You guys remember Image Space Media right?……..Nah? Don’t worry about it, neither does 90% of the rest of the web. I wrote about these guys over 2 years ago when they were originally called PicAdMedia. I basically addressed the low payouts, the possible potential of the service and a couple useful features.

I’ve long since dropped the service because it simply wasn’t profitable and it was on one of my most popular websites iHipHopMusic.com, which at the time was clocking 2 million page views monthly.

Today Vibrant Media, another company which I worked with announced that they acquired the service. I’m not sure why they would do that, maybe Image Space Media has improved drastically since I used them but as far as I know – GumGum owns the In-Image Advertising space.

Below is apart of the press release.

We are pleased to announce today our acquisition by Vibrant Media, the global leader in premium contextual advertising. This acquisition combines our image technology with Vibrant’s unmatched scale, robust contextual platform, award-winning sales force and publisher service team.

Vibrant currently works with more than 6,500 publishers and the top 100 brands, including Samsung, Chrysler, and AXE. With this acquisition, we can deliver new and expanded revenue opportunities for you, and offer your site visitors an enhanced experience that is relevant to the content they are viewing. In addition to Vibrant Image, Vibrant has a suite of products that help publishers add incremental revenue: Vibrant In-Text, Vibrant Video, Vibrant Bar, and Vibrant Display.

All things considered it could be a smart move, since it’s puts them in direct competition with GumGum in the In-Image Advertising space. When it comes to In-text Advertising they’re already playing second fiddle to InfoLinks, who’s long since blown pass them – at least according to my earnings comparison.

Read the full press release at Vibrant Media.

I really don’t spend much time paying attention to these shitty internet marketing products coming down the pipeline anymore, I gave that up about 3 years ago. You know the products I’m talking about – those products were they schedule a live webinar, which you found out about via some other douche bag self proclaimed proclaimed expert’s mailing list. They get you on the webinar, show you some logins, stats, screenshots if they’re lying and maybe some live examples which they could have used there own money to ramp up.

When it came to Mobile Money Bandit which I got updated about via 3 different mailing lists, I was already prepared to trash this product as another recycled bullshit Mobile Marketing course that was gonna run people $1,000 which seems to be the standard asking price for internet marketing junk products these days.

It’s not until I got on the webinar that I realized that this course was different from the others, before I talk about that lets first talk about how people are making money in mobile marketing right now.

This is what the mobile marketers usually try to sell you.

Mobile Affiliate Marketing: This is is where you make money by advertising affiliate offers via mobile ad networks which mobile users click on – and you make a profit depending on what action they take, I’ve been doing this for years with ringtones. It’s no where near new information, check out Making Money With Cell Phones, My First Month Running A Mobile Site, I wrote that almost 2 years ago, back when 18 year old Adam Horwitz wrote a course on it..

Mobile Apps: Building Apps for iPhone and Android platforms, I’ve been on 3 webinars that talked about making money this way and honestly you don’t damn course to tell how to do this. The most stupid ass apps can make tons of cash, if you have a silly idea and a clever name for an app – all you have to do is go to Guru, Elance or Freelancer and shell a couple hundred dollars to have it built and your set, nothing genius there. You then give it away for free, it gets downloaded thousands of times then serve ads within the app with the help of mobile ad networks like AdMob, InMobi, AirPush and a bunch more. You then build more free apps and link them all together, creating your very own app network that brings in money everyday… This one paragraph is all you’ll ever need to know about how people are making money with apps, put away that $1000 – this will cost you $0.

Time and time again I’ve seen both these techniques get recycled a dozen times into new shiny products, don’t waste your time…There is so much free resources to find information about that.

So What Makes Mobile Money Bandit Different?

It’s not so much that it’s different but instead a step forward into the next level of  Mobile Affiliate Marketing, to put it simply it’s Pay Per Click + Mobile + Pay Per Call.

Pay Per Call is exactly what it sounds like; you get paid for when someone calls a company via your unique 800 number, it was a system introduced to the Affiliate Marketing industry a couple years ago by RingRevenue -  the leading call performance marketing platform.

No matter what Ad network you go with, they’re all using the RingRevenue platform, Pay Per Call is just another type of Pay Per lead program; the only difference is it’s being done over the phone……Oh and they pay a shit load more money than your standard Pay Per Lead program.

Guess what guys? I’ve been making money with Pay Per Call as well, for damn near a year now. Usually at this point I’d show you the site that’s bringing in the cash like I do with the other sites owned by my company the Covanant – but with this site I think I’m the only one doing it and I don’t want the leeches jacking my swag.

I can tell you the offer that I’m making money with though, it’s Angie’ s List which pays up to $18 per call – other stipulations apply of course. It’s been making me a small mortgage over the past year.

Now here’s what separates me from Justin Elenburg the creator of Mobile Money Bandit, he doesn’t use a website (but you can if you want to) and he’s doing it all on mobile phones – why the hell didn’t I think of that? I can honestly say none of the other mobile marketing products that have hit the web over the past 2 years haven’t covered anything remotely like this – not even close!

Oh and did I mention he’s raking in $500,000 a year?

Check out a unique mobile marketing course for once, Mobile Money Bandit.

No flip-flopping we’re going to get right into how you can guarantee your content goes viral with some real life examples from some of my successful viral campaigns.

1. Attention Grabbing Headlines, Lie If You Have To

It’s all about the headlines, nothing else matters as much to readers. If you take away all the great headlines from the web you’d be left with nothing but paragraphs of the same content written in the different ways, even this very article your reading right now; I’m sure there’s a bunch of other articles just like it with only the headline to decide which will be the most successful.

If your running a news type of website or blog, then headlines can literally make or brake your business. When writing about existing news, pick the best thing from that article and turn it into something controversial if possible, your basically lying but it’s completely acceptable. Magazines, major News websites and TV Networks do it all the time. How many times have you been watching the news and they say “coming up” followed by some headline that makes you wait around for it, and then it turns out after you finally get the news it’s not exactly what you thought it would be?

This is the same thing, just take things out of context. You’ll feel a little dirty at first, but after a while you’ll start liking it. Another thing to do is use a headline to make the content more than what it is or to explain what the content will be without out ruining the ending; the same way a movie trailer does.

Here’s an example:

YouTube sensation Karmin created a video called Look At Me Now which was a cover of Chris Browns “Look At Me Now” song. As soon as I saw the video I knew it was destined for viral greatness so I needed to get a piece of the action.

Before this video Karmin wasn’t really known beyond their YouTube channel so my headline couldn’t be something lame like “Karmin Covers Chris Brown’s Look At Me Now Song,” at that time the first thing my audience would have said when they saw that headline is who the f*ck is Karmin?….So instead of putting that headline I wrote “White Girl Singing Look At Me Now and Kills It” and that headline was responsible for bringing me over 70,000 views for that video. Now 2011 is over, that video was one of the most popular videos on YouTube for the year clocking over 50,000,000 views.

2. Broadcast It Everywhere, Snitching is A Good Thing

Your building your social presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Google+ and whatever else your using for one reason; and that’s to get the word out about whatever it is that your doing. It’s a no-brainier to announce your content to your social edges. Do it more than once for the same content if you need to, since the audience in your social reach will have different check-in times and they might miss it on the first go around.

3. Lips, Ass, and Tits, Sex Sells

It’s all about the headlines but I have to say a sexy pic is a close second. Images in general increases traffic to your content but a sexy pic can easily double or triple your traffic with no extra effort. I don’t care who you are, male, female, black, white, brown or yellow,  you took a few seconds to look at that picture above of Nicki Minaj, and yes you looked at her ass; whether it turned you on, freaked you out or you thought it was gross (Don’t know why you would), you still looked and if it was on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or wherever else, your gonna click it.

You can use sex to sell pretty much anything, not matter what the industry is. GoDaddy is infamous for this and have been doing it for years but what does sex have to do with domain names and web hosting? Not a damn thing but it doesn’t matter.

Depending on what industry your in and what it is your doing; sex will work. The pic could be sleazy, a sexy geek with some cute glasses on to cater to the nerdy types, a hot mom etc..

In my category which is Urban Entertainment, I can always get away with sleazy stuff, everyday I look for something to take advantage of and add some sleaziness to….I enjoy it. This is the case with a video which was released by a Hip Hop artist named Tyga for his song “Make It Nasty,”…….The title alone was sleazy enough, and the pic was the icing on the cake. I intentionally chose the most eye catching sleazy pic I could get from the video.

The video premiered December 8th 2011, by December 20th I had over 150,000 views, today the video has 1 StumbleUpon which brought me over 1000 stumblers which is nuts, 13 Google+ Ones, 176 Tweets, and a whopping 42,000 Facebook Likes which brings my current views for the video to 250,000 on my site Mixtapes.tv.

All due to that sleazy preview pic that spread across social networks like wild fire.

Yeah I know it’s cheap, so what? It’s a part of the human condition, I’m simply exploiting it…..So sue me.

4. If I Can See It, I’ll Believe It

I’ll keep this one brief because you should already know this, video gets more attention than anything else. Whatever your content may be, make your best effort to enhance it by adding some visuals. A video can go much farther than a article can.

5. Do it For The Haters, No One Cares About Love

Listen your a blogger, and content creator so stop with all the none-bias, no taking sides neutral bullsh*t. Talk smack, be a hater or create something that will make the haters get bent out of shape. Majority of the people that comment of your content aren’t the positive ones, the positive folks usually just consume the content and move on while those who are more critical, negative and miserable always have something to say. You need but to read some YouTube comments to see the trolls hating away.

6. Tell Me The Benefits, Not The Features Dumb Ass

Don’t be technical, forget about the specifications of whatever product or service your marketing. Play to the readers emotions, whether it’s ego, love, loss, regret etc…From there you can use that to create urgency for whatever it is your trying to promote. Of course this doesn’t really work for a site that’s using a News format since specifications is key.

7. Do You Have A Problem? No? Well You Need To Make One

Controversy is great, if your controversial with the content you create you’ll have so much more discussion around it. If you Google the search term “why I hate blacks” most of you will find in the number one spot, the most controversial article I’ve published on my Hip Hop site iHipHopMusic.com.

It was a brilliantly ignorant article written by Kenneth Eng in a San Francisco based weekly newspaper called AsianWeek. Now me being a black man and a opportunist, it’s only right that I make a profit from this man’s hatred, my way of standing up for my race I guess.

He already did all the heavy lifting, I simply presented the content, gave my opinion in which I took a side and that is key to controversy. The best way to create controversy is to take a side so people can attack you, this is what you want – no one likes a flip-flopper so voice your opinion. Taking a side turned this article into a 800+ comments discussion.

8. Your Late, I Said Be Here At 8:30, It’s 8:35 Now, Just Go Home

If your running a news type of site then first movers advantage is the key to success. On the internet 1 day is a lifetime, so if you know your competing with hundreds of other sites for the same content you need to be first.

In my niche which is music, Hip Hop being the most competitive I’m competing with thousands other sites and blogs so being first is hard but still possible especially if your social fan base is big enough.

One of my most recent viral success is when I was one of the first with Hip Hop artist Drake’s Take Care album tracklist, as soon I received It I sent a email and blasted it out to all the social networks. Long story short I’ve received over 370,000 views and I rank number one in Google for the search term “drake take care tracklist”….All due to first movers advantage.

These are some of my methods for going viral….Thank you for reading.

People often ask for an alternative to Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver and other Adobe products, due to the fact that their prices are so high and you often need to upgrade frequently to keep up with consistent releases.

Truth be told as a web designer I haven’t used Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator in almost 2 years, I retired them after I discovered Xara’s Designer Pro 7.

This tool has become my number one Graphics and Photo editing tool over that past 2 years, It’s 3 tools in one and is capable of Web Design, Graphics, and Photo editing. I still use Adobe Dreamweaver for web design framework because Designer Pro isn’t quite yet up to par on the Web Design front, but it’s pretty solid with everything else and their making constant updates.

When it comes to the learning curve, Designer Pro is by far much easier to use than any Adobe tool. After about a 20 minutes of using it you’ll be on your way to doing almost anything you want. I recently used it to design the logo for Mixtapes.tv, I usually out source logos because for the life of me I can’t design logos, not good ones at least. For some reason I pictured this logo a certain way that no other logo designer was bringing to reality, so I decided to give it a shot with the help of Designer Pro and below is what I came up with.

That was my first official logo with Designer Pro, I’ve been using it since back when it was called Xara Extreme but I never did a real good logo before. This logo is quite simple but don’t think that’s all that Designer Pro is capable of doing. Below are some logos, graphics and illustrations that other Designer Pro artists have put together.

And guess what? This isn’t even close to the best stuff they have in the Artist gallery on the site.

In terms of affordability lets compare, a full version of Adobe Photoshop is $699, Adobe Illustrator is $599 and Adobe Dreamweaver is $399 which totals $1,697…Ouch! On the other hand a full version of Designer Pro costs $299, and you only need but look at the images above to see what it’s capable of.

I didn’t post any images of websites designed by Designer Pro (Too lazy) but it’s a very capable Web Design tool as well which is probably only second to Dreamweaver and CoffeeCup.

Designer Pro is without a doubt the best alternative to Adobe Web Design and Graphics products.

Check out Designer Pro.

……Oh and Designer Pro is also the fastest graphics program available, period!

In this guide I’ll break down all the sources I’ve used to get my sites to where they are today, some of which get over 1 million people per month. First I’ll cover free traffic sources then paid ones.

Free Traffic Sources

Don’t confuse free with useless, because that’s not the case when it comes to getting free traffic. Most of the money I make online is from free traffic.

Forums / Message Boards

You might be thinking, hey it’s 2012 who in the hell still uses message boards anymore? From my experience millions of people still use them everyday, even with the emergence of Blogging and Social Media, message boards have stood the test of time and remains a great traffic source.

The way to get traffic from message boards is not to blast a bunch of messages across hundreds of forums, that’s a sure way to get your ass band. What you should do instead is pick 3 of the most popular forums available for your niche or topic and actively participate on those boards, many forums have different requirements to participate in their boards. When I just started forums were the only source of traffic I had before search engines started paying attention to my site, before word of mouth got out, before Twitter or Facebook became the giants they are today.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia and other sites like it have been my best kept secret to getting none stop traffic, I’m still getting traffic from links I posted years ago on Wikipedia, in fact my newest site Video Game Player, it has been receiving consistent traffic from Wikipedia 12 months straight from just one link. There is a science to marketing on Wikipedia, I’ve written a guide on how to do it correctly and get long lasting traffic.

StumbleUpon

I’ll be honest with you, I get allot of traffic from StumbleUpon but I’ve yet to figure out exactly how I’ve been doing it, all I know is users have been submitting my links to my sites and they’ve been doing very well. I’m in the process of working on a guide on how to get traffic from StumbleUpon, that will provide a more clear and precise way of getting traffic from the service. I’m currently doing tests, so stay tuned. For now my advise is submit all your links to StumbleUpon and get more followers, unlike most of the other sites like StumbleUpon that started out before the social media explosion StumbleUpon has become a service that users find very useful and it continues to grow. This isn’t something you should overlook.

Twitter

Twitter drives over 10,000 visitors per month to my sites and it continues to grow, it’s really a no-brainer that this service would drive traffic to your site, since pretty much everyone has a Twitter account for their website. I have quick little guide I wrote about getting traffic from Twitter, so check it out.

Facebook

The biggest of the biggest when it comes to getting traffic and keeping them coming back. Just to one of my websites (iHipHopMusic.com) I receive over 30,000 visitors per month. With the help of a Facebook fan page you can market to the users that “Like” your page over and over again, it’s literally like having social media mailing list. Checkout my guide on how to get 1,000 visitors per day from Facebook. Also I’ve been doing some really cool things with Facebook lately and I have a few tutorials coming up.

Yahoo Answers

This site along with it’s competitor AnswerBag.com and few others can be really resourceful, but it’s a hit or miss with these type of services because you have to answer the right questions within your niche, but the thing is you never know which answers will drive traffic, for more on getting traffic by answering questions, I have a definitive guide on how to get traffic from Yahoo Answers. It’s quite the guide.

One of the best ways to get traffic from these answer websites, is to ask the same questions you find on those answer sites on your own website and then answer them. They would then show up in the search engines when people search for the answers.

Mailling List

The last but definitely one of the most important things for getting long term traffic is having a mailing list, even though I have over 40,000 Facebook fans and and over 5,000 Twitter followers for my various sites, in reality that’s not my list. You never know what can happen your account, you could get banned for whatever reason, these sites can change their policies and terms of service at anytime and you could end up loosing that entire list.

That’s not the case if you have your own mailing list hosted by a email marketing service provider, you can contact this list as much as you’d like and send that traffic to wherever you want. Everyone of my major sites have a mailing list which I blast out a email to at least once a week.

This is the end gold, you should be using Message boards, Wikipedia, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo Answers and any other traffic to ultimately drive traffic to your site so they can sign up to your mailing list.

They don’t say “The money is in the list” for nothing.

I personally use Madmimi for my email marketing, it’s the most affordable and has allot of cool features, but I also highly recommend Aweber and GetResponse as well which are two of the biggest and oldest in the Email marketing industry. There is over 70 email marketing services to choose from, check out our other site AllEmailMarketing.com to see them all.

That about raps it up for how to get traffic to your website, everything I mentioned above is something you should be working on daily. You never stop trying to find new ways to get traffic to your site and when you find news ones, add it to your list of traffic sources you already have.

It’s a system and you need to work at it consistently.

Thanks  for reading, stay tuned for more.

….Chozen.

WordPress’ advertising executive Jon Burke executive says:

“Over the years one of the most frequent requests on WordPress.com has been to allow bloggers to earn money from their blog through ads. We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better.”

Wow, that’s big talk coming from a company that’s never stepped foot in Advertising prior to this. I’m interested in seeing what WordAds has to offer that is so ground breaking that they can call Adsense sad.

What is known so far is that the opt-in ad program will be available exclusively to WordPress.com bloggers, though I’m pretty sure somewhere down the line they’ll release a plugin; most likely via JatPack.me for WordPress.org users.

The percentage of ad revenue paid to bloggers is unknown. When asked what the ad revenue is split between WordPress and publishers was, founding developer Matt Mullenweg responded, “Our primary goal is to create something that rewards bloggers for their hard work and the quality of their work, and do so at a higher level than generic Adsense would, not optimize around a particular revenue share.”

The WordAds program is not a free for all, to qualify for the program, blogs must be publicly visible and have a custom domain. Applying to the program doesn’t ensure acceptance; WordPress will choose participants based on the type of content, and traffic/engagement levels. This is natural when launching a new ad platform.

Where Are The Ads coming From?

As it is right now, Federated Media has partnered with Automattic and in conjunction with their recent acquisition, Lijit Networks, Inc. Together, they said, the companies are able to offer brands content curation, sponsored posts, and conversation targeting to help marketers reach more targeted audiences across the blogosphere. This could be a big deal for advertisers and publishers alike.

At the moment this really isn’t a competitor to Adsense per say, since it’s only available on WordPress.com which didn’t serve Adsense ads in the first place so it’s not like it’s going to hurt them. Though this could be a big incentive for many who use Blogger to move to WordPress.com’s superior blogging platform, since one of the big reasons people use Blogger is because it can serve ads.

Lets see what WordAds has to offer.

Starting next month Google will introduce the +1 button and personal recommendations to display ads. The +1 button will begin to appear on AdSense for Content and AdSense for Mobile Content display ad formats, image, animated gif, and Flash. +1s will be one additional signal to help determine an ad’s relevance.

By socializing Adsense Google aims to improve ad relevance, make their Plus 1 product more useful and of course  up the ante in the showdown with Facebook.

The good thing about this feature is that it’s completely optional, if your an Adsense publisher and prefer not to show the +1 buttons on display ads on your pages, you can opt out in your account. Check out the example below.

Do you think this feature will benefit Adsense publishers?

Not too long ago I wrote about why it’s important to be mobile ready in this day and age. The problem is that it’s still too costly to create Mobile Apps for your website and even more expensive if your trying to do something fancy (did I just use the word fancy?). Even WordPress still doesn’t really have a simple and affordable solution for creating mobile applications, well that’s until I ran into WiziApp.

WiziApp does exactly what I’ve looking to do for quite some time now, basically it’s a WordPress plugin that  turns your site into a native iPhone app. This is better than using a 3rd party solution because everything you do will be in real time, so as soon as you make any changes or updates to your WordPress site it happens on the iPhone app at the same time.

Pretty much everything you can do on your WordPress website can be done using WiziApp, such as comments Posts, Pages, Comments, Categories, Tags, Links, Images, Videos and audio files etc….

You can download the plugin for free and start building your app right away. Once your ready to launch your WordPress iPhone app to the App Store, WiziApp.com will handle that for you.

Currently this is the best option I see available for turning your WordPress powered site into a native iPhone App.

Check out WiziApp.

Enter AffiliateRoyale

AffiliateRoyale is the new guy on the block and came out swinging, it’s from the makers of the popular PrettyLink WordPress plugin which I use on all my sites. From right out the gate these guys offer a full API that allows you to do deep custom integration to fit your needs, I find it ridiculous that so many premium plugin developers don’t do this.

AffiliateRoyale automatically works with third party payment processors like PayPal and Authorize.Net, as well as the most popular WordPress membership plugin WishlistMember. It also automatically works with popular WordPress eCommerce plugins like Cart66 and Shopp.

AffiliateRoyale can also be manually integrated with the following:

• 1ShoppingCart
• 2Checkout
• 3DCart
• Actinic
• aMember
• AspDotNetStorefront
• Cart Manager
• ClickCartPro
• CS-Cart
• DL Guard
• eCartSoft
• eCommerce Templates
• Foxy Cart
• H-Sphere
• Iono
• Mambo-ChargePlus
• Mambo-phpShop
• Volusion
• Plus More

Below are some screen shots from  AffiliateRoyale demo.

I like the plugin, and it’s the most feature filled Affiliate Program plugin currently available for the WordPress platform. I’ve been in communication with Blair Williams the creator of the plugin and about doing some integration with my in-house plugins that will be going public soon. One of the plugins will allow you to easily start a Pay Per Lead affiliate program using  Affiliate Royale. My programmers are currently working on some cool tools that you’ll see soon.

In the meantime, if you’ve been looking for a solution to run an affiliate program on WordPress then this is it.

Check out AffiliateRoyale

If  you run a website that receives a substantial amount of traffic then you’ve already experienced one of the worst things that can happen to a website, and that is it goes down and you don’t know about it.

You notice how most web hosts say 99% uptime? The reason why you don’t see 100% as often is because they simply can’t guarantee that. If your running dynamic CMS platforms like WordPres, Joomla and Drupal then you most certainly know those tools kick the shit out of a unprepared server. Even with the help of Cache technology and CDN support sites still go down, and the worst part about it is that you don’t know when it does.

Just 2 weeks ago one of my servers was down for an entire day, it was a Sunday so I wasn’t even online. It wasn’t until Monday morning that I found out about it from one of the regular visitors to my site. So for a whole day 3 of my sites were down and thus lost me a ton of money.

And it’s not like web hosting companies don’t offer website monitoring, they do but it’s not very good and if it’s a server issue then the notification tool that’s running on the server is down as well.

I wrote about this on Facebook and as soon as I posted it a ad showed up about a website monitoring service called Site24x7 (good job with the ad targeting Facebook).

Of course I immediately checked it out, and the service is straight forward, they monitor your website 24×7 in frequencies of minutes, hours or day the choice is yours. They go even further than that by offering monitoring services for Web Applications, DNS, Mail Server, WPA, Port, POP, SMTP, Ping and SSL Certificate. One of the best things about the service is that as soon as your site goes down, within a minute of the downtime you receive a text message to your mobile device letting you know.

Some screen shots of the back-end of the service below:

Site24x7 Detailed Page

Site24x7 Summary Report

Site24x7 Downtime Alert Configuration

If you’ve experienced downtime on your website more than 3 times then a service like Site24x7 is definitely worth a shot.

Check them out,  Site24x7.