The One Minute Guide: March 2010

09 March 2010

What is HVP (Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein)?

Since 4th March 2010 Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein (HVP) got into the mainstream media because one of its largest producers in the United States - Basic Food Flavours Inc from Las Vegas - got a consumer safety warning announcement from the FDA. The FDA stated that Salmonella contaminated the company's HVP production equipment. Afterward a nationwide recall has been initiated. It includes products from McCormik, Trader Joe's, Safeway and a lot of other companies.

Here you can find the FDA list of recalled products.

What is HVP?

Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein is a commonly used soy-based food "filler" to make literally thousands of processed food products. You will find in veggie burgers, gravy mixes, soups and many other grocery products, just have a look at the list of ingredients.

Most Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein is used by food production companies as an ingredient in mainstream processed foods. It shows up in thousands of grocery products -- and most consumers are not aware they're eating this ingredient.

It's a fact these days that many consumers are concerned and asking for the first time, "What's behind HVP?"

HVP is just one of many ingredients mentioned as a potential source of hidden monosodium glutamate (MSG).

MSG, of course, is a potentially dangerous neurotoxin used to flavor countless processed food products. It's used in soups, salad dressings, processed meats, gravy mixes, flavored snack chips and virtually every popular brand of beef jerky. It is considered an "excitotoxin" by Dr. Russell Blaylock, a neurosurgeon who has written extensively about MSG and its damaging effects on human neurology.

According to Blaylock, MSG can promote eating addictions, obesity, brain cancer, endocrine system disorders, infertility and many serious neurological disorders. That's why it's so disturbing that MSG is hidden in so many natural-sounding ingredients.

More information can be found on the below mentioned websites (daily updated).

08 March 2010

HaloScan Comments not working!

Image via CrunchBase

Sorry i just recognized on the weekend that the Haloscan comment system is no more working. They have been bought a while ago by JS-Kit and now they stopped the Haloscan comment system because of too many flaws over the last few months.

They wrote that users should change to the Echo system (which costs 12$/year) or change back to Blogger's comment system. I intend to go back to blogger's comment system but for this change HaloScan needs to edit and remove their code from my template.

This will take some days... Hopefully the comments can be saved and imported in Blogger's comment system and everything will work fine again.

Have a great week!

03 March 2010

3 steps to make money blogging

Image by Michael Kwan (Freelancer) via Flickr

Make Money with your Blog

Blogs can be written to make a profit or non-profit but most bloggers blog for the purpose of making money.
Usually some posts will be published to provide an outlet for voicing out the bloggers opinions and share their thoughts on personal issues. But most of the population of bloggers has the intention to make money from their blogs.
Fortunately, there are several methods of profiting from a blog and applying these methods can help you make money blogging. Here are three steps to make money with your blog from scratch on:

1. Promoting your service and writing Premium Content

The first (and basic) step is to write a well-written quality content for your posts.
Imagine if you would write it for a customer who would love to pay you 5 or even 25 $ for it, how much research (time) would you put into this blog post?
If you are able to keep such blog posts as your standard, you are already on the way to not only attract visitors to your blog but in the future, clients and other bloggers could get attracted and ask you for guest posts (which increases your reachout in the blogosphere), product reviews (which gives you in some cases a brand new product for free!) or simply paid posts (which earn you some or many $).
When you maintain your blog and focus on your area of expertise, it will help you to become a recognized authority in your specific field. If your blog (posts) can be found at the top pages of the Search engines (mainly Google, Yahoo and Bing), potential clients will find you much easier, too.
You can drive this way in two ways. The first way is by writing for yourself and posting it in your blog, after you see the reaction of the readers in the comments it may encourage you to sell your best posts on your own to other blogs or sell memberships to access the whole post.
The second way is by getting offers from paid to post companies like Izea's PayPerPost, ReviewMe and many more. There you have to promote websites, services or special offers for other companies in your own style mostly by including the given keywords.

2. Advertisements for your blog and from your blog

After you have written some quality posts in your blog, it's time to promote your blog by using Social media networks like Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter and free or paid advertisement networks like Adgitize, CMF Ads, EntreCard or Project Wonderful, submit some of your articles to Article directories (Ezinearticles, GoArticles) and register your blog in blog directories like Blogcatalog or use this list of free directories.
Because for selling ads it requires you to have some kind of established traffic. Traffic is important because it draws interest from potential advertisers. You might find it hard to sell an ad space without traffic and it will most likely not produce much revenue.
Selling space for advertisers is one of the most common ways to profit from a blog. Since blogs that have a considerable amount of traffic can make income with ad sales, make sure that you have a target audience.
The reason why bloggers are selling advertising is because it's a passive form of income as soon as traffic has been established. Although it takes time and work to look for advertisers + maintain the ads on the blog, those who can achieve it gain usually a reasonable amount of money with the ads.
Compared to other forms of making money from a blog, selling advertisement space can be one of the most consistent revenue streams. If you are able to maintain your ad slots filled, you should have a very good idea of just how much you can make every month.
Additionally, the blog must have a target audience in order to achieve the maximum amount of cash for advertisement space. Remember that advertisers are more likely to pay if your target audience is a match to theirs as most advertisers look for click-through-rate (amount of unique clicks they receive from your blog) rather than just paying money for the view.

3. Make money with Affiliate programs

Affiliate programs are another major resource of income for several bloggers. Even with a small audience you have the chance to make a reasonable amount of money with affiliate programs.
However, one bad side to affiliate programs is that there can be instances where you can't make any money at all (as there has to be in most cases a sale to earn money). With your newly created blog you can't make much wrong by featuring two or three small affiliate ads in your sidebar or on top of your blog.
Like mentioned in step two selling ads can be hard to do without much traffic, affiliate programs would be perfect for your new blog. More so, they can be easily maintained and only take very little time. I would suggest you look in the beginning for Affiliate programs with low sale prices of the items.
Additionally, some bloggers for example only publish content for their affiliate programs, no matter if it's for paid to click programs like Neobux or e-books or downloadable programs from Affiliate Networks like Clickbank, Commission Junction, E-Junkie and so on. This can make you to an expert in Affiliate Marketing in the future with the possibility to share your knowledge like John Chow or Shoemoney have done it and still improve their skills further to stay on top of this market.