One Good Advice for Income Seekers Online

I've a piece of sound advice for you today: focus
on actually having made money in affiliate marketing
first BEFORE attempting to sell anything.

Sounds like common sense right? Well, look at some
of the launches around you and you can easily spot
some people trying to 'shortcut' their way.

:: It isn't difficult to make money online! ::

It really isn't. Neither is it DEAD EASY as well of
course. I'm sure you've heard of these methods:

* Article marketing - writing articles and driving
traffic to your adsense pages, presell pages or
squeeze pages.

* Web 2.0 marketing - using hubpages, squidoo lens
and blogspot blogs to send traffic to your 'money
pages'.

* Freelancing - using whatever good skills you
have and selling them to other marketers. You get
paid and would have built good relationships.
(provided you didn' screw up!)

* Creating presell/review pages and driving online
and OFFLINE traffic to it.

* Providing a service - forums, URL shorteners, a
job posting board etc and monetizing the traffic.

You might think to yourself, "oh yea, I know those
already". But give it a good hard THINK! Have you
REALLY tried them and made them work? Or do you
just "KNOW" them?

Have you tried but given up after seeing little or
no results? I often tell my marketing friends and
students that the people who are making the most
money online are the ones who tried the hardest and
failed the most.

Now go out there and make some profits!

Best regards,
Dylan Loh

Facts About Impulse Buying - Consider this when drafting your ads

By Vickie Champion

Debbie was called into the boss’s office Thursday and berated for something she didn’t do. She stewed all day, thinking about how her promotion was now in jeopardy. At 5 p.m., she grabbed her purse and headed for the mall. Debbie thought she needed a little retail therapy.

And why not? She was innocent after all. And the smell of leather from a fine pair of shoes has the power to comfort and soothe, the way Debbie supposed fresh baked goods could for other people.

The following morning, the shoes still in the box, she couldn’t help but regret her impulse shopping spree. Deep down, Debbie felt guilty.

It’s not what you do that’s important, it’s what you’re thinking when you do it that matters. If Debbie had thought about buying the shoes and saved for them, she most likely would have happily worn them at work the next day. Instead, her guilty pleasure sat untouched because her binge purchase was to alleviate stress.

Below are five facts about impulse buying that once realized could change your life:

1. By definition an “impulse” means unplanned, hasty and thoughtless. When we spontaneously buy something, most of us mistakenly believe we are in control. But in truth, we’re acting without thinking about it or the long term consequences. The mere ability to purchase something with cash, a charge card or credit card, doesn’t mean we are in control or have regained a sense of power we fear we have lost.

2. Anger, stress, guilt or boredom is usually what drives an impulse purchase. It’s true that buying things can put us in a better mood. But the high lasts only a short time and doesn’t address the reason we needed a quick fix in the first place. The pleasure Debbie felt from her pricey shoes only masked her anger and frustration at her work situation – it didn’t erase it or resolve it.

3. The positive effects of an impulse buy are replaced by guilt and possibly worse. A client of mine timed how long the good feelings lasted: 18 minutes. After that, guilt began to creep in. As soon as you think, “I shouldn’t have done that,” you know you made an impulse buy. By the time Debbie got home with her new purchase, the positive feelings had been replaced by negative ones. Guilt is bad enough, but others may also have to deal with the repercussions of mounting debt.

4. Impulse buying “nickel and dimes” us out of our dreams. Instead of saving for what Debbie really wanted – down payment on a house, a new car, a vacation to Hawaii – she relieved her stress with binges at the mall.

5. There are three easy ways to avoid or handle an impulse buy.
First, recognize that you have a choice. You can choose a quick fix to a temporary problem or you can choose to pursue your lifelong dream instead.

Second, wait! Before you buy, take three deep breaths. This simple exercise helps to release the immediate emotion. If you are already at your shopping destination before you calm down, take a little extra time to compare items. You may find that you simply don’t want to and go home. Or tell yourself that you can come back that the next day and buy the item. This will help you gauge whether you really want it. Had Debbie waited until the next day, she would have found that she didn’t want the shoes after all.

Third, learn to take it back. If you went ahead and bought something, and the thrill is now gone, take it back. You don’t have to live with the guilt forever. Because Debbie felt remorseful the next day, she returned the shoes.

Rather than heading to the nearest mall the next time Debbie is angry, frustrated, sad or bored she will release her emotions with some deep breaths, taking time to listen and trust her intuition.

Resisting the urge to impulse buy is one of the best things you can do for your wallet, but also for yourself. In doing so, you build your self-esteem in a way that no shoes could ever do!

Author's Bio
Vickie Champion is a business/life coach and speaker committed to helping people listen and trust their intuition and achieve their dreams. She has coached as many as 54 concurrent clients on a one-to-one basis and has given over 750 classes and workshops. For more information visit her at wwwVickieChampion.com or call her at (602) 249-1912.

AP Will Launch Scraper Bot - Not Targeting Bloggers

And 'hot news' misappropriating

The Associated Press plans soon to sic a scraper-bot on the Web to find swiped AP content. While no one would argue with taking on scraper sites, the vagueness of AP news editor Ted Bridis might be worth considering.

In an interview with Ars Technica, Bridis talked of a new technology (that writer Matthew Lasar cleverly described as a "search-and-maybe-threaten bot") that is on the horizon for the AP. The technology will identify and flag webpages copying entire AP articles. Upon flagging, AP lawyers would review.

Bridis insisted the news organization would not be going after bloggers or publications excerpting a paragraph of AP content and linking to the original. He admitted AP sometimes borrows excerpts from newspapers and crafts their own story around it.

But Bridis stopped there and made no such concessions about usage of headlines and AP ledes. Arguing the so-called "hot news misappropriation" doctrine, this could affect search engines, aggregators, and sites like the Drudge Report who display headlines and the first line of an article.

Also under the radar would be articles written based on AP content, especially commercial websites rewriting with hedges like "the AP has reported" or the "AP said." That's where the vagueness is troubling, and where the lines are fairly blurry. It's hard to tell if there is more emphasis on commercial or on an attribution method. It is also unclear what is meant by "rewriting." Does he define rewriting only as reporting the facts with only a word or two changed (i.e., plagiarism)? Or does Bridis also include rewriting as retelling a story in different words, or even summarizing facts?

Depending on how these questions are answered, Bridis could be drawing a line between blogs and news sites, essentially saying nonprofit bloggers can quote and refer but commercial news sites cannot. He's also drawing a line between textual storytelling and verbal storytelling. Bridis seems to suggest any commercial, textual relay of information wouldn't be considered "fair" use, so long as they can, in a decentralized communication universe, prove the AP was the only outfit that knew certain facts. That argument is rather stunning considering the AP is a distributor of news first written elsewhere in the world at local publications.

What's extra interesting is that though the AP has criticized fair use as a "misguided" legal theory, the organization itself is insisting on its own with a "hot news" doctrine, which is mostly semantic device to create a separate category for "facts," which are not copyrightable in the first place.

Ninety years ago, the AP sued William Randolph Hearst's International News Service (INS) for swiping breaking news the AP had gathered and distributing the news on its own. Over a lengthy court battle reaching the Supreme Court, the "hot news" doctrine was born. Though the AP essentially lost the suit because the courts found that facts could not be copyrighted, hot news (a scoop) was designated as a special kind of property to which the outlet breaking the news had exclusive rights for a limited amount of time. Just how long these special kinds of facts are protected is unclear, especially in the Internet age, when hot news gets cold much faster.

To succeed in its efforts, the AP will have significant legal hurdles in front of it. The organization will have to redefine fair use, get a court to uphold that some facts are protected and set some kind of timetable for that protection, explain how textually reporting facts to an Internet audience is different from reporting facts to any other audience by any other method, find a logical differentiation between bloggers and journalists, between Internet forums/social networks and water cooler conversations, convince courts previous precedents regarding aggregating, linking and snippeting should be overturned, all while avoiding federal charges of anticompetitive behavior.

Those are some pretty tall hurdles, and likely a 90-year-old argument from a different world isn't going to be able to jump them.