Preparations before Launching a Membership Site

A good start is half the job done; most of the businesses fail because they were started with appropriate analysis of their feasibility. Likewise, before you launch a website a membership site or a niche site for that matter you must carry out a good study about it. That’s why some people release a product and it sells like hot cakes and other products don’t sell at all?

I believe you must have heard about Yaro’s Membership Site Masterplan. If not then read this post about Membership Site Masterplan.

Now Yaro had released a short video that reveals a very simple technique to find out what people want, so your next product will be a best seller. It’s called the Blue-Sky video and you can watch it here:

I can’t believe how easy this technique is, yet how incredible the insights you can get from doing it. Yaro uses this simple idea each time he launches one of his membership sites. It’s useful because you can find out what people are actually willing to pay money for, rather than waste all that time creating a product and then finding out no one wants it.

If you haven’t yet grabbed your free copy of the Membership Site Masterplan, it’s still available. Just go and register and Yaro will send you a copy by far the best reports I have ever read

Download Your Free Copy of Membership Site Masterplan

Statuzer – Yet another Twitter Air Application

There is a new Twitter desktop client named Statuzer is in the town. I use TweetDeck and by far this is the best Twitter desktop client available and you will agree that it has everything you need, but when I found Statuzer I thought lets give it a shot.  It looks similar to TweetDeck and both are framed on adobe air but Statuzer have some cool extra features which make it different.  Statuzer will sure give TweetDeck a run.

Statuzer come with following features:

• fully customizable color scheme
• MP3 Playing from song.ly and tra.kz
• Jamendo music search (free and legal)
• Displays twitpic images in tweet
• Youtube Thumbs
• Twitter search moving Trends
• Hashtags
• Fast display filter
• contacts groups
• followable Twitter searches
• notifications
• URLs preview
• image/webcam upload
• image/webcam upload to twitter profile image
• multi-account
• search filters
• short URLs (Twitter API)
• encode/decode MinUrl and TinyUrl

It seems it has been design to give some pleasure along with promoting your stuff on twitter. Give it a try. It is HERE.

I have been Released

Couple of days back I posted about me being blacklisted by Akismet because someone had shown the “Spam Bin” way to my comments.

Some of you guys suggested for contacting Akismet Team to pull me out from blacklist. Thanks Mike, Harsh Agrawal, Sherry , Brad Callen, Mr. I, Wilson Pon and Nihar for showing your concern. I wrote to Akismet Team and requested them to pull me out from their spam commentators list.

Today morning I received this refreshing and soothing mail informing me that they have fixed the problem.

Sorry for the problem.  I believe it is fixed now. Please note that your comments may not be published on some blogs if the owners of those blogs have indicated they believe them to be spam.

Kind Regards,

Alex,  Akismet

As some of you doubted I was also not expecting that Akismet team will come up with the solution so soon. I immediately checked up to see whether my comments are appearing on blogs or not, and happy to see that finally I am out of that dumping bin.

I said earlier that I hate Akismet, now I’m taking my words back, Akismet Rocks .  Let me have my say on your blog now.

Learn to Make Huge Money with Membership Site Masterplan

He has proven himself time and again, he is a master planner and very good friend of mine. I’m talking about Yaro Starak. If you are make money online blogger you must have heard about Yaro Starak, and if you haven’t probably you are living under the stone.  The man behind the Blog Profit Blueprint; by far the best report on making money from blogs I have read so far. I’ve already started to implement the ‘Pillars’ technique explained in blog profit blue print in my blog and I’m experiencing a nice increase in my traffic. Yaro is also behind the Blog Mastermind Program – A mentoring program just for bloggers. The program is less than $100 a month to become a member and you get direct access to your own blog mentor, plus all kinds of audios, videos and e-lessons to help you make money from your own blog. Well we will talk about both these projects some other time but first let me explain -

What is Membership Site Masterplan?

The Masterplan is a FREE content report. The Masterplan is a FREE solid guide for launching successful membership sites. In the Masterplan, Yaro explains how he was able to make $250,000 from just one membership site and then explain how you can set up your very own membership site and earn at least $100,000 within the next 12 months. The report deals and explains following process:

1. How to find topics for a membership site
2. How to develop preeminence, people choose to join your membership site over all the other options
3. What sources of traffic to use to bring members to site and build list
4. What technology should be use to deliver content
5. How to make money from a membership site.
6. How to fill your membership site with hundreds of new members in a matter of days.by conducting a powerful, yet simple, launch campaign
7. And much more….

What is Membership Site Mastermind?

Early next week Yaro is opening the doors to Membership Site Mastermind training program, inviting you to participate in a six-week intensive course to get your membership site up and running.

I recommend you here to download this FREE membership Site Masterplan and learn how Yaro made US $250,000 from just one membership site.

Your FREE report is HERE.

Imagination WordPress Theme Grab it for Free Now

My Friend duo Mohit Aneja and Abhinav Sood come up with another beautiful, cool and stylish WordPress Theme Imagination. And this time they are giving it to you for free. Remember a couple of week back they launched their first highly customizable Premium WordPress theme which is now making great impression of their work in the blogsphere.

Let me tell you why I am recommending Imagination for you:

1. Plug & Play – No Programming Knowledge Required
2. Comes with 9 preloaded Color Schemes
3. Customize the Interface to make it unique
4. Built-In Twitter, Flickr and Entrecard Widgets
5. Built-In Feedburner RSS Integration
6. Widgets Ready & Plugins Compatible
7. W3C Valid & Cross-Browser Compatible
8. Fully Documented Admin Options
9. Compatible with WordPress MU (Multi-User)
10. Standalone processing without interfering with default WordPress tables
11. All this and lot more, absolutely Free!

So head over to this page and grab your copy now.

 

WordPress.com is now WP.com

Yahoo again treats Automattic by giving it much needed wp.com domain. Ma.tt is pretty excited about it.

He was keep playing with this domain the whole day long checking whether the redirection from wp.com pointing to WordPress.com is working fine or not.

Yes it’s true, Automattic is now the proud owner of WP.com, which we acquired from our buddies over at Yahoo! We’ve been using WP.com as internal shorthand for this site for years now, and ever since we figured out four or five years ago that Yahoo had that domain (as opposed to the Washington Post or something) we’ve been doing our best to get it, a journey that culminated in ultimate success a few days ago. (Ma.tt)

It also means bloggers who have their blogs hosted on WordPress.com and having URL like myblog.wordpress.com can now have much easy and simple URL like myblog.wp.com. ( Automattic has not yet confirmed it though)

What should he do with WP.com?

Matt has asked for your answer to put it into the Automattic idea machine and crunch something out at the end.

GeoCities Shut Down – Remembering The Life Before WordPress

Yahoo closes down it free web hosting site GeoCities.

Remember the days before WordPress?

Ahh, those days!

I remember I made my first website somewhere in March 2002.  It was on a free-hosted space platform. There was this website freehomepage.com which was (is) offering free space to create static web pages.

I made this site to put some cool pictures of mine, my family and my friends on the web. That was pretty exciting experience at that time.

Remember college going students, and Tech Freak (Geek) guys created those beautiful pages to share some stories about them on the net.

When I heard a couple of days back about Yahoo being decided to close down its free web-hosting service GeoCities, it gave me nostalgic feeling. Though my site was not on GeoCities but still I know how much people love GeoCities pages. I know many of you guys have their first web pages drafted on Geo. It was first free platform where you can create something like that. I’m talking about a time 15 years back.

I immediately head over to my first web site to check up am I still alive there. Fortunately I’m still very much there.

When I integrated Bravenet Guest book into that site I flashed this message from my site to all my friends.

Hey guys N Gals Plz sign up here to my guest book so that I can store it to my cherished memories.

Shanker Bakshi, March 18, 2002 06:10:55 (GMT Time)

I gone through my Guest book there again; there are really some touching messages.

Do you remember the first website you created?

You can share the link of your first website created in good old days in old fashion ways in comments below and also share your first hand experience of creating a website.

Here is the screen shot of my first website created on March 18, 2002.

Image courtesy : Robert The Noid

Offices of Some Big Bloggers and Your

Wonder how offices of these top shot bloggers look like? Well in my quest to become a successful blogger I always think about it. Most of the Tech Geek Bloggers  uses their laptop for blogging purpose but most of the top bloggers have their very own blogging headquarters, a very fine decked fully loaded and equipped office. I always wanted to have a workplace like this.

I’m giving here pictures of offices of my favorite bloggers for your delight. Hope you would like it.

Send in picture of your office

If you like to include your blog office picture here then send it across to me I will keep on updating this post with your office setup pictures in UPDATE just received section below.

Here is the Top Boss of world’s biggest corporate blog TechCrunch Mr. Michael Arrington at his home office in California.

Jeremy Schoemaker busy blogging about how he can help you to increase your skill to pay the bill. Have you seen his private beautiful swimming pool with big Shoemoney Dollar sign on its floor?

This is the office of Super Affiliate “Spiderman” Mr. Zac johnson. look at his collection of super hero toys.

Let’s have a close look at Zac’s office.

Chris Pirillio’s office. Well this guy as you know is great in “defining things”.

Chris in his den. You can catch him live HERE ( check if he is there right now )

Thats John Chow office. He calls it his Blogging station.

The root of all Make Money Online “evils’ Mr. john Chow at his Blogging Station.

That is Darren Rowse Blogging Head Quarter. He hasn’t posted any picture of his office on his blog (although he runs a digital photography school) only a video available showing his office setup from which I extracted this picture. Sorry for poor resolution.

Darren Rowse in his Blogging Head Quarter.

Great guy Yaro Starak at his office. Yaro is in this blogging and internet business from a decade now, and just back to his home country Australia after his around the world tour.

Yaro’s partner in his Road to  become a Blogger program Mr. Gideon Shalwick at his office desk.

Affiliate Marketer and Blogger Ian Fernando’s office. Ian blog about his success and failure in life and make money out of it.

The dream of any Internet Entrepreneur, any one would be jealous of Stefan Didak’s office equipped with multiple monitors.  I’m sure all of you would like have one such office, what say?

The man with the million dollar smile on his face. Our very own India’ s no. 1 blogger Mr. Amit Aggarwal at his home office  in beautiful city of Agra.

Now talk about those who uses only their laptop for blogging. Matt in the above picture seen with his Dell Laptop, as he has to travel a lot to attend WordCamp  around the world he uses this laptop for updating his blog.

Co

[NEW] Community and Social Media Expert Chris Brogan’s Office Space at Courtyard. He love to Blog from Book Stores.

This white beautiful laptop belongs to Megastar , Bollywood actor and now a active blogger Mr. Amitabh Bachchan. Mr. Bachchan’s blog is on a social networking site BigAdda.com  which runs on WordPress MU Platform. if you watch it closely you can see on Mr. Bachchan’s laptop WordPress Editor is open, he directly writes posts from WordPress Editor and surprisingly despite of his so busy schedule he update his blog everyday without fail.

Bollywood actor Aamir Khan used to blog a lot few months back but now he is not a very active blogger. aamir with his Dell.

I think i have seen this cute little boy somewhere. Thats my Son Aditya at my work station. 

YOURS IS HERE

SEND IN YOUR OFFICE PICS

Abhinav Sonkar’s Work Station. This qualified engineer from Nagpur  has some really cool latest Bollywood guitar codes and also lessons on how to play guitar on his blog.

Pinal Dave send it across this picture of his home office. Pinal is a principle database architect , developer and Project Manager, Expert in SQL Server Programming with 6+ years of hands on experience. Sound Cool. He writes mosty about SQL stuff on his blog.

The Chetan’s Work Station, Chetan is a blogger from nagpur, india and talks about on his blog about Technology, WordPress and other cool Technical aspects of Web. 

Here is Muhammad Azhar Qayyum in his office. Azhar writes on his corporate blog about blogging, hosting, website designing and other technical aspects of web devlopment. 

Professional Indian Blogger from Bhopal,  Afzal Khan at his home office.  Afzal writes on Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing  at TopRank SEO Blog  and AfzalKhan.org . 

I Hate Akismet For This

Because someone had shown the “Spam Bin” way to my comment on his/her blog, Akismet consider me as bad guy and throwing all the comments I made thereafter on my favorite blogs.

I’m still trapped in Akismet Spam list; I don’t want to use any other e-mail ID or URL for my comments and off course I never tried to sell all those medicines and sites, never ever.

If this is the only criteria for Akismet to identify and mark Spammers then I must say

I HATE AKISMET.

Google Maps Typography by Rhett Dashwood

This earth is Amazing, Google Maps too.

Rhett Dashwood, Melbourne based Creative Director in his spare time while searching Google Maps discover land formations or building resembling to English Alphabets letters.

These finding are limited to state of Victoria, Australia. have you seen any such strange stuff on Google Map in your area?

Head over to his website to see some more interesting findings of Rhett DashWood.

Proud Moment for Indian Blogger’s Community

A really proud moment as Blogger Amit Varma has been included in the list of “50 most powerful People in India” released by esteem BusinessWeek Magazine yesterday. This is first time any blogger in India has been awarded at that high level. Blogging is still not very popular among Indians. Though it’s now getting its due space progressively.

Blogger Amit Varma brings a particular libertarian point of view to his columns and blog items, but also a risqué sense of humor that keeps readers hooked. He won the 2007 Bastiat Prize for his columns in Indian business paper Mint, and for a select group of Indians, he represents a libertarian, anti-tax and anti-government sensibility that is still quite rare in the country.

Another “blogging thing” to be mention today is that celebrity blogger Amitabh Bachchan’s has completed one year. It’s cool to see how jubilant he is on completing successfully one year of his new love blogging. He writes:

No one believed that this would last. No one believed that I would last. No one believed that any one would last. No one believed that the titles of the ‘DAY’ was right. No one believed that I wrote my blogs myself. No one believed that I was not paid to do this. No one believed that I do not moderate. No one believed that I find time to write. No one believed I would respond to comments. No one believed that I would tolerate abuse. No one believed that I would respond to criticism. No one believed that I would write this blog for other reasons than just to clarify and attack media. No one believed in me….

We love you Amit Jee and I believe in you.

The Twitter 1 Million Followers War between CNN and Ashton Kutcher is Over, Ashton Wins

If you are big at one place that dose not give you a Right that you would be consider big everywhere, here I am the boss.

-Shanker Bakshi

I love to use this phrase whenever something like above happens, there are examples when these biggies failed miserably and trophy lifted by the Guys Next Door.

I think you are now aware of CNN and Ashton Kutcher Twitter I million followers Race. This fight between mainstream Media (CNN) and Hollywood Star Ashton Kutcher fueled when Ashton made a video statement that he wanted to beat CNN to one million followers. Interestingly he promised in that video that if he wins he will “ding dong ditch” billionaire Ted Tuner’s (founder of CNN) House. “Ding Dong Ditch” is a sort of game played by children when they go up to a person’s house, ring their doorbell, then run away and watch as they look around to see who’s there.

Now as the war is over and Ashton Kutcher hits 1 Million Twitter Followers mark beating CNN in this race, I’m eagerly waiting when Ashton will stream the video of him Ding Dong Ditch at Ted Tuner house. Go Ashton Go, we are following you

Ashton Kutcher Promised if he beats  CNN in 1 Million Twitter Follower race he will “Ding Dong Ditch” Ted Tuner’s House.

Larry King replied back to Ashton Challenge.

But Finally Ashton Wins this Race.

UPDATE : Here is Mrs Ashton Kutcher ( Demi Moore) with her more then half a million followers

So When You Will Start “Twittering” Keywords Instead of “Googling” it?

From last couple of months or so there has been much buzz about twitter as being strong alternative for search engine Google. We all know how big Google is, undoubtedly there are no close competitive as far as Internet search usage is concern Here are some data to prove my point:

But look there is one strong reason why people looking on twitter as new search alternative.

Real Time searches

The question of most relevant information still remains but twitter search tool places the most recent tweets on search phase. It will help you get updated answers for your quarries.

Twitter gives better results on current affair quarries.

In case of incident like Mumbai 26/11 massacre, I would definitely prefer to get updated information, pictures, and reports through Twitter search and not through conventional Google search, you know better why I’m saying this because you have already tested twitter search tool for this sort of information on current affair.

If you ask me I don’t find these feature makes twitter outclass Google from search engine business. Google will always remain first choice for all your search quarries and I don’t see any threat to its core search business activities. Couple of week back there was news of Google buying twitter, Twitter founder biz clear the air immediately stating there is no such deal executed between giant G and twitter.

Twitter Searching Tool

I’m giving you top shot Twitter Searching Tools for your delight.

Twazzup : Twazzup is a privately funded startup based in San Francisco, which searches relevant tweet.

Tweefind : another cool tool for your keyword searches.

SocialMention : Search results are aggregated from numerous popular social media sources, including Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, YouTube etc. and remixed as a single stream of information. The data is fresh, which means you can track conversations as they are happening in real-time.

How to take Screenshots of Complete Web Pages

Tell me how you do it. Well if you google this phrase in results you will get several software made for this purpose. It seems that they are free shareware, but when you visit these pages you will surprise to see that there are people who are charges many dollars for such simple software.

There is Firefox Add On to solve this purpose.

That’s why they call Firefox the best internet browser. Install Screengrab Firefox Add On and take screenshots of a complete web page. just right-click a page to bring up the context menu and look at the options under “Screengrab” point the location where you wish to save the file, BINGO.

It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images – either to a file, or to the clipboard.

FireFox Add On Screengrab in Action.

Seven Things You Do Not Know About Me

Ages back my dear friend Brian Hawkins tagged me in a meme where I need to write about seven things which you don’t know about me, (which probably wish I wouldn’t tell ). I was busy tweaking my theme at that time, now the thing has been settle down so let me do this meme job. Well there is a lot you can found about myself on this blogs, as say “my life is like an open book” but still there are couple of secret pages which I would like to turn now and bring to your knowledge. Before I start let me tell you that this is the first time I’m trying this meme thing, so be cool with it, but I must tell you that this is really wonderful to be a part of this, thanks again Brian for tagging me.

[1] I have come a long long way baby

Life was never been a bed of roses for me, since my childhood I struggle a lot for even small basic things. I’m the lovable youngest kid among four brothers and one sister. I belong to a very small village in India and nearly eight years back when I landed on this most beautiful city of India Chandigarh, I had only Rupees 1500 [ equivalent to US$38] in my pocket and after hardship and struggle of eight years I build an assets of approximately US$50000. Its not something very big but I pat my back for achieving this because I know there a time in my life when I was struggling for day meal. There is still a long long way to go (before I sleep).

[2] And they named me “Love Guru”

I love to see when people calls me The dot Com Guru,  This is a title given by me to myself, I’m a self proclaimed dot Com Guru and I wish to be refer by this title, but when I was in college my friend who were in love usually discussed there love problems with me and look for answers. Even I felt surprised when I found myself able to understand their love problem and sort it out in no time. The reason why they called me Love Guru was also that at that time I usually surrounded with some beautiful Indian girls. (Oh those were the days).

[3] I tired my hands at various form of Art

I’m a jack of all trade whether it’s painting, cartooning, caricaturing, singing, dancing, Voice over, Dubbing, Anchoring, Radio Jockeying poetry and writing novels and short stories. After attempting to all these forms of art and after reading some of John Chow’s best post  I decided that blogging is the thing where I have to claim my stake and so far with the support from all you guys I think am “Doing Good” in it. Nearly a decade ago I wrote a short story “Broken Wings”. Marlene once requested it. Finally I have decided to give it to you for your delight.

Here you can download “BROKEN WINGS” (a fictional love story)

Here you can read some of my Hindi Poems if you wish (there is language translator active)

Here you can watch my Media Videos

[4] Am a finance Guy and not a Tech Geek

There are several articles on this blog which explains about how to deal with Search Engine Optimization, Installing WordPress, Tweaking Themes, playing with Plugins but PHP and HTML is not my thing, am a qualified Finance Accountant and before starting blogging in 2007 I never even heard about these stuff. But again there nothing in this world that you can command if you really have passion, willing to do hard work and have that zeal to learn. I feel like Geeky, there is a fully loaded Geek inside me.

[5] Shanker Bakshi is not my real name

My real name refers to something “Heavy Mythological Thing”. When I was in school and even in college people used to make fun of my name. So the first thing I did after passing out was to change my name to shanker Bakshi. Shanker is the god of destruction, and Bakshi is my surname. According to google I’m the third most famous shanker in this world. Thanks Google for giving me that place.

[6] My wife never reads my blog post.

But she is nice and supports me from the bottom of her heart. What Shivani (My Wife) thinks about blogging is that this is something I’m passionate about and I working hard to earn a big name in this field. I know she wish to see me on the top of the world. Once I asked her; hey Shivani could you please help me dropping 300 Entrecard daily to promote my blog in my niche?

[7] I still love to watch Cartoon on Television

And my favorite show on television is Pink Panther, they say there is a kid inside every one of us, by the time you grow up you lost that kid in this complicated world. But I’m lucky that kid is still alive in me, not only I love to watch Cartoon on Television I also play with them on the street. I am waiting for the day when my 5 years old son Aditya Sharma will play and dance with me.

I guess I have unwrapped myself enough. Brian I must tell you I love to do this and sorry for the delay. Let me Tagged seven people but before that all of you must know the rules for this meme :-

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged.

I’m finished, let me lock my seven in this series:

[1] Marlene - I know you love to do Memes, you have done so many can you please do this one for me.

[2] Amor - You write so many thing about yourself let us know some untold secrets about you this time.

[3] Michael Aulia - Hey buddy speak up some inside scoop about you. Will you?

[4] Luis Torres - I don’t know much about you dear, share some secrets.

[5] Dennis Edell - You escaped from Brian’s list let me trap you here.

[6] Nilo Evangelista – How can I forget you my graphical genius.

[7] Billy Boxer Girl – where are you Nikky ? Lets fill in your about me page section with this meme.

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