Max Available 1600*1200 Full and 2560*1600 Wide | from Desktop Nexus.

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I’ve prepared a few items to help you build a more successful community.

Find Your Niche

While this seems rather obvious, it deserves more thought than most people give it. You want to choose a niche that isn’t overly saturated, but that has the potential to reach a high volume of users. Once you’ve found a niche, do your due diligence; check stats for keywords to estimate available traffic, visit other sites in the niche and analyze what they have done well and what they’ve done poorly… and not just the successful sites either, you’ll find plenty of great but poorly executed sites out there to take a cue from. (more…)

Shoemoney has it down, like a champ. On Saturday Shoemoney posted up for advertisers sponsors for an RSS giveaway.

Each day four prizes will be given away - one prize for each RSS service (Google Reader Subscriber, News Gator Subscriber, Bloglines , and one for all others) . An additional GrandPrize giveaway will be given out on November 1st. This prize will only be available to those who entered every day so get crackin!

A full prize list has not yet been posted, but some of the early noteables include an xbox360, a PS3, a WordPress coding from PSDchopstick, and full conference pass to Search Engine Strategies Chicago. The prizes total a whopping $13,000 - no small amount considering the offer for sponsors was only open for four days.

It certainly appears that with this giveaway ShoeMoney has the contest in the bag (not to mention new readers and the great link bait), but you never know what John Chow has up his sleeve.

Invoicing your client in a very professional and simple manner is an effective way to instill confidence and build loyalty. Here are a few apps that can help you bill more effectively.

FreshBooks.com

FreshBooks offers six plans ranging from gratis to $149 per month. All plans above the free (trial) plan offer the same features, but as the cost goes up so does the usefulness of each features.

For $14 per month you can send an unlimited amount of invoices, manage 25 active clients, and allow one person staff access. Emails are unbranded and can be slightly customized by adding your logo. Time sheets, document sharing and support ticketing is also included. One unique option with FreshBooks is the ability to send an invoice via snail mail, very handy for those bigger accounts.

simplybill.com

Simply bill has just three plans, free, enhanced ($15), and premium ($25). Again, the features are the same, but less limited as the price increases.

The $15 plan includes unlimited quotes, unlimited clients, and 100 invoices per month. Some of the spiffier features are RSS subscription and a time tracking widget for project management. You can also setup recurring invoices, and customize your invoice template colors and layout. (more…)

Free CSS Cart

FreeCSSCart started out when a nice, lightweight, standards compliant cart was really needed. Then they made the decision to switch the backend to RoR (for no other reason than because RailsRocks! I imagine). Delay after delay, and finally realizing it wasn’t as easy as that, they decided to keep the admin written in RoR, and the client side in PHP (yes I agree that’s just stupid). And by this time the need had passed and the void was filled by several other, less ass-backward solutions. Damn shame, I loved the logo.

WidgetMachine

WidgetMachine was one of the first and more popular sites for OSX widgets. The site had some hiccups and down time, then in December of ‘06 it went down and never came back. It was talked about on quite a few forums and supposed to come back this summer. Apparently it never did. Bummer it was quite a nice site. (more…)