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10 Reasons Why Agloco is Booming February 13, 2007

Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Business, Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Goals, Wealth, Work, Assets, Blogging , 4 comments

1. It’s free
You just can’t compete with free. However, the psychology of free often works against you since many people are cynical enough to believe that nothing that doesn’t cost you any money can’t be a profitable idea. It does cost you time and effort to build up a decent network, but you can’t lose money in the process. So yes, it doesn’t take money to make money.

2. The web 2.0 assists you
Have you noticed how dominant the Agloco effect has been on blogs and forums? More and more bloggers sign up and use their blogs as leverage to get readers to sign up, which is a good idea no matter what you blog about. This shouldn’t be a discouragement to those of you who don’t have a blog of your own though, since the social web 2.0 was predictably bound to be the center of innovation where the agloco effect blasted out from. There’s plenty of room left since the viewbar hasn’t even launched yet.

3. It’s easy
You get a referral url and give it to everyone you know. In other words, it’s a no brainer. But as a reality check, if you want people to join your network with a higher probability and a higher degree of dedication, you need to be descriptive, to the point and keep the hype level down. I haven’t told a single person how much you can make from this, because I’d rather keep it real and stick to the current facts.

4. It’s useful
It’s surprising that many don’t even consider the option that having the viewbar on the bottom of your browser can be useful to you in getting new information like movie trailers, anti-fraud utilities and a search engine. I might as well never minimize it and use it all the time instead of the 5 hours per month.

5. It’s a challenge
This one fits me very well. I like the challenge of having a concept at my hands that has virtually no downside effects to it. Because of this, I can freely attempt my very best at building my referral network as far as I can because it has my 100 % recommendation behind it.

6. It generates passive income
I always liked the idea of doing the job once (create a system) and then let that network or system create revenue from that point onward with less and less effort. In other words, you also start to realize what kind of a mind-set rich people have about making money. I just love having assets like this one.

7. It’s less work than other viable options
Granted, those that already have an existing, big and promising network before they start promoting, have a head start. But I don’t belong to that group and I’m still seeing much better performance than when I did e.g. network marketing. Just spread the word to anyone who spends some time on the web and give the heads up of what’s going on to those who have turned passive.

8. It’s not obtrusive
One of the reasons network marketing is frowned upon is because the network marketers are too hype-driven, obtrusive, obnoxious and whatnot. With Agloco, you just tell them these ten reasons to join and let them be if they don’t care. There’s no point beating a dead horse over it if that’s the case.

9. It makes you think creatively
Ever since I joined, I’ve found myself sporadically thinking of how I can increase, improve and optimize my performance in building my network. One of those sessions spawned the idea to create my own Agloco banner (468 x 60). You’ll see it in action at the bottom of this post. For using it on your own website, I only ask that you social bookmark this post.

10. It’s too easy
This isn’t much of a positive thing, but it does explain why Agloco has spread like wildfire. People sign up and then forget about it. Which means that with all the referral links found everywhere, sometimes people sign up even when they don’t even know what Agloco is. It’s the 90/10 rule in action. So the question is, do you want to belong to the 10% of people who make 90% of the money from this opportunity or not?

Join the Agloco network and stay updated on this blog.

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

How to Blog - 8 Essential Steps to Effective Blogging February 9, 2007

Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Goals, Productivity, Technology, Writing, Blogging , 17 comments

So you’ve decided to start blogging? That’s great, but in order to make the most out of your venture, I’ve compiled a massive 8-step program with lots of detailed advice that you may use as reference whether you’ve been blogging for quite some time now already or if you didn’t know what a blog was until yesterday. It is designed to be easy enough for anyone to follow, yet consist of information that may be new even to bloggers with several months of experience under their belt.

These entries will be long and there will be plenty of external links embedded as well for even more in-depth information and utilities. A new article will be presented every Monday and Friday for the next four weeks. In this sense, it fits perfectly as a real time workshop where you follow each of the 8 steps at the given pace and as thoroughly as you choose to. You’ve probably already pictured for yourself a bit what your blog is going to look like so you are in no way required to follow and do everything exactly as I suggest. Strive for uniqueness on at least one aspect when considering what content, niche, design, features, writing style, layout and audience you want. This guide will be tailored to the Wordpress blogging platform and will also include the element of making money off your blog.

Here are the eight essential steps that will get their own article and link from this introduction.

How to Blog - 1/8 Start Offline (XAMPP, WP, Themes, Files)
How to Blog - 2/8 Go Online - (Web host, FTP, WP Config)
How to Blog - 3/8 Plugins - (How to install, 20+ essential plugins)
How to Blog - 4/8 Design & Tweaks - (Permalinks, Favicon, CSS & PHP)
How to Blog - 5/8 Google Utilities
How to Blog - 6/8 Ads
How to Blog - 7/8 Traffic Building (Internal means)
How to Blog - 8/8 Traffic Building (External means)

I’m not going to let you leave totally empty handed, so I’ll cover the most important things you need to focus on before you make the decision to follow these steps - the reason and the content.

What’s your motive?

You need to establish an underlying reason why you want to blog about something. Do you want to help people with a specific issue? Or do you just want to get yourself heard over yours? Whatever it is, it should be a prevalent and persistent behaviour and thought pattern that will ride the ups and downs that you may experience from time to time. This is most important if your goal is to make a living off of blogging because for such a goal, you need to reserve at least one or two years before you can get to the proof if you’re cut out to be a professional blogger.

Find your why first before reading how to blog because failure is most often found when people start to question why they’re doing what they’re doing. Few people fail out of not knowing how to do what they should do. I can’t really help you any further on that question because you have to find your own personal answer to it yourself. All successful bloggers (as well as entrepreneurs and businessmen) have a strong why and it keeps them going. You may find this article to be relevant as well.

What are you going to write about?

This should be a done deal for you by now, but question first how broad your perspective will be. Will you be able to write hundreds of posts in a very narrow niche or should you keep flexible boundaries to ensure that writer’s block doesn’t hit you? It doesn’t matter if you will monetize your blog or not, readers want to see persistence, a predictable posting frequency and above all else they want to read interesting and useful entries.

As long as you love writing what you’ve decided to write about, you’ve got the highest odds of succeeding in attracting plenty of readers as well as personally having the drive to go on for a long while. Every blogger will agree on the notion that the greatest key to success is writing compelling entries that provide lasting value.

What will the name of the blog be?

For starters, do a Google search on “domain registration” and you’ll find plenty of websites that enable you to enter a url in a field for you to check its availability. I suggest getting your own domain name if you want to stand out as a seriously dedicated blogger. This is also the only option if your idea requires plenty of storage space for media rich content like images, podcasts or videos. Wordpress’ own blog hosting program will not allow you to run ads on your blog. Blogger on the other hand lets you do this in its blogspot directory. More on hosting your blog and going online is presented in step 2.

Then make up your mind on what the blog’s name will be. New blogs grow in numbers like mushrooms in rain, so you’d better make a search on the blog name that you want as well before settling on a final decision. Also decide upon the tagline or trademark text that goes hand in hand with your blog title. Finding a great match between the url and your blog title is getting more difficult for every day, but try to be creative and find a solution that catches and matches with the essence, motive and content of your blog-to-be.

Write compelling headlines

In order to grab attention, your post titles need to be carefully selected. Are you going with wit, clarity, controversy or guidance? Do you aim for people’s emotional or rational attention? Do you want to entertain or provide help? John Wesley provided a great case study over the choice of headlines. Copyblogger presents alternative options of how to rephrase your headlines. And while you’re at it, check the wording of Steve Olson’s headlines in the Most popular posts section in the sidebar. Always experiment and try different methods and analyze the results.

Checklist for introduction

Motive - Why are you blogging? What do you want to accomplish?
Blog Content - What is it about? Niche or general? What do readers expect?
Name & Domain - Check url and name availability. Make it all match together.
Headlines - Know which headlines grab attention. Choose your style.
Post Content - How will you write and present? Write pillar articles once awhile.

In the first step of this workshop (Monday, February the 12th) I’m going to show you how to install and use XAMPP, a free software that allows you to run Wordpress offline on your computer. This way even the most cautious newbie can install and try out the blogging platform and tweak all they want without annoying online readers with downtime, errors or continuous changes when you tweak your blog to the max throughout the 8 steps.

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