Here is a neat little service I just signed up for today. Brring is a service that allows you to create an advertising number to redirect to your actual number. It is completely free to sign-up for and use, so there is no reason not to. My thoughts are that this is ideal for personal and some business use. If you own a business (local) and want to make a little money off people calling you then go ahead. On the other hand, if your friends call you all the time on a personal phone, you could also setup the service to make a few bucks.

Each call earns you a minimum of $0.05.  I am already starting to drum up a few ideas for this program.

And for those of you who are thinking about making money off your friends phone… When you first sign up you have to enter a verification code to activate the account.

Today I noticed a similarity in two advertising widgets. I am not going to make any assumptions on whether or not one inspired the other, but I just want to make a few observations on the two.

I first heard about the OneYearGoal.com FireBoard back on July 16, 2007 when it was released. Initially I didn’t think much about the widget because I wasn’t into monetization at the time, but the idea seemed quite innovative. FireBoard allows you to pay $1 to get a link under a category labeled, “Featured Sites.”

Today as I was surfing the net I came across ScratchBack.com and immediately remembered the FireBoard tool. Right away I noticed how the two function almost exactly the same. Yes, the ScratchBack.com widget is much more commercialized, but they basically seem to do the same thing. The ScratchBack.com widget allows you place a certain amount on your available spaces and places them under a header which reads, “Are you in my TopSpots?”

Are these two widgets similar? I think so. Perhaps just two different individuals with two similar widgets. I am just here to make observations.

Today I submitted an older post titled Battling a Troll to BloggingZoom.com. So far the post has received about 80 hits alone and is also spilling off a little traffic to other articles. Initially the post generated a little traffic through BloggingZoom, but once it hit StumbleUpon, everything exploded. The post was originally submitted on 07/24/2007 and also did very well back then. So it goes to show you than you can always re-introduce your old popular posts to generate traffic. This is contrary to my old habit of submitting a post only once upon its release and leaving it at that.

I read an interesting article today which sparked a few thoughts about blogging. If you read blogs like:
JohnChow
DailyWebIdeas
and so on, you know that they often give a little information on selling and advertising on the internet. I used to frequent their websites daily, but was always left wanting more. My curiosity always wanted more detail and how-to information. Until today I hadn’t found much sales information which made it easy to apply to blogging.

The article is hosted at ezinearticles.com and titled, “Psychological Tricks in Selling,” by Stephen Bucaro. At first, judging by the size of my scroll bar on the left, I thought this might just be a sugar coated sales letter. Needless to say, I was wrong. The article is a must read for practically anyone. Bucaro discusses six types of, “tricks,” which are commonly used among all businesses. Even though businesses might change the packaging and offers, all still use these fundamental principals to drive their marketing strategies.

I personally have opened my eyes to a lot of advertising methods in magazines, television, and the internet. So read this article already and tell me what you think.
Psychological Tricks in Selling

Have you heard of WidgetBucks yet? It’s a nice little tool that allows you to place content related or catagory specific ads on your site. An advantage to using the tool as opposed to other tools is the ability to list more than one popular item in the same ad. In my experience with related advertising I have noticed that you can usually only list one item every time the page is refreshed.

The widget is very easy to apply to any blog template. For this Wordpress theme I was able to get the ad unit applied within minutes.

Referral? Of course you can refer people to WidgetBucks and make money in the process. Here is an the current referral info from the site:
With WidgetBucks’ Referral program, affiliates can earn a 10 percent referral fee based on the commissions earned by the people they refer. Affiliates receive this 10 percent for the full 12 months after the new member joins. Payouts to affiliates are monthly, along with their commission checks.

If that is not enough, there is of course more. If you join now you receive $25 just for joining.
Publishers and bloggers can get the ball rolling with WidgetBucks’ instant $25 sign-up bonus, which gets you half way to your first check!

So all in all we have an easy to use advertising tool. Check out the site, read the information for yourself, and maybe even join.

Earn $$ with WidgetBucks