The Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette is being flooded by submissions.  The magazine added seven new subscribers in June and has added eight in July.  And on July 24, 2010, someone downloaded the Ebook that the blog is promoting. 

The magazine got over 2,400 hits in July.

Now none of these events are big news.  The magazine is still small potatoes in the world of blogging.  But these events make me think that the trend toward succeeding and success is positive.

And that’s really all a blogger can ask for.  The fact that the magazine now has ten pieces of content from other writers in the slush pile means that I don’t have to write everything that goes into the magazine.  It means the blog is getting recognition.  It means that the writers that I publish in the magazine are going to tell all their friends and even strangers that they have been published in the most dynamic flash fiction magazine on the Internet.  It means more subscribers. 

And out of all those writers and readers and subscribers, it means a growning number of people will download the Ebook at $6.00 a pop of which I get $3.00.

My brother and sister bloggers and writers, these are the small victories that must be won if you are serious about making money on the Internet.  And I want to make money blogging.  I have to.  My social security will not allow me to pay back my student loans.

A blogger must give his or her readers something useful.  The Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette gives reading pleasure to readers and a showcase for writers to bring attention to their works.

All of these things together is a big victory.

Every one of us has something that is useless to us, but can be useful to someone else. Junk is something that has sat around the house unused for a year or more. These things just are wasting space and wasting away; and could be useful to someone else. Selling this stuff can earn the owner some extra money.

EBay

This is the world’s most popular online auction site. Sellers can practically sell anything and buyers can buy almost anything on eBay. Sellers are required to pay a small upfront setup fee, a low final sale fee and sellers can choose from a host of extra selling tools which have a range of extra costs. Ebay attract millions of buyers and sellers around the world; making eBay the world’s largest virtual shopping mall on the internet.

Craigslist

Craigslist is the internet’s biggest classified ads directory. Some users have describe Craigslist as the world’s largest garage sale, which have millions of classified ads from people trying to sell things, rent property, sell houses, find roommates, find mates, and practically anything else that you can think of. The service is free, but does have some requirements, rules and policies that users must read and agree on before placing any classified ad on the sight.

Amazon

Amazon is quickly becoming a real threat to eBay’s supremacy on the Internet. The big difference between Amazon and Ebay is that Amazon is an online retail outlet and eBay is an online auction website. On Amazon, sellers can sell a wide range of products at a retail price that the seller will set and charge a shipping fee that Amazon will help the seller establish. Buyers can shop through millions of items from hundreds of thousands of sellers and save money. Amazon does charge sellers a small fee for each item that is sold on Amazon, but this fee is usually much lower in the longrun than what a seller is expected to pay on Ebay.

 Sell

Sell.com is a pretty neat alternative to both eBay and Craigslist; mostly because this website blends the best of both of the world’s biggest shopping worlds in one easy place. Sellers can setup a free classified ad and sell products like would normally be done on Craigslist; and then with the same ad, the seller can add a PayPal BuyNow button to enable potential buyers to buy directly from the seller online. Buyers can select the city in which interested in shopping. All needed to join; is a valid email account.

BookScouter

This website is the perfect place for any bookworm to go; when wanting to scale down mountains of old books that are just collecting dust tucked under beds, in closets or stored in cardboard boxes in the attic. BookScouter dot com is actually like having your own personal scout working for you; to search out the best re-sale book prices on the Internet. Simply plug-in the book’s ISBN number, and then click on the search button, and then – POW!: The results. The search snoops out the 40 best book-buying websites on the Internet for the best selling prices.

How to Build a False Facebook Account

To build a false Facebook account all you need is an email address. To make it simple register your false person/friend with their own invented name as the basis of their email account. For example if you want to invent a pretend friend called Maria Mullovatimall, register her with this email address MariaMullovatimall@whatever.com. (Please note that for this example we have replaced aol.com or gmail.com with the fictitious email provider whatever.com but apologies to the whatever organisation if it exists.) 

Make up as many fake friends as you like but keep a note of them with the password you need to access their email accounts. Tip: use the same password for all your false email accounts as this is much easier for you to remember than the 500. 

Once you have the false email accounts you can start making your false Facebook accounts. We recommend that you note down the details of your false friends in a notebook or open an excel document or other spreadsheet type of thing. Each of your false friends will need their own birthday and you should (so as to seem more authentic) add details which are individual to all your fake friends.

Are You Sad Enough to Do This?

We hope beyond all hope that you are not sad enough to do this. Please do not fall for the Facebook social pressure to have so many friends you couldn’t fit them into the average size dwelling. If you haven’t 500 or more Facebook friends you are likely to be more socially successful than those who do. By all means invent one or two false friends but make these exceptional people. For example make them the Chief Executive Officer of a multinational organisation or the mother of thirty-four children.

Don’t Fall Foul of Facebook

We hope that this article has made you think about Facebook and might have stopped you taking Facebook at face value. There are many false profiles on Facebook. Although some of these have been invented for fun some are masquerading as harmless types to ensnare their next victim. Children and the vulnerable should have their Facebook sessions monitored to avoid getting to know these types and harmed in the future.

There are 1001 directories available on Android phones now days, some are basic, some advanced; some as stylish as the visually pleasing Layar that actually signposts locations on your phone and navigates you towards them. The trouble being is that many of them do not have a wide audience of people advertising on them, or people writing about them.  On a recent visit to London we were looking for a branch of Prezzo that I had passed by earlier, but could no longer remember where I saw it. I had three of these directories stored on my Android mobile and not one showed us the location, the result we never got there, although ended up somewhere possibly much better.

Enter Google Places Directory, this is by far the best of these applications, because if the company or attraction is listed on Google, then they will be on the Places Directory.

Image by Ivan Walsh via Flickr

Places Directory not only gives you the most accurate up to date list of places, it also has some handy add-ons, such as interconnectivity with your phones satellite navigation so you can either on foot or car navigate your way in. There is also a nice “Dial” option that allows you to quickly and easily dial the location you are looking at should you need a bit more information. Some locations even have exterior shots to help you, and some if you are looking at chain eateries even offer a look at their menu. Some locations such as hotels have photographs of there rooms and communal areas for you to peruse at your leisure.

It’s good to be a critic too, because while you are out and about you can write reviews on the services you have received in the location, those reviews instantly appear on the places directory, and on the associated online Google search pages. Locations that have entries on the likes of Trip Advisor also pull in reviews from their website too, so its not all just Google based information.

Each day the directory becomes more and more populated as more business open themselves up to the internet, as a result Places Directory is fast becoming the number one on the go directory for everything from days out, eating out, to fuel. This really is an application you have to have on your phone.

For the past year and a half Connie Schultz has posted Department of Defense casualty alerts on Facebook. These are our American forces who were killed fighting a war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now a woman named Pat McDermott Nixon in Strongsville, Ohio has added a biography of each causality. Nixon is a retired children’s librarian. She came of age during the Vietnam war and recalls another list of names and faces that are still etched in her memory. She was a young school teacher in Cleveland, Ohio in 1969 when 242 young men were killed in Vietnam in one week, from May 28 to June 3. Life Magazine consecrated 12 pages to the fallen. Nine of them were from Ohio. Nixon still remembers looking into those faces, reading each name aloud and feeling a deep awareness of the loss. Now she publishes the bio of each of our fallen, one death at at time onFacebook.

Image by Beverly & Pack via Flickr

Nixon says, “We must pause to look into the faces. We must know how many, we must know who. On Facebook, the name of each casualty, known but to family and friends, are recognized by all in Facebook’s gallery of young Americans. Nixon does her research on each of the war dead and posts the bio under his or her name as recorded by Connie Schultz.

Following is a post on Facebook written by Schultz as taken from the Department of Defense Casualty alerts.

“Sgt. Justin B. Allen, 23, of Coal Grove, Ohio, died July 18 in Zhari, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when he was shot by insurgents while conducting combat operations.”

Underneath is a bio written by Nixon.

“In November Justin was going to marry his fiancée, Kimberly Schwartz, whom he had met when she moved to Lawrence County from Florida. “She had already bought her dress,” (his mother Bonnie said) The last time Bonnie saw her son was this spring when he came home between deployments. She wants her son to be remembered for his generosity, honesty and patriotism. “

Image by Misserion via Flickr

We cannot stick our heads in the sand. We must remember these men and women who sacrifice their lives, so we can  live in peace in our comfortable homes while they suffer and die in a foreign country. We owe them a debt we can never repay.

Publish your articles and earn income.

More articles:

http://socyberty.com/issues/afghanistan-and-the-military/

http://newsflavor.com/world/usa-canada/vietnam-vet-honored/

http://socyberty.com/government/bill-of-rights/

http://socyberty.com/military/the-suicide-of-keiffer-wilhelm-soldier/

http://scienceray.com/technology/applied-science/nuclear-testing-and-howard-hughes/

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According to experts, there are only 232 million IP addresses left in the world. This is only enough to  last about 340 days. An IP address is a unique 32 digit number that is used to identify each computer, internet connected device, and computer website.

IPv4 was developed over 30 years ago. At the time, developers thought that it would be suffice to provide an endless supply of  IP addresses for decades to come. However, the personal computer was a rarity at the time, mobile phones did not even exist, and no one would have ever imagined that a air-conditioner might need an IP address. The explosion of home computers and web-enabled devices certainly is the causative factor behind the “well running dry’ on IP addresses. 

There is somewhat of a doomsday fear surrounding the internet industry. If/until the problem is fixed, multiple customers would have to share IP addresses, and this would cause all sorts of applications from Gmail to iTunes to stop working correctly.

Experts told the Sydney Morning Herald that the solution is “IPv6,” which was developed several years ago. Ipv6 uses an address with 128 digits, as opposed to the 32 digits used by IPv4.  Supposedly, it would allow everyone in the world to have over four billion addresses each.

There are a few in the internet industry (Windows and Mac operating systems,  iPhone, etc) that have adopted Ipv6 protocol.  Web services such as Facebook and Google have also made strides to adopt IPv6. Australian ISP Internode is the first to offer IPv6 as a commercial service. A spokesperson for Internode told The Sydney Morning Herald that changing from IPv4 to IPv6 is like changing the road and tires while the person is still driving on the road. The spokesman went on to say, “It’s been expensive, it’s been time-consuming and it doesn’t produce an immediate return on investment so it’s the kind of thing that isn’t popular with CFOs. However, it’s laying an important foundation for what happens over the next few years as it becomes increasingly difficult to obtain IPv4 addresses.”

Still, much of the internet industry has not made any attempt to transition. The reluctance is most likely because of the cost and time consumption. Users would also have to buy new hardware and upgrade networking equipment and software. Each internet connecting device would have to upgraded or reconfigured to support IPv6. 

So you’ve got a site and / or a blog that needs some link love, but you don’t know where to start? Search no more, for you are reading the best article on newbie link building ever written on the Internet. Following these five basic steps doesn’t require any previous knowledge of SEO and other fancy term strategies and tactics. Even my grandma could follow these steps and get her blog visible in no time!

So, without further chit-chat, here are the top 5 basic steps to get you start building links for your website:

1. Write great content. I know it’s a no brainer, but most people ignore this part and then wonder why they failed. Great content means great links which, in turn, mean more traffic and leads for you.

2. Write articles or hire professionals to do it for you, and then distribute it all over the web. In no time, you’ll have plenty of links pointing right back at your site.

3. Comment on blogs and forums. Even if the blogs have nofollow in place, you shouldn’t worry. Interacting in your niche is sure to get readers for you, readers who might, in turn, link to your website or blog. Forums are a great way to get your link out there, simply by having a one-line signature linking back to you.

4. Get your site listed in all the directories you can, and get your blog and rss feed listed in directories that promote this type of content. You can hire people to do that for you, but you don’t need to be listed in thousands and thousands of directories, at least not now. Yahoo, BOTW and Business.com should be more than enough for starters.

5. Write a squidoo lens on your business or website, comment on Yahoo! Answers, Amazon and all the others, submit your content to digg and stumbleupon, write a wiki on your business, use social networking at your best interest. This is called web 3.0 by some, and it works like a charm when it comes to link love.

So there you have it. The top 5 basic steps to get you start building links for your website. Just follow them, and get ready to be overwhelmed by both traffic and new links for your business.

You’ve been hearing a lot lately about SEO, one way link building, search engine rankings and what not, and you want a piece of the action! It’s easy to see why; after all, when your ranking increases so do your sales and, ultimately, your bank account. And that’s great for you. So read on, and find out about the most effective way to increase that famous search engine ranking: one way link building.

First of all, to build one way links is more difficult than the common practice, which is link exchange. Why would you go over your head to build one way links? First of all, because it all pays off in the end, and you’ll get excellent search engine results for a longer period of time. Second of all, it’s because efficient link building will make your site look better in the eyes of potential customers, having that great reputation given to it by all those free links.

Generally speaking, you want link building to happen when your business depends on your website. Your main concern is Google, the all mighty search engine, but do not ignore the other search engines, such as Yahoo, as you’ll get precious traffic from them too. Think of it this way: Google sees every link you get as a positive vote for your site. The more votes you get, the better the place you’re getting in search queries for your keywords.

The number one benefit of one way link building is that you aren’t bound to link back to websites you don’t like, as part of a link exchange program. You just get them, ideally they should be natural, but it doesn’t really matter if you use a cheap link building service or the services of a professional link building company. Natural links are better because they’re constant. If you get a natural back-link, you can be sure it stays there for a long term.

So how can you get more back-links for your website? Other than the simple answer, which is content, content and more content, you can also try some of these methods:

- acquire the services of a link building company

- read a link building book, or a link building handbook, as they’re easy to find and very informative

- read all the articles about SEO you can get your hands on

- provide free content on your website

- buy one way back-links or use a back-link submission company

- build one way links by submitting your website to directories related to your activity

- link building isn’t hard when your company blog takes off with a blast, people will link to it

- free back-links will be coming your way when the newsletters you send are really valuable to those that read them

- hire a writer to provide you with quality, original articles that you can then submit to all sorts of websites

- for efficient link building, hire a SEO copywriter to take care of your website content and other marketing collateral

These are just a few of the strategies available to you in your pursuit of free back-links. Our advice, when it comes to one way link building, is to hire professional to take care of it for you. It will be one of the best investments you’ll ever make, and link building services abound on the Internet. With a little research, you’ll be able to build back-links that will be both natural and will last for a long time. That, obviously, translating into money in your bank account. Good luck!

Natural Search Engine Optimization, or, as it is called, organic SEO is a practice which prepares the code and content of your website with keywords and phrases that you want related to your website. The result is, hopefully, that your site appears on the first page of results for a particular search (your keywords and phrases). Basically, SEO friendly websites are easy indexed by search engines. Some websites need simple SEO, whilst others require lots of hard work, and intricate coding to have the best results.

As you know, organic (or natural) searches are those done by individuals highly interested in the keywords or key phrases they queried the search engine for. The best thing for your business is that the search engine connects you to the interested, potential customer. But that’s happening only if you’ve made good use of natural SEO when designing your website. But don’t take my word for it. One of the most important audit companies in the world, PriceWaterHouseCoopers, search advertising and search results made more than $14 billion in the last years. And that makes perfect sense! After all, search engines are the single, best way people find stuff on the Internet. That’s why natural search engine optimization and SEO friendly sites make sense: because they connect an interested audience with the object of their interest, via that particular search engine, whether it may be Google or Yahoo, or any other search engine, for that matter.

Basically, the algorithms used by Google and Yahoo to perform searches make for more than 90% of all search queries around the Internet. There are two ways you can be on top of those searches: one is buying advertising on the search engines (only about 30% of traffic is directed to advertising results) and the other is search engine optimization. When it comes to SEO, natural SEO takes more time to be effective, about 6 months if the people you hire to do it know what they’re doing. After your website reaches the top, thanks to its SEO friendly code, you’ll most likely never lose those wanted top spots. But that’s only happening with natural search engine optimization. If you choose to use the so-called “black hat” SEO techniques, beware – no search engine approves of them. And, trust me, you really want to avoid Google penalty, and you really want to avoid the Google sandbox. Nobody knows for sure how or why some websites are sandboxed by Google; suffice to say that if you used “black hat” SEO tactics and your site is sandboxed, well, you’ve got your answer.

Zero cost per click is a marketer’s dream. And natural SEO is the only way to go if you want it to happen. Remember, more than 70% of all clicks go to the sites that appear to have made their way to the top naturally, without paying for the spot. It’s true that natural searches deliver millions of dollars to the best prepared websites out there, but it’s also true that most websites aren’t designed with SEO in mind. Just a little effort on your part might make the difference between profit and loss.

I’m sure this article managed to show you what you need to do to get your site out there, fighting the best of the best, and making money for you. Just make it SEO friendly, get a natural search engine optimization expert to take a look at the code, avoid Google penalty, avoid Google sandbox, and you’ll be just fine.

Happy profits!

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a technique of writing your content in a way that improves the volume of traffic to your website from all search engines. Practically, good SEO on your website means higher, targeted traffic for your products and content.

Search engine optimization was initially developed as a marketing tool, but now more and more people use it for their blogs, websites and social network pages more for the audience and less for a profit. So let’s see if search engine optimization really is good for your website.

First of all, we’ll need to establish what you want to do with your website. If your website is what we call “personal”, that you only use to talk about your life and close circle of friends an places, a website mostly made so that your friends and family can catch up on what you’re doing when you’re not around them, then search engine optimization is not something you should be bothered about.

If your website is something other than that, be it a business website, a portfolio or an ambitious blog, then yes, you need search engine optimization. This way you’ll attract more customers for your online products, more readers for your new book, possible employers of your artistic talent and even new fans for your music. The sky’s the limit.

Should you decide that you indeed need search engine optimization implemented on your website, our advice is to hire professionals to do it. Especially if you’re not accustomed to computer programming or html commands. A good SEO specialized company could be the difference between failure and success.

Good luck!