This is the invisible line of running a website putting advertising on it. Its’ the line that has never been clearly defined and it moves everyday, how much advertising is too much. So one of my first actions was to take down Kontera, it was just a few bucks a day so it wouldn’t affect my master plan too much… yet the weeks after, I kept seeing the message don’t put all your eggs in one basket… and I’ve preached it in the past as well.

The Solution

Pretty simple actually, I’ve took some time to analyize the Kontera and how it works, and came up with the conclusion that it works really for new users… as soon as people hover or click the links they realize that they just clicked on an ad, which is not bad but for returning users this just becomes one big eye sore on the website with having these double underlined links all over the content they’re trying to read.

Cookies, yes you gotta love cookies The basic idea behind this is you serve the Kontera ads only for the first time someone visits your site, they might click on a link or not, but after that pageview they never see them again. I’ll probably tweak this to serve those links maybe every nTh page view for users that are on the site for the first time.

Effects?

What happened to the earnings you may ask? Well they haven’t droped much, which in turn proves what I’ve stated before that mostly first time users are clicking on those ads, anyway it’s a great way to ad another avenue to making money online. Give it a try.

If you haven’t signed up for Kontera do it today, you don’t want to get stuck when google might ban your site from adsense.

There was a major redesign of the UI, you could say it’s a brand new site. However on top of that I’ve been able to recode the entire backend templating system of wordpress. What I’ve done is build the entire system in OO PHP Classes which makes the code so much easier to read and much more organized. It allows me to easily add new additions to the system much faster then before.

I’ve also implemented a big bridge between wordpress and vBulletin which works quite well right now. Over the next few months I want to refactor the code a bit more and deploy it on my other site, and who knows maybe in the future release it to the public.

Other then that I’ve started a new job at JumpTV which is an IPTV company and everything is going great, just busy busy busy. Some other projects I’m working right now are pretty cool. One will be a wordpress tool I’m hoping to be able to sell a subscription for, it will be a linking strategy system for your blog, more on that in the coming weeks.

I’ve also started a new project to create a service that’s really needed, again I don’t want to disclose too much but I’m really excited about it. Both projects are pretty simple, I hope they stay this way. Hopefully I’ll have something to show before the end of the summer.

I know I keep making these promises but I’m going to really try to post more regularly, we’ll see how it goes.

When you invest the time to learn SEO you quickly learn that content is king and really the best thing for your website long term is to focus on content alone. Here are some quick tips on SEO:

I’ve been working for seven years right out of school and only for the past year I’ve really started looking at how to make money online, by using your own projects.

One of the biggest achievements I’ve accomplished to date was buying my first condo. I was 24 and after losing quite a bit of money on the stock market I finally decided to put my money into good use and buy my first home. The first step was getting an agent, they make sure you get out there and actually start looking J. I found a great condo that was on the market for 1 day.. a penthouse suite with an amazing unobstructed view of the lake. It’s small but the price was right. I purchased the condo for 189,000, that was over three years ago.

The condo market here in Toronto has been red hot, which is great but I wasn’t looking at flipping, I’m in it for the long run. See there is a few ways to look at a mortgage payment and I look at it this way… I used to spend $700 on rent plus utilities, when I got my new place it was going to cost me $1400 with maintenance. The way I see it is, I’m paying myself about $300 a month that’s the principal amount. So my cost goes down to $1100. Now I also got a bunch of great amenities and the luxury of living in a penthouse suite, not bad. So there is a little bit of a difference but not much, easily I adjusted to the new hike in my living expenses. See the brilliant thing about this is, just a few months ago I got an estimate on the value of my property and it’s valued at around 250,000. That’s about a 33% jump in my equity in just over 3 years, divide that into 3 years invested and each year I’ve made a potential additional income of $20,000. Now that’s what I call a sweet deal.

Anyway I’ve moved out of my place about a year and a half ago to move in with my girlfriend and we purchased a new place just a few months ago. It’s on Yonge St. right in the middle of downtown with an amazing view facing east on the 33^rd floor. My other place I rented out and it’s currently covering itself… meanwhile my equity keeps going out.

Want to know another big tip? Here it is… compared to New York and Vancouver, Toronto’s housing prices are currently considered BARGAIN prices!!!! Toronto is exploding, there is 100,000 new people moving into Toronto each year, and it’s the biggest city in Canada. The potential for prices to keep going has never been stronger.

I’m hoping that we’ll be able to buy a new place once every 3-4 years and keep going. I like to think at it this way… every time you buy a new place it’s like you’re getting a new partime job. Think about it… you invest 20-30k to buy a new place… rent it out and within two years you get all of your investment back and your equity goes up. You keep doing this over and over and as long as you plan thing properly there is no reason that by the time you’re hitting 40, you don’t own 4-5 properties. It’s that simple, again when trying to make money look at where you’re spending it first.

I recently moved and just got cable installed today, it’s costing me $50 a month… what am I paying for? well basically 20 minutes of commercials per hour and other promotions within the actual shows.

Why did I get cable?

Well, I love basketball and need to watch it live and shows like HGTV (my GF )haven’t fully made it torrents yet. Ahh, Torrents… one of the most amazing inventions since probably the internet revolution. See pirating has always been there… it’s been there in the early 90s when you could download games off BBSs and it’s been there when you could download tiny files called MP3s through MIRC way before Napster. It’s just now though that the general public is getting their hands on the nice and easy to use tools to let them “borrow” content off the net.

The future Now?

In a way the future is here… here is a perfect example.. couple of weeks ago when I still had analog cable the new Heroes episode stared airing but I couldn’t watch it right then. So I turned on my Windows Media Center in Vista to record the show right off cable… about an hour and a half later I came back and started watching it… picture quality wasn’t great (analog cable) plus all the commercials were kind of annoying… meanwhile uTorrent blip appeared which stated that the new episode of Heroes just started downloading… so I stopped watching the crappy cable copy… waited about 20 mins and I had the same episode on my computer. Here is a little comparison.

Cable

Torrent

See, most people aren’t at this level yet but it’s easy enough to setup that all the shows you watch you have uTorrent watch for in the RSS feeds and you’ve got great quality content without wasting time on commercials or being glued to the tv. Now yes there are other solutions like PVRs but you still have to pay the big bucks for content you mostly don’t watch… and what you do you have to be inconvenienced by commercials.

Movie are another big area where most of the bandwidth is being used up by… do you know why? Shitty Hollywood movies. Coming from a semi-film education I have an idea what goes on behind the scenes with script writing. Hollywood has this very child like behavior of banging it head against a wall until after they’ve totally killed any given genre and then they move on to the next one. In the 80s it was the Horrors, now it’s the comic book heroes… just think of how many truly great movies have come out in the past few years… not many… why was The Matrix so popular? It was different… there are so many great stories out there waiting to be told but nobody gives those stories a chance…instead they go and make American Pie 4… this is why I among thousands of other people on the net will not go and spend tons of money on cookie cutter movies for $15 a movie.

Anyway that’s one big rant off to bed now. Have a great night.

In the past few weeks I’ve had a lot happen, we recently purchased a new condo… so with that came a move, we just finished moving last weekend. I’ve also accepted a new position as a Sr. UI Developer as JumpTV. This after working at my company for seven years, so it’s going to be quite a change for me. I’ve also had a bit of an incident playing basketball and I’ve been seeing dentist left and right trying to figure out how to fix my teeth for less then 10,000… but that’s here or there.

So back to the subject at hand… why do I blog. As you can see I don’t blog much but I hope I can change this.

This is when aboutmyplanet.com was launched. It was originally supposed to be a website that talks about alternative energy, UFOs and other weird stuff. I got three other friends interested who also listened to the show, however after the initial interest they never ended up contributing much to the website. Again the word DEDICATION just jumps out at me.

So anyway, having a good background in design and development I chose wordpress and designed my first theme. Got the website launched just a couple of weeks later. Now what… I’m not a writer… so not knowing much about SEO, marketing or anything to do with SEM I stared looking at cool articles and copied and pasted them into my own site… (remember this was over a year ago when I had ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE to what I was doing). So here I am with a few cool articles and a neat site, and no visitors.

Luckily for me, social sites were just really starting to take off and doing really well… and you didn’t hear much about gaming systems or using using social sites to do SEM (Search Engine Marketing)… so being a big fan of digg I started posting my cool articles on digg… and viola I managed to get to the front of digg a few times… each time I would get 20,000-30,000 visitors… not bad I was on top of the world. That’s until people started to really abuse the systems and they cranked the screws on anyone submitting the own articles… so that lasted about 3 months.

In the next post I’ll try and put up some graphs of those days and illustrate how digg traffic can affect your site and how “borrowing” articles fits into launching your own website.