PHP editor under development

While developing the CBIntuition script, I needed a decent PHP editor. Whenever your write code, whether it's a web script or a conventional programming language, life is a lot easier if the display is syntax-highlighted.
What this means is that the script or programming language's keywords are displayed in a different style - bold for example. Numbers and text are displayed in different colours, as are comments. This makes programming a lot easier.
There are a number of highlighting editors available, but I remembered that I once wrote a highlighting editor for the Pascal and C++ programming languages. With a bit of tweaking, this could become a web page editor which recognises and highlights PHP, HTML, Javascript and XML.
So PHPIntuition is born.
Another useful feature of programmers editors is "code snippets". This is an idea I came up with years ago, and evidently many other programmers have thought of too.
Basically it's a set of "library" functions that can be simply pasted in to your code wherever you need them. Similarly, if you write some code that you might use again and again, you can create your own snippets.
PHPIntuition provides you with a set of snippet libraries for PHP, HTML and JavaScript. Additionally, it lets you save your own snippets.

The expected release date of PHPIntuition is during the first quarter of 2008.

We'll keep you posted.

Computing Guide

The newly revamped site mentioned in yesterday's post is coming along nicely. At time of writing it contains three of the original articles from the site. I plan to write another article today, which will be completely fresh material, to help the Google rank along.

The site still needs a bit of customisation because I copied the script directly from another one of my sites and it contains links that I don't really want.

I plan to add an index of "10 most recent articles" on the opening page because at the moment, you're simply presented with a large bundle of Google Ads. That's not particularly inviting.

I'll also be adding new ad blocks using my CBIntuition script, which displays ClickBank ads in the same style as Google Ads.
I can create different ad blocks for each article category, using the most relevant keywords for that category. This means the ads will be much better targeted.

Finally, I want to overhaul the look of the site. It's quite dull to say the least.
I'm not sure whether the script uses themes or CSS or not, but I can freely modify the code anyway.

Another site gets a revamp

I recently acquired a PHP script for making article sites.

I used it to create my Home & Garden articles site.

It seems to work reasonably well, so I decided to use it for another of my sites, A Practical Guide to Computing.
It was already an article site, but consisted entirely of static pages. That made it very difficult to maintain, and being the lazy type that I am, I stopped maintaining it.

Now I am being a bit cunning about the revamp. The site already contained over 100 articles, but it didn't rank anywhere in Google, and it has fallen down the Alexa rankings to greater than 10,000,000.

So, yesterday I set up the site with just one article, and today I created a new Google Sitemap and submitted it. It's just come back with a status of OK, so I can now put my plan into action.

As I've mentioned before on this blog, Google likes sites that update regularly.
So, every day I'll reintroduce one of the old articles and update the sitemap to reflect the new page. In addition, I'll add completely new articles that I write myself from time to time.
Google should then see the site as a very active one, with a decent amount of content. Admittedly, some of that content will be duplicate (the original articles came from other article sites), but my own articles will be all new content.

It will be interesting to see how quickly this "live" site attains a Google PageRank higher than zero.

Of course, it's not just about content - Google likes to see external links to the site, so I'll work on obtaining some of them. I shall not be using link farms or reciprocal links - I want good quality one-way links.

Breakthrough

The data file for my new script, CBIntuition, comes from the ClickBank Marketplace in ZIP format. I've been tearing my hair out trying to get a PHP script to unzip it.
Most of the scripts that I've found depend upon the Zlib library being linked in to PHP on the host server. My host's servers don't appear to have the library built in, and as I don't own the host servers, I can't add it.

A new friend of mine, found via an online forum, has just furnished me with a library, DUnzip2 that will do the job. It's not his library, but I have to say thanks to him the Admin of CBIntuition is now one step nearer completion.

PHP Scripts

Almost everyone who's got seriously into developing interactive websites would agree that it doesn't get any easier than using PHP and MySQL.

Having now spent the last couple of weeks working on a script using PHP, I'm inclined to agree.

The script, CBIntuition, delivers Adsense-style advertisements for products on the ClickBank marketplace.

And this has spawned another related idea, which I'll be calling MyIntuition until I find a better name.
Basically, it will deliver similar, AdSense-style ads, but the advertisements will be for your own products, or other affiliate links (ie not ClickBank).

The idea is that the user will be able to add their own advertisements to a MySQL database and the script will then deliver ads from that database.

I'll be working on the script just as soon as the CBIntuition script is finished.

More about videos

Ever since we decided to produce some videos, I've been racking my brain for ideas.

The finished products will probably end up on a site about conversion secrets, so I was looking for ideas on that subject.

However, I think that information on a wider subject is still appropriate.
For example, if I produce a video describing how to improve your rank in Google, it doesn't necessarily improve conversion, but it should improve sales.

So I'm going to produce a video about using the Google Webmaster tools - specifically about using a Google Sitemap.
I've already proved to myself that using a sitemap on a live site is worthwhile. The GoogleBots have started visiting one of my sites every day since I provided a sitemap.

And as I have a Google Sitemap creator program in the pipeline, there's a classic opportunity for follow-on sales.

Into the unknown - video production

Video is everywhere now. The advent of sites such as YouTube has made video publishing the latest thing.

Some of my Internet Marketing friends and I are getting together to produce a bundle of Internet Marketing training videos. This will consist of a varied selection of narrated Powerpoint-style presentations, Screen-captured video demonstrating how to do something, or simple discussions and presentations.

Most of us have never done anything like it before, so we're all jumping into the unknown.
Hopefully, the result will be an excellent collection of hints, tips and other useful information which we can put together as a bundle and market as a joint effort.

It could be the start of something big.

ClickBank meets AdSense

If you cast your eyes to the left-hand column of this blog, you'll see a section called "Ways to make money".
Under that section, you will see a list of titles and brief descriptions. They are actually advertisments similar to those "Ads by Google" ones you see on most web pages (including this one).

The difference with these adverts are that they are for products being sold via the ClickBank affiliate program.

They are displayed on this site (and some of my other sites) by a script that I wrote myself, which I've called CBIntuition. It selects all the ClickBank products that contain a pre-defined keyword, and then chooses up to 5 of them at random to display on the page.

The advantage of this is that many ClickBank products pay huge commissions on sales - up to 75% for some products.

The script is still under development, so it's not yet available to purchase, but it should be some time in December 2007.
The ad display script works just fine. I'm now working on an admin and configuration script. Installation will be very simple - simply copy it to your host.

The most difficult part of this script is keeping the ClickBank marketplace database up-to-date. This changes almost daily, so it should really be updated at least weekly.
I'm working on another script to do as much of that as is possible.

The script will be available from my software store, Dryice Computing, where you can find out more details.

Caveat emptor (buyer beware)

When I set up my ebook site, The Cafetorium, I purchased the eStore script and a bundle of ebooks and software packages.

I set up the eStore, loaded in the product database, which consisted of all the ebooks and software in the bundle. Then I set it to work.

Yesterday I received an email from the owner of an eBook saying that they had never issued that eBook with resale rights of any kind.
Of course I removed the eBook from my inventory immediately and explained that I had received it in a bundle of stock for an eBook site.

So the old phrase, "caveat emptor" or "buyer beware" raises its head again.

If you find yourself in the same position, just remove the item from sale. Don't bother arguing about it. I still have around 200 products in my store so I'm not going to lose out by having my stock list reduced by one.
(Actually I never sold any copies of the product in question, and I doubt whether I would have sold many in the future)

Incoming links

There are two main forms of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

The first is known as on-page SEO. This basically means adjusting your content to make it search-engine friendly. It's all about using keywords in the domain name, the title, description and body text. Get the ratio of keywords to other text too high and you get penalised for "keyword stuffing". Get the ratio too low and you lose out on relevancy.

The second is known as off-page SEO. This is a lot more difficult to achieve because it's basically about other sites having relevant links to your site.
It is preferable if these links are one-way, otherwise you get accused of simply trading links specifically for SEO purposes.
Last night I discovered that one of my sites, Dryice Computing, has 14 incoming links. I knew about one or two of them, but the others were somewhat of a surprise. However, 10 of the links were all from sub-domains of the same site, so it probably only counts as 1 link in Google's eyes.

There are several factors to consider when getting incoming links set up. The first is that the linking site is on a different C-Class IP address. This is to make sure that the site owner is not simply linking in from all his other sites.
The next factor is relevancy. The site that links to yours must have some relevancy in terms of content. If your site sells dog biscuits, it's no use having links in from a company that makes radiators.
Another important factor is Google PageRank. If you can get links in from a high-ranking page, your own PageRank will grow.

The site that links to my site 10 times has a Google PageRank of 5, which means it carries a lot of weight.

It will be interesting to see if my site's PageRank grows from its lowly 0 as a result of these links.

Keeping Google-friendly

Whenever I change or update any of my websites, I always go to Google's webmaster tools to keep everything up to date.
It's a site worth visiting anyway because if you use Google sitemaps, you really need to ensure that they are up to date. If they are not, Google reports an error and stops indexing the site. You then need to update the sitemap and re-submit it.
When you do that, it can take a while for Google to go and check the site out again, but you really mustn't forget to go and look at the results. If there are still errors, your site's changes won't be updated in Google's database.

Google likes sites with Google sitemaps, so it's worth investing the time to create one. However, creating one by hand is not a lot of fun and prone to error unless you really like writing XML.
There are plenty of tools out there for generating Google sitemaps.

Another advantage of using Google sitemaps is that submitting your sitemap to Google is a much faster way of getting your site indexed by Google than simply by submitting its URL.

You can visit Google's webmaster pages at http://www.google.com/webmasters.

Bum Marketing

One method of marketing that I've read about numerous times is the publishing of articles on article sites.

The main reason for doing this is to create high-ranking links to your sales site, which is good in SEO terms. The same principle is used by posting on forums, adding a link to your website in the signature.
Another advantage of this method is that anyone reading the article or the post could actually click through to the sales page.

So when I heard about Bum Marketing, I thought that it was just somebody churning out the same old stuff with a new name.

In reality, that's true to some extent, but it takes it a little further by explaining how to do it properly.

In a nutshell, you target phrases containing a number of keywords that render a relativly small number of results in a search engine.

Let's say you are selling Albanian sausages, either directly or as an affiliate.
Rather than choosing one or two keywords, you go for complete phrases, such as "how to knit an Albanian sausage warmer".

Basically, you publish a number of articles relating to that subject and at the end, you include a link to your sales site (or your affiliate link).

The article sites all have a high Google PageRank, so the inlinks to your site are quite valuable. The article sites are also indexed quite often by the search engines, so your site can get a good placing in the search results.

The bottom line for this method when used for selling ClickBank products as an affiliate is that an article can earn you in the region of $20 per month.
The idea then is to write a new article every day for 3 months (90 days), so that your 90 articles earn you a revenue of $1800 per month.

That sounds good to me - that's equivalent to my mortgage payments. I'd love to be able to cover that simply by writing an article per day.

I read another ebook which described an accelerated version of the Bum Marketing method. Basically you churn out 5 articles an hour for a month. All very well if you have that sort of free time, but you have to look at it realistically.

I quite enjoy writing, so I think that once I've got into the swing of things, I could knock out a new article during my lunch break every day. A couple more in the evenings would bring my daily total to 3 articles. So I'd get my 90 articles in the space of a month.

So let's give it a try. I'll keep you posted with the results.

A new venture to try out

Yesterday I attended an Internet Marketing workshop. The main theme of the workshop was Drop-Shipping, but also included other necessary techniques such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and how to use Pay Per Click (PPC) search engines without going bust.
The information I picked up from the workshop was worth much more than the measly £20 I paid (which included a reasonable lunch).

I'd heard about drop-shipping before. Basically the marketer sets up a website to sell products from a drop-shipping wholesaler. Customers buy from that website, and then the website owner places the order with the drop-shipper at the wholesale price, thus making a profit.
The drop-shipper fulfils the order and ships it to the customer.

So in a nutshell, the only thing that the website owner has to do is market the website and pass on orders to the supplier. In some cases, the ordering could be automated, depending on how the drop-shipper prefers to receive the orders.
If that's the case, the business becomes self-running. All that's required is a little maintenance - changing the items on sale, ensuring that orders are getting through etc.
Everything else is handled by the drop-shipper.

At the workshop, we were shown examples of successful and not so successful drop-ship websites. The least successful one was making about a few hundred dollars a month. Not very good, but not bad for very little effort. And consider this; if a self-running site can earn $300 per month, think what 10 or more of those sites would do.

I'm now looking at drop-ship suppliers in the UK, although they don't have to be UK based of course. Any drop-shipper that will post internationally is a potential supplier.

Widen the scope

Once people start getting into Internet Marketing (IM), they discover the merits of putting Adsense units on their pages. After all, if they can earn some money just by giving up a small amount of space on their pages, why not?
A recurring, passive income. Add the code once and leave it.

What these people often fail to consider is that Adsense is not the only scheme out there. Yahoo! can supply similar context-sensitive ads in some areas.
There's also Amazon. See the left-hand column for an example of a context-sensitive Amazon ad.

Personally I have made more money from my Amazon Associates links than from Google Adsense.
I have Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk Associate IDs, so I can target a wider market.

Forget Alexa - Concentrate on Google

After some 2 weeks of no updates in Alexa ranks of the sites that I monitor, I'm now seeing some very strange things happening.

The ranks of many of the sites have plummetted by around 1 million places. One has fallen 3.5 million places, and another has dropped off the face of the earth as far as Alexa is concerned and has gone from a rank of 4.4 million to No Data, which is a fall of at least 5.6 million places.

And as on a few occasions before, one of my sites gets a different rank depending upon which page you visit.

I guess it's possible that these positions are a result of my robot visiting he sites every day, but it's unlikely.

Anyway, after a short discussion about Alexa on a forum, I've decided it's not really worth bothering about, and I shall be uninstalling the Alexa toolbar.

A week or so ago, I saw the August 2007 results for search engine popularity. Google wins hands down. Of 61 billion searches worldwide, 37 billion were handled by Google. That's more than the other search engines put together.

From today, I'm just going to concentrate on getting my sites highly ranked in Google.

Internet Marketing Workshop

Last night I attended an Internet Marketing seminar. In actual fact, it wasn't so much of a seminar as an introduction to Internet Marketing (IM) and a commercial for a 1-day IM Workshop.
That wasn't so bad - the seminar was free, they fed us, and the workshop is only £20 for two people. The reason it's so cheap is that they make money out of hosting and providing programming and eCommerce solutions, which they try to sell as part of the workshop.

I already have eCommerce solutions in place and I'm a programmer by profession, so I'm just going for the tuition.
It takes place in about 2 weeks time. It's going to be interesting to hear what they say.
They claim that using their techniques, you can get a top spot in Google within 3 days of launching a site.
I suspect that there's a trick involved - it probably only works if you choose their hosting package (maybe your site ends up as a sub-domain of their site, which already has a good Google Page Rank.
We shall see.

During the seminar, they did give me a tip which might help improve my site Google ranking. The answer is "Give something away for free".
If you're competing against others for the same market, give the customers something free. On my eBooks and software sites that's easy. I have several little utility programs that would not command a high price. They would make excellent giveaways.

I think I need to do a bit of redesign on The Cafetorium. It could really use an intro on the front page, with news of special offers etc.
Have to dig deep into that PHP code and see what I can do.

New domains now online

My new host has managed to fix the problems I was experiencing and my new domains are now online.

The first domain, The Articles pages, is a kind of Article Site Directory.

The next domain will be a Blog which will be related to the Directory site. This is because it is much easier to promote blogs and get them in the search engines than any other type of website.

The third domain, will be an article site. These are becoming well known as a medium for making a fair bit of money. I'm all for that!


PS. It's now 13 days since the Alexa ranks changed on any of my sites.

Alexa is still driving me crazy

It is now 11 days since there was any change in the Alexa ranks of any of the sites I monitor. (Several of those sites do not belong to me - I monitor them as a sort of control against which to compare my own sites)

I guess as the number of sites in the Alexa database increases, the longer it will take to recalculate the stats, so this could actually get worse. let's hope that Alexa introduce some more processing power to cope with it.

The project I'm currently working on is designed to rise through the Google ranks as quickly as possible. It will be interesting to see whether this is reflected in the Alexa ranks. However, as Alexa is based only on visits by Alexa toolbar users, there might not be any correlation between them.

Yet another false start

Well I set off with all good intentions to get my latest project off the ground.
I planned how I was going to do it, and was going to work through it methodically.

The first task was to register some domains, which I did with no problems. It's something I've done numerous times before, and it's very straightforward.

The next task was to find a new host for some of these domains. The reason for this is part of SEO (search engine optimisation). I want to link various domains together, but the search engines see this as a blatant attempt to exploit external links if both linked sites have the same C Class IP address. (See the end of this post for a quick description of IP address classes)

So, I found a new host and my account was created. Then I set my new domain's DNS to point to that host's servers and waited for it all to come online.

Still no sign of it. Even before all the DNS are updated, the account Control Panel should work, but it's not letting me log in.

The hosting reseller is aware of the problem and doing everything he can to sort out the problem, but it is a little frustrating.
I can not proceed with the rest of my plan until those domains are online.

If it doesn't happen soon, I may have to cancel this hosting account and move elsewhere.

Getting down to business

Over the past few months I've had a few false starts to various online business ideas. This has usually been due to pressures of work and family, and the fact that I'm also trying to renovate a house.

I have now decided to knuckle down and get one of my ideas implemented, working through it methodically from beginning to end.

A while back, I noticed a huge increase in article sites. It wasn't until I set one up myself that I realised that they can be big money-spinners with Google AdSense.
However, my site was all static HTML pages, so it was a real chore to maintain. Consequently, my article site has stalled and its popularity has dwindled.

Over the last few weeks I've been getting into PHP which can make website maintenance so much easier. So, I am now going to set up a new article site at The Articles Site, using PHP and a mySQL database.

I'm not going to rush into this - I believe that's another reason why I've had only a little success with my past efforts.
So, visit The Articles Site regularly to see it evolve.

(By the way, for anyone who's been following this blog, you will have spotted the fact that I've deliberately put the URL of the new site in this post in a blatent attempt to get it into Google as fast as possible. This is despite the fact that there is currently no content on the site. Google will simply log the URL at this time, but as the content increases, should begin to love it)

New money-making domain

At the moment, I have two main web sites. The Cafetorium is the place where I sell eBooks and software. At the moment, most of the products I sell from this site are 3rd-party products. I'll be adding more of my own once I get all my other projects established.
The next site is Dryice Computing. The plan for this site is to sell only my own software products. At the moment, it carries only one of my own products, and one 3rd-party product. I plan to replace the 3-rd party product with an improved version that I'm creating myself.

I'm now setting up a 3rd website. This has two main purposes. The first is that it's an experimental area where I can try out marketing techniques, and sell products that don't fit in with my main sites. It's likely to use hard-sell techniques similar to those used by the Internet Marketing "gurus", pushing hyped-up, high-price items.
The second purpose is totally mercenary - to make money. I figured that if I can successfully push products that sell for $67 (about £34) upwards I might as well really go for it.

My plan is to make at least as much money as I make in my day job from this site, and preferably 10% more. I really like the idea of going to work (I really like my day job, by the way) with the secret that I actually earn more money from my websites than I do from my job.
It's what I call financial security. If I was made redundant, or the company went under, I'd just shrug it all off.

To go along with the theme of making lots of money, I've set up the site Unmarked Bills. It's just a blog at the moment, but that's just to get the domain Googled. The blog will be moving over to a sub-domain, while the main promotions take over the domain home.

Protect your software from pirates

If you write software or you sell software, you'll know how important it is to protect it from copying. The more useful and high-demand the software is, the higher the chances are that it will be pirated.
If you protect it, then the crackers WILL crack that protection. Then you will find unprotected copies, or serial numbers or even serial number generators going around the Internet.
In a way, it's flattering. The crackers consider your software highly enough to warrant the effort of cracking it.

However, if you make your living from software, flattery doesn't pay the bills.
So your protection system must be very strong. There really isn't any protection system that can't be cracked with the right amount of effort. But if the system is strong enough to deter the crackers, you're in with a fighting chance.

Shareware Creator is a strong protection system that can be applied to new and exisiting programs. It forms a secure wrapper around the program that lets you control its usage. You can make the software time-limited, require a registration code, lock it to run on one PC only etc.

Many commercial licencing software products cost a fortune. One very popular one has a starting price of around £1,150 (about $2,300) rising to £7,500 ($15,000).
That may be ok for the big software companies selling expensive software, but if your software package sells for £20, you'll need to sell a lot of copies just to break even.

Shareware Creator has many of the features of the big commercial protection systems, but at a very small fraction of the price.
Powerful software doesn't have to be expensive. Check it out.

New domain, new site

I've just registered a new domain, www.KidsCanMakeIt.co.uk. My plans for this domain are to provide projects for kids to make stuff. I find it quite sad that kids are spoon-fed so much stuff nowadays that they don't get the satisfaction of having made something for themselves.

The site will contain articles and plans, ideas and suggestions, and will welcome contributions from readers.

This is something that I've wanted to do for a while now, because I think my 3-year old son will benefit from it.
Then today I had a conversation with someone who runs a different type of site for kids. They put Amazon ads on their site and make a lot of commission on the sale of books, CDs, DVDs etc. In fact they've had months that have earned them over $1000.
I like that kind of side-effect of running a website that I'm genuinely interested in running.

I only just registered the domain, so the DNS hasn't been set up, and there's no pages available just yet.
I'll be getting started on it tomorrow.

Alexa Rank system is a joke

Well after weeks of following the Alexa rank of various websites, I've concluded that it a bit of a joke.

The rank is supposed to be site-based, but I'm now getting different ranks for different pages of the same site. What's more, some of the less popular pages have a higher rank than the others.

Other sites, where I monitor only one page, sometimes return a wildly different rank from two visits within minutes of each other.

I've tried re-installing the Alexa toolbar, which has appeared to fix strange anomalies before, but it made no difference whatsoever.
What makes it worse is that I am now experiencing the same effect when I view the rank from home and at work.

So, although I shall probably continue to monitor the rank (I have a system set up to do it automatically), I shall not be taking it very seriously until they fix this bug.

Web Link Checker

A new software product has made its way to The Cafetorium eStore. It's a Web Link Checker.
We've all been there. After carefully crafting your website, you upload it to your webspace only to discover that you've mis-typed a link to another of your pages.

Web Link Checker lets you quickly and easily test all your internal links before you upload them.

It's a simple program - just choose an HTML page (usually your home page) and click the Test Links button. Within seconds the program will tell you which links are broken so you can fix them before the site goes live.

It's only £4.99, which is well worth it, especially if your site has a lot of pages.

However, as a software engineer, I've been inspired to write my own version of it.
Web Link Checker doesn't recognise encrypted links as created by EmailLinkMangler and other such programs.
I would also like a version that will test a site that has already been uploaded, and will also check links to external sites, because we don't have any control over the existence of those.
If you buy Web Link Checker now, but would like the improved version when it's available, you'll be able to get it by paying the difference in the price, so you won't lose out in the upgrade process. In fact, I might reward early buyers by giving a discount.

Watch this Blog for news about the new version.

Buyer beware

A bit of a warning today.
One of my websites sells ebooks and software as digital downloads, making it all totally self-running. This is an excellent way of having an online business.

However, I bought a large bundle of ebooks and software as stock, and this is where you be careful. I decided to review all the products that I sell and improve the descriptions of them on the website.

I decided to start with the software, and chose one product that I actually need to use myself. I installed a copy of it and ran it. I really couldn't believe how many bugs it contains. The software in question is Sitemap Maker. It is supposed to scan your website, finding all the URLs of all the pages, and then generate a Google Sitemap file. You then load this file onto your webspace, tell Google about it and your site will be indexed some time later.

I entered the root URL of one of my sites exactly as specified in the help. The program then appeared to lock up. It finally came back having failed to find any URLs. I then modified the root URL and it went away and listed my site's pages, but included two which didn't even exist!
Then I got the software to generate the sitemap file and there were errors in that, too.

A while back I actually wrote a program that does the same thing. Mine isn't perfect which is why I haven't put it on sale yet, but it does a much better job than Sitemap Maker.
As a programmer, I was able to spot the faults in the generated file immediately, but the average customer buying the software would not.
In fact, Sitemap Maker has an option to upload the file to your web space, so most people wouldn't even bother looking at the content of the generated file.

Needless to say, I have removed the product from my online store. I'll be replacing it with my own version once it's complete.

That was the first product that I decided to review. How many others are of a similar poor standard, I wonder?
I think I'll remove them all from sale and then reintroduce them once I have reviewed them.

My online store is all about making money, but I don't want to be seen as a vendor of inferior goods.

Another experiment

During the day I work for a small, sonar design consultancy, Wavefront Systems Ltd. The reason why I mention it, and have put a link to their website is purely for the benefit of the search engines.

I overheard two of the directors lamenting the fact that our site doesn't rank highly in the search engines, so I figured that if I include a link in here, and then ping the blog directories, it will stand a chance of being seen by the search engines.

So, let's see what happens...

Another Blog

Last night I set up another blog. Unlike this one, it uses WordPress, which means that the blog is hosted by my own domain host.
WordPress comes as a bundle of PHP scripts, so if there's something I don't like about it, I can change it.

The content of the blog is related to this one in that it's basically about making money. It's a total experiment, but I'm not going to reveal the basis of that experiment otherwise it is bound to fail.
However, if it works, I'll be logging it here so that anyone who's reading will be able to replicate it and make some money too.

Check it out at Unmarked Bills.

And the above link to the blog is also an experiment. I'm not going to ping the other blog to get it seen by the search engines. Instead, I'll ping this blog and see if the other blog gets noticed.

Aaaaaggggh! Alexa is driving me nuts!

As I mentioned recently, I discovered that Alexa doesn't just count hits on a site, but hits on separate pages within a site. That's what started my BrowseBot experiment, to see what effect viewing every page of a site had on the Alexa rank.

I check and log the rank every day to view the progress. Now I find that I'm getting a different rank depending on which page I view on the same site.
It's not a unique rank per page, but one of two rank figures comes up depending on the page.

There's no rational explanation for this. The pages are all in my own domain, and there's nothing strange about them.

The only possible reason I can think of is that there are several Alexa servers (very likely), and their databases don't always match. I suspect that with so many sites logged, they probably don't get the chance to synchronise their databases as often as they would like.

Web site resurrected

A few years ago some friends and I planned to build a battling robot to enter into the UK's Robot Wars TV series. Unfortunately, the series was cancelled before we had the chance to complete it.

Later, when another TV series, TechnoGames, sais they would introduce walking biped robots in the next series, I started to build one of those. Amazingly, that series was also cancelled and the walking biped events never took place.
My project was shelved because I had too many other things to do.

At the time, we set up a website, Robot Assassin, showing our experiments and development of our robots.

I am now going to resurrect the Robot Assassin site as a "Niche Content" or "Article" site, to use Internet Marketing speak.
It's going to be an experiment to see whether niche sites really can earn money from Adsense and other Affiliate programs. It will also serve to demonstrate whether having regularly updated content really does give you a high rank in Google.

Finally, it is also a means of furthering my knowledge of the PHP scripting language.

There's nothing on the site yet - I only just switched the DNS to my new host, so it will take a few hours to get up and running. I also need to design the new style and put together some content before it goes live.

I plan to set up a robotics forum, so if you're interested, why not bookmark the site and come back later.

Getting Googled

Although I have been concentrating on the Alexa Rank of my sites, I am also very interested and keen on getting my sites ranked by Google.

Except for Google themsleves, nobody seems to know the exact criteria used by Google to rank sites. However, amongst the unknowns, there are a lot of known criteria, so of course everyone concentrates on them.

Google doesn't want to list junk sites because they are no use to anyone, so content is very important to Google, as it should be. To this end, I had previously created static web pages so that all of my content was there in plain HTML for the search engines to see and index.

Since then, I have discovered the wonders of PHP scripts and MySQL databases and dynamic pages. This means I have fewer actual pages on my site, but several of those pages have content added to them dynamically (on request), and that content comes from my database.

Not to worry though. Google does index dynamic pages as long as it knows how to access them.

Dynamic pages usually have a list of one or more details added to the page address, like this (I've highlighted the details):
http://www.cafetorium.co.uk/product.php?products_id=108&osCsid=8eea7

This means "load the page called product.php, and fill it with product data from the database, where the product ID is 108&osCsid=8eea7".
The product could be an article for sale, an article - anything really.
Here's the address again as a real link:
Blogging Secrets

Anyway, as long as you give Google all the possible combinations of product details, the resulting pages will be indexed.
Fortunately, on sales pages, those links exist, and
The Cafetorium has a list of all products, where all those links will appear in one page.

For good measure, I always create and submit Google Sitemaps for all of my sites, which tells Google all the pages that are available.

And finally, if you wonder why I put links to my site in this blog, it's not for the convenience of readers, nor as blatant publicity. It's because Google indexes the Blogging sites (especially Blogger), and it's a good way for Google to find links to pages.

The Alexa experiment continues

Since I created my robot to view all of the pages of one of my sites while running the Alexa Toolbar, there's only been a slight move in the Alexa Rank (less than 1000), and it's no more than my other sites for which the robot visits only one page.
However, the updating of rank is somewhat erratic - it often goes for over a week without changing - so it still might have some effect.

New eBook Store Opens its eDoors

The new Cafetorium eBook store is now online and in business.

It took a little longer to configure than expected, but it's all done now.

Currently we have a stock of 206 products; mostly eBooks, but some software as well.
Over the next few weeks I'll be adding a lot more products, some of which will be available exclusively from The Cafetorium.

I have implemented a system by which you need to create an account to be able to purchase from The Cafetorium. The advantage of this is that you will then have full control over your account - you can subscribe or unsubscribe to the newsletter, remove your account, change your email address etc.
We never pass email addresses on to anyone else. We hate spam as much as the next person.
The details that we keep in your account are the minimum required. There is no unnecessary personal information kept. All account details are kept in a secure database.

If you want eBooks - Give us a try.

The new Cafetorium eBook store is on its way

After spending a few hours mending my car last night, I finally got around to loading my new PHP-based eBook store to The Cafetorium. It's not complete yet, and still needs a lot of configuring. As a result, a lot of the content is replaced by error messages.
Howver, if you go there, you'll get the idea of what it looks like.

I plan to do a lot of customisation of the appearance once everything is up and running. I've already updated the logo graphic. The rest of the site will have its colour scheme adjusted to blend with the logo.

I must say that I am impressed by what I got for my measly $7. I'll be even more impressed once it's up and running.

The administration control panel is just excellent. There's help on every page, and it's designed to let you administer your site without ever having to worry about HTML, PHP, JavaScript etc.

Online shop rethink

Late last night I was offered a turnkey online eBook store, stocked with 200 eBooks.
It's fully automated with PayPal, and obviously uses some scripting such as PHP, because it has some automated features.
I suspect that it's database-driven because adding new products is simply a case of entering the details into an online control panel.
This is something that I had planned to do with my own store eventually, as I learned more about PHP scripting. Now it appears that it's been done for me, so I figured that it was easier to buy in the technology than to spend time writing it myself. As the price was very low, it has to be worth it.

It's a huge download (about 350Mb), so I left it downloading and went to bed. In the morning when I checked the download, it had stopped due to an error. I resumed the download and went to work. So I won't get to see it until tonight.

It was very cheap at $7, so I'm not expecting too much of it, but from its description, it sounds as if it's worth buying just so that I can see how it works.
Plus, the 200 eBooks might be useful - although I suspect they will be the same ones that everyone is selling or giving away in bundles because they've been around for a while.

In the meantime, I'm still working on The Cafetorium. Yesterday I developed a PHP script that allows me to create just one single download page that will work for all of my eBooks, instead of writing one per product. That's going to save a lot of work and will be much less prone to error.

Maybe I'll see if I can do the same for my sales pages - and my catalogue pages. There's a lot of them to write, and until my eStore Builder program is fully operational, I'll have to do those by hand.

Actually, the major chore is creating the PayPal Buy Now buttons. PayPal's web interface for creating buttons is tedious to use and you can't save your data.
I'm not keen on programs like Paylock Generator because they are easily cracked. I cracked it by hand in about an hour, and have since written an unencryptor program which will reveal all the details of a Paylocked PayPal button.

I really need to write a program that will generate real encrypted PayPal buttons. It's possible, but not easy, so it might take a while.

The Cafetorium goes online

My Cafetorium eBook shop has now been built. The shelves are empty at the moment as I review my stock for quality.
A vast improvement on my previous version is that the stock is being categorised to make it a lot easier to find particular eBooks.

Every day I'll be taking a few eBooks to work and I'll read and review them during my lunch break. Then in the evening, the ones that pass the review will be added to the site.

This is going to be a long process, but I think it will be worth it. There are so many eBooks out there today which are either total rubbish, or duplicates of other eBooks. This duplication happens because people sell the PLR (Private Label Rights), allowing the buyers to rename them, change the content and put their names to them. Many people do nothing but change the title and author, meaning that you can end up with several identical books under different titles.

By reviewing all my stock, I hope to eliminate all duplicates. If I can, I'll also try to make a note of duplicates so that my customers don't end up buying something they already own.

On the Alexa front, I downloaded and installed the Alexa Toolbar again and everything seems to be working again. It seems that the ranking system doesn't always work if you don't have the latest version installed.

My idea for writing a robot to visit all the pages of my sites has now been realised.
I've used it for a few days now. It's too soon to determine whether visiting all of the pages of a site has any bearing on the Alexa Rank, but for the two sites that have the most pages, the initial results look promising, with increases of around 350,000 compared with other sites for which I'm visiting just one page, which have increased by about 100,000. One set of results doesn't provide much evidence though.
We shall see over the next few weeks.

The number of pages on the Cafetorium site will increase steadily over the next few weeks, so if my theory is correct, its rise should be phenomenal. That site also has a Google Rank, so it will become a valuable site for all my other sites to be linked to.

A new site on its way

I have decided to resurrect my plans to create an eBook store. I put it on hold before because I thought that too many people were doing the same thing and my site would just get lost.
However, I've read recently that people are still making reasonable money from selling eBooks, so I thought I'd give it a try.

I have collected a fairly huge stock of eBooks over the past year, but I have to say that quite a few of them are utter rubbish. So, I have removed all of my entire stock, and I'll be reading through each of them before putting them back on sale.

There are numerous rip-off artists about who try to sell you rubbish like that, and have no scruples. They don't even read them themselves - they just buy the resale rights and churn it out.

Personally, I can't bring myself to do that. I plan to provide a decent service, selling quality products.

I also figured that if I add a new product or two every day, the search engines will view my site as an active, changing site. And if I write up reviews of the eBooks that I sell, there will be a lot of changing content for the search engines to get their teeth into.
This can only do my search engine ranks a lot of good.

The domain that I am using for my ebook store has been around for about 6 years now (simply used for a personal website), and Google seems to prefer long-lived sites. This is reflected by the fact that it has a Google Page Rank of 2/10. Not brilliant, but better than nothing.

The site now has an Alexa rank of 1,891,986. Again, not fantastic, but not a bad position for a startup site.

The site is called The Cafetorium (like this blog), and is at The Cafetorium.
There's nothing to buy there yet, but the stock levels will pick up over the next few days.

A new Alexa experiment

Having experienced bizarre and inconsistent results regarding Alexa rank of my sites, I decided to read up on how Alexa computes rank.

It's not only based on unique user visits to a site, but on the number of page views, as well. That puts a whole new slant on things.

What if I was to visit all of the pages on all of my sites every day? Would this affect the Alexa rank? Let's give it a try.

As all of my sites have a Google sitemap file listing all the pages on the site, it should be easy to write a script that takes my browser to all of those pages.
I should be able to make it linger on those pages for good measure to make it look as if it's a human reader and not a robot.

The experiment will be all the more interesting because some of my sites have considerably more pages than others. In theory, the ones with more pages should gain a higher Alexa rank more quickly than those with fewer pages.

I'll keep you posted...

Short-lived

Well my faith in Alexa was very short-lived.
Today I checked the ranks of my sites as usual, and all except one had reverted back to the same rank as two days ago.
I then revisited the one which hadn't changed, and then that reverted back to the old rank also.

What's more, the numbers I get from the Alexa Toolbar never seem to bear any relation to the numbers I get on the Alexa.com site, where my sites appear to have a considerably higher rank.

Maybe I'll just dismiss Alexa as being a waste of time and concentrate on Google.

Faith restored (for now)

Anyone reading this blog will know that I am an avid watcher of Alexa ranking, and I discovered that simply by visiting my own sites while running the Alexa Toolbar, I was able to increase their rank.

As the sites rose through the ranks, progress became slower, so that graphs of the rank would have a distinct tailing-off shape.

Over the last few weeks, the ranks have not been updated as regularly as before, and movement has been very slow, moving just a few thousand positions in the space of a month (average of about 400 per day compared with moves of 600,000 per day in the beginning).

I was beginning to lose interest in the ranks of my sites, assuming that they had reached their peak until other Alexa Toolbar users started to view them.

Until today.

Suddenly, there has been a huge jump on all of my sites, averaging about 75,000 per day since the last update. One site, which until today was listed as "No data" (which means a rank of greater than 10 million) came in at an incredible 4,218,030 - a jump of over 5.75 million places.

Two of my sites now have a rank of less than 2 million (the highest being 1,892,795).
My target still remains sub-200,000, so there's still a way to go, but it's now all looking possible.


So my interest in Alexa ranking has increased again.
(until it starts to drag its heels again)

Still here

It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted on here. I would like to say that it's because I've been away on vacation, but it's not true. It's more due to the pressure of work than anything else.
Hopefully, one day, I'll be making enough money to give up the day job and that won't happen any more.

Unfortunately, development work on my software products has also taken a hit, and there's been little or no progress there.

I'm still getting a few people joining my mailing list as a result of the Ebook and Software Blowout giveaway event.

I sent my subscribers details of a course that will give step-by-step instructions on getting started as an Internet Marketer. It begins in September, and carries a $10,000 prize for the best-performing student. Well worth signing up for.
I don't have the details to hand (I'm not in my home office just now), but I'll post it here tomorrow, or later tonight.

Now I'm completely confused by Alexa

Yesterday there was an update on the Alexa stats and all the sites I am monitoring rose by a few thousand places, but by a little less than before, which supports my tailing off curve theory. Except for one site, which went completely against the grain and plummetted by an astounding 306,843 places.

There doesn't seem to be any reason behind the fall. Who knows the secrets behind the search engines and site ranking engines? I guess we'll never know unless we go and work for the likes of Alexa or Google.

Still, it makes my Alexa rank graphs look a bit more interesting - a bit of a break from the standard curves that they all seem to be following.

The Theory Confirmed?

Yesterday I commented that the increase in Alexa rank for the various sites that I monitor have been levelling off.

Today's results seem to confirm the theory that you can't push your own sites high by visiting them every day.
On average, the ranks seem to update about every 3 days, so my graphs have a stepped look to them, but the curve is still prominent.

Today's results, after a gap of 6 days with no change, saw one of my sites increae in rank by just 3 places. Not much of a dent on its rank of 2,889,553.

This also confirms my theory that the Internet Marketing gurus give away custom Alexa Toolbars just so that people will visit their sites with the toolbar switched on. I guess the neatest trick would be to produce websites that serve content only if the Alexa Toolbar is running. I don't know if that's possible, but it might be worth looking into.

More about Alexa

Regular readers will know that I monitor the Alexa rank of various websites on a daily basis. The rank is determined by the number of unique visitors to the site each day as long as the visitors have the Alexa toolbar running.

I discovered that by visiting these sites daily myself had an impact on their ranks.
Once Alexa had started logging them, and their ranks appeared as less that 1 million, my daily visits to the sites were pushing them up fairly rapidly.

I suspect there is a limit though. I plotted graphs of their rise, and every single one of the 9 sites that I'm monitoring has a curve that starts off quite steep, and is now starting to flatten out around the 2 million mark.

I've read that to be noticed in the search engines, you need an Alexa rank of less than 200,000, so I doubt if it's possible to push your sites up there yourself unless you can make numerous unique visits (from different IP addresses). However, that's probably forbidden by Alexa and if they find out, you could be pulled from their system.

I'd like to know how they would find out though if you were running from different IP addresses.

Caveat Emptor - buyer beware

As a programmer, it's always interesting to see other programmer's source code - especially when it's a popular product, or it does something clever.

I recently came across a bundle on eBay called Site Wizard Pro (SWP). It claimed that it would generate websites for you, that it came with resale rights, and also the source code.

As I am currently writing a series of website generators, I thought it would be useful to see how others did it, so I bought the SWP bundle. It was less than $4, so it didn't really matter if it turned out to be the rubbish that I was expecting.

As it turned out, it was ok, but not exactly mind-blowing. The vendor claimed that the software sells for $97. I'd be very disappointed if I paid $97 for it. In fact, I'd say that $9.70 would be high!

The source code is in C++, but specifically in C++Builder by the look of it, so impossible to rebuild in Visual C++.

The bundle included an HTML editor, complete with VB source code. This failed to run because it was missing an OCX file. Luckily I managed to download that from the net and get it running, but the average PC user wouldn't know what to do.
The program looked promising to begin with, but soon plummetted in my estimation when I clicked on a button and the entire application bombed out - No error message, no chance to save data - nothing. I later discovered that several of the controls cause it to bomb out in a similar fashion.

So I tried loading the source into my copy of VB (a later version than that used to create it), and it failed to convert the project to the later format.

There are sections of code that I'll find useful, but the overall product as it stands is rubbish. Unless you're a programmer who might find some of the source code useful, I'd stay away from SWP.
If you buy it with a view to reselling it, it might just come back and bite you as your customers start asking for their money back.

More on the Alexa glitch

I've solved the Alexa glitch problem that I mentioned a couple of days ago.
At home, I have the official Alexa toolbar as downloaded from the Alexa site.
At work I had a custom Alexa toolbar which was supplied with some software that I installed.
It seems that the custom toolbar stopped working properly for some unknown reason, so it was returning the same rank figures that I had a few days ago.

I have now uninstalled the custom toolbar and installed the official Alexa toolbar and I get the same results in both places.

I'm pretty sure that the custom toolbars given away by other companies are purely so that if you visit their website, you have Alexa running and therefore help to increase their rank. Maybe I should create a custom toolbar and give it to my customers.

3D Pictures

A slight departure from the usual ramblings here.

You know those pictures that look 3D when you view them through glasses with different coloured lenses? They're called "anaglyphs"

Well yesterday I worked out how to make them with Paintshop Pro. I couldn't believe how easy it is as long as you have two pictures of the same object taken from slightly different viewpoints.

I was so surprised that I'm going to write an ebook about it and put it on my forthcoming ebook store.

I even made some 3D anaglyphs from completely computer-generated pictures (generated using Povray). This is going to open up a whole new world for me. My neighbour who runs a portable planetarium/science dome often uses anaglyphs in his shows, so this will be very useful to him.

Autoresponders

I just acquired the resale rights to a server-based autoresponder. Initially I'll be setting it up as my own autoresponder. Until now I've been using a free one, which work really well, but is limited to just one campaign. With this new one, I can set up unlimited autoresponders across unlimited domains.

It's very easy to install, but I do have the advantage of being a computer professional. I'll probably write an idiot's guide to installing it and bundle it in with the complete package, which will go up for sale on my website.

I'll log it here as soon as it's available.

Alexa Glitch

Last night I checked the Alexa rank for the various sites that I'm monitoring and was pleased to see that all 7 of them had risen quite significantly.

When I looked again this morning, they had all reverted back to the positions they held two days ago.

I can only assume there was a bit of a glitch in the Alexa database when I looked last night.

Serendipity

Occasionally, I obtain items of software that are aimed at Internet Marketers. These are either through giveaways, bought in a bundle of other products, and more rarely, bought individually.

On a lot of occasions, I've seen that the software is of quite low quality and obviously created by some sort of "software creator" program. Many of them don't even work. They are missing an essential file, or they were made for an earlier version of Windows.

Sometimes I come across something which is quite the opposite - a well-written, professionally designed program that is useful and a pleasure to use.

It happened again last night. I saw an advertisement for a program that was being sold for less than $5. I considered that to be so cheap that if it turned out to be rubbish, I hadn't lost very much.
What a bonus, then, to discover that it was of good quality, and came with Master Resell Rights. In my opinion, the software alone is worth considerably more that $5. More like $25 or $30 if promoted properly. I would make more than my money back with just one sale.
But it doesn't stop there. It was also supplied with no fewer than 4 eBooks, which could be sold separately or as a bundle with the software.
And finally, there is the potential to write another eBook or report about how to use software of that type. I would make it a free or low-price report containing several links back to my site where the software will be offered for sale. I'll then offer the report with full resale rights, and I will have my first viral marketing vehicle.
Finally, not only is it a potential money-maker - it's software that I can and will use in my own business.

The first part of this story is serendipity - making a fortunate discovery by accident. The advert I clicked was a moving pop-up, and I missed the close button, so I was taken to the sales page.
The next stage is the difference between the average man-in-the-street and an entrepreneur. Seeing the value and potential of the items purchased and how to extend that value to become more lucrative than the original package.

[Apparently, the word "serendipity" was created by the author, Horace Walpole. It's based on the title of a Persian fairy tale, "The Three Princes of Serendip", in which the main characters made several such accidental discoveries of good fortune.
Serendip is an old name for what is now called Sri Lanka (and formerly Ceylon)]

New eStore online

My new software eStore is finally online at Dryice Computing. There are not many products in there yet, but it's early days. I expect to be adding at least one new software product every week over the next few months.

I decided that it was better to get my site published and in the search engines now, rather than wait until I had a large range of products.
I suspect that this approach will also have the advantage of being search-engine friendly in that its content will change every week as I add more products.

I have now started work on the new site for my eBook store. I already have a lot of stock for that, so it's going to take a while to write all the pages for it. However, I'll probably take the same approach as the first store and get it up and running with a small stock and bring in others on a daily basis.
Hopefully I'll get my template-based eStore Builder program running soon, and all that hard work will be taken away.

On the subject of search engines, I just looked at the Alexa rank for 7 sites (4 of my own and 3 others) that I regularly monitor and every single one of them has fallen slightly by an average of about 500 places. That's nothing compared with the rises they have experienced recently, but it seems slightly odd to me. Perhaps Alexa have been doing a bit of housekeeping over the weekend.

From litle acorns do mighty oaks grow

The previously mentioned ebook and software giveaway has increased the size of my mailing list. It was not very big to begin with, and it still isn't.

However, as I see it, even if I'd only added just one person to my list (it's more than one, believe me!), I'd have something to work with.
And that's the point of this message - look on everything as an opportunity. A low response to any marketing effort shouldn't be seen as a disaster or a disappointment. You should think about how you can exploit the situation to make things work better in future.
There are a few things I can do with my newly-expanded list:

When I was invited to join the giveaway, I was told that the more people I bring with me using my affiliate link, the higher up the list my product would be.
So next time I'm invited to one of these events, I email everyone on my list and advise them to get a free product ready because this is a list-building exercise, and explain to them why they should follow in my footsteps.
In my email, I give them my affiliate link, so that when they sign up, it ensures that my product is higher up the list, which means that more people are likely to download it, and my list will increase by even more next time.

Secondly, the software I gave away has a link back to my website where they can find other software products to purchase, so I have the potential to make money.

But the trick then is to set up some affiliate schemes for my software products. I email my list with an offer to become exclusive affiliates for some of my software.
If they take me up on it, they'll be marketing my software, which contains links back to my site. And it is I who will get the email addresses of the new purchasers that the affiliates send to my site. So not only do I make money from the sales (as do my affiliates), I expand my list even further and use the same marketing ploys on them.
And then it's just repeat as required.

I don't expect it to make me a fortune within a month like some of the plans you read about. But using this viral marketing method, my list should start to grow exponentially.

ebook and software giveaway

Yesterday I mentioned that I had joined an eBook and Software giveaway, here. Well, the giveaway has started and anyone can go along and download anything they want from the huge list of free products.

Even though the products are being given away, it gave me a bit of a buzz to see one of my own products, Email Link Mangler, on the site.

Note that if you visit the Giveaway, there are two sections; Hot items and General, and each section has several pages. Be sure to look through all the pages.

And does this system help to build your list? Well I certainly have more people on my mailing list than before, and that should increase as more people get to know about it and start downloading my product.

An interesting Alexa and Google experiment

My next-door neighbour has a new business, with two websites. When he asks new customers how they heard of him, they usually say that they found him in Google. However, he always complains that when he searches on Google, his site never seems to come up, and he asked for some help.

I tried searching in Google, and I couldn't get his sites to appear either. Google didn't have a page rank for them, and according to Alexa, there was no data available for his sites.

So, I viewed his sites once every day, from two different computers, with the Alexa toolbar running. Nothing happened for about 3 weeks, but today, there has been a change. For his chosen keywords, his sites now rank at 6,461,879 and 6,461,878. The fact that they are consecutive suggests that it is only my own activity on his sites that has pushed them up. I was quite amazed that only 2 visits per day were enough to have such an effect.

Curiously enough, if I look at the Google page rank (as reported on the Google toolbar), one of the sites says "No PageRank information available", but the other now has "PageRank is Google's measure of importance (0/10)".

Ok, having an Alexa rank of 6.4 million, and a Google PageRank of 0/10 is not very impressive, but it means that his sites are at least known by the search engines.
As his line of business is a very specialised niche, perhaps his sites will rise up the ranks quickly now.
His business is a portable planetarium system for displays in schools, fairs, parties etc., and can be found at Science Dome.

Building your list

Every Internet Marketer talks about "building your list". Every beginning Internet Marketer knows that you have to "build your list".

What the mainstream IMs and the Gurus never tell you is HOW to build the list. Sure, they supply you with all manner of Traffic Schemes, Internet Explorer toolbars, ad rotators and the like, but many of them simply don't work. The people who end up seeing your ads are other people just like you. Most of them are not interested in buying what you're selling - they're only interested in selling their product to you.

So how do you build your list?

Well, how many lists are you on? How did you get on those lists?
I was on hundreds of lists until I had a blitz on them and pared the m down to the most useful ones. I got on most of those lists by being invited to a free eBook and software blowout Joint Venture.
Basically, one IM (the initiator) sets up the blowout by inviting other IMs to offer a free product for visitors to download. They supply the product and the download page, and the initiator adds a link to his blowout page. The links mainly go to signup pages, and once a visitor has signed up, they get their free gift.

The IMs then invite everyone on their own lists to visit the blowout. The visitors sign up for products that they want, so the owner of that product gets a new person on their list.

So basically it's a way of getting a group of IMs to share their lists with each other, but it's the visitors who determine whether they want to join your list or not.

A few days ago, I was invited to participate in one of these blowouts and submit a free gift, which I have now done.
Everyone on my list will be invited to go and download anything they want, and the other IMs will do the same. So I should pick up some people from the lists of other IMs.

As a result, my list grows and I have a larger target audience for my other products. And when there's another blowout, I get to invite more people, and my list will grow bigger, and so on.

If you would like to get involved with the blowout, act quickly because it opens tonight. There's still time to get your freebie in there though.
Just go here to sign up. It's free.

A warning about Alexa

If you've been reading this blog, you'll know that I've been monitoring the Alexa rank for various of my sites.

What I've just discovered is that you have to be very careful abou how you interpret the rank.

I have a domain that I haven't used for years, RobotAssassin. It was set up when some friends and I planned to build battling robots. The domain redirects to the webspace of my ISP account, without any domain masking. So when you visit the site, the browser address bar shows "http://www.cafetorium.eclipse.co.uk/robot/".

If I view this site in IE, with the Alexa toolbar, it gives a rank of 41,015. I was astounded - it's a site I haven't touched for years. How could it be so high?

The answer is that Alexa only seems to log stats for top-level domains, so it's actually "www.eclipse.co.uk" (the ISP) that has that rank.

So beware if you check your Alexa rank. It might not be as high as you think unless you have a genuine top-level domain, and that it's not redirected to a sub-domain.

Expiring domains

A few years ago I registered a domain. I didn't do much with it, and it expired a few weeks ago. When I logged on to check the status of my other domains, I found that I still had the option to renew the expired domain, but it would cost a staggering £80 because it is overdue.

So I let it expire. The rules are that once 30 days after the expiry date have passed (which is in 3 days time), the domain goes back in the pot of available domains and anyone else can register it.

So, if I'm quick, I could re-register it for a two-year period for just £5.90.

I'm not that bothered about getting it back, but if I find it's available, I'll go for it. But I'm not paying £80 for a domain.

First product online soon

The first of my software products, Email Link Mangler, will be going up on a website this week.
It's a small program that scrambles email address links on web pages to hide them from the spammers' Address Harvesters, or SpamBots.

It's a small, easy to use program that hopefully will help to reduce the amount of spam that people get.

I'm just writing a completely new website from which to sell it - a software store, so it's a bit more than a simple sales page.

However, I'll probably go down the single sales page route as well, and promote that separately. That's probably a quicker way of getting my product online as it happens.

If you're wondering why I take so long to get all this done, it's because I have a day-job and a family. I don't get a huge amount of free time to devote to my online business.

The experiment begins

The end of the first day of my Double-Up Experiment is drawing to an end.
I've been drawing up a general plan of action for doubling my overall annual income over the next 12 months (or less).
I came to the conclusion a while ago that the best thing to do with information from the "gurus" is to ignore it. Today I read an interesting eBook that basically confirmed this.
The thing is that whenever you buy the latest "system" from the gurus, there's always a big flaw. It's probably true that their latest thing earned them tens of thousands of dollars, but they have mailing lists of 50,000 people or more.
For us lowly beginners who are yet to build a list at all, it's no use whatsoever.
So they promise you a system that sells itself, but they don't tell you that you need an established customer base to sell it to.

Anyway, the point of this is that I have decided to ignore the mailings that pile into my email inbox every day, and just concentrate on getting a single income stream going, and where possible, completely automated. Then once that's running, work on the next income stream, and the next, and the next and so on.

The idea being that even if each income stream brings in only £100 a month, together they will eventually be enough to equal my salary.

So, I'm now working on my first income stream which will be selling my own software, and maybe a few other software products written by other people.
I have several programs that I have the right to sell, and I shall continue to create more.

I've given myself 1 week to set up my online software shop, including writing the web pages, building them into a complete site, preparing the digital downloads, and setting up the eCommerce required to sell my software online.

I'd prefer to use one of my forthcoming website generators to create the store, but they're just not ready yet. A pity, because the site would be its own advertisement for the capabilities of my eStore Builder program.

Google rank

I'm amazed! Some time ago I put together a package containing an ebook and some graphic templates. The ebook describes where to get some powerful 3D software for free, which combined with the templates I'd created, would let you make 3D images of books, software boxes, CDs, DVD cases etc.
These are things typically used by Internet Marketers.

I created a sales page for the package, and submitted it to Google. It was taking so long to be indexed by Google that I gave up looking.

After several months, it has appeared in the Google listings. I came across it by accident when looking for ebook covers for another project, and it appeared on page 9 of the Google results for a search on the keywords "create ebook covers free".

Page 9 is not very good as far as SEO goes, but not bad for something that I haven't bothered to promote. Now that it is in Google, I shall be working on improving its ranks, and using its status to pull up the rank of my other sites.
The first attempt is this - Blog & Ping. By including the URL of my site in this blog and pinging the blog directories, it may well rise up the ranks. Let's see...

Alexa update

My websites continue to rise in the Alexa ranks, albeit a little more slowly than before. However, that might be just a localised dip. We'll see later.

I checked my web stats to see how people are finding my sites. Some are from search engines, but others are from traffic generation programs. That's useful to know because I always wondered whether those programs worked or not.

The Double-up Experiment

Having been spurred into action with regard to my online marketing activities, I've decided to set a target and see how long it takes to reach it. So, I am now running the Double-up Experiment.

My target is to earn the same amount of money as I earn with my day job, taking taxation into account. So I need to earn online the same as my gross annual salary, and ideally within 1 year.

I think that's a reasonable target for a beginning Internet Marketer. After all, the plan is to be able to give up my day job and concentrate on my online business.
If I can earn the same amount of money, but part-time, then I know it must be relatively safe to give up the day job.

As I go, I'll keep a diary of exactly what I do to earn that money, and I'll also report back on this Blog.

I'm not going to reveal my day-job salary here. The actual amount is not important.
What is important is whether I can equal that amount through my online activities.
I can live off my salary, so I want to prove to myself, and anyone else who's interested, that I could live off my earnings on the Internet.

What I shall do is report back how much I have earned as a percentage of my target sum. As I do that, I'll keep track of the percentage of the year has elapsed so that I can see how on target I am.

As I won't be able to do any work on my internet business until tonight, the project will officially start at midnight tonight (00:00:00 10 July 2007)

That means that as of today, the current status is:
Year elapsed: 0.0%
Target reached : 0.0%

Incentives to do something

Being in a reasonably well-paid job, it's very easy for me to let my attempts at Internet Marketing slide somewhat. I'm doing ok in my job, so I tend to put off getting my internet projects off the ground.

Now I have an incentive. Interest rates in the UK have just gone up again, for the fifth time in a year. This has an adverse effect on mortgage payments, loan payments and credit card payments.

So I figured that I really need to get my Internet businesses sorted out and online, and earning me some money before the interest rate rises really start to bite.

So this week, I'll be setting up my online software store, followed by my eBook store next week. Then I'll start putting my products in my eBay store as well.
One of my trusted IMs says that you can still make a decent living by selling eBooks on eBay, so it's got to be worth a try.

B***S** overload

Over the past year, I've subscribed to countless mailing lists and ezines from various Internet Marketers (IMs). Some of them have been very useful, but many have just been unimaginitive "me too" mailshots sent by affiliates of the big-league players. A lot of them even contain the exact same email message as many of the others - they couldn't even be bothered to rewrite the message supplied by the main vendor.

Yesterday had to be one of the worst days yet. The date was 07/07/07. As 7 is seen by many as a lucky number, the IMs have been playing on the punters' superstitions and selling a very high-priced item released on that day. There had already been a lot of hype on the run up to the launch, so when it finally came, people snapped it up in droves, without even knowning what it really contained. If I want to buy a book that costs £50, I go to a bookshop and browse through it first, and then decide whether it's worth it or not.
These people have been shelling out several hundred dollars for a product that they don't get the chance to look at first. Ok, there's a money-back guarantee, but how many people will use that option, I wonder?

Something that struck me today is that for several weeks now, people have been selling eBooks for $7. Again with the "luck" idea, but perhaps there's been something a bit deeper going on. I suspect that the originator of the 7.7.7 product started the hype about selling for $7 to plant the idea about 7 in peoples' minds.

One more imaginitive IM broke away from this 7.7.7 hype. He's launched a plan that will take a year to complete - the 08/08/08 plan. I'm not promoting it - it was just a pleasure to find somebody doing something original.

Anyway, having had my email inbox swamped by numerous carbon-copy letters about this way-too-expensive 07/07/07 product, it's finally sparked me into unsubscribing from most of these IM mailing lists. I now have a select few of trusted IMs whose lists I've remained on, and the strain on my mailbox is much less now.

Alexa update

A few days ago I wrote about Alexa ranking and how four of my sites had jumped up the ranks by a considerable number.
The ranking is based on sites visited by people using the Alexa toolbar. I visit my own sites once a day, just to monitor their ranks, but it can't be just me that pushed them up by an average of 1.5 million places each.

And looking at my ranks again today, there have been some even further increases to the tune of 1,826,023 1,454,320 2,816,698 and 2,099,112. That's an average increase of just over 2 million places each.

I must admit that I made a fundamental error when creating those sites; I didn't put any form of hit counting or tracking on them. Maybe I'd better check my web hosting to see if they provide any statistics.

It would be useful to know how people are getting to my sites to push the ranks up so rapidly.

By the way, I read that once you're within the top 200,000, you've "cracked it". That is to say that you're probably pretty high up in the search engines for your selected keywords, and you're even more likely to get new visitors.
I'll keep on monitoring and see if it's true.

Sorting your life out

A bit of a change in direction today. Way back in 1993 when I was preparing to launch a career as a freelance software engineer, I met an excellent financial advisor by the name of David Scarlett. He organised my pension and various investments which he would monitor and advise me to change when their performance started to dwindle.
David has moved on since then and now provides coaching on how to get your life in gear, including setting yourself up to be financially independent.

David has written an book, The Soul Millionaire, which covers such things as

• The 10 Laws that lead to true riches


• Why Financial Freedom is less than 5 years away


• How to easily double your income and make it more predictable


• Why your knowledge and experience is worth a fortune


• How to leverage serious property deals with small deposits


• How to become an information millionaire


• The one secret of great relationships and extraordinary influence


• How to enjoy balance, fulfilment, success... and leave a legacy

The difference with David's book is that it's not just some of the usual stuff hurriedly cobbled together into an ebook and pushed onto thousands of would-be Internet marketers for an inflated price. David's book is a novel based on his own life, and it's a real, physical book.

This may sound like a blatant advertisement for David's book, but I'm not making anything from it. I've been thinking about my own life a lot recently, and over the years, David has been an inspiration to me. He's given me great advice, given me hope whan I was down, and most of all, given me a positive attitude to set up goals and work out ways to achieve them.
I think a lot of other people could use his advice, and the simplest way of doing that is to get his book from either Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

Links make Google happy

That's what I've read, anyway. The help on Google's site confirms this. The more incoming links you have from "quality" sites (ie with good content), the higher will be your site's rank.
Now if that's not an invitation to subscribe to link farms, I don't know what is. But wait! Google penalise you if your links come purely from link farms. They're not stupid - they know all the tricks.
But what if I was to create say, 20 different sites, all on different domains, and they all linked to each other? As long as my sites contained some decent content, shouldn't Google take note of this and promote all of my sites?
I think so.

Now what if it was 50 sites? or 100 sites? Surely that should create a nice network of sites that all help to pull each other up the ranks. It would be like having my own link farm, but I would have total control over the quality of the sites that linked in. And rather than simply making a list of links, I could spread the links throughout the sites at relevant places.

Now how about getting other people to link to my sites? Well I have a cunning plan for that, too. It's all about incentives. I'm working on a range of software packages to create and manage content sites (which I'll be using to create my own sites of course).

My plan is to sell these packages to other Internet Marketers. So what if I offered this deal to my customers?
I create a list containing "These sites were created using Content Site Builder" and add links to my customers' generated sites. In return, they put a link to my site on their site saying "Created with Content Site Builder".

My software already contains an option to add this link to the generated sites, so it's no big deal for them. In return, they get an external link coming in which will help their rank.

And the higher their sites rank, the higher mine will rank. And the higher mine goes, the more people see it, buy the softwre and link in.
It's an obvious solution.

Now all I need to do is get that software finished and out on the market...

More Alexa experiments

My current websites have all been experiments so far, just to find out about search engine optimisation, blogging and pinging, content etc.
Over the next week or so, I'm going to be restructuring my sites - moving different content to different domains etc.
So it's going to be interesting how that affects my Alexa rank. I suspect it might have a major effect on Google as well. One of my experimental content sites had quite a large number of pages indexed by Google. Then I changed the content entirely and Google's webmaster tools now report 67 pages unreachable because they no longer exist, but they are still in Google's index.
This is despite creating a new Google sitemap and submitting it to Google. After about a month, Google still hasn't caught up. I guess it doesn't deem the site "important" enough.

Another way of increasing the Google rank of a site is to set up incoming links. Well all of my sites (in the new form that they will be taking) are related to each other, so I can include valid links from each site to all the others.
Perhaps that will have a positive effect on the rank.

I'll report back when it happens.

Good grief! It works!

Since I decided to get into Internet Marketing, I must have read about all the tricks that the gurus push in their eBooks about earning revenue, directing traffic to your site, search engine optimisation etc.
Fortunately, it didn't take me long to discover that you don't actually have to pay for these ebooks to find out the information, because somebody somewhere will have written an article about it and published it on their own site or in their blog.

Anyway, I decided to give Blog & Ping a try. Basically, you write a blog, like this one. Doesn't matter if no-one reads it - just write it. Write about something related to one of your own web sites and add a link to your site. Then Ping the blog directories and sit back. What happens then is that your blog gets listed in the directories, and the search engines scan the directories and the blogs for content. Bingo! Your website address gets discovered by the search engines and indexed much more quickly than if you submit it manually.
And then as the search engines keep seeing your web site's address mentioned over and over again in various blog directories, it gives your site a higher rank.

Another cunning little trick is with relation to Alexa. If you run the Alexa Toolbar while surfing the net, each page you go to is logged as a hit by Alexa. It's smart enough to know that people might abuse this by hitting there own site several times, so it limits it to one hit by each unique visitor per day.

Why do you suppose so many of the gurus give away their own customised versions of the Alexa Toolbar?

Some of my own sites suddenly jumped in the Alexa ranks this weekend. They were down at quite low places (still are, but at least they're moving up).
I had moves of up 356, up 2,008,347, up 2,764,504 and up 1,480,987 for my 4 main sites.

So, if you have a site that people keep coming back to, such as a niche article site, then you really need to Blog about it, and Ping the directories.
And if you can get your visitors to install the Alexa Toolbar (maybe a customised version of it), then all the better.

Why do 95% of Internet Marketers fail?

The Gurus often claim that 95% of Internet Marketers fail to make any money, or even end up making a loss.

I suspect this is true, but I can't help feeling that the reason why they keep telling us is to convince us to buy their latest product which will surely keep you within the successful 5%.

Personal experience has shown that it IS difficult to get started in IM. It took me a while before I started earning any significant money. In fact when my first payment of $50 arrived, I was over the moon, but it took a while before the next one came!

Perhaps the reason why so many fail is that they give up too soon. Everyone is looking for the "magic pill" - the system that you set up, start running, and forget it, just banking all the proceeds.
There is no magic pill of course, and no business succeeds without putting some effort into it.

Which brings me to what I think is the real reason why so many people fail. They are either too lazy, too gullible (they believe that the Gurus are selling them the magic pill), or they just don't have any intelligence.

What brings me to this conclusion is something I read on a forum. The writer said that he had been given affiliate links which consisted of HTML links that you would paste into your web pages or HTML emails. However, he wanted to send the links in plain text emails, and of course, they didn't work. His question was "how to I convert the link to the right format?".

In a plain text email, all he would need is the URL, which is embedded in the HTML link code. If he was serious about becoming an Internet Marketer, he should have made the effort to learn at least the basics of HTML.
I know there are many excellent website tools that hide all the HTML from you, but my experience is that they never do exactly what you want, so I end up modifying the HTML by hand.
And anyone who is getting into Affiliate Marketing really needs to understand exactly what his affiliate link codes are, and how to use them.

That's my message for today - if you're going to start a new business, take the time to learn about the basic tools you'll need.

---

I figured that if there's one person out there who can't extract a URL from an HTML link, then there must be thousands, so I wrote a program to do it. urlExtractor is free to download for anyone who wants it.

Hiding your email address from SpamBots

Stemming the flow of spam is a bit like King Cnut (AKA Canute) ordering the advancing tide to return.
However, one of the main sources of email addresses must be from web pages. The Address Harvesters or SpamBots, crawl the net just as the search engines do. However, they only look for email addresses.
The SpamBots know that if an email address appears on a website then it's almost 100% likely to be a valid, active address.
So I've just created emailMangler to hide addresses on my websites from passing SpamBots.
I'll be putting emailMangler on my website as a free download.
Within the next day or two, you should be able to get it from here.

Managing a content site

Due to prolonged heavy rain over the weekend, I was able to spend a lot of time at my computer, programming my latest application.
It's a content/article site creator and manager. Once finished, it will let me build a content site without having to wrestle with HTML. All I will need to do is type in (or paste in) an article, give it a title, and then the program will generate all the required web pages for me. At the moment, it generates the home page, complete with Google AdSense ad units, and a Recommended Books section that links to Amazon with my Amazon Affiliate ID. It works with either Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, and I might add support for other locales later.

The sites generated by this program will categorise the articles for easier navigation, so the home page links to all the Category pages. These will in turn list the article summaries in a similar way to those on the home page of this site.

The design of the generated sites are based on templates, so that the entire site looks consistent. It also means that if I need to change the appearance or layout of the site, I simply choose another template and regenerate all the pages.

Today, I'll be adding the code to generate the Category pages.

Niche Site Manager

Having put a computing article site together (Here), I've realised that it's going to be quite a bit of hard work maintaining it, which kind of goes against the grain for me.

The reason being that when I want to add a new article, I want to put it at the top of the list on the front page. This means shuffling all the other articles down the lists, pushing them back to other pages. That means I have to edit every index page just to add one article. Not good.

I'm also not 100% happy with the layout. I think there ought to be some editorial, especially on the front page.
I've also realised that the index page selectors at the bottom of the page are all hyperlinks, but the one for the current page shouldn't be. And as the number of pages increases, I'll have to come up with a way of reducing the the space used by the selectors.

Finally, I think it would really help my readers if I categorised the articles and made the site more hierarchical. That way, it would be a lot easier for them to find what they're looking for.

To this end, I'm going to write a program to create and maintain article sites, so that all I have to do is type in (or paste in) the new article and categorise it. Then the program will generate all the pages for me, including a Google sitemap. That will give me more time to research and write more articles.

If anyone is interested in having such a program, let me know. What features would you expect it to have?

New look

I thought the old template made my blog look a bit grim, so I've brightened it up a bit. It's amazing what a difference it makes.

Content sites

Everyone's talking about niche sites and content-rich sites as I described in my previous post. Having investigated it a bit more, I've found that you can write the articles yourself, or use some pre-written ones by extracting them from the numerous article sites.
The deal is that you can use the articles if you leave in the links that the authors have added at the end. I guess it's a kind of viral marketing system.
Sounds fair to me.

To keep people coming back (to click on more Ads), the idea is to keep the site updated regularly. Even if it's just adding one article a week, it should keep people interested.

So I've decided to try it out. I've put together a computer niche site here.
Ok, not much of a niche, but I happened to have that domain lying around unused, so it had to be a computer-based site.

I've added Amazon links to my site, as well as Google AdSense ones. Another possible stream of income.

I'm told it can take a while for people to start finding the site and reading it, and clicking on ads. I'll be promoting the site in the usual ways; forums, this blog, viral marketing in free reports etc.

I'll post the results back here every month, just so you can get some idea of how much a site like that can really earn from AdSense and Amazon.

One of my other sites that contains Google Ads managed to score me the incredible sum of $1.93 last month, but the site's not finished, so I haven't been promoting it yet, so earning some revenue from it was a bit of a surprise.

Maybe I'll start posting graphs of how much I earn from the various income streams that I'me trying to set up, just so that you can see what (if anything) works for the outright amateur.