Zuckerberg was said to have announced that March 15 would be the day that all Facebook users would start living without Facebook. Users will longer be able to access their Facebook accounts on March 15, and you’re advisable to download those treasured pictures, videos and messages of you and your friends on your Facebook account, save it on your computer so you can view them again when you want.

Many Facebook users have started to worry about this. Some users have been spending almost 10 hours a day on Facebook, it’s almost occupying more than their actual live. Look at it, if you spend 8 hours to sleep a day, you’ve got left with 16 hours for the day. If you really spend about 10 hours a day on Facebook, then you’ll have only 6 hours for your work or school. So, is this healthy? Some parents who’re not so computer or Internet literated may love to hear that Facebook to shutdown this March, as their children could be returning to them, having more time to spend with parents instead of sitting in front the PC for their Facebook friends.

Facts to support that Facebook will never shutdown
1. Facebook is worth $7.9 billion – In business point of view, Facebook will definitely not shut down, as it’s one of the most profitable online businesses out there. Facebook is currently ranked as one of the wealthiest businesses in the world, with economists estimating its value at around $7.9 billion. With a value of 7.9 billion, do you think Facebook can easily shut down like that, just because of Mark Zuckerberg does not want more stress?

2. Facebook has just got $500 million USD investment from Goldman Sachs – With the new $500 million investment, what is Facebook going to do with it? For sure, the investment by Goldman Sachs will not let Facebook shut down. Apparently, an opinion piece published on CNN said that the recent Goldman Sachs investment was the “beginning of the end” for Facebook, has gone so viral and caused many worried Facebook users and others to spread the words and make it more and more viral.

3. Will Facebook let the 500 million users down? Facebook currently has more than 500 million users, will it just shut down like that? If Zuckerberg is too tired of managing Facebook but he can take a rest for months or step down as a Facebook CEO and let some other talents manage Facebook if he can’t. You can even say Facebook is not only the business of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees, it’s the business of the 500 million of Facebook users. So, no worry, you do not have to start backing up your “Facebook assets” now, Facebook will definitely not shut down!

via techchee huffingtonpost weeklyworldnews

If you’re serious in making a constant monthly income from being affiliates of CPA networks, you should be looking for a monthly figure around a couple of thousands of USD. What about a figure that is £2,000 or about $3,010 USD per month on average? Yes, this is a significant figure which is able to contribute to your monthly bills, vehicle payment and even house mortgage installment.

In order to make that amount of serious money from affiliate marketing, you’ll have to write blog posts for advertisers’ products that are interesting. Using something like CJ is definitely a painful process. As mentioned, if you’ve found an advertiser that offers interesting products in the field that you’re interested in but if you’re not yet the approved affiliate, you’ll have to first apply for an approval of becoming the affiliate. Usually, this will take days or weeks for the advertiser to approve your blog, especially, if you have not yet got a super popular blog.

Please also note that, in order to make that significant amount of money, you’ll have to choose a particular interest or industry and keep churning out blog posts about the products of those advertisers in your area of interest. Lets take an example, if you’re interested in gadgets or technology, you’ll need to write blog posts that cover various gadgets in a consistent manner. But with the cumbersome process of CJ or other affiliate networks, having to apply for the approval to become an affiliate, you’ll have run out of idea on the few interesting products on an advertiser’s website after the advertiser has approved your affiliate status. So, you’ll want a much easier to do that, where you do NOT have to ask for approval and you’ll just need to continue search through many advertisers and keep churning out blog posts with their interesting products. The answer to what you need to work with is Skimlinks.

Skimlinks is basically the middleman that glues advertisers and publishers together, and the best it contains a huge database of advertisers that you just need to search through and you do not have to apply for any one of them to become the affiliate.

The only process is you apply for a Skimlinks account and submit your blog for approval and paste a JavaScript code on your blog, then you’re good to go to make money from lots of advertisers in the Skimlinks database.

Searching through Skimlinks’ database is also super easy, which is categorized by industries and it shows you how much commission each advertiser offers. What I usually do with Skimlinks, e.g. is going to any of the advertiser website, find an interesting product, write a short introductory blog post or ask a product and write a longer review for it and place a hyperlink over words of calling for actions or just simple hyperlink back to the product page. Whenever your reader or someone from search engines has arrived on your blog post and he or she clicks on the product link or call to action link in the blog post and gets directed to the product page and then buys the product, you’ll get the commission.

As simple as that, and you do not have to bother of inserting any affiliate code in the product or call-to-action hyperlink. Skimlinks does it all for you using JavaScript. And you’ll be paid with commission by Skimlinks once someone buys a product from the advertiser via your blog post.

Furthermore, I’ve found Skimlinks very useful with its user-friendly search for advertisers, so I can browse on those many advertisers’ websites and choose any products that I’ve found interesting and write blog posts to cover them instantly – this also helps ensure that I’ll never forget or run out of idea, so I can right away churn out a blog post by simply placing a hyperlink back to the product page or with some words of calling to action. And it even serves as a resource tool for me to keep finding more interesting advertisers or companies that offer interesting products which also helps ensure I’ll never run out of information for me to write for my blog. Using this method, I’m almost making somewhere close to $3K USD a month!

1. Using servcie such as NetworkedBlogs – NetworkedBlogs works as a plugin service in Facebook which is able to fetch the RSS Feed of your blog and automatically publish your blog posts on your FB’s profile page when a new blog post is published on your blog, so your FB friends will also get to see what you’ve just published and go to your blog post to read the interesting contents. The NetworkedBlog on FB is very easy to setup, regardless whether you have a self-hosted WordPress blog or a service-hosted Blogspot blog.

2. Adding a Facebook share or like button to your blog post While NetworkedBlog automatically publishes your blog posts and those friends interested will click your blog posts that appear on their or your Profile page, and come to your blog to read your full blog post. In order for your friends who have come from FB to share or like your blog post, you just need to add a Facebook Share or like button at the end of the blog post, so they can click and share on their FB profiles and their friends will be notified and getting a chance to read your blog post. And this can go viral, imagine, your friends share your blog posts on their FB, friends of your friends continue to share the blog posts on FB…. this will definitely bring a significant amount of traffic to your blog that will eventually turn into long-term readers.

3. Create a Facebook Fan page for your blog It’s also great to create a FB fan page for your blog, which you’ll need to place a badge at the bottom or side of your blog which shows the number of fans you have. And through your FB fan page, you can make some announcements and you have your blog posts published on the FB fan page, which is also subsequently shown on the FB profile of the fans of your blog. And of course, they’ll be attracted and drawn to your blog which will then share or like your blog posts and getting them to go viral through their circles of friends or friends of friends.

Since he has lots of contents to be added to the website and he wants better visibility over search engines such as Google, I’ve then suggested that it’s better to launch a blog instead of just an ordinary website with 5 reasons as follows:

1. Blog is apparently easier to maintain than an ordinary website. As blog is specially designed to allow you to keep adding and publishing contents. It’s a content publishing platform where you can easily write texts and upload images. And you can design your blog template (such as WordPress template) to look like a corporate or company website. E.g WordPress, you can have your information pages added as “Page”, while continuous coming information is to be added as “blog post”.

2. Blog is liked by Google and other blog search engines Yes, blog is apparently much faster to be indexed by Google than an ordinary website, which you just need to have some incoming links from some relevant websites or blogs to get started. And when you write a blog post, it’ll ping or notify Blog search engines, such as Google Blog search or Technorati, which will have your blog posts indexed in these blog search engines or directories, which could bring you hundreds or thousands of visitors per day as they accumulate tons of searches by Internet users everyday.

3. Blog comes with Plugins allowing your website or blog to get indexed by major search engines fast If you run a wordpress blog, you’ll have a handful of plugins such as XML Sitemap generator and SEO plugin that allow your blog to be structured properly to be submitted to various “Webmaster tools” of major search engines such as Google Webmaster Tools. And the SEO plugin also ensures your web pages or blog posts properly structured with title and description meta tags.

4. Blog is the only platform that you need to publish and distribute contents to your customers or subscribers. Blog comes with tools or plugins allowing your customers to easily subscribe to your new contents via RSS feeds or email subscription. Whereas for an ordinary website, you’ll have to spend extra money to get an email newsletter platform and you’ll have to re-enter your content into your newsletter for sending to your existing customers or subscribers. In short, blog serves as a single platform that allows your contents to be published for the public and sent to your existing customers or subscribers in a much more maintainable way than an ordinary website is.

5. Publishing a new blog post allowing you to get your subscribers or readers to come back. You’ll have a number of subscribers or readers over times with your blog, since they’re subscribed to your blog posts via email or RSS feed. They’ll be the “loyal” traffic to your blog or website, every time you have new information or contents.

So, after reading this, if your intention is to kick start a website and get indexed ASAP by Google, you should then launch a blog that serves as a single platform which kills two birds with one stone. If you have any comments or disagree, please feel free to comment below.

Thanks to Gideon Shalwick, who has published a video that shows you his top 7 tips of setting up a mailing list. The video is included at the end of this blog post. The 7 tips are summarized as follows, in case you have not had too much time to view video.

1. Increase value of the thing you give away As we’ve told you to get someone to sign up, you have to give away something such as a free e-book, a useful software or reports. So you’ll have to find a way how may the things you’re gonna give away useful.

2. Have a news letter sign-up on your blog Just like what we’ve done on this blog, now you can sign up to our news letter, which we use AWeber service to deliver the newsletter to you!

3. Have lightbox hover on your blog – While you’re configuring your Aweber subscription web form, choose the “lightbox hover”, as this will at least double your opt-in rate as what we’ve just done here.

4. Use ultimate footer ad – Use pop up ad at the footer that draws attentions of others to sign up.

5. Get sign-up from blog commentators – use WordPress plugin called Optin Comments to get your commentators to sign up.

6. Get signups from RSS readers Add to feed footer to get your subscribers to sign up

7. Get signups from Facebook Create a Facebook Fan Page, add your subscription form in your fan page and turns those fans into your mailing list subscribers.

And watch the video below for more information!

1. Whether you’re running a blog or an online store, it’s best to capture the emails of your visitors as well as their names. Even though you’re running an online store, the visitor may not buy from you right away on his or her first visit. But you’ve managed to capture his or her name and email, you’ll be able to reach them by sending any of your future promotions or new products, which will then turn into sales.

2. Use service like AWeber.com to build your mailing list. If you’ve been running a blog, you may have been used to using FeedBurner to get people to subscribe using their emails. But the problem with FeedBurner is it never takes the name of the subscriber. With only email that FeedBurner captures, you can’t personalize the email such as by calling the person with his or her name which proves to be more appealing to get the newsletter opened. AWeber starts at $19 per month if you have a mailing list less than 500 subscribers.

3. How big your mailing list needs to be in order to make lucrative income from the Internet? (whether you’re doing affiliate blogging, your own online store etc). People like John Chow having a list of 100 over thousands, which earns him about $50K USD a month. But this list sounds very far away from being achievable if you’re a beginner. But a list of 5,000 subscribers could be lot easier, and having such a 5K-list sounds pretty promising of allowing the earning of $100K USD a year, which has been proven by Yee Shun Jian, having made that much from being a number of affiliates of CJ, Clickbank and Amazon etc!

4. Of course, to build a 5k-list, it’s definitely not easy at all. You’ve gotta have something free to attract people to subscribe, and it’s being built day by day. If you’re able to write good e-books, you can offer a copy or more to your visitors for free after they’ve entered bith their name and email and subscribed your newsletter!

Such a tool that helps you manage your customers is generally called CRM (Customer Relationship Management system). If you want a free one or one that allows you to manage your customers wherever you go, the FreeCRM is a great choice. FreeChoice in a nutshell provides you the following features.

And they offer two versions, Free and Pro which you can sign up online. If you do not wanna see some banner ads, go for the Pro version which starts at $15 per month dependent the level of supports. And the Pro version has SSL encryption for the web access that ensures your data transmitted over the web is highly secure.

Now FreeCRM even offers Business Web Hosting, which they allow you who has a Pro account with them to integrate business-class domain hosting, so you can host your business web site, have your email accounts under your own business domain name, and FreeCRM has also integrated e-commerce, social networking and easy web design template features to let you more easily promote your Internet business online. Read more about it here.

The idea of creating niche web stores is to sell niche products online that have little competitors. But it’ll not be an easy way to setup a niche store. You’ll need to be concerned and consider the following 5 factors:

1. What niche products are niche enough and will make you lots of money online? Since you wanna make money online, you’ll of course wanna make at least $1,000 as a side income or even more up to $10,000 which you can make a living and quit your day job. So, the very first thing you need to know, what niches that are popular and attract sales and bring you with tons of money online.

2. How to I find suppliers/wholesalers for those niche products or do I need to keep stock for them? – This is crucial. Since you’re talking about selling niche products online. Lets say you’ve found your niches e.g. selling Water purifiers online. But you need to find suppliers to supply you with the products. And you’ll probably need a small store to keep these products. And of course the best is you could find some suppliers that would drop ship those products for you, so you do NOT have to keep any stock and keep your costs at minimal. But how to do that? This is the big question.

3. So now you have your niche products, then how to setup the niche web store? Well, you do not wanna spend another couple thousands of dollars to get someone to build a web store for you. This is a web store that you plan to make some money online. The initial control of your costs is crucial, so you won’t overspend and will see ROI (return of investment) in just a few weeks’ or months’ time. So, you’ll need a niche web store that is well designed and cost effective enough to you to start rolling out your niche products online.

4. Now I need traffic for my niche stores – Yes, you need traffic to convert into leads, so you can generate money online from your niche products. Of course, you can make use of PPC advertising such as Google AdWords. But if you aren’t careful on how to control your budget or how to exercise the best keywords to rank well in Google with higher CTR, you’ll then easily burn your own butt.

So you should learn a way to master the skills to create keywords and write effective ad campaign on adwords that will generate huge sales for you. And also the best is you could build more Organic Traffic or search engine traffic by building incoming links and to get your website to rank well on search engines that will bring in lots of sales for you.

5. Now, you have all the above set up properly. You’ll need solid knowledge on how to take order, accept credit cards and ship your products to your customers. – This is the most crucial part of your niche store. Since now you have sales, so you need to know the fulfillment part which will make your niche store a long-term money generator for you and your family. So you must fulfill every sale you capture and also add some effort of supporting your customers online in order for your business to stay long term.

So, now you need some simple tools in order to get the above 5 factors going well to make your niche stores successful. The reason that you need some simple tools is of course, you’re most likely to do everything on your own as to maintain cost as low as possible. And you want quick profit/result to show and less time to maintain the niche store, so you could have more time with your family and friends.

In order to cope with all the 5 factors mentioned above, you just need one tool i.e. The simple tools bundled – Niche Blueprint 2.0 – The Niche Blueprint 2.0 is one of the effective packages that bundles a couple of effective tools and information to get you going well with the above 5 factors that determine your success in your e-commerce nice store.

The 5 tools that Niche Blueprint 2.0 bundles are as follows:

1. Discover Niches tool – This helps you in factor 1, as you do NOT know what popular niches to sell over the Internet. The Niche Blueprint 2.0 has this great tool that helps you discover what niches to rank and sell well over the Internet.

2. Dropship Blueprint – Now you know your niche. You’ll need suppliers for your niche. And you do NOT want to keep stocks of those products as you wanna maintain costs as low as possible to maximize profit (Note: if you keep stocks, you’ll need to maintain a small warehouse that involves running costs such as store keepers, and product maintenance etc). So the Dropship Blueprint presents you a huge database on where you can find and sign-up with suppliers for drop-shipping your products for you and you earn the profit margin without having to keep stocks or worry the degradation, aging of the products etc.

3. Keyword Blueprint – Discover how you can rank well on Adwords or search engine for keywords you’d like to target and get more visitors to your website and get converted into leads or sales. With this you can control how to spend minimum to max out traffic to your website and capture more leads or sales.

And you’ll get video walk through on how to do Internet marketing, how to setup your own web store easily and in lower cost manner, how to write great articles to build organic traffic and even to make use of Web 2.0 social media sites to pull traffic to your website.

Well, the Niche Blueprint 2.0 doesn’t come cheap, it costs $500. But it’s the only tool that will get you to excel and make money from Internet niches. A $500 investment is definitely much cheaper than any other investments you have to make to setup bricks and mortar physical store. If you think that this is what you wanna go for then Click Here! to go ahead and purchase and learn the techniques that it teaches. Please note the decision is all yours!

One of the pioneers in cloud hosting is RackSpaceCloud. I did have a quick chat with RackSpaceCloud. The answer I’ve got is cloud is almost like dedicated hosting, where you don’t get CPANEL. You’ll only be given SSH shell access. If you wanna have a blog hosted there, you have to install your own WordPress, MySQL. These could be lots of hassles for those who lack of technical capabilities. To me, these are all fine as I’ve been supporting lots of Linux environments and web hosts.

But after googling around for “rackspace cloud server reliability” and having read the what WebDevNews have posted about their experience with RackSpaceCloud, I’ll need to think twice and do more research before moving to cloud.

Apparently, WebDevNews didn’t have good experience with Rackspace Cloud, when they moved their blog onto cloud servers on RackSpace cloud and they had very bad problems with the WP Cache, MySQL and .htaccess – the essential elements on a popular WordPress blog. And their blogs had about 600+ pageviews a day (about less than 10% of my gadget blog) during the time when they were on RackSpace cloud.

So shall I move to cloud after reading the bad experience of WebDevNews? I guess I need more research before making the decision. The RackSpaceCloud starts at a basic of $11 per month and the bandwidth is additional cost that costs 7¢/GB in and 22¢/GB out. So, how much bandwidth do you need for a blog that has 5-6K daily unique visitors? It seems like you’ll only know once you’ve got onto cloud for a start first then you’ll be able to know how much you need. And increase from that on……

Btw, does PageRank matter? Yes Pagerank does matter!!! When you have higher pagerank, your blog posts or articles tend to get into Google index faster and rank pretty high, normally on the first page of the search results. So Pagerank also means better traffic to your blog or website. Of course, you will need better contents and continue to add more contents to keep more traffic or visitors coming. Now you have higher pagerank, it’s so much easier for your articles or blog posts to be indexed by Google faster and they will appeared on the search results much faster.

But once you’ve gained certain pagerank value, avoid doing the followings:

1. Do NOT sell text links. Something like TextLinkAds is very attractive lets say you have a pagerank 5 and above which you’ll lots of buyers of text links and place on your blog or website homepage. If you do not know textlinks, they are simply hyperlink with the anchor text to certain keywords that the advertisers wish to rank in search engines. By selling text links, you’ll then be de-ranked by Google or may finally get penalized down to pagerank zero!

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2. Do NOT exchange links excessively Don’t exchange links. The old time’s of exchanging links is over. Google no more values reciprocal link exchanges. If you have more links carried on your homepage or the blog roll in your homepage, you’ll be considered as link farm, or spam link farm, which Google will finally lower your pagerank. When you lose your pagerank, you’ll also lose your organic traffic that brings you sales and income.

But you’ll need to have more incoming links to maintain or go for higher pagerank, how to do that? Submit more articles to article directories, embed a hyperlink back to your website or your blog with the anchor text you want. If you operate a website, selling interesting products such as gadgets, do consider ask some bloggers to blog about your products by sending tips to them. They’re hungry for contents!