Amazon Affiliates

The book I read to research this post was Amazon Affiliate Niche Sites by Rawee M which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is about selling stuff as an affiliate which means you get a comission on what you sell and the company like Amazon handles sending the item out. With Amazon there is also various packages like Amazon Local worth trying where you get commision for people in your locality making purchases. It’s a good idea to have your own website and links to your Amazon pages where they can make the purchases. A lot of people use a hosted version of WordPress which can have plug ins to automate the various things. It avoids lots of programming. Some people use several sites to maximize the number going to their Amazon pages and will use something called thin content where you put a small amount of good content about the products to encourage the search engines to list them. You can also be an affiliate for more than one company collecting comissions on a variety of products. This book is around 100 pages so is a reasonable length. I enjoyed it and do recommend it. The book does also go through the processes of setting the various things up with a variety of tutorials.

PC Computers

The book I read to research this post was PC Systems Installation And Maintenance by RP Beales which is an excellent book that I bought from a car boot sale. This book is about computer building and repair and although quite old published 1999 is still very interesting. It is written by someone who teaches at Worcester College Of Technology. The PC standard came about when Microsoft developed PC-DOS for IBM computers and they let other companies develop it as MS-DOS which became an open standard and fuelled development of those computers. In 12 months they sold a 100,000 computers and of course it developed into Microsoft developing the Window operating systems. An operating is little more than a program that opens every time the computer comes on and some people choose to have a program open in the same way like a media playing software for example. An operating system is probably the most useful software you will ever have with your computer as it provides you with many options least of all being it enables your computer to play other software and allows the various hardware to function. I know a computer engineer who was a huge fan of BIll Gates and Microsoft and reckoned he deserved to be the richest man in the world on the basis of Windows 95 alone and lets face it it was a game changer. Even when the reviewers have slated various editions of Windows like Windows Vista struggling to run on certain computers, we have often looked back on them and thought actually they weren’t that bad. I know Windows 8 hasn’t been hugely successful with a lot of it being people having to learn the Metro which incidently can be turned off. Maybe we have to wait and see how people in the future will look back on that. This book is around 520 pages so is a decent length. Certainly if you want to learn a bit about the development of computers this is an interesting book to read. I certainly enjoyed it and do recommend it.

Dark Side Of The Internet Book 4

In this part I am going to look at internet security and cybercrime. You should never share any personal information on the internet especially on social media sites. You might think information you share on a site like facebook is fairly but consider it is transmitted on your friend’s feeds and then subsequently on their friend’s feeds and so on. It is worth considering if your page is only viewable by friends that if their pages are free for people to view someone can view their feeds and find out about you. Doing this is perfectly legal and is often used by organisations you want to find out about you. Another trick is sending you a friend’s request from an account they have set up and I’d suggest only accept friend’s requests from people you now. Of course everyone knows that malware can damage your computer but their primary motive in the majority of cases is finding things like banking information to steal your identity. When they tried to harm your computer in the old days it was relatively just lone people messing about but nowadays cybercriminals tend to be much organised. If you post a photo on the web it can be used to claim a driving licence and they can then go on to borrow money in your name. With many people they have several linked bank accounts of one type or another and they can plunder all these accounts in one go.

The Amazon Millionaires

The book I read to research this post was The Amazon Millionaire by Dave Kettner et al which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is about being an Amazon affiliate and becoming very rich. One good point in the book is a lot of businesses don’t last 5 years because they are little more than tax avoidance schemes. If a company makes a loss 5 years running it automatically gets audited. In the meantime it avoids paying tax. In running the business in the book you are looking at the long term. To maximize your profits you need to find a business to build something to your specifications and resell it. You can also sell secondhand goods which you can find at flea markets or even be given. On Amazon you can sell a wide of items and can sell a few of each product and make a nice living. You may also have to trademark or copyright what you sell to avoid others copying it. Another issue if you don’t is they can be substandard copies that can potentially bring your product into disrepute. You can also try selling on other sites like Amazon’s Chinese equivalent Alibaba.com. Your customer service has to be top notch. Amazon tends to side with the customer perhaps even unfairly sometimes. There own customer service is great and they expect the same from affiliates. This book is around 90 pages so is quite short. I very much enjoyed reading it and do recommend it.

Business Online Resources

The book I read to research this post was Work Smarter 350+ Online Resources by Nick Loper which is an excellent book that I bought from kindle. This author asked 500 business experts and professionals what there favorite business online services and this book is the results of the survey. Google Drive and Docs came top and some of the resources are bound to be familar to you but there are bound to be some you’ve never heard that make you think I might try that. There is Lynda.com for example where for $ 25 per month you can access any of their thousands of online tutorials on different aspects of computing and software. Duolingo offers free language learning software. JSTOR offers free access to over 2 million e-books. There is nimble and spiceworks which are less well known business social media sites. There is ning which is a platform where you can host your own social media site starting at $ 25 per month. There is scrivener which has a 30 day free trial and is a word processing software that you do kindle books with and is priced at $ 40. There website is http://literatureandlatte.com. There is the CRM service Basecamp which is priced from $ 9 per month. There is also Infusionsoft which I think is more for bigger businesses and is priced from $ 199 per month. There is also the online accounting software service xero priced from $ 9 per month. There is also Airbnb which allows people to stay at either a spare room in someone’s house or rent a whole property for going on holiday. Prices vary from $ 50-200 per night. It allows you to both rent out your property as well as stay at any of the properties around the world. This book is around 150 pages so is a reasonable length. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and think it is the kind of book I would want to re-read from time to time. I do recommend it.

Dark Side Of The Internet Book 3

A lot of people even poor ones think it is essential to be online and have a mobile device. In some cases they even spend money on things like a smartphone they should be spending on essentials like food. Many people have huge amounts of subscriptions to online sites. There is a growing trend if someone needs shopping they try and do it online. The generation z group of baby boomers who are likely to come of age 2013-2020 are more internet and technology savvy than any previous generation. This trend is likely to grow with each subsequent generation. Young people now for example are quite adept at texting and the average youngster sends 3,000 texts per month. They also spend 7 1/2  hours online per day on average. We are likely to see virtual worlds and the physical world merge more and more this century. On sites like gambling and porn a lot of that makes them so addictive is the high they provide can’t be predicted as to when it will happen. Dopamine is the hormone that provides this high and works best when it is released unexpectedly. If you were happy all the time you would get used to it and start to need something else to provide a further stimulus. There have been cases of people dying after marathon online game sessions. One person died after playing starcraft for 50 hours. The online porn industry is second to the dvd film industry in terms of revenue generated in the entertainment industry. A disturbing trend is the number of teenage girls posting semi-nude and nude selfies on social networks. Boys perhaps not surprisingly are less inclined to do this.

Internet Business Development

The book I read to research this post was Internet Business Development by Simon Donnovan which is a very good book that I downloaded for free from kindle.This book is about setting up an onine business website for businesses and doing this for a living. It’s only around 20 pages so is quite short. If it is just a simple website someone wants often something like a hosted wordpress site will do. You can still make money customizing it. Most businesses though will want an e-commerce site and for this you can set up a self-hosted wordpress site which has thousands of ready made plug ins available. This can save a huge amount of programming. If you have the hosting done by Host Gator they pay you commision of upto $100 per person you sign up to their service. Even after you set up the site there is other things you can charge for like site maintenance and e-mail marketing. You can make potentially a good living doing this. This book is a bit lacking in information. While I did enjoy reading it I think there probably other free books on the same topic that are better.

Internet Security

The book I read to research this post was Internet Security by James Cloud which is a very good book that I downloaded for free from kindle. This book is only around 25 pages so is quite short. It tells you what precautions to take if you have a computer and go online. Often when you buy a computer it will include a trial version of anti-virus software installed and you may have to buy it after the trial to extend the protection. Sometimes the anti-virus is a total solution including things like trojans, spyware and pop ups. Other times you will have to buy these sepatately. There is some software called K9 that emits a dog’s bark each time a malware laden program comes onto your computer. There are also free software like AVG and Spybot. The first anti-virus program was created in 1987 and was McAfee which is still going strong today. On a slow computer you might find if you use Norton Anti-Virus it slows the computer as it runs in the background. If you get spam e-mail you are better off not even reading it as if you respond it tells the sender that e-mail address is active and they will send a lot more spam etc to that account. You should also bear in mind your bank will never ask for your account information via e-mail. Often the fraudsters send a e-mail request this information and it will have a link that takes you to a website that looks like your bank’s but isn’t and if them the requested information they will rob your account and run up debts in your name. I did very much enjoy this book and do recommend it. It’s a good introduction to this subject.

 

Using WordPress For Business

The book I read to research this post was Using WordPress For Business by P Teague which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. As wordpress books go this is a pretty good book but I have recently read Using Facebook For Business which was a better book in the series. wordpress has 2 main options the hosted and self hosted platforms. If you choose self hosting he recommends Hostgator for web hosting and getting a domain name from http://mybusinessname.com. They are both reasonably priced. A lot of web hosts specialize in wordpress hosting and this simplifies setting it up on their servers. The hosted version of wordpress is free but is limited in what plug ins you can install. E-commerce is also banned and if you sell something you must direct them to a website to do the transaction. Generally for business a self hosted wordpress is best. Many celebrities like Katy Perry have websites powered by wordpress. There are countless themes for pages on wordpress on either type and many of these are free. The hosted version has quite a lot of plug ins by default especially things like social media plugins for reblogging on various websites of this type. When you install a plug in you must go into the plug in list and activate it for it to work. If you are editing a website with wordpress knowledge of HTML is vital. This book is around 140 pages so is a reasonable length. I did quite enjoy it and do recommend it.

Twitter Marketing Book 28

If you go to http://www.google.com/reader and http://my.yahoo.com they are online RSS feeds and news aggregators where you can customize what sites or blogs are used to display news. Some airlines use Twitter to do customer service in particular @JetBlue and @HawaiiAir and the latter has a website where you can find the progress of flights. Remember if you use Twitter you must resolve customer complaints effectively. Angry customers can do you a lot of damage not just on Twitter but online in general. There’s a website at http://blogsearch.google.com that offers a free or paid service that monitors the reputation of your website or brand. You simply enter your company name or keywords. There is also a free service at http://www.tweetscan.com which is similar. Some businesses may stage an event to promote their brand. The best website for managing this and things like ticket sales is http://eventbrite.com. They can also manage things like ticket sales. You may need to watch what people are tweeting about it and have someone who can respond to these in a professional manner. Journalists can use http://www.mediaontwitter.com which is a service that follows what stories are trending on Twitter. Don’t go promoting your business on this site as it is only news they are interested in and you are liable to be blocked.