It would be a lie to say that I love him, of course I do, but most of all I idolize him for his achievements on the net. I first heard about John Chow through my own blog. Yes, this very blog. Near one of the post, which was related to online revenue, Adsense displayed an advert with John’s blog, offering to teach you how to make money online. Since I couldn’t click my own ad, I just had to copy the URL manually and went to see what is he actually offering.

Well, I was impressed with quite a few things right from the start. First of all, his blog offers tons of articles, tips, tricks for online revenue - free. He is not trying to sell you his ebooks, not begging for donations, or do what other “marketing guru’s” do, trying to get your attention, and then to get you to pay. All you see if free to read, browse and learn. This is exactly the kind of blog I was looking for, for long time now, to subscribe and learn from someone who build himself, built his stable online revenue and shows exactly how he did it and with what network.

I have been visiting his blog for a couple of months now and learnt so many new things, that I never actually thought about. His creativity when it comes to marketing knows no boundaries, makes you smile and wonder how come no one thought about it before, and maybe if someone did, he didn’t blog about it or gave his secrets away, while John does it freely. I particularly enjoyed his “evil” tip to increase subscriptions, and following that tip I embedded some of my links into redirects, another way I was never introduced to before. John updates his blog everyday and practically showers you with ways and opportunities to make money online, so you need to be extra lazy to do not avail of at least one of the ways he is offering you and try yourself with online revenue.

Most of all, I was impressed with his generosity. A rare quality nowadays, I am sure you would agree with me. Not only he gives away so much precious information for free, his blog is also very interactive, and again, the readers benefit from it. For instance, if you write a review of his blog, he will link to your blog (regardless your ranking) and send you a ton of traffic. John Chow dot com has climbed to PR6 upon the recent update, and participating in one of his batches “buys” you a back link that will increase your Technorati profile. This, however, was my sincere review of his blog and I want to use this opportunity and thank him for been my distant teacher and muse.

This post is basically for bloggers, and not only bloggers but those who make money off sponsored reviews. Not many do, but those who do have a decent PR, Alexa, and Technorati Rank, found blogging for money to be a very nice additional way to monetize your online activity. Let’s assume you already know about been a blogger at ReviewMe and now can benefit from their new feature, campaign reviews. Why is it good? It’s only good for the bloggers who have low rank blog and have no chance of been accepted in the premium position, yet with this new structure they can make good money. Advertisers, however, are not in a profit because they pay minimum 10$ for a review, which can end up on PR0 dead blog. So, if you want to be reviewed by this blog Get Reviewed At ReviewMe!, it’s only 100$ now.
Anyway, enough with shameless self promotion, so how to grab a campaign? Technically it’s very easy, all you need to do is log in regularly to your ReviewMe account and check if there are no ongoing campaigns they offer your (related to your category of the blog). If you like any of the offers, click to accept it, and from that date you will have 3 days to post the review on your website. Practically, it’s easy, but there are a few things you should remember.

• You can only accept 10 campaign offers per month.

What does it mean? It means there are likely to be more offers, but you can’t make more than 10 reviews via campaign offers (you can, however, make unlimited posts with premium reviews), so it would be wiser to grab only the higher paying advertisers. For example, now it’s May 7th, and since the beginning of the month I already was offered to write a review about 25 times. Some were priced 28$, others 5$, and the rest in between. The 5$ reviews came first, so if I’d have accepted the first 10 which all cost 5$, I’d not be able to make more than 50$ this month from the campaigns of ReviewMe. To be honest, the reason I did not accept it was not greed, but rather the fact that they require minimum 200 words in a review, and 200 words for 5$ is… well, not much. Of course, there is an option of submitting up to 6 blogs, I personally have 4 listed, and each of them belongs to a different category, which automatically multiplies my chances of getting an offer by 4. Remember, that ReviewMe marketplace is big, with many many many bloggers, so the offers won’t stay up long, if you see a good offer - grab it right away, and also check a few times a day for an offer, if you really want to hunt down a good opportunity.

Bottom line is, don’t rush into accepting minimum payout offers, but also, don’t curse me in the end of the month when it would turn to be your only offer you could have taken…

Yay, it’s been a long time. 6 months it’s about 180 days, which is about 4320 hours.. let’s not keep trying to split it to molecules and atoms, you got my point - the blog have had a long life so far!  I do remember how I registered this domain because it was catchy and related to tutorials, I still remember it was generated by an online domains generator for the keyword “tut” and I also remember I got it only with one intention - to pull it to a good PageRank and resell for a good price. I never had the intention of starting my own blog and wasting time writing anywhere else except my forum, but after one month already I realized that a blog is a part of you, and there is no chance on the planet that I would ever sell this site.

As a reward, Google gave me PR5 upon the first update (which has now collapsed to PR4, but most PR’s experienced downgrade this update, so I am not worried and know it will be back).
Some (interesting?) info about TopTut.com:

1. This blog we redesigned twice, starting off with the Thirteen theme, and now uses a customized version of Icbto Theme.
2. TopTut.com has more traffic from Google then the rest of my sites altogether.
3. TopTut.com has never been submitted to Google. (Honestly I just forgot to do it).
4. At present, it costs me 2$ a month to keep it online.
5. 65% of our traffic comes from USA, 12% from UK and 10% from Canada.

6 months online, and what did we achieve?

1. Google PR5 for a start.
2. There are currently 2,770 results for “toptut.com” in Google.
3. Blog Juice: Total Blog Juice: 2.6.
4. Alexa Rank: 210,024 (yes, within 6 months online).
5. 268 blogs listed in Technorati link over here.
6. Toptut.com makes over 250$ a month from sponsors.
7. Technorati Authority: 121

Wanna keep been updated? Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog, so you will be instantly notified once we celebrate 7 months online.

LiveTrio is probably by far the best tool for keeping in touch with your clients in real time. This piece of software saves a lot of time and money, allows you to communicate with customers and see on your screen right away their IP addresses, names and department. The best part about this chat is that it’s entirely web based, i.e. you need not install any plug-ins of third party software, which may crash your computer.

Is it expensive? Nope, it’s damn cheap, currently $9.95 but it’s a limited time offer but you don’t have to buy blindly, you can try it for free, using up to 5 operators at the same time and see how this technology operates in real time. The main advantage of LiveTrio, in my opinion, is that you can chat with visitors and provide support or sort out the issues while viewing their traffic history, information and other interesting facts about their activity on your site. The public chat has a very pleasant blueish interface while you, the site owner, will be able to handle all the requests on a fully featured desktop application which you can minimize on your desktop tray and stay available online for your clients as long as you are online.

The installation is very easy as well, all you need to do is after you have signed up, place the code in your website either as a classical support button or just a text link in your signature, and that is it, the rest is all up to LiveTrio. The only disadvantage I can think of, is that you will be bound to another host’s uptime, as they provide the service through their host and therefore if, for whatever reason, they experience downtime, your support could be unavailable for a while. But let’s not be negative
This review was sponsored.

As a part of my Fantasy Art tutorials series (mostly posted at Lorelei Web Forum), following many requests, I decided to make a tutorial that will show you how to turn a woman into a vampire / witch. Well, only visually

Step 1 - starting… Take a photo of a girl you are going to work with. Traditionally I am using Becca’s photo, you can also avail of her free stock at DeviantArt.com. We will only be working with a face, hence we are using only the upper part of her photo.

Step 2 - smoothing the image. Let’s smooth the image. We want to avoid using blur settings, what we will do is just “smoothing” the photo, same effect as we used in Like in Magazines tutorial. Go to Filter >> Noise >> Reduce noise and apply the settings you see on the image. We will only use 5px noise reduction as we don’t want to smooth it too much.

Step 3 - removing black eyes. Our image had black areas under the eyes, which we want to remove prior to applying our own scary effects. Using the Healing Brush tool, Press “Alt” near the eye (where there is no dark area) and, using a brush with soft edge, about 30px, make a few “stamps” around the eyes, which will remove the dark parts. It will probably take a few times ’til you succeed to do it properly, if you see you are not managing, just skip this step. On the left side you can see the result after applying the healing brush.

Step 4 - removing redness. Photos rarely come in excellent colors, and here, for a vampire look, we most definitely need to add a bit coldness to the image’s colors before we start off with the main effects. Press Ctrl + L to go to Levels panel. Reduce the redness from your photo, by selecting the “red” channel and dragging the left arrow a bit rightwards.

Step 5 - The doodle part. Make a new layer (Shft + Ctrl + N) and select a brush tool, approximately 20px, or smaller (depends on your image, and just go over the hair of the girl, covering all that area, as shown on the illustration.

Step 6 - Merging settings, gray hair. As we don’t want the hair to be just black and look like a real kid’s doodle, while the upper (hair layer) is selected, change the layer’s blending options to “Color”, this way, you will get grey, old looking hair. While most tutorials on the internet show how to remove gray hair and make one look younger and better, I decided to show how to do it the other way around. So, hair is now gray. If you see that at some parts you missed with the brush, just remove it carefully with eraser tool.
Read More  "Photoshop tutorial - turn woman into a vampire / witch"

Yahoo hosting is considered to be among the best web hosts on the Internet and rightly so. It’s a well established company, with good reputation that provides a highest quality hosting for both professional and beginner webmasters. I just wrote a comprehensive overview of it on Host 2 Get blog, explaining why Yahoo is the best solution.

Up until recently, most of us did know that Yahoo web hosting service is great, but not everyone could afford it. It used to be rather pricy, with 25$ set up fee and pretty high prices for a comparably small disk space and bandwidth. However, now that the competition is tough and big amounts of bandwidth are no longer a luxury, Yahoo cut their prices down. Set up fee was waived, and every once in a while they offer miscellaneous deals.

One of them, is a low cost domain registration, click below for more details.

1.99$ for one year of Top Level Domain registration is as cheap as you can get, and this is only the first part of their on going deal. Don’t forget that you register your domain with a well known and establish company, not one that offers a domain as a bait to get you to sign up with them and pay annually in advance. Yahoo guarantees support and my logic is, they have been around for so many years now, how fat is the chance they would close such a huge corporation down?

At present, hosting prices are cut in 35%! Yes, that is pretty impressive as well, not forgetting you get more disk space and bandwidth then they used to provided before. I’d really recommend Yahoo to both professionals and beginners, you can read more about it in my full review of Yahoo hosting. Beginners get a site builder and all the ready-to-use features for putting a site live online, while professional webmasters get a stable host they can rely on, with excellent uptime and great support. I’d really recommend this company as been both reliable and affordable.

Well, there are quite a few ways to monetize your website; you can make money off AdSense, Adbrite, or any other contextual ads, you can implement the elegant looking text link ads, or go with affiliate marketing and sales. Whichever way you choose, you will find yourself freeing more and more space for “sponsored” links and banners, which take up a lot of “pixels”, and let’s face it - make the site look a bit ugly. Not all of them, but if you want to make good money off the adverts, you have to free enough space for placing them, and not only that, but also placing them right under visitor’s nose, otherwise they will not be clicked. That is, even without mentioning the most irritating (yet good paying) type of ads such as interstitial and pop ups.

So, what if you want a perfectly looking, clean site? A serious presentation of your work online (articles, essays, writing, literature, service, whatever), without been classed as a commercial site by the visitors? (who will judge the appearance of your website by the amount of adverts on it). There is very skillful way to do it - Sponsored Search. You just hit the spot by placing this useful function at the upper corner of your website. You will be surprised to see how many people use the search box every day. Don’t forget, visitors are lazy, and no matter how flawless your navigation is, any visitor will always prefer to shorten the process by typing the desired keyword in the search box and letting the cut edge technology do the work. It just saves time, navigating through the jungle of your content.
The “trick” with sponsored search is, you have to place it above your content, where anyone, upon opening your website, will see it. Placing it at the footer or at the bottom of left navigation menu won’t do you any good because the visitor will face the content and then will start browsing around. Search function just loses it’s basic function: to help one to find what he wants, fast.

How sponsored search works? Very simple. All you need to do, if you have not done already, is to sign up with Google Adsense (you can see their link at the top of this page in “We recommend” box). Once you signed up and got you account approved, you will have the option of making money by referrals (currently advocating FireFox, AdSense and Adwords), displaying contextual ads (which is what you see on the right column here, though they come in various formants, and, finally - sponsored search. Since this topic is concentrated on how you can make money without ads, we will choose the sponsored search function only.
I had a search box on one of my websites, which I sticked in a rather forsaken corner and used to think for many month that sponsored search is totally useless waste of space and I kept it there just for visitors to search the site, yet out of 500 unique visitors a day, I hardly got one search query. Then, I read on someone’s blog about the wonder’s of Search function, and how much that blogger was making with it additionally to the ads, so I looked closer at his layout and realized that the top position of the site - the top navigation bar, is a big search window with a nice and juicy “go” button, that I bet no one could refuse pressing on. Neither did it.

This blog, as you can see, have the Search box in a rather respectable position and the amount of queries is huge. Not all of them lead to clicks, but the leitmotif of this article is - if you place the search box under your visitors very nose they will use it. And if they already use it, why not to make money with it..?
Other advantages of sponsored search.

1. Get clicks on ads not related to your site subject. Through the search function, your visitors may come across an advert which is not relevant to your content. For instance, if they look for “WordPress themes” and you only offer “Blogger layouts”, with sponsored search they will most definitely find what they want and hopefully even click on the featured results to proceed further, while regular crawl of your website will just show zero results and make the visitor leave empty handed.
2. Customize the look. With Google AdSense search, you can fully customize the page on which the search results will be displayed, which means you can create a similar look to your website, even using your own logo (clickable, leading to wherever you want it to lead), which will complement your site’s design and in no way imply your are making money off your highly respectable site.

Hope this gives you yet another idea for monetizing your website wisely.

Yes, no tricks, no hidden fees, no details or donates required… You can view and read this website through RSS feed and browse it without any sort of adverts at all. If you feel that Adsense and sponsored links provided by other third parties irritate you or slow down your pages loading time, you can easily get rid of it.

• What’s my benefit?

No benefit at all, serious.

• Why do I do it then?

Well, the logic is pretty simple. At present (April 2007) this blog gets about 1,500 unique visitors daily. Those are not subscribed readers and often do bring profit from viewing the adverts displayed here. If you are a returning visitor, you will tend to ignore the space dedicated for advertising anyway, and concentrate on the written or graphical content, so since you already became a part of my “audience”, I see no point in keep showering you with java codes. Don’t worry about my big loss from your subscription; first of all, I know not everyone would want to read a feed, most people like the experience of visiting (my!) website, not everyone is a returning visitor and not everyone knows how to handle a feed, how to subscribe and where to read it, so I am only risking to lose, in the worst case, 10%-15% of my CTR.
So, do not hesitate, click here to subscribe and view this website without ads and enjoy the ads-free browsing.

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