Bondox's Ramblings

Water should be an element of life just like air. Without water, man will not survive. We use water for our daily activities. Water is not only useful for us, it's also effective for other things. Your car uses water to cool its engine. Water is a blessing to mankind.

What about unclean water?
An unclean water is a water that has been contaminated by any foreign harmful substance. And this unclean water has been a menace in our society. Recently in my country Nigeria, an epidemic of cholera is affecting lives in the south-eastern side.

Well, they say prevention is better than cure. While there is a cure for cholera and some other water-borne infection, we ought to make sure that we avoid contaminating the water so as to prevent any epidemic like this.

I am not an expert in water cleansing or treatment but there are some common sense tips we can use to prevent water-borne infection. Because we know that our water can be contaminated in so many ways like toxic waste from big industries. So we should be ready to treat our water before consumption.

Boil Before Drinking
If you happen come from the region that does not have access to government supplied water and you can't dig your own bore-hole to get water yourself, then any other water you want to consume MUST be boiled. Boiling to the highest degree celcius will kill any germs in the water.

When it comes to toxic waste or acidic water, I must be sincere, I do not know the chemical process of purifying or treating them to be safe for consumption but I do know that water supplied from the government are safe for drinking.

Unclean water is very very dangerous to our society, let's join hands to support cause to better water for the community. Bloggersunite, WaterAid America & megree.com are working together to bring clean and safe water to people who are dying because of an unclean water.

Bloggers are uniting to support this initiative don't be left out.

Clean Water, Safer Life!

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Recently, a new virus (Malware) is making the buzz around the internet and has been confirmed to have hit big companies that was suppose to be extra careful about security.

Coca-Cola, Disney, NASA, Comcast and the almighty Google were all hit by this new virus. The virus is an email-borne virus and it had Comcast shut down their email servers completely to prevent further attack.

The 'Here you have' virus appears in your email box as a new message from someone who has your email in their email address book. In the mail is a link disguised to be a .pdf file that compels victims to click. Once clicked, it does nothing visibly but behind, it automatically attacks the address book and sends out the same email to the contacts in the address book.

Presently nothing has been said about the damage caused by this virus (atleast not at the time of putting up this post). But it was stated that if you have any new mail with the title 'Here You have', you should delete it immediately and not open it even though the virus cannot operates on its own if the mail is opened unless you click the .pdf link.

My oquestion now is that, what if the sender of the virus change the title of the email message to something new, how do we now secure ourselves? Left to me, though it was advised not to open any email with the 'Here you have' title, I would recommend that you should avoid clicking any link in your emails for the moment till enough information about this virus and how it operates is available.

Do not think that this virus only affect your email address book, it also affects computers that are connected through the network. So you need to be at alert for any suspicious email whether it has the same title with the virus or not.

Secure your PC with an up-to-date antivirus programs. Antivirus programs with firewall and anti-spyware services are the best bet to keep yourself secure online from virus and spyware attacks. Norton Internet Security, Kaspersky Internet Security, McAfee, are the ones I can recommend but do check their features to see if it suits what you want before you get them.

To delete 'Here you have' emails or not to delete? Just be leery of any links in your e-mail as you might not know which one carries that malware. What's your opinion?

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In my previous blog post, I introduced you to CPA Marketing. Today, I’ll briefly talk about different, easy to use and free ways to promote a CPA offer.

Blog
If you own a blog or website, that’s a great tool to use. All you need to do is to keep visitors coming to your blog, the more traffic you have, the more money you can make. To increase you CPA earnings, increase the number and value of traffic on your blog. Then you can promote a CPA offer that is related to your blog or website's niche

Articles
An alternative to owning a blog is to use article marketing. If you can write articles or hire someone to do that, you can make tons of cash by using articles related to the CPA offers you want to promote. You write the articles, input your CPA offers link in your article body and the resource box and submit to article directories to direct all traffic reading your articles to the offer. This is also known as Bum Marketing; when you use articles to promote affiliate products.

Forums
Promoting your CPA offers in forums could be rewarding. Forums have the largest number of users after search engine and social networks. Hence, it’s a very good place to promote offers. You can do that by putting the link to the CPA offer in your signature or even you can start a new thread on the CPA offer you want to promote.

Social Networks
It will be an insult on the social media if this is left out. Being the centre of attention in the present age, social network is a perfect place to promote your CPA offers. You don’t want to underestimate the result this can give you. Trying it out, it won’t cost you a dime, so why can’t you?

With this in your arsenal, you are bound to be successful in CPA marketing.

Is there any other information about CPA marketing? Let us know by dropping your tips in the comment area.

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CPA stands for “Cost Per Action”. It means an action must take place before a price or fee is paid. CPA marketing is another lucrative way of making money online. It involves an affiliate to refer an active customer to a merchant. This is another form of affiliate marketing. But here, you are not being paid for any sale referral, you will be paid for referring a customer who either submit just their emails for an offer, fill out a form to subcribe for offers or do any other thing apart from buying.

CPA networks are similar to Affiliate networks, nothing is different. They offer you with CPA offers from merchants and make sure that you are paid your commission. Joining a CPA network is free but can be difficult because they are always very selective about the kind of affiliates they accept. The sign up process is not long but they will manually go through your registration to make sure that you will be productive for their advertisers (merchants).

Some CPA networks allow you to re-apply if your application is rejected. To avoid rejection of your application try to meet their demand. Once your account has been approved, they will assign you an affiliate manager to monitor your progress with their network because your progress is their progress. Most of them will call your specified phone number to communicate with you.

In my own case, I registered with NeverBlueAds and I was assigned my own affiliate manager. My application was declined in the first attempt I made because the mobile number I specified can not be reached each time they tried to call me. So you must give them accurate and up-to-date information about yourself.

Owning a website or blog is not compulsory but it is an added advantage to get your application registered very fast. They will want to know how much traffic you can get to your link, so telling them you have a blog is an advantage.

Examples of CPA Networks
I won’t go with a long list here, I’ll just give a short list of the ones that are good to go with for now and say one or two thing about them.

AzoogleAds
Azoogle is a very large CPA network, they offer a quite large number and variety of CPA offers that range from ringtones to freebies for a form submittal. Their network seems very stable and highly credible as they make sure publishers (affiliates) get paid for their effort.

NeverBlueAds
This I have signed up with and I can say they have excellent customer service. Good news to Nigerians here; their network is open to all nationalities. They are so kind and lenient with affiliates who don’t own a website. Their network has a friendly user-interface which is good for newbies. A highly recommended CPA network is NeverBllueAds.

HydraNetwork
They offer exclusive and unique campaigns that they say will translate to higher conversions for affiliates and advertisers. They claim to have the best payout on any campaign. They also encourage people to be top money-makers.

ClickBooth
This is a CPA network with a multi-tier referral program for affiliates. You get an instant $10 signup bonus for every person you refer to their network. You also get 2% gross credit for life for signup bonus under your affiliate referral id. What this mean is that, they offer you 2% credit and not cash for all signups generated by your down-lines. This credit can be used to fund you own advertising campaign if you wan to. Their minimum payout is $50 and they pay 15 days after the end of the month in which you made money usually called Net15 schedule.

Others on the list are:

Maxbounty

Xyz

FluxAds

MarketLeverage

MotiveInteractive

And the list goes on and on like that. For a full list of CPA networks, check them on warriorforum.

Recently, I signed up with Peerfly; a CPA network and I love the offers they have and I have been successful personally with them and I will recommend them for any new or professional CPA marketer because they are not that strict about choosing affiliate and they offer same day payout. Sign up with Peerfly today.


Choosing an appropriate offer
What niche are you focussed on? Who are your target audience? These are the questions you ought to ask yourself before you select any offer you think is appropriate. You might be tempted to follow others in promoting some offers that are right for them, but think of the fact that your audience might be different.

The perfect offer you can promote is the one related to your blog or niche. And if you don’t have one already, focusing on hot niches could help you out. Use Google Trends to determine what hot niches do a particular region has. Use keyword tools also to determine recent top searches. This will help you know which product offer you are to promote.

More to come on ways to promote your CPA offers

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Twitter is a social networking site that network people through status updates called tweets and direct messages. Twitter is a good marketing tool to promote a product and also to drive traffic to your website or blog.

The network is people you follow and the ones that follow you. Any status update (tweets) you post will be visible to all your followers who will see it in their tweets feeds page. With this, you can build a large followership and market anything to them.

You can be among those who criticise twitter as you might not see any reasonable thing in sharing status updates. But since the emergence of twitter, different applications have been developed to make it more interactive and fun to use and ultimately profitable. Just like Facebook.

What interests me in twitter is that you can determine the popular topics and join the buzz. But aside that, twitter is good for marketing. If you are yet to be on twitter, my sincere advice is that you should register for an account now.

As to making money from twitter, I got a mail from John Chow long ago about the easiest way to make money on twitter and I followed the instruction set in the mail. I once put up a review article on twittad on my previous blog (I will rerun it here), but this standalone platform that uses your tweets with your twitter account to make you money is wonderful and different.

Sponsored Tweets is a social media marketing tool that utilizes your twitter account with your tweets to fetch you money per tweets created by IZEA. They link you up with advertisers that are ready to pay you for your tweets. Do you get that? Advertisers are ready to pay you any amount you specify to have you post just a tweet about their product or service in your twitter account.

Sounds easy? I thought the same way when I got the message. Now, let’s do this together. I’ve signed up for Sponsored tweets and I want you to do that too now.

Joining Sponsored Tweets is free, only your twitter account is required. They require your twitter account to be around 120days old and with a minimum of 200 followers. Advertisers will not want to advertise on new accounts, only existing and valued ones are marketable.

If you know you fall into this category, i.e. your twitter account is up to 120days old (4 months) and you have more than 200 followers, then, let’s roll together into this new platform. This is an opportunity, start today.

If you’ve joined sponsored tweets already and you are familiar with their platform, please share your opinion through comment, so we can all learn from it. If you know more about them, let us know.

Sign up with Sponsoredtweets

To a blogger, traffic means money and links to your blog is free traffic. This in turn results in free links to your blog and also means more and more money for you as a blogger. The more links to your blog, the more visitors you get and the more activities on your blog. Moreover, search engine like Google love blogs with high inbound links.

See the progression like this: get more sites or blog to link to your blog; this will increase your page rank on search engines which will also in turn give you free traffic and in the end, make you more money.

You can now see the importance of having links coming into one’s blog. Here, I will discuss top linking strategies that will push up your blog’s page rank and also increase your traffic in no time.

Write Great Content
To start with, this point is the most important point in any blog’s success journey. Content is the soul of a blog. It has a lot of benefits. I can’t mention all here as I wrote in the 5 steps to creating a successful blog, but I am interested in using my great content to get free links back to my blog.

Not just any content, but a good content that will compel anyone to want to link to it from their blogs. Good contents like pillar articles, how-to articles are nice ones to write to get free links back to your blog. Try it today and see the amazing return you will see.

Link Out and They will Link Back
The adage; give and you shall receive is a strategy to follow to get top blog to link to you. After strategy no1 is out of way i.e. you’ve been writing good contents on your blog, try sending out free links through any means from your blog to other blogs and owner of those blog will want to link back to you even if you did not ask for it because they believe they owe you. That is how life is, you sometimes help people out without expecting a return and they will want to return that favour for they believe they owe you a lot.

Visit Other Blogs
Visiting other blogs is to know more about the blog and the blog owner. Knowing more about them will give you a sense of belonging to them. Try to join their community and comment on their blog, that is when they know you came to visit their blog. Great bloggers do visit their readers’ blog and if they find any good article, they’ll link to it. Or even mention about your blog on their blog.

I got a free video review of my previous blog on shoemoney.com and this gave me a boost in traffic. Jeremy has a plugin on his blog that shows the recent comment in the post on the homepage. It is a free way to shout out yourself and your blog to his blog’s readers.

Make a Broadcast
This has nothing to do with the media; it is not a jingle you broadcast on air on TV or radio. This is another way to notify blogs that you’ve got a new article on your blog. Make a list of blogs in your niche and send out news broadcast to them that you have an article on your blog. If they come and notice that the article is worth linking to, they’ll do it without hesitation.

Because they want to hold their readers with good content, linking to yours will even make their readers trust them more.

Harness the power of Social Networks
I don’t need to scream this into your ears. You should know how valuable this can be if you add it to your linking strategies arsenal. Tap into the power of the social networks to send out your content through the networks so as to get links back from the networks. We have a number of them, just try to get your content to the first page of any of them lets say Digg or StumbleUpon and see the number of sites that will link back to you.

Grab the opportunity of my Blog-roll
This might not be new to you but still you can have it done for you. I want to give out free links to blogs and hopefully if they’ll return it.

Now that you understand the importance of link exchange; a better way to get me link to you is to contact me requesting for a free blog listing on my blog and I'll do just that.

Work out these strategies and you will experience a massive boost in your blog page rank on Google and a boost in traffic that leads to a boost in income.

These are not all strategies available on the internet, there are much more of them that are useful for bloggers to implement. Don’t hesitate to contribute by leaving a comment. Leaving a comment itself is another way to get a free link back to your blog.

The task of creating a new blog can be daunting sometimes for a newbie. If you are new to the internet, probably you are only interested in checking your email and nothing else concerns you about the internet, then creating a blog might be a serious challenge to you. Reasons for creating a blog are numerous.

There are hundreds of tutorial articles, blog posts and even websites dedicated to teaching newbie how to create their own blog themselves. No need to hire anyone to this for you because they will charge you exorbitant fees. Learn how you can create your own blog within 5 minutes by watching video tutorials on Youtube.

This post is to give you insight about the steps you should follow if you plan to have a successful blog with full authority online. As all blogging coaches will say, your success in blogging depends solely on your passion which means that this post is about creating a blog around what you love doing.

Following the steps below will help you in your quest of building a successful blog.

Step 1: Choose your specific topic to blog about

This step has been the major step all new blogger should understand very well. Before you can start a blog, you need to have something to blog about. What your blog is created for is your blog topic. All articles you post on your blog should be around this main topic.

Choosing a blog topic can look so difficult at start but if you get down with it by doing a research around your passion, your interests, your life and even your environment, you’ll discover a niche (topic) you can write multiple articles on. Choosing a topic to blog about is a separate tutorial on its own.

Step 2: Choose your desired blogging tool

There’s not much to discuss here, I just added this step for you to know that choosing a blogging platform too has a lot to do with your success as a blogger. If you choose a platform you are not familiar with, you might find it difficult to develop yourself at the pace you need to.

There are 2 major blogging platforms; Blogger and Wordpress. Some other platforms we have are Joomla, Livejournal, Moving Type, and on like that. The number of blogging platforms should amount into hundreds. The two widely used platforms (Blogger and Wordpress) are popular because of the functionality, universal acceptability and also because of the simplicity they offer their users.

I was using Wordpress before I moved to blogger after so many issues with my hosting company. I used the self hosted wordpress because of its ability to accept 3rd party plugins to increase its functionality. Whatever function you want with Wordpress that is not available on the platform will definitely be available as a plugin. On the other hand, Google owns Blogger so its users use it because of its easy implementation of their Ad revenue sharing program (Adsense).

So the platform you choose depends on what you want. You can explore the two platforms or even other ones listed above and see if they suites your purpose for creating a blog.

Step 3: Write informative content around your blog topic

You should know this for sure that only a blog with information will gain authority in its chosen niche. Once you are through with step 1 and 2, the next thing to do is to write informative articles tagged around your blog topic. The more informative your articles are, the more trust your readers will have in you and the more authority you command in your niche.

Informative articles are also called pillar articles. Articles that educate or ones that solve problems for your readers are wonderful. Like the one you are reading, it is a pillar article. How-To articles, bulleted articles, important news that will interest your readers are what you should write about. And note that, the articles must have one or two things related to your blog niche so as not to feed your readers with what they do not want.

Step 4: Do the Dos

Do the Dos of blogging

Step 5: Avoid the Don’ts

And lastly avoid the Don'ts of blogging

Having said all these, the next step has to do with your passion for success. Go on and build something you’ll always be remembered for. A successful blog is a result of endless effort of the blogger to build an authority. Blogging is fun, exciting and educative. And lastly it’s a business that gives dividends for an active blogger.

Do you have any other important step to creating a successful blog that are not listed here? Then you can contribute by posting them in the comment section. The post is opened to comments.