rssHugger is a new website developed to help bloggers promote their blogs and help visitors discover new blogs. If you own a blog, you can get your own page on rssHugger for 10 years for giving an review of the site on your blog. If you want to join rssHugger but do not want to review the site, you can pay a one time review fee of $20.

rssHugger has a top 100 as well as random page to let the visitors get to your site. rssHugger is all about generating buzz and finding new content. Much like stumbleupon in that respect.

Now for Free!
It appears that the community has spoken and now rssHugger does not cost a thing if you write a blog post about it. If you still don’t want to write about it then just pay the $20.00 and you’ll get your blog listed. This should help the site grow quickly without the fee.

Buzz works! It can work for small and start-up businesses, as well. Why wait, join rssHugger now!!!

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There are many ways to make money: a job, your own brick & mortar business, or even an online business. Many individuals are making a go at it online. Some are even doing it for their sole income. One such person is blogger Tyler Cruz. Tyler is an internet entrepreneur and operates a self-named blog – TylerCruz.com as well as some other sites.

While this blog is not intended as a money-maker, I do have a few ads that help support my habits such as golf.

One great aspect of TylerCruz.com is that he uses extensive case studies. He doesn’t just tell you do X. He does X,Y,and Z and then concludes that X is better. This is a very scientific approach and it also lends him more credibility in convincing his readers that his strategies work.

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What is a pocketmod?

According to the website:

The PocketMod is a new way to keep yourself organized. Lets face it, PDAs are too expensive and cumbersome, and organizers are bulky and hard to carry around. Nothing beats a folded up piece of paper. That is until now. With the PocketMod, you can carry around the days notes, keep them organized in any way you wish, then easily transfer the notes to your PDA, spreadsheet, or planner.

The PocketMod is a small book with guides on each page. These guides or templates, combined with a unique folding style, enable a normal piece of paper to become the ultimate note card. It is hard to describe just how incredibly useful the PocketMod is. It’s best that you just dive in and create one.

My Pocketmod

I created myself a “pocketmod” with the week on the first page, 5 individual days, and a finance page on the last page to track expenses. Anyone that knows me knows I’m a post-it nutcase. This will be a nice tool to carry around and when I have more time transfer over to my PDA. Sometimes its just easier to use paper/pen.

Build your own pocketmod now.

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I recently Stumble’d on Buzzdash a site to generate polls. I registered, created the poll found below in this post, and received the code via email in about 2 minutes. It is very easy to use.

Per the Buzzdash website,

BuzzDash is a site and tool for gauging popular opinion on a wide range of topics – from sports, movies and politics to relationships and philosophy. Built upon individual polling modules called buzzbites™, BuzzDash provides a real-time forum where people can solicit, measure and share opinions on nearly any issue.

With BuzzDash, people can:

 

• View real-time popular opinion on a range of timely issues

 

• Express opinions by voting or commenting on individual issues

 

• Post individual buzzbites to personal web pages, blogs or emails

 

• Create buzzbites for personal use, for submission to BuzzDash, or both.

You can quickly post your poll currently to MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, LiveJournal, Freewebs, Blogger, or Tagged user. For Wordpress you have to get the code emailed to you. It is slightly annoying. Why can’t they just display the code for cut ‘n paste?

Below is a working poll I generated and embeded using javascript.

What’s unique about Buzzdash is that your readers vote along with everyone else who visits the main Buzzdash website and finds the poll or anyone else’s site that embeds your poll. You get a good sample of people to conduct your poll in this manner. For example I posted my poll in the “Economy” category. You can see it here along with other “Economy” category polls. For example, the poll I embeded had 2 votes before I got around to putting it in this post. The votes came from other Buzzdash users finding the poll in the “Economy” category of their site’s polls.

Overall, I think it’s a great service, but the emailing of code to embed is a bit backwards. I’ll probably start using Buzzdash for my blog polls. The polls are clean and easy to embed. I like the fact that others from the Buzzdash website can also vote.

“Jump In. Be Heard” with Buzzdash.

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In an earlier post I mentioned that I received a request to do a book review on the soon to be published book – An American Hedge Fund by Timothy Sykes. Tim has been featured on CNBC, starred in “Wall Street Warriors“, and has been written about in several national magazines and newspapers.

I received my pre-release copy a few days ago and I read it over the next 2 days.

The Intriguing Industry

Per wikipedia “hedge funds generally exercise extreme secrecy and little is known with certainty about the activities of specific hedge funds or the industry as a whole.” Hedge funds have always intrigued me. Why? Hedge funds have more flexibility than mutual funds in their investment vehicles/mechanisms they use to invest. Also the manager of a hedge fund typically gets 2/20. That is they earn 2% of assets plus 20% of any gains. That’s big money.

The hedge fund is a very misunderstood area in the financial world and for good reason. The secrecy is in part caused by the burdensome government regulations to protect investors. Timothy sheds light into this otherwise mysterious world. There are few books on the topic and this is the first book I am aware of that gives a full account of a Hedge Fund from the inside – from inception to maturity. Timothy goes in great detail of how he got into trading, how he traded, how he started and operated his fund, and the slew of shady characters he met along the way.
Play by Play – The Trades

The play by play of his at time gut-wrenching trades and his huge wins and losses draws the reader into his trading world. Tim shows his youth and passion in his trading as well as the partying that goes with fast money. He shows a very honest account of the industry, its pitfalls, and difficulties. He also demonstrates the big money that can be made in the trading industry. Shedding light on an otherwise murky, mysterious industry Timothy has done a bang-up job. This is the first book I know of that covers micro-cap stock trading in such detail trade-by-trade.

The book is slated to be out on October 1 and I recommend you get it.

The ISBN# is 978-0-9795497-0-0

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I just received an advanced copy book review request for “An American Hedge Fund” by Timothy Sykes. Timothy has been on CNBC and is a well-published author on financial topics. This is the first time I’ve received a book review request and I have to say this is one of my favorite topics. I think its no secret I secretly aspire to manage my own hedge fund. Not just for the money. Oh yes the ridiculous money, but also for the thrill and challenge. I’m anxiously awaiting to see if Timothy does this industry justice in his book.

Stay tuned. My book review will most likely be one of my longer blog entries to date. The review will be unpaid and unbiased.

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I came across a website recently that was trying to raise money for new equipment for a baseball team. They were using Chipin to facilitate collections.

The chipin system itself is very simple. You must have a paypal account to create a chipin account. Once you create your account you simply describe what you are raising money for and set the goal of the amount you are looking to raise. You put some snippet of code on your website or blog and chipin takes care of the rest. Users simply click the widget to contribute. They can contribute via Paypal or credit card.

It is an interesting and simple solution to a common problem for individuals raising small or large amounts off-loading the tracking/communication to contributors of how much has been raised and collecting funds.

I decided to try it out myself on my blog. If you notice on the right-hand side at the bottom, there is a chipin widget. I setup a very small goal of raising $100. Since today is 7/7/07 a lucky day by some accounts, I’ve decided to create a lottery pool to invest the proceeds of the chipin in Texas lottery tickets and subsequently donated to charity. I have not yet decided which charity to donate to. If anyone has any good ideas or knows of any non-profit that needs funds let me know via comments and I’ll update the chipin to reflect accordingly.

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Without further ado here are the sites:

Courtneytuttle.com – This blog discusses issues related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well as methods to promote your website or blog. One of my favorite articles is 102 Ways to Make Your Site a Back-Link Superstar The blog in general has excellent and original advice. I must stress this. It won’t be a repetition of what you see everywhere else. The content is meaty, well-thought out, and pertinent. From Wordpress tips, to Technorati, to Back-linking…. This blog has you covered.

“Write To Right is a site designed to WRITE the words of the great ones in a simplified format to help RIGHT people’s lives.” per their blog. I really like their mission to help people. Good intentions and good content make this site worthy of visiting. The site is very interesting and discusses small business topics such as funding for example. The post Government Grant Money for Small Business is an excellent read for the small businessman wondering how the government can help fund your ideas.
DavidPaulRobinson.com is a blog discussing technology primarily. It is not the usual dry commentary. He has articles such as Commented Code Doesn’t Equal Clear Code and “Thinking Messy Monitors”. The latter reminded me of my own blog post – Increase Productivity with Dual Monitors

Blogbait.net is a website listing sites that will offer linkback exchanges.  The site offers bloggers an opportunity to see linkback opportunities to improve their traffic.  The site itself has some linkback bait of its own via contests.  My blog showed up on the site and I got a few takers so it appears to be effective.  It doesn’t hurt that he had a nice review of my site. )

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1. jakeldaily.com – I really like the tagline for this blog “Life’s Boundaries Greener Grass or Unexpected Cliffs”. They operate the site www.jakeldaily.com also. www.jakeldaily.com is their celebrity gossip site which started out as a fashion site. jakeldaily.com in contrast is the personal blog. He blogs about several things almost an insider’s view of a professional blogger. He describes how he got into blogging, his equipment, and also has some interesting articles such as “Kissing Seduction” and “Be a Man get the Snip” The blog has some good inspirational topics as well as some parenting intermixed. There are many good suggestions for building website traffic as well. If you get bored bounce over to their other site www.jakeldaily.com and get some hot juicy celebrity gossip.

2. Restructuringbusiness is a blog that is “a collection of startup business ideas. The ideas are meant for those with no previous business acumen and they require limited startup capital.” This blog has some interesting ideas that you might not find anywhere else. The off-beat ideas might make you some money. The blog is fairly new, but it has some interesting articles such as “Electric Cars and Terrible News” and “Burning Man Corp” which describes the benefits of incorporation in Nevada. I think this blog has some good potential. A good blogger brings originality to the blogosphere and Restructuring business cuts through the plain jane business articles you’ll find scattered around the web.

3. [Your Review Could be Here]. See Blog Review Rules.

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Here’s what’s in it for you:

1. Increase your readership with a link back from the 24,323 ranked blog according to Technorati.com.
2. Increase in your readership directly affects your revenue/traffic if you are monetizing your blog.
3. It’s free! Something for almost nothing.

The rules:

• I will do a review with a link to your site in exchange for the same in return. I will review in batches of 10 with a link to your blog and upto 50 words of review. I will post a review batch, starting with the first blog and will continue adding to the blog entry as I get more linkbacks. Once I get 10 blogs reviewed, I will start another blog review batch.
• Once a month I will post one full review to the holder of the Top Commentators position.

See blog review batch 1 to get an idea of how this will look like.

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