Technorati + Links
Hey, I signed up on technorati.com, here’s a link to my Technorati Profile. It doesn’t look great to be honest, I have a low rank, but that’s quite probably as my blogs only been up for a week.
So, if you’re starting a new blog or you’d like to help me out, contact me using the contact page about exchanging blogroll links, and you get a free link to your blog to build your technorati profile, and you get some free traffic in, there’s nothing to lose!
Also I’d appreciate it if you subscribed to my readers in the top right, it’d be helpful, thank you.
Avoiding downtime when switching hosts.
How to avoid any downtime when switching hosts.
1. Don’t tell your old/current host that you are switching or they might cut off your service early or try to avert you from switching, this happened with my old host a few years ago.
2. Make sure that full downloads of your sites directory are available via FTP or similar, as well as database backups, get a full backup/download of your site.
3. Buy your new hosting, upload the full site you downloaded from your first hosting account.
4. Get your DNS details for your new hosting, switch it over to your new hosting account, wait for the DNS to renew as this takes some time.
5. You can then cancel your subscription to your first hosting account, having averted any downtime that may have happened if you had cancelled before switching or by using alternative methods.
Unfortunately if you run a dynamic site running databases such as a forum and blog you may lose some posts, members or comments, so you may want to let people know before you switch it or move an updated version of the database over once the DNS has moved.
John Chows Earnings.
JohnChow
Well what can you say, Johnchow of Johnchow.com is one big earner, and he makes all of his money from the internet. John Chow gives a monthly report on how much he earns the previous month, this month his total was a staggering $17,828!
Let’s see how he does it.
- He made $7,224 from Affliate sales. - Selling other peoples products, pretty self explainatory.
- He made $4,200 from ReviewMe. - A service where people pay Johnchow money to have there sites to be reviewed which pulls in lots of traffic for them.
- He made $2,370 from Private Ad sales - putting ads on his site for people privately.
- $2,157.88 from Text Link Ad’s, a service that handles all the ads and gives you payment at the end of the month.
- $1,000 from Kontera, a site that puts small text links into your posts automatically, when they are clicked, money is given to the site owner.
- $490.94 from Google Adsense, definately not bad at all from automated ad’s with no effort required.
- $141.18 from feedburner, another automated service, not bad for the effort required.
- $117.99 from ‘Buy me a beer’ displayed at the bottom of every post, looks like he’s going to be one happy fellow after drinking his way through that lot.
- $66.62 from TTZ media network, a blog + site network which he is part of.
- $50.00 from Subscription.
What i’d like to know is how he spends all that money.
Just imagine if he decided to start up a blog network covering Finance, gaming and so on, he could hire the best people from other blogs of there category to make all the posts, and get traffic to them from his personal blog, and monetize them the same way he monetized Johnchow.com to increase his earnings by several times over a few months. He could probably make $75,000 a month or even more if he wanted to.
Forum protips 1.
Big empty forums.
An average bulletin board has around 10 or more forum areas for discussion on various topics, which is often awkward, especially when boards are new and just starting up, to have a load of empty forums, it can often disuade members of the public from registering with you, unless they’re keenly interested in what you have to offer, or they want to be one of the first members on your soon-to-be huge bulletin board.
Backup.
Recently I skinned a bulletin board which was live, I accidently mucked up part something on the admin menu, and the whole board was stuck in a mysql error of some kind, the biggest problem: I had no backup to fall back on, and I couldn’t access the admin menu. Had I had a backup before editing key files, I would have easily just been able to rescue the board, but I didn’t, thankfully a friend did his magic and managed to fix the error.
(At this point my host decided to fubar the databases again, i had more written but it didn’t save them, so I’ll rewrite part of what I had down.)
Member-ate.
Encourage growth by starting a referral competition, time-limited bonuses or forum cash, a most-post competition, or something in that category.
Moderate.
Pick good moderators, make sure they are well liked in the community and have a good standing, also be sure that they are active and have a lot of good posts and fit the job well. Previous experience shouldn’t matter, because it might have been a board with 2 members who flamed eachothers heads off, and went down after a week, so you and only you should decide the moderators. A good choice would be to make 1 moderator when you have 100 moderators if you can’t be there a lot of the time, or at 200 members if you are very active + able to moderate it yourself, pick another one to try and fill in the time gap when your other moderator is usually offline, so this would probably be someone from another continent.
Pick a few more as time goes on.
Planning posts.
Planning posts
As a finance and money-online blogger, I need to aim to make at least one post a day, which will increase once I know I’ve established a simple readerbase, to around 2 or 3 posts a day if I have the content available for posting.
I have made a list of critical assesments that need to be checked before making your posts.
- Good title should give a clear indication of what the posts content will be about
- Bulletpointed list of the content if there is more than 1 category being covered.
- Easy to read content, several paragraphs.
- Content, lots and lots of it.
- Well formatted images (If any) that load fast and keep a good level of quality.
- Good usage of Bold + Italics.
- Check spelling + punctuation for any errors.
- Read over your posts before publishing them.
Anyone who has a blog probably knows these rules are key, but I decided to post them up for any new-bloggers or soon-to-be bloggers to read.
8 steps to making money from websites.
8 steps to making money from websites.
1. Come up with a good website idea, make sure it has not already been done before.
2. Get your site idea properly put together, with a domain you’d like which is available, how you plan on spending your money and time efficiently with your website. Also find a good hosting solution, and be sure that you can do all of the work that you can to get the site up and running, or if you cannot, make sure you have the money available to pay someone who can.
3. Get your domain + hosting account set up with a good reliable host which will not let you down. Build the site or get someone who can to do so. Take care to make it easy to navigate and make sure the idea is properly implemented.
You don’t initially need to have an outright button asking people for money, this comes later.
4. Next, you may need to spend some money advertising + marketing your site unless you can successfully do it for free. Find people who run sites where people interested in your type of site may visit, if you are running a technology blog for example, you will want to find technology related blogs to get ad’s or blogroll exchanges with. Work for a few weeks or months building traffic through this method, making sure that the site is updated a lot with useful information relating to your site/blog type which is unique and not just taken from any other blog. You may also want to check your pagerank as this can be important when finding ad-buyers.
When you have a decent amout of traffic flowing onto your site/blog, it’s time to make some money, make sure you have a great deal of unique hits because most of the time with advertisment solutions, unique hits are the only things that count.
5. You can go for automatic adverts such as googleads which are potentially easier, but googleads pays per click, and theres a minimum payout, making it not ideal for a lot of circumstances. Also a lot of bans take place due to the automated service involving unique clicks, and it’s a pain to get the ban revoked. The same applies for bidvertiser, and similar options.
The best bet would be to contact other, smaller technology sites and offer them an adspot on your site, taking care to include your monthly uniques (which should be around 200 a day), which would be 6000 a month, and a price, start off fairly low, offering them an ad spot for $20/mo, remembering that if you contact 10 people, you’ll still be making $200 a month through this method alone. All the time you’ll still be getting more and more traffic as you’ll still be utilizing step 4 (hopefully) and your site should have started growing other ways as well.
6. At this point you may want to spend some of that hard earned cash in a larger traffic-bringing plan, such as getting johnchow to review your site/blog or finding smaller blogs that can do reviews for cheaper. As your pagerank grows you can expand your advertising influence, offer different ad locations for different prices, offer them a .gif animated advert for $60 or your own specified price. Make an ‘advertise’ page where you list all the different advertisment options.
When you have a firm readerbase (on a blog) or a good alexa ranking, you could do a ReviewMe service yourself, charging $100 for a review or similar, provided you have a good amout of hits, people will go for this or possibly even more money for adverts, and very soon you’ll be raking in quite a large amout of money.
7. At this stage you could cancel any advertisment solutions you have with other places as you’ll most likely have picked up a decent readerbase and some free publicity at various places along the way. This will give you more money to spend on adverts at bigger and better places, building your traffic further and making even more money as you can charge more for your adverts.
STOP!
8. Never be satisfied with the amount of money you earn from one site, come up with an equally good idea as the first idea you came up with as now you know you can make one successful site/blog, so what’s to stop you making more, repeat the steps with an equally good site, but instead of getting some cheaper ads you can go straight onto more expensive ads straight away, and use your other blogs/sites to advertise your new one. However you may want to find some good writers to write some new + unique articles for your first site so it doesn’t get forgotten unless you can handle doing many quality posts every day.
Very soon you’ll be making a ton of cash from your sites + blogs and can eventually hire posters to do all the writing for you, or even get a manager to handle all the new blogs + sites which your network runs, meaning you can just sit back + watch your domain grow and grow and your bank account/pocket/sock get fuller and fuller.
Tips
Do Link all your blogs + sites together on a network page, to make it easier for people to find all of your sites + projects in one place and to navigate between them.
Don’t sell your sites unless you really really have to and can get a lot of money from them.
Thanks for reading!
First Steps.
First steps.
This blog was established on the 1st September 2007 as a way for me to get my money-making, and money-keeping tips advice out there and perhaps create some revenue along the lines as an additional source of income.
I have run many sites, and establishing your first site as a primary source of income is not easy unless you follow one of the following paths:
1. Knowing HTML + CSS fluently, creating a really great looking site, getting it noticed, making money through a donate button/ad’s.
2. Creating a forum for your own projects, such as a well-known game, this brings a lot of traffic in, which in turn leads to income through subscriber fees in exchange for enhanced forum browsing tools or merit or from ad’s.
3. Finding a great blog idea, building the blog, getting traffic and eventually looking for ad placements etc.
4. Learning PHP/flash actionscript/java and building a dynamic site such as a forum game, browser based flash game or flash/art portal, getting it popular and loading it with ads or getting deals.
5. Creating an official fansite for anything popular early on, and getting the ads out and the google ranking as #1 to get people on, then again loading ads on or creating forum subscriber benefits.
Now, there are more ways than the ones listed above, but I chose the ones I did for convenience.
What do they all have in common?
They all require quite a lot of work + effort to get them going, especially #1, #2 and #4, as they all require either great design skills, great coding skills or a great deal of money to get them going.
Pro’s + Cons
Okay so you’re looking for your first online cash-pull, let’s sum up the pros and cons of the door you might try.
Forums
Forums are pretty hard to get members to join early on unless you have a unique idea which no one else has ever used or you get in quick enough to build a fan forum of a new band, movie, game or TV series which you think will last a while.
Also officially endorsed forums will remove your chances of building a great forum, especially if they are advertised on the Band/movie/game/tv series or on the official websites.
Fansites
Fansites are easy to get started and depending on what you’re building a fansite for, there might even be a fansite kit available from the developers. In some cases you can even get your site on the official site under ‘Fansites’ or ‘Links’ if you contacted them. If you decide upon this method it would be better to build the fansite, buy the domain + host it long before the actual product comes out so then it has more chance of being ‘the original’ and thus getting the largest memberbase.
Online game
Takes a ton of coding skill, but a really easy way to climb aboard and ride the cash cow if you successfully manage to finish the coding/graphics side. Unfortunately, server costs and other fees will mount up so it’s important to build a memberbase and start making money as soon as possible through this method.
ProBlogging
Okay, so your a professional chef, and you want to get your recipes out to the world and make a buck? Need a quick solution? Make a blog about it. www.blogger.com, www.wordpress.com and similar blog engines/free blog hosting exist for you to use and they couldn’t be simpler. Money can be earned here through donations, adverts, or even just asking for money once you have a decent readerbase. Problems are found when your ‘totally radical idea for a blog!’ has already been made and someone else is taking money which should be yours!
Conclusion?
My conclusion is that you should come to your own conclusion, pick a method that’s right for you.
Awesome coder? Make a game then sit back, relax and enjoy the money flowing into your bank account/pocket/sock.
Have an awesome skill? Pro-blog about it.
New TV Series coming out? Fansite-it.
Run a successful project or game/ modification? Make a forum.