Linkersblog.com

Linkersblog looks like a quality webmaster related blog. The keyword here is quality as the articles, comments, ebooks and marketing on the site are far beyond the usual blog crap being spouted on Flippa. However there is a big question mark over traffic and revenue with little details given, which concerns me. Going off alexa is dangerous at best, but it does suggest decent traffic. Overall though not a bad looking business and I think anything under $800 would be a steal. I wouldn’t go above this amount unless more details about traffic and revenue are provided.

Fundrinkinggames.com

Fun Drinking Games is full of decent content on the subject and it is a severely under-monetized website. It has excellent Google rankings for very popular keywords and has a huge number of visitors as a result. The site would benefit greatly from a redesign in terms of aesthetics and monetisation, so some work would need to be put in. Again the sales listing is short on details but in this case I think it only helps reduce the final sales price for this gem. I think getting this site for anything under $3000 is a steal.

PHPBux.com

PHP Bux is a website selling another version of the very popular Paid-To-Click (PTC) script. Dependant on the quality of the script (I suggest you buy and test before buying the site) this is a rare opportunity to buy a real online business. PTC is huge with many new webmasters trying there hand so it would be an excellent market to enter into. I think they would benefit from making it a free script and adding some premium upgrades which would establish them as the #1 script in the industry. Obviously you would need to be a PHP developer or be able to employ one and the conversion rate of the product is somewhat a worry. Assuming the product is worth $35.50 as it has been priced I think $2000-$3000 is a very good price for the site. Having said that you will need another $2000-$3000 to develop and market the product properly and reach the sites full potential .

So there you have it my shortlist of quality sites available to buy. I will probably post similar opportunities whenever I find some worth posting. You may have noticed that none of these sites will sell in the low XXX range. Any site in the low XXX range generally is not worth buying because the amount of work needed to put into the site is similar to if you started the site from scratch. If you are thinking of buying a cheap site my advice is to save your money for a couple of months and buy something of real quality.

8. “We have no power”

Seems like a reasonable excuse to be late on a deadline. However apparently there was no power for 9 days, allowing 3 consecutive deadlines to be missed.

7. “My Grandma was sick”

Family is definitely more important than work. But you will see why this is a bad excuse soon.

6. “My Grandpa was sick”

This is the excuse I got a week after the one above from the same guy. Apparently his family get severely sick at close intervals or his imagination is just plain lacking.

5. “I thought you were going to email further instructions”

I had to look back at our past conversations to see the validity of this one. Unfortunately there was just no more instructions to be given. In fact the last sentence I wrote to them beforehand was “can’t wait to see your progress next time we talk”.

4. “The project is out of my league”

Surely you would be aware of this before accepting the terms of a project. Surely…anyone?

3 “My Internet connection is down”

Very possibly true, but has to be the most overused excuse on the Internet.

2 “I got injured in a fight, because someone was saying that you were not the best client going around”

OK this one never happened but if a designer told me this one I reckon I would let them off.

1 “I was working on another clients project”

Wow, thanks. Not only could you not perform the required work you manage to insult me by suggesting I am less worthy than your other clients.

Let me know some other excuses you have hard in the past. I would love to hear other great excuses and add them to this list.

So how did I fix it?

Well most of the advice was to use the more tag. But I couldn’t use the more tag because I had AdSense and images before the end of the first paragraph. Besides manual excerpts are not always just the first paragraph, they can be used to summarise or even advertise a post. Eventually I found a plugin that allows me to use the manual excerpt section again. The plugin is called Excerpt Editor and is fairly simple to use. Only thing was finding how to change the settings after activating the plugin. You can change the settings of the plugin under tools in your wp admin area, after you activate it.

The Facts

These are the facts and they are not being disputed. I left a cup (plastic) of water on my computer workstation after I had finished using the computer. My fiance later in the day accidentally knocked over the cup in question causing half a litre of water to spill off the workstation straight onto my box. As a result my power supply and video card were destroyed and needed replacement.

The Issue

Who’s fault is this? I am blaming my fiance and she is blaming me. I think its only fair we present our cases and let the readers decide.

My Argument

I was not even in the suburb when the tragedy occurred. How can I be held accountable? If perhaps my hyperactive 2 year old knocked it over I could accept some responsibility because he can hardly be blamed for being 2 years old. But any responsible adult should be fully aware of their surroundings and be careful around important and fragile pieces of equipment such as a computer. In the end the simple fact is that my fiance knocked over the water and killed our computer.

Her Argument

I should of not left a hazardous substance around the computer. She innocently knocked it over because she did not realize it was there. If I had not left the cup there the computer would still be fine.

My Rebuttal

Firstly the cup is bright red. Fairly hard to miss. Secondly if you blame me for leaving the water there than surely you can blame god for creating water in the first place. The argument is ridiculous, you would not blame a car dealer because you crashed the car on the grounds: no car, no crash.

Her Rebuttal

She doesn’t get one. This is my blog and one of the privileges is that I get the last word (I never said this would be a fair case). Besides her argument is totally flawed and I am 99.9% sure that I am right (god I hope she doesn’t read this).

Well I would like to hear your thoughts on this one (particularly if they side with me). Let us know what you think in the comments below.

What Is It?

A guest post is quite simply a post published on a blog written by another author for free. The blog gets unique quality content for free and the author gets related traffic, links and the post helps builds the authors credibility online.

The issues Related to It

Generally there are a few simple rules that need to be followed for guest authors to get their content published. The most important being, that the content is unique and will not be republished elsewhere. The second most important rule is that the article or post must be of high quality to be published. The last rule (similar to the first) is that the article should not be similar to another article recently published on the site.

For me the last two rules pose significant troubles. Whilst I believe my posts to be of the highest quality in terms of content, I am not oblivious to the fact that my use of the English language is less than desirable. Hopefully the quality of the information provided will be enough to hide the lack of quality evident in how the information is presented. The last rule is more of a random occurrence issue. I can only write on topics which I know and hope that something similar has not been published recently. Worse case scenario is whilst writing a quality post 2-3 days another post is published on the topic unbeknown to me.

My Experiment

Seeing as this will be my first guest post attempt I thought I would track my results via an experiment. The experiment will consist of two parts.

Part 1: Can I get my article published as a guest post at problogger.com?

Part 2: What gains in terms of traffic will I receiver for having my article published as a guest post at probogger.com?

Update: 30 Jan
So its taken me a few days to write the post. Admittedly I didn’t do anything on a couple of those days but from start to completion it took 4 days. I have contacted Darren at problogger.net to ask permission to guest post. I will now have to wait for a response. In my email to Darren I was personal and made comment that he is a fellow Australian blogger like myself. I’m not trying to be best friends but hopefully stand out enough from the other 1000 emails he would get so that he would give proper consideration to my post.

(’’)

As any professional athlete, businessman, investor or coach will attest, learning from your mistakes or failures is a critical component of ensuring future success. I have been online close to 6 years now and thought, a public display of the mistakes I have made as I endeavour to become a web entrepreneur will not only help me to grow, but such public humiliation may also help new webmasters avoid many of the mistakes that I have made in the past.

Reflecting on this list and publishing it, is highly embarrassing now that I view them from a different understanding. Logic should have been enough for me to avoid most of these mistakes, but being inexperienced, and impatient is a handicap that can be difficult to overcome. So without further ado here is the mistakes that have shaped my past and led me to where I am now online.

Surveys (do I even need to elaborate?)

The first money making venture most people will come across online is paid surveys. It all seems straight forward, big companies looking for market research paying regular people (like you and me) for their information. Unfortunately in my experience the whole industry is saturated with hyperbole. Yes, you can make money but the surveys a few and far between, they take a lot of time to fill out and the compensation is less than desirable. If indeed you think you have found some surveys that pay a decent amount, it usually involves you paying money for a guide, links or participation in those surveys. Nothing screams scam more than being asked to pay something upfront so that you can than earn money. Needless to say after several weeks, countless hours and almost zero income I gave up the surveys.

Logic dictates: Companies would not want anonymous, impersonal easy to scam surveys for their market research. They would be better placed to put their money into face to face surveys and reputable research companies instead of the anonymous world of internet users.

Ebooks

Whilst ebooks are starting to find a niche these days within the premium content they contain, in 2004, they were pretty much repackaged articles and of the low quality kind. There was really no value to them. However I could buy resale rights to ebook packages and then sell them individually. With no stock to manage and no additional cost it is easy to see how a naive entrepreneur was quickly sucked in. I bought a couple of the ebook packages and tried to sell them in forums, on ebay and through my own ebook website. I made probably enough sales to cover my cost and a little bit of profit, but when you factor in the time spent making those sales, it was another spectacular failure.

Logic Dictates: People will only buy something of value to them. If you can not fill a need or a want with a product that meets the individuals standards you will not be able to make a sale, and in the rare cases you do make a sale, there is less chance of making a repeat sale, which is significant if looking to make long term profits. Also when selling a product or service in an over-saturated market it is critical to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Ebay

OK my Ebay mistakes are due more to my incompetence then the auction giant itself, but I bet I’m not the only one who has made these mistakes. It usually always starts when experimenting with Ebay by selling the excess junk you have around the house. In my case it was old mobile phones and video games. Making a few hundred dollars out of junk you would otherwise throw out is a good feeling, so you continue to sell whatever you can find. Eventually however, you run out of your household junk and need to find more stuff to sell.

After running out of household items I began my search for more goods to sell and eventually I found out about dropshippers, companies who stock, package and post the goods for you so you can focus solely on the sales. Seemed like a perfect solution, but unfortunately it had more holes than the Green Bay Packers defense. Firstly dropshippers seem almost impossible to find. The only dropshippers with any credibility I could find charged prices which were comparable to the prices on ebay anyway. Anytime I found a reputable looking dropshipper with competitive prices I was required to pay for the privilege to sell their stock or worse for a list of contacts for dropshippers. Again this sounded like a scam and so I was left without any products to sell.

So with the dropshipper idea worse than Paris Hilton’s singing career, I tried buying in bulk and selling the products individually. I think I bought a bulk lot of DVD’s and was able to sell most of them. Unfortunately after accounting for ebay fees, the profit margins were small and I still had some leftover stock which I could not sell, so overall it was a fairly unsuccessful endeavour.

I had one more idea and it involved hitting up garage sales around the area every weekend and buying bargains which I could resell. This was actually fairly successful with most garage sales selling items way below their actual worth and for a couple of months I was making some nice profits. However getting up early every weekend was not my idea of being a web entrepreneur and keeping an eye on market values of products on ebay was becoming rather time consuming. Also I began playing sports on the weekend again and as such had to abandon this idea.

Logic Dictates: You need a reliable supplier (or supply) of a popular product, which you can get under market value. It would probably be best not to buy in bulk stock unless you have a plan to get rid of excess stock somehow. Ebay is very similar to a brick and mortar business and requires a lot of time, dedication and luck. The most important aspect is finding reliable suppliers which is something I definitely never achieved.

Pyramid type schemes

I should have been able to easily see through a pyramid scheme I know. But in effect it did actually sell a product and was more of an affiliate pyramid scheme. Essentially the scheme involved a 5 tier affiliate program where you sell .ws domain names. I probably could of been more successful if I had a website (and a list) at the time to help me sell the program, but alas I didn’t and so I tried to sell through ebay and ebooks. A few wasted weeks later I realised I would not see any success from this program and as such I cancelled it.

Logic Dictates: that pyramid schemes must have a large number of losers to have any big winners. The question to ask yourself is: are you at the pinnacle of the pyramid making all the money or are you at the base of the pyramid funding the people at the top?

Holiday Website

This project is still alive and may yet become a success but at this stage I think we can still call it a mistake. The idea was to sell advertising space on a holiday site specific to a destination, in this case Ulladulla (my home town). You can view the site here to see the idea. Traffic was good, rankings were good but unfortunately I needed to be more proactive in generating sales. I made a few sales on the site, but I think the potential was far greater than that. Most holiday websites these days are national generic ones where you search for individual locations and I think there is definitely a market for niche sites like mine.

Logic Dictates: That small businesses (particularly in small country towns) are less inclined to use online advertising models. They are even less inclined to seek out advertising opportunities and as an advertiser I should of been far more proactive (I might still).

Pagerank Domains (Selling Llinks)

After becoming more competent is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) I became aware of the value of relevant links on high pagerank (PR) sites. I thought if I had a number of high PR sites selling 10 links each at monthly rates I could make a living off of the links alone. Buying an established site was too expensive and creating more would take far too long, however I found out that you could buy high PR domains at a decent price. I was also somewhat aware of the risk of buying domains based on PR alone. However having no patience, I jumped straight in, buying up to 10 domains with PR, setting up simple blogs and trying to sell links.

Half the sites lost there PR within a couple of months, 3 lost PR and 2 remained constant. Of the 5 remaining PR websites, 3 became niche blogs related to their domain and the other 2 became bidding directories. One of the niche sites did quite well in the search engines and I sold it for $400 with some adsense revenue as well as selling some yearly links. Selling monthly links proved far more difficult than I had envisaged and so I began tying to recuperate funds by selling yearly links. The other two niche sites made a minimal profit as well after selling them. The two bidding directories were actually quite successful. I sold quite a few links and used this revenue proof to sell the sites at a very tidy profit.

Overall though, I would estimate that I broke even with my PR domain endeavours. That being said I was in the red for a long time while I added value to the sites so that I could sell them. Selling links on the sites was far more difficult than I estimated and far less lucrative. I would probably not recommend ever buying a domain name (as opposed to registering one) as search engines and visitors really do not pay much attention to the domain.

Logic Dictates: People don’t sell something that could easily make them more money. Any domain without content (website) is going to be punished by Google as it offers nothing to its visitors. There is merely a delay between the infringement and the punishment.

Website Marketplace

Without doubt my most disappointing mistake as well as my most costly. I tried to make a quality marketplace to buy and sell websites because I felt there was a gap in the niche with no easy search options for listed websites as well as no escrow payment options. I spent $5,000 and a better part of a year getting the site developed by foreign freelancers as well as creating a strong website flipping blog and getting first page rankings for buy website and sell website.

However the site had a few bugs in it and the quality of the scripting was generally very poor. In addition Sitepoint began rolling out changes eventually leading up to Flippa (which I think was somewhat a response to my marketplace) and I had run out of funds to properly launch the website. Despite the site being of high quality and countless hours of work involved I made a few key errors that caused its eventual demise. I later found a strong adaptable auction script for $500 which could of easily been customised to suit my needs and it would of save me $4000 as well as being more secure and taking far less time to develop. An extra $4000 to promote the site may of been the difference between success and failure. Another mistake was not being more knowledgeable about my subject matter. I had bought a couple of sites before I began the project but by no means was I an expert in the field and as the project evolved with my knowledge on the subject, my cost and time similarly were affected.

Logic Dictates: Most sites can be made from available scripts that can be customised to your needs. Usually it is far cheaper and far quicker than developing a script from scratch. Also when creating a marketplace you need to be able to quickly establish yourself amongst your competition with a number of both buyers and sellers to create activity within your site, so you will need a budget that can help you achieve this result.

Currently

I could almost make my entire living off of the internet. In fact I think if I chose that path and dedicated more time to my online activities that I would be able to live comfortably (not rich) from my internet businesses. However I think I will keep my day job if only for the social interaction I enjoy which is definitely one of the worse attributes faced by many a web entrepreneur.

Future

My next goal (amongst many) is to develop, promote and sell my own product aimed at webmasters. I have seen the amount of success many have made by selling their products through places such as clickbank and I have a few ideas of products that will fill certain needs many webmasters face.

Summary

I hope you have had a good laugh at my expense and also learnt a few things. I think I will write up a partner post in the near future something along the lines of “what I have learnt from my mistakes”, but for now all I want you to take a way from this article is that a god dose of logic and cynicism when making decisions online will often be enough for you to avoid making these types of mistakes.

Also I am looking forward to hearing some of the mistakes you guys have made. Get it off your chest, you will learn something, make others smile and feel better as a result. So if you have made a mistake (everyone) post a comment below.

I can’t be sure of the number of newsletter subscribers the site has, but the number of twitter followers tops 22,000, so they must be doing something right. They in the previous sentence refers to Lincoln Adams, the man responsible for the personal blog Habitation Of Justice. The blog is full of good content, however the content alone would not be responsible for the number of followers. I think the bait I mentioned above may play a part. However, it also seems Lincoln has done really well to create a community around his blog with several recurring commentors adding additional quality to each post which is something I as a blogger wish to replicate.

Generally it is regarded that the google adsense rectangular blocks have the highest CTR of all the adsense blocks. You have probably seen many blogs use them in the top left hand side of the articles aligned with the top of the article. But how exactly do you achieve this effect? Well its a fairly siple fix.

So here is the code

If you wanted to add a larger gap between the adsense and your text your code should look like this

So thats it. By adding the div code around your adsense script your page will look a little something like this:

META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”

The result of this new code was that google (and other search engines) stopped crawling my site and all external links form my site carried no SEO value. Obviously this was detrimental to the site and I needed to fix the issue immediately.

What I Did

So instead of dissecting the source of this new code I just jumped on in and tried to remove it. Here is a step by step guide of what I did wrong

1. Viewed the header file to remove the code. Could not find the code.
2. Added my own robots meta tag with index, follow. Needless to say that did not work.
3. Noticed a php wp_head in the header code. Tried to edit the file to no avail. (On a side note it took me a while to find the code, wp_head can be found at wp-includes > general-template.php > line 1132)
4. Luckily stumbled upon the solution in a forum

What Needed To Be Done

If I thought about this logically it would of only taken 2 minutes to fix. I should have asked why did the code suddenly appear? I recently reinstalled the newest version of wordpress. And what happens when you do that? It resets to its default settings. And what default setting affects search engine robots? The privacy settings.

So to solve this issue is an incredible simple fix. Go to Admin area > Settings > Privacy > select “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” > save. Problem solved.

I wrote this article to teach you two things. One was to show you how to remove this tag, META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” from your wordpress header. The other is a lesson in logical problem solvng. If I had taken a few minutes to consider the issue (particularly what could have caused it to begin with) logic would have led me the solution much faster and saved me a lot of time.

View the sales page here. Bookmarking Demon is a traffic and link building software that specifically targets a number of the social bookmarking websites. It allows you to bookmark your pages automatically using different logins, ip’s and on a large number of social sites generating a large number of links and traffic.

The Experiment

Well it may be slightly difficult to measure the results of this software. I am going to use the software on my finance site Big Loan Guide. I will monitor the serps and my analytics to see if any noticable changes occur after using the produt.

Start (Jan 1, 2010)

• Pagerank: 0
• Backlinks: 923
• Visitors via Social Sites: 0

The Verdict

Still Testing

The Score

Still Testing