Facebook - The First Month

My new profile on Facebook has probably been started for about a month. In that month, I have been relatively active on Facebook, adding friends, playing games, starting a group and generally getting a feel of how things work. And I have to say that it is most probably the most prodigious time waster ever invented!

Having said that, it is also a very effective tool for networking, marketing or simply making friends. In fact, many of the features of the apps and games on Facebook are designed with the viral element in mind, and I can appreciate that under the right conditions, a Facebook app can really spread like wildfire.

It usefulness in Internet marketing is undisputed. On Facebook, it is much easier to reach people with your marketing message than with other mediums. And if you are looking to build a list, just start a group and get your Facebook friends to join.

One thing about Facebook is the diversity of the people you encounter. I could start a group related to Internet marketing and invite all my Facebook friends to join. While I might get a response rate of 10% - 20%, that is achieved with minimal resources and effort.

But if I can find an offer which is of interest to perhaps 50% of the people there, and incorporate a viral element, things could get interesting.

Anyway, just thinking out loud. I'm going to continue to explore this new medium and its possibilities.

Facebook - Join Me On Facebook

I finally gave in to the Facebook craze and started a profile. I actually already a profile which I hardly use and I mainly use it for my offline friends. This new profile is for my online friends and anybody else that I might meet online.

I know you have heard it many times but I am still going to say it anyway.

Please join me on Facebook. This is the link to my Facebook profile. :)

Hub - True Faith

Back about 25 years ago, I had a remarkable experience in a little room on the 3rd floor of Bravo Company. During some recent discussions about God and faith at HubPages.com, I thought back to that experience. Although the experience I had was not a religious one, I realised that that must be what true faith should feel like - an unshakeable belief in something that can stand any test.

Read more....True Faith

SEO - Firefox SEO Tool Problem

I wonder if anybody is having any results from the Firefox SEO Tool plugin that I talked about yesterday. It happens rather inconsistently but when it does happen, the 2 lines generated before each site of the search engine result disappears. It seems to happen with Google.com but not with Google.com.sg. Checked out some sites but can find any such problem mentioned. Seems that at one point, about 3 years ago, there was a problem with country specific Google search engine.

Anyway, I didn't look too hard as I found a solution by accident. When the problem happens, look at the top menu of the web page where it says "Web", "Images", "Maps", News", etc. Click on "Images", and then click back to "Web". That should get the plugin working. At least, it works for me.

And if it still doesn't work, you did enable the plugin, didn't you? ;)

SEO - Firefox SEO Tool

Just found this great plugin for Firefox that's very useful if you are doing any kind of SEO work. For starters, when you search on Google, it gives you the page rank of each site in the results. So basically, you go to Google and do a search for your keyword. When the result is displayed, you can tell, at a glance, the kind of competition you have for your keyword.

In addition, it also gives you a bunch of other information like:

• The number of links pointing to the domain and to the page.
  
• Its Alexa page rank.
• The number of pages from the site that are cached in Google.
• The number of times the page has been bookmarked on Delicious.
• And much more.

In addition, when you visit a website, you can right click on the page and pull up all the preceding info about that page in a window. And if you are looking to build backlinks to your site. the plugin will highlight all links that are nofollow on a website or blog.

It's a dream come true. It makes the post I made about the Page Rank Tool seem so outdated.

And the only drawback? You gotta be running Firefox. With all the major browsers having generally the same features, that shouldn't be too big of an issue.

Checkout the plugin here.

Blogger Categories

Perhaps this post should be titled "Blogger Categories - Not!". I have started with blogger a few months ago. Since then I have also tried Wordpress. Overall, I am quite happy with blogger, finding their interface much more user-friendly than Wordpress. I can't comment more than that as I have only used them at a very basic level and is only now looking into a little bit more detail.

I started on the web some years ago, and I remember my first website. It was called NewbieLand.com. I registered it with Network Solutions but it never went online. Never having a good eye for color and design, I got so bogged down by the site design that I eventually lost interest. I wish I have saved the design. It could probably go down in history as the world's ugliest website. :)

Anyway, things are different now with website templates and website builders being freely available. In fact, I am actually going to use blogs as a website. They have ready made templates, easy to use back end interface, and a content management system. Of course, there are issues regarding images, and programming, but as I don't do too much of those on my sites, that is something I can live with. And I'm sure I can figure out a workwround should the need arise.

Anyway, I can have the website, which can be accessed through the static posts. This can be done through categories, or through pages, in Wordpress. In addition, I can also have a blog on the same site, which can serve as a blog, or serve as an update of the main site's content, or a myraid of other uses.

Using blogs software to develop websites is such an improvement over the usual way. It saves a lot of time, and the blog software provides so much more functionality. Recently, I designed a site in days, and the only website design I had to do was to select the template and modify the template's setting's. I did not even have to write a line of html code!

Having said that, I would like to complain about the lack of categories in blogger. While I am working around it - see the "Categories" on the right - as this blog is meant to serve as a blog and a website, it would really make my day to have categories built into blogger. :)

Site Review - Easy Money Making Ideas

I was expecting just another "make money while you sleep" site. While these types of sites are entertaining at best, they don't do that much to your pocket book. If anything, they tend to have the reverse effect.

Easy Money Making Ideas is not exactly an accurate description of the site. There are no long list of easy money ideas. Nor do you see any recycled reports about chain letters and pyramid schemes. Instead, the webmaster focuses on a select few ideas which can yield good income if done diligently.

The ideas contained in Easy Money Making Ideas are not that easy. But among the money making ideas that really works, and can yield very good money if pursued consistently and over the long term, the ideas on this site can really make you easy money.