Seems to me the directories craze is not over yet and despite all the rumers about google penalties, directories still prospare and bring submitters a very good benefit. One of the directories I decided to submit to recently is Top Blog Directory. My choice fell on it not only because its PageRank 5 and the submission does not cost you money, but also because my blog will end up in a relevant links environment. Moreover, there is an interesting feature that allows you can sort the blogs in according to their Google PR, feedcount, Alexa, Technorati and sent out traffic, so I must say it’s quite interesting to browse the blogs and see which of them is the most popular based on different parameters.

From what I could see, this directory is very well indexed and gives good results in Search Engines, not to mention that thanks to the interactive features, you are likely to get hits and real traffic from this directory. In order to submit your website, you need to register, and registration is, of course, free.

Bear in mind that this directory is only for blogs, so if you are looking for interesting blogs to read on a daily basis — just browse this site by your topics and interests, for sure you will find something worth reading!

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As being a designer myself I often browse other’s blog to see what tips and tricks I can learn from the bigger sharks out there, and one of these lovely “sharks” will of course be the writers behind stylishdesign.com - Robert and Andrei. If you also read their blog (and if you don’t I highly recommend you to!) you will learn plenty of new things about Google, SEO, internet, web design, networks and even servers. By the way, speaking of which — have you read their article about server backup yet? Quite amusing article, just try to keep track with the numbers throughout the story. Finally someone does NOT blame the software and hardware!

Many webmasters use TLA to monetize their websites, but not many actually sit to calculate their profit and their potential profit, which is why not many decide to kiss TLA goodbye.

Well, I can’t say it was an easy decision, but it’s time to move on from Text-Link-Ads. At some point, I think any webmaster realizes that their automatic pricing system sucks. Let’s take the last example of my newly PR6 domain - loreleiwebdesign.com. When I seen it was PR6, as being a very spiritual person, my first thought was (and I mean a thought that came to mind on the first millisecond) to sell 10 annual links and.. buy a second-hand car. Yeah, PR might not be of top importance but a few Data Centers update and you can purchase a monster TV.

Just roughly calculating, if I was to go really cheap, say — annual link on high quality PR6 - $500, selling 10 of them means I put 5k in my pocket over night. That’s not a bad profit, is it? And this is, again, assuming I am coming in a rush and selling for $40 per month, which is dead cheap for a PageRank 6 site with only 15-20 outgoing links. So basically, I can have $5,000 in a few days now, IF I want.

Now we have text-link-ads.com who want to sell links on Lorelei Web Design (and did in the past). Based on their intelligent automated pricing system, my link (yes, a PR6 one!) would be  $18 a month, of which I get only HALF as their cut is 50%. So, I can earn $9 per month for each link, and the funniest part is, I sell some PR 0 links for more. If I will be lucky, TLA will gather 10 links for me (which is also unlikely as many advertisers hesitate to buy links with them after the Google’s penalties) and: 9 x 10 x 12 = $1080 annual income. Yeah, 5 times less, not to mention that I will be getting paid bit by bit and can’t go and sell a whole lot of them and cash out.

So tell me, why would someone want to sell links with TLA, if they are not lazy enough to do the link sales manually? This was just an example, I am not planning to sell links on LoreleiWebDesign.com (so please don’t contact me if you want to advertise) but I think it shows how TLA may waste your website’s potential revenue.

You must have seen my face tonight when I opened LoreleiWebDesign.com just to update the low pricing offer which had expired at the end of the month, and… what do I see on the Google tool bar? PageRank 6.

Dang. Hey, Google, are you serious?

But sure, as usual every PageRank update brings some victories and causalities. My 2 new websites, which I just lunched 1-2 months ago - pswish.com and onweekends.net went straight up to PR4. But there is also a handful of PR loses, for example - digitalfreephoto.com went down from PR4 to PR3, and same story with loreleiweb.com and smileyskit.com, so basically you may sell links or you may not, if big G doesn’t want you to rank higher, you won’t.

I am more amazed though, that toptut.com is STILL PR3. Any calculation shows that it should be at least PR5, with over 80,000 backlinks, most of which are quality. And Google should know that we are stingy here and don’t buy any links. Oh well, one PR6 is a little better than three PR2’s, don’t you agree?

There are many ways to sell your products online and make money from adverts and Adsense, but no matter what your online business is about, you need to stick so some simple and basic rules.

Powerful Business Model 1: Spread Freebies

Nothing spreads over the internet faster than freebies. People link to them in forums, share useful info and download links with friends, they stumble it, they use it themselves… Freebies are the best model to spread the word about your business in the most effective way. While it works for most business models, it might not work for beginner hosting companies, who will have their harddisk space filled in no time with free accounts without any hope any of them will upgrade in the future. However, if offering free designs, software, plug ins, and even graphics, will help you greatly. Naturally, freebies themselves don’t bring in any money, but they draw in continues, genuine traffic and potential clients.

Powerful Business Model 2: Good Timing

It’s very important to start selling a product while it’s still “in”, so to speak. If you were to open a ring tones site now, the chances it will fail are huge, because you can’t impress anyone with ring tones now, let alone there are way to many of them already and the downloading ringtones mania is pretty much over. Always remember that if you are entering the market, you should either offer a ‘timeless product’ or, if you are just trying to ride on the wave of a temporary hit, do it exactly in time, and not when the tide is over.

Powerful Business Model 3: Your website is your FACE

Would you rather sign an important deal with a 14-years old boy in a torn t-shirt and crappy shoes, or a well established business man, in top quality suite and a suitcase? Of course this is a misleading mistake,
Read More  "4 Powerful Business Models for Making Money Online"

This theme is ideal for for webmasters because it was optimized for Adsense and banners positions, pretty much like John Chow’s design. Only sleeker. “Cars Power” is competible with all browsers, has 3 columns, big RSS icon, fixed width and many other interesting featured, all this was designed by me and coded by my partner — Tomas Sramek. If you need support or have any questions, just post your comment here. Enjoy!

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A few days ago I was introduced to yet another publishers network that popped out on my horizon — The Clickbooth Publisher Network. I just signed up today so I can’t really tell or judge how profitable is it. Basically this is a Cost-Per-Action middle man that helps site owners to find affiliate advertisers and get paid for sales. The main advantages over other companies is that publishers can request banners of any size they wish. While we are all used to some standard billboard slots on our sites, it should be a good idea to place a non-traditional advert size, which will blend it more naturally in site’s design. Moreover, they offer Custom Rotators which gives publishers full access to custom built rotators and increase conversions.

Unlike some other similar companies that set the minimum monthly payment to $100, Clickbooth’s threshold for the month is only $50. You can also make money by referring other publishers to Clickbooth and get $10 off each new referral. While they guarantee the highest payout to publishers, I guess you cannot really know it unless you give them a try and sign up, run their ads on your website and see how much does it pay you.

You will have the option of email marketing, search engine marketing and of course on-site publishing. Sign up is absolutely free and you lose nothing by trying.