A week or so ago, Peter Sewell of Zlio emailed me, asking if I would like to review the services offered at Zlio.com. He let me know that they had a new version in the works, too, but it won’t be ready until after the new year, and I was anxious to review something other than a blog. Today, I jumped in and started playing.
I started by signing up for a new account. I must admit that I got a little worried when I saw the second step in the process (shown below), but I laid the whole process out so you can see what I quickly learned: it’s relatively quick and painless. Honestly, I hate signing up for affiliate programs. It seems like it takes forever and there’s not a lot there to help me make the sale. Zlio, on the other hand, was actually not too bad. I was able to get my store running pretty quickly. Too bad it starts out without any products, but that’s a good thing, actually.
Next, I needed to select products to sell. Obviously, being a tech blog, I wanted some computers and electronics and cool stuff like that. This, however, is where Zlio has a lot of room for improvement. Finding the specific products I had in mind was not an easy task. The good news is that there’s hundreds of products to choose from for many categories. The bad news is that they’re not organized very well. The search is helpful, but only if you have a very specific result in mind. For example, I wanted to list products I would buy myself or that I already own, so decided to start with the laptop I bought earlier this year. When I viewed the Computers and Software category, I didn’t see any laptops at all. I then searched for “laptop” which returned 300 results. “sony” returned 300 results, as well, which means there’s probably a maximum of 300 results returned for any query. Still, I’m not about to poke through all 300, so I searched for “sony vaio” and got back 138 results. I finally found my laptop on page 8. On the other hand, when I searched for “apple ipod touch”, the first item was what I sought. Ultimately, though, the drill-down category method should be better organized, leaving search as a secondary option, or they should fine-tune the search. Within about 10 minutes, I had 9 products live in my store. This part of the setup was my only sore spot.
Once my store was filled with some products, I decided to poke around the rest of my control panel to see what they had to offer me. I half expected to be done, but I found a few more goodies. One of these is the ability to choose my revenue model. The choices are Pay Per Sale revenue model (A commission is earned for every successful sale that you contribute to), Pay Per Click revenue model (A commission is earned for every click on a merchant link from your ZlioShop – Not available yet), and Mixed remuneration (You earn commission per sale + per click). I chose the mixed. There’s also a section to fill out more details about yourself and include an image, internal blogs, commissions reports, alerts (so I get an email when I sell a product), community tools (this IS supposed to be “social shopping”, after all), ZlioLive (I have NO clue), and ZlioZone (as seen at right).
Clearly, these guys have put a lot of effort into their service and aside from the product discovery issues noted above, I think it’s very clean and easy to get rolling in a hurry. Something else I noticed is that they seem pretty active with their product offering and their interaction with members. Peter was good with his communication with me and they help promote members on their blog to keep people more involved. Will it make you money? I imagine anyone with enough traffic can make a few bucks with it and even more with the referral program, but I won’t know until I give it a little time. If I make any money with Zlio, you’ll likely see a follow-up post in January.
I don’t think that I’ve yet mentioned that I am a amateur photographer, armed with a slightly older digital camera, little time, and some creativity. I think I have taken some good photos, but I still view myself as a newbie and I’m always looking for improvement. I could use a camera upgrade, but I’m learning new tricks and getting more ideas all the time, too.
A year ago, I found out about a site called JPG Magazine. The concept of the site/magazine is laughably simple. Photographers (amateurs included) submit their photography to the site. Members of the site vote on which photos should make the magazine. Chosen photos are then placed into the print magazine and the photographers, in many cases, receive compensation for their work.
I have an account. You should go check it out. What drew me to the site, initially was the thought of someone like me having one of my photos in a print magazine. Who wouldn’t want that? I still haven’t gotten anything printed, but the site has other advantages, even if you never make a print edition. Other people’s photographs often get my creative juices flowing and help me think about different things to shoot and different ways to shoot things. Lately, I’ve really been wanting to get a more professional camera with a macro lens for closer shots.
(click any image to see it full size)
One feature of the site that makes me go back pretty often is the themes. Every month, they release a handful of new themes to which you may submit a photo. Of those, a few will be themes for the next issue. You can only submit one photo per theme, which makes the photographer really think about which single photo to submit. The themes are one of my favorite sources of new ideas, mainly because I find myself looking for a new photograph to shoot that can fit in one of the themes. For example, the recent Delectable theme inspired my late night “Chocolate Alien” photograph. I should remind you that I’m an amateur here.
If you’ve been tinkering with your camera and looking for inspiration or for a place to share your photographs and get opinions on your work, check this site out.
Bloggin-Ads.com has a somewhat unique approach to blogging, and that is to review other blogs as it’s main source of content. At first, I thought this was a bad idea, devised just to get links back to his blog, but then I started thinking about how it can be useful and I felt a little more OK with it.
Bloggin-Ads was created by Mike to explore the whole Blogging Community by reviewing a blog every single day.
Who is Mike
Looking at Mike’s About page, he’s the much unlike me. His wife is named Michelle, check. He reads and is inspired by John Chow and ShoeMoney, check. He wants your ad money to help cover hosting costs, check. From the About page, you can pretty much get the idea that, like many bloggers, he’s inspired to write because he has a great idea for something bigger than just one post, but that requires every little post to build upon. Thinking about it actually inspires me more.
Lip Service or Just Good Sites?
That sounds simple enough, but are the reviews fair and honest. While we all love a little lip service, a fair and honest review serves the readers as well as the blog being reviewed. Constructive criticism can often be a lot more valuable than a fake pat on the back, even in a public setting. Of the first several posts, I didn’t find anything disparaging, but my reviews are all pretty nice so far, so It’s possible that the lack of any bad review is due to the lack of a reason for one. To make myself feel better, I decided to skim through the three sites reviewed on the home page, myself. Everything looks fine to me, other than my comment on the FaveMe Up page not showing up.
Don’t Blog Ugly
I’m not talking about what YOU look like. Blog in your pajamas with hair sticking up all over the place, for all I care. I’m talking about your blog’s design. That’s what I have to look at when I’m reading your blog. I like this blog design Mike has. It’s simple and clean. I love the footer. It’s a great use of space and not cluttered at all. I might suggest a nice new logo (see the ads for Logo Samurai at right – they did mine), but other than that, it’s pretty clean.
I really don’t know what else to say about a blog, but I’m just getting started with these reviews. I do know that I’ll be reading more through Bloggin-Ads.com for ideas, though.
When Michelle and I went to see Transformers, I had never heard of this movie. The trailer came up and it was so mysterious. There was no fancy pants actors we recognized, nothing but a glimpse of something destroying the Statue of Liberty and a date: 01.18.08. With just over a month left until it hits theaters, they’ve ramped up the marketing campaign with a (hopefully) viral widget, showing the first 5 minutes of the film.
Grab the widget and enter to win some cool stuff. You can grab the embed code right here really easily if you just want to share it.
A week or so ago, Peter Sewell of Zlio emailed me, asking if I would like to review the services offered at Zlio.com. He let me know that they had a new version in the works, too, but it won’t be ready until after the new year, and I was anxious to review something other than a blog. Today, I jumped in and started playing.
I don’t think that I’ve yet mentioned that I am a amateur photographer, armed with a 
A year ago, I found out about a site called 
