Recently I’ve been involved with a new website all about drumming (I’m not posting the link here since it really isn’t relevant to this blog – if you want it… message me – I still check my kmail occasionaly).  Along with playing in my own band I have also started part time work as a drum tech for an amazing Atlanta drummer and have been running his entire online presense (twitter, myspace, facebook, website).  Along with my real job I just don’t have the time to write on this blog or actively participate in Kaneva any more.

This isn’t to say that I might not pop back in world on a slow day to say “hi”, but I definetly don’t have the commitment time needed to write quality blog posts for all of you wonderful (well at least most of you are) people .

Love me or hate me, doesn’t really matter in the end… the people that I was close with on Kaneva love me and that’s really all that does matter.

Now for my last giveaway -

I’m giving away this entire blog!!!  That’s right the whole fuckin thing!  This isn’t some random drawing contest though…. I will choose the winner and if you don’t like who I choose – too fuckin bad… it’s my blog and I’ll give it away if I want to =)

Anyone who is interested in taking over this blog, please send me a kmail that includes information for how long you’ve been on Kaneva … how much time you spend on Kaneva a day (average)….. and why you want this blog.

But wait!! that’s not all.  I will also hand over the keys to the Kanevian Blog community on Kaneva and the Kanevian Blog Mogulus account.

That’s right bitches… I’m handing over the keys to my kingdom empire!  So get those kmails sent – impress me and you get it all!

But, I digress… April fools day was fun this year and I think that most people actually enjoyed the joke.

I don’t like the fact that Kaneva was going to wait to make their user base see this video, so I decided to go ahead and post it.  Check it out below – or CLICK HERE to view the video.

Feel free to leave comment sharing your thoughts, opinions, or memories of Kaneva.

Ok, so I know the layoffs from Kaneva are sooooo two weeks ago, but I really hadn’t had time to sit down and think what I was going to write about.

Going through the forums, reading comments on this blog, and just generally talking to other members – I’ve noticed that a lot of people are stressing about the fate of Kaneva because of the layoff’s.  My thoughts – we are in tough economic times for everyone… and if Fortune 500 companies are laying off employees what would my make anyone think that a startup like Kaneva would be free from layoffs?

It’s a sad fact of life – Everyone’s gotta work…. they just don’t have to work here.  Will I miss those that got laid off?  Of course, but I still plan on keeping in touch with the ones that I enjoyed talking to.  I do feel bad for those that lost their jobs, but unfortunately that is one of the risks you take when working for a startup like Kaneva.  All of those that were good at there job will more then likely find a new one working for another company.

Why you shouldn’t stress – Too many people in Kaneva like to jump to conclusions or read to far into things (hence all the drama people seem to complain about).  Don’t get up in arms over the company changing…. companies have to be dynamic in order to survive…. “I DON’T WANT KANEVA TO GO CORPORATE” – Well, what the hell do you expect them to do.  You don’t honestly think that credit sales can keep the company afloat do you?  Kaneva has to look at all possible ways to bring in new income and get rid of as much expense as possible or else they will ultimately fail.  Why should this bother you?

If your stressing because you were friends with some of the GM’s – check out my post on staying in touch with people outside of Kaneva.

If your still stressed, think I’m wrong, or think this is some sort of conspiracy and that Kaneva paid me to write all of this then feel free to leave a comment and get it all out.  Love it or hate it – Kaneva, just like any business has to make changes to survive.

Since I haven’t been as active on Kaneva as I normally am I thought it would be a good time to write a post about how I stay in touch with all of my Kaneva friends even when I’m not logged into Kaneva – 1 word: Digsby.

I use Digsby to manage all of my Instant Messaging, Twitter, and Gmail Accounts (I have a ton of them).  Are you worried about Kaneva going out of business?  If so, now is the time to setup your “out of Kaneva” accounts so that you can stay in touch with all of your Kaneva friends.  We all have made some the best friends on Kaneva and would definitely not want to lose them.

Here are my steps for keeping in touch with your Kaneva friends, outside of Kaneva:

1. Download and Install Digsby – you can get it by clicking here (don’t worry, it’s absolutely free)

2. Setup a new gmail account – use your kaneva user name or put kaneva in the title.  Make sure you write down your login information cause you will need it later.

3. Setup a twitter account – again, use your kaneva user name or put kaneva somewhere in the title of the username

4. Setup an IM account with AIM, MSN (you can use your gmail address that you created in step 2), and Yahoo.  Make sure you write down all of the account information for each of these also.

5.  Setup a facebook and/or myspace account with your Kaneva username (they might let you only setup an account with your real name in facebook – this is optional)

6.  Startup Digsby (since you downloaded it in step 1)

7.  Once you have logged into Digsby, on the menu at the top of the client go to “Digsby” –> “My Accounts” and then add all of the accounts you have created so far.

You have now setup a bunch of different ways for all of your Kaneva friends to keep in touch with you.  And the best part is, with Digsby… all of this information is in one place.

You are notified of new emails, and all of your IM’s, no matter what account, come to the same place.

Now is the time to setup these accounts, due to an unstable economy and an unsure future for Kaneva – you never know when it will be your last login and last chance to talk to all of your friends.

How do you keep in touch with your Kaneva friends outside of WOK?  Let me know in the comments?

In case you haven’t done it yet, click on the button below to download Digsby.

For those that want to know more about Digsby – here is the information from their website:

• Digsby offers complete synchronization between computers and installations. Everything from the skin you chose to your pre-defined status messages follows you from place to place.
• You can place a widget on your blog, website, or social network profile so you can chat with visitors right from digsby.
• Manage multiple simultaneous file transfers from one simple transfer manager.

I will be sure to post my thoughts and any information I gather as soon as I have collected it.

So have you missed me?……. Well, that’s ok I didn’t really miss you either….ok, maybe a little bit…… alright, I missed you a lot – I just didn’t want to to come off as desperate.  It’s been a while since I’ve written a “real” post on here, but that’s because I’ve been very busy – what? too busy for you?…. No I’m never too busy for you – ok, maybe I was too busy for you these past few weeks, but I have good intentions.  What have I been up to?…. I’m glad you asked -

I love playing Kaneva and I love blogging, but two of my big passions are Internet Marketing (mostly affiliate marketing) and web design.  Recently I’ve been working on several new websites and I don’t know how many designers/programmers read this blog, but you will understand that a custom designed website from scratch can take anywhere from several days to several months to get up and running.

On the Internet Marketing side.  I recently signed up with a service called PPC-Coach.  For those that have never heard of PPC-Coach let me give a brief explanation of what PPC or Pay-Per-Click advertising is and how it works in terms of affiliate marketing:

First lets start with “what is affiliate marketing” – affiliate marketing is basically selling or preselling offers for other companies.  When you hear or see the ads that talk about “making money online”… they are normally refering to affiliate marketing.  To become an affiliate marketer you can sign up with any of the following companies:

• wotogepa
• affiliate.com
• clickbooth
• flux advertising
• xy7
• neverblue
• marketleverage
• commission junction
• clickbank

Each of these companies have there own offers with their own conditions for each of the offers.  Some of the offers only require that you get a user to enter a zip code or email address to get paid.  Pay-per-click advertising is buying ad space on places like Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Facebook.  You create your ad with the keywords you want to be listed for and then bid on those keywords.  You only put in a maximum bid so what you actually pay when someone clicks on your ad might be lower (in some cases a lot lower).  The best part of this type of advertising is that you only have to pay when someone clicks on your ad.  You use these PPC ads to send users to the offer that you are promoting.  The idea being that you spend less on advertisement of the product then you make when someone buys the product through your affiliate link.

Now I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for about 6 months now off and on and was struggling with it.  Mostly due to my lack of dedication.  Affiliate marketing is hard work (I put in about 5 – 8+ hours a day with affiliate marketing campaigns alone).  Since I was struggeling I decided I needed to seek help and get serious about it.  That’s when I found PPC-Coach.

PPC-Coach is a service that offers videos, tutorials, a private forum for answering all of your questions, tools (which are worth much more then the subscription cost), and direct contact with people who have been doing and succeeding with affiliate marketing for a long time.  Many of the senior members on the forum do affiliate marketing full time now and were able to quit their day job.  One of the most successful members of PPC-Coach makes an average of $3000 a day doing affiliate marketing (that’s about $90k a month).  This is the high end of the spectrum.  On average a lot of memebers will make a passive income of about $100-$1000 a day (that’s an extra $3k – $30k a month!).  Ok, Ok… I know all of this sounds really sales pitchy, but I wanted to share what I have been up to with all of you and thought that I would pass along this great program if any of you are interested in making money on-line: CLICK HERE to check out PPC-Coach.  The cost is $50/month – Canadian… so less then $50/month if you live in the US.  If you create a good campaign that $50 will be made back within a day so it makes for a good investment.  The money is basically to keep out those who aren’t serious about affiliate marketing – take a look around alot of  the other private forums for affiliate marketing cost at least $100/month and the free public forums are mostly BS… all they will do is insult you for asking what they consider to be a dumb question.

What else has been in the works?

Currently I am working on a plan to move The Kanevian Blog off of the wordpress.com servers and on to my own servers.  With this move will come a site re-design.  So between working on the new design and planning the move so that none of the posts or any of your wonderful comments are lost – it will take time.

I am also trying to plan more contests for the blog so in the comments let me know what you would like to see as contests/prizes for the contests.  Also, if you have any questions about affiliate marketing feel free to put those in the comments section also and I will try my best to answer them.

I know this was a super long post with a little bit of a sales pitch in it, but I am honestly trying to help out the Kaneva members that want to find a way to make a little bit of extra money while staying at home.  It is always inspiring when I hear that someone quit the day job that they hate because they now make enough money online using sites like PPC Coach.

Not too long ago I visted Kaneva HQ in Atlanta, GA.  While I was there I was given a gift of a dance party 3d card worth 1500 credits.  I wanted to pass this along to my readers in the form of a comment contest.

That contest ended Friday and I am happy to say that I have found a winner!!  The way that it worked was all entries were put into a spread sheet and assigned a number in the order they were recieved.  I then used a random number generator to pick one number out of all of the entries.  The winner of this contest commented and sent out a blast about the contest which gave them a total of 3 entries.  Out of a total of 37 entries, this put them at good odds.

So without further babbeling on my part – The Winner Is……

MrsCaptainHarley

Congradulations Mrs. C – You can Kmail me to setup a time to claim your 1500 credits in world.

Thank You to all who participated.  Please make sure to keep reading – never know when there will be another contest!

All you have to do is CLICK HERE, enter your email address, and the verification code, and then hit the “Complete Submission Request Button”.

And now you will receive the updates right in your inbox. How sweet is that?

Last Thursday I took a field trip to the real life home of the Virtual World of Kaneva.  A few days prior to this trip I sent a quick message to ShamelessPlugs – Kaneva’s head of marketing and public relations to talk to her about doing a guest post on Kaneva’s official blog.  We talked about meeting up for lunch and she offered me an invitation to come and meet the team at the Kaneva office.

Unfortunately, I was running late and missed most of the team as they were already at lunch.  However, I did get to meet many of the names that we know and (sometimes) love – Rotini, Corelli, and CKlaus were among those I was able to shake hands with and say hello to.

The visit started off by me getting lost in the large office complex that Kaneva is located in here in Atlanta.  Once I found the right building I was surprised when the elevator door opened and I was greeted by a vast blue wall that hosted the Kaneva logo – a very clean (almost zen like) lobby.  I was actually expecting the elevator doors to open and see doors that matched all of the others that I had seen in the other office building (the wrong one).  However, I was surprised to learn that Kaneva had grown so much that it needed it’s own floor.

I got a quick tour from ShamelessPlugs showing off the offices and seeing the employees hard at work to develop the 3d world of Kaneva.  After the tour concluded Shameless, Corelli, and I went to lunch and talked shop.  On the way over I got a nice surprise as we were accompanied on our walk by Chris Klaus (Kaneva CEO and Co-Founder) and Animesh Saha (Vice President of Kaneva Engineering) and was asked several questions about my feelings on Kaneva and was told about some of the new exciting features to come – such as user developed flash games and new deeds that will soon be released.

At lunch we talked about my feelings on the changes made to 2d profiles, some of my pet-peeves with the game, some of the things I would like to see, and one of the most important things of all… the changes YOU would like to see.  We talked about how Kaneva Ideas has made it easy for customer service to keep track of all of the changes the users would like to see and get the attention of these ideas from developers and Kaneva upper management.

Corelli and I discussed challenges faced by customer service professionals (I have spent many years working in the technology industry with several degrees of customer service).  Overall I was happy to see how much Kaneva wants to listen to their users input to make changes (even though those changes sometimes seem to take forever).

Like a dummy, I forgot to bring a camera – but I am hoping to make more trips to their office and will try to take some more pictures (and show up on time so I can meet more of the staff).  They were very nice to me and if nothing else made great company for lunch.

OK – Now the fun part of this post for you guys…. ANOTHER COMMENT CONTEST!!!!

While I was at the office I was given a Dance Party 3D card (the card they used to sell at Target) worth 1500 credits as a gift.  I wanna give these credits to you!!!!  This contest will be very similar to the last comment contest I had on the blog, but there are a few changes so read the rules below:

• To enter in this contest all you have to do is simply leave a comment on this post.
• Leaving a comment will get you one entry.
• To get a bonus two entries send out a blast linking back to this post (use this link: http://kanevian.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/my-field-trip-to-the-kaneva-inc-office/)
• See Below for a picture of what your blast should look like
• Make sure to send me (SFNdust) a screen cap of your blast either through kmail or through email – kanevianblog (at) gmail (dot) com.
• Winner will be selected by random drawing
• Contest ends Friday March 6th at 11:59 PM EST and no late entries will be accepted.
• Winner will be announced Monday March 9th – Winner will have 3 days to claim their prize in the virtual world or a new winner will be selected.
• I have the right to change this contest at any time – this is something I don’t have to do so don’t bitch!
• NEW: No using alt accounts – If I catch you… all of your entries are disqualified… let’s keep it fair =)

What your blast should look like:

Tips for helping me help you: When you leave a comment for the contest use your Kaneva Screen Name and an email address that is valid so I can contact you easier if you win.  If you email me a screen sot of your blast, please include your Kaneva Screen Name in the email.  If you have any further questions – feel free to PM, Kmail, or Email me.

So let’s get to it Kaneva – Come and win your 1500 credits!!!