I’m Just Sharing

Time for something a little different. My friend Aussie Sire has created a little online game room that he calls Blogsire’s Game Palace. It’s a place where you can basically play a bunch of different types of little online games, some you’re familiar with, some you’re not, just to basically waste time and try to get into the top ten for your own bragging rights.

I have to admit that I don’t play a lot of games outside poker and chess, but there’s something fascinating about some of these games, and I have to admit that I like the spirit of competition. Thus far I’ve played three of the games, making sure I was in the top 10 before moving on. After all, who doesn’t like seeing their name in lights.

So, if you’ve got some time to waste and want to just noodle around for awhile, give it a quick look, and have a bit of fun.

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Though I have another career, I really want to make good money online. I was going to add “through whatever means necessary”, but I realize that’s not quite true. I also realize that I’ve probably been limiting myself in some ways, mainly because I’m not ready for the consequences of doing certain other things.

For instance, when one thinks about how big they want to be online, most believe they want to make millions. That’s a laudable goal, but the truth is that most of us are set up right now to possibly make a few thousand, but may not be thinking ahead to what may lie in wait if we did have the opportunity to make way more money. For instance, if you started to get 100,000 visitors a week, or a month, are you ready for the increasing cost of your hosting package? Are you ready to pay more in taxes? Are you ready for any and everything that might come along?

I came across this post by Zac Johnson, known as the Super Affiliate Marketer, called How I Made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 Months!, and it was amazing reading. He actually got to the point where he had to purchase his own servers to handle his site, and not just one but 17 of them; ouch!

It’s actually a great story. He hit upon a niche, uploaded lots of free content, put the word out and people flocked like crazy. With numbers, people clicked on and bought a lot of his other stuff, but all that traffic comes with a price itself, and he worked a lot of hours both upfront and while it was all going on, and had a lot of worry because he knew he couldn’t afford to let his system go down even for ten minutes.

He also talks about all the different programs he signed up for and tested, and which ones paid him and how. Instead of rehashing his, I’ll mention that I’m with Commission Junction, Google Adsense, Performics, Joel Comm, Shawn Casey, Clickbank, and recently signed up as an affiliate for a niche medical billing site that ties in well with my new medical billing site. I didn’t link to any of those sites here, except for my new medical billing site, since they’re all easy enough to find. I’ve also signed up with TextLinkAds for this blog, but I’ve had to get an advertiser who wants to market on this site, or so I’ve been told when I wrote the company to ask them why nothing was showing up yet.

I mentioned on my 101st post a few days ago that I’d made $8 on this blog thus far. What I hadn’t mentioned is that, across the board, I’ve made around $650 online over the years with all the stuff I sell, which is more than my web costs have been, so I’m slightly ahead of the game. However, I just earned another $100 on Adsense, and the amazing thing about that is that this is the first time I’ve reached that figure in less than a year. Okay, eleven months, to be truthful, but also to be truthful, the amounts have jumped ever since I purchased Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets, which I’m not linking to because it’s over there on the right side, and that was, what, February or March? So, I’m hoping that the next $100 I make is six months or less, and less wouldn’t depress me one bit.

Anyway, I love reading these types of stories and reports of online income. Many of the big time bloggers post their monthly statistics, such as John Chow and I realize I have a long way to go. I only hope that, if things really do take off, I’m ready for the next step in the process.

Sometimes you see something where else that only posting a trackback won’t do. Instead, I’m going to post this little humorous video for you and also give props to the Virtual Voyage blog I first saw it at (which has now been discontinued). If this doesn’t make you laugh or feel good, you’ve lost your funny bone:

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To me, the best way to track the traffic to all my sites is by using Google Analytics. It’s pretty easy to use if you’ve created your own sites. All you have to do is sign up, drop in the code they give you somewhere on each of the pages on your site (or only those you want to track), and you’re good to go.

As an example, I’m going to take a look at one day’s worth of traffic, instead of an entire month. On June 6th, I wrote my second rant against New York state and those stupid internet taxes. I guess it was a passionate enough topic for once because it got over 140 readers; that’s my best day ever for a blog post.

Google Analytics tells me how many visitors I got on that day for all my posts, though I can select just one to see the information on it. It tells me how many page views total, as well as an average of how many pages people read on average, the bounce rate (how many people left my site after the initial visit without checking anything else out), the average time spent on the site, and the percentage of new visits.

It then gives you an overview of visitors, which, for one day, doesn’t really tell me much, and a map overlay, which is really intriguing because you can break it down into countries, then states, and even cities. The folks in Cali seemed to love me on that day. Then you can see the traffic overview and the top 5 pages that were visited on that day, or that time period.

Of course, it goes deeper, as that was only the main page, but I just wanted to give you a flavor of the types of stats you can get. If you’re running an Adwords campaign you can use Analytics to track it for you also. And the visitor numbers are way more accurate and realistic than those numbers your host will give you.

All in all, I believe this is something people should be using, even though I also use Site Meter. This has so much more for you, and it’s free; can’t beat that!

Okay, this is a cheapy, but hey, as the title says, I love stuff. In this case, John Chow found a link to a site called Market Leverage that’s having some kind of special promotion and is giving away free stuff. Some of it is standard logo stuff, but the two big prizes are the $200 Am Ex gift card and a Nano iPod. Hey, with the price of gas, that card is golden, and I could listen to fresh tunes while pumping gas (do kids still use “fresh” as a phrase these days?).

Anyway, visit John’s site for details on entering the contest and getting more than just one entry. And there you go; I’m just sharing the link love tonight! And, since I’m going for the cheapo, let’s go for some sex appeal also:

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Price: $34.99

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Alvin Phang writes a blog he calls Gather Success, and he’s another successful blogger who makes great profits from it, and some of his other online endeavors, including what’s probably his best known product, Atomic Blogging.

His latest post is something that I, and many other people, need to always read and be reminded of, called 14 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Blog. He gives great points, some I’ve seen before, some I haven’t, but all are very good.

One I really like is #2, where he says “Your writing style must have a dash of humor, wit, sarcasm and spoof-ery to it. I don’t think I do this often enough, even if my friends say I do. On my other blog, since its focus is more business related, I know I don’t have enough humor, but on this one, I believe I’m at least somewhat engaging, and sarcastic at times, but it’s hard to say. But I like it, and I need to keep trying to do it more.

Number seven is also one I’ve done, though not all that much lately, that being “Post pictures and videos (if applicable) on your blog. What’s funny is that Alvin doesn’t post almost any pictures, and his videos thus far have been of him, which is probably more what he means, as opposed to my posting things like this (Yoda is the man!):

Finally, #11 is something else I haven’t done at all, but probably could have something that does it for me: Ask your visitors to tag your blog/post if they like what they see. Use del.icio.us, digg, furl, technorati and reddit. On his site, after each post, he has a box asking people to sign up for his blog feed or email updates, but he really doesn’t do what he’s advocating other people do, but then he really doesn’t have do. However, he has made it easy for people to tag him, which I’ve done by adding the possible tags for my blog.

Anyway, please go read the rest of the post; I think it’s pretty illuminating. Yoda likes it also.

As the title says, this is post number 101 for me. With my other blog, I’ve always highlighted the actual hundred number, but I decided to do it differently for this one.

Instead, I wanted to take a quick look back at what I’ve done thus far on this blog, and that requires having a full 100 to look at.

So, let’s first look at how long it took me to get to 100 posts. I started this in the middle of December 2007, so basically 180 days ago, just estimating, I wrote my first post, and this means I averaged just over a post every couple of days. That’s not so bad if you ask me; sure, some people try to make sure they post something every day but I do have other work I have to do from time to time that takes me away from blogging. So, I’m pretty content with that for now.

Next, the categories. I try not to add categories all the time, though obviously it happens, but I’ve worked to stay true to what I’d hoped this blog would be about. My top five are:

Marketing - 29

Motivation - 8

I’m pretty content with that also. Of course, a part of me thinks that maybe I should add way more categories, but I keep shouting that voice down. Also, I’ve noticed that this version of Wordpress also gives one the ability to add tags, and I think I’m going to stay away from that for the time being also because, on some blogs, it starts looking really messy, and I don’t need messy. If there was more control over how it looked then I might think about it some more.

Oh, and thus far I’ve earned about $8 from this blog as far as Adsense goes, but it’s the only thing I’ve earned money on so I’m not complaining. I figure it’s still very early, and as visitors grow things can only get better. But I’m going to keep marketing my few affiliate products with every post, and along the right side, because, after all, not only am I trying to inform and entertain, but I’m trying to make money!

I have a new web client whose webpage I was hired to optimize. In essence, he built the site using Microsoft Publisher, which I knew could do the job, but he wasn’t overly happy with what he’d done, and I had offered to take a look at it for him at some point, so he sent me the file to take a look at.

That’s when I noticed the first thing. He actually sent me a Publisher file, and I wasn’t expecting that. It was easy enough to open, and then I figured out how to save it as HTML files so I could use my Top Style program to look at the pages.

I knew Microsoft Publisher could be used to create webpages, and it’s relatively simple for users who don’t know HTML, but I never realized just how much work it was going to create for me on the back end. Forget about trying to optimize the page; I’m fighting to try to standardize all the pages. For some reason, there’s a lot of text that Publisher created as images; what’s that about? Also, there’s a lot of extra code, ugly code, that’s getting in the way of trying to determine what I can do to get things on the up and up again. Finally, Publisher helps people create menus, but it doesn’t keep the formatting from page to page, so all 10 of his pages have the same menu, but the images are all different sizes. I’m still trying to figure out how that was accomplished because, oddly enough, when the pages were downloaded all the menus turned into images; what the hey?

After spending the first 90 minutes trying to work around all that extraneous code, with very little success, I decided I had to go a different route. I didn’t start with the index page, but a different page where the formatting was totally out of whack, and all the text was merged with a picture of my client into one much larger image. I opened Publisher back up, went to that page, and learned that I could copy the text in the program to Word; that was a life saver, because it made what I needed to do next easy. I cropped his picture out of the bigger picture, because I wasn’t going to need the rest of it.

Then I eliminated all the code I could, all those extra < td > and < tr > tags that made no sense whatsoever so I could widen the page, which was at 43% for some unknown reason, to 85%. For now I’m stuck with using a menu image, which I’ll probably go back and eliminate since he said it didn’t quite turn out how he’d wanted, but I was more interested in getting the formatting of everything else down first.

I then created a table to encase his picture in so I could merge it in with the text that I was adding back in, and because most of his pages were using Verdana as the font (there were at least 3 different fonts that came up, though the client said he had thought he was only using one) I decided to go with that across the board.

When all was said and done, I had established at least a workable template that I can use for all the other pages, except for that menu that I’ll probably go back and change up before I save the template for good. It took me 2 1/2 hours of work just to get it presentable, and though it was time well spent, the lesson seems to be that it doesn’t do much good to try to work around bad coding just to make something look passable. I wish someone could tell me why these Microsoft programs that can make webpages seem to add so much extraneous, and bad, code. Word does the same thing, and Front Page also adds extra code, which makes no sense as it’s specifically for making webpages.

It’s a lucky thing for me that I’m working on an hourly basis, but I hate wasting client’s money, even when they’re the ones who created the mess. I have two other possibly clients whose sites I might be fixing up also, and one of them also used Publisher. Someone please help stop the “messes”!

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Two weeks ago, I wrote about how New York state is killing my attempt to try to do more business on the internet. It’s all about New York state deciding it has the right to taxes that many companies don’t charge for doing business on the internet.

Since that time, six of the companies that I’ve been trying to promote have decided to drop me from participating with them because I live in New York state; isn’t that a blip? In their minds, they don’t want to have to deal with having to be responsible for collecting, then paying, taxes to the state of New York, and would rather not do any business with anyone in the state, which is still number two or three in population across the country, than collect these taxes.

It brings up the conversation of whether states have the right to collect taxes on its citizens who decide to buy their products elsewhere, whether it’s on the internet or not. For instance, if you’re in Ohio and decide to buy a car, then come back to New York, are you supposed to pay taxes on that car, even if you happened to pay the taxes in Ohio? Or, if I’m in an airport in Chicago and decide to buy a few tee shirts, when I get back into town am I supposed to declare those purchases and pay New York the taxes I’d have to pay if I’d bought those same items here?

I have a friend who bought her cigarettes online to try to save some money, through one of the Native American websites. Two years later, she received a bill from the state of New Jersey for the taxes on those cigarettes, even though she wouldn’t have had to pay taxes if she’d bought them on the reservation, for almost $1,500. Personally, I think that’s outrageous, and it’s seems to be a restraint of trade issue of some kind.

I know that while I live in New York that any products that I create and sell to other New Yorkers has to be taxed, and I don’t really have a problem with that. It’s the cost of living here and doing business here. But if I had to suddenly start collecting sales tax for people who lived in other states and then sending checks to those states, I know that I wouldn’t be selling to anyone in those states, or else I’d sell and just not pay; what’s another state going to do other than possibly sue me, and I know they’d be going after much bigger game than me. However, just having to even have that as something I might have to consider isn’t fair to me, or anyone else doing business online.

Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck with it at this point in time. I hope Amazon’s lawsuit against our state ends up in their favor, but I don’t have high hopes for that happening. Andrew Cuomo isn’t as much of a bulldog as our previous Attorney General (who shall remain nameless since he disappointed me as our previous governor), but he’s had a couple of big time wins against insurance companies, which proves he’s more than up to the challenge.

So, I guess I’ll just pout a little bit, deal with the defectors, and see how it all falls out. I’m still going to continue trying to find more affiliates that aren’t ready to defect just yet, like the one below. Let’s see how it all ends up in the end.

Firefox is my favorite browser, as I mentioned in my post about Error Doctor. Now it’s in testing for the next release, Firefox 3, and I can hardly wait.

The main improvement that I’m looking for is how it handles memory. For all its good qualities, it uses a lot of RAM, which, when you’re doing as many things as I tend to do at once, really starts slowing down other things. I’ll admit that I’m not quite sure how virtual memory works, but Firefox can eat it up the longer you have the browser running. It got so bad for me that I had to turn off pre-caching of sites just to free up some of that memory.

So, just that one feature would be enough for me. But there are a few more things coming that I like. There will be more security against bad sites, those sites that will drop malware and other nasty things on a flyby. You’ll also be able to close your browser and have open right back up to everything you just closed out if you wish; I love that idea, because I’ve often had to shut it down for some reason or another, and forgot to bookmark some pages I’d wanted to read. Something else it will do that I don’t have an issue with but others do is that if you have to close the browser in the middle of a download, it will pick that download back up when it’s opened again; that’s actually pretty great.

Of course, I won’t be happy if all the extensions I presently use won’t work with it, but I hear most of the developers are scrambling to get them all working, and that would be a good thing. Oh yeah, it’s supposed to be faster than Firefox 2, and no one ever complains about more speed, do they?

So yeah, I’m ready for Firefox 3. I will not be a tester, though, so anyone else who’d like to do it can, as the beta is available already. I hope you have a good experience with it; I’ll wait until the real thing is ready.