Satish | Technotip.org

“Cool, Promote it!” Orkut secret link: Get a rank badge

Its been some time since Orkut started allowing its users to advertise their business on Orkut, with ‘promote’ feature: a free tool to help you spread the news to all your orkut friends…and beyond!

At first I thought this could be a great opportunity for bloggers and marketers to explore and leverage from Orkut community. But to my dis-appointment, there are many people who are randomly creating some community message and asking to promote it! And the dis-appointing things is, these communities are not at all taken care by anyone, people just create it, promote it and forget it 🙁

So, am I saying this Orkut promote is waste of time? No. Since many Orkut users have no idea about how to set this up or what to do with this feature, its a great thing for few people who understand and have some goals to achieve from it.

Here are some points to keep in mind to write a good copy
1. First make sure whatever you are trying to promote is of use to the users.
2. Let your message be clear.
3. Don’t tell half things and ask them to click the link to read rest of your story. Everyone is busy with their life!
4. Make sure you have a call to action.
Ex: You can ask people to promote it or you may ask people to do something after seeing your ad.

How Orkut promote works:
When you first create a promotion, only your friends will be able to see your promotion. Once any of your friends click on “Cool, promote it!” button, the promotion copy will be shown to their friends.. and so on.

Secret Link!
Some months back Orkut stated showing a secret link(promo URL) in the promotion page, using which we could ask our friends and followers to promote our ad copies. But in just 24hrs time, they removed that feature. Now once again they have introduced the same feature. So just grab the links and ask your friends to promote it.

Log into your Orkut account -> Applications -> Promote -> (Promo URL)

If you are on Orkut, promote our stuffs too.

Here are the links to some of our promotions:
Promotion 1
Promotion 2
Promotion 3
Promotion 4
Promotion 5
Promotion 6

Orkut Badge:
Recently Orkut also introduced ranking users based on some criteria, one of which is based on the number of views of your promotion.

So, if you still care about Orkut and want some exposure and the badge!, then go ahead, grab these secret links and promote them.

By the way, I am on facebook at http://facebook.com/technotip 🙂

Note:
It may not be a promotion as beneficial as that on Facebook and Twitter, but it has got me 500 – 600 visitors to my website so far, which is not bad for a small site.

GMail: “Priority Inbox” To Help You Focus On Important Emails

Often time we get a lot of email in the last minute before going to a meeting or exam! But we are unsure if its just another autoresponder mail or a genuinely urgent as well as important.

Check above video – its a very good animated video explaining Priority Inbox neatly.

To solve this problem, Google has introduced a new feature called Priority Inbox. This is a separate section in your email and will automatically separate your important mails, based on which email you read and reply to.

And ofcourse it has some filters to manually mark someone’s email as important or as unimportant.
And Like most things, Priority Inbox isn’t perfect, so it needs your help to get more experience in knowing what is important to you. So it has a + and – symbol to mark any email(either in ‘Priority Inbox’ or regular ‘Inbox’) important or unimportant.
Priority Inbox is in Beta, and will be enabled to all GMail and Google Apps users in 1 or 2 weeks time.

Source: Priority Inbox

HostGator: All WordPress Posts, Comments Deleted

This is a quick post or rather “quick fix” post.

If you are on HostGator shared hosting plan, then please check your blog. Today some of the HostGator customers reported that their WordPress posts, comments and almost everything went missing.

When we contacted one of the hostgator support team member, we came to know that it might have been due to a software upgrade at hostgator and not a hack.

Note: Only some customers have been effected by this.

If you are facing this problem, then simply log into your hostgator cpanel. Click on MySql Databases icon.
databases-cpanel
Now select the database where your WordPress has been installed and hit Repair DB.
database-repair
This should fix the problem. If not, you will have to restore the site with the latest backup.

Our blog was fixed by using the Repair option and now its working fine.

100 Writing Mistakes To Avoid In English

We all know how important communication skill is in this corporate world. Without good communication skill it is hard to get a job, even though the candidate is good in his field. So communication is the key.

In online world as well as offline world, it is important to write without making silly spelling mistakes, usage mistakes and grammar mistakes. For a blogger its important to make sure what he is trying to convey is properly reaching his readers. And most importantly, if you have a online service then good communication skills, proper error free writing skills are crucial. Your prospects must understand what you are trying to convey them.

Couple of weeks ago I came across a ebook titled “100 Writing Mistakes To Avoid”, on Daniel’s DailyWritingTips.com

The Book Covers:
Small Introduction.
Spelling Mistakes To Avoid.
Usage Mistakes To Avoid.
Grammar Mistakes To Avoid.
Punctuation Mistakes To Avoid.

Here is one sample excerpt from the ebook:

less/fewer:

INCORRECT: This box contains less fire crackers.
CORRECT: This box contains fewer fire crackers.

Less is used with uncounted nouns: less soup, less intelligence, less forage.
Fewer is used with countable nouns: fewer voters, fewer apples, fewer commercials.

Unlike other English grammar books which are lengthy(takes a lot of time to read) and complex to understand, “100 Writing Mistakes To Avoid” is simple, straightforward and concentrates on just 100 important writing mistakes, avoiding which we can instantly improve our writing.

Author of the ebook:
Born in Chicago, Maeve Maddox has lived, studied, and taught English in the United States, France, and the U.K. Her educational qualifications include a B.A. (Hons) in English from the University of London, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She is also a published author of both fiction and non-fiction.

If you want to learn basic English Grammar first, then have a look at DailyWritingTips.com and signup for their blog’s RSS update and receive “Basic English Grammar” ebook for free. Also grab “100 Writing Mistakes To Avoid” ebook soon, as the price of the book will be raised to ~~$19.99~~ $9.99 after 1000 people have purchase it. Now the cost of the ebook is $9.99, and its a steal at this price. Kindle Edition is available only for $11.99.

Amemeber: All In One Solution For All Your Online Selling

I have seen many plugins that cost from a range of $95 to $800 that are used for creating membership sites, or some sort of sites that allow accepting payments.

Every other software script is built to solve any one particular problem. That is good, if someone has only one problem to solve and has a lot of money to spend!

But what if you want to create a membership site and also sell your ebook on the same site. And you have multiple income streems and you don’t want to depend on a third party website service to accept payment for you and then send it to your paypal a/c.

Amember is the solution. It doesn’t cost you a whole lot,.. its a great script which costs ( ~~$199.95~~ ) $179.95 – for single domain license. You will also get a license key for installing this script on your local machine(local host — wamp, mamp, xamp ).

There are various plugin’s which support integration of amember with WordPress, vBulletine, phpList etc. Below is a complete list.

aMember Pro ($179.95 for lifetime license with 6 months of free updates)
WordPress plugin (Free lifetime subscription)
“One-Time download” plugin ($30.00 for 6 months)
4Images plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
@Mail integration ($60.00 for 6 months)
CopperMine plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
Dokeos plugin ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
DruPal plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
Expression Engine plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
FusionBB ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
I-Rater plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
Incremental content plugin ($60.00 for lifetime subscription)
Invision Board Plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
Joomla plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
ListMail plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
MamboServer plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
OpenRealty plugin ($70.00 for 6 months)
OsCommerce ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
PerlDesk plugin ($20.00 for lifetime subscription)
Phorum plugin ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
PhotoPost integration ($40.00 for 6 months)
SMF plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
Serendipity plugin ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
Vanilla Integration ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
WowBB plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
XOOPS plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
e107 CMS plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
phpBB3 plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
phpFox plugin ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
phpList Integration ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
phpNuke Plugin ($40.00 for 6 months) details
phpWebSite plugin ($40.00 for lifetime subscription)
punBB plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
vBulletin3 plugin ($40.00 for 6 months)
Facebook integration gate (new)

Some of these plugin’s cost $30 or $40 and the license in for lifetime. But WordPress integration plugin is free and its licensing is also for lifetime.

If you ever decide to sell something online make sure you check out amember, you will surly love it and save a lot of money in the long run of your business. See it as a good investment.

I wanted to explained how to install the script, but I advice you not to try this yourself. If you run into problem it will be difficult to analyse the root cause for the problem and solving it may take a lot of your valuable time. The good news is, you need not spend in hiring a professional to install it for you. In fact, once you purchase amember software you will get a one time free installation service.

Some of the things to know:
1. Security: Amember is a secure software for accepting money online. But I still recommend not to use this to accept credit card payments if you are on a shared hosting. If you are serious about your business then go for a dedicated server.
2. Troubleshooting: When you run into trouble with your script, contact amember support team directly. I had a minor issuse with my php.ini and Alex from amember sorted out the problem very quickly. And with all those email exchanges I had with the staff, I feel that their support staff is technically very strong.

Amember For Membership Sites:
Recently I setup a membership site for one of my clients and used amember and wordpress alone to create a very good, simple to navigate and maintain membership site.

You can run membership sites with recurring payments and also sites where you have multiple levels of memberships like: Silver, Gold, Platinum membership etc.

Basically I had installed WordPress two times. One in the root and the other in a directory called members. The root WordPress is like anyother WordPress powered blog. Its intended to be a public blog. Another WordPress installation was protected using amember and the access was allowed only to registered members. Its so simple and easy with amember.

Affiliate System To Boost Your Sales/Bussiness:
Amember also has a built-in affiliate system, which doesn’t seem to be as powerful as the dedicated affiliate system software out there. But it does its main job properly, that is, tracking the incoming affiliate traffic, setting the cookie and assigning the commission. What I would love to see is a graphical stats(pie chart, bar chart in the stats for visual representation) and some option to convert any link on the website into a affiliate code.
For example, people should be allowed to link to news letter page instead of sales letter page using their affiliate code. There are manual ways to do that of course, but a automated tool would help.
What I like the most about amember affiliate system is, we can assign affiliate code automatically to everyone who is signed up as a member(we can enable or disable this option easily in the admin area).

On the administrator side of affiliate system, it does a lot of great job. It has option to set first month affiliate payment percentage and percentage for rest of the month etc – we can even set subsequent months payment to null. This model is very helpful where members pay monthly fees and affiliate get commission for each of the payment their referrals make in the subsequent months.

Members area of amember:
In members area, members will have the option to manage their news letter subscription, there is a news letter archieve page, and affiliate statistics(that is the number of clicks, conversion etc).

With all these nice experience with amember, at one place I was stuck-up and felt like a stupid myself! That is, when I forgot my admin panel password and there was no way to recover it 🙁
I think amember purposefully have not included a option for password recovery for admin panel(other members who have signed up for your service have option for password recovery. Its only in the login page of admin panel that doesn’t have a password recovery option.)

That’s just a lesson for rest of you, don’t forget your admin panel password – you will be in trouble!

Things I like about amember:
1. Costs less.
2. It has a super easy DB backup system.
3. Integrates with a lot of open source scripts.
4. Has a lot of payment options. Including the popular PayPal.
5. Sophisticated mailing system(You can integrate it with aweber using plugin. But it works just fine even without aweber.)
6. Simple affiliate system.
7. Free installation(very important!)
8. Report import/export option.
9. DB repair option.
10. Recurring billing.
11. Good Support.
12. Active forum.
13. Good Documentation about all the features and options.
14. Members area user interface is very simple, easy to understand and get use to.
15. 30 days free trial.(very important)

What I don’t like and want to be improved:
1. Not so pleasing user interface in admin side.
2. Would like to have visual representation of stats in affiliate system.

Server Requirement:
PHP 4.3.0 or later
MySQL 3.22 or later
Unix/Linux hosting

Before you purchase any membership software or any other software for selling your products, go ahead and download the free trial of amember and try it. Remember, you get a 30 days free trial of amember.

Update: Alex informed me that, there is a nice tool to recover admin password. Here is the link aMember CP login/password.
It can be reset using this tool: FixAdmin