I finally got my first iPod, courtesy of frequent flyer points from a few years back. So until last week I had a cheap radio/CD player in the kitchen with really bad speakers. It really didn’t inspire the best cooking experience.

 I was tempted to use my son’s old speakers connected to my iPod, on top of the freezer, but I didn’t like the idea of missing out on radio. Sometimes you need to hear the new stuff. And they were 20 year old speakers.

I went to Myer and asked if there were any speakers that catered for radio and iPod. No, can’t be done, said the confident young guy. Too much interference.

 I went to the Apple store and asked for their advice. Get yourself a good sound system, and use the iTrip to connect the iPod.

Well we’d tried tuning my son’s iPod to the car stereo using an iTrip a few years back but gave up out of frustration. It wasn’t the greatest car trip. But I bought an iTrip anyway. And still haven’t spent the time in the car to find a clear frequency.

But casually walking through David Jones the other day, I saw a very affordable radio/iPod speaker set by Cygnet that also charges your iPod. I thought about it, did some research online, and decided that this was probably the solution I was looking for. I went back to DJs and bought it, and it works wonderfully.

Of course there are other solutions, like Creative’s Zen Vision MP3/Video/Radio player, but I was hooked on the iPod thing, now that I’ve got one.

There’re a lot of angry AdWords advertisers around this month, hit by changes at Google.

People have been hit by large increases in the minimum cost-per-click for ads, in some cases rising to $10 per click from previously under-$1 clicks. This has completely wiped out some people’s profits, and they’ve had to cancel campaigns.

Talk has it that the most affected people were thin affiliate sites, PPC arbitrage sites (paying low AdWords bids to earn high AdSense income on MFAs), and signup sites that only capture your details without giving much information away first.

The theory is that Google is concerned about the quality of landing sites, and wants to improve the search experience.

Some have reported success by purchasing new domain names and redirecting them to the old site, and improving the landing page to add more relevant content. Good old SE optimisation strikes again.

A good summary is available from Affiliate Classroom.

http://www.strategicprofits.com/2006/07/19/video/

If you only watch one business seminar this year, make it this one by Rich Schefren. It’s free. It’s fun, insightful, and cuts through the crap. About how to have a real business, and not a job that owns you. One of the few times I actually watched a video to the end.

One way I earn money is by building niche websites with affiliate links on them. I only have a few, as I lovingly hand-craft them, do all the research myself, look for affiliate companies and update the content and links manually. They earn additional income from Adsense ads placed on them.

And an increasingly large number of affiliate income earners laugh at this approach. Most of the big earners online have hundreds (or thousands) of sites, automatically created by software, that churn out MFA (made-for-Adsense) sites on a daily basis. They use cheap hosting, cheap domain names, lots of subdomain names (so they don’t have to buy more domain names), automatically place articles and RSS feeds on the sites for content. The more advanced software programs also let you automatically refresh the content by rotating or changing the articles and RSS feeds, so it looks like your site is constantly being updated.ÂÂ

Search engines like lots of fresh content, so this enhances your chance of being indexed on search engines. And even if these sites make $1/day, with a hundred sites, that starts adding up.

The big news is that Matt Callen has made a FREE version of his cutom-built Virtual Real Estate software available. Yes, for free, you can download his program that lets you easily create content affiliate websites.

I really like Matt Callens stuff. His brother is Brad Callen, creator of the excellent  SEO Elite, which I use the most for finding and tracking link exchanges, Keyword Elite, and I’ve bought most of his programs, and subscribe to his email series, on optimising websites for search engines. I do have to say most of it is logical, if you’ve done any kind of reading about search engines, but Brad does a stupendous job of marketing and presenting information in a very clear fashion. I even bought his UltimateWeightLoss ebook, which was also impressive. Brad has used Matt in creating his software.

So grab a copy of Virtual Real Estate . For Free.