Urban Vancouver

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When it comes to real estate and commodities in the real world, you can probably expect some fluctuations. Investing in those kinds of properties, you are bound to market conditions and it can take quite a bit of work to produce any kind of profit. When it comes to buying and selling websites, however, you are not bound to any single economy and you can never run out of stock. When done correctly, this practice can generate quite the healthy income for the right individual.

The challenge, of course, is figuring how to do this correctly and consistently. The Equity Millions System by Brian Owens promises to teach you how to develop web properties and “quadruple (or better) their value before selling them off inside 60 days.” Brian requested this review, so let’s have a look at what the Equity Millions System has to offer.

This is Not an E-Book

While you may encounter a good number of e-books out there that seemingly teach the same thing, the difference with this online asset building system is that it is comprised of several videos. There is some other stuff in there too, which I’ll get to in a moment, but the core material comes from the eight hours of video lessons. You’re not reading a book; you’re taking a course.

The goal with Equity Millions is to train you on how to develop web properties, build up their value, and then flip them for massive profit. The monthly subscription fee for Equity Millions is pretty comprehensive, not only instructing you on the process of building online assets, but also providing you with some of the tools that you’ll need along the way.

Modules and Homework

Equity Millions is a course that teaches you how to build “online assets with real value” and it walks you through the entire process. Currently, the course material is broken down into four modules, each of which contains several lessons. For example, the first module (Success Begins with Day 1) is comprised of ten individual lessons.

Each lesson starts with a brief text introduction, but the real meat comes from the video. These are not short five-minute videos either, so be prepared to sit down for about a half hour at a time. I wan’t able to grab a screen-capture, but the first lesson — The Equity Millions System Overview — was done through a screencast using MS Paint. Brian Owens uses MS Paint as his whiteboard and I felt this was unprofessional. The math described in the video was also a little off. He says that to make $3,000 a month from a website, you need to only sell a $97 product thirty times. That works out to $2,910. I get his sentiment, but he should be more accurate. Owens admits that he’s not exactly high-tech, but he could have easily done something like a simple PowerPoint presentation instead of using MS Paint. Thankfully, the rest of the lessons appear to be much better.

Other lessons in the first module include Getting 24 Times The Value, How to Find Good Domains, and Dissecting a Successful Site Flip.

Upon completion of Module 1 and Module 3, you will be presented with a homework assignment. I did say that Equity Millions was an online course, didn’t I? In fact, your homework assignment — which is presented to you in the form of a video — must be submitted and it will be graded. If you happen to fail, they’re not going to kick you out of school, but they will “hold your hand” as you try to make the appropriate corrections.

Blog, Forum, Daily Flip Alerts…

Aside from the main course described above, the Equity Millions System is also comprised of a few extras. For starters, all members receive free hosting for their websites. You are limited to one gigabyte of storage, but you can create an unlimited number of mySQL databases and host an unlimited number of domains. This hosting plan is equivalent to about $5-$10 in value each month. There are also site builder tools and 4,500 templates at your disposal.

Although there isn’t much there yet, Equity Millions also has a blog, which is freely accessible to both members and non-members. There is also a members-only forum where you can discuss the individual modules (think of it as an online study group), as well as anything related to the building, buying, and selling of online properties.

Other features include daily “flip alerts” with details on how to buy specific websites and build them, monthly site selling summits (webcasts), and joint venture contests where members have a chance to work on flipping a website with Brian Owens himself.

Invest, Develop, and Sell

Obviously, I didn’t have the time to go through all eight hours of online videos, but from what I did see, the material is easy to follow. With a little ingenuity, dedication, and practice, you may be able to flip websites on a regular basis for big profit too, but just know that it won’t be easy. It’ll take some hard work, but at least Equity Millions can provide you with the tools (and the helping hand) to lead you in the right direction. To get started, you can sign up for a 30-day trial for $9.95. Each subsequent month costs $47.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR EQUITY MILLIONS

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Life-Changing Thanksgiving Meal - Just $2.59

On Monday, October 13, the Union Gospel Mission, will host their 21st annual Thanksgiving Dinner. Preparations are underway as they expect to serve thousands of meals to hungry men, women, youth and children at their Vancouver, Mission and New Westminster facilities.

The Union Gospel Mission cares for the hungry, hurting and homeless of Greater Vancouver. Founded in 1940 as a small soup kitchen, UGM now has satellite facilities in Surrey, New Westminster, Mission and downtown Vancouver, and provides services from employment training to affordable housing solutions. UGM serves over 280,000 meals each year, and provides shelter for almost 10,000 individuals a year. They are an organization that I support and I’m asking you to join me in helping to feed the hungry this Thanksgiving. A complete meal cost only $2.59. This is an amount I believe we can all afford.

I Will Match Your Donation

I will personally match every dollar donated by John Chow dot Com readers up to a maximum of $1000.00 per person. Simply make a donation at the UGM online donation page, then email me a copy of the receipt to johnchow @ johnchow.com. Feel free to leave a comment about your donation as well.

All readers making donations will be recognized in a blog post this Friday. If you have a website or blog, I will link to it. If you think about it, this is a pretty inexpensive way to get a link on this blog.

The meals and other services we provide can be the start of a new life and new beginning for those in need. I grew up in the Downtown Eastside, the poorest neighborhood in Canada. I did not come from money. I am where I am today because I know that in order to receive any blessings in life, you must first give. The more you give, the more you receive.

October 13 is just around the corner. The meals and other services we provide can be the start of a new life and new beginning for those in need. Let’s show the Union Gospel Mission that the John Chow dot Com community cares.

Help Feed The Hungry This Thanksgiving

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If you’re a Pay Per Click marketer, then you know how long and tedious a process it can be to create and monitor a campaign. Many tools have been created to help make PPC more efficient and user friendly. One of the most impressive tools I’ve reviewed to date have been SpeedPPC. SpeedPPC is a must have for every serious PPC marketer or anyone thinking about getting into PPC marketing.

Pay Per Click At Warp Speed

SpeedPPC dramatically shorten the time it takes to get a pay per click campaign up and running. How much time would you have to spend in order to create 436 ad group with 1,744 ads to target every major city in the United States, plus make a targeted landing page for 8,720 keywords? Done manually, this process would take a week or longer. With SpeedPC, it can be done in 12 minutes. Don’t believe me? Watch the video and see for yourself.

SpeedPPC is a suite of tools, all based on ultra-smart methodologies. SpeedPPC’s ground-breaking software tools include a Campaign Builder, Landing Page Generator, and Affiliate Datafeed Software. You can launch powerful PPC marketing campaigns of any volume, quickly and effortlessly. Read how SpeedPPC works here.

Aside from the time saved on new campaigns, the two best features of SpeedPPC include dynamic token insertion and and dynamic landing page generator. With SpeedPPC, searchers in New York searching for “online dating nyc” could get a targeted ad such as:

Searchers clicking the ad will be taken to a dynamic landing page that reflects the same search terms.

Because of the extremely tight targeting due to the dynamic token insertion and landing page generation, you have a much higher chance at converting the visitors into sales. That means higher quality score, lower PPC cost and more money in your pocket. If you’re not excited about SpeedPPC at this point, then Pay Per Click marketing isn’t for you.

How Much Does All This Cost?

SpeedPPC is available in two packages; SpeedPPC and SpeedPPC Affiliate Pro. The following chart shows the difference between them.

At only $100 more, SpeedPPC Affiliate Pro is definitely the better value of the two. This is especially true if you’re an affiliate who deals with data feeds like I do.

Some may bark at the nearly $500 price for SpeedPPC but if you look at it from a productivity standpoint, it’s really inexpensive. How much is it worth to you to reduce a week of work down to 12 minutes? I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s worth way more than a measly $500!

Download SpeedPPC

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While in Florida, I took a tour of NASA and experienced what it’s like to ride in the Space Shuttle. The Shuttle Launch Experience is the newest attraction at the Kennedy Space Center. Designed to simulate a Shuttle launch, the ride has been a huge hit for NASA.

I’m pretty sure the ride is extremely toned down compare to a real Shuttle launch. I imagine if they made it too realistic, most riders would be losing their lunch. Still, the Shuttle Launch Experience does give you an idea on what it’s like to go into orbit.

No cameras are allowed inside the launch facility. However, I managed to sneak my Flip in and took the following video of the pre-launch instructions. I wasn’t able to film inside the simulator itself because there were surveillance cameras everywhere.

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Still Selling SiteWide Links? That Means You Are Losing LOTS OF MONEY! Replace your sitewide links by TNX.net code and generate 10x times more income by selling different links from every single page of your website or blog!

Getting traffic to your blog can be quite the challenge. No matter how skilled you think you are in search engine optimization, a big part of the equation is getting quality backlinks. You can try getting backlinks by commenting on other blogs, participating in relevant forums, and asking other webmasters for reciprocal links, but these strategies can take up a lot of time and may not necessarily provide the results that you want.

The subject of this review should be right up the alley of many John Chow dot Com readers, because Viper Linking is all about generating thousands of one-way links. Google likes that, right?

Viper Linking for Thousands of Backlinks

As soon as you arrive on the homepage for Viper Linking, you are immediately hit with the bold statement that it can offer over 3000 quality one-way links. That’s a pretty big claim, how exactly does Viper Linking work in the first place?

My initial guess was that Viper Linking would submit your link to a series of web directories. That’s not exactly true. My other guess was that Viper Linking worked in much the same way as something like IZEA (formerly PayPerPost), where they would get bloggers to link to you for a price. That’s not really true either.

Instead, you submit a custom written article to Viper Linking and it will publish it on over 500 blogs instantly. The article can include whatever backlinks that you’d like. Viper Linking say that these blogs are indexed in Google and they have PageRank. In fact, some of these blogs are said to be a PR6.

In effect, you are spamming the Internet with your article. Wouldn’t this run into duplicate content issues with Google and other search engines? This is the fundamental challenge that I foresee with this model.

Registration and Submission

The good news is that it is free to register with Viper Linking. Simply hit the Register link along the sidebar and you are taken to a short registration form.

After verifying your email address, you are granted access to the administration area. From there, you can submit your article to Viper Linking through the simple one-page dashboard. If you need help, this page also has a video tutorial, but it’s pretty straightforward.

In the first area, you can select the relevant category for your article or target website. For example, if I wanted to buy links for my fighting games blog, I wold select Entertainment. By selecting the right category, you can presumably get more targeted backlinks from blogs in that niche. Other categories include Education, Finance, and Travel. After that, you have a Content Meta area where you can input the title, keywords, and a brief description.

Further down the page is where you can compose your custom backlinked article. It is a WYSIWYG editor with a word processor-like interface. This means that there are buttons in place for bold, italic, bullet points, and even emoticons. This will work for most users, but I would have preferred an option for raw HTML input as well. It’s unclear whether you can use raw HTML in this text input field.

After that, you submit the content and proceed to the payment page. From what I can gather, Viper Linking operates exclusively with PayPal.

Additional Webmaster Tools

Beyond the main backlink-generating service, Viper Linking also offers three free web tools. The one pictured below is for Google PageRank. There is also one to check for link popularity and one for search engine position.

Strangely, these tools automatically prefix any provided domain with a www. This may be fine for many sites, but what if you wanted to check the PageRank of a subdomain? What results is the PageRank of a subdomain that doesn’t exist. For example, when I check btr.michaelkwan.com (the URL to my blog), it checked www.btr.michaelkwan.com.

The Price of Generating Backlinks

While the system and user interface for Viper Linking are reasonably easy to understand and navigate, I’m not exactly sure if the backlink service is really worth it. After all, you have to provide your own custom article and then it gets published verbatim on a series of (what appear to be) splogs. The duplicate content thing with Google has to kick in, doesn’t it?

In any case, the standard price for Viper Linking for each article submitted is $39. This includes distribution of your article to over 500 blogs instantly and then another 500 blogs over the course of the next 90 days. Note that this price only includes 3000 characters, including line breaks, spaces, keywords, meta info, and the title. Every character over this limit is an additional 5 cents. You are also limited to three links within your article. Additional links are charged at $5 each.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER WITH VIPER LINKING

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I’ve been using video more and more in my blog posts. I’m not the only one doing this either. Many bloggers are adding videos to better communicate with their readership. While most everyone uploads to YouTube, it may not be the best choice if video quality is one of your main concerns.

To compare the video quality of the various video sharing sites, I uploaded the same video to YouTube, AOL Video, Google Video, Viddler, Vimeo and Yahoo Video. You can see the results below. Well, you can see the results from every site except for Yahoo - they’re still processing as I write this post. YouTube offers two quality settings so I’ve shown both. For reference, I’ve also embedded the original video file.

The video sharing site with the best quality is Vimeo and this is why I’ve been using it. Vimeo is also the only site that allows HD video. The downside to the Vimeo is the 500MB per week upload limit. They’re also very picky about their TOS. Shoemoney had his Shoemoney Tools video removed because it was considered too commercial.

While Vimeo has the best quality, it lacks the viewership of YouTube. The best solution would be to use a video distribution service like Tube Mogul. All I had to do was upload my video to Tube Mogul and it sent it all the video sharing sites on my list.

AOL Video

Google Video

YouTube Normal Quality

YouTube High Quality

Viddler

Vimeo

Original Video File

During Blog World Epxo, Abby Johnson of WebProNews managed to corner “The Big 3″ for interviews. Darren Rowse at Problogger talked about strategies for success, Shoemoney gave some advice on comments and content and I was asked for blog some monetization tips.

You can’t really go into full detail with a five minute interview but it does give you a taste of the strategies and ideas being put forward. The cool thing about WebProNews interviews is they’re done in HD and I can embed them right into my blog. Enjoy the interviews and I hope it helps you be more successful with your blog.

John Chow - Monetization Tips

Shoemoney - Comments and Great Content

Darren Rowse - Strategies for Success

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A blog that isn’t updated regularly is a dead blog. You might as well say goodbye to your readership if you don’t have quality posts on your blog on a regular basis. That’s why both John and I have discussed the power of the Wordpress timestamp feature. By using the timestamp, you can effectively write many of your blog posts in advance, getting them to go live at whatever point in the future that you’d like. This comes in really handy when you go on vacation, for example, and you may not have consistent access to the Internet.

Expanding on this concept is Blog Warrior Elite, the online application that serves as the subject of today’s review. You get the same concept as the Wordpress timestamp, but Blog Warrior Elite is quite a bit more powerful than that. Don’t just timestamp one post at a time; timestamp tens, hundreds, even thousands of articles at a time.

Designed for Regular Bloggers, PLR Article Users, Slave Sites…

This may be hard to believe, but you may not always have full acecss to the Internet. During these times, you can still draft up your blog posts in Notepad and save them on your local hard drive. Continuing with this concept, you may have multiple authors on one of your blogs and you may not want to grant them full access to your Wordpress dashboard. And let’s not forget about people who purchase PLR articles for posting on their sites as well. There are literally tons of scenarios just like these where Blog Warrior Elite can come in pretty handy.

In a nutshell, you can compress your articles into a single ZIP archive and upload them into Blog Warrior Elite. From there, the individual articles can be published on your blog using whatever schedule that you would like. When you consider the alternative — copying and pasting individual articles into the Wordpress Write tool — you can see how an article import tool like Blog Warrior Elite can save you quite a bit of time. Don’t set those timestamps one at a time; set them all at once through the Blog Warrior Elite online interface. You can also publish these articles on multiple blogs from a single interface.

Adding Blogs and Importing Articles

The main user interface may look pretty confusing at first, but that’s why there is a substantial help section on the site as well. The quick start guide is particularly helpful. In short, you create a user profile in your Wordpress blog, add your blog to the Blog Warrior Elite application, upload your articles, select the ones that you would like to publish, and set the time intervals for the articles to go live.

Perhaps one of the coolest features of Blog Warrior Elite is the ability to create a semi-random publishing schedule for the articles that you are uploading. When you have a very distinct posting schedule, readers may think that the publishing schedule is automated. This semi-random schedule, — read more about it here — gives readers the impression that you are actually publishing these articles live. Much more organic-looking.

Lucrative Affiliate Program

You do not need to sign up for the Blog Warrior Elite service to run the partner program. Simply sign up for the affiliate program, provide your PayPal details, and you’re ready to go.

The affiliate control panel is actually much more attractive than the main control panel for Blog Warrior Elite. Don’t you think it looks a little like the user interface on the Apple iPhone, only with a lot more red? The individual icons illuminate as you hover your mouse pointer over them.

The affiliate program pays 70% for every sale that you refer and these commissions are given out for every month as long as the referred membership stays active. It’s also very nice that you don’t necessarily need to use your provided affiliate link. Simply provide your own domain, verifying it by uploading a small text file, and all traffic sent from your site to their site qualifies for affiliate commissions.

Timestamp Your Way to Success

I’m not entirely sure how useful this online application would be for regular Joe bloggers who only publish a new blog post once a day or so, but it can come in very handy for people who manage multiple blogs and those who import a good number of PLR articles, for example. The interface is quite streamlined and I particularly like the option for a semi-random posting schedule. There’s even a built-in tool to check for duplicates.

Blog Warrior Elite costs $17 a month on a month-to-month basis. Alternatively, you can opt to pay $84 for six months ($14/month) or $120 for twelve months ($10 a month). Feel free to check out the free demo to get a feel for Blog Warrior Elite, but know that the free trial has limited functionality.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR BLOG WARRIOR ELITE

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Just saw over at Problogger who saw over at PaidContent that Bankaholic, a blog run by Johns Wu, was sold to BankRate for $15 million!

Financial info site BankRate is expanding its financial product listings, as it’s acquiring Bankaholic, which provides info on deposits, savings accounts, and money market accounts. The company will pay $12.4 million up front, with another $2.5 million possible earnout over the next 12 months.

The story goes to say that Bankaholic has a staff of one and Johns (both Problogger and PaidContent got his name wrong. It’s Johns, not John) will stay on to keep the blog running. Johns and Bankaholic are advertisers on John Chow dot Com. I’ve sent an email to Johns to confirm the story. I’m waiting for his reply. If it’s true, then I think I’m going to raise his ad rate!

Joking aside, if Bankaholic did sell for $15 million, then I’m offering Johns my huge congratulation. Drinks are on him at the next meetup!

*Update - Just got an email back from Johns. He has confirmed the sale of Bankaholic for $15 million. Huge congrats man!

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One of the coolest feature of the 3G iPhone is the high speed, always on, Internet connection. Having a constant connection to the Internet is pretty much a must have for any Dot Com Mogul. The main problem with the iPhone is the screen is too small to do any serious Web surfing. Yes, it’s great for Twitter or checking up on emails but blogging from it is an exercise in frustration. Fortunately, there is a way to extend that 3G connection onto your laptop by turning your iPhone into a wireless router.

Ed Lau and I were at Kam Do today for lunch and decided to do a video showing how to tether your iPhone to your Macbook so your Macbook can surf the Internet using the iPhone’s 3G Internet connection. You can do this with a PC as well. However, there are more steps involved because Windows like to add more steps. The setup works amazingly well. Just don’t exceed the limits of your data plan or you may end up with a huge cell phone bill!

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Still Selling SiteWide Links? That Means You Are Losing LOTS OF MONEY! Replace your sitewide links by TNX.net code and generate 10x times more income by selling different links from every single page of your website or blog!

After taking a few months off, the blog income report is back! The income report took a little break while I worked with Unique Blog Design to give John Chow dot Com a whole new look. The new theme is phase one of a makeover that will shift the blog’s dependence on advertising as its main income source.

The income report started back in September 2006 as part of a case study to see if you can really make money by blogging. The goal of the case study was to make full time income ($3,000 per month) with part time blogging (2 hours per day). In its first month as a monetized blog, John Chow dot Com made $352.94 and by September 2007, blog income hit $20,512.17. How well did John Chow dot Com do on its second anniversary as a monetized blog?

Total Blog Income for September 2008 - $38,030.57

September 2008 goes down as the blog’s second biggest income month. The blog did break $40K back in June but that was due to a $10,000 blog post. If that post was not taken into account, September 2008 would be the biggest month ever. Here’s the income breakdown.

• Affiliate Commissions: $12,807.69
• Private Ad Sales: 11,730.00
• Appearance Fees: $4,000.00
• ReviewMe: $4,000.00
• Text Link Ads: $2,028.59
• Shoemoney Tools: $2019.60
• Kontera: $1,000.00
• RSS Ads: $444.69
• Total Income: $38,030.57

At its current rate, the John Chow dot Com is on its way to a $400K year, which is pretty good for a blog that just rambles about whatever is on my mind. For the first time ever, affiliate commissions overtook private ad sales to become the blog’s number one money maker. This is something I’ve expected to happen and was working on. It’s part of my effort to make the blog less dependent on advertising sales.

Shoemoney Tools is part of affiliate commissions but I’ve separated it in order to show the residue income power of affiliate marketing. Shoe offers 20% for life on any sales you referred. Shoemoney Tools are sold by monthly subscription so you can make that 20% month after month after month. Refer enough people and it can create a nice pension. This is how affiliate commissions have overtaken private ad sales. I am still being paid for sales I’ve made years ago and that income will continue to come in even if I shut this blog down.

Blog expense for the month was $296.25 for contextual advertising. Hosting for John Chow dot Com is sponsored by BlueFur Webhosting. They provided the quad-core server that powers this blog. Use coupon code JohnChowRocks for 15% off any BlueFur hosting package.

How To Be a Six Figure Blogger

The key to making money by blogging is to drive a lot traffic and then maximize the hell out of that traffic. These are the two elements that you really need to work on. If doesn’t matter how great your content is if nobody reads it. However, if you have a ton of traffic but only run Google AdSense, then you’re leaving a ton of money on the table. Google AdSense is known as welfare for webmasters. You need to run as many revenue options as possible while still preserving the user experience. Check out my recommended money makers to see what systems I used to produce my blog income.

I also recommend you download my free eBook, Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com. The book explains the methods I used to create content, drive traffic and make money online. You can get it for free by signing up for my free newsletter at the top of the page.

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John Chow dot Com is not a blog strictly about how to make money online. We’ve seen a number of “rambling” posts from John, for example, as well as posts highlighting his culinary exploits. That said, the vast majority of review requests that come through this way have to do with affiliate marketing, blog designs, and that kind of thing. Such is not the case today.

Strangely, the review today is for a natural sleep aid and fat burner called LipoRidPM. This has to be one of the most off-the-wall requests that I have seen come through John Chow dot Com in quite some time.

The Pitfalls of the Dot Com Lifestyle

Most people like to applaud the advantages of the dot com lifestyle. You are not bound to any single location and you don’t have to have any set working hours. You can work form the comfort of your home, even in your pajamas and bunny slippers if that’s what you’d like to do. Working from home as an online entrepreneur, freelance writer, or any number of other professions sounds awfully appealing, right?

Well, the dot com lifestyle also has its pitfalls. because you feel like you can work at any time of the day, you may feel like you should be working at every hour of the day. This can result in long hours in front of the computer, a lack of exercise, poor nutrition, and a less than stellar night’s sleep. The LipoRidPM natural supplement might not help you with exercise, but they say that it can help you with sleep and weight loss.

She looks pretty peaceful, right? According to the official page, this “natural non-prescription sleep aid” will get you to sleep deeper longer and to lose weight faster. They claim that there are no side effects whatsoever, because LipoRidPM is made from all-natural ingredients.

Stop Counting Sheep and Start Losing Pounds

There are two components to LipoRidPM, attacking both your needs for proper rest and a healthy weight. According to the FAQ, LipoRidPM is “a nighttime sleep aid that suppresses after dinner food cravings, promotes sound restful sleep and round-the-clock fat-burning activity.”

There are several advantages to taking the natural route over prescription drugs. When you take prescription sleep medication, you enter what is known as a medicated sleep and this is not the deep REM sleep that provides the best kind of rest. LipoRidPM is said to lull you into a natural sleep while suppressing your post-dinner appetite. They also remind you that LipoRidPM isn’t just for obese people and it is safe for everyone.

Really? That’s How It Works?

I’m naturally skeptical about a long of things and these “natural supplements” are no exception. It could be because of my background in psychology, but I’m always on the lookout for proper studies that explain how (and whether) certain health supplements (as well as drugs, therapies, and so on) work. Hitting up the How It Works page for LipoRidPM, I find this “helpful” graphic.

So, I order the pills, pick them up from my doorstep, pop a couple before bed, and wake up feeling refreshed. That’s exactly the description I needed! Riiight…

I don’t expect a full medical explanation, but some supporting information would certainly help to legitimize LipoRidPM as a viable sleep aid and not some shady fly-by-night operation. The mass populace trusts the value of gingko, glucosamine sulfate, and other natural supplements, but they’ll want some reassurance about a relatively unknown supplement like LipoRidPM. The writeups on the Why Go Natural and Sleep Science pages are a good start, but I’d just like to see some references for where they got this information.

The Price of a Good Night’s Sleep

So, how much does it cost? If you want to buy LipoRidPM, you are rewarded for buying more. There’s a bulk discount. A single bottle, which is enough for one month, sells for $29.95. If you buy two bottles, you get a third bottle free. This works out to $19.97 a bottle. Alternatively, you can get a five month supply for $89.85 ($17.97/bottle) or a nine month supply for $149.75 ($16.64/bottle).

How do I feel about LipoRidPM? The official website looks like an affiliate landing page to me, but I do appreciate that it is a 100% natural supplement. At the same time, you have to remember that “natural” does not equal “safe”. I would feel much more reassured if this product was tested and certified by a trusted third party, like the FDA or a similar governing body. Without that, I really have no idea what pills I’m popping.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER LIPORIDPM NATURAL SLEEP AID

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OIOPublisher Direct has released Version 2 of their ad management software. OIOPublisher is the best solution for bloggers trying to sell direct advertising. Before OIOPublisher came along, I would always recommend new bloggers use ad networks instead of selling ads directly because you need to concentrate on producing content when you’re starting out. OIOPublisher automates the ad buying process so you can concentrate on blogging instead of selling.

With OIOpublisher, advertisers can order, pay for and upload their ads directly to your blog. The only thing you have to do is approve the ad. If you get a sale, then great. If not, then OIOPublisher will run network ads until you do. Some of the new features added to Version 2 includes:

• Possible to integrate the ad platform with any website that uses PHP
• Purchase / account pages are now templated, editable within the admin area
• Text links are now controlled via zones (like banner ads)
• Performance improvements - various caching options available (more to come)
• Full javascript ad display support
• Entrecard Payment option integrated

By far the biggest news is not requiring Wordpress to use OIOPublisher. The software will now work with any website that use PHP. Wordpress users still get the nice easy to install plugin. The other big news is the ability to accept Entrecard credits as a payment option.

If you running OIOPublisher Version 1, then you should upgrade to Version 2. It won’t cost you anything because OIOPublisher comes with free upgrades for life. If you don’t currently use OIOPublisher, then it will cost you $47.00. Ask any blogger who runs OIOPublisher and they’re tell you it’s worth every penny.

Limited Use $17 OIOPublisher Coupon

To celebrate the release of Version 2, OIOPublisher issued me a $17 coupon for you to take advantage of. Purchase OIOPublisher and enter johnchow in the coupon field at checkout to bring the price down to $30. The coupon is good for one week or 100 uses, whichever comes first.

Download OIOPublisher Direct

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It all started when I was in the market for a new notebook and decided to check out the new Santa Rosa Macbook Pro. My original intention was to replace the Mac OS with Windows (plus stick a MS sticker on the back of the screen) and be a thorn on the side of every Apple fan boy. Instead, I decided to run the Mac OS-X for a week just to see what the fuss was all about. That was a mistake because it made me realized just how much better OS-X is to Windows.

Today, I run nothing but Apple products in my office. My MP3 player is an iPod, my cell phone is an iPhone and I was recently given a Macbook Air to add to the mix. Does that make me a fan boy? No. What turned me into a fan boy was an incident at Blog World Expo.

I was in the blogger lounge taking advantage of the free WiFi when another blogger came up to me and ask if my WiFi was working. I replied yes and she asked how come it’s not working on her notebook. I looked over at her Dell laptop and answered, “Because you’re not on a Mac.”

Will I always use Apple products? That depends. I use Apple products because they are clearly better than the competition. There really is no rival for the iPod and the iPhone is the best cell phone I’ve ever used. However, if someone comes along with a better product, it won’t take much for me to switch. In that sense, I’m not a true fan boy but this ex-hardcore PC user is now a huge fan of Apple.

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While you could certainly attempt to do the affiliate marketing thing by relying on just a single affiliate program, that’s probably not the best course of action. You’ve heard me say it before and I’ll say it again: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Why is it, then, that so many would-be affiliate marketers focus their energies solely on the affiliate programs offered by eBay and Amazon? There are more opportunities out there, but it can be so time-consuming to hunt out just the right products to fit your chosen niche.

Reportedly helping you to not only seek out these great products, but also to populate your affiliate website with relevant content and videos is a helpful program called StoreStacker. The idea is that it is completely integrated with eBay, Amazon, Clickbank, Overstock, eBay, and more, effectively making “affiliate marketing easier, faster, and infinitely more profitable.” Here is my review.

Setting an Affiliate Website on Auto-Pilot

Now, we all know that it is perfectly possible to create a website from scratch, targeting whatever niche that you’d like. That’s all well and good, but it can also be incredibly time-consuming. Those of you who have been doing the affiliate marketing thing for a little while may also be familiar with scripts and software that can pull product lists from a single source, like the eBay affiliate program. That’s how AuctionAds got its start. Even with this latter strategy, you can be quite limited.

The key difference with StoreStacker is that it draws products from several sources simultaneously. Furthermore, every link is automatically converted into a masked affiliate link with your account information. This ensures that every outbound link has the potential to make you money and, at the same time, your affiliate IDs remain anonymous.

As it stands, StoreStacker can work with eBay, Amazon, Clickbank, Overstock, Regnow, and HotelClub. That’s for pulling the products based on your chosen keywords or keyword phrases. You can literally create thousands of product pages in an instant. The other half of the equation comes from YouTube and RSS, allowing you to populate your affiliate site with relevant articles and YouTube videos as well. Regular updates will encourage Google to send its spider bots to your site more often. That’s a definite SEO plus.

If you’d like, StoreStacker can be used to build a new affiliate website from scratch. Alternatively, it can also be integrated into your blog or installed into a subdomain.

Video Killed the Radio Star?

To gain a better understanding of how StoreStacker works and exactly what it does, the developers have put together a short video explanation.

Note that after you have setup your StoreStacker-powered affiliate website, it can effectively run itself, automatically getting updated with new products, new articles (via RSS), and new videos from YouTube. John always said that passive income is the best kind of income. They say that with StoreStacker, you can set it and forget it. And yes, a single license can be used on as many websites as you’d like.

Control Panel and User Interface

The developers tried their best to make StoreStacker as intuitive as possible. That’s why when you enter the main administration area for a StoreStacker-powered website, you will be shown the basic navigation at the top and a site preview below.

The navigation at the top is meant to be followed from left to right, just like how you read. Follow those steps in the provided order to setup and edit your affiliate site as you see fit. The settings menu is equally intuitive with drop-down menus and simple fields to fill out. This is where you decide on the length of descriptions, which template to use, and number of products to show on each page.

Integration Will Cost You

At first glance, StoreStacker looked like it could be a pretty powerful tool for all the affiliate marketers out there, because they could literally set up hundreds or even thousands of niche affiliate stores selling all sorts of targeted products from a number of different affiliate programs. After taking a peek at the purchase page, however, I found that there was a bit of a catch.

You see, the core StoreStacker software can be had for $97, offering you an unlimited domain license. The catch is that this core software only includes integration with eBay, Amazon, and YouTube (they’ve got a typo on the buy page too). If you want integration with ClickBacnk, RSS, RegNow, Overstock, or HotelClub, the associated plugins come at an additional price of $25 each. It’s also unfortunate that the StoreStacker script will not work with GoDaddy or Yahoo! hosting. That’s something they’ll definitely need to overcome.

All this said, StoreStacker sounds like it could pay for itself if implemented correctly, because it stacks the odds in your favor. The user interface is straightforward and StoreStacker could save you tons of time by finding all the relevant products for you. The developers are also working on additional plug-ins for more integration, so be prepared to fork out an extra $25 when you need those too.

CLICK HERE TO BUY STORESTACKER

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I’ve uploaded a bunch of photos from the 2008 Blog World Expo into my photo gallery. You should check them out if you haven’t done so. There are some pretty funny photos of Shoemoney and Darren Rowse in there.

Ever since the new theme went live, I’ve been receiving a ton of emails about the photo gallery. A photo gallery is a great way to keep readers on your blog longer and to increase page views. Depending on the photos used, a gallery can help connect the reader with the blogger. The software used to create my photo gallery is call Flickr Photo Album for WordPress by Tan Tan Noodles. It’s one of the best Wordpress plugin I’ve came across.

A Picture is Worth 1000 Words

This Flickr plugin for WordPress allows you to pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your blog. The plugin provides a very simple template that is fully customizable. Unique Blog Design was able to integrate it into John Chow dot Com Version 3 pretty easily. You can also hook the plugin up with Lightbox or any other number of display libraries.

Another really cool feature of the Flickr Photo Album is it will add new Flickr icon to your WordPress edit screen which will allow you to easily insert your Flickr photos into your blog posts with just a couple clicks. You can either have your inserted photos link back to your WordPress Flickr photo album or directly to your Flickr.com photo page.

To use the plugin, you will need a Flickr account. Flickr offers a free account that limits you to 200 photos and three sets. For $24.95 a year, you can upgrade to a unlimited account. Considering how many photos I planned to upload, that’s a really good price! Since all the photos are being pulled by Flickr instead of your blog, you’ll be saving server resources.

Download Flickr Photo Album for WordPress

Congrats goes out to Adam Mlynarcik of Crediv.com. Adam is the winner of $67 is cold hard cash! Well, it’s more like $67 via PayPal but you get the idea. Adman beat out over 120 entries to take the money.

Thanks to everyone who entered. It was a lot of fun. I think I’ll do this at every trade show where Market Leverage has a Cashinator running. After all, the best money to give away is other people’s money!

If you’re looking for more free stuff, then keep an eye out for next Saturday’s Dot Com Pho. I’ll have free “I’m Blogging This” or IZEA T-shirts for everyone who shows up.

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After a long layoff, Dot Com Pho returns to the place where it all started. Dot Com Pho started at Pho Lan and for this edition, we returned to the little Pho shop on Number 3 Road and Granville to shoot our latest episode. In attendance were myself and Sarah, Wolf, Ed Lau, Ray, Greg Morgan, Gary Ng and Stephen Fung, who showed up late.

A new feature of this week’s Dot Com Pho is the Twitter Shoutout. If you were following me on Twitter, you would have saw a twit asking for your name and blog to be included in the video. Those who replied to the twit in time will see their sites featured in the video. That’s one more reason to follow me on Twitter.

In addition to the Twitter Shoutouts, this week’s Dot Com Pho features blogging for food, Pho menu #21, lots of iPhones, Dot Com Pho pens, the tip of the week and how I got a free Macbook Air. Enjoy!

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Still Selling SiteWide Links? That Means You Are Losing LOTS OF MONEY! Replace your sitewide links by TNX.net code and generate 10x times more income by selling different links from every single page of your website or blog!

Have a Blog? Offer $20 BidVertiser Coupon of Free Clicks to your Readers - Simply signup as our referral and you will get a unique link which will give your visitors $20 in free clicks! And you will also get paid for it! Isn’t that a WOW?

It’s no secret that I like Aweber Communications. I’ve talked about them quite a few times on this blog and recommended them during my Super-Panel at Blog World Expo. During that panel, I said that giving a choice between building my RSS list or building a mailing list, I would choose the mailing list every time and that Awber is the best service to use.

The mailing list’s advantage over RSS is you can use it to promote things that are not part of your blog while RSS only sends out your recent blog posts. Another important factor is many people still do not know what RSS is but they understand what a newsletter mailing list is. Fortunately, Aweber gives you the best of both worlds.

With its Blog Broadcast service, Aweber can take your RSS feed and instantly turn it into a ready to mail newsletter. Aweber also reports your subscription count to FeedBurner so having readers signed up to your newsletter also increases your feed counter. Aweber accounts for 1/3 of my RSS readership.

It seems all my recommendations of Aweber got the attention of their Education Marketing Manger, Justin Premick. When I got home from Blog World, I found this gift in the mail.

Yes, Aweber sent me a pair of socks. They’re not just any socks, they’re Aweber socks! I must admit, it’s pretty unique and I’m sure when Justin sent it he was thinking, “Maybe John will blog about it!” Smart move Justin. Creativity like this is why I use Aweber and why you should too.

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Remember when you were a little kid shooting rubber bands at people? Well, if you had this rubber banding shooting gun, you would have been the terror of the school yard (and no doubt get kicked out of school as well).

The Silver Wolf pistol was created by a crazy Japanese fan of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. The Silver Wolf is the pistol used by Solid Snake, one of the game’s characters. Constructed of numerous cross-drilled plates and featuring both a laser sight and integrated flashlight, the gun looks to be very accurate to the real thing and is likely quite painful as well. Check out the video below of the gun in action.

If a game maker ever picks this thing up and manufactures it, I’m buying one!

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Have a Blog? Offer $20 BidVertiser Coupon of Free Clicks to your Readers - Simply signup as our referral and you will get a unique link which will give your visitors $20 in free clicks! And you will also get paid for it! Isn’t that a WOW?

Still Selling SiteWide Links? That Means You Are Losing LOTS OF MONEY! Replace your sitewide links by TNX.net code and generate 10x times more income by selling different links from every single page of your website or blog!