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It’s sometimes hard to believe that there may be folks who use a different browser than ourselves. But it’s the reality.

And if every browser would have the same way of showing the same piece of code it would not be a problem at all. In most cases it’s not the correct coding that poses a problem but the wrong one (like not closing a command).

It first stroke me a couple of years ago when I visited a web site that looked awful in Firefox. As I still have Internet Explorer on my computer, I decided to give it a try. And it looked just fine. On a side note, this is kind of weird as Internet Explorer (or at least its versions previous to 7) does a worse job than Firefox.

Anyhow, it bugged. And I immediately decided to check my website in both. Thankfully, everything was OK. However, whenever I do some desing tweaking I always check the results in both browsers. It hasn’t been just once that the desired effect of the changes was not met by both browsers in the same time.

To make the situation even worse, there’s way more than just these 2. I’m not going to list all of them. The point is that you couldn’t possibly install all browsers on your computer and check your design on all of them at the same time. “It’s madness, I tell you.”

Thanks to Rachel from cre8d design I have found the one tool to help me with the problem (and it could help you too). The name of the website where you can find it says it all: browsershots. It’s an open source service so it’s free.

Go ahead. Test your web site and if anything looks “strange” don’t waste another minute and make the necessary changes. I can’t even count the times I left a web site simply because it looked all weird. Superficial? You bet. But I’m on a tight schedule 24/7 as it is. I don’t have time to figure out web sites.

SouthWest Airlines - funny little guys.

I’m not much of a flyer (twice in my life). One of them was a couple of weeks ago. I flew SouthWest to Florida.

A few odd things (as I thought at the beginning) happened. First the three flight attendants seemed as if they were on vacation (doing their job, but really having a good time and entertaining the customers). “Well, they must be a weird team.” Then, once we landed in Ft. Lauderdale, one of them started singing and threatened us that he would stop only if we applaud. Everyone started laughing and clapping their hands like crazy. Read the rest of this entry »

Before you know it, it will be all over the net: Google changed it’s TOS yet one more time. And God forbid things are getting any easier for us.

So what is it this time:

Basically, you can’t run (on any page of your web site) AdSense ads that can be mistaken with other ads, whether from other networks (contextual or not) or your own ads. (For a detailed explanation, please read Jennifer Slegg’s article)

I guess when you’re the big boss and own most of the market, you can do whatever you want. Read the rest of this entry »

Unfortunately it does and what’s even worse is that there’s still folks out there who fall victim to phishing scams.

A friend of mine received an email which seemed to be from Yahoo!. It said that due to a large number of login attempts his account was going to be susspended unless he clicked on a link that was provided in the body of the email and login one more time on the secure server of Yahoo!. Since this is my friend’s only email address (he uses it for all of his electronic correspondence: banks, credit cards, utility bills, family, friends etc) he got really scared. Read the rest of this entry »

I just read a short article from Helium about how to make unlimited money. The first thing the author says we should do is set goals. The next one is writting them down as

When your goal is written, it is very easy to see, remember and visualize.

As by all means I don’t argue any of that, I do want to add one thing:

Write down your goals somwhere where you can see them every day.

What good is a written goal on a piece of paper that you hardly ever check or in a notebook or agenda that you hardly ever open? Nada, zilch. Been there, done that.

Write it on a huge piece of paper and put it in the most visible place of your home. For example, I have a wall clock strategically positioned so I can see it from most places of my living room (which is where I spend most of my time at home) as I always like to know what time it is. Whenever I have a new goal to accomplish I just replace my clock with a piece of paper on which I write my goal. Huge piece of paper; even bigger letters.

What about long term goals? Just like a note in an organizer that you end up never checking, keeping a long term goal on the wall, instead of your clock won’t do much good either. Because, eventually you will start remembering that your clock isn’t there anymore so you just won’t look at it.

Just be inventive. For example, each night, before you go to bed, stick you goal to the mirror in the bathroom. This way you’ll see it every morning when you start your day. Or if you carry a breif case, put your goal somewhere on it so you see it every day before grabbing your breif case. Any place that would do the job for you is just fine.

A good idea would be to come up with new places all the time. This would be one way of keeping things fresh.

It all started when webmasters and search engine optimization (SEO) experts found out that the number of web sites that link to a particular web site (let’s call it site A) is an important factor in determining A’s importance and position in SERPs (”search engine results page”). It is considered that the more web sites link to A the more important it has to be. Why else would so many webmasters link to A unless it’s a good quality web site, very usefull to its visitors, with tons of information and resources, right? It’s like when you link to a web site you give your vote to it.

What do you think happened once all of this got out to the public? Everyone started trying to get as many web sites as possible link to theirs. Easier said than done. Would you link to a web site without gaining something, unless you really have high consideration for it? I know I wouldn’t! Since many new webmasters lack financial resources, what could be the least expensive thing they could give me so I would, in return, link to their website? Well, the first thing that came to many minds was a link back. And this is how link exchange (link swap, link trade) was born. I will link to your web site if you agree to link to mine in return.

Just like everything else in this world, link exchange had its own developments. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, The Digerati Life talked about the latest eBay scam. I have heard of it on the news about a month ago. A quite good amount of money had been stolen before the scammers were caught.

What happened? A bunch of guys were following various bids (apparantely for all kind of products; no preferences). Once the bids were over, they were contacting the 2-3 highest bidders who lost, pretending to be the seller of the product they just lost. They would lie that the winner of the bid could not go through with the transaction (either a change of mind or the incapacity of paying). That’s why they decided to offer to sell it to the next highest bidder.

All good and nice, although, according to my knowledge, so far there’s already a couple of flaws to the scam. First of all, as far as I know 90% percent of all transactions on eBay are done through PayPal. Once you have won a bid, the amount you have engaged to pay is automatically deducted from your PayPal account. In case you don’t have the money there, they are, further on, automatically deducted from your bank account or credit card that you have provided to PayPal. The way the system works is that, whether you like it or not, once you have won a bid, the amount you have taken the responsibility to pay is automatically taken away from you.

As eBay itself puts it:

A bid or Buy It Now purchase on eBay is considered a contract and you are obligated to purchase the item.

Whenever anyone contacts you about an item you have just lost to a higher bidder, as excited as you may be about your “luck”, take a step back and thoroughly analyze the situation. Try to find out who that bidder was and even contact him/her and have them confirm their retraction.

The bottom line is that such actions are the first signs of a possible scam. It’s not always the case, however, better safe than sorry. Oh, and one more thing: if it’s too good to be true, it usually is!

Let’s go deeper into our scammers’ story.

In those cases when they managed to fool their victims into believing luck has struck them, the next step was to arrange for the payment. What the scammers would ask is that you wire transfer the amount of money you have bid to an Eastern European country. Their promise was that once they got their money they would deliver the products. Needless to say the last part of the agreemant never happened.

Such payment arrangements are the second sign of a possible eBay scam. A seller accepting only one method of payment (and especially when that is a wire transfer) should always raise a red flag that that seller might be involved in fraudulent activities.

What can we learn from all of this?

• If it’s too good to be true, it usually is;
• Always try to know who you’re dealing with on eBay;
• Be skeptical of any eBay seller who only accpets one method of payment (especially when that is a wire transfer);
• Be skeptical of any out of the ordiary deal proposals from other eBay members;
• When something smells fishy, do your reasearch: try to find out as much as you can about the seller/buyer. You could even contact eBay. You can rest assured they would be more than happy to help you out, especially when you tell them you have serious concerns about someone trying to pull a scam on you.

This is the first headline I’m going to talk about in the Catchy Headlines - How Much Do They Say series, because it was when I read it that I got the idea for this topic.

So what’s wrong with this headline? Basically nothing. It actually belongs to a business with quite a good reputation. I’m not very well documented as to what the business is all about. However, after visiting their web site, I managed to understand that it offers a very easy to use tool to those who need to build a web site to sell products and services.

It has been around for quite some time so I can only think that it actually delivers what it promises. But what does it promise?

I remember that a little while after I started I ran into this headline. For some reason I didn’t really have the curiosity to see what it’s all about. Being a beginner, and as most beginners, not being used to reading between the lines, all I could understood from their headline was that they were offering some sort of an easy to build web site that would bring their customers fast and easy profits.

Even if you read the sales pages you pretty much get the idea that if you use their services it would be quite easy to profit from your web site.

What they don’t tell us (and it actually isn’t their job) is that building your web site is probably the easiest task when taking your business online.

What you might be missing from the headline, is that, once you’ve built your web site, you’ll need traffic to profit from it. You’ll need to get it indexed by the search engines; you’ll need to get others link to it. Make it popular. Make it good quality, so that your visitors keep coming back and send others to you as well.

And that my friend is the hardest task of them all. It involves countless hours of hard work, dedication and perseverance. You’ll have to give yourself plenty of time and/or invest plenty of money to have it optimized for search engines. Even in this case every honest SEO expert will tell you that it will take time to get where you want to be.

This is what the above headline won’t tell you. That you can have the nicest looking, easiest to use (both by you and your customers) web site, yet, it will take time to make it profitable.

When you read such a headline, you might be thinking something like: “Yes I do need a web site that will sell stuff for me” overlooking the fact that before that can happen, it will take (a good deal of) time, effort and money to bring customers.

One of the biggest problems work at home entrepreneurs have to face in the early stages of their entrepreneurial adventures is headlines. We are uneducated. We can’t tell who’s lying and who’s telling the truth. More important, we’re not used to reading between the lines.

This is actually what this post, Catchy Headlines - Beware category and the rest of the posts in this category are all about. Teaching us how to read between the lines. Especially when it comes to headlines.

I want to make it clear from the very beginning that what I’m trying to do here is teach folks what to understand from headlines. How to approach them and keep an open mind and not give in to their first impulse. How to stand back and ask themselves how much of that headline is true, how much does it actually tell, what possible things might not be told and how can they affect us in the near future.

If any of you will have a single bit of curiosity about this issue and do a little research on each headline I’ll analyze here, you’ll find that some of them belong to real, reputable, honest business opportunities.

One of the things I “preach” on this blog is that, without work, dedication, perseverance and (eventually) investments, you can join the best affiliate program, business opportunity, buy the best business packages and solutions and yet they won’t work for you. That’s why I decided to talk about headlines belonging to honest opportunities too: to emphasize my point.

In time, most likely, this serie will not focus only on work at home related headlines. You see these things anywhere you turn: radio and TV ads, advertising boards, sales announcements etc. Learning how to look behind the headlines (of any kind) is a great exercise for learning to read between the lines, which is essential for any (home based) business owner.

Bellow is the list of headlines I’ve talked about so far. Click on each one of them to read the post dedicated to it.

• “Need A Web Site That Sells?”
• “Make $25-$75/Hour By Completing Surveys In Your Spare Time”
  

I’ll be out for about a week (a well deserved vacation for the first time in 4 years). But I shall be back stronger!

Stay tuned.