I am a big fan of those them-specific magazines and for years now I have been using Zinio Reader in order to read my favourite ones. A lot of them are not available globally and that’s yet another reason to choose the digital ones.

For those of you who have not used Zinio – this is the digital issues  reader used by all larger magazines and newspapers. It allows subscription at far lower price than the one at the cover and the digital issues are created by the publishing houses themselves. The content  is the same, as other extras are included, too.

The new initiative of Zinio is called Go Read Green. The reader offers free One year digital subscription for a magazine of choice,  as the idea is to save paper ad thus save the nature (by not killing trees). I must admit, that in the offerings list I was not able to find even 1/3 of my favourite magazines, yest I am sure that everyone will find one to his/hers liking. Try them and tell me here if you are pleased by the magazine. Who knows, you may be the next one paying for digital subscriptions.

This week we had a lot of internal updates which you can’t see right now. Many from them will be available to you as well a bit later (IU changes, new service types etc). Most visible highlight was new blog design which you can see obviously.

In addition you can now test multi-country services as well. If you are using SMS-pay in several countries you can just select the country name from drop-down menu and test the service in every country separately.

And then a small thing actually but a lot of people have been asking that lately. We added 2€ price point to Romania.

We are glad to present you the new blog design. We didn’t change a lot, you can call it as cosmetic improvement or facelift. Now it is more like web 2.0 as it should be

This is a feature you have been asking for, you can see visual graphs and get a great picture how many messages a day your service gets. Change the time frame of the charts, analyze campaigns and your user’s habits and get a clear picture about the activities all the time. The best part is that new features (get a visual overview about all the services you have ) will be added shortly.

Other new features

Things keeping us busy

Affiliate systems could have different forms but generally speaking it is pretty similar to AdSence. The biggest difference is that you’ll get paid per action. Well if we are looking what happens in PPC world then all the bigger players are using PPA form as well. Why? We all want to be effective and pay only for the valuable traffic, especially in todays economical climate. So it seems to be the most reasonable form for both sides. And yes, this is the part where affiliate systems are coming in.

One is clear internet ads (AdSense for instance) do not bring $ right away, the same thing is with affiliate systems. The main reason is that the blog/website owner do not know all the aspects he/she should consider. The thing is that you are very lucky if you just put up an ad and will start earning a lot. In real life you would have to do some activities and it will take few months before AdSense or affiliate systems will start bringing money in.

Here are small things that could help you:

1. Define who is the target group
At first you should know who is the target group of that ad, what are the benefits they are getting etc. It you have made it clear then you are able to move to the next phase (what is the trigger and ad optimization).

2. Know what triggers the target group
So what is the hook or the cookie which brings clicks and eventually money? In todays world where we have so many ads and other flashy stuff it is important to be short and simple. So find out what is the key benefit the site visitors could get from the affiliate system you are promoting.

3. Optimize the ads
When you know what triggers people it is time to see what works and what isn’t. With flash banners it is difficult, but with text it is easy. Try different text variations and different places, measure the results and concentrate on best deforming ones. BTW in some cases it is great to divide your visitors into different groups and send them different messages.

When you can use your affiliate code (not only flash or text ads) you can also expand the medium possibilities. Try Twitter, social networks, IM mood messages, forums, blog commenting – these things can bring great results. Only thing is, find the right target group and message.

4. Bring additional traffic to your blog/website
If you are having a blog or a website then the last step would be to get additional traffic to the site, basically to bring more relative traffic who will turn it into money. How to do it? Become an expert- write about the topics that will interest those people. Register yourself to online directories, write about relative topics, create few forum posts and link them to your blog posts (the post has to have added value) and you can see the results after some time.

All in all, you don’t have to do much to become a good affiliator, but you have to be consistent. So why don’t you start today

Nearly a month after the previous story that we shared with you it’s time for a new interview.It is with Nikolai Presolski. His project is the http://napravisigrad.com/ game( in translation from Bulgarian – Create your City). The site is in Bulgarian, but if you’re interested in joining it – let us know by commenting here and encouraging the creator to implement the EN translation. Here is what he says:

My site http://napravisigrad.com is an entertainment one, where the users create their own city, that is developing when people invite relatives and friends of theirs to visit and click. In this way the city progress and reach tremendous sizes.

The idea is that the user can create something on his own, even though virtual, to care about it and to be pleased with the final results achieved.

While creating and testing the site I was building a city of my own, too and was thinking of how to make it even more interesting for the people Read the rest of this entry »

We have been lately getting really positive feedback from Malaysia where we launched month ago. And I just wanted to share customer feedback with you, since it is great to see we can help so many people to do their business.

Its quite a creative concept and I’m trying to get my hands on it for learning new things, and plenty more info to know about Content Provider.

Fortumo blows my mind, and it is the first I’ve ever seen of its kind. Nice work!