AdesBlog.com

Free Online Banner Creator Tool

Posted in » Online Tools - by Ades

11 Comments 

BannerFans is a cool Web2.0 banner creation tool that comes with lots of features. You can select predefined standard banner sizes or enter your own dimensions. It has a cool font selection window too. Other things that you can change are: shadows, effects and banner border styles.

It also allows you to upload your own backgrounds for your banners. And when you are done with your banner, you can either download it or just get the code. If you get the code, your banner will be uploaded to ImageShack.us (it creates myspace compatible codes too)

Basically, this is the tool that you need when you have internet but not Photoshop.

Winner of the Contest, 1000 Free EntreCard Credits!

Posted in » Contests - by Ades

3 Comments 

Winner of the 1,000 Free EntreCard Credits contest is AJ! Congratulations!

AJ, I have sent you an email, reply back to me to claim your 1,000 entrecard credits.

If you want to be part of more contests, subscribe to my RSS. Most of the time, that is the only thing required to enter AdesBlog contests.

Bill Gates signs-up for LinkedIn

Posted in » General - by Ades

5 Comments 

LinkedIn is a popular social network for professionals. It can serve as a CV and a place to network with other professionals, usually through your friends and their friends.

Bill Gates signed up for LinkedIn too, his profile can be found here. Now you can talk to Bill Gates directly and network with him ;) www.linkedin.com/in/billgates

Source: lenta.ru/news/2008/02/28/bgates/

Is Passive Income a Myth?

Posted in » Articles, Guest Posts, Make Money - by Ades

8 Comments 

Author info: This guest post has been written by Alan Johnson, who has exposed the 100 most popular online myths over at TheRatingBlog.com.

You can hear more than a few people saying that you can earn passive income by working from home, but is that actually possible? Are you, as an online entrepreneur, capable of generating passive income, or is it just one big myth?

Can passive income be earned online? Yes and no, it depends on what you understand by passive. Yes, if you compare being a webmaster to having a regular job, it does seem like passive since, with a job, you
are only getting paid while you work or, in other words, you are selling your time.

As a webmaster, on the other hand, you can definitely earn money 24/7, even while you’re sleeping. Think about it: let’s assume that you are running a website and promoting products related to your niche as an affiliate. Whenever you make a sale or generate a lead through your affiliate link, you are getting paid. In other words, if one of your visitors decides to buy a certain product using your affiliate link while you are sleeping, for example, you get paid. If that’s what you understand by passive income, then yes, it is definitely achievable.

On the other hand, thinking that earning 100% passive income is possible as an online entrepreneur, or, in other words, thinking that you can earn money without working is just plain foolish on your part.
A website which is currently profitable can stop generating revenue at any point, depending on how well you do your job as a webmaster.

Sure, you may currently be receiving visitors form search engines but rest assured, things will definitely change if you neglect the process of SEO. The same way, a PPC campaign can and will no longer be
profitable if you don’t tweak it whenever necessary. No matter what others say, you have to invest time and efforts in order to make money and, while just relaxing and doing nothing while profits are rolling
in does seem like quite a tempting scenario, I’m afraid that things don’t exactly stand this way.

As a conclusion, depending on what kind of meaning the term has to you, earning passive income as an online entrepreneur may or may not be a myth. Are you interested in making money 24/7, even when you are not working on a certain project? Then yes, it is definitely possible if you do your job right. On the other hand, do you think that, after you launch a certain project and it becomes profitable, you can just sit back and relax, that your job is now done? Then, my friend, I am afraid that you still have a lot to learn and you basically have two options: you can either understand just how foolish such a way of thinking is and change your attitude or you can learn your lesson the hard way.

Depending on your answer, your experience as an online entrepreneur can be a dream come true or one large disappointment. What will it be?

Best wishes,
Alan Johnson

Choosing reliable hosting, why I chose Pair.com?

Posted in » Blogging Tips, Personal - by Ades

12 Comments 

So, why I have chosen Pair.com out of all the other hosts? Because it’s environmentally friendly! ;) Well, not really. (But they should be commended for that) That would be the answer of Miss World who happen to be a blogger… But I have chosen Pair for other reasons.

My relationship with Pair goes back to early 2000, when I was still in University and my first website was on geocities.com (still remember geocities?) Then my website (now adesdesign.net) was mostly on photoshop tutorials and tons of other webmaster things. One fine day, someone writes me an email saying that he visited my site and liked what he saw, and that he wants to sponsor me a hosting at Pair.com under his account. Upon hearing it, I was ecstatic! Of course I agreed.

Since my website was hosted on a sub folder of my sponsor, I had used www.cjb.net as a URL shortener. He hosted my site for about 2 years until when I could afford my own hosting and domain name. At the time when I was leaving his hosting, I had thanked him greatly for his good deeds, but I wish I had his contacts to thank him now. Those days I was using hotmail… now hotmail is a history… so do many contacts of mine which were in my hotmail account…

So, since 2000, I have been a regular customer of Pair. There were times when I shifted to other hostings but found myself back in Pair just after few months. Because those sites were not reliable, I often had downtime problems and my support tickets were left unanswered. With Pair, I had no reason to open support tickets, because my site would run years and years… without any problem.

Here is an interesting story why I love pair dot com…

Going extra mile for a customer

About 2 years ago, after my adventure with other hosts, I came back to Pair dot com. And chose their webmaster plan. As you can see to the right, it comes with plenty of harddisk space and bandwidth. So I decided it will be enough for my needs.

I was right, space was enough and the my site’s bandwidth was within the limit. But apparently my site was too heavy for their shared web hosting, it was overloading the whole server. So they asked me if I wanted to upgrade my plan to dedicated server. I said there was no reason for me to upgrade to dedicated server since my site was running within the “webmaster plan” limits.

So, what do you think they did? They transfered my site to dedicated server at the price of webmaster plan (dedicated servers start from $249 per month). Since then my site has been running on dedicated server. What a service right? I know… Now I call that CUSTOMER SERVICE!

So, that’s my story about my special relationship with Pair.com. That’s how I became regular customer of Pair.com. Maybe you should too!

Note: Pair is consistently among the most reliable hosting providers in the world.

Blog status: stable, after 48 hours

Posted in » Personal - by Ades

8 Comments 

Shifting blog to a new server went smooth without any major issues (i will write step by step instructions on how i did it on the next post). However there were times when my blog went down with server errors, as a result I had to delete everything and re-install it on a new database and with fresh wp files. This issue was caused by plugin called subscribe2, basically it was flooding the mail queue of pair.com.

Subscribe2 is a plugin that notifies people who have subscribed to be notified when there is new post on the blog. I am not sure if it indeed sent out emails to subscribed members, or was just overloading the server. If anyone received emails from AdesBlog.com during this installation, I sincerely apologize for it.

Good news is that, I am no longer using comment2 plugin anymore. So you don’t have to worry about anymore email problems.

This was the message I got from the support momentarily after the installation:

This script was launching numerous sendmail processes, driving load up on the server and flooding the mail queue with over 7,000 messages. Please review the usage policies on the following page…

Luckily, Pair has a 24/7 support team that monitors all the servers. They disabled the script and notified me about it. I quickly deleted everything and re-installed the blog without this plugin.

The source of the problem was not because of the “activation” of the plugin, but it was caused during the data transfer (posts, comments, various plugin data) from my goDaddy to new server. I guess somehow when transferring the data (inserting into db) the plugin started sending emails.

Other than this issue, overall process was fairly simple and straight-forward. Of course, it took sometime (24 or more) for all the DNS to update completely. During this DNS update, the blog was going back and front between the two versions: goDaddy version and Pair version.

In the beginning there were some plugins which were not activated yet, but their code was already in the blog theme. This might have caused the blog to run slower than its actual speed. Now all the plugins are activated and working correctly. So you should be seeing a better loading time after this. I have also implemented WP-Cache plugin, this should further improve the blog speed.

Overall, I am happy with the result and with my decision to change the hosting.

P.S Changing to new host allowed me to update my WordPress to 2.3.3 too, so that was a good thing.

AdesBlog.com moved to New Hosting!

Posted in » Personal - by Ades

13 Comments 

Finally moved to a new hosting at Pair.com! My blog is now hosted on a dedicated server, sharing only with my other site www.adesdesign.net. So, no more sharing with other 700+ sites or 2K+ sites on goDaddy ;)

How is the loading time for you now? Please let me know by voting on the poll to the right.

I am pretty exhausted at the moment, so I am gonna take some rest (it’s 9.48am). Do let me know if you see any bugs or errors in the blog.

Book: How to Make Money with your Blog

Posted in » Blogging Tips, Make Money - by Ades

13 Comments 

Somebody had to do this, and Duane Forrester and Gavin Powell did it. The duo has published a new book called: How to Make Money with Your Blog: The Ultimate Reference Guide for Building, Optimizing, and Monetizing Your Blog. I am surprised it’s not JohnChow ;)

The first customer seems to like it, he had rated 5 star. I haven’t read the book so I cannot comment on the contents of the book, and whether it is a good book or not.

There are tons of blogs and websites that teach you how to make money online, but the big problem with online resources is the archiving, posts get buried. Also the online resources might have affiliate links in them, some people might just promote something because they are making money with it, but not the referred people. So, the book is better over the online resources in that sense. I just hope it has more tips than just AdSense and TLA.

Contest: Free 1000 Entrecard credits giveaway

Posted in » Contests - by Ades

22 Comments 

Ready to win 1,000 Entrecard credits? Well, rules are simple. Everyone who has entered my previous contest are already automatically entered in this contest. So if you have entered in my previous contest, and if you have not unsubscribed from my RSS then you are already in. You don’t have to do anything.

Contest Rules:

1. Subscribe to RSS
   I am sure most of you have already subscribed to my RSS anyway, but if you haven’t please subscribe here first. This rule must be accomplished before you proceed to Rule No.2
2. Leave your Name and reachable email under this post
   By commenting on this post you will automatically be entered into the contest. Just leave your name and email.
   Example: Bill Gates, bill(at)microsoft(.)com - this is sufficient to participate in this contest. However, if you want to comment more than that, feel free.

Contest Deadline:

Winner will be announced after one week on 28th February, 2008. So please enter the contest anytime before this date.

Good Luck!

Increaseing your RSS count through newsletter subscription

Posted in » Blogging Tips, Make Money - by Ades

9 Comments 

If you have a blog and at the same time if you are running your own newsletter, then there is a way to increase your blog’s RSS count. Yep, using your newsletter. If you have only a handful of newsletter subscribers then it’s not worth to try this method, because it’s not free.

However, if you have few thousand subscribers, then you might want to invest in this. At the same time you will be using a professional newsletter management system - Aweber Communications.

Aweber is now tracked by FeedBurner. So when you shift all your newsletter members to your Aweber account, they will be added to your RSS count. Thus, your RSS count will skyrocket.

As I said, Aweber is not free. If you subscribe for month-to-month plan, it will cost you $19.95 (see screenshot). If you go for a yearly plan, than you can save $60.00.

Previously, Yaro of Entrepreneurs-Journey had about 6000 RSS subscribers on his blog. After FeedBurner started tracking Aweber members, now his RSS count stands on over 23,000 members. Impressive huh? That means he had, like.. 17,000 members in his newsletter subscription. No wonder he was saying 70% of his income comes from sending out newsletters. Here is his post about Aweber incident.

We should all consider this newsletter business seriously! Don’t you think?

www.aweber.com