PeaceLoveWorld.com | Store Review

Posted on June 18, 2012 by shari

With all the new trends of boasting brand names and logos on your clothing, it is nice to find a brand with values and messaging that shouts out to the world that love is the way to go. PeaceLoveWorld.com is more than a unique chic-casual clothing company, it is a way of life.

About PeaceLoveWorld.com

Peace Love World was created by Alina Villasante. Alina’s goal is to spread peace and love through the company’s products, which boast bold prints, symbols, and words – such as Love, Peace, and Happy. She started with a tee shirt line and quickly opened a retail shop in South Miami. Today Peace Love World has 6 stores and a website, and the line can be found in stores all over the world.

Men’s, Women’s, Kid’s, and Accessories

What started as a single t-shirt has now developed into a full range of products; t-shirts, hoodies, and pants, for all shapes and sizes. They also have a full range of Peace Love World accessories ranging from shoes, bags, accessories for your home, accessories for your pet, and accessories for your gadgets!

Olympics 2012

Olympic swimmer Dara Torres looks comfortable wearing a long sleeve raglan from the Peace Love World’s Comfy KT Collection. It’s a great shirt to be wearing while cheering on the USA Olympic teams this summer.

Giving Back the PLW way!

Peace Love World contributes to various social causes and charities through sales and donations. They have been very involved in the relief help in Haiti through their “One World One Love” campaign.

Shipping, Returns, and Exchanges:

According to the website, items purchased online must be returned through the mail and not to a retail outlet. Returns must be made within 30 days from invoice date.
Refunds will be issued within 30 days
PeaceLoveWorld.com ships through FED EX ground service
They ship internationally, too!
All items purchased through the website are packaged in a gift-ready embossed PLW black box.

Customer Service

It’s wonderful to have great products, but great customer service is just as important. PLW rates high in customer service, whether in one of their retail outlets or online. If you have a question, you can contact them by using their online-chat, or on Twitter/Facebook or by email.

We are proud to have PeaceLoveWorld.com as a PalTip Partner.

Are You Commenting on Blogs? | PalTip Blogging Tips

Posted on June 11, 2012 by shari

English: Comment icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Commenting on Blogs Drives Traffic

Driving traffic to your new blog is hard work. Are you commenting on blogs? Commenting on blogs is a great way to introduce yourself, share your expert knowledge, and drive traffic to your blog. Most bloggers, when they read the comments on their posts, will click on your link to see who is behind the comment. If you are commenting on numerous blogs every day, think of how much traffic you can generate from commenting.

Engagement and Relationships

Driving traffic to your blog by commenting on other blogs should be part of your strategy. The goal should be to form relationships, and commenting is one of the tactics. So comment on other blogs, tweet links to blogs that you have read and enjoyed, post links to other blogs on Facebook. Most importantly,be nice. Being nice gets you real traffic.

The Dos and Don’ts When Commenting

Make sure that your signature includes a link to your own blog. Use your real

name, and your avatar (profile picture) should be you. People want to know with whom they are engaging.
Be nice. If commenting is part of your strategy for building your community, remember that if you are not nice, people are not going to come visit your blog/site!
Get to know the blogger, read a few posts, not only the one you want to comment on.
The length of your comment is also very important. If your comment is too long, it might be considered a rant, and possibly be ignored. If your comment

is too short, the blogger might think you’re just a spammer trying to get a link.If you want to speak, speak!
Once you have commented, you have created another link in the Google love chain. The more links the merrier, but remember this only applies to relevant content! Don’t think that if you just write, “Have a good day,” someone is going to click on your link. Make your comments worthy of someone’s click.

Where To Comment

Part and parcel to writing your own blog is finding other blogs that complement yours, that share a similar voice, and that would appreciate your expertise. Once you have found them add them to your Google Reader or your RSS feed. Check them regularly and when you have something to add, share, and comment on…comment.

I recently read a great post on commenting by Annabel Candy (and I suggest that you all read it). I love tip #3 in her post, where she says:

3. If you leave a comment for another blogger, you’ll probably make their day and you might even make a friend for life.

The Comment Debate: On or Off

While writing this post, I must be completely honest and say that there is a huge debate amongst leading bloggers, whether to turn off, or leave on the ability to comment on one’s blog.

I recommend reading the following posts about in regards to this debate:

DEBATE! SHOULD YOU ALLOW COMMENTS ON YOUR BLOG? FIND OUT WHAT TWO REMARKABLY POPULAR BLOGGERS THINK

YES, BLOG COMMENTS ARE STILL WORTH THE EFFORT

Until you have decided whether to remove the commenting on your own blog, you should continue to comment on other blogs. The following is from the link above. I agree!

“A blog without comments is a soap-box, plain and simple. Not having comments says you are only interested in passing on your wisdom, without testing it against any external source (at least not where others can watch you do so) or leaving open the opportunity to actually learn something from those who don’t have their own blogs, or aren’t on Twitter or Google+.”

Do you comment on other peoples blogs? Have you seen traffic on your blog from commenting?

Monetizing Your Blog | PalTip Blog Series: How To Blog

Posted on June 5, 2012 by shari

Monetizing a blog is one of today’s hottest trends, but many bloggers are worried about the technical side of it. Read on to see when and how you can monetize your blog even if you’re not interested in investing hours on your monetization.

When should you start thinking about monetizing your blog?

Some people suggest monetizing your blog when you’ve written 30-50 posts. When deciding on how to monetize your blog, you have to keep your audience in mind. Your readers come back to your blog because you are feeding them great, relevant content. They will not continue to read your blog if you suddenly put up flashy banner ads all over your site.

One other important note; don’t expect to make lots money on your blog right away. It takes time to build a converting readership! However, you have to start somewhere, so let’s start!

Disclosure

Remember that as soon as you start monetizing your blog, regardless of the types of compensation, you must include a disclosure statement on your blog – and you can’t hide it.

Test the waters

Test your market. Check how other bloggers in your niche are monetizing their blogs.

Adsense

This might be one of the easiest ways to put ads on to your blog, but ask yourself; when was the last time you clicked on a Google ad on the sidebar of a blog? With that in mind, Google is always coming up with new ideas and formatting to make it easier to use their ads system and to get more people to click on their ads. For more information on AdSense, check out Googleadchoices.org

There are alternatives to Adsense. Here is a great list of alternatives ad programs.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. (Read more on Wikipedia.)

If your readers look forward to your recommendations and reviews of products and services, affiliate marketing is for you. Many studies have shown that you get more clicks and purchases from a link that is inside your content than from a sidebar advertisement.

You can join numerous affiliate-marketing programs.

There are benefits of using affiliate marketing and there are downsides, too. The biggest challenge with affiliate marketing is the back-office of most affiliate programs. The signup, the product search, the input of information into the feed, can all be very complicated, time consuming, and not user friendly. Now you can save hours spent in affiliate program back offices by using one WordPress Plugin.

In the first blog of this series, we suggested that WordPress is one of the best, if not the best platforms to use for your blog. PalTip has created a WordPress plugin that cuts out all of the back office horror and makes affiliate marketing as easy as one click!

All you have to do is download the plugin and install it. When writing your blog, make sure you include the link to the product,** (in more than one location) and when you click to publish the post the plugin goes to work and changes your link to a personalized PalTip affiliate link.

Here is an example of how it works, from a blog on coffee:

“My favorite beverage, as you all know, is coffee! Coffee, good good coffee. ……..

Recently I was introduced to a private barista. He knew exactly how I like my coffee throughout the day. In the morning, I enjoy a full Arabica in the morning, and later, I enjoy a smooth Kona, and in the evening, a decaf chocolaty pleasure. It was love at first sight. Let me introduce you to my personal barista, and my new favorite coffee maker, the The Keurig B60.

All I had to do was copy and paste the original link into the blog post and when I published it, the link was transformed into an affiliate link automatically.

(In both places; in the picture and the coffee maker link)

This is an easy, fast, and profitable way to use affiliate marketing in your blog.

Banner Space

Selling banners on a website or blog has always been a good way to monetize. There are several possibilities for doing this. Probably the easiest is to join a banner ad network. The systems will keep track of your earnings and placement of the ad. If you sign up for a pay-per-click agreement you can make between 0.5 -.80 cents a click. To make money this way, you must have heavy traffic on your site.

If you are selling the banner space on your own, you can sell it per impression, per click, or per time period. You have control over this! When deciding on the costs of these spaces, the following should be taken into consideration.

The position of the ad – if it is “above the fold,” it is worth more.
Horizontal banners are easier to read so they should be priced higher.
If you’re in a certain niche – your advertising space is more valuable to advertisers than if you were an “all about everything” site.
In addition, remember size! Big banners are more expensive than smaller ones.

Final Tip

Don’t overdo it! Don’t fill up your pages and posts with so many banner ads and affiliate ads that your visitors can’t find the real content that you have worked so hard on. You will lose traffic and probably won’t make very much money.

Be subtle. Be creative!

If you have any tips on monetizing your blog, please share them with us.

**the link must be from one of the over 2500 PalTip partner sites.

ChefsCatalog.com | PalTip Store Review

Posted on June 4, 2012 by shari

Time to update your kitchen gadgets? ChefsCatalog.com is the place to go when you need something, anything for your kitchen. Their tag line says it all!
The Best Kitchen Starts Here®

Tips and Tools: How to Make Money on Your Blog

Posted on May 24, 2012 by shari

It’s a new dawn – the Age of the Blog

The next few posts are dedicated to blogging. How to, why, where, and of course how to make money from your blog.

5 top reasons for having a blog:

To express yourself
To connect with people
To help others
To share your passion
To make extra money

You have heard it repeatedly:

”You have so much to say and you say it so well, you should start a blog!”

”You are always recommending something that just saves me so much time, energy, searching (continue and fill in the blank) you should really start a blog”

Yes, you should!

If you are sharing information with friends today, and they have named you as someone they can rely on for trustworthy advice tips, why not build a blog around it?

Blog with Passion

Passion is probably the best part of the equation for a successful blog. What are you passionate about? When you share your passion with others and write fresh content about it, similar-thinking people will find you and will appreciate your words. (This doesn’t mean that you don’t have to promote your blog, because you do.)

Blog Platforms and Names

We are not going to get into details here, (there are experts in the field flooding the net with excellent information) but WordPress comes highly recommended by the top bloggers and brands. The open-source platform will provide you with everything that you need for your blog. The forums are great and other WordPress users are eager to help when help is needed.

What’s in a Name?

Your domain name is your name! Don’t forget it! Choosing the right domain name is similar to naming your firstborn! (OK, I’m exaggerating, but it’s important.) Some of the most common guidelines for choosing a domain name are as follows:

The .com domain is the most popular but today you see more and more usage of .li, .am, .me, even .tv -it all depends on if the rest of the URL matches the suffix.

Easy – make it easy to say, easy to hear and type, and, most important, easy to remember!

Spelling: make sure it is easy to spell – The average person doesn’t have the same spelling skills as the winner of the 8^th grade spelling bee.

Writing a Blog is a Commitment

Are you ready to commit? How much of a commitment? Most people would say that as long as you are creating fresh amazing content on a regular basis, that is enough. But what is a “regular basis”? Is it every day, twice a week, once a week, or less? Every day – great! Twice a week works. As you become more comfortable, writing the words will flow and you will be able to write more. Working with an editorial calendar will make your life even easier. It is vital to have an editorial calendar to keep your content consistent and relevant. Here are some excellent tools and templates for calendars:

How To Make Money from Your Blog

The next post will be on promoting your blog and monetizing your blog. Here is something to start thinking about, Adwords, and affiliate links. Sounds complicated? Check out this WordPress plugin, affiliate marketing made easy!

PalTip WordPress Plugin

Posted on April 30, 2012 by shari

Introducing the Fastest Route to Affiliate Marketing

A while back we asked on Twitter and on Facebook “Who uses WordPress?” and we heard back from a lot of our users that they do use WordPress as their content management system, whether for a site or just for a blog. The PalTip team went to work and did its magic. Today PalTip officially launches the PalTip WordPress plugin – it works magic on your blog with just one click

Affiliate Links - Automagically!

The PalTip plugin changes the links in your post to personalized PalTip links “automagically”.

The PalTip WordPress Plugin works like this:

Install and activate the PalTip WordPress Plugin
That’s all you have to do!
The PalTip plugin works it’s magic, checks all the links in your blog (old and new posts), and changes them to PalTip affiliate links!

Download the plugin now, and use your precious time to write another post. PalTip will work it’s automagic on your blog, and you will start earning money from it.

Download the plugin here.

PalTip

PalTip has partnered with over 2500 affiliate programs (and we’re adding more all the time). When using the PalTip WordPress plugin for the first time, login with your PalTip account if you have one (in settings) . If you don’t have a PalTip account, we will create one for you. Once you have earned money from your tips – you can go back to the settings and activate the temporary user to claim your funds.

We invite you to download the PalTip WordPress plugin today and start earning money from your product tips and recommendations.

For more information about PalTip click here.

As the plugin is fresh off the development table, the PalTip team invites your feedback!

Diamond Engagement Rings: Blue Nile | PalTip Store Review

Posted on April 18, 2012 by shari

Capitol Lighting – 1800lighting.com | PalTip Store Review

Posted on April 1, 2012 by shari

Your one-stop shop for all your lighting needs, Capitol Lighting has been around long enough to see almost 100 years of lighting trends and technology. Today, with 9 locations and a well-developed website, they offer an amazing selection of lighting at prices to fit all budgets.

Lighting in your home either makes or breaks the ambiance that you wish to create in your dream home. How do you want people to feel when they walk in the door? Lighting can create a beautiful background for your home, highlighting the accents and your beautiful furnishings.

Lighting Tips:

Before you start thinking of what lighting you want in your home, make sure you take a good look at how natural light enters your home during different times throughout the day. Depending on which way the room is facing, natural light will be filtered through windows differently. For example if you have a north-facing bedroom, the room will be dark, especially during the winter months. Remember this when you are planning which lighting you are going to implement.

For more tips check out the Capitol Lighting Blog.

Capitol Lighting Wizard

If you are starting from scratch and building a new home, it would be wise to make sure that your interior designer is an expert on lighting or to bring in a lighting designer to help you with the placement and types of lighting so that wiring can be done during the construction stage. It would be a shame to have to dig into those walls after you’re finished!

Capitol Lighting has an amazing free service on their website, an “expert wizard.” If you are planning to invest in lighting in your home, this is the place to start. The wizard will help you find a lighting expert in your area.

“Welcome to the FREE Capitol Lighting Designer Directory! Capitol Lighting has recruited hundreds of professional decorators and interior designers from all over the country ready to assist you with your latest and greatest decorating job. Whether you’re beginning a rustic kitchen remodel for your home in the hills or are looking to perfect that mid-century modern style for your new apartment in the big city, our network of designers and decorators are ready to help.”

Different Lighting Needs

Each room in your home serves a different function and the lighting should be designed to reflect this, for example:

A kitchen needs light. You need to be able to see what you are doing on the countertop, digging into the cupboards, and cooking over your range top.
Your dining room should have enough light to enjoy and see your food; however for coffee and after dinner drinks the lighting should be flexible to provide a softer, warmer ambience.

Green Lighting

As the world is trying to go eco-friendly. Your lighting designs should, too. Today, low energy bulbs are designed in various shapes and sizes. They are energy-efficient and use up to 80% less electricity than regular light bulbs. Capitol Lighting has a dedicated section on Green Living. (Save the planet – save on your electricity bill!)

Shipping, Returns, and Customer service

Lead times for shipping are only estimated, so if you are pressured for time, I would suggest giving them a call.

They ship using either their own drivers (close to locations) or a courier company.

Capitol Lighting believes in their service and the merchandise that they sell, and they have a 30 day return policy. However to avoid restocking fees, make sure you contact them prior to shipping the item back to the store – all returns must be pre-authorized!

Have you made a purchase from Capitol Lighting – 1800lighting.com ? We would love to hear what you think.

And the Oscar goes to….

Posted on February 26, 2012 by shari

Have you ever thought what happens to brands with Oscar winning brand ambassadors? Or brands that advertise during the Oscars? Maybe it should be “And the Oscar goes to… Coke, Revlon, L’Oréal, Hyundai, Samsung…” Now is the time to start tipping Oscar winning brands using PalTip.

Nostalgia for the 80′s

Posted on February 12, 2012 by shari

This morning I woke up to the news of Whitney Houston’s passing, a sad day in the world of music. Albeit, I was not a cover-my-walls-with-posters fan, however I was known for dancing around the house with a wooden spoon microphone and my Walkman clipped onto my 501′s singing one of her hit songs. She had a beautiful voice, Whitney Houston – RIP.

Here I am 25 years later, thinking of all the cool, un-tech products that we had and loved in the 80′s. I realized that a lot of the products of the 80′s set the stage for new technologically advanced items and that many of the products have been reintroduced and have become best sellers, again.

Music of the 80′s

For example, who didn’t have a walkman? How cool was that to record your music and take it with you. Would we have the MP3 player or an iPhone today if there wasn’t a Walkman in the 80′s?

The products of the 80′s showed us the beginnings of nano (i.e. the walkman) and on the opposite side of the spectrum, the Boom Boxes! Do you remember watching people walking down the street with huge music amplifying plastic boxes on one shoulder?

Today I guess with all the nano sized music players some still like it big!

Toys of the 80′s

Smurfs were the rage in the eighties and are hot again with my kids in 2012. Did you ever think that you would purchase a phone case with Smurfette on it?

One game that was popular in the 80′s was the Rubik Cube. I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t conquer it in the 80′s and I don’t think I would now. However I have ordered one to check out my 8 year old’s abilities. I have a feeling that she will succeed – fast!

I also checked the app store and low and behold, there is an app.

Photography of the 80′s

Although it was introduced earlier, the Polaroid instant camera became popular in the 80′s. It was big and clunky, but it was the party accessory that you had to have. Today, even with digital imagery and the fact that everyone has a camera in their smart phone; there is a resurrection of retro Polaroid cameras – they are just as fun today, as they were back in the 80′s!

What were your favorite products of the 80′s? Are they re-surging into the modern tech market? Share your 80′s favorites with us.