This is a good news for those who can only manage US$50 a month with Infolinks, a leading PPC contextual advertising network — they can now be assured of a regular payment as the payment threshold has now been lowered to US$50. Previously, the payment threshold was US$100.

Infolinks says the change was due to a high demand for early payments.

Payment is also made easy for those who earn hundreds or thousands of dollar from Infolinks — they can now choose to have the payment credited directly to the Infolinks Prepaid MasterCard®. Those who apply for the prepaid card on or before March 31 will enjoy an activation fee waiver.

According to infolinks:

To apply, simply log on to your account on the Infolinks website. Go to the ‘My Account’ tab and click on the ‘edit’ button on the ‘Payment details’ section. Click on the Payoneer Prepaid Mastercard® option, sign up and the new card will be mailed to you.

Use everywhere MasterCard® is accepted – online and at any point of sale.

Withdraw cash from any ATM – in your local currency.

Your funds are secure. As long as the PIN stays uncompromised, your funds are MasterCard protected even if your card is lost or stolen. A replacement card will be mailed to you and the balance transferred.

No bank account needed.

Chitika, a leading on-line advertising network serving over two billion monthly impressions across more than 80,000 websites, has upgraded its Chitika | Premium ads and renamed it Chitika | Select. The new feature allow Chitika ads to display non-search traffic.

Chitika | Select... Covering a wider segment

The upgraded feature will automatically take effect from Monday, March 8. Up until now, Chitika | Premium ads will only display to visitors coming from search engines.

Chitika foresees an increase of between 5 and 10 per cent in revenue with this new feature.

Chitika | Select ads utilise Chitika’s click-prediction technology and will display only when there is a higher chance the ad will be clicked.

I’ve been using Chitika | Premium ads for sometime now and have been receiving a small revenue each month. Although small, it adds up to the dollar in my PayPal account, money I can use to finance my online activities such as paying Bluehost and Hostgator web hosting services, financing purchase and renewal of domain names, a pro account on Flickr photo-sharing website and so on.

Having the ability to include tables in a blog post can open up a whole new opportunity in how you can present information to your readers.

I use tables a lot in my photography blog to compare cameras against one another in terms of specifications.

How to add table to a Wordpress blog

It’s easy once you get used to it, thanks to a plugin called WP-Table by Alex Rabe.

First, download the WP-Table plugin here, upload the files to the wp-content/plugins/ directory and activate it. If you are using Wordpress 2.9 or higher, you can install the plugin directly from your plugin admin panel.

After you have activated the plugin, go to “Tables” to create your table and set the number of columns, rows and colour appearance. If you don’t make any change to the colour, the table normally takes the colours of your blog.

Each table you create comes with its own numeral ID. To embed the table in you post, simply add [TABLE=X] with X being the table number into you post. Good luck.

Wow. Look at where we are already since the first successful communication via what was later known as the Internet, was carried out in 1990.

Where were you back then? What computers were you using? Were you even using one?

I was. The computer I was using belonged to a school where I was temporarily teaching. It was a cool looking — well, it was cool back then — IBM machine with a 286 processor inside. Pentium was still light years away and megabytes sounded so very Star Wars, so very far far away in the ancient future.

Man, those were the days; the days of fumbling and stumbling trying to make sense of the new technology and wondering all the time about the brain behind those smart people who invented the 5-inch floppy disk.

I remember my first successful attempt at saving a file and then retrieving it and making it appear back onscreen. Wow, it felt so good at being able to do that. Felt so clever even.

Clever because I thought I had managed to hide a file only I knew how to retrieve because only I knew the file name. If only I knew back then what I know now that it was just a simple act of saving a file and that there was nothing clever about it… oh well.

It was the same story several years later, when the 486 processor came on board. By that time, computers were already supporting what was then a sophisticated piece of technology called CD-ROM.

See Dee ROM. Man, the very fact that I was able to tell people that my Acer computer had a CD-ROM was enough to feed my alter ego for days.

Heh heh heh! Today, of course, Internet is my drug. I’m still making sense out of the whole thing, however, and I doubt there will ever be a time when there was nothing more to explore on the World Wide Web.

In the course of surfing, I find lots of interesting stuff, some extremely useful pieces of information depending on one’s needs, some less so. Join me in this journey as I explore the web and blog here about things that I find useful, things that could make life a little easier.

It’s been quite a while since I last blog here. The last time I posted an entry was on Nov 27 last year. That’s more than two months ago. Some of you might think I’ve given up blogging. Well, far from it. Here are some of the reasons why this blog has been dormant during the past two months or so:

1. I was in Borneo the whole of December last year and not once did I have the chance to log on to the Internet.

2. I actually wanted to kill this blog by letting the domain to expire but now thought the better of it. This domain comes free with this blog’s hosting plan.

3. I fell ill, I mean, very ill, during the first two weeks of January, so obviously blogging had to take a backseat.

4. After I recovered from my illness, I busied myself setting up several experimental niche blogs to see the response. By the way, how do you know if you have hit a profitable niche? One straight-forward way to find out is this: set up a blog on a specific topic, write several keyword rich articles on the topic for about two weeks and see if there’s any traffic coming into the blog. If you see the traffic coming — several hundreds will be enough for evaluation purposes — after two weeks, and half of them are from the United States and Europe, then you have hit a good niche!

5. I was busy maintaining my better-performing blog; can’t afford to lose that one.

6. I’ve lost my blogging momentum here, which I’m now trying to regain by writing this entry. Posting an entry, any entry at all, even a nonsensical one, is one of the ways to kick-start a dormant blog.

That’s all for now folks. I’ll be seeing you here more often from now on

If you are running Chitika Ads or planning to do so, one thing you should consider carefully is ad placement.

I am currently running Chitika ads across several of my blogs, including this one, testing the ad placement of each one in relation to Google Adsense ads. Finally, I found that the best way to display Chitika ads and Google Adsense together is by placing them just after the blog title, see screenshot below:

Chitika-Adsense ads placement

Improved conversion

I notice that there is an improvement in the click through rate of both ads by between 40-60 per cent compared to putting them as skyscraper banners in sidebars.

Chitika ads are special in that they only target search engine traffic from the United States, Canada as well as some selected countries. They won’t appear to normal blog visitors or those coming from countries other than the selected ones.

Those who come to this blog entry from this blog’s front page or from non-selected countries will only be able to see the Google Ads, because Chitika will be hidden, see screenshot below:

Chitika ad collapses into nothing

By the way, this is also one of the most effective ad placement for Adsense.

How did I manage to arrange these ads?

Quite easily. Both ads will be automatically inserted in all posts — past, present and future — thanks to a minor customisation I’ve done with the Thesis Wordpress theme, the one I’m currently using. Not sure if I can do the same with other Wordpress themes though.

Google is expected to roll out its PC operating system, Chrome, next week, according to TechCrunch.

Quoting a reliable source, TechCrunch said on Friday that the operating system, which Google announced in July, will become available for download within a week.

So, would you try out Chrome or stick to either Microsoft’s Windows or Apple’s Mac OS?

Lightroom 3 Beta interface... click for larger image

The version 3 of one of the most powerful photo editing software, Lightroom, is now available for download from adobe. Lightroom 3 is now on beta and Adobe is providing the software for free throughout the trial version, here.

Adobe says the beta version is to give users the opportunity “to evaluate a select portion of the new features planned for Lightroom 3, to help the team discover and address issues if any, and to send feedback that the Lightroom team can use to make Lightroom 3 an even better digital darkroom and more efficient assistant for you.”

I’ve recently downloaded the software and played with it. Here are the results. The first picture is the original:

I am a subscriber to Yaro Starak’s newsletter and an avid reader of his Entrepreneurs-Journey.com blog. I gain a lot of inspiration from people like him and the people whom he blogged about.

Recently, Yaro blogged about a man, Pat Flynn, who lost his job as an architect due to the economic crisis. Not wanting to let the retrenchment bring him down, Pat decided to start an Internet business and he now earns over US$200,000 a year.

Listen to Yaro’s interview with Pat, here, or read Pat’s blog at The Smart Passive Income Blog.

Blogging, to a large extent, revolutionises the way people acquire knowledge.

By continuously blogging about a certain topic, for instance, it is possible for a person to become knowledgeable on the matter.

For instance, pick any topic you have an interest in exploring and learning, and start a blog dedicated to the subject and challenge yourself to at least come up with three blog posts a week on the subject.

Chances are, unless you already have a good grasp of the issue, by the third month you will run out of ideas.

Blogging forces you to read, interact and explore

It is important that you choose a topic that interest you because if you are not interested in it, it is likely that you stop blogging when the going gets tough.

Your interest in a topic is what keeps you going, spurring you to read and search for information, or else you would have nothing to blog about and the young blog will die a sure premature death.

The reading and researching will eventually lead you to others who are similarly interested in the topic you are blogging about; and before you know it, you are caught in a universe of information related to your blog topic.

You may not become an expert on the issue in its true sense because of the nature of the learning process but the knowledge will be enough tho keep the blog going.

And having knowledge on a topic is extremely important when one maintains a niche blog.