Saturday, May 30, 2009

Give Your Blog A Traffic Injection

Anyway, I’ve got lots to tell you about, what I’ve been up to the last couple of weeks, not least that I’ve been spreading my wings a bit, getting out and about the internet more than usual and I’ve been meeting some interesting new people.

But first, though, I wanted to give you all a heads up on something that you can jump in on right now…. to get some traffic to your blogs. It’s actually something that a new online aquaintance, Eoin O’Leary told me about…

Take a trip over to Jack Humphreys blog, Friday Traffic Report, and check out his Technorati Favorite Blogs Exchange.

All you need to do is leave a comment on his blog and follow his instructions.

More posts coming…… honest!

My Laptop is Burning Up!

Yep that’s right, my laptop is so hot you could fry an egg on it. Sadly, that’s not a clever euphemism for “wow, my laptop’s on fire cos I’m churning out so much work”!

My laptop really is like Mount Vesuvius, waiting to erupt at any minute!

For the past month or so, every time I put my laptop on my lap, I ended up with scorched thighs, which I can assure you, isn’t a pretty sight! I know Rod Stewart opined on the virtues of Hot Legs, but this is ridiculous!

I’ve never really been a `laptoppy’ person until August last year, when just before I was due to whizz off on holiday , my PC decided to have a hairy fit and start spewing blue screens of death at me and all sorts of other technical unmentionables -arrghh!

So I took the bull by the horns and steamed into my nearest store and grabbed a laptop that I thought looked rather attractive. I know, attractiveness is not a good criteria to choose a laptop but I was pretty desperate and it was just as good as Eeny Meeny Miny Mo!

Now up until a couple of weeks ago, all was well with Lysander the laptop, he was a rather spritely boy and I became rather addicted to him. In fact, he encouraged me to become terribly lazy. Who could be bothered to fire up the old PC and sit perched there as winter was approaching, enduring frozen fingers and toes, when Lysander was beckoning me enticingly; positively luring me to jump on the couch, cover my feet with a quilt and flip his enormously attractive lid?

But, suddenly, inexplicably I thought, the laptop started to cut out. Black screen… nothing! Bizarre. I couldn’t start him up again he just wouldn’t put out.

At first I thought I’d got one of those deadly viruses - blamed Thing 1 and Thing 2 for downloading dodgy games and getting me infected.

Every day, this would happen more and more. Depending on what I was doing on the `puter, it would just shut down with no warning. If I was watching a video I could hear the fan chugging and working like a Trojan. If I was running a few programs at once, woah, the fan was working overtime and that thing was heating up like a pubescent boy at a Miss World beauty contest.

The mouse pad was turning into a ceramic hob and the underneath of the laptop was growing more pyroclastic by the minute giving me more than just a sharp crease in my trousers!

Time to hit Google, type in my model name and number and see what happens.

Phew. How comforting. there were tons of people who were all experiencing the same problem as me. It’s odd, isn’t it, how you always feel better when you find other people that are having the same problems as you - you just don’t feel so alone, somehow!!


Monday, May 25, 2009

View my * My Posts 5 Money Making Opportunities on Facebook

With the release of its new platform, Facebook’s recent endeavor in social media presents a unique opportunity for marketers, developers and businesses to tap into the social network’s young, active, and viral crowd.

However, over the past few weeks there has been a rising concern among developers to uncover ways to monetize their Facebook applications. The curse of instant online success is that you can no longer sustain expensive servers to support hundreds and thousands (or even millions) of Facebook users. The question: how can the developers of Facebook apps actually make money? We don’t have all the answers yet, but here are 5 suggestions:

1. SELL. Develop applications solely for the purpose of selling them to interested parties. Several applications have already been acquired in this fashion; the most recent example is that of Mozes’ purchase of TextMe.

2. DEVELOP. An indirect source of funds: develop applications under contract for third parties. A number of companies have been posting contract jobs over at the Facebook’s developer forums. There exists a large gap in the supply and demand of available Facebook application developers; as a result, finding potential clients to charge reasonable rates should not be a hassle.

3. ADVERTISING. Use advertisements, cross-promotion schemes and affiliate marketing. It is not feasible to use Google Adsense for this since Facebook does not allow JavaScript embedding. Adsense may be embedded through iFrames, which despite being popular among Facebook developers, is against Google’s TOS. Affiliate marketing is a great alternative to advertisements; my own source of income on Facebook is generated through Amazon’s affiliate marketing.

4. MICROPAYMENTS. Sell services within Facebook through micro-payment transactions. PayPal payments made for accessing premium services could potentially yield reasonable income depending on the application’s purpose, size, and prospective users.

5. GET INVESTMENT. If you think you have something big on your hands and lack the funds to scale it, apply for investment through Bay Partners and others who have expressed interest in funding Facebook apps. This would be the likely course of action for a startup with plans to expand globally within and beyond Facebook.

Facebook has a huge active community. It is reported that of the 29 million active users, about half log in each day. This is a rarity among Web 2.0 companies (comparatively, Google Videos has about 3% active users). If FacebookFacebook reviewsFacebook reviews can convince its users to shell out $1 to send those silly virtual “gift” images to each other, then surely a clever developer or startup can find other approaches to earning money from a Facebook application that do not involve just drowning their users in ads.

Due to the pace of innovation over the web, it is imperative that companies jump on opportunities like these as they turn up. LinkedInLinkedIn reviewsLinkedIn reviews and Bebo are expected to release their own set of developer APIs as well; I personally cannot wait to be among the first to tap into that opportunity. I advise others to start planning as well.