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Our Texas LP is making its last push to recruit prospective candidates before the filing deadline on January 2. Even though the actual election is still more than ten months away, time is running out for getting the necessary paperwork completed in order to get on the ballot. I have reprinted Wes Benedict’s email below just in case any of you who might be eligible to run for office in Texas and wouldn’t mind seeing your name on the ballot will have the information needed to make an official application.

Dear Texas Libertarian:

I need you to fill out an application to be a candidate and send that back to me as soon as possible. Please do it this weekend.

We are behind on candidate recruitment. We have about 79 candidates right now, but there are less than three weeks left to reach our goal of 250 nominees.

I hope by now most of you understand how important it is to have an army of Libertarian Party candidates on the ballot helping to build our movement. I understand most of you won’t spend any funds or much time on your campaign and that’s okay. I also understand that some of you will be running very active campaigns and that’s wonderful.

Whatever your plans, please just get an application in to me now. If you change your mind later, you can always withdraw.

The absolute deadline for filing an application is 5:00 PM on January 2, but waiting till the last minute makes my work incredibly difficult. If you wait, that means I’ll be asking other people to run for the same position, and if you both file at the last minute, then I won’t have time to offer one of you a different race where we have an opening. Additionally, that means I will have wasted my finite amount of time recruiting a candidate we didn’t need, and leaving an office unchallenged where we wanted a candidate.

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Although I wound up writing a “book” of an email to request it, I finally received my first payout from the Owl Post PTR program yesterday. It was not for my entire balance, but I did manage to get most of it:

In case you’re curious, here is the relevant excerpt from my email where I requested payment. The first (unquoted) part was some discussion about advertising and clicking through on the site support links.

Now that you seem to be caught up on November payouts, I would like to put in a payment request for December. Amazingly, I’ve never requested payment at this program since I first joined back in 2004, so this will be my first time. Part of the reason for this is that I have had problems with trying to request payment from the Owl Post site. Whenever I click on the link from there, it launches some sort of Outlook Express application that I can never get to work. I never use Outlook Express and cannot seem to configure it for sending mail, so I have never been able to get a request to go through from the site. It might be a good idea to set up a regular contact form for the payment requests so that we don’t have to worry about issues with different email clients.

Alternatively, you could just do a rotating random payout system where members who reach a certain minimum threshold are paid out for whatever is in their cash balance as long as funds are available. If there are not enough funds available to pay out all members, then those members who have waited the longest (as determined by the date of their last payout or the date that they joined the program for those who have never received a payment) are paid first, and everyone else is eventually paid according to date order.

This would save members the hassle of having to make actual payment requests and would give you a system that would insure an element of fairness even when funds are limited. Members who do not want to be paid their cash balances because they want to redeem for advertising in the future can indicate this in their interest section or profile (many programs allow members to do this by checking or unchecking a box).

Well, this email is starting to get longer than I had originally planned on, so I guess I had better wrap it up. Hopefully your recent progress with revenues and payouts will stimulate more interest in the program and lead to an overall increase in the active membership. Now that I’m running an active blog and getting more seriously into Internet marketing, I need all of the advertising potential that I can possibly muster!

Later that day Michele Ballard replied (again, this is only the relevant excerpt):

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Today Dan Moses, owner of the online marketing and traffic building program FreeClickThruClub.com, sent out a rather lengthy newsletter that reported on some of the recent happenings with the program. In the last part of the newsletter, he included this feature article that discusses some of the lucrative possibilities of having your own program or membership site.

He has given us permission to republish the article on our blogs as long as we include his author resource box, which I have placed at the end of the main text in between the two lines.

Have you ever asked yourself what it would be like to be a program owner?

Have you ever thought how it might feel to own a program of your own some day?

Have you ever wanted to own a successful Internet business, but just didn’t know how or where to start?

Do you find yourself day dreaming what it would be like to own a program online? For years I wanted to own a program online, but really didn’t have a clue at that time what I wanted to own. Finally, I met someone that could help me get started in owning a program and my life changed forever.

Becoming a program owner is so much more then just establishing an online presence. You can do that by building a list or promoting affiliate programs… no, being a program owner is like creating a masterpiece that you have control over. It’s something that you become a part of… it gets in your blood and if done right… it will become part of who you are.

In order to make the best decision on what type of program to own, several factors need to be considered. You want the most suited program for you… this program needs to enable you to perform at your peak level. Warning: Don’t create a program until you’ve answered the following five questions…

1. Would you like to earn a residual income from the Internet?

2. Would you like to build a list very quickly?

3. Would you like to create traffic on demand?

4. Would you like to build relationships with Top Marketers?

5. Would you like to achieve freedom from employment?

If you answered yes to these 5 questions then this is for you, but are you willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen?

Being a program owner is more then getting up in the morning and checking stats and sales. You have to invest your heart into your program and the time needed to make that program a huge success. At least that’s the way I’ve always done it.

People know the difference from an owner who cares for them and a owner who’s only in it for themselves and the money.

So what kinds of programs are there to own online?

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Online business network Take the Internet Back, a division of WLPP, has announced the launch of its latest website venture, Bidsnarf.com. It is being billed as a “reverse auction” site, but after studying the program’s rules and FAQ, I have determined that it is effectively more of a raffle ticket and sweepstakes system. The way that the auction works is that the lowest unique bidder on each item wins. In other words, if two people both bid 1 cent on an item, neither would win because the bid is not unique; however, if only one person bids 3 cents on the same item, then that person would win.

The catch here (yes there has to be a catch, considering the value of some of the prizes!) is that in order for people to place bids, they have to register at the site and purchase “bid credits” for $10 each. Each bid credit entitles the member to place one bid. Therefore, in effect bidding on an item is much like buying a raffle ticket for $10 plus a small amount for whatever your guess is for the lowest unique bid price. There are also odds of winning listed for the prizes, which makes it seem more like a sweepstakes or drawing type of system than a regular auction.

Membership in the TIB program is free. Members are awarded profit shares for reading email advertisements and receive cash earnings based on the number of shares owned approximately once per month. Earnings are derived from the sale of advertising at TIB and other businesses that are part of its network. Here is the full update about their latest project:

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CPU-Z is a handy little detection and testing program that will display detailed information about the hardware specifications of your PC. The application is approximately half of a megabyte in size and is very easy to use. All you need to do is download it, unzip it, and click on the file named “cpuz.exe”. After a few seconds of loading time, you should see it open in a new window that looks something like this:

The display consists of six tabs that will provide the following information:

1. name, vendor, package, technology, and core voltage of your processor
2. processor specs including core speed, multiplier, bus speed, and level 1-3 cache data
3. manufacturer, model and chipset of your motherboard
4. BIOS brand, version, and date
5. graphic interface version and link width
6. memory (RAM) information: type, size, number of channels, frequency, latency, cycle time, and other specifications
7. on the About tab: author, version number, operating system specs, validation tools, and link to CPUID developers website

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This morning I discovered a nice little three minute video that explains the concept of blogging in a way that most non-bloggers (yes, amazingly such people still exist!) will probably understand. It also saves me the trouble of typing out one of my 1,000+ word essays saying essentially the same thing.

Video credit goes to Lee LeFever at www.commoncraft.com/show.

Today I had the chance to review a new site that may be able to provide some help to those of you who are struggling with bad credit problems. Appropriately enough, it’s called BadCreditOffers.com, and it provides information about an array of financial services ranging from bad credit loans to credit repair. Each section of the site has links to several reputable finance companies that are willing to accept applications from customers with “less than perfect” credit histories. A convienient summary of each company’s most relevant features and rules is also included alongside each link.

Overall, this site seems to provide a useful service for people who need to make important purchases but have run into difficulties because they cannot get the financing approved. By putting a sufficient amount of relevant information from several different companies under one virtual “roof”, BadCreditOffers.com saves people the hassle of applying to many credit card companies or financial institutions only to be turned down, or (perhaps worse) being accepted for financing but under very unfavorable terms. Meanwhile, for people who do not necessarily need to buy anything but instead want to improve their credit, they also have a credit repair section which contains information about companies that provide assistance with bill consolidation, debt relief, and consumer credit counseling.

Of course, the best way to avoid the difficulties of bad credit is to abstain from deficit spending to begin with, but if you do find yourself in debt and need assistance with financing or credit repair, BadCreditOffers.com may be able to point you in the right direction.

Earlier tonight I received an email from the owner of MoneyListProfits.com, a site that offers a system for increasing revenues from PTR programs. They also have an affiliate program that I joined a few days ago, which means that I have been receiving newsletter tips from the program’s founders about how to best promote the program. This seems to be one of the more informative ones so far, so I might as well share it with you here. It covers the topic of affiliate link tracking software and why it is important for affiliates to track the original sources of their traffic and sales.

As I explained in the last email, your success as an MLP Affiliate Partner is very important to all of us at MLP. We want you to succeed and we do not hate sharing our profits with you.

On the contrary, we want you to make as many affiliate profits as you can because you are helping us achieve our primary mission of reaching as many people all over the world as possible.

And in order to do that, I will be sharing with you some great tips that you can use to maximize your affiliate profits.

Today, I wanted to let you know why you should NOT use your default affiliate link. That is because we have given you the power of advanced tracking that 98.87% of the affiliate programs on the net do not provide.

With this power tool, you have the much-needed ability to change your affiliate link instead of using the same link all the time at all the places.

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This article by Sarah Tenney is a review of the book The Comparative Method by Charles C. Ragin, published by the University of California Press in 1987.

In this book, Charles Ragin puts forward a “qualitative comparative method” in an effort to preserve the essential features of case-oriented research while introducing Boolean algebra as a means of formalizing scientific inquiry and incorporating larger numbers of observations.

Ragin describes comparative politics as differing from other areas of social science in its attempt to examine two levels of analysis — the system level and the within-system leve l— at the same time. This approach developed in light of the nature of social interaction, in which a number of conditions can culminate in various ways and under different circumstances to produce similar outcomes. Thus, the comparative method takes a holistic approach. Rather than working with samples of large populations, it examines a small number of cases in detail. Ragin argues that unlike quantitative researchers who are focused on testing hypotheses across a broad spectrum of observations, comparativists are concerned with applying theory in order to interpret particular cases.

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Today I received a letter from the Libertarian Party notifying our membership that there has been a bill introduced by Ron Paul called HR 3600, officially titled the Voter Freedom Act of 2007, that would establish a national ballot access standard for all Congressional candidates. In most cases, it would effectively lower the threshold to something much more reasonable than the complicated, ever-changing patchwork of state laws and regulations that currently govern ballot access for independent candidates and “minor” parties. According to the text of the bill, prospective candidates could qualify for the ballot by submitting a petition declaring their intent to run for office and collecting at least 1,000 signatures from registered voters within their respective districts.

The Libertarian Party letter from Shane Cory reviews some of our current struggles with ballot access issues and includes a petition declaring our support for the Voter Freedom Act. Members can sign the pre-printed petition forms and mail them back to the Libertarian Party, who will then forward them to Ron Paul. The contents of the letter and petition are published below:

Dear fellow Libertarian,

Enclosed you will find with my letter a very important petition personally addressed to Congressman Ron Paul.

Why a petition to Congressman Paul? Let me explain.

Although the Libertarian Party has made great gains in recent years winning Presidential ballot access in nearly every state (48 of 50 in 2004), we are in a constant battle to remain there and continue as the only viable alternative to the Republicans and Democrats.

Congressman Ron Paul has introduced HR 3600, the Voter Freedom Act of 2007, a bill which would set a reasonable national standard for Congressional candidates to gain a position on local ballots for Congress. Passage of this legislation will be a great boost to our efforts in 2008.

You see, each election cycle, we have to jump through hoops and comply with thousands of state laws regulating voting - even voting for Congress!

The horror of the matter is that these laws are constantly changing and it’s a whole lot harder to hit a moving target!

Why? Because as Libertarian candidates continue to increase in voting strength, and more and more of our candidates are elected at the state and local level, we are a growing threat to the Democrats and Republicans we challenge.

The Republican/Democrat monopoly in politics isn’t good for our country and it is certainly not good for your state and local government as well.

While the Republicans didn’t invent corruption, they certainly seem to have elevated it to an art form. And can you remember back when Republicans claimed they were the party of smaller government?

That’s all changed.

And as for the Democrats, when they aren’t being corrupt and ineffective, they are advancing a socialist cause that threatens to grow government even bigger and to restrict so many of our freedoms.

As a Libertarian, I know I don’t have to convince you of the value of our work!

My friend, we have excellent opportunities in several benchmark states, and I believe that once we clear this gigantic hurdle that is ballot access, we will be able to move forward toward the critical 2008 elections with great momentum.

Our goal of having ballot access in 50 states may still be a few years off due to rising challenges, but I believe we will get there soon.

Recently, North Carolina has been a top priority…and a good example of what we have been up against. While voters have been allowed for several years to register publicly as Libertarians, in 2005 we were “decertified” as a party. There, the state raised the threshold for party recognition, and in the process they even sent letters to our members telling them they were no longer part of a recognized party!

Volunteers from across the Tar Heel state have collected thousands of the needed signatures and we are hiring temporary help to get the rest. In fact, we have been able to get an excellent bargain and are paying a very low rate of just one dollar per signature acquired. And the best news of this situation is that we are in a position to regain a long term position on their ballot in 2008.

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Using Google AdWords is arguably the best way to quickly bring targeted traffic to a website and attempt to convert it into sales. For many people, it is an attractive and convenient alternative to conventional website building and search engine optimization. However, many Internet marketing beginners, commonly referred to as “newbies”, can easily get caught up in the hype that often accompanies the potential for relatively quick profits from Google Adwords advertising. Consequently, many of them make crucial mistakes in setting up and implementing their AdWords campaigns, which can be very costly and may lead to some of them quitting the Internet marketing business altogether. Therefore, I have assembled a list of 10 common pitfalls that you should avoid when advertising with Google AdWords or any other similar pay-per-click service.

1. Not split-testing your ads: Almost all veteran AdWords advertisers do not simply run a single campaign and hope for the best. Instead, they create two or more campaigns using the same keywords but with slightly different wording in their ads. This allows us to see which ad performs better in terms of click-through rate (CTR) and actual sales. After enough clicks have been tallied, you can simply drop the loser, keep the winner, and then split test it again against another variation of your ad. Through this process, you can consistently improve the quality of your ads over time and pay less money per click over time.

2. No tracking of conversions: The word “conversions” is one of those semi-fancy Internet marketing terms for “actual sales”. With PPC marketing, it is very important to track these so that you know exactly which of your keyword groups are profitable and which ones can be safely discarded. The most profitable keywords are not always the ones with the highest CTR.

3. Making ad groups with too many or irrelevant keywords. This common newbie mistake occurs because many people start out with the idea of throwing whatever keywords “sound good” into the group, thinking that more keywords = more traffic = more sales. Of course, this is not a very efficient way to do it and can lead to poor quality scores and unnecessary losses. A better strategy is to make several ad groups of closely related keywords and match them to the text of your ads and the landing page.

4. Mixing up search and content results: Many AdWords users will simply opt into the content network as part of their campaign. While this can increase the number of clicks received, it can also bring a lot of unnecessary expense because the content network represents a different group of visitors from those who arrive at your ads through search queries. These two networks should be placed in separate campaigns, after which the content network results can be tweaked to lower the cost per click and exclude underperforming sites from showing your ads.

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One of the most important aspects of website promotion is the procurement of more inbound links to your site. For many webmasters, this has become a real challenge, especially in light of Google’s recent actions which have penalized many sites that sell text links or have participated in sponsored review programs such as Pay Per Post. Moreover, many of us may not have a lot of money to spend on text links and would rather do it in the bum marketing fashion, which for those not familiar with the terminology roughly translates to “promote your website for free”.

So how can you get free text links without having to resort to obvious spamming or black hat tactics? Well, there are a few different ways to do this that will actually work as long as you’re willing to invest a little bit of your time:

1. Post in relevant forums that allow signatures. Most bulletin board services, known more commonly today as forums, will allow users to place at least one link to a website of their choice in the signature. This signature line appears at the bottom of every post made by any user that enables this feature. This presents a good opportunity to obtain many one-way backlinks from the forum site after you make posts there. For best results, choose a forum that is relevant to the topic of your site; these links will generally carry more weight with the search engines.

2. Post comments on blogs. Most blogs that allow comments will have a URL field above the place where you are supposed to type in your comment. By placing your site’s URL in here before posting, you can get a free link back to your site. It is advisable to make sure that your comments are relevant to the topic of the blog post and add value in some way; if the comment appears too “spammy”, the blog owner may delete it.

In order to save time in finding relevant blogs, you can go to your favorite search engine and use a very specific query such as this one:

“your favorite keyword” “powered by wordpress” “leave a comment” -”comments closed”

This will tell the search engine to return only WordPress powered sites that allow comments and have your chosen keyword somewhere in their content. Because WordPress is one of the more search engine friendly blogging platforms, this will make your job easier. If you want your comment links to also pass PageRank in addition to providing traffic potential, you can add the words “dofollow” or “nonofollow” to the above query to increase your chances of finding blogs that do not use the dreaded rel=”nofollow” tag.

In order to make sure that a blog is properly following comments, you can look at any posts that contain comments while having the Firefox Search Status plugin enabled. If the blog in question is using the nofollow tag, the URL of the commentator will display with a pink box around it. If you don’t see any pink boxes around the commenters’ names, then these links should be able to pass PageRank.

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Today I received a rather unexpected commissions payment from a PTR program that I joined two days ago, Myster-E-Mail. Although the payment is only 14 cents (PayPal) because I haven’t had a chance to do much clicking here yet, it is always a good sign to see a program owner that is able to pay out so quickly and keep member accounts current:

Sue Roley just sent you money with PayPal.

Sue Roley is a Verified buyer.

Payment Details
Amount: $0.14 USD
Transaction ID: XXXXXXXXX
Subject: commission payment
Note: myster-e-mail

According to the site, the program has about 3,300 current members, which represents a significant potential advertising base. There are some country restrictions on joining; allowed countries include USA, Canada, and most of the European “search friendly” countries with the exception of Italy. For some unknown reason, members from Italy were banned from the program about three months ago. My guess is that there was some kind of cheating ring that was found to originate from this country, but I will probably need to contact the program owner to find out the exact reason.

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While browsing through a relatively new online auction site that is being promoted by Royal Surf, I ran across an advertisement for a viral website promotion method that can supposedly result in a steady increase in traffic to the targeted site. While I think that some of the numbers used for potential traffic volume better represent theoretical hopes as opposed to realistic projections, there is no cost to use the system, so I went ahead and joined the program to see how well it works.

The system originates with a membership site called T-2000 Ultra. I’m not sure why the creators of the site decided to give it a name that more resembles a newfangled vacuum cleaner than a marketing technique, but frankly if it can bring some much-needed traffic to this site, I’m not going to worry about what name they decide to put in the title tag. Upon arriving at the site, the first 80% or so of the text explains how the system is supposed to work and basically sells the idea that it is a good thing to get more traffic to our sites so that we can make more money (as if we really needed to be convinced of this - duh!).

The important part where you can actually start to promote your site is located near the bottom of the page. There are six text ads of other people’s sites down there, all of them displaying with the familiar blue hyperlink color. Below that are six little boxes for entering the ad codes, along with a short registration form that you’re supposed to fill out after you input the codes.

To get the ad codes, you click each one of the six text links and view the site for at least 10 seconds, after which a five-digit code will appear in a bar across the top of the screen. After collecting the codes and entering them in the boxes, you can then enter your site URL and preferred link text, along with name, email, and password in the appropriate fields and click “Submit” to begin the registration process.

At this point, they will send two confirmation mails to your email address. You will need to click the links in both of these to fully confirm your registration as part of the opt-in process (apparently they’re wanting to make extra sure that there are no problems with spam complaints). Most of this information, including the funding source for the site, is explained fairly well in the welcome mail:

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While searching for sites other than Constant-Content that offer inexpensive non-duplicate content articles, I ran across an interesting forum called NamePros.com. Generally speaking, forums are a good source of information and an integral part of website promotion. You can use them to develop a positive reputation for yourself and your brand name while simultaneously getting backlinks and traffic to your website through your signature.

This particular forum that I discovered today, however, seems to offer a good deal more than the usual routine of making posts while quietly promoting one’s site. Although the main topic of NamePros.com is domain names, it covers many other areas such as web design, website development, programming, search engine optimization, and various aspects of Internet marketing and making money online. They also have a Community section where you can discuss off-topic issues and introduce yourself to the other forum participants.

Perhaps more interestingly, they also have a Marketplace section that is large enough to be considered a forum of its own. There are many separate categories within this section that allow you to offer purchases, sales, or trades of everything from domain names to article content, and just about anything else that would be of interest to a webmaster. The forum even has its own currency called “NameBucks”, usually abbreviated NP$, that can be used for low to mid-value transactions between registered members.

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