In an ongoing effort to offer publishers the best tools for making money online through advertising sales, Text Link Ads (which is the biggest money maker for this blog) has made some significant changes to their user interface.

Now when you log in you get a breakdown of which sites you are selling ads on are active and what kind of links you are selling, notice the small blue or red icon next to each listing. You can also see how many ads are sold on each of your sites.

They have also made it much easier to find your projected earnings for the month. On the right side at the bottom of the main page is a box that shows your projected earnings.

Text Link Ads really is one of the best ways I have found to make money online. The bottom line is, if you can drive traffic to your site, you can sell advertising the easy way by having someone else do it. Less work means more time for blogging and getting other things done. Sign up Today!

With the Windows Vista Backup Status and Configuration Tool (Start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Backup Status and Configuration) you can make a backup of your entire computer which can be restored at a later time should something happen to your main hard drive.

You can also set up automatic backups to run at specified intervals so you can be sure your data is safe on a regular basis.

In my case, I had to purchase a new Hard Disk Drive because my old drive was showing a SMART failure and imminent death. Running the backup tool allowed me to capture all my data in one file and restore it directly to the new drive without any hassle.

The only problem I found was that EIDE drives take precedence over SATA drives in the boot order so I had to also copy my second, smaller drive to my external drive as well. Copying that data to the new drive was a snap once everything was up and running again.

The main point I am trying to make here is you should be always backing up your data to one or more external devices so that in the event of a failure you are ready. In my opinion, Vista has one of the best backup tools built into the system (ultimate edition in my case) so you really have no excuse for lost data.

What is XS Energy Drink?

XS Energy Drink was created by a southern california duo that wanted a healthier alternative to the sugary energy drinks and sodas that are everywhere in stores these days. The main competitor is Red Bull (which now has a sugar free version, mainly due to XS!).

In September 2002, XS made an exclusive distribution agreement with Amway Global that changed the future for this energy drink which now generates $120 million annually in sales. Read the FAQ here.

Why Am I Giving Away A Case?

I drink one or two of these drinks a day to help me get going in the morning and  keep me going throughout the day. I don’t drink coffee and I don’t drink sugary drinks like Monster or Red Bull because I hate the “coming down” effect all that sugar has. Most people call this a “crash”. XS is also loaded with B-Vitamins and amino acids which help your muscles and keep you alert. As a by product, XS is a natural bug repellent because of the B-Vitamins.

I am so sure that you will like these drinks, I’m giving one case (12, 8.4oz cans) of your choice away to a lucky winner (approx retail value up to $35).

There are several ways to enter.

1. The easiest way is to comment on this post which earns you 1 entry.
2. The second way is to follow us on twitter and tweet the following: I just entered to win a case of XS Energy Drink (http://bit.ly/5DLtB) from @flagusco. Read about the contest here: http://bit.ly/kYDJZ.
   This will earn you 2 entries.
3. The third way, and in my opinion the best way is to order a case for yourself, and you’ll earn 5 entries. To qualify for the 5 entries and to verify you have actually ordered, you must use the contact form on this site and paste your order receipt in the body of the form. All orders must be verified.

You can earn a total of 8 entries if you use all three methods above. All entries will be placed into random.com and one winner will be chosen on July 1st so enter today!

On a side note, if you are interested in making money selling XS, contact me about becoming an Independent Business Owner with Amway Global.

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What is Twitter?

Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networks today because it is simple, straightforward and it works. Twitter allows you to communicate what you are doing in 140 characters or less. If you are already following me on Twitter then you already know this and I’m preaching to the choir. However, if this is new to you, it’s time to look at what Twitter can do for you and your online business.

I use Twitter to not only get news on topics i’m interested in, but stock trading ideas, marketing and information on making money online and other business related ventures I am involved in.

Just as you want to have multiple streams of income, you need to have multiple avenues of information gathering and dissemination. Although I don’t follow every single one of my own followers, I do follow those ones that I feel contribute to the topics I am interested in or need to keep track of.

Why Do I Need Followers?

Your efforts to make money online are only going to be as successful as the number of people you can reach. You may have discovered the greatest money making opportunity ever but if you can’t tell others about it, you could be losing hundreds or thousands of dollars in revenue.

What you want to do then is get as many people following you as possible. There’s one tool on the market that does this better than any other tool i’ve seen. It’s called Hummingbird and you need to buy it today if you are serious about making money online.

Hummingbird works the same way a human would if they were adding followers in Twitter. You search for followers by keyword or hashtag(#) and then using the tools in the Hummingbird interface, add all those followers.

That’s the first part, but there is more. What will happen is your account will get to a point where you can’t add any more users. You wait one day and then unfollow all those people that haven’t followed you back. Hummingbird knows who you have followed an unfollowed and will prevent you from following the same person you have unfollowed so you won’t seem spammy to the Twitter servers.

When you are able to add more users, usually a day or soe later, you just repeat the same process. It’s not uncommon for someone to be following thousands of others and have thousands of followers.

My goal is to have as many followers as possible so that my marketing efforts have the highest impact with the least amount of effort. Download Hummingbird today, it’s the best tool for the job.

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The basic idea behind TweetBucks is to pay users a commission on clicks through to links or products. You shorten your URL using bit.ly and an affiliate code is automatically inserted into the link if it matches one of the merchants in the TweetBucks database.

So if you post a link to Twitter or Facebook that goes to Amazon.com, Best Buy or any of the other 1000 or so merchants, your affiliate code is automatically added and you earn a commission on the sale. It’s that simple. You can sign up for a free account today.

There’s also a great article about TweetBucks here. ProTwit asked a great question in the article:

Protwit: So what if the link I want to shorten is not part of your list of supported Merchants?
TweetBucks: That’s the best part, you can still make money on every click using our customizable ad-frame!  This optional feature inserts a leaderboard (728×90) ad unit on top of the site you are sharing.  We pay you for every click.  People are earning anywhere from $0.5 to $1 eCPM.

So, if you aren’t on Twitter or Facebook you can still earn money using an ad-frame. The potential for making mone with this is unlimited! It’s much the same as everything online. Drive traffic, convert clicks and make sales and you’ll find success. If aren’t doing so already, follow me on Twitter and keep up with what I am doing.

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I created my twitter account to communicate ideas that don’t warrant their own full post. I work full time for a bank and don’t always have time to write a full blown post about some of my ideas, especially stock trades which happen frequently.

To that end, I have a couple hundred followers as you can see by my widget in the sidebar. However, I don’t follow every single one of my followers. There are several reasons for this.

1. I believe there is a limit to the amount of information you can digest from a single source in any given day.
2. Not everyone has something interesting to say, or their tweets are so infrequent it wouldn’t matter if you followed them or not.
3. I don’t believe in automatic reciprocal following. See my first point as to why.

Taking these points into consideration, I still find it difficult to follow the 100 or so tweeps that I follow now. My basic criteria for following someone is this:

• Do they have something interesting to say that meshes with my own interests
• Are they business/career oriented in my same profession
• Are they friend/family/Coworker
• Do they regularly tweet links I find interesting/useful

With these basic guidelines, you can see why I can’t/won’t follow everyone that follows me. Don’t take it personally, I always try to check out who the new followers are and if you meet my criteria above you’ll get a new follow from me, otherwise just realize that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with a half dozen conversations let alone hundreds or thousands.

Also realize that my tweets primarily revolve around stocks, investments and bussinesses that I am involved with. I truly think it is a great way to get word out about something new to as many people as possible that you might otherwise not reach. This is because of the power of hashtags and the twitter search engine. In fact, Twitter has gone a step above and beyond and put on your home page, topics that are most being talked about so you can get in on the conversation from right there.

So next time you are feeling bad about unfollowing someone, just remember they are probably using their own criteria for following just as you do.

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This is where XMarks (Formerly Foxmarks) comes in. With XMarks you can synchronize your bookmarks in Firefox so that you have the same ones no matter where you are. Another great feature of XMarks is the ability to backup your bookmarks. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to reinstall my Operating System and the process of exporting and re-importing bookmarks is such a pain. XMarks makes it easy to get those bookmarks back because it’s all stored on their server.

Don’t worry, XMarks is free and this isn’t a paid post, I just really like the service. Check out all the features here: http://www.xmarks.com/about/features

This of course, is just one of the many productivity tools I use in my day to day life.

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I wasn’t able to attend the second or third days due to a conflict with my work schedule so I missed the two keynot speeches I really wanted to see. I think next year I may just take the time off work so I can fully enjoy what Ad:Tech has to offer. The show floor this year was bigger and had to span two entire floors of Moscone West. If you plan on attending next year, let me know so we can meet up for Lunch or drinks during the show.

Here’s a wrap up video of the first day (This isn’t me, I just found it on YouTube). Enjoy.

For reference, here’s the email:

Hi,

We’re writing to let you know that we’ll be retiring AdSense video units at the end of April. After reviewing this feature, we’ve found that it hasn’t been performing as well as we had hoped, so we’ve decided to focus our efforts on other opportunities to help publishers monetize their sites.

We recommend that you begin removing the video unit code from your pages as soon as possible, to ensure that you can take advantage of the available ad space on your pages. At the end of April, any remaining Leaderboard or Skyscraper video units will begin directing users to YouTube.com, while other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players. These standard video players will display top YouTube videos, but you won’t generate earnings from them once this change occurs.

If you’d still like to display free video content from YouTube, you can do so through YouTube.com directly: visit any specific video page for the embed code, or sign in to your YouTube account to create a playlist. For more information about embedding YouTube videos, please visit http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=57788. Alternatively, if you have less than three ad units on your page, you may prefer to replace your video unit with a regular ad unit.

Although video units are being retired, other video offerings within AdSense aren’t affected. Video ads may still appear on your pages and AdSense for video is still available for eligible publishers. If you’d like more information about the retiring of video units, please visit our Help Center at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12182.

Thanks for your support of video units in the past, and we appreciate your patience and cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdSense product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

I think what really wasn’t working here is the format of the video units. The idea was that you could embed YouTube videos into your blogs and people using the player would generate revenue for you when the videos were played. The problem was, none of the sizes of the players are economical in terms of real estate on your blog. They were too big for most spaces and had a clunky interface. Perhaps they are going back to the drawing board to redesign them. We’ll have to wait and see.