Power Maxx Blog

The moment has finally arrived!! OnePoke.com Beta is finally up and running!! You can access the site at either www.OnePoke.com or www.OnePoke.com/beta.

We decided to make it a public beta just to get a bigger input in terms of likes, don’t likes and glitches. If you would like to report anything that you do/don’t like, feel free to either post here, or access the help section in the OnePoke.com header.

There you can either use the contact form to email us, or access the OnePoke.com forum to make a thread about it.

I’m eagerly awaiting your comments, criticisms and ideas! So get on there and let me know what you think!

Who doesn’t love free gifts?!?! I know I do!!! So here’s the scoop on this one. Over the years, I have collected a LOT of interesting stuff that I’ve found on the internet.

I guess I’m kind of like a packrat of interesting things that I find on the net. Usually these things just sit there, never to be used again. Heck I probably won’t even use most of these things again!!!

But then I thought, what if I bring this archive of amazing things to you guys!! Kinda like a museum of neat stuff, but you actually get to take this neat stuff home with you!!!

Now tell me, have you even seen a blog do something like THIS before??? I didn’t think so.

All that I ask is that if you guys want to share whatever material I bring to you, that you guys link back to the post itself. Please don’t just give out the link to every tom dick and harry on every blog and internet forum that you might be a part of.

Even if you want to share this stuff with your own readers, please link back to my post, instead of just saving the material to your own server. In otherwords, I’m just asking for a little credit and recognition for bringing you guys some interesting and unique stuff that you might not find anywhere else in the blogosphere!! Almost like a citation if you know what I mean.

More importantly, I don’t want my bandwidth to get hammered either lol!!!
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Hey guys - hope you all had a great New Year’s Eve last night, and aren’t too hung over to read this and enter my latest contest!!

This contest is going to be mainly referral based, and the concept will be very simple - the person that can refer the most traffic to my blog wins!!! Comments will not be directly affecting the outcome of the contest, but if there is a tie for most number of referrals, the person with the greater number of comments will be decided the winner. This will encourage people to continue commenting despite the fact that it will not have a direct influence on the outcome.

Prizes!! The most important part!!! Prize structure will be similar to that of my last contest, but I will be adding 3 blog reviews into the mix for those that don’t win the top 3 prizes.

Here are the prizes for this contest:

1: $100
2: $50
3: $25
4-5: A free blog review of your blog on my blog (Approx. $10 value)

As for the rules, here they are for the most part!

Referrals will be determined though Google Analytics.
You can make up to two referral posts on your blog per week, for a total of 8 referral posts to my blog for the month.
Do not try to cheat the system - if I see 1000 referrals, but with an average time spent on the blog of 2 seconds, then it will be fairly obvious that something is up.
To enter the contest, simply post a comment stating that you’re entering, and a link back to your blog.
You can refer people using any method, from simply stating that I’m holding a contest, or writing an article based on one of the articles I have written.
No false links - don’t post a link saying “Win $100000000000 CLICK HERE!!!” and have it link back to my blog. I will have all of the entrants on my RSS feed, so I’ll be able to ensure everyone is on an even playing field with fair referrals.

That’s about it though, so get to it everyone!! I’m looking forward to seeing how this contest compares in terms of my last commenting contest, as it definitely gave me a great number of comments and page views, but I didn’t have as many participants as I was hoping!!

CONTEST ENDS JANUARY 31st, at MIDNIGHT EASTERN TIME!!!

Hey all!! A quick post to update you on the progress of that new venture I was telling you about. The website is called OnePoke.com, and as you might be able to tell from our “Coming Soon” image, it involves one of the things that has slowly become a mainstay in many of our lives: Social Networking.

The site, OnePoke.com, is not another social networking site. Let’s get that straight from the get go. The purpose of the site will be to act as a central hub FOR social networking. It will integrate your social networking sites, dating sites, email accounts, blogs, and eventually media such as youtube or flickr, to seamlessly display all of your information in one place.

This will effectively act to increase the efficiency of your social networking experience by a SIGNFICANT margin. Imagine a website that will tell you whats new, who’s trying to get in touch with you, and what you need to do on each of your social networks, with no more than a few clicks of your mouse.

OnePoke.com will be able to do much more than just this, and I will give you guys more information in my next update. We are looking for beta testers, so if you want to be one of the first to use and experience one poke, check out the website at www.onepoke.com, and check back here for updates as to the progress of the site. Our goal is to have it up and running by January 12th, 2009. If you are interested in becoming a beta tester for OnePoke.com, please reply to this post stating that you would like to beta test, and I will get back to you with further details.

For the rest of you, sign up to our mailing list at www.onepoke.com, to receive updates via email as to the progress and new exciting things to come from OnePoke.

DON’T FORGET TO CHECK OUT MY $175 COMMENTATING CONTEST AND HOW YOU CAN WIN AT THE FOLLOWING LINK!! CLICK HERE!!!!

Hey guys!! I’m back with my next installment of the Looking at the Big Picture series - Don’t Forget Where you Came From. To be honest, I’m not sure how long this post is going to be, but I’m going to just go where the flow takes me. In all honesty, I could probably write this article in a paragraph, but what would be the fun in that?

I was inspired by an article I read on another fellow bloggers website. John Chow wrote an article about the Dot Com lifestyle, in which he includes a nice video thats a good watch. So after you’re done, go check it out. But as a quick prologue to my post, one of the things he tries to say is that when becoming a successful entrepreneur, you should not forget about the little things in life. In fact, you should hold those little things even more dear than before you became a great success!! But check out the video and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Anyways, what I’m getting at is that as you become more successful in life, you should never forget where you came from. We all started off somewhere, with most of us starting in average households, with normal lives. I say this because I really hate to see when people succeed in life, and then start acting like they’re better than the rest of us. At the end of the day, we’re all still human, and I don’t believe anyone has the right to feel that they are better than anyone else.
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Hey everyone!! I recently wrote my first piece on the idea of “Looking at the Big Picture,” and how to use the concept to live a better life. It was an overwhelming success, especially considering how new my blog is, and thus I present to you part 2: a compelling argument as to why you should always do the right thing. This will most certainly be the shortest of any of my articles on the topic, but it is important nonetheless.

Always doing the right thing goes hand in hand with looking at the big picture, and in reality, you can’t have one without the other. There are a myriad of reasons as to WHY you should do whats right, but truth be told, the best reason is simply for the well being of others.

Some may argue that this sounds a bit unrealistic, after all, I did say that whole purpose of looking at the big picture was for YOU to live a happier and stress free life. So what’s with this look out for others business you might ask? Please read on so that you can learn!

You know that good feeling when you’ve accomplished something? You’ve been working on a major project, or task around the house, put a lot of effort into it, and now its DONE! We all know this feeling - the feeling of achievement and success. Now think if you felt that on a daily basis, wouldn’t that be something!

That’s where doing the right thing comes into play. You don’t have to help cure cancer, or stop world hunger, or even save a species from extinction (it would be nice though lol), but something as small as helping someone that’s lost find their way, or helping that old lady across the street (very 70’s I know), can give you that warm fuzzy feeling inside to make a gloomy day that much brighter.
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In the previous installment, Make Money with a Blog for Dummies: Part 1, I discussed all the basics of getting your blog setup, including all the plugins you’ll need, as well as making it stand out from the others with a free downloadable theme. As I previously mentioned, I am seeking to simplify the book by John Chow, as I myself found some parts a bit confusing for a beginner blogger.

I give all credit to John where it is due, and I will simply seek to get to the meat of the book so that someone can get setup and running as quickly as possible. I will also continue to add my own information where I have found it to be useful.

Alright! Now that you’re blog is all setup, and you’ve hopefully got a few posts up, its time to add a few money makers to your pages. You don’t want to go overboard from the beginning, as too many ads is a bad thing, and you want to keep your readers coming back, not drive them away. In the following section, I will detail the Recommended Money Makers for the beginner blogger.

The book by John Chow details 9 different ideas of where to start to begin generating ad revenue. I found that if you were to put all of these into effect on your blog, it would simply be too much. As your blog expands, you should gradually make use of these ad networks on your blog. For the beginner blogger, there are three good ad networks I suggest you sign up to first.

THE BIG THREE FOR THE LITTLE GUY
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As many of you know, I started my online business by selling on Ebay. It first started off as a hobby, and as I found more and more things I could sell online, it eventually became a profitable business. At the beginning of 2008, I decided to stop selling old collectibles and models that I had lying around and sell the Power Maxx Vortex Generator full time. This is when my hobby became my fulltime job, and I registered myself as a business. For the online retailing sector as a whole, the past few years have seen double digit increases in sales growth monthly, and up until the recent economic crisis, everything was dandy in the Ebay world.

This steady sales growth has since come to a halt, with a mere 1% growth in sales in October. This has lead to online retailers globally crying out for help as their sales take insurmountable hits, in some cases showing declines of 80% or more. With the Christmas season fast approaching, it looks like the number one time of the year for sales will turn out to be more like a struggle just to stay in business.

An article posted on November 19th by the Silicon Alley Insider sums up the crisis being faced by online retailers, in a few short but consise paragraphs:
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Hello everyone!! If you’re reading this post, you, like me are interested how you can make money online using nothing more than your blog. I first heard about this idea from John Chow, owner of the blog www.johnchow.com, on G4 tech TV. After watching the piece, I thought that it seemed easy enough, and went to his website to learn more about how you could turn something as simple as a blog into a money maker.

On John’s website, he has a free e-book that he wrote for the beginner blogger. While it is an excellent read, some parts can be confusing, and might apply more to that advanced blogger. It is my goal that by using this multi-part series, I will be able to take the best information from John’s book, condense it for simplicity, and add to it, so that you too can make money with your blog like John Chow. I give John Chow all the credit that he is due for coming up with the original, and I only seek to improve upon what the master has laid out.

He starts off by saying that to achieve anything, you must set yourself a goal and a time frame to achieve that goal in. By having a time frame, you will put pressure on yourself to achieve that goal as opposed to constantly putting it off, in which case your goal will never be realized. If you’re not willing to commit to something, don’t even bother trying to start it!

Now the next thing he gets into is his top money makers. In my opinion, I think it’s important to point out a few basic things that you need before you even think about monetizing your blog.

THE BASICS
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Timminco (TSX: TIM) is among the handful of small cap growth stocks that I currently hold in my porfolio. This company was the darling of the TSX last year, making a gain of over 7000%. Since then, it has returned to the spotlight, being further and further devalued by the continued global economic crisis and panic selling.

The main reason for the jump in Timminco’s share price last year, was the fact that it developed a process to convert normal metallurgical silicon into solar grade silicon. This was very interesting to the solar world as the demand for solar energy is constantly on the rise, and a cheap way of producing the systems to harness this is an almost godsend.

This process has been criticized left right and backwards, but it finally looks like Timminco is able to produce, and for the past few quarters has been shipping its product to solar cell manufacturers world wide. With a 2009 output target of 14,400 metric tons, it is projected to have a significant income in the 2009 fiscal year.
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