I’m writing this post due to a recent incident on PayPal which I feel was unfair towards me; The seller.

I recently sold a laptop for £500 ($1,000) to someone online, that person sent me the payment via PayPal and then came and picked up the laptop by hand (locally).

Oblivious to thinking this guy might be a scammer, I didn’t think anything of that as he had already sent me the payment so what did it matter.

Anyway, a few days later I saw a dispute on my PayPal account. This wasn’t raised by the ‘buyer’ supposedly but by PayPal themselves. They obviously have some automated systems to detect fraud etc. Now, the dispute was that they thought the payment itself aka the money may have been stolen; Sent from a stolen credit card on a hacked account to be exact.

Understandably PayPal want proof from the seller to prove the item was sent / handed over. Given that I didn’t sell this via eBay or postage this was impossible for me. What proof could I provide that I handed somebody over a laptop… I think this is a little bias from PayPal. To only accept postage tracking as proof is a bit unfair as there are some things that you cannot provide tracking for. For example; Digital items, I have sold digital items in the past and obviously because this is done online, you cannot provide tracking because you haven’t posted anything. Also pickups as in this case.

I can obviously see it from PayPal’s perspective in that they only cover people who sell with recorded delivery of items and do not cover sellers who do pickups or digital items… so they say although I don’t remember reading that. Anyway, even if that is right, I think their system is flawed. Anybody could just buy something off eBay - go pick it up locally and then raise a claim saying they didn’t get the item. And PayPal saying they will investigate is pointless as the ‘buyer’ will always win in that case because it’s impossible for the seller who sold by hand to provide tracking information.

I think they should really take everything into account. For a start, I have been a PayPal member for well over 2 years so surely hundreds of successful transactions back and forth with no complaints should count for something? That itself proves I am legitimate. So if they believe whoever sent me this payment stole that money; Why not go after him? If they can’t find him, that’s their problem, how was I to know this guy stole the money he sent me via their service.

Despite everything, I lost the case (inevitably) and the unfortunate thing is I had already spent the £500 by the time I saw the dispute. So as a resolution PayPal have reversed the payment and given that I have already handed over the laptop to a buyer which is long gone and spent the £500, I’m £500 in debt thanks to someone elses crime and PayPal’s incompetency.

Why should I be punished because somebody else stole money. A scammer with no track record gets a free laptop and no action against him and I get £500 into debt… that’s justice (NOT). That’s like somebody getting mugged on the street; The mugger getting rewarded and the victim getting charged.

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I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about SEO; What it is and how hard it is.

Personally I just see it as following rules and never like to admit people as experts on it as it’s always changing and I don’t think it’s hard enough a field to have experts in.

I’ve always done fine in search engines and have never needed to get an ‘expert’ to use their special powers to do it for me. It’s literally as simple as following instructions. As long as you keep up with what’s good and what’s not, it’s all good.

Some basic SEO pointers from a non-SEO-expert:

• Write clear, descriptive, keyword friendly page titles. Never compromise viral ability or site integrity for search results though.
• Write short, effectively distinguishable, relevant META tags.
• Write quality content. If you can, fit keywords naturally into your rhythm but again, don’t force it. If it happens or, you can make it happen naturally, do it. But great content will result in great backlinks, which in the long run are much better practice for your SEO.
• Use no-follow on links you do not trust or links you do not feel are relevant. But in my opinion, if you have to use no-follow, why are you linking that link anyway? I only ever link to relevant sites or sites that I deem trustworthy quality.
• Use image tags on all your images. I have found images to be pretty effective SEO wise. On one of my first posts I was the very first Google Image result for ‘YouTube Logo’ in a post about YouTube. Just because I used that as the image title tag. I foolishly changed this image and I never got that position back but on some of my other sites, I cover a lot of the first few pages of Google Images with image results for decent, relevant keywords.
• Use a redirect on your URL to have it point to one only; It should only ever point to http://www.yoursite.com or http://yoursite.com so that if someone types one of them, it will go to the other. If you don’t do this then search engines will treat your 1 domain as 2 domains; Defining http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.comas separate sites. This isn’t good, you will get different pageranks and it will weaken the overall SEO effect of your site.
• Do NOT make any paid posts or sell links, Google will punish you. If you don’t care about PR, as I don’t, don’t worry. But if you do and you do either of these, expect a bitchslap from Google.

Moral of the story is, don’t pay anyone to do your SEO. It’s not worth it. A lot of so called ‘experts’ charge ridiculous amounts per hour to do easy work, stuff you could do yourself with minimal effort.

There are some legitimately good SEO people out there such as Aaron Wall - creator of the SEO Book. He genuinely knows a lot about SEO and I believe he genuinely likes to promote the development of it and help the knowledge of it grow amongst webmasters. I own his SEO Book and it’s definitely the best stuff I’ve read on the subject. That being said, there wasn’t too much in there that I didn’t know or wouldn’t deem easily findable for free. But, it’s still a very nice SEO guide and collection of links and helpful tips. I recommend reading it just for the knowledge expansion.

I know this title is a little provoking as there are a lot of people who base their careers on this subject and me saying ‘It’s easy’ does sound a little disrespectful. I don’t mean it to be perceived quite like that though, I just mean; It’s really not as hard as you may think and with a little research and effort, you can be a self-proclaimed expert on it much easier than you could be…. an affiliate expert.

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Here I’ve compiled a list of what I think are probably the best 20 blogs in the Make Money Online niche. A very saturated, flooded and sleazy niche at times. But also a very helpful, insightful and interesting niche at times too.

This list isn’t in any paticular oder of consequence, #1 doesn’t mean ‘the best’ it’s just a top 20.

1. ProBlogger

2. Shoemoney

3. John Cow

4. Zac Johnson

5. The University Kid

6. Winning the Web

7. Tyler Cruz

8. Seth Godin

9. Dosh Dosh

10. The Net Fool

11. John Chow

12. Blogging Tips

13. Self Made Minds

14. Retire at 21

15. 45n5

16. Ian Fernando

17. Slyvisions

18. Mixed Market Arts

19. Internet Babel

20. Daily Blog Tips

With all the Make Money Online blogs being produced every single day, you’re spoilt for choice. But there are only so many that I think are really worth dedicating your time to reading. Of course reading anything will expand and widen your horizon to a degree, but these 20 I believe are the best mix of marketing technique, SEO, SEM, Affiliate Marketing and general Internet Marekting blogs out there.

PS. Sorry for the lack of posting lately. Have been quite busy and also only like to post when I feel like I’ve got something saying that’s worth reading as apposed to forcing posts out for the sake of it. I do have some posts lined up though that should make up for the recent lack of content.

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Putting an accurate price tag on your blog isn’t always easy but it is easy to get it wrong unless you know the basic principles on which to value a blog.

Different bloggers put different weight of worth of different factors which can determine what a blog is worth.

In general, we tend to over value our own blogs due to the fact that they’re our own. But just because we as the authors place so much value in what we believe is so amazing, doesn’t mean everyone else will or that it’s worth what we think it is.

Here I’ve written up what I believe to be the most logical, reasonable and easiest ways to come to a realistic financial value of your blog.

RSS Subscribers

To me, RSS subscribers of a blog is probably the single biggest factor in determining potential value. Even above revenue. How many RSS subscribers a blog has on a daily average indicates how many people like the content of the blog so much as to want to keep coming back.

There are, as many people know, ways to manipulate or deceive people into thinking the RSS number is higher. You can buy subscribers, you can grab an image of an RSS chicklet of a blog with 2,000 subscribers and place it on your own and at a glance the majority of people wouldn’t question it.

These techniques can help improve actual subscribers as people never like to be first, so if they think lots of other people have subscribed before them, they assume the content must be good on a regular basis and good enough for them to come back. So will usually subscribe as well. I however, would prefer to be completely genuine and honest with myself and actually see how people naturally subscribe without display of false statistics.

I don’t think enough bloggers put enough value on RSS subscribers when they go to value or sell their blog. As a blogger, your readers are your biggest asset and without them, even with traffic but no continuous readers. You don’t have a blog. You have a static resource. Which is fine, but the real value in a blog to me is the return factor. If people don’t even want to come back and get free content on a regular basis, assuming you give it, how much can your blog realistically be worth.

Monthly Revenue

A basic rule of thumb evaluation factor for basically all sites, not just blogs. Personally I don’t think the monthly revenue is AS important as the subscriber amount of a blog because monetization can be improved if the traffic is there, but if people aren’t even coming back… there’s a lot more work to be done.

Some people selling their blogs like to take the highest revenue figure they’ve achieved in revenue and put that as the monthly revenue. I think this is a little bit misleading as it gives the impression that’s regular. For monthly revenue you should be giving what the blog makes on average, every month. As in, it will make at least X amount. The easiest way to get an average is to take the highest and lowest earnings you’ve ever made in a month, then find the middle-ground.

If you do go to sell your blog, make sure you don’t lie about revenue as the buyer will eventually find out. Which won’t comeback to serve you well. Just be honest and give proof. People love screenshots, stats or any further form of proof that you can provide to absolutely clarify everything you are claiming. Makes the sale easier on both sides.

Quality Content

I think the amount of regular, unique, quality content is sometimes overlooked as a genuinely important evaluation factor. A blog’s content is a blog’s foundation. If your blog doesn’t consist of great content, why would anybody want to come back.

There are a lot of marketers who pay for content. Some simply buy a load of domains, build a huge network of sites or blogs, slap a few AdSense units up, a basic design and then pay other people to write heap loads of articles which they spread out. Then, overtime the sites build age, rank and small monthly incomes from AdSense.

Now this blog for example has 213 posts, this being the 213th. And I would say about… 190 of those are PURE content. I mean, you can count anything as content, any text on a page, anything on a page. Is content. But I use the word content in a more defined meaning to mean hard-written. And the vast majority of the posts on this blog are hard-written, took me quite a while to conjure up and usually cover, I think, some valid points.

That being said, how much do you think it would cost to pay somebody to write 190 + hard-written, quality articles? Quite a lot I’d bet, even at Indian prices.

I definitely think the amount of quality content on a blog should come into play when placing a value on it.

Site and Blog Evaluators

There are a lot of evaluation tools out there that will give you a rough market value of your; domain, site or blog. And there is a difference. There are some evaluators that are purely meant to evaluate your blog. Some which are meant to purely evaluate the domain itself.

But, all of these evaluation tools pretty much work using the same principles. They all check; age of site, incoming links, general mention, search engine rankings / inclusions. Then you have other things which some check and some don’t, such as your site’s Alexa rank. Which to be honest I don’t value at all. I find Alexa’s rank to be about as useful as… Alexa’s rank.

I’m not going to do a big comparison between each evaluator as I think that’s a bit pointless. Instead I’ve just pointed out one at each end of the stick. One which I would recommend you completely ignore and one which I recommend you pay good attention to:

Useless = Business Opportunities

Right, now, I assume this wasn’t built to be a competitor in the evaluation field but more of a general in-site tool people can quite handily link to for fun. But this may as well not exist lol.

According to that tool, this blog is worth $69k. Well, I don’t even need to express any sort of logic to expand on why that is completely ludicrous. $69k! LOL!

Useful = DNScoop

This is about the best generic evaluation tool I’ve found yet. DNScoop pretty much gets it as close as you can get. It checks your site’s age, all your incoming links, your PR, your Alexa rank, general mention and then combines everything to come up with a sensible market value.

According to DNScoop: Internetbabel.com is worth $2k. Sounds more like it.

Things That Really Don’t Mean THAT Much

I’m just going to briefly cover what I consider to be overrated indicators to a site’s worth. Notice I put the second ‘that’ in capital letters as these things do obviously help but I think too many people buying and selling put all their trust in these things.

1. Google PR - I used to care about PR, until I realized that it really doesn’t matter. Why is a high PR important or valuable in any way shape or form? Ok, so Google respects your site more, they list you more, they place you higher in the SERPs. So what, I get so little traffic to ANY of my sites from Google that it really doesn’t matter to me.

Google, not so long ago shafted this blog from PR 2 to PR 0 for, I assume - a PayPerPost post I made. I can understand why Google do what they do and I love Google and their business ethic. I just really do not care about PageRank. There’s so many fun ways to get traffic, so many viral ways that will get you huge traffic if you just apply yourself in comparison to scraps of Google’s traffic from months of trying to improve your PR. Let Google view your site how they want but don’t let them influence you.

This is why I think, when you sell or buy a site, you should really only take notice of PR peripherally. If I was buying a blog and saw the PR was 0 after 10 months. I wouldn’t suddenly think “WHAT, NO PR! WHOAH, NO GO!” Because that blog could of just been bitch slapped by Google too, doesn’t mean it’s not quality. You have to look at the whole picture.

2. Alexa Rank - The reason I don’t think a blog’s Alexa rank is very important in terms of value is because of Alexa’s infamously bad inaccuracy. It’s hard to be accurate with anything on the web and trying to be a dominant ranker of every site alive is beyond comprehension so you have to admire their valiant effort. But still, I’ve just lost more and more faith in Alexa as time has gone on.

With the recent update things appear to have gotten worse not better.

Anyway, I think Alexa is useful in that it gives a VERY generic and VERY loose view of what sites are where on the web. You can place some small faith in an Alexa rank when buying a blog no doubt but don’t rely on it. I view Alexa as another peripheral statistic. You don’t really need it but it sort of helps when trying to get your head around what to pay or what to sell for.

In Closing

To finish, here’s a quick checklist of things I would recommend doing to find the real value of your blog:

• Ask other Internet marketers and bloggers what they ‘would’ pay for your blog, without even giving them any idea of what price you have in mind.
• Get all the primary statistics of your blog and compare them to others who are selling.
• Research the marketplace, see what other blogs similar to yours are selling for and compare everything.
• Use DNScoop!

The best way and easiest way of course is to simply try and sell your blog. Whack it up on SitePoint or a popular forum and see what people would pay for it up front. That’s the real value

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Please note, these are in no particular order of consequence. I think it’s hard to say that this way is better than that way for everyone because monetization can vary from site to site, service to service and blog to blog.

1. Direct Ad Sales

Even though I did say these aren’t in order… I think, if any, this can generally be considered the number 1 way to monetize not just a blog but any site with good traffic. If you have a lot of quality traffic coming from all sorts of relevant places on the web with perfectly targeted spectators; you can demand a lot of money for private advertising.

It’s this independence that makes private advertising so lucrative, giving you the following advantages:

• No middlemen.
• No rules or restrictions on your part. You place ads, wherever, whenever and however you want.
• Quality control. You decide who advertises, not someone else.

No middlemen of course means you get all the profit. You don’t have to give Google or anyone else a cut at your expense. You also get to pinpoint the advertising as if you have a lot of demand from advertisers then you really can pick and choose. It’s a luxury compared to contextual advertising which can sometimes lead to irrelevant or what you deem inappropriate ads.

2. Paid Reviews

I like the idea of reviewing a product or site for cash. You don’t really have to compromise any quality at all. You can pick and choose from your offers and do the reviews you wish to do. Tell your readers about new, quality, unknown products; sites or online services on the rise and get payed for it.

Doing paid reviews can also improve your writing style and perspective too I think. If you’re in the make money online niche and review what you consider a crappy eBook; not only do you get to flex your ability to write from your own opinion and viewpoint as apposed to copying others, you can also improve your perception of your own projects. When you review somebody Else’s site, product or service, you’re generally much more brutal as it’s not yours. As simple as that.

You don’t mind finding something wrong and blatantly pointing it out when it’s someone else.. Yet when you take a look at your own project, even if others have maybe told you that it’s rubbish, you tend to kid yourself to a degree. Which is sort of OK sometimes as believing in yourself is key to success but don’t confuse arrogance with confidence. They’re very different. I think when you constantly practice ripping other people’s stuff apart with good intent to prompt improvement, you really can start to do this more naturally with your own stuff.

A good paid review is pretty much win win.

3. Affiliate Sales

I think this method of monetization on blogs depends a lot on the niche / target audience. I think, if you’re in the make money online niche and target your content at intermediate Internet marketers then it’s a lot harder to make regular affiliate commissions because Internet marketers do what you do. Therefore, they can distinguish what’s an ad and what’s not but more importantly what’s an affiliate and what not.

Some will even go as far as to liking a product you’ve talked about and wanting to buy it but purposely avoid your link or banner and go find it directly. I know because I’ve done it and I know I can’t be the only one! It’s silly but It’s hard not to do.

If however, you’re in a more popular niche, a niche more in the public consciousness on the web, then it becomes easier because the awareness of the marketing is not raised. It becomes easier when you’re not actually writing about what you’re doing and still trying to pull it off.

Which is why the MMO niche is so hard because if you’re writing on how to make more cash from affiliates with placement and relevance and what not and are simultaneously trying to make money from the affiliates on your blog by getting the same people reading this stuff to click and buy, it’s tough. It’s almost slightly insulting lmao. In fairness though, in this niche, I think the most money is made from dead air as apposed to regular traffic. I think newbies flicking between blogs looking for products tend to get sucked in by attractive banners with attractive proposals and wild earning figures.

Monetization depends a lot on your traffic’s perception of it. But in generic terms I think these 3 methods are generally best for most blogs.

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I remember hearing about Twitter when it very first came out, like when nobody was using it and just thinking… that sounds completely pointless. It just seemed bizarre to me, I mean… why not just use MSN for quick messages and chats or if you actually need to send someone a message… Email.

I ignored it forever and it’s only recently I could start to see why some people like it I suppose. It’s very quick and you don’t need 100 chat boxes open, just quick, limited updates in which you can keep to a handful of people if you like. It’s nippy. So I just decided, before I wrote this post, to sign up.

I’m not overwhealmed by it to be honest and can’t really understand why some are supposedly obsessed with it. But I’m going to use it for a little while to give it a chance, I can see the potential for marketing though. Social marketing can be lucrative but I think inevitabely gets crushed by people over-adding friends etc. then not bothering to really keep up with anyone in particular.

Anyway, check me out on Twitter here

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Joel Comm, supposed, self-proclaimed AdSense guru recently released the 4th edition of his AdSense Secrets eBook series.

With this release he made a big mistake and slightly tricked people into paying for more than they had originally thought they were going to. He is selling the eBook at an impressingly cheap price of $9.95. Did you think there was no catch at that price though? Joel used a negative opt-out marketing technique which automatically had a box ticked for you to subscribe to his monthly newsletter for $29.95 a month.

Supposedly, and I haven’t seen it - the original format / layout made it very hard to spot this option given the 90’s like, vintage, super-long sales letter page with a small option you had to UNTICK to NOT subscribe to this service.

This is pretty sly marketing. Although, no doubt I’m sure Joel made a killing using this old fashioned technique which although not illegal, is very sneaky. The average user usually scrolls down fast to look for the buy it now button, if they’re convinced already that it’s worth buying. In credit to him, this is an option, not a requirement. So, as long a potential buyer did read everything carefully, they would / should of spotted it… it’s just not in most people’s nature to do so. And I’m pretty sure he knew that.

He’s now made a public apology for this ‘mistake’ and accepted it was a bad move on his part. As well as this he’s corrected the issue by clearly setting apart the two options at the bottom of the sales page. I don’t really take the apology as much though as he knew what he was doing and given how rich he is I think it was pretty sleazy to sort of trick people into paying for more than advertised.

To be honest, I’ve always thought his marketing looked sleazy. In the sense that it looks outdated and very 90’s like. Obviously his techniques, or rather, the techniques in which he employs work very well, this doesn’t justify a sleazy marketing move like this. He could of just been totally genuine and used the more modern, preferred method of an opt-in option for an EXTRA service. It shouldn’t of been ticked by default. The technique of having the box ticked by default has been used to negative effect before. Most notably by BearShare when they had the option to set their Google homepage as your default homepage ticked automatically. They had a bad reaction from it, just like anybody who has done it.

I think Joel should of anticipated people would obviously notice and it would invenvitably lead to a backlash. I’m nowhere near as experienced in this game as Joel Comm but even I wouldn’t use this outdated technique. Come on Joel, you’re better than this. I hope. I’m not going to even insult you as my readers by putting an affiliate link to his eBook in this post, buy something else

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This post is really just an admiration post. A shout out to SOSFactory for their awesome designs.

I’ve known about em’ a little while and might order some stuff soon. Their design really is flawlessly stunning. Fantastic artwork with skillful Photoshop precision and coloring.

They’ve designed for some top bloggers. Most notably John Cow and Tyler Cruz.

Here’s one of my favorites:

Check out their full portfolio here and have a good browse of awe as you look at these pure class designs!

I’m actually quite a good drawer, as I was a bit obsessed with it as a kid. Like… young kid, maybe 8 - 13. I’m really good at drawing things I can see. Like, I could probably duplicate that Drunken Monkey thing above very nicely.

I just cannot draw off the top of my head. It’s like my preconception of objects, animals and people is irradiated when I actually go to draw them. I can obviously draw basic things but it just seems so hard without something in front of you to actually draw. So I really admire people like this who can just draw crazy over the top art with such accuracy in terms of scale and realism of features. Off the top. Really nice.

I can sort of design with Photoshop. I mean… not really lol, I’m very lazy with it. I can create logo text I suppose but I’ve never attempted scanning an image in, digitalizing it and then coloring it.

That’s gonna be one of my new goals for 2008 actually. To become a good sketch to Photoshop designer. It can really benefit you cost wise if you can design all your own logos. It’s just time that it takes up. But you get nice feeling of satisfaction when you create a good piece of art.

There’s some great tutorials on SOS’s site as well by the way. Although, not in the best of English, looks like the text has been freely translated. But they’re pretty clear for even a complete newbie. Check out the tutorial page here.

I know this kind of looks like a review, but it’s not lol. I was just browsing their site and felt like doing this post. So I did.

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What’s Pingo?

Pingo is a service of iBasis, one of the world’s leading international long-distance carriers. The iBasis network is your assurance of superior quality and reliability—in addition to the most competitive rates out there.

Personally, I’ve never used calling cards, have no real familiarity with them or the core need for them. Other than to save a few pennies… meh, call charges aren’t something on my super high priority list. But passing that, let’s take a look at Pingo.com as a service, site and online based business as apposed to something I wouldn’t use.

Design and Feel

Pingo.com has an exceedingly fresh and simplistic stylistic feel to it. Much like Google or any big players online when you think about it. White background, well designed logo, standard links, a bit of graphic touch-up and a slogan. Gets pretty much top marks for me in terms of structure, design and feel. Captures that new-age, web 2.0 feel nicely, as well as looking and feeling up to date.

Ease of Sign up

No messing about here. In terms of sign up, Pingo has done well to keep it short and concise by getting your main info at the start. Gaining you as a user, then explaining the bulk when your inside.

I think this is just how you should have people sign up with a service site. You don’t want big paragraphs and tons of mandatory fields on a sign up page. Just enough to get by.

After you fill out the sign up form, you’ll get an email explaining how to login and use your account. Then, you can go login and start saving on calls. You also get a free $5 of call credit when you sign up. Incase you hadn’t noticed on the above picture

Ease of Use

You can get all Pingo’d up in a mere 4 steps. They’re as follows…

Key Points

• You can pre-program your phone so that there is no PIN codes
• You can speed dial up to 25 people internationally
• It cost you nothing to sign up!
• You get a free $5 credit

There are some nice little handy benefits you get from this service. But not too many.

Affiliate Program

Every Internet marketer loves a good affiliate program. Well, lets not be generic and use cliche phrases. But we can say, with assumed confidence that; a large amount of GOOD Internet marketers certainly love a good affiliate program. So, is there a super-affiliates dream built into Pingo? To be honest, I’ve never really been much of an affiliate marketer. But I have used a few.

Pingo say they’ll pay you up to $15 when you send them a customer. Now as far as I can see, there’s no minimum payment here. So theoretically up to $15 sounds good because you see $15. But will it usually be $15? Who knows. I don’t because I haven’t used the program yet! I had to bang this stomping review out for the guys over at Pingo though as I really was taking way too long, due to other stuff… you know. So I haven’t had a chance to properly use the program yet.

On the outset it all seems nice but the affiliate program is through LinkShare. Not saying there’s anything particularly wrong with that but I much prefer, if I’m going to use an in-site affiliate program at all. For the affiliate program to be… in-site, as apposed to external. It’s nice and convenient to have the program built in, all compact within the site’s well structured design and I think it’s a bit of a shame Pingo haven’t done it.

I think a lot of companies tend to go with the option of separating their affiliate program a little bit and send their affiliates off to new window land to explore the depths of a site which looks nothing like theirs, maybe just to take the load of their server in terms of displaying, potentially shed loads of stats a day. Maybe so they can save on costs and focus on the actual driving force of the company. Which is understandable.

All I know is, I won’t be using this affiliate program. Not just because it’s external but also because I don’t believe the service is appealing enough to draw tons of customers via an affiliate link.

Overview

Looking at the site. The company. The service and the product as a whole. I can’t really fault Pingo - they do a top job and seem to genuinely enjoy their service as much as their many customers do.

But it’s definitely not for me. On the business side of things, these guys are pros and they know how to present in a manor that draws customers. But in all honesty their service just does nothing for me. It’s one of those products that makes me think… ”I wouldn’t mind having that” but then again I don’t particular want it either.

Now with the use of the affiliate program, I think there’s quite a limited market for this product in the realm of social online marketing. On a mass scale of course the market for these guys is incredible and it’s a very social friendly product. But online, I would follow the intuitive gut feeling that this type of product/service makes most people subconsciously turn a blind eye because it just doesn’t offer that much.

It’s not that it’s bad or that the site is bad, it’s just that… the benefits of this service don’t seem great enough to want to make most lazy web users click on the advertisements.

Anyway, as I’ve clearly made clear as a clear crystal ball on crystal ball celeberation day, this service isn’t for me. The business and site aspects of Pingo are spot on though, so if you fancy giving their service a go - Click this link!

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I was randomly browsing the most subscribed to YouTube channels last night and just thought how much cash they could make. I know a lot of them do, especially Smosh.

Well, I’m assuming Smosh do anyway. Considering the fact that their channel has had over 12 MILLION views and has a nice banner right at the top of the page linked to their site, which has AdSense on it and a dedicated store full of novelty / brand t-shirts.

Smosh have done extremely well. Especially considering, in my opinion that they’re not really very funny lol. But their new videos are very well made, I’ve only seen a couple but they originally shot to YouTube fame with the infamous Pokemon Theme Tune video (original has been taken down).

I don’t think that all the YouTube ‘celebrities’ maximize the advantages of their YouTube fame for business purposes like Smosh have though. A lot of these guys / gals could really launch some interesting stuff right off the bat, link and talk about it in a new video and receive Instant awareness.

There’s also endless possibilities for branding and novelty items galore. And you may think ‘I wouldn’t buy any of it’ just as I do. But there are plenty of people that are bizarre enough to want it. These guys could make some serious cash

If you haven’t even attempted at probing the YouTube fame factor yet. I’d advise you to give it a go. You don’t have to act like an idiot or an obsessive to be a YouTube celeb or more respectively, have a channel with a lot of subscribers. You can of course build up a huge channel based upon countless TV shows or music videos etc. but I wouldn’t advise this for business purposes as it’s only a matter of time before the copyright holders make a claim against you to get the videos taken down.

On that subject though, of the copyright claims issue. I actually had a large company recently allow me to keep videos up that I’ve uploaded. The videos are all songs from a certain, big music artist and the copyright holders made a claim but gave permission for me to keep the videos up providing that they could advertise on the video pages. All the videos have the URL of my related site in them. So I thought it was pretty cool of the company to let that fly.

I think this is much more sensible on their part as well. As apposed to taking the stand some copyright holders do which is to demand it all be taken down. Which I think is the equivalent of trying to fight a bear with a pillow. They’re absolutely and postively outnumbered on a mass scale. As soon as they take something down, someone else puts it back up. So I’m glad some monster companies are seeing that they pretty much can’t win and the smart thing to do is just to try and make revenue from it by allowing it.

I can understand copyright holders being annoyed about people ripping their content though. I would be annoyed. But, realistically, big, big shows and music artists etc. just need to accept that it’s going to happen and there’s not much they can do about it. Period. As soon as they think of a way to stop it, there’s already been 10 new ways to get it.

Back to the original discussion point. I think you should really have a go at using YouTube to your advantage. They supposedly reckon by 2010 that ‘the Internet will break’ given the excessive bandwidth use of things like YouTube and BBC’s iPlayer straining networks that can’t keep up. Apparently YouTube used as much bandwidth in 2007 as the entire Internet did in 2000! that’s pretty crazy. Plus, like Internet marketing, becoming big on YouTube is getting harder.

Unless you make a complete circus show video and fluke a few million views, it takes a lot of effort. Unless you’re extremely talented at something of course.

I’m not doing too bad with my magic channel. I was doing card magic before Internet marketing, I started at about 11. I have so far only done 17 half ass videos but still managed to get 622 subscribers so far. Note, I haven’t uploaded a video in over 6 months yet the subscribers keep coming.

Just shows if you’re good at something, you will naturally gain exposure. And I’m not being big headed lol but I know I’m good at card magic, a lot better naturally than I am at Internet marketing anyway.

You can check out my mentioned YouTube channel here.

Honestly, the best way to get a lot of subscribers that will keep coming back for more, is to upload something unique. Obviously. But when I say unique, I don’t mean you doing stupid faces, I mean like a talent. If you can sing… sing.

As it happens I can do a lot of card magic so I experimented with that. And found the subscribers to be very instant and I really should get back to growing that, as I’ve just let it dry up and never really put much effort into it. Which is silly as it’s the one thing I’m actually talented at and can challenge a lot in the field of yet I have done little with it.

Anyway, once you get the subscribers and are getting nice instant views when you upload new videos. You can even start placing AdSense ads next to your video. If you have an AdSense account you can now submit videos for consideration in your account, once/if approved, relevant AdSense ads will then be displayed. Pretty nice considering the height of statistical viewing power you can reach overtime.

There really is a lot of cash to be made on and in the name of YouTube. Exploit it’s social awareness, broad age and nationality range and do your best to use it for business advantages… it’s such a lucrative marketing tool if used in the right way.

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