Entries from April 2008 ↓

The Veronica’s (and a swag of others including Silverchair, Powderfinger, Operator Please, Jimmy Barnes, Evermore, Gyroscope, Frenzal Rhomb, Grinspoon, Phrase, Human Nature, Mahalia Barnes, Damien Leith, Anthony Callea, Weapon X, Ken Hell and the Dawn Collective.) are releasing a free video to urge people to stop downloading pirated music.

Meanwhile, ColdPlay is planning to release their Violet Hill single for free… just as RadioHead and Prince has done before them.

My view? Free music is the new world order and musicians and artists alike need to learn to adjust. They will need to settle with just being famous, going to massive exclusive parties, and making millions of concerts and interviews… instead of making millions just on music sales alone.

Popularity: 12%

man drugs 18 year old daughter, locks her in a windowless cellar for 24 YEARS! Fathers 7 kids, three of whom live in the cellar the whole time, including one who is 18 years old already. Absolutely sad and disgusting. Could the Wife really not have known??!

Popularity: 9%

This dipstick should have stayed on to get his yearly bonus .. and then pissed off to start his on company, taking ALL the clients with him - muhahaha

Source: News.com.au

Popularity: 15%

I’m sure this was inspired off the famous Jackie Chan’esque stick figure fight flash animation…

Popularity: 12%

I’m having a bit of issues with my ancient Dell Inspiron 8600 and had a look at my services.msc running on my windows. I was shocked to find a services named #Id_String_32378923_3232….. It fully looks like a trojan!

Luckily, it turns out that this is used by Apple iTunes to autodiscover services, computers, and devices on the computer or the network. Phew… I haven’t become a zombie bot! Just to be on the safe side, I’ve disabled it nonetheless.

Popularity: 16%

This may not be the biggest punch in AFL history but it’s not 1980 either and if Barry Hall doesn’t get rubbed out for the rest of the season for this, there will be a riot.

Under rules, the tribunal can only suspend him for 6 - 8 weeks if it was a ’king hit’, or a maximum of 4 weeks if it was just a ’normal’ hit - what a joke. Barry Hall should get at least the whole season off, if not banned from playing all together. Anything less than a season will be a laugh - why not just send in a thug to take out the opposition’s best player each game? All you get is a four week holiday.

In a similar incident in 1985, Leigh Matthews coped 4 weeks, and a criminal conviction with a 12 month good behaviour bond when he broke Neville Burns jaw behind the play. That was 20 years ago and the game has changed to be more about skill rather than brute force initimidation.

The stark constrast between the two incidents is not the punch itself but the reaction from fellow team mates. It is absolutely disgraceful that ONLY ONE west coast eagles player stood up for stokes and challenged Hall. In the Matthews incident, there was an all in brawl. The west coast eagles players AND their supporters should hang their heads in shame.

Let’s hope that Brent Staker also makes a formal complaint to police. This sort of behaviour does not belong on streets, let alone the football field.

Popularity: 11%

In Febuary, my online income was $364.31. I set a goal to get over $500 in March. I am proud to say that I have well and truly smashed that target… so much so that I have gotten to a point where I feel a bit uneasy to disclose my income except to say that I can now say that I have finally joined the club.

photo source: Flickr

I started this blog with the goal of making a million bucks. Initially, I tried a few get rich quick ideas but eventually I learned that to make money online takes a lot of learning, a lot of trying, a lot of slowly slowlies - Yes, there are people who get rich on one great idea, but they are the oddities that strike it lucky rather than making it through good planning and hard work.

Whilst I’m not quite a millioinaire yet, I’m well and truly on my way. My current money making avenues include

Adsense

This is where I made my first buck online - and to that, I owe a lot to Google. The way I make money with adsense is to buy old domains with keywords that are fairly popular but not so much so that they are over saturated in competition. I build lots and lots of mini sites by paying someone else to write 20 to 30 articles. Then I start meticulously building as many back links as I can get from social bookmarking sites and do follow blogs until I get indexed by google. In comes the visitors and… ka-ching - residual income in the bank!

Affiliate Marketing

I’ve always thought that affiliate marketing made a lot of sense. With adsense, you are really just adding an extra layer between your site and the ppc guy pushing an affiliate campaign. If affiliates can pay google to pay you to put a link up, then there must be good money here. I tried my hand early on in ppc but I suck at marketing… especially the part of writing the copy! My luck really turned around though when

1. I noticed that ALL the ads on one of my adsense ads were for this one product. This site was making about a dollar a day with a 50% click through rate. That’s good money there so I was a bit hesitant to change the site. I didn’t really like the product on offer but, I thought, if these guys are going to own my site with such ad domination then I’d try and run this offer myself. To my surprise when I slapped on the affiliate ads, my revenue jumped up to an average of $7 a day - that’s a 700% increase! woohoo! From this moment on, I stopped spending my time on creating mini sites for cpc to creating mini sites for cpa!
2. I have always found it difficult to pick an affiliate campaign that I could wholeheartedly push. There are not many companies out there I would buy from myself and also happen to have an affiliate program up. Luckily for me, there’s
   • eBay - everyone buys from eBay… including myself. I always thought it’d be profitable promoting ebay auctions and, early on, I tried putting up a few of their links and auction feeds without much success. I knew that the big players were taking advantage of the ebay api but I never had the time to familiarising myself with it. My breakthrough came when a chap named Wade Wells came up with a plugin that uses the eBay api to populate your wordpress blog with ebay auctions. I could have spent a whole weekend coding away at this, but how much better was paying $49 for phpbay - a ready built wordpress plugin! PhpBay is absolutely awesome… well no I guess I should say that populating your sites with auto-generated content from ebay auction listing is absolutely awesome - phpBay is just an easy way to fast track the build process. For some reason, google absolutely loves ebay auction content and for some sites, I am ranking in the front page of google for two word phrases without me even adding ANY backlinks to the site. If you’re not on the ebay bandwagon, get yourself signed up and buy phpbay today.
   • Symantec and ZoneAlarm - two of the world’s best anti-virus software companies. Which one do you own?
   • SnapFish- Printing online by Hewlett Packard. In Australia, they’ve recently dropped photo printing down to 15cents which finally makes it competitive with printing at the shops. Also they give away the first 30 prints for free.
   • GoDaddy - I register ALL my domains here and so should you.
   • VistaPrint - you get 250 free business cards … sure there’s limited design range but it’s free so why not?

So there you go - a nice bunch of reputable companies to promote! :) The affiliate Networks that I currently use and can recommend are Commission Junction, NeverBlueAds, MaxBounty, and WebGains. I’m also an AzoogleAds member but there was a campaign that I was promoting and I was not getting any conversions… the moment I switched to NeverBlueAds for the same campaign, I started seeing the money roll in - go figure.

Consulting

As a result of some of my sites and this blog, I have helped a small number of people with technical work - predominately setting up mediawiki and wordpress mu. I’d prefer to work on my own sites but of course, everything has a price and I set my opportunity cost of not working on my own work at US$100 an hour. That might sound like a lot to those peddling around at $2 an hour but anything less is really not worth my time.

So there you go, March was awesome and April is already looking up! Adsense clicks seem to be worth more and eBay has a new geo-targetting tool which means you can now redirect visitors to the eBay of their country - kaaaa…ching! :D

Popularity: 20%

I’ve just been reading MarketingExperiments.com and it looks to be a gem! Two articles there that stole my attention are:

1. PPC Advertising - There’s details of a few adwords experiments and the results of different texts used. The main take away here is to provide a landing page that exactly matches what the user was searching for, then try to funnel them to your sales page.
2. Harnessing Social Media - In this experiment, they were able to get 90,000 + unique visitors for a total salary cost of $3,000. This was compared to their 2,000 visitors for $1,250 in adword clicks for the same sites. Take away here is that it can be quite profitable to hire someone else to do the blogging for you!

Overall, this site has some of the most well written articles and reports I’ve come across this year. Well worth the visit for anyone new to internet marketing.

Popularity: 16%

eBay has decided that sellers will only be able to accept COD or Paypal. This will come into effect after June 17.

I think this is a great move and a great win for the consumer. I recently bought a nikon d80 from ebay which came up to almost $1500 including the 18-200mm lens. The seller only accepted direct deposit into his bank account. Despite the seller having a good reputation and over a thousand sales, I still felt a bit uneasy.

The beauty of paying by paypal is that it comes with a chargeback policy where you can claim up to $20,000 if you do not receive the item or it is not as it was described. With a direct deposit to the sellers bank account, you need to deal with the banks and whilst I’ve never had to do it before, I seriously doubt your chances of getting your money back.

Popularity: 15%

A picture speaks a thousand words…

Source: Cliff Pickover

Popularity: 16%