I admit that I’m so far off when it comes to social networking sites — I just can’t keep up. So you can’t imagine how crazy I went when, while in my mood to listen to David Foster’s songs, I searched and found a site that’s not only a social networking site, but also a music sharing portal!

Imeem! (I can already hear the guffaws coming out of most of you)

If you haven’t heard of the site, though, then I sympathize with you and understand your plight.

Anyways, the site is filled with all sorts of music you can imagine. You build your playlists from the assortment of songs already in there, then share it out with others in your network. The streamed songs are amazingly fast, and extra options such as linking to your Twitter status makes Imeem fun to use.

But if you just want to download some MP3s, MP3Raid is the place to go. You have the option to purchase and download full albums for darn cheap prices, going for as low as 90 US cents per album. I think that’s an awesome deal. They even accept PayPal, which is very convenient for me and I’m sure is for you, too.

Do you have any free music sites that you know and would like to share with me (the legal ones of course)?

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Before I go further, I’d just like to show off to you a pathetic snapshot of my first ever AdSense cheque which I’ve received earlier this month (and a wonderful New Year’s surprise it was!).

I was in a rush preparing for my son’s first day of school for the year, and only managed to take this picture while I was driving to the bank to cash it out. It takes a month for that US$124.15  cheque to clear. Why not use Western Union? That is a story for another day. Anyway, I’ll be getting another cheque at the end of February just from that one arts and crafts site I mentioned and yet to reveal.

Apart from paid posts and playing forex, making money online takes hard work, action, and patience. I’ve bought e-books and implemented the advice of  many Internet guru programs, both locally (in Malaysia) and internationally, that promise you to make money online, and I ended up getting frustrated each time. As many have claimed, they are mostly crap. More annoying is the fact that, at one point, I bought some e-book on profit blogger from one of those Malaysian Internet marketing “experts”, only to find out that I actually knew all the techniques he pointed out during my first month of blogging. What a bunch of bull.

Luckily, my early days of blogging introduced me to RT at Untwisted Vortex (who also happens to be one of the first people to comment on my blog), who, through his many posts, introduced me to two most invaluable web sites on making money online. Best of all, they’re totally free!

I based my niche site development through the advice I get from Court Tuttle’s Internet Marketing School and his new site called The Keyword Academy (co-run by Mark Butler). Due to their advice, I was able to increase search engine visitors to my web sites triple-fold. I started using Court’s techniques since late August 2008, and my traffic at that time was 900 unique visits a month. By end of November that year, traffic surged to around 3,000 uniques a month, and as of January 2009 is now close to 6,000. More importantly, my visit-to-clicks conversion for my ads are steadily improving. I realize I was in a low-paying niche, but it doesn’t stop me from getting that $1.50/day AdSense earning (and it continues to increase — imagine if I had 20 of those sites…). You need to subscribe to Court’s two sites right now, as he and Mark are currently releasing a series of very critical posts on how to improve keyword content on your sites. One of his recent posts featured a demo web site which you can follow exactly to the dot for your next niche site.

The other site I refer to for specific AdSense advice is Grizzly’s How To Make Money Online For Beginners. Don’t let the blog title and fugly design fool you — no matter how seasoned you are in AdSense, you’ll always benefit from Grizzly’s insights on making money with AdSense and other programs and methods. He continually convinced me that we should be chasing organic (a.k.a. search engine) traffic instead of social traffic if we’re seriously into the making money online business. One of his recent eye-opening advices is that you may make more money by not posting. It makes sense, and this seems to be true for my case. My subscribers have jumped more than triple in the last couple of months, mostly obtained through organic traffic, and 80% subscribed via e-mail (the rest are RSS aggregators and search engine updaters). I only spend one hour a week updating my niche site, posting 3 original content at the most per update. Yet, by doing so, I still get more search engine visits every day. The nice thing about it is that even during my month-long hiatus in December, traffic is constantly increasing without me updating the site. Chasing organic traffic also helped me increase my ads earning from Chitika, AdBrite, and shockingly, Amazon.com! I’m not eligible for eBay affiliate for some reason, but I’ll keep trying to apply until I get it. I’d hazard a guess that revenue from eBay could burst through the roof In any case, enjoy Grizz’s long and valuable posts, and for those who’d like to get started making money online, he has a set of tutorials for you to refer to. Just scroll down the navigation bar on the right until you see the sections called “Make Money Blogging” and “AdSense Lessons”.

I’m checking out another program to see its effectiveness, but I’m taking my time on this fella. I’m going to work full-time starting next week, so I’m sure there’s a lot of things going on for me soon.

Besides, I’m starting two more blogs. Yeah, can you believe it? As if I’m not busy enough with my 30 other blogs! WebGrrrl.net (this site) will focus more on technology, the Internet and WordPress. Blogging Fu is going to be my space for exposing my techniques on how I actually update my 30+ blogs, as well as tutorials on how to start a blog. Lastly, Looking For Niches is a site that tells you how I go about researching and making money from my niche sites, as well as the tools I used to do my research. Both Blogging Fu and Looking For Niches will be launched as early as mid-Feb, so stay tuned!

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Here is another site I’ve dug up as a result of my bloghopping. Months ago, Online Tech Tips mentioned about IconFinder, a search engine that does what it says it does — find icons. And, surprisingly, after months since I last visited it, the engine is still in beta. Will they ever move to a stable version? Nonetheless, the free icons you can find there are very impressive in terms of its design and quality. I like the fact that for every icon listed, you also have the option to download that icon in different sizes, just ready for you to select. The engine also allows any user to add tags to the icons to improve its meta info.

The best feature of IconFinder, as pointed out by Online Tech Tips, is the fact that while you enter your keywords into its search form, IconFinder immediately provides you with other suggested keywords related to your search. This list appears right below the search text box, and makes it convenient for you to click on those words if you’re interested in using those suggestions.

What I’d like to see in IconFinder is a way for me to find icons within the same sets, for example if I find a Home button image that I like, I would also like to get a link to other similar button images that match the Home button theme.

My browser bookmark de-cluttering resumes….

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I couldn’t believe it at first, but it’s true! Yeah, I know it’s an old game, but it’s still a simulation game, and I love simulation games! Anyhoo, I was on the lookout for more free downloadable games by Bullfrog when I stumbled onto Electronic Arts’ SimCity web site, and apparently they are letting us play the online version of SimCity Classic for free (they call it SimCity Live). The site was nice enough to include a quick start guide and in-depth instructions on how to play the game, just in case your SimCity skills are rusty.

Like any other good web sites, you will have to register first and get your e-mail account verified before you can access the game. The registration was quick and easy, and I didn’t have to give out personal information other than my full name and my e-mail address. The game itself was fast to load (at least on my computer), and a cool feature is that you can save your game! Another interesting thing is that there is a section within the SimCity site, called Waterski Challenge, which you can also play through your browser. I’ll be trying that one out later.

One bummer though, you can only use Internet Explorer to play it, so for us Mozilla-based browser lovers like Netscape Navigator and Firefox, we’ll have to give in to IE if you so desperately need to play this game.

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Either no one blogged about this, or I must have been living under a rock for not knowing about the existence of Open Source Web Design. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I have come across the site, although it never really got my attention until someone I know developed a web site using Multiflex-3, one of the amazing free web templates that are hosted in OSWD. There is a WordPress version of this template ported over, although the WP version doesn’t look as snazzy as the original.

OSWD is an excellent site for free web site templates if you are going for a business- or serious-type look.

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Update: If you’re looking to download Bullfrog games, head over to Old School PC Games.

While downloading a mobile version of The Sims 2, I suddenly went nostalgic and had the itch to play two of my favourite DOS games from 10 years ago, Theme Hospital and SimTower. You can imagine how elated I am when I found that these games are now available for download, free! I downloaded Theme Hospital from Best Old Games, and got Sim Tower from Abandonia. Both of these sites have a huge collection of popular DOS-based games way back when, like Theme Park, Final Fantasy, SimCity, Bubble Bobble, Warcraft and Civilizations — all of them were must-installs in my dearly departed Pentium MMX powered PC.

The only challenge with playing these games on newer PCs is that they may not be compatible with your sound card. I downloaded DOSBox to see whether it solves the issue, and after an amount of tweaking, I did manage to get decent sounds coming out of the game.

If you do decide on downloading the games, maybe you can do those free download sites a favour like I did. Get a couple of sponsored posts on your blog, then donate your earnings to those sites.

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