We talked so many times about Stumbleupon so I assume you already know that this is one great social network. Lately, Stumbleupon has introduced a new function called  sharing.

You can now share a story that you liked most with your entire list of friends.  To do this you have to go to “Your favorites”. Once you get there, you will see in the left side of the page a list of thumbnails. Mouse over one of those thumbnails and then click “Share” if you want to share that respective story with your friends. Here is how it looks like:

(click on the image for full size)

The good

It’s obvious that you can now easily share a story that you liked, with your friends. You can manually select some fellows or you just click on “all” and stumbleupon will do the hard work.

The bad

This is also obvious - spammers! Since this functions has been introduced, I started to get way too many stories into my email from people that only want to promote their websites. I do agree to be sent one or two stories per week from a fellow of mine, but sending me 2-3 stories / day / person is just dumb. I don’t even have time to read&see so many websites.

There was something like this before as well. It is named  “Send to” and can still be found in the toolbar. However, with “Send to” you aren’t able to send emails in mass.

Business cards are very important nowadays and I feel like they will always be important because of one simple reason: they are a must. Whenever going at a meeting, you will want to meet new people, interact with others and so on. Alright, you will talk a lot with them at that meeting but you will also want to talk with them later tomorrow so here’s where business cards are important - they will simply give one to you, which practically is a small card that contains little information about that respective person (name,occupation,phone/e-mail).

In return, you always need to have some business cards at you. Don’t fall in that shameful situation of not having a business card at you when someone asks you for one, you just can’t simple say “alright, do you have a pencil and a piece of paper? Write down my contact info!”.

UPrinting is one great company that delivers this kind of stuff - from business cards, to canvas prints, flyers and more, you can find out more by simply visiting their website.

Done with talking, let’s get back to serious things. Here’s one great giveaway that you will definitely like, sponsored by UPrinting:

Prizes:

- The first winner gets 1000 free standard size business cards.

- The second winner gets one free 18×24 canvas print.

You can choose from any of their stocks for these items.

How to enter:

It’s very simple. Just leave a comment at the end of this post, describing what you would use the free business cards/canvas print for.

Rules:

Winners will be picked randomly. Also, winners in the United States and Canada qualify for free shipping. Shipping fees will apply to winners outside these areas.

This giveaway will end on March 26. I wish you good luck!

Getting approved at big affiliate networks that have great payouts it’s a challenging thing, but my brain works on this principle “if he could do it, why couldn’t I?” and you should too. I am member of many affiliate networks and trust me, some of them are really really good (Market Leverage, MaxBounty,etc) but some offer only few campaigns that don’t even pay much. So, choosing and getting approved at a big and good affiliate network is an important step. So, how do I get approved by any affiliate network?

Tip 1 - Have an website/blog

I know, you could be a huge e-mail marketer, but this isn’t enough. Every big affiliate marketer has its own page on the web. Perhaps, you could make your personal website or blog where you describe yourself and what you do. This helps a lot, the review team will definitely think you are a serious and professional guy.

Tip 2 - Speak English fluently

This is only valid for people outside USA. If not all, 90% of the affiliate networks that exist will give you a call and ask you some questions. If you will say only “aaah”, “okaay”, “aaah”, your chances to get approved will decrease. If you are good at writing but not that good at speaking English, ask a friend of yours to speak instead of you.

Tip 3 - Don’t use “ghetto language”

You should never, but never speak with “yo”, “dawg” and I don’t know what other ghetto words when talking to an affiliate network staff member. You won’t be cool doing this, the person who you will be talking with will think you are just a kiddo or a douchebag that only had a dream to make money through affiliate.

Tip 4 - Be prepared to answer any question

Most of the affiliate networks if not all of them will ask you this when trying to join them:

“How are you going to promote our products?”

You should have an answer ready for this question and not babble. If you have a pause like “aaaaa”, your chances to be approved will decrease.

Tip 5 - Use email@your-domain.com instead of gmail, yahoo, etc

Some networks even request you to use the email provided by your domain name in order to verify that you really own that website. Using this tip will show that you are professional and don’t play.

There could be more, but following these tips should eventually get you approved by any affiliate network as long as it is open for new publishers. If you have any other questions, feel free to e-mail me or write a comment here and I will try to help you!

Getting approved isn’t really a big thing, the hard part comes when you have to make money, but this is the first step. You can’t make money without being a member somewhere.

I’ve just upgraded all my blogs, installing the new Wordpress 2.7 which seems to be fantastic! This is a review of the new Wordpress script.

First of all, I can say that Wordpress 2.7 has a new interface which, in my opinion, is better in terms of usability and design than the previous interfaces used on the older Wordpress scripts. You wouldn’t notice the changes looking outside-in, but inside-out. The admin panel got a very clean and modern look which reminds me of the operation system called Macintosh. Here’s how the new Wordpress 2.7 admin panel looks like (click on the picture for maximizing it):

What I like about Wordpress 2.7

I personally switched from Wordpress 2.2.1 (I know, I’m oldschool!) so obviously I had a big shock because the things are very different from what I was used with, but I addapted quickly to the new design because many things are now just much better! A new feature I really like is called “Screen Options”. What it basically does is to show or not show different things on the dashboard, things like “Right Now” (which is a short summary of your blog), “Recent Comments”, “Incoming Links”, “Plugins”, “QuickPress”, “Recent Drafts”, “Wordpress Development Blog”, “Other wordpress news”, you know, in general stuff that was before too but you couldn’t do anything about them. You aren’t interested in let’s say “Other wordpress news”? No problem at all, you won’t see that box any much longer! Another cool feature is that you can now drag the boxes and arrange them the way you like. To do this you must click and hold while moving the boxes.

Did you know that wordpress can be a feedreader too? Sure thing! You can now get the latest articles of your favorite blog right into your wordpress dashboard.

What I don’t like at wordpress 2.7

There are only few things I didn’t like. For example, I am a person who should wear glasses, so I would liked it more if the font was a little bit bigger in the “New Post” page. Another aspect that I didn’t really like is still related to my eyes. Although the new design is clean and modern, there seems to be too much gray and my eyes are hurt. I would add some more blue.

Conclusion

All in all, Wordpress 2.7 is great, and I again recommend you to try it. This way you’ll experience something new, something that will make you be proud of wordpress, and you will stay up to date with the latest security updates.

How do I upgrade?

Very simple! All you need to do is to download the new script from here, access your ftp, delete the old “wp-admin” and “wp-includes” folders, and then copy all the new wordpress files (skipping wp-content because there are your themes, pictures, plugins, and you don’t want to lose that), overwriting the old ones. If you encounter any problems, feel free to add a comment here, telling what happened and I will try to help you.

A very essential part of blog optimization is making it be a comfortable place for your old, faithful readers and even the new ones. I’m sure you agree with me that font size is a tricky part, on the internet, there are different opinions about how big or how small a font should be in order not to cause pain to the eyes.

I came across so many blogs and websites that had some really nice articles which could be a great read, but there was a major problem. The font size was too small for my eyes, so I couldn’t read anything. There were 2 possibilities: copy the text in a word processor and make the font bigger in order to read it without problems or just simply hit the x button and close the window. There are 99% chances that you would choose option number two (closing the window), and that’s exactly what I did. In other terms, this means money loss, high bounce rate, big decrease in the subscribers number, and more bad things for the one who tried to write a good article.

The best thing you can do is to install a plugin on your blog that will display a button on every article, a button that allows the reader to make the font smaller or bigger, according to his tastes. Luckily, if you are on wordpress, a smart coder made a very nice plugin called “WP-chgFontSize” which can be downloaded from here. Once the plugin was download, here are the installation steps, according to the author:

2. Decompress and upload the contents of the archive into /wp-content/plugins/.
3. Activate the plugin on your WP Admin > Plugins page by clicking ‘Activate’ at the end of the ‘WP-chgFontSize’ row.
4. Configure the plugin on your WP Admin > Options > Font Size page.
5. To use it, there are two possibilities:
* If your theme supports widgets, and you have installed the [widget plugin](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widgets/) or you are using Wordpress 2.2 or higher, add the ‘WP-chgFontSize’ widget on your WP Admin > Presentation > Widgets page.
* Add `<?php chgfontsize_display_options(); ?>` at the place in the theme’s file where you want the font size selection appear.

Regarding step 5, I personally chose the second option and it looks like this (click on the photo to make it bigger):

Again, I really recommend you to use this plugin which will definitely make happy some of your readers. If any problem occurs during installation, feel free to add a comment here telling what the problem seems to be and I’ll be glad to help.

As you all know, a blog is an online journal where you can write your thoughts, opinions about certain topics, in my case: blogging about blogging. Blogging has evolved over time and you can now see huge projects like techcrunch that are actually blogs.

What’s so great about blogging, you may ask. Well, the great thing is that you can get a response from your readers on your articles, that is called feedback. Really, everyone has an opinion and you’ll see how great you feel when someone posts a comment on your article. In blogging, connecting with your readers is essential if you want to “stand out of the crowd” and do something special. Maybe that is why in the last few years the “blogoshpere” has grown so much, it came with something special.

But how can you connect with your readers?

Read the rest of this entry »