The Haphazard Gazette

Incredible Hulk #1 FN+ 1st Hulk & #181 NM 1st Wolverine

2010-07-24T11:12:00.011-05:00

Below you will find close up pics of the few defects found on these great comics as well as close up pics of bother front and rear covers of both comics as well as the inside of both front and rear covers of both comics. Please examine all pics and email me with any questions you need answered. Email me at dcbernhardt1@cougars.ccis.edu. Thanks for looking! (There are 22 pictures in total with comments below each pic)

Proof picture showing ebay ID and comics for sale.
Bottom half of inside of rear cover of Hulk #181

Top half of inside of rear cover of Hulk #181

Inside of rear cover of Hulk #181

Bottom haf of inside of front cover of Hulk #181

Top half of inside of front cover of Hulk #181

Inside of front cover of Hulk #181

Bottom half of rear cover of Hulk #181

Top half of back cover of Hulk #181

Bottom half of front cover of Hulk #181

Top half of front cover of Hulk #181

Bottom Half of inside or rear cover of Hulk #1

Top of inside cover of back of Hulk #1

Inside of rear cover of Hulk #1

Bottom half of inside cover of Hulk #1

Top half of inside of front cover of Hulk #1

Inside cover close up of tear repair..... very difficult to see at all.

Inside of front cover of Hulk #1

Bottom half of front cover of Hulk #1

Top half of front cover of Hulk #1

Top left corner of Hulk #1

The slight tear repair between the E and I.

Free Advertising Methods Google Used To Succeed

2009-11-05T13:18:00.002-06:00

Google Inc is one of the most admired and respected companies in the world. But many people do not have details on the company’s humble beginnings. The truth is that Google grew from obscurity to the huge success it is today without spending a dime on advertising. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page simply used free advertising methods to get the word out about their company and the wonderful service they were offering. Surely this should be proof enough that free advertising works. It worked for Google.

In this article we will examine the free advertising methods that Google used.

a) Identify a problem and then create a useful product to solve it

The Google guys identified a problem. It was getting increasingly difficult to find stuff on the web even as it expanded rapidly. So they created a search engine that would help folks find things fast. It is much easier for a product to take off when it addresses a real problem. The more serious the problem the bigger the rewards in the end. The most powerful form of advertising is word of mouth advertising. It is free but very difficult to trigger. It helps a lot if the product is useful and solves a nagging problem.

b) Give free samples of your product to get it out there and get word of mouth working

The next thing Brin and Page did was to encourage their colleagues at Stanford (where they were Ph.d students) to use their wonderful new search engine. They did and instantly liked it. It is important to get people using your product as soon as possible and giving free samples is the most powerful form of advertising.

c) Create an email list

Brin and page had an email list which they regularly sent an email newsletter to. They called the list “Google friends.” It is easy to build an email list if you are not in a hurry to grow a huge list quickly but instead want to use it to help get the word out and to use those in it to spread the word.

Can you use these powerful free advertising method to get your own online business off the ground?

Two Powerful Free Advertising Methods For Any Affiliate Program

2009-11-05T13:16:00.001-06:00

Does free advertising work? That has to be one of the most frequently asked questions online. And yet the answer should be pretty obvious. There is evidence all around us to prove that free advertising works. Let me just give one example. Look at Google. Google moved from obscurity to huge success by using nothing but free advertising. In other words Google grew into the huge success that it is today using free advertising.

Actually various fascinating methods were used and I examine them in great detail in this article. But in this article I will concentrate on two powerful free advertising methods that can prove to be quite effective for any affiliate who wants to exploit them to the maximum;

a) Blogs

Blogs are an amazing way to promote any affiliate program. You just have to know exactly what to do with them. The truth is that you will need to put in a lot of very hard work. Remember there are no free lunches in this life. The advertising method may be free but it will cost you plenty in terms of time and effort spent.

What you need to do is to create popular blogs based on some of the serious problems that the prospects for your affiliate program face. For instance if your affiliate program sells business books then your blog should deal with some of the serious problems businesses fail which are addressed in the books you are selling. Remember that people do not come online to be sold anything. They get on the web to look for information. If you can provide exactly what they are looking for, people will find you through the search engines and they will read the information and with time trust you and all the recommendations you make to them. So have a few links in your blog but do not look like you just want to sell books. Provide genuinely useful material and information.

The magic with blog is that you get to qualify your leads and send very targeted traffic to your site. Instead of sitting idel and miserable at the low traffic arriving at your affiliate program site why not get busy creating content for a blog and having fun as you meet prospects and provide useful information?

b) Free reports to build email lists

There are few marketing tools online that are more powerful than email lists. Remember that tired old cliché; the money is in the list. Don’t get anxious or give up too easily when building your list. Be patient and take your time to build a quality list. It is better to have 10 people who are ideal prospects for your business than 1000 people who were tricked to get onto your list.

The most effective way to build your list is to create valuable reports from your blog posts and offer them free on your blog. This way you will legally “trap” email addresses of those who visit your site and build up a list of hot prospects for your affiliate program.

Dramatically Improve Your Affiliate Program Revenues: The Power Of Focus

2009-11-05T13:14:00.001-06:00

To be successful at anything, one must be able to focus with the focus of a laser beam on a single particular area of their business that requires improvement. In real life there are so many distractions and it is easy for an entrepreneur to get sucked into constantly putting out small fires while ignoring the main problem. The fires are always mere symptoms, what always needs urgent attention is the main disease itself. There is no point wasting time treating symptoms while the real disease just gets worse and goes untreated.

When it comes to an online business things are even worse. This is because one of the main strengths of the web is also its’ curse or main disadvantage. This is the vast information available online which apart from being a huge plus also tends to easily distract. What this means is that online entrepreneurs need to have plenty of discipline and focus in everything they do. The rewards of focusing can be huge.

Let’s take a struggling affiliate program as an example. The affiliate has invested a lot of time and maybe even resources learning about the affiliate program and how it works. Finally they dutifully set up their affiliate program site and put their affiliate links at all the right places hoping that something will happen. Nothing happens and frustration sets in. So what is the problem? Most new affiliates tend to be so optimistic and excited about the affiliate programs that they are joining that when they end up failing they don’t even have the heart to carefully analyze their reasons for failure.

What if they instead sat down and carefully looked at their online business? What if they then realized that the problem was that their affiliate program sites were not getting enough hits from potentially interested prospects? Identifying the problem is always the beginning of a solution. What if they then focused on finding out what methods are used by successful affiliates in the same program? This would lead them to focus on the single area that they would need to work on to bring about dramatic changes in their affiliate program online business.

Focus means that they would not get distracted by anything else like wasting time checking back again and again on their affiliate stats hoping that by some miracle some traffic has come in from somewhere. Instead they would place all their concentration on learning how to build traffic to their sites and then implementing everything they learn even as they analyze the results and tweak and improve.

That is a really a secret to online success that should not be a secret at all.

Use The Biggest Affiliate Success Secret To Revolutionize Your Business

2009-11-05T13:08:00.001-06:00

Don’t you think it rather strange that in this information age so many businesses end up failing simply because they lack enough information to build and improve on their businesses? Think about it for a minute, all the valuable information to rescue your online business or affiliate program from extinction and change it to a very thriving enterprise is available online. So why don’t people just look for the information they need? Do they prefer to suffer and struggle in frustration even as all the answers they seek are just a click away?

Actually the answer to this puzzle is a little more complicated than that. The really important point for you to take away with you from this article is that if you want to use the power of the web to revolutionize your affiliate program or online business there are a few steps you will need to take. Here they are;

Identify critical areas you need to work on to improve your business

You will have to clearly identify which areas in your business need the most immediate attention. For instance most affiliates start off with the problem of not having enough traffic arriving at the affiliate web site. So in this case the critical areas of the business involve the building of traffic to their site. And not just any traffic. It will need to be targeted traffic to yield success.

Once the problem areas have been identified, you will need to be even more specific and zero in on something much more specific. This may require some initial research. Start off by looking at the very methods other successful sites have used to build high traffic. Choose the methods you think will most likely work for your site. List them down in order of priority.

Create a program for continuous research

Once you have your list, the next thing is to focus on each item on the list dealing only with one item at a time. Set aside some time every day to research and read about the particular topic you are focusing on. Be careful not to get side-tracked. The idea is to get the knowledge and experiences of others that will help you. You will then seek to apply the same methods successfully to your affiliate program.

It is really that simple. Online success is only a few clicks away.

Ten Reasons to buy the new Kindle 2, and ten reasons not to

2009-10-29T01:56:00.005-05:00

Having used both Kindles 1 and 2, I thought it would helpful to list where the new Kindle excels. The dead tree book will never die – I think it will even have more longevity and popularity than the boutique appreciation of vinyl records – but our generation will be the last to use “books” as our primary reading systems. Expect ebooks to hit colleges in perhaps five years and high schools and grade schools in about 7. That said, should you buy a Kindle now? Why?

1. It’s great if you travel. If you travel, the Kindle is a godsend. I’m the kind of guy who stocks up books for even short trips, fully expecting to finish War and Peace, Notes from Underground, and four Clive Cussler novels on a plane trip from Pittsburgh to Columbus. With the Kindle you have a full complement of books available at any time.

2. You can put anything you want on it. You can easily email DOC, TXT, and PDF files to your own Kindle email address for conversion to the Kindle – but that costs 10 cents.

3. It looks great. The Kindle 2 is an amazing improvement over the Kindle 1. If every manufacturer took cues on build quality and product life cycles from Amazon, we’d all be better off.

4. It feels great. This new version has excellent button placement and is thin enough to cut cheese. It’s eminently portable.

5. Almost any book at any time. Except for a few esoteric reference books I’ve found just about everything I need on the Kindle store. As more and more publishers go ebook – and I think an iPhone Kindle reader will truly blow the last bottlenecks out – this excuse will become ineffective.

6. It works in inclement conditions. I was in Mexico with the wife and kids and I wanted to test the Kindle out near the pool. Three books later and I felt like the laziest high-tech maven in the world. The ladies next to me brought twenty softcover novels with them and all of them got wet and messy. The Kindle worked like a dream.

7. The bookmarking and highlighting systems are vastly improved. The original Kindle had two methods for note-taking: you could select text and add a note or you could add a book mark. The new system refines those considerably and adds visual feedback whenever you take a note.

8. The dictionary is now in-line. When you move to a word, its definition appears at the bottom of the page. If you wanted a definition before, you had to pop out to a separate page.

9. You can almost see and understand the illustrations in 16 greyscale shades. Note the “almost.” However, it’s better than 4 shades, which was abysmal.

10. It is the future. Sorry, it is. Amazon nailed the ebook and they’re going to own the space for the next few years. Maybe they’ll pull a Netflix and sell the software to OEMs, which is fine by me. But ebooks are what we’ll be reading while we rocket to Mars in 2050. Or we’ll have our robotic concubines read them to us.

Ten reasons NOT to buy the Kindle

1. It’s bad for research. I’m working on a book right now and I wanted to use the Kindle for all of my research. Sadly, this is almost impossible. The book is a physical object – you can move through it, skimming for notes and important points – and there is something in our education that gives us a sense of space inside a book. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but you know how you can pick up a book and show someone what you’re looking for in a few page turns? You know it was halfway through, maybe a third of the way down the page, and it was near another set of words. The Kindle is not conducive to that kind of mental map-making… yet.

2. It’s horrible for reference. Don’t buy a Kindle of you just read programming manuals. Programming manuals offer something different. While it seems counterintuitive that a document you can search programatically wouldn’t be good as reference material, you’re better off looking up function calls on a website and using the physical book as a guide to building your programs. This is a corallary of point 1, above, so this could change.

3. The Kindle is flimsy. You’ll go through your day thinking you will break your Kindle. You don’t fit that much screen on a thin device that is meant to be thrown into a bag without a care and not risk cracking it. There will come a day when you open your bag and see that your Kindle is dead, even in its case. It’s not your fault. Say it with me: it’s not your fault.

4. It’s not ready for students. Add points 1, 2, and 3 together and you come to the conclusion that this is not ready for students. This may be a good device for English classes requiring lots of long novel reading, but as an education tool it isn’t quite there.

5. The net connection doesn’t work internationally. For some reason last year I was convinced the Kindle had Wi-Fi built-in. I was trying to get on the Internet in Warsaw, Poland and I kept looking for that Wi-Fi button. Then I remembered – no Wi-Fi. And I cried. How I cried, my friends. Then I downloaded the Kindle book onto my desktop and dragged it over via the USB cable. So that’s, in essence, your international solution.

6. No SD slot. While the Kindle can easily hold 1,500 books, what if you’re the kind of person who likes to keep everything in its right place? Maybe you want to make a book playlist? Maybe you have 1,501 books? I don’t know. Sadly, the Kindle doesn’t allow for memory expansion. Not a big deal, but to some it’s a bad thing.

7. Flight attendants will tell you to turn it off on take off and landing. You can’t explain that it’s epaper and uses no current. You just can’t. It’s like explaining heaven to bears.

8. It contains a battery. Remember, Reader, the Kindle is mortal. It will die on you when you don’t have your charger.

9. It’s bottom heavy. The internal battery makes the device want to plop face down on your chest. I read it last night when I was sleepy and it kept getting ready to fall on me.

10. There’s just something about a dead tree book, isn’t there? It’s nice to pop into the airport news stand and pick up a novel. It just is. I’m sorry.

Quick and Easy ways to make money from home!

2009-10-28T03:47:00.004-05:00

Because tens of thousands of people all across America want to know how they can work at home and earn enough money to run a household, there is a special need for this report. Today the need for women to work out of the home is stronger than ever. According to recent surveys, almost 70% are married and contribute up to 50% and more to the family income. Because family responsibilities play such an important part in the lives of men and women, millions of individuals and couples are seeking ways to make money at home.

In the past decade, money-making home-based opportunities that match a person's skills, interests, abilities, and ingenuity have become almost limitless. The purpose of this report is to show you that it's simple and easy to join the ranks of success-minded people by choosing a work-at-home program that suits your interests and needs. Business histories have shown over and over again that the rewards and advantages of working at home can go far beyond a person's wildest dreams! In fact, it's perfectly possible to launch a small business in your garage, backyard, basement, or a room in your home, and become a giant corporation.

Your first step will be to study the company listings in this manual, and then contact those that interest you. It's possible that you may not be interested in many of those listed in this brief report. But others may serve as that great motivation that makes you look further with a renewed determination. Once you develop that mind-set, persistence will follow and then nothing will stop you from achieving your goals.

When you write to any of the companies listed in this manual, you should include a self-addressed, stamped envelope. That will give the impression you are serious and insure that you receive a speedy reply.

$4.99

All payments made securely through Paypal, and an instant download of ebook after payment. Buy with confidence and 100% moneyback gaurantee.

My Time with Walmart

2009-10-25T17:34:00.004-05:00

Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world, and was started by a good ole boy by the name of Sam Walton in Bentonville, Arkansas. Sam began his career in retail by opening his own five and dime. When he opened his first store, the industry was set up a lot differently than it is today. In that time if you went to a retail store you gave the teller a list of items you wanted to buy, and you waited as the person went and got the items you wanted and brought them to you. Then you paid and you were on your way. This was nice from a service standpoint for the customer, but had many drawbacks for the retailer. There was no place for impulse buying, and there wasn't much room to excel in customer service because most all stores were the same. Sam saw these drawbacks and their financial implications and addressed them directly. He changed the format of his store so that the customer shopped around the store much like we do today, and provided more employees to help customers directly thus improving his stores customer service. He even took his business to the next level by buying things in bulk and cheaply and then passing the savings he was able to achieve on to the customer. He would only mark his inventory up so much based on how much he paid for it regardless of how much he paid for it. He made the same amount of money on an item even if he bought it for half the price. These were good work practices and ideals that a great man pioneered at a time when it caught everyones attention.

Sam Walton was soon catapulted into owning his own business under his own name and he left the five and dime franchise behind him. Things quickly ballooned into the retail giant of Walmart. As Walmart grew, its policies and ideals began to change due to its size and the number of people involved. Then Walmart became a corporation and with the addition of a board of directors to oversee the corporation, the once great mom and pop store had become a bureaucratic nightmare.

In the later years of Walton's life he still stood by the ideals he had formed in his original five and dime, and would visit any and every store as often as his busy schedule would allow no matter how small the store was and how far it was from him. He treated every employee in his corporation as an equal and treated a cashier at one of his stores with the same respect he would show his board of directors. When Sam Walton passed away, things really began to get out of hand.

Corporate Walmart could now do whatever they wanted and then tack Sam Walton's good name to it, and the trust that people had in this fine retailer was now misguided in ploys for the corporate Walmart to take over. They pedaled Walton's name to create higher profits but were now treating there employees not as individuals, but instead treating them as a mass that must be controlled. Customers were shown respect, but not to the degree they were when Sam was alive.

Granted, since the corporation grew, more and more people looking for an easy way to scam Walmart would show up, but there was now no distincttion between the two as far as walmart was concerned. Instead of treating each customer as an individual, they would now treat all customers not as decent and innocent until shown otherwise, but customers were now treated all as scammers and guilty until..... well, just plain guilty.

I began working with Walmart in July of 2000, and worked for the corporation until I was fired for getting a second job in July of 2009. I worked at three different stores in Sam Walton's hometown and have met all kinds of people working for Walmart. I met people that believed Walmart to be the eternal answer to life and all creation, and I met people that hated Walmart more vehemently than anyone I knew, but still worked for the company.

I will be posting more articles from my experience working with Walmart to give you and insight to what Walmart has become. Everyone has an opinion about Walmart, and it is shown that everyone is bias about there opinion of this retail powerhouse, but I worked and studied Walmarts policies and saw them in effect and change for eight years. I will try to be unbias in my posts, but my words are not of speculation and are as true to fact as possible. Please join me in my retelling of my journey, and email me at HapGaz@gmail.com if you would like to be notified of new posts on this subject.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for Bloggers

2009-10-22T01:20:00.001-05:00

The internet is chock full of blogs. It’s a harsh reality that as the internet becomes more densely populated, rising to the top of the search engine rankings (SERPs) will naturally become more difficult. However, there are numerous SEO methods available to all bloggers that will help increase search engine exposure.

First, we will consider blog posts. Each blog post should be tuned to maximise its contribution to the overall SEO effort of your blog. Usually, each post will appear on the front page of your blog for a period and subsequently be linked to from the front page of your blog. So it is important that it be fine tuned in accordance with accepted SEO best practices.

For each post, ensure the post title includes its target keyword or keyphrase in the left most position and ensure that you have your permalink structure set up appropriately.

Contribute to the overall crawlability of your blog by linking within context to other articles or post on your blog. For example, you could start out “In my last post on this topic found here” etc.

If using images and/or links within blog posts, be sure to include concise and accurate HTML ALT and TITLE tags.

Within the main body of your blog post, attempt to repeat your main target keyword or keyphrase several times. Some ‘experts’ seem to brand figures of anywhere between 1% to 5% of the overall body text should be keywords. I have never noticed any empirical conclusions that back up these figures. But I do recommend repeating your main keyword several times.

Additionally, repeat similar keywords or keyphrases or popular search variants and synonyms of your main keyword or keyphrase. This will increase your exposure for searches that couple a variant of your keywords.

Where possible and when appropriate, use HTML tags to emphasize your main keywords or keyphrases. Some say that this has no overall effect on your SERPs, however, I have noticed some improvement when using this technique in particular situations. For example, I once had a sports blog and used HTML tags to highlight inline the names of players. I used such highlighting consistently for this purpose across the entire blog and mid-term results seemed to indicate that I did start to see more traffic from search engines when these names were used in the search phrases. Although I do not believe the evidence behind these claims to be entirely anecdotal, the gains might be very small.

The above are pointers that should help you increase organic traffic through search engines. However, the most important rule to consider for every post is to write clear compelling content for human readers. Above all, do not get overly pre-occupied with writing for search engines.

Boy Dog Names, Girl Dog Names, Cute Dog Names, Ugly Dog Names

2009-10-18T19:24:00.007-05:00

Dog names are not dissimilar from baby names in that you are naming a member of your family. Of course, you are legally binding your child to his/her name, and you are in no way bound to legally tie your dog to his/her name. Even so, we never change our dogs names and our dogs form an identity all their own unique to themselves and reflecting their names. A dogs name does not change if the dog does not like it, and he/she is always pleased and excited to be called upon by its name.

A dogs name gives an outsider a glimpse of the dogs personality, this may be a stereotypical glimpse, but nonetheless it is still the perception a person will have of your dog without even meeting the him/her.

Steve Martin named his dog Shithead in the 1979 comedy The Jerk. Paris Hilton's chihuahua is named Tinkerbell. These dog names say as much about the owner as they do about the dogs of which they are named. The name you choose says as much about you as it does about your dog. It shows how you view your dog and your relationship with it. Depending on whether the dog is a pet, therapy dog, search & rescue dog, tracking dog or any other dog that works with the public, it is important to use a name that conveys the proper image. Much thought should be put into what to name your best friend.

The most popular dog name in North America is Sam, Sammie or Samantha (which means "listener"). The second most popular is Max, Maxie, Maxwell or Maxine (which means "the greatest" in Latin). Third is Lady, followed by Bear, Maggie, Buddy, Tasha, Chelsea (or Chelsie), Holly and Shasta. Other very popular names are Brandy, Ginger and Taffy.

Julie Chao wrote an interesting article in the San Francisco Examiner showing a trend in canine names reflecting the times. According to Chao, dogs are becoming a more integral part of the extended families of America, and it shows by the amount of thought we put into naming our dogs in society today. The booming pet industry is further proof of Chao's findings.

Go here for a plethora of dog names to choose from. For another dog name bank to help spring ideas, click on the alphabetical tabs here.

You can make your dogs name ironic, classic, funny, harsh, or nice, but make sure you give it plenty of thought. You know your dog would.

Don't forget to get your Frontline for your new family member and protect them from fleas, flea eggs, ticks, and disease.

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Don't forget your top of the line discounted crate to properly house train your new pup and give him/her a cozy home.