X-Mas gift for bloggers from MaxBlogPress

Pawan Agrawal of MaxBlogPress is giving an early Christmas present and it is targeted towards blogger. If you have spend some time trying to make money with Wordpress blogs you probably have heard about MaxBlogPress. They are renowned for there amazing Wordpress plugins that help you achieve lots of things. Some of his products sell as high as 147$ so I'm sure he's making a decent amount of money from them. This Christmas he's bundling together some of his best products and giving them out for an insanely low price. The products include some of there top products like Subscriber Magnet, Ninja Affiliate, Wordpress Wizard, $365k traffic formula and Blog traffic blueprint. This is a great deal and you really should take advantage of. Check out MaxBlogPress Christmas deal review and quickly make the decision.

My Squidoo experiment continues

Squidoo has become a nice way to earn some money while being a great source for back links. In Internet Marketing if you have access to back links then you can make money much easier than most other. Squidoo pages are a great source for back links and as an added bonus you can make some money too. I'm starting to see some Amazon sales as well from Squidoo so this is something I think that has good potential when it comes to money making. Another great thing is with Squidoo you can write about almost anything you like, so you are not limited to one subject like in a blog. So if you have knowledge of something but it isn't worth starting a blog over then a Squidoo page might be just the thing you need.

My experimenting with Squidoo continues and today I created a Squidoo lens about hot Sri Lankan actress Nehara Pieris. There is nothing special about the lens and I haven't acquired any back links yet as well. Just waiting to see how this will rank for the specific search term and how much traffic it will pull as well. I have a feeling it will do pretty well :-).

Refresh Colombo - November edition

Yesterday I attended the November edition of Refresh Colombo, which could be roughly classified as a monthly gathering of techies who are willing to share there knowledge and expertise. There were four presentation planned for that day and I was especially interested in the presentation about "Adopting social media in local companies". Unfortunately there wasn't enough time so there were only three presentations, but those were great presentations and you can definitely learn a lot from them.
The first presentation was done by @Chamara of Apramana and it was about "Benefits of web standards to your visitors, clients and you.". The only kind of web designing I have done is changing some CSS in my blog templates and it was fairly easy. So it was amusing to hear how it was done in the old days and how hard it was those days. After hearing those I felt really glad we have web standards now. Then he talked about how to validate your websites and the advantages of doing that. Being an Internet marketer one point that got me thinking was, IT HELPS in Search engine rankings. If you are a web designer then there were some great things to take from this presentation.
The next presentation was done by @Devaka of WSO2 and it was about "Being more than just the Ordinary". Its no wonder this guy is in marketing because he sure knows how to sell a product and to capture an audience. He talked about how we can compete with the rest of the world in terms of quality and showed how much Sri Lanka, as a country has contributed to the creation of different technologies. There were some amazing facts like per capita contribution to open source, how we have consistently performed well in Google summer of code and lot of other facts. He also showed how there business module is sustainable compared to most other outsourcing companies in Asia.
The last presentation was done by @Gihan of GTS and it was about "Creating games in Sri Lanka and Optimistic entrepreneurial spirit".He seems to have money to spare because he gave away Rs.1000, but not to everyone, but to someone who wanted to grab the note from his hand. It sure was a unique way to demonstrate why you should grab your opportunities. His session was entertaining and interactive, which is not surprising since he is into game development. His company created Colombo ride, the first Sinhalese mobile game. Now they are releasing Colombo Ride 3D. He talked about gaming industry in Sri Lanka, History of Colombo Ride, more released coming from there company and challenged faces by his team when developing and marketing games.
If I can summarize this edition of Refresh Colombo in one word, it is "INSPIRATION". Attending this session made me feel proud to be a Sri Lankan, it is amazing to see how much we have achieved in the software and technology field with a relatively low resource pool. Also there were enough examples of how successful you can be if your are willing to take a risk and follow your dreams. If you are looking to do your own thing and looking for advice then this is the place to be, where young entrepreneurs hang out and share there ideas. Looking forward to the next edition :-)

The much talked about visiting card of Gihan, courtesy - @InduNan

Colombo Ride Game



Cool things to have -

How can we improve a great event like Refresh Colombo ? Well one thing I can think of is having there presentations available online. The best place I can think of is there website. This gives the attendees a chance to reference past material and and look up on points they might have missed. Also then the presenters can prepare a more detailed presentation with more points, helpful resources etc as well. So they can go through the presentation quickly and give the audience more resources to follow up.

Efficient way to manage bills

Managing bills can be a tedious thing, especially if you are not a very organized person. The problem with paper bills is they are easily misplaced and even if you have them filed away it is not easy to find them quickly and it certainly isn't accessible from everywhere like office. This is where an online bill management service comes in handy. One good thing I found for this is Shoeboxed, where managing your bills is simple as taking a picture. You take a picture of your bill and upload it to your Shoeboxed account and they will human verify and do the data entry for you. All you have to do is log onto your Shoeboxed account and you can view the sorted and categorized bills. They also provide a iPhone application to manage your bills free of charge. Looks like a great service to try out and definitely a time saver.

Analytic can give you great keyword ideas

While optimizing a client website for search engines I went through the list of keywords that is already pulling them traffic and I was pleasantly surprised to find some popular names in Sri Lanka in the keyword list. I started working on that angle and immediately managed to draw highly targeted traffic that my client would love to have. Finding and predicting search patterns hard to do, which is why top SEO companies have special software to do this. However affording there services is a bit beyond a small business owner so most of the time they need to look elsewhere for there search engine optimization efforts. This is where a free but hugely important tool like Google Analytic comes in handy. Search engine optimization in Sri Lanka is still a growing business but I can see some future potential in it.

Planning a wedding is a nightmare

Looking at some of my mates I can get a brief idea how hard it is to plan a wedding. The look on there faces when the big day comes close is pretty amusing. Although it looks simple there are so many thing to look into and it is just too much for two persons to handle. Sri Lankan weddings are a complicated affair anyway, from finding a suitable hotel to picking the guest list to find tuning the wedding dress, these things can be overwhelming for anyone. I guess that is one reason why the couple seems so relieved after the wedding.
The cost of a wedding is also increasing by the day. Its amazing how much of an extra cost it takes simply to add liquor to the occasion. Most now prefer to arrange a small drinking party for those who drink and avoid serving hot drinks at the wedding. Another very costly things is wedding photography, it can cost you from 50k to 300k, depending on your preference. I know its once in a lifetime things but spending that much on one occasion just for photography is insane. Money rules I guess