This is a sponsored post that I am doing for a good friend of mine, Michael Dunlop. Therefore, my views are going to be completely biased… just kidding of course.

There’s a new webmaster resource website in town for anyone who owns a blog or website and wants to kick things up a notch. You could be a complete amateur trying to figure out how to start up a website or a seasoned professional looking to add some nice design touches, either way you are going to find the tips at Web Design Development to be quite helpful.

It can be tough to get your feet wet in an industry where people often expect you to know this or that. Michael’s new web design site will teach you everything from how to create a blog, to cool photoshop techniques, to manipulating the images for your website. Coming from the author of RetireAt21.com, you know that you’ll be getting quality information at a pace you can understand. With a great webmaster forum in place to learn from the best and a brand new web directory that can give your websites some added exposure, there are ton’s of tools made available for your use absolutely free. This might be the start of something big!

Web Design & Development Homepage
Perhaps the focal point of this webmaster resource is the main website where all of the tutorials are stored. This is a lot like a blog format, but everything is written as a tutorial. Because of this, things seem to be really clear-cut and every post has something new to offer. One of my favorite articles is about creating and monetizing your first blog. You are basically getting everything instructional that you would in a blog, but sparing the formalities so you really just get what you want without any playful distractions, which can be very nice.

I feel like the bulk of this website is devoted to Photoshop tutorials, which is honestly a bit of a poor choice in my view. With all of the Photoshop tutorial websites around the internet, it’s going to be hard for Michael to compete unless he starts to shift focus back to creating and developing websites. However, the tutorials are colorful and well explained. If you are a beginner/intermediate Photoshop user, you’ll love all of the creative tips that are there for your to use. Great Photoshop tutorials that have been selected especially for websites in our niche.

The Web Design Dev Forums
If there is one thing that I believe Michael can do well, it is making forums that encourage participation among users. With over 100 members already, the webmaster forums are decently populated as is, and are only going to grow outward into the future. If you are a beginner in designing websites or blogs and you need some help with what you are doing, why not register on the forums and post your problem? The people here are very knowledgeable and will answer your questions in a heartbeat.

I guess I might be a sucker for a well run forum, but this is definitely a promising start. Sure, there isn’t a whole lot of discussion like on a more popular website like Digital Point of Bloggeries, but if you can get in on a newer forum from the get-go… being an original member of a popular forum has its perks, so check it out!

Web Directory at Web Design Dev
If you know about website optimization, you probably realize how beneficial it can be to submit your blog or websites URL address and information to lots of web directories. This one just happens to be brand new and is accepting all free links for a limited time. As an established Pagerank 4 website, you are going to get a valued PR 4 link back to your website just by submitting… it takes only a few seconds! Heck, I’ve done it.

I know that a lot of you were upset about the recent Google Pagerank update, well Michael has organized a brand new web directory that could be an essential step one to boosting your numbers. This is a pretty elite directory, so get in before the rates are raised. Simply click here to submit a link for approval now!

Sign Up To Their Free Newsletter!
The best way to keep in touch with any website is to subscribe to their RSS feed or newsletter to get updates in your inbox every morning. This is an especially valuable tool for the new WebDesignDev.com, and on each of Michael’s past blogs he has been generous in giving out prizes left and right to active readers. Because of this and the valuable (& simple) tips, it’s going to be a big benefit for any aspiring web developers looking to jazz things up. Why not sign up for the free newsletter or RSS feed and try things out for yourself?

Bottom Line: Web Design Development is a brand new webmaster website that has a lot of tips so far that can help you advance your web presence and learn some neat tricks. Granted, this blog/website is very new so it’s going to take awhile before there is a sizable amount of information on the blog or forum… but there has already been a solid amount of information published that can really help you out. Check it out today!

-Jimvesting

One question I have been asked time and time again is “how do you use images in your blog posts?” More specifically, readers are talking about the unique way that my articles look and feel with images inserted professionally in all the right places. It’s really little more than a clever web design trick, but having your images styled to fit with the rest of your articles can be a major catalyst for your blog’s popularity.

The video above outlines the entire method with a helpful screen display that walks you through the process I go through every time I slip images into my blog posts. I’ve discussed before a more general guide on how to effectively use images in your blog posts, but I feel like you guys are looking for something more specific to this blog. Therefore, the video above goes through step-by-step to show you exactly how I style images and add them to all my articles.

I like to back all my videos up with a post just as normal as any other, so let’s discuss right now Jimvesting’s Blog Post Image Method for getting all of your articles styled to perfection. Using images effectively will increase your traffic and popularity over time simply because people like to be entertained, and images are the number one way to add a unique touch to everything you do. Better yet, they make things easier to read… which encourages people to stick around!

Understanding What Images Work For You
One thing that many bloggers do incorrectly is use images that obviously clash with their overall designs. What do I mean by this? Well in my case, everything is drawn and animated. I’m not using any “real” photos of people or things anywhere on my blog, so I shouldn’t be using them in my blog posts. To fit with my theme, I am going to be using the type of “cartoony” or “hand-drawn” graphics to maximize my style. This could be the most important tip for many of you, as finding images that naturally match the overall feel of your blog should always be square one.

Grabbing Images That “Fit”
Once you have the general concept down on what kind of image you are looking for exactly, we need to actually go out and get a copy, right? My three favorite services for getting stock images are: iStockPhoto.com, Google Images and Stock.XChnge. Of course, iStockPhoto images do cost a few dollars a piece to purchase. However, I have found that these images are far superior to anything you’ll find for free, and you can use them over and over again (as I do) in order to make the purchase worth your while. If you are looking for a 100% free I would recommend simply messing around with images from Google Image Search.

Format the Images to Your Blog’s Content Style
Once you have the images you are going to use, the most important step is to get them cut down and optimized to flow with the rest of your article. Here are the general tips that I use in editing photos to get them looking their best!

1. Use a professional image editor like Photoshop!
It is really important to use a professional image editor so that everything can be edited to perfection and later optimized to cut down on your blog’s loading time. This is a prime reason why you should be using more than just MS Paint!

2. Make sure the image background matches your content area!
In other words, whatever background is under the normal text of any article you put out should match the image’s background. My background is white, so all of my images are going to have a white background (#FFFFFF, not something “close” to white). This ensures that the images don’t distract, but still offer some eye candy.

3. Resize Your Images to Fit Your Articles
Take note of how big the content area is that you will be posting in. For me, it’s somewhere around 500 pixels. Because of this, I never want to go more than 1/2 the size of the total text area for ANY image that I use. I typically choose to resize all my images to somewhere between 200 and 250 pixels. Unless you are planning on using a separate line for your images (if it’s just too big), things need to be no more than half your total content space.

4. Save as Optimized .jpg, .png or .gif
JPG, PNG and GIF are the three primary ways to save images simply because they look good and aren’t too big. I personally use JPG images because they are the smallest in size for what I use. What’s more, you can typically get away with just 60% quality since you aren’t going for high definition necessarily. Optimize images to cut down your blog’s loading time, and you’ll have satisfied readers!

Upload Your Image to the Internet
An obvious step, but I felt that I should address it nonetheless. A lot of bloggers just use images from Google or other websites and have links to the images on someone else’s server. I recommend just saving your own copy (if legal) on your web server so you can be sure that it won’t be down next week. A lot of these websites are offline within weeks of you seeing them, so you don’t want to run the risk that things will be offline. If you don’t want to use too much of your own bandwidth by hosting all of your images, you can simply use a service like ImageShack to host them for you for free.

Insert and Align Your Image with Spacing
The sad part about most blog articles is that people work hard to format their own images, and then just throw them in their posts without a care in the world. This strategy can completely dismantle the appearance of your posts, so you need to be formatting everything correctly to make most effective use of your images.

One thing I ALWAYS do is add a protective 10px horizontal spacing between my images and my text. You can accomplish this in the “appearance” tab of your WordPress WYSIWYG Image Editor. This makes sure that the text doesn’t bump against your image, which always looks sloppy.

Assuming that you have your image all formatted ready to go, one last step is to align either left or right to make sure that your text wraps around it properly. Of course, if you image is too big, I would center the whole thing and put it on its own individual line. Otherwise, things need to be to one side or the other if you want to rack up the most style points possible.

Bottom Line: Using Images In your posts is one of the most essential steps to ensure that you gain popularity as a blogger. Blogs that fail to put images in each article are going to find gaining subscribers so be a bit harder, as readers generally see blogging as an escape from reading through news. People want information that is fun to read, so using your images in a way that optimizes your content can really boost traffic and returning visitors.

-Jimvesting

I’ve had tons of people come to me and ask simply “how can I make money online?” A simple question at first, there are literally hundreds of answers. Most typically, I will first suggest to them that using a get paid to (GPT) website might be the best option.

First things first, anyone telling you that GPTs are a waste of time is on a high horse and doesn’t understand that not everyone has a network of friends to leverage, the know-how to start an ad campaign or the time to create their own blog. Using an incentivized GPT website allows you to have a reliable secondary income stream. You can make money when you want, and be paid for the time you put into it. I’m here today to show you the best way to maximize your gains and minimize the time that you spend working!

What is a Get-Paid-To (GPT) Program?
Much like a lot of internet marketers go out and start up ad campaigns, some websites compile systems where you can simply complete the ads yourself and get paid! The basic idea here is as follows: advertisers pay for leads and trial product members; the money goes to the GPT website gets divided up and kicked back to the member who completed the offer. Understandably, “good” GPTs pay out most of the money that advertisers give them… bad ones horde all the cash for themselves. At any rate, you are getting paid and making money with your spare time.

But Why Not Just Do It Yourself?
Let’s not get carried away here, completing offers yourself using your own affiliate network program is fraud. Don’t do it! GPT websites run off the basis that some advertisers allow “incentivized” offers. In other words, they allow you to pay other people to complete them. A lot of advertisers really only want people to get leads or to sign up for trial offers, and will pay based on that alone.

What’s great about having a GPT website is that you get all the customer support you can handle, and you get your own member area where you can track how much you’ve earned, what offers are completed, what offers are still pending, your bonus earnings and more! They make it very easy, and typically offer creative bonuses along with the offers they pay you for. Many utilize a credit-based system, so that the more offers you complete, the more points you have to cash in for free prizes and the like. Best of all… you don’t need to mess around with any affiliate networks, they provide all the latest offers and incentives for you!

Jimvesting’s Top Five GPT Websites That PAY!
Truth be told, there are a good number of scams out there. Meaning GPT websites that won’t pay you, GPT websites that pay half their members or simply websites that take 90% of the profits. You can check out my Approved GPT list for those websites that won’t rip you off… and here are my top five in order:

1. Swat Cash
2. Cash Crate
3. Treasure Trooper
4. Fusion Cash
5. This Site Is For Real

You shouldn’t be using a website that isn’t approved here first, it simply isn’t worth wasting your time as I am already aware of nearly all legitimate GPT programs. I recommend sticking with the top three because of their extensive bonus programs which are actually a lot of fun!

How Much Money Can You Actually Make?
Many people scoff at get-paid-to services, claiming that the money isn’t worth the time. I beg to differ. If you are doing things correctly, the cash flow can be outstanding! Just a quick example, my next check from SWATcash is going to come in just under $1,900 for the month… yes one month, and I’ll have the check to prove it. This isn’t typical; however, it is more than possible to achieve earnings in excess of $10/hour on a consistent basis (will be more at first)… which is a nice secondary salary to compliment your overall household income.

Three Steps to Maximize Your GPT Efforts
There are certain ways to go about the offer completing profit that can really boost your earnings and cut down on dead time. The following are some neat tricks and tips that you should follow when you sign up to your go-to GPT websites before you start.

1. Register Multiple Email Addresses
Lots of offers that you will be completing work off of the basis of emails to store data on who has and hasn’t completed an offer. Therefore, you can use multiple email addresses both to protect yourself from spam advertisements and to ensure that more offers that you complete give you the credit you deserve!

2. Buy a PrePaid Debit Card
There’s no secret about it, you can literally be making upwards of $20/hour with relative ease if you are completing offers with credit cards required. Typically, these are trial offers… so you just need to cancel your subscription before the trial period expires and you will make a bundle. Buy a prepaid Visa from Simon.com or another provider, and you will limit your downside and eliminate the potential credit rating hit. Basically, these trial offers operate on the presumption that most people forget to cancel their membership, and they charge you an excessive amount if this happens to you. So make sure that you cancel after the offer credits to your account, and you’ll be making 2-3 times more than your would be if you did only free offers.

3. Don’t Overkill It!
Lots of people that are new to the GPT industry log into their accounts and start completing the 100% free $0.50 or $1.00 offers like clockwork. This will work for the first few days, but will eventually get your IP address and mailing information blacklisted from servers.. which means you’ll have a harder time getting offers to credit. Instead, you should complete just 2-3 offers per research company per day.

If you have done a few offers, you’ll soon notice that a lot of them are run through the same company (like “myrewards.com” or “offercentral.com”). These guys aren’t fools, and they’ll pick up on your attempts if you are completing 10 offers at a time through their website. So play nice, and hop around from network to network to keep your offers approving.

Bottom Line: By applying for and completing offers on a GPT website, you really can make money online. This is really becoming the “everyday man’s” technique at making an extra buck on the internet. While it’s definitely not the most profitable, it’s something that everyone can do with confidence to make a nice additional income. So if you are looking to purchase some extra web hosting, a shiny new watch or even pay off some debt, a  well paying get-paid-to program might just be what you are looking for!

-Jimvesting

Hope you all had a good week,

This has definitely been an exciting week all around. With a great session of Q&A here at Jimvesting where I gave out two free text links to the best question-askers of the day, the launch of my latest blogging masterpiece Bullish Bankers, and a “surprise” Google Pagerank update… there has certainly been a lot to talk about here.

I managed to rack up a massive 40 comments on the latest post about Pagerank. Proving once again the power of link love. My strategy was essentially to spam the blogosphere by making a huge list and linking each blog individually. Some would say that this is Pagerank suicide, but my PR 4 doesn’t seem to mind. Regardless, you can always get comments, traffic and exposure if you spread the love around! On that note, let’s hit on the best posts for the week ending July 26th 2008.

• Garry Conn – What Is A Viral Video?
• The Blog Entrepreneur – Quit Wasting Your Time With Directories
• Blog About Your Blog – Why Newsletters Are The Next Big Thing
• Zac Johnson – Affiliate Network Offer Sharing and Cutting Margins
• Stephan Miller – The Ultimate DoFollow Blog List

First and foremost, I promised Garry a link due to me skipping him on my PR post (hey man, your blog was down I swear!). Great article there about viral videos, which are always fun. Also, I was really impressed with Stephan Millar’s massive post about dofollow blogs. Those are those websites that get you a nice backlink every time you leave a comment, so I’d recommend checking that list out!

Stock Market
A ho-hum week in the stock market, with things closing out the Dow down 1.1% on a relatively steady week. Sentiment was flip-flopping all day, but some bad reports on housing along with some disappointing earnings misses from the likes of Boeing and Ford had things in a slump. I’m quietly pleased with the way things are coming along, as my core holdings Deere (NYSE: DE) and Apple (NYSE: AAPL) had some pretty good gains to speak of.

Despite all of the negativity, I do believe there are many areas for growth rearing their heads, namely in healthcare, tech and agriculture. Energy is kind of on standby as we wait for a more clear image of how earnings are coming along with oil dropping off to $124/barrel this week. Precious metals like gold and silver were down as well, which really puts me in a position where I feel like opening my arms to the likes of Yamana Gold (NYSE: AUY) and Freeport-McMoRan (NYSE: FCX). Healthcare is rocking everyone’s socks off right now with one of my favorite growth plays Intuitive Surgical (NYSE: ISRG) absolutely blowing away estimates late into the week.

If you need some investing help or want me to review your portfolio, please leave a comment or email me directly. I’d love to talk stocks and will definitely be more than willing to offer some suggestions.

Blogosphere

Again, most of the mindless rambling this week was centered around Pagerank updates, which definitely wiped away whatever anyone else happened to be talking about. The Top Affiliate Challenge completely died, which is probably why we haven’t heard much more from them. Also, not a lot of talk about the Blogging Idol competition, though people are apparently still duking it out for first place. At least I sucessfully got a cheater disqualified…. rant posts aren’t all that useless after all I suppose?

Jimvesting’s July Referral Extravaganza is still in play until the end of the month. There haven’t been a whole lot of entries, so if you want a free Flip Mino Camera… it’s going to be pretty easy to get one if you refer your friends, eh? We’re waiting for someone to step up and get people to subscribe to my blog through the official request form found on the contest page. It’s an easy way to win a $200 camera courtesy of Jimvesting dot com and Market Leverage, so get on it!

The Week In Focus
This week is going to be boring so don’t bother coming by this blog….

Actually, in all seriousness, I’ve got a lot planned in the way of posting for this week. I’m trying to have you guys making money on the internet, so I plan on posting another lesson/technique that can make you hundreds… stay tuned for that. In addition, I’m fed up with the naysayers of the GPT industry, so I plan on releasing a post explaining for the last time why it is indeed a great way to make money on the internet. I’m in the giving mood, so perhaps I’ll give out a prize this week randomly as well too? I’ve hit a growth of over 100 subscribers in July already, so you guys have certainly done your part to make Jimvesting a success… time to return the favor!

-Jimvesting

As many of you have probably heard by this point in time, the Q2 2008 Google Pagerank update has just concluded. Every few months, Google re-evaluates every website on the internet and places rankings on some of the best sites available. This ranking metric is very important for blogs for many reasons, including reader participation, advertising rates and industry reputation.

Don’t believe what you hear, Google Pagerank isn’t as worthless as people (with bad rankings) try to point out. The bottom line is that sometimes, the rankings are unjustifiably high or low. However, for the most part Google does a fantastic job presenting accurate representations of website popularity. Jimvesting.com held it’s PageRank 4 designation, which I believe is a 100% accurate rating for the time being based on statistics, quality and traffic. Despite the fact that I would prefer a PR 5 (wouldn’t we all), it’s important to look objectively at things to see what you are really worth in the eyes of a third party.

Jimvesting’s Pagerank “Fair Value” Rankings
Because of the constant ranting on how “unfair” Google’s Pagerank service is, I decided to pull generously from my RSS reader to see how other blogs in the “make money online” niche fared on the updating process. Below, you will find a list of 55 blogs, their new Pagerank as of July 26th 2008, and their Jimvesting “Fair Value” ranking.

Q2 2008 Jimvesting’s “Fair Value” Pagerank Analysis

The Results
Google often gets bad press on the Pagerank process, but I believe that a lot of this criticism is undeserved. As the results show, a lot of the blogs that represent the “make money online” niche are either appropriately valued or downright overvalued… getting more than they statistically deserve in my opinion.

• Appropriately Valued: 51% of blogs
• Overvalued: 12.7% of blogs
• Undervalued: 36.3% of blogs

I was overly critical of Pageranks in my own analysis, so most will actually find more than 51% of blogs to be accurately represented by the recent Pagerank update. At any rate, a clear majority (63.7%) should have no cause for concern, but it is the rough one-third of blogs that is publishing the negative press that we have all come to know and love.

The Verdict
Google does in fact to an impressive job in accurately portraying a website’s overall popularity and traffic strength. Many webmasters feel that they deserve better rankings, but lack the link juice from upper-tier blogs to get them the reputation that they need to obtain higher rankings. Furthermore, many “undervalued” blogs simply haven’t been around enough for Google to honestly justify a high PR for the website.

Bottom Line: Hopefully, this sample pool of websites is large enough to get an accurate representation of the Google Pagerank process… as I feel it does. All this weekend, be prepared to hear all of the Pagerank “horror stories” that are out there. Just don’t forget that many bloggers post on impulse rather than rationality, and this case study clearly favors Google as the results lean toward appropriate or generous valuations. Sure, there are a few websites that Google has totally botched… but you need to expect that to happen if they are analyzing so many pages!

-Jimvesting