Another rather comprehensive update was released by Royal Surf today, bringing news of an upcoming game feature, tweaks to surf ratios and bonuses, special awards for advertising and splash page design, and the winners of recent surfing contests.
This time, however, before displaying the text of the update, I will include a little video of some jousting tournament footage that was produced by the Full Tilt jousting troupe from Australia. I know that some of you are arriving at my Royal Surf update pages from searches on keywords like “jousting tournament”, “medieval jousting”, and other similar phrases. This means that you may be experiencing some disappointment upon discovering that the content of these pages is about some traffic exchange that you’ve probably never heard of instead of the real jousting-related information that you were presumably expecting.
If you happen to be one of these readers, then hopefully this video will satisfy some of your curiosity about what medieval jousting performances really looked like. This particular clip was one of the best quality productions available at YouTube on the subject, although there are many others that can be viewed by doing a video search on jousting-related keywords. This particular piece is approximately two minutes long and highlights the various feats that medieval knights performed during the jousting tournaments, including a dramatic double unhorsing scene near the end.
The-Owl-Post PTR has released a fairly comprehensive update today, covering topics such as recent payouts, mailer issues, and blog updates.
On an interesting side note, I recently discovered during a Google search on her name that Admin Michele Ballard was mentioned in a rather lengthy Business Week article from October of last year. The topic of the article is “Click Fraud” and the piece on Michele is buried pretty far down on the page. To find it, scroll down until you see the boldface subheading “Korean Clones” and look for the 13th paragraph below this. The next four paragraphs are about our intrepid webmistress. Business Week’s coverage of her was not entirely favorable because of the implication that her program may be enabling click fraud, but they did give her a chance to defend herself and the PTR industry.
Meanwhile, she has finally started to post some “ramblings” on her blog at http://theowlsblog.blogspot.com/ after a long dry spell. During this period, some questionable entries were made in which a few words, apparently from the Spanish language, were displayed as a title, but the posts were otherwise completely devoid of content. More recently, placed in between the entries for October 12th and 15th, a third mysterious Spanish language entry was made, this one containing about a paragraph of actual text for the body of the post. Amazingly, neither Michele nor any of the other contributors to the Owl Post blog have done anything about these illogical entries or have offered any sort of explanation for them. In my opinion, it is probably just some Spam that is being made to look like it is coming from one of the blog’s authors.
At any rate, you can read the program update below, complete with the usual complement of smiley faces and occasional English usage errors:
Although this article by L.T. Wright was composed from the standpoint of a traditional freelance writer, most of the same motivations and experiences that the author mentions also apply to modern bloggers. The technology of writing and publishing has certainly changed; instead of dealing with brown envelopes and mailboxes, we can simply press that handy-dandy little “Publish” button. However, this article is still one that I can readily relate to because the fundamental experiences involved with creating new content and attempting to make a living from it have not substantially changed with the passage of time.
What exactly is it that motivates wannabe writers to take the plunge into the competitive, minefield spawn world of writing?
It is a scary experience finally posting off with shaking hands and apprehension, that big brown envelope full of all your hopes and dreams of becoming an established writer. Now the waiting begins and you start to count rejection letters jumping over the fence in place of sheep in your sleep.
In one of the few free offerings at Constant Content that has not been duplicated on other sites, this article by Christina McAllister reminds us that we should strive to maintain a sense of professionalism in our marketing endeavors and avoid the trap of becoming too personal with our potential customers.
Many marketing books and gurus repeat a similar message: Get personal! Build relationships with your customers! Get to know your customers and let them get to know you!
Great advice. But there’s a fine line between relationship building and getting a little too personal.
In the past several weeks, our household received many pieces of direct mail regarding political candidates, their platforms and reminders to vote in the primary election. Many of these pieces were informative. But a few pieces were a little too intimate to be tasteful and productive forms of marketing.
Currently rated as one of the best performing manual traffic exchanges, EasyHits4U.com has just released their latest newsletter. They are announcing a new surfing contest for October along with some significant expansions of the site’s features that will now be made available to free members. Specifically, it will now be possible for free members to surf without having to have an active site in the rotation, making it possible for us to save up credits and use them later at our discretion.
In another welcome move for credit savers, they have also lifted the forced 50% auto assign requirement, which means that we can now receive one full credit for each site that we view while also saving up to 100% of our advertising potential. The details of both the contest and the feature expansions are explained in the newsletter below.
Originally intended as an example of a speech that would be given by the CEO of the tollfreenumber.org site, this article by Adsophilos was apparently never used or sold. However, it does make a pretty good point about the need for clear communication between businesses and their customers.
Thirty seconds before the dot of the hour, Chief Executive Officer John Jones strode to the podium. He strung his prop over the top edge of its canted table. He swept his eyes over the crowd as he justified his notes against the lip at the table’s lower end, He tucked a couple of loose items from inside the podium into his jacket pocket. On the dot of the hour, he drew the mike from its stand, moved into the open and began to speak.
In addition to article syndication, using hosted content is another excellent way to build backlinks to your site for SEO purposes. Hosted content sometimes goes by different names such as “advertorials” or “content swapping”, but they all essentially work in the same manner. You write an article, include backlinks to your site, and pay another site owner a small fee to display your content on his/her site.
As an author, this may not seem like a very attractive option because you are actually having to pay to get your article published, but with this method, you have the advantage of being able to embed your backlinks into the body of the article’s text instead of being confined to a standard resource box. This is supposed to help in optimizing backlinks for the search engines because it looks more “natural”. Also, at least according to the “money talks” theory, this can be a way of building favorable relations with other site owners since most people like the idea of getting paid for very little work.
As in any kind of commercial endeavor, almost all of us wind up dealing with time management issues as some point. Those of us in the publishing and advertising industries, including bloggers, webmasters, and Internet marketers, understand that juggling all of the myriad tasks involved in managing a successful website can produce its fair share of headaches and stress. Although this article by Donna Zeller does not deal with any specific industry, the information that it contains can help us to manage our time more effectively and focus on increasing the efficiency of our money-making efforts.
There are so many things to do and so little time. You have to make choices between working, studying, taking care of your children or your aging parents, cleaning the house, or doing the yard and much more. Do you have time to have any fun at all? Today’s adults are torn in many directions. The effects of jam-packed schedules are something that everyone shares.
USAA Federal Savings Bank is warning its members about a new email phishing scam that tries to collect sensitive account information.
The email has the USAA logo at the top and contains the subject “Unauthorized Activity!”. The rest of the text attempts to trick users into thinking that their accounts have been compromised and tells them to click on a link in the email in order to “confirm their records”:
Notification of update 10/07/07: Although this minimum wage essay was originally published several months ago back in March, I have added some additional content to it in order to reflect the recent changes in the federal laws. At the end of the document, I have also provided explanations and resources regarding the minimum wage rates for each state and the curious exception for the territory of American Samoa.
Approximately two weeks ago, my brother needed a minimum wage essay for an online college course that he is taking this semester. Since political issue topics are not exactly his cup of tea, I decided to put my brain to work and create a minimum wage essay that would be suitable for submission and fulfill the requirements of the course. As blog posts go, it’s a little long (about 1800 words), but since I spent the better part of a day writing this thing, I might as well publish it here instead of letting it collect virtual dust on my hard drive. Hopefully some of you will find it informative and/or enlightening.
The latest email from Larry Phillips at Medieval Hits highlights a recent trend toward some traffic exchanges banning blogs that have Google AdSense or similar kinds of advertising on them. Google, in an attempt to prevent click fraud and increase traffic quality for advertisers, has prohibited promotion of AdSense pages in any kind of systems that use automated or incentivized viewing of the pages, a category that includes sites such as traffic exchanges, paid-to-click (PTC), and paid-to-read (PTR) programs.
For Internet marketers and bloggers who are also AdSense publishers, there are two ways around this problem. The first workaround is to make sure that you do not have any pages entered into the traffic exchange rotations that actually have AdSense on them. Instead, place the text ads only on the optimized article pages (also known as single post pages or permalink pages for Wordpress bloggers), and use only your index, category, or archive pages (which will not display any ads) in the traffic exchanges. If the viewers are interested enough in your article topics, they may click from an index or category page to the article page and then click on one of the text ads. However, since the referring URL at AdSense will originate from another page of your site and not the traffic exchange, you should be able to avoid getting banned by Google.
The other solution is to use splash pages. This has become an increasingly common method for traffic exchange promotion anyway, and it also happens to have the added benefit of avoiding the problem of generating prohibited clicks. With a splash page, you can use some enticing text to lure the visitors onto your article pages and possibly generate some ad revenue from this. As in the first scenario, any clicks on your ads will come from a page that is part of your own domain, not the traffic exchange site. The main thing that you want to avoid is having any of your AdSense ads directly clickable from a traffic exchange, PTC, PTR, or other prohibited site.
Meanwhile, the relevant portions of the latest rant from Larry Phillips at Medieval Hits have been reproduced below:
Although I have not commented on any ridiculous HYIP spam for a while, you probably haven’t missed much. I have been simply deleting most of the emails for these “investment opportunities” because they are not really saying anything that I have not already covered in previous posts. Today, however, I got spammed with a program that seems to take the idea of ridiculous HYIP to a whole new level of dumb: IGProfit.com.
LPStuff.com, the Libertarian Party merchandise site that I mentioned earlier, has updated their stocks again. This time they have released some nice looking T-shirt designs and are now giving us the option of custom orders where we can choose our own designs and messages for the shirts. There are also customized ordering options available for other materials such as business cards, bumper stickers, flyers, yard signs, and other useful supplies for Libertarian Party candidates.
27 colorful shirt designs are now available at LPStuff.com. This selection makes it easy for you to find a message that will fit your personality and express your Libertarian principles. It is an ideal way to help spread the Libertarian message of freedom and personal responsibility.
World LPP, the investment partnership program that I had mentioned about a month ago, has posted its monthly profits from the IT call center in Romania. The overall returns are a little better than they were last month, and the company is also allowing a few members to sell back their units, thus opening up a few slots for new or current members to purchase shares. Moreover, the WLPP administrators are promising to release some kind of surprise in the form of free benefits to members, but they are not revealing any of the actual details at this time.
This article by Aaron Turpen, who is the editor of the Utah Freedom Activist Newsletter at http://www.utahfreedomactivist.com, highlights the problems with the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which I like to think of as “No Child Learns Better” for its failure to substantially improve the American educational system.
As Libertarians who believe that individuals should actually manage their own lives without the need for government interference, we see the current government-controlled school system as being at least partially to blame for why many Americans are stupid and continue to live in blissful ignorance while spending their money on all sorts of frivolous nonsense. Hopefully, as more people begin to understand that State-controlled monopolies on education do not work and are actually holding back the true potential of the American people, we can begin to seriously explore other alternatives and allow parents to choose the ones that they believe are the most effective.
