Today is the start of a brand new year and we can put 2007 behind us. A lot of exciting things are coming up in 2008 and the most exciting thing might be the election that will occur in November. I wonder who our next president will be? It should be interesting to see what canidate represents the Republican and Democratic parties in the 2008 Presidential Elections.

I didn’t set any goals for 2008; other than to try and make this a better year than 2007. I guess my best way to judge that will be on the money I make. Hopefully I can earn more money in 2008 and start putting away some for my retirement. I’m still decades away from my retirement years, but it seems more and more likely that our Social Security won’t be around when I hit 62, 65 or 70 years old. I’m guess that the retirement age will be 70 when I get to retire. I might have to wait longer than that if I don’t start putting some money away.

So did you set any goals for your self in 2008? Please share them and let me know what you hope to accomplish in 2008. I know the New England Patriots football team will have only one thing on their mind in 2008 and it’s going to involve winning the Super Bowl. Their perfect season in 2007 isn’t going to mean much if they can’t win a Super Bowl in 2008. I hope everyone has a great New Year’s Day and we are only 364 more days away from 2009! I think it will be here before we know it! HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY!

A new company called bloggerwave has come onto the scene to offer a way for bloggers to get paid for writing reviews and blogs about various businesses. Bloggerwave is looking to become Europes’ premiere advertising source for companies to find new ways to reach customers and generate a buzz about their products. They are part of IQ Division which offers several marketing and advertising solutions for your online business. What is interesting is that they have another project in the works called ReviewWave which may be something along the lines of Bloggerwave with a new twist. Stay tuned for future updates.

We just purchased my daughter a new set of Healys, and they now have placed a bright yellow sticker on the sole of the shoe stating ” Removing of this sticker, you waive all rights to sue Healy, and accept all liability….” WOW! I don’t remember that on the first pair we bought. Next I guess we will those stickers on Lincoln Logs, ” Should you remove this sticker and swallow one of logs, you waive all rights to sue our company…”

For all you mothers out there online looking for a place to go and read some day to day news on mothers like you then head on over to A Mother’s conversational blog. This is a mother who home schools her four kids and takes care of the home. My wife home schooled two of our kids for about 2 months when we first moved and she was ready to send them back. So for any mother to have time to keep the family moving, home school, and blog is very impressive.

A couple of key items you need to keep in mind as the Social Search marketing is growing is:
1) Blog about what you know and are passionate. Become an expert in that field to help your customers find information.

2) Share your blog with others and get your content syndicated through sites such as FeedBurner, and ezinearticles.com.

3) Create your own friendly network of like minded blogs and create links and posts. This will help you create your SEO and also additional customers.

Will Facebook and Yahoo ever come to an agreement? The talks have been going for a few months, and appear to be getting closer. This was a huge step for Yahoo to gain a larger exposure in the Social Networking arena. It is amazing that the founder is a 22 year old college student and the site is only 18 months, and now being valued at close to $1 billion dollars. It will be interesting to see how the Social Newtworking grows, as there will sure to be more competitors to spring up. Will this eventaully change the way interact with each other, and have the same impact as eMail?
Social networking sites typically allow users to create and share blogs, pictures and videos with friends and the wider public. I think they are just Blogs on Steroids, but a younger generation is running the show. There are bound to be more Niche Social Netwroks, that will tailor to Seniors, working parents, Soccer moms, it is only a matter of time.

For many people today getting on the internet has become part of their daily routines. You get up, shower, and then check your email. For those that wish to communicate to other and have a more interactive dialogue there are blogs. These simple online diary’s have exploded in the past few years since they are relatively simply to do and inexpensive to maintain. We have a few blogging partners that are listed below that you can bookmark and check them out to get a different perspective on the online world.

Community Thought

VontuSuccess

Single Source Writing

Lucy Creek

The Crimson

Brother Hood Begins

SpeedStream

All of these present some interesting comments and blogs on various subjects that you may find of intetest. Syhcronize your daily interests into one location here.

In the world of blogging, using Pay-per-click is one way to help monetize your traffic. This means that you earn commission whenever your reader click a link you provided. Google Adsense, or Revenue Pilot is the best example of this scheme.When you incorporate Pay-per-performance this  means that you’ll not earn any commissions just by click. This is ususally referred to as CPA (Cost per action)You can get commission only when your reader purchase something from the web site that you provided by means of a link. These usually pay beteween $1- $60 per actual completion. Most of affiliate programs, for example amazon associate program. As well as Azoogle, and Qclix are great examples of further CPA.While pay-per-click Ads seems easier to perform than CPA, the latter has sound reason you may have to consider:that is, the amount of commission is much higher than that of the former.Most of case joining an affiliate program is free, so no risk and no catch is involved. But certainly you have to put more effort than you do with Google Adsense. You can regard ‘more effort’ as a cost of ‘free’ and ‘more commission’.

With the rise of the Social Network sites such as MySpace, FaceBook , and others searches now for more specific topics and people are beginning to rise. While the traditional search engines are looking of ways to incorporate this new way of thinking. The concern is that how do you ultimately protect the consumer, while not giving out their personal info. The traditional online marketer will need to consider this when marketing their sites. While receiving 100K hits per day is good, if they are not converting to sales, it is money wasted.

One great way to increase your Social appeal to your intended audience is by posting and getting seen on high profile blogs. Also, getting your customers to search and write about your product is priceless. As we have on our site, Swicki is a great example of a Social Search. It will actually learn the behaviors and search patterns of your customers.

Recently my parents had their old reel to reel converted to VHS. They asked me if I could then take the content and covert of digital and edit some of the footage, to take out some of the longer footage, of where the camera was left running. I was able to use some editing software and cut it down a bit, but did not realize the shear size of this video would take on my Hard Drive. So I had to try and do it in segements. I searched the internet and found 100’s of recommendations on the best way to edit over old movies to DVD, but still experimenting.

Have you ever been with friends that seem to know a lot about nothing. We just came across this new blog that will provide a Trivia Blog for all They have one of their blogs that talk about “Weird Jobs” and some of the items are quite interesting. Such as , do you know what a Vermiculturist does?: Answer: worm farmer.

Another great post is on inventions throughout history. This was of interest, becuase my family just went downtown Philly, and took the tour of Benjamin Franklin once lived, and some of his great inventions. They also talk about Fact of shaving, which they state that an average shave will trim away between 20K- 25K hairs? they must be referring to the Wolf man, because that seems like a lot of hair. If that were the case, there would be millions of sinks everyday clogged with hair. Yikes!

I would recommend this to some of friends to help them with some of their trivia knowledge. Best of Luck!

We played 80 trivia with our neighbors this weekend, and some of our freinds we found out spent way to much time watching TV. Like who was the lead singer of Wang Chung?

When did Edie Brickell have her first hit? I can’y even remember what the answer was, but some of our friend knew this right off the bat.  This goes to show who was hanging out in front of the TV , while the rest of us were out working in high school.

As we approach the holiday season, it appears that stress seem to go up. A good way to eliminate stress  through exercise. Any type will help. I coach my kids soccer teams, so that definitely helps. Even just getting on a bike and riding for a 20-30 minutes can do the trick. If you spend a lot of time on the PC like I do, you need to take a break every 30-45 minutes, walk outside, or just get away from the monitor. This will also help your energy level if you are working on a project that requires you to be in front of your PC.

More community thoughts.

Swicki this

Has anyone seen this new search/blog site. It is called Swicki and incorporates Adsense and some other publishers into your blogs.Check them out here

Swicki is a newer search engine that basis it’s results on the patterns of keywords that are associated with a particular site. It is a great way to share thoughts and interest and capture keyword searched by creating your own Swicki.It is up to you and your community of readers to define the search criteria. You can even have it create your own buzz word cloud which are powerful tools in the search engine world to help you gain more traffic.

We have included an excerpt from a poem that I received over 15 years ago. I so not know who the author is but I read this almost everyday:

Winning is helping someone who’s down

It’s sharing a smile instead of a frown

It’s giving your children a hug by the fire

And sharing the values and dreams that inspire

It’s giving your parents the message ” I care

Thanks, Mom and Dad, for being so fair”

Just some positive words for our readers!

How do you rank higher in Search engines? How do can you use the vast resources of the internet to drive targeted traffic to your sites? We have been experimenting with a few different methods both paid and free and it appears that the free placements tend to work very well. If you have a littl bit of time you can easily locate some site where you can create a a good amount of sites to submit your blog and rss feed too. We experimented with one particular site and where they asked for the RSS feed we gave them our FeedBurner feed and within one week we had over 50 new incoming links to our feed and blog. This was amazing and helped to create an additional 500 back links in a little over 2 weeks. One of those site is Blogtoplist.com where you can find a great resource that will help you get started.

In the ever growing world of YouTube, more people are using them as a central source to get all their media coverage, or missed episodes of some of their daily shows. This brings into question, of when the Big networks and media companies will start enforcing their rights of protected content. The NFL, which their are 1000’s of clips from NFL games, expressly states that no part of any of their broadcast may be reproduced without the written permission of the NFL. Will YouTube become the next Tivo? Is YouTube already being used as a verb similiar to Google?

Now that Google has purchased the company for $ billion dollars, it will be interesting to follow the developments over the next 6-8 months, as the larger media companies come calling about their content being displayed, outside of their control.

According to a recent article in the WallStreet Journal, there is pending legislation that will make it illegal to bet online if you are a US citizen. This will have major impact on some of the big Poker sites such as PartyPoker. Most of these sites are located outside of the US and privately held companies. But for about a 100 or so public gaming sites, they will have to set up rules that will not allow them to accept bets from US citizens. Approx. 60% of these sites revenue come from US bets, so this could be major problem for those whose clients are mainly fomr the US.

I started selling online via eBay like most people and have found it to be a great way to ad some additional income. Just this past week, my wife listed some of the kids Disney costumes that they only wore once and sold them for more that we paid. So if you have childrens costumes laying around now is the perfect time to list them on ebay.