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Image Tools You're Going to Love
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Whether you love to work with images or hate the idea of having to create them, they're a powerful tool for your website. They add visual excitement to your content, they can act as a call to action, and they can be used to get more traffic from Pinterest or Facebook.
Tool #1 - The first is just a simple button generator site for call to action buttons: http://buttonoptimizer.com/. Pretty easy and self explanatory but I hadn't seen it before. (Bookmark it for now and keep reading....)
It's the second one that's a whopper for Pinterest users or anyone who wants to create images with very eye-catching modifications without a lot of hassle.
Tool #2 - If you've read any of my ebooks you know I like to use the Banner.Fotor.com site for making simple images. While searching for some tips on making collage photos that might look nice on Pinterest I found Fotor has a FREE collage tool!
Just choose one of the
pre-formatted templates, import your images, add text or "stickers" to embellish the photo and save it to your computer. The font choices are much more exciting than those in their banner tool.
If you register on the site (still free) you have access to all the templates, fonts, and stickers.
I
haven't been able to change the width and height of the templates so if I want to use one that I think isn't a good size for Pinterest I still make the collage with the tool and save it to my hard drive. Then I create a blank canvas in my own photo software in the size I want, paste the Fotor collage image onto the canvas and then add text around it OR upload that new image to the collage tool and use the Edit tab in the navigation menu to fill in the blank spaces on the
canvas.
That Edit tab allows you to do some basic adjustments to your own photos like crop, rotate, add a frame (and they have some really sleek frame options!), add/remove shadow and more.
Here's the
link: http://www.fotor.com/features/collage.html
Click the Try it Now button and play around with the tools to see how they work.
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3 Ways to Make More Money & Review Site Tip
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I have two young adult children who are in the serious "I need more money" stage of life. As in money for a car, money for dating, and money for rent/gas/insurance/cell phone bills...I know many of you have spouses, older children or significant others who
may also be looking for ways to make extra money.Following are 3 easy things you can fold into your life for more income. Two of them are perfect for you or your family members. The third is one you could use with almost any existing website that's getting traffic. 1 - Amazon Becoming the new eBay
(Review site owners - there's a tip here for you!)
I'm sure you know that Amazon sells used products but did you know YOU could sell YOUR used belongings on Amazon and
they'll handle the shipping for you? That's the ONE reason I've never ventured too far with eBay - I do not want to deal with shipping.
However, Amanda Craven has come up with a guide for beginners to use in selling stuff around your house or that you acquire from garage sales using Amazon's FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) program. I am sitting on hundreds of DVDS, games, books, toys
and clothes (many with tags still on them because a kid or two stuffed them in their closet and forget they had them until they'd literally outgrown them...).
I don't want to do a garage sale. I've put off gathering everything up and donating it to charity. I've avoided eBay because I don't want to man every single listing, take photos, and ship stuff out a piece at a
time.
But, Amanda's strategy was a forehead-slapping revelation. I don't have to do any of that if I use Amazon FBA. One shipment to get rid of all my stuff and then just some online clicks to get things listed. Photos won't even be required for most of the stuff I have because...Amazon already has photos of those things!
HAVE A REVIEW SITE? I've been starting to buy the items I'm reviewing in one of my niches so I can do hands-on reviews and stomp my competition but that leaves me with a pile of these things laying around my house when I really only need to keep one of them. Here's a way to review those products and get most of my money back...buy them, review them, and then turn
around and resell them using Amanda's strategy. (I can't believe that in all the time I've worked through how to reduce my expenses when doing hands-on reviews I never thought of this!)
Write your hands on review, take your own photos, do a video demonstration and you've got excellent UNIQUE material that will put your site miles above your competition and you can recover a share of the
money it cost to buy each product.
(I did buy it and I bought the upsell but you don't need the
upsell unless you're considering expanding into FBA full time and want a good beginner's guide.)2 - Mystery Shopping - an extra $208.50 in one weekA few weeks ago I had an opportunity to talk to fellow WarriorForum member and blogger, Leo Quinn, by phone. Leo is a financial planner
who has come up with a unique twist on helping people get out of debt and he had questions about one of my products.
Instead of telling his clients just how to cut expenses (which he knows can be painful and boring and hard to stick with) he helps people find easy things they can do to make more money as quickly as possible. I got on the phone with him and after we'd talked about
Amazon for a bit we got to talking about the things he tells his clients to do to increase their income. One method of bringing in more money that he recommends is to sign up for a select few mystery shopping apps. Mystery shopping is when you go into a store or service location, perform some sort of task (like count heads or ask questions and rate the customer service) and then get
paid for turning in your report. This stuff has been around for quite some time but smart phones and related apps have made things much easier these days.To be sure this worked Leo first did a lot of research and tested it himself. He made $208.50 his first week. He did say not
all mystery shopping apps are good ones (you'll need an iPhone or Android smart phone to access the apps) and that this is best for people who live in highly populated areas (more jobs available) but that he was able to schedule these little mystery shopping jobs in and around his errands.
He's put together a book with his recommendations for which sites to use and what kinds of mystery shopping gigs are best. He also said that if you do this you should "never have to pay for an
oil change again". Perfect for my oldest son!3 - Hold it! Amazon Has CPM Ads for
Affiliates?!Sometimes I log into my Amazon Associates account and don't even look at the messages in the middle of the screen but lately that message was hard to ignore because, for some reason, it's pushed my stats right off my computer screen to the right. The announcement says that
affiliates can now make more money by showing CPM (cost per impression) ads on their sites. CPM ads are ones where you earn a few cents just by having a visitor on your site who sees the ad. They don't have to click the ad - it just has to be shown to them. Now, I'm not sure I want to put those on my Amazon review sites and tempt my visitors away from my site with those ads in
exchange for a few cents per visitor but if you have a site that gets lots of traffic and you haven't monetized it in some other way then it might be worth giving this a try and at least getting something from each visitor.
Log into your Amazon.com Associates account and read about CPM ads here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/network/display-ads/display-ads-tnc.html(Just don't ask me how to implement them because I haven't tried - just thought you should understand more about the opportunity they're providing. They do have some instructions but you'll need
some experience putting ad code on your site.)Yes, I wrote another LONG email (I'm sorry, sorry, sorry) but I just have so much to share sometimes and so little time to get it out to you. I truly hope there was some nugget of value for everyone!
Sincerely,
Erica Stone
erica@extremereviewer.com
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