All Painted Out
Thursday, October 18th, 2007What we do to make money!
Offline, I still have to work to pay the bills. I do some casual work for a guy who runs his own builder’s business, so I usually get a day or two a week here and there as well as my own gardening services that at the moment take up just one day a week.
The last two days have been hard work… painting some freshly rendered walls on a building - two days solid work. As I don’t do this every day, the old muscles never get a chance to grow accustomed to heavy work as they should, so each new job kills me once I’m finished!
Now I’m recuperating with aching muscles and a stiff neck, but instead of lying down and relaxing, here I am in front of this thing desperately trying to catch up on all the writing that I’ve gotten behind on!
I’ve also just revamped one of my blogs with a new theme, if you want to take a look, its at: Make Money Blog - I think it’s a definite improvement on the old one, which was a bit slow to load up thanks to the pre-historic HTML used by the author - I mean tables in a Wordpress blog?
How very yesterday!
The new theme is much better at dealing with all the add-ons and widgets that blogs carry these days.
I’m actually thinking to update this theme, as I’m already growing tired of it - it’s a little too cartoon-like for what is supposed to be my self-branding, “hey look at me and what I can do,” site!
Needs to be a little more professional looking…
Watch this space!
PS: Alexa today: 792,377
Back to Squidoo
Sunday, October 14th, 2007After that rather damning report on the state of the local water supply, I thought it would be a nice refreshing change to get back to some good old Internet Marketing!
Squidoo, to be precise. That’s because I’ve just created yet another lens to add to my growing family.
This time, I’ve decided to put to good use all the PLR eBooks that I have lying around on my hard drive. They’re just gathering virtual dust so rather than do nothing with them, it makes good horse sense to make a little money out of them.
It’s taking rather more work than I originally envisaged, because they all have to be set up with their own sales pages and PayPal buttons, download pages and all the other odds and sods that go into creating a salable item. And that’s for just one of them.
Anyway, I got to thinking that the best way to promote them for sale would be to put up a bargain basement sales page on Squidoo and lump them all in together. It’s far from ready to sell anything, so I’m going to withhold the link until it’s got a few eBooks ready to sell.
But here’s the plan:
- Set up the lens first with some text modules and other paraphernalia to make it publishable. Add some eBooks to sell with links to their sales pages.
- Set up a free hosted blog on the same theme and link to the lens.
- Set up a pro hosted blog (not another one!) on the same theme and link that to the lens as well.
- Set up links from my other lenses to the new lens - but a couple per day over a week or so, so the SE’s don’t think it’s manufactured - they like to see new blogs grow slowly and naturally!
- Write an article (or two) and submit to ezine articles for a high PR back-link to the blogs to get them indexed fast. Then write more articles linking to the lens to get that indexed too.
- Promote the lens through social bookmarking such as stumbleupon and del.icio.us etc and make it known to the social networking sites.
That should keep me busy for the next few weeks, so let’s see how this little experiment comes off!
PS: Alexa today: 939,043
Don’t Drink The Water!
Friday, October 12th, 2007This has been almost a mantra mumbled by ex-pat Brits over the years when living in southern Spain.
The truth of it is that the water that comes out of your tap is not fit to drink! Don’t believe me? Then don’t, it’s not my health that you’re putting at risk by drinking the stuff.
Why is it so unsafe?
Well for starters, there is no true water main anywhere on the Costa Del Sol, at least not as we know it in the UK. All the water that comes out of the tap comes from a mixture of reservoirs and subterranean aquifiers which is pumped into local “depositos”, large concrete bunkers that are built into every new urbanization. These depositos are not particularly well sanitized and can be accessed by vermin, insects and other nasties. To combat the high levels of bacteria in the local water supply, a large amount of chlorine is added.
Add to this the local water is also very high in calcium, as your kettle and electric water heater element will attest to! Include the dangerous levels of heavy metals like aluminium and lead, then add the high levels of pesticide residues that the over-zealous farmers pump onto their land several times a year that leeches down into the water table and you have a cocktail of unhealthy particulates in every glass of water that comes out of your tap!
By World Health Organisation standards, particulate levels above 150 ppm is considered dangerous to health. Guess what the levels are on average coming out of your taps? Between 250 and 300 ppm is regularly found in local tests. Oh yes it is!
By the way, the authorities will not admit to any of this, naturally.
So ok, you only drink bottled water, but…
Boiling the water won’t get rid of the pesticides, heavy metals or a lot of the calcium. So if you’re drinking a nice cup of tea made with water from your tap, think again - is it really so nice?
Ok, you make your tea with bottled water…
Do you cook with water from the tap?
Then your food will soak up all those nasties that are dissolved in your water and you end up with it all in your blood stream anyway.
Chlorine, like flourine binds with other particulates in the water to form compounds which are… wait for it… carcinogenic. That means cancer. If you doubt this point, do you remember the scare in the UK several years ago about the addition of flourine into the water and links with cancer - and how it suddenly got swept under the carpet? Wonder why that was…?
Think how much it costs the local health services to deal with a few cases of cancer, compared with a major outbreak of cholera or dysentery…
Excess calcium in water causes digestive problems as well as helping to cause gall and bladder stones.
Aluminium poisoning has been hailed as a major cause of Alzheimer’s disease.
Do you still think the water out of your tap is safe to drink, or cook with?
Would you also like to hazard a guess at how safe that bottled water is you’re lugging home from the supermarket and drinking?
That’s for another time…
Now Here’s a Short Post…
Saturday, October 6th, 2007I just added this blog to my Technorati Profile to help raise it’s awareness and drive some more traffic this way!That’s all.
