On first sight you can notice that Clickbooth Advertising Network isn’t a usual affiliate network, you get the feeling that something is out of the ordinary, but what gives you the feeling that you are in a bigger safety than ever(the AES 256BIT high grade encryption also raises the safety value). To get approved as a publisher starting from the sign-up page you will have to verify your phone number, by answering the automated call(yes, a robot will call you regardless of your country and will tell you the PIN number twice) and entering the PIN number in the box. Without the PIN number you can’t continue the registration process.

This is the most strict verification method i have ever seen, you have to verify your phone number before you are approved. This lowers the fraud level substantially!

After you signed up your account will be reviewed within 72 hours after which if your account gets approved you will get a confirmation email along with a welcome email.

Your Publisher account

There are lots and lots of campaigns you can choose from and the extremely advanced campaign search will definitely help you find the appropriate campaign for your niche.

It took me less than a minute to find more than 100 campaigns that fit my blog’s niche. It’s that simple! Once you start using ClickBooth more often things will get even more easier and managing your account will be like childplay.

After you select a campaign you will be able to see all the details related to it. Here are the most important details(to you as a publisher):

Payout: You want to know precisely how much you will get paid.

Campaign description: You have to apply to the advertisers specifications and restrictions, otherwise you won’t be making much money.

Campaign limitation: Some campaigns are limited to specific countries the advertiser is targeting. For example if a campaign is limited to leads from people who live in the US you won’t apply if your website has almost no US traffic.

The stats system is also well developed and it will display in almost real time the most important data you are interested in. Compared to some other affiliate networks this with no doubt smashes the competition.

Looking for help? You’ll get it!

There is a huge help database where you will find detailed answers to the most common account type related questions. If you are looking for a bit more help don’t hesitate contacting the support team or Ashlee via email, phone or even AIM(Aol instant messenger)

Conclusion

If you read carefully what i wrote above you can say with sincerity that ClickBooth is a serious affiliate network who really cares about their advertisers and publishers, and that it’s guaranteed that you will get better performances using ClickBooth than other traditional affiliate networks.

In an older post i expressed my opinion about the new entrecard system and wrote that in my opinion how stupid it is and that they should have stayed at the previous crediting system or to think out a better one, because this just sucks.

Lots of bloggers also removed the entrecard widget mostly because of the poor quality traffic it delivers, the high prices(heck, i saw a blog with an alexa rank above 1mill with an advertising price of 256ec) and because it just uses an extra block in the side bar or in any part of the page.

I removed the widget with sadness, but i have to move on to new things. I really liked entrecard at the beginning, i think that Graham treated the project with more enthusiasm.

I still have 54 credits left on my account, which isn’t much, but still better than 0. I will give it away the credits to one of you guys who comments on this post in the next 24 hours(remember to use your entrecard email when posting the comment).

The bottom line is that entrecard can’t bring your blog quality traffic, meaning that the chance that the visitors who visit your blog from an entrecard advert will comment or become loyal subscribers of your blog.

This was it, no more entrecard for me, well not till they come up with a logical crediting system.

Entrecard earlier today changed the credit system. To be honest they did a huge mistake because this is just dumb.

Here’s how the new system works:

I see many people building a website/blog and after a short while they just give it up saying:“ahh…it’s not worth it” and start an other website thinking that one will bring them success, which won’t happen because in a short while they will find themselves in the same situation as at the first website.

If you decide to start a website or blog, or if you want to start any type of project you need to start it with confidence. You need to want your website to succeed otherwise you will treat it like a project that can be left behind. This doesn’t guarantee that your website will succeed but the chances of success will increase significantly.

Bloggers mostly give up after a short while because they see that they don’t have many RSS subscribers nor many unique visitors. Those who abandon their blogs because of this don’t know that the google bot always crawls their blogs looking for new stuff that he indexes. Even if you have 10 unique visitors/day you must not stop writing! Google will index our posts and in a short while you will get organic traffic which will constantly grow.

In my opinion you can determine if a website is worth further development after one year of activity. In that year you need to do your best to promote it, and get the max of it. If after a year you see that traffic flows in and organic traffic(from search engines) is flowing in then you hit the jackpot and you know that its worth further development. In one year you can build enough backlinks to get a solid pr 2-6 to your website and more than 3,000 hits/day(value depends on niche).

Examples

www.webarea.ro
This year on 28th april my Romanian webmaster forum will be one years old. I did my best with it, submitted it to directories/dmoz/advertised it here-and-there, did competitions, added revenue sharing, offered free hosting, did a lot of posting but it just didn’t work out. There isn’t a such big romanian audience for it. And thats why i’m closing it down next month. Its breaking my heart, but i need to move on and i will most probably start a more complex forum but in english which i think will succeed.

www.yable.net
An other example is my yable project. I bought the domain almost a year ago, back then it didn’t work out, and next month i’m starting it back up with a brand new design and features. It will be an image hosting website with cool photo editing and sharing tools that will serve social networking websites(myspace,facebook,hi5,etc) users.

The most important thing is that within the first year which i call The test year never give up and try to do anything to get things rolling. As said above if things just don’t work out than it’s time to abandon the project and start something new.

You can’t start something new if you don’t have creative ideas. Creativity plays a great role when you start up a new website, you need to offer the visitors reasons to check out your website and keep coming back.

Remember my post which contained a ping list supplied by Ernest? Well i also used that ping list and noticed that my traffic increased with almost 30%! Taking in consideration that i did almost nothing to achieve the extra traffic you can say that it’s worth it to use the ping list.

Not just pinging can increase traffic to your blog, but directories can bring a constant flow of traffic to your blog also. Not all blog directories can bring you good traffic, and it’s not worth filling your sidebar with links to blog directories which don’t get you any traffic.

Here is a list of blog directories where you should submit your blog

www.blogcatalog.com - Blog Catalog is the premiere social blog directory on the internet. Whether you’re looking to promote your own blog or find blogs on various topics, this site is for you. You can also add a Recent viewers widget to your blog which looks similar to the mybloglog one.

www.readablog.com - Read a Blog is a blog search engine which indexes feeds and gives visitors the possibilities to navigate/search trough them. Submitting your blog takes less than 20 seconds.

www.blogflux.com - Find blogs you will find interesting. Tags, categories, country, language, groups - find blogs however you want. Can bring you great traffic.

www.findingblog.com - FindingBlog.com is blog directory, featuring free blog submission and fast approval. Submit your blog to our directory, and you can easily promote your blog to hundreds of daily visitor of our site.

www.bloggeries.com - Bloggeries is a blogging portal that contains blog directory/forum and blog reviews with the possibility to get your blog rated. Reciprocal listings are free but not available every time.

www.globeofblogs.com - Globe of blogs is a huge blog directory which contains more than 65,000 blogs. They require a link-back and if you wish to use a small button than you must host it on your server.

www.blogrankings.com - Blog Rankings is a blog directory with deeplinking possibility. Getting approved usually takes 24-48 hours.

www.bloggernity.com - One of the exciting bloggers hangout and directory on the internet. Search our directory for latest news, entertainment, humour and politics issues. We get many new blog listed on our directory daily. Be sure to check out their blog.

Premium directories(you need to pay to submit your blog):

Alive blog directory - Alive web directory’s premium blog directory. Pricing starts from $59.95 /Year and $179.95/permanent listing.

Other traffic sources

Social bookmarking websites

You can get constant traffic from Social bookmarking websites, and each time it would take only 1-2 minutes of work after writing a blog post.

To ease your submission work you can use OnlyWire which will blast your content on 22 social bookmarking websites.

Blogrush widget

Blogrush.com can bring a great deal of traffic to your blog, all you need to do is register an account, enter your blog details and add the widget to your blog. Simple as that.

Entrecard widget

If you use Entrecard.com right and manage your campaigns using the smarter part of your brain than this small widget will bring you lots of traffic!

Search engine optimisation

Ofcourse, the best traffic is the organic traffic(from search engines) so remember to have seo friendly URL’s on your blog and to create a sitemap, but most importantly to update your blog constantly!

New merchants want everything to be simplified and to have the possibility to setup an online shop in just a few minutes and with no coding knowledge. For them Oscommerce or ZenCart are a no-go because to use it they need to find a web host where they need to set it up, create database, install it, get a SSL certificate, setup a payment gateway and just after that use it + its the problems that might appear on the way: payment processing problems/database errors/hosting problems. Also, if you are unexperienced with programming why hire someone to do the job, when you can do it?

If you are planning on starting an online store with remote shopping cart softwares things can’t go bad and they can’t be more simple. A great remote shopping cart provider is Ashop which is a leading provider of hosted shopping cart software. All you need to do is SIGN-UP, get the setup information by email and start your store within minutes. They also offer a 10 day trial to test out their software.

It’s like having everything at the tip of your fingers with absolutely no programming knowledge. You can manage your online store from the web-based administrator panel which is so easy to learn and once you’ve learned it adding products can be done in no time!

Don’t think that remote shopping cart software’s quality is inferior to the old fashioned self-hosted shopping cart softwares! Here you also have full flexibility meaning that you can customize your store the want! From custom store design to managing staff it’s got it all!

Remember that your main goal is to save money, yet to build a successful online business with no worries that you might encounter problems on the way.

Day by day i read quite many tech and IT blogs, not just popular ones but those that just got started and that are in the process of growing. Everyone complains that serving contextual advertisements(like adsense,bidevertiser) doesn’t earn them much money, and they aren’t yet prepared for affiliate marketing(you can’t just start a blog and from a day to other earn thousands of $, you need to invest work in it).

It doesn’t matter if you are a newbie blogger or a professional blogger, you can still earn good money from your blog. How? Really simple, by writing your opinion about a specified product. Getting paid for blogging is well known in the blogosphere and many bloggers benefit from it greatly.

If you own a blog Smorty can help you get paid to blog and create a flow of revenue just by writing your opinion. Payments are made via paypal and managing your tasks is really easy: you get to choose which service you want to review and you will get the anchor text and link you need to use to link to the advertiser.

You can earn money from putting referral links/banners on your blog and referring new bloggers. You will earn a commission from their posts.

Smorty also offers blog advertising for advertisers who can pay bloggers to write opinions about their services and by linking back to their websites.

If you think you got what it takes to generate revenue by writing your opinion than head over to smorty.com, sign up and start earning!

You are most probably aware of the offer Microsoft made to Yahoo! The offer consists in 44.6 billion $, which means 31$/1 stock. By purchasing Yahoo! Microsoft could become the most important company on the internet and its chances to compete with Google would rise, meaning that it could have the chance to become #1 in internet searching.

I am a big Google user, i have Adsense, Google accounts, Adwords, Gmail, Analytics, Feedburner accounts(i never used Blogger). I rarely use Yahoo services, except for Yahoo messenger which is running all the time when i’m online. I quit using Yahoo mail 2 years ago when i got pissed on it because many emails didn’t arrive(yahoo has a long list of blacklisted servers, and because of this the emails sent out by forums/online games/etc will never arrive)

David Drummond the Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer at Google wrote in his blog-post: Yahoo! and the future of the Internet: “We believe that the interests of Internet users come first — and should come first — as the merits of this proposed acquisition are examined and alternatives explored.”

I couldn’t agree more, but heck, i’m just a simple blogger.

Here’s My vision on how will some Yahoo! services look like if Yahoo gets bought by Microsoft:

*Disclaimer: All the images are photoshopped and they represent my vision on how some Yahoo! services might look like in the future if Yahoo! gets bought by Microsoft.

Yahoo Messenger

The guys at Microsoft will most probably integrate the Microsoft Live ID in Yahoo! messenger(the possibility to log-in using the Microsoft Live ID) and they would merge the yahoo service into the Microsoft Live service.

One MSN LIVE ID for every service on both portals( www.yahoo.com , www.msn.com ) this means that you will have the possibility to LOG-IN with a single ID on Classfields, News, music, Live messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Mybloglog, personals,sports, tech yahoo Answers, i think you got the idea of what i’m talking about.

They will most probably Tune-up the file sharing system giving users the possibility to share files and webcam/voicechat between MSN messenger and Yahoo Messenger users(this is currently not supported) .

A cool name for the Yahoo! messenger would be Yahoo Live Messenger.

I placed the Select Service button because i think it would be cool that the Yahoo/MSN users could personalize the messenger(to look like either Yahoo Messenger or Live messenger(main window/chat windows/buttons/emoticons/etc.

The ads in the bottom of yahoo messenger might get replaced with ads served by the MSN network, and Yahoo Search might be enchanced by Live search.(Why not? Isn’t that the main goal of Microsoft?, to beat Google?) The search bar provides a good amount of traffic, it’s right at the tip of the Messenger user’s finger, meaning that he can search without opening up a browser window. Also the Live words in chat windows are widely used by Yahoo messenger users. its a cool feature and to be honest i like it

Messenger Chat Window

Yahoo Messenger and LIVE messenger are two stand-alone messengers. Why not combine them?
Yahoo messenger has lack of some features that are present in Live messenger, those features would make a great addition to it.

Yahoo Mail

As stated above the yahoo ID’s might be integrated in Windows Live ID’s. This means that when logging into yahoo mail you could use your Live ID. One Windows Live Id does it all,onnects the users on both portals.

If this would get applied the most probably when signing up to yahoo mail you would have the posiblity to choose from the email domains available in the MSN network also.

The possibilities are endless. When you have a huge budget and creativity there’s absolutely no barrier.

hotmail.com Login page

If the yahoo services would be integrated in the Live services then it would most probably be specified on the hotmail login page.

Yahoo.com Footer

If Microsoft will buy Yahoo! then there’s a big chance that the Microsoft logo will appear in the footer.

If you are reading this post you are most certainly familiar with DIGG . If you are familiar with digg you should know that if you get on DIGG’s Frontpage and/or in DIGG’s Popular your traffic will go sky high, and you will get lots and lots of traffic.

Along with this a chain reaction is started: your page will be stumbled by hundreds of users, many people will blog about your post and leave trackbacks, you will gain backlinks and Technorati authority.

Want all this? Well getting there isn’t easy so try to follow the steps above and your chances on getting on DIGG frontpage or popular page will increase substantially.

The steps below are relatively simple, you just need to work everything out right:

1) Step One:

Write a KICK-ASS unique article specific to your niche. Write about what your the best at, research, combine and create the perfect article. Writing a great article may take even 10 hours or more. The better and more descriptive the article is the more users will read it. Make sure you write it in a form so everyone will understand it(if you use specific terms explain them in brackets so the readers will know what your talking about).

After you wrote the article check it again for eventual errors and misspells, after which ask a few friends to read the article and express their opinion. This is almost crucial in writing a great article, after their reviews you will know what to modify/add/remove.

After everything is done make sure your article’s title is catchy and to the point, after which submit your article to DIGG.

2) Step Two:

Ask a few of your friends(even those who reviewed it) to read and eventually digg your article, this will give you a kick-start and you will get into the HOT NEWS box on the upcoming page of the selected category.

About 12 diggs will do the job just fine and will guarantee that you will stay there for 24 hours(after 24 hours your post is removed automatically from HOT NEWS box on upcoming page) so every time when someone checks the upcoming page of the specified category they will surely see your article and the number of diggs.

Ask on webmaster forums opinions about the article and ask the users to digg your article if they like it.

The more diggs your article gets the more eye appealing it will be in the HOT NEWS box.

Simple isn’t it? You just took the 2nd step on getting your article on front page.

Don’t be to excited, the hard part is yet to come. When i mean hard part i mean the REALLY HARD PART.

3) Step Three:

In the Hot news box its all about the title, if you chose a catchy title you have big chances of getting on main page. People will check out your article and comment/digg it. Adding a DIGG THIS button to your blogpost will help you get more diggs(read further to find out why).

Remember to promote your article on forums and sites related to your niche, eventually joyn an exchange network like www.piqq.us

REMEMBER! diggs gained from exchange services are NOT legit.

If your post will get around 100 diggs it will be made popular and put on POPULAR page and Main page. By this time readers will start commenting/digging, leaving trackbacks and most importantly stumbling your page(remember digg this button) -> users who will stumble over your blogpost will digg your article(remember the chain reaction)

Once you hit the 100 diggs and your article will get on main page just see how the hundreds of diggs and comments will flow in in a VERY short period of time.

Good Luck!

Yep, its true today my friend CobraCRK told me that he got paid, he even gave me a cool printscreen from his paypal account.

I’m really glad he got paid, 1,200$ is a great amount of cash for a month. For the next month probably his earnings won’t be as big because the origin of the traffic on his site is only in a small percent US traffic.

What am i talking about here? I’m glad that he got paid…the question now is: WHEN WILL I GET PAID? lol, hopefully before Christmas(extra cash is great before christmas )

If you too got paid feel free to post a comment.