Posted December 30th, 2008
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
Those are the main ones I have at the moment, and I think if I really work at it then it can be done. These aren’t massive goals, but a good start I think, and when I get to them then it will be a good starting point to raise the bar considerably.
I hope you’ve all had a great 2008, and wish you all the best in your plans for 2009! Feel free to comment and let me know what your goals are for 2009.
Posted December 24th, 2008
Just wanted to jump on here to quickly wish everyone a Happy Christmas!
Have a great day!
Posted December 18th, 2008
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 November 18th, 2008
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.
Posted November 8th, 2008
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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
- 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…
Posted November 3rd, 2008
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 .
Posted October 19th, 2008
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.
Posted October 15th, 2008
There is a good reason that I haven’t posted anything here so far this week… and that’s because I’m currently visiting New York! It’s not all fun though, I’m here to visit the NY office of the company I work for, but still I have the evenings to get about and see the city which is cool.
Of course because of this I’m not really going to have much time to post this week, or do much work on my sites. However, I did just check analytics and adsense stats and the new technology site I created last week seems to have just been indexed by google in the last couple of days, already started to get visitors searching for my main keywords and had one adsense click so far, so fingers crossed this just gets better and better. I’ll work next week on adding more content and hopefully I’m onto a winner!
Hope things are going well for you guys.
Posted October 10th, 2008
In case you don’t know, the term “domain flipping” means to buy a domain with the aim of selling it on again at a profit. This could either be a brand new domain, one that has expired or one you buy from someone else.
I’ve looked into this a little bit in the last month or two and I’ve no doubt that if it’s done right it can be a nice little extra income stream. I’ve read about people who are making a pretty good living just flipping domains.
While it’s something that will probably take practice to get really good at, from what I can see it’s a fairly easy way to make a bit of extra cash without being too time consuming. I might be wrong! It could be really difficult to get right and take many hours to flip just one domain!
The Experiment
As I mentioned in my last post, my first attempt to simply buy a domain then sell it straight on failed since I then decided to setup a site on the domain instead . Last night I bought another domain, this name is to do with something that could be very big in the technology world, but at the moment I’m not 100% on it. I would like to try and sell it on soon because I am eager to see how I can get on flipping domains and see if I can make a profit, but I think the best course of action would probably be to let the main keyword get some more exposure in the news and online world and maybe even wait to see whether others start selling domains with this name in it and see how much they go for.
Although I’m still very busy with the affiliate sites I have on the go, it can’t hurt to take half an hour here and there to try something different. In fact I have a couple of domains which I don’t think I am going to use so I may try and sell those, they are .co.uk names so not sure what the market is like for those at the moment. Both names are fairly short (7 and 8 letters). These domains don’t have sites, don’t get traffic, they are just domains sitting there doing sod all!
Once I’ve been through the process I’ll post back here with my experiences. Hopefully I’m successful and can look at this as another consistent income stream, and hopefully I can help you guys out with what I learn from it.
Have you flipped domains before or are you considering trying it out?
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Posted October 8th, 2008
I’ve been quite productive in the last few days and have been working hard on a couple of my projects… one of them you already know about which is my IT niche site, and the other is a new one just started today! Looks like I still have some way to go before I can keep my attention focused on just one or two sites!
The IT Niche Site
I feel that this one is coming along nicely, and soon I’ll be starting to promote it and get some visitors in. Hopefully Google doesn’t take too long to index pages and organic traffic will also start flowing.
So far I’ve researched keywords, got the domain name, setup the site (I’m using WordPress), written 4 articles, added some Adsense blocks and got my analytics tracking code in. Before the weekend I’d like to get a few more articles on there and drop in some affiliate links.
So far I’m finding this site quite enjoyable and easy to write for, mainly because I work in IT in my day job but also because I am quite interested in this particular niche.
Initial searches on Google and some research using Google’s keyword suggestion tool lead me to believe that there isn’t too much competition at the moment and the search numbers look promising, so fingers crossed I can rank well for some decent keywords. There are also plenty of choices for affiliate offers for this specific niche so I’ll just have a look around and choose whichever I think will convert better and will mean I get paid more!
The New Site
This one just kind of happened by accident today. As I’ve mentioned in a couple of my recent posts I am quite interested in trying out domain flipping. I’ve been reading up on this in the last few days and this morning was doing a little research by looking at what domains people are currently selling and basically following a tip which was to keep up-to-date with the latest technology and trends to give you ideas for domains to flip. As I mentioned earlier I work in IT and I regularly read technology news sites and blogs, and as I was thinking about what “new trends” might be profitable I realised that something I have read about in the last couple of days may well be just what I need. So, I did a bit of checking on available domain names and came across a few that I thought could well work out nicely. Of course, I don’t know for sure that they will as I’m a complete newcomer to domain flipping but I reckon they would turn a profit.
Anyway… I went ahead and registered one of the domains I’d found but instead of flipping the domain straight away, I decided to stick a site up on it and see whether it would be more profitable to hold on to it and monetise it. I’ve been beavering away today and have so far setup WordPress (with a handful of useful plugins), got a design I feel fits well, added some well placed (I hope) adsense and added some content. As this is a bit of a hot trend at the moment I want to make sure I get some more content up there in the next couple of days and get it submitted to search engines. I’ll also go about participating in forums and on other blogs in this niche, and look at other ways I can monetise the site, probably in-text ads and affiliate offers.
If the site gets no traffic and makes nothing in the next 4-6 weeks then I may well try and flip it (not just the domain - the entire site), but either way I really do think that it has the potential to make me a bit of money. Hoping my spur of the moment decision to do the site pays off, but I guess the most I lose is the cost of the domain so it’s not too much of a risk.
What About the Real Estate Site?
Unfortunately with all the work I’ve been putting in to the sites mentioned above, I still haven’t even decided on a niche to pursue, not done any keyword research or anything for my Niche to Riches challenge site. I’d really like to try it, but to be honest at this early stage in my affiliate marketing career I’m not sure I’m ready to try and create a site in a niche I really know nothing about. It’s been much easier for me to come up with ideas and content for the IT and technology sites than it has to even think about this one.
Sorry Empress! I really did want to participate fully in this challenge, but I just can’t see it happening. Maybe when the next challenge comes round I’ll already have a few sites under my belt and feel more confident with dipping into niches where I’m not so knowledgable.
That’s it! It’s been busy but I have been enjoying working on these. You never know, one of these might turn out to be a good little money maker for me… that would be very nice indeed 
.
How are your online projects coming along?
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