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Please, I Can Has Firefox 3.0?

Please, I Can Has Firefox?

Firefox 3.0 was supposed to drop today. As you may recall, the Mozilla team wanted to break a download record with this release. I guess they promoted this contest a little too well because everybody and their Grandma decided to download it at the same time and the mozilla servers have yet to recover.

There are various convos on FriendFeed regarding this FAIL by Mozilla. (here is Scobel’s convo Firefox Down)

Thanks to Bwana Mcall, we have direct download links for Firefox 3.0 in another FriendFeed convo.

We also have a link to Watch the Mozilla guys live on Mogulus, which spurred this hilarious convo. Stefen Haden had me rolling with his comment.

Some people were not all happy with the communities heckling of Mozilla for their FAIL, but I think it’s all in good fun.

Update

Just got this email from “Firefox Download Day” and the link actually worked. Probably just a fluke:

Today you’ll make history with Firefox

Are you ready to make history? Are you ready to set a World Record? Today is Download Day. To become part of the official Guinness World Record you must download Firefox 3 by 17:00 UTC on June 18, 2008, or roughly 24 hours from now.

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How To Run a Contest On Your Blog

Refracted Moments

One of the best things you can do to drive traffic to your blog is to run a contest. I recently came across a blog doing just that with some awesome prizes. Visit the site and enter the contest here.

How Does A Contest Get Me Traffic?

Well, don’t you like to win stuff? Of course you do. Everyone does. If people find out that you’re giving away random crap on your blog, they will be all over it. It’s even more attractive when they don’t have to deviate from their normal routine.

Viral Marketing

There is also a viral aspect to running a contest. You basically set up a points system where the contestants earn points for doing things to help your blog. A few examples of what may earn them points:

  • Subscribing to your blog
  • Adding to Technorati Favorites
  • Linking back to your blog
  • Add to MyBlogLog / BlogCatalog

You engineer the contest so that the participants are promoting for you in order to win. They subscribe, favorite and link your blog. In doing so, they have just alerted everyone they know that your blog has something going on. Viral stuff is awesome.

Where Do The Prizes Come From?

More than likely, this is going to require you to get together with all those awesome people you’ve met in the course of providing valuable content and input in your niche. All those people that you have had interesting and thought-provoking discussions with using various social media tools. Most people refer to this cooperation as a Joint Venture.

For example, the blog contest in question here offers premium WordPress Themes, unique visitor traffic, and an E-Book (just to name a few). Obviously, the prizes were not all created by the blogger running the contest. In providing the prizes for the contest, the others involved are getting some advertising and traffic as well.

Go Sign Up Now!

In conclusion (that sounds so corny), run off to TechSuave and get in on this contest. pay attention to what prizes are offered and what you have to do to win them. Try to think of what you could offer if you ran your own contest. Also, think about the best things to incorporate into the contest rules in order for you to get the greatest benefit.

Are you an Aspiring Blogger? – Win Prizes worth $1000 and more

Zemanta Pixie
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5 Ways to Make Money from Home

So, you’ve decided you would like to make money working from home. Maybe you can’t afford the commute anymore because of high gas prices. You’re sick of your boss, your job, your co-workers. Maybe you just want to spend more time with your family or you need to make a little extra on the side. You might need the time to look for important advice if you’re going to tile a wet room in order to save some money by doing it yourself. Whatever the case may be, I’m here to make sure you have a basic understanding of what you’re getting into.

There are a huge number of ways to make money from home, but there are also a lot of people trying to make money off you. This simple list will help you decide what route to take and also give you some tips on how to avoid wasting your time and money.

1. Network Marketing

This is probably the most infamous method of making money from home, but it’s also one of the most lucrative. Also known as Multi-Level Marketing or MLM, it has created more millionaires than most other industries. Basically, you’re starting your own business, so there will usually be a start-up cost. There may also be a monthly overhead cost or minimum sales requirement, depending on who you get involved with.

What Do You Do?

There are usually at least 2 ways to make money. You will be marketing some type of product or service, and you will be recruiting others into your business who also want to make money. This usually involves calling leads, placing ads, and talking to people you already know.

You will make a commission on any sales or enrollments you make. You also make money when those on your team make money. This is called leveraged income. You may also have the chance to make residual income, which means you will get paid repeatedly for work you only did once.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing and Network Marketing are pretty hard to tell apart. Either way, you are marketing a product/service and making a commission. There are two main differences:

  1. You may not have to pay to become an affiliate
  2. You won’t be able to build leveraged income

What Do You Do?

You receive a unique URL or link where people can go to find and buy the product or service. When they make a purchase through your link, you get paid. Usually, you market this affiliate link by placing ads on your website or any other standard Internet Marketing practices.

3. Pay-Per-Click Ads

Google is probably the most well-known PPC program. You get paid anytime someone clicks the ads which you have placed on your website or blog. The ads are usually relevant to the content on your website.

What Do You Do?

You paste some code on your website and hope someone clicks the ads that show up. It’s really that simple. This works best in combination with a Blog or some type of website where you can attract lots of traffic by providing quality content.

4. Internet Freelancing

This just means doing odd jobs that people have posted on the Internet. You can find these types of jobs on sites like Craigslist and eLance.com.

What Do You Do?

Well, you basically do whatever the client asks you to and negotiate what the payment will be. This could be anything from basic administrative tasks to programming PHP. If you have a decent resume, you may find success doing this on a site like eLance. You will usually have to compete for jobs against other candidates.

5. Completing Offers

This involves anything from completing surveys to applying for credit cards. You get paid on completion of each offer. Project Payday is one of the main companies you can enroll with for this type of work.

What Do You Do?

You sign up for 30-day trials, credit cards, loans, and anything else you can imagine. You may have to pay for some of these things and then remember to get your refund once the trial is over. Someone who is trying to get a free Xbox 360 or 54″ HD-TV will pay you for completing these offers. I tried it and didn’t like it. It works great for others. If you don’t mind giving out your SSN and other personal info repeatedly, it may work for you too.

The Bottom Line

This is an extremely basic overview of your options. You will have the most success by doing more than just one of these. It all depends on how much work you are willing to put in and how serious you are about educating yourself on the details and techniques you will need to succeed.

I did research for months before I ever signed up for anything and that has really paid off. I have been able to really focus on what my strengths are and how to use them to earn an income. Once I chose to start helping people and stopped thinking of everything as sales and making the next dollar, my business exploded.

What have you run into in your search for financial independence? What questions or fears do you have about working from home or starting a home business? Feel free to comment below.

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Zemanta Made My Blog Fun Again…Kinda

Blog better using Zemanta

Image by chucks via Flickr

Zemanta is a plugin for Firefox (also for Flock) which suggests images and links to articles that you may wish to insert into your post. It has support for WordPress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com, and self-hosted WordPress installs v2.0 and up. The concept is awesome because this would make it much easier to provide more valuable content to your readers.

What’s Good?

As soon as you begin writing, Zemanta runs off and grabs items it thinks you may want to insert. These include: context links, images, tags, and links to other articles. All you have to do is click what you want from your sidebar and it’s automagically plopped into your content. All the content suggested is checked to make sure you don’t violate any copyrights.

I can’t stand filling in Tags for my blog posts. I always feel like I’m doing it wrong. But, as Jeff points out in a recent post, you should always tag your posts. Zemanta handles this for me, so I don’t have to think about it anymore. This is a huge plus if you are thinking about SEO.

Also, you can simply highlight a word (SEO above, for instance) and click the suggested link in Zemanta, and it makes the link for you. Pie and Cake.

What Kinda Sucks?

Zemanta uses a proprietary algorithm to figure out what you want. They do index your posts in order to improve their engine, but they say they won’t share with anyone outside the team. I could care less since I’m posting to a public blog.

Whenever you insert an image from the Gallery, you will be linking back to the source of the image (I’ve no clue who this “chucks” guy is, but I appreciate his photo). This could possibly be a concern for those who are trying to avoid sending user’s elsewhere. It could also affect your PR depending on who you ask.

Also, I’m not sure how many bloggers just randomly link to other blogs, so I’m not sure how useful this Articles feature is. I guess it all depends on how free you are with your link love.

There will also be links to Zemanta on items you insert, but you are free to remove them according to the Zemanta home page.

A lot of shady spammers may try and use Zemanta for evil. Don’t let this be you. Write original content and use Zemanta to take it up a notch.

Moral Of The Story?

Zemanta will allow you to easily take your posts to the next level by providing your readers with relevant images and links at the click of a button. Unless you enjoy hunting for these things on your own, you should definitely give it a shot.

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So Much For Leadership From My Upline

Last night I decide to jump on a conference call and get some leadership and direction from those higher up in one of my companies. It’s very important to stay connected with those who are successful because, well, it actually does tend to rub off.

I’m expecting to gain some knowledge from this call. Maybe a nugget of wisdom to help me to press on with my business. Something inspirational that I can pass down to my team.

The guest speaker was some motivational-speaker-guy that became a millionaire at age 26. He wasn’t very eloquent, isn’t a rep in my company, and didn’t really say anything important. He just kinda spouted a bunch of things you would expect to hear from your average motivational speaker, nothing exciting or ground-breaking. I was a little disappointed.

So, the call is almost completed and the guy is starting to wrap it up when he says that he wants to do something “special” for the people that are on the call. My ears prick up because I thought I had simply wasted 30-minutes of my life that could have been spent watching the Season Finale of House.

He says that he is going to give us his CD set at a huge discount. A set that usually sells for around $250 and he is going to give it to us for…get this: Sixty-Seven Dollars!

Imagine my excitement! I can buy this guy’s entire CD set for just $67?! That’s obviously something I gotta act on right now! Of course, that’s what I would be thinking if I was a network-marketing NOOB.

This is not the first time that my upline has tried to sell me and I really don’t appreciate it. Why bring some guy in that is not even in my company to motivate me? Why have this guy that’s not in my company and not even a good speaker try to sell me his crap? Why do this to me on a regular basis? Why do I feel like the financial leaders in the company are trying to gang-bang me?

What’s the moral of the story? Don’t trust anyone in this business. Like I said, it’s necessary to network with others in order to succeed, but that doesn’t mean you have to trust and believe everything they say. Watch their actions over time. It’s normal for your upline to recommend resources for you to learn from, but if it starts to seem like they are just milking you for all your worth….you are probably right.

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Just Say No!

Everyone remembers this phrase from back in the day. It was supposed to help deal with the large number of young kids abusing drugs in the 80’s and 90’s.  I’m afraid it didn’t really work, you want to know why? because back in the day there were no rehabs like the holistic drug rehab centers around today that also help you on where to go after detox, like Life Assurance Recovery. This is proven by the fact that a lot of network marketers and home-business owners to this day refuse to say “No.”

Let me explain. How many times have you been on the phone with a prospect and you could tell they would NOT be a good addition to your team? Maybe they sounded lazy, not really interested, asked too many negative questions, or maybe they even asked you outright if you were trying to scam them. What did you say? Did you try to overcome their objections or did you do what a pro would do and tell them to kick rocks?

As I stated in a previous article: You Are NOT a Salesman. You are not out to change everyone’s mind about joining your business or buying your product. You are here to help those that want to be helped. When you are prospecting, you are interviewing people and sorting them to see if they will be able to benefit your organization.

If it seems like you are putting in too much work to enroll someone, just tell them straight up: “I’m sorry, I don’t think you would be a good fit for this position. Good Luck!” and end the conversation there. Time is your most important resource because you can NEVER get it back. Never Waste Your Time!

If you are going to be successful in this business, you have to be a leader. Maybe you don’t feel like one. Maybe you’re kind of shy. Maybe you didn’t hang out with the “cool” kids in high school. Who Cares! You are running things now. This it YOUR business. Own It!

You are the one offering help to someone else. You already run your own business and the person on the other end of the line wants what you have to offer. You do not need them to sign for you to be successful. You are already a success! This person will not make or break you because you keep your pipeline filled in many different ways.

I would like you to perform an exercise I read about in Mike Dillard’s “Essential Reports” e-Book (bundled with the highly-recommended Magnetic Sponsoring System). The next time you’re doing calls, make it a point to tell at least 5 people “No.” Just pick any old excuse and tell them that you don’t think they are going to work out.

This exercise will change your mindset and your posture instantly because it gives you all of the power and it will help you adopt a mindset of abundance which is a critical trait that all Alphas share. Your mind will finally understand that you are the leader, and that the success of your business is not dependent upon any one person or handful of leads.

-Mike Dillard

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Please Hold All Questions

After dialing about 30 numbers (15 of which were disconnected), leaving about 10 voicemails, and listening through about 4 of the most annoying callertunes ever, you finally get someone on the phone. You are conducting your interview of this potential prospect, feeling them out, when they decide to interrupt you with a question of their own.

What do you do?

Some reading this may have no idea why this is even an issue (don’t worry, I’m going to bring you up to speed). Others are smiling right now because they already know where this is headed. The bottom line is: the person asking the questions is the one in control of the conversation.

Do police officers or soldiers answer questions? No, they control situations. They ask YOU questions. They slap your questions aside like mosquitoes on a muggy day.

Think of your interview as a fencing match. The person asking the questions is the one on the attack. They are in control. They are looking for a weakness or flaw to take advantage of in their opponent. The other participant is simply defending. They hold no sway in the outcome at this point. Unless the attacker makes a mistake.

So, where do prospects get off interrupting you to ask you questions? You are supposed to be a leader, a master recruiter, an expert in your field. Start acting like one and control the conversation! You do it however you feel comfortable, but you do NOT answer any questions until you are done asking your own. Here’s a couple of examples of things you might say:

  • “That’s a great question and I’m glad you asked it! We’ll be getting to that in just a sec. Now, you said you have 2 kids, right?”
  • “The purpose of this call is simply to find out if you would be a good fit for my company. My time is very valuable, so we can either end the call here or I can continue the interview. Which would you like?”

Notice how both statements end with a question directed back to the prospect. This puts control of the conversation firmly back in your hands. You are probably going to stick with a variation of, “Good question, I’ll be covering that shortly. [insert random question here].”

Of course, you don’t want to sound like a robot and you may want to make sure that “random question” allows you to pick up right where you left off. If someone is consistently interrupting, then you may want to go with the more stern example above and probably end up sending them along their way. One of the best things you can do to avoid battling for control is to tell your prospect to write down any questions they may have so that you can answer them later.

Not only will controlling the conversation help you to maintain your leadership status, but it will help you sort you prospects faster as well.

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WordPress 2.5.1 Migration and Redirect

So, I decided to go ahead and upgrade WordPress since I was tired of seeing the damned reminder in the admin area. In the process, I figured I might as well move WP to my top-level (if you recall, it was stored at /blog) and slap on a snazzy theme.

Still working on the “snazzy theme” part. I looked for hours while watching TV and just couldn’t find anything I liked all that much, so I just picked one.

Of course, now we are left with the problem of redirecting from /blog back to the root directory. A quick search on Google turned up this site, which gives you the code to do a proper permanent redirect with HTTP 301 in various languages. This will make sure that Google knows I moved and I don’t lose any Rank (as if I had any to begin with).

If you know where I can find a good theme site and not one that just recycles what’s already out there, let me know.

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Get Your Blog Google-Ranked In 30 Days or Less?

WebProNews has an interesting article about getting your blog ranked. They tell you to forget about PageRank. Hey….I’m down with that.

“Blogs have been around long enough to become standard elements of the web landscape. They’re easy to construct and manage, they create fresh, user-generated content and, if well-executed, blogs draw crowds and the attention of search engines.

Whether starting out with a new domain name, or a domain that’s been around for a decade, you can rank your blog on Google if you just do what Google wants you to do. So here are 25/50 tips to get your blog ranked by the world’s biggest SE.”

Read the full article here.

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Red Monkey Jeans

I haven’t got a new pair of jeans since…well…I don’t even remember when, so it’s great to finally get a fresh new pair of Red Monkey Jeans. They have some cool little designs on the back pockets and left-front pocket and feel pretty good. Quality seems up-to-par for a pair of $800 jeans and the gold buttons just add a little extra flair, although I have no clue who is ever gonna know I have gold buttons on my fly. I was also told by the distributor that I have to remove these buttons if I decide to wash the jeans, but who washes jeans anyway, right?

Red Monkey Jeans are apparently one of the hottest and fastest growing brands out there and, according to Google, they are highly sought after in the Southeast.

There are only 3 locations in the United States that sell these jeans. One was in Atlanta, but that distributor has since been revoked. The other 2 are in DC and LA. A new distributor has just been activated in NY as of a week or so ago. Bottom line here is: If you have purchased a pair of Red Monkey Jeans in a place that I have not named, they are fake and I hope you paid under $100.

There will be a new Atlanta distributor coming soon so check back for details. I will also be posting some pics of official Red Monkey Jeans and info on how to spot the fakes.

http://www.rmcjeans.co.uk/