Recession good for IT?

This is an interesting article on how the recession could be a good thing for IT. I have to agree. Firstly, in my mind, recession isn’t a loss of jobs or lack of spending, it’s a state of mind.

photo credit: Renegade98

If the big guns at the top of the food chain get nervous, worried and defensive with their cash, it filters down to us peasants. We (the grease that keeps the wheels moving) stop buying, things start grinding to a halt and because no-one else is buying and we’re being told not to buy, we listen and follow the trend, even if we have money.

The media are playing a huge part in this recession imo - in fact, i’d go so far as to say the media are the single biggest driving force behind our current global recession. EVERY day this week and for the past few weeks and months the main headlines are basically telling us how bad things are and how much worse they’re going to get.

This inevitably leads to ‘viral marketing’ if i can call it that Crops up in daily conversation in the street, in the workplace, on the net. When you’re surrounded by negativity, it’s extremely difficult to remain positive and optimistic. ‘Bailing out’ banks restores some confidence but it’s a defensive move. Why should they need to be ‘bailed out’ in the first place? After all, it’s a case of the government charging you more to pay you back your own money which banks have spent.

Anyway, as this article points out, recession = loss of jobs = people with more time and desperate for work. That’s a good thing for the internet as a whole. More networking will take place, more services will be founded and ‘free’ will now become the big selling point of any game, site or service.

We also have to remember, an Irish website isn’t just limited to irish users or an American site to American users… so recession means sweet FA to most website owners as they have a global market to play with. Now is the time to get the thinking caps on and be optimistic and brave whilst the rest of the world crumbles around you

The Motive Network - powered by Advent 2.0

Disclaimer; This is a paid review however not influenced by the fact it is paid. It is of my own, honest opinion.

Although i’m only really starting out in affiliate marketing, i can see the potential in it and it is the ultimate form of ‘passive income’ if you can master it. Creating a new site specifically to make money is never a good idea, never something that will work right out of the box… some can do it, most can’t. But when you have a high traffic site or a site in a really targeted niche, it’s much wiser to run affiliate offers on your site rather than just adsense ads. This is a valuable lesson i’ve learned in my short career online.

Affiliate networks, in a nutshell, allow me to browse various different affiliate offers and ads which i can then place on my site and make money from when somebody buys something through that link. I don’t get paid every time someone clicks on an ad, i only get paid when somebody buys something or signs up for something through my links.

Motive Interactive

Motive Interactive are an online advertising company which are comprised of two main platforms; Motive Media (for advertisers) and Motive Network (aka ‘Advent’, for publishers). I’ll be focusing on Advent for this review as i am of course interested in making money online, usually not spending it

Motive Interactive have recently launched their new ‘Advent 2.0′ system for publishers. In their own words this is “an advanced performance ad network that implements two functions critical to internet advertising: a publisher centric advertising network and a direct lead generation network”.

Review

Having played with advent 2.0 for the past few days, i have to say it is one of the most easy to use network backends i’ve seen. Loads of AJAX which reduces pageloads, simple navigation, easy to use search features and plenty of stats and reports to get stuck in to.

Once you login, you’ll be greeted with all the usual stuff you come to expect from affiliate networks… contact details of your account manager, clicks / revenue / important stats, notices and selected campaigns you may be interested in. Delving deeper in to reports, changing account details or simply browsing the offers in the system is also made really easy with the main menu located horizontally on the left sidebar.

In terms of the meat and bones (the actual offers available to publishers and performance of offers ), Advent 2.0 doesn’t disappoint. There are literally hundreds of offers available in the system. At the time of writing, ranging from $0.75 to $33.75 with mixture of CPA / CPS offers (Cost per Action / Cost per Sale). So whether you’re generating sign ups or converting sales, there’s plenty of cash to be made and speaking of cash, Motive Interactive payout using paypal, cheques or bankwire. So loads of options for everyone!

Motive Interactive also have a referral / rewards system. Referral earnings are 5.5% FOR LIFE, provided the referred publisher makes some cash for 12 consecutive months. So in layman’s terms, if i sign up under you, you’ll earn $5.50 for every $100 i make, provided i keep making money every month. This is great if you can get a few super affiliates to sign up under you, but not so great if you get a few guys to just sign up and then they give up after a month or two, which in my experience, happens quite often.

There’s also a rewards system (for those who earn above $1k/month) which pays out between 1-2% on top of your earnings.

Conclusion

Overall, Motive Interactive and their new ‘Advent 2.0′ platform for publishers, are user friendly and conform to the KISS analogy - keep it simple, stupid! I love their AJAX interface and as a result, the speed at which you can navigate between pages. If you’re in to affiliate marketing or just starting out, i recommend you join not only Motive Interactive, but as many programs as possible. Once you do, you’ll see that Motive are perhaps the most user friendly of the lot

Signup to Motive Interactive today!

Clearing the backlog of work

Over the past month or so i’d just gotten involved in too much. It was a nightmare and i couldn’t really enjoy myself as i was bogged down with work. Here’s what was on my mind;

Skydive Competition

• Gathering and organizing results, sorting out how i’d draw winners, doing screencast etc…

College

• I’m trying to get off to a good start this year in college so ideally, i’d like to spend a few hours at home not ’studying’, but trying to develop what i’d already learned.

Video

• I’m doing a video production for a college project… i needed to get familiar with Premier Pro and After Effects plus read up on tonnes of tutorials and videos.

BeerChief

• BeerChief always requires work even if i don’t work on it. It’s a daily pressure on me but a nice one as i know it will be very sweet once it’s actually ‘complete’.

Listlunatic

• Last month i was involved in developing listlunatic.com - that involved talking with 4 people regularly and coming up with some posts…

Paid Reviews

• I had one paid review (will be posted this month) and although it’s only one, it still requires research and thought… more so than a standard blog post.

Whilst that may not seem like much, it is…. 3 of those 6 have been ‘cleared’ and it’s a nice weight off my shoulders. I now am free from listlunatic work, my skydive competition (a real time eater) plus that paid review.

Of course i still have mountains of work to be getting through and i will, slowly but surely. Ultimately, i’ll be happy to scale things back to just this blog, BeerChief and one or two little side projects - that’s the goal and that in itself is more than enough

My blog suffered last month (in terms of blog post volume) as a direct result of the above and that’s not something i want to see too often. It’s extremely easy to surround myself with work and take on more projects and challenges, but it’s very difficult to actually get through them all on time.

anti-virus software extinct???

Am i the only one out there that doesn’t use any anti-virus software whatsoever? To my shock and horror, i was the ‘odd one out’ when this topic came up in college… it seems the rest use some sort of anti-virus software

photo credit: Zepy.net

I’ve been without anti-virus software for over a year now. In my view, all of them are as bad as each other and designed to cash in on the fear factor. In the early 2000’s, yes, windows could be opened up by hackers easier than a tin of beans as everyone was using windows 95/98 or ME and running Internet Explorer.

Then Firefox came along and all of those annoying little trojans and applets that got through in IE, were shut out by Firefox. These days, i think both are relatively secure and any problems are generally cause by the user and not the software.

Vista, although i STILL think it’s worse than XP and nothing but a fattened up version of XP, is pretty secure. I should also mention the fact that i’m not running a standard version of windows… if i was i think i’d have gone insane by now

I’ve ditched the sidebar, all the security pop ups, enabled auto-login on startup, trimmed the start up processes to the bare minimum plus gotten rid of the flash graphics on start up.

If i get spyware or a virus, i’ll be able to fix it myself or else google it. These days, i’d say 99% of virii and spyware infected PC’s are brought on by the user being stupid and doing things they shouldn’t be doing like downloading ‘FREE serials crackz click here to download FREE NOW’ or else running a .exe file from somewhere…

I’m not sure what exactly anti-virus software does these days only warn people before they click on things. What sort of set up do you guys have? Just like me or full to the brim of anti-virus junk?

Playing with Premier Pro

As some of you will know, i’m currently filming/editing/acting in a short film as a college project. Don’t worry, it’s not as professional as it sounds It’s a mock up of the hit TV series Dragon’s Den and i’m the man responsible for editing which will, let’s face it, make or break any video production.

This is my first real attempt at using premier pro… I added in a few subtle transition effects and cloned the same person 5 times which looks hilarious from a distance

The reason why the one person is doing all 5 Dragons is mainly because this guy is hands down, the best actor (and has all 5 voices down to a tee). It’s also due to the fact i CAN clone him as people who don’t read my blog will be wondering WTF is up when they see the video… is it editing? is it a different person? how is that done?! They’ll have to look twice.

So it’s a clever use of software and i can the cut back and forth between the presentations and the dragon’s reactions. We’re also bringing in a (fake) IRA member and a jedi in to this (please don’t ask me how or why!) in full costumes so it’s gonna make for some *interesting* viewing.

We also have several stupid but hilarious ideas to present to the Dragons… BeerChief will be the only serious one and i’ll be doing that (it’s also free promotion for me in front of potentially hundreds of people) Although that above video looks pretty good, i’ve yet to touch up the ‘lines’ and cut back and forth between panning shots and closeups of each Dragon so the real deal should look much more professional.

We then have to present the entire project (video and all) to a few lecturers who will mark us. So it’s gamble going for ’serious’ comedy as that can always backfire but i think we have the ideas and personnel to pull it off