Tonz

How to find affiliate programs that pay instantly via PayPal upon a conversion

Tejas Ramakrishnan — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:58:04 +0000

We affiliates have seen all sorts of scams, have not we? We were one of the first ones to note and nudge away the Nigerian Uncle and Bank scams, right? We were also the ones who swayed away the persisting v1a6r4 (read as that thing that makes things go you know what) adwares while the other lesser informed internet dwellers got hooked and ripped, right?

Making Money Online

But then why do we get trapped by the equal or lesser brained product marketers for whom we become affiliates and rake in millions? Why is it that they get to keep our money until we reach their prejudiced Payment Limit/Threshold? Why?

Let us all pledge today that no longer will we promote the products that keep our commissions till we reach their fancy limit. That we need to be paid instantly, as and when a buyer gives them their money!

Now, to the original idea of the post – There are already people who are shelling out our commissions to us the instant they get paid and we can scrutinize them and select their products to promote as they are not any worse than the ones that already are present. They pay us instantly because there is almost no chance of anyone asking for a refund from their products as the products are top quality. Let us understand that we need to be savvy of people whose products we choose to promote.

So, how do we find affiliate programs that pays commissions instantly via PayPal? We ask Google for it.

Search with the following keywords in www.google.com -

“Direct to Your PayPal Account”
“Direct to Your PayPal Account – Over and Over again!”

You will now see hundreds of affiliate programs offering exactly this and well, take your pick, analyze and make some killing. That’s all for now.

Convert XPS to PDF easily using web based service

Tejas Ramakrishnan — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 18:19:35 +0000

This post is one after a long break due to many reasons. I’ll let you know the reasons for my absence, as it is going to be beneficial to you guys too, but for now, let me put this up – convert xps to pdf.

Print to PDF Option in Google Chrome

So, the other day, after booking a ticket online from a friend’s laptop and saving it down in the usual .XPS format using the print option when it comes up, I went down to the local print center to take a printout and noticed that running Windows XP, the system doesn’t detect the XPS file out of Windows 7. I am not sure why this incompatibility is present, but i was in a trouble situation.

The print center did not have an internet connection and that’s why i was not able to print directly and needed to get the ticket saved from somewhere else. Also, the computer i was using did not have any facility to convert the xps file into doc or other format too. In the latest versions of the Google Chrome browser, however, i noted that there is an option to “print as pdf”.

But in case the computer you have to use in emergencies to access and get a online ticket is like the one i encountered, you might be better of doing what i did (SEE BELOW) than getting and installing Google Chrome just due to the trouble it saves you.

You can easily convert the xps file to pdf format using the convert xps to pdf service offered by many sites online. One of the easiest and simplest ones that i encountered upon a simple Google search for convert xps to pdf was www.xps2pdf.org

Here’s link hyperlinked – Convert XPS to PDF

The ease with which this site gets your XPS file converted to PDF cannot just be explained and must be experienced.

In case the file in question is a personal one requiring privacy i do not advice it as i do not know whether they do maintain that. They do delete the file after sometime according to the timer set when they give you the download link for the converted pdf file.

Convert your XPS files to PDF online

Anyway, it is quite a good tool to convert xps to pdf and might come in handy for you someday, sometime. That’s all for now.

Find, listen and download MP3 music totally FREE! Over 40 million songs!

Tejas Ramakrishnan — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 14:07:42 +0000

Many a times have you come across situations when you wanted to find an mp3 version of a song or video, and was stuck at either resorting to piracy or shelling out cash to buy it. You might have frowned at either and then silently resorted to one or the other after going through rounds and rounds of “eenie meenie miney mo“.

Well, you can stop that and have 40 million songs (and counting…) at your finger tips. Search, select and PLAY. That is all you need to hear your favorite song online.

Ginoplayer is a very easy to use, small and lightweight software that you can download and use this instant without paying a penny, ever. With Ginoplayer, there is no need to download songs and store them onto your computer – you can just pick a track and start listening to it, as simple as that. If you would like to keep a copy on your Windows PC, then you can of course download the song as well.

Listen, Bookmark or Download

Any of the 40 million songs can be bookmarked or downloaded to your PC. When you want to listen bookmarked songs just switch to bookmarks view and select a song to play. Listening to a song that you downloaded works like any other music player – point to the file and play.

Just Ginoplayer

GinoPlayer searches the whole web for your favorite songs and shows results just in moments! Over 40 million songs are available. You can now forget about those ambiguous sites with tons of advertisements and spammy links! The only software you need is GinoPlayer!

Ginoplayer - Click to Download!

100% Clean and FREE!

This program is absolutely free, 100%! It does not contain any spyware, malware or any kind of trojans. You can feel free to install and use it.

Software DOWNLOADED and TESTED BY TONZ.NET – Seems secure. Scanned with AVG and Malwarebytes’ AntiMalware and found 0/NO infections. Use at your discretion.

Make money by building and running proxy servers

Tejas Ramakrishnan — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 09:36:33 +0000

Make Money

Making money is always on the top 1 list of things to do for almost all people. DO NOT LIE. It’s even the same for you, otherwise you wouldn’t even be reading this post, right? There is nothing shameful in it, and so we all do it, more and more.

So, how to make money? Making money is not an easy task unless you are a criminal, and there is always hard work involved if you want to earn a legitimate penny. These days you will find hundreds of thousands of make money ebooks and guides all around the web, with a majority of them filled with bs. Seriously.

Proxy servers where once the deal, with one being able to make hundreds of dollars even on a daily basis, and now, they are back to the top of the make money method list. If you had read one of my earlier posts on the make money topic, you would see proxy server business at the top.

Well it is good news for you now again, as proxy servers are easy to setup and run, with almost not much of an initial cost. The work basically revolves around setting up a domain and hosting, then configuring the script to work. Finished, and your make money endeavour is on a rocket launcher with that.

This post is aimed to be just a simple heads up for you, and soon I will link to an upcoming post from here where i will try and bring up a detailed tutorial on how to setup and run a profitable proxy business. This will also later be turned into an E-Book, for you guys to devour and make a living out of.

Stay tuned and check back frequently so as not to miss the wonderful opportunity that is upcoming towards you. If you want to make money, feel free to check out the other posts under the make money category.

Also, check out our Make Money Guides section too to find more and more exciting methods to make money.

Server down, data lost, me gone mad and now everything back to sanity

Tejas Ramakrishnan — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 07:16:20 +0000

Losing my mind

Well, this past one was one of the worst weeks for my online presence. The server went down for all we knew, data got corrupted beyond a point of recovery according to the tech support guys at Burst.Net, and above all, I DID NOT HAVE A BACKUP.

The actual downtime was noted since 22nd of July 2011, and that is about 7 days before today. A week of downtime, and a hell of a downtime.

I am one of the stupidest webmasters in the world – My last server backup was 6 months ago. o.O

Yeah, can you believe it? After all my Top 5 mistakes and stuff posts, i forgot the basic thing in life, especially an online one – Keeping frequent backups. In fact, i haven’t even taken a backup after all this issues and getting them fixed. (Will get to it, after this post. Need to put this first.)

I have a request/suggestion to all you guys – Take a backup of your entire system, NOW! Not tomorrow, not after breakfast, NOW!

I killed my sites through my stupidity.

Tonz last 30 days

Trust me. You do not want to go where i had been. Mine was not a normal crash. The entire server fell through the clouds and as was to happen went straight to the ocean floor, if you can make out the satire i mean by that. It was utterly beyond recovery.

My hosting is at BurstNet and they offer only Basic Server Management. You need to be good at server administration in case of problems. But yet, the people there had been the most supporting ever.

The server needed an OS Reload and they copied all my private container files to backup before doing that. They then gave me the backup files to copy the back… Getting this done myself was very difficult, but they do not provide this level of service. I had to learn the ‘cp’ command and basic bash functions and sshing in unix to get things copied at first.

The NAMED service was crashing like a million times a day. Okay, that was too much – 30 times a day.

Nameserver Failure

The named service and some other services typically go down on cPanel and that is why they all have the automagical restart thing added to them. But this was continuously failing.

For the first 4 days i hoped the BurstNet support team will fix the issues, but their commitment was till the OS Reload as per the terms of the agreement. I reeled in and started learning how to find errors by reading error logs and messages, and then searched on Google for a fix for them. I do not know exactly what route i followed to get things fixed, but i can assure you that in the past days, i had done all of the following and many more via SSH.

In fact, for the past 3 days, my fingers were in Scranton, Pennsylvania going through Burst.Net data center scrambling for my files and data.

Copied a hell lot of files from the backup folder to get the old system configurations and files restored.
Copied a hell amount of files to /etc to get the cpanel and other services fixed.
Updated cpanel via /scripts/upcp –force
Updated apache and php, and recompiled them.
Restarted BIND (nameserver) 10s of 20s of times, and still failed to get it running.
Got BIND running after i updated it and performed a complete overhaul of resolv.conf and named.conf – The best way to fix any issues with named.conf is to create a new cPanel user account from your WHM and the system will rewrite the named.conf with the correct settings. TRUST ME on this. Delete the user later if you do not want to keep it.
Every cpmove or even crude backup has got common issues attached with it. This is orphaning files and folders without a user or group for them. Fixed this by assigning chown root:root user:group to the /home folder and then assigning $user:$user rights to individual cpanel user folders under /home. Next provide Recursive chown right to the folders under the /home/user for user:user.
The above fix needs to finished with a /scripts/chownpublichtmls run which will set things right. This is especially useful if you websites showing 403 or 500 or other issues.
Finally, run /scripts/fixcommonproblems and /scripts/fixeverything just to make sure you have all the configs and things right.
In between, i had to reboot the server 2 times, and perform various other tasks which offered no help, but seems useless now. In all, any of the above solutions will fix the respective problems.
ADD: cPanel White/blank screen errors can be fixed by doing a forced upcp command to update the cpanel. If you do not have ssh/root access, ask your server admin to do that.

Now, everything seems to be working. All sites are running as good as they were before. If you notice any errors, please do report them by comments here. If you have a problem similar to this, then i insist that you let me know. I have gone through this, and would gladly help you for FREE. Let me know. Take care.

P.S: Going to setup a backup. DONE!

Get Google AdSense Account Approved easily and quickly

Tejas Ramakrishnan — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 09:40:13 +0000

One of the many questions that you will notice in the comments on this blog is about Google AdSense, and the top question asked always, is -

How do I get my Google AdSense Account Application Approved?

Google AdSense Account

Well, the answer is quite pretty simple – Emphasizing and offering quality content. This is the one single point which has no or any shortcuts or walk-throughs. You can tinker with any of the following points i mention, but the one in those bold characters above about quality content, is eternal. If your site does not offer any unique and/or quality content or value to its visitors or anyone in general, then be assured 100% that Google is not going to be interested to add you into the AdSense program at all and you will not be getting a Google AdSense Account anywhere in the near future if you do not respect this point.

Now, having cleared that, i would like to stress on some points which will most definitely have or give you an upper hand or let us say a favorable point when it comes to Google evaluating your application for any merit.

Get a domain, for your site
Having a blog or site on your own domain is a very good idea not just in terms of getting your site and/or Google AdSense Account approved for the AdSense program, but also later in being able to branding the hell out of your site. If you are thinking of getting a free site up and running now, and then getting a domain and branding later, you will be making a huge mistake in losing and wasting resources more valuable than money.
Of course, the idea of trying out first on a free domain or blogger service is great, but if you are looking to make some money, it is imperative that you get a domain. Getting a domain shows to Google that you are interested in branding your site with it, which will show them that you are going to get some quality content and traffic in that they should grasp immediately.
Also, domains cost just under $10 or say Rs.450 these days and that is an yearly cost too. Don’t tell me you are not wasting that much money in your life. In fact, most people waste twice that in a month, period. Invest in a domain, it is worth it. Read this post about investing in domains first.
Write in a niche you are comfortable in
Do not pick and write about a topic that you have no idea about. You will end up wasting time and resources and not to mention money. Pick a niche in which you can post content that you are comfortable writing up. You might be a multi-talented person with multifarious interests, but that does not mean you can write in any of the topic, does it. And even if you can, picking the topic for the first blog which should be niche specific to have a bit of a following, is important.
Before you pick up a niche, read this important post on niche blogging and the selection of niche.
Setup a proper website/cms
I have not mentioned about getting a hosting service here and that is because that is not paramount. You can use any of the blogger services that allow you to use your own domain – blogger.com and/or wordpress.com are the two that i recommend. You can point your domain to the blog that you have there and get along with a pretty secure blog instead of having to maintain and pay for hosting.
Also, in this stage, you have to pick between wordpress and blogger and that is quite a task in itself. The two offer quite similar features and/or functionalities and the choice is pretty much based on personal preferences.
If you are going for a self hosted system, i recommend wordpress, as always. Millions of users can’t be wrong.
Start posting content systematically
I have talked too much already about how to setup a blog system and deviated from the original point of getting Google AdSense Account approval easily.
So, here comes the main stuff. Post systematically, at a defined pace with constant time in between. Do not pick a schedule that you cannot meet. There is no need to have a grueling schedule of posts, a modest number of 1 post per week is also good, as long as you commit to a great content quality on all your posts.
Also, most importantly, follow basic on-page seo guidelines when you make up the content of the post. Let the search engine know what sort of content and for whom you are preparing it through such an action. DO not copy-paste content from other sites. DO NOT assume that your site’s visitors are fools. They are not. In fact, they are more intelligent and informed than you are, exactly like the case of this blog. You guys know more than what i do, and you are just checking out what i write up in this niche, keeping tabs on me, like friends. And, thank you for that. So, yes, appreciate that your site’s readers are more informed than you are. Ensure the content is unique and have a great quality.
And now the waiting comes – SPECIAL TIPS here.

DO NOT submit your site to Google for Google AdSense Account approval until you have a good number of quality posts.
Having a domain which has been around for 6 months or more at the minimum is a good idea to suggest to Google that your site is a great one and has been around for quite some time.
Provide original and accurate information about yourselves while applying for the Google AdSense Account.
It might be a good idea to use a Google Account which you have been using for quite some time, because Google appreciates long time loyal users whom they know much about already.
Read and familiarise yourselves with the Google AdSense Program Policies, and try and meet all of them.
Make sure that your site has got atleast some 6 months of quality post. Even if you post once a week only and have 24 posts, that is okay, as long as the content was great and not some copy paste stuff. Say your site has just 5 posts over a 5 month period, but it is unique and no where published ever before, then that too is quintessentially great, much better than 100 posts at times. Content is King. No, Content is everything. Information is power.
Once you have done almost all of the above things and most importantly followed the above Special Tips, then there is no stopping from you getting a Google AdSense Account approved, period.

All the best and good luck to you on that. if you were looking for a sweepstakes easy ride to a Google AdSense Account, then sorry. It is impossible. You could try buying Google AdSense Account and get scammed out of your money doing that though. I am sure you won’t be. Take care and have a nice day.

And to give you some inspiration, check out this fact -

Google approves around 2000 AdSense accounts a day

Yeah, it is damn easy to be one of those. Trust me. Follow the above points and you will get one.

Google Docs supports ZIP and RAR files and now with this Chrome extension you can perform direct opening and file viewing

Tejas Ramakrishnan — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 05:58:39 +0000

Google Docs

Have you been wondering Google Docs is not much of a stuff that you can find real use for? First of all, there is not a better backup service for your important files and documents. Google Docs is the ultimate file sharing and if you do not want to share, then the ultimate file storage service.

Any backup service you get online, paid or free is at the mercy of the wit of the employees of that company and at most times you find the hard way that the backup you have with them is not always up, and in most cases secure. Their servers could be poorly managed making these problems evident from day 1 most probably. Google has been running and maintaining over a million servers worldwide and are now experts at it. Their servers are not even rarely down, and hence, there is no better backup service that you can get better than Google Docs.

Now, to the new extension out there – Open ZIP and RAR with Google Docs. What an amazing extension.

Haven’t you always wanted to know what exactly are the files you are downloading when it comes in an archive as in the ZIP or RAR format? I bet you did. There were a thousand times when i was supposed to be downloading word or PDF documents and i ended up getting exe files which are most probably viruses or trojans. Seeing inside the archive and being able to check the files before download would have been superb ability in such scenarios. With this tool, that is now possible. You can view the files and check their extensions even before downloading them via Google Docs.

open zip and rar with google docs

This plugin is from a developer called ArpitNext who has brought out various other plugins that are all very good ones and hence there is no reason to suspect that this might be a handicap to your chrome setup.

I recommend that you use this plugin which allows you to verify the contents of any zipped archive file cvia Google Docs because of the extra security it offers. Now, that’s one security tip from us after all we being security fanatics.

WordPress theme transformation for the first time on Tonz.net after launch

Tejas Ramakrishnan — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 16:23:45 +0000

It has been over a year long now that i have been talking to you on Tonz.net/blog in this manner. To be exact, the first of the posts that today exist on Tonz.net is from the 20th of June 2010. Find that first post here – A salute to wordpress.

Many of you might have been with us when this site was first started more than 3 years ago in a different format. I had lost track of all the work due to various other interests that kept me engaged at that time that this blog was literally dead till the 20th of June, the yesteryear. From there, we have grown to what we are today, a second home for you, if i may.

Well, we are in another phase now, although just the outer part. The developer(s) of the previous wordpress theme that we were using, Mystique, the DigitalNature, has dropped the support for their wordpress theme, which no longer works with the latest wordpress installations. With the 3.2 upgrade of wordpress, Mystique started generating too many problems on Tonz.net, most of which are due to the archaic level of coding that Mystique abodes.

Well, it is now time to move. From the many wordpress theme that i love and admire, Atahualpa is on the top percentile of the list. I have always had a fascination for this theme because of the flexibility it provided. And above all it is free.

free wordpress themes

I still recommend Thesis theme as one of the top themes i have ever come across, but Thesis a paid theme, while Atahualpa is a free wordpress theme. I might have moved to Thesis, but wanted to give Tonz.net a taste of this wonderful theme.

Well, let me know how it feels for you. Do let me know any issues that come up. I am continuing to tweak this wordpress theme and also making other changes, including the XFBML Facebook Like Button that you can see under the post title on posts. I’ll add a tutorial foryou guys on how i did it, so that you can do it effortlessly. For now, bye and take care.

WordPress 3.2 upgrade and associated issues to expect

Tejas Ramakrishnan — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 19:34:03 +0000

WordPress 3.2 has been around the corner and it is time to expect a bunch of buddies squeaking at the problems the upgrade brought. i am one the first to squeak at it myself when an upgrade to tonz.net left me like below. The issue could be also due to any of the other reasons, but the most common chance is of a plugin corrupting the organization of the whole wordpress system and causing issues.

Left Admin sidebar missing in WordPress 3.2

Well, as is clear from the image above, and as i said in it, the issue is caused if you have the wp-insert plugin installed in wordpress. The easiest fix is to uninstall the plugin and leave it be, or if you want to keep the plugin if you have been using it well, do the following:

After the wordpress upgrade, go to your wordpress plugin page at /wp-admin/plugins.php
Now, scroll down to the wp-insert position in the list and you will see that it’s update is available.
Perform the update for the plugin. You might want to backup your wordpress system before doing this.
Now, clear your browser cache and check the admin panel, it will be there, the missing guy.

Simple, right?

wordpress

Well, the wordpress 3.2 upgrade has quite some surprises including the change in the format of the admin dashboard. The wordpress admin dashboard looks a bit more organized, especially with some new tabs on it. The wordpress dashboard did definitely get a practical upgrade, but i would have liked them to keep the old style of the wordpress dashboard. Overall it looks good, but there is something of the old wordpress dashboard that i am still missing. What do you think about this wordpress update? Let us know in the comments below.

UPDATE: If you have any other or similar issues associated with your wordpress upgrade or unrelated to wordpress, we would love to help you. Feel free to drop a line.

Contest time as it is the July of 2011 and the best time for a contest for you guys

Tejas Ramakrishnan — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 06:51:23 +0000

Contest

Well, what is this contest all about then? This blog is mainly for bloggers, but also caters to people who have technical issues running their systems, for people who need to know that one marketing trick that i used from somewhere to gain that extra edge. All in all, Tonz.net is a blog where i share with you guys the tons of resources that i accumulated, mostly information.

Why such a contest?

Well, this blog is for you, and us. And i thought, why don’t i communicate more with you and get in touch with you guys more along and understand what you want from this blog, more and more. This will enable me to tune this blog’s contents more to your needs and will make this blog all the more enjoyable to you guys.

So, the contest is a way of tempting you to be active in the blog by commenting and also taking up the very small 1 page 5 question survey that we will bring up later this month.

What is the contest then?

The contest involves commenting on the posts of this blog, old and also upcoming ones till the end of July. The comments will be checked and moderated and need to be non-spammy, and must be at least 50 words long. No one or two word comments like ” nice post”, “bad post”, “good content” or like that.

How is the prize decided?

The ranking list is based on the number of approved comments made by the person on this site.

How do i take part?

You can start by commenting on the posts on this site whenever you want to starting now. It is best to create an account on Tonz.net for the purpose, but is not compulsory.

What about the prizes then?

There will be prizes for the top 3 commentors.

1st prize involves:

$25 worth products to choose from our upcoming product site – GadgetMafia.com
A free .com domain registered for you in your name or equivalent worth coupon for GadgetMafia.com.
A dofollow backlink from this site (PR2) to your site.
A post about the winner and his/her blog on this post.

2nd prize involves:

$10 worth products to choose from our upcoming product site – GadgetMafia.com
A free .com domain registered for you in your name or equivalent worth coupon for GadgetMafia.com.
A dofollow backlink from this site (PR2) to your site.
A post about the winner and his/her blog on this post.

3rd prize involves:

$10 worth products to choose from our upcoming product site – GadgetMafia.com
A post about the winner and his/her blog on this post.

Consolation prize for all participants:

A 30% discount on all purchases from GadgetMafia.com and a collective mention in a post on this site about the participant and his/her blog.

Well, i sure do hope this is a tempting offer for you guys, and do feel free to check out GadgetMafia.com in a few days. We are bringing it up and is currently in its old state as we have not uploaded the site’s script and database for now.

So, i guess i’ll see you guys around at least till the end of July 31st 2011.

The above gift pattern and/or the contest is liable to change and is at the discretion of the promoter. I’ll take the most care to conduct this properly, and will bring more and more valued gifts in as prizes for people, and never remove them on my own. Just a disclaimer.