Those home workers who sell products through Amazon might be interested in the newly introduced Amazon project – Amazon Instant Website (Beta):

Build your own eCommerce Web site using Amazon Instant Website technology.

By joining the Amazon Instant Website Program, merchants selling through Amazon Seller Central can use our eCommerce technology to quickly set up their own Web site:

•    Use your Seller Central listings to create a Web site using your own URL.
•    Use the product descriptions and images you already uploaded to Amazon.
•    Customize your Web Site with your own branding and design layout.

Build your Amazon Instant Website in three simple steps:

1.    Provide basic store information – Your company name and the URL you want to use
2.    Upload your company logo and select your Web site color scheme
3.    Choose product categories and optionally cross-sell Amazon items on your site

• Quick and easy set up – easily create your own branded Web site that shows just your products.
• Powered by Amazon – your Web site is reliable, scalable, and uses proven technology solutions.
• Use the secure Amazon payments system to process your orders – no need for a separate merchant payment system.
• Leverage Amazon co-branding – because customers trust the Amazon brand for security and reliability.
• Access to proven upsell and cross-sell technology and techniques –
• Automated product recommendations that offer similar functionality to what Amazon.com uses today.
• Community features and content, such as customer reviews.
• Automated merchandising, such as top sellers.
• Leverage the work you’ve already done – use the same product descriptions and images that you’ve already added to the Amazon Web site.
• Increase your sales opportunities – collect additional commissions by selling other Amazon products on your Web site through our Increase your sales opportunities – collect additional commissions by selling through our Associates Program.

For more information, please contact your Amazon Services Sales Representative.

It is a way to expand your business and benefit from Amazon experience in online shopping. Amazon takes care (for some fee, of course) of some headaches – payment systems, shopping cart, up-sell and cross-sell technologies. Your website gets great backup and is powered by Amazon. It is a way to follow for those who were thinking about starting an online store, but did not do that in the past.

In some way, Amazon Instant Website project will compete with eBay Stores and Yahoo! Shopping. It would be interesting to follow the competition of these online giants.

[tags]Amazon Instant Website, eBay store, Yahoo! shopping, online store, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo![/tags]

Those home workers who run bogs or websites and use Google AdWords for their affiliate marketing activity are familiar with tons of spam websites that compete with them for pay-per-click placement.

Google is aware of PPC spam problem and it looks like it will fix it soon and properly. Now in addition to the bid price and click through rate to define the position of the ad Google will consider one more point – landing page. How will Google evaluate your landing page?

The AdWords system will visit and evaluate all pages specified by your ad Destination URLs. It will also follow redirect URLs. (Redirect URLs send a user to another website page without any action on the user’s part.) To fully understand the quality of your specified page, the system may follow other links on the page.

Visits from our system won’t appear as impressions or clicks in your AdWords account – so you won’t be charged for these visits. However, third-party click trackers may log our visits as user visits. We recommend that you contact your provider to learn whether this is the case.

We’ll use automated programs to determine how often the system visits advertiser sites and how many pages it visits. For tips on making your pages easy for our system to review, see our Webmaster Guidelines.

Note: Your site’s inclusion or ranking in the Google search index won’t be affected (positively or negatively) by AdWords system visits.

It is possible (but from Google point of view is not recommended – it will negatively impact your AdRank) to exclude your landing pages from AdWords visits.

Summary
Google progresses fast with spotting and eliminating new spam techniques. It is necessary to wait and see if the new technique will fight PPC spam efficiently, but in my opinion, Google will win this battle sooner or later.

[tag]affiliate marketing, google adwords, home job, work from home, home based business, blogging, pay per click, google[/tag]

Are you a blogger? Or a freelance writer? New website – LousyWriter.com – aims to help you to improve your writing skills. It is a good thing if you generate your income from writing. People do not like spam blogs and all that sort of websites.

New service has released a press release that starts with: “Stop writing junk!” It is the bold-faced statement at LousyWriter.com, a new website that helps writers and non-writers improve their writing skills. It is a free resource at LousyWriter.com

What, exactly, is “writing junk”? “Writing junk is just that: writing with misspelled words, grammatical errors, punctuation mistakes, and sloppy formatting,” says Brian Konradt, a freelance writer, who designed, crafted and created LousyWriter.com.

“The ease and informality of the Internet has made us lazy writers,” claims Konradt. “With a few taps of the keys on the keyboard, we can easily kick off a short note or letter without thinking much about content, much less formatting. Usually we think nothing about our lazy and sloppy writing in our e-mails because other people e-mail us the same type of junk all the time.”

Unfortunately, this type of thinking — that society has accepted lazy writing, especially in e-mails — has negatively affected the quality of our writing in many areas, both online and offline.

“Writing poorly adversely affects your personal life and business career,” says Konradt. “Poor writing makes you sound dumb and makes you look unprofessional. Do you really think with poor writing skills you will get a job promotion, a salary raise, or seal a multi-million dollar deal?”

Writing correctly is easy to do, according to Mr. Konradt. “We only need 2,000 different words as part of our vocabulary. We already know most of these words. We use these words in everyday conversation. Knowing simple words, where to place them, and how to use them correctly, makes us good writers.”

Writers and non-writers can use LousyWriter.com to learn how to write different forms of copy, how to use words correctly, how to write sentences, and how to communicate effectively.

The website owner – Brian Konradt. He has been a professional freelance writer for over ten years. He is founder of FreelanceWriting.com and LiteracyNews.com

I wish you good luck with your efforts to improve your writing skills. Hopefully, the described service will help you. I personally like the interface of the website: easy and intuitive to navigate. Another thing I like about it: it functions properly. It is common with new websites and services that they have a lot of bugs. But it is not the case with LousyWriter.com. Content: you will enjoy it. Easy to scan and digest.

Now you just need to spot online writing job to practise your writing skills.

[tags]freelance writing, online writing, writing skills, work from home, home job, freelancer[/tags]