Ive just spent a frustrating morning trying to get Ebays Turbolister 2.0 working properly again and have still not succeeded. I dont understand why Ebay with its millions (or is that billions?) of dollars profit each year (more than many countries GDP), cannot employ some decent programmers to produce a stable piece of software for bulk upload management.Turbolister 2 looks and performs like its been written by complete amateurs. I would be happy to pay a few dollars for a quality product (and so would thousands of other users) even though I do think its ebays duty to provide us with such a product for free.

Im not the only disgruntled ebayer, the forums are riddled with complaints about bugs that randomly appear. My issue is a common one. When I try to upload any auctions I get an error saying ’system cannot find the file specified’. Ive read countless different fixes , none of which have worked for me this time (but some that have worked in the past). Its so buggy and right now I cant upload the auctions I require and I will probably lose some sales because of it as some items are things requested by customers.  

Come on Ebay - get your act together and show you actually care about your users - if you do.

(This is not a crappy April fools joke - least I hope its not one from ebay cos Im not laughing.) 

Last night im pretty sure I was dreaming about this blog all night. I remember waking up thinking about it and was even writing posts in my sleep and half sleep. Unfortunately there is no wordpress plugin to allow you post this way so Im not gaining an unfair advantage. Pretty glad really as I wouldnt want all my dreams posted here - it could really screw up the relevance of the adsense ads!

The whole blogging thing is very addictive though and if your setting yourself goals to achieve then it becomes a obsession.As soon as I get up the first thing im doing is checking stats, emails and seeing if anyone has left a comment.Ive been spending alot of my time on this and seemingly the only time Im not working on it is when my girlfriend is with me - she wouldnt take very well to be a blog widow! I think you would have to be pretty organised to run 5 or 6 (or more) blogs properly as some of the probloggers do.

It got me wondering aswell about people who blog at work. Im sure there are millions of people updating blogs at work when they should be doing what they are supposed to. It would be interesting to see some stats of how many hours are lost to blogging and the cost to employers. Do many companies block IP or port numbers to stop blog updates? I imagine more companies are adding restrictions into their policies regarding blogging to counteract this.

Has anyone heard of anyone that has been fired for blogging at work? - im sure there are a few cases. 

Well nobody ever said it was gonna be easy! Since starting this blog a few days ago Ive spent countless hours working on it. Now it may not look like it as there isnt a whole load of content, something I have to address asap, but for example I have just spent hours registering with blog directories. Its amazing how time consuming stuff like this can be but hopefully it will show some rewards in a few weeks. the site isnt picked up by google yet but some searches in other locations do pick me up. I have quite a largish ping list I use when I put a new post up - I remove this at other times though as if I make slight corrections I dont want to ping them all - its takes about 3 minutes to do plus it annoys the search engines!

Ive also been testing out a couple of money making ideas such as being payed to read emails and I have just signed up for a survey site that might bring in some money (Ill post on this later). Also I have been hanging about in mylot a bit and starting a few discussions - they havent been replies to very much though so I need to experiment with this a bit.

Adsense hasnt being doing anything for me and neither has freindfinder but then Im not goting much traffic so its to be expected. I need to concentrate on building content and traffic as nothing can be done without that. it would be good to hear any tips from people about getting more traffic and also about adsense placement. I toying with the idea of putting small adsense text ads in each post but I dont want to be too intrusive.

 Ok back to the research!

High speed internet connections are now common place in many homes all across the USA, Europe  and Asia. It is probably normal for many blog readers to being reading via broadband but in fact there is still a higher percentage of people using dial-up connections at home or surfing the net in shared bandwidth internet cafes.

I am one of these low bandwidth surfers - my home connection is via dial-up because broadband is not available in my area. Other connections I often use - wifi in cafes or internet cafes, are often pretty slow. So for me it is really annoying when I visit a blog and it is full video content, hi-res images or overloaded with so many widgets and offsite hosted buttons that it takes 5 mins to just load the frontpage so I can read some content. Unless I know there is something on the blog that I am looking for, I will most likely leave before reading anything at all. It will almost certainly stop me from staying on the site for very long or ever returning as it is so frustrating to be waiting around.

I understand though that for many sites this kind of content is key to the experience and  is sometimes the main focus of the blog but there are ways to reduce the ‘heavyness’ of the index page (more…)

Whilst im quite new to blogging this isnt my first blog and I do have several websites for personal or business reasons, so Im not a complete newbie to all this. That said ive never made any money from advertising or afflilate programs before so I am new to that side of things. With regards SEO (search engine optimisation) Ive done a bit of study into this and know a bit of stuff, but again im certainly no guru in this area. So im still trying to work out the best approach for making money from this blog but I expect that whilst I will learn quickly the ever changing nature of the internet will require me to be constantly updating my approach and learning new things.

Looking for Blog Host 

Obviously (I presume so anyway!) this is the first thing to do and clearly I have already done so as I have this blog up and running. So I’ll tell you how I decided on my host -  blogsome.com. Ive not used a free blog host before but have wordpress running on my own hosting for another site so I am familiar with that. Whilst I like wordpress I was prepared to use any platform if it gave me what I needed and had the following requirements in mind: (more…)

The challange I have set myself :-to see if I can create a blog that brings in money without spending any money at all (internet connection costs aside).There is quite a glut of blogs out there about making money online, blogging for a living and or earning 5 million US $ per month from affiliate advertising. Some are very good (problogger.net, johnchow.com) some are just plain terrible or at worst they are scams. How is this different? Well it probably isnt unique and no doubt someone will point out a similar site at some point.

The difference as I see it is that I am not an expert internet dot com mogul marketing guru (yet) nor profess to be (as im sure many do that are not). I am just someone who is quite computer savvy and is going to see if I can make some of this money stuff I see other people with. It will be a process of learning which I will document online as I go. Hopefully I will get people giving me advice and helping to put me right when I make mistakes.

Obviously getting some of that money stuff would be nice but I do have other reasons for doing this and its not purely financially motivated (more…)