For all you who have been peppered with rss updates on various feeds over the last few days sorry about that! You have found the new home of the one central blog for all of MediaWhiz’s properties:

Text Link Ads - Static Text Ads
ReviewMe - Buzz and Social Marketing
AuctionAds - CPA Product Ads
ShoppingAds - CPC Product Ads
Filinet - Affiliate Marketing
AdNet - Display Advertising
Coregistrations - Custom Lead Generation
MonetizeIt - Customer Acquisition
WhiteDelivery - Email Marketing
MediaWhiz Search - Search Marketing

Here at MediaWhiz we are striving to be the #1 performance marketing company and are well on our way. Please stay tuned as we have lots of exciting new features and products launching in 2008 and we are committed to doing a great job of communicating with our Publishers and Advertisers on our blog starting now!

How do you make money from the Google Adsense Program? What AdSense Tips can you share with us?

I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog - and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.

Covering costs of my Digital Photography Blog is why I originally signed up with Google Adsense - blogging can get expensive when you have high levels of traffic and a lot of pages.

Whilst the agreement you sign with Google stresses that you are not allowed to give specific information about your earnings from the program I can say that I’m glad I’ve signed up because its well and truly covered my costs - and then some. In fact I think its quite feasible to expect that Adsense coupled with other strategies for making money from Blogging could quite easily generate a decent living. It takes time and hard work, but I think its very doable. (Update: Since writing this series I’ve revealed that I am now looking at making over a six figure income this year in 2005 from blogging).

So how do I make money from Google Adsense? Let me share some AdSense Tips that heve helped me.

This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Let me say up front I’m no expert - there are a lot of people out there making a lot more money than I am using Adsense - however most of them are not telling their secrets - well not for free anyway. I’ve got no secrets to hide and am willing to share what I’ve learnt since I signed up for the program 8 months ago. If you want a REAL expert’s opinion on Adsense I’d recommend buying Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense E-Book. Joel earns $15,000 per month from Adsense and has some good things to share.

I know some bloggers are put off or offended by the idea of making money from blogging so I’ll try not to let these posts dominate my blog - however if you are not interested in the topic, simply skip over these posts.

I am going to assume a few things in this series to cut down the amount of introductory comments I have to make. Here is what I am assuming:

• You have a blog. Whilst most of the following tips will apply to other types of websites I run Adsense on blogs and will speak from that experience.
• You have (or will) read a basic overview of Adsense and have some understanding of what it is.
• You have(or will) read the program policies as outlined by Google. These give details of site eligibility, ad placements and other requirements for using the system.

I’ve been reflecting this week about the amazing diversity of opportunities that are opening up for bloggers to make money from blogging.

I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to make money from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.

The wonderful thing is that this is becoming easier and easier to do 2005 has seen many options opening up. I thought I’d take a look at some of the methods that bloggers are currently using to make money through blogs.

Income Streams for Bloggers - How to Make Money Blogging

Advertising Programs - Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers looking to make money from their blogs. The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google - Adsense. A more recent addition that many are using successfully are Chitika’s eMiniMalls and WidgetBucks, Text Link Ads.

Azoogle Ads, Intelli Txt, DoubleClick, Tribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, Pheedo, TextAds, Bidvertiser, Fastclick and Value Click (to name just some of the options) and there is a smorgasbord of options. Of course there is more to come with MSN Adcenter and YPN both in beta testing and with a variety of other advertising system currently in development (YPN is only available to US publishers).

Lastly there’s BlogAds - one of the first blog specific ad networks.

RSS Advertising - The past 12 months have seen some advances in RSS Advertising also. I’m yet to hear of any bloggers making big money blogging through it to this point - but as improvements are made to the ad programs exploring this I’m sure we’ll start to see examples of it being profitable.

Sponsorship - In addition to the array of advertising programs that are available to join there is a growing awareness in the business of the value and opportunity that exists for them to advertise directly on blogs. I’m hearing more and more examples of this and have been fortunately to have a couple of ad campaigns of my own in the past month - one with Adobe a couple of weeks ago and another just completed with Ricoh for a new digicam over at my Digital Camera Blog. These are not isolated cases - as I say I know of many blogs exploring sponsorship with advertisers at present and suspect we’ll see more of it in the year ahead. Sponsorship is also happening on a post by post basis with some bloggers being paid to write on certain topics by companies - either in one off or a regular fashion - and they are able to make big money from their blogs doing so.

Affiliate Programs - There are larger affiliate programs like Amazon, Linkshare, Clickbank and Commission Junction but also literally thousands of others from the large to the very small.

Digital Assets - Increasing numbers of bloggers have been developing other digital assets to support and add revenue streams to their blogs. By this I mean that I’m increasingly seeing e-books, courses and tele-seminars being run by bloggers. My recent foray into this with the first series of the six figure blogging course that Andy and I ran a few weeks ago and have just released the study version of. This type of activity will only increase in future - in fact this week I’ve seen numerous examples of bloggers running courses.

Blog Network Opportunities - with the rise in popularity of Blog Networks - bloggers are also being presented with more places to earn an income from their blogging - by writing for and with others. While it might be difficult to get a writing gig with one of the bigger networks - there are plenty who are always asking for new bloggers to join and who are willing to pay bloggers using a variety of payment models. While there are distinct advantages of blogging for yourself - blogging for an established network who will handle a lot of the set up/promotion/admin/SEO etc has it’s advantages also. More and more bloggers are combining writing for themselves on their own blogs with taking on blog network blogs as additional income streams.

Business Blog Writing Opportunities - as blogging has risen in it’s profile as a medium more and more businesses are starting blogs. Many of these companies have internal staff take on blogging duties - but an increasing number of them are hiring specialist bloggers to come on and run their blogs. I know of a number of bloggers who in the past month or two have been approached for such paid work. Check out Bloggers for Hire if you’re looking for this type of work.

Non Blogging Writing Opportunities - Also becoming more common are bloggers being hired to write in non blogging mediums. Manolo’s recent coup of a column in the Washington Post is just one example of this as bloggers are increasingly being approached to write for newspapers, magazines and other non blog websites. Along side this is the rise of bloggers as published book authors - this is to the extent that one blogger I spoke with this week complained to me that they were one of the few bloggers than they knew who didn’t have a book deal!

Donations - Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now but this last year saw a number of bloggers go full time after fund raising drives. Perhaps the most high profile of these was Jason Kottke of kottke.org who through the generosity of his readership was able to quit his job and become a full time blogger.

Flipping Blogs - Also more common in 2005 was the practice of ‘Blog Flipping’ - or selling of blogs. This has happened both on an individual blog level (I can think of about 20 blogs that sold this year) but also on a network level (the most obvious of these being the 8 figure sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL).

Merchandising - My recent attempt to sell ProBlogger.net T-shirts wasn’t a raging success, but it is an example of how an increasing number of bloggers are attempting to make a few extra dollars from their blogs by selling branded products through programs like Cafepress. While I didn’t have a lot of success with merchandising - quite a few larger blogs are seeing significant sales - especially blogs with a cult following. I’m not at liberty to discuss details - but I know of one largish blog which will see sales over $20,000 in merchandise for the calendar year of 2005.

Consulting and Speaking - While it has been popular for established consultants to add blogs to their businesses we’re also starting to see bloggers with no consulting background able to make money by charging readers for their time in consulting scenarios BECAUSE of the profile that their blogs have built them. Blogging has the ability to establish people as experts on niche topics and we all know the value of being perceived as an expert. I spoke to one blogger last month who charges himself out at over $200 an hour for speaking and consulting work - his area of expertise was something that he knew little about 18 months ago - but through his blog he’s become a leader in his field and a minor celebrity in his industry.

As time rolls on there are more and more ways that bloggers make money from their blogs opening up. Feel free to suggest your own ideas and experiences in comments below.

Taken From http://www.problogger.net/

Picture by: destinetics
Here’s a collection of 115 social bookmark and news sites ranked by PageRank, number of links and value of each site.

We used dnScoop to gather the data for all these sites. This is what the dnScoop data is based on:

Page Rank- Google PageRank

Inbound Links- The total number of pages that contain links to www.sitename.com

Site Value Report - This value is calculated based on several factors shown above, including: Links, Traffic (Alexa), age of the domain, site category, domain keyword popularity, and overall occurrences of the domain name on the web.

The list was based on this social bookmarking list . We added a few more sites, such as, Shoutwire.com, Plime.com and PixelGroovy.com.

The dollar value of the sites are a bit misleading (is Simpy.com really worth $302,332,960 more than Digg?), but this list should hopefully provide you with some data on social news and bookmark that you haven’t seen before. If anybody knows of any better online tools to roughly estimate the value a site then leave a link in the comments section and we’ll update this list over the next few weeks and compare the data.

Site	PR	Inbound Links	$ Value
www.slashdot.org	9	28,018,962	$25,787,200
del.icio.us	8	370,943,962	$521,172,000
www.technorati.com	8	148,233,993	$276,243,000
www.digg.com	8	137,000,000	$215,992,000
www.reddit.com	8	132,924,191	$178,934,400
www.stumbleupon.com	8	59,888,074	$39,723,400
www.connotea.org	8	3,272,642	$11,241,440
www.furl.net	7	99,028,154	$188,853,100
www.newsvine.com	7	49,881,588	$35,890,400
www.blinklist.com	7	47,039,214	N/A
www.folkd.com	7	13,766,114	N/A
www.squidoo.com	7	7,171,958	$13,336,150
www.citeulike.org	7	3,694,298	$11,226,880
www.kinja.com	7	2,593,905	$9,965,880
www.propeller.com	7	2,503,342	$13,613,600
www.spurl.net	6	34,419,253	$32,200,000
www.simpy.com	6	23,405,771	$518,324,960
www.mister-wong.com	6	9,672,510	$10,667,840
www.rawsugar.com	6	7,481,362	$14,925,880
www.diigo.com	6	6,095,828	$11,243,680
www.linkagogo.com	6	3,987,085	N/A
www.corank.com	6	1,536,589	$4,281,340
www.care2.com/news	6	808,351	$2,237,900
www.backflip.com	6	733,144	$2,463,550
www.spotback.com	6	315,219	$459,980
www.kaboodle.com	6	309,115	$3,691,950
www.shoutwire.com	6	284,654	$216,910
www.sphinn.com	6	270,738	$100,000
www.searchles.com	6	261,216	$197,160
www.bibsonomy.org	6	141,521	$2,305,350
www.clipclip.org	6	59,146	$75,210
www.sitebar.org	6	15,661	$245,204
www.taggly.com	5	998,006	N/A
www.buddymarks.com	5	890,014	$3,090,150
www.mylinkvault.com	5	559,084	N/A
www.stylehive.com	5	547,675	$1,377,760
www.hyperlinkomatic.com	5	505,338	$1,457,890
www.plime.com	5	448,091	$474,360,000
www.lilisto.com	5	363,661	$529,000
www.sk-rt.com	5	322,076	$442,900
www.markaboo.com	5	238,271	$227,900
www.xilinus.com	5	57,701	$38,160
www.startaid.com	5	49,341	N/A
www.uvouch.com	5	34,057	$424,020,140
www.thoof.com	5	30,719	$20,600
www.myhq.com	5	27,015	$29,536
www.mybookmarks.com	5	25,443	$29,468
www.hanzoweb.com	5	12,618	$17,222
www.favoor.com	5	11,756	$6,322
www.socialdanger.com	5	7,095	$1,600
www.murl.com	5	6,017	$8,236
www.mobleo.net	5	739	$1,039
www.plugim.com	4	588,860	$1,313,340
www.zurpy.com	4	192,408	$111,180
www.tagfacts.com	4	169,135	$120,772
www.oyax.com	4	112,111	$115,000
www.lifelogger.com	4	99,808	$107,744
www.complore.com	4	93,751	$74,200
www.connectedy.com	4	59,588	N/A
www.sitejot.com	4	55,414	N/A
www.pixelgroovy.com	4	41,778	$19,080
www.cloudytags.com	4	41,654	$29,664
www.blurpalicious.com	4	27,567	$12,900
www.dropjack.com	4	27,251	$13,100
www.bookmark-manager.com	4	18,872	$7,434
www.myvmarks.com	4	17,084	$6,650
www.contentpop.com	4	13,188	$16,274
www.bmaccess.net	4	11,959	$5,600
www.memfrag.com	4	10,564	$5,668
www.bookmarktracker.com	4	10,518	$8,618
www.mysitevote.com	4	9,218	$6,500
www.freelink.org	4	8,427	N/A
www.urlex.info	4	3,962	$2,507
www.rambhai.com	4	2,926	N/A
www.easybm.com	4	2,236	N/A
www.zlitt.com	4	2,236	$3,193
www.chipmark.com	4	2,196	$1,792
www.thinkpocket.com	4	1,914	$848
www.mywebdesktop.net	4	1,329	$368
www.philoi.com	4	1,097	$1,397
www.bookkit.com	4	1,049	N/A
www.bookmax.net	4	874	N/A
www.votelists.com	4	399	$339
www.whitelinks.com	4	269	N/A
www.tedigo.net	4	135	$458
www.mixx.com	3	559,683	$1,854,160
www.marktd.com	3	43,855	$56,180
www.tagza.com	3	35,627	$7,500
www.wirefan.com	3	17,204	$27,772
www.blogbookmark.com	3	11,934	$11,124
www.bukmark.net	3	8,545	$1,620
www.getboo.com	3	7,742	$42,728
www.fungow.com	3	4,553	N/A
www.syncone.net	3	4,026	$25,070
www.linksnarf.com	3	3,893	$1,120
www.ez4u.net	3	1,030	N/A
www.listerlister.com	3	633	$5,702
www.xlmark.com	2	15,012	$5,974
www.totalpad.com	2	4,693	$510
www.barksbookmarks.com	2	2,786	$11,766
www.memotoo.com	2	2,382	N/A
www.blipoo.com	2	598	$100
www.bookmarkall.com	2	371	$694
www.yattle.com	2	127	$1,081
www.wetogether.info	1	911	$515
www.vuju.com	1	284	$145
www.newsweight.com	1	67	$42
www.voteboat.com	1	41	$10
www.freezilla.co.uk	1	38	$21
www.faves.com	0	50,781	$38,720
www.socialogs.com	0	50,090	$18,500
www.i89.us	0	28,192	$11,872
www.crowdfound.com	0	1,516	$3,050
www.quickieclick.com	0	9	$650
ma.gnolia.com	N/A	N/A	N/A

Posted by randfish  

E-commerce has, for the most part, evolved far beyond the late 1990’s cliches of hair-wrenching, sanity-shattering slogs through yet another “clever” designer’s take on how shopping on the web should be. Standards prevailed, usability won out, and we’re now free to spend our collective $107 billion (Census.gov e-commerce stats) per annum.

That said… It can still get better. Online shopping is in, if not infancy, at least a toddler stage. The advances that brought us here have made the process simpler and easier than ever, but some sites still haven’t caught on.

Since I’ve been doing an inordinate amount of online shopping recently (thanks to the theft last weekend and my upcoming lengthy trip to China), I feel uniquely qualified to share a few e-commerce site design tips - 17 tips, actually. Enjoy.
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#1 - Tell Me Where I Am
Whenever a user is navigating inside a store with more than 1 sub-level of navigation, it’s critical to show them where in the site structure they are. This should be accomplished with headlines, sub-headers (when necessary) and breadcrumbs (e.g. Home > Category > Sub-cat > Product).

#2 - Let Me Remove Narrowing Options
When a user starts to “narrow” their navigation inside a particular category (in this case by selecting the designer “Ted Baker”), it’s only right to allow them to remove those navigation selections rather than forcing the use of repetitive “back button” clicks.

#3 - Allow Me to Sort Every Which Way
The standards are “Price - low to high,” “Price - high to low,” “Popularity,” aka “Best Selling,” “Featured,” “User Rating” (or “Editor Rating” if you don’t have users rate products), and “New” or “Latest.” You can eliminate “Featured” if you’ve got nothing to push, but all the other sorting options must exist (assuming it’s possible to do so).

#4 - Show Me the Products
Unless you’ve got more than 200 products total in a sub-category, it’s only right to offer the user the option of seeing every product on one page. Broadband has rendered the load time argument nearly irrelevant and I personally (along with Mystery Guest) can’t stand sites lacking the feature.

#5 - Refining Options Bring Joy
If you can provide the user with a useful refinement option, you’ve made their experience better. In the instance of sizing, this is particularly important, as users loathe finding that “perfect” piece of apparel, only to discover you don’t carry it in their size.

#6 - The More Specifics, the Better
Rule #6 is so worthwhile, I’m repeating it. Actually, #7 serves to illustrate a substantive difference between refining your browsing in a section (as #6 shows) vs. navigating to a new sub-category. Offering the latter as an option where relevant and valuable (and when the number of items warrants it) is a wise decision.

#7 - Tell Me What it Costs & What I’m Saving
Some product category pages shows items without the detail users are craving. It’s particularly important for discount sites (anything off MSRP helps conversions) to show pricing, but nearly every website can benefit from providing an extra bit of detail before the click to the product page. Tell them materials, give a tiny description or list the sizes/colors/options you have in stock.
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#8 - Keep the Search Bar in Easy Reach
When a search has been performed, don’t just show the search and the results, do like the engines and make the search bar front and center, while maintaining the user’s query in the box for potential modification.

#9 - Give Me Search Refinement Options
If you have an advanced searching system, or can allow users to select prices, options, colors, sizes, models, etc, do it. Your bottom line will thank you - users often rate “search” as the most frustrating part of many e-commerce sites (apologies for not having the study to cite here).

#10 - Get as Close As You Can Get (while staying relevant)
In the example above, eBay has done a masterful job showing which queries would have produced results. This advanced technique should be a wake-up call to others.
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#11 - Share the Critical “Fit” Information
Many products are designed to “fit” certain criteria, whether it’s a laptop (in this case) or a human body (with clothes) or another piece of equipment (when compatibility matters). In every instance of potential matches, show the critical information in the product details. I can’t tell you how many laptop bag sites I browsed before finding this one that actually showed which laptop sizes it was intended for.

#12 - Tell Me If You’ve Got It
There are still sites out there that let you click “add to cart” or even “checkout” before discovering the awful truth - no more of your SKU in stock. It’s the kind of experience that will lead you to permanently switch e-tailers.

#13 - You Can Never Have Too Many Photos
Since you don’t get to see the item in real life, photos, reviews, videos and even fancy, 3D interfaces (where appropriate) are invaluable to helping the user feel like they’ve “experienced” the product prior to purchase. One photo, from one angle, sent by the manufacturer to every online store doesn’t cut it. Go above and beyond the call of visual duty and conversions will skyrocket - links might, too.
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#14 - Let Me See Delivery Options
There is a certain subset of users that has to see the delivery options before they start shopping. Older generations often fit this stereotype, but those baby boomers still have a lot of online spending years to go, so don’t ignore them. It’s best to make the link obvious in the permanent navigation (it’s most customarily at the bottom of each page).

# 15 - If You Won’t Send it To Me, Tell Me Who Will
In the example, Ted Baker is refusing to sell me the $200 dress shoes I want, but what’s worse is that he won’t tell me who will ship them to his old colony. I ended up finding them on Amazon.com, eventually, but Ted’s losing out on his commission with them by not providing the link (and if I wasn’t so dedicated to the brand, he’d probably lose the sale, too).
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#16 - Reassure Me With Email
I panicked earlier tonight when I realized the replacement laptop I ordered may not have been shipped quickly enough to arrive in time for my trip to China (and no one wants to spend 28 hours on planes without a lappy). Luckily, Dell’s order confirmation proved that I’d chosen wisely. Replicate this experience for your own customers, rather than leaving them in the dark (or, worse, crowding up your customer service dept. with e-mails that could have been answered in an automated fashion).

#17 - Give All the Order Details ASAP
When you send out order confirmations, make sure to include all of the product details to re-assure the buyer that they’ve selected properly. If I accidentally ordered the size 9 instead of size 8, I want to be able to fix it before the package arrives.

Hopefully, these techniques will find their way to your e-commerce sites, and when they don’t, you’ll grab the project manager and point them to this blog post. Together, we’ll make the Internet an even better place to shop.

Taken From http://www.seomoz.org

If you like this article, click here to give it a Digg (Whoops!)

Anyone who has tried to get to the Digg front page knows how hard it is to do that. You need a lot of friends, influence, and need to be a top member apart from writing quality content before you can dream of meeting success on Digg.

On Digg-clones, on the other hand, it’s relatively easy to get the attention you deserve. Many niche specific Digg-style sites have emerged over the past few months where you can submit stories to be reviewed and voted by those who are interested in your content. Though, you may not get as much traffic from niche social media sites as you would from Digg, it’s worth having your content read by the like-minded people who are more likely to become your regular readers.

Below is a list of 11 most popular Digg-like sites where bloggers, designers, and web developers can submit stories (their bog posts or whatever) to promote their content.

Sphinn

Sphinn is a social site for search and interactive marketers. It’s designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others.

PlugIM

PlugIM is a user driven internet marketing community. Submit content, share articles, comment on projects and promote your favorites to the front page.

Blogg-Buzz

Blogg-Buzz is a blogger driven site, exclusively for bloggers like you, to share, discover and promote blog posts that you find interesting!

Design Float

Design Float is a Digg style, community driven news aggregator dedicated to the design industry. Design Float aims to collect and organize design-related content from across the web while letting the community float the best articles to the top pages of their categories and sink the most irrelevant one’s to the bottom. The ultimate goal of Design Float is to, hopefully, categorize the huge amount of design-related content available on the web into neat and easy to navigate pages of articles in order of importance/relevance as decided by the community. Basically, it’s just a niche version of the highly popular Digg.com.

Pixel Groovy

Pixel Groovy is a user controlled tutorial directory. We provide the members with the control, not editors, to decide which tutorials are worthy of being published and which tutorials aren’t. This helps filter out and set a level of quality in the tutorials seen on the frontpage.

CSS Globe

CSSG is a web standards oriented site where, basically, anyone with the right will can post updates.

DZone

• DZone is a free link-sharing community for developers
• anyone can submit new links to the incoming queue
• members vote on upcoming links to determine what gets promoted
• everyone can browse, search and comment on links

TagNe.ws

TagNe.ws, is a web 2.0 application that allows you to submit an article that will be reviewed by all and will be promoted, based on popularity, to the home page. When a user submits a news article it will be placed in the “upcoming” area until it gains sufficient votes to be promoted to the home page. The original source for TagNe.ws was authored by Ricardo Galli. He was influenced by the extremely popular English technology site digg.com.

Dig a List

DigaList is a global personal lists website. We all love lists, we all have kinds of lists, about life, work, dreams etc. Have you ever wished to dig out all these treasure and share them with others? In DigaList, you can create your lists, co-create a list with others, or dig out a list you like.

SEOyak.com

SEOyak.com is a news site for the Search Engine Optimization community.

SEOyak.com allows users to submit stories that affect the SEO world and then vote on those stories to decide which submissions get the most exposure. The SEO industry has come to appreciate the power of social media recently, and SEOyak.com provides a great opportunity to get SEO news heard.

Qoolsqool

Qoolsqool is a free and open educational resource for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.

Qoolsqool’s mission is to take advantage of 21st century technologies to advance knowledge and education around the world and reach to people with a need or a desire to learn or teach.

Even though there are plenty of books available in stores on almost all aspects of web design, you don’t need to spend a dime when you can get all the basic information for free. The following list of free web design ebooks and guides will get you started building accessible, usable, and useful web sites in no time.

General web design ebooks

WEB STYLE GUIDE - It is a practical guide to help you design Web sites for the long run. This book offers basic design principles that you can use to make your content as easy to understand as possible.

Web Typography Style Guide - This guide covers the basics of good typography on the web, explaining theory behind font choices, and the details of providing accessible and good looking text.

Web Design at Wikiversity - Includes topics that help provide a pathway for you to learn the main skills of web design.

Web design from scratch - Your complete guide to web design.

Getting Real - Getting Real details the business, design, programming, and marketing principles of 37signals. Anyone working on a web app — including entrepreneurs, designers, programmers, executives, or marketers — will find value and inspiration in this book.

Laura Lemay’s Guide to Sizzling Web Sites - This book is a must for you if you are a Web designer and require a hands-on reference with practical and conceptual techniques to expand your knowledge and enhance your work.

Web Design Reference Guide - This guide provides a snapshot of everything Web design. The information in this guide includes reference, news, and access to the Web design community.

Eloquent JavaScript - Eloquent JavaScript is a digital book providing a comprehensive introduction (tutorial) to the JavaScript programming language.

Accessibility

Access by design - The Universal Usability site houses an unabridged, online version of Access by Design: A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers, by Sarah Horton.

Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design - This book tells you how to integrate accessibility throughout design.

Building Accessible Websites - Explains how to design, develop, and program Websites (Web sites) that are accessible to people with disabilities (blind/visually-impaired, deaf/hard-of-hearing, mobility-impaired, learning-disabled).

Dive Into Accessibility - 30 days to a more accessible web site.

Usability

Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines - Current research-based guidelines on web design and usability issues.

Current Issues in Web Usability - Usability expert Jacob Nielson’s column on web usability.

Task-Centered User Interface Design - The central goal of this book is to teach the reader how to design user interfaces that will enable people to learn computer systems quickly and use them effectively, efficiently, and comfortably.

Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design - Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design is an intermediate-level book about interface and interaction design, structured as a pattern language. It features real-live examples from desktop applications, web sites, web applications, mobile devices, and everything in between.

CSS and (X)HTML

Complete css guide - Complete CSS Guide is a reference to every aspect of cascading style sheets. If you need help learning CSS or if you’re looking for info about selectors, properties and all the other aspects of cascading style sheets, this is the place.

Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 CSS2 Specification - CSS2 reference.

CSS CHEAT SHEET - Also available as PDF download.

HTML Dog: The Best Practice Guide To XHTML and CSS - Welcome to HTML Dog, the web designer’s resource for everything HTML and CSS, the most common technologies used in making web pages.

USING HTML, Second Edition - A comprehensive book covering basic to advanced web design techniques using HTML.

A blog is a personal journal that you update online frequently and the author points to other links to support the author’s commentary. Readers post comments on the journal entries and this makes the blog interactive. Readers can also subscribe to blogs using Really Simple Syndication (RSS).Brainstorm ideas on paper. Find topics that interest you like karate, dancing or fish to name a few examples. An example of a good niche is product reviews of digital cameras. Preferably choose an idea that you already know a lot about. You can use the Overture Inventory Tool or Wordtracker to find words that get traffic from search engines with little or no competition and write content using these keywords.

I suggest using the two main types of software for creating blogs Blogger or Wordpress. I recommend Blogger if you starting out on the internet as it is very simple. If you want more features use Wordpress. You may want to hire a professional to set it up for you and do your layout of your blog as it it can get technically complicated to work with. I recommend registering your own domain and signup for your own web hosting to publish your blog to. If you decide to choose the hosted blog on Blogger and Wordpress and you migrate to your own domain once you become well established this will cause you to lose your search engine rankings.

You can use Technorati tags to tag your posts. This will allow you to dominate niche conversations. You can also use Social bookmarking services like Addme to generate code to install on your website that will allow your visitors to tag your posts thus creating popularity for them on social bookmarking sites and giving you backlinks.

You can use Google Adsense to monetize your blog. Use different layouts to test which generates the most income for you. You can also use affiliate links related to your article. If you offer a blog on a highly technical subject like digital cameras you can also use Chitika eMiniMalls.

You can market your blog in the following ways. Submit your blog to blog carnivals. These blogs host a carnival featuring blogs related to a niche. You will also receive backlinks from thes