I signed up for Chitika a few years ago and to be honest, I just hadn’t done anything with it. I didn’t invest time in learning the setup or even exploring the advantages. I just signed up, set up a few referral buttons and let it go.

It wasn’t until I got a notice that I had received a payment from Chitika that I even thought about looking into it further – but hey, if someone is paying me, I’m thinking if I made money for doing absolutely NOTHING, I wonder what I could make with a little effort.

Chitika is an alternative to Google AdSense Contextual Pay-Per-Click Advertising. I run Chitika on a couple of my blogs. It performs best on product related blogs, but can achieve good results on blogs such as this on also.

Here is a snippet from the Chitika Publishers website that contains two stats that show Chitika is a respected Ads Publisher:

Fact 1: Chitika has over 70+ power-packed revenue earning ad units, the largest collection of revenue-generating solutions catering to publishers of all sizes.

Fact 2: More than 17000 bloggers and publishers are already using Chitika’s ads to earn revenue.

Fact 3: Chitika passes over 50,000 publishers in June 2009

One of the greatest advantages to using Chitika is that you can use them on the same page as Google AdSense. This allows you to maximize the earning potential of your blog. Chitika tends to have a higher CPC than Google AdSense in alot of the areas I have used it in.

Since Chitika is still kinda sorta new to me, it will be a short while before I can give you much detail on profits – but I’d say $50 for absolutely NOTHING is something. What I can tell you however, is it is currently outperforming Google AdSense on two of my blogs and I’m only a few days into actually using it.

What you waiting for, You should sign up for Chitika Now!!!

Do share your personal views or experiences with Chitika and how it has performed or is performing for you.

Is your Facebook account suddenly sending messages to your friends or posting strange messages on your wall that YOU did NOT post?

Chances are, you have been hacked or hijacked.

Just this morning a friend of mine had this message and response:

This might be a simple fix to that problem…

Strange messages likely appear because of fake apps.

These apps look and act like real ones, but are not. And since you have given them permission to access your Facebook info when you added the app they can do things like change your status, send messages to your friends, etc.

SOLUTION

Step 1: Remove apps you don’t use regularly

Step 2: Change your password

If the problem persists, the app that is causing the problem has not been removed – remove more and change your password again.

I run very few apps these days. Anytime an app requests access to my account, I opt out or cancel. It’s just not worth the hassle anymore to know who might have a crush on me, who is looking at my profile most often or which Disney Princess I might be.

RSS – The Basics

In a nutshell RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is used to syndicate or subscribe to the feed of a website, blog or just about any media content online (this includes articles, music, video or just about any other digital media).

By syndicating you subscribe to the feed of the site which means you do not have to actually visit the website to read the updated and most recent content. Instead you use feed reading software or a website like Google Reader to read the latest articles. Instead of going to each of your favorite blogs individually you can collect all the feeds of the sites (provided they make them available) in one place. The purpose of syndication is to therefore make it easier for you to consume the content from your favorite sites in less time.

Even if you are not tech savvy you don’t need to know much about XML. It’s basically the formatting language that software and websites use to distribute the content to your feed reader. If you know nothing about HTML then you probably don’t really need to know much about XML either. Just understand that behind syndication is the language XML.

The best way to learn is by practice and example so let me tell you exactly how I use RSS.

Web Based Feed Reading

With standalone software feed readers you have to be on the computer you installed the software to in order to have access to your feeds. Because of this limitation many people choose to use a web based feed reader and the most popular is Bloglines. Bloglines works much like feed reading software except because it is entirely based on the Internet you can access your syndicated feeds online from any computer connected to the web. You can also share your feeds with other people or search other people’s feed lists to see what is popular.

I personally use Google Reader.

Subscribing to a Blog

To continue with my example, I of course subscribe to my own feeds, the RSS of this and other blogs I own. At the top right corner you will see an orange RSS link button. To subscribe to my feed all you do is copy and paste that link into feed reading software or a web based reader like bloglines. You may also have to name the feed. This feed is called “Gayla Baer”. The RSS feed link for this site looks like this – http://feeds.feedburner.com/gaylabaer – and if you click it you will get the XML output of this blog. That’s the stuff I told you about that you don’t really need to understand, but take a look by clicking the link if you are interested. I use a third party service called FeedBurner that adds features to my feed and it provides me with statistics on how many people subscribe to my blog.

All blogs will have a link which you can subscribe to. It might be called Atom, or RSS, or simply Syndicate, but they all do the same thing.

I have wanted to start a newsletter for this blog for a while now and frankly, the thought of working Aweber into my budget just wasn’t an option. While Aweber seems to be the golden standard for email marketing, it can be quite expensive when you are trying to budget as sharply as I am.

I wanted to offer my own readers and visitors opportunities that come along in a way that is most effective in helping them advance their own online earning potential – if they decide the offers are right for them of course.

You may ask yourself, why would someone running a blog want to run a newsletter also? There are many reasons to run a newsletter.

One of the major reasons is to keep in better contact with your readers. I know I can offer additional benefits to your readers by highlighting popular articles and even offer content not regularly shared on the blog. Some things are better kept in a close circle of friends, right?

I can also use a newsletter to consolidate all my most recent posts into one email update. This way my readers will the extras, but they can also get post updates less often then by RSS subscriptions that tend to inundate email accounts every time I update my blog.

When it comes to email marketing and newsletter programs, two issues come up with many bloggers. 1. many blogs are not big enough to need a paid newsletter service. 2. many bloggers lack the time and the design know-how to spend on designing and sending a newsletter on a regular basis.

I believe I have found the solution to both issues in an email marketing tool called Mad Mimi.

Mad Mimi proposes to be the easy answer for the email marketer.

As a comparison with other email marketing tools, you may be familiar with another newsletter service called MailChimp which is free for up to 500 subscribers. That’s great for the budgeter – but not for the budgeter looking to spend as few hours as possible learning to design and compose their own newsletter.

Mad Mimi is only free for up to 100 subscribers but its ease of use makes it a good choice for smaller sites. Check out Mad Mimi and see if it’s the option to suit your needs.

Get your own Mad Mimi Email Marketing Account now!

What newsletter/promotion service or email marketing tools do you use and why? We’d love to read your comments. And before you leave – be sure to sign up for our newsletter in the upper right sidebar. IT’S NEW