TUTORIAL: 2012

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Easily Designing a Portfolio for Stock Photographer

Just about anyone and everyone requires a portfolio to showcase his works and either lure in new clients or prove his proficiency in his chosen niche. A stock photographer is no different. Actually a good portfolio is a great resource for any photographer in general and a free lance photographer in particular.

If you are an up and coming freelance photographer looking for new clients or to market your stock photos then the answer is definitely "Yes". An online portfolio not only allows you to attract international clients, but provided it gains sufficient search engine visibility, it will also make attract many potential clients who has by chance stumbled on to your site.
In addition, you can use it to sell stock photos directly from your portfolio on a royalty free basis

The mantra for a successful portfolio is to showcase your success not your failures! Spend sufficient amount of time to choose just a handful of your very best photos and those which are representative of your interests and passions. Remember, in a portfolio your intention is to wet a potential clients appetite to see more of your works and quality and quantity should always be given priority.

Designing a website which matches your style of photography is vitally important as in this age of competition the slightest of margins can make all the difference between getting and not getting the commission.
Many web masters use flash animation and ready made gallery extensions to showcase their images. Undoubtedly, Flash animation is great for attracting real visitors but many web browsers along with I Pad, I Phone etc. do not support Flash. So it is always wise to have an HTML page just for back up.
If you are a hardcore pro then get a pro designer to do the job for you. Otherwise you can also design it yourself by using ready made templates and most conveniently by using the popular WordPress platform.
If you are unsure of how to go about designing your website, remember a simple or neutral design where the focus is firmly on your photos is often the way to go.

And last but not the least you need to market your website in order to gain greater visibility in the internet. A great way to catch the attention of search engines and your audience is by integrating a regularly updated blog with your portfolio where you can publish both tips and tricks as well as personal experiences and observations. If you have a large following then using a discussion forum may also be a pretty good idea.
Regular social bookmarking and maintaining a twitter and Facebook page are other ploys you may want to try.
But above all have patience, Rome was not built in a day!

Of course, the most professional approach to creating a website yourself is by using a powerful piece of software like Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage. However, these software are often intimidating and rather difficult handle for the amateur developer. A great alternative to this, that will save you considerable effort (not to mention money) and allow you more time to concentrate on important things (like taking great photos) is to use ready made WordPress themes. Many of them are free and those which aren't are almost always priced below $50. Here is a look at some of the themes you might want to try out:

Gallery is a premium WordPress theme which can be used for many purposes, including a Photoblog, Portfolio, Personal Blog, Product Reviews, and more. Some of its interesting features include:

Comes in 2 styles, 3 color styles each allowing easy makeovers to make your site look fresh every time.
Widgetized Sidebar and Footer where you can display relevant text, add cool plugins or even your Adsense code
Custom Fields for Images are optional
Featured Posts (or in your case images) on Homepage
Drop-Down Menu for Pages and Categories to give a cool professional look

Unlike the above two, Photoshot from Theme Forest is uniquely designed to serve as a photographer's portfolio theme. It includes a range of features to allow you to easily create the perfect portfolio website.

FAVORITE BOX - add photos to the favorite box and view them later in a beautiful fullscreen slideshow.

Block right click (prevent images from saving)

Unique menu - unique menu style, all elements are same width and it looks just awesome.

3 Homepage variations (Slideshow, photoblog, static page) not to mention two different color schemes (light and dark)

Infinity is a free professional WordPress-theme. The theme has 3 fixed columns, thumbnails integration, Flickr, Delicious and Twitter integration as well as an attractive visual design. The theme was designed by Zhang Yichi. It includes:
3 fixed columns design
Thumbnail covers style
Flickr, Twitter and delicious integration
However, a major drawback of the Infinity Theme is that it is NOT widget ready.

nother way of using WordPress to showcase your photos is by using a WordPress Gallery Plugins
instead of a dedicated WordPress photography portfolio theme. Some of the most popular WordPress Gallery plugins include:

1. Nextgen Gallery
2. Photosmash Gallery
3. Cincopa Wordpress Plugin

A few other less popular Wordpress gallery plugins include:

1. WP Photo album 2. Picasna 3. Superslider-show 4. Lightbox Gallery 5. Page Flip Image gallery 6. Cleaner Gallery.

Proven Methods to Get Free Easy Targeted Traffic

As I have already mentioned in my previous post How NOT to Get Traffic to your Blog what you are looking for as a website/blog owner is not just any kind of traffic but TARGETED traffic and here are 3 very easy and of course free methods to generate targeted hits for your site which have worked for me. (This article is strictly objective and non-promotional!)

YouSayToo
YouSayToo is one of those community blogging sites that seem to be growing in popularity every day but it also has some great potential for generating traffic for your blog. You can link your blog with YouSayToo so that people can view your post on YouSayToo as well as your own blog. You can further increase your PVs by participating in other programs. But at this time I cannot tell you more about them because YouSayToo undergoing a complete makeover and many of their services are being discontinued with the promise of being replaced by newer more improved features in the near future.

The one major drawback about YouSayToo is that the intregation with your blog is not seamless in the sense that the comments your posts receive from YouSayToo users will not show up under your original post and viceversa. Also, to participate in the YouSayToo programs you must display their banner on your site, but they are sufficiently inconspicuous and even cool so that it shouldn't be major issue for most site owners.

Link Referral
Link Referral is essentially a cross between a traffic exchange site and a search engine. After signing up and registering your sites you can perfrom a number of activities such as visiting member sites using their search engine, rating and reviewing them or simply creating forum posts. For each activity you earn some amount of points and more the points you have more the priority the search engine will give to your sites when someone searches the relevant keywords (similar to the concept of Google PageRank). As the person is SEARCHING to find your site it has a greater possibility of being targeted. Further, you can also free quotes and ratings from others users which you can republish on your site.

Link Referral also provides paid membership and by default they are given priority over the free members.

SocialAdr
SocialAdr is an automated bookmarking services whereby you can easily get your articles bookmarked in some of the leading bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious etc. After signing up you have to fill in your usernames and passwords of a number of social bookmarking sites and there is no obligations the more you fill the better. Then you can bookmark posts by other members either individually or using the Quick Share option and earn credits for each share. Once you have 8 or more credits you can use them to get your own articles Dugg/voted up etc. by the other members. Though this really boost your traffic and have a really lasting impact, the only downside of SocialAdr is that at least for free members, the service is very slow and you must prioritize which few URLs you want to submit to their network because realistically you can't promote all your links through SocialAdr.

How NOT to Get Traffic to your Blog

If you are a new blogger and have a couple of posts online then there is a pretty good chance that your pageviews are not quite you expected them to be before undertaking the trouble of writing those great posts. Desperate for some free and easy traffic for your blog you decide to take advantage of that ever faithful monster called Google and in time your screen is littered with millions and millions of services and affiliates of services all of which promise to deliver tons of hits to your blog and the more you read the more you get convinced that they are too good to be true. Know why? Because they really are.!

Before you start misinterpreting me I must clarify that almost all the FREE services are 100% legit and will work just like their respective pitch pages promise. But what they tacitly skip mentioning is that you will only receive tons of traffic but hardly any TARGETED TRAFFIC (you can hardly hope to interest beyond a few seconds a person looking for gardening tips with your blog on automobiles!) and further you might lose some vital brownie points with Google.

So here are some of the very common types of traffic generating schemes that every blogger should avoid:

Automatic Traffic Exchange Sites
Automatic traffic exchange sites works on the simple principle that for every site you view using their system another member of their system will visit your site a specific (usually .5 or .75) number of times. They are free (though premiere membership is also available) and require minimum effort on your part as all you need to do is keep a window open and the sites will rotate automatically, changing every 30 seconds or so. And the really big traffic exchange sites (like autosurfpro) can easily generate 400+ PVs for your site on a daily basis.
Even so, some of the reasons you don't want to use this apparent godsend of a service are:

Since it is fully automatic there is no guarantee that your page is actually getting viewed. Someone may just keep the window open and minimized and be watching a movie for all you know.
Your onsite time is typically very small (10-30 seconds) and often your page won't load properly in that time.
Since your page will automatically rotate it will register an incredibly high bounce rate (most likely 100%) and this will prompt Google into thinking that your site is of very poor quality and that is why all your visitor are clicking out in such a hurry.
Additionally, Google positively HATES automatic traffic exchangers and while you cannot use it with Blogger, you might even run into trouble if you try to use it on pages with Adsense ad units.

Viral Traffic Sites

As the name suggests, viral traffic sites helps your traffic grow virally. Basically everytime a person in your downline refers a new person to the viral traffic site he has to view your page before being allowed to sign up. Sounds easy? Here's why you still shouldn't waste you time on viral traffic sites:

It is a lot more difficult than it sounds to actually build yourself a sufficiently large downline to actually generate sufficient amount of traffic on a regular basis.If you are not getting any traffic where will you find the people to persuade to sign up under you and join your downline?
The persons who are actually viewing your sites are being FORCED to do so and in their eagerness to get a part of the action are hardly likely to show much enthusiasm in your site.

Free Backlink Exchange Sites and Directories

Though not as direct as the above two methods, backlink exchange directories list your site on their high pagerank pages and provide you with dofollow backlinks which is supposed to boost your search engine visibility and help you to get more visitors from Google. So why not to use it? Here are just some of the answers:

First and foremost they DON'T work! The backlinks are hardly ever one-way (you will also be required to link back to them) and will almost never be CONTEXTUAL, and it is commonly acknowledged that if anything Google frowns upon link lists and definitely doesn't give much impotance to them.
Backlink directories have a habit of cheating on you and there is a very good chance that the link to your site will disappear within a week and possibly before Google has even had time to spider it.

Now that you know how not to get traffic to your blog put your fingers to your keyboard and keep churning out some more great articles (which is the key to success in the long run) and check out my next post where I tell how yo can get easy, free and targeted traffic to your page.

P.S.: Though aimed at beginners and inexperienced bloggers this post does contain some relatively advanced and technical terminology such as bounce rate and dofollow backlinks. If you have problem understanding any of these words then simply highlight the word or phrase and let Apture do the rest.

MathType : Software Review

MathType is a specialized software which enables typing out of complex mathematical formulae and expressions which cannot easily written on popular text editors like MS Words or even MS Excel.

Some Useful Features of MathType
The most remarkable feature of MathType is its intuitive and user friendly yet immensely powerful simplistic user interface. There are several modes such as derivatives, matrices, statistics, algebra etc with each mode having a series of one-click expression entry options for commonly used expressions.

There are also a series of tabs for easily entering all sorts of symbols and commonly used Greek letters. In this regard it may be worth noting that though MS Word definitely boasts of a much more exhaustive set of foreign characters and symbols (though many of them find NO use in writing mathematical expressions), it is far easier to find and properly use them on MathType.

Another impressive feature of MathType is the highly efficient way in which they have dealt with superscripts and subscripts and even sub-subscripts. This feature is far superior than any other word editor I have used either online or otherwise. In fact, in many ways the ability of MathType to seamlessly handle scripts of different sizes and at different realtive positions simultaneously is the corner stone of its success.

The matrix/vectors of any dimension can also be suitably represented with MathType.

Expressions involving summation and various types of integration (surface,volume,line etc) can also be easily written using MathType.

Disadvantages of MathType
Though MathType is a highly efficient software and fits its product description perfectly, yet its nearly $100 price tag is quite exorbitant.

Also, personally I felt its integration with MS Words could have been considerably better as it is quite a hassle to rectify the typos once you have pasted to Words. Further, alignment of the MathType symbols with the Words documents is also not always perfect.

Last but definitely not the least not all online publishing platforms support Math Type, and I am talking major sites such as Hubpages, and to the best of my knowledge even Blogger!

Suite101 Introduces Subdomains

This is just a short post to inform my readers that Suite101 has followed Hubpages' lead and introduced author specific subdomains.

It has been well documented over the past few months how Suite101 was one of the worst hit content sites following Google's calamitous Project Panda and that their pageviews went down by around 40% withing two to three months in early 2011.

Since then Suite101.com has undergone a sea change and chopped and changes things around with limited success. Their latest modification in order to win back Google's lost love (though it is still PR7 domain) is to introduce individual subdomains for every contributor like anish-d.suite101.com where you can choose the name from a limited list of options created by various permutations of your name.

All pages will be shifted to their respective subdomains by 15th Sept. automatically by Suite101 so you might as well hurry over and exercise your choice.

However, unlike Hubpages, almost each and every one of my Suite101 pages was PR2 or more and the change in URL means that I will at least temporarily loose it. Hopefully I'll recover them soon enough.

Another thought that struck me regarding this content sites issuing subdomains to authors is that soon all these sites will effectively become blogging platforms (like Blogger, WordPress) and every community will behave like blogger tribes (group of people commenting and linking to each other's blogs) with backlinks flying everywhere. I am sure that will be a really interesting development because then all these sites persecuted by Project Panda will become identical to Google's very own Blogger.

Earn Upfront With Your Articles from Looking For Clues

While there are quite a large number of sites which pay you through passive revenue share are, the number of sites which pay you upfront for your articles is dramatically less and those that are around have one (or both) of the following issues:

They require absolutely perfect English and the bar is almost ridiculously high.
They tell you which topics to write on and this might really cramp your style, especially if you are not a pro but just keen to have a good time and make a few bucks on the side.

In fact, Looking For Clues is the only site I could find where you will face neither of the aforementioned issues. They only require you to be passionate about your topic and your English to be coherrent, which of course is the very essence of blogging (I mean no one's expecting your blog to read like PG Wodehouse!) So here is a quick review of this real life saver for struggling small timers.

Submission Guidelines of LFC
As I have already mentioned LFC publishes articles on just about any topic but generally pays more for reviews than for general info articles. The only issue with their submission guideline is that each article must be at least 800 words, which significantly longer than the average 300-500 word articles you write for other content directories. Articles must be unique and exclusive to LFC.

Submission Process
The submission process at LFC is very low key but highly personalized and efficient nonetheless. You just have to e-mail your article to their editor who will get back to you in around 2 weeks time and inform you if they are willing to buy it and how much they will pay for it. If you accept their terms then your articles will be edited (just grammatical and spelling errors) and once you approve the edits you will be paid and then your article will go on online.

Though there is no passive income scheme, LFC expects every author to promote their articles and this you ability to generate traffic for LFC may have a bearing on your future transactions with them.

LFC Author Compensation Scheme
Usually LFC will pay you something between $10-$20 for each article and it gradually increases as you publish more and more articles there. However, payment is only made to business or premiere paypal accounts which means around $1 will be deducted for transaction.

In addition LFC also allows you a 2-3 sentence long author box and 1-2 dofollow backlinks to your personal blogs etc.

Despite its seedy looks LFC is a 100% genuine site and they have paid me a total of $42 for 3 articles. You can check out my articles at my LFC profile page.

Hubpages Introduces Subdomains

This is just a short post to inform the reader that Hubpages has launched a most innovative post-panda survival strategy to help check the slide in pageviews and search engine trust--they have introduced the .hubpages.com domain name and here is how they hope it will solve their traffic woes.

It is no secret that ALL the user generated content sharing sites have taken a major hit since Google introduced their new content quality based algorithm commonly referred to as Panda. But, while most other major players (most noticeably Suite101.com) are trying to upgrade their editorial process and weed out spammy looking content, Hubpages are trying to shift from an online content magazine to a Blogger style push-button publishing platform by offering each user a separate domain name like username.hubpages.com

At this point each user (or rather Hubpages account) can either shift to your reserved subdomain or continue to publish hubs as before. So should you transfer your Hubpages profile to .hubpages.com?

Advantages of Shifting to Hubpages Subdomain

The main advantage of shifting to .hubpages.com subdomain is to slightly alienate yourself from the standard hubpages.com/hub/ URL and there by establish a separate existence in the eyes of Google. The major reason why Hubpages has taken such a hit is because some people are writing low quality article which is prompting Google to devalue the entire hubpages.com/hub domain. So, everyone's articles are feeling the crunch. Which means, if you are confident that you write above average hubs then this should help you get more search engine trust whereas if you are spamming only your subdomain gets blacklisted.
If you are using Hubapges to gain leverage or as a portfolio for bagging freelance writing gigs then a subdomain of your own should definitely give more gravity to your bid compared to just a profile URL
Apart from your profile and hub addresses everything else remains exactly the same with your homepage doubling up as your profile page. So you don't have to make sacrifices on the cool Hubpages user interface.
You will be automatically shifted to your subdomain within the next month. So might as well take a head start.

Increase Page Time with Apture

OK, so you have now got a blog with a decent number pageviews every month. Now, the next important thing you want to ensure is that your readers are actually reading the stuff you have spent so much time writing for them and are staying on your site for appreciable periods of time(like may be a couple of minutes!)

In other words, now that you have gained quantity, it is time to measure the actually quality of your site traffic. And are you managing to hold on to your visitors and make sure that they read through the post and click your ads and affiliate links? A person leaving your site within just a few seconds will usually mean one of four things:

You are targeting the wrong keywords and your domain name is irrelevant to your site content.
There is something inherently wrong with your landing page (design, content etc) that is repulsive to your visitor.
Your page is so clear cut that the visitor has found what he was looking for very quickly and has left.
The visitor found something interesting in the top half of your article and has gone off to Google it.

While, the only way to solve the first 2 issues is to put more thought into your site, situation 3 may be a good thing and there is a high possibility the reader will keep visiting your site in the future or even start spreading the word about how good the site is. However, situation 4 was, until recently, the most difficult to solve.

But now that a program named Apture has solved the problem you just have to marvel at the simplicity of the solution.

What is Apture ?
Apture is a service that allows visitors to read stuff relevant to your content without ever leaving your site. All your reader has to do is highlight a piece of text on your article and then Apture will search through trusted sites like Wikipedia, search engines like Bing and even your own domain to pull out relevant excerpts, photos and videos, thus providing a ready reference for your readers so that he never has to leave your site to fill in the gaps of your content.

Apture can also sense if some words are generating more responses from your audience and then those become Hotspots, i.e.the Apture info box opens on mouse over.

Another, interesting feature on Apture is that it does not work on anchor texts so you may rest assures that your page links won't get messed up.

Additional Features of Apture
In addition to this enhanced value-added service Apture also offers the following services:

You can use Apture to show Amazon ads and earn commissions through your Amazon Associate account when a purchase is completed.
You can specify domain names (in addition to Wikipedia, Amazon etc.) from Apture draws relevant content.
You can enable the trendy Apture side bar.

See Apture at Work
You can see Apture at work right here on this page. Simply select a piece of text and then click the Apture logo!

Get Paid to Write Sites You Haven't Heard of 3

This is the third installment of my Get Paid to Write Sites You Haven't Heard of series (read Part I and Part 2) where I try to maintain an up to date list all the new and upcoming content sharing sites from which you can earn money (either upfront or passive revenue share) from your published content.

The main purpose of writing this series of articles is to empower the reader to think beyond the established sites like Factoidz, AC, Suite101, Helium etc which has a tendency of developing strategies and installing rules that can create issues for your work ethics, work flow and most of all creativity.

So, without further ado lets dive straight into the list:

Wizzley
Wizzley is a really impressive content sharing site developed by some of the Squidoo big boys (and girls). It has adopted the standard module based writer interface similar to Hubpages and Squidoo. Though it does not have as many module types as Squidoo (which quite possibly has several thousand modules), Wizzley does feature some very innovative modules like the Wikipedia module.

However, my favorite module there is the Download module which allows the writer to upload a file to the Wizzley server which the reader can then download. An absolute godsend people looking to offer freebies to their readers.

Minimum article length is 400 words. Editorial system is fairly strict but that might prove to be a good thing in the Post-Panda Cyber world. Wizzley allows you to place one promotional link per 50 words (approx.)

You earn through your adsense publisher ID and you get 50% of the ad impressions. You can also earn through Amazon Associates, AllPosters and Ebay.

DailyWiki
DailyWiki is another India based content sharing site that user the standard and super easy WordPress platform which means that if are familiar with this platform (ever owned a WordPress blog or written for Snipsly amongst other sites) then you can start churning out those articles in no time at all.

The minimum wordcount per article is a standard 300 words but you earn more points for writing longer articles. And 400 words articles have a better chance of getting search engine traffic. Articles must be unique. 2 Dofollow promotional links are allowed per article.

You earn points for various activities and win cash prizes of upto $100 every month in addition to adsense revenue!

RitePad
RitePad is a VERY new and slightly unprofessional (nothing bad, just amateurish) looking WordPress based content sharing website which offers 80% adsense ad impressions on your articles.

Adsense Revenue Sharing Site Seekyt : Review

Seekyt is an upcoming content sharing website where author's can make some some passive revenue through Google Adsense.

Vital Statistics of Seekyt
Home Page Google Page Rank : 3
Alexa Rank : 69,072

Overview of Seekyt

Seekyt only accepts unique content of length 2000 characters or more. Your 3 articles will be moderated before they are published to ensure that it is not spam. But, provided your article is unique and doesn't have too many spelling errors (don't forget to use the Seekyt spell checker tool) your articles should have no issues whatsoever with their editorial system.

You earn revenue through Google Adsense ads placed around your article, but you must have a verified Adsense account to earn from this site. Seekyt offers 70% Adsense ad impression to the author and is significantly higher than most of its more established competitors like Xomba (60%), Hubpages (60%), Triond(50%) and Bukisa (60%). In addition, you can also earn through your Amazon Associates account.In additon to this, Seekyt offers a whopping 25% referral bonus!

Seekyt also allows you to place a limited number of dofollow backlinks to your articles and so may be a good place to market your blog or website or even try and sell your products.

My Thoughts on Seekyt
The first thing that struck me about Seekyt is how active their network is. Your article is sure generate some nice comments and get tweeted, f-liked and shared within just hours of going online and that is a big advantage Seekyt has over many more established content sharing sites.

Seekyt is also one of the very few content sharing sites that actually allows you to chose your page layout (placement of adblocks etc.) and this makes the site very flexible for content writers.

However, on the downside Seekyt is a pretty new and site and so it might take a while before you actually start receiving tons of targeted search engine traffic or get a high page rank. But, the decent Alexa rank (for a rather new site) does prove that Seekyt has quite a bit of potential and it might be a good idea to get in the ground level of so promising a venture. Join Seekyt now!

Free Flash Games at Stick Sports : Review

Of all the hundreds if not thousands of free online gaming websites Sticksports.com is probably my favorite. As of present it offers the following five games and several variations/dervatives.

In order of preference (preference is of course subjective) they are:

1. Stick Tennis

This is my absolute favorite online game. It has probably got the best graphics of all the games in the Stickfranchise and as far as the game play is concerned it is in league with any of those EA sports games that you spent good money to buy. With all five grand slam scenarios (Wimbledon, US Open, Oz Open and Roland Garros) along with separate graphics (grass, clay or synthetic) for each of them and accurate players’ skill levels (Federer moves faster than Rodick but Rodick’s surf is faster than Roger’s) ensures that Stick Tennis stays head and shoulders above the competition, at least for the time being.

Further the game is sufficiently challenging so that you have to work for your wins and that makes Stick Tennis an even better game.

2.Stick Cricket

Up next is Stick Cricket–the very first game in the Sticksports family. With a descent game play and tolerable graphics this is also a damn good freebie. Like Stick Tennis this is also a very fast game and usually each match lasts no more than 10 minutes. However, if you’re very busy and can’t possibly spare 10 mins. there’s no need to despair–try the T2 mode, it hardly takes a couple of mins to complete a T2 match.

3.Stick Football

Sorry football lovers but this game is know where near as good as the two mentioned above. For one thing the graphic is absolutely pathetic (I can’t remember the last time I played a game where the characters glidedinstead of walked)

On top of that this game is so easy that you get tired of scoring goals even before the first half is over! A real disappointed!

4.Stick Baseball

The gameplay is very similar to Stick Cricket but can't really say much more as baseball is really not my sport

5.Stick Racing
The latest addition to the Stick Sports family is Stick Racing. However, this game is also very disapointing and rather boring with stupid graphics and a pathetic gameplay.

How to Choose a Free Website Hosting Service

For first timers and casual webmasters (like myself) free services are particularly appealing even if they are restricted and lacking in features. These days there are hundreds of companies who offer free web hosting but most them of them have some sort of a catch in order to force you into opting for one of their paid plans to gain greater freedom on the net.

The following is a beginners guide to web hosting mentioning a list of features that are available for free and are particularly helpful to webmasters.

1. MySQL and PHP support.

MySQL and PHP are very important and you can run a very limited number of applications without them. For example even a basic WordPress blog requires a MySQL database and PHP support. Apart from this a lot of popular applications such as Movable Type require Perl for proper functioning.

2. FTP Access

FTP access is very important to maintain a website because every time you need to upload something you will be needing it. Even if you have browser upload facilities it is not always very reliable, specially when dealing with relatively large files, in which case FTP is the best and easiest method to achieve your end.

3. Bandwidth

Bandwidth is basically a measure of the maximum amount of traffic that your website can receive within a given frame of time (usually one month). Assuming that you are hoping to get at least a few visitors to your website apart from yourself and family you should look for a web host which provides bandwidth in excess of 200MB/month at least. For a very realistic estimate a text-based website which has received around 200 page views will expend 90MB bandwidth.

If you are considering photo blogs or Vblogs (video blogs) you should only consider web hosts providing over 500MB data transfer per month.

4. Advertisement

A lot of free web hosts monetize their service by forcibly placing banner or pop-up ads on your website. Some include a footer text like “Click here for free web hosting”. If it is a purely personal blog these advertisements hardly pose a problem. But otherwise it somehow seems to undermine the credibility and authority of your website, not to mention become tiresome to your readers.

5. Diskspace

Depending up on the nature of your site this may be either your most important or your least important concern. For most purposes a disk space of above 500MB should be quite sufficient and a lot of web hosting companies provide more than that. However, if you are planning on creating your portfolio and get your high resolution photos or HD videos online you might be a touch hard put to find a free host with sufficient amount of disk space. (the maximum I’ve ever heard of is 50 GB and that’s a bit rare).

6. PHP cURL and fsockopen enabled are two other important features for a web host but these are very rare in case free web host provider. I’m not sure exactly what purpose these two features serve, but I can guarantee you one thing: If you are looking to use any auto blogging applications chances are they won’t work without cURL and fsockopen enabled.

This is basically all you need to know in order to find yourself a descent web host. In case you get stuck, never mind, I’m planning to do another article discussing my experiences with some of the larger web hosting companies that provide free hosting.

Vocaboly : Vocabulary Building Software for SAT GRE GMAT TOEFL

In case you aspire to study abroad, especially in the US and Australia, and English is not your first language then it might be quite a good idea to polish up your English vocabulary before taking the tests. While there are a large number of books and online resources which contain large 'word lists' for the various different exams, the number of interactive vocabulary building software for exams like SAT, GRE, GMAT and TOEFL are a bit harder to find. However, Vocaboly is one such software which facilitates vocabulary building for all the above mentioned international entrance/scholarship exams.

Vocaboly supports multiple users and stores each user's personal settings. It also has five dedicated 'books' (which are basically word lists along with definitions, pronunciations and sample sentences), one for each of SAT, GRE, GMAT and TOEFL and one for total beginners. But, this much can be found in any online or offline support tool for these exams. So what makes Vocaboly special? Well, quite a lot of things actually, and here's an in-exhaustive list:

Difficulty Levels and Filters: As you come across the different words (which are arranged alphabetically in the form of a list) you can assign a difficulty level, ranging from 0 to 5, to each word. Words of each difficulty level will be highlighted in a particular color for easy scanning. Further, Vocaboly also offers a filter facility by which you can search for words within a particular difficulty range as assigned by you
Memory Cards: Vocaboly offers 8 memory cards for each book (SAT, GRE, GMAT, TOEFL and VOA). A memory card basically allows you to create your custom word lists or rather word arrays. For example you can create a memory card for homophones for easy revision.
Pronunciation: Vocaboly has a pronunciation guide where a human American voice will read aloud any word/page you select. It also has a audio test where a word is read aloud and the meaning is provided and you have to spell it.
Interactive Learning: Personally, I believe that it is important to make learning interactive in order to make learning interesting and Vocaboly does just that with the help of some basic but interesting games. My favorite is the classic memory game where you have to match every word to its meaning in order to complete the game. With timer, click counter and a hall-of-fame, the games definitely make learning a lot more fun.

Vocaboly is probably slightly over priced at $80 but there is no doubt that it is a quality software and delivers on all its promises. Also don't be disheartened by Vocaboly's modest and spartan website or the sample word lists (which consists mostly of very easy words), trust me when I say Vocaboly is the real deal and the perfect tool for boosting your vocabulary.

What I Think of the Hubpages Ad Program : Actual Earning Figures

As I have already mentioned in my previous post (please read it before continuing), Hubpages has recently launched the Hubpages Ad Program which enables hubbers (freelance Hubpages contributors) to earn some side income alongside there Google Adsense earnings as per the pre-existing Hubpages revenue share policy (60% Adsense ad display ratio).

I had also mentioned in that post that opinions were divided and it was too early make a call on whether it was a good thing or not for their writers seeing that it could potentially (read: most likely) negatively affect your Adsense earnings from your Hubs.

Well after seeing it in operation for close to3 months here is what is I think of the Hubpages Ad Program. I have also included my actually earnings from my Hubs for both Hubpages Ad Program and Google Adsense to give you a better idea. However, I must inform you beforehand that:

I am not a very active Hubber (though I think Hubpages is easily the coolest content sharing site around). So it is very likely that you will earn a lot more from Hubpages than I have. Hence don't treat these figures out of context.Instead use them to just compare Adsense and the Hubpages Ad Program on a relative scale.
Google Adsense usually serves CPC ads whereas the Hubpages Ad Program exclusively serves CPM ads which means that you will earn a few cents (or even dollars) in Adsense revenue every time an ad on your page is actually clicked but you will earn a fraction of a few cents every time your page is viewed. However, in both cases the rates depends greatly on the subject matter as well as the target audience of your contents. You can get a better idea of this by taking a look at the Adwords Keyword tool.
The CPM rates offered by the Hubpages Ad Program are indeed a lot higher than those you can hope to get as a medium level publisher (as with 5000 monthly PVs). It is usually around the $5 mark but can be a lot higher as well whereas third party servers are likely to offer CPM rates of around $2 or even less if your main traffic source is Asia and Africa.

You can find my actual earning figures from Hubpages from both Adsense and Hubpages Ad Program by visiting this page. (I wanted to include it in the post itself but I just can't get the table to look right. Sorry.)

Zurker : Own a Social Networking Site for Free !!!

Have you heard of Zurker yet? It is a new Social Networking sites which claims to be more fun than Facebook and is making no bones about the fact that toppling Facebook as the number social networking site is their main ambition--and that should tell you something about what its creators think about the potential for Zurker. However, it has one major difference from Facebook, Myspace and just about any other social networking sites--it is owned by its members and you get paid for Zurker's success.

How does the payment structure at Zurker work?
Zurker assigns its member vShares for every new successful referral. And I am very happy to say that Vshare isn't another one of those abstract revenue sharing rating points. Instead Vshare is simply a virtual share and will become a real share once Zurker get 1 million members. The value of one Vshare is one-millionth of the evaluation of Zurker. So here's the catch: only the people who refer the first 1 million people will be awarded Vshares. So it is best to join Zurker as soon as possible to maximize your chances of referring new members.

This is actually a great earning opportunity considering that Social Networking sites are some of the greatest money makers in the cyber world and even if Zurker falls way short of Facebook's $50 billion evaluation and is evaluated at just $50million (and that is quite a conservative estimnate considering Myspace fetched close to $600million and Bebo $800million), each vShare (which you are getting for free) will still earn you $50! Now that's not to shabby.

Other features of Zurker
Apart from this radical new development, Zurker has all the features you would expect in a social networking site. However, for obvious reasons Zuker doesn't allow multiple accounts and they are also planning to go open source sometime in the future. Another point to note about Zurker is that it has already introduced country specific TLDs (like in Blogger) and this shows that they are more than willing to adapt to the present scenario, which has now become almost a prerequisite for success on the internet.

The future of Zurker is still quite uncertain, but it has been building up members at an impressive rate and is already of PR4 site with an Alexa rank of around 58000. So I will definitely reccomend you to check out Zurker specially as it is completely free and easy to use.

Note:At present Zurker is in beta testing and you cannot sign up without an invitation. So ince you don't have one feel free to use mine (or click on any of the links to Zurker in the article above):
http://www.zurker.in/i-123003-ajdsilrbdk

Hubpages Launches the Hubpages Ad Program

A couple of months back Hubpages had announced the beta launch of their very own Hubpages Ad Program which would enable contributers to earn more money from their Hubs should they decide to opt in for it. Initially it was based on an invite only basis and they had hoped to make it open to all the Hubbers by June-July.
Well, things seems to have worked out perfectly for the Hubpages team and they have already opened up the Hubpages Ad Program to all their contributers and thereby joined a very small number of sites (Triond.com being another one) which enables its writers to earn both direct revenue as well as revenue through 3 rd party ad servers like Google Adsense.

How the Hubpages Ad Program Works?
To get the HAP ads to run on your Hubs you need to opt in for the program and fill out a Tax form and provide a Paypal ID. In case you are a bit apprehensive of sending your tax info online, you may also fax it to the Hubpages team. For non-US individual operators like myself the "tax form" is very basic and basically amounts to a statement confirming that my Hubpages earnings has nothing to do with anyone or anything in the States.

After you fill in these details Hubpages will verify whether your Hubs meet their ad serving T&C and then start displaying Hubpages ads on those hubs which they judge as having appropriate content.

Payout threshold is a rather high $50 (compared to Triond's 50 cents) and payment is made through Paypal. So effectively, if Paypal services are available in your country then you can earn from the Hubpages Ad Program.

However, a very important thing you should know about the Hubpages Ad Program is that you must have an active Adsense account in order to run HAP ads on your hubs even though there is no direct link between the two affiliate programs.

Will You Really Earn More With the Hubpages Ad Program?
Well , I guess this is definitely the most important you have ask regarding the Hubpages Ad Program and it rather a tricky question to answer, specially considering that the program is very new (a week old at the most) and I have up signed up for it just a few hours ago. But one thing is for sure: the Hubpages Ad Program definitely sounds like it can give Adsense a real run for its money as far as making money from Hubpages is concerned.

For one thing, Hubpages is a major online publisher with millions of PVs every month. This mean that it has access some very lucrative CPM ad programs which normal publishers like you and me won't have.

However, it is also important to realize that once you decide to run Hubpages Ad Program ads on your site it will encroach on your Adsense ad zones and so you may expect to see a dip in your Adsense earnings from your hubs. But whether there will be an over all increase in your Hubpages earnings is time will tell and (as far as I can read the situation) it may very well vary from publisher to publisher depending on their Hub style, content and niche. But there is no reason to get overly pessimistic as beta level testing seems to have produced encouraging results. So go ahead, cross your fingers and give it a shot!

Get Paid to Write Sites You Haven't Heard Of : Part 2

This is a continuation (or second installment if you prefer) of my reasonably popular hub Get Paid to Write Sites You Haven't Heard Of where I have mentioned a number of less popular but 100% legit and quite profitable get paid to write sites which do not have the backing of Yahoo! and don't make as much noise as Associated Content, but can quietly earn you a reasonable amount of money. So lets get rolling then:

Looking For Clues
Looking for Clues is the stand out site in this list because it is one of the few sites which offer an upfront payment ($10-$20) for your articles instead of revenue share. Approval period for LFC is rather long drawn and can take between 2 weeks and a month, but if you follow their criteria and write passably good English (no need to be absolutely perfect) then you have a pretty good chance of getting published. LFC also expects its contributers to drive traffic to the site and your payout for subsequent articles increases if you can manage to generate sufficient number hits to your articles. You can also promote your other sites and blogs through an author box.

Snipsly

Snipsly is arguably the most popular site in this list and fast becoming a rival for the likes of Infobarrel and Xomba. The things that has enabled Snipsly to gain such widespread popularity amongst the online writer community are

Snipsly's revenue share is better than almost every other Adsense revenue sharing site with an author ad display ratio of 80%
You can write about anything you want and have no issues getting it published so long as it is unique and over 3 sentences long.
All links are dofollow. So you can use Snipsly to generate quality backlinks
Snipsly uses the popular WordPress format and many writers are already so familiar with it that they can just start creating great content without having to familiarize with the user interface.

Seekyt
Seekyt is yet another Adsense revenue sharing site where the author ad display ratio is 70%.Content must be unique and substantial. Check my detailed review of Seekyt and how it is evolving into a major player in the industry.

Zestbit
Zestbit is a Squidoo style publishing platform (but obviously not as cool) where you can earn revenue share from a number of affiliate programs by creating Twists. Like Squidoo, you can earn from Zestbit without having any affiliate accounts in general and Adsense account in particular.

Squidflix: Generate Revenue Generating Webpage in Under 5 Minutes

Squidflix.com is one of the few publishing portals available on the internet where you can literally create a fully functional (and revenue generating) webpage in less than 5 minutes.

All you have to do in order to publish a movie-review webpage (or lens) is this:

1. Sign in with your Squidoo ID (registration is free)

2. Select a movie (movies in languages other than English are also accepted)
3. Decide whether you love the movie or positively hate it.
4.Fill in a submission form with the details you would like to publish on your lens (title, cast, plot overview etc.)
And you are practically done!

However, you can always return and edit the page, upload photos, add new modules and jazz up your lens.
Squidoo, for their part will put in Google and Infolinks ads and Amazon and Ebay links, and share with you a percentage of the revenue generated from these sources.
Though some people claim to be earning over $5000 a month with Squidflix, but personally I have had no such luck.

If you have 5 minutes to spare and want to do something fun and worthwhile then I’ll definitely recommend Squidflix, but if you are mainly looking to make a few fast bucks you may as well give this site the miss.

Catasia Studio : Screencast Software Review

If you are looking to create computer based video tutorials or demos to promote your products and applications then the easiest way to go about it is by using a screencast software which captures all the actions going on on your computer screen and directly renders it to popular video formats which can be used in just about any which way you want.

Though there are a large number of free online and offline screencasting options available on the internet, it is quite likely that if you are trying to produce a video with any degree of professionalism then you would want to use a paid screencast software, and sooner rather than later. Here is a look at one of the more popular paid screencasting software, Catasia Studio.

Features I Like About Camtasia Studio 6
Intuitive User Interface
Camtasia Studio uses a very user friendly interface which is so intuitive that you hardly ever need to consult the help files, which themselves are are pretty comprehensive albeit compact. But to help you master the software better you can also download or stream short tutorial videos from their website.

Zoom-n-Pan
The Zoom-n-pan feature gives you great control over the camera angles (such zooming in to a particular section of your screen) and is very handy in just about any tutorial as it allows you to focus in on the relevant part of your screen in every single shot.

Caption
Caption is a very basic feature and present in most screencast software. It basically allows you to add subtitles to your video and is a very handy feature as it will almost invariably increase your audience.

Call-Out
The Call Out feature allows you to add various kinds of "boxes" inside your video during post processing and maybe used for a variety of purposes such as highlighting text, drawing special attention to a part of the screen or to simply blur out sensitive information from the screencast.

Drawback of Camtasia Studio 6

I had just two issues with my Camtasia Studio 6 software:

It is slightly difficult to get the aspect ratio right in order to get the maximum possible screen area for your video. Further, if you are using captions they too tend to eat up quite a bit of screen space.
The Youtube version of the rendered videos often turn out to be of a slightly lower quality than expected as per the preview.

Pricing of Camtasia Studio 7

The latest version of Camtasia Studio available is Camtasia Studio 7 and it is priced at a marginally expensive $50 for the individual license and also offer a host of different licensing options.

New Age Online Billionaires

Now that the depression is firmly behind us, the dotcom bubble is beginning to grow in size once more, and this time the focus has shifted from Google and is set on a number of new and moderately old online enterprises like Facebook and Groupon. Here is a look at the 4 fastest growing dotcom giants, each of whom are valued in several billions.

Facebook
Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in the first half of the last decade, the social networking site Facebook has steadily gained in popularity and has over 500 million members, who share their thoughts and photos through the website everyday. It is currently worth a whopping $50 billion dollars and is one of the most serious competitors to Google's throne. In fact, if rumors are to be believed, Facebook may soon go into all out competition with Google by introducing search engine and free e-mail services.
Facebook's early gestation period has been turned into an Oscar nominated movie, The Social Network.

The Groupon official logo

Groupon
Founded by Andrew Mason, Groupon is famous for providing its 50 million subscribers with deals of the day e-mails in which local businessmen offer large discounts to attract new customers. Groupon was founded in 2008 and is currently valued at $15 billion dollars.

Twitter
Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams in 2006, and has since then revolutionized the way of posting on internet, replacing lengthy blog posts with 140 character posts known as tweets. At present Twitter is valued at $10 billion.

Zynga

Zynga founder Mark Pincus with his dog, Zynga

Zynga, the developer of several popular social games like Farmville, has made tremendous progress in the last one year and has roped in a number of big investors and its estimated worth is $7 billion dollars. However, it is popularly believed that the real figure is probably closer to the $10 billion mark. According to analysts, Zynga earned $850 million last year from selling game credits alone!

Make Money from Product and Movie Reviews

Out of the several ways you can make money on the Internet, one of the easiest and most popular is by writing product reviews. Most review sites are free to join and offer either upfront or residual payment for reviews you write for them. The following is a list of the most popular websites that pay you for your reviews:

1) Review Stream: Review Stream is one of the few websites on the Internet that accept international members as well as pays upfront. Set up with an aim to pay for every review published with them, it is one of the best places to earn substantial money on the net. They accept reviews of almost everything and anything under the sun, ranging from books to softwares to local restaurants.

The amount they pay for reach review varies between $1.25 to $2.5. Apart from that they buy slightly inferior reviews at a bulk rate, which is the normal rate divided by five.

2) Epinion: Epinion is another major player in this industry but unlike Review Stream they only offer a passive revenue sharing for your reviews. They encourage you to write reviews on products available on their store and a percentage of the sales made by them is distributed amongst the authors. This does not mean that you cannot write a negative review on Epinion as they pay you even for negative reviews.

3) Ciao!: Ciao! (Not to be confused with Ciao.com) is another major website dealing with reviews and is probably powered by Bing!. However they do not accept international members. Ciao has specific websites for different countries such as Ciao.co.uk for the United Kingdom, and Ciao.it for Italy. If you live in any of these countries then I can assure you that Ciao has one of the finest revenue-sharing policies out there.

4) Softwarejudge: Softwarejudge accepts reviews of only softwares. For every review published on their site that pay you a minimum of one dollar but it might go up to as much as $50. However the cash redemption process of Softwarejudge is slightly troublesome and you’ll probably have to write quite large number of reviews before reaching their payment threshold of $100.

5) Squidflix: It is a subsidiary of Squidoo and is dedicated solely to movie reviews. You simply need to choose a movie, decide whether you love it or hate it, write hundred words about it and Squidflix will do the rest. It will display Google Adsense and Infolinks(optional) advertisements on your Web page (or lens as they are called). Apart from that you can also easily integrate Amazon and eBay modules and earn through referrals by displaying related products available on Amazon or eBay.

6) Shvoong: Shvoong accepts reviews of all most all forms of published text ( such as books, news etc.) as well as websites and movies and the site pays 10 per cent of the revenue generated from your reviews.

7) Gomolo: It is probably a subsidiary of Shvoong and specialises in Indian and especially Hindi films. Its revenue-sharing policies are same as Shoovng.

Niner Niner Collaborative Blogs : Review

Like Associated Content, Bukisa and Triond, Niner Niner Collaborative Blogs is a paid to write service. Niner Niner has been around for quite sometime but has never gained a lot of popularity and in all honesty I cannot envision them becoming a raving success anytime soon. But still, I think it really deserves to be reviewed. So here goes:

Basic Set Up of Niner Niner Collaborative Blogs

Like Triond and Demand Studios, Niner Niner uses a number of collaborative blogs based on the WordPress platform on which members can publish their articles. However, Niner Niner allows the users to choose in which blog they want to contribute their article and often has multiple blogs for the same niche.

Articles Accepted by Niner Niner Collaborative Blogs

Niner Niner requires your articles to be exclusive and over 200 words. They claim to have an editorial process, but a look at any of their blogs should be enough to convince anyone that it is probably lax to the point of being non existent. Simply put, Niner Niner attaches more important to quality than quantity. Compared to most other content sharing sites, Niner Niner is slightly limited in its blog categories and focuses mainly on finance, love and marriage and recipes. Visit their site for a complete list.

Niner Niner Payment Structure

Niner Niner’s author compensation scheme is radically different from most other content sharing websites because:

It is the only content writing site I know which offers a $5 sign up bonus!
Instead of passive revenue sharing, Niner Niner pays upfront for your content. Depending on which blog you publish your article they will pay you $.10 to $.50.

The threshold payout is a rather high $25, as compared to Triond’s $.50
My Thoughts on Niner Niner Collaborative Blogs
If you are into 5 minutes writing or lack the skill to write full length articles then you can certainly give Niner Niner a try. It is specially favorable for those who are not adept at getting page views, because of their upfront payments.
On the downside, Niner Niner claims permanent exclusive rights to your articles and the money their paying is quite shabby in comparison to others who impose this criterion.

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