c-online.co.uk

Hello… Is This Thing Still On?

*blows dust off of the Wordpress post editor*

Wow, it’s been a while.

I can’t believe it, but my last post here was over a year ago, and reading back over it I can see why!

For the last year or so I have done pretty much no work on any online projects at all. Nothing. I completely lost all momentum and enthusiasm, I had run out of ideas and the ideas I did have didn’t seem all that great.

Recently I’ve been thinking about why I started this blog, and my attempts to make money online in my part time, and I feel the urge again to give things a try. The main goal of my online adventures was to learn what I needed to build up to a point where I could work on them full time from home, spend more time with my family and live comfortably, obviously one of the distant hopes being to make a lot of money.

These goals still very much appeal to me, and it’s thinking about this again that has sparked the return to thinking about trying this all again, hopefully this time I will be able to use what I learned in the past to get a bit further with it all!

At the moment I’m still thinking things through, taking stock of what I do still have in the way of half finished websites and idle domains. I think that what I will probably be starting with is attempting a niche affiliate site. I’m not thinking anything big, probably just a few pages to start with, but this time I want to do it all properly, see it all through to completion, which is something I never managed before. I’m determined to be more organised in my approach, and willing to push through the moments when my thoughts start to veer off towards something else. I feel that was my main downfall in the past. I need to get through the whole process before I can start thinking of grander things. I need to start with the basics, and I need make sure it gets finished.

I’m not too sure what I’m doing with this blog. I think for now I’ll just be posting as I feel the urge to, just to get my thoughts out really (I find writing stuff down like this helps). I’m going to leave all the old posts, and probably have a read through them myself at some point soon!

Quite surprised that I still have 6 RSS subscribers (apparantly - so says feedburner)… but not sure if anyone has actually been visiting the site at all! If you are, then… hello :) . I’ll have to take a look at the stats etc. I’ll probably also be rejigging the site a little bit, remove the ads as they aren’t really serving much of a purpose right now, not sure what else yet (if anything).

Tags: ideas, return   Posted in General

Still Here

OK, it’s been a couple of months since I last posted and I feel pretty crap about that. I just haven’t been able to get the momentum going again on any online projects. That isn’t to say that I haven’t tried, I have spent the odd couple of days every now and again thinking the enthusiasm is coming back and then it just goes again very quickly, so frustrating!

I knew when I started this stuff that there would be times like this, but I always thought I’d be able to ride it out, but it’s proving a bit more difficult, and this is lasting way too long.

When I am going back to work on ideas I had months ago I’m just not seeing them as positively as I had before, which isn’t helping, and new ideas just don’t seem to be coming as freely as they did in the beginning.

Hmph. I didn’t want this blog to turn into somewhere for me to moan and whine about not getting anywhere, but it seems like that lately.

Anyone got any tips to try and turn this around?

Posted in General

Goals for January

A few days ago I posted my goals for 2009, these are what I am aiming to have achieved by the end of the year. Each month I will be setting smaller goals to achieve during that month which will all take me one step closer to the bigger ones.

For the first few months or so I am not going to be setting income goals, I am just going to concentrate on creating sites and getting traffic. I will, of course, monetise the sites but will not worry at first how much (if anything) is coming in from them. This way my focus will just be on getting these sites out there and learning to promote them and get visitors.

Here they are then, my goals for January:

• Give some attention to a blog I created about 4 months ago which hasn’t been touched in about 3 months! This does actually get some visitors (about 150-200 a month, all organic search engine traffic) so with a little work I hope to be able to increase the traffic to it. This is more of a hobby site (video game related) but I believe it does have potential to bring in a little bit every month, it all adds up doesn’t it!The main points I think I need to focus on with this site are to post regularly (a couple of times a week) and find a couple of forums and other related blogs to comment/post on and get my link out there. With a little time and effort I should be able to line up a decent number of posts to keep me going for a while.
• Another site that I do currently get a trickle of traffic to (around 100 visits a month) that I haven’t looked at for even longer than the one above is in need of some work. Basically I threw up quite a basic site which only shows ebay listings from various categories. I think with some work (posting articles, link building, forum posting, change of design) I could drastically increase the traffic to it.
• Similar to above but with a site I started around 6 weeks ago. Seems to be a pattern with all my sites… I start off quite strong but then there’s no real follow-through . That will change this year! Anyway, this site is a music related one, quite specific to one range of products. Same deal as above really, needs content and promoting.

Tags: Goals   Posted in Goals

Looking Back At 2008… And Forward To 2009!

No doubt you’ve already seen a bunch of these kinds of posts in the last couple of days… so I thought I’d better get mine in before everyone’s sick of them!

So, it’s been 6 or 7 months since I started this blog and other online endeavours, and no everything has really gone as I had hoped. Things started off quite slowly, then as I got into the swing of things the income and activity here picked up a bit, and then the last couple of months have really slowed down alot. All-in-all I think I’ve learned quite a bit, I just need to start putting it all into practice and really sticking with it.

There are various reasons for me slowing down lately, it started when I was out of the country for a week in October, I really lost the momentum at that time, and rather than throwing myself back into my online projects I started doing other things in my free time (mainly gaming…). Since then I just haven’t had the motivation to go back to my sites, I just haven’t been able to get my head into it, mind just goes blank when I sit down with the intention of working on something.

Anyway, evil games. But… I will change this in the new year!

Of course this time of the year has a habit of getting people to make promises for the year to come, and so seems like a good time to make my own resolutions and set some goals for 2009.

Here we go then, here are my online goals for 2009:

• To get one site up and getting traffic every month. Now this doesn’t necessarily mean each site will be very big or very involved from myself. Some may just be quite static affiliate type sites, some ebay/amazon mashup sites, but I also do hope to try one or two bigger projects.
  I have just made a list of all the domains I own, most of which were bought in the last 6 months, and it turns out I have 25 of the buggers… so I aim to work with those rather than buy new ones, after all I did have ideas for them all in the first place! 
• To be making £300/$500 per month regularly by the end of the year. May not seem a high goal to some, but to me if I could do this by this time next year then I’ll be very happy. I know I can do it, I just need to focus more on my online work.
• To learn how to create WordPress plugins. This might be really simple, I don’t know, I haven’t looked yet, but it’s something I do want to learn so that I can start to enhance my WP sites properly rather than editing the WP files. I already know PHP fairly well so I’m hoping this might be something I can get out of the way early in the year and build on. You never know, I might even be able to create some really good plugins that people would actually pay money for!
• Start to regularly contribute to blogs and forums in the niche(s) I am interested in or will be working in. At the moment this means MMO sites, web development type sites, and maybe some general techie/gadget sites. These are what I’m interested in, but I will also add others related to whatever projects I work on. I do enjoy visiting and posting on blogs and forums but just don’t make time to do it very often. I think this could really help to promote my sites and get traffic too, as well as hopefully helping other people and maybe learning a thing or two myself as well

Tags: Goals   Posted in General, Goals

Happy Christmas!

Just wanted to jump on here to quickly wish everyone a Happy Christmas!

Have a great day!

Posted in General

Bit Quiet Around Here Lately…

Yes, it’s been very quiet indeed recently with all of my online activity.

I fear I’m very close to losing all momentum for doing this stuff, but I really want to try and get back into the swing of things. It’s strange, because when I’m doing other things I’ll come up with some ideas that I think are quite good, and sometimes just think about things I could/should be doing on my current projects/sites and I get a bit excited, but when it comes to sitting down and actually doing some work all motivation just goes out of the window! I literally go brain-dead and can’t focus at all on what I’m trying to achieve.

Maybe the problem is that I’m not trying to work on something I am really really interested in. I’ve tried things that I’m a bit interested in but nothing that I have really go into.

I don’t know. I just hope I can find something to pull me out of this slump, because I really want to make a go of making money online.

What I have decided to do, in an effort to try and get more active on this blog and hopefully spur me on to work on my other projects, is to re-define this blog a little bit. Nothing drastic, I still want to discuss how I am doing in my MMO efforts and post about relative information, tips etc., but I may also post about other topics, some will kind of go hand-in-hand with the MMO stuff (like web programming), and some may not (general tech kind of stuff - nothing too serious though, I’m not THAT much of a geek ).

I hope that doesn’t adversely affect my traffic or subscribers here, maybe it will help, I don’t know, but I think it will help me get a bit of drive back if I’m posting more regularly here. I’m obviously not trying to become a “thought leader” in a specific niche here, so figure it can be a more relaxed and personal blog which I’ll enjoy posting on.

I’d be glad to hear what others’ opinions are?

Anyway, that’s that out of the way… you never know, the next post might actually be upbeat!

Posted in General

Syte Black Review

I was contacted by Adam Carn requesting a review of his product, Syte Black (www.SyteBlack.com), on this blog in exchange for use of a beta version of the product. As it is relevant to the blog, and as I’m interested in trying this out to see if I can make some money from it, I accepted. Please keep in mind that this is a beta version of Syte Black and therefore not necessarily exactly how the final product will be.

This review is more of a first look at the product itself, how easy it is to use and understand, how easy it is to create a site from it, as well as my initial thoughts. As I have only had this for a few days I can’t say whether or not it will make you money, but I can give some thoughts as to what I think the potential is here, so that’s what I aim to do. I will follow up over the next few weeks with some updates on my own Syte Black test site so, if you’re not already signed up, feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up-to-date on my progress.

What Is It?

Syte Black is a Windows application which allows a user to easily create a potentially money making website which consists of sleek, modern graphics, well written content and three income streams (ClickBank, Adsense and Amazon).

Here’s the official blurb from the Syte Black website:

“It will be your own ready-made money making website with cutting edge features and super-sleek graphics. No need to put up with an ugly website anymore!

Once setup (it’s easy) Syte Black will make you money on auto-pilot so you can get away with being lazy.

Are you a newbie? No problem! Syte Black will be totally newbie friendly too!”

Installation

The installation of Syte Black is fairly simple. You just unzip the file to your C: drive (must be the root of C: otherwise the application doesn’t work as it should – as I found out), so the SETUP folder is found under C:\SyteBlackFiles. Within the setup folder there are a couple of exe files, install.exe and SyteBlackSetup.exe. Now, you’re supposed to just be able to run SyteBlackSetup.exe, but this didn’t work for me the first time. In the instructions this is mentioned, and in this case you need to first run install.exe, then SyteBlackSetup.exe. Personally I think whatever install.exe does (I believe it copies a required file to your system folder) could be integrated into the main app to avoid this extra step and make things just a little smoother. However, it’s no big deal and the application ran fine following this step.

Setting Up a Site

The application itself looks pretty straightforward, and every field available has an explanation in the setup instructions provided.

In the first section all that is needed is to enter the domain name you will be setting your Syte Black site up on (without the http or www part, ie. example.com), your ClickBank ID, Adsense ID and Amazon ID. Just one thought on this… I haven’t tried setting a site up from Syte Black on a sub-domain yet, but I have a feeling you’d have some trouble with that as it seems to assume the www part of the address, so putting in something like subdomain.example.com might break things a bit in the site with it trying to use www.subdomain.example.com. I’ll try this out and report in a future post.

The second section allows you to specify a page description and keywords for each page, as well as to specify a URL to an article to be included on the page, this article must be from ArticleDashboard.com. It’s fairly simple to find related articles on ArticleDashboard, and there is quite alot of choice.

You are given set topics for your pages (there doesn’t seem to be a way to change this). The pages you get for your site are:

• cars
• computers
• finance
• Index (your home page, co you can choose whatever type of article you are after for your site here)
• privacy (no need for an article for this one - not sure why you are given the option to, maybe to specify a custom privacy page?)
• shopping
• travel

I know that this is aimed at beginners who might not need or want to, but I think it would be much better to give a user the option to set their own page titles/topics, rather than force them to use these preset ones.

Once you’ve specified the above, you simply hit the Modify files button and the app will go through each HTML file, insert your ClickBank, Adsense and Amazon IDs, as well as page description and keywords, into the relevant places and download and insert your chosen articles. Once this is finished you are ready to upload the files to your site. See, it’s that simple.

You will need to already have web hosting and a domain name ready for your Syte Black site, and you’ll need your FTP details for the next bit.

All you need to do is to enter your FTP server address, username, password and specify the path to the root of your site (this will normally be /public_html/ but you should check this first). Now, just hit the Upload Files button and the app will go ahead and upload all the necessary files to your chosen site.

Once that’s done, that’s it! Your new site is up.

What Does The Generated Site Look Like?

Here is an example of what a Syte Black site looks like, this is using the default images.

You can also check out the site I used to test this on, since it’s on a domain I once bought but now doubt I’ll set any other type of site on . The site is www.antique-watches.info.

You can swap the site images with your own, or even edit the default ones (PSD files - for use in Photoshop - are provided). This way you can give your site a unique look so it doesn’t look like every other site created with this software.

I think it would be a great idea for Adam to also release optional graphics “packs” that users can download and unzip straight into the folder to change the look of the site. He may already be planning this, but it’s just a thought.

Will This Make Me Money?

The big question.

Once your site is up, you do have to do all the marketing yourself; submitting to search engines, directories, forum marketing etc. It’s all up to you, so maybe one of the biggest factors in whether you make money or not would be how hard you work to market your site. Adam has mentioned that he will be providing guides with this product for going about doing marketing but they aren’t quite ready yet so I can’t comment on those.

At the moment I honestly don’t know about the money making potential here as I’m also fairly new to this. I am going to be testing this with a site of my own and posting results back here during the next few weeks, and I hope it can make the kind of money claimed on the Syte Black website!

Syte Black should be available for sale in the next 3-4 weeks, most probably for a price of $97.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times in this post, I will be trying this out over the next few weeks and will post back here with any action that I get on my test site, subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up-to-date.

Tags: make money, review, SyteBlack   Posted in Reviews

My First Domain Flip

As I mentioned in my October earnings report I went through my first domain flip last month, but not with the great success I had hoped for! In fact I made a loss on that one, but did learn a little bit along the way.

This post I will go through what my experiences were with domain flipping and where I think I went wrong and could improve upon for the next effort. Hopefully this will also provide some good pointers to others who are new to this.

Picking a Good Domain Name

Firstly, looking at it now I don’t think the domain I bought was as good as I initially thought it was. I rushed a bit to buy one (excited to get started I guess), and I should have done a bit more research into what types of domains sell, the keywords used etc.

The domain I chose was to do with the new Google G1 phone. I saw domains selling for $100-$200 or even more and thought I could get in on that action , but my domain obviously didn’t carry as much weight as the others that were selling for high amounts. As I said, I rushed it, basically throwing words together with “G1″ or “Android” (the new phone operating system) that I thought sounded good. What I should have done was do some research and see what types of keywords people include in their domains that sell big, and tried to work around those.

I think that when picking the niche of the domain you want to flip, look at what else is selling well right now, and just generally keep an eye out for any big things that are going on, ie. in the news, on the internet, in the technology world etc.

Where to Sell

I chose to sell my domain on eBay.com. Although I know SitePoint and Digital Point Forums are both popular places to trade in domains, eBay was an easy choice for me to start off with as it’s familiar and I would think a little bit safer to start off with.

I’m not sure yet where the best place to sell domains is, I need to sit down and really look into this some more. Apart from the sites mentioned above there may well be much better places to sell, and if you find a place where there are lots of buyers then obviously you’ll have more chance of your domain appealing to somebody who’s willing to buy it.

How Much to Sell For

I actually started my auction at $0.99 with no reserve. There were a couple of reasons for this: 1) To keep the eBay fees to a minimum ($0.15); and 2) To encourage potential buyers to keep an eye on the auction in the hope of a great bargain. Of course doing it like this means you run the risk of making a loss (as I did). Other domains I’ve seen that have sold for hundreds of dollars have also started at just $0.99 so I have no doubt that this would work, but it definitely has to be a good domain, as I found out! If I had started my auction at $10 to cover my costs I have no idea if it would have sold or not. Maybe I will try this out next time, I’m not sure yet .

What I’ll Keep In Mind Next Time

1. Check anywhere that has an active domain marketplace and have a good look through to see if there are some particular niches that are really doing well.
2. Once I’ve got my domain niche in mind, start coming up with some domain names. Again, see if there is a trend in what keywords are selling and try and incorporate those into the name.
3. Again, look through any marketplaces I can find that are very active and see if any one of them tends to have higher sale prices than the others. Find out where the big buyers are hanging out!
4. Review the “start at $0.99″ strategy - see what others are doing, try to gauge the potential worth of the domain I get (if that’s possible!)

Hopefully with this experience under my belt I can have a bit more success with the next flip. I’ll keep you posted and no doubt next time will have some more tips for you!

Wish me good luck…

Tags: Domain Flipping, Domains   Posted in Domain Flipping

October Online Earnings

It’s been a bit quiet round here for the last couple of weeks, my New York trip just seems to have knocked the get-go out of me, but I plan on changing that this week

As a consequence, I only really worked on my sites for the first couple of weeks of October, so I’m a bit disappointed with myself. However, I didn’t actually do too badly compared with September. I also won $100 in Tyler Cruz’s cash giveaway which provided a welcome boost to earnings .

October also saw my first attempt at domain flipping. This didn’t work out as well as I had hoped, in fact the domain only sold for £1.39 ($2.26), and seeing as I paid £5.66 ($9.19) for it + eBay and Paypal fees I made a bit of a loss there, the cost of experience I guess! I’ll be posting more about how I went about this, what I’ve learned and what I plan to do differently next time so keep an eye out for that post this week.

• Affiliates - £14.80 ($23.97)
  I managed to get a couple of “big” eBay sales last month which meant the earnings from there was just over £10. I also referred one person to Pepperjam, so that’s $7 (about £4.30) to me for that.
• AdSense - £2.97 ($4.81)
  A nice increase on last month, but still not an earth-shattering amount. Still, if I can keep it on the increase then I’m happy with that.
• In-Text Advertising - £0.06 ($0.11)
  Hardly worth mentioning, but there it is!
• Domain Sales - £1.39 ($2.26)
  My first domain sale, and that didn’t work out too well seeing as I made a £4.72 loss. But seeing as it was my first time I think I’ve learned a little bit and will definitely try some more this month, fingers crossed with better results!
• Competition Winnings - £61.64 ($100.00)
  As mentioned already, I won $100 on Tyler Cruz’s cash giveaway. Probably not repeatable for next month but still online income.

Total = £80.86 ($131.15)
Expenses = £8.70 ($14.13) - domain and eBay/Paypal fees

Total Profit = £72.16 ($117.02)

I really need to get my butt into gear and get into a proper routine for my online work and once I can do that I’m sure my earnings will increase much faster. For now though I can’t be too unhappy with last months income .

Tags: Earnings   Posted in Earnings

A Nice Surprise

I arrived back from New York yesterday and have had a nice surprise, I won $100 in the Tyler Cruz Cash Giveaway! Not bad for simply signing up to the newsletter of a blog I already read regularly! Thanks Tyler!

Apart from that welcome boost to my online earnings this month things aren’t really progressing as I’d hoped, adsense isn’t really up to much lately and neither are others (ebay, in-text ads etc.), but there’s still some time to improve those so we’ll see how that goes.

I should get back to my regular posting and of course working on my sites next week and hopefully can kick things back into gear.

Tags: cash   Posted in General