Kathy over at the Electronic Perceptions is a real giver. She’s giving away free stock photos on her blog. You are free to use the photos marked as “Royalty-Free” under the terms defined. Please read the terms before you download them.

One thing I would like to see is some free high-resolution stock photos. I know she can do whatever she wants to do with her photos, but I feel that she can attract more traffic to her site if she gives away high-resolution versions for some of her photo sets. That would be really awesome.

I highly suggest that you bookmark her blog. New stock photos are posted daily basis. Thanks Kathy!

Samples
Red and Green Tableware

Visit : Electronic Perceptions for Free Stock Photos

FilePub is a free file hosting service where you can upload any files up to 500mb per file. Allowed file types include : jpeg, jpg, png, gif, bmp, mp3, txt, avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, doc, rar, and zip.

It comes in handy when you need to share a big file or a big image on your blog. You can save bandwidth and the web space if you host these big files outside of your web hosting server. FilePub is perfect for that. Read their terms of service before you upload your files.

How to upload a file
Click “Browse” and choose a file. Once the file is selected, just click “Click to Upload” That’s it!

Once the file is uploaded, you will be redirected to a folder. From there, you can either view the full version of the image or download it.

By the way the screen shots used in this post are hosted at FilePub. Here is another example of a uploaded file (2.16MB).

Visit: FilePub.com

Upgrade your WordPress immediately.  WordPress just announced its version 2.5.1 today.  It includes a very important security fix and more than 70 bug fixes. 

Here are some highlights of improvements :

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

One of the most annoying bugs in WP 2.5 was the media uploader bug.  It just wouldn’t work for me.  Uploading works fine, but once it is uploaded I can’t retreive it using the gallery menu.  WordPress 2.5.1 fixed some of the media uploader problems, but from my testing, it still needs improvements.  I can now upload and view the file fine, but I still can’t insert images to my posts.  I hope they get fix it quickly. 

If you want to learn more about WordPress 2.5.1 go to WordPress Blog. 

Thanks for visiting MarketingSyndrome.com. Over the last 3 years, I’ve been blogging about niche marketing and I had great time doing it. It was a great learning experience for me. I’ve learned great deal of blogging and communication skills along the way.

Last year, I moved the main blog to a subdirectory so I can do something else with the main domain. But I didn’t find a great use of the domain since. Just last month, I came up with an idea that I can transform it into a blog that talks about blogging :)

Because the niche marketing I do for living is closely tied to blogging, I’d talk about blogging as well. That way, I can finally fulfill the purpose of MarketingSyndrome.com. Now, my niche marketing blog will continue, but the main page will be transformed into a new blog. Old contents are already updated and I recycled as much as I could.

Thanks again for visiting my new blog and I hope to see many ideas evolve from my blog.

David at his blog posted an interesting findings on YPN vs Adsense. He switched to YPN from Adsense for 10 days and shared his results with a screenshot.

Very interesting read, please check it out.

Making Money with YPN

WordPress 2.1 is out for download. One of the important changes is in this version is that now it requires MySQL 4. Which means I have to upgrade my servers in order to test drive it.

Download WordPress 2.1.

I recently found a great marketing podcast whi is better than some of the paid seminars that I’ve listened to. Make sure to add this podcast to your bookmark! Enjoy!

Internet Business Mastery

One of the common mistakes that Adsense publishers make is using wrong labels above Adsense units. People think it’s a hot trick, but it’s really not. Google doesn’t like to see wrong labels right above Adsense ad units. let’s review Adsense’s TOS.

Publishers may not label the ads with text other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements.” This includes any text directly above our ads that could be confused with, or attempt to be associated with Google ads.

TOS clearly states that publishers may not use labels other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements”. But as you may have seen already, people become creative when it comes to labeling their ad units. I’ve seen people putting, “Articles, Navigation, Books, and Latest News” as the title of the ad unit.

Usually Google sends out warning letters first if they think you are using a wrong label. Just be careful of what you are doing with it.

Have you heard the news? WordPress MU 1.0 is officially available to public at no charge. WordPress MU is a blog script that let you run a blog hosting service like WordPress.com. This is a great news for us the niche marketers.

Things you can do with this powerful script is up to your imagination. You can make a blogging hosting service for a particular niche market and use them to attract traffic to your main site. I’ve already registered a few domains around a couple of niche markets I’m involved in.

If you are technically challenged, ask for help at our niche marketing forum. I will help you there. I see great opportunities here. Don’t be late.

For many year, I thought AOL was leading the show with the highest email block (permission-based) rate, but boy.. I was so wrong. Return Path, a email delivery firm did a study on this topic recently and published very interesting numbers.

They reported that overall, the delivery rate has been increased to 19.2% from 21% last year due to sophisticated technology. But considering that almost 20% of our permission-based emails are not getting delivered, I think it is not good enough. Take a look at some stats.

% of Blocked Emails (Permission-based)

Highest Five
Excite - 50.7%
Adelphia - 33.5%
Gmail - 34.3%
Hotmail - 22.7%
MSN - 22.4%

Lowest Four
CompuServe - 11.8%
USA.net - 13.2%
AOL - 14.1%
Yahoo - 15.2%

Gmail has one of the highest % of emails blocked, but they have only 2.87% of false positives (emails incorrectly identified as spam). Which is below an average (3.29% in the US).

If you have a list or send out newsletters, you should educate your list members about properly whitelisting your email address. Also consider using a mailing service company that works with various ISPs to get their emails delivered properly.