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Announcements, How To's, Social Marketing

A new brilliant idea for Online shopping

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As some of you guys may know that one of my favorite “Geek merchandise” website is thinkgeek.com, and there is only 2 other places that I shop online, eBay and Amazon.
That was until I wrote the article about ping.fm and I got a comment on it from a follower (now a friend) from twitter, so, as usual I went to check their site like from their twitter bio at: http://thebuyersnet.com and I found out a new way of shopping online.
The idea is simple yet brilliant, look for items, join or create a club for it, other people like the same item, they add it to their wish list or join the club, everyone buys it at the end as a group, and that’s where the savings come by buying the item wholesale price.

A great diagram explaining how it works is here.
I am currently looking for a new laptop, so far (As a proud geek) I am falling in love with the new Sony Vaio FE series, most likely with a read/write BLU-Ray player. If anyone else interested, let’s create a club for it and share the savings on http://thebuyersnet.com.
The site have categories including: Automobiles & Accessories, Computers & accessories, Electronics, Fitness, Furniture, Appliances, sports & more.

I just wanted to share the discovery with you all 😉
To follow http://thebuyersnet.com updates on twitter go here.

Announcements, Blogging for Profit, Blogging Tips, Make Money Online, News

$65,000 for this blog!

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The picture above is an actual $50,000 photo of cash I took out today from the bank.
Why did I do that?
I am just sick and tired of this one company (That they requested to remain anonymous) offers.
Here is the story in a nutshell:
4 Weeks ago, a New York based electronics company contacted me via the contact form asking me for my number!!
I thought it was like any consultation request or any developing service of mine. I was wrong..
Their “Sales manager” called me (Not even the companies manager nor the owner or CEO), simply to offer me $50,000 for this blog that you are reading right now.
As you may know that I migrated 5 of my blogs into this one, one of them was about gadgets (Electronic gadgets of course) and he said that they wanted to buy this blog, delete all categories (except for the gadget category), have me write for them for the next year in a regular bases, then they will redirect the URL to their own blogs…. HUH?!
First of all, this blog was appraised for more than that, then the fact that I would make this amount in less than a year, got me asking my self: Why stop the cash flow after a year?! And why would I work for someone else for an entire year?
I simply said: Thank you for the offer but my answer is no.
2 Weeks later the owner of the company called me (the day after my interview with John Chow) and raised the price to $60,000 and I don’t have to work for them (Except for a 2 weeks visit just to get them used to the blog “blog training” he said), I thought about it and said no again.
4 Calls followed some of them were very rude (That’s not a good way to do business) 2 calls were the day after my (interview with Yaro Starak).
They have contacted me again 2 days ago by email, the offer was $65,000, and left me with 2 choices:
Ask them for no less than $100,000
Or
Ask them to stop the rude and annoying calls and leave me alone.
I took my time to answer this time, I thought about my readership (You guys), I thought about the income that would stop coming in, and I thought about my future plans for this blog (Like the Online school I am working on launching soon), So I tweeted about it 2 days ago (If you follow my twitter you’ll know how annoyed I was). I guess they didn’t like that, I got a twitter reply by one of their employees asking to keep them anonymous.
OK… it’s over now… no wait another phone call this morning from the secretary telling me they want to raise the offers price but I have to approve to them that I actually make this kind of money, So I took on the challenge to send a clear message and went to the bank, withdrew the cash and used my photo studio to take the picture!!!
If all the above was not working, I thought maybe this blog post will, here it is loud and clear:
I am not “under-selling” this blog, for all the reasons above.
That’s the bottom line.
Another reason I blogged about this is for the lessons I learned that I will share with you:
Lesson 1: Don’t under estimate your power.
Lesson 2: Negotiate, don’t send rude emails or bad calls, be smart and you might get what you want.
Lesson 3: Don’t play games (Like having your secretary calling to raise the offer) just be straight forward.
Lesson 4: Don’t forget your people, your friends, your readers. They are the reason that made this blog as big as it is today.
Announcements, Blogging, Blogging tools, Cool Toys, Social Marketing, Social Networking, Tools, Web 2.0

Ping.fm is now open beta to the public

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The fun and extremely useful service is now open to public beta.
As some of you may know, I am a member of 67 social networking services, that means 67 online profiles that I have to maintain regularly, Do you you how hard it is do do so? You probably do.
That was until I discovered the best tool of 2008 in my opinion, www.ping.fm and until September 2nd, it was an invite only beta service.
Well now it’s open to the public, still in beta, but open to all.
What is Ping.fm?
Let’s say you have multiple online profiles, like me, you might want to update all of them almost everyday.
Before Ping, I would manually go on my twitter, facebook, plurk, pownce, linkedin, tumbler, identica, brightkite, freindfeed, jaiku, plaxo, bebo, hi5, kwippy, xanga and rejaw to update my status, sometimes twice a day for each one.
After I got my special beta invie code and signed up with Ping.fm, set it up, I can update all the above and more in one shot, whether I am updating from web, phone, email or IM, it’s all in one shot, life became way easier 🙂
Now here is the best part: (Warning! geeks content follow)
Ping was built with open API calls, meaning if you hire a nerd like myself (And you can!) to set it up with your blog or RSS feed, guess what? You know it. More organic exposure. I even setup some of my affiliate feeds to go there immediatly and I can’t tell you how much I love getting those extra commision checks in the mail.
Ping.fm is more than just status update, you can even setup your wordpress blog so you can blog through Ping.
I advice everyone to get an account (Now that it’s open to all) and enjoy everything Ping offers.

Update: I have some Brightkite invites, comment on this article and I will email you an invite. (Hurry I only have 10 invites and I will send it to the first 10 commenters only).