Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Code Pink Goes Into Business With Iran

From SweetnessAndLight

Speaking of the professional America-haters of Code Pink, here is another example of their courageous efforts to help our country’s enemies, from Pakistan’s Pak Tribune:

Jodie Evans (l) and Medea Benjamin (r) attempt to disrupt the speech of Republican vice presidential candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul,
Minn., Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2008.

US Co. Plans to Invest in Iran’s Energy Sector

Wednesday December 17, 2008

Codepink Women for Peace has announced plans to launch a new company that will invest in an Iranian wind energy company, allowing Americans to show support for peace and
sustainability in Iran.

The company, called Winds of Change, will sell shares for $5 each. The shares will give investors an opportunity to support the Saba Niroo Wind Company, based in Tehran, and the
campaign to end sanctions
.

Saba Niroo designs, develops and manufactures medium and large wind turbines, with a commitment to furthering the development of pollution-free energy to improve the health of our
environment.

The US Government has not only opposed Iran’s nuclear program, but it has also stymied Iran’s attempt to develop other energy alternatives. Recent US pressure
on the Danish wind company Vestas has stopped Vestas from providing Saba Niroo with critical parts, halting production.

Washington and its Western allies accuse Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian nuclear program, while they have never presented any corroborative
evidence to substantiate their allegations
. Iran denies the charges and insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.

Tehran stresses that the country has always pursued a civilian path to provide power to the growing number of Iranian population, whose fossil fuel would eventually run dry.

Iran is under three rounds of UN Security Council sanctions for turning down West’s calls to give up its right of uranium enrichment, saying the demand is politically tainted and illogical.

Iran has so far ruled out halting or limiting its nuclear work in exchange for trade and other incentives, saying that renouncing its rights under the NPT would encourage world powers to put further pressure on the country and would not lead to a change in the West’s hardline stance on Tehran.

Iran has also insisted that it would continue enriching uranium because it needs to provide fuel to a 300-megawatt light-water reactor it is building in the southwestern town of Darkhoveyn as well as its first nuclear power plant in the southern port city of Bushehr.

"It’s ironic that the West is so vehemently opposed to Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear energy, but it is sabotaging our efforts to develop clean energy sources like wind," said Nader Niktab, Sara Niroo’s managing director.

By supporting wind energy in Iran, investors will not only aid the environment but improve the political climate by breaking down trade barriers between the United States and Iran.

"Under present US law, companies that invest in Iran are subject to a $1 million fine," said Medea Benjamin, Codepink co-founder. "We’re challenging those unproductive restrictions and pushing the Obama administration to lift sanctions and establish peaceful relations with Iran."

Benjamin will present the initial elements of the plan this weekend in Chicago to the fourth annual assembly of the nation’s leading peace and justice coalition, United for Peace and Justice. At the Assembly, delegates from the UFPJ’s 1,400 member groups - as well as from those who have not yet joined UFPJ - will come together and map out effective plans to fight two wars and economic disaster under the administration of President-elect Obama.

Benjamin and other Codepink women will also present a "Let’s talk!" initiative, a plan to gather a broad spectrum of peace, justice and progressive groups together and invite President-elect Obama to meet with them to discuss promises he made during his campaign, question his Cabinet choices, and ask how he plans to be an agent for peace.

Benjamin, co-founder Jodie Evans and (retired) Col. Ann Wright were inspired to invest in Saba Niroo during their recent citizen diplomacy trip to Iran as citizen diplomats, meeting with Iranian officials and people to create human connections and foster understanding between the two countries.

Codepink is a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end the war in Iraq, stop new wars, and redirect the United States’ resources into healthcare, education and other life-affirming activities.

Codepink rejects the Bush administration’s fear-based politics that justify violence, and instead calls for policies based on compassion, kindness and a commitment to international law. With an emphasis on joy and humor, Codepink women and men seek to activate, amplify and inspire a community of peacemakers through creative campaigns and a commitment to non-violence.


As the article notes, there are laws against this, since there are currently many US and international sanctions against Iran.

But when did Code Pink ever have to worry about obeying the law?

And again, the aforementioned Jodie Evans was a prominent Obama campaign bundler.

By the way, lest we forget, Code Pink is a 501c3 taxpayer supported “charity.”

Green fact of the day - Michelle Malkin

By Michelle Malkin From reader Matthew R,

“Obama will use as much energy in flight to CO as the museum’s solar panels can produce in 4 years.”

Thought you might find this interesting - according to the info I found on Boeing’s website and elsewhere, the 747-200 that operates as Air Force One uses anywhere from 5 to 7 gallons of fuel per mile, depending on how full it is. At roughly 1500 miles from DC to Denver, that’s at least 15,000 gallons of fuel round trip. There are 33.4 kilowatt hours of energy in a gallon of fuel, meaning this trip will use about 500,000 kilowatt hours of energy. According to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s own website, their solar installation has generated only 90,000 kilowatt hours of energy since it was installed last June!

Crossposted at ConservativeWomenForTruth

Monday, February 9, 2009

Free Download - The Self Improvement Buff Series - With PLR

The Self Improvement Buff Series - With PLR
from Information Marketing Madness


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On the average, each of the Self Improvement products have over 5,000 words and with the editable rights to them, you can: Download Here

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Top 10 Things To Do With An RSS Feed

From Jason Hulott of Internet Marketing Experts

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is one of the oldest yet underused marketing techniques available to webmasters. Below is a list of the top 10 things to do with an RSS feed

1. Build one. You can't do anything without having an RSS feed. They are simple to build. Go to google and carry out a search for building an rss feed.

2. Add it to your Google, Yahoo and MSN homepages. If you download our free reports as described in our resource box there is a step by step guide to adding RSS feeds to your main site homepages.

3. Include it on any social networking sites that allow you to import RSS feeds such as Ecademy, Myspace, Fast Pitch networking and others.

4. Add links to it on your website and attract users to add it to their feed readers. You can grab RSS icons at www.rssicons.com

5. Ping it! Use a Ping service to promote your feed.

6. Use a widget to allow other sites to add your feed content to their site. Try tools such as widgetbox. Build a separate page on your site to show how other webmasters can syndicate or use your RSS Feed.

7. Use Javascript or php to add it to any other related sites you may have.

8. Submit it to all the RSS directories listed here: http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

9. Make sure you have a meaningful keyword loaded RSS title and Description as this is used by the RSS directory and RSS search engines to rank and display content.

10. Add it to your Google Webmaster tools account so you can track what keywords and what positions you are achieving with your feed.


Jason Hulott is owner of Speedie Consulting, a Finance and Insurance Content specialist, They are also Internet Marketing Experts that provide a range of services to the Finance and Insurance industry. To get 5 free reports to help maximise your Internet business please visit the site: http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/ and complete the signup box.

Google Adwords Policy Change

From AffiliateTips

This is quite important. if you use Adwords to deliver trafifc to your affiliate programs please note the folloing from Google:

With this new affiliate policy, we will only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse sampling of advertisements to choose from. As always, your ad will be displayed based on its Ad Rank for given searches.

For instance, if a user searches for books on Google.co.uk or anywhere on the Google search and content networks, Google will take an inventory of ads running for the keyword books. If we find that two or more ads compete under the same URL, we will display the ad with the highest Ad Rank.

How this will affect you:

If you are an affiliate, this means that you no longer need to identify yourself as an affiliate in your ad text. However, your current ad text will continue to display your affiliate status until you change it.

Affiliates or advertisers using unique URLs in their ads will not be affected by this change. Please note that your Display URL must match the URL of your landing page, and you may not simply frame another site.

What you should do:

We recommend that you continue to monitor your ads' performance and optimise your ads as needed to ensure that they are bringing you the best results. Please visit our Optimisation Tips page for more information.

Hope this Helps!

How to Bring in New Customers

by Brian Littleton @ ShareASale

I was recently involved in a debate at ABestWeb.com involving the value of new customers vs. returning customers. The debate itself had good points by a bunch of different people, but I thought I’d go into a little more detail about some ideas I think might help you (an Affiliate) focus on bringing in new customers - is that is what you so decided to do.

(In the debate, I argued that 2009 will be a huge opportunity for Affiliates to focus specifically on bringing in new customers and that if one did so, it would bring greater financial return.)

1. Get off (redirected) search.

Search makes up an enormous percentage of traffic generated - and thus we all love it. However, as Merchants become more sophisticated in their own search efforts, they will likely de-value Affiliates who work in that arena. This has already happened with Paid Search in the area of brand terms, trademarks, etc… and will continue into natural results. The most common reason that I hear Merchants changing and enforcing policy on this is that they feel the majority of customers who have searched for their “Company Name” are repeat customers or those customers who would have ended up at their store without the assistance of an Affiliate.

So - as an Affiliate, a new source of traffic - and one that belongs all to you should be a goal.

Which brings me to….

2. Build a Community

There is no greater source of traffic than the one that you build yourself. Going back to point 1 above, I think the better use of search would not be to simply rank highly for terms and pass that traffic along to Merchants… but instead use search as a way to build up your own site. In the past, Affiliates have been successful (going way back) with gateway pages or reviews that have ranked highly for keywords… but were essentially traffic redirection to a Merchant of their choice. The visitor came thru an Affiliate site but really had no compelling reason to stay (or come back at a later date).

Use your skills at search to bring traffic to your site, and then build a community around that traffic. Use small things like polls, questions, games, prizes, discussion, comments - all these things can bring people into your community. Communities feed on themselves - and bring the kind of organic growth to your affiliate business that can’t be obtained thru search alone.

Be a traffic source, not solely a redirector of traffic.

3. Go Smaller

This entails a few things… a) I believe that working with emerging Merchants in markets brings you greater odds in working with new customers and b) I believe some of you should be working with less Merchants. Less Merchants… more focus.

To fully focus on, and master a particular niche requires an obvious great investment in time. One of the common techniques in Affiliate Marketing today is to apply to as many programs as possible and see which one performs the best. A large number of Affiliates see success with this, which is great. However, if you were to focus specifically on bringing new customers to a Merchant, I don’t think this technique would work as well.

Pick a niche and master it. Within an individual niche there are likely several Merchants who are suitable, thus giving you the opportunity to test individual conversion. Newer (sometimes smaller) Merchants with less overall market reach will bring you the best opportunity - as the likelihood of bringing in a new customer (vs. a returning customer) will be much higher. One possible way to go smaller is to target local markets. This is something that requires a blog post of it’s own though so I’ll leave that till later.

As I stated in the debate - it is my opinion that in 2009, this issue will become more important. I also believe that Merchants will be willing to pay a premium commission to Affiliates who can prove a track record of bringing in new customers. I hope some of the thoughts above help some of you to do so - and look forward to further conversations!

-Brian

Mark Brown At ValueClick Fails At Spamming Contact Forms

From Jeremey Shoemaker at Shoemoney

I get unsolicited messages through the contact form… and of course… thats what its there for.

But when a publicly traded company fails this bad and spamming contact forms…

Can you spot whats wrong ?


Now maybe its just me… but I would think the company who just settled a FTC lawsuit for 2.9 MILLION dollars for violating the Can Spam Act (the largest ever) and has pledged to completely change their spammy ways would be a little more careful. NAAAAAAAAH