On my internet travels, I came across this rather odd product. It’s called ‘Adhancer’ from adhancer.com.

Adhancer: Mail to Money?
Here’s what it does. Remember those 1,350 mails in your spam mail folder, well, this product takes those messages and cranks out HTML pages from each post. The making money twist is quite simple: it turns those emails into financial revenue by displaying ads from companies like Google AdSense, or Yahoo Publisher. Voila! Spam in your mailbox becomes dollars in your bank account!

Requirements
To do this marvel, you will need a number of things: a website and domain name with email. It runs on Unix/Linux hosting on PHP4.3.2 with mySQL 3.x and Zend Optimizer 2 as a minimum. Cron jobs would also be helpful. To make money, you’ll need an Ad Publishing company whose code you can use in the application.

Benefits and cautions
Of course, there is the risk that you will end up creating junk pages or worse ‘spam’ pages that will get you booted off the ad program you are using. Some ad vendors take spam and junk seriously. You could find your website blacklisted, your earnings gone…

However, the application could work with those newsletters and other emails that you get, a lot of stuff that you consider ‘quasi-spam’ because you can’t remember how to get off the mailing list, or even when you subscribed.

You know the stuff, you usually hit ‘spam’ when it comes in, but you remember you subscribed to it at some time. That would be a much better way to use the mails rather than let the mails sit in your spambox. And the Ad vendor wouldn’t likely consider them spam, as they are legitimate emails, newsletters, and so on. My Yahoo! mailbox is likely filled with a lot of good content for that kind of website.

What’s more interesting, though, is that almost any email could be turned into a website page this way… letters to friends, mailing lists, etc., there really is no limit. Check out the demo.

There is only one problem: the price $39.95 PER Domain. Without a discernible income source, it might be difficult to justify ponying up the initial investment. Unless you have a sure fire way. You interested to try, let me know!

Disclaimer: none, I just found this on the Internet. Thought it was interesting.

I already hinted today that I would be giving a full response to Michael Kwan’s review, and indeed here it is. For those of you reading this for the first time, I recently purchased a review of my website from Michael Kwan for $40 (during Michael’s 90% off promotion). The review has been published, and you can read the “good and bad of ‘InvestorBlogger.com’ here.”

Why get a review?
Well there are a number of reasons why having a review of your blog done is a good idea. Firstly, it allows you to get exposure on a more prominent blog or website and should drive additional traffic to your blog from the reviewer’s website. Secondly, you should experience some SEO benefit on Google’s PR system. It’s always difficult to estimate how much of a benefit you get, as the PR ranking system is always changing, the review moves off the frontpage (will it be linked to? who knows?), but this is not something that should be ignored.

Thirdly, most of us bloggers labor away in our cubicles, offices, SOHOs, or on the laptop on the kitchen table; we don’t always share what we are doing with the people around us, so having an extra ‘impartial’ set of eyes going over your blog can really help to see things differently. For me, this is the principal reason I decided to pay for a review of my own blog. That, and I couldn’t afford the $400 fee for John Chow’s website (I’d rather use that money to pay a hosting fee or upgrade to a private server).

Why Michael Kwan?
I was already familiar with Michael’s work on John Chow, and had found that his reviews were particularly thorough, detailed and insightful. It was when he offered a special promotion that I jumped to do a review on his blog. While it won’t have the same SEO/traffic benefits as one posted on John Chow, at least initially, I felt that the extra pair of eyes was going to be beneficial.

The Results?
After a couple of days, I received the review in good order, all 650 words of it, plus graphics, and numerous links throughout the text to the main page and to individual pages within the blog. It’s clear that he spent quite a lot of time on researching and writing the review. His inclusion of annotated graphics also suggests that he spent some time making the images!

Ok, one surprise was that he mentioned so many of my financial posts… I guess in my large archive, that that’s what has been most recent, esp. with the finance week that I did in August. I had always thought that I didn’t blog enough about finances and investment, but it seems he thought otherwise.

His suggestions: The Big One
Truthfully, his suggestions are absolutely spot-on. In fact, I had been considering a re-design some time in May, but we got very busy running promotions for our business, that I had to put it on a back burner until I had more time to focus on it. I guess it has been in the back of my mind for quite some time… In fact, one of my clients did a redesign in April, and introduced me to a possible designer then. I wonder why I haven’t followed up, nearly five months later….

So, at any rate, he suggests that, if I want to keep the MistyLook theme (and it’s a big ‘if’), I should really make an effort to make it ‘my own.’ He wrote: “That’s still no excuse for having such a bland and generic blog design.” And there isn’t. I still like the theme, it really makes good use of space on the blog, and doesn’t look at all crowded unlike that Bully of the Pandas… So, this is my goal, and I’ll be looking into how to create a new theme. I’m already scheming ideas in my head.

Content is important, but it’s the presentation that will draw visitors further into your site.

The other stuff, too.

Here’s my response to each one:

• Lose the Related Posts on the index page…. Yep, they’ll go. Now that you say it, it does look CROWDED. I’ll replace that with an image or something.
• Too many categories: why have Wordpress and Wordpress Classes? … I did a category count today, it’s back upto 20 categories. That is TOO many anyway, and there is unnecessary duplication, as well.
• Category names aren’t very descriptive. More Reading vs. Good Reading? … Yes, good point. And I should really fill in the text box so that mouse-overs show additional comments.
• The sidebar feels too busy for me. Drop some of the fluff. … Mm. That is harder. Perhaps I’ll lose some of the unnecessary stuff in the blogroll, remove the pages, Blogrush, and the admin panel. Other stuff can be reduced to a link, such as Alexa’s code. The rest should be shuffled. I’ll start, though, with the blogroll.
• Lack of graphics. I realize that it’s an investment blog, but a few images here and there would really break up that huge body of text. … Yes, good idea. It’s actually one of the aspects I raised when doing reviews. I usually do post some pictures, but I think I need more visual aspects. Duly noted .
• Change the byline to read Kenneth Dickson rather than kennethdickson. … Actually, I already changed that one as soon as I saw it. It now reads ‘Kenneth’, which I like.
• Hard to tell where one post ends and another begins. … Mmm… That’s a hard one. I’ll think about adding something to separate the posts … but what?

Summary
I found that the review very helpful for the things he suggested. I don’t know if it generated any traffic directly yet (Google’s analytics is refusing to load for me right now). And the SEO value is very much in the future. I’d still highly recommend this for the suggestions he gave. I’ll add the traffic reports if I can access Analytics. Thanks, Michael. Highly recommended by InvestorBlogger.com.

With so many options available for buying and selling text links, and Google looking to get into the market itself, it is the rare and brave website that enters the market! Let’s welcome TNX… (click on the picture to see the front page).

I’ve been asked to review a new text link service that is called TNX. In fact, TNX is an interesting new take on the idea of buying and selling Text Links. We’re quite familiar with Text Link Ads and Linkworth, and their methods of doing business. But TNX adds a couple of twists that make it more interesting.

Best of Both Worlds

The TNX website incorporates both publishers and advertisers into the same scheme, but it borrows some of the ideas from traffic websites, like BlogMad and BlogExplosion by incorporating several things: credits (you are provided bonus points when you initially sign up, you can earn credits, and you can buy credits) and campaigns (you can create, target, assign credits and monitor them).

As with all credits, there is a purchase price, which can vary rather than a fixed price. I’m not quite sure why and how the price will vary, but it is currently set at $1.14 per 1,000 credits. Moreover, intriguingly, there is an option to sell credits to others or back to the system. I’m not sure again why this is useful, but it looks like credits could be a mini-currency within the system. It is possible that it could be a form of payment.

Opportunities for DOSH!

It is clear though, that the site is intended to create opportunities to trade links or points. Payments are to be handled through Paypal as usual. There are additional opportunities to earn money from building your own affiliate network through TNX. In fact, their website says:

When you refer webmasters to TNX.net, you get 13.3% (as long as your account is active) of all TNX-points that are generated by their websites. In addition, you will receive 5% of all payments, made by referred advertiser.

Referrals right now are attracting additional credits of upto 7,000 credit points, and an additional 5,000 credits for each site that is approved. So it’s a good time to join up!

Installing the CODE

I have already installed the code on one of my blogs. Initially, I was surprised how long the PHP code piece I was expected to include – it’s long! But, that presented no problems. In fact, for Wordpress users, you will need to use a plugin like Wigdetize Anything or EXEC-PHP to put the code directly in your blog. The instructions provided with the code that TNX are clear and easy to follow.

In fact, I was able to get the code installed and working within a few minutes of installing Widgetize Anything (but I had to remove the <php… and ?> tags at the beginning and the end). After struggling with Linkworth’s code for ages, I hadn’t much hope but it worked a treat. I, however, would recommend that TNX develop a plugin for bloggers to use with Wordpress. (Oddly, I found that the code might be includable in MANY PHP driven websites, but it might be better for tech-savier to try out the installs themselves.)

Once my sites are approved, I’ll write another post on how to install the code, how to create your first campaign, and what the results are. I’m looking forward to doing a followup on this website. It has a lot of potential that is just being hinted at right now.

Sponsored by TNX.net.