A month ago, I wrote about being serious in building my blog into a search engine friendly blog and even joined a free tutorial class, which did not materialise. I continued to search for companies that offer SEO Training either for free or at a most competitive price and came across MarketingICE.

In case you are wondering what ICE stands for, it is “Interactive Creative Education”. All tutorials on MarketingICE is by video and it does not matter what you would like to learn, there is a video for it.

As a premium member, you will have access to a members-only forum where each video has its own dedicated thread and all questions that you may have will be answered there. As they say, membership has its privileges. With over seventy video tutorials on various topics, we would be quite dumb if we pass over the one time offer of $9.95 for the first month. Well, I skipped it and was offered a second chance in my email at $12.95 for the first month, still considerably lower than the monthly fee of $19.99

For the time being, I have access to my trial account and I have access to the video tutorials. I must say that the video training is very comprehensive and easy to follow. If anyone still have questions, he could get expert answers from the dedicated thread on the forum.

To test out how good Marketing ICE is, I opted to watch How To Create A Blogger Blog. Well, I already KNOW how to already, of course, but I watched it to see if it covered every step in a clear and precise manner and it did, from creating a Google account to step by step instructions on what to fill out on each space until the blog is set up.

This membership is definitely worthy of the money spent for anyone looking for clear and interactive video tutorial.

A couple of days ago, I received a Friendster Friend Request. It is weird because this is was from a rather prominent local blogger and while I do not know him personally, he is chums with one of my friends, also a very popular local blogger. I am sure my friend has never mentioned me to him before so I wondered why he suddenly could come across my Friendster profile and then send a friend request.

I have been a Friendster member for years at the request of a good friend but I never did anything to my profile and never seek anyone out to “add”. I can never understand why people can link up with total strangers and call them friends.

In this case we are now linked up and then what? I may have accepted his request but we never even exchanged a note.

The other day when I logged into my account, I saw a few people in my friends list and wondered, “Who the heck are they?” You see, I don’t even have more than twenty people in my list and I don’t even remember who they are!

The problem with me is that when acquaintances request an “add”, I will accept it but after a while of not keeping in touch, I would have forgotten about them totally. What makes it worse is that some do not use a universal online ID and their Friendster user name is not something that I recognise straightaway.

I think I am going to delete them from my list. When I don’t remember them, how can they be my friend??

If you read my other blog, you would know that I suffer from acne. I wouldn’t say that my condition is bad because I have seen people worse that mine but it does not help when society keeps letting me know of my bad skin condition wherever I go, in glossy magazines, etc.

I am fortunate that I am not to the point where the mirror is my enemy (yet) although I have days where I feel that I would look more beautiful IF only the acne are not around! To be frank, I have tried many possible solutions but none seems to work permanently. Perhaps I am not diligent; perhaps I am too cheap to try the more expensive products, hence better? That is the perception, anyway.

Some people will advice me that I should not eat chocolate or spicy food. Well, I think those are just old wives tales because I did abstain from them before but there was no improvement to my complexion.

As someone who is practically glued to her computer the whole day, of course I did my research on acne online and one of the best resource site that I came across is www.acne.com. I have found the tips here useful. One of the most effective methods for me is to apply a coat of Benzoyl Peroxide 2.5% cream ALL OVER MY FACE. Many people were shocked by that because usually people apply acne cream on the affected spots only but trust me, you can really see a huge difference.

There was once the pharmacy ran out of 2.5% so I bought one with 5% strength and ended up burning my skin. Hahaha! It was a lesson well learnt!

I recently registered with something called Job-O-Matic that I saw from Feedburner. They say that we could have another way to monetize our website or blog by creating a job board. That sounds great so I joined hehehe

However, after joining, I am not sure if as an independent and individual blog, I could get the sales or not. The good thing is that even if you are not able to find people who are willing to pay you to advertise on your job board, Job-O-Matic will automatically fill your board up with their ever ready database of jobs and you will still receive a cut of the commission.

The jobs that Job-O-Matic fills for you are based on your tags or keywords. I have tried it out on my own newly created job board and was happy to note that only relevant results were displayed. Luckily!

Although I have a job board, I think such a concept works best for sites like JobStreet. They can use such a board to cater to their overseas browsers. As for now, since my readership is not as impressive as I would like it to be, I am not going to put my job board live first.

Perhaps sometime in the near future when I have grown my readership further and spent time redesigning the Job Board, I will link up to it from my blog.

If you have tried Job-O-Matic with success, I would like to hear from you!

Last week while at work, I was given the thankless task of collecting data from a recent survey conducted by our company. I say thankless because nobody understands the amount of work that I have to put in after setting the survey forms, making sure they are filled in as accurately as possible and collecting the data and then analyzing and interpreting the data and putting them into pie charts and graphs. A lot of thought has to be put into each survey and we do that about twice a year (!), not forgetting the time, energy and sleepless nights.

I am always afraid of missing out an important item in the survey and then I am answerable to the boss. Believe me, the stress is no fun at all.

I sort of complained to my friend about it and he said my company is so back dated!! He told me that his company has been using a web based survey solution provided by iSalient for sometime now and the problem I faced, which he has also encountered is not a thing of the past.

According to my friend, iSalient offers a complete solution to surveys and analytical studies online. By using iSalient alone, we could really thrown out all the old software that we have been using and cost us a lot of money to upgrade yearly.

My friend encouraged me to convince my management to upgrade to the new technology of iSalient because this program guides users through the process of getting a survey off the ground from its free question templates and styles that we could customize with our own questions, to distributing the survey forms to reach a larger database of people, to interpreting the results from the feedback and generating quantitative analysis and rendering detailed reports in a professional style.

I am impressed to say the least! I hope that by the next round of survey, our company would have upgraded the whole survey system. If they haven’t, to be frank, I don’t want to get involved anymore!