Share and Tweet Your Emotions with Smood.it

Tweet

There’s a new microblogging platform in town and it’s called Smood.it. On the site you can share your smood with the world; the word smood is “a syneresis of two words: smile and mood.” Smood.it calls itself a “micro(emo)blogging” services since it’s more focused on letting you share your emotions rather than a simple status message.

Smood.it offers all of the basic features like a profile, the ability to invite and search for friends as well as a timeline view that showcases the smoods of those you follow. In addition you can keep up with your weekly mood (that is if you use the site consistently).

There are two simple steps to sharing your smood:

1. Pick one of six emoticons that describes your mood. The choices are: joy, surprise, love, anger, fear and sadness.

2. Tag your mood with words that describe why you’re feeling that way; you can also use URLs here. Previous used tags from the community will appear below the text box as you type.

Once your done, your smood will appear as picture below, with the emoticon and tags. Clicking on each tag will, as expected, take you to a page where you can see others who have used the same tag.

Connect Your Twitter Account

Smood is tightly integrated with Twitter. When you first sign up, you have the option of signing up via Twitter OAuth. Be aware that by default, your smoods will be set to auto-post to Twitter. You can, however, turn this off under settings. You can also customize how your tweet will look when it posts, which is a nice addition that not many sites offer.

Alternately and also in addition, you can have your tweets post as smoods to Smood.it. This is also something that is set by default, but can be changed under settings. It seems as though Smood.it scans your tweets, gets a feel for the mood of them and then automatically sets one of the six emoticon for them. As for that tags, it uses the URL in your tweet (if one is included), the users mentioned (if you @mention anyone) and hashtags that you may have used.

I do like being able to quickly share how I’m feeling on Smood.it. Sometimes a simple emoticon (as opposed to a text status message) is the best way to describe my current mood and Smood.it makes this possible.

While the community does not seem very active, it may just be because it is hard to find other users (besides clicking on tags). Also, there doesn’t seem to be a way to “like,” comment or reply to others’ smoods. Of course, these are just some of the missing functionalities that come with an early beta site, so I’m anxious to see how Smood.it progresses.

Once again, here’s another site that I’d really love to use often and hope that I will remember to do so. What are your thoughts?

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Use WP Spire to Power Sales Pages

The great thing about WordPress is that it is such a robust content management system and while it is fantastic for blogging, it is a platform that can also be used for other purposes. You just need to add the right tools and modifications to make it work.

From an Internet marketing perspective, one of the more interesting products is WordPress Spire. Available as a WordPress plugin or as a WordPress theme, this product can effectively let you create multiple WordPress sales pages, landing pages, and squeeze pages.

Multiple Designs for Multiple Purposes

You may have encountered some other products that allow you to use WordPress to power your sales page, but WordPress Spire goes a little further than that by offering a huge range of design options.

The sales page design is easily configurable to include custom backgrounds, different page widths, different headers, footers, image boxes, and other features. You can also use it to generate landing pages, squeeze pages, and even mini-sites.

Going further, the same domain can be used for multiple sales pages, each with a different design. This is particularly powerful if you have a single brand to promote multiple products. Each WordPress post can be its own sales page, looking totally different from the other posts on your single WordPress installation.

A Simplified User Interface

Dealing with messy HTML and PHP code is a thing of the past. Yes, the coders still have to deal with that kind of thing, but the “end user” webmaster can get a lot going on with much easier to understand menus.

This is the case with WordPress Spire too. The various theme options and features can all be accessed through the WordPress dashboard. Click on the appropriate menu item, access the right section, and you can change just about everything you want.

It is here that you can add and remove things like opt-in boxes, testimonial boxes, and header images. To add these to your posts, for instance, all you have to do is make use of the numerous shortcodes that are included with the themes.

Combine with Split-Testing for Optimal Results

Want to see which designs work the best for your purposes? Since all you need is a single WordPress installation with WordPress Spire, you can make use of some great split-testing to see what design elements result in the best conversion rates.

The options and features in WordPress Spire are easy enough to change, so you really can try a range of different designs without dabbling too deeply into the raw code. If you’re an Internet marketer looking for an easier way to develop sales pages and squeeze pages, WordPress Spire looks like a good bet.

The theme version is currently on sale for $77, representing a $50 savings from the regular price of $127. This grants you a license for unlimited installations on your own personally-owned sites.

Link: WordPress Spire

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Sell Ad Space with AdSella Marketplace

Go with traditional ad networks and you can expect them to take a 50% cut. Go with affiliate marketing and you have to work hard to increase your conversion rate. Take out private advertising and you have to deal with all the administration of the ad placements. There has to be a better way to monetize your blog.

Designed to make both the ad buying and ad selling experience easier for everyone involved, AdSella has just launched into its beta testing and you can sign up right now. Is this the right deal for your website?

Buy and Sell Website Advertising

The vast majority of beginning bloggers will turn to networks like Google AdSense when they first get started. The barrier of entry is low and they can start making money right away. However, they quickly learn that private advertising can be much more lucrative.

Handling private ad sales can be very time-consuming, however, and that’s where AdSella can come into play. In short, AdSella is an online ad space marketplace where site owners can list their available ad placements and advertisers can buy these spots.

A variety of different ad types and banner sizes can be used and AdSella takes care of all the administration. Publishers are paid once a week and they really do just “set it and forget it.”

How Does It Work?

From the blogger’s perspective, the ad marketplace from AdSella is very easy to understand.

Site owners create a listing on AdSella for every block of ad space that they’d like to offer for sale, setting whatever price that they’d like, whatever duration they’d like, and whatever size they’d like. A simple line of text is then inserted into the space on the site where they would like the ad to appear.

A placeholder ad block appears immediately on the site. Ad buyers can then click directly on the “buy this ad” banner, proceed through the checkout process, upload their banners, and have the ad go live almost immediately. From the blogger’s end, no additional code needs to be added or altered; it’s automatic.

When the purchased ad time expires, the ad block once again becomes available through the AdSella marketplace for new advertisers to purchase. Once again, the blogger doesn’t have to do anything. There’s no management of expiry dates and advertiser banners; the AdSella engine takes care of all that.

Sifting Through the Marketplace

Each time that a blogger sets up a new available ad slot, it shows up in the marketplace for buyers to browse. Basic information is displayed in the main listing, including site name, URL, PageRank, run (duration), status, and price.

Clicking through to an individual listing, the buyer can then get a little more information about the advertising opportunity, ad location, acceptable formats, ad run time, website category, and other related details.

However, the purchase process cannot happen from this page. The ad buyer has to go directly to the seller’s website, find the available AdSella ad spot, click on the blue banner, and proceed through the checkout process that way. This ensures that the advertiser knows exactly where the ad will be placed.

After uploading the ad creative, the advertiser can log into his or her AdSella account to make changes. Once again, the site owner doesn’t need to do anything. The same code stays on the website.

What’s the Catch?

The good news is that it costs nothing for site owners to list their available ad placements through the AdSella Marketplace. Naturally, though, AdSella has to take a cut when a sale is completed.

The commission rate is 20%, meaning that the site owner receives 80% of the total ad price. If a one-month ad placement is $50, then the ad seller receives $40 of that and this is sent out every Sunday via PayPal.

That 20% is certainly worth avoiding all the extra administration required to sell ad space privately, not to mention the extra exposure the site owner receives through listing in the AdSella Marketplace.

Link: AdSella Marketplace

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Search for Current Trends on NowRelevant

When it comes to search engines, you have no shortage of options. Even so, most people that I know turn to Google to find just about anything on the Internet. However, even Google is flawed, depending on what exactly you want to find.

As an alternative or supplemental search engine, you might want to consider giving NowRelevant a try. This is an off-shoot from the Internet Time Machine project that you may have already read about. Well, the NowRelevant search engine is now open to public beta.

What Is NowRelevant?

When you use a conventional search engine like Bing or Google, you get fairly universal results for your search term across the entirety of the world wide web. With NowRelevant, you are searching for relevant content within the last two weeks.

That’s easily the most critical difference that separates NowRelevant from just about every other search engine. It doesn’t concern itself with postings from a year ago; it only looks at what’s being said about your subject in the last fourteen days.

For people researching news and trending topics, these kinds of search results are much more useful. Further still, the types of results that come up with NowRelevant can be remarkably different from Google in another way.

Skip the Corporate Hoopla?

You can watch the demo video for some real world examples, but the crux of it is that Google search results can be very formulaic. You get hit by sponsored ads in the top and side, official corporate sites and Wikipedia in the first few slots, high-profile news sites like CNN and NYT, and then the “SEO bloodbath” to capture your sales lead.

With NowRelevant, according to the developers, you can skip all of that and get straight to the news and happenings that are most relevant to your subject. You can also adjust the slider between one and fourteen days to define how far back you want to go.

Even in searching for my own name, the first result in Google is my website. That makes sense, but what if you want to know what I’ve been doing lately? NowRelevant brings up a recent Dot Com Pho gathering and something about the Rihanna concert that I attended. That’s more current.

An Affiliate Program Too?

There is some advertising on NowRelevant and you can read more about the PPC campaigns on the appropriate page. Related to this is the affiliate program.

That’s the good news. The other good news is that they are quick to provide you with all sorts of banners and text ads that you can use to promote NowRelevant. The bad news is that there isn’t much information about the affiliate program laid out in a clear manner.

What is the revenue share? Is it ongoing? What is the payment schedule? What is the minimum payment threshold? What payment methods are available? It would have really helped if NowRelevant set up a simple FAQ page to address these kinds of questions.

Aside from that, NowRelevant looks like it could be a useful research tool, particularly for SEO and PPC experts, who want to know what is “now relevant” in their current areas of interest. It won’t replace Google, I don’t think, but it’s a good supplementary tool.

Link: NowRelevant

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Convert WordPress to Classifieds with ClassiPress

WordPress is a very versatile content management system and that is why the platform can used for so much more than “just” blogging. People use WordPress for resource sites, company profiles, and so much more. With the right theme, you can do just about anything with this free CMS.

For instance, you could use ClassiPress by AppThemes to turn your WordPress blog “into a professional classified ads web site.” You don’t need to invest in expensive classifieds software; WordPress can handle it just fine.

How Does ClassiPress Work?

It is largely in your best interest to implement ClassiPress on a fresh WordPress installation on a fresh domain. This is because it will drastically alter the way that WordPress operates, away from being a “blogging platform” and into a full-fledged “classifieds site.”

You can put it on an existing domain with an existing WordPress blog, but you may run into some issues with formatting and the like. If you didn’t know any better, it can be really tough to tell that a ClassiPress-powered site is actually using WordPress as its backend software.

As you can see in the screenshot above, you can allow people to post classified ads in your various defined categories. Should you choose to do so, you can also charge people to post these ads on your site. Check out the main theme page to read about the other features that this theme has to offer, including multiple pricing models and multi-language support.

Looking at an Individual Classified Ad

Each posting published on your ClassiPress-based classified ads website comes with a number of features that you may not find with many other classified ads software.

For instance, instead of just showing a text address, the ad can integrate with Google Maps to show a map of the seller’s location. This can be very handy for buyers. As the site owner, you can define other fields for the sellers to use too, like expiry date, images, description, and city.

Each ad (here is an example from the demo site) also includes the ability to add post tags, printer-friendly versions, quick email links and social networking sharing links.

One other feature that I find interesting is the two ways that potential buyers can contact sellers. There is a contact form integrated into the ad (click on the tab above the map), as well as a blog commenting area toward the bottom. The former is private, of course, while the latter is public.

Customization and Usability

On the back end, after you install ClassiPress on your blog, you will find an additional ClassiPress section in the WordPress dashboard.

This further breaks down into the ClassiPress dashboard, settings, pricing, ad packs, gateways, form layouts, custom fields, transactions, and system info sub-sections. This makes it relatively easy to customize ClassiPress to suit your needs and preferences.

If you are comfortable dealing with the various settings and preferences pages within other areas of the WordPress dashboard, you should no trouble navigating through the ClassiPress dashboard as well.

How Much Does It Cost?

ClassiPress is available in four different packages. Choose from the $69 Personal Edition, $99 Small Business Edition, $159 Professional Edition, and $199 Ultimate Edition. They all come with lifetime updates.

Link: ClassiPress

* This was a Paid Review. If you are interested in having your site reviewed on Blogging Tips, please check out our Advertising Information Page.

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