First of all I’m not big on Joomla, WordPress is my weapon of choice when it comes to building websites not because WordPress is better but it’s just the tool I started with on the web and I’ve always been satisfied with it so I have no reason to change it. Since I run a website called Site Builder Tips I can’t make it all about WordPress, Though I don’t use Joomla for any of my projects I do use some there theme designs, meaning I’ve seen some great CMS themes for Joomla that I then convert to WordPress themes, I have a membership at Joomlart which is a Joomla premium themes site that has some really great themes that I convert to WordPress themes.

It’s on Joomlart where I discovered a site called JomSocial which is a Joomla social network website builder plugin, I have to say this is the first time I ran into a tool that I couldn’t find for WordPress, I mean there is BuddyPress but JomSocial is a whole other level. The cool thing about JomSocial is that the site it self is a social network that allows you to see the extension in action, a couple months back I joined the site and I completely forgot that I was trying out a demo because It was a real social network where I was interacting with other members. I think that’s a great way to sell a tool, the look, feel and functionality of JomSocial reminds me of being on Facebook.

JomSocial does a good job with this tool and they’re quite a few successful sites powered by JomSocial, 3 of which are GibLink.com that has 113,380 + members, OnlineRadioStations.com with 49,500 + members and KenyaHub.com with 120,583 + members just to name a few.

A few features and Specs that stood out for me.

Facebook Connect

Facebook has now eclipsed MySpace as the #1 most popular social network on the planet. With over 350 millions active users worldwide, chances are someone registering at your community will already be a member of Facebook.

To make the registration process hassle-free, JomSocial even included our new Facebook-Connect login-module in JomSocial, so your members can log-in to your JomSocial-powered community using their Facebook account details.

Profile pics, status updates & more are “pulled” in safely & securely from Facebook, making it easy for new and existing users to sign up and stay logged into your community.

Twitter Integration

If Facebook Is the king of social networks then Twitter is the prince, I’ve watch the service bloom from the very beginning (I was one of the first to use it back in 2006) when it was just a side service to Odeo to now being one of the most talked about services on the web, I mean you can’t even go a day on the internet without seeing something regarding Twitter.

JomSocial allows you to integrate your community with Twitter allowing your members to show there Twitter updates as well as there friends updates on your JomSocial community profile pages, also members of your community also have the option of automatically updating there Twitter account with status updates they make on your JomSocial community.

External Applications Support (Apps)

This is a really important feature for tools like this because it allows you to integrate your community with pretty much any third party service out there, thus giving you more flexibility with your community.

I’m really considering building WordPress plugin that does exactly what JomSocial does for Joomla because there is nothing out currently for WordPress that does this and I think a tool like this would be great for WordPress.

Anyways check out JomSocial, sign up to there community to get a real life demo of JomSocial in action.

Check em out, JomSocial.

WP Affiliate Platform allows you to easily launch your own affiliate program with just a few clicks right from within your WordPress installation. It has all the standard features that most affiliate management tools have today. It’s built to be integrated with any shopping cart solution one of which includes Instinct’s WP-eCommerce plugin (the most popular and widely used shopping cart plugin for WordPress). Even more importantly it can be integrated with Wishlist Member which is the WordPress membership plugin I’m using to build my membership website.

Check out some screen shots of the front end and back end of the plugin.

Affiliate view of WP Affiliate Platform plugin:

[View with PicLens]

Admin view of WP Affiliate Platform plugin:

[View with PicLens]

I gave the WP Affiliate Platform a run by testing out the demo and I gotta say it’s a pretty solid plugin, and will be my choice for managing my affiliates not to mention it’s only $35 bucks which is big difference from iDevAffiliate which puts you back $299.00 for a single site license and without any addons.

Depending on what your looking for to mange your affiliate program, this may not be the best choice for you but if your using WordPress and don’t want to be bothered with installations and customizing a solution to work with WordPress then this should be a no brainier.

Visit:WP Affiliate Platform

Update: PicAdMedia.com is now ImageSpaceMedia.com, so when you click on the links it will redirect you to that site.

Even though sites like Youtube stream 1.2 billion videos per day it still pales in comparison to how many images are viewed on the web daily, yet there is still no company to successfully monetize images. Of course sites like IstockPhoto and ShutterStock make millions from selling images but that business model only works for a few. Websites, blogs and social sites with millions of images can’t benefit from that business model. This is where in-image/in-picture advertising comes in, which is an idea that works similar in-video advertising where an overlay ad is placed on top of the image. Now the concept of making money from images by means of In-Picture Advertising is not a new thing, BritePic (A product of Adbrite) was one of the first services to offer a monetization model for images but the model’s possible success was hindered by the inconvenient method of implementing the ads into your images.The idea is that you would have to log into BritePic or Adbrite and manually ad your images which would return a embed code for you to place on your website. The problem here is that the code is javascript and it generates a flash version of your image, this means Google or any other search engine would not be able to pick up those images which means less traffic and if you have a website with allot of images your already aware that a significant percentage of your traffic is accredited to the images on your site. Secondly this is a time consuming method not to mention that all the images already on your site will not benefit from the method.

Introducing PicAdMedia

About a month ago I received a email from someone over at PicAdMedia inviting me to a private Beta testing of there new In-Picture Advertising service, as soon as I saw “In Picture Advertising” I remembered BritePic and I deleted the email. For about 3 weeks from time to time I continued to receive emails from them, they eventually wore me down so before I decided on adding them to the spam list I went to check there service out. After signing up and checking out the dashboard I quickly realized that the method by which they place the ads on websites was completely different from BritePic’s and adheres to standards of web usability. I decided to test out the service on my hip hop music blog HipHopMusicDotCom since it had the most images on it.

PicAdMedia wins at everything that BritePic fails at, implementation is very simple just add the website(s) you would like to serve ads on then get the embed code, place it on your website or blog and boom shortly after that ads will start appearing on all the images on your site. The ads are shown whenever a visitor hovers over a image on your website via a slide in effect and slide’s out whenever the visitor hovers away from the image. The best thing about the ads is that they open in a new window so you don’t loose your visitor when they decide to view an ad. It 100% compliant with Google Adsense and you can also set it to only display ads on certain images for example if you have a logo in your website header, in the Image Manager dashboard (image below) section of PicAdMedia you can set it so that image does not display any ads on that logo. The ad engine is very fast as soon as your page loads the ads are available for display though I’m not sure how they will perform with billion impressions happening daily across the web.

As you can see in the image above PicAdMedia scans your website for all the images available on your website and archives them inside your admin area called the “Image Manager”, it automatically creates tags for the images which is pulled from the meta data available in the images. In the future this will be very beneficial for advertisers who want to target keyword specific images which will drive more targeted visitors to the advertiser’s website and generate higher earnings for publishers.

[View with PicLens]

Above are some ads from HipHopMusicDotCom, as you can see the ads are not very targeted but that is to be expected since it’s still only in the BETA stages and currently advertising isn’t even open for testing yet.

Above is a screen shot of the Domain Manager where you can add the domains you would like to display ads on.

Above is a 7 day earning report from PicAdMedia, of course I can’t show you certain stats due to PicAdMedia’s policy but lets just say that click through rate isn’t that great which is to be expected from untargeted ads, however this doesn’t mean your site wouldn’t perform better, keep in mind that I tested it on my hip hop music blog. With these early stats I can say this could become a additional income stream with more targeted ads and also would be a new frontier for advertisers. I can see how I could drive some major targeted traffic to some of my other sites with this platform at a much lower price than Google Adwords.

Something like this would be great for sites with a thousand images or more, photo sharing sites like photobucket, imageshack and tinypic would make a killing from this. Just think about displaying targeted ads over a hundred thousand images being viewed by millions of visitors. Blogs that post images almost everyday would do great with a service like this as well.

In closing I have to say that I’m going to continue to display PicAdMedia ads on HipHopMusicDotCom since it generates additional untapped revenue and doesn’t affect my other income streams plus I haven’t lost any traffic because of it which is the most important thing. Registration for there beta test is currently open to the public for publishers but not advertisers which is what I’m now waiting for, if you have a blog or website with quite a few images you should definitely check them out.

Visit PicAdMedia

I just finished creating a social network on SocialGo to see what they had to offer, above is the video you see once you finish signing up and head to the dashboard page. At first glance at the dashboard there very similar to Ning but far more polished. Ning is good for building Social Networks but the features are limited and you have share your network of members with other network creators, which doesn’t work well when your trying to build a brand. Kickapps offers far more features than Ning (you can do virtually anything) but it’s not free, it use to be but not anymore, actually it’s quite expensive. SocialGo picks up from where Ning and Kickapps left off by offering a common ground those services don’t offer, it’s free to start a social network and also has many premium features.

[View with PicLens]

The one feature that stands out the most about SocialGo is the Member Billing feature, where you can charge members to view content that you deem as premium content. One cool thing about this feature that you can have some content as free content and some aa premium which is great for converting sales, I can see marketers jumping all over this. Another great feature is the Audio, Video and Chat modules which allow members to chat with one another using Text, Audio and Video. There’s allot more bells and whistles that were available but these were the two that stood out the most.

Another thing that should be noted is the flexibility in SocialGo’s theme structure, which gives web designers such as myself more freedom when creating website themes. You can also use ready made themes that are available in the theme store both free and paid. You can see screen shots below of some actual social networks powered by SocialGo.

[View with PicLens]

Is SocialGo the right fit?

Well it all depends on what your looking for in a social networking platform, personally I’m looking into maybe possibly implementing SocialGo into my video site MusicVideoCast.com, which I’ve been searching for a social network to integrate with the site. I’m not sure but it would be great if SocialGo had a single sign on feature that could work with WordPress powered sites but since they have REST API access, it wouldn’t be hard to build a custom script to get that done.

SocialGo seems to be a solid platform and would be beneficial to those looking to start a social networking site, or add one to there existing site.

Visit SocialGo.

9 months into 2008 Kontera contacts me talking about joining there program unaware that I was already affiliated with them. I told them I already tried the program and the results were less than mediocre. They told me that there ad inventory had grown drastically since the previous year and that they had a special promotion going on. I decided to give them a shot to see what was up and I must admit the ads were most certainly performing better than before. I was averaging about 300 clicks daily and that’s along side my Google Adsense earnings which were not affected, From October going into December of 2008 the earnings were really good and started to think well maybe Kontera could become a long term income stream.

So When Did Kontera Start to Suck?

It started in January of 2009, as soon as the new year came around the earnings tanked, and when I say tanked I mean “TANKED!!”, I’m talking about getting an average of 200 + clicks per day and only having a $1.28 to show for it. What? That’s a waste of time to say the least, I decided to run the ads for a couple more months which was a big mistake, I should have removed them as soon as they were no longer profitable. So in May I had enough and decided to kick Kontera’s ass to the curve. I wasted 5 months of valuable ad space hoping that the program would come around and it never did. I was like a drug addict that experienced drugs for the first time and keeps on taking the drug trying to relive that first time experience.

So What Am I Using Now?

Well after browsing through a couple threads on the Digital Point forum I ran into InfoLinks, It turns out that I already had an account with them for quite some time but completely forgot about them. Most of the discussions in the forums side with InfoLinks as being a better In Text ad network. So on June 1^st I decided to give them a shot, it’s only been 3 days so I can’t give you a real estimate of how well they perform but the first 3 days are far better than Kontera’s daily average. I’m going to test them out for thirty days to see if there program is worth the time.

What If Info Links Sucks As Well?

Well earlier I mentioned that I was rejected by Vibrant Media, well they have now approved me so if InfoLinks turns out to be Kontera’s retarded little brother then I guess I’ll give them a shot but then again I’m not a fan of Vibrant Media just for the simple fact that I had to apply 4 times before I was accepted, Nothing had changed with Hip Hop Music Dot Com so why was I rejected in the first place?

Is In-text Advertising Even Worth It?

From my personal experience, hell no, But maybe your topic or niche will do better with this type of advertising. To be honest it’s one of the most intrusive forms of advertising there is and it also goes against the principles of web usability. How do I know this? Well I just remember my wife browsing the web one time and I’m not sure what site she was on but the site had in-text ads and I remember her saying “these pop up links are so annoying”. I didn’t know she was referring to in-text ads at the time but that got me thinking, if I’m getting over 20,000 daily visitors to Hip Hop Music Dot Com how many of them are saying these ads are so annoying? So with that thought after this month I most likely will be done with In-Text advertising all together. You will never know if users are clicking on the ads because of relevance or because they just think it’s a link on your site. This type of advertising could hurt your site’s credibility and the only reason why my traffic hasn’t decreased on that site is because of the reputation I’ve built with my readers. That being said I might have lost future visitors forever using this type of advertising.

In Conclusion

So not only does Kontera suck but in-text advertising sucks all together, don’t waste your time on in text advertising there are much better monetization methods available…..Stay Tuned.

The ability to automatically calculate shipping and tax information for various states and carriers such as FedEx and UPS. An easy way to mange your customers, inventory and orders as well as keeping track of your profit and expenses.

To achieve all this you would need a variety of tools and services that could possibly cost you thousands of dollars, and you haven’t even gotten to marketing and promoting your business. These are the obstacles that ecommerce business owners face and the reason why 90 percent of them fail within there first year. This dilemma created a demand for more efficient, less time consuming and a more cost effective ways of getting and online store up and running.

ProStores is one of the the few tools that has attempted to solve this a problem and has succeeded at doing so. ProStores an eBay company is a all in one online store solution that combines all the fundamental tools required to operate an online store and then kicks it into overdrive by offering many more features and add-ons that makes running a online store as simple as writing a email.

So what’s some of the benefits of using a solution like ProStores?

Easy Store Design

lets face most individuals looking to start there own store are not web designers, with ProStores you can choose from more than 150 professionally designed eCommerce templates, easily upload your logo or create one with ProStores built in logo creator. If you do have some design skills you can custom design your store with 3rd party HTML editing tools. You can also have a custom store designed by one ofProStores certified web designers.

Sell on eBay Automatically

Obviously ProStores being an eBay company gives you the ability to sell your products to over 250 million potential customers on the web’s number one marketplace. You can automatically list to eBay fromProStores, everything such as your inventory, shipping and tax cost will be synced with eBay.

Accept Payments

Easily take payments online with web’s leading payment processors such as PayPal (Also a eBay company), Authorize.net, Quick Books, Link Point and more.

Automatic Search Engine Optimization

By using ProStores you can rank higher in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN with the use of search engine friendly URLs that are automatically tuned for the best search engine performance. Automatic site map creation and customizable product keywords.

Quick Listings on Shopping Sites

ProStores will automatcially submit your products to Google Base which is a free service that can quickly drive drive targeted consumers to your website. They also provide tools for you to submit your products to the three major shopping comparison search engines Shopping.com^®, Yahoo! Shopping^®, and Shopzilla^®.

Who is ProStores Mostly Suited For?

ProStores is suitable for both small to mid sized busniesses whether your selling a few hundred products or a hundred thousand products, ProStores can scale to meet your needs.

Screenshot of few different stores powered by ProStores.

[View with PicLens]

In Conclusion

Now more than ever business owners are looking for the most cost effective ways to build an online business and get the biggest bang for there buck,ProStores breaks down most of the walls you will run into when running your online business and provides the service at a fraction of the cost if you were to do it by other means. Of course there is no truly end all be all solution for running a business but you definitely benefit from starting out down the path with the least amount of resistance.

Check out the service at ProStores

StatsJunky fills a void for Affiliate and Pay-Per-Click marketers by giving them a centralized dashboard where they can manage all there campaigns, affiliate networks, advertising networks, keywords, profits and losses. There software is integrated with hundreds of affiliate networks which include all of the most popular ones such as Commission Junction, Click Bank, Link Share, Click Booth, Azoogle Ads and bunch more.

Now of course there are tons of tools and services out there that offer similar features sets, so what are the benefits of using StatsJunky over hosted or open source platforms?

Lower Risk Level

When using open source or hosted platforms, you have to dedicate allot of time to setting up your dashboard and getting all your campaign links, not to mention it won’t all be automated. Another issue with hosted and open source platforms is that you are at risk of the server going down. Depending on how long the server is down this could be devastating to your daily revenue and your bottom line.

Add-ons and Plugins

StatsJunky is already compatible with all major affiliate networks but if there is something you need, they will gladly build an Add-on or Plugin for you.

Constantly Updated Resource

StatsJunky provides a daily webinar for all its users and it will answer all questions no matter if it takes 1 hour or 5.

Security

When using StatsJunky there is no need to worry about a hosted application having access to all your campaigns and keywords that you’ve worked so hard to build, all you’re your data is stored on your computer.

Free for 7 days!

You receive a seven day free trial of the Pro version of StatsJunky.

StatsJunky has built a great tool that has real value and substance which is rare in the Internet Marketing arena and it could easily become the most used tool in your internet marketing business.

Check them out StatsJunky

Procaster.com is a easy to use live broadcasting software created by the live streaming service Mogulus that only requires you to have a computer in order to create a live broadcast from your desktop to your website or channel on Mogulus.

This technology is definitely not new but this is the first that a service has come along with this level of quality and amount of features. The most attractive part of the service is that it’s free and is full featured with no limitations.

Record & Play
Whatever you record, Procaster records it directly in the streaming service so your recordings are available immediately for on-demand viewing.

Broadcast Your Camera or Webcam
You can use any camera that is connected to your computer and the same goes for the webcam connected to your computer or built in. It supports Firewire, USB and video input cards.

Broadcast Your Screen
Many other services and software out there that record your screen can cost upwards of $200. Procaster does the same thing for free, if it’s on your screen Procaster can stream it live whether it’s Powerpoint, web browser, video and audio.

Live Chat and Twitter
Easy integration with Twitter as well as easy moderation Chat service.

Broadcast to 100,000+ viewers
With the use of the software and the Mogulus streaming service, you can reach a massive audience.

There is a boatload of other features that you can see for your self.

visit Procaster.com

Some of The Benefits

• Creating an Affiliate Website that sells like Crazy
• Unique Search Engine PPC Strategies that kill the Competition
• Search Engine Optimization Strategies (SEO)
• Selling Your Own Informational Product
• Buying Wholesale and Selling on eBay
• Websites you can Make Profitable Right Now
• Other Online Ventures to Consider
• Supplemental Info for Beginners
• Quality Products/Services I Highly Recommend

This guy is not such a jerk; he is a realist like myself and takes the internet for what is (another medium for making money), he does not spend time trying to brainwash you into thinking the internet is this magical place that cranks out millions of dollars into your bank account without and effort.

The Rich Jerk mostly covers the profit potential of creating affiliate websites, and instead of simply just talking about the oh so very popular arena of internet marketing, he tells you about many different ways to make money as an affiliate marketer for both digital and physical products.

He also gives you case studies about a few of his own affiliate sites that he is currently making money from, one of which is making him $20k per month. He even talks about a few of his websites that he sold, one of which he sold for $379.000 on eBay.

Being that I’ve been marketing on the internet for over four years now, I already knew about most of what he talked about, but his case studies gave me some new ideas on designing some new niche money making sites.

The SiteBuilderTips.com blog which was originally Glens-Website-Builders.com was created a as a result of reading this book, I run five other affiliate websites but this was the first aimed at internet internet marketing, reason being is because internet marketing is so competitive yet it’s such a small arena. There are hundreds of other industries you can target and make a killing (trust me on this), and that is exactly what The Rich Jerk covers.

For the price that he sells this ebook, it is definitely worth it and he covers a lot more than what these other marketers’ overpriced ebooks offer. Just take a look at this site and keep in mind that it was created as a result of me reading his book and then you decide whether or not it’s worth a try. The book is only 9.95 which is a steal since I paid the original price of $99 when it was first released.

Visit The Rich Jerk