Key Features

The add-on supports:

• Common reporting time periods (today, yesterday, last 7 days etc.)
• Custom update frequency
• AdSense stats for Content, Feeds, Search, Mobile, & Domains
• Scrolling notifier or single line view of data
• Customizable actions for left and right mouse clicks
• Secure local password management and login

Where to Get it

You can download this useful add-on here. If you’re anything like us, you log in and check your earnings more than 10 times a day. I’m loving the ability to track earnings right from my status bar!

Please give it a run through and let me know what you think
NOTE: We are in the sandbox at Mozilla as this is a new add-in. If you leave a review here it will go a long way in getting the add-on approved. Thanks!

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Many people demand we stop texting them (we don’t do that), others want a $49.99 credit card refund (we don’t bill credit cards). However the one email that frustrates me the most are the job inquiries.

Lets take a look at the most recent job request from our contact form:

Now we do actually hire people from time to time (Data Entry Contractor Needed at WhyDoWork.com). However this is not the correct way of landing that position, nor any other work at home job, nor work anywhere in the universe.

A few tips for the newbies trying to contact a potential employer:

• Use a Proper Greeting - Try ‘Good Day’, ‘Dear WhyDoWork’ or better yet try find out where the email is going and address the person directly. ‘Hello Joe’. The more personal the better your chance at a response.
• Use Proper Grammar - All your words must be spelled correctly, and your grammar better be tight if you want to be taken seriously. DO NOT USE ALL CAPITALS!!!!
• Get to The Point - Make sure you write enough to make the email make sense, however don’t run on. If a known position is available, explain what you are after and how you are qualified. If no actual position at the company exists, try and create one! Explain what value you might bring to that organization.
• Show Intelligence - People don’t have time to explain things to you. If a position interests you but you want more details, make those questions very specific. Do as much research about the position as you can before applying. As a potential employer if I see that you don’t understand the job description, I’m going to assume you won’t be able to do the job.
• Request Follow Up - Everyone wants to know that their email was read and acknowledged. It doesn’t hurt to ask for that in your email. ‘I look forward to hearing back from you’, ‘Let me know if any positions will be opening up at your company in the near future’, ‘Thanks for your time, I look forward to discussing this opportunity further’. These are just a few examples but I think you get the idea.

Seeking employment for those that are new to the game is intimidating and my post wasn’t meant to make fun, but to educate. I hope these tips help someone land a job.

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ABG = Always be Growing

I meet a lot of people who have started websites, but expect that once it’s on the Internet, “the Internet” will grow it. Sadly, “the Internet” is a series of core routers that co-operate to send streams of data between networks using common routing protocols; it is not going to automatically promote and grow your site.

What you do with your business once it’s on the web, defines the level of success you’ll see. Looking at the successes I’ve had, they have all come from experimentation, and exploration of new ideas. When we’re talking about this site specifically, sometimes it’s easy to think “well, we’ve got a lot of features, lets sit back for a bit and see what happens.” That usually lasts about a day before we think of something new to try and we’re off working on another idea. Why? ABG.

If you’re not gettin’ busy growing, you’re gettin’ busy dying.

Barriers to entry on the web are next to nothing. If your earnings, traffic, membership, or content is at a plateau, it’s time to remember your ABG’s and get to work. I’ve mentioned in many other posts the importance of a strong mission statement. You can read ours here. If you were too lazy to click the link, a big part of it is …To become the Internets largest and most trusted telecommuting and work at home website.. Is there any way to do that other than to Always Be Growing?

Nope.

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So today at SMX Advanced, sculpting was being discussed, and then Matt Cutts dropped a bomb shell that it no longer works to help flow more PageRank to the unblocked pages. Again — and being really simplistic here — if you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.

If you’ve been steering the flow of Google PageRank across your site (which I just talked about this here: Small Changes Can Improve PageRank), it might not be working the way we all thought.

Based on Matt’s comment, if you now put nofollow on links that you don’t want getting any authority, that authority is not going to increase the value of the other links you are passing PageRank to. Basically you’re not getting any extra credit by ‘nofollowing’ links.

Just a heads up to all the PageRank sculptors out there!  There’s more good coverage here.

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Peter Peterson founded the Blackstone Group ( BX) in 1985. In 2007 after a successful IPO, Peterson found himself an instant billionaire.

At 81 years young, ready for retirement, but still razor sharp Peterson wondered what next?

From the article:

…Kurt Vonnegut once told a story about seeing Joseph Heller at a wealthy hedge-fund manager’s party at a beach house in the Hamptons. Casting his eye around the luxurious setting, Vonnegut said, “Joe, doesn’t it bother you that this guy makes more in a day than you ever made from Catch-22?” “No, not really,” Heller said. “I have something that he doesn’t have: I know the meaning of enough.”

Read the full article  here.

What would you do?

Having a sense of “enough” is a great lesson for all home business owners. What are you working towards? Are you making a difference, or just chasing the get rich quick dream?

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I settled on a link that let visitors share each results page on Twitter, but being exploratory by nature I went a step further and set up a Twitter account to track each search done on the site.

‘How’ exactly I did this I’ll get into, but it was the ‘What’ that shocked me.

My Bot is More Popular than Me After One Week

I have been checking out Twitter myself for about 6 months (@whydowork). In that time, I have amassed 172 followers. I try and update when I have something useful to share, and join discussions where I can. Overall I’d say I struggle with finding a use for it. I still don’t really get it, and I still predict it will one day go the way of pogs (insert your own fad from your childhood).

My bot on the other hand, (@workathomeninja)has been around a little over a week, and has 354 followers, more than doubling me in popularity. I never thought I’d get atleast 25 users a day interested in following a ninja-penguin living inside the computer who streams job searches (you have to read the twitter bio on the account to get that).

What Does it All Mean Basil?

I have no idea. I am actually quite surprised that an automated robot can destroy me in terms of followers at such an astounding rate. Am I really that boring to Twitterland? I like to think not.

When looking at why this might be the case, it’s worth mentioning the fact that about 60% of Twitter users quit after the first month. (source) I’ll go out on a limb and speculate that the average attention span of a twitter user can’t be more than a few seconds when using the service. Users likely come by bot via search results, note the fact that it will automatically keep them updated with interesting job searches, and decide to subscribe.

How to Make a Twitter Bot (in PHP)

Here’s my base code to get you started, feel free to borrow it:

$username = ‘yourusername’;
$password = ‘yourpass’;
$message = “whatever you want to say. Use a dynamic $variable to make it fun.”;
$url = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml’;
$curl_handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, “$url”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, “status=$message”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, “$username:$password”);
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);

If you place that code in a small file called testTwitter.php and visit the page, you’ll autopost a message to the account you define. Pretty easy to build some intelligence around what gets posted and voila, your first twitter bot.

Some Tips on Popularity

Hashtags (#) are a great way to encourage your bot becomes popular. They provide users of the site and other services built around the site the ability to subsribe and search on a particular identifier. For my bot, I use the hashtag #jobs to help spread the information provided.

I also mix in some of my own thoughts to keep things light (I just made a comment about tonights’ Laker-Magic NBA game).

Who really wants to follow a bot? Not many would instinctively; but followers ultimately go where they see value. If you can provide a bot that provides useful things like cheaper flight notifications or other time sensitive pieces of information, you could have a winner on your hands. Spamming the service is a sure path to failure, but if you are sensitive to the needs of your users, you’ll be just fine.

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Promotion and marketing for me are equally as important as your product. Often times I see entrepreneurs fail because they have a great product.

Think that sentence was incomplete?

Here’s a correction; Often times I see entrepreneurs succeed because they have a great product and great marketing.

This is one such case.

Read above to see how one resourceful entrepreneur followed the set of steps below to go from a new product to likely being published in Forbes magazine in less than a week:

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
2. Twitter
3. Getting Blogged
4. Forbes!

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Have you ever noticed that sometimes site size is inversely proportional to site quality?

Some are complaining that this has happened to Internet darling Twitter, which even Oprah is using. There is a term for this phenomenon dating back to the early ages of modern man, in 1994, and it is called Eternal Semptember.

This term was coined to describe:
The belief that an endless influx of new users (newbies) since that date (Sept 1993) has continuously degraded standards of discourse and behavior on Usenet and the wider Internet.

Now, it’s crazy to look at this with a narrow mind and say the Internet is worse off now than it was in 1993, but has the sense of community improved? Haven’t tools like Facebook and Flickr brought us closer? I say yes, but don’t think Eternal September is working against innovation.

As I say in almost every post I make. The Internet community is the same as a real community. Your site (depending on your traffic) could be a small town or a huge metropolis. All sites with a community of users need a government: police, social services, and health care, etc.

I think of WhyDoWork.com as a small town.

The “Eternal September” that many websites face is growing faster than their government can scale. Think about a real town. What if you grew from Timmins Canada to Los Angeles overnight? Could the current police force or social services groups handle the growth: no way!

The most important step a community site (like Twitter) can take is to grow their government to an adequate size that can serve members. If not, crime, low quality discussions, and freeloaders (spammers) will take over.

Think about your site, and make sure you don’t get caught in an Eternal September!

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Think about what your time is worth. For example lets say my time is worth $100/hr. If I watched 31.5 hours weekly I’d be theoretically ’spending’ $3150/month, or $37,800 a year on this largely unproductive habit. Don’t get me wrong, learning about how humpback whales migrate on Discovery and following Jack Bauer on Fox does have some return benefits (especially if you aspire to be a Spy posing as a Marine Biologist) but the benefits for most aren’t really there.

I think it’s worthwhile to read How Dumping TV Allowed Me to Quit My Job, Create an Online Business and Fund My Retirement Account. The temptation can be huge as a home business owner, but by controlling what you watch, and how often you watch it, you can find that extra time to code some new features for your website, expand your online sales, or take on more freelance work.

Read the article. Then turn off the TV.

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About a month ago I posted a hole in our PageRank strategy that I thought was draining some of the authority Google gives our site (see nofollow and improving PageRank). I made the changes (knowing that early April was the next update), and every major page on our site has been bumped to PageRank 5 on the toolbar.

For those that say the visible PageRank is just a snapshot, it does make a difference when selling ads, and it does make a difference in the eye of a large portion of your site audience, so you should try and get that little green bar as high as you can.

If you read this and have no idea what PageRank is, here’s an overview.

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