For those who haven’t taken advantage of this yet, you have until midnight tonight to sign up to Become A Blogger for only $1. After tonight, Yaro and Gideon will close the door on their six month course. After the doors close, you won’t be able to get in for at least another six months. And apparently, the price may have increased by then as well. The price has already increased once, so why miss out again and pay more later?

Yaro and Gideon are the real deal. You can prove it to yourself by doing a simple Google Search of their course, and you’ll see what other people are saying. To me, a course like this is a no-brainer because you really can’t lose, especially when you can test it out for $1.00.

Sign up today, pay $1, spend the next week exploring the program and if you decide it’s not for you, just cancel and you won’t pay any more. If you like the program and want to complete the training, do nothing and you will be billed the regular $47 monthly fee for six months to complete the course. There’s also a 60 day money back guarantee. But you must hurry, this offer expires in…

Sign Up for Become a Blogger $1 Trial

An increasing number of social media websites are finding that the only real way to structure advertisements so that they have any significant ROI for sponsors is to integrate them into the social nature of the website itself. StumbleUpon did this through the use of “paid stumbles” where they charged $.05 a visitor from the StumbleUpon toolbar and Digg rolled out a similar program soon after showcasing “sponsored stories” amongst the other submissions on the home page.

If you are going to pay to advertise on social media websites, this is the way it is to be done. This is the only way to force readers to seriously consider clicking on your “advertisement” as it is essentially part of the content, essentially being the key word. To retain any sort of credibility, any social media website adopting such advertising forms will display a visible, although often times discrete, “sponsored post” message to let users know the link is an ad. However, since the ad is part of the content, users can’t help but to take notice of it and thus if intrigued they will click. This is a far cry from traditional sidebar banner advertisements which many users will glance over without any consideration.

The key to successful social media marketing through the purchase of paid advertisements is discretion. Simply getting users to read your ad isn’t enough, you need them to click through. This is especially true for sites like Digg where the ad is featured in a list of links people are looking to click on. The traditional 5% click through ratio does not apply here. Social media users hate advertisements so how does one go about promoting a product in this form? Through NOT trying to make a sale.

The moment your social media submission focuses to discussing prices or making a purchase, you have lost the potential visitor. Instead, you need to focus on what value you can add to the visitor assuming they won’t buy anything, while EDUCATING them about your product so that they can if they are interested.

The best way to see this is through an example so take a look at two recent sponsored posts on Digg. One, an advertisement for Virgin Atlanic airlines reads, “Bubbly Low Fares from $49” with a description that says, “Fly in style with WiFi, movies, on demand food and drinks, and more–all for a fabulously low fare”, while another for the HTC Google phone reads, “Who Knows You Better than your Phone” with a description that says, “See you from the perspective of your phone”. The Virgin Atlantic post has amassed 250 Diggs, while the HTC ad has done twice as well, generating over 575 diggs and 360,000 views on YouTube.

Why? Simple, Virgin Atlantic was simply trying to sell its product and even with the popularity of the brand in the tech community, its ad was not as highly rated as the HTC ad that took the reader to a cleverly put together short video on YouTube which served as the video advertisement for the company’s phone. The HTC ad also allowed the user to interact with the brand on two social media sites, Digg and YouTube, where the user could view and subscribe to the official HTC channel.

Here is more information on the most effective marketing techniques for start-ups .

This post was written by Aditya Mahesh, founder of AMBeat.com, one of the web’s most popular entrepreneurship blogs.

The engineers at Porsche have developed a range-topping sports car designed to deliver the finest in terms of power, performance and driving dynamics: the 911 Turbo S. The heart of this exclusive high-performance athlete is the six-cylinder boxer engine boosted by two exhaust gas turbochargers with variable turbine geometry. The flat-six engine has an increase in power over the 911 Turbo by 30 to 530 hp and maximum torque is a most impressive 516 lb-ft.

Despite its significant increase in power and dynamic performance, the new 911 Turbo S does not consume any more fuel than the Porsche 911 Turbo, making it by far the most efficient sports car in its class. The 911 Turbo S Coupe is EPA rated at 17 mpg city, 24 highway.

The 911 Turbo S comes exclusively with the seven-speed Porsche-Doppelkupplungsgetriebe (just say PDK), Porsche’s Double-Clutch Gearbox, delivering power to the Porsche Traction Management (PTM) all-wheel drive system. The increase in driving enjoyment is ensured by the now standard Dynamic Engine Mounts and Porsche Torque Vectoring (PTV), including the standard mechanical differential lock on the rear axle. In conjunction with Launch Control, part of the standard Sport Chrono Package Turbo, the 911 Turbo S accelerates from a standstill to 60 mph in 3.1 seconds.

Top speed is 195 mph. Extra-light and fade resistant Porsche Ceramic Composite Brakes provides outstanding performance in terms of stopping power and controlled application of the brakes. Other standard equipment on the 911 Turbo S includes Dynamic Corning Lights, 19-inch RS Spyder wheels with central locking, a three-spoke sports steering wheel with gearshift paddles, adaptive sports seats, cruise control, and a CD/DVD changer. The special twin-tone leather upholstery in Black/Cream or Black/Titanium Blue, along with the new Ice Blue Metallic exterior color underlines the exclusivity of the first Turbo S in five years.

The new Porsche 911 Turbo S will be at dealerships as both a Coupe and Cabriolet in May 2010. The 2011 Turbo S Coupe and Turbo S Cabriolet prices are $159,100 and $170,200, respectively. Start saving those pennies!

Last night, I was at a Chinese New Years party at West Van Baptist Church. During the party a few people asked me how hard it was to set up a blog and how long it would take. As luck with have it, I just happened to have my Macbook with me and decided to give a little demo on how to register a domain name, set up a new WordPress blog and have it all live on the Internet in 15 minutes.

Twelve year old Ifan Yang is the son of one of the church members. I decided to use him for the demo. The goal was to show everyone how easy it was to get a blog up and running. Here’s the step by step process.

Step 1 – Register The Domain Name

Deciding on a domain name can be the most time consuming of the entire blog creation process. Most people get stuck at this step and never move forward. Fortunately in this case, the domain name was Ifan’s name and it was available. The domain name was registered at GoDaddy .

If your domain name is available, then go ahead and register it. We just register the domain name. We didn’t use any other GoDaddy services. The main reason I like using GoDaddy is they have a really nice DNS manager that makes domain admin very easy. Total time to register the domain name was two minutes and cost $10.69.

Step 2 – Set Up The WordPress Blog

For this demo, I set the blog up at WordPress.com. This is WordPress’s free blog hosting service. I don’t recommend using this for a money making blog because WordPress.com does not allow you to place any type of advertisings on their service. However, if you’re looking to test the blogging waters, WordPress.com is a great service to get your feet wet in.

The main advantage of WordPress.com is it’s free and extremely easy to use. Registering an account and setting up the new blog took about ten minutes. The most time was spent deciding which theme to use.

Step 3 – Map The Domain Name

Blogs on WordPress.com use a sub domain structure. If you set up a blog on the service, the URL would generally be http://yourname.wordpress.com. This is fine for many bloggers but from a branding standpoint, it’s far less desirable. However WordPress.com offers a domain mapping service that will allow you to use your own domain name. Mapping a domain on WordPress.com cost $9.97.

WordPress does offer domain registration and mapping service for $14.97. However, I prefer to keep my domain provider and host provider separate. Should I wish to move any of my blogs to a new web host in the future, GoDaddy will allow me to do that easily. Trying to move a domain registered at WordPress.com would be a lot more difficult and may not even be possible.

To map a domain, log into your GoDaddy account and fire up the Domain Manager. Check the domain you want to admin and then choose Nameservers. This will pop up a box for you to enter the DNS information for WordPress.com

After entering the above DNS info, log back into your WordPress.com blog and go to Settings -> Domains in your blog’s dashboard, enter the domain into the form at the top of the page, and click the Add domain to blog button. If the name servers are verified, you will be prompted to purchase the required credits via PayPal and complete the mapping process.

After you have made your purchase, go back to the Settings -> Domains page, select the radio button next to the domain you just mapped to your blog and click the Update Primary Domain button.

As soon as I set the primary domain to use, I was able to view the blog on the Internet by typing IfanYang.com in a web browser. Total time to set up the domain map was three minutes. Here’s the finished blog.

Total cost of the demonstration was $20.66. I think I could have created the new blog in less than 15 minute but I was limited by the 3G speed of my iPhone connection. Now that the blog is up and running, the real work of keeping it updated begins. Good luck Ifan!

I have seen DirectCPV advertising on this blog for awhile, and decided I would try them out. Overall I oversee thousands of dollars per month spent on CPV through my accounts and those I manage, but really Media Traffic is the primary company used as they seem to be the most stable and well priced.

I decided to give DirectCPV a run for their money, so I dropped $100 into my campaign (their minimum deposit), and forgot to enter my $30 coupon code (JCH30) to give my total $130. This was stupid on my part so I kindly sent them a support request asking if they could add the coupon to my account, and instead they added an extra $20, bringing my total to $150 for the case study.

I created a campaign promoting a free dating on facebook application, and since there are so many people who use Facebook, I decided to do the case study with DirectCPV’s Run of Network (RON), which is basically untargeted and super cheap ($0.004 per view).

In only a few hours, the campaign was capped and I had received 37,269 unique views to my landing page. While DirectCPV has a much smaller overall user-base than its adware competitors, 40,000 impressions is a very small percentage of their network so they are able to send it very quickly, and their low total amount of users wouldn’t affect me.

While we pay about the same price using Media Traffic, we get a little bit more targeting (rather than anyone from anywhere), so the numbers converted quite a bit less than I am use to with Media Traffic. However we had to talk with everyone at Media Traffic to get such a deal, and if anyone planned on using DirectCPV on a daily basis spending hundreds of dollars, I certainly would talk to them as well to increase your rates which I am sure something could be arranged.

Pros:

• Very cost effective advertising
  Starting at only $0.004 per view for CPV traffic is as low priced as it gets off the bat, so that works out well.
• No delays
  With most CPV networks, any changes you make to your campaign takes 15+ minutes to execute on their servers, and if you are bidding on sites like facebook, that means a one second typo takes 15 minutes to fix and can run you up hundreds of dollars. With DirectCPV, their system seems closer to real time so that error can easily be fixed.
• Easy to sign up, fast approval
  Their staff got back to my email fairly quickly, and my campaign was approved in a timely manner. When it comes to affiliates using CPV systems, waiting 12-24 hours for approval can be life and death of a timely campaign.
• Great support
  They responded to my email and credited my account when I asked them to, and in a timely manner. I am definitely a fan of that in a network.
• Powerful referral system
  They offer a 5% referral on all qualified advertisers (they have to spend over $125, which excludes all the people who do $100 minimum bid tests like me, bummer! =P). They also offer a $20 signup bonus for these advertisers, as well as entering you into a contest with multiple tiers, and a chance to win a BMW! You will need 100+ people spending $125+ to reach this tier however.

Cons:

• Small Network
  For a CPV network, DirectCPV does not have the demographics that some of the oldest networks have, however their network is still large enough to not have a problem if you are a small to moderate sized advertiser, only the people spending a fortune every day will have a problem with capping.
• Site Navigation
  The site has everything you need in one bar, however the system just isn’t as fluent as many other CPV networks I am use to, which to me is a con.

Conclusion:

Overall I am very satisfied with this network. It is very cost effective and the pros definitely can outweigh the cons depending on what your goals are with advertising. There are definitely strong alternatives to DirectCPV, but like anything, if you do split testing you can definitely make this network work for almost any industry online.

If I had tested with a larger budget, and worked directly with an affiliate manager to get the best targeting for the cheapest deals, I believe this network could very easily be on par or better conversions than Media Traffic and the other big networks. Split testing everything takes time and money, and this case study could have certainly been optimized better if I ran it longer with more direct stats.

If I were to start over with DirectCPV, I would certainly not use Run of Network traffic and would instead start targeting it a little bit more. When it comes to targeting, a little bit can go a long way when it comes to conversions, so my conversion numbers could have been a lot better even if I am spending more per click. Otherwise I would have tried to get my minimum bid down for RON, or even see if I could get them to do country targeting for RON prices like I have done with other CPV networks. (Hint: They need your business as much as you need theirs, work with them so you both make money!).

If you plan on using DirectCPV to promote affiliate offers, then their $0.01/view URL targeting would probably be the best bet unless the offer is international and accepts conversions from many countries.

I realize $150 is a small budget to write a case study on, but I wanted to share my thoughts for those users on the edge and I hope some of you can take this post as some food for thought when it comes to trying out new affiliate networks. If anyone has anything other thoughts about their experiences with DirectCPV, feel free to post them in the comments below.

My name is Collin LaHay and this case study and guest post was written by me. I am currently rebranding my blog’s domain to my new flagship site called Uber Link Building where I share link building strategies that can help you raise your ranks in the search engines and ultimately make more money online.