Blogging for profit - get more people to your site

• Simple, little article about blogging for profit
• In summary, it recommends doing a bit of ‘blog promotion’ to get lots of users to your site, rather than just doing lots of posts to get your site to the top of blog directories

Uk’s richest get 20% richer in a year!

Click here for a BBC article on this.

Concert Tickets… peer-to-peer style

*Click here for concert tickets site (StubHub)*
StubHub is a site that lets you buy and sell concert tickets (and sports/theatre tickets) online. Its a peer-to-peer style system a bit like e-bay (in fact was bought by E-Bay in Jan this year,) so you also get the security of a big company being involved in the buying/selling.

Becoming/being self-employed… hints and tips

*Becoming/being self-employed article here*
Especially aimed at web-workers, a nice little summary of ‘best practices’ for the self-employed is available at WebWorkerDaily (lots of other interesting posts here as well.)

Free traffic! Increase web site traffic for free.

Get some free traffic to your blog / web site (through a site called ‘ipings’.) All you do is fill in 4 boxes on a form (name, URL etc), and click submit. When you do, a bunch of sites get notified that you have new content for them to come and index. Its a dead easy way to increase traffic to your web site / blog.

**WARNING! - you should only use the service when you add new content to your site. Pinging without having new content “probably will get you banned or ignored”!!

If you want to know about how the site works and what happens when you ‘ping’, check out the ‘about‘ and ‘to ping or not to ping‘ pages. Well worth reading IMHO - there are good explanations of how web spiders work and how pinging can help you get listed on major search engines!

Do you Digg?… Digg this post at Digg.com

Digg is a GREAT place to go to find out what cool/interesting/fun sites people have come across. Its a major (ranked 88th most popular site in the world! at Alexa.com) ’social bookmarking’ site, where members submit ‘content’ (weblog posts, news articles, etc.) Other users then check out the content themselves and if they like it they ‘Digg’ it.

**To Digg this article, click here **

Mortgage refinancing. Get the best mortgage rate!

Mortgage refinancing can “substantially slash mortgage repayments” - this article details five easy to follow steps to help you get the best mortgage rate you can, and to pay your mortgage off early.

Robots in our future

Scientists are predicting that in the very near future (within 5 years) we’ll have robots for things like child-minding, care-home work, and prison monitoring! This is according to an article in the Daily Mail, a large UK national daily paper… “Are we safe from robots that can think for themselves?“

The BBC also have some interseting articles on this subject. An article written yesterday talks about future robots being autonomous, decision making machines. It also talks about ‘robot rights’! amongst other things. There are some other good robot articles in the right hand column as well.

Car Insurance

Car Insurance is a big area these days with loads of companies to choose from. There’s a site called reviewcentre.com that lets users rate companies on different criteria, then shows them all in a list. If you’re looking for car insurance it may be worth having a look here. The AA look to be one of the best rated - if you scroll down the list, they’re the first company with more than 10 reviews and they manage a decent rating of 7.7 (at the time of writing this.)

The site also has reviews for a ton of other stuff

What makes us happy in the long-term?

The BBC has an interesting acticle on this subject, which follows on from a recent European survey. The summarised answer is “To be well off, have a better work-life balance and good public services, and, possibly, to lower our expectations” The comments are quite interesting as well.

7 ways to drastically improve your learning

Great post and very interesting site ran by a guy called Ririan.

UK pound goes through $2 barrier

Looks like UK interest rates are going up again. Check out the full article here.

Don’t Buy Stuff You Can’t Afford!

V funny comedy advice video from Steve Martin and friends

Keep drivers & software up-to-date the easy way!

This handy little bit of free software scans your PC and tells you what updates are available for your hardware and software! You can then either google to find the updates for download, or you can pay for the full version which gives direct links to the downloads. I’ve only used the free version and it found 4 hardware and 5 software updates

Freeware recommendations from those in the know

Majorgeeks.com have a list of ‘must have’ freeware for a whole bunch of uses. They highlight their picks based on whether they’re suitable novices, intermediates, or ‘Majorgeeks’ - very helpful

Are UK house prices beginning to crash?

There’s a website dedicated to this topic, which has some interesting graphs and a great wiki style news blog. The BBC have also written an article on this subject which includes comments from someone from the website. In today’s news, they also report a slight fall in UK house prices.

Blogging for beginners

I just found a great series of free lessons by a professional blogger on blogging for newbies.

Trade gold or sports bets online

You can buy and sell gold at Bullionvault, or sports bets at Betfair. Both sites use a similar interface.

Funny house price crash video

Very funny house price crash vid. Its a UK vid so you may not get all the jokes (UK viewers should find it extra funny though )

Feed the hungry with a click

At the hunger site you click to send 1.1 cups of staple food to the hungry (click the yellow “Help Feed The Hungry” button.) The food is paid for by advertisers/sponsors.

* The site’s been going since June 1999
* They get an “average of over 220,000 individuals from around the world… each day”
* “To date, more than 200 million visitors have given more than 300 million cups of staple food.”

Check out the tabs at the top of the screen for similar schemes on breast cancer, child health and more.

Make money through your blog

Blogitive and similar sites let you earn money by making blog entries for advertisers. I’ve never tried this but it does look interesting, so any hints/tips, do’s/don’ts, recommendations, general comments etc would be greatly appreciated. From a quick scout around though, there seem to be mixed opinions about making money this way (i.e. is this just another form of spam!)

For a list of similar companies check out supermom’s page (a page or so down.) There are loads of other web-based money making systems/ideas etc, as well.