Customer reviews are an important research tool for online consumers, with 71 percent saying that consumer reviews make them more comfortable that they are buying the right product.

When reading customer feedback, 63 percent of online shoppers said it was important to have multiple reviews for each product; 14 percent looked for reviews from trusted a source; and just three percent wanted reviews by people they knew personally.

“Consumer reviews are a must-have for online retailers, especially during the holiday season when shoppers are buying for others in categories they’re less familiar with,” said Ken Cassar, vice president, industry insights, Nielsen Online.

“Perhaps more than any other time of year, consumers are looking for outside feedback for guidance.”

Close to a quarter (24%) of online shoppers have spent more than $500 so far this holiday season, with 22 percent spending between  $100-199 online. The majority (78%) of consumers said convenience was the main reason for shopping online.

The most popular reason to shop at a particular online retailer was having made a purchase their in the past, with 62 percent of respondents. Search engines were the second most popular way to find an online retailer, with 38 percent of respondents

Advertisers

obviously, Advertisers have the ability to obtain links from publishers for as little as 1 point a link. Currently at the time of this post the point-dollar exchange rate is 1000 points per dollar. So a dollar for 1000 links is not too bad if you ask me even if the links are all PR0.\

Starting your first link campaign is a peice of cake. It’s as easy as hitting the “create new campaign” button. You then are asked to name your campaign, and select the types of sites you would like your links to appear on. The value of links is measured through Yahoo Backlinks and Google PageRank, hence the higher the PR the more expensive a link is.

For accurate targetting TNX allows you to choose the most relevant category to the URL you are promoting. Even better, you can GeoTarget, and only select sites that are in a specific language.

Creating ads is easy too. In fact, it reminds me of the adwords setup. You are encouraged to create a diverse range of ads, just incase the one’s you want are not approved.

Publishers

Publishing, selling adspace is relatively simple too. Firstly you submit your site to TNX, not that your site must be hosted on a server that supports Perl or PHP, and it must already be indexed by Google.

You can decide how many links are displayed on which pages, and what links are displayed. Helping to prevent irrelevnt ads.

What’s special about contest beat then?

Firstly, unlike a number of other contest sites with this kind of coverage and frequency of readers this ContestBeat is free. Other sites often charge upto $150 to post your contest on them.

For those of you who know about our tragic ‘Win a PS3′ competition, we will not make the same mistakes we made last time. If we ever do hold another contest (and we will). One of the changes we will make to our strategy will be the use of contest sites, notably ContestBeat.

1. Mailinator
2. MyTrashMail
3. MailExpire
4. TemporaryInbox
5. MailEater
6. Jetable
7. SpamBox
8. GuerillaMail
9. SpamHole
10. 10MinuteMai

Hopefully you’ve heard about RSS Hugger before and if you haven’t let me briefly explain it’s purpose. Putting it simply the site can be used as your feed reader as well as for including your own blog. You can then distribute these feeds with others, somewhat like social bookmarking for blogs.

Here is a quote from RSS Hugger:

The Idea – rssHugger is a unique website that aims to bring bloggers and readers together. rssHugger aims to provide blog owners with a unique easy-to-use way to promote their blogs by sending them traffic, building backlinks for search engine optimization, as well as attracting new rss subscribers if the content is interesting to the reader. rssHugger aims to help visitors be able to easily find blogs that write about subjects they are interested in. These subjects include: internet marketing, making money online, charity, sports, gambling, and many more. If the visitors find a blog that they had not previously heard about, they can easily add it to their RSS readers or bookmark it.

Not so long ago a $20 registration fee was necessary for sign up, however recently the service has been made free, Under the condition that you make a short blog post about them on your site, which explains the reason behind this post.

What does Qassia get from all of this good and bad intel? Well they get just that! Good and bad intel! Their aim is to build up a massive database of useful and trashy information and to have it published on their site. Qassia obviously want the useful “intel” to be the most readily available to people, however I’m pretty sure that it would require quite a lot of moderating to achieve this. I’m not too sure how useful this good and bad “intel” is going to be for Qassia, however they are pretty sure of what they want so let’s just wait and see what happens.

Within Qassia, you can submit 3 types of content:

• Original Unpublished Intel
  (You receive Q$40 ~ Q$100 depending on length + Q$0 ~ Q$300 depending on rating)

• Existing Authored Content
  (You receive Q$20 ~ Q$50 depending on length + Q$0 ~ Q$150 depending on rating)
• Legally Redistributed Content
  (You receive Q$20 irrespective of length or rating)

As you can see “Original Unpublished Intel” is worth the most, followed by Existing Authored Content and Legally Redistributed content. Obviously you must write your own content, however if you have legally purchased articles from someone (and have the rights to them) then you can published them under Legally Redistributed Content (although this option pays the least amount of Qassia $$$).

Qassia is a relatively new concept that hasn’t really made its’ way around the web just yet, and the site is still in the beta stages. Who knows? Qassia could possibly be the next best thing, however I would be very skeptical as to whether or not it will be black marked by the Google Page Rank system as it provides multiple links to single sites without requiring the most targeted information. If Google gives counts the backlinks towards Pank Ranking scores then I would highly recommend that everyone signs up ASAP, because the site is still relatively new and doesn’t have many members.

Quick Note: Although it’s a new site and system, the Money007 team has already developed techniques to make very good use of Qassia.com and we will include these techniques for free in our *soon to be released* Link Juice Guide.

If you are thinking about joining up, then I would suggest going through our affiliate link because the site is closed for beta at the moment and you can only sign up through current members: www.qassia.com

The Money007 team.