Top 5 sites to find free images for your Blog Posts, Logos, Banners and Headers

Published
by
Shypy
on August 6, 2008
in Graphics and Making Money Online
. 0 Comments

We’ve all had to do it sometime in our careers. I’m talking about creating headers images and logos for our sites and banners for advertisement.

Now I know some of you don’t like to get your hands dirty and outsource all the graphics work. But since I’m less of a designer/developer and more of a traffic broker, I don’t need super high quality graphics. Hence,  I do everything myself (well, alteast most of the time).

I use Photoshop CS3 and I like to think that I’m pretty good with it(I’ve tried to use GIMP too, and no, it doesn’t even compare(to Photoshop)).

We’re thus faced with the predicament of finding good quality, royalty free images that we can use for:

1. Website Graphics and 2. Blog Post Images.

Now I am not a kind of person that’d like to pay even a couple of bucks for an image, because creating designs is not what I make a living off. Either way, there are quite a few image sharing sites that provide roaylty free images for free. Here are my favorites, in no particular order:

1. Stock.Xchng - Thousands of images - many of them of very high quality. Unless you’re working on a really obscure niche (which is usually the case), this site alone will suffice.

2. Flickr - This is one of my favorite sites. Thousands upon thousands of highly imaginative and creative images taken by some of the best photographers in the world. The only problem with flickr is the fact that you can’t use the images without permission from the owner. Just send them a polite PM requesting the use of their photo/image in your website. Be courteous and very specifil - usually they let you use their image for free!

3. MorgueFile : Similar to Stock.Xchng. This is a good resource too.

4. FreeDigitalPhotos: Thousands of royalty free photos for websites, PowerPoint presentations, newsletters, forums, blogs, school projects and homework. Our images can also be used for artist’s reference, and video productions.

5. CreatingOnline Stock Photos: Very simliar to sxc.hu. Even though this has a relatively smaller collection, you can still find some great photos if you’re lucky.

There you have it - now you know where to head off for when you’re looking for that special photo for your banner and dont want to open your wallet.

Mozilla Firefox - How to make all extensions work for Firefox 3

Published
by
Shypy
on August 5, 2008
in Firefox
. 0 Comments

It’s been over 40 days and 28 million+ downloads since the launch Mozilla Firefox 3 and it’s not a surpirse Firefox has gotten that kind of response, since it is simply the best browser out there.

What surprises me though, is the number of firefox users who havent upgraded from Firefox 2.0.0.13 just because some of the addon’s are not compatible with FF3. As you might have noticed, almost all of the more famous ones have been made compatible for FF3 and so have many of the not-so-famous ones.

So if you’re among the few who are hesitant to lose their precious addons after updating, here’s a simple solution.

It’s called the MR Tech Toolkit Firefox Addon.

Here’s how you make your old extensions work with Firefox 3:

First of all, you’ll need to download Firefox 3.0.1.

Install the MR Tech Toolkit and restart firefox.

Click on the Tools Menu -> Addons.

Find the addon that is not compatible with FF3. Right click on it and select “Make compatible”. Restart Firefox.

There you have it - MR Tech Toolkit will make most of your old extensions work with Firefox 3.

Now I never want to hear any excuse for not updating to 3.0 again.

Have fun :)

How to Download From Rapidshare despite IP Bans

Published
by
Shypy
on August 3, 2008
in File Sharing and rapidshare
. 0 Comments

Apparently Rapidshare.com has blocked certain Indian IPs. Here is the message that I get when I try to download files from rapidshare.

Call my ISP? Like they’re gonna do something about it.

Since they wont allow you to access their site directly, here are a couple of tricks that you can use to fulfill your filesharing needs:

1. Use a proxy. Not any proxy will work for downloading files with rapidshare though. You’d best use a CGI Proxy. Just google for “CGI Proxy” and you’ll get what you want. Here are a couple of good ones that I like to use:

http://youhide.com

http://url1.in

http://nocheck.in

Enter your download link in the page and you’ll probably be able to download the file at full speed. Make sure you select the checkbox that says “allow scripts” or disbale the checkbox which says “disable scripts”.

2. Alternatively, you can dump rapidshare altogether. There are plenty of reliable free filehosts out there. My personal favorites are Mediafire and SendSpace.

There you have it. Thanks to Shypy, rapidshare banning your IP range doesn’t affect you anymore.

Free Report - Overwhelming response

Published
by
Shypy
on August 1, 2008
in Affiliate Marketing and Making Money Online
. 2 Comments

So the other day I found a relatively new advertising network. I joined up, submitted a couple of my sites and thought their payment scheme was really cool. That prompted me to write a 3 page report on how you could make a quick buck from the site in question.

In the beginning, I thought about selling it over at the DP Marketplace for 10 bucks apiece. I did some math. If I sold it for $10 and managed the thread really well, showing the door to the freemongers(review copy please?), etc I’d manage to sell 15 copies at the very most(and that’s being optimistic). That would make me about $150. Now that’s not bad, but well, I had other ideas in mind.

Here’s what I did - I gave away the report for free. And not just anywhere, I posted it on the freebies forum. A mad flurry of incoming and outgoing PMs later, I’ve given the book away to atleast 300 people by now.

And you can get it for free too. Click here to download.

Oh, and by the way have you guys seen the Harry Potter 6 Trailer? Looks like a so-so movie - I’m not too impressed.

Video of the Week

Published
by
Shypy
on July 30, 2008
in Videos
. 0 Comments

Wednesday is Video of the Week day. Today we have the supremely talented Jeff Dunham with Achmed the dead terrorist in one of the most viewed youtube videos of all time.

If you still haven’t seen it(were you living under a rock till now?), now is not the time to miss it.

The Easier Way to Move A Wordpress Blog to a New Host

Published
by
Shypy
on July 28, 2008
in Wordpress
. 0 Comments

The other day, I wrote about how you can move your wordpress blog to a different server/host.

Although moving your database and files is quite a foolproof way to move your script, a couple of my friends reckoned that they’d rather stay away from databases. Although phpMyAdmin is a GUI based solution, people’d rather not mess with databases at all if they could help it. Furthermore, manually moving all the files could be time consuming if you have a slow connection at home.

That is why I decided to publish this post which shows an easier way to do the same without the hassle of meddling with phpMyAdmin.

This uses the export feature provided in the wordpress dashboard.

So here’s how you move to a new host in 2 mins:

1. Login to your wordpress blog/site

2. Click on the Manage Tab and Select “Export”. Select all authors and Download the Export File.

3. Save the .xml file on your localhost. You’ll need this later when you export it back to the new server.

4. Note down your permalink, plugin and theme settings. You’ll have to manually reset them in the newer installation.

Permalink Settings

Permalink Settings

5. The export is now complete. Head off to your domain registrar and change the DNS settings to the one provided by the new host.

6. Open cPanel on the new host and create the addon domain. Use the 5 minute install <link here> or fantastico to install a new version of Wordpress.

7. Login and head off to the “Manage” tab. Select “import” and upload the .xml file that you downloaded in step 2.

8. Now you will have imported all your posts and comments to the new location. Time to tweak a few settings to make it look completely like the older version.

9. Delete the default “Hello World post”. Change the permalink settings to match those you noted in step 4.

10. You’ll also want to upload the previously used plugins to the wp-plugins folder. Upload your old theme to the wp-content folder and select it.

11. Move the wp-uploads folder.

12. Voila, your wordpress installation is complete. Your new blog looks exactly like the old one.

First CPA Commision

Published
by
Shypy
on July 27, 2008
in Affiliate Marketing and PPC
. 0 Comments

I have been willing to get into PPC -> CPA marketing for a long time or another, but due to one reason or another(read laziness), I wasn’t able to get started with it.

A week ago, I managed to sort it out, discipline myself and have a serious go at it.  My first couple of campaigns (one was related to weight loss and the other related to designer shoes), were not profitable so I dropped them in a couple of days. This time, I selected a simple two-page submit with only one field to be submitted on each. It was then that I hit the target (or atleast inched a little closer towards it). This campaign has generated my first CPA profits, and I am feeling quite happy to be on my way.

Here’s my last couple of days. Not bad considering the fact that I’ve never done serious PPC marketing before:

I have 4 more days in June and hope to achieve reach my target of $200 in gross commissions for the last two weeks of July.

My goal for August is to earn atleast $1000 in CPA commissions.

It’s not that hard once you take care of a couple of things:

1. Do not direct link; at least not with google adwords. Since Quality Score is such a big issue with Adwords, your max CPC can shoot through the roof if you’re directly linking to the merchants page. Use a landing page - this will boost your Quality Score and help presell the customer before he’s sent to the merchant’s page.

2. Use as many keywords as possible and sort them into as many ad groups as possible.

3. Take your time while creating the keyword list and weed out the ones which look out of place. Also make sure you don’t use broad-match - and if you do, make sure that the max CPC is set pretty low. Use negative keywords

4. Keep testing and tweaking. Take a peek into your campaign every 6 hours and observe which adgroups are converting and which aren’t. Split test landing pages and ads & keep the profitable ones.

5. Do not feel defeated even if your first couple of campaigns don’t turn out to be profitable. It is easy to lose quite a bit of $$$ with adwords in the beginning but be persistent and trust yourself. No one said it was going to be easy - keep working at it.

Oh, and by the way the CPA affiliate network that I prefer and use is Coepac.

Downloading Movies from IMDb.com | Hacking a Greasemonkey Script

Published
by
Shypy
on July 25, 2008
in Hacks
. 0 Comments

Greasemonkey is a Firefox addon that allows you to customize your browsing experience using snippets of JavaScript code.

You can find a huge collection of different types of user-written scripts to install run on Firefox(with Greasemonkey installed) or Opera.

Movie Dude is a UserScipt that cross-links movie sites so you don’t have to search for a movie info on related sites.

e.g Say you’re browsing the imdb page for The Dark Knight. Now if you want to visit the wikipedia entry for the same movie, you’d have to open a new tab and run an independent search.

Now with the Movie Dude script installed, you’ll automatically see small icons for  related movie entries different sites including Wikipedia, RottenTomatoes, Google Video, YouTube, MetaCritic, etc.

You can also edit the script to make it display related link from other sites. Here’s a little hack to add ThePirateBay Movie Search and Mininova Movie Search to the list.

If you’re on Firefox you’ll need to have Greasemonkey installed. Then go ahead and install the Movie Dude script.

Open up the .js file for editing in your favorite text editor and add these lines to the code:


Mininova: {
name: "Mininova",
link: "http://www.mininova.org/search/{search}/4",
icon: "http://www.mininova.org/favicon.ico",
scanURL: "mininova.org",
},
ThePirateBay: {
name: "ThePirateBay",
link: "http://thepiratebay.org/search/{search}/0/99/200",
icon: "http://www.thepiratebay.org/favicon.ico",
scanURL: "thepiratebay.org",
},

Save the file and you’re good to go. Now whenever you’re browsing IMDb and feel the urge to *ahem* have a look at *ahem* the mininova listings, all you need to do is click on the link at the top of the page.

Have Fun!