Archive for April, 2006

Quality Freebies…

Thursday, April 20th, 2006

Hey, please throw a bookmark at this blog so that you can find it again easily, OK? I know you’ll want to come back often when you see the rest of this post… quality freebies that I’ve found for you! Check it out…

On this page… http://www.karenandalex.com/php_stuff/

…you’ll find a ton of great stuff by my friend Alex. He’s a bit of a legendary programmer and he said, “see all that stuff people are selling for $47/$67/$97 each, I’m just going to give it away. So you get access to these great tools…

» Affiliate Link Cloaker

» Email Address Cloaker

» HTML Encryptor

» Page Printing Preventer

» Redirect Maker

» Right Click Preventer

PLUS Alex’s own ebook, PC Security Secrets Revealed !

And all for nothing! :-)

Don’t forget… please bookmark this blog, or, if you’re very clever, add the RSS feed to your feed reader. Just don’t ask me for tech support about that! ;-)  

Child’s Play

Thursday, April 20th, 2006

Running an Internet business is easy… you just get your kids to do it all for you…

whos in charge

Click the graphic for a larger version.

…and you thought I ran this business? ;-)

933 hits since 1996!

Thursday, April 20th, 2006

I was trying to find out when my “10 years online” anniversary is. I know I first encountered the Internet in the summer of 1996 while working in a science lab in Chicago. The earliest online evidence I could find was the “last updated” date on my first ever website… a free one at Geocities.com (now part of Yahoo).

It takes a while to load the graphics, but here’s the archived page courtesy of the Internet Archive

Archived index page from my first site

Last updated October 1996!

Boy do I feel old! :-)

(hey, I just noticed that I had a working imagemap back in 1996… that’s hot!) ;-)

And check out the counter… only 933 hits since 1996! Can I claim the least visited decade-old-webpage award when October rolls around? LOL

Edit: My three other pages on that website were actually last updated August 4th 1996… so that’s older than the index page.

Archived older page from my first site

Coincidentally, that’s exactly 4 years before my son was born. :-)

Soooo… DOT EU anyone?

Thursday, April 20th, 2006

Since the .EU top level domain went live to the general public on 7th April to much fanfare and applause yawning, it has apparently overtaken dot BIZ total registrations. Wowee!

Let’s look at the stats… total registrations… dotBIZ 1.3 million… dotEU 1.4 million… dotCOM 51 million active and 120 million deleted!

Source: http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/ (although dotEU isn’t mentioned on that page… not sure why)

and: http://www.ipwalk.com/general/show_news/id/19 (the .EU data)

Looks like dotEU has a ways to go to become a big player. I’m technically in the EU, but why I’d want such a domain name extension I have no idea. Only 350,000 companies registered .EU during the sunrise period when they could claim “their” trademarked name with a .EU extension. By contrast, 800,000 registrations were taken in the first 24 hours of open launch… so… are we looking at purchases by domain name speculators and traders… I would guess yes…although who they’ll sell the domain names to is a mystery to me. :-)

Creating DVD’s

Thursday, April 20th, 2006

I’ve finally started backing up my camcorder tapes to DVD. I know, it’s taken me a while to enter the digital age. LOL

(Actually, I find it amusing that I’m so at-home with the Internet and all things Web-based, but can’t stand my mobile phone and have never sent a “text” in my life. Why is that?) :-)

So, people are creating DVD products and selling them as high-ticket info-products… so I thought that by learning how to back up my camcorder tapes and creating DVD’s I’d get a feel for the process. Well, adding titles and whizzy graphics was quite good fun, I admit…. but what’s with the time it takes to burn a DVD? I mean, wow!

All I want to do is create a DVD with about an hour of movie on it… it shouldn’t put my PC under much strain, right? Wrong. Even though it’s the newest PC I own, it’s been sitting there “encoding” for probably half an hour and it’s at 13%!

This is going to take forever!

(mental note: let an outsourcing company burn any DVD’s in any future products!)

(actually, I don’t do physical products… digital ones are so much easier… but I also never say never!) ;-)

Are you blacklisted?

Wednesday, April 19th, 2006

If your website is hosted on a shared server… meaning your domains are hosted on an IP address with lots of other domains, your domain could be on email blacklists without it being your fault. If someone else on the same IP address is spamming, all the domains on that IP address could be blacklisted. If you get on a blacklist it’s usually temporary… but it can make getting your emails delivered very problematical for a while. If you know the IP address of the server your domains are on you can plug it in at this website and see how much email volume that IP address is responsible for…

http://www.senderbase.org/ 

If the email volume is high, and you’re not sending most of it, I’d consider moving from a shared server to a dedicated server. In fact, I’ve been on a dedicated server for many years and there’s no way I’d consider sharing my IP address with anyone else… it’s like starting up a business without knowing the other businesses in your neighborhood… a bad idea online or offline!

Adsense Income Boost

Wednesday, April 19th, 2006

Many of you know I like earning passive income from Adsense. I’m totally in favor of making “hands free” money… in fact, it’s like the holy grail of making money… it’s how the very rich make money… they put their piles of cash to work for them and let their money earn interest payments on cash and dividend payments on shares… passive, hands-free income.

Most of us aren’t amazingly rich, so we need to find another way to earn “hands free” money… and Adsense is the best way I’ve found so far.

(”Adsense” is a Servicemark of Google. “Adsense” is the most well known example of what is more correctly called “contextual advertising”. But I’ve found that people only know what I’m talking about if I talk about “Adsense”, not “contextual advertising”!) :-)

Here’s a link to sign up for Adsense if you don’t have an account… it’s free…

OK, so I was making some money from Adsense on a few sites… one of which is quite a large directory site. It was basically neglected and just sitting there in Cyberspace, so I threw Adsense ads at it and was making a few dollars… it was fun… a small-time example of “hands free” income.

Then, at the beginning of this month, I used a few tricks to make better use of the Adsense ads… to try to get more clicks from the same number of visitors. I didn’t think the tricks would work very well… but they did! I used the “CPM” method to do a direct comparison of the amount of money I was earning per thousand page impressions… my small tweaks had DOUBLED the earnings per thousand page impressions. Basically, if the traffic stayed the same, I would earn double what I was earning before… each day… twice the amount of money.

Now this applies whether you’re earning $1 per day or $1,000 per day… if you double the CPM you have doubled the amount of money you earn per page impression and, if the traffic stays the same, you’ll double your monthly earnings!

What’s really interesting is that I did what I’d call some “basic tweaks”… nothing too clever and all totally legitimate. But today I was shown an advance preview of a series of movies created by a friend of mine who takes Adsense very seriously. He should, he’s earning $19,000+ per month from Adsense!

In his movies he shows how he uses really clever tweaks to maximize his CPM… and his stuff made my tweaks look like kindergarten playtime! This guy earns his $19,000+ per month from only 10 websites… so he must be getting the absolute maximum clicks from his site… and now I know why… his tweaks are bringing in clicks by the truckload!

OK, so I’d love to tell you where you can get these movies, but they’re not available yet… as soon as I can let you know, I will. Stay tuned to this blog!

Until then… I’m off to go and apply some of his “clever tweaks” and see if I can’t double my CPM again!

(by the way, these tweaks are totally legitimate and Google-friendly)

I wouldn’t normally post this… but…

Tuesday, April 18th, 2006

OK, so this is pretty cool… I got an email yesterday saying I’d earned some affiliate commissions and to expect a check. I got an email today from a different company saying I’d earned some other affiliate commissions and to expect their check. Take a look…

> Sent: 18 April 2006 17:49: Your latest commission check, as of 4/18/2006, has been calculated to total $1,767.63

> Sent: 17 April 2006 05:29: Your check for $1,767.15 for your completed sales is on its way.

How did they both come up with the same figure? Should I run out and buy a lottery ticket with those numbers? :-)

(Income figures are not representative of average earnings, etc etc etc)

When you build your lists to significant numbers, and treat the people on your lists well, you can do mailouts endorsing products and earn affiliate commissions on any sales. That’s how most of the top affiliates earn their large checks… by building lists and creating a great relationship with those lists. It’s hard work… but the payoff is in the commission checks and the knowledge that you can do a mailout at any time…

Get Your Free Link Here!

Tuesday, April 18th, 2006

In the last post I said I’d try to get this site to #1 for the phrase Neil Shearing.

So…. I was just doing some research… looking for my neilshearing.com site at Google.

I typed in Neil Shearing (without quotes) and I couldn’t find neilshearing.com in the search results of the first 13 pages! I know the site is listed because doing a search site:neilshearing.com brings it up. I wonder how far down in the listings it’s buried. :-)

So… I have a big task getting this site to #1 for searches for Neil Shearing. LOL. I could use a little help. :-)

If you’d like to link to this site using something like:

Visit *a href=”http://www.neilshearing.com”>Neil Shearing’s blog*/a>

…I’d really appreciate it! Just paste the code into a page of yours and replace the *’s with <’s

In return I’ll approve a comment from you (this thread only please) with your website address in it. :-)

Phew… that was tricky!

Tuesday, April 18th, 2006

Actually editing the name of the person doing the posts to this blog (from “admin” to “Neil Shearing”) was easy… it’s just a config setting in the blog admin area… no biggie. But actually making the name of the person appear on the page as having made the posts was tricky… I had to FTP into my server, navigate to the default theme directory and add a bit of PHP code to the index.php file. Hehe, I love mucking about with that kinda stuff. Even though I don’t consider myself much of a tech-head, you really have to be to get this stuff up and running… especially if you like customizing it. :-)

So, as I was saying, now “posted by Neil Shearing” appears underneath all the posts… boosting the keyword count of my most important keywords. One day this blog will rank at #1 for the phrase “Neil Shearing”… I hope! ;-)

Wordpress and SEO = more traffic!

Tuesday, April 18th, 2006

Ok, so traffic is very important. Without it you don’t have an online business. :-)

 I’m trying to set this blog up so that it gets maximum exposure for the keywords I’m interested in… namely “Neil Shearing” and, less importantly, other Internet Marketing related terms.

 I’m guessing other people have considered the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aspects of blogs, so I just plugged “Wordpress” and “SEO” into Google to get some tips…

Wordpress SEO

There’s a lot of quality information ranging from setting your trackback links correctly, your category names, your HTML headers and so on. If you’re considering starting a blog, be sure to do a few minutes on maximizing its SEO impact… it could pay off big time with better search engine placement and more traffic. :-)

Oh, and you’ll notice that I already link to my sites, products, services and freebies on the right hand side of the page… links are very important… especially when you control the anchor text (the clickable part).

edit: I just tried updating the name of the person making the posts from “admin” to “neil shearing”… to get another few instances of my top keywords on this page but broke the code. Hmmm… give me a few minutes. :-)

Blog Kickoff!

Tuesday, April 18th, 2006

Well I thought I’d make use of this domain name to host my own blog and let anyone who’s interested know what I’m doing on a regular basis.

This is a place for my articles, tips, hints and general thoughts. I will try to sort the useful from the ramblings… but make no promises. :-)

As someone who’s been making a full time living online for many years and has watched the Internet evolve while establishing and growing a business online, I hope to pass on some insights to those wanting to walk the same path…

…wanting to live a life based around commuting to your home office…

…wanting to work the hours you choose…

…wanting freedom from worrying about bills…

…wanting to spend lots of quality time with your wife and kids.

The path is a tricky one… but the rewards are fantastic. :-)