The Daily Dinar

We touched on the topic in an earlier post on making money online, but an additional source of inspiration for topics to write about (if you are interested in drawing new and organic traffic to your blog) is the excellent Google Trends.  The site basically aggregates people’s search requests and, by doing so, is able to identify ‘hot trends’.  For example, as we can see, a lot of people are currently searching for “chicks with swords” (!), the Alma Awards, and someone called Maya Polsky.  Increased searches for a particular keyword or key phrase means increased demand for information on that topic: if attracting traffic to your blog or site is your objective, then writing about these topics should see more visitors to your site.

 The Wall Street Journal has this excellent piece on the spread of outsourcing even to personal matters:

Sending work offshore has transformed the U.S. economy. Now, some families are tapping the same approach for personal tasks, getting them done for a fraction of what they’d cost at home. Taking your to-do list global.

I frequently outsource time-consuming and mundane personal tasks to overseas workers and it has paid dividends.  Firstly, it is almost always a lot cheaper and, secondly, it allows me to take advantage of the differences in timezone.  I’ve used the popular elance.com site to find all sorts of people and companies willing to take on some of the tasks and projects that would have otherwise wasted my time and money completing.  For example, I recently hired an Indian company to do research on the internet for me and manually collate a list of 500+ websites serving a particular niche.

A few people have asked about how Muslim bloggers can make money from their blogs. I haven’t made much of an effort to monetise this site as it’s very small relative to some of the other projects I’m working on. However, since I’ve already written and spoken extensively on this and related topics for mostly non-Muslim audiences, I thought it might benefit the Muslim blogging community to describe a few of our advertising options. This is the first part of several posts I have in mind that will cover a range of topics, including search engine optimisation strategies for Muslim blogs/websites and more.

Feel free to post any questions or suggestions in the comments.

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The June issue of Business 2.0 is going to have an interesting cover story on the phenomena known as domaining. This is, essentially, the speculative purchase of domain name with the expectation that given their scarcity they will appreciate in value and make some money in the mean time from the placement of advertising on the parked domain. It’s long but it’s worth a read.

Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you’ve never heard of. Here’s how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire.

KEVIN HAM LEANS FORWARD, sits up tall, closes his eyes, and begins to type into the air. He’s seated along the rear wall of a packed ballroom in Las Vegas’s Venetian Hotel. Up front, an auctioneer is running through a list of Internet domain names, building excitement the same way he might if vintage cars were on the block. As names come up that interest Ham, he occasionally air-types. It’s the ultimate gut check. Is the name one that people might enter directly into their Web browser, bypassing the search engine box entirely, as Ham wants? Is it better in plural or singular form? If it’s a typo, is it a mistake a lot of people would make? Or does the name, like a stunning beachfront property, just feel like a winner?

When Ham wants a domain, he leans over and quietly instructs an associate to bid on his behalf. He likes wedding names, so his guy lifts the white paddle and snags Weddingcatering.com for $10,000. Greeting.com is not nearly as good as the plural Greetings.com, but Ham grabs it anyway, for $350,000. Ham is a devout Christian, and he spends $31,000 to add Christianrock.com to his collection, which already includes God.com and Satan.com. When it’s all over, Ham strolls to the table near the exit and writes a check for $650,000. It’s a cheap afternoon.

This is one of the most amazing products I’ve seen in a long time.  It’s Clicky and it’s Web Analytics 2.0 style.  Really, it’s a must-have for any webmaster or blogger who wants a more detailed and useful view of his/her users and visitors.  Check it out.  It’s impressive!

We’ve posted previously about places online to find free books. Well, this is the Mother of All Free Book Lists.

A scenario in which thousands - perhaps millions - of customers can successfully claim back money is unusual, the result of a regulator’s decree. But the basic situation is very common indeed. Customers have bought into a product line or ongoing service, in this case a bank account, and have decided they’re no longer happy with the way the service is provided. They decide, however, that switching to a competitor is too much trouble.

Lots of products display what economists call ”switching costs”: your mobile phone network; the supermarket whose layout you’ve mastered; a brand of car you know how to drive; your trusty PC - or should that be your trusty Mac? Sometimes the ”switching cost” is financial, but often it’s simply a matter of inconvenience.

It’s an interesting piece because it describes, in simple terms, the rationale behind the ’switching costs’ that many companies impose on customers who wish to terminate their mobile phone service, change bank accounts, and so on. It is to dissuade them from making the move and thus keeping prices high by dulling the competitiveness of that particular market. If more people switched — even if it costs them more to do so — when faced with bad service or high prices, then it would send the appropriate signal to the company to reduce its prices and improve its service. However, company-imposed switching costs (whether in terms of money or in terms of the headaches that such moves generate) ensure most people don’t and won’t.

The Simple Dollar, one of the best personal finance sites on the internet, reviews a new book by Keith Ferrazzi called Never Eat Alone.

The word networking has a very negative perception for most people; they imagine some guy shaking their hand, smiling, and marking them down in a Rolodex somewhere as merely another asset to tap someday. While there are people out there that match this mold, the truth is that actual relationships with people are a big key to success, and it’s also true that most people simply aren’t very good at quickly building mutually beneficial relationships with others. They either don’t have the social skills, see it as being vampiric and cold, or simply don’t see the larger benefit.

Never Eat Alone is a guide to networking in a socially healthy and mutually beneficial way, although it avoids the word “networking” on the cover (instead using the subtitle “And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time”). The approach here isn’t shaking everyone’s hand in the room, grabbing business cards, and jamming them into an overstuffed Rolodex; instead, it’s a much more humane approach, one that actually appealed to me even though that picture of the shifty networker above really turns me off.

They summarise the key points in each chapter. It’s worth a quick read even if you don’t buy the book as the suggestions apply across a broad range of social contexts.

Seeking Alpha list four places on the internet where one can find free books to read. One can add Scribd to that list too.

1) Wikisource - You must know by now we are big fans of Wikipedia, occasional controversies and factual problems notwithstanding. Wikisource is the virtual library portion of the Wiki-empire. Recent additions to Wikisource are right up the alley of college and high school students studying literature and the humanities: “The Mayor of Casterbridge,” by Thomas Hardy, “Daisy Miller,” by Henry James, and “Erewhon,” by Samuel Butler.

2) Online Books Page - This is more of a directory than a repository, with links to more than 25,000 online books. It offers links to books in their holographic (that is, original format and design) format, especially good for students and scholars.

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The Brazen Careerist has some good advice about when not to change our career:

1. You hate your boss. This is not a problem with your career. Change jobs instead of changing careers. Or, get better at managing your boss to get the treatment you want.

2. You want more prestige. Get a therapist - you’re having a confidence crisis, not a career crisis. Prestige is a hollow goal when it comes to careers. The quest for interesting, fun, rewarding work is one thing, but the quest for fame is, in fact, bad for you emotionally.

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Paula Mooney has put together an list of bloggers and webmasters, and their estimated salaries.  It’s pretty impressive.

According to this fascinating research from Carnegie-Mellon, there are neurophysiological differences in the way people react to spending opportunities.

Consumers often behave differently than they would ideally like to behave. We propose that an anticipatory pain of paying drives “tightwads” to spend less than they would ideally like to spend. “Spendthrifts,” by contrast, experience too little pain of paying and typically spend more than they would ideally like to spend. This article introduces and validates the “Tightwad-Spendthrift” scale, a measure of individual differences in the pain of paying. Spending differences between tightwads and spendthrifts are greatest in situations that amplify the pain of paying and smallest in situations that diminish the pain of paying.

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Austrolabe have published a great article about the state of Islamic finance in Australia and some of the opportunities it represents (and challenges). It’s written by Ozrisk, who is an expert on banking and finance, and is well worth a read.

In the longer term, some of the Shariah-compliant products may also appeal to non-Muslim borrowers. The sharing of risks inherent in many of these products is likely to appeal to borrowers uncertain of the future. A Mudharaba mortgage, for example, may be appealing to a person uncertain of the direction of real estate prices.

Australia has approximately 300,000 Muslims according to recent census data. Is that enough to sustain a competitive and creative Islamic finance industry? Probably not and that’s perhaps one reason why, as the article points out, there are only two Islamic finance institutions in the entire country. Therefore, maybe the adoption of Islamic products by non-Muslims shouldn’t be the long term goal but rather the short-term objective of any new product offering. There will be features of some products — such as the certainty of real cost provided by a murabahah contract — that would appeal to the cross-section of society. It’s not necessary for these products to even be marketed as Islamic products at all.

Steve Pavlina offers 33 rules to boost your productivity. There are some great recommendations here including some of our personal favourites such as the Pareto Principle, batching, and timeboxing.

Zenhabits has the answer:

I submit that I save at least $3,000 a year (and possibly more). How? Well, my co-workers often spend $10-15 per meal on lunch. A brown-bagged lunch costs between $1-3. If you save $11-12 every weekday, for 52 weeks of the year, you get about $3,000. Now, if you also eat out a lot for dinner, eating in for dinner would save you just as much. And if you eat out on weekends, your total amount saved by cooking for yourself could reach $7,500 or more.

Attaining wealth isn’t always a question of earning more, it’s also a matter of spending less.  Make Your Nut makes a similar point.