Wow, we’ve been busy here lately, kicking butt and making money :) Yay, us!

I thought it was time to drop an update though, and there’s some exciting news to share for those of you who are members at our forum, and if you’re not a member–why is that?

First, we’ve added some new sections and HUGE shares there for folks who are serious about growing their sites or business, if that’s you then check it out!

Next, our “Code-Master” has been busy building virtual assistants lately. Little spiders and bots to do some of the niche researching and link building grunt work that most marketers and site owners find time consuming and even annoying; and he’s begun sharing them openly on the forum for others.

Also, Heather just shared an impressive Twitter 101 for people who struggle with getting value from their time spent tweeting, don’t miss that in the Web 2.0 section of the forum. When it comes to “getting the most” out of social media I don’t believe there’s anybody out there that does it better than Heather, and the proof is she doesn’t waste her time trying to hawk “How To” manuals to newbies for a living, she just does what she does in her niches and makes a killing with it! So, any time she’s willing to share some insights like this my mouth starts to water.

For almost a year now my NIMS scripts have been doing great for me and others using them, but I’m never satisfied with anything and have been working on a new version of the script that’s going to blow the socks off of everyone who has seen the original in action. That’ll be released in the next week or two, and may even end up being free for VIP members of the forum, you never know…

That’s what’s going on around here and what I’ve been up to. How and what have you been doing lately? Seriously, I want to know so tell me below.

Email this post

Technorati Tags: Business, forums

Like so many people right now a good friend of mine is out of work, and this weekend we were talking and she asked me if there were any money making online models that weren’t scams and didn’t require a ton of up-front investment.

Now, I want to preface this by saying this is not an instant cash machine scheme that I’m going to lay out here. This will take a little time to ramp up into a revenue stream that pays the bills. If you have zero income right now I wouldn’t suggest trying to build an online income for yourself, but if you have a window of time with unemployment benefits or some other income stream that provides you with a cushion then this could be an option to consider in addition to looking for a new job.

This is a super-easy to understand model, it only requires you take the time to implement it. There’s nothing too technical involved, in fact if you can write an email you can do this. You just have to invest the time.

What I’m going to describe is a simple advertiser sponsored content publishing model. You’re going to use a simple script to create content rich web pages, place a few lines of special text on the pages that will display advertising related to your page topics, and then step in front of existing traffic online to get visitors to your site.

When people visit your site and click on your ads or make purchases you earn commissions.

Believe it or not, it really is this simple to make money online. You don’t need expensive courses, ebooks or software to do this, those only make money for the people who sell them, rarely for the people who buy them.

Step #1 - decide what your site will be about. You need a general “theme” that will encompass the topics for all of your pages. For example, if you’re interested in things like ghosts and Bigfoot then “paranormal” would be your basic theme for the site, and your individual pages will each focus on one topic from that theme, so you might have a page on UFO’s, a page on Bigfoot, a page on ghosts and so on.

Step #2 - you will need a domain name. You can read older posts here for help with picking a keyword based domain, but honestly with this site we’re not focusing on search engines for our traffic, that will come naturally on its own over time, so I would suggest just picking a domain that is short, easy to remember and perhaps even “sounds cool” or fits your site theme in some way.

For example, GhostPics.com would be a great keyword domain for targeting search engines, but since the focus here is going to be on pure human traffic and our site will cover more than just ghosts I’d rather have a domain such as AmazingMysteries.com or TruthSeekers.com because those are memorable and will create curiosity that helps to bring traffic for us.

Don’t spend a lot on a domain name, you can get one for around $10 at GoDaddy.com or NameCheap.com — or even better — you can even get your domain for free if you purchase your hosting through Dot5 for just $3.95 per month. I’ve used Dot5’s hosting and they’re a great service that I don’t think you can beat for the pricing.

Step #2b - if you do buy your domain on your own and don’t want to use Dot5 as your host, then you can always check out Build The Dot Com for information on a bunch of hosting providers that are reliable and affordable.

Step #3 - getting advertisers. This is an easy step, you just need to sign up with advertising networks like Google AdSense, Amazon.com, Yahoo! Publisher’s Network, AdBrite or any other advertising/affiliate network you like.

I would suggest signing up as an Amazon affiliate and then also with either AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher’s or AdBrite. When you sign up for any of these they will explain how to get your “display code” for putting their ads on your site pages.

Step #4 - setting up your website. This is the part that I think scares most people, but trust me I’m going to show you a super easy script for creating content rich pages around your topics that will be quality resources for your visitors and designed to make you money from your traffic.

Visit www.nichemashups.com and you will find a script called NIMS. This isn’t free, but at under $30 it’s well worth the investment; I know, because I’m one of the developers who worked on creating this script.

There is a small but thorough manual with the script that tells you how to create content rich pages in just a minute or two each, so I won’t cover that here. The manual also shows you how and where to paste your advertising display codes from the networks you joined in Step #3, and you will only have to do that once for the whole site, not on every individual page you build.

The main feature of the NIMS script, other than being so easy to use, is that it pulls information and resources from multiple locations to create comprehensive mashup pages that are helpful to your visitors. By giving your visitors value you will get more value back.

If you don’t want to spend the money for NIMS you can always use WordPress and make your site a blog. This can be very effective too, but setting that up and adding your advertising to it is more involved than I want to get in this posting. The rest of the concepts in this post are the same though, so if you decide to go the blog route that’s fine you will just need to use the documentation from WordPress to guide you in getting your pages online.

NOTE: While this seems like a lot of material, the truth is if you have an idea for what you want your site to be about you could have the domain name, hosting and first few pages setup and online in under an hour. The real work is getting traffic, covered in the next few steps.

Step #5 - “talking traffic to your site”. This is the most involved and time consuming part of the whole model.

Once you have your first few pages online with the NIMS script you need to bring some visitors to them. This is where you make money, building web sites doesn’t earn you money, bringing traffic to them does. Traffic is the currency of the web.

Over time as the search engines find your web site pages and start listing them in their indexes you will begin to get free traffic from them, and that’s great, but right now we want to get instant (and no-cost) traffic to our new site so we’re going to go out and find existing pools of traffic online with people who are already interested in the topics our site covers, and we’re going to attract visitors from them to our site.

You’ve probably heard a lot of people use buzz-words like “social media”, “social networking online” and “social marketing”… if not you will over time as a site owner. I use those terms a lot myself, but what they each are doesn’t really matter, it’s what they collectively imply that’s important.

People are social. Online just like in the real world, people like to socialize and gather together with others who are like minded and have shared interests.

As a site owner that’s great news for us, because it means we will be able to find those places online where people interested in our site topic are already gathering.

Perhaps you already know some of these places since you may be interested in the topics you’ve built your site on? I’m talking about forums, blogs, Facebook or MySpace groups; any place that already exists online for people to learn about or discuss the topics we’ve covered.

By joining these forums and groups, you can add your site link to your user profile so that it is displayed whenever you post something on the forum boards, and then just be social. Engage in conversations that are already taking place. Ask or answer questions, be informative and entertaining.

People will see the things you post (and your link that you added to your profile) and if they find the things you say to be helpful or entertaining they’ll click through your link to your site.

Find other blogs where people are writing about the topics your site covers, and make comments on their postings. You are allowed to add your web site URL when you leave a comment, so again if you post interesting or entertaining comments it will encourage readers who visit the posting later to click your link.

This may seem like a lot of work, but think about it this way, the actual work is just “talking traffic to your site” by chatting about topics that you built your site on, and are hopefully interested in yourself. That’s not really a lot of work at all when you think of it that way.

The trick is to always be interesting, informative and entertaining. Never just flat-out say “visit my site”, people will respond poorly to that. But if they read what you say and are impressed then they’ll seek out more from you by visiting your link.

Another great place for “talking traffic to your site” is at Yahoo! Answers. If you know a lot about the topic you made your site on, then visit Yahoo! Answers and find questions that people have about your topics and post answers for them with your site link.

Be creative, find every place online that you can where people who share an interest in your topic are already gathering and join in the conversations. Spend some time every day posting in discussions and commenting on blogs. Use Google to find additional places, groups and portals online where people are already discussing your site topics and participate on as many of them as you can.

In addition, don’t forget about social networks like Twitter where you can find people talking about the topics your site covers, as well as social bookmarking sites where you can bookmark the pages of your site and let others know about them.

Your goal is to just “talk traffic to your site”, so the more you’re talking the more traffic you’ll be getting, and soon others will begin talking about your site too, and that’s when the snowball really starts rolling.

That’s it! Just keep adding a new page or two every day to your site, and then spend the time required “talking traffic to your site” and you will begin to see traffic and revenue levels rise.

I know folks (and “gurus” selling expensive systems) like to complicate all this stuff and make it seem like rocket science, but it’s not. Traffic is currency online, and people are social which makes talking traffic to your site fairly easy to do if you just find the places online where interested people are already gathering and add value to the conversations that are taking place.

I have to add that nobody, including myself, can guarantee that any web site you build will earn money. There’s just no way to predict what topics everyone who reads this might decide to build their sites on and if those topics will be popular or not. So take this to mean that I make no guarantee or promise that you will earn money by following the steps in this posting (to cover my legal behind).

However, if you follow the steps here and build your site on a topic that has even moderate interest levels and you are interesting and entertaining while “talking traffic to your site” then I am confident that it should be a profitable money making online model.

Email this post

Technorati Tags: money making online

The top question I get asked from people, online or off, when they learn what I do for a living is how or where do I come up with ideas for new sites to develop.

I’ve talked about this before here, but to recap I’m basically a CNN and Discovery channel junkie. One or the other is on all day long in my office and for me they’re both invaluable resources for ideas that will be interesting for me to develop and hopefully profitable.

That works for me because for the most part I enjoy building resource sites. Either informational hubs on narrow niche topics where I’ll take all the information anyone could spend several hours searching for themselves online and put it all together in one place, providing an easy and encompassing resource on the topic–or tool resources like scripts or software.

What I don’t normally develop are community based projects. I’ve been involved with a few, but they haven’t been a major focus for me in the past, so I don’t really feel qualified to talk much about those.

Which is unfortunate because I’m noticing more and more people I talk or email with seem interested in such projects.

Thanks to a friend on Twitter today, I found a posting on RattleCentral.com where the folks behind Rattle share a development idea that they recently pitched to an Innovation competition for a neat site targeted towards younger music fans that would allow online communities to grow around local music scenes from anywhere, and then scale upwards with artists who gained momentum beyond their local levels.

The “Bands From Here” idea didn’t make the final cuts of the competition, but after reading through it myself I can see someone grabbing this and making a nice project (and profit) with it at some point. BTW, Rattle says they’re cool with someone doing that.

I think it’s awesome that they’re sharing this view of how project ideas are formed. It would have been nice to also hear of some of the spit-balling and brain-storming sessions that likely went into shaping the pitch, and since they’re promising to publish additional project ideas in the future too rather than leave them sitting in the dustbin perhaps they’ll describe the creative process even more in the future too.

Even still, as is it’s a great peek into what goes on before a project ever sees any code/design/financial investments and I think will be an interesting read for those of you who are, or wish to, developing community based projects.

Check out the full posting with the pitch for yourself at:

http://www.rattlecentral.com/blog/2009/02/bands-from-here.html

Email this post

Technorati Tags: ideas, online communities

Open Source Initiative Logo

Something I’ve had to contend with over the years was working with clients who were afraid to develop or build their applications from open source software platforms. It has been especially frustrating when a client wanted features that were readily available with a very brief installation, but because they were resistant to open source demanded that we reinvent the wheel over and over again.

While I understand where these fears stem from, mostly the myths perpetuated by the makers of proprietary titles that open source comes with a lack of quality support and is a security risk since the source code is widely available for anyone with malicious intentions to exploit–I have still gone to great lengths with these clients to show them that the myths are typically unfounded, the platform support behind many projects is equal or superior to competitive licensed titles, and that unlike commercial titles, the community behind open source programs rarely try to “save face” by hiding security holes or exploitations and in-fact is often very fast to react to such situations and create a patch or upgrade quickly.

That’s because the community behind open source projects aren’t spending resources on marketing and brand management, they’re usually personally committed to ensuring the software is functional and secure because they themselves are using it.

So, far beyond the time and cost savings associated with using open source when possible, I’m a fan when I know the people behind it are caring for and growing the title as if it were their own child. In my experience you can’t beat that type of community support for any price.

Which is why I was excited this morning to read that the White House has embraced an open source CMS [content management syste] for the new Recovery.gov site where the public can browse and track the spending and results of the new stimulus package the President signed yesterday.

First of all, despite any political leanings I think we all can agree to offer kudos to the Obama administration for saving taxpayer dollars on an unnecessary commercial CMS when Drupal, the CMS being used, is a fine title with a long and proven reputation and devoted community behind it.

But more importantly to me is that this move may make it slightly easier to convince small business clients that using open source solutions which already fit their needs is a safe, fiscally sound and viable option over developing from scratch.

My Uncle once asked me why I care about this when building from scratch just means a bigger project paycheck for me. The answer is about volume. While I’m busy reinventing the wheel for client “A”, I have to turn away clients “B” and “C”.

I’d much rather earn a smaller paycheck from “A”, and be able to make “B” and “C” happy too, so that I’ll have all 3 coming back to me over and over again in the future.

I believe that a big paycheck from a single client will pay your bills for this month, but a large base of repeat clients will pay your bills every month.

What do you think, are you using open source technologies in your business or websites? Why, or why not?

Email this post

Technorati Tags: open source software platforms, open source solutions, open source technologies, White House

So, it’s 12:30am and I’m just finishing up for the day. I’ve been involved in a major programming-mashup project and have written before about how I go balls to the wall while working on projects, so the long days and late hours aren’t a big deal to me.

But, something very interesting has come from this project that I wanted to share, just because I’ve been neglecting you(and my blog) lately and I wanted to touch base and say “Hi”, as well as let you in on what I’m up to.

So, a couple years ago a few friends and I started up Build The Dot Com with the intention of just giving some bare-bones resources and information for noobie webmasters in a free and friendly manner.

And as is prone to happen on non-commercial collaborations, my friends basically lost interest quick and left me alone with a site that I couldn’t possibly do justice to on my own given my time constraints.

Which ultimately meant the site sat like a rock in space for a long time. It had some great information and resources that we included when we first launched it, but it didn’t receive any of the attention it–and visitors to it–deserved.

This has bothered me all along, and now finally I’ve decided to pour some resources into it and have grabbed a few new people who will also work on it with me, only this time they’re punching the clock so I know they won’t bail out on me.

Anyway, to keep this brief (you know I’m long winded) I decided to go all out and really beef the site up. Not just with a new design and a little updated content, but rather I wanted to create a platform that could really grow as a resource over time.

To me that meant it had to be more than a static site. It would need a blog, an article library, and a place for discussions.

The only problem is there’s very little out there as far as backends go that handle all of that in a way that I like. So, I decided to take the individual programs that I feel most comfortable with for blogging, article content and discussion forums, and create a bridge integration between them and the custom CMS I initially setup on the site 2 years ago.

Talk about a nightmare.

This is a single administration “wrapper” that bridges ArticleMS, WordPress, SMF [simple machines forum] and a custom CMS [content management system] I originally developed for a project almost 6 years ago. That’s just to bridge the administration zones for the site.

Then there was the whole nightmare of tweaking a single Open Source design template for each respective platform. Since I plan to focus on and promote the use of Open Source technologies with the site, I felt it important to start with an Open Source design as well. Thankfully one of our new contributors is gifted at building styles and themes, so I let them handle that heavy lifting.

And after several long days the site is almost ready for prime time. There’s still a few bugs I’ve got to tweak out in the SMF forum before that section will go live, but the main site, blog and article library are all up and running and I’m pretty pleased with the results.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to lately.

Now, for the unexpected returns I said this project prompted:

For several years I’ve wanted to start a charitable group or foundation. It’s no secret to anyone who reads my postings regularly that I’m one of those bleeding heart types… and while I love the work that I do to earn a living I also have to recognize that it doesn’t really matter much in the big picture.

If I closed shop tomorrow and started serving fries and burgers at the local Micky-D’s it would have almost no impact on anybody else’s life.

And that’s okay, our job/work/career doesn’t have to define us, and as I see it for most people it shouldn’t.

It’s the things we do from the heart and without the need or expectation of compensation that should matter.

So I’ve felt this way for a long time and have been tossing around this idea of a “not for profit” startup for a while, but the biggest obstacle for me has been focusing down to what specifically I want it to accomplish.

There’s so many causes that I care deeply about, and the idea of just throwing a dart to pick one certainly seemed wrong. And after a while I think I unconsiously let this remain an obstacle as a way to justify a complete lack of action and progress to myself.

Until now, because while working on this backend project for Build The Dot Com it suddenly came into clear focus what I would like to accomplish with my not for profit, and I’ve got the entire general strategy for how I want to setup and launch it mapped out, including the technology and methods I’m going to use to “jump start” it with a bang.

I know I’m being short on details about this, I hope you understand that’s necessary at the moment as I have to set some things in place before I begin giving out any specifics.

But, I’m uber excited and had to share that feeling with you here, and I hope it shows how grand inspiration can come when and where you least expect it.

I promise to post more about my not for profit project in the near future too. I’d like you to become involved by offering me feedback as I set it up. And trust me, if you’ve ever created a web site, written on a blog or tried your hand at Internet Marketing you are fully qualified to offer me advice on my project.

Email this post

Technorati Tags: not for profit, open source, startup