Buzvia Blog

The easiest way of generating income on the net is to not spend it in the first place! The internet is full of fantastic programs that make your job as a webmaster or site administrator easier and more profitable, here are a few tools that may be of interest to you.

Free Web Thumbnails

One of the features that our second phase of buzvia will have is site thumbnails and the system we chose was thumbshots.org. Alexa offers a similar service at a rate of 20 cents per thousand thumbnail returned but these guys offer it for nothing! Sure, the thumbnail is smaller but they offer a fantastic upgrade path their their parent company thumbshots.com at only 9$/month! If you have a popular site, thumbnails are a cool feature but eat-up precious bandwidth and server power, avoid these costs as long as you can or better yet, sub-contract this process entirely!

Free Site Statistics

I have been using Google Analytics for years now, it provides an easy, at a glance look at general traffic patterns and if you want, in-depth view of many other important things. It is actually the reason why I thought of buzvia, I like Analytics but I wanted a system that I could pick and choose exactly which links where going to and from with the same “at a glance” functionality. If you haven’t tried Google Analytics you are missing out on a critical piece of the web puzzle that your site is made of.

Free Spying Tool

Every website, no matter how original or remote, has a competitor fighting for (your) market share. What is a poor webmaster to do? Well, find out some of their traffic information! There are a number of tools to accomplish this but here is a short list that I use. The oldest out there is Alexa and DomainTools.com, they provide general traffic information that is valuable for establishing benchmarks. Another interesting system that I found out looking at my own stats (yes, this stuff can be used by your competitors as well to find out info about you) is KeywordSpy which basically tells you keywords competitor’s clients are using to find their site and if they participate in any “pay per click or action” advertising mechanisms. I can tell you that comparing my own stats to those generated by KeywordSpy that they are completely inacurate but this is interesting information regardless.

Free Site Promotion

As phase II of buzvia.com is nearing, I have to plug my own system! If you want to find out specifically which urls people click to get to your site or the ones that they leave to, you need to try this free system out! We have a number of fantastic goodies coming out with phase II and I guarantee you will find this site invaluable in helping you win the monetizing game that is the internet.

The Bottom Line

Cheap is good but free is better!

Buzvia: thumbshots.org, thumbshots.com, Google Analytics, Alexa, DomainTools.com, KeywordSpy, Buzvia.com

With no lack of competition out there to serve as a monetization system for bloggers and large portals… you have to wonder what the point of ReviewMe is?

ReviewMe.com: Background Information

ReviewMe.com is part of the larger MediaWhiz group of companies which includes mystical systems such as Filinet.com, Coregistrations.com and Monetizeit.net. What I find most telling, and this re-enforces why ReviewMe.com sucks so much, is that it isn’t listed as one of the systems on their corporate site; I can’t find it under either the advertiser or publisher sub-menus.

ReviewMe.com: How it’s suppose to work

ReviewMe.com is essentially a system where advertisers publish a campaign specific to a particular category and then publishers jump on to write something up in return for compensation. Publishers are also encouraged to stick an advertising saying that if somebody wants to have an article published about them, they need to give them some money through the ReviewMe.com network. I am not against publishers making money but ReviewMe.com just doesn’t make sense to me on many levels.

ReviewMe.com: The Problems

The ReviewMe.com interface is an absolute mess, for example, if you click on “my account” and instead of being shown your account information, you are sent back to the account home page; if I am a blogger, I should automatically go to the “Edit User Account”. There is also NOTHING in campaigns, you would think a system that prides itself in creating a marketplace for advertisers and publishers alike would have something. Nope, apparently even a history of past campaigns isn’t worth showing on this site. I have been a member for about a week now, I got one “request for a campaign” but when I got there, there was nothing. So, from my experience with ReviewMe.com, I can tell you that it has -0- advertisers and seems to rely on individual publishers to generate leads for the group.

ReviewMe.com: The Good

I guess the one saving grace of ReviewMe.com is that it doesn’t cost anything for publishers to join. If you are an advertiser, I don’t see the point of using this system, there are so many other, well established systems out there to get the word out.

ReviewMe.com: The Competition

The first and foremost company that comes to mind is PayPerPost.com. For all the negative feedback PayPerPost.com gets, they excel in user interface design, have a great publishers and advertisers network. PayPerPost.com is to a rich uncle what ReviewMe.com is to a backward hillbilly.

ReviewMe.com: The Final Verdict

I have one question for ReviewMe.com. What is the value of an ad network to publishers when you have no advertisers?

The Bottom Line

The lack of attention to details is what causes many companies to loose market share.

Buzvia: ReviewMe.com, Filinet.com, Coregistrations.com, Monetizeit.net, PayPerPost.com