Archive for the ‘Websites’ Category

Don’t touch Qapacity, they do not keep their word!

Looking around recently for anywhere that was offering a free Facebook advertising coupon (I thought it time to test the water), I came across qapacity.com. Qapacity were offering a free coupon for the region in which I live – so I thought, why not. Lets give them a try – it actually looked like quite a nice site and I thought a profile might be useful for backlinks.

So, I registered an account – fine, no problems, filled part of the profile in, and linked to my Facebook account as per the conditions of the offer. The site then tells you it would be a couple of days before receiving the coupon. Nothing, so, as per their instructions I mailed them to ask where it was. This was the email exchange that followed… Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m no fan of Twitter. It’s a pointless mass of white noise in my opinion.

But – if you’re the kind of sad individual who values quantity above quality – here’s a tip for you…

I play with Twitter – (only because I hate it so much, and as research for posts like this). Overnight I got 200+ new followers, and they are still coming in at the rate of around ten to twenty  an hour.

How? Very simple, just add the ‘big name’ Internet Marketers to your Twitter account.

If you don’t know who they are – they aren’t hard to find. You probably already have mails from the likes of Eban Pagan and Yaro Starak in your spam folder, having been ‘tempted’ into subscribing to their mailing list to download some free useless information in the past…

Your new followers will for the most part be generated by bots, and be of no use whatsoever – and are only from sad ‘get rich quick on the Internet’ types – but it’ll up your numbers.

Earlier today I was asked by a friend to check out whether a particular website was a scam – it happens a lot!

Whilst looking into the site in question I stumbled on a link to peoplestring.com – a social networking site. Nothing new there I hear you say! Thousands have sprung up on the back of the success of MySpace, Facebook and Twitter… But this one is different – it’s free to join and they claim that they pay you to attract people to, and use the site.

The only immediately apparent catch is that you have to accept a certain amount of junk mail. Not really a problem, getting it sent to a Hotmail account or similar will minimize that inconvenience. The principle is that you get paid for recruiting new members and there’s also an ‘upgrade’ (you get a percentage of if people buy that from your links) – which entitles people who pay $200 to a larger stake in the profit share they describe, which is based on their advertising revenue (this I wonder about when Facebook and Twitter are reportedly losing money on a daily basis!).

It’s all very MLM, and seems very ’spammy’ with your ‘make money on the Internet’ sharks… But – the key thing here is it’s free! I like free! So, I’ve signed up to see if what they say is true… I’ll be back to report on if it works or not…. If  you’d  like to help with my ‘experiment’ click here and join….

In recent months I’ve become a fan of Fotolia stock library…

One of the biggest problems with a blog can be finding suitable illustration for your articles, or for use in a custom template. Having waded through many an on-line stock library in the past I always seem to end up back at Fotolia which must have one of the biggest collections  – approaching 7 million photographs.

Prices for images suitable sizes for use on the web start from 2 or 3 dollars.

Most of the images are of very good quality due to a human based approval system

So – no need to steal photographs any more. It only costs a couple of dollars to avoid breaching copyright laws!

We have a very successful specialist forum, and I’m now in the process (or should I say have pretty much finished) setting up a new one devoted entirely to blogs – the blog forum. And now, I’m looking for bloggers who might be interested in helping with contributing, promoting and moderating the new forum.

Being a founder member of the forum will present plenty of opportunity to promote yourself, your blog and your credibility as the forum grows.

I could easily do this myself – but thought it would be much more entertaining to do it with some like minded souls…

Interested? Send me and email and tell me a little about yourself (in return I’ll send you a bit of background on myself) and we’ll take it from there…

I promised some positive post – so here’s one…

Every now and then you stumble across a great site – today’s was Kiva. A site distributing micro-finance to small business around the world, mostly the third world.

If you don’t know what micro-finance is – put very simply, it’s a small loan – usually from a number of investors to small business owners. Its a way to help people grow a sustainable business in a developing economy. And get most of your money back into the bargain…

You can loan as little as $25 and make a real and lasting difference to someone who needs your help! Go on – you have nothing to lose!

Visit the Kiva website and see how easy it is.

I hadn’t used Moneybookers before, having always preferred PayPal. I guess I always stuck with PayPal as everyone new them. It certainly wasn’t because it took 300 pieces of paper faxed to recover a lost password – or because they deemed to close an account because I had the ordasity to log on from Eastern Europe a few years ago whils travelling. For my own security they said – but you wouldn’t believe the hoops I had to jusp through to get my money back… I still use them, but thought I’d give Moneybookers a try after being persuaded by a client who wanted to set up a merchant account through them.

Moneybookers has in the end turned out to be great – as always opening the merchant account took a bit of time, they wanted to see the working site, and of course, and wanted the usual anti-money laundering paper proofs.

The merchant account was FREE (always a good thing), and Moneybookers commission rates are low at 1.9% compared to PayPal’s 3.4% (plus a smaller transaction fee), that saving alone was enough to persuade me to open an account and give it a try!

On the downside – I didn’t find their site either particularly user friendly, there’s a learning curve when you are used to using PayPal – and support wasn’t particularly quick. However, the advantage of reduced fees outweighs these minor grumbles!

We’ve all seen the hype about Twitter – my god even Oprah got into it (loved the look on her face on that show when she realized just how much she gave to charity – you’d think they were about to empty her bank account!)…

Lets face it – what is Twitter – it a means to scream out into the world stuff it doesn’t want to hear – are you really that desperate for friends…? It’s millions of people shouting out on a CB radio looking for friends (or should I say readers) but getting nothing but sales pitches back. I tested it out recently on behalf of a client. What do you get, millions of bloggers selling crap ‘following’ you.

Twitter has no substance, no longevity and is nothing more than a silly Internet fad (look what happened to MySpace). It’s not useful in any commercial sense to a small business, and it’s time consuming for very little in return. It’s nothing more than hype…

Watch it crumble fairly quickly now its got polluted (as everything does) by your get rick quick merchants , the Clickbank report sellers, and scam merchants.

Yes, you can spend all day “tweeting” (how stupid does that sound) and beg people to visit your site, and you visit theirs in return, but for one minute have you thought about the quality of that traffic? What you are getting other than sad “I´m going to be millionaire one day” bloggers – just like you – without two cents to rub together to buy the crap you are selling (they are probably selling the same crap too anyway…).

Is Twitter the new way to fame and fortune for wannabes – somehow I doubt it….

Don’t believe me? Then why not look at something like the “Turbo Cash Generator” (love the name – very catchy) – this person claim to make over $3,000 a day.. Call me a cynic – I am!