This site seems to be more focused on getting people to submit their articles as opposed to being an actual resource for articles, since the menu of tutorials is at the bottom of the page, and the first half of the page is dedicated to telling you why you should submit your unpublished articles to them. The articles have to be unique, in that they cannot have been published anywhere else on the internet.

Howto.fm has an attractive design, and is logical to navigate. Things are mostly laid out how you would expect them to be, so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for. Most of the articles I looked over are quality-written, and the authors display a knowledge of the subject.

They also have a “get free content for your website” page which allows you to place some javascript (or XML) on your site that automatically updates with the most recent content from whatever category you choose. It’s a good idea but I couldn’t find it particularly useful. Each article title generated links back to the respective howto.fm page, and the articles themselves are simply excepts. Plus you have the obvious duplicate content issue.

There were also some issues I noticed with the articles themselves. A random article I checked (Secrets of wifi) is not only placed in the wrong category (programming -> oracle,) but actually contains wrong information. The first sentence is “any signal that is sent without wires is called a radio transmission.” That’s simply not true, as microwave communications and infrared are also wireless, for example. I realize it’s difficult for moderators to be an expert in every subject, but as shown here, you run the risk of publishing false information. That’s exactly why Wikipedia requires that you cite your sources and each category has it’s own moderator.

Another problem with the website as a whole – and you’ll notice this on the front page – is that it’s painfully clear that the owner or writer for the site does not speak fluent English. There are misspellings and blatant grammar errors all over the site. I found these gems on the front page: “toturials” “articlea” and “analized” – which actually means something completely different (google it.)

The grammatical errors are actually bad enough to make the site difficult to understand: “There are actually many advantages for visitors experienced as well as the owners of Web sites” – “The advantage for the owner of the site is that the increase in articles entering links to Web sites” – there are plenty more. A recommendation to the site owners: hire a native speaking English proofreader. Please.

There is a clear link between howto.fm and web-articles.info – the sites are identical. To the owners: if you’re moving away from web-articles.info, be sure to update all links and references to it in the new site (Example – second paragraph.)

Another big suggestion here: If you want people to submit articles and be active on the site, you must provide them with some sort of incentive. Currently each article only displays the name of the author. Allow the author to use their own links within the article (moderated obviously,) or at link the author name to their own profile which lists their own websites if they have one.

I would also put the article directory at the top of the front page to help people find articles they’re looking for. You can still display how to submit your own article, but it wouldn’t take up half the page.

Altogether, Howto.fm has a chance in this arena. Take a few of my suggestions, get some traffic going, tweak the writing a bit and you’re off to a good start.

Regardless, I may still do sponsored posts here, and I’d like you to know what my stance on them are.

I take sponsored posts from various 3rd-party companies as well as direct. My favorite places to take sponsored posts: PayPerPost, SponsoredReviews, ReviewMe, and LinkWorth (LinkPosts.) It’s a good stream of revenue, but they’re still too reliant on Page Rank. Fortunately, Izea (PayPerPost) is working on RealRank which has already been implemented in response to Google dropping the PR of a lot of blogs in their system to Zero (including mine,) so be careful.

Anyway, I don’t have anything against sponsored posts unless the advertiser requires a positive review, or no in-post disclosure. I believe it’s very important that for your blog to remain trustworthy, you need to be transparent. That means not recommending something that you don’t like just because you’re getting paid for it. Tell the truth. If the advertiser doesn’t like it, maybe they need to listen, and change the service. You did them a favor; companies pay tons of money for real customer’s opinions. Why would this be any different?

I once got a request to review a financial services company on an old blog of mine. I did the review, but there were a lot of problems with the site that I not only said was a problem in the post, but offered a good way to fix each issue. The advertiser didn’t like the fact that everything in the review wasn’t positive, so they didn’t pay me. I “nofollow”d their links, and never took another post opportunity from that post broker.

But I digress. My point is that I believe sponsored posts are great, as long as they’re honest and fully disclosed as sponsored posts. Each of these that I do on Egonitron.com is included in the Sponsored Posts category and also have a disclosure inside the post, usually at the beginning or end.

How do you feel about sponsored posts? Are you OK with not disclosing them as paid, and why?

Well now, ooprint.com came up with a great idea to design business cards specifically for bloggers – tag cloud and all:

What a cool idea. And the best part is, they’re free. Just pay for shipping. But if you do a PayPerPost article about it, you can get a voucher for free shipping, so the cards don’t actually cost you a dime!

Get your 100 FREE business cards, blogger style by going over here to ooprint.com

After looking around the site a bit, it looks like ooprint could even be a good competitor to VistaPrint. Some of their free designs are more attractive, but I’m not sure about the prices yet for the premium cards. I’m going to order a set of these blogger business cards, I love the tag cloud thing.

The tags come into play when you’re doing a unique search such as “brown hair, blue eyes, San Francisco” to find people with those attributes in the San Francisco Bay area – Pretty freaking cool, huh? That’s where the tags come into play.

The searching can be amazingly flexible. For example, search for “2008 presidential candidate” – you’ll get a page with (you guessed it,) the 2008 Presidential Candidates with related sites, pictures, tags, description, and more. You can even create a neat little widget from your results. The widget for the 2008 Presidential Candidate search is displayed to the right. Hell, I might display that on my sidebar until the elections.

Remember Ego-Googling (searching for yourself on Google?) Start “Ego-Spocking.” It even sounds cooler. I searched for myself and interestingly enough, I found another dude on there that had my exact same first and last name, striking similarities in interests, looked kind of like me, and had my brother’s birthday. Kinda creepy, but cool, none-the-less. If you have a page on Myspace, LinkedIn, Facebook, or other sites with publicly available info, they should at least have some info on you. You can then sign up for an account and import or add information about yourself, if you wish.

Looking for a certain service in your area? Let’s say you live in Los Angeles and you’re looking for a local Web Developer. Just do a search for “Web Developer, Los Angeles.” How about old classmates from you college? Search for “Stanford University” or whatever your school is. Not only will you find other Stanford alumni, but since Wikipedia and other high-profile sites are included, you’ll find the Founder of Standford and other related characters. You get the point.

The design and layout of the site is very simple and easy to navigate. No overpowering ads (mostly just some Google AdSense in the right sidebar.) The home page gives popular and recent searches, and recent people in the news. After you search, the link to create the widget (like the one above) or email the search is in the right sidebar at the top in a small font. That’s really the only change I would recommend; I would put a “Create Widget” button in a more prominent place if they want people to use it.

I think this service is good fun, but it might have a while to go before being very useful for searching “normal” people – that is not famous people. Now at this point I usually start thinking of a way to exploit a new service, but I think I’ll hold off on this one for now

Check it out:
http://www.spock.com

The Good

TechnologyGoal has some really good, in-depth articles. The content is there, and with some more time and a few modifications to the blog (see The Bad, below) I could see them becoming a great all-around source for tech-minded geeks like myself.

The articles range from beginner (like How to Set up a Wireless Network,) to advanced, as well as simply entertaining. An all-around good RSS feed subscription.

The Bad (Suggestions)

The site is a bit poorly designed. The banner at the top with their logo has their site title (“Technology Computers”) overlaid on it, and it looks pretty bad. They need to remove or comment out the part of the header.php file in Wordpress that displays the title at the top.

The page is completely overloaded with ads and ranking boosters, etc. Technorati, whos.amung.us, ChipIn, Spurl, Digg, ThoofRank, Pagerank, Alexa and Compete rankings are all on the blog at different places, and there are a lot of Adsense, Clickbank (affiliate,) PayPerPost ads, and a bunch of other ads bugging down the loading time and cluttering the page. I HIGHLY recommend taking some of these down, especially considering the blog is so new. By doing this, you really turn off a lot of readers, and many won’t return. The “Directory @ v7n” large banner is displayed after every post along with the PayPerPost ad next to it. Especially since it’s so new, it’s important that you highlight the real content, but right now, the non-valuable (to the reader) content is overloading and distracting. Take a look at the screenshot below (click on it); I circled all of the parts that do not provide valuable information to the reader:

Because of all this, the page load time is greatly increased and can be frustrating.

They really need to increase their search engine visibility. If you take a look at the DomainTools page on the SEO Text Browser, it takes almost until the middle of the page before it gets to any content. This can be fixed by taking off the clutter like I said above, and also switching to a more SEO-friendly theme, such as K2 or one of it’s variations, then modifying the theme from there, or hiring a theme designer and preferably getting a custom theme to look much more professional.

The Final Word

Altogether, TechnologyGoal.com has great content, but is overloaded with ads and other superfluous objects that can be removed without negatively impacting their reach within the niche. It’s definitely a site you should add to your RSS reader and keep an eye on. Hopefully they take some of my educated suggestions into consideration.

Today’s sponsored post comes from IncParadise.com, whose total package for Nevada incorporation costs $283. I don’t know very much about incorporating a company, but from what I do know, it seems rather inexpensive. If you have your own Registered Agent, the total is only $194.

Not knowing much about the process and details, I was wondering what the differences were between a corporation and LLC, the difference between a “C” and “S” corporation, etc, so I headed over to their Corporation Entities FAQ page. Here’s an example of what they gave me:

What is the difference between INC and LLC?

“LLC” and “Corporation” have many of the same characteristics. The most important characteristic they share is that they both offer limited liability protection to its owners. Typically, shareholders are not liable for the debts and obligations of the corporation; thus, creditors will not come knocking at the door of a shareholder to pay debts of the corporation. In a partnership or sole proprietorship the owner’s personal assets may be used to pay debts of the business. With an LLC, the members are not personally liable for the debts and obligations of the corporation.
There are many important differences between the corporation and LLC. The entities are taxed differently. An LLC is a pass-through tax entity. This means that the income to the entity is not taxed at the entity level; however, the entity does complete a tax return. The income or loss as shown on this return is “passed through” the business entity to the individual shareholders or interest holders, and is reported on their individual tax returns.
With a standard corporation, the corporation is a separately taxable entity. Corporations are treated as a separate legal taxable entity for income tax purposes. Therefore, corporations pay tax on their earnings. If corporate earnings are distributed to shareholders in the form of dividends, the corporation does not receive the reasonable business expense deduction, and dividend income is taxed as regular income to the shareholders. Thus, to the extent that earnings are distributed to shareholders as dividends, there is a double tax on earnings at the corporate and shareholder level. We can do S Corporation status election with IRS for $25.

That will come in handy, I’m planning to start a business for liability purposes within the next few months. I live in Iowa though (soon to move to North Carolina.) Thankfully, they offer a page with every state and their respective charges for incorporation and registering an LLC, and even offer a place to fill out the paperwork.

As far as the website, each informational page is laid out in a simple way. This page where they show every type of company and how to create on is especially useful, and couldn’t get any simpler.

I’m bookmarking this one.

Stephen L. Nelson, one of the original Dummies authors (Quicken for Dummies and QuickBooks for Dummies) recently shared with me some chilling statistics concerning the Google Content Network. This summer, Nelson ran a six-week to sell his downloadable do-it-yourself incorporation kits. He sells these kits for all fifty states and, as you might expect, created state-specific sets of keywords that advertised, for example, on the keyword “Florida incorporation” and then dropped a visitor clicking on his ad onto the web page that sells his Florida Incorporation Kit.

Here’s the scary part of his story. Over the roughly six week period that Nelson ran the Adwords, he paid for 643 clicks in total and for all fifty states. Of those, 317 clicks were for the Idaho Incorporation kit. Of those clicks, 315 were Content Network clicks. Yet, Nelson did not sell a single Idaho incorporation kit.

Why does this matter? Nelson told me that the conversion rate that he receives for organic traffic runs between 1.5% and 3%. Accordingly, if those 315 visitors had instead been organic traffic visitors, he would have expected to sell between 5 and 10 Idaho limited liability company formation kits.

The final part of this story: When Nelson did contact Google Adwords customer service about his experience, they simply sent him a nice message which assured him he didn’t have anything to worry about. “Please know that we have several proactive measures in place to automatically detect invalid activity on the content network,” they said.

Gee, really? I think not.

Being into Pay Per Click advertising myself, I know all to well about these types of stories; it can be frustrating. We never really know if we can trust AdWords or Yahoo or any other ad networks, for that matter. None of their algorithms are (even close to) perfect, but hopefully they’re getting better as time goes on.

On the topic of this specific story though, there are multiple reasons this could have happened, including the fault of Mr. Nelson. We don’t know his keywords, landing page, and not really knowing much about the product, don’t know if it’s worth the $59 he’s asking for it.

I’m not saying this was Stephen’s fault by any means though. Like I said above, PPC advertising can be very frustrating, and sometimes takes a lot of trial-and-error to create a successful campaign.

Once you want to move up, they have more packages available, all the way up to a “Business Hosting” package with 10 Gigs of disk space and 1TB of bandwidth. Where MySite.com really shines though is it’s beginner packages, for folks just getting into hosting their own site.

They offer free hosting, but it only has 50MB of disk, and 1GB of bandwidth, and comes with ads on the site. Fine for people hosting a few Britney Spears pictures for their friends, but I suggest at least forking over the measly $3.95/month for the Starter Hosting, which has 1GB of storage and 10GB of bandwidth, with no ads, and still includes the $25 in AdWords credits. That is unless you’re planning to start a blog, in which case the Wordpress Blog hosting is for you; a great place to start, especially if you’re on a low budget and don’t have the revenue to start big.

MySite.com offers some decent hosting solutions for beginning webmasters, and seems to help along the way, letting the user bypass a lot of the technical aspects of hosting. And I bet they get a lot of unintentional links back just from their domain. I normally use “example.com/…” but I know some people who use other “dummy” domains like this one.

Check out their Hosting Comparison page to see which package you’d like to start with.

Sponsored by MySite Hosting

Website Pros affiliate program is a great place to get started if you own a website dedicated to a topic similar to starting your own website, or want to dive into other promotional methods such as Pay-Per-Click marketing.

With affiliate rates as high as $297 (20%) per sale, you have a lot to gain.

Website Pro caters to creating websites and online marketing solutions for small businesses. The prices they charge seem a little bit high to me, but they’re been around since 1999 and they obviously know what they’re doing. Plus, I probably devalue website creation since I do my own. The portfolio of Website Pros is impressive. Very sleek looking sites with the “Web 2.0″ look.

For affiliate marketers this seems like a great opportunity to make some good money by adding Website Pros to your portfolio. If anybody has any experience with them, please share it here.

Website Pros Affiliate Program

As a disclaimer, the review requester (DebtHelp) did not require that this review be all positive, I really do think it’s a great resource for those who can use it.

America has a big problem with consumer debt, as we all know. If we all know it, then why is the problem only getting worse? One reason: Because Americans are obsessed with keeping up with the Jones’. It’s not necessarily our fault; it’s been ingrained into us since birth. Wanna know the ultimate secret to staying out of consumer debt? Stop it. Stop trying to keep up with your neighbor. It’s not worth it. If you can’t afford that new Lexus, don’t buy it. Get a Toyota instead; they’re the same damn car, and you’ll save at least $10,000 ($200 per month!) Already got yourself into trouble? Keep reading…

DebtHelp.com gives you in-house resources to consolidate debt, do a mortgage refinance, learn about how to get out of student debt, credit card debt, bankruptcy, and even give assistance with tax debt. I’ve had my share of debt issues (in my less “responsible” days,) and anywhere I looked online for a debt consolidation loan looked shady, so I eventually got myself out of it, but could have really used a trustworthy site like this to help out.

The last financial site that wanted me to review them copied all of their content from articles on the internet, and embedded the loan application from the affiliate site into their own site, providing no security. No so with DebtHelp. Their applications are secure (just look at the certifications at the bottom,) which is very important, especially when releasing personal information over the net.

The only suggestions that I have for the website itself, is that currently it looks a tad cluttered. There is a lot of information to display on this site, and sadly there is a limited amount of space to display it. I would recommend finding a better way to design the site so that the information is not overwhelming as it is currently.

DebtHelp.com

Agreeing on a place is even more difficult. I want to move to San Francisco, CA, and she wants a place in Tampa, FL. Me being in IT and her being in Marine Biology, we had to find a happy medium. Upon much deliberation, we decided on North Carolina. It’s a good place for both of us, so I’ve been looking into places to buy down there.


Since we’ve recently been looking into this, this sponsored post opportunity came along at the perfect time. I guess writing this post is bringing me just a little bit closer to actually moving

Anyway, being as cheap frugal as I am, I’ve already checked all the foreclosures in the area and have made a few notes. While Raleigh is likely our best bet in terms of location, I’ve been looking at Asheville real estate as well, if we decide to spoil ourselves on a mountain home. As nice as it would be, I believe a mountain home may be a bit too “out there” for us at this point. We need to be where the action is.

I’ve been looking a little bit into Charlotte real estate as well, but despite the slightly reduced prices, I still think Raleigh has more of what we’re looking for in a new home.

Either way, when we move out there we want to rent at first, until we find a home that we want to buy. I can’t stand paying rent anymore, it’s just like throwing away money in my opinion. So the sooner we move, the better. On top of that I would actually like to get into real estate investing (flipping houses, renting out) so I hope North Carolina is a good place to get into that. That’s the one good thing I can say about Iowa; the cost of living is cheap. Of course, there’s a reason for that. It sucks to live here!

Oh yeah, and since this is a sponsored post, I have to post this link as well: compare mortgages. Anybody have any advice for me? I’ve heard Raleigh is a great place to live. I hope it lives up to the hype.

LinkWorth recently released a few new products to help you make money online by monetizing. On top of their normal text link advertising, they now offer LinkinText, LinkArt, and LinkPost.

LinkPost is another player in the “get paid to blog about something” playing field, along with ReviewMe, PayPerPost, and Sponsored Reviews. While not original, it’s a good idea to be enrolled in as many of these as possible to open all of your options. So far, ReviewMe has been the highest earning for me (for AutomoBlog.net,) but I’m excited to see how LinkPost works out. It works similarly to ReviewMe in that advertisers choose your blog among a list. PayPerPost works differently; you have to review the opportunities available and choose which ones you want to take advantage of. It’s not a bad method, just different.

Similar to PayPerPost and ReviewMe, LinkPost requires you to disclose your post as sponsored by entering a badge at the end of the article, as you can see below: