Race For A Million

How CommentLuv Can Help Find Hackers

So yesterday I was catching up with what was going around on the various blogs I visit, trying out a few new ones to see how they fit and feel, when I noticed that I was having a problem with comment-luv. Now the problem wasn’t on my site, but rather it was an error when I was attempting to leave comments on others websites - simply put, I was receiving an ‘XML error’ instead of comment-luv displaying my latest post!

XML error: Invalid document end at line 261, column 1

Obviously me being the loving person that I am, and not being just out for the links (I am such an angel), I continued posting and thought of it as just a glitch…oh how wrong I was…

How To Overcome Distractions

I think I’ve set a new record with my posting - 4 days without a new post! Apologies to all, originally I had a post planned for Friday that I was to write up while at work (obviously during my break, haha), however as the day began to end, I got more work given to me - so by the time it came to leave, I had no post to show! Then on arriving home, it turned out my building decided to implement a new ‘gated community’ feature as of that day, and my girlfriend was unable to park anywhere. So I spent most of the night chasing down car parks looking for someway of making her car safe - which kinda killed my night.

Then the weekend came, and as I always do on the weekends, I spent time with my girlfriend. We had a lovely day, and when I had some time spare, I played on the new PS3 release Mirrors Edge. Playing the game saw me into the evening and then my girlfriend returned, and we caught up on some TV shows. Today has been very much similar, spending time with my girlfriend and playing Mirrors Edge.

So why am I telling you all this? Well while all this was happening, something in my brain was screaming at me…

Yet Another Amazing Idea

After the success of revealing an all so amazing idea, I thought I would share with you all another potential money making idea I had. Now this is an actual idea with potential, or at least a lot more potential than my other idea, haha.

So why am I revealing it here? Well, a number of reasons. Basically I get ideas to generate money online all the time, yet I rarely have the time to actually go ahead with any of them, and some of them are quite big investments that would take me a long while. So by sharing them with you I may be able to help one of you guys start up something, or even start a joint venture! Also, after initially thinking it hasn’t been done, I accidentally stumbled across a site which is very similar to my idea, so the ‘unique’ potential has already flown out the window. It could be I haven’t searched hard enough and there are already sites offering this without me knowing - if that’s the case please leave me a comment letting me know! Another reason is the fact that I want you guys to come away with good information, and I don’t want this to be a blog with lots of ’secrets’, where I give you crap and keep the ‘good’ techniques / ideas to myself.

Anyway, enough with the tension, lets get to the actual idea:

Make Money From Blogs With No Readers

I’ve been reading a lot recently how blogs are essentially ‘nothing without readers’. Strictly speaking, this is true in a sense. I mean, what is the point of blogging if your not blogging to anyone? Well, if your not looking to make money online, then there are lots of reasons - keeping track of your life, sharing things with family and friends etc. Yet if you are blogging to make money, readers should be your biggest concern right? Well…not necessarily

Get Respect With Your Blog Comment

I want to actually talk about something I feel is quite important in your blog commenting practise, but isn’t really addressed. A lot of you will already know what I am going to talk about, possibly the majority, but I feel like I need to discuss it - for a good reason.

You see, when I started blog commenting, I always felt something was missing - I was leaving comments but people didn’t seem to be visiting my blog, and I wasn’t getting replies from the actual bloggers themselves. I wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong. Then one day it hit me like a ton a bricks - I was looking through the comments of a popular blogger, visiting the various blog comment links to check out some new blogs, and I skipped one. I realised what I did, and went back to see why I skipped it - turns out that user didnt have a personal avatar in the comment. I went and checked all the others - all these people had pictures of themselves, of their mascots, or logos next to their blog comments. Yet this user and myself didn’t…and I didn’t even know how to fix it!

Luckily I managed to find that by visiting Gravatar I was able to set myself up with an avatar and now when I post a little cheeky picture of myself shows up next to the comment I have just made. However, why should you get an avatar for posting? Well, I’v found that since getting myself an avatar, I have had an increase in the number of visitors to my blog - sadly I can’t say this is a thorough test, as I have also increased my blog commenting circle - but I genuinely believe that by having an avatar, you are making yourself a more appealing blog to visit. I feel that it instills a sense of trust in your blog, and yourself as a blogger. If you don’t have a ‘gravatar’ yet, I can’t recommend it enough! Go get one now!

Dan

How I Made $150 On My Second Website Sale

When I first was introduced to website design, it was at a young age and I didn’t really get to terms with it. I was more about the ‘flash and pizzaz’ of the site, and because of that I had a hard time starting out. Obviously as a beginner I wasn’t going to be anywhere near as good as many of the professionals out there, but at that age I had the attitude that if I wasn’t amazing at something on first try, it wasn’t worth my time. I have now since learnt my lesson from that, and in university I picked website design up again - namely as I didn’t have a choice; it was part of my course.

So I learnt various bits about designing sites, about HTML, PHP, CSS, but never really saw it as an avenue making money, so I let my knowledge on the subject grow stale. Its only when I started looking to make money online, I found out about people selling websites online, and the various places that you can do it. Immediately I saw a gap for my old experience with building sites, and decided to take it. I looked around on Sitepoint, the first place I was introduced to, and started looking at websites I could essentially ‘copy’ to make the same type of profit on them. This led to me building a ‘favicon generation’ website, and selling it for $70. However, the building behind that took quite some time, as I was rusty with my old skills, and there were still a couple of bugs in it as I released the site - luckily they were fixed shortly after going live with the auction (first tip here, don’t rush into the auction just to get it ‘over-with’ like I did).

So I wasnt too set on my first website sale, I wanted to do something bigger and better, yet something that could potentially be less complicated, and something that no-one else was selling. Not asking for much I know! lol. Now I’m not sure how the idea popped into my head, but I came up with a website idea that, as far as I could see, had not been sold on sitepoint before and had definate potential - a route planning site. Now when I first thought of it, it sounded foolish as it seemed like such a lot of work to do - however I remembered that google had a route planning service on its google maps, and I know people have included google maps on their websites before, so why not google route planning? I dug a little deeper and found that essentially by ‘borrowing’ javascript code from their example pages, and putting it on my own site - wrapping it up with a logo and some design - I had a route planning website with little effort on my part. Now before we get acrried away here, I will state that this is legal, as the google maps is part of a freely available ‘API’ that allows people to incorperate it on your site at no cost. Just before anyone accuses me of stealing, haha.

I published the site for auction at 1am UK time - you can see the details here. I initially put a BIN of $200, but after a couple of private offers I lowered it to $150 and sold it within 12 hours of the site being up. Not too bad for my second attempt? All by finding something that is available free online, and putting it into a nice little ‘wrapper’. So to those of you looking to make a quick bundle of cash - try and look for something you can get for free that isn’t on sitepoint; or more importantly, you cant find recently on sitepoint. If you sell something as ‘unique’ or ‘rare’, you want to make sure that when people search for it in sitepoint, they don’t find any other sites like yours - even if they have been sold on sitepoint before. It’ll diminish the value of the site. Be sure that whatever ‘free’ thing you find to sell though, you make sure you are allowed to do so. I just profited from the website ‘wrapper’ surrounding the google API, not googles technology itself.

Now most bloggers would leave it there, and you would go off attempting to replicate what I did, with me remaining quite cool for making $150 off of something free (would I be cool for that? lol). Yet I’m not like most bloggers and I want to share my full experience. I did try selling the same thing again, however this time I made the site design even better with the same basic premise. You’d think that Id make near the same, maybe more with it being ‘prettier’ and better laid out. Yet maybe because of the time I posted it, maybe because of the fact I had sold a site like it before, or maybe because I wasn’t being looked on favourably by the gods of sitepoint that day, it only sold for $51. Now that’s not to say its a bad outcome - the fact it sold for more than it cost to create is good, but that site which is ‘essentially’ better than the one prior, should have sold for more in my books.

So in essence, originality and creativity is the best chance to make a big sale on sitepoint (at least in the ’startup websites’ auctions), but after the intial appeal of the originality is gone, it could be hard to make money off of it again. Let me know your experiences with Sitepoint, and what you feel has worked the best!

Dan

Why Writing Guest Posts Is Good For Beginners

I had a revelation recently about guest posting on other blogs, and am very thankful for it - so I thought I would share the experience with you.

When starting out in the blogging world, you might not know what to expect - some may own blogs for fun, others to educate, and a few(!!) to make money. Yet whatever the reason, the blogger always wants readers to come and read their posts, join their feed, and hopefully be entertained / learn something valuable. Yet how do you know what your writing is actually of any worth to these people? Why would they come to your site over others? More importantly, how are you going to know without any actual visitors?

Guest posting allows you to extend your ‘reach’ onto another persons blog - by writing up a post and sharing it with the readers of that blog. The benefits of guest posting have been outlined many times, in that they can provide you with a new source of readers, and possibly more guest post requests. The larger the blog you guest post on, the larger the possible surge of traffic.

Yet in order to be allowed to post on anothers blog, what you write must be worthy of their standards. You can’t write up a simple ‘i make teh monies lolz’ post and expect it to be placed on some of the high standard blogs that are out there. At the same time you can’t write up an intricate piece on a blackhat technique and try and get it posted on a whitehat blog - just ain’t ganna happen. You need to know a bit about the blogger themselves, and what they like to post about, only then can you make your first attempt to provide them with a post - and this is the advantage for new time bloggers.

You see, when you post on your blog, a few people may read it - a few may even comment on or about it - but you won’t get yourself essentially ‘a review’. By submitting your ‘work’ to another human being to show on their own blog, they will have to judge if it is worthy enough to be submitted. This allows you to get a real review of your writing capabilities, and possibly some helpful hints into how to improve your work in the future. If your post isn’t written well, they’ll tell you; if the subject isnt covered enough, you’ll know - and it will be much more useful than just the ‘post and see’ attitude. A persons’ blog is very personal to them, and therefore you will be able to get a real opinion.

A possible arguement to counter-act this view could be that you could simply ask your commentators to tell you what they think, yet if you look at various other blogs you can see what most comments boil down to. People can happily say ‘Good post man, I really enjoyed it’ because its not on their blog, and they have nothing to essentially gain from it - whereas in creating a guest post you are creating a piece of work that should benefit both you and the blog you are posting to.

Another argument could be that the blog you apply to guest post to might have low standards, yet simple matter to sort out, as you only apply and send your guest posts to ‘worthy’ blogs, bloggers whose opinion you value in this big ‘ol wide world. If you have what you think is a ‘quality’ post, try sending it out to a couple of the big timers out there and see what they say about it!

Now its possible that you could get a response back criticising your work to pieces, and saying that it is awful (its unlikely, but it might happen). Don’t respond out of anger, but rather ask what was wrong with the post (if they haven’t stated) and maybe try to make some improvements. Maybe they will highlight on some real issues and it will help you to learn this, or rather maybe they will say that the post is ‘unsuitable’, in which case you can thank them and approach another blog. If the latter is the case, you can even ask what posts they might be looking for, as if they can give you a post that they want, its more likely to be accepted!

Now I’m not going to get into how you should go about sending your guest posts out and convincing people to show them, as Adam over at Creadiv has already done that for you, so you can check out his rules of guest posting and increase your game to the higher levels!

In summation, I believe that your blog can, and will, grow from writing guest posts - not just in the terms of readers, but in the quality of what you write. Having someone giving you advice and help for ‘free’ is something that should never be frowned upon.

Dan

A Day In The Life Of…

Wow, over 2 days since my last post, and I am feeling terribly guilty about it. You see, I don’t have writers block, and I have some great things to write up, but sadly I lack the real world time to do so. To give you a better understanding, (and myself an excuse) I thought I would show you what a day in my life is like.

Firstly, I have a full time job, which starts at between 8-8:30am (depending if I catch the train) and finishing at 5-6 (depending on how the companies system is currently doing). When I eventually get home from that (which can sometimes be at 7), I head off to the gym to do an hour and a half of various cardiovascular and muscle exercises. By the time I get home, it has most likely reached about 9 at night - about the time when I cook my food!

Now the time I am cooking / eating is essentially where I would write my blog posts up, try out stuff online etc. but I have been finding myself feeling tired a lot earlier than usual, and normally heading to bed at around 10. You see, strangely enough a lot of the work I do with this blog and inventing new ways to earn an income online, starts off at home but progresses while I am at work!

You see, when I don’t have a lot to do at work, it allows me time to do some research, look up my favourite blogs, and lets me type up my posts of the day. Normally this is fine, however if (as has been this week) I am very busy at work, I sadly don’t get a chance to do any of that, and then end up trying to do that at night. Even then life manages to interfere, as now I have various plans over the course of a week where I meet up with friends, which again, diminishes time. An example would be tonight where me and a number of friends went out to have a couple of drinks and a steak (which was mediocre at best!). All these little things sadly add up and I’m sure you have all experienced this in one way or another.

You might be saying to yourself ‘Aha, but what about your weekends Dan?!’. Well the weekends I spend visiting my wonderful girlfriend, as we only get to see each other during this time. Normally I’ll be able to write a blog post, and have a look around, but not having my computer on me (I visit her mostly and my computer is a desktop) hinders me in actually designing what I have planned. Besides which, she might kill me if I was trying to do stuff online all weekend and ignoring her, lol!

Now please don’t see this as me complaining that I don’t have enough time. I enjoy having this blog, and I enjoy attempting to make an earning online (as hard as that might be), but I feel that sometimes I owe an explanation as to why I don’t post some days. I might not have the same amount of readers as some of the bigger blogs (and most of the smaller ones), but I have been among the small surfers of the smaller blogs, wondering why a user hasnt posted for a few days when they usually do every day.

I have some great posts lined up that I will be writing soon, so you can look forward to those - I’ll be using any free time I have to get them done, along with my own efforts to try and start a business in this crazy world wide web (so long as the lions don’t slow me down!). I can sense change…

Dan

End Of October Status

Well it has been a pretty slow month sadly - I have designed and sold one website (which I finally received the money for a couple of days ago) which gave me a little bit of profit, which was then squandered on another couple of website domain names. Damn.

I didn’t achieve any of my goals this month either, all but selling the one website. Sadly, websites aren’t going for what they used to on sitepoint, and the site I sold for only $51. Now seeing as I sold the same website about a month and a half ago (albeit with a worse design), and it went for $150, you could safely say there is something amiss atm.

Mainly the reason for my lack of ’success’ this month is that the company I work for went ‘live’ with a piece of software and we have been racing around to make sure its performing correctly. This has meant a lot of late nights and early mornings and hasn’t really allowed me any time to do what I would have liked to. Its slowly coming to an end now, so hopefully I’ll get back on track this month.

However I can’t really attribute my lack of success to just that, when I have had chances to do some work realting to making money, I have been unmotivated and lazy - my heart just hasn’t been in it. So I’m planning on making a change this month, and going to attempt to ’step up my game’. I do have some big plans, and if I can get them to fruition November could be a very successful month!

So stay tuned, I’m going to delving deep into the mmo world, and uncovering the many ’secrets’ it holds.

Dan

 

Success On Halloween

It is officially Halloween today. OoooOOoo. Scary no? As you can see I made a delightful little banner up there to wish you all a happy Halloween - it’s not as good as Adams’ Creadiv pumpkin or SuiteJ’s self-portrait (very good), but I thought a little ‘festive’ cheer might brighten (probably the wrong word) up the page. Only problem is now I’ve done it, I’ve gotta stick with it, so have to think a Christmas themed one now as that’s just around the corner! lol

So what does Halloween mean in the world on online blogging, entrepreneurship and money making? Well, for one it means decorating your blog to show its Halloween (for some, not for others), and two - anyone who has a fancy dress shop should be laughing, although sadly this isn’t always the case (sorry Clog).

Now I’m quite tempted to get in on this whole Halloween thing, I think the possibility of starting up a website to sell Halloween goods (or something else that I haven’t thought of) could prove to be a money maker (and quite fun to design). Now I can hear a sudden uprising of people shouting “um, your too late, its Halloween NOW” to which I reply that yes, its Halloween, but no, I’m not late, I’m here at just the right time.

See, I beleive the best time to start something for a holiday period is actually just before (or just after) it has happened. The reasoning behind this is two-fold: one, you can get a lot of ideas from websites that have information about the holiday season, and build up some knowledge. Two, it gives you a whole year to advertise and get yourself to a ‘natural rank’ etc. through legitimate means. Now this doesn’t sound very exciting, as you would have to design and advertise the site for a year before you make any profit from it potentially. However, think of the positives of doing this - you have a lot of time to build up ‘natural’ search rankings, saving you having to pay for click-through links; you can visit many other sites over the year and tweak your site to work ‘just like the big players’; and more importantly you can take your time over it, its not a rush to get it done - I mean, you have a whole year!

As I said previously, I’m thinking of taking on this mentality and starting up a Halloween website…not exactly sure what I would sell / advertise on it yet though, but I like the idea of taking a ‘long term’ project. Hell, I might even try doing one for Christmas as well! Although, that is a much bigger, more competitive market and relies a lot of ‘niche products’ of the year to get your advertising right. I mean, this year the top Christmas toy might be a stuffed lion (now complete with opposable thumbs!) but next year it could be an army issued grenade launcher (courtesy of McCain industries). A market that volatile is hard to plan for a year in advance, unless you stick with the ‘core’ values of it, and do a kind of ‘all-rounder’ site, which might offer Christmas food, a selection of goods etc. Once you’ve built your position, and once you know the years Christmas niches, you can advertise accordingly, keeping your position (or even increasing it) in the holiday.

Altogether I think that the idea is very sound, and could enable you to become a force in some very big markets! It does have its problems; the fact that you can’t make any ‘real’ profit from the site until a year later, and even then your site could flop (it shouldn’t, I mean, you had a whole year to make it!) and make little money. Yet think, that if you put the little work in bit by bit over the course of the year, and the site was a big success, not only would you have the profits to show from it, but you would also have to do very little to the website to make it profitable again for next year - the site might almost be self-sustainable!

Let me know your opinions guys, I appreciate them all and would like to know what you think about this.

On a side note, I realised I made a political joke in my post…blimey!

Dan