Manage Your MySpace Blog, Address Book, and Music

Now to the part everyone loves: creating a blog on MySpace.  For those of you unfamiliar with the meaning of the word, but familiar with the term “blog”, it is short for Weblog, with the “we” cut out.  Basically this is a technical term for “chit chat” except this chit chat talks to a specific audience and can actually be useful.  For example, in the blog we set up we want to speak to people, (students, 30-somethings, moms and dads, and retirees) who like to garden either personally, professionally, or on a volunteer basis.  The blogger plans on discussing everything from her fear of bugs to tips and tricks she recently learned about gardening techniques.

Step One:  Click <Home> on the top tool bar to access the main menu.  Click <Manage Blog> which is the second to last link.  This will take you to your Blog Control Center.  (Woo hoo! As you can see from the menu options, you’re almost done building your basic site!)

Step Two:  The Blog Control Center (shown below) is the brains behind the blog.  The thin menu bar shown below may look skinny, but there is a lot going on here. 

Step Three:  Let’s get started by clicking the <Post New Blog> link under “My Controls.”  Once you do this, an entry form will appear next to your blog menu bar. The first line asks for the day you would like to post your entry.  By default this is set as the current date.  This feature is offered with many blog posting software, so that you can add many entries at once, and assign each one a future date.  This keeps readers interested, as you always have new information no matter what your offline schedule is like.  Plus, once you write on short blog, you’ll notice you get into a groove and can usually create a handful at once.  On the next line enter your title, and then choose a category from the drop-down menu.  In the large box, or body, enter your blog post. 

Step Four:  As you would with a Word document or email, you can format the text by changing the font style, size, or color; aligning the text, and add images, background colors, or symbols.  The following is a close-up of the blog entry format toolbar.  Run your mouse over each icon to see what each feature is. 

Step Five: If you decide to add a photo, you need to enter the URL for the image, or you can simply copy it from one of your existing websites and paste it into your post.  

Step Six: When you are done entering the information, and answering any of the fun questions at the bottom of the page, hit the <Preview & Post> button.  The next page will show you a preview of your blog.  If you love it click <Post> if you hate it, click <Edit> or <Cancel.>
Once you add a blog post, you’ll notice that at the bottom of each post are links for readers to leave comments or kudos, and for you to edit or remove the post.

Customize the Blog

Step One:  To change the background color of the main blog page, add a heading, or make any other changes to the default settings click on the <Customize Blog> menu link under My Controls on the Blog Control Center page.  Don’t be intimidated by all of the customization options you see.  We’ll break this page down by section and walk you through each one.  Let’s start with the first section, General Page Settings.  This let’s you change the background color, adjust the alignment and length, set the default font, and determine the number of posts per page.  As you make changes you can click <Preview> or <View My Blog> to see how things are progressing.  When you preview your site, a message appears asking if you wish to save changes.  Click either <Yes> or <No>.

To change your background color, click the icon to the right of the option box.  A pop up window showing a grid of color options will appear.  Choose a color by clicking it with your mouse and then hitting the <OK> button.  That particular color’s “number” will now appear in the background color box.  This is also the color box that pops up when you click the icon to change the link colors. 

Step Two:  The next section of the customization page allows you to modify the page header.  There are three main options:  no header, custom header, or add your own header HTML.  Creating a custom header is easy.  Just add a title for the blog, choose a font, create a tagline (optional), and then select a color for the border and interior of your header.  If you know HTML you can include your custom code in the HTML header box. 

Step Three:  The third section lets you customize the site module; these are the menu bars on the left with your picture, details, and information about the blog.  Your options here will allow you to add colors and a background to the menu box, decide which side of the blog post you want it on, and pick and choose what information blog viewers can read (i.e. your age, city, status, and gender.)  Be careful what information you reveal, remember, these are just blog posts—does your age or gender really affect the value of what you have to say?
 
Step Four:  Wow, this is a long section, but hang in there—your blog is going to look great!  The next set of options allows you to adjust blog post settings. Here you can change the background color of the post (not the blog), font, date format and background color, subject font, and the time format and position.   After that scroll down to the next short section and designate the colors for the Comments area of your blog.

Step Five:  The last step to customizing your blog is to change your background setting, or add a custom style sheet.  Add a background image (URL) and music (URL) for your blog and then click <Preview>.  Don’t forget to save your changes! 
Tada! You’re done customizing the blog!  Don’t forget to go back to the main Blog Control page and play around with the links.  Your blog stats are also listed on the control page.  When people visit your profile, in the upper-right hand corner they will see a list of your latest blog entries, with a link to read them or to subscribe to your blog.

Manage Address Book
The last option on the main menu is to manage the address book, and this one, I promise is easy. Click the last link in the men <Manage Address Book> and you’ll see an address book.   Easily add new contacts by typing in their first and last names, email address, and username and then click <Add>.   The name of all your contacts will then show on this main page. To change information for a user, or delete an entry, click <Edit> and change the appropriate information.  From the Edit page you can also create contact lists (i.e. friends, family, online friends, work, etc.) by clicking the <List> link in the left-side menu bar on the Edit page. And that’s it folks, for your main menu options.  It’s official—you have graduated from the basics of building a MySpace page!

Add Music to Your Profile
But wait, folks, there’s more! You’ve added photos, slideshows, video, a calendar, blog, and a contact list, but I bet you’re wondering where the music is? How can you add music to your space? Relax.  Adding music to your site is done a little differently than adding photos or videos.  The easiest way is to click the <Music> link in the upper toolbar. 

This will take you to the main music page.  One of the first features you’ll notice is the MySpace Music search engine.  One way to find songs is to type in the keyword of a track or artist in the search engine and then click <Search>.  You will then receive a list of relevant sites.  Be prepared to do some serious sifting to find music to add to your profile on MySpace if you use the search box option. When you search for a band name or song, your results will be riddled with not only the artist’s site (if they have one at MySpace) but also fan pages.  Some bands have many, many, many, many fans.  A clue to finding the artist’s page (again, only if they have one) is to pick the site with the most views. 

Your results will give you this stat.
A second way to find songs is to scroll down to the genre menu, on the left-side of main music page.  Click on your genre of choice and you’ll see a chart of related bands listed by their status (unsigned, Indie, or major label.)  We chose Electronica from the top genres menu on the main music page, and then scrolled down to find Paul Oakenfold in the major label column.  This took us to his MySpace page.  For those not familiar with Oakenfold he is famous for Starry Eyed Surprise which you may know from Coca-Cola commercials, as well as Ready, Steady, Go from the movie Collateral.

If you go to Oakenfold’s site you will see he has some songs online, with an <Add> button next to each one.  If you click the button, a message asks if you want to add the song automatically to your profile.  You can click <Add Song to Profile> or <Cancel>.  Once you choose a song, click <Home> and then click <Profile>.  A media player will now appear in the left-side menu bar.  Click the play button and enjoy!  When you’re done enjoying the song and want to delete it click <Home> on the top toolbar then click <Edit Profile> from the main menu.  Go to Profile Songs and delete the song.

Learn From 15 Ebay PowerSellers How They Raked In Over $11,726,200 Last Year Alone

eBay:  the Early Years

On September 3, 1995, the NFL Jacksonville Jaguars expansion team lost their first game to the Houston Oilers, by a score of 10-3.  On September 3, 1995, the Soviet transport spacecraft Soyuz TM 22 was launched on its mission to carry cosmonauts to the Mir space station for a 10-week stay.

And on September 3, 1995, in San Jose, California, computer whiz Pierre Omidyar  started a web site called AuctionWeb, and offered for bidding a broken laser pointer.

The Jacksonville Jaguars remain one of only three NFL teams never to have played in a championship or Super Bowl game.  The Houston Oilers moved to Tennessee in 1997 and became the Titans.  The Soyuz TM-23 returned to Earth on February 29, 1996, and was mothballed.

And when AuctionWeb sold the broken laser pointer for $14.83 to a collector, eBay was born, making Pierre Omidyar the hands-down winner in the class of September 3.

On that fateful Labor Day weekend, AuctionWeb was a free website with a workmanlike grey background and angular dark blue font.  It offered buyers and sellers only three options: they could list their items, look at other people’s items, and make bids.  According to Adam Cohen’s book “The Perfect Store:  Inside e-Bay” AuctionWeb was hosted on Best, where Omyidar already had a $30 per month account, and was built largely from freeware.

But the listing price was right, and before the end of 1995 AuctionWeb had become so popular that Best began charging Omyidar $250 per month, their going rate for commercial accounts.  Like any smart business person, Omyidar passed his increased expenses along to his customers.  But he had a twist.

He would neither charge anyone to list their items, nor charge buyers a fee to bid.  He would simply take a cut of the final sales price; five percent of anything under $25, and two-and-one-half percent of anything above $25.

By February of 1996, AuctionWeb was clearing more than $250 a month, Omyidar was in the black. And amazingly enough, he had found a way to bring complete strangers together to exchange their goods and money in good faith.

AuctionWeb‘s Code of Ethics was a familiar one:  treat others the way you would like to be treated, and be willing to cut the other guy or gal some slack.  Omyidar came up with The Feedback Forum and Bulletin Board as alternatives for those who wanted him to mediate their disputes personally via his e-mail, Pierre(at)ebay.com. Before he knew it, his customers were also his customer service department.  And the online forum was born.

In May of 1996, Auction Web had its first $5000 month, and Omyidar needed help opening the hundreds of envelopes which arrived in the mail every day with his fees.    He hired Chris Agarpao to help him count his money two days a week.  But in June, when the proceeds exceeded $10,000, Omyidar did the unthinkable:  he quit his day job at General Magic.

Understanding that he needed help to develop the AuctionWeb concept to its now clear potential, he hired Jeff Skoll, a Stanford MBA who appreciated the commercial possibilities of the Internet.  Within a matter of months, AuctionWeb had a licensing agreement to list the plane fares and product of Electronic Travel Auction..

And in September 1997, two years after the sale of the broken laser pointer, AuctionWeb was finally laid to rest.  Omidyar’s consulting firm, Echo Bay Technology Group, was assigned the domain name www.eBay.com, because EchoBay.com was already taken.

It may have been the only time in the entire history of eBay that Omidyar didn’t get there first.

How To Succeed With E-Zine Advertising

 

1. INTRODUCTION TO EZINE ADVERTISING

We’re going to discuss something that is not quite as popular as it was back in the stone ages of Internet marketing, but is still a viable marketing strategy.

I’m talking about E-Zine advertising.

We’re going to be discussing what an e-zine is, how to set one up and so on. It’s actually quite a complex process and in order to do it correctly you really have to break it up into distinct steps or you’re going to end up getting confused.

Before we launch into the topic of e-zines, we’re going to first have a discussion on the state of email marketing in general. Why? Because most e-zines are sent via email. Yes, there are some e-zines that are web based, but for the most part, your most popular e-zines are going to end up in your in-box.

So let’s get into the subject of email marketing and the e-zine.

2. STATE OF THE UNION OF EMAIL MARKETING

Email marketing, advertising, or whatever you want to call it, has taken quite a hit over the past few years. To understand how things have gotten so bad, you first have to understand where email marketing came from and what caused it to take such a down turn.

While history may be boring to many, you have to understand where you’ve been before you can understand where you are and where you’re going. Otherwise, most of what you’re going to read is going to be Greek to you.

Email marketing, in the early days of the Internet was like when we discovered the first cell phone. People would walk outside of their homes, take their cells out of their pocket, call up their best friend and say “Hey, guess where I am?” Of course the friend had no idea what he was talking about so he’d just answered, “You’re home.” And of course the reply came, “Nope! I’m walking down my block.” And of course the friend would say, “Yeah, right.”

Those days are long gone. Now the question is, when your best friend tries to reach you and you don’t answer your phone, “Didn’t you bring your cell with you?” Notice they don’t even use the word “phone” as cell is immediately associated with the word phone.

What does this have to do with email marketing?

Nothing and everything.

Let me explain.

In the early days of email marketing, when the only emails people got were either from their friends online or their ISP, there was no such thing as selling to people online.

Then suddenly that all changed. Email ads started to come. Slowly at first.

At the beginning, this was actually kind of cool for people as they’d see an ad come into their email box and they’d turn to their spouse and say, “Hey honey, look what we just got.”

But then the emails started to increase, especially if somebody went online to a web site and requested information. What would happen is that their email address would be sold to a zillion people.

That’s when people’s email boxes started to get overrun with what we now call spam.

Well, it really got out of control and eventually people starting screaming STOP!

So somebody had to do something about the mess.

Let’s now rewind a bit.

Before things got really bad, e-zines started to rise in popularity. People liked the idea of having news letters delivered to their email boxes about subjects that they were interested in.

But these same people started getting flooded with a lot of stuff they DIDN’T want. It got to the point where they couldn’t find their e-zine emails anymore.

So the complaints started.

Well, long story short, the ISPs had to do something about this mess. So they started putting what we now call spam filters on people’s email accounts. This seemed like a good idea at the time in order to keep unwanted emails out of a person’s in-box.

Except there was one problem.

The emails that the people were expecting to come, didn’t come. The spam filters really had no way of differentiating real spam from an e-zine.

Why?
Because most e-zines, back in those days really were just glorified ads. If you looked at en e-zine issue and a piece of spam email, you really couldn’t tell the difference except in very few instances.

As a result of this, e-zine email delivery started to drop like a rock and so did subscribers. It was starting to look like e-zines were going to die a slow death.

Then things got even worse. 

In 2003 we had the Can Spam Act of 2003.  I won’t bore you with all the details, but basically what the act said was that if you were to send any email to anybody on the Internet for business purposes, you had to include a ton of information such as an actual postal address. These people had to be able to hunt you down and nail you to a wall if you sent them spam.

Unfortunately, the Can Spam Act of 2003 didn’t stop the spam problem. The professional spammers still got away with sending junk all around the Internet and the honest businessmen were getting hurt. Somehow this was just all wrong.

You’re probably thinking right about now, why on Earth you’d even want to create your own e-zine. Well, things have changed a bit since 2003. Autoresponder services now have good relationships with the Internet community and can easily get your e-zine delivered about 98% of the time, which isn’t too bad.

So, because the worm has partially turned, we’re now going to teach you how to turn out a killer e-zine and build a substantial list in the process.

3. WHY OFFER YOUR OWN E-ZINE?

Good question. Certainly reasonable enough considering all the email horror stories I just told you. It would be perfectly understandable if you went running for the hills right about now. But before you do, you might want to read the following. It just may change the way you feel about starting your own e-zine.

What exactly is an e-zine? Well, an e-zine is short for “electronic magazine.” It is usually emailed to people though it can be in the form of a web page with a member’s login.

The first thing you need to understand is why somebody would sign up for an e-zine or news letter. This all comes down to why people even surf the Internet in the first place.

They’re looking for information.

This information can be anything from looking for a natural treatment for acne to trying to find directions for building a bird house. If you go to any search engine and type in just about anything, you will literally find millions of results on most topics. Yes, there is a lot of information out there.

But what if somebody wants a lot of information? What if they’re interested, not only in natural treatments for acne, but natural treatments for a number of ailments? Imagine how they’d feel if they saw something like this on the Internet.

“Natural Health E-Zine…Get your weekly e-zine news letter where we cover a different health issue each week.”

A person looking for such a resource has just struck gold.  Don’t you think that they’re going to sign up for that e-zine quicker than you can say “Bob’s you uncle?” You better believe they will.

Okay, you’re probably thinking now something along the lines of “Okay, but so what? How does this do anything for me to send somebody an e-zine on a weekly basis? What do I get out of it?”

What follows in the next few articles are a boat full of things that you can get out of offering your own e-zine.

The point is, once you’ve gotten these people to opt-in, as we call it, you now have the opportunity to occasionally (and I do stress the word occasionally) send them an offer for something to buy from you. We’ll touch on how often to do this later in this series.

Publishing your own e-zine and building a list is actually building your business. So now we’re going to show you just how to do that so that you become an expert at e-zine advertising.

What this does is establish you as an expert in your field as well. As your subscribers get your information, they’ll start to see how knowledgeable you are and will begin to respect you for that knowledge.

Plus, and this is something most people don’t realize, but offering your own e-zine, you actually get educated yourself. It’s unlikely that you will know everything off the top of your head. This is going to make research necessary. As you research, you learn. The more you learn, the better you get at your business.

So without any more delay, let’s get into how to actually put together your own e-zine newsletter that’s going to have your subscribers eating out of the palm of your hands.

4. CREATING YOUR OWN E-ZINE

Now that we have established that creating your own E-zine is actually a good idea, we’re going to begin the process of actually creating the e-zine itself. The first step in doing this is deciding exactly what kind of e-zine you want to create.

Remember what we said in the previous article? There is more than one way to create an e-zine.

One is to offer what we call an e-zine newsletter. This is an e-zine that will be emailed to your subscriber base on a regular basis, whether it be daily, weekly, monthly or whatever frequency you choose.

In creating an e-zine newsletter that will be emailed, you also need to decide on the format of the newsletter itself. Are you going to send out text emails or are you going to send out your e-zine in HTML format? Just a word of caution; HTML emails are many times flagged as spam by Internet service providers, so you may want to stay away from them unless you have a really reliable autoresponder service that has an excellent delivery rate and reputation with the ISPs.

While we’re on the subject of autoresponders for your e-zine, there are a couple of ways you can go with this.

The first, and simplest, is to go with an autoresponder service like Aweber or GetResponse. Both are good services and you can’t go wrong with either one of them. They will both make sure that the bulk of your emails get delivered to where they need to go. The advantage of having an outside service is that you don’t have to worry about spam complaints, as they will handle all of them, including all opt-ins and opt-outs, or as is most commonly referred to as unsubscribes.

The downside to going with an autoresponder service is that you are pretty much at the mercy of their system. If there are things about it you don’t like, well, you either have to live with them or switch to a new service.

The second option is to have an autoresponder script set up on your own server. The advantages of this are that you are in complete control of your list and how your autoresponder works.

However, there is a HUGE downside to going with your own autoresponder script. Should one of your subscribers happen to scream spam (yes, it DOES happen), the complaint goes to your ISP. If you get enough of these complaints, your ISP can pull the plug on you and you’ll end up losing your hosting.

My personal recommendation is to go with a service like Aweber or GetResponse. You will save yourself a ton of grief.

Aside from offering your own newsletter through email, you can choose to offer your e-zine in the form of a web page that you would update every so often.

There are pros and cons to this as well.

The pros to having your e-zine on a web page are that you don’t have to worry about spam complaints. No emails are sent. The person just goes to the site, signs up for membership, gets his login and password and then accesses the site whenever he wants to.  This makes for very little work for you as far as notifying members.

A good idea would be to have the last time the site was updated somewhere on the main page with what the update was so that people don’t have to go looking all around for the new information.

The cons of having your own web site e-zine are numerous.

For starters, maintaining a website is a lot more difficult and time consuming than typing up a 2 page letter and sending it out to subscribers.  If you’re not an expert at web design, updating your site can be quite a painful process.

Another negative of having a member’s e-zine is that, unless you still have them opt-in, you have no way of contacting these people to let them know that the site has been updated. Many people, if not reminded about the e-zine, will simply forget that it exists and as a result will not come to the site at all after a period of time.

Another negative about having a website e-zine is security. If you want to keep the site only open to members, you’re going to have to have certain scripts written to keep people from hacking into your site. All of this is going to cost a lot more money than just sending out a newsletter, even if you do have to pay monthly fees to some autoresponder service.

Regardless of which format you decide to go with, there are going to be administrative headaches with each. Because of that fact, I strongly recommend staying away from the website and go with the email newsletter, at least when you first start out. As time goes by, you can “graduate” to a web based e-zine.

 5. E-ZINE CONTENT- WHERE TO GET IT

Okay, you’ve decided on the format of your e-zine. Regardless of what format you decide on, you’re going to have to get content for it. The question is, where do you get this content from?

Well, you basically have two choices.

You can write it yourself or you can get it from someplace else.

Let’s start with the writing it yourself option since it is the probably the best option overall.

First of all, let me explain why I feel writing the content yourself is the best option.

The Internet is content crazy. Everything on the Internet is based on content. The sites with the highest rankings and the most visitors have the most content. But not just the most content, but the most “original” content. And that is the key.

What exactly is original content? The best way to illustrate that is with an example.

You sit down at your computer and type up a story about how your Aunt Bessie went to the store to pick up a can of peas and ended up being attacked by a 700 pound gorilla. Now that’s quite a monkey story for the middle of New York City.

It’s also original content.

Now, let’s say you submitted that story to an article directory and somebody liked it enough to include it in one of their story e-zines. They pay the article directory for the right to use the article and then they send it to their subscriber base.

That is NOT original content. It is content that somebody got from a third party.

That is why your first choice is to write your e-zine content yourself. If you send out old content that you got from some article directory to your member base and somebody happens to recognize it from someplace else, they may feel cheated. Maybe they WERE expecting original content. Don’t get me wrong, purchasing content from article directories, or even finding free content, which you can do, is perfectly legit. But don’t you feel that your subscribers deserve the best that they can get?

Now, having said that, if you simply can’t write, you can still get original content. All you have to do is hire somebody to write it for you. You can go to a place like Elance.com and get somebody to write articles for you. Please understand that in most cases, you will get what you pay for. Somebody charging you only $3 an article is probably not going to give you top notch quality work.

Now, if you should happen to find somebody who is willing to write for you for free, there is going to be a catch to this. Most likely he is going to want to include a link to his website in the newsletter itself. So just be prepared for this.

Some people really have no choice when it comes to content and have to get content from a third party. If it’s original third party content, meaning they wrote it specifically for you, that’s fine. It’s just as good as your own, if not better, especially if they are a good writer.

But if you get content that has been circulated all over the Internet, your e-zine credibility just won’t be as great. This is something you might want to consider before you even decide if you want to offer an e-zine, because without killer content, that’s the ball game.

6. COMING UP WITH IDEAS FOR YOUR E-ZINE

This is where most people are tripped up right out of the gate. The truth is, this is no different from coming up with an idea for a product or service. In this case, your e-zine IS your product, and if you want to keep people hanging around for the next issue, you better come up with a solid idea to keep them coming back. This will usually take some thought and a lot of hard work.

So just how DO you come up with ideas for your e-zine?

Well, there are a number of ways.

The first is to go on the Internet and see what e-zines are already out there. If you go to a directory of e-zines, of which there are many, you will see that there are more themes than Imelda Marcos has shoes. What you might want to do is subscribe to a few e-zines in the niche that you are in and see what kind of information they send out in their e-zine newsletters. Don’t copy it. Just get a feel for what kind of information is sent to subscribers. Also make a note of the format of the e-zine. See if there are any ads in the e-zine or if it’s strictly content.

While you’re looking through these e-zines to see what they’re sending to their subscribers, here’s something you should do that very few people even think of. I’m just giving you the benefit of my years of experience here with this subject.

Look to see what’s NOT in the e-zine.

Of course each topic is going to be self contained and therefore you’re not going to see every piece of information that exists in each e-zine. But, over time, you will start to notice things that the e-zine publisher does NOT cover.

Why is this important?

Because this is potentially a market to exploit and take advantage of.

For example, let’s say you subscribe to an e-zine on Internet advertising and you notice that in all the issues, the publisher never once brought up the subject of article writing for the purpose of advertising. This could be a chance for you to capture that corner of the market.

How?

Simple. Start an e-zine for aspiring writers. Show them how they can turn their writing into profit not just by selling their works, but also by using their writing to promote other products and services. Teach them how to do a product review among many other things.

You could very well come up with an e-zine that reaches a wide audience.

Coming up with original e-zine ideas is not easy, but it doesn’t have to be excruciatingly difficult either. By doing a little research and thinking outside the box, you can come up with ideas for your e-zine that could very well make you one of the most popular e-zines on the Internet.

7. HIRING A WRITER FOR YOUR E-ZINE

Okay, you’ve got the ideas for your e-zine but you’ve also decided that writing is just not for you. However, you’ve also decided that you don’t want to dig up rehashed content for your e-zine. Well, in that case, the only thing left to do is hire a writer.

Work for hire on the Internet is not as easy to get accomplished as in the offline world for many reasons that are beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say, it’s a question of who blinks first.

Let me try to explain with an example.

John Doe decides that he wants to hire a writer for his e-zine. So he looks around the Internet and finds an email address of a Sally Rogers. So he emails Sally and tells her that he wants her to write 5 articles for his e-zine. Sally replies back saying that the 5 articles would cost him $50. He says fine.

Sally then emails John Doe and says that he has to pay $25 up front.

Now, think about this. All John knows about Sally is an email address. For all he knows, she doesn’t even have to be a Sally. In theory, and unfortunately what happens way too often, John Doe sends $25 to Sally’s PayPal account and then never hears from her again. He’s out $25.

In defense of Sally, if she’s one of the honest ones, what happens all too often is that she delivers the articles and never gets paid. She’s now put in all that work and has nothing to show for it.

This is why dealing with these type of things on the Internet are so difficult. In the offline world, you simply go down to the store with the money in your hand and say, “Are my articles ready?” The person who wrote them then hands you a package and you hand him the money.

So, the first thing you have to do when you hire a writer to write content for you is to work out the terms in advance. If the two of you can’t agree on delivery and payment, then there is no point in doing business with this person.

After you have worked out the terms of payment and delivery, you can then get into the details of what you want for the e-zine. Again, you have to be very specific about what you want right up front. If you have to, write up an outline of how you expect the articles to read. You may not be able to write yourself, but you should at least have a decent idea of exactly what content you want in these articles.

This is just another one of those reasons why I strongly suggest writing your own content, to avoid problems like these.

However, if you should find a really great writer who is easy to work with, hold on to this person. As you develop a working relationship, you will find that they will probably start to give you discounts on your requests.

These relationships are rare and hard to find, but when you do find one, hang on for dear life.

You may never find another one like it again.

8. PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Okay, you’ve gotten your content. You’ve either written it yourself, paid somebody to write it for you, or shudder the thought, got some free content from an article directory.

Now what?

Now, it’s time to put it all together and actually create your e-zine, whether it be an email or a web page.

What, you thought this was all going to put itself together all on its own? No, I’m afraid there is quite a bit of work to do.

For starters, what do you want your e-zine to look like? Even emails can get pretty fancy without going the HTML route. There are so many fonts and styles to choose from. Do you want your e-zine to be just plain old ordinary Times New Roman?

Maybe you’re doing an e-zine on antiques. So maybe a font like this is something that just might attract your readers.  Or maybe you’re putting together a comic book e-zine and something along these lines might be just what the e-zine ordered. Most people really don’t think about this sort of detail. That’s what separates the good e-zines from the really great ones.

Aside from the look, you also want to decide on the order that things will come in the e-zine. What if you decide that in addition to the article, you also want to put a brief ad in the e-zine. Do you do it at the beginning, the end, where? My gut tells me to give them the content first and then do your sales pitch. Remember, you don’t want to give them a pitch with each e-zine.

What if you decide that your e-zine is going to be a web page. How many pages? Will the content be on the main page? Will you archive all old newsletters? Will you have a page with products? Will you also have an opt-in box for an email series?

Lots of questions, and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface.
What about graphics for your e-zine? You do want to have a look that people will recognize. Branding is so important with everything we do online. Sometimes people will recognize us more by a certain logo than by the words on a page.

And what about the actual layout of your web page? You want each page of your e-zine to have the same look. If the pages are thrown together willy-nilly, visitors to your site are going to get the impression that this isn’t a very professional e-zine.

Everything has to look like it goes together, especially if visitors are going from one page to another, otherwise they may not even know that they’re at the same site and end up leaving because they’re lost. So navigation is also very important.

The point is, you just don’t throw your e-zine together. Everything has to be planned out to the letter if you want your e-zine to have a professional look and convey that professionalism to your subscribers.

Learn From 15 Ebay PowerSellers How They Raked In Over $11,726,200 Last Year Alone

Does everyone give eBay positive feedback?

At some point everyone has heard an eBay horror story. Stories much like this one:

Alan Thomasson, a student at the University of Lincoln, was looking to buy a new guitar. So, like millions of others, he went to ‘the UK’s largest online marketplace’ – eBay. Like millions of others, he browsed the items up for sale before finally deciding on a ‘nearly-new’ Fender Stratocaster. He used PayPal, eBay’s official online payment service, and coughed up the £300 needed for his new six-string. A week passed, and Alan hadn’t heard a peep from the seller. Like any other self-respecting buyer he emailed the seller and asked where his guitar was. He was told it was on the way and not to worry. Another week passed. Then another. Alan emailed eBay asking them to help with his missing guitar, but all they told him was to email the seller and work it out between themselves. Eventually Alan took matters into his own hands. He managed to find the seller’s address from one of the emails he’d received, and as it turned out the seller was a mere 30 miles away! Alan and a couple of friends (for moral support) drove to the seller’s house, knocked on his door, and asked for the guitar or the money. The seller was reluctant, but not aggressive. He took on an ‘it’s a fair cop’ attitude, and refunded Alan’s money via PayPal right then and there.

 It’s safe to say that eBay is one website Alan won’t be bookmarking!

Stories just like this one have been floating around the internet and general media since eBay was founded in California, USA way back in September 1995 – then known as ‘AuctionWeb’. The company’s founder, computer programmer Pierre Omidyar, tried to rename the website ‘EchoBay’ however the name was taken so he resorted to his second choice – the world renowned ‘eBay’. The idea of a ‘virtual marketplace’ took the world by storm and in a matter of a few years eBay was world leader of the online auctions market, spawning countless ‘clone sites’ ever since.

According to eBay’s official figures, they have a global customer base of 181 million users. That’s a lot of auctions. 78 million auctions at any given moment to be precise. With that many users buying and selling that many items, there are bound to be some unhappy customers, right? That’s exactly what this article is all about; how many people really do give eBay ‘positive feedback’?

To get a general idea, I asked a cross-section of people whether their experience of eBay had been a generally positive or negative one. Out of the seventy people asked, only 15% of them said they’d had a generally negative experience. If we look at that as an indicator of the global market, that’s a staggering 27,150,000 unhappy customers. Obviously it’s not practical to see the results of seventy as the results of the whole world, but it gives you an idea.

So, if there are so many people who aren’t so happy with eBay – where can we find them? Well, a good place to start looking would be anti-eBay website ‘FireMeg.com’. The name refers to the current CEO & President of eBay, Meg Whitman. Members of the website believe that she is the cause of much of the discontent in the eBay community, and are working towards, as the name suggests, have her fired. I talked to the founder of FireMeg.com, Josh Shaffer.

I wondered what the initial motivation behind the website was.

“It wasn’t one singular event, but rather many little issues that culminated in my decision to start the site.  My wife and I have been selling on eBay, full-time, for four years now.  I had been selling off-and-on for about four years before that.” Josh told me “I was prompted to ‘attack’ CEO Meg Whitman because many of the issues aside from glitches (fraud, scams, investments, etc.) seem to point directly back to her as the perpetuator of problems.”

Josh continued to speak about the increase in ‘seller fees’ (eBay charge users to sell their items and take a cut of the profit) over the past two years. He even claims that the biggest gripe his group has with eBay is their “lies and deceit”. This refers to eBay stating on more than one occasion this year that there would be no more seller fee increases.

Last June at ‘eBay Live’, an annual eBay convention held in Las Vegas, Meg Whitman made a speech regarding the future of eBay’s sellers. Josh was quick to point out that Meg did not once mention an increase in seller fees. Then, a month later, eBay announced a fee increase which “caught [sellers] completely off-guard”. The site ‘glitches’ that Josh told me about are also a major concern, especially when eBay phone reps have, according to Mr Shaffer, been caught lying to users. As Josh puts it “eBay’s view on glitches is until it becomes a site-wide glitch affecting nearly all of the users, both buyers and sellers, that it isn’t really a glitch.”
So, what do you think? Are eBay swindling their customers or do you think there’ll always be a few unhappy customers? Would you give eBay positive or negative feedback?

One important thing to remember in a case like this is that eBay is a worldwide company. Every day they have to deal with complaints about fraud, deception, glitches and a range of other issues. Whilst doing this they have to maintain the cost of running all of their global sites. That includes a full payroll - from web technicians to ‘Live Help’ reps.

In the world of business there’ll always be an eBay and there’ll always be a FireMeg.com. Some, much like myself, would rather sit on the fence and enjoy one of the 85% of transactions that seem to run without a hitch.

If I ever find myself in that 15%, though, you can be sure Mr Shaffer will be the first person I’ll call!

The Wrath of Google: PageRank Cuts for Link Sellers

A lot of blogs earn money by selling links. Whether you are working with PayPerPost, TextLinkAds or selling links on your own, it’s a good way to earn some cash with your blog and it is often a far sight more money than AdSense. While some bloggers do earn well with Adsense, there are plenty out there who don’t and these folks need text links to survive. But now, Google has made good on its threats to punish anyone who sells links on their blog.

In the past week, a variety of huge blogs, including JohnChow.com, CourtneyTuttle.com and Statcounter have all been penalized for selling text links. How? Their PageRank plummeted, one point in most cases, two in other cases. Now, this wasn’t actual PageRank, but toolbar PageRank, which is bad enough. Bloggers the blogosphere over are considering this a warning shot . . . the next round of punishments will likely be harsher.

So, how does this affect smaller blogs, especially those who have been waiting for PageRank in order to be able to take on higher paying text links? No one is exactly sure yet. It may be that we will be able to simply add no-follow links and continue to sell our ad links . . . that remains to be seen. You see, the apparent problem here is that people buy text links from bloggers in order to siphon off PageRank juice. While this may not always be true, it is how Google is looking at blogs for now and that means we have to be careful.

For the moment, bloggers are becoming rather paranoid and most are stopping all sales until further notice. While this is probably a good idea, it could mean drastic loss of income for anyone who makes their living off text links. At the same time, it may cause the value of text links to go up temporarily . . . a good thing for anyone willing to say “screw Google” and continue on with this type of money earning method.

Even if you decide to continue selling text links, it is advisable to go underground, at least for now. Take down your advertising page and make potential link clients contact you by email, since Google appears to be checking this. You may want to make your links unobtrusive and not obviously sponsored links, as well, though this is deemed pretty sneaky by blog readers.

In the end, whether we like it or not, Google pretty much has a dictatorship and can make these kinds of wide-scale changes that affect us all. One can only hope that there will be a solution presented shortly so bloggers the world over can continue earning with text links.

Choosing Wordpress To Host Your Blog

If you are looking to jump on the blogging bandwagon, choosing the right hosting service for your blog can be a bit of a nightmare. There are so many ways to get your own blog these days, but there are two options that seem to have the same appeal. Firstly, many website hosting services offer the opportunity to host a blog as part of the hosting package. Freewebs is a good example of this. You can host your blog as a sub domain, which basically means that the URL that you choose for your blog is tacked onto the end of the freewebs domain. Secondly, websites such as Wordpress or Blogger allow you to host your blog for free. Again, you do not get your own domain name unless you choose to buy it, but you do not have to pay for the privilege of hosting the blog with this option.

If you choose to host your blog on one of the main blogging websites, the three main players are Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad. Whereas Wordpress and Blogger are both free to use, Typepad requires a subscription to set up a blog, which many people then use to host a portfolio, as opposed to a regular blog. Wordpress is generally considered to be superior to Blogger in the hosting stakes. Wordpress offers built-in statistics, so you can easily track how many visitors your blog is getting, as well as how these people find your blog, the keywords that they type in to do so, and the links that people click on in your blogroll. Blogger does not offer this feature, and you will need to install a site meter to provide statistics on who is visiting your blog.

Most bloggers are concerned with directing traffic to their blog, and this is where it pays to make your blog search engine friendly. Wordpress is far more SEO-friendly than its competitors. There are plug-ins that you can add to do so. You can set up your blog to add meta-tags to your posts. This means that you can add keywords and descriptions to your posts that will be picked up by the search engines. The Add Meta-tags plug-in uses excerpts from your blog posts as the post’s description. You can also download the Head META description plug-in, which does a similar job. You can link other posts on your blog that are in the same category with this plug-in. It can also link posts that have related content, but are not necessarily in the same category as the post in question. If you have a tag cloud on your blog, the Keyword Tag plug-in will post links to other posts on your blog with the same tagged keywords.

Other top plug-ins for Wordpress include Akismet, which fights spam and checks trackbacks. The Google sitemap plug-in creates a sitemap of your blog that is search engine friendly, especially for Google. There are many more plug-ins available, and a good list is available here.

There are many obvious reasons why Wordpress is one of the most popular blog services, but it will ultimately come down to personal preference. There are very few other blog services that offer the same array of impressive plug-ins to make your blog more search engine friendly, and this is one of the major factors behind the popularity of Wordpress.