Cracker Marketer

Happy Holidays

Zach — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 01:03:03 +0000

I’ve been kind of busy this week, with the holidays and all. Some family came up and we had the usual Christmas Day get-together. It was fun.

As for affiliate stuff, I’ve been reading up on PPC and playing with Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing, but so far no money earned yet. I think I’m getting the hang of it, though…

For those who want to get started in PPC, here are some resources I’ve found to be REALLY helpful:

Uber Affiliate Marketing Guide
The Super Affiliate’s Guide to PPC Marketing
Super Affiliate Mindset
Digital Point PPC Forum
Adwords Blog

New PC

Zach — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 02:12:33 +0000

I know this doesn’t have anything to do with marketing, but I thought I’d share anyway. I’ve had the same old HP desktop computer for 5 years, so last week I decided it was time for something a little more modern. I ordered all of my parts from NewEgg (great deals, by the way) and just got everything assembled tonight. This is the first time I’ve ever built a PC on my own before, and it scary and at the same time awesome. So far it’s all running swimmingly, except for the spark I saw when I first turned it on…I haven’t discovered what got fried, yet. Anyways, here’s what I got:

COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UB Black /Blue Computer Case

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ 2.1GHz Socket AM2 65W Processor

GIGABYTE GA-M61P-S3 ATX AMD Motherboard

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB 3.5″ SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Memory

MSI GeForce 8600GTS NX8600GTS-T2D256E-OC Video Card

SAMSUNG 20X DVD±R DVD Burner Black SATA Model SH-S203B

And the grand total of that was $504.93. Not too bad, I guess. It nearly tore my heart out working enough courage to order everything. I’m a huge tightwad and I spent all day fretting over whether to spend that much money. But, in a frenzy I went ahead and clicked the magic button and I’m glad I did. Now I can be more productive and get more into video editing and stuff. Also, I play a game or two occasionally.

Easy RSS Reading With iGoogle

Zach — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:51:43 +0000

I like having stuff available from everywhere–email (gmail), documents (Google Docs) and especially RSS feeds (iGoogle), so that if I don’t have access to my laptop I can access everything from any computer in the world that has an internet connection. Sure, there are other online services for RSS subscriptions, but I like everything in a centralized location. I can click a tab for email, another for docs, another for RSS and yet another for news.

iGoogle is a personalized homepage for those with Google accounts. It’s basically a themeable page on which hundreds of different widgets can be added such as calendars, daily comic feeds (Garfield is a favorite of mine), news, RSS feeds, and so much more. I love it, because I can just go to iGoogle and access everything I need.

How does one set up an RSS feed widget with iGoogle? Well, it’s easy if you already have a Google account! Here’s how:

1. Go to your iGoogle page

2. Click the add stuff link, as shown in the below picture.

3. Click the Add RSS feed link in the left sidebar.

4. Put in the feed URL of the website you wish to subscribe to. The feed of most Wordpress blogs is reachable by simply adding /feed to the end of the site’s URL. For example, the feed location of this blog would be www.crackermarketer.com/feed.

5. Go back to your iGoogle page, and view your fancy new RSS feed widget! You can now add more RSS feeds, adjust their settings (such as how many items to display in the feed), or add other widgets (or as Google calls them, gadgets).

UberAffiliate.com

Zach — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 23:22:33 +0000

While looking around for quality affiliate/internet marketing blogs, I came upon this gem. UberAffiliate is authored by a 19 year old affiliate marketer who has become VERY knowledgeable (and therefore, successful) about affiliate marketing. He has a lot of interesting stuff on his blog, and I’ve definitely found it to be a great read. UberAffiliate.com has only been up since September and it’s already become pretty popular.

Reading about his success is inspiring to me, because he’s around my age and has already “retired” from college. Something for me to aspire to, certainly.

Grooveshark

Zach — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 03:59:36 +0000

Here is one of the most innovative music-themed things I’ve ever seen. Introduced to me by Loyalis from Captain Squid, Grooveshark is an online music community that rewards users for sharing music. It’s a completely legal system of distributing DRM-free MP3s across a peer-to-peer network. No more crappy protection preventing people from doing what they want with their music. Awesome.

How does it work? Users upload their music to GrooveShark, and other users can purchase that song through Grooveshark. Artists get their share, Grooveshark takes a cut, and the person who uploaded the song gets 50% of the profit Grooveshark makes. Users are literally rewarded for selling their songs. It’s like the perfect music social network.

Head on over to Grooveshark and join the community and give it a try!