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Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

AboutUs.org - Advertising worth the money?

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

I don’t know if you have heard about AboutUs.org before but it’s a wiki similar to Wikipedia.org, but it’s only for web sites. You can look up any domain name you like in AboutUs.org by typing aboutus.org/sampleaddress.com in your web browser.

There are three ways to get your domain name listed in AboutUs.org:

  1. Wait until the AboutUs.org bot has spidered your site
  2. Write your own page
  3. Pay AboutUs.org $197 to do the page for you

To find out if it’s a good deal to pay for a page at AboutUs.org I pulled out my credit card and paid. To be honest I didn’t only pay just to be able to do this review, I really really wanted a better AboutUs.org page too :D . A good Aboutus.org page must be as good as a good MillionDollarWiki.com page or maybe even better :???:

At their site they offer you the following for a flat fee of $197:

  • Position yourself in front of more than 5,000,000 unique readers each month.
  • Increase your results in the search engines.
  • Point more traffic to your website.
  • Create an amazing article that will tell the world about your business.
  • Build strong relationships with the community.
  • Develop ongoing dialog about you and your business.
  • Generate another way for clients to find you.

I’m happy with the coach I got to help me build the page, but what I don’t like is that most of the stuff at my AboutUs.org page is copied directly from my site. Hey it’s a page about my site so it actually doesn’t matter…. Or?

The traffic they mention is not something I’ve noticed at all :( , but I guess it will take until the next pagerank update by Google to see some results on the search engine ranking. I think they should offer some kind of statistics for the people that upgrade their page because otherwise it’s going to be really hard to figure out if it was a good investment or not. Especially since it’s your wiki page that’s featured on their front page, not your actual homepage.

So, was it worth $197?

My opinion is that it’s not worth the money, but on the other hand people spend $100 for a page at MillionDollarWiki and then you don’t get any help building the page at all. At Aboutus.org I got a coach helping me at least.

If you can build your page yourself (i.e. you know the syntax) and have the time to do it then do that instead of paying $197. If you don’t know how to do your own page and really really really really want a better AboutUs.org page, then buy this service.

If you’re interested in having a look at my AboutUs.org page you’ll find it at aboutus.org/xaviermedia.com.

Earn money from links

Friday, April 11th, 2008

There are a lot of services letting you earn some money from placing links on your web site and TNX.net is one of them.

TNX lets you as a web site owner earn money from links on your web site and advertisers can buy links to their sites from sites in the same niche. What’s different from TNX and some other similar services is the point system they use instead of cash. For showing link on your site you earn points and as an advertiser you spend points which can be sold to/bought from TNX. I have to say that I don’t really like the point system :( . I would have preferred hard cash instead since it’s easier to understand how much you earn/spend, but one good thing is that the $ amounts are also mentioned almost everywhere.

If you’re selling link on your site you can of course spend your earned points on advertising campaigns promoting your own sites, so you don’t have to cash in your points if you don’t want to :D .

Something really good and surprising these days where the registration process. It was so easy it almost scared me. No CAPTCHA, no email verification link, nothing :D !

Webmasters

All webmasters (i.e. people wanting to earn points) have to add a special PHP or Perl code to their pages. The downside with this code is that it’s not working on all pages on your site. You need to have the possibility to run scripts. Ok, most webmasters do have that option today, but some don’t :( .

You can of course ad more then one site and also add the code on more then just your main page.

I wasn’t able to find any information on how popular you site must be to earn 1000 credits, but I guess this part from the advertiser FAQ will give you an idea:

What can you do with 20,000 TNX-Points?
In case website characteristics are not important (YahooBacklinks [YB] below 500, category “Fun and Games”), then you can buy a month (in case spots are available) of static links to your site:

- 20 000 different PR0 pages from different websites
- 400 different PR1 pages from different websites
- 200 different PR2 pages from different websites
- 100 different PR3 pages from different websites
- 40 different PR4 pages from different websites
- 20 different PR5 pages from different websites

So from one link on a PR3 page you should be able to earn 20 000 points / 100 links * ($0.78 / 1000) = $0.156 . $0.78 was taken from the “Sell points”-page and is the market value of 1 000 TNX points at 2008/04/09.

Advertisers

As an advertiser you get several options when you create your campaigns. You select category, language of the sites, Yahoo back links and Google PR on the sites you want to advertise on. What really confused me was that when I selected only one category I got 1750 links to my site for $11.20/month, but when I selected two categories I only got 1400 links for the same amount :???: . Anyway, $11.20/month for 1750 links sounds like a good deal to me :D

When I signed up my account they had 15685 sites I could advertise on in 17 categories:

Affiliate program

As most advertising networks TNX got their own affiliate program where you can earn extra points by referring webmasters and advertisers. You get 13.3% of all earn credits from webmasters you refer and 5% of all payments made by referred advertisers. The affiliate program is located here.

Get some credits for free

At DP forums there is a campaign where you get up to 5 000 points just for joining. Read more at Limited Offer from TNX.net: Get LINKS from 5,000 quality websites for FREE!

GPS tracking

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

I guess you’ve heard of GPS (Global Positioning System), a system allowing you to find out your exact position using satellite signals, and the map service Google Earth before. But did you know there’s an easy way to combine these two?

By using the GPS Tracking Key from LandAirSea Systems and a laptop with Google Earth installed you can see your exact position in Google Earth. The internal computer determines the exact GPS location of the device within 2.5 meters and records this data every second. The data can then be downloaded and viewed in Google Earth simply by plugging the Tracking Key into the USB port of a computer. You can then view where you have been on the satellite images in Google Earth with the time you spent at different places. You can also see the speed you had while moving!

The device is water resistant so you can use it outdoors and even on the sea :) . That’s really good since I rarely need to find out my location when I’m indoors :wink: .

On Youtube there’s a video where GPS tracking helped solving a murder case thanks to it’s accuracy. The authorities discovered there was a global positioning system in the suspects car that his wife put it in the truck, because she suspected he was having an affair. Based on the information taken from the tracking key, the suspect was charged with murder o a 12 year old girl.

[youtube]RpM1wJ-AXZs[/youtube]

It’s amazing what you can do with GPS tracking :)

Blackjack Club - Free Online Blackjack

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

Blackjack Club is basically the usual online casino web site with the normal games you would expect like for example black jack (hence the name :) ). They got both games and support in several European and Asian languages like Swedish, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and of course English (I guess it’s British English since they don’t accept bids from US :wink: ). The site design is really nice looking at, but I don’t like the white text on black background (call me old-fashioned :) ).

If you’re just looking for some fun you can play without betting any money at all which is really great. You don’t even have to download and install their client software since you can play online directly in your web browser.

New games are developed constantly, which can be seen at their web site. For example one of the up coming games that really got me interested is Penguin’s Playground. It’s a 3D slot game with penguin characters :)

Penguin’s PlaygroundPenguin’s Playground

CGTV Games is the owner of blackjackclub.com and they got about 80 people working for them. Since they got people speaking all of their supported languages I guess most of them work in the customer support department. What’s really surprising me is that they don’t accept paid bets from USA and Canada, but they still have 1-1.5 thousand visitors from US each month. Could it be that most people are just there for the free games?

If you got a few minutes to spare I suggest you play a few of the games found at Blackjack Club, but I wouldn’t spend any money.

PayJunction Web Credit Card Processor

Saturday, January 19th, 2008

PayJunction is a payment gateway that can process payments at your office, on our web site and “on the go” wireless. You can choose on your own how you need or would like to process your credit card transactions. :) . For the wireless part you only need access to a WiFi network to process the card transactions.

Merchant accounts

PayJunction doesn’t provide merchant accounts on it’s own but is instead a broker for several providers with whom they set up their clients accounts with. The specific provider will be chosen based upon the clients needs and business type. Different providers specialize in different types of accounts, so it is very beneficial for the client to be matched up with the proper one. The auction like format for placing accounts also allows PayJunction to negotiate for the best rates available which of course benefit the clients because as you know a small cost costume is necessary in todays world where everyone is competing about the lowest prices.

Accounting and reporting

You get real-time reporting via their interface called Trinity where you can view and search for specific transactions. You can of course download the transactions in several formats like Microsoft Excel, XML and CSV so the transactions can be imported into your accounting software without having to type each transaction in manually.

Plugins

Third-party plugin’s are supported by the system so you can easily integrate the credit card processing in your shopping cart or your order system.




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