Famous for its niche and constantly going down, Twitter still continues to be big news. Today Techcrunch has a post about Twitter and how it might become as ubiquitous as email, instant messaging, etc.
I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but they could be right. Which of course leads to the next question then, where are the big competitors? Certainly venture capitalists think there is money to be had there even though Twitter doesn’t monetize their site yet, so there has got to be room for a competitor to nudge in and take some of that market. I think this will become more of a reality if Twitter continues to have their scalability issues, but that is a side issue.
So the question again is, can Twitter be overtaken? I think yes. What do you think?
Hmm… maybe there is an opportunity to build that competitor myself 
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TechCrunch has launched a new site called Elevator Pitches. The idea is as simple as it is neat, you submit a 60 second video giving your ‘elevator pitch’ for your startup. They then put the videos up on you tube and via their site allow users to rate the pitch and comment on them. The highest rated pitches will then get a mention on TechCrunch itself.
The benefit is twofold here. First you get a chance to see what a lot of people think of your startup as well as your pitching technique. The critiquing itself can be a huge benefit, as long you don’t take it too personal of course, allowing you to improve your delivery.
The second is of the exposure and if you get on the main site even more exposure.
Currently they only take pitches from existing startups but will eventually open it up to those who are still at the concept stage.
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I forgot to post about my first check, which was a whopping $87. However today I got my second check and this one is a bit nicer at $206.63. If I could only double my earnings month over month I’ll be rich in no time!
The majority of this check came from one of my eBay sites created off of my niche store builder software. I’m in the process of finishing up converting my old BANS sites to my new software and upgrading my other sites as well to use the new eBay Partner Network setup. Then it will be to find a bunch of new niches and working on prettying up the exiting ones to hopefully get some more sales.
In any event, it is encouraging
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With eBay moving to their own inhouse affiliate program, I was almost dreading the changes to TUNS for it. However, like the good developer that I am :), most of the config stuff was external to the code and making the change over was pretty easy. I just took to long to get around to it honestly. The hard part however will be converting over my existing stores, but I have some free time this weekend so maybe I can knock those out without too much trouble.
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As promised by eBay, they are moving away from using Commission Junction for their affiliate program and going internal. Well last night a little before midnight I got an email for them to join their new network.
Their interface is a nice departure from CJ. Nice and clean, as seen by the screen shot below.
The real chore now is to make sure my niche store software is converted over and wait for the BANS guys to do the same for their stuff. Of course I could just convert the rest of my BANS sites over to my stuff
I don’t think converting my software will be too difficult and actually shouldn’t have to change any URLs, as long as the eBay API is migrated over as well, but testing will tell. Guess that work starts tonight!
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I recently started a couple web site projects for a client and needed an invoicing solution. I didn’t put much thought into it at first as I was more focused on the actual projects, then I needed to send an invoice and realized I didn’t have one!
The quick and dirty approach
The first thing did was fire up Open Office Writer and create a simple invoice. Nothing fancy. No logo, no colors or fancy fonts, just a simple table with the work done and cost.
While not the most professional looking invoice, it served its purpose and Open Office has a nice export to PDF for me to send it off to the client. Given that, I started looking for online solutions to my invoicing needs.
Lots of Choices!
A simple Google search revealed that there are quite a few online invoicing solutions with a variety of features and costs. I started looking at a few of them and liked what I saw. Then I came across a post on FreelanceSwitch that has a quick summary of seven online invoicing sites.
A couple such as Blinksale and SimplyBill I had seen already so I focused more on the others. Most of them have the modern ‘Web 2.0′ look and feel as far as colors and layouts. Some also have modern web application features like AJAX functionality, making the application more pleasing to use.
Features
My feature requirements were fairly straightforward. I wanted invoicing (duh), PDF export of an invoice and fairly inexpensive. The PDF requirement was a given in that I wanted to be able to send a document to a client for easy printing and distribution on their end. Unfortunately not all the invoice companies provide this capability and a couple said “just have them print the page to a PDF driver”. Uh, yea. Not everyone is savvy enough to even have a clue as to what that means and web pages don’t always print nicely as it is. PDF export is a must.
The more I looked at the offerings the more features I started to want. I liked the idea of a time tracker even though I don’t normally charge by the hour. I would still like to use it to keep an internal record of my time for each project. This kind of information will help in providing estimates for similar projects in the future.
Customization
Customization is a definite plus. Beyond a simple logo upload, the better solutions allow a lot of control over the look of your invoice. This allows you to really personalize your invoice to your company or brand. A quick thought here would to customize your invoice to match the look and feel of your website. Very handy.
Proposals
A few allow you to write up a proposal to send to a client, and then turn that proposal into an invoice with a simple click or two. May not be helpful to me for most of my work but it couldn’t hurt.
Misc. Features
A few of the offerings have the capability to integrate with Basecamp, which is an online project management and collaboration application, for importing clients. Very handy if you are going to use Basecamp for that functionality.
Cost
Most of the invoicing solutions I found are very reasonably priced, with plans well under $50 a month. Most of the offerings that I found had a plan in the under $20 range that suited me quite well. For the most part cost goes up as project counts go up or by invoices sent, etc.
Most also have a free version or at least a 30 day trial so you can try them out.
Which did I choose?
I haven’t made a final decision yet, but I’m leaning towards Cashboard. It seems to have more features that the others for a comparable or lower cost. They have Basecamp integration, great customization capabilities, a nicely time tracker widget and for my needs would only cost me a whopping $12 a month. Not too shabby.
Whatever your requirements are, you are sure to find a nice solution with the variety of online solutions.
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I was hoping to get a release of TUNS out this week or so, but as luck would have it eBay decided to drop Commission Junction and run their affiliate program in-house. Unfortunately they aren’t giving details until April 1st so I can’t make any changes until then. Hopefully it won’t be anything to major and it will go pretty quickly.
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Since I started the beta testing program, I’ve made 19 updates to date and things are moving along nicely. I plan on having another big update tomorrow with an eye to launching in a couple weeks with a version 1.0.
I’ve already completed the features for version 1.0 so I feel good about that. So I just need to polish it off, improve a few things here and there and unleash it upon the net
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So I have a couple stores setup with my new eBay store builder software and decided to drive a little traffic via AdWords. I was getting some good click through rates on a couple campaigns, but when I went into analytics the numbers were adding up. I wasn’t seeing any traffic via “google cpc”.
So I started looking around in the help, forums, etc. and it finally dawned on me about autotagging. That was all good and fine, but I never looked into how the auto tagging happened. Turns out it works via appending a query string onto the URL you provide, which honestly I should have guessed anyway. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but the framework I was using by default doesn’t allow query strings when you have the SEF URLs enabled. OOPS! In essence what was happening was every one of those clicks resulted in a 404 and a money down the drain. sigh
So I figured out how to get the query strings enabled and now it all works. Lesson learned: Test your AdWords!
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Google is almost ready to roll out their AdSense for video advertising solution, starting with their 20 big partner sites and limited to the U.S.
Given that video is a really big thing on the net these days, this gives advertisers a more direct view form of advertising. They will use an overlay method for the ads as opposed to the preroll style, which is more like a traditional TV ad in addition to being more intrusive. If you have seen any videos on YouTube, then you have probably gotten a taste of what the overlay ads will look like.
The nice thing is that the ads will also be contextually targeted, just like their regular text and image ads are currently. I believe in a year or two this form of advertising will become really big for some markets that want to really get in front of potential customers. Something that AdSense ads can have a hard time doing.
I look forward to it.
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