If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. So that you can read the latest updates about Web2.0 tools, Making Money Online, Tips in SEO, Ajax and many more. Thanks for visiting ProgramimiCOM!

Podcasting is a relatively new method of delivering radio to listeners with internet access. This free method of listening to your favorite radio show is becoming increasingly popular as more and more people learn about it. Podcasting is usually commercial free, which is another reason for its popularity.

Podcasting is also extremely popular because you choose when and where you want to listen to it. You can also decide which episode you want to hear and have a choice of listening to the podcasting episodes on an iPod (where this distribution form got its name from), a computer or any MP3. The flexibility of podcasting has catapulted it into the public’s attention.

In order to get started downloading podcasts, you need to download a podcatcher program. This allows your computer to automatically download podcasting episodes of your favorite radio shows which have been converted into digital audio files. There are several podcatchers, with the most popular being Apple’s iTunes which is also a searching device for new and interesting podcasting. You can use it to find more radio shows that you might be interested in listening to.

Other podcatchers that are free include Juice and Odeo. Both of these podcatchers also have podcasting search engines built in so you find new radio shows to download. Once you have a radio show that you wish to listen to, you can subscribe to the RSS feed so that your podcatcher can download the radio shows without you having to go to the radio website each time a new episode is released. This saves incredible amounts of time and is quite easy to use, as all the podcatchers have an easy to use interface that allows you to subscribe to the RSS feeds with just the click of a button.

Once you have set up your podcasting preferences, you don’t have to worry about anything except searching for new and more interesting podcasting feeds. It is very easy to discard or erase any shows that you no longer enjoy and since all the episodes of your favorite radio shows will be saved on your computer, they are able to be accessed or downloaded to your iPod or MP3 player for easy listening whenever you wish. Unsubscribing from any podcasting broadcast is quite easy as well and you can quickly find new shows to replace the ones you delete.

There are various websites dedicated to podcasting where you can find information and new podcasts as well as fellow radio fanatics who are more than willing to share their favorite radio show feeds with you. Among the more popular are Podcasting News and Podcast as well as Podcast Alley. You can find podcasting forums on all of these websites as well as featured radio shows, both popular and lesser known. It is a good opportunity to find something new and unique for your personal radio programming.

Podcasting is still growing in popularity as it is a fairly new technology. It has great potential though and will probably continue to improve and expand over the years to come, so go ahead and jump in now.

• 0 Comments

If you have even a remote interest in earning money on the internet, you have probably come across those pay per click programs that promise fabulous amounts of money just by clicking on ads and completing free offers. Are these things for real? Let’s take a look at exactly how they work and why you should avoid them.

The reality is that these pay per click websites are earning quite a bit of money off of their users. Sure, they might pay you a sum of money for doing the offers on their site, but rest assured that they are earning far more than you are! Between paid ads and the payment they receive for sending you to collect all those special offers, the pay per click sites are raking it in! And they have even more techniques to make money off of their unsuspecting users.

For example, have you ever read the Terms and Conditions contract that is on the website of one of these pay per click programs? If not, you should. You are almost guaranteed to find that they are not protecting you against anything. Your private information will become public knowledge and not only that, but possibly sold for yet more profit by the pay per click company or its affiliates!

While many pay per click sites really do pay up, they often have a payout limit that takes forever to reach so many people give up before getting to their goal of $50 or whatever the amount is and the company never needs to actually pay up. And when you do reach the payout level, there are far too many pay per click sites that actually refuse to pay!

That is the downside of the actual pay per click company, but what about the offers that you are completing? There are assorted different offers that you can fill out. Anything from simply filling out a form with your email address and name to ordering a product or a quote that you pay for and are then reimbursed for (on top of which you receive a bonus from the pay per click company).

If you fill out a form on a pay per click site, you are probably signing up for an email newsletter from the company that is paying. These are the lowest paying pay per click actions, ranging from fifty cents to a dollar. You are guaranteed to receive heaps of ads and junk mail to your inbox after signing up for one of these offers, and just deleting them all takes so much time that the piddly sum isn’t worth it!

As for the major pay per click offers where you sign up for a free trial period or a quote or other item that requires you to enter your credit card, stay far, far away. Too many people have been cheated out of their money by these companies when they were unable to cancel their membership when the trial period came up. These sites are usually designed so that you can’t quit even if you want to and they just keep charging your credit card, month after month.

Pay per click programs sound great, but they are often a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It is better to look for a real online job rather than waste your time with these programs.

• 0 Comments

For those of you who are new to the internet this whole online business thing might seem a little overwhelming. If you have never really surfed online, you might find yourself wondering how to find information on the things that interest you. Once you get the hang of things, you shouldn’t have any troubles at all. This article will explain the basics for you.

Search engines are the new to the internet surfer’s best friend. The most popular ones include Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves. There are plenty of others, but as someone who is new to the internet, these will serve you just fine.

Since you are new to the internet, what a search engine does is take the important words that you type in and looks for the same words in millions of webpages around the world. It then throws back all those matching pages and they appear in front of you. This usually only takes a few seconds since all these pages and articles are already indexed. The most popular and most relevant (according to the main words) will appear at the top of the list.

For example, if you type in “craft supplies, wheat, felt, google eyes”, your first results on the search engine page will appear with all of these. Further down, or on the next page will come those that didn’t match all of the search terms. Perhaps they only had felt and craft supplies on the list. And so on and so forth until in the last pages you are looking at just one of any of the words that you entered, such as “eyes” or “craft”. For this reason, most people don’t bother looking further than those first two or three pages.

Once you have typed in the words or phrases that you are interested in and gotten back your results, you are ready to start looking at websites. This can get a bit confusing for those who are new to the internet. There is so much information crammed into a tiny space that it can be difficult to know what to look for. The first few results on the page, the ones that are separated by a colored box or a line, are sponsored links and they will generally lead you to a website that is trying to sell you something. Most new to the internet explorers fall for the appealing text of these ads, so stay away from them. Continue downwards until you find the real websites.

Each website has a title and a brief description. You can often tell from the few sentences that you can see whether or not this is something that you wish to look at. Many people who are new to the internet only read the titles and click, but these are not necessarily indicative of what there is on the page, so read the description, too. If the site is not what you thought, hit the back button at the top of your screen and try another site.

Just because you are new to the internet doesn’t mean you need to end up lost in cyberspace. Understanding how to use a search engine is the first step in getting to the sites you want to visit. After that, everything else is easy.

• 0 Comments

You see banner advertising everywhere online. They are those wide picture bands that stream across the top of WebPages, or down the sides, claiming that you can change your life by clicking on the photo. The great thing about banner advertising is that you, the average webmaster, can earn money with them!

There are a few different ways to bring in the cash with banner advertising. The first is to take on paid advertisers. These are companies that pay you to have their banner on your webpage. They provide you with the code and you place the banner advertising on your website. The price often depends on the placement of the ad on your page. For example, the highest payment would come from a banner ad at the very top of your page since this is where most people look first. A banner at the bottom will not earn you as much.

Banner advertising from third parties pay in one of two manners, per click or per impression. Pay per click is slightly higher than per impression. This is due to the fact that you could have a million page hits and only three or four clicks on the banner ad. However, although higher in pay, the pay per click program requires that your visitors actually take an action upon seeing the ad, or you receive nothing. For this reason, some webmasters prefer the pay per impression. Every time the page loads with the ad on it, you receive a small amount of money.

The second method of earning money is to promote affiliate programs through banner advertising. This requires that you sign up for as an affiliate for a product that you want to promote. You will be given the necessary codes to place the banner you choose (there are often several options) on your WebPages.

Affiliate banner advertising can be very productive in the way of earning, but they are more difficult to earn with. To get your money from the average affiliate program, you must have visitors that not only click on the banner, but perform a specific action upon being transferred to the ads website. This usually means buying a product or signing up for more information or paying for a membership of some sort. Obviously, many people will click the banner, but never pay a dime, leaving you with nothing.

With affiliate banners, you can actually write a review on your website, directing people to the great offer within the banner ad. This will raise the possibilities of having your visitors actually complete the offer. If they do, you will earn far more than simple third party ads. Affiliates often pay up to hundreds of dollars, depending on the product they are selling.

The last type of banner advertising is from Google Adsense. These pay you per click, with the rate depending on the popularity of the keyword. Adsense is a rather complicated subject and it is best to research it before using.

Banner advertising is a great way to add a bit of extra income to your website and they are free to set up, so there is no reason why you shouldn’t start putting them on your site today!

• 0 Comments

No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your site is as useful as an empty shell. Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.

The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.

Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease.

Ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors. Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the crème de la crème of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.

Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.

• 0 Comments

Networking is a vital part of internet marketing, but one that is often overlooked. Working online, it is easy to forget that there are real live people out there who are interested in the same things you are and who are also struggling to get into internet marketing for their own businesses. By hooking up with these other business people, you can form a valuable networking community that in beneficial to all involved.

The best way to start networking is to join internet marketing forums. There you will find like minded webmasters who will be interested in forming liaisons. Also, those who are not appropriate for joint ventures or link sharing will probably have some excellent advice for you. Internet marketing forums are wonderful places to have your questions answered whether you are new to the game or not.

When networking with other internet marketing pros, don’t forget about joint venture partnerships. This is when two or more internet marketing webmasters get together to form a temporary partnership that is mutually beneficial. This might be teaming up to create an information product giveaway event, where everyone chips in a product and their opt in list, or it could simply be writing an e-book together. The choices are endless, really, but this is a form of internet marketing that should never be ignored.

Another vital part of internet marketing is forming a network of affiliates. If you have a product that lends itself to an affiliate program you should certainly consider it! Imagine an entire army of vendors selling your products! They can reach places that would take you months or even years to get into. This is internet marketing at its finest. And setting up an affiliate program doesn’t need to be a hassle if you go through a reputable website like Clickbank or ShareASale. These programs will help you get your networking with affiliates off the ground for a modest fee.

You can also start networking by looking at websites that are similar to yours, but not necessarily in direct competition. Write the owner and ask if they would be interested in doing a link share or even mutual reviews of each other’s website. This can be a great way to expand your internet marketing network as well as make new friends and get some reciprocal links, which allows you to tap into the other site’s visitors.

Just taking the time to get to know other internet marketing specialists is a form of internet marketing in itself. You are not only learning, but answering questions and forming business bonds that could be extremely useful to you in the future. Plus, by speaking with other webmasters, you increase interest in your website and if you have high quality content, someone from your new network might even link to you without being asked to! A mention on their website is even better and a full-on recommendation will send you loads of potential customers.

Internet marketing can be a bit tricky when you are first getting into it, but with a bit of networking skill, you can quickly learn what you’re doing and turn your website into a success.

• 0 Comments

Graphics can add a real nice touch to a website . . . or they can slow it down so much that no one will wait for the page to load! Webmasters designing new pages are forced to examine the pros and cons of web page graphics. As you plan your latest website project, will you use graphics or not, and if so, should you? Here we will look at both sides of the equation.

It all boils down to functionality. If you are selling paintings on your website, you will obviously need graphics, no two ways about it. The same goes for nearly any kind of product that could be featured graphically, such as books, stereos, etc. People like to see what they are buying, so you pretty much need to have pictures for these items.

However, if you are going to put photos of your products up, you should consider making them thumbnails for faster loading and make them clickable. Clients can then choose which one they want to see in more detail and click to see the full version. Since they know what they are doing, they won’t mind waiting a little extra time to see the product graphics.

Apart from purely practical use, should you use graphics on your website? That depends on what kind of graphics you want to use. You need to make the page easy to read and relatively fast to load. This rules out most giant graphics, such as photographic backgrounds, unless they are absolutely necessary.

If you do decide to use some reasonably sized graphics, you should try to limit the number per page. While a cute logo is fine, having little animals all over your sidebars and buttons can be not only distracting, but it also looks pretty unprofessional. Cluttering up your site with too many graphics is not generally a good idea, it gives a bad impression and if you are trying to sell something, an amateur look is not the way to go, no matter how fun it is.

When deciding whether or not to add graphics to your website, you should consider whether or not it adds quality to the page. Do you feel that your website will be represented through the graphic you are considering? Will it help sell your products? Is it going to convince the customer to stay when they might have thought about clicking away? If you find yourself saying yes to any one of the above questions, you have a good reason to be putting graphics on your site. Otherwise, you should probably forget about it and stick to a more simplistic look.

The decision of whether or not to display graphics on your website really is a personal one, but it can make all the difference in terms of sales and how many visitors actually stay on the page! If it takes too long to load graphics that you simply must have, try lowering the resolution a bit for faster loading times. Remember that people are impatient and will simply click away to another site if yours is too slow or too cluttered.

• 0 Comments

Offers for free stuff abound on the internet and many of them are completely legitimate. While it might be nice to get a free sample of mocha coffee or a free pair of baby booties, what do you really do with all that free stuff? Why not earn some cash with it?

Free samples are so prevalent online that you can literally order five or six things every day and be getting free stuff in the mail for a month! These samples are available for everything from coffee creamers to baby wipes and antacids. The idea behind them is to turn you onto the products so that you will begin buying them, but you can also turn free stuff into cash in your pocket by reselling it.

Let’s start with samples. If you package similar items together, you have the perfect “sampler kit” or gift basket. All you need is three or four related items and you are good to go. For example, you could get together some baby products, a sample of Dove soap, a couple mini packs of baby wipes, a formula sample and maybe even some talc powder or baby perfume. Put those all in a cute basket along with a bow and cellophane and you have the perfect newborn gift basket.

To create a sampler pack, you need items that are even more similar, like coffee. If you can get eight to ten different coffee samples, they can be packaged together in a neat little box, perhaps along with a mug or creamers and sold as a sampler pack. No one will ever know it was created from free stuff!

Larger free stuff like baby booties and T-shirts can be resold online, on Ebay or Craigslist, for example. If you get together several T-shirts or other items that are similar, you can sell them on Ebay as a package deal, charging only a few dollars per item. Let’s face it after all, this was free stuff, so even a few pennies are pure profit!

Often, for free stuff that is actually worth something, like a necklace or book, you will have to do something in exchange. This might be signing up for an email newsletter or giving some kind of information, but there will be an exchange required. In most cases this is completely worth it since you can resell the item for a small profit.

To get really great free stuff, look for 100% rebates. This means that you actually buy the item, but with the rebate, the cost of the entire item is refunded, leaving you with high quality free stuff. You can find great rebates at places like buy.com, or search for them on Google.

Not only is it fun to get free stuff, but if you can also earn from it, what’s stopping you? Start ordering your free stuff today and in 4-6 weeks, you should have all the product you need to get your own free stuff business off the ground!

• 0 Comments

Using Wi-fi in public hotspots can be dangerous when packet sniffers are readily available. You’d want to encrypt and protect what you are sending and receiving over the network. Even at home if you don’t want people on the network logging your activity (for whatever reason) you would want to encrypt your traffic. An excellent way to do this is to set up a proxy over an SSH connection. You will need the following to do this (works for any platform):

• PuTTY for your platform (I use v0.59)
• A server that supports SSH (either set up at home or your web host)

That’s it! First set up PuTTY to connect to your SSH server but also set the following Tunnel settings:

• Source Port: 7070 (this number can be pretty much anything)
• Destination: localhost
• Select Dynamic and Auto

Then click Add and it should show up as D7070. Select Open and log-in. Your traffic can now be forwarded once you configure your applications to use the proxy.

In Firefox (2.x), go to Tools->Options->Advanced->Network->Settings and set the following proxy configuration:

• Manual proxy config
• SOCKS Host: localhost
• Port: 7070
• SOCKSv5 (or v4, doesn’t matter)

Then hit OK and you’re done. To make sure the proxy is working, you can go to a site that will display your IP address or location. You can also encrypt your BitTorrent traffic or your MSN connection by changing connection/proxy settings to point to localhost port 7070 using either SOCKS v4 or v5.

An easy way to switch proxy settings in Firefox is to install the Switchproxy add-on — change proxy settings with just a click. Enjoy your secure browser session!

• 1 Comment

You have probably seen the ads for email reading programs. They claim that you can get rich by simply reading a few emails each day and hundreds of thousands of people sign up for these programs. Exactly how legit are these businesses? Can you really earn money by just reading an email or two?

The way email reading services work is that they offer clients a certain number of hits to their websites. The clients pay for this service and the site then turns around and pays people like you to receive emails which must be opened and have a specific link clicked on in order to qualify. You usually have to stay on the advertiser’s site for 30-60 seconds before your hit is counted and you will be paid.

In general, reading and clicking an email is not a high paid job. You end up getting somewhere between half a cent and 3 cents per email that you open, if you perform the requested action.

Even if you are willing to work for such low pay, you need to be aware that many of these websites are not as great as they might look at first glance. Apart from sending you an email or two a day, they are earning from you and all their other “workers” by doing less ethical things like sell your personal information and email address to other companies. Some of these sites also have spyware which will install itself into your computer and gather vital information like bank account numbers, passwords and any other useful and confidential content that you have stored on your hard drive.

Other email programs are set up to lure people in, but they never actually pay. So they are receiving money for all the hits they send to their clients, but not paying out to their workers. It is a nasty way to do business, but these sites tend to draw so many people that they will never actually pay, that they just keep going! By promising to pay $1 per referral (or more), they ensure that people continue to reel in fresh meat so they will never lack for workers.

However, it is possible to find decent email reading websites that will not do you damage or steal your personal information and that will truly pay you when they say they will. The best way to find these is to ask people. Avoid anyone who gives you a referral URL since their opinion will be biased. You should also ask to see proof of payment. This just means that the person commenting will send you a screen shot of his or her Paypal account with the amount credited and the name of the business paying, or a photo of a check if that is how the email program pays.

A pay to read email program that is worth checking out is one that pays and has a clear privacy policy which states your information will not be used by anyone except them, and for job-related purposes only. They should also be able to provide proof of payment for their workers.

• 0 Comments