You might remember way back at the end of Feb/early March, I started a project on RentACoder which subsequently went belly up due to the coder who was good at first turning out to be a bit naff and being unable to follow my instructions. The project went to arbitration and I have finally won and been awarded all my funds back ($500, so not a small amount!).

I’m trying to fathom what lessons I can learn from this. I think I did everything right when choosing the winning coder, but still ended up in a nightmare. What I might do differently next time (if there is a next time) on a project the size of this is set a number of milestones that have to be met in the course of the project. That way I have something to hold the coder to and would be able to cancel the project earlier if any of these deadlines were not met.

Anyway, onwards and upwards…!

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I know, no posts for over a month, very bad indeed! The reason? Well I didn’t actually do much for most of May and I was on holiday for a week too. Towards the end of May and the start of this month, I’ve got the motivation back though and have cracked on with a couple of projects. Offline, I’m still trying to buy a flat too (that’s only been going on since January!), so here’s a quick round-up of what I’ve been up to:

The RentACoder Project
This has gone a bit wrong unfortunately. I thought I had a good coder and he was good to start with but he kept doing things how he thought they should be, not how I specified. I made a mistake in that after the deadline had passed and it wasn’t complete, I should have cancelled the project and got my money back. Anyway, it’s now in arbitration. I’m sick of the project and just want to get my money out. The coder has until tomorrow to deliver or else forfeit. I hope the later will happen. If I end up having to pay for it, I will try and flip it ASAP to cover the costs and maybe a little profit.

New Project - Facebook Application
I bought a Nintendo Wii about a month ago (highly recommended btw!). Some of the games you can play online but your have to swap “Friend Codes” to do so. Anyway, I went on Facebook certain there would be an application already available to do this. And there were a few, but they were all out of date or had errors. So I set about coding up my own…it was a steep learning curve, but I managed to put something together in just over a week. In the week since I made it live, I’ve got over 100 users already which I’m quite pleased with and the feedback about it has been very positive. Of course, I’m now thinking of ways to monetize it!

Reality TV
For those of you who live in the UK, you probably know that the new series of Big Brother starts this week. I’ve been busy setting up a blog and a news aggregator to take full advantage of this and hopefully make some nice cash.

That’s all really - the Facebook app has been the most pleasing of all this as it was quite a challenge even though it hasn’t made me any money yet!

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Well, as you may have gathered, I haven’t had much to blog about recently. In fact, a lot of the blogs I read seem to have gone quiet too except for the recent excitement over the AdSense Secrets alleged scam. The reason I haven’t had anything to blog about is because I haven’t been doing anything particularly new - a lot of my current projects are still work in progress:

The site I’m having done at RentACoder isn’t going particularly well and I’m close to cancelling that.

The site I’m doing for a colleague at work is going very slowly as it’s turned out to be a bigger job than I thought. Turns out that the membership script I bought is appaulingly badly scripted and I’ve had to totally re-write parts of it. Unfortunately this was the lesser of two evils - the other being write the script from scratch myself! Anyway, that is nearly done now, and it’s working quite nicely.

The adult niche site I set up in Feb continues to go from strength to strength with over £275 earned this month. I really can’t believe the success I’m having from this! I’m now trying to rinse & repeat this on another niche to see if I have similar success and, to that end, put a new site live earlier this week.

The niche site giveaway experiment was a success. Certainly a lot of people downloaded the free site and we covered our costs by up-selling the article packs. Next stop on that route is to repeat the formula but try to sell the niche site rather than give it away!

In the offline world, my flat purchase still hasn’t happened and I’m getting more and more frustrated by the day…!

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It’s sometimes funny how an innocuous blog post about one thing can spark off a series of interesting comments about a related topic. Burt’s post about being busy did just that with some interesting comments about peoples’ motivation.

This got me thinking about what makes me come home from a day working in front of a computer…and spend more hours working in front of a computer!

My motivation is three fold:

1. Money - the extra income I earn from the online world enables me to live a more comfortable lifestyle with a few extra luxuries - to indulge in my hobbies (snowboarding & mountain biking) and to buy more gadgets & clothes than I otherwise would be able to.
2. Knowledge - I enjoy learning new things and there’s always something new to learn whether it be PHP, SQL or CSS etc. 
3. Challenge - similar to knowledge, I enjoy figuring out solutions to problems and get satisfaction from getting a site to do exactly what I want it to do.
4. Ego (wasn’t sure what to call this one!) - I get a bit of a kick from creating a site, publishing it on the web and then seeing how popular it becomes. It’s also a sort of culmination of gaining the knowledge and overcoming the challenge which ultimately leading to making some money.

However, sometimes even these aren’t enough, and I do just come home, sit in front of the TV and not even turn the computer on (or just go to the pub!). Remember, for me, this is extra income - I’m not relying on it to pay the bills or to buy my food which I suspect gives you that extra kick if you are full-time self-employed.

That’s just me though - it’s always interesting to hear why other people are doing it and what keeps them going - what are your motivators?

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Well still nothing too exciting to report from me - I’m still going through a period of creating new sites.

The big site I’m having done at RentACoder is coming on nicely but still a couple of weeks from completion.

The tipsters venture is going at a snails pace, largely because my first customer still hasn’t chosen a domain name, although I have been developing the nuts and bolts of the site locally. Off the back of this, I also have a second customer lined up who wants their own tipping site. The idea is to simply offer him the same site with different graphics etc - nice and easy! Both of these will be run on a revenue share basis.

The new site I put up last month has now made over £110 ($220) this month, which has massively exceeded my expectations. When I get some spare time, I’m going to try to find some similar products to repeat this formula on.

Finally, in conjunction with an old online friend, I’ve knocked up a little niche site based around a few unique articles she had written. We are going to give this away to our mailing list for free, with a small up-sell of some extra unique articles on the same topic. Depending on how this is received, we may do a similar thing on some other topics, perhaps changing for the initial site too with a limited number of copies for sale. It’s a bit of an experiment, but also a thank you to our mailing list, so we’ll see how it goes.

Offline, my flat purchase has been delayed again, very frustrating indeed

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Apologies for the lack of updates this week; I work in the betting industry and this week it has been the Cheltenham Festival - the biggest week of the year for the industry with predictions of £600m+ in turnover ($1.2bn) across the 4 days - so things have been somewhat busy in the offline world. I’m also in the process of buying a flat so that is taking up any spare time (and money!).

Anyway, on the online front, here’s a quick summary of what’s going on…

• The new site I launched almost a month ago is starting to make money. I was beginning to think it was a dead dog, but it’s suddenly started earning with £55 ($110) made in affiliate sales in the past 4 days. All visitors are from an AdWords campaign with an Avg CPC of 2p. I’ve had 45 clicks costing me 84p ($1.68) so a very nice return so far!
• The site I had an idea for and then comissioned through RentACoder is chugging along and seems to be going ok. Following my Top 10 Tips for Buyers on RentACoder has paid off as I seem to have a decent coder.
• New site - I’ve got an idea for a new site which I hope to finish this week. It’s in a very competetive market and, again, UK focused but I think I have a unique slant on it. The idea is to code a “wizard” type site where users can enter some details and it will choose the right product for them (to buy through an affiliate link of course!). I hope to get this finished by next weekend.

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Don’t get me wrong, I love Text Link Ads (TLA), how easy they are to use, the money I make from them each month and their excellent support. It’s a great way to monetize a website. BUT! It still irks me that they take a whopping 50% of every sale. It also annoys me that you have no say over what price your links sell for.

This got me thinking that maybe I could sell links directly off my websites…so I tried doing just that!

(more…)

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After a year or so having a bit of a break from the whole niche/internet marketing world, I’m back and trying to catch up on developments in that time.

What’s new?

• Keyword Avalanche has become Niche Rockets and the monthly membership is a massive $147.77 per month. Wow! Now, I do recommend this site but not at this price. It is the only monthly membership I currently hold though and I’m keeping my membership though because the forum is useful and they do provide a decent amount of content each month. Fortunately for you guys, you can try before you buy, plus get a discount on the monthly membership:

Niche Rockets $1 7-day trial & $50 off the monthly price thereafter [aff]

• There seems to have been some kind of storm about selling links on web sites which I’ve totally missed. From what I can gather, nobody really knows if it’s ok to sell links using TLA anymore or what effect it has on your rankings/pagerank? Can anyone update me on this?!
• “Web 2.0 properties” seems to be the current buzz phrase
• Videos are all the rage

What’s the same?

• Good one-way links are still important
• Content is still king
• Article marketing still works to some extent
• “Gurus” still don’t actually tell you how to make money
• Stupid prices are still fashionable (see $147.77 above)

Anyone have anything to add to these lists?

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