Be Informed When You Purchase A Computer

When you go online or look at ads for electronics stores, you will probably be able to find a computer that will be just right for you. There are many types and styles available on the market. You can find a computer that will take up a whole room in your house, while you can also find a computer that will fit into the palm of your hand! At a business, you will probably find a mainframe computer. In your workplace or at home you will normally find a desktop computer. In the airport, the person sitting next to you could be working on a laptop computer or handheld computer. So, when you find yourself looking for a computer for your own personal use, you know you will have a lot to choose from.

When looking for a home computer, nowadays called a personal computer, you will find it is made up of several parts. There will be a box sitting on your desk, black, gray or beige in color. This is your actual computer, containing everything from the microprocessor to the memory, the storage to the input/output devices. You can’t work with just the “computer” alone, though. There are accessories that go along with your computer like the monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers. Other attachments you might find are printers and digital video cameras.

If you want to buy a computer, it is good to know that there are two separate categories of computers: PCs and Macs.

- A PC is a computer modeled after components and standards created by the IBM Company. A rather high percentage of all personal computers, shown at somewhere over 90%, are PCs. Some companies that sell PC computers are IBM, Dell, Compac, and Gateway.

- A Mac computer is a personal computer made by the Apple Company. MacIntosh was its most popular style of computer several years ago. The new IMacs are popular with die-hard Mac fans, although not as many people today use Mac computers as used to.

A personal computer in your home can be used for many things, including word processing chores, personal and business letter writing, financial records and planning, internet searching, photography, and many other types of functions like graphic design and publishing. For the younger crowd, a personal computer can also be used to listen to music, watch movies or play detailed video games.

The basic elements of your personal computer that you choose, like the processor, amount of RAM, floppy or CD-Rom disk drives, hard disk drive, sound card, speakers, monitor, modem and graphics card will be determined by what kind of computer user you plan to be. Heavy users of complex programs will need much more “stuff” on their computer than the average computer user. Once you’ve determined how much of everything you need, you will be able to calculate an average cost for the computer you want.

Basic Online Business Techniques...

When someone starts an online business, and many do, they tend to think that they know what they are doing. In other words, they don't have a clue. Everyone keep telling them that they need a nice looking website, throw some affiliate programs on it, advertise at free classifieds pages, and watch the money roll in. Easy money, right? That's what they think.

"I don't need anyone to show me how to do this. It shouldn't be hard at all. Actually, it should be a walk in the park." Many people probably think like that. So they advertise here and there. Free classifieds. Free advertising. Maybe some forum posting every day. Free traffic, right?

A few days go by. Then a few weeks go by and they only made about $30 in sales in one month. Many continue to do this and think that if they keep doing the same thing, maybe a miracle will happen.

Not so......

It so very true that the online work at home arena is highly competitive. If you are doing the same thing and keep getting the same results over and over again, not only are you killing your potential for online success, but you are allowing other competitors to pass you by. The only thing that you need to do is to stop and find someone who is already succeeding with their online business. Become like an investigator. Investigate what they do EXACTLY on a daily basis that created that wealth for them.

Here are a few good pointers on what you can do to succeed online:

1) Start Getting Educated......

Again, find someone who is very successful online and see what they are doing on a daily basis that creates their success. Do some detailed research online as to what methods and techniques are working for them and others. You can not succeed if you keep associating yourself with people who aren't successful online. So you need to take yourself by the hands and start to associate with successful online friends.

2) You need an Auto-responder.....

Before I go into explaining this subject, it is important that you know that you will want to work with an opt in email subscribers who will come to your site and give you their personal permission to send them periodic emails. What you will not want to do is to buy email subscribers. If you do buy them and send them your emails, then this can kill you and your online reputation.

Having and opt-in email list will allow you to free up lots of your time because your prospects will be receiving messages from you periodically and automatically. The nice thing about email marketing is that instead of you having to call them each time you want to promote something, which will take you forever, your auto-responder system will be working for you while you go out and have fun.

Imagine having an opt in list of 10,000 subscribers. If you were to call each one of them to promote one of your programs, think how long it will take you to reach all of them. It would be impossible for you. With email, you can contact them all in a matter of a few seconds or minutes. You write one email and hit the "submit" button, and you are all done.

"If I don't get an auto-responder and email subscribers, will this cut my chances of succeeding online?"

I am not saying that it will, but if you do get one, your income will just keep growing all the time as your subscribers do.
3) Find a mentor

After you find someone who is very successful online, email them and tell them that you will want to work with them one on one if it is possible. Don't try going into their training thinking that you know it all. Listen and follow each guideline that they are recommending to you.

This person will be your mentor. Your coach and most of all, your friend.

By stepping out and trying a proven way to make money online, you will begin to see that you too can make a nice income online. And the best advice that I can also give you is to never ever give up. A lot of people are making nice incomes online and so can you. Believe in yourself and you will succeed.

Bandwidth Robbery Through Hotlinking

Have you heard of hotlinking? It's the number-one method that bandwidth is stolen from you by other web designers, and it can cost you a lot of money. It involves creating a direct link to a website's non-HTML files in such a way that these files are embedded on another person's page.

For instance, imagine that you have created one of the best adult sites online. You have tons of images, and visitors love to come to your site. Now imagine that suddenly, though your user stats aren't increasing, your bandwidth (the amount of data transferred from your site to viewers) usage is going up. Your server administration contacts you to tell you that you are delivering 40% more images now than you were last week.

Has your income gone up commensurately? No. Has the traffic served by your site gone up? No. What has happened is someone, instead of just ripping off your images, has decided to hotlink to them from inside his or her own website.

This means instead of saving your image in their own images directory, they are linking to the image where it is hosted on your site. At one time in the early, early development of the web, this was an acceptable solution to stealing an image, provided you credited it properly. Today, with bandwidth usage at a premium and many, many more high-resolution images online, it is not acceptable.

Why Do They Do It?

There are many reasons for image hotlinking. For instance, suppose a relative newbie has started blogging or selling on eBay. They want an image, but they are alert enough to know that copying it and putting it on their own website is illegal. So, they figure, you won't notice if one person links out to your site. Besides, they really need that image.

That's an innocent use, and unlikely to greatly increase your image serving. But what if you're running an image-heavy site – an art site, for instance – and a competitor decides to simply use the images you've uploaded to sell their own posters? That is malicious. And if they use all your images, they can double or more your bandwidth usage, with no benefits whatsoever coming to you. There are even malicious webmasters who use this as a way to drive competitors out of business, as extra bandwidth is either charged for by the web host or the site is taken offline. And, unfortunately, it is not illegal. Yet. (Though some web servers will shut down a hotlinking site after complaints.)

A good analogy is someone wiring their home up to your electric utility pole. They don't pay for the electricity metered through your home – but you do. Many hotlinkers try to rationalize that what they are actually doing is akin to stealing cable – not at all the same, as cable users pay a flat rate for all the services they use total – or similar to using someone else's wireless WAN connection. Not only is this not true, but hotlinking is much more traceable than any of these examples. All it takes is patience and a good Google search.

Am I Hotlinking?

If you are linking directly out to any image or other non-HTML file that is not hosted on your own website, and you don't have permission from the webmaster to do it exactly that way, you are hotlinking. Anywhere you see a link starting src="http://" that goes on to list a domain that is not yours, you are hotlinking. Bandwidth to serve this image is not charged to you, but rather to the person you're stealing the image from. See the electricity analogy above!

You can either host images and other files from your own image directory, or you can upload them to a free image server that states in its usage restrictions that you are allowed to hotlink. Otherwise, just don't do it.

Though it is difficult to prosecute people hotlinking, there are ways to punish them. For instance, some webmasters use the "switcheroo" – they replace the image you've been stealing with something incredibly offensive, pornographic, or obnoxious. For example, they replace the beautiful flower you've used on your header with one of a body part – or with a guy holding a sign that says, "This person steals bandwidth." Any time you hotlink, you leave your site open for someone else to manipulate it.

There are hotlink checking services that can check your image links one at a time to see if they have been stolen – or to see if they are safe from hotlinking. These consist of sites that allow you to enter your own image URL in their form; the next page either will or will not contain your image. If it does, you know you're vulnerable. If you need a lot of images checked, you may have to pay a service to do it.

But there's a much simpler way to do it, if you have time to check all your images. Simply run a Google search for the complete URL link. If anyone is embedding your image URL in their page, it will turn up in the URL search. At that point, you get to administer whatever correction is appropriate – switcheroo, warning off the webmaster, or complaining to the host of the website.

You can protect your images, movies, sound, etc. from hotlinking by proper use of an .htaccess file as well, or by speaking to your server administrator. Always check with an administrator before uploading an .htaccess file.

What Else Should I Know About Hotlinking?

Though there are few formal outlets to complain about hotlinking right now, it is certain that in the future this will be a more serious offense. Instead of hotlinking, email webmasters with content you like and see if they'll let you use their content in exchange for a link back to their website; because of the value of links back, many will agree. Protect your own images, and even if you have them secure check them regularly. And to prevent good old-fashioned plagiarism, learn about watermarking your valuable images.

Bacara el Preferido del Agente 007

El Agente 007 y su audacia con el juego continúan deslumbrando año tras año a sus sensuales compañeras en escena y derrotando a sus astutos enemigos.

El Bacara: El Juego preferido del clásico James Bond: Bacará y el Agente 007

El Bacará es el clásico juego de apuestas originado en Italia en el siglo 15 y es también característico del famoso espía 007. En cada escena lo identifican una elegancia y excelencia, que junto con su impecable Martini en mano y las apuestas en otra James Bond ha mantenido una leyenda desde su origen desde los años 50 hasta el presente. Es así como el espía ingles domina la versión francesa del juego Bacará llamada Chemin de Fer con gran talento y admiración.

Bacara siempre fue popular entre la alta sociedad, especialmente en el siglo 15, cuando surgió en Italia. Bacara significa cero en italiano y a lo largo de su expansión en diferentes países nuevas reglas y variaciones fueron inventadas y adaptadas como en Estados Unidos o en Francia el Chemin de Fer, o el denominado Juego de James Bond.

El juego consiste en el "Jugador" y la "Banca" el nombre que se la a las opciones de apuestas, estos son repartidos dos o tres cartas cada uno con el objetivo simple de llegar a 9 sin pasarse de el. Mientras tanto la banca decide según las reglas del juego cuando detener la jugada y los jugadores ya han debido apostar a cual de las dos Jugador o Banca ganara la mano. Los jugadores o el jugador apuesta y el que apuesta a la mano que gano el puntaje mas correcto, gana la mano. En la adaptación americana, el juego funciona en contra a la banca, mientras que en Chemin de Fer, los jugadores compiten el uno con el otro. Uno representa al jugador y el otro a la Banca.

En compañía del Chemin de Fer los libros de Ian Fleming junto a las adaptaciones en escena de James Bond, han deslumbrado por décadas las diferentes aventuras del espía, con ayuda de su impecable poder del juego y su atractivo estilo. Hasta su último estreno en el 2006 James Bond sigue disfrutando de la lujuria de las mesas verdes de los casinos junto a su cigarro y el su sensual compañera en acción. En el anio 1964, las novelas y capítulos de James Bond, fueron escritas por Kingsley Amis, John Pearson, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, y Charlie Higson. Tambien sus actores variaron comenzando con el conocido Sean Connery, siguiendo con Geroge Lazenby, Roger Moore, Tomothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan y Daniel Craig.

Si observas, es muy interesante ver la manera en que el Agente apuesta al juego y a su vez actúa y descubre los secretos que lo rodean con la misma rapidez, seguridad y astucia. Enlas películas de James Bond el juego Chemin de Fer transcurre en elegantes salas llenas de mujeres elegantes y hombres adinerados que detrás del juego tienen otros intereses por revelar. En la realidad el enlace entre el Bacará y El Agente 007 es de un acompañante fiel de aventuras secretas y emocionantes de mas de cinco décadas que hicieron de el una leyenda inolvidable que resurge de generación en generación.

Avoiding Online Paid Surveys Scams

The bottom line is, if the hype for online paid surveys sounds too good to be true, it likely is. That's the safest way to screen out "offers" that hype big rewards for small investments of time or money. Don't be fooled by:

Testimonials - Ropers and shills typically write these for scams, not satisfied customers.

Documented Proof - Some questionable paid survey sites provide checks and other documental replications as "proof." But just because someone made money at least once, doesn't mean that you will. Besides, with today's computer technology, anybody can counterfeit just about any document and make it look authentic.

Guarantees - Don't believe guarantees that promise the Moon. paid survey sites can't possibly guarantee you much of anything, except that they'll refund your fees if you're not satisfied. But good luck collecting your refund if it's a paid surveys scam.

Reliable- and Trusted-Site Logos - Some questionable paid survey sites display these logos to indicate that they are self-regulating in compliance with the standards represented by the logos. But even legit logos can be stolen, such as those trademarked by the Better Business Bureau (BBB), with a simple right-click of the computer mouse. Click the logos to see where they lead. If they don't lead to valid reports at reputable sites (such as the BBB's official, national reliability site, the URL for which begins with https://www.bbbonline.org/) or the reports are unfavorable, be wary.

The "fine print" at questionable paid survey sites often contradicts much of what their hype implies. (That's how they try to cover themselves legally.) Don't let the hype alone sell you. Read all of the fine print too and ask questions if it's vague or you don't understand it. Think twice about submitting your personal information to any paid surveys site that does not provide a clear privacy policy or arouses your suspicion in any other way. Also read disclaimers, terms, conditions and any other fine print. Avoid sites that don't answer your questions in a satisfactory and timely manner. Be wary of conducting business with sites that list only email or PO box addresses for questions and other matters, as they might be fly-by-night, paid survey scams.

Perform "whois" lookups to reveal if paid survey sites were registered by proxy. If so, be wary of doing business with them too. Site owners might be hiding their contact information behind proxy services, because they're running paid survey scams. Whois lookups will also tell you if different sites were launched by the same owners (unless they were registered by proxy). If so, be wary about that too. Owners might have launched multiple sites so to make their "industry" appear to be more legit, dupe you into buying the same list of paid surveys more than once, or both.

Check with the BBB for complaints against specific online paid survey sites and their owners. But, be aware that, just because there are no complaints, it doesn't mean that all who have conducted business with the sites are 100-percent satisfied. It just means that no one has yet complained to the BBB about those specific sites. More about that is below.

Browse scam forums, such as Scam.com and RipOffReport.com, for messages from consumers who think they've been duped by online paid survey scams. But, proceed with caution. Some messages are posted by ropers and shills pretending to "rescue" those who've been duped by paid survey scams or who are looking to avoid it. For example, the "rescuers" might say that all online paid surveys are scams, except for the "wonderful opportunities" they've found. But, what they don't tell you, is they profit from recommending the "wonderful opportunities". (The same goes for many sites that claim to screen out paid survey scams.) Scam-forum moderators typically remove such messages. But, natch, they'll remain posted until the moderators screen them.

For more information about avoiding scams, see the consumer advice from the FTC and BBB. But, although both have issued general warnings about easy-money schemes (such as work-at-home and Internet business-opportunity scams), at this writing neither has specifically warned about online paid surveys. To issue specific warnings, both agencies typically require many complaints in short order. But many victims don't file complaints, because they're embarrassed that they were duped. Additionally, online paid surveys are a fairly new easy-money scheme at this writing. So, the agencies might not have collected enough complaints to issue specific warnings. But this writer is willing to bet that it won't be long before they do.

If you've been ripped-off by online paid survey scams, as indicated you may file complaints with the FTC and BBB. You may also file complaints with the U.S. government's Internet Fraud Complaint Center.

One of the questions I get most often is how to tell whether a work from home job posting is a scam or a legitimate job. There are some warning flags. In addition, there are sites that can help you determine what's a real work at home job and what isn't.

Avoiding all the scams in home business

Many websites claim to offer home business opportunties. Some people do make money at home through online jobs, but many of these so-called opportunities are scams. How do you know the difference? Here are some tips for avoiding home business scams.

First, use some common sense. If you are looking because you're short on funds, it can be easy to talk yourself into believing the promises you will read online. Try to look at the offers objectively. Many scams try to convince you that you will become wealthy with little effort, and you might even see on the website that this is some "secret" for making money that is just now being revealed. Much later they reveal the cost for learning the secret. Before buying this kind of information, take a moment to wonder why it's being sold. If it's really that effective, the person selling it should be wealthy and not need to sell anything.

Second, don't get involved in a pyramid scheme. These are programs that pay you to recruit but don't really have a product to sell. You make money by getting other people to join the system. This only works for those who start the pyramid scheme, and is illegal in several states. Note that this is not the same as home party or similar plans where you get a percentage from what you sell in addition to a percentage from those you recruit.

Third, don't pay to stuff envelopes or make products. In fact, don't pay to work for anybody.

Avoiding home business scams means avoiding anything that offers easy wealth. It also means avoiding paying to work for somebody. Don't expect anything online that makes no sense in the real world. Don't get scammed.

Visit me at http://www.vanclen.com

Avoiding 'Make Money Fast' Schemes

We live in a world where the internet is one of the most important tools for communication and business. The convenience the internet offers is vast.

About a decade ago, online businesses boomed and since then many people who wanted to make some extra buck turned to the internet. Some are legitimate businesses who sell products and skills and some are fraud sites that steal and harass people.

An example of these fraud schemes is the Make Money Fast or MMS schemes. This scheme is very much like chain letters forwarded to people. Make money fast will often claim that it is legal and promises vast sums of money in a short period. It will promise you with too good to be true investment opportunities.

People, especially those who are unlucky are easily deceived into joining this kind of frauds. So why do people believe such things? The only explanation is that they think these schemes are true and that they can afford it.

People tend to think “what do I have to lose?” and another thing is, almost everyone would love to make easy money.

Make money fast schemes usually come in the form of an email. The contents of the letter states that you should send money to some or all the names on the list then include your own name and send the email to other people.

Here are some basic contents in Make Money Fast emails:
• It will usually start with a greeting from the person who created the letter.

• This scheme will include some testimonials from “investors” that will say that it made them a millionaire or made their life easier.

• It will include a list of names and addresses.

• It will state that you have to send a specified amount of money (usually a small amount of money) to some or all the people on the list.

• It instructs you to forward the email to as many people as possible and modify the list of names by placing your own name and address at the bottom and removing one at the top.

• It will usually claim that it is legal and will promise you a return on your investment.

There are several variations of this scheme. One common type is that it will instruct you to send money to people as payment for reports.

It will always claim that it is legal and some will include section of the law to confirm the legality, when in fact the very same law will state that it is illegal.

There are also websites that offer these schemes, and often it will look very attractive and legitimate to lure people in investing. It will display pictures of people smiling and will include testimonials. Keep in mind that these are just photos which can be purchased for cents at various graphic sites and also be aware that anyone can make testimonials.

Although some of these websites are legitimate and offer true business opportunities, most are fraudulent. Before you invest, here are some tips on how to distinguish fraudulent sites from legitimate ones.

Fraudulent sites will often offer investment return and big profits that sound too good to be true. An example is that some will offer to convert your $20.00 investment into $50,000.00 in a matter of days and some even millions.

Find out if there is at least a reliable contact address on the website. If it is legitimate, it will include a legitimate phone number and address of the person. Call the phone number and wait for someone to answer to find out if it is in fact legitimate.

Research the website on internet forums to find out if it is a legitimate website or blacklisted. You can also find out if the forums you visited and the website are fraudulent by tracking the IP address. If the IP addresses are the same then it is fraud.

Keep in mind that not all offers on the internet are true. Save yourself from frustration and losing money, and always research before investing in any kind of businesses!

Avoid These Strategies, Keep Your Website Visitors Happy And Make Money

It is no secret that the success of your Internet Marketing Business is to a great extent dependent on the traffic you get. For the Internet Marketer who wants to make money,the website visitor is a very welcome person and his visit is most anxiously awaited. When this is the real scenario imagine webmasters adopting strategies and creating situations knowingly or unknowingly, forcing their website visitors to take a round about turn and flee from their websites. Why do this, and lose your visitors?

The disappointment and frustration the visitors experience sometimes is such that they vow never to return to these sites again and an opportunity to make money is lost for ever.

Given below are specific situations that visitors encounter when surfing the internet hoping to find some useful information.

1. Instruct your website visitors to register before entering your site without giving them any clue what your site is all about.

2. Have an Audio sound track on your home page and compel him to listen to your rhetoric without providing him any provision to turn it off.

3. Ensure that your website has graphics and multimedia and will take at least one minute to download. This will give your website visitor sufficient time to get frustrated, change his mind and go to another site.

4. Once your website visitor is in, confuse him without providing him with concise and clear labels to enable him to know his whereabouts and movements.
Also do not provide him opportunities to explore your site and go back to where he came from but entrap him in a mesh of web pages.

5. Keep changing frequently the location of features in your site making your regular Internet Marketing website visitors and customers confused and frustrated.

6. Do not update contents on your website. Have old or stale Internet Marketing contents without any indication of fresh content. Display today's date for old content giving a clear indication to the visitor that you are
not only inactive but also dishonest.

7. Have plenty of Typos and grammar mistakes. Make it difficult to read both text wise and color wise, indicating to your website visitors that you are a person without substance, rather than looking professional.

8. Plaster your web page with Internet Marketing banners, advertisements and pop ups thus irritating your website visitors.

9. Do not check your website for broken links. Have plenty of broken links and error messages thus annoying your visitors.

10. Finally as your website visitors are about to leave you site, serve an exit Ad. and ensure that they simply can't leave that Ad. or exit from your website.

When a website visitor is confronted with this type of situation it is nothing but natural to expect him to be disappointed, disillusioned and frustrated.
There are millions of websites in the internet. There is no reason why the visitor should hang around in a website that is not user friendly and helpful. He knows exactly what he should do in such a situation,-yes, quit the site.

To counter these problems and make money from your website visitors, correct your errors, update your website regularly and dump these strategies that satisfy your whims and fancies. Instead provide your Internet Marketing visitors a website that is simple, attractive and user friendly where he feels very much at home.

Avoid Computer Disaster: A review of Spyzooka

In recent times, our modern society has become completely dependent on computers to survive. Unfortunately, computer hackers have taken advantage of this fact and are using spyware to slow down and render useless many home computers. Luckily, there is anti-spyware software available to regain use of the computer. SpyZooka, a popular anti-spyware program, is easy to use, does not detect false positives, and increases computer speed. This article will review SpyZooka’s effectiveness in dealing with spyware.

Unlike many of the other brands of anti-spyware programs, SpyZooka’s ease of use makes the user more comfortable in dealing with spyware. The interface is clean-lined and modern, not distracting the eye from the most important elements. Simple buttons on the left side of the screen describe the main options. To keep the interface uncluttered, the more specific options are revealed by clicking on the main option tabs. After the initial installation, SpyZooka continues to scan the computer for any spyware threats and displays scan results in a in a results tab. While the ease of use may make consumers leap for joy, SpyZooka also avoids time wasting false positives that occur with other types of spyware protection.

One of the biggest hassles of protecting your computer from spyware is the amount of time required to tackle the issue. SpyZooka avoids this pitfall by only reporting actual spyware issues. This is done by using a complex algorithm that detects and removes only spyware, not the programs that user wants to keep on the computer. It also counts the spyware issues only one time, not confusing or frightening the consumer with deceptive results and complex rating scales. With such time-saving features, Spyzooka gets the computer working faster.

Not only does SpyZooka help the consumer to use the product more efficiently, but it actually makes the computer to run faster. Spyware on the computer has many irritating effects, most commonly things like excessive popups, snail-paced internet connections, home page changes, and unbearably slow computer speed. SpyZooka removes spyware, adware, keyloggers, trojan horses, worms, malware, hijackers, dialers, unwanted toolbars, rootkits, rogue antispyware, botnets, unwanted browser plugins and any other related issues that might affect computer speed. Being protected from so many of the causes of a slow computer almost guarantees faster computer use for the consumer.

As is easily seen, SpyZooka is an effective anti-spyware program that does the job of keeping the consumer protected from computer disaster. Not only does it have a user-friendly interface, but it also avoids false positives and makes the computer run faster.

Autosurf Investments To Avoid

There you are many pubic Autosurf Investment opportunities available today. One simple search for “Autosurf” returns about 1 million results on Yahoo. Anyone could get started in these types of internet investments.

The question is – “Would you want to?”

With the ease at which budding HYIP “starters” can obtain scripts used by popular programs such as 12DailyPro, do you really want to invest your hard-earned cash with these people?

While reading various Autosurf related forums, it became obvious that these programs were nothing more than elaborate pyramid schemes put together with “ready-to-go” scripts. To avoid any legal issues, they claim to “pay you for viewing ads” and that the “investment” you make is, in fact, not an investment but a “membership fee”. Administrators of these programs claim that they are able to sustain paying high returns (usually over 30% per month) because of money coming in from people wanting to purchase untargeted traffic at their Autosurf. Do you believe them? I certainly don’t.

In the month of December, I managed to track 18 Autosurf closures. The real figure was probably more than that because new Autosurfs seem to spring up every day and disappear the next. On the 31st of December 2005, 12 new Autosurfs have miraculously appeared out of nowhere. How many will last one week? Not a lot.

Internet investments can be profitable though. You just have to know where to invest. My advice to newcomers would be to avoid investing in public Autosurfs completely. It’s not worth surfing an hour each day, just to lose your money to some 10-year-old crook with a script. Sure, there may be some which last for a longer period of time, but sooner of later they will close.

Instead, look for reliable private investments which have a great chance of surviving and have a constant stream of income. Private investments are usually have money coming in from trading on stock exchanges and buying small businesses. Although the returns may not be as great as promised by Autosurfs – they are much safer.

Autoresponder, the persistent salesperson

Most people in sales will tell you that most sales occur after the prospect has said no a number of times. Setup your autoresponder to be that persistent salesperson.

There is a number of different types of buyers from the hyper-excited. They want to buy it even before opening the email through to the most sceptical and most difficult to convince buyers.

So even if you have a great sales letter you will only convert a certain percentage of people on the first viewing. And others will only buy after seeing the information the certain number of times that suits their style. Some people need to see that something has been around for a while before they will give it any credibility.

Now of course you can improve those odds by getting a professional direct marketer to write your sales letter, doing a joint venture with a more experienced direct marketer or by giving a special offer with a discount and/or free bonuses.

These are all great things to do but let’s get back to focusing on direct simplistic benefits of the autoresponder. The autoresponder is the perfect sales person.

Create separate campaigns (list of people’s email addresses) with different messages for different types of products. It is much easier to sell to a list of people that have a common interest than just to a common list. Set up each campaign with a series of messages, pre-programmed to go out at a certain interval of days. Eg Instant, Day 3, Day 7 etc etc. Encourage them to take action and use your words to help them see the benefits of doing that.

After you set it up once, this can all happen automatically as soon as the prospect subscribes to your list. You can just tweak the messages and improve on them over time until you have the perfect salesperson staying in contact with your customer and ensuring that you have every chance to make a sale. Meanwhile you are sleeping, surfing or working on other money making ideas.

For people to buy from you they need to trust you. Regular contact with the person and giving them useful information is a great way to achieve this.

Now before we get too carried away with this idea, are you in this business to send out information or to run a business and make money? Now you want to be clear on that as professionally run businesses generally make the most money.

Sure you want these people to improve their lives. As a quality internet marketer, you always send people valuable information. Remember this, People’s lives only change when the person changes, and the catalyst for them changing is to make a choice about something. Buying your product can be one of those choices that are moving them towards something that they want.

So set up a persuasive series of messages in your autoresponder to encourage people to take action and get your product. Get them excited about the possibilities. Continue the series of messages after purchase to encourage them to take action and use the product to get what they want. If you help them with this they will be much more likely to buy other products that you introduce to them.

So make sure you capture people’s email addresses and use the magic of the perfect persistent salesperson to create credibility and plenty of sales.

Autoresponders are one of your best friends, use them well

Automated Website Testing

You just finished building your company's website. You have tested it yourself and had other company employees test it. The website now goes live. A few weeks later you start getting emails from irate customers who complain that they are unable to place their orders because certain steps in the “Buy Now” process give errors. You quickly fix the problem. A few days later you get complaints about some other issue and you again react quickly to fix the website. This continues for a few months till the complaints finally halt and things stabilize. At this point you make some enhancements to your website. A few days later a customer email alerts you to the fact that in the process of making this enhancement you “broke” something else on the website. Again you spend time to find and fix the problem but by now you are perplexed and not a little frustrated. These issues have cost you many customers in the last few months and potentially spread ill will across the broader customer community. It seems to you that the only way to have detected these issues before they went “live” was to have employed a large army of software testers, something your company is unable to afford.

Enter automated software testing. While nothing can replace good human testers, broad test coverage requires some degree of software automation for it to be economically feasible. Automated testing tools can provide a huge workforce multiplier and do a very good job complimenting human testers. Every change to your website no matter how small requires thorough testing to ensure that nothing else was affected. This becomes very time consuming very quickly due to the large number of possible cases to test. A strategy whereby tests are automated using software becomes an economic necessity.

There are two classes of automated testing tools. The first kind, functional and regression testing tools, helps to make sure that the website behaves as it should: for example if a customer clicks on button X, page Y is displayed without errors. Functional and regression testing tools are able to automate a large number of scenarios to ensure that your website works as intended. The second type, load testing tools gauge how well your website performs when subjected to a large stress, such as a large number of simultaneous users. I will be discussing load testing in a separate article.

I will now give you an overview of the basic characteristics of functional testing. Before you can begin any kind of functional test automation you will need to identify the test scenarios you wish to automate. Once this is done, you will need to generate test scripts that cover these scenarios.

A functional testing tool will typically record user interactions with a website. As you perform various operations on your website or application, the tool records every step. When you finish recording, it generates an automated script from your interactions with your website. Alternatively you could use the tool to construct the script by hand. Typically testers tend to do a combination of the two. They will use the recorder to generate the basic framework of their scripts and then tweak the scripts by hand to incorporate special cases.

Scripts can be graphical and/or text based in nature. A good functional testing tool does not require users to have a programming background. Users not proficient in programming will work predominantly with graphical scripts. In most tools graphical scripts will typically show all interactions in a tree structure and users can edit any node of the tree to modify the script. Some users however, who have programming backgrounds may wish to program their scripts. These users will typically work with a text script written in a standard language such as JavaScript or VBScript.

Once you have generated your script you will need to insert checks in your scripts to test if your website is functioning correctly. Such checks are usually called checkpoints. A checkpoint verifies that values of a property obtained when testing the website match expected values. Checkpoints enable you to set the criteria for comparing expected values with obtained values. The expected value of a property is derived from recording interactions with the web site. It is viewed and modified from checkpoints. The current value is retrieved during replay (i.e. during the execution of the test case).

There are many different kinds of checkpoints. A page checkpoint verifies the source of a page or frame as well as its statistical properties. You can check for broken links, verify link URLs, image sources, the hierarchy of HTML tags or even the entire HTML source of the Web page or frame. You can also set thresholds for the loading time of a page. A text checkpoint verifies that a given text is displayed or is not displayed in a specified area on a web page. A web object checkpoint verifies the properties of a web object e.g. the value of an HTML INPUT field. A database checkpoint verifies the contents of a database used by your website.

When you replay a test script, the testing tool will open the recorded application and perform the recorded steps in the same sequence they were specified in the script. As it replays the script it will also run through all the checkpoints you have inserted into the script. In addition, you can test your application’s behavior with varying data inputs. For example you can try to submit a page after entering different values in the edit box of a web page. At the end of the replay a detailed report is typically be generated.

Functional test automation allows you to automate the repetitive testing of a large number of scenarios across your website. Functional testing tools are an important weapon in your development arsenal whose use provides a huge productivity gain and allows for small testing groups to accomplish significantly more work. There is a very strong economic case for the use of Functional Testing Tools as part of the development and deployment cycle of a website.

Autoblogger Pro, Content Theft Or Innovation?

First of all, there may be some of you that have never even heard of Autoblogger Pro. So let’s examine this new script. Autoblogger Pro is really a very simple concept. It integrates itself into a Wordpress blog and then uses RSS feeds from news sources and blogs to populate the blog with relevant content. For example, if you want to build a blog that focuses on ‘Mortgages’ then you would simply locate several blog or news feeds that focus on mortgages and then load them into the admin area of the script. Every time the script is executed it will then pull in the RSS feed from all of the sites you’ve entered, and post them to the blog. In essence, you end up with a blog that contains highly targeted content, blended and unique because it comes from a variety of sources. All maintained by you with the click of a button! (A sample ABP blog can be seen here: http://www.dogs.pn )

Let me say this now. I am an advocate of Autoblogger Pro and I think that it’s a fantastic and logical development of the expected use of RSS feeds. It’s evolution people, and I think it’s fantastic!

But this morning I was surfing the web and I happened to do a search for Autoblogger Pro to see what other people were saying. To my shock and dismay I found many sites screaming that Autoblogger Pro users are ‘content thieves’ , ‘content RAPISTS’, ‘Scam artists’ etc. I found this very disturbing, so I researched a few of their websites to see if their content was in some way being actually stolen. To be honest, I really had to laugh when I looked at most of their sites. Prominently displayed on all of them were buttons for their various RSS feeds, asking for syndication!

What exactly did you expect when you put that feed on your site? RSS is defined as Really Simple Syndication. So aren’t you asking that your content be syndicated when you put the feed link on your website??? Of course you are. Either they are too uneducated to understand what RSS is and put it on their sites without knowing what it is, or they are just ignorant or naïve and believe that only a few people with news readers will use the feed.

There’s a very simple solution for this if you’re one of those people crying foul. TAKE THE FEED DOWN. If you don’t want your content syndicated, don’t put up a feed!

Now there are some responsibilities that must be held by users of Autoblogger Pro, it’s a very powerful script, and there are options to use it unethically. When syndicating someone’s content you need to give CREDIT to the source. Remember writing term papers in college or high school? You always have to give credit to your sources. Autoblogger Pro gives you the option in it’s configuration to give credit and a link back to every post you get from syndication. USE THIS FEATURE. It’s only right to give credit where credit is due. If this is done properly, all of those blogs you’re getting your content from will stay happy, because they are in turn getting quality links back to their site, from another relevant site, and that in turn helps them in their search engine standings. It may even send them some traffic if your Autoblogger Pro site has some.

Like it or not, syndication of content is what RSS was designed for. If you don’t like how your content is being syndicated, don’t put up a feed. But if you see the positives for content syndication you’ll understand that Autoblogger Pro sites will enhance your site, not detract from it. In the long run you’ll be glad to see your content in tons of places on the web!

Till next time,
Chuck Crawford

Attracting Web Business

So you’ve finished building a great website and you’re ready to start raking in the profits – if you can figure out how to let the world know your business exists. Although creating an attractive website is an important first step if you plan to start your own online business, it is definitely not the last. In fact, once the website is complete you’ve still got quite a lot of work on the horizon.

Just because you have a website up and running, it doesn’t mean people will automatically know where to find you. And yet, surprisingly, many first-time web entrepreneurs drop the ball at this point in the game. They assume customers will find them amongst all the other sites floating around in cyberspace, as if through some kind of psychic connection. But if you think about it, this type of thinking is very misguided.

It is the same with any business: customers won’t start flocking to your store unless you invest some time and money into advertising. Depending on your budget, you can either blast the trumpet really loud or toot the horn a little bit at a time. But in the end, you have to make some kind of noise in order to be heard.

But how do you achieve this in the vacuum of cyberspace? Or perhaps more fittingly, how do you make yourself heard amidst a crowd of other aspiring musicians all trumpeting their own cause? Obviously, online marketing is different from marketing a bricks-and-mortar business, so it’s important to know exactly where to begin. If you take the proper steps you will be attracting interested customers in no time.

The first step is to know your customer, inside and out. This is key if you want to be successful in your marketing strategy because you can’t market to potential customers if you don’t know who they are. For someone selling baked goods, targeting the “Carb-Haters of America” might not result in the profits you are anticipating.

Next, determine where you want to market your product. The Internet allows every new or expanding business the opportunity to reach a global market, but not every business is aiming for that goal. If your website is set up as one arm of your existing offline business, you might wish to target potential customers in your local area who also want the option of online shopping. In this case, integrate your website into promotional materials for your store so people will learn about the new branch of your business. Essentially, the efforts you make to promote your business outside of the Internet can be used to get your web address out there as well.

Internet Marketing

But of course, most people who begin an online venture are looking to broaden their customer base and attract a global clientele. There are several ways to start advertising online. Just remember: online marketing is always changing, and nothing works perfectly for every business. You might have to tailor a marketing plan to suit your company’s specific goals, or if Internet marketing makes your head spin, you also have the option of hiring a company to do the marketing for you.

Step one: register with search engines. Unfortunately, this doesn’t guarantee hits to your site, and the promises many search engines make are usually more pie-in-the-sky than realistic, but it is still a necessary evil. If you have to choose, register with Yahoo! and Google, as the highest percentage of web traffic originates from these two giants. In the past, achieving top search results could be done for free; now you have to shell out some cash if you want to get top placement and advertising space. Yahoo! Express and Google’s Adwords program are two examples of this type of paid search engine placement.

Another way to get noticed is to participate in a link exchange. Simply put, this involves seeking out other websites that are related to your company or product in some way and asking the owner if he/she will post your link on the site. If the owner agrees, you offer to post their link on your site, hence the term “link exchange.” This is a good way to start advertising your site because it involves targeting the right kind of people (someone visiting a site already related to your business) and forming solid bonds with other websites. And the more links other sites have to your site, the more popular you become with the search engines, without having to pay for top placement.

Finally, don’t sit back and wait for customers to come to you. Be proactive and go directly to your clientele. Of course, this means you must know where to find them, but this sounds harder than it actually is.

For instance, many new businesses actually use eBay to source potential customers. It depends on what you’re selling, but if you know a lot of people looking for your product spend a good amount of time making eBay purchases, that might be a good place to begin and get your name out in public. Use eBay as a marketing tool – sell a few items for very low prices, get people on your email list and invite them to consider future purchases from your website. EBay is more than a place to sell goods; it can be used as a highly effective marketing tool.

Or, as mentioned above, make business connections with people in a related business. Pay to have banner ads displayed on other websites to help spread the word about your business. This will bring you closer to the people who make up your target market.

This is just the beginning when it comes to online marketing, but if you start off on the right foot and persevere, you will succeed.

Artists Biographies on Film: Top Movies about Visual Artists

Visual artists biographies is a popular theme in the movie world. Moviemakers have always been fascinated by visual artists biographies, especially if it includes struggle with insanity, drug addiction or social conventions. In addition, it gives them an opportunity to depict original or resurrected artworks on the big screen.
Here you can read about some of the most interesting movies about visual artists biographies.
Lust for Life directed by Vincente Minnelli in 1952

Vincent Van Gogh biography had gained several cinematic adaptations. Lust for Life with Kirk Douglas as the struggling artist is one of the most notable. The movie is based on a best selling book by Irving Stone, who also authored The Agony and the Ecstasy about Michelangelo, which also had appeared on the silver screen.

If you are a fan of Van Gogh artwork, you would enjoy watching Last for Life, which features almost 200 of Van Goghs original paintings. However, if you are familiar with Kirk Douglas previous filmographic, seeing him as a tortured Dutch painter might take a little adjustment. Another recommended film about Van Gogh is Robert Altmans Vincent and Theo from 1990.

Surviving Picasso directed by James Ivory in 1996

Like Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso image made him an iconic figure outside the artistic circles. While Van Gogh symbolizes the self destructive, manic depressive artist who achieves success only after his death, Picasso represents the misanthropic and womanizer artist. Picasso infamous relationship with women is the focus of this Merchant and Ivory film. The story is told from the eyes of Picasso mistress Francoise Gilot and features only reproductions of Picasso works. With Anthony Hopkins talent and his physical resemblance to Picasso, Surviving Picasso manages to create an unflattering portrait of an artist as a cruel, self centered genius.

Girl with Pearl Earring directed by Peter Webber in 2003


Comparing to Van Gogh and Picasso, Vermeers biography is less known and less controversial. Therefore Girl with Pearl Earring is much more restrained and delicate. The movie focuses on a short period in Vermeers life in which he was painting the portrait of his young low class maid. Although Girl with Pearl Earring does not avoid filmic conventions by over dramatizing Vermeers painting process, the movie is worth watching if only for its artistic design, which success in evoking Vermeers perception of light and color.

Basquiat directed by Julian Schnabel in 1996

The most common critique against movies that deals with visual arts is the way they depict the creation process. Therefore, there were big expectations from Basquiat, which was directed by the celebrated painter Julian Schnabel. Schnabel did well in depicting Jean Michelle Basquiat rise and fall story in less the predictable manner we have seen millions time before. However, the only reason to watch Basquiat is David Bowie plays the role of Andy Warhol.

Frida directed by Julie Taymor in 2002

Like most of the visual artists who had their life story appear on the silver screen, Frida Kahlo carried an unusual biography, which includes bus accident, problematic marriage, and an affair with Leon Trotsky. Like Van Gogh, Picasso and Jackson Pollock, who was the subject of a biopic from 2000, Frida Kahlo was an icon long before Frida was released, but the 123 minutes film did help to strength her position as a feminist idol and probably the most famous woman painter of the 20 century. Frida tries its best to integrate Frida Kahlo life story with her painting and the result is very colorful and pleasant, but still does not stay far enough from the conventions of depicting artists on film.

Article Sites

you are a writer or own your own business, you may be familiar with article sites. Articles sites give writers the opportunity to offer their material to a submission website for free. In turn, the article will receive a lot of promotion from visitors to the site on a daily basis. The author or person who submits the content allows visitors to publish the article on their website free of charge. However, there is one catch. Any one who copies information that you have written must give you credit for the work and include a link to your website if applicable.

Some writers may feel a little hesitant about giving their work away for free but actually this is one of the best ways to promote both your talent and your business to the world. If you spend a couple of hours crafting your content for an article submission site, you will lose a little bit of money that could have been earned from the sale of the article. Fortunately though, your submitted work piece will earn you much more than you ever could have made from a single sale.

At a popular article promotion website such as Article Alley, there are thousands of visitors to the website every day. This means unlimited exposure for your work. If someone has an interest in the topic you have written about, they simply click on the link to read the full text of the article. At the end of the article you include your name, contact information, and website address. If a person really enjoyed your writing or is interested in the information you provided, they will be very tempted to click on the link in your resource box for more details. You now have the chance to attract an endless amount of customers to your website without the use of traditional advertising methods.

There is an added benefit for writers who include a website address in their biography or resource box. Every time a visitor clicks on the link to your website, it increases the amount of incoming traffic. Most of the major search engines rate websites by not only the content they provide but also the number of incoming links going to the site. Many article promotion sites, including Article Alley, receive a high volume of traffic, typically thousands of customers per day. If just fifty people click on your website link, you have greatly increased your traffic through the use of a single article.

Another factor to consider is the number of times your article will be reproduced on the web. For example, let’s imagine that ten customers really enjoyed your article and have posted the content on their own website. Now every time someone visits one of these websites, they have the opportunity to read the content you have written. Better yet, the article will at least include your name and possibly your website address if you included it in the original article posting. By submitting one article for free, you now have your name listed at ten different websites and possibly an additional ten incoming links to your website. This kind of advertising is especially good exposure for a writer. Often times when a client is considering hiring you, they may be interested in what previous online content you have published. By typing your name in a search engine box, they will instantly see the results of all the websites your work is posted at. This can be a great way to gain a clients trust.

Finally, one of the best reasons for offering content to an article submission site is the amount of time it saves you. Think about all the time and energy that is needed to promote your product or service. Some article submission sites, such as Finance Alley and Article Alley, do virtually all of the work in promoting your material. Your article will be advertised not only at these sites upon submission but also through RSS feeds to many other websites. With all the extra time and money you have saved in adverting costs, you can now afford to spend more time actually running your business. Article submission sites actually bring the customers to you.

Article Optimization - Directory Submission 101

It is a pleasurable challenge writing to Ezine and Article publishing Directories.  This is the "sandbox" that most writers are contributing to today.  More articles are written and show up as an entry to Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVist and other search engines than their are websites.  Some websites are articles in themselves.  It is much easier to write an article than it is to build a new website for most of us.  The common person may not be able to do build their own website, but he or she may have the talent to be a successful writer. Think of the competition though!  Thousands of writers writing about their content, promoting their website, and sharing their ideas.  The numbers are overwhelming!  There are a number of things that a writer needs to be aware of when submitting articles to develop a mass readership. 

<b>Article Optimization</b> - If you want your article to show up on page number one of Google, it has to be optimized.  Optimization is done by following some of the simple rules called "Search Engine Optimization". 

Choose a <b>high quality article directory</b> to submit to.  This will contribute a great deal to getting the article close to the number one spot.  You can determine the <i>article directories PR rating</i> in Google ·by installing the Google task bar on you browser and going to the article directory website.  Contributing your article to the directory is a very simple thing.  You will have to provide personal information, possibly a pen name, your website url if you have one, and the category you will be writing about.

Use <b>keyword rich content</b> in the title, teaser, and body of the article.  You have to do some keyword research and plug them in to your article every chance that you can.  A good example in this article would be the keyword "<u>article directory</u>".  It has to make sense when you use it.  Once every paragraph or two and your readers will not get bored with the article and keep reading until the end of the article.

Use bold, italic, and underline when it seems appropriate with your keywords.  Using Google, go look up some of your favorite keywords.  You will notice in the list of Google links that the keywords you put in are in bold.  Google picks up on the keywords.  Let me repeat that, Google picks up on the keywords.  In SEO Made Easy, the author indicates that not only does Google pick up on keywords, but Google picks up on keywords that are in bold, italic, and underlined.

Article Directories will let you place one to three incidents of anchor text in the body of the article.  This is an excellent way to <i>get a link back to your website</i>!  Google takes a while to do this, but eventually it will index the article and register the link.  You can work in your keywords in clever fashion this way.  If you have a website, and you are promoting your website in the article, this is the opportunity to use the keywords from your website.  If the article directory allows the technique, html anchor text entries can be made in the body of the article as well as the bio.  The reader would not normally know that html was being used.  Of course the Article Dircetory has to accept html code for this to work.

<b>Use anchor text</b> in the article writers bio.  <i>Most Article Directories</i> accept three, others will only allow you one.  This is the sales pitch.  If you have interesting content in the article, and have succeeded in convincing your reader that your contribution is worth investigating some more, they will want to go to your website and look some more!  This is the author's sincere wish most of all, to gain trust and repore with his or her readers and to start a continuing business relationship.  It can be done with a proper close to the article asking for the reader to "come on in, the water is fine!"

<b>Article Writing</b> - If you want your article to be read from start to finish, <i>choose keywords and content that will make sense to the reader</i>.  Don't try to write about nuclear physics to a business crowd. 

<b>Determine your audience</b>.  This is done easily by entering your keywords into Google.  Look at the number of entries returned.  An article will be successful if you choose an audience that is not to large that you cannot compete against and not so small that you will only expose the article too few times to too few readers.  When starting, it is a good idea to start with keywords that are getting about 30 hits a day at Overture.  Normally there would also be less than ten million entries returned from the Google keyword search for your topic.  Work on the larger populations when you get this down.  You will find innumerable targets and keywords that you can do this with.  There is no end to topics available on the internet.  What a rich source of information!

<b>Use original content</b> when submitting to <u>Article Directories</u>.  They have a way of finding out if your content is not original.  Article directory submission guidelines always require you have exclusive license allows your name to be associated with the articles produced for you or by you.  So don't do it.  You will get caught!

Enjoy your writing!  The world is open to to your ideas and more than willing to accept what you have to offer, if it is done the right way!

Art Theft: Most Famous Cases in History

Art theft is an ancient and complicated crime. When you look at the some of the most famous cases of art thefts in history, you see thoroughly planned operations that involve art dealers, art fakers, mobsters, ransoms, and millions of dollars. Here you can read about some of the most famous cases of art theft in the history.

The First Theft:
The first documented case of art theft was in 1473, when two panels of altarpiece of the Last Judgment by the Dutch painter Hans Memling were stolen. While the triptych was being transported by ship from the Netherlands to Florence, the ship was attacked by pirates who took it to the Gdansk cathedral in Poland. Nowadays, the piece is shown at the National Museum in Gdansk where it was recently moved from the Basilica of the Assumption.

The Most Famous Theft:
The most famous story of art theft involves one of the most famous paintings in the world and one of the most famous artists in history as a suspect. In the night of August 21, 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen out of the Louver. Soon after, Pablo Picasso was arrested and questioned by the police, but was released quickly.

It took about two years until the mystery was solved by the Parisian police. It turned out that the 30×21 inch painting was taken by one of the museum employees by the name of Vincenzo Peruggia, who simply carried it hidden under his coat. Nevertheless, Peruggia did not work alone. The crime was carefully conducted by a notorious con man, Eduardo de Valfierno, who was sent by an art faker who intended to make copies and sell them as if they were the original painting.

While Yves Chaudron, the art faker, was busy creating copies for the famous masterpiece, Mona Lisa was still hidden at Peruggias apartment. After two years in which Peruggia did not hear from Chaudron, he tried to make the best out of his stolen good. Eventually, Peruggia was caught by the police while trying to sell the painting to an art dealer from Florence, Italy. The Mona Lisa was returned to the Louver in 1913.

The Biggest Theft in the USA:
The biggest art theft in United States took place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. On the night of March 18, 1990, a group of thieves wearing police uniforms broke into the museum and took thirteen paintings whose collective value was estimated at around 300 million dollars. The thieves took two paintings and one print by Rembrandt, and works of Vermeer, Manet, Degas, Govaert Flinck, as well as a French and a Chinese artifact.    

As of yet, none of the paintings have been found and the case is still unsolved. According to recent rumors, the FBI are investigating the possibility that the Boston Mob along with French art dealers are connected to the crime.

The Scream:
The painting by Edvard Munchs, The Scream, is probably the most sought after painting by art thieves in history. It has been stolen twice and was only recently recovered. In 1994, during the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, The Scream was stolen from an Oslo gallery by two thieves who broke through an open window, set off the alarm and left a note saying: thanks for the poor security.

Three months later, the holders of the painting approached the Norwegian Government with an offer: 1 million dollars ransom for Edvard Munchs The Scream. The Government turned down the offer, but the Norwegian police collaborated with the British Police and the Getty Museum to organize a sting operation that brought back the painting to where it belongs.

Ten years later, The Scream was stolen again from the Munch Museum. This time, the robbers used a gun and took another of Munchs painting with them. While Museum officials waiting for the thieves to request ransom money, rumors claimed that both paintings were burned to conceal evidence. Eventually, the Norwegian police discovered the two paintings on August 31, 2006 but the facts on how they were recovered are not known yet.

7 Reasons You Need To Blog For Your Business

If you are not blogging for your business then you should be. While many people simply dismiss blogging because of its description as a web diary they are missing a lot of traffic and revenue generating opportunities every day. Are you one of those missing out?

In truth blogs are much more than a simple web diary. They are actually a content management system and/or an easy web site template. Blogging software allows you to begin posting your content to the Internet in minutes and when you harness that ability with an RSS feed you have a powerful traffic magnet.

I have come up with 7 reasons why every business should have a blog and RSS feed.

1. Publishing a regularly updated blog helps you keep in touch with your existing audience and/or customer base. You can publish updates, news, or thoughts in your blog as well as answer questions.

2. A blog can help you attract new customers. Your blog entries (posts or articles) will become fodder for the search engines and will attract new visitors. If your blog answers the visitors question or attracts their interest you have just found another qualified lead.

3. Blogs and RSS feeds often rank higher in search engines than traditional web sites. Search engines love blogs and RSS feeds. If you design your blog properly then every time you update it the search engines are notified. Even if you don't regularly ping most search engines will revisit blogs more frequently. Plus the very organization of a blog lends itself to spidering and good search engine ranking.

4. Blogs can help you establish or build your reputation in a particular field. As your blog grows you will demonstrate your knowledge in your chosen niche.

5. Blogs and RSS feeds are good revenue streams. You can add pay-per-click ads, affiliate ads, or sell ad space on your blogs. In fact, many PPC companies also provide the ability to add PPC to your RSS feeds.

6. Blogs are great ways to generate leads. Even if you don't want to put any advertising on your blog you can use it to promote or capture leads for your own programs. These are great leads as the fact that they came from your blog means they are already interested in your topic and predisposed to your individual message.

7. Creating your own blog is the easiest way to establish a presence on the Internet and creating an RSS feed is even easier. In fact, it is also the cheapest way to get started on the Internet as there are a number of free blogging sites out there. I started out with http://blogger.com and usually recommend them but have heard others point to several other top blogging sites as well. The blogging software that I now use is WordPress and also happens to be free. In fact, most web hosts now offer WordPress (or other free blogging software) as a free site add-on through Fantastico. Installing WordPress from scratch is quick and easy but Fantastico makes it even easier. Blogs created at Blogger have an RSS feed created for them and WordPress also creates feeds in several variations automatically.

As you can see there are several benefits to starting your own blog and RSS feed. If you can count that many benefits from an Internet marketing technique that is also free and easy then you are foolish not to begin using it for yourself.

Are You An Internet Marketer Wannabe?

Are you one of the many thousands of Internet marketer wannabes who have decided to become the next batch of Internet Millionaires?

You've read that about 600 million people have access to the Internet - and yet it is still in its infancy. Every month millions of newcomers and thousands of businesses are reported to be setting up online.

With this huge and expanding audience coupled with the fact that marketing and advertising can be done on the Internet so easily and at only a fraction of the costs of traditional methods, we now have a fantastic opportunity to be successful in online business.

Many companies have now aligned themselves with the Internet which has created many new paradigms in the past few years. Residual Incomes are made available to people from all walks of life. You can now make money online with simple and proven formula used by many to earn multiple streams of residual income.

However please beware of the hurdles ahead because it is not as easy as it seems. It takes a lot of hard work and some financial investment. The following is a short list of some of the things you should be aware of:

1. DECIDE WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO SELL

1.1. Selling Products
When you sell a product you can either carry out the whole operation of manufacturing or creating the products, handling orders, stocking and inventory management, shipping the goods, and processing the payments OR you could simply join some affiliate programs and market for companies that will handle all the administration for you.

Your job is therefore merely to get the orders to the companies and receive commission as a result of your effort. The question we should ask ourselves is “What products should we sell?”
We should all know that the item that has been recognized as the number one business product of the future is “information”. Examples of highly successful information products are the 'how-to' and “self-improvement” e-books which tell the readers how to solve certain problems.

If you are knowledgeable about a particular subject you could consider writing and developing your own products and delivering it via the many channels opened to you such as websites, newsletters, ezines and emails.

1.2. Selling Services
One advantage of selling a service is that you can often generate a 'residual' income. It is possible to have a monthly passive income as long as the existing customers continue to use your service. But we should ask again “What types of service are suitable for online selling?”

As the Internet boom continues the most obvious possibility is any service which could help companies in using the Internet in their business. An excellent example is a web hosting service whereby the host will provide the space to put up websites of others with the necessary tools to manage it while providing technical advice and service to their clients.

2 A Comprehensive Business Plan
Don't start until you have made a plan that includes what the markets are, what products and services you’re selling to these markets, how to acquire these products (and services), how you will market and sell them and how to get the money to pay for all these things. Like any other forms of work, you must have a plan for your Internet business. Set an achievable short term, medium term and long term objectives, prepare a budget and stick to them as far as possible. Carry out periodical checking to determine any deviations from the plan and take the necessary remedial actions.

3. An E-Commerce Program
You must have the capability to accept orders, arrange for payment, preferably by credit card, and ship the product. Otherwise you should do as many successful Internet entrepreneurs do, that is, joining good affiliate programs where you need not worry about processing of orders, collection of payment, packing and shipping of the products as these would be taken care of by the merchants i.e. the affiliate program owners.

4. Well Written Sales Copy
The content of your website should have attractive and hard hitting selling materials to persuade your prospects to buy from you while maintaining and keeping the existing customers. Copywriting requires some skill. If you can't do it yourself you will have to hire professional copywriters to do it for you for a fee.

5. Patience and Perseverance
Building a successful business on the Internet takes not only a lot of effort and time, it also requires some financial input on your part especially for acquiring the necessary knowledge and to advertise your business. Don't be trapped by the “overnight miracle” and “become-an- instant-millionaire” hype and stories.

You’d be tempted with countless of seemingly very attractive offers and promises from the Web to help improve your business. Many of these would lead you to disappointment and frustration. You should persevere and re-invest your early profits back into the business.

6. Get Your List As Soon As Possible
In Internet marketing, always remember three very important words. They’re…LIST, LIST and LIST. Also, do not forget the popular Internet adage, “The Gold is in your LIST!” This means that a big chunk of your time, effort and concentration should be directed to getting the right strategy to drive traffic to your site. Advertising is therefore of utmost importance.

7. Be Disciplined
Although this is a home based business with all the freedom in the world, it’s prudent to have some form of discipline. Once you’ve decided to sit in front of the computer to start working online, you must stay focused and do not allow any distraction to affect your concentration. Treat it as your business and not a hobby. It’d be nice to stick to a schedule which is also made known to other members of your family so that they’d know when to leave you alone. However do not get carried away and spend too much time in front of your PC because your loved ones, including your pets also deserve your attention and time.

8. Stay away from the temptation to spam.
Do not ever try to spam i.e. sending unsolicited e-mails to unexpected recipients under any circumstances. I get very annoyed when I find chunks of unwanted e-mails plugging my mailbox resulting in the e-mails from my friends and business associates being “lost” in the midst of these junks mails. The frustrating process of deleting them is enough to drive me through the roof! If you insisted on “spamming”, you’d very likely have your name and registration terminated. It is therefore not worth the while because eventually your business would suffer.

9. Know how to place your advert
There are many locations where you can place an Ad such as newsgroups, forums, ezines, websites some of which you have to pay for while some are totally free of charge. It is possible to post your Ad to a mailing list, newsgroups, and also discussion forums using a signature file to promote your products.

Are There Benefits To Ordering Magazines As Part Of A Package Deal?

Many people in the 21st century spend a great deal of time seated in front of their computers or their television sets. Indeed, these people spend a significant amount of their time each and every day at the computer -- perhaps even playing games -- or watching television and movies. One wonders if people do read any more.

Perhaps you are one of those people who still read, who enjoys reading books and magazines. If that is the case, you may find yourself interested in buying books and taking out subscriptions to different magazines.

With that said, you also may be like many people and find yourself living on a pretty tight budget. If that is also the case, you may not feel that you have much disposable income available to purchase magazine subscriptions.

There are ways in which you can order and read some of the best magazines on the market today without breaking the bank in the process. One tried and true method that you might want to consider when it comes to subscribing to magazines is ordering magazines as part of a package deal.

Years ago, young people -- and some not so young people -- would go door to door selling magazine subscriptions. Through these efforts, you would be able to order a selection of magazines for a reduced price. In other words, you were able get something of a package deal on magazine subscriptions.

For the most part there no longer are people going door to door selling magazines to consumers. Indeed, there are very few door to door sales people at this point in history. Nevertheless, it still remains possible for a person in your shoes to make the purchase of magazine subscriptions as part of a package deal. In other words, you can purchase multiple magazines, take out multiple subscriptions, and pay a reduced cost by buying more than one publication.

Therefore, if you are interested in reading a number of different magazines, you might want to determine if there is the availability of a package deal when ordering these magazines. There are subscription services that can be accessed in both the brick and mortar world and on the
Internet and World Wide Web through which you can order a variety of different magazines of interest to you and at a cost that you can well afford.

Are Made For Adsense Sites Ruining Search Results?

It's happened to you. You've searched for something on Google and several promising results appear. You click on a link, but when you get to the site all you see are a few ads and nothing even remotely close to what you searched for. So you go back to the search results and try again, only it happens again and again until you finally find a page with some decent content...or frustration sets in and you give up all together.

Why does this happen? How come in this day and age Google can't give you the results you're looking for? A large part of the answer is the growing number of made for AdSense (MFA) sites on the web today. MFA sites are designed for the sole purpose of getting you to click on a Google AdSense advertisement.

Define Made for AdSense

A site is made for AdSense if its sole purpose is to get users to click on AdSense ads. Its owners don't intend that users will learn from its content or participate in a community. All that they want is for them to click on an ad. A site is NOT made for AdSense if its primary purpose is to provide unique content and the site owner decides to keep their content free by displaying advertisements, AdSense or other. This has been going on for years – television, newspapers, and magazines all generate revenue with advertisements. The difference is that the advertisements SUPPLEMENT the content of the show or article. The same applies for the web. If you have a news site or a forum, placing ads on your site does not make it a made for AdSense site.

Why Do People Make MFA Sites?

The thing with MFA sites is that they work. The overwhelming majority of the population has no clue what Google AdSense is and doesn't understand that Google and the site owner make money when they click on an ad. By placing these ads in locations that people tend to focus on (Google gives you examples of locations that result in the highest click through), it's inevitable that a certain percentage of visitors will click on the ads – either intentionally or unintentionally.

Site owners make anywhere from a five cents to several dollars per click (revenue is split between them and Google) depending on the industry. Big deal right? If you convert 5% of users into clicks and you make 10 cents a click, you're only making 50 cents for every hundred visitors to your site. Well if you make a thousand MFA sites and each gets two hundred visitors a day, you are making a cool $1,000/day.

Smart MFA site owners design sites with keywords that advertisers pay more than the standard 20 cents or 30 cents. They design sites with “content” about lawyers and car companies that purchase AdWords advertisements that cost several dollars a click. Re-do that calculation with five dollars a click instead of 10 cents and your jaw will drop.

How do they get their traffic? In addition to using conventional white hat SEO methods (like unique content and link building), many of these sites shamelessly also take advantage of keyword stuffing and cloaking – tactics that are considered unethical and are against Google's terms of service. Many also get their clicks in unethical ways – either by clicking on ads themselves or by employing bots to automatically click. This is called click fraud and is also against Google's terms of service.

Who Gets Hurt?

Some would argue that no one is getting hurt by “tricking” people into clicking. Hey they're not getting charged anything. No, but some advertiser is. Some business that's pouring their hard earned money into Google AdWords to attract TARGETED visitors to their site. Instead they end up paying for accidental clicks.  You (the searcher) also get hurt by getting less than optimal results. Imagine an internet where these sites didn't exist. You might actually have a chance at finding what you're looking for on the first try. That would save you some time that I'm sure you'd be glad to have.

Should Google Do Something About It?

Everyone's first thought is “Google could stop it if they tried.” In reality, probably not. Regardless of the talent they recruit, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people trying to figure out a work around. As Seth Jayson recently said in his article about the same topic entitled How Google is Killing the Internet “I think when you pit a few hundred Google Smarty Pantses -- who are getting fat on stock options and gourmet meals at the Big Goo campus -- against many thousand enterprising schemers on the Internet, the battle will go to those hungry schemers every time.”

Google does have a system in place to reduce click fraud and are always improving their algorithm to rid their results of sites that practice cloaking, keyword stuffing, and other black hat SEO techniques. Unfortunately, it's probably not enough.

The larger (and much scarier) question is whether or not Google wants to do something about it. For the time being, they stand to make a ton of money off of MFA sites. Until Google starts to see a negative impact from MFA sites there's really no reason for them to rush to do anything about it. Say Yahoo! all of a sudden came up with a way to identify and block MFA sites and provided better search results because of it, Google may be threatened by the potential (or actual) loss of search percentage. But until that happens I wouldn't expect Google to do much more than they are right now.

What Can You Do?

There's no doubt that MFA sites have clogged up the web with thousands of worthless pages. The best way to reduce the number of made for AdSense sites is probably to do something about it yourself. If you advertise on Google AdWords, don't allow Google to display your ads on their content network (AdSense sites). As an internet user, you can educate others about MFA sites and encourage them not to click on ads. It may not seem like much, but all of those clicks add up – just ask someone who owns a made for AdSense site.

Are Link Exchanges Harming Your Business?

Many of the top search engine optimization gurus tell us that we must perform link exchanges and lots of them in order to reach the top of the search engines.

But is this still true?

Once if certainly was the case and that was enough to get yourself ranked highly. Nowadays, with the huge rise in Internet usage and websites, the search engines have wised up to this and have complex algorithms for working out your ranking. These are, of course, a closely guarded secret known to a few geeks on the inside, and guessed at by those on the outside.

Many of the search engine optimization experts are now telling us to be wary of link exchanges and to consider the following key points.

1) Link farms – if your link is in what the search engines classify as a link farm then it could harm your ranking. A link farm is typically a site full of links, or a page with a high number of links on them. If the link farm is organised into categories with only a couple of dozen of relevant links per page, then it is less likely to harm your ranking.

2) Irrelevant sites - if your website is focused on children then having link exchanges with pharmacy and gambling sites could well harm your rankings because they are not really relevant. Having links to other children’s sites and sites related to children are possible much better for your rankings and will give your website more relevancy.

3) Anchor text – the words that link from another site to yours are actually quite relevant to your search engine ranking. If the words “hello stranger” were a hyperlink to your site then it wouldn’t really do you much good unless your site was about strangers. However, if your site was about children and your main keyword was “good parenting” and you had links from other sites with the words “good parenting” being the hyperlink, this will be looked upon favourably by the search engines

When you are exchanging links with anyone, it is worth your while being discerning about the links. Yes, I know you want as many links as possible, but you should consider the relevancy of the links to your visitors, and also what your visitors would think of those links being on your site. If you had a site full of children’s games and educational material and then lots of links to adult related sites, how keen do you think parents would be for their children to visit your sites?

Always check out if a site you are linking to has an affiliate program. If they do, then it is worth you signing up for it and putting the affiliate link on your site. Why? Because then when someone follows the link and buys, you get paid for it!

By keeping your link exchanges relevant you can increase your standing in the search engines and give your readers valuable extra resources.

Are Adsense Tracker That Important? You Bet Your Behind It Is!

The importance of adsense tracker.

You should not be contented with the reports you are getting out of search engines about your adsense. Although they can tell you what is happening, they do not really tell you how you can still develop these ads to get more money out of them.

Adsense tracker can do all this and more for you. Compared to search engine reports, what you will get from adsense trackers will help you to improve the income you are already getting. Adsense trackers help you and your site grow and not always stagnant.

Adsense tracker:

1. Helps you suggest which keywords and search engines to use to make more money.

Click thru rates are being broken down by adsense trackers into two categories; search engine keywords and the search engines themselves. Once this is done, you will have no more problem in choosing which keywords to use more in a specific engine.

Adsense tracker can also help you in selecting the sites that you can link to. They will choose quality and high traffic sites from among the many existing ones.

2. Tells you the kind of content you should be creating.

Adsense tracker will be the one doing all the searching through sites and contents that are getting clicked and visited more. It will zero down on the sites that have contents that people are looking for.

When you have more of the topic or content people are searching for, you will be on your way to generating more money than you used to have.

3. Shares with you the ads that are clicked through most often.

As with contents, visitors also have reasons for clicking on an ad that is displayed on a certain page. Adsense tracker will help you understand what is there in these ads that attract the visitor’s attention.

With the many adsense already out there, you will need all your creative juices to come up with something that will get the attention of your visitors and fast.

4. Will suggest what colors and ad formats work effectively.

The appearance of your site is as important as the contents you put into them. Since it is the first thing that your visitor will see when they come into your site, you may want to project a good first impression that will last.

Adsense tracker will tell you the format and colors that the more effective sites are using. It will tell you how you can use these colors to get the traffic that you needed. Getting more visitors into your site can only more income coming to you.

5. Gives you real-time statistics.

Some search engine takes time before information are updated. This is not the same thing with adsense trackers. They can give you real-time and instant updates whatever time or day it is.

Every second counts when you are looking out for the most important data. This means that no time should be wasted just waiting for some details to be checked and reported to you.

6. Checks as many domains as possible.

Not all domains can be accessed by search engines. And some takes time before getting connected to.
Using adsense tracker, you can have access to as many domains as you possibly can. And all this in the shortest possible time.

All these are good enough reasons why you should go and get yourself an adsense tracker today.

AOL Gives Up The Ghost

The company that dominated dial-up Internet use is coming to grip with the future. As broadband use increases dramatically, AOL has watched subscriptions decline and advertising dollars move to Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Facing approaching irrelevance, AOL has decided to act.

AOL Reinvents

In an effort to compete, AOL is reinventing itself as an open use portal. To date, AOL has always restricted use of its portal to subscribers. No longer. AOL is beta testing a portal that makes services and content available to everyone. If all goes well, the company will launch the service this month.

AOL’s Motivation

The growth of broadband use has correlated to the decline of AOL. It is estimated that as many as 20 percent of subscribers have left the service in the last three years. This loss, of course, correlates to a loss of revenues. As a publicly traded company, AOL must act or face a shareholder revolt.

Catch 22?

AOL is playing a dangerous game with the free portal. The company is risking losing more subscribers that have stuck with the company simply because they like the AOL portal. If “You’ve Got Mail” is now free, why would anyone pay for it? AOL is soon going to provide an answer.

Further complicating matters, AOL faces an extremely difficult transformation. There is a cliché – If it walk like a duck, quacks like a duck and smells like a duck, it’s a duck.” At its heart, AOL is a dial-up connection company. How likely is it that AOL will smoothly convert into Yahoo, MSN or Google? Time will tell, but one can expect AOL to learn some hard lessons in the transformation.

What It Means For E-Commerce

The AOL development has little direct impact on e-commerce. As time passes, however, the new strategy could significantly impact Google. Google currently supplies search results to AOL and places Google Adwords on the system. As subscribers decrease, you can expect AOL to develop solutions to replace Google. Much like Yahoo did, Google will eventually be booted from the AOL platform. The loss of 20 million AOL users must be causing Google some consternation.

The Internet is a dynamic, evolving platform. The AOL transformation is just another step in the process. Only time will tell if AOL can adapt in the evolutionary process.