Internet Babel

What’s Pingo?

Pingo is a service of iBasis, one of the world’s leading international long-distance carriers. The iBasis network is your assurance of superior quality and reliability—in addition to the most competitive rates out there.

Personally, I’ve never used calling cards, have no real familiarity with them or the core need for them. Other than to save a few pennies… meh, call charges aren’t something on my super high priority list. But passing that, let’s take a look at Pingo.com as a service, site and online based business as apposed to something I wouldn’t use.

Design and Feel

Pingo.com has an exceedingly fresh and simplistic stylistic feel to it. Much like Google or any big players online when you think about it. White background, well designed logo, standard links, a bit of graphic touch-up and a slogan. Gets pretty much top marks for me in terms of structure, design and feel. Captures that new-age, web 2.0 feel nicely, as well as looking and feeling up to date.

Ease of Sign up

No messing about here. In terms of sign up, Pingo has done well to keep it short and concise by getting your main info at the start. Gaining you as a user, then explaining the bulk when your inside.

I think this is just how you should have people sign up with a service site. You don’t want big paragraphs and tons of mandatory fields on a sign up page. Just enough to get by.

After you fill out the sign up form, you’ll get an email explaining how to login and use your account. Then, you can go login and start saving on calls. You also get a free $5 of call credit when you sign up. Incase you hadn’t noticed on the above picture

Ease of Use

You can get all Pingo’d up in a mere 4 steps. They’re as follows…

Key Points

• You can pre-program your phone so that there is no PIN codes
• You can speed dial up to 25 people internationally
• It cost you nothing to sign up!
• You get a free $5 credit

There are some nice little handy benefits you get from this service. But not too many.

Affiliate Program

Every Internet marketer loves a good affiliate program. Well, lets not be generic and use cliche phrases. But we can say, with assumed confidence that; a large amount of GOOD Internet marketers certainly love a good affiliate program. So, is there a super-affiliates dream built into Pingo? To be honest, I’ve never really been much of an affiliate marketer. But I have used a few.

Pingo say they’ll pay you up to $15 when you send them a customer. Now as far as I can see, there’s no minimum payment here. So theoretically up to $15 sounds good because you see $15. But will it usually be $15? Who knows. I don’t because I haven’t used the program yet! I had to bang this stomping review out for the guys over at Pingo though as I really was taking way too long, due to other stuff… you know. So I haven’t had a chance to properly use the program yet.

On the outset it all seems nice but the affiliate program is through LinkShare. Not saying there’s anything particularly wrong with that but I much prefer, if I’m going to use an in-site affiliate program at all. For the affiliate program to be… in-site, as apposed to external. It’s nice and convenient to have the program built in, all compact within the site’s well structured design and I think it’s a bit of a shame Pingo haven’t done it.

I think a lot of companies tend to go with the option of separating their affiliate program a little bit and send their affiliates off to new window land to explore the depths of a site which looks nothing like theirs, maybe just to take the load of their server in terms of displaying, potentially shed loads of stats a day. Maybe so they can save on costs and focus on the actual driving force of the company. Which is understandable.

All I know is, I won’t be using this affiliate program. Not just because it’s external but also because I don’t believe the service is appealing enough to draw tons of customers via an affiliate link.

Overview

Looking at the site. The company. The service and the product as a whole. I can’t really fault Pingo – they do a top job and seem to genuinely enjoy their service as much as their many customers do.

But it’s definitely not for me. On the business side of things, these guys are pros and they know how to present in a manor that draws customers. But in all honesty their service just does nothing for me. It’s one of those products that makes me think… ”I wouldn’t mind having that” but then again I don’t particular want it either.

Now with the use of the affiliate program, I think there’s quite a limited market for this product in the realm of social online marketing. On a mass scale of course the market for these guys is incredible and it’s a very social friendly product. But online, I would follow the intuitive gut feeling that this type of product/service makes most people subconsciously turn a blind eye because it just doesn’t offer that much.

It’s not that it’s bad or that the site is bad, it’s just that… the benefits of this service don’t seem great enough to want to make most lazy web users click on the advertisements.

Anyway, as I’ve clearly made clear as a clear crystal ball on crystal ball celeberation day, this service isn’t for me. The business and site aspects of Pingo are spot on though, so if you fancy giving their service a go – Click this link!

This is a paid review but the fact that it’s paid for in no way distorts, changes or shapes my opinions. All reviews are of my own viewpoints regardless of the fact they may be payed for.

About the site

Retireat21.com is a site some, or most of you might be familiar with or at least heard of. Being that it’s been around the review blocks a few times. It’s certainly growing.

RA21 (sorry for the tacky abbreviation) is a site dedicated to the passion of the ‘young entrepreneur’ making money online and given that I’m one myself. I like that fact.

If I was more sure of exactly what I wanted to achieve everytime I built a site, I may have built a site similar to this at some point and wish I had done.

This site seems to focus a lot on interviews and the ‘A-Star’ line-up of Internet marketers is certainly there. Take for example the interview with SEO obsessive Aaron Wall – known for his infamously good book on the subject called… SEO Book.

So what else is here other than interviews with well known Internet gurus. Well, you have; a Forum, a Blog, a Young Richlist and some nice independent articles such as the one teaching the basics of Creating A Website. With some nicely slipped in affiliate links

Free ebook anyone? How many Make Money Online ebooks do we need. Seen enough! I haven’t had the time to read this free ebook yet but at least it’s free. So I might have a gander soon. Personally, I’m never going to bother writing an ebook on the subject as it’s so saturated that Internet marketers seem to shrug any new ones off as they assume that they’re mostly recycled information and I agree. But I’m not going to pass opinion on this one yet as I haven’t read it. So, you can grab the free ebook from Retire @ 21 dot com by signing up to their newsletter. The form is on the homepage.

About the author

Michael Dunlop is the creator of the site. He’s from Sussex, UK.

You can read Michael’s full story on his very own site – here.

Design

So, the design. I… quite like the design to be honest. It’s simple, to the point, not too flashy and does the job. It may not be amazingly impressive graphic wise but is nice and web 2.0 and is very easy on the eye.

I quite like the simple web 2.0 low graphic approach. You’ll notice it’s often a big success factor of many of the big sites. Digg, Google, Facebook, MySpace… they all have simple, sharp logos, basic colors and white backgrounds. I think Facebook took over from MySpace because of a better model of simplicity to be honest.

But anyway, back to the site

Layout and Ads

The layout of this site is nice and organized. A lot of sites usually suffer definity early on because the owners are finding their feet with the site in the early stages. I know what that’s like, it can be hard to place everything right first time, it can take a lot of constant tweaking.

But at the moment… Everything seems to be placed conveniently on the site.

This site does have quite a lot of advertising. To be expected. But it’s placed quite nicely.

I think the BLOG could benefit from less ads as they still only have 249 subscribers so some of the large affiliate banners / links could be driving away potential return visitors. Which are so valuable on a smallish, growing blog within a saturated niche. It’s hard enough getting people to come back as it is, throw ads into the mix too early and you’re making it harder.

Affiliates on posts / interviews are at the bottom so not much harm done there I doubt but I would lose the one on the homepage. This should be the hook to the site not the thing that takes visitors elsewhere.

Content

A lot of the content on Retire @ 21 is made up of interviews and lists. Like a lot Make Money Online blogs or sites to be honest. But I do think the site could benefit from more home grown content.

Personally I don’t like the name. It’s a nice motto and good punchline / hook / brand-ability factor for the site but I just don’t like numbers in domain names.

But, leaving aside the name. I think with the motto that the name drives forward and the intended passion of young entrepreneurial spirit the site tries to shout out, it really could benefit from content focusing absolutely on very specific areas of making cash online. But more importantly, written in such a way that truly defines it to the site. The name is brandable so I think the content really needs to be as well.

The forum seems to be pretty lively but I think the blog could do with some life.

Conclusion

In closing… I think Retireat21.com is a solid site with some nice spirit and atmosphere surrounding it’s design and motto but I think it definitely needs some work with some better, more definitive content being made. And possibly some more media to wider spread the name as a brand.

This is a paid review but the fact that it’s paid for in no way distorts, changes or shapes my opinions. All reviews are of my own viewpoints regardless of the fact they may be payed for.

Affiliate much? This site is a creation dedicated to teaching you the ‘do’s and dont’s’ of affiliating with poker.

I know the guy who owns this site, he is also the creator of some other useful poker sites such as ThePokerBank and StudenPokerPro.

Quality Content

NewPokerAffiliate is full of quality content. Tons of articles packed with information guiding you in the right direction when it comes to site creation aimed at making cash with poker affiliates.

Apart from giving you an inside view on the benefit of poker affiliating, the articles on this site are also useful to the Internet marketing wannabe with some need of coaching.

Just check out these articles to see what I mean. Whether you do or do not use poker affiliates, I’d recommend you check out this site purely for the quality content and the benefit you may get from reading it.

Affiliate Ratings

Apart from tons of quality content, NPA also gives you a helping hand in knowing and deciding which affiliates to go with. All common poker affiliates are given an overall rating out of 10 based on their payout and support amongst other things.

Any site which gives you ratings such as these are always useful as not too many people speak out on what’s good and what’s not these days. Every market, especially the affiliate market is in need of some healthy direction.

Authority rating sites can also help shape better affiliates as companies can sometimes work harder to get the acceptance of sites with a voice. Any influential voicing can help bring them more users and revenue, so it’s all good.

Look and Feel

In terms of the look and feel of the site, it’s nice and friendly. The colors and design factors are all nice and web 2.0 and coherent with today’s standards.

More could be done to the structure and graphics to add character but on generic terms, the site has a nice theme going.

The site is on a WordPress installation and customized to feel less like a blog and more like an all rounder, but it still benefits from using WP with comments and easy article integration.

Conclusion

On first site NPA doesn’t look all that impressive but once you actually dive into the site and read some of the content, it’s apparent that it’s built with quality in mind.

The Internet really could use more content packed sites like this aimed at a very specific niche with the intention of guidance and value.