and way to make money online.

I don’t know of a lot of other careers where literally the harder you work it translates into more money. Most careers I have had before this one I could work my fingers to the bone and never see any kind of incentive coming my way.

Finally, with affiliate marketing you are your own boss. You set your own hours, decide what it is that you want to promote and how you want to promote it, and you don’t have any specific deadlines or anyone breathing down your neck.

With affiliate marketing you’re not just making money for yourself but you’re earning time, as well. This means you have the time and money to do what you want to do when you want to do it and that’s a very important distinction to make because I would rather make a decent amount of money and have time to enjoy it as opposed to making a lot of money and not being able to enjoy because I’m so busy making it. Much of affiliate marketing can even be automated once you reach a certain point, as well.

Article source: http://ezinearticles.com/6387549

Google offers so many different products and services that one wonders how even the engineers at the Googleplex keep track of them. The search company just launched a new one that taps into everything, though. Dubbed “What Do You Love,” users can search for anything and see what pops up specifically from Google’s many different resources.

You’ll find the new service at http://www.wdyl.com/. If you’ve ever used a search engine, you’ll have no problem with the interface. Just put your answer to the question “What do you love?” in the search box and click on the blue button with the white heart. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land popped in “email” and was surprised that “Gmail is the second to last option on the right column.” He figured it would return Gmail as a top listing.

Intrigued, I tried putting in “video,” figuring that YouTube would come back near the top. I did better than Schwartz, but not quite as well as I expected. I got a three-column return, just like Schwartz, with Trend, Sketchup, and Product Search as the top three results. Product Search didn’t even find anything, which apparently made it feel a bit inadequate; it gave the message “What if we told you we didn’t find anything? Still friends? Try simpler terms.” YouTube showed up as the third result in the right-hand column, with the statement “Watch videos of video on YouTube.”

Let me offer a quick word about what you see after you click for results. As I mentioned, there’s a three-column layout, with each Google service in its own little box. The box offers an image of the service, links to it at both the top and the bottom of the box, and a headline. Sometimes you even get a little more than that.

For example, for Sketchup, in addition to the “Explore video in 3D with SketchUp” headline, the image (in this case, of little green men in front of a spaceship) is clickable, as if it’s a video all by itself. By the way, if you search for the same thing more than once, the order changes. For Picasa and some of the other services, at the bottom right within the box, I saw a pair of clickable arrows in buttons. Clicking on the arrows changed the image.

All the way over on the left, you’ll see a small set of gray boxes with the outline of a blue rectangle around six of them. This is how WDYL lets you know where you are in your list of results. Scroll up or down, and the rectangle moves with it. Under this part of the interface, you may see the word “Share.” I did, followed by an You may also see an “m” icon in red. This is the icon for Gmail, and clicking it opened a new tab which loaded Gmail and gave me a full-browser Gmail message with the subject line “Hey this is awesomely awesome.”

The body of the message, after I’d typed in a search for “food” (hey, it was mid-afternoon, time for a snack), read “So you type in something you love like ‘food’ and it automatically gives you a map of nearby food, lists of books about food, blogs about food, 3D models of food, recent food videos, discussions about food…everything. It’s like a ‘wonderful things dashboard’ http://goo.gl/p105P.” The link given, which is NOT live in the email, just takes you to the home page of WDYL, but you can be that Google tracks it in some way.

Below the Gmail icon I also saw an icon for Google Buzz; clicking that took me to a page where I had the option to try Google Buzz by posting about WDYL, or clicking the “no thanks” link.

I love that the images that come up when you do a search on WDYL are often very relevant. When I searched for “crochet,” Picasa showed an adorable amigurumi, and all of the thumbnails in the Image Search box were clearly of crocheted items. The YouTube box encouraged me to “Watch Videos of Crochet” with a clickable video that was clearly on topic. All of the books that came up under Google’s Book service included “crochet” in the title. The latest news about crochet included a small but understandable mistake: it included a headline for a Marine Corps officer being commissioned. The officer’s name was Grant Crochet.

I hate to sound like I’m gushing here, but I think that this new service is ridiculously cool – and frankly, it’s about time that Google created something like this. It gives users the opportunity to take whatever they’re passionate about and see how Google’s other services and features let them pursue it in a dozen different ways. I found plenty of Google services I didn’t even know about, and I’m sure my experience was not unique.

I wonder if Google is hoping that visitors will give WDYL a try and then not check out the competing sites in each category. For instance, after a WDYL search on their favorite topic, would they start a blog about their passion with Blogger rather than WordPress? Might they look for books about it through Google Books rather than Amazon? We’ll have to wait and see. Right now, it’s just a neat-looking service with the kinds of minor bugs you might expect from a beta release. I think it’s also an educational PR move – a clever way to let users know about the full range of Google’s offerings. What users do with that knowledge is up to them. 

More Google Optimization Articles
More By Terri Wells

Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/WDYL-Searches-All-Google-Services/