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.