‘White People Stole My Car’

October 7, 2009 by 12 Comments

Who really stole your car?

Who really stole your car?




‘White people stole my car’ became one of the most searched topics in Google over the past few days. If you are thinking it’s the new hot rock band, you are wrong. So what made this phrase so popular? The result generated by Google on the search was ‘Did you mean: Black people stole my car.’

I know, I know, right now you are probably like ‘whaaaaaat???’ Well, if you spent sometime on Google more than a week ago trying to figure out why this phrase became one of the most searched phrases, you probably came across a lot of unsatisfactory results and got a whole lot of bugs and viruses while at it. I have tried the search severally but haven’t been lucky enough to get the said results either because Google has already fixed it, or it simply never happened. There isn’t really anything out there that fully explains this.

Some say it was just another Internet scheme, some say it really did happen. Either way it has been all over the Internet and generated comments from readers all over the world expressing their disapproval, shaming Google and demanding a public apology. While others have just taken it with a light touch and laughed it off. Weather it was a mistake by Google or some schemer’s plot, it sure has caught a lot of attention.

Here are some comments I came across:

Kevin: Try to Google black people shoot up school or black man chops up his wife and see what the results are smh. LOL
Jay: How is it racist? The search engine generates results based on popularity. More websites have the content “black people stole my car” than “white people stole my car”. Statistics are the truth….not racism.
Flagburner: All black people are criminals, some just hide it better than others.
Brandon: After nosing around a bit, I discovered that devilish lil’ spammers made this oh-too-popular phrase appear on Google Trends and from there, folks were led to Web sites filled with spam and viruses.
Joe: How about this: WET(White Entertainment Television)
now how would that go over? Will blacks be upset? Will you watch?
Mandy: Honestly? Come up to where I live and you’ll see all the blackies acting like we owe them something…
From Canada: Racism is alive and real… Blacks are suffering internationally, even in Africa.. slavery has been replaced by debt and prison systems…It’s worse than the Martin Luther King days, because it’s hidden…I am a successful black, but why did I have to work 3 times harder and be 10 times more aware???
Anon: relax everyone. It’s hilarious! I laughed so hard when I read that… and black people DID probably steal your car. Ha ha ha funny though!
Brik: So you are saying that white folks ain’t thieves? That’s just Bull!!
Jolenr: Ok this is racist but really funny. Like if I Googled “black people can’t dance” and it said “did you mean “white people can’t dance?” we need not to take ourselves so serious and laugh!
Heidi: a joke is something that all or most people can laugh @…even as a white woman this makes me upset. I think to just say “oh its a joke” should not make it okay.

There is also a whole website whitepeoplestolemycar dedicated to helping all our brothers out there find their stolen cars.
So to laugh or frown upon it is up to you.


Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: , ,

How To Make 30,000 A Month Online

September 29, 2009 by 8 Comments

Lately, we’ve been talking to people about online freelancing. A lot of the people seem to think that the life of an online freelancer is chaotic at best with low pay and long hours. This doesn’t have to be the case and to prove that, here’s a plan on how to make at least Kshs 30,000/- per month from online freelancing.

1. Belief – Have you ever heard the song, “it is all about belief”? Well, it is. You have to convince yourself that you can do this; you can make 30,000 a month working in your underwear. The easiest way to bring about belief is to break down the target (30,000) and make it seem more achievable. So, 30,000 a month is 7,500 a week which is about $100 a week. Achievable? On sites like getafreelancer.com, the lowest that you can be paid for one freelance job is $30. Do three of those and you have your $100 a week.

2. Pay Yourself – The biggest mistake freelancers make is undercharging. You’re so desperate to take a job that you’ll do it at any price. This is wrong – do not underpay yourself. Ensure that your time and energy are well compensated.

3. Target a Niche Market – contrary to popular belief, the people who will buy your services are not “the whole world”. Only a specific group of people with specific characteristics/needs will be interested. Find this group of people, and target them. This makes your advertising and marketing job pretty straight forward. Be warned that some niches are not worth it. All good niches have the following:

  • Your target market is able to afford your charges
  • There is a good number of potential customers in the chosen niche
  • Your market is not going to disappear overnight

4. Marketing Plan – Who is your target market? What do they want/need? Where can you find them? Is the market seasonal? You don’t need a 30 page document, but you need a marketing plan.

5. Prepare Your Marketing Material – first things first, get a website. Today, right now. If you do not have a website you won’t make much money. Can you do e-commerce if you are not online? No. Can potential customers who hear about you check you out later on the internet if you do not have a website? No again. Can current customers find out what your new offerings are if you lack a website? Not easily. Get a website! Nickel Pro offers a sweet deal on websites for freelancers.

Apart from a website, you probably also need business cards, a cover/introductory letter and samples of previous work done.

6. Execute – Many, many, many freelancers give up before they get anywhere. I never said freelancing is easy in any way but it can be sweet. Once your name is out there and jobs are coming in regularly, life gets to be very good. It is similar to climbing a hill: the climb is difficult and tiring but once you’re at the top…well, you’re at the TOP. Do not give up, just do your thing until you make it.

A very practical example, Maria, joined Biashara 30 being totally green. She wanted to get an online job but had a little problem: she didn’t even know what she could do for money as a freelancer let alone how to get an online job. But she’s a hard worker – she kept at it and kept learning and trying. About a month ago and after applying for numerous online jobs, she finally got one paying $30 to write some articles. Her online freelancing career thus took off and she is now doing pretty well for herself if I say so myself.

What about you? Do you want to make 30,000/- a month online?

Filed Under: Make Money, Online Jobs Tagged With:

11 Web Apps That You Should Know About

September 22, 2009 by Leave a Comment

LifeHacker has a list of very useful web applications that many people don’t know about. They say, “As with rock music, video games, and other awesome pursuits, great web applications often don’t get enough credit for what they do well..”

Here’s a list of some underhyped web-apps.

  1. The Aviary Suite – Aviary is a webapp maker that specializes in fully-featured Flash apps, and they’re seemingly engaged in a dare to see how much users can get done entirely in a browser.
  2. Fonolo – If calling a company’s customer service line and dealing with automated answering systems fills you with a certain kind of dread, you need a Fonolo account.
  3. Drop.io – Besides giving anyone 100MB of temporary file-sharing space without any sign-up required, drop.io can handle the rare faxing job, record voice memos by telephone, set up quick multimedia presentations, and more.
  4. PDF to Word – If you need to grab elements from a PDF, edit part of its text, or cut down its size, you might try converting it to a Microsoft Word file.
  5. YouMail – For those feeling like their phones are under-powered, there’s YouMail. Sign up, follow YouMail’s instructions on setting up your phone to hand over your phone’s voicemail duties to its service, and you’ll be able to listen to or download voicemails from its web site or smartphone apps.
  6. Instapaper & Read It Later – It’s a really cool article or blog post you just stumbled across, but at the moment—right this second—you don’t have time to read it. If you had a bookmarklet or browser plug-in for either the Instapaper or Read It Later service, you’d be able to quickly send that web page to your account for bookmarking.
  7. Lovely charts – The Flash-based webapp produces very clean-looking charts for all kinds of purposes.
  8. Screen Toaster – Fire up ScreenToaster’s site, load its Java-based applet, and you can record surprisingly decent quality screencasts and demonstrations, with audio voice-overs, at the push of a single button.
  9. Tinychat – Setting up a live video, audio, and screen-sharing chatroom for up to 12 people at once seems like something that might require a dozen software installations and point-by-point walkthroughs. Tinychat makes it easy.
  10. Freckle – Freckle doesn’t require you to learn a new set of rules or input methods to track how you spend your time working for clients.
Filed Under: Cool Sites Tagged With:

How To Make Money With A Simple Blog Business

September 10, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Well, after all the boring stuff – thinking of a topic, researching, setting up a simple blog and promoting it – it is now time to start earning some money out of your new simple blog business!

As said previously, the strategy is to set up a blog and optimise it so that when people search for your topic, they find you. You think make money from Google Adsense when they visit your blog. But what is Adsense? Basically, Adsense is a tool that allows you to place advertisements on your blog. Google uses fancy software to make sure that the advertisements are relevant to your blog. For example, if your blog is about golf, your readers will see golf related adverts. How do you earn? Whenever someone clicks on any adsense advertisement, you get paid. Therefore, the more people who click on your adsense ads, the more you get paid. Nice, eh? Thousands of people earn their money this way.

Integrating adsense into your blogger blog is very very easy. Here’s some excellent reading for beginners:

For best results, I recommend that you set up your adsense “ad blocks” in these three places:

  • The top of your blog, just below the title
  • The sidebar
  • The footer. This works best if you have set your homepage to show only one blog post

By doing the above, you’ll maximise the chances of people clicking on one of your adsense adverts.

How do you get your money?
You are able to check your earnings at any time in your Google Adsense Account. Google will only pay you when you reach a certain minimum limit ($100). It may certainly take you over a month to reach that limit but if you follow the steps I have outlined here and in the other posts of this series, you are guaranteed to get more and more visitors and see your earnings rise and rise. Google will then send you a cheque or transfer the funds electronically.

How much can you earn?
Depending on the topic you are writing about, you’ll make anything from a few (US) pennies to one or two dollars every time someone clicks on your Adsense ads. This can quickly build up if your site has a good number of visitors. The more you blog, the better it gets!

So that’s it – a simple step by step guide to starting a simple blog business. Any questions? You have no excuse – get your own simple blog business.

PS
You can use KeyWordSpy to estimate how much each click pays for the topic you are writing about. The amount that you will earn is approximately half the amount that Keywordspy estimates the click to be worth.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: , ,

How To Promote Your Simple Blog Business

September 7, 2009 by 4 Comments

If you’ve been following the series so far, we’ve managed to have a good thought about what we want to blog about. We then did a little research and finally set up nice new blogs. Before we start making money from our blogs, we need to let the world know about them – or else the will die, painfully.

If you recall, the simple blog business strategy revolves around getting visitors from our blog from search engines. Therefore, when telling the world about our blogs, the best way is by high quality backlinks. If done right, this will give you a high ranking on the search engine results pages and you will start getting visitors. Ideally, you should be spending two or three hours a week doing this. Here are just a few ways to get you started:

Yahoo Answers – This is a pretty simple and effective approach. Just head over to Yahoo answers and answer related open questions, putting your blog as the “resource”. The trick is to make your answers very high quality. It takes only a few minutes to post an answer but if you do this 2 to three times a week, you’ll have lots of great backlinks from an authority site.

Comment On Other Blogs – Most blogs let you comment on each post on the blog. Just find related and interesting blogs and post your comments on the articles you read. Make sure you actually read the posts and leave a meaningful well written comment. Most comments left on blogs will not really help you rank better in the search engines but they will popularise your blog and connect you with other bloggers.

Squidoo – Squidoo is another effective way of promoting your blog. Set up a squidoo lens and put up a bit of quality content – you can steal this from your site. Make sure you link back to your own site. Also, optimise your squidoo address to be relevant to your blog. For example, get something like: squidoo.com/yourblogname

Your Other Blogs And Sites – Place links to your new blog from other websites or blogs that you own/run. If it is your first blog, create another free blog on WordPress.com and link to yourself from there.

Submit articles to article directories: I’d say the three main directories are EzineArticles, GoArticles and SearchWarp. The articles that you submit should be keyword optimised (just like your blog posts) and should be unique. Make sure you link to your own blog – the author Bio area is perfect for this!

Submit your blog to social aggregation sites like Digg, Netscape, Stumbleupon, etc. Even if your articles don’t get a high rank on these sites, the backlinks you get are very helpful!

Directories – Submit your blog to as many online directories as possible. One particular directory, DMoz, is of note – make sure you submit there. It is hard to get listed (your blog needs to be high quality) but a link from Dmoz is very valuable.

There are probably 100s of ways to promote your blog but the above are some of the most simple and popular. Keep doing this effectively and in 30 days or so you will start seeing consistent and growing numbers of people visiting your blog from search engines. Here are 52 other ways to promote your blog.

PS
To track how many visitors you get and where they come from, use a simple and free tracking tool like StatCounter.

Ok, that’s it for today. Next, we’ll get to the part where we start making money! Do not miss out. 🙂

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With:

How To Start A Simple Blog Business

September 4, 2009 by 2 Comments

Okay so we’ve thought about the topic we want to blog about and even did some keyword research. It’s now time to create our simple blog business. The easiest place to create a blog to make money from is www.blogger.com. So go on over there and create your blog in five minutes. Once you have filled in your information and accepted their terms of service, you get to the point where you get to pick the name of your blog. Nice, eh? You’re almost there.

You’re going to base the name of your new blog on the keyword that you selected. Remember? For example, I’d choose “classic cars” so I would want my blog’s name to be:

classiccars.blogspot.com
or
classic-cars.blogspot.com

Those are probably already taken, though. What to do? Simple, let’s add a word infront to make it unique:

flashyclassiccars.blogspot.com
goodclassiccars.blogspot.com
best-classic-cars.blogspot.com

I hope you see that the possibilities are endless. Just pick a name and go on. Don’t get stuck choosing! It doesn’t really matter much whether your name has dashes (-) or not.

Ayayai, we have a spanking new blog. What shall we do first? Write our first blog post, of course! This is the part where most people fail. It is really very easy but it requires consistent work and focus. You need to spend between 2 to 3 hours per week doing this. Is that too much? Yes, it is a little bit of work but it WILL pay off. Just do it and stick with it. If you can consistently write optimised posts for your blog you willl attract the attention of Google and other search engines and you will get visitors to your blog. You will then be able to make money using adsense. (We’ll discuss how in a bit, no worries).

First things first, what type of things do you write on your blog? Remember the keywords? Specifically, the keyword list, like this one:

Google Keyword Tool

Well, you’re going to write a letter two to three times a week related directly to one of those keywords. You can fake your way to a great blog by pretending you’re writing a letter to a friend. Easy? That’s all that blog is, in a nutshell. Assuming you picked a topic that you just love, is writing letters about it that hard? Each letter you write is going to be about one of the keywords that you found. So, for my cars example, I’ll have to write about old cars, used cars, sports cars, etc etc. Get it?

For each of your blog postings:

  1. Should be 100% valuable and interesting to anyone who may read it.
  2. The title should be the exact key word that you are writing about.
  3. Should be between 350 to 500 words long and should contain your exact keywords repeated three to four times.
  4. Should have the exact keywords in the first 50 and last 50 words.

That’s it! Go forth and start blogging 🙂

If you write 3 or 4 ‘letters’ a week you will start getting visitors to your blog and you will then be able to start earning money from your blog. But you need to start getting those visitors. That’s the subject of the next article in this series. Make sure you don’t miss that!

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: ,

Keyword Research For A Simple Blog Business

September 2, 2009 by 1 Comment

We’ve been thinking about topics that we could be interested in, right? Now it is time to put up a blog around one topic that you are interested in. The basic idea is not to put up just any blog; it is to put up a niche blog to serve an already existing ‘market’. So, first things first, we need to find a market, or a group of people who would be interested in reading your blog.

How can we do this? There are probably many ways but we shall focus on one. A simple way to find out if people are interested in what you write is to use Google (or any search engine). If people are searching for the stuff you want to write about, then people are interested! How do you find out if people are searching for what you want to blog about? Simple, take your topic (e.g. cars) and run it through a free keyword tracking tool such as Google keyword tool or Wordtracker keyword tool. You will find out how many people search for your topic and, more importantly, you will get a list of related topics. For example, this is what you get when you search for cars:

Google Keyword Tool

Let’s assume that you want to start a blog about cars. As you can see above, cars is a very popular topic with more than 151,000,000 searches per month so you’re on to something good. The idea is to find a topic that has a good number of people searching for it. Once you find such a topic, you then set up a blog about that topic and work hard to get your blog in the search results that are displayed when people search for your topic. If your site is displayed on the front page of Google when people search for, say cars, then people will click and visit your site. If many people search for your topic, you get many visitors. In the case of cars, you get millions of visitors 🙂

Sounds simple, eh? The basic idea is simple but the execution requires hard work, patience and commitment.

Now, getting your site to be listed in the first results page of Google when people search for a word like cars or money, etc is very difficult. Why is it difficult? Because these words are so lucrative that bigger better financed sites are after them and it will be nearly impossible to beat them in the short term. It is always better to try and go a niche deeper. Perhaps ‘sports cars’ or ‘classic cars’. These phrases still get searched a lot but are easier to tackle. Always try and find a niche.

Don’t worry if you cannot find a “good” topic. The important thing is to be able to write several blog entries about it and that your general topic (e.g. cars) has a lot of related topics (e.g. classic cars, old cars, vintage cars, etc). These ‘topics’ are called keywords and you’re going to be writing blog entries on each one of them (more on this later) so make sure there are a lot of them available! Don’t get too caught up in choosing a topic. Pick one and move on; so that you can start earning sooner.

Next we’ll build up our blog and start writing. Make sure you don’t miss that!

Filed Under: Blogging, Make Money Tagged With: ,