Burts AIS, osCommerce & More Blog

New Website Address

2006-04-26T17:16:00.000Z

osWorld - I won't be posting on Blogger anymore. Obviously need to update the new site (in terms of functionality and look), but I'll do that as and when.

Blogger -> Wordpress

2006-04-26T14:26:00.000Z

OK, I made the executive decision to swap from Blogger to Wordpress. Domain Name is registered and hosting is set up. Next up is to wait for DNS to resolve, then I will play with Wordpress (I have very little experience of theming WP) for a while to get a layout that I like. Then I'll attempt to import all the posts and comments from here into my new WP set-up. That should be fun. I expect to have it completed sometime next week. In the meantime, I shall be looking for a WP theme (I can't be bothered to create my own) - anyone know of a good looking theme repository. Don;t mind if it's free or paid-for. Ta.

Anonymous Comments

2006-04-25T16:16:00.000Z

Due to silly people who would rather play games than post properly, I have enabled comment moderation. Anonymous comments will simply not be shown, unless those comments include your name or URL.

Google Referrals - More Options

2006-04-25T15:22:00.000Z

If you haven't already noticed, here's a heads-up that Google has introduced "text link" links for the referral programs (adwords, adsense, firefox). So now you can have inline links that llok like a normal link. As an example of inline text: - it's a great internet explorer that's twice as good as Internet Explorer and three times as good as sliced bread. Here's how the "wizard" looks: Basically choose the text you want to use, then copy/paste the javascript into your page. What could be simpler? Nice one Google!

Keyword Avalanche Forum appears to be open again

2006-04-25T11:02:00.000Z

I just found out that Keyword Avalanche Forum appears to be open for new people - I don't know how long it'll stay like that for though. Scroll to the bottom of the sales page and click the credit cards, this should take you through to Paypal at $57 per month. In recent weeks I've found that Keyword Avalanche has been of less use to me, I think that this is because I have now (after 8 months) read the whole of the forum). There is an interesting ongoing thread entitled "What Do You Want From Your KA Membership?" in which everyone is encouraged to post what they would like to see more of (or less of!)...

I still highly recommend the site and service, but will temper that by saying that you will probably have a 6 month shelf-life (unless some changes happen based on peoples wants and needs)...

I recommend that you sign up if you have at least a passing interest in AIS niche building. Not for the actual product (Keyword Lists), but for the Forum itself. Link: Keyword Avalanche Forum

Blogger just gets crapper and crapper

2006-04-24T15:31:00.000Z

I've not been able to post for the last 4 days. I'm about to move to a Wordpress set-up I think, as I read that WP 2 has a good blogger->Wp converting script...

Viral Instigator - avoid this one!

2006-04-24T14:38:00.000Z

Viral Instigator is a new service set up by an australian based entrepreneur named Peter Drew. It basically allows you to set up hundreds or thousands of Blogger Blogs (and lately it's own blog system) easily and quickly. You can then use these blogs with the likes of RSS2Blog to post to in order to build up a Blog Farm quickly and easily. They also offer an upgrade service so that anyone who does not own a Blog posting tool such as RS2b can pay extra to have their blogs populated by Viral Instigators "Internal Posting Service". Anyway, I was intrigued to find out more so decided to sign up. Not really for the purpose of using the service, but more to provide ancilliary services such as templates - and to find out more about the type of people who use these services. Anyway, I signed up using Paypal on 28th March. The terms of service: $50 non-refundable set-up fee and $59 each month. OK, so far. Paid up via the site and then... nothing. No thank you email, no email with log-in details. Absolutely nothing except for the Paypal receipt. I waited a few days then sent email to the Paypal address that I signed up to. No reply. As Peter Drew is a member on Keyword Avalanche, I then contacted him through the Private Message system to let him know that I had signed up but had not received any emails from him. He obviously looked into it, as I shortly began receiving mail from him, but not the important details about my account! I then took it upon myself to cancel the paypal payment myself. To cut a long story short, he refunded the monthly payment, but will not refund the $50 set up fee. This even though my account was never set up. Problems: 1. There is no forum for the product. 2. There are no published email addresses to get in contact. 3. The "helpdesk" will only help people who have been sent log in details. 4. The owner seems to talk the talk when it comes to sales, but not walk the walk when it comes to customer service. My view: avoid this one - however, there are many people within the Keyword Avalanche Forum who use and like the program. Link: Viral Instigator

Thankfully not all Australians are as poor at customer service as this bunch => my Kath & Kim DVD's turned up in less than 72 hours. Look at moiye, look at moiye.

Having said all this, this type of tool does look to be quite useful if you are into creating many hundreds of sites with least amount of effort. I am considering going straight to Paypal to dispute the service offered. However, they did say the $50 was non-refundable, and even though I consider them to be 100% at fault (ie, take a set-up fee, then set up nothing) there's really no way I am entitled to that $50 back.

The beauty of being self employed

2006-04-20T12:25:00.000Z

One of my friends called me up earlier - I hadn't seen him for a couple of years. We just spend a nice couple of hours in a nice country pub having a bite to eat and a couple of pints. Catching up on old times and so on. It was nice, and this is the beauty of being self employed (particularly in the AIS field) - you can just take off whenever you like without having to worry about what your employer will say or earning money etc etc. I highly recommend not working ;)

Article Miner is closing it's doors

2006-04-19T18:55:00.000Z

A few months ago I spoke of the need to use articles on AIS sites, and recommended a program called "Article Miner". I usually use articles that I have purchased which are known as PLR articles - this type of article allows you to change the text and add your own attributions. The other type of article is the type that "Article Miner" scans through and presents in a good format ready for use on AIS sites. These are the type of articles found at the likes of articlecity and ezinearticles (amongst others)... I have just learned that Article Miner is closing it's doors to new customers as of May 1st. If you did not already purchase it, now is the time to do so. Link: Article Miner

Emails received on Easter Monday

2006-04-18T16:24:00.000Z

Hello I'd like to have one UNIQUE NPB TEMPLATES! Please tell me the price for 1 Unique templates. Thanks bye

A few hours later

HELLO LOOKING FOR NPB UNIQUE TEMPLATES PLEASE WRITE BACK!

And today

HELLO THIS IS THE 3RD MAIL THAT I SEND YOU AND THE LAST! I CANT WAIT ANYMORE, I WILL PURCHASE IT FROM ANOTHER SITE. BYE

My reply

OK!

Impatient people I have no time for people who cannot understand that the world does not revolve around what they want. I'd prefer to lose a $500 deal than have to do work for people like this.

Adsense as time goes by

2006-04-18T07:59:00.000Z

I was working out a few figures over the weekend, and started delving into my Adsense history. Basically I am still making progress, though this has been halted in recent months as I've been working on product AIS sites rather than Adsense based sites. Still, it's interesting to view some figures: March 2005 Adsense Earnings: $29.14 Daily Average: $0.94 March 2006 Adsense Earnings: $824.40 Daily Average: $26.60 Over the course of 12 months, I increased my Adsense earnings 28-fold. This is due to a number of factors; ~ I have more sites which have adsense on. ~ I have honed the way that these sites show adsense. Had I been more willing to build many hundreds of sites, I know I would have been earning much more by now. My next aim is to build a network of good content sites which will carry adsense and a product to sell.

Extra Monetization Methods for AIS Sites

2006-04-16T14:45:00.000Z

Whether you are an old AIS'r or a new person to this world, you'll most likely have realised that you need to give your sites extra income streams over and above Adsense. There are many ways to do this, I've found that writing eBooks is one good method. Only problem is that an eBook takes a lot of time to research and write. I ended up paying someone £99 (about $180) to write me one eBook to suit one of my sites, as I did not have the time or inclination to do it. Anyway the point of this message is to make you all think about what would happen if your Adsense account was terminated tomorrow - would your sites survive ? By adding extra monetization streams you can go some way to at least make your sites viable whilst you look for an Adsense replacement. Here's the pitch Get 8 eBooks with Resell & Rebrand Rights - the first 3 are downloadable immediately, 1 will be available next week, and the remaining 4 will be available next month. The seller is limiting this to 250 sales, so if you are after a very easy income stream to add to your sites, have a look! There are also some nice extras such as articles, a guide showing how the author make niche sites, sales letters and so on. It's good value! I've bought the package and can tell you that the eBooks are very well written - it would be worth you spending an extra hour on each to customise them to your liking, but once done, you'll have a nice little earner. I can tell you that eBooks (in general) sell very well! If you would like to see an eBook before you purchase, please feel free to buy an example eBook from the pack; The Natural Dog eBook Every day thousands of people do things to their puppy that they think are GOOD for their puppy – and the vet says so too! Then when their pup gets horribly sick they find out the hard way just how wrong they were... This is payable via Paypal at just $5, and is instantly downloadable (for verified Paypal buyers). If you go onto to purchase the full eBook pack through my affiliate link, I will refund the cost of the eBook you bought directly from me (so long as your order shows in my login of course!). Can't say fairer than that! Please note that I have not modified the text in this eBook at all, so it is exactly as supplied in the download...if I was building a true site, I would pretty the eBook up by adding in pictures, pretty borders and so on. I would also create a Box Cover to use on my sales page as this has been proved to increase the buying ratio. Affiliate Link: 8 eBooks with Resell & Rebrand Rights

The Apprentice

2006-04-15T08:53:00.000Z

I haven't posted as much on this season of the Apprentice as I usually do, let's right that wrong, by at least providing some websites for this bunch of no-good, good-for-nothings; Seem OK so far Tuan Le I like Tuan - he is too quiet by far, and seems reticent to take the lead. He needs to start getting busy with his plans for World Domination. It also helps that he's a local boy, Weston-s-Mare apparently. Ruth Badger I really like The Badger. She has balls. Paul Tulip This guy could win it overall, I think. Not shy to make his point known at all. Sharon McAllister Fired. Michelle Dewberry A bit wishy washy, needs to assert herself more. OK though. Karen Bremner I thought she was ultra business-like. I cannot remember why she was fired though. Could not organise a piss up in a brewery Samuel Judah Useless, useless, useless. Would you like a bottle of water? Fired. Praise be. Alexa Tilley Fired. Ansell Henry Why he has not yet been fired is anyones guess. Dire. Just plain annoying - make me want to punch the Telly Jo Cameron Fired. Nargis Aga Fired. Syed Ahmed This guy is just unreal - the weakest contestant on at least 3 tasks and yet he survives the Boardroom. This guy is less use than Samuel Judah. And two more, both fired (and rightly so). I couldn't find websites for them; Mani Sandher Ben Stanberry

Blog Top Sites

2006-04-14T09:58:00.000Z

You might have noticed the small "blog top sites" button in the very bottom of the right hand column. It's basically a counter which shows me how well my site does compared to other sites in the same genre (marketing/seo). What Blog Top Sites does is count the number of times the button is loaded, then put your site into a league table. The count is reset each week, so the values are meaningful - everyone gets the same starting line each week... I added mine on April 12th and it's at #15 in the league table so far - which is not bad for 3 days results. Why not add your sites? It's free and is a useful indicator of how your site fares against other sites; Blog Top Sites Mainly, it's a bit of fun :)

Exercise Your Body And Mind

2006-04-12T12:50:00.000Z

I got my MTB out and did a 9 mile ride. After around 6 months of no cycling, I was pleasantly surprised: 42' 06" last Friday, then 42' dead on Monday. Yesterday I really pushed it and got down to 36' 29" - mind you I felt really bad afterwards, almost to the point of vomiting. Maybe I won't push it so hard again, so early in my schedule. I bought some aero-bars and slick tyres (I've fitted the bars and the front slick today), I'll do the back slick later on tonight. Then tomorrow, I'll do the same route and see how much of a difference slicks/bars will make. I'm thinking I should manage at least a 10% difference in my time, we'll see. Often, when I'm cycling I get my best ideas for business. Seems to me that sitting at a desk or doing the "usual" routine dulls your mind. Anyway, my MTB looks very strange now I've converted it to a (cheap) road bike. I might have to buy myself a proper road-bike soon so I can really start training hard again.

Are You A Dead Fish ?

2006-04-12T09:39:00.000Z

Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream. Malcolm Muggeridge, 1903 - 1990

It's a good quote. If you don't come up with your own ideas and methods, you're a dead fish! Think about it for a moment...

TZ Rant

2006-04-11T13:11:00.000Z

Why is it that some people think that the whole world is on their own Time Zone? I woke up this morning to 4 emails all from the same person, basically moaning about the fact that he didn't get a reply immediately. He was interested in an osCommerce site build; this morning I decided not to take him on as a client, due to him being so impatient. I'll email to let him know in a few days ;-) I'm sorry to say, in my experience it's mainly Americans that think the world revolves around them, I wonder why that is?

Does your blog need more readers?

2006-04-10T14:06:00.000Z

My online buddie Yaro is about to launch his new adventure, Blog Traffic King. ~ Which blog system Yaro recommends and why ~ How to easily come up with content that will bring in the most readers ~ Yaro's unique blog traffic methodology including the "Pillar" concept ~ How to use trackbacks and pingbacks effectively ~ How to get more RSS subscribers ~ And loads more blog traffic tips and tricks Well worth looking into, and of course, the price is right: free of charge! Link: Blog Traffic King

Business Idea - SEO blogging

2006-04-10T10:13:00.000Z

I think that anyone who blogs knows just how easy it is to write content and press "publish". We also know that Search Engines love the simplicity of Blogs, thus ranking them relatively highly for SEO searches. Business Idea Start up a service which offers blogs, with content written (by you) on a regular basis. You could charge by the article, or a set fee for 6 months/12 months worth of blogging. Each blog post will point back to (a page on) the companies website. Abandon traditional SEO methods I can foresee companies abandoning traditional SEO methods - after all what's the point of having a website SEO'd when it's far simpler (and probably more productive) to simply write up a Blog - in addition a blog brings a "face" to a company... Costing Traditional SEO firms charge anywhere upto 20k or more for an ongoing promotion. I can envisage companies even halfway serious about SEO paying a few thousand pounds for 6 months of quality blogging. Work involved? Sure, this is not an AIS by any stretch of the imagination. A lot of work involved, I would say at least 1 hour per day...to research the article and type it up. The Concept The concept is valid - the problem would be finding a company that is willing to; ~ take a chance on SEO blogging, and ~ does not have the knowledge (or time) to do it themselves What are your thoughts on this? Valid idea, or waste of space?

Sea Change in my Adsense AIS

2006-04-08T14:12:00.000Z

I've never really been in love with creating sites just for adsense revenue - my sites have to give value. It's probably why I have only around 20 such sites and earn only about $900 to $1000 per month from Adsense...some of the so called "big boys" have thousands of websites and earn upwards of $50k per month. These people have systems in place to enable them to automate most everything. Count me out After quite a lot of investigation (and loads of $$$ spent) I have decided not to go forward with this type of site/system. Such programs I found for doing this include "Blotto Blog Maker", "Viral Instigator", "PG Insider", "RSS 2 Blog", "Blog Solution" and so on. With the advent of these new tools, I am seeing people brand new to Adsense create 1000s of sites/blogs per day, in the hope that a few of them will make a decent amount. To me, this is no better than email spam. A Sea Change My own (adsense style) AIS sites are now 5 to 10 page websites, ultra-targetted, with proper content on each page as well as adsense and perhaps a product to sell (or an Affiliation). Because I've used so many site creation programs over the past year, I know what works and what doesn't - I have been tinkering & tweaking these tiny websites and have decided that it's a viable way to earn an Adsense Income; with CTR above 40% and earnings coming in at an average of $4 per site per day - more importantly, I feel happy that my sites are adding value to the Internet, rather than simply adding more spam.

Possible Bird Flu in Gloucester

2006-04-07T13:18:00.000Z

Apparently, 3 gulls ahve been found dead on a boating lake in Gloucester. They've been sent off to DEFRA for tests. The dead swan found in Scotland is an english breed apparently, this means that there are definitely other birds with bird flu in the UK (migratory birds)... Will be interesting to see the reactions of the popular press...already on some forums people are taking this very seriously. As yet, the H5N1 strain cannot be passed from human to human. The only humans to have died are those in very close (and prolonged) contact with poultry. If H5N1 mutates, then we have problems... Interestingly, I own an AIS site about Bird Flu. Doing OK too! The more bad news about Bird Flu, the more visitors it gets!

Automated Site Building Script: PG Insider

2006-04-05T19:04:00.000Z

I recebtly joined "PG Insider" as I felt it would be interesting to see how the people who churn out site after site do it. Pretty simple: automation The cost of this is $47 per month, and I am quite sure that this is an absolute bargain for what you get. I am uninterested in gaining Affiliate cash (as it is not a service I would use) so here is the direct link PG Insider/ Usually I only give Aff Links if I like/use the product. I like this one (particularly at the low price), but wouldn't personally use it, thus you get an either/or choice. To sum up, it is a suite of tools and eBooks. The eBooks detail the site owners methods to raise adsense income. The tools allow you to replicate his methods.

Google Related Links

2006-04-04T15:24:00.000Z

A new service brought out by Google, is Related Links, here is an example: As you can see, it is somewhat like the Chitika Layout, I am quite unsure what this could be useful for at this moment. Perhaps an Adsense interface merged with this could be an interesting addition to Googles (and the adsense publishers) armoury...

Chicken Egg, Egg Chicken

2006-04-04T14:29:00.000Z

I noticed that suring the past few months my local tabac/newsagent has been closed more than it's been open. Today I popped in to speak to the (lovely) owner - she's been having some problems recently and has had to take a lot of time off. Because the shop is closed so often, her customers are shopping elsewhere; takings are down so much that she cannot afford to employ anyone to cover her down-time. Because she cannot employ anyone, the shop loses more and more customers. It's the classic Chicken-Egg scenario. It must be a difficult situation to see your business failing, knowing that she can do little to halt the slide into oblivion :(

Online Income, How?

2006-04-03T14:14:00.000Z

Let's imagine that you wanted raise $1000 online income over the next 4 weeks. You could do that many ways, amongst them: 1/ Build a website, monetize it using adsense etc. Consider that it would take hundreds, thousands of clicks to earn $1000 from Adsense - you'd be crazy to rely on Adsense to make decent cash. 2/ Build a website to promote someone elses product (in other words, be an Affiliate). Consider that selling someone elses product means you get only a small cut of commission. Take for example a $100 selling price, on which you get 33% commission - you therefore receive about $33 per sale. You also need to consider all those other affiliates that you have to fight with to get the person to buy from your link. It's plain madness to sell as an Affiliate - there's little money to be made in my opinion. The answer is staring us in the face; 3/ Build a website to sell your own product. Consider that you would be keeping 100% of the profits! This is obviously the way to go, why are not more people forging their own path in this way? Well, they are slightly more work, but the rewards are greater also... For me, I like to set up sites which sell downloadable products, eg eBooks, website templates and the like. Making and Selling your own product can only be good for your pocket. You are likely thinking "sure, but I don't have the knowledge to build a product" - that's OK - get someone else to build the product for you...pay them a fee upfront, or cut them in on a % of sales - whatever it takes. It does not take skill or experience to set up a site selling a product - all it takes is the belief that you will cover your costs. The last two large AIS sites that I set up both have products on that were not created by me! I paid to have them built - and I did not pay an extortionate amount of money... Final Say Of course, it is also possible to realise a profit when/if you decide to sell up - this is almost impossible with "adsense sites" or "affiliated sites".

$137 per day - is it achievable ?

2006-04-01T11:44:00.000Z

The answer is patently "yes". I just looked back through my last 6 months AIS earnings, it works out to an average of just under $162 per day. Is 6 months long enough to gather data, I'd say yes. Now, assuming I keep at around $162, this equates to a yearly income of around $60k - now I am unsure if $60k is a decent wage in the US, but in UK Sterling that's almost £33,000 which is a very nice wage (or €50000). Particularly for doing very little work to earn it. So, the next step is to sit back and decide which areas need more development - for me this is simple as I have kept a very detailed spreadsheet since October 1st 2005, which details every cent and where/how it was earned. I can already see that Adsense Income makes up less than 15% of my (6 month) income - this is good in one respect, eg if adsense stopped tomorrow I'd be OK. But it's an area that I need to concentrate on in order to build this up to nearer 25% - it's quite simple to build sites with adsense on! I can also see that eBook income drastically dropped off after I sold the oscbooks site to Paul - this is another area which I need to work on, as I want to start selling my own written eBooks once again - I need to find some good subject matter. Template sales are still going well, not only for osCommerce, but also for the other pieces of software that I have an interest in. Affiliate Income is still quite small, as I do not recommend products that I have not personally tried (unlike most other marketers!), thus my recommendations are few and far between, meaning my earnings are also quite low. I am quite happy with this however.

Niche Products Monthly is re-opening slots

2006-03-31T15:16:00.000Z

A couple of months ago, I was one of the first to post about "Niche Products Monthly", a membership site set up to give you three "adsense style" sites per month (along with a lot of extra features). I have just learned that a number of original buyers subscriptions have ended, and so slots for new members are going to be available shortly. Niche Products Monthly - simply click the "CLICK HERE to Start Your Risk-Free Membership NOW!" link, and this will take you to the notification page. Fill out your details. When the slots become available, I guess everyone will get an email. You can then decide whether or not to buy into this. Of the first batch of purchasers, I can almost guarantee that 50% won't have done anything with their sites. They won't even have uploaded them! You'll be asking yourself why this - pretty simple: procrastination. They bought into the idea, but never found the inclination to upload the sites... Are you one of that 50% ? Link: Niche Products Monthly

Is your osCommerce site really slow?

2006-03-31T10:46:00.000Z

Another way that my Blog gets found, is via the (Google) search phrase "my new oscommerce is really slow" - when first installed osC is quite clunky, but there are many ways that you can make into a lean, mean site. You need this eBook that I wrote: This shows a number of ways to make your osCommerce site faster, ranging from simple solutions (such as making images smaller) to more expert solutions. Link: Speed Up osCommerce

Where were You ?

2006-03-30T14:15:00.000Z

In an attempt to find out a bit more about each other, I decided a good way would be to ask "where were you?" 1 year, 5 years and 10 years ago... It might take off, it might not - might be interesting, might be not...answer the questions, then send them on to three others! 1 Year ago (2005) Pretty much doing what I am doing now - as little as possible in a self-employed status. Working on creating streams of income! Set up around 10 or 12 sites. 5 years ago (2001) My first year of self employment, but sub-contracted out to a small hosting firm. First got involved with osCommerce (The Exchange Project as it was). Set up Dot Drag Net with an online buddy, this is still going strong with an interesting bunch in the DDN Forum. 10 years ago (1996) Working all-hours for one of the largest Life Assurance firms in the World. It would be another 2 years before I first accessed the Internet! Got married (divorced soon after & still living with the consequences)! How about you? I pass this onto Boo, Rich and Chris.

Amusing Search Phrases

2006-03-29T21:57:00.000Z

I find it quite amusing to look through my referrals from Search Engines, to see what people have search for in order to find this Blog. Here's my favourite from today: michelle dewberry "i would"

SEO is so hard. Or is it ? No, not really...

2006-03-29T10:14:00.000Z

Over the past few years, I have come across countless individuals and companies whose holy grail is to get to the top of Google for their chosen search term. Everyone says that getting to the top of Google is so hard, but in reality it is not at all difficult. What many fail to realise is that when people are searching for something they don't put in a generic phrase. They search locally or "niche'ly". Example, what would you search for if you needed a broken tooth fixed: Dentists or Emergency Dentists in your town You can plainly see that targetting your pages to search phrases is likely to be much more beneficial to you. It's not rocket science! To test this out, I recently made a post about "osCommerce Training". Guess what? As of now, that Blog Post is #1 in Google for osCommerce Training (Google Search)! What can we surmise from this? Google loves Blogs. Google loves Blogger Blogs. Google updates really quickly. What about Yahoo and MSN? What about them ? MSN shows the same Blog Post at #9 and Yahoo will probably pick it up soon enough. So, as a business owner you should be Blogging! Why not? It's another way to get your message out to the potential buyers of your product or service. Why bother optimising your website, when you can set up a Blogger Blog, and have #1 listings really rather easily? That's a rhetorical question by the way, no need to answer it. All you need to do is make some good, interesting posts with links to your main site, and you'll soon find you're getting more and more traffic... Further Reading Yaro over at Small Business Branding wrote an excellent piece on this very subject.

Open Source and GPL does not mean FREE

2006-03-28T10:54:00.000Z

I'd like to remind users of Open Source, GPL'd programs such as osCommerce, Zen Cart and the like that this does not mean that everything associated with such programs has to be free. The freedom that the GPL brings is the freedom to do as you wish with the script and associated services. As an extreme example, you could download osCommerce right now, and then sell copies of it on eBay for $1,000,000 - I expect it would be hard to find a buyer, but that is your freedom. A true story I offer no Technical Support at these prices, in fact I charge extra for installation (should the buyer require me to install). This is quite well explained on my site Conditions of Purchase. Last week someone purchased a £9.99 ($20) template from my osCommerce Templates site - they did not order the installation service, so this is an AIS purchase. They buy, they install. I the received an email a few hours later asking why their osCommerce Store was not working. I took a quick look and easily determined it was a known bug within osC that is to do with MySQL paging on 4.1 - I simply pointed the customer at that page and politely explained that the cost of the template does not include Technical Support (unless my template has caused errors). I'm thinking that this should now be the end of it. A few hours later I get another email asking for help - he had tried to apply those fixes, but everything had gone wrong; so he deleted everything. Because I am such a nice guy, I reinstalled, installed the template and fixed the paging error - all free of charge. After all, it is only a few moments work. At last, the customer is now happy... Oh no, another email received. He decided to try Zen Cart instead, and had deleted osCommerce. He had already decided not to stay with ZC, and wanted me to reinstall osCommerce - I agreed on payment of my standard install fee. I consider this to be extremely fair based on the low price of the template (it's on special offer) and the fact I already installed it once for him free of charge. The problem here is the misconception that everything Open Source/GPL should be free (as in "no money") - this is simply not the case. If you are using osCommerce and need the help of a 3rd party, expect to pay a reasonable fee!

Shopping Cart - stop abandonment now!

2006-03-26T09:42:00.000Z

Do you get lots of Spam Email - I do. It's annoying to the point of me actually finding phone numbers, then ringing up these people and telling them (very bluntly) to remove my email from their database. Anyway, I digress, I had a Spam that had a couple of interesting nuggets of information:

1. 75% of all e-shopping carts are abandoned before the purchase is actually complete? 2. Nine out of 10 shoppers who abandoned their carts did so because of a lack of customer service. (Web Merchant, Fall 2003, Cybershopper Survey) 3. 72% of respondents said that customer service is critical in shopping satisfaction. 4. Less then one percent of all ecommerce Websites offer live customer assistance. (eMarketer, June 2002)

Even though these nuggets are quite old (certainly in Internet terms), they are still very valid. As a shop owner, what have you done to track where people are leaving your site? A few years back, I spent a few days watching one of my clients osCommerce store - it soon appeared that a very large % would abandon their cart at the "log in" page. I changed some code around and reduced this by over 50%... The main problem with almost all osCommerce installations, is that the customer must create an account before he sees the full cost of his order! How dumb is that? Of course, this is because osC needs the customers address before it can give a shipping quote - but how many Store Owners have realised that this is a major turn-off for buyers? What can be done about it? There are a couple of contributions which can help quite a bit, 1 is "ship in cart". Another idea would be to give an estimated cost of postage, based on the weight (or number) of products in the shoppers cart. Anything is better than nothing. Have a think about how you can streamline your osCommerce Store - it could result in more sales being made, which is always a good thing!

The Stress Free way to move an osCommerce site

2006-03-24T08:24:00.000Z

The other day, Rich posted about the stress of a server move. It can be a nightmare to move a site, particularly a dynamic, interactive sites usch as an osCommerce Shop. Here's how I move osCommerce sites: 1. Purchase a cheap temporary domain name (eg: www.yoursite.info) 2. Select your NEW host, and get the account set up (using the NEW domain name). 3. *Copy* all files across from the OLD host to the NEW host. 4. Set up the NEW configure.php files using the NEW domain name. 5. Set up the OLD host so that the MySQL Daemon can be accessed from the new host. Using cPanel (uugh) this is very simple, if you don't have cPanel, then the host can easily do this for you. 6. Go back to the NEW configure.php file and set up the DB connections at the bottom of this file to access the OLD hosts database connection. Now, think about this. You have two sites, each of which is exactly the same as the other. Except for domain names. Most importantly, both OLD & NEW sites are pulling from the one database. You can now take your time to make sure everything works on the NEW host by using the NEW domain. Once happy: 7. Make your DNS changes on your ORIGINAL domain name, to match the NS details the NEW host gives you. 8. At the same time, PARK your OLD domain on top of the NEW one. 9. And change the Domain Details in the NEW configure.php to match your OLD domain name. We know that dns changes take between 1 hour and 48 hours or so to update - this means that ISPs around the world will see the NEW hosting at different times. Because you still have the NEW hosting using the OLD hosting MySQL, you are still running 1 database, thus you will lose no orders during the changeover. Once you are sure that the DNS changes are complete: 10. Close down BOTH OLD and NEW sites for 20 minutes (say on your quietest time in the middle of the night). During these 20 minutes; 11. Take a dump of the OLD database 12. Set up MySQL on the NEW hosting. 13. Transfer the DB to the NEW. 14. Change your configure files to stop accessing the OLD host DB and make sure that they are accessing their own DB (on the NEW). It sounds complicated, but is in fact really very simple. Doing a server swap this way, ensures that you lose the minimum of orders, as you will be down for only about 20 minutes maximum. If you work quickly, it is possible to have downtime of less than a couple of minutes! Sure, you'll have spent a couple of pounds for a throwawy domain name (you could go on to use this for something else, perhaps a feeder site for your main domain, or a different site entirely). If you buy the cheapest possible, a .info for 1 year, you'll be paying less than $3 (£1.50) or so. This is beer money compared to loss of orders, surely?

Serious Advice for all osCommerce Store Owners Don't rely on a host to understand the best way that a 3rd party script works => go to someone who you feel can do the job quickly and without fuss! It might cost a little more in terms of money, but will cost a lot less in terms of stress, hair loss, and keyboard pounding.

I think I found out why Harald does not like me

2006-03-23T10:27:00.000Z

Regular, long-time readers will know that HPDL of osCommerce does not like me. Even though I've been a staunch supporter of osCommerce for well over 4 years, it appears that I have upset him somehow - I still don't know how or why he is upset, but there we are - he won't answer my emails. Anyway, if you want to read more about that, see here and here. Anyway, I received email from someone who reads my blog but prefers to remain anonymous:

A couple of months ago, Harald invited me to be a Contrib moderator. I agreed. After a few weeks had passed, and I had neither been invited to their Skype meetings nor given any further instruction, I asked if they were waiting on me for something. Harald replied that they were no longer sure they wanted me on the team, since I was "staff" at osCommerce-Freelancers, and Bobby had indicated he was working on a fork. I was therefore affiliated with a fork.

Hmmm, this is what someone alluded to in my recent threads, but I was certain that Harald would not punish someone for being friends with someone else. That's akin to Ford (motor company) requiring all employees to drive Fords. It just wouldn't happen.

I recently emailed Harald that due to the time involved, I was assuming I'd been silently un-invited, but would have appreciated a yes/no rather than silence.

I also suffer the sound of silence. I wish that Harald would answer me once and for all to say what the problem is (rather than just say "it's a personal problem").

I'm 99% sure that my team invite was retracted solely based on the fight between Bobby and the team. Nothing to do with me. I hope that clarifies my comments. I didn't want to post them under my name in the case that there is still a shred of a chance that I can help the community as a moderator.

It certainly sounds like it. To be honest I was not ready to believe that such actions can take place - I guess I know better now. I am now 100% sure that my being involved in the "freelancers" project is the real reason why Harald decided that I (as in me personally) am not a good fit for supporting osCommerce. Oh well, at least I now know that it wasn't something that I had done to upset him - it was simply his fight with someone else that I was dragged into by Harald himself. Fair enough - I am now happy that I know the reason, and this can be the end of it as far as I am concerned.

New Look - might go wrong...

2006-03-22T17:27:00.000Z

I'm going for a colour change - grey. Whilst I am doing this, the blog'll look a bit strange. That is all.

Bootstrapper Notes

2006-03-22T12:10:00.000Z

Whilst checking out my stats I found quite a few interesting blogs. So far, the best of which is this one: Bootstrapper Notes As I find more quality blogs, I'll update this thread...

Re-monetizing a Site [more]

2006-03-22T11:49:00.000Z

In yesterdays AIS-potpourri post, I briefly mentioned that I had rejigged a site to try and get a better adsense value from it. Yesterday was the first full day in it's new format, and here is the Adsense Screenshot for the last 7 days: You can plainly see that the effect of my change (late Monday Night) has increased the site's adsense value by quite a factor. You can see that the $2.03 value was for the remainder of the day (half of monday) when I made the change and the $5.66 value from the first full day (tuesday) after the change. So, I spent 10 minutes to rejig the site (it's only a 1 page site!), and this has increased income by a big factor. Of course, this is not really enough data, but I hope to make you see that a simple change can result in big increases in income. Of course, this may be co-incidence, but I think not. In about a month, I will provide more data, and maybe before & after screenshots of this particular site.

Paypal Fees Reduced

2006-03-21T17:29:00.000Z

Just received this...

PayPal is pleased to announce that from 16 March 2006, the small fee you pay for receiving payments of more than £6,000 per month has got even smaller.

Great! Now, if only I could reach £6k per month it might be a help ;) But then, I suppose there are many people who do receive that kind of cash via Paypal, so it's a help to them. Well done Paypal.

AIS potpourri

2006-03-21T08:15:00.000Z

A few things for todays installment of AIS adventures... My first Donation I received my first donation from Easy Menu - this is a site I purchased about 10 days ago as it fits nicely into my portfolio. The basis of this site is not adsense, but is all about raising money via donation/payments for use of the semantically correct list. Thank you to the Donator :) Re-monetize an underperforming site Late last night I took another look at one of my underperforming sites - it should be doing better than it is! Last month it averaged just $0.27 per day. In one month I will come back to this post and let you know the effect of the changes that I made. Basically all I did was rejig the content of the site (it is only a 1 page site), and place adsense more prominently. It took about 10 minutes. osCommerce Templates You'll know by now that one of my sites was "featured" in an article in the popular UK computer magazine .net - I made an offer for all .net readers to get an extra 25% off and have had a few orders on the back of this over the past coupple of days. Update on PLR Manna PLR Manna sales have dropped off. I knew that this particular product would have a fairly short shelf-life, but was hoping for a little longer yet. I'll keep the site up for now as it has PR and may be useful for something else in the future. This site earned it's way though as I made a nice profit though I did over-estimate the sales I would make (I should have taken the 7.5k offer that was made for it). Oh well, at least I cannot say "what if" (if I had sold the site). New AIS upcoming! I am in final preparation to launch a new product AIS (no adsense). It's linked to my other AIS's and if my previous is anything to go by, it should sell around 50 products at an average of $50 each. We'll see. More on that when I launch (which should be by the end of this month). The Dawn of a New Age? Over on one of my other Forum haunts, Boo posted this:

Anyway, I had a spare few minutes earlier today and so logged into my adsense account for the first time since Dec, just to see if ANYTHING had changed - and what did I find? I've got over $200 dollars sitting in there! Checked the stats in a bit more detail and since Jan I've been averaging just under $5 per day. And this is all from sites that I'd completely forgotton about - zero promotion, nuffin. So I'm a very happy bunny - and it seems that those of you saying 'stop stressing, sit back and give it time' were right!

This is a good result, nice one Boo. Now, please update your AIS blog ;)

Website Owners & Back Links

2006-03-20T09:07:00.000Z

Over the weekend I decided that my websites need quality backlinks, so I got in touch with a number of people in order to ask them to remove my links from their pages & sites. 95% were quite OK about it, but the odd one or two were not. This raised an interesting question; Does a website owner have a right to ask another site owner to remove a backlink? I think "yes", but would be interested to know what you think.

Oli's Site Builder Service

2006-03-19T14:47:00.000Z

I just learned that Oli's Site Builder Service is going to be limited to just 100 members. I know quite a bit about Oli's service and can tell you that you want to be a part of this as the cost is incredibly low. Oli, I'd have charged a lot more money! Anyway, take a look - if you are into Niche Site Building, this will be a good way for you to quickly and easily build a portfolio of web properties. Remember that all the hard work is done by Oli, and no 2 customers get the exact same site. Link: Oli's Site Builder Service.

Back in the Country ...

2006-03-18T16:21:00.000Z

Back in the country after a few days of R & R. Need to catch up on some forums and blogs that I read, after which I need to catch up on my viewing of TV (mostly business type programs). I also learned (cheers Paul!) that one of my AIS sites has a small write-up in one of the UK's leading computer magazines; I did notice a an upturn in sales and wondered why. I've now had the chance to check this out and I have a screenshot and a couple of lines of text at the end of a large e-commerce article. Nice! Don't know why they didn't ask me to pitch for a part in the actual article though ;)

Posting from Gay Paree (that's Paris for you non-mac lovers)

2006-03-13T20:18:00.000Z

And, may I say that wi-fi access is mega expensive! But it's all good fun, and much easier than trying to find an Internet Cafe...

Ok, so we came over on the Eurostar (Channel Tunnel Train), today we did the usual suspects: Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Boat ride down the Seine. Tomorrow I think we have a cycling tour of Paris (as in pedal bikes, not motor bikes). With what I have seen of French Drivers, this should be fun ;) OK, with that said, and because I am paying an extortionate amount for net access, that's it for now.

If I survive the bike ride tomorrow, I may post, but if not, I'm back next week sometime after doing a spot of house hunting on the west coast. If anyone is expecting email from me, I think I've done the most important ones, others can wait a little while - sorry!

Cheers, Gary

osCommerce - Customer Groups

2006-03-10T14:28:00.000Z

If you run the "Customer Groups" contribution [ this one ] on an osCommerce store it gives the ability to define a "group" (eg for 25% discount). Some shops need the ability to give trade discount to a group of customers for example. I've been running this for a while to deal with Resellers of my osCommerce Templates, but have found it increasingly mind-numbing to not know actually who is in a group (detailed in one place). The usual admin page looks like this: Pretty useless really. What I did was add a few lines of code to this page, so that it will now list each customer in the "group". The customers name appears like this: In addition, I linked the customers name directly through to the customers detail page (so I can easily see who has ordered what, how many times they've logged in, their address details and so on). This is now much more useful and less time-consuming to use!

Lack of Interaction - is AIS bad for your health ?

2006-03-09T23:11:00.000Z

Though working from a home office is nice, I've come to the conclusion that doing this is not what I need at the moment. For the last 5 years, I've basically been self employed (though I did sub-contract myself out for a couple of those years). What I've been striving for over the past 18 months or so is building enough streams of income to allow myself to take as much time out as I need and not lose income.

To test this, I have not done any work since approx 10/02; income has pretty much held steady at around $176 per day (across all my income streams). With this in mind, I'm pulling back a bit from AIS as this amount is more than enough to have fun with (consider I have no major outgoings); I've decided to offer on-site osCommerce training to companies in the UK. I'll probably do this 2 to 3 days a month, which should bring in a nice amount, but also, more importantly, get me out and about, making contacts and networking.

I already have my first gig booked for the end of March, 2 days intensive setting up a brand new osCommerce site and then 1 extra day providing training on the Admin section. It's kind of going back to what I did when I was working in a corporate environment (training & development), but mixed in with what I've learned during my self employment (how to build websites & ecommerce integration).

Should be interesting!

osCommerce Training in Edinburgh (or anywhere else in the UK)

2006-03-09T22:42:00.000Z

If anyone in the UK is looking for on-site training for anything osCommerce related, please feel free to email me on oscshops@gmail.com - my daily rates are very reasonable.

Wahey! Adsense Referral Payout

2006-03-09T09:56:00.000Z

I'm stoked - I just recevied my first $100 payout for an Adsense Referral. Many thanks to whoever it was that signed up using my link :) Thanks Google for the nice little bonus.

Keyword Avalanche

2006-03-08T22:49:00.000Z

I've just learned that the Keyword Avalanche Forum is re-opening it's doors. If you are at all interested in learning about entrepreneurship, marketing and such, then you need to join up. The main slant of the Forum is in creating "Adsense" sites, but the community there is (in the main) open to new ideas and processes. I often pick up tidbits of information that have helped my business. Link: Keyword Avalanche Hand on heart, I can tell you that if I was not a member of this forum I would have missed out on around $7000 of sales during the past 2 months. This is my top recommendation for anyone (whether experienced or not) to join a community that has no barriers to success.

My osCommerce Site has suddenly picked up...

2006-03-07T23:24:00.000Z

Burty, posting by the power of email :-)

Many of you will know that one of my longest serving and trusty AIS sites is my osCommerce Templates site at <a href=" www.oscommerce-templates.co.uk">osCommerce Templates</a> - over the last 18 months or so, sales have gone steadily downhill, this due to a couple of reasons:

1/ Template Monster started selling osCommerce designs.
2/ I withdrew from the osCommerce Community.

These two things combined have reduced my AIS income on my Templates sites from around $500 a month, to around $100 a month. However, over the last 6 weeks or so, there has been quite a turnaround, and I'm pleased to say that income from template sales on this particular site has risen back up to around $400 a month on average.

I do have a few resellers of my templates, but sales on this are very few and far between - I am considering closing the scheme down as it is just not bringing in sales. I'll have to ponder that a bit further, maybe set a minimum sales threshold every quarter or something.

Testing 123 - sent by email!

2006-03-06T09:37:00.000Z

As I'm not in the office for the next 2 weeks, I'm posting this via the power of email. It should show up as a post in my Blog.

Record Day for AIS in February

2006-03-03T23:05:00.000Z

I don't really update you all with my monthly stats anymore; however, I did promise to let you know of any particularly good days; On Feb 21st, I earned $834.06 for absolutely no work. A couple of template packs, a very nice affiliate commission, some adsense and a few sales of my latest script. I was hoping to break the 4 figure barrier, but fell short. If only every day was like this! To give this some perspective, 2 days before (19th) I earned just $25.46 (all adsense)...

A new addition to my portfolio

2006-03-02T14:56:00.000Z

Yesterday I purchased a website, which is another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that is my portfolio of web properties. It links in well with a few of my other AIS's and should raise a small amount of money each month. I paid over the odds really, but I can see some potential for the site. I already jigged the site a bit to provide better revenue streams and changed some licensing on the site to provide a better revenue model. Site: Easy Menu I also have a few other ideas for raising revenue from the site, but these are not really connected with the actual site itself...that probably doesn't make sense, but all will become clear as time goes on.

Looking to start an Empire ?

2006-03-02T00:03:00.000Z

If you are looking to start up an AIS Empire, look no further than Niche Sites Monthly. This is a new service started up by one of my online buddies - basically, you get 10 niche websites per month. There are many other places you can get "already made" sites from - indeed, I used to sell such sites at $49 each! With Niche Sites Monthly, you get 10 unique sites! The next buyer gets 10 sites on the same topic, but with a different website & different articles/text. And so on & forth. In effect, every customer gets similar (but different) sites - this means that no-one should get hammered by any duplicate content penalties. Of course, such a service is a real PITA to provide, but I am sure that Oli will rise to the challenge! For now, you can get the first 10 sites for just $30 ! Well worth looking at, I recommend this service highly - think of it as another arrow (or 10 arrows) with which to shoot at the Adsense Target! Link: Niche Sites Monthly

Good Year so far

2006-03-01T12:16:00.000Z

I didn't actually do much work for almost all of February. I still managed to some in at almost 167% of target. What that means is that the over-age in January and February will make up for any loss of income during March. Based on my daily target amount, I am 39 days ahead of myself - so I basically have a 39 day buffer => in plain english; I can earn nothing for the next 39 days and still be ahead of my daily (cumulative) target for this year. Can't be bad!

The Apprentice, Round 2 tonight

2006-03-01T12:09:00.000Z

BBC2, 9pm. So last week we lost Ben Stanberry - basically the guy didn't have the ability to lead his team. I was quite surprised that Alan Sugar had a downer on the women for getting free fruit and veg to resell - seems to me that that is a proven method of creating income for a lot of companies. On a side note, this blog is getting loads of search engines hits, from people looking for details about The Apprentice => The Apprentice Official Site

Taking a Break from Blogging

2006-02-13T13:48:00.000Z

I'm taking a break for a bit - unfortunately forced upon me as I'm a bit poorly (health) :( This is a good reason wy AIS sites are so good - they earn income even if the site owner is unavailable. So my income should stay somewhat steady even though I am not going to be working!

Apprentice UK - more info

2006-02-09T15:55:00.000Z

I found some more details: Ansell Henry Aged 34, is a Sales Manager and for Millwall Footballer... Benedict Stanberry 33. An IT consultant. more... Paul Tulip 26. A "head hunter". Samuel Judah 35. Martial Arts expert and product developer. Tuan Lee 27. Vietnamese refugee and financial adviser. I'm guessing not Tuan Lee, the famous poker player! Mani Sandler 39 & runs a speed dating business! Syed Ahmed 31. An entrepreneur. Loves to argue. Sounds familiar! An argumentative entrepreneur :-) Karen Bremner 34. A lawyer and mum of one. Jo Cameron 35. Single mum and ex Asda shelf stacker. Nargis Aga 38. Another single mum. A student. Michelle Dewberry 26, a telecoms consultant. Sharon McAlister 30. Mum of One - a lecturer. Ruth Badger 27 and a "sales boss". Alexa Tilley 28. Management Consultant. Cousin of comedian Matt Lucas.

Sounds like an interesting bunch!

Banned From Adwords. Yes. No. Dust?

2006-02-08T14:08:00.000Z

The other day I received an email from Google;

Thank you for advertising with Google AdWords. After reviewing your account, we have found that one or more of your ads or keywords does not meet our guidelines. You can see your disapproved ad(s), the reason for disapproval, and editorial suggestions, from the Disapproved Ads page within your account. Action taken: Suspended - Pending Revision Issue(s): Unacceptable Content SUGGESTIONS: -> Content: At this time, Google policy does not permit the advertisement of websites that contain "hacking or cracking". As noted in our advertising terms and conditions, we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when it comes to the advertising we accept on our site.

Seems like they decided my PLR Manna Tool is a "hacking or cracking" tool. I think these must be machine generated based on Keywords Used in your Adwords Ad. Anyway, I wrote back explaining that it basically merges text files together and can't be used for War Games or anything of that nature... A day or so later I received this:

Firstly I would like to assure you that I have reviewed your account and I have confirmed that your ad is now approved. Our AdWords Specialists review ads that run on Google to ensure that they comply with our advertising policies. I apologise if an error was made regarding the prior disapproval of your ad. However, after reviewing your ad again, our Specialists have found that your ad meets all our Editorial Guidelines and advertising policies. I am sorry that you have been inconvenienced due to the period when your ads stop running.

So, all is not lost - at least the Google Team respond swiftly when contacted - and it is nice to actually get a human email (rather than some rubbishy machine generated email á la eBay). So, be careful with your wording on Adverts!

New PLR Manna Tool Released

2006-02-07T14:31:00.000Z

I just this moment (14:30 UK time) set live a basic sales page which has details of a new tool that I paid to have coded. Let's see how long it takes to get the first sale...

New Product AIS started...

2006-02-06T15:17:00.000Z

Yesterday I set live a new product AIS. This one sells a graphic logo pack, it won;t do as well as the PLR Manna site that is for sure. I expect this one to be quite a slow burner - if it sells 1 product per month I will be happy. With this latest addition to my web properties, I now have five "product AIS" sites (in other words, the only form of monetization on them is sales of the product)... I have plans for another addition to my product AIS portfolio, but this will not be until March at the earliest, maybe even longer. In the meantime, my next project is going to be something linked to the PLR Manna site... But before all that, I have this week booked out with a client for a rework of an osCommerce site. Urgghhhh. Working is not great :( It's all go in world_of_burty !

Challenge Story: It's Mothers Day

2006-02-04T15:57:00.000Z

I earned 26cents on 30 Jan from one click! I guess Mothers Day wasn't the best choice of theme for a challenge ending in January! However, I'm happy. The visitors are starting to come and I've done very little to promote the site or get it indexed. It made me use my new web design software and I'm pleased with the site. Link: It's Mothers Day

Many thanks to Carol for sending in this short story! Hopefully Carol will be able to tell us more details soon...

Free Google Adwords...

2006-02-04T15:42:00.000Z

We'd like to give you a free £30 Google AdWords voucher for every one of your domains, so you can drive thousands more visitors to your websites by advertising on the world's leading search engine. With Google AdWords you can create high-profile adverts on Google and its partner sites, helping you to sell more products, attract new members and increase your audience. In fact, AdWords are so good at attracting the attention of surfers that Google normally requires payment for placing them! With your Google AdWords voucher though, you'll be able to create adverts to the tune of £30 absolutely free of charge.

If you register domains through Fasthosts (UK Reg), you can get £30 of free Adwords for every domain! I have about 100 such domains in my UK Reg Control Panel ! The only problem is that if you already have an Adwords Account, the voucher code is not recognised: BUM! The only way around this is to create a brand new Adwords Account for every Domain, which I just cannot be bothered to do. I may make a few, but certinaly not 100! They didn't think that one out to well - surely creating masses of Adwords accounts just creates "paperwork" for Google doesn't it ?

Challenge Story: The Green Belt

2006-02-04T09:10:00.000Z

I've never used Adsense as a means of generating revenue before, so this seemed the obvious choice to explore for the challenge. I didn't want to build another 'Asthma / Weight Loss / Credit Card' type site; I wanted something that could genuinely be useful to people, but also generate it's own content to a degree. I eventually decided to build a gig listings site, aiming to appeal to bands listing their shows and people searching for live entertainment in their area. The site is at www.thegreenbelt.co.uk. Bands can list their gigs automatically online, thereby building the useful content. Another potential source of income was as an affiliate for Ticketmaster - adding 'buy tickets now' links to gig listings, as well as sending mail-outs with new gig announcements and affiliate links to Ticketmaster. Unfortunately, the Ticketmaster affiliate set-up is dreadful and the site was only approved mid-way through January. Once approved, I couldn't figure out how to implement this, or even log in to the 'affliates area'. My intentions were good but unfortunately due to an unexpectantly heavy workload in other areas (and a crippling addiction to Su Doku) I was unable to promote the site as heavily as I would have liked. The site never really made an impact on the search engines, although a lot of pages were listed on Google - but seem to have been mysteriously dropped. Briefly the site was the number one result on Google for the term 'Drug-addled waster Pete Doherty', but I doubt this yielded much traffic, and is sadly no longer the case (being no1 on Google that is; Doherty is still a drug-addled waster). The main source of visitors was via a myspace.com profile I set up for the site, which brought 10 - 20 visitors to the site daily, but could have been vastly improved with a bit of promotion. At the end of the challenge www.thegreenbelt.co.uk had made the princely sum of 82 cents in adsense revenue - just about enough to buy a packet of crisps in the pub tonight. I do believe the idea has potential, especially with the Ticketmaster affiliation - it's just a case of knuckling down to it, which isn't easy when you have a 'proper' business to worry about. I intend to keep gradually improving and promoting the site, if nothing else as a means of pushing people onto my promotional sticker printing site, www.sticker-factory.co.uk.

Many thanks to Tim for his Story!

Challenge Story: PLR Manna

2006-02-03T09:37:00.000Z

About The Site: PLR Manna offers a desktop tool, coded in VB which allows people to add customised content to PLR (Private Label Rights) Articles. At the moment PLR Articles are all the rage in the Marketing World. The Idea: On one of the Forums I am on, someone was moaning about hundreds of people having the exact same articles to promote. They wanted a quick and easy way to change many articles at once. I started asking more questions and came up with an acorn of an idea – I freely posted my intention to have such a tool built. I then proceeded to gather more feedback and ideas from interested people. The Tool: I have no idea about coding in Visual Basic. I employed an online buddie to build me a tool, based on the ideas and feedback I had gathered. The original tool was very basic but over the course of 10 days or so, it has been transformed into a tool that does everything bar the washing up :) The Site: The site is based on a free design available from www.oswd.org – this took me around 10 minutes to change and build. The download system is linked to “Dotwidget” of which I already have a license (I use this on a number of sites linked to 1 central download area). It is simple to create a Paypal Button in Dotwidget, and it gives you a nice (but quite basic) interface to determine your sales levels... The Promotion: When the original version of the tool was ready, I posted into a couple of Forums that I am a member of – these are full of people who are on my wavelength when it comes to site building and tools thereof. I did not submit at all to any Search Engines. I do have an Adwords campaign running for this tool. One buyer mentioned another Forum that I was not aware of – I got in touch with the owner of that Forum who agreed to write a review of the tool for his members, on the basis that I would give a discounted price for his members. Here is what he wrote:

OK, I had a chance to review Gary's program, which is called PLR Manna (is that supposed to be Mania?) and I give it a big thumbs up when compared to Dr. Mani's program, both in productivity and price. There are a number of features that make this simple program a real gem. For starters, you can create as many header, middle and footer paragraphs as you want. You can build up a library of them over time and sense they are in your own words, you're not going to be reusing the same paragraphs as a few hundred or thousand other people as with Dr. Mani's system. Next, you can decide whether or not to include a header, middle or footer paragraph in each "batch" of articles you process. This gives you some added flexibility to avoid article "Footprints" with your paragraphs. Lastly, the one awesome feature this program has is you process entire directories full of articles rather than one at a time like Dr. Mani's system. You can little change hundreds of articles in a few seconds! In talking with Gary, he's offered a discount of 25% to our forum members - he needs to set up an order page though so hold off just a bit. The price is normally $50, but we can get it for $37.50 if I did the math right. Overall, for what it does and considering the price, time and effort to doing it through Dr. Mani's system, I'd say the PLR Manna beats everything else hands down. Now, I also have to throw in my two cents in regards to depending solely on this or similar programs. I still think the best long-term value of a PLR Article is to manually re-write it. But, I do understand that you're all mostly going to buy something to automate as much of it as you can, so if you do need to buy a program like this - buy Gary's! I can see it now - Gary is going to launch a whole new industry around PLR Paragraphs. Great job Gary - I'm impressed!

This person is very well known in Internet Marketing, so it was nice to get such a great review. The Sales: It took off quite well. Within an hour or two of my first message, I had a couple of sales. One buyer in particular was very helpful with feedback and ideas ( thanks Linda ! ) - this allowed me to go back to my programmer with some extra ideas for functionality. Over the 14 days that I was in the Challenge I sold 83 products for a total of $3875. Other Monetization: None. I never put Adsense or 3rd party adverts onto my Product AIS's. Summary: Since the challenge ended, I have gone on to make another 14 sales. I intend to put up the price of the tool within the next few days. Once I do that, I expect the tool to sell only 3 or 4 per month, but even so this is a great little AIS, with upsell opportunities (more on that to follow in the future). Though the earned figure is comparatively high, please bear in mind that my costs were also quite high. Link: PLR Manna

Challenge Story: Real Money Web Design

2006-02-01T15:41:00.000Z

The initial concept was to write an e-book titled "How to make real money as a web designer." I know a lot of people who do web design but barely make enough to make ends meet, so I figured, why not share some of my secrets? I work fulltime but do freelance on the side and make some serious extra $ doing it! I work smarter, not harder. Well, 24 pages into the book and Jan 1st rolls around. I KNEW it wouldn't be done in enough time to do anything with an AIS site. So I decided to turn my AIS into a blog (www.realmoneywebdesign.com) which dealt with the same topic but more informal... kindof like an adventure. The concept now was to develop a loyal reader base and at the end of the year (2006 and pending positive results and a high income) I would put the ebook up for sale on my site and hopefully, sell it to all my readers =) So where am I at now? Well, THE AIS itself made $0! Yup, Nada, zippo, zero! I promoted a book called "Don't make me think" through Amazon as an affiliate at one point (which is in fact a very good book!) but that didn't generate an income. However, sometimes things happen as a result of something indirectly! I started a different type of AIS. I built an ecomm site and have a 50% partnership in a company. I don't have to do a thing and we're registered resellers for some high end equipment by a twist of fate! Yesterday we sold a $10,000 printer. That's about $800 in my pocket for someone else selling it and having it ordered online. ALSO! I billed about $5k in freelance work this month. www.realmoneywebdesign.com forced me to keep the content fresh and the only way to do it was to do freelance work =) So! That said, I've got my fulltime job which pays very well, I made $800 off my e-comm AIS websites first sale AND about $5k of freelance web development/design. All as a direct "Side-effect" of my starting my Direct AIS challenge! My costs? $8 for a domain and my time. Thanks Gary!

Many thanks to Corby for his story. Though the actual AIS that Corby started did not take off too well, it led onto other things which have impacted Corby's bottom line. Nice one!

Just For Fun

2006-02-01T15:18:00.000Z

I will reveal what I earned on my Challenge Entry in a day or two. Just for fun, have a guess at what I earned. The nearest guess, without going over, will win a prize. 1 guess per person please... Not sure what the prize will be yet though...anyway, guess away!

Burts Challenge - The Results

2006-02-01T11:33:00.000Z

Over the next few days, the results of the challenge will trickle in. I'd like to take this opportunity to say well done to every entrant! Obviously the league table will change as more results come in... League Table: #1: PLR Manna $3875.00 #2: MP3 Extras $398.77 #3: Face Party Tips $180.33 #4: Niche Templates $147.30 #5: The Essay Guru $8.03 #6: The Green Belt $0.86 #7: It's Mothers Day $0.26 #8: Proxy Templates $0.00 =8: Real Money Web Design $0.00 Those who entered, but never responded afterwards: Feed Me Info World Cup 2006 Tickets The Online Info

Challenge Story: The Essay Guru

2006-02-01T10:30:00.000Z

Site The Essay Guru About the site Originally intended to sell a self-written e-book on essay-writing techniques, priced at £6.99 (approx $12). Realised that needed more information on site to draw visitors in so expanded with a series of articles (again self-penned) – thanks as usual to Gary for the idea. Also used this opportunity to add Adsense to the site to generate extra income. Investment Around £50 on hosting, domain and “Dotwidget for downloads” script. Income Adsense: $8.03. E-books sold: 0. Positives ~ Exciting to learn about generating income online and develop own site. ~ Potential for earnings to increase over time and supplement income from the full-time “day job” Negatives ~ Despite keyword-rich text and attempted SE optimisation, have struggled to attract visitors – still single figures most days. ~ Site is in Google but not for the key search phrases – sandbox issue? ~ Low Adsense earnings – though clicks seem to earn quite well so potential for decent return if can achieve traffic increase. ~ E-book took a fair amount of time and effort to write, so disappointing to receive no sales. Some thoughts ~ Been very busy (bought and moved house just before Christmas) so unable to work on promoting the site in appropriate places; perhaps need to work on this more. ~ Maybe need to look into specific opportunities for promoting the e-book. ~ Possible conflict between the aims of the site – partly for visitors to only stay briefly and then depart via the Adsense adverts, or do I want people to stay longer and think about buying the e-book? If the articles are really good then it might encourage people to buy the book, but then the Adsense income will drop (not that it’s huge now!) ~ Perhaps if lack of interest in e-book continues, I should scrap it and use the content (which is quite good I hope) to build up the size of the website and concentrate on Adsense. Overall Pleased to have taken part but the experiment has shown that this AIS thing isn’t as easy as some people may believe! Still, determined to stick with it and keep playing around with the site – I’ve got another 11 months till deciding whether to renew the hosting. Long-term aim is naturally – like every other online entrepreneur – to come up with the next million-dollar idea...

Well done to Tom. Though the site has not performed as Tom hoped, it's plain to see that some lessons have been learned for future AIS efforts!

January Round Up AIS

2006-02-01T08:23:00.000Z

I did pretty well in January. I had my highest Adsense month ever at a smidgeon under $1000. I also had some fun starting up a new AIS, which has done OK - more details to be revealed... Januarys Targets: 1/ Make at least 15 new AIS sites. Failed. I created 8 small AIS sites. 2/ Purchase another 20 Domain Names. Succeeded. I purchased about 25 Domain Names. 3/ Create an AIS for entry into my own Business Challenge Succeeded. My original idea was too much work to get started in such a short time-frame, so I opted for something else. More details to follow! 4/ Win my own Business Challenge! ???. To be determied after all the entrants have their story written up! Targets for February: 1/ Make at least 15 new sites. 2/ Register another 20 Domain Names. 3/ Create 1 large product AIS.

It took me a week of pure Bedlam

2006-01-31T12:20:00.000Z

Well, I'm feeling rather smug. Do you recall one of the pitchers on the latest series of Dragons Den was the Bedlam guy? I bought one; it took me a week, but I finally found one of the 19,000 odd combinations to solve it!

Burts Challenge - Final Day!

2006-01-31T11:44:00.000Z

6 weeks has gone by since the start of the challenge...today is the final day! It just seems like yesterday that I originally thought of the idea. I hope that all entrants have done as much as possible to get those sales/clicks flowing in - and I am looking forward to reading all about each entrants adventures over the next few days. As the results come in, I will post up a leaderboard, along with linkback to the entrants story. On the morning of Fenruary 5th, the leaderboard will tell it's own story - and the winner will be Paypal'd $100. I will also get someone else to pick a random entrant, this entrant will receive $25. Good Luck for today, and please get your stories written up ASAP! I can't wait to read them!

The Apprentice (UK version)

2006-01-30T17:39:00.000Z

A new series of The Apprentice (UK version with Alan Sugar) starts on Wednesday February 15th. Most likely BBC2 at 9pm. Before the series proper, there is a one-off documentary called "Tim's Story" which follows the fortunes of Tim (the last winner) over the course of his year with AMS...

PLR Manna Update

2006-01-30T13:04:00.000Z

I'm starting to see a few more links now from Blogs and Sites who have come across PLR Manna - it's getting some pretty decent reviews...just need to get some sales! I hope to make a couple more sales before the end of the Burts Challenge, as I really want to "win" it ! Link: PLR Manna

Burts Challenge - Final Stretch

2006-01-29T09:32:00.000Z

Burts Challenge is drawing to a close. Within the next few days everyone gets to find out who did what, who did best etc etc. For the 12 or entrants; now is the time to start thinking about your site write-up. You should include as much detail as possible so that we can all learn from each other, it is always great to read a personal story. The more we have to read, the better in my opinion! Possible inclusions: ~ how you thought of the idea ~ why that domain name ~ how you monetized the idea ~ and so on. Also of course: ~ high points ~ low points And not forgetting: ~ how much you earned! If you received Paypal payments we would like to see screenshots (blank out the payer name). If you used Adsense or any 3rd party adverts, we would like to see screenshots (make sure to blank out everything that is not allowed in the ToS). The Winners To stand a chance of winning, the following common sense "rules" apply: 1/ You must be truthful in your story. If you earned nothing, no-one will think any less of you - you were at least one of 12 or so who actually did something. 2/ You must finish up your story and have it online (at your blog, or at this blog if you wish) by February 4th. The Prizes 1/ Overall Winner receives $100 2/ A Randomly chosen entrant receives $25

I am looking forward to reading your stories! GOOD LUCK!

If any entrants have any questions, please feel free to email me: oscshops@gmail.com

Up The Robins

2006-01-28T11:25:00.000Z

Cheltenham Town FC play Newcastle this afternoon in the FA Cup. Cheltenham Town are one of my local clubs, so I am hoping for a giant-killing win...

Up The Robins!

PLR Articles - Make Content Unique

2006-01-27T19:24:00.000Z

PLR Articles are all the rage in the Internet Marketing World at the moment. You might not know what a PLR Article is, so I will try to explain; It's basically a text document (generally about a Niche Subject). Most PLR providers supply 200 to 250 such articles, usually spread across 10 different topics. You can rewrite, rebrand these articles and place them onto your (AIS) websites, or in eBooks etc etc. So what? Well, if you wanted to get 250 articles written, you'd either do it yourself (it would take hours!), or get a ghost writer to do it for you at $20 (or so) per article. You can see that this is uneconomical, both in time & expense. So, join a PLR site and get articles written once a month for a low-cost (generally between $25 and $100 per month). Is there a Downside? Well, truthfully, yes there is a downside. It may be that as many as 700 other people get exactly the same article pack as you do... You can imagine 700 sites with the same articles! Pretty pointless to do SEO on these... What's the way around this problem? It's pretty simple - you need to rewrite those articles! That'll take just as much time and effort as just writing them yourselves... The Alternative... There are a couple of products on the Market - the most (in)famous of which is something called "Make Content Unique". This tool allows you to change 1 article at a time, and each article takes around 3 to 4 minutes to split up, paste into an online form, then re-save onto your hard drive. Who wants to sit at their desk all day doing that? PLR Manna I'd like to introduce you to PLR Manna which is a tool that will scan an entire directory of PLR Articles and change them. You simply write a number of generic "headers", "middles" and "footers", then press "go". I changed over 1000 articles in less than 10 seconds! Some feedback about PLR Manna

Just a bit of feedback regarding this amazingly useful tool, in case you were on the fence about buying it. I have been using it for a few days now and cannot believe the difference it has made to my productivity.

I started off by adding a paragraph to them each by hand! As you can imagine that takes quite a bit of time and gets boring too. So now I'm happily spinning away headers and footers with webspinner and adding them with Garys tool - much less time and more fun too! Plus I am making my headers and footers specific to each site so now I can feel free to use the same article on multiple sites!

I keep laughing my tail off everytime I get an email mentioning his tool (Make Content Unique) because it's touted as the next best thing to changing your content (mind you I'm not dogging his application). I just chuckle because I know we have a better one here in the forum for a fraction of the cost but the marketing guru's have no clue.

Gary's PLR Manna is the Rolls Royce in the field right now.

So, there you have it - my introduction to PLR Manna. Put simply, it allows you to change the content of 100s or 1000s of Articles at lightning-fast speeds! I have a limited DEMO version available free of charge on the site so that you can get an idea of just how powerful my version of "Make Content Unique" is!

7pm CST today - Keyword Avalanche

2006-01-27T10:48:00.000Z

Slots open at 7PM CST today (friday). I am not sure what that is in UK time, probably around 1am tomorrow (saturday). If you are not a member of Keyword Avalanche, please consider joining - the benefits are worth ten times the monthly cost, in my opinion. Link: Keyword Avalanche If I was not a member of Keyword Avalanche, my monthly earning would be approximately 50% of what they are now! No BS - this really is a fantastic forum to be involved with.

Laptops Schmaptops

2006-01-26T20:19:00.000Z

Why on earth do purveyors of Laptops speak in riddles? I've been trying to find a laptop which will enable me to carry on my businesses when I am out of town. So this means getting a decent(ish) laptop which has wifi capability. So, I have a look in a couple of the local computer stores. Some spotty little 18 year old tries to sell me some Sony Vaio that I know I'll never get enough use out of to warrant spending so much money. I already told him I was after a laptop priced about £600(ish). He basically laughed at me. Me being Mr Middle-Aged Angry Old Man, had to count to 10 so that I did not end up clipping him about the ear. So, next up, I have a look on eBay. My god. There seem to be some sellers on there who are ultra dodgy. No feedback and selling £800 computers and laptops... So, the question. What Laptop should I buy for about less than £600 ($1100) or so. Answers on a postcard please!

Does Commission Drive Sales?

2006-01-25T16:09:00.000Z

So, you'll all have realised by now that I entered the Burts Challenge by having a product created which I am now selling via a website. Simple, so far. I have just one competitor, who launched a few days before I did. I spent too much time going over the details, gathering feedback and did not just get out there and "do it" as I normally do. The competition product sells for $197, which is due to increase to $297...he offers 50% commission. My product does a better job, much faster with more options and less hassle. And costs a lot, _lot_ less. Over the past few days, I've been contacting people who are in the affiliate marketing game to sell the product to their opt-in email lists and site/forum members. I sent around 25 to 30 emails to these people, and so far only one has replied. Basically his response was "wow! great tool - but I'd be missing out on $100 of commission if I sell yours; if you up the price I'll stop selling his and starting selling yours"...this kind of got me thinking - should the rate of return for an Affiliate determine whether or not he sells one product over another. In most cases, the answer is patently "yes", even though the superior (but cheaper, and consequently lower commission) tool would be better for his clients! I sincerely hope that I never start promoting products like this. I would rather say "this ABC product is crap, buy XYZ product instead" - even if it meant I earned no commission. Maybe, my view of the marketing world is not as cynical as these people yet. It appears that most marketers will do anyting it takes to get affiliate commissions, and that to me is wrong. Perhaps this harks back to my days as an offline salesman where the correct product had to be sold, or else we'd be fined for mis-selling.

Please, someone shoot me if I start promoting products based on rate of commission rather than what I believe will help you.

Of course, I could increase the product price to $197 and offer 50% commission, thereby matching my competitor - but I do not want to do that. That stinks :(

What Would YOU Have Done?

2006-01-24T10:12:00.000Z

The scenario You created a site for a challenge. The site sells a new product which saves peoples time and effort. The offer A person (no names mentioned, but quite well known in the Internet Marketing world) sees the site & buys the product. He then gets in touch and offers $7500 for the site and rights to the product. The dilemma Consider that the site has been up for only 40 hours at this point! To accept or not. Do you keep hold of the site and maintain your commitment to your own ideas and AIS success or do you sell out quickly and quietly? Reflection I know full well that this person could promote the site in his circles and because of his reputation sell probably many 1000s of the product. I cannot do that, as I do not mix in those same circles...I believe in myself & in AIS; hence my glass is always half-full. To get a good offer after less than 2 days of the site being live, must mean I am doing something right. The decision Though it would be a tidy profit, I turned the offer down. I believe I can make more (in the long run) by keeping the site and selling 2 or 3 products a week.

What would you have done?

Monthly Target Reached. Hurrah.

2006-01-24T09:37:00.000Z

Yesterday I reached my Monthly AIS target of $4247. So the next 8 days income (including today) is all gravy. Nice! Good job too, as I need to purchase a car and a laptop and pay for my vacation. Why do big expenses always come at the same time? My entry to the Burts Challenge is starting to pick up steam now as well, which is great. The product had a very good review from one of the leading Internet Marketers, so I am hoping for a few sales from that over the course of the next week or so...

osCommerce - a bit strange ?

2006-01-24T08:33:00.000Z

I've a client who needs quite a lot of osCommerce work done - I don't have the time to do it all, so I thought I would contact one of the osCommerce Team... The only two I would use are Mattice, and Christian Lescuyer. Anyway, I go to the Team Page at osCommerce to get the two email addresses that I need, to find that Mattice and Christian no longer appear to be Team Members! I can't access the Forum to find out why that is, but it seems strange to me. I'll try to find out more.

You Must Get In Quick - Articles

2006-01-23T18:24:00.000Z

Guys, I've just been made aware of We Deliver Articles which offers a monthly subscription to purchase a number of articles. If you are one of the first 100 buyers, you get in at a monthly rate of just $12.95 !!! I downloaded the articles this afternoon, and they are top quality. Articles include: Disneyland, Ski Vacations, eBay, Aspen Night Life & more! If you're running AIS sites, you need articles! The price is a no-brainer. Get in now, do not procrastinate on this offer. Link: We Deliver Articles

Any Polish speakers reading this?

2006-01-23T14:34:00.000Z

I've been wondering what this means: "Tylko najwyższa jakość". Any ideas? I managed to work out that Tylko means "only" or "merely", but the rest I cannot get... Cheers.

Graphics Tutorial - Metal Corners

2006-01-23T08:53:00.000Z

Super-Simple Metal Corners Graphics Tutorial. Courtesy of Sam, who is the proprietor of Hampton Smith Design Studio

Question Just wondering what would be the best way to create this "metal corner" effect... Step One Open a new photoshop document. Create a gradient top to bottom for the area you want the nav bar. Step Two With the same selection; 1. Create a new layer and fill it with black. 2. With the selection still active, choose Select > Modify > Contract and choose 1 pixel to contract the selection by. 3. Delete the area covered by the new selection; you should have a perfect 1 pixel stroke around the whole nav bar. 4. Use the single pixel column selection tool (click and hold the standard marquee tool in the toolbox to reveal this option). Add a single column to create the area you want to become the corner. 5. Fill it with black again. Step Three 1. Ctrl + Click the top layer to get back the selection (unless it's still active). 2. Fill with a diagonal gradient from white to light blue. 3. Add a new layer and stick a single column pixel immediately to the left of the side of the button to provide the shadow. 4. Add a further stroke around the whole thing behind the gradient to provide the bevel. Step Four Add text and enjoy! A nice and simple tutorial for creating good looking buttons! Many thanks to Sam. Good looking accessible website design from www.hampton-smith.com

Keyword Avalache slots available soon...

2006-01-22T10:27:00.000Z

Anyone interested in joining the Keyword Avalanche forum (which I *highly* recommend) might be interested to know that they will be opening their doors for a very few people to join up on Friday January 27th at 7pm (America Time). Last time they allowed about 30 people in, this time will most likely be about the same. The reason for the available slots: natural churn of members... OK, so why is Keyword Avalanche so good? For me it is access to the Forum which is full of knowledgable people ready to help out with any questions that are asked. There are more than a few "newbies" in there as well, but it's a real breath of fresh air...the Forum also has first access to many new products, sites and services, more often than not at a good discount. Keyword Avalanche also supply weekly keyword lists (hence the name) which are good, though I admit I have never used them. Worth joining? In my opinion, without a doubt, "yes"! Link: Keyword Avalanche

Burts Challenge - 10 days to go!

2006-01-22T10:11:00.000Z

As most readers know, I recently started a challenge to build and monetize a site; the winner being the one who made the most cash upto and including Jan 31...there is about 10 or 12 entrants. There's only 10 days left, which is not too late to enter. You will have given yourself a serious disadvantage though! First prize is $100. There is also a random prize of $25. During the past few days, I managed to get my site live, hurrah!. It wasn't my first choice of site, but the one I had in mind was simply too much work to get going in such a short time-frame...anyway, I'm doing OK so far :D Looking forward to the end of the month so that we can all read about the other entrants, and I will be able to reveal my new site and monetization efforts!

Don't Sell Information; Save My Time!

2006-01-21T09:52:00.000Z

Yesterday I had a short email conversation with someone about how to go forward with an AIS idea. As everyone knows, I can come up with ideas and angles that no-one else thinks of, my mind works in mysterious ways :) Sometimes it's just as easy to do what's very straightforward... The Idea My idea for this person was for him to sit down and create an eBook about where he lives (it's an exotic holiday destination). The eBook would have details of everything, from where to eat, how to dress, how to get from a 2 b, the local laws and so on. His response:

...I could see why you would think that’s a great idea but all that info is already well publicised and free...

Sure, that's a good reason, but not a good enough reason. We know that the *vast* majority of people searching for things on the net are not internet-savvy. They don't want to have to spend hours to find out stuff about XYZ. A simple eBook which gives all the info in one place will save them time. My reply:

...what every eBook seller does, is SAVE THE BUYERS TIME. If you put together an eBook with *everything* in it, I'll buy it - I'd rather spend £20 and get the info delivered to me, than spend even one hour hunting for stuff...

Don't sell a product; save the buyers time! Those just getting into this game need to know that you are not selling a product - what you are doing is saving time. ~ The time needed for John Smith to search out loads of sites about XYZ, the time to print it all of (buy my ebook instead) ~ The time needed to build an ecommerce website (buy my template instead) I'm sure you get the idea. Internet Savvy? Now, if you are reading this Blog, then you are most likely a fairly internet-savvy person. You probably have been online for a good few years, you probably know how to search out information quickly and easily. Forget all that. Put yourself into the shoes of someone who just bought their first computer - and angle your AIS towards them...

Flee the Cube

2006-01-20T15:56:00.000Z

I found another interesting blog: Flee the Cube Seems that this guy is in the same game as we are; entrepreneurship, adsense, product sites and so on. I've read the latest entries and it looks like a good one to bookmark!

Totally Dominate Adsense

2006-01-20T09:07:00.000Z

Here's another pack of Adsense Websites that I found whilst browsing. Looks like you get 59 adsense websites for $97. Please see my important note at the end of this message! Some of the marketing spiel from the sales page:

Earlier this year, I set up my first Adsense™ website. Although initially, that crappy little website only made me about $49 a month, I was fascinated that I was able to make this money without lifting a finger. So I started thinking, if just one crappy little site can earn me $49 a month, why couldn't 10 more pay me 10 times that? So I got busy building more sites. And a couple weeks later, I had over 50 websites running. Each of those sites paid me money without me having to do a single thing. My website traffic to those sites wasn't very good at first, so I implemented a few easy advertising techniques (included in this package). Within a few weeks, my sites were earning about $11 a piece, each day. As the weeks moved along, each site earned a little more and more each day. Now my sites each make around $22+ a day, which totals to a whopping $33,000 a month!

Link: Dominate Adsense Important Note; I have not purchased this product so I cannot give advice on whether it is any good. The link above is not an affiliate link. If anyone does purchase the pack, let us know what you think please.

PhDiva - archaeology at it's best

2006-01-19T23:39:00.000Z

If you know me of old, you'll know that I am really keen on archaeology - particularly Roman and Greek - I actually have A-Level archaeology, my thesis was on Pompeii and Herculaneum. Please keep that info to yourself though as people might think I've become a spotty oik student ;) Anyway, I was reading about the Elgin Marbles and came across a fantastic blog, PhDiva - the blog of Dorothy King, one of the foremost archaeologists in the world. Reading that blog will be my task for tomorrow :)

Laser-Targeted Traffic Using Overture

2006-01-19T10:12:00.000Z

In online marketing business like affiliate marketing, no traffic means no sales. That’s the reason why most affiliates or webmasters easily shell out even big bucks just to get top rankings on the search engines. Once you are promoting a product or service in you web page, you need to have more visitors that can be potential consumers to your products and services. This is one of the fundamental rules to succeed in online marketing business. Here, you just need to start and get it right and you can do some things wrong but still manage to succeed. Don’t ever try to get it wrong because no matter how hard you work, you can never find yourself on the way to success. I guess everyone will agree if I said that obtaining enough highly targeted traffic is the key to success in affiliate marketing business. This method is proven to be effective if you’re promoting or reselling product or service online. One of the best and most secured marketing strategies that affiliate marketers can employ is the strategy of paying for performance. This means that your investments are used only on results such as additional sales and incomes. Let’s take a practical example. Paying for performance could mean giving a commission to a sales person only when new sale is made. This strategy assures you real profit because you can already compute the amount money you have to spend for every new sale made. Also, you can avoid spending any marketing bucks because every cent you use up has either come from sale or will generate a sale in the future. And one of the proven and most efficient ways of acquiring sales in affiliate marketing business is by drawing laser-targeted traffic towards your web site and converting them to sales by means of “Pay-Per-Click” Search Engines (PPCSEs). Overture claims to be the Internet’s best pay-per-click search engine. It is the world’s leading resource of Pay-For-Performance search on the web. And what’s more enticing about Overture? When you advertise in Overture Premium Listings, your site will absolutely appear in the leading U.S. search engines like Yahoo, InfoSpace, MSN, Netscape, AltaVista, Lycos and more. Plus, you can get the benefit of reaching more than 80% of active Internet users. PPCSEs like Overture can bring impressive sales because they permit you to pay for performance by means of attracting precisely targeted traffic to your niche. And this means people or site visitors who are actively searching for what precisely you are offering or selling. Overture’s secret is to drive laser-targeted traffic to your website by proposing or bidding on keywords that are related to the product or services that you are offering. And this strategy works this way: the more exact the keyword is, the better results you’ll receive and the less you’ll have to spend for each new sale. Overture drives targeted traffic by keeping you away from the general keywords that are very common and usually come expensive and by casting a wide net of laser-focused keywords that are more targeted, not so expensive, and with high conversion rate. I’ll tell you, attracting laser-targeted traffic through Overture is nothing but a “Win-Win” Situation. Overture’s strategy also allows your visitors to respond. And what’s important once you get your visitors to respond? Well, you are given a chance to develop lifetime customers that will patronize your product and will buy from you over an over again. Bear in mind that one-time sales can’t be a key in creating a highly-profitable business especially online. You can only achieve this through PPCSEs like Overture, which gets your site visitors to respond. And once it happens, you can constantly market and sell your products to them. Another tactic that Overture uses in order to gain laser-targeted traffic is to have a “Back-Up Response” for those who “almost bought” your product on the first visit. To successfully realize this, you need to market and advertise to them over and over again until you make them a new customer. Offer them an incentive so that they’ll allow you to advertise to them over a certain time span by means of e-mail or post mail. Here are some of the back-up responses which you can use: send a free e-mail newsletter, give a free catalog and offer a promo or sweepstakes which gives them the chance to win free merchandise. Other things that will surely attract lifetime customers to your site are offering valued customer discounts, giving seasonal and special offers especially to your repeat customers and any other incentives to purchase. Don’t get me wrong with this; the abovementioned strategies can surely develop a trusted relationship between you and your customers. Aside from patronizing your products over their lifetime, they may even refer others to you or to your site. To sum up, one of the most effective and secured marketing strategies that any businessman can utilize particularly those who are involved in online marketing is the approach of only paying for performance. And one of the most helpful online strategies to create more sales is by pulling laser targeted traffic towards your website and converting them to sales by means of Pay-Per-Click Search Engines like Overture.

My Challenge Entry is live!

2006-01-18T22:28:00.000Z

I did not have the time to start up my original idea for entry to my own challenge, so came up with a new idea. I launched this at 10:25pm tonight (just a few moments ago). I will not provide any more detail on this until February 1st, when I hope to have made at least a little cash from this new AIS! Good luck to everyone else who is in the challenge!

AIS - misconceptions & advice

2006-01-18T08:37:00.000Z

Misconception #1 AIS sites have Google Adsense plastered all over them. Wrong! My most successful AIS sites have never had Adsense or any 3rd party advertising on them. Misconception #2 AIS sites need regular updating. Wrong! A true AIS site will never need updating. The A in AIS stands for Automated. Misconception #3 All AIS sites are "spam sites". Wrong! Can a site with links, content, products to sell, amazon, ebooks, further reading, etc etc be considered spam? If so then the Internet should not exist. Misconception #4 All AIS sites are created using Automatic Site Generators. Wrong! My top 4 AIS sites were hand built by me. Misconception #5 AIS sites earn money straightaway. Wrong! Any site, AIS or not, needs visitors - if you have no traffic, expect no income. Is AIS right for everyone? Of course not - some people just don't have any spark. But most people are able to run AIS, even if they don't yet know it. So you want to give AIS a go? 1/ Try not to listen to "glass half empty" people. 2/ Try to forge your own path rather than copy someone elses blueprint. 3/ Remember that AIS sites are just that - automated - once you get traffic. 4/ Don't get sucked into the hype that people come up with "I earn $30k a month so I'm better than you". Go with your gut feeling. 5/ Remember that AIS is not a quick fix to money problems - it will probably take many months to get to even $10 per day. How to build an AIS site 1/ Think of a problem. 2/ Come up with a solution. 3/ Sell the solution. Easy! Example Problem: some people suffer with terrible dandruff. Solution: have someone you know (or a friend of a friend) write down how to properly wash hair and treat scalp problems. Most good hairdressers know this, and everyone knows a hairdresser, surely. Now sell it: Speak to the hairdresser. Create an eBook. Create a site. Sell the eBook. Easy! YOU CAN DO IT. I know you can, you know you can. What is stopping you from creating your own AIS site within the next month? Most likely procrastination.

Forgot to mention about Rich

2006-01-17T12:26:00.000Z

After the hectic run-up to Xmas (I cannot imagine running a seasonal business!), Rich is now updating his blog again :) Link: Rich's Business Update

First $50 day yesterday :)

2006-01-17T09:38:00.000Z

Yesterday I earned $53.75 from Adsense. I recently made some subtle changes to my few websites and have started seeing immediate results. Consider that I still have only around 12 of these AIS-style sites (adsense, clickbank etc) and you can see that earning over $50 is quite an achievement. I also earned around $20 on clickbank and paydotcom products from these sites. Not bad! It doesn't seem so long ago that I put forward a challenge to myself to increase my Adsense from $1 a day to $5 a day. Within just a few months and with no extra sites this has now gone from $5 a day to $50 a day... figures don't include my other product AIS sites, the above figures are only from my "fire and forget" sites

1 or 2 ads instead of 4 ?

2006-01-16T08:43:00.000Z

Recently Google started serving up 1 or 2 ads instead of 4 in the 336 block - this is supposedly to increase CTR & revenue;

To increase monetization and improve the relevance of ads, we now vary the number of text ads that appear in an ad unit. When we determine that increasing the size of the most relevant ads will improve performance, we'll drop the lowest-performing ad or ads and expand the remaining ones to fill the entire unit. Showing fewer ads works to your advantage, allowing the better-performing ads to draw more user attention and click-throughs. Our system automatically determines the optimal number of ads to display in your ad units, in order to maximize click-throughs and revenue. All of our ad units function in this manner, and we don't offer the option of permanently forcing the maximum number of ads into an ad unit.

Should be interesting to find out what difference this new system makes - for me so far, earnings have been up while CTR is down. But we'll have to see how it goes long-term... You can read more about this at Jensense.

I found another interesting Blog...

2006-01-16T08:18:00.000Z

My name is BJ, and I'm self-employed. I run my offline business out of my home in Ontario, Canada. I'm also a Web publisher, affiliate marketer and blogger. For me, the ideal career has always been one in which I can play with different ideas. I think that's why I find my online adventures so exciting. Lots and lots of ideas, lots and lots of opportunities for creativity - and the ability to have almost instantaneous results. So you can hop on to the next idea, and the next, and the next ...

Link: Adventures in Net Marketing...

Mini Round Up

2006-01-15T10:48:00.000Z

I ended this last 7 days (8 Jan -> 14 Jan) just $18.60 short of my 7 day target. Bummer! The last 2 weeks have been good though, as I've been concentrating on getting my income to come from a number of sources, in other words, not putting all of my eggs into one basket. My aim for this week is to sort out my entry into my own challenge - as I already mentioned, I know exactly what I want to do, but it's going to take some time for me to actually do it. I'm thinking probably 4 days solid work...but this should give an ongoing AIS income of a couple hundred $ per month. I managed to get SkyPE onto my machine after a bit of trouble with it, I'm not really one for talking to others but decided it might be nice to start networking a little bit more (though I still have not managed to find time to speak to Yaro yet!)... I am thinking of re-designing this Blog after seeing what JC has done with his - I'm not sure I like the lurid green of this one any more...so you might see some subtle changes here soon.