There is a relatively new person on twitter that I started following because of a recommendation from a Twitter Friend (@lolaaugustine) who I have been following her since I got onto this Twitter thing.  When I visited this new person’s profile earlier this week I noticed one of the SPAMMER warnings that jump right out at me.  She had been using an ow.ly shortened URL as her profile, not as bad as bit.ly, but still made me cringe.

I have noticed that most of the people using a shortening service like ow.ly or bit.ly on their Profile link to trick you into clicking it and then signing up for something.  It happens enough that people like me, and a lot of people I know on Twitter, will simply not follow you if see that.  I brought this up at a Tweetup once and there were a number of people at the table that said they will automatically block them without a second thought.

Now how to fix it

If you are one of the culprits and don’t even realize it.  Maybe a friend set up your account for you, well it is easy to fix.

A couple of other blogs that I have in my reader do a weekly link dump of sorts.  Gala Darling does – Things I Love Thursday, Dr Pauly does various Link Dumps, and there are a few others that I can’t think of right now.  Now I am going to have my own Karma Friday where I will be pointing out the cool or important posts that I come across during the week.

• Clickbank Case Study – Clickbank is not something that I have had a lot of luck with over the years, but maybe it is time that I take a simple approach to it and see where it takes me.  Dan Walker did a very simple Case Study that started me thing that maybe it was me and not them

So after just over a week, I’ve earned $100 from a spend of $55, an ROI of nearly 100%. So how did I turn $55 into $100 with literally half an hours work a week. Schimples.

• Top 5 Crucial Internet Marketing Tips for 2010 – This is from Winning the Web, I am not sure if I agree completely that the longer you wait the harder it is going to be start making big money online.  Maybe it will be harder the way that people do it today, but that is similar to saying that it is getting harder to start any business.  The fact is that it is not easy no matter when you start, and if you do it right anyone with a good idea will be able to profit from it.

The most important thing is to keep hustling and working smart in the new year to see success. Consistency and persistence are always rewarded.

• How Graywolf manages a Wordpress Site – This is a great post for everyone, I have bookmarked it to read again later when I have more time.  Rather than use Thesis for my theme framework I like to use Genesis.  The community is not as large for the child themes but Studiopress is a great little company that has been doing good things.

Why Wordpress and not another CMS? It’s easier to administer, easier to get writers to upload and format their own content, and it has RSS and other social tools built in or that can be integrated very easily with plugins.

If you have link/tweet that you think I would like be sure to let me know.  The easiest way for it not to get lost in the shuffle is to tweet me at The_Bluenoser but if you are not on the Twitter drop me a line using the Contact Form.  I love to hear from you…..

Cheers,

Jeff M

One of the things that I am going to be doing on this site is monthly updates on the backend of the blog.  It is in these posts that I will be talking about the plugins that I have installed, explain why I have each installed, any tweaks to the site that I may make.

I have a rather selfish reason to be doing this.  I have a habit of continously tweaking a site and not really keeping track.  By documenting everything that I do it will both slow me down, and teach you on what works and what doesn’t and more importantly why.

Since I just completed a major overhaul of the site and have moved hosts this post will not cover everything.  In subsequent Blog Updates I will do reviews of the plugins and talk about the advantages and disadvantages of them.

I am also thinking about a permanent blog brand that I will be developing over the next 6 months.  At the end of this time I will have a new theme designed that will work on top of the framework theme that I have installed now.

The Host:

Well I moved the site from my old host to ThisWebHost. I yelled out to Twitter and a couple of my followers suggested them. I have read as much as I could online about them and they seem to be an up and comer that is either going to grow huge or get bought up by one of the current big players.

I bought the smallest account that they have for this blog for now.  It is just a tester and if I like what I see then I will be buying larger accounts from them and moving my other sites.  This is not an insignifcant task, so I want to be sure that it is the right move so that I won’t have to do it again for a long while.

The Plugins:

• Akismet
• Google Sitemaps
• WordPress Mobile Edition
• WP Super Cache
• OIOpublisher Direct 2.0
• Pretty Link
• Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form
• Feedburner Feed Replacement
• Google Analytics for WordPress
• Twitter Widget Pro

So these are the plugins that I have installed and activated right now, a lot of them are self-explanatory for anyone that has been around Wordpress for a while, but they are all very basic and with the exception of OIOPublisher and WP Super Cache.  However not all of them need to be installed on every blog, in fact the only plugins that I install on all of my sites are the first 4.  These I will give a little more explanation.

Akismet:

Akismet is a comment spam plugin that comes right from the makers of Wordpress.  When it is installed it takes a look at every comment that someone makes on your site, compares it to a hug DB of comments, IPs, emails, etc and decides whether or not that comment is worthy on your site.

This plugin will save you hours of maintainence on your blog when you are approving comments.

Google Sitemaps:

This plugin is relatively self explanatory, what it does is create a Google friendly sitemap of your site that you can submit to Google using their webmaster tools.  It helps Google with finding the relevant information on your site and indexing what you want.

WordPress Mobile Edition:

This is a newish one to me that I have been using a lot more.  It takes your site and if it notices that your visitor is on a mobile phone it will output a page that is very light and vry easy to use on a mobile.

The importance that I see in it is that it allows the use of social networks to link your site that people may be using on their mobile.  All the major social networks have mobile programs and this allows your friends, follows, etc to click through to your site and not feel sorry about it.

WP Super Cache

This one may not seem that important to the small blog, but you never know when you are going to “go viral” and you want to make sure that your site can handle the load for as long as possible.  There was a couple of times over the years that I either got Stumbled hard or was linked to on Fark that my site died after a couple of hours.  Who knows how large of a lost opportunity that was now.  But I do know you don’t want that to happen to you.

I will review/explain the other plugins in future posts.  Keep reading here, add the site to your RSS reader, or follow me on Twitter to stay current on everything Bluenoser.

Cheers,

Jeff M

Well if you are one of my readers you may have noticed that the site has been acting up lately.  Well I really can’t figure it out, and my host doesn’t seem to know why every once in a while this blog will go off-line and not be viewable.

The Move

I have decided to make a change and try a new host with this blog and take the time to start completely anew. In the last few days I have been moving the entire site to a new host, and will be starting to be more active in my posting on here to reach some of the goals.

The move turned out to be a more painful experience that I was expecting, my site has gotten very bloated with plugins and various other stuff that I couldn’t do it on my own.  I had to use the service provided by my new host to make the move for me.  I must say, even if you are proficient with these technical details, I recommend using the free service if it is available to you.  They did an amazing job and it was very pain free.

The Goals

One of my goals for 2010 is to cut my debt in half.  So I am going to hit making money online again. I will be basically starting from scratch as I all of my old compaigns have now been dead for a bit, as I have been busy with other things in my life and haven’t had the time to work on them.

What I will be doing on this site is publishing the time that I spend on these tasks, how much money I have spent and how much I have earned, I will be trying to do this on a monthly basis.  I will also be pointing out the services that I use and ways that I make the moola. I won’t be publishing the specific niches or campaigns that I will be working in, but I will tell you the networks I am using. Follow along with me and join the ride.  Ask questions and I will either give you my answer or find someone who has the answer.

There were a number of local twitter-ites that I noticed were talking about moustaches so I decided to see what was going on with it.  So I thought it was a good idea. 

What is Movember?

Movember is an annual, month-long celebration of the moustache, highlighting men’s health issues – specifically prostate cancer.

The idea for Movember was sparked in 2003 over a few beers in Melbourne, Australia.  The guys behind it joked about 80s fashion and decided it was time to bring the moustache back.  In order to justify their Mos (Australian slang for moustache), they used their new looks to raise money for prostate cancer research… never dreaming that facial hair would ultimately lead to a global movement that would get men talking about a taboo subject – their health.

A Mo Bro starts Movember – the month formerly known as November – clean shaven, and grows a moustache all month long, garnering support from friends and family in the form of donations.  What’s more, a Mo Bro is a walking billboard for the cause as his new look opens the door for him to talk about prostate cancer – making the moustache a symbol, much like the pink ribbon is for breast cancer.  Each Movember culminates in a Gala Partè in major cities around the globe where Mo Bros dress up to match their Mo, channeling the likes of Tom Selleck, Ghandi and Ron Burgundy, vying for the ultimate accolade:  Man of Movember.

About Movember

The money that is raised goes to the Movember Foundation to help fund mens health issues.  The money raised in Canada goes directly to Prostate Cancer Canada. Prostate Cancer Canada will use the money raised by Movember for the development of programs related to awareness, public education, advocacy, support of those affected, and research into the prevention, detection, treatment and cure of prostate cancer.

What Can you do?

One thing that you can do is donate to support my moustache.  My goal is to raise a minimum of $500, so if you have the spare few dollars help me out. Or you can register and grow your own ‘stache.

You can even simply link to this post and help spread the awareness of Men’s prostate cancer.

Cheers,

JM

I have completely lost me touch with PHP.  I tried to simply use a simple include(“file”); to allow me to simply make some footers and headers on a static site I was working on.  Shouldn’t be that hard, right?  Well, everything that I tried didn’t work, when I would go to the page it would download the source file rather than show me what I wanted.

I spent about an hour going through forums, searching and searching on Bing and Google to see if there was something that I could do.  So now, well, I am back to Wordpress as the default.

The issue I didn’t just use wordpress in the beginning is that I am noticing huge speed issues when I have multiple sites on the same hosting account.  Even without any plugins enabled they seem to crawl.  If I figure out what is going on with it I will let everyone know.

Help me?

So do you think you know what I was doing wrong?  Please let me know in the comments.  I have already decided to jump to Wordpress for this site, but in the future I would like to be able to develop some static sites again.  Without pulling out my hair.

Well I guess I am not much of a blogger, so I think I will start calling this my, “place where I try to organize my thoughts”.

I have tried using twitter to do this, but I have found that most of the time I can’t clear my head of what I  am trying to get out in 140 character increments.

The Scene

Let me set the scene for you, my reader, for where I am at and what I am doing.  As you can probably recall from previous posts, I seem to spend some time every couple of months re-grouping.  Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, the problem is that typically I have a good run then something major happens and I never reached that critical mass.

The latest event that has really hurt is the change that ebay made to their payment scheme.  They have gone from a percentage model to a CPC model.  Basically they are going to pay you per click what they feel your clicks are worth. 

I have read a lot of talk of marketers getting hit hard by this, but they also mention that they were making the majority of their income from ACRUs.  I on the other hand had been making almost all of my income from sales.  The difference was that you get paid a set amount for every new member that you get to sign up to Ebay, the other is that you get a percentage of the fees that are generated when someone that you send to the site makes a purchase.  This was my bread and butter, and because of this I foolishly thought that I would get a decent EPC for the traffic that I was sending.

However that was not the case.  From about February till September my effective EPC was about $0.45, now it is $0.15 and lower if someone happens to come to my site, click an ad not like what they see, hit back and then click another.

Where Now?

Needless to say this was one in a line of huge hiccups in my trek. I haven’t given up however, I am flaying around a bit at the moment, but I am starting to dabble in some direct linking with some promising affiliate offers.  If any of them are a hit I will then build a site around it and get serious.  My plan is to go after a bunch, if I spend $50 and not get anywhere I move on, if I see promise I will tweak and let it go for another $100.  From there is when I make the decision whether or not to go for the site.

I will let you know how it goes.

Wordpress is my CMS and blog platform of choice.  I have tried a lot of different programs in the past, Geeklog, Drupal, Joomala, and even PHP-Nuke.  However the power and simplicity of Wordpress has made it the one for me.

Here is a list of the plugins that I install on EVERY site that I start either for myself or for a friend.

1. Add-Sig – This addon is great for adding a signature to every post.  I put in my twitter link, a reminder to add my feed at the bottom of every post.  Remember to keep it short though, you don’t want your signature to over-whelm your visitors.
2. All in One SEO Pack – If you are going to do nothing else for SEO, install this plugin and use it.  This plugin allows you to give every post its own title and meta information.
3. Google Analytics for Wordpress – This is the easiest way to add your site to Google Analytics without having to modify your theme.  This plugin also gives you the ability to NOT track the information of the admin which will give you a better idea of the traffic on your site when you are starting out.
4. Google Sitemap Generator – Google loves its sitemaps.  I know I said above that if you did nothing else for SEO you should use the All in One SEO Pack, well you should install this too.  With this you just have it install it, and every time you make a post it will add it to a XML sitemap that Google will use to hopefully index your site.
5. Contact Form – One of the things that Wordpress doesn’t have built in is a good contact form.  This plugin will allow you to add a contact form and allow your readers to get in contact with you, without you having to worry about making email public….if you’re worried about that sort of thing.
6. Twitter Widget – You’re on Twitter….right?  Well if you are and you have a Wordpress blog you know that the widgets that they have suck.  This plugin gives you a widget that will match your theme and allow your readers to see what you have been talking about on Twitter.
7. What would Seth Godin Do? – Seth Godin once said in his blog that you should use cookies to ensure that visitors to your site get a unique experience.  This plugin allows you to give first-time visitors to your site a special message.  With this message you can welcome them, point them to other great posts, and tell them where to go next.
8. Wordpress Super Cache – So you just started a blog and you are wondering why you need a caching system.  Well be positive, your blog will be popular enough and if you get a huge traffic spike you want to be sure that your site can handle it.  So install it, test it, and be ready for everything.
9. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin  – This plugin puts a list of past posts that you have made with the same tags as the one that your visitor is reading.  This gives the blog more stickiness so that your visitor has somewhere else to go when they finish reading the post that got them there.

These are my must have plugins for every wordpress installation.  What are some plugins that you would recommend for all wordpress users, or how about alternatives to the ones that I have listed here.

It has been a long time since I updated this site, and for the readers that I have left…Sorry.

Where to Start?

The long and the short of it is that I have been working hard on my Ebay sites and developing a network of sites for the past 3 months  I am building the sites within the same overall horizontal niche so that I can easily interlink them.  This allowed me to develop a following on one site and gain visitors to a new site by “Guest Blogging”.

That was going great until something on the Ebay end changed at the start of this month.  The month of April was amazing for me, I had an ROI of over 300% with no one site earning a huge majority.  I felt that was great news and I continued to plug away.  Then something happened, my ROI dropped hugely at the start of May with my earning no Ebay commissions for the first 4 days while changing nothing on the traffic generation end.  In other words something over at EPN (Ebay Partners Network) changed.  It got to the point that yesterday I turned off all of my PPC Campaigns to my EPN sites to re-group.  I was losing money in buckets and at this rate I would have lost all of the gains that I made last month.

Regrouping

Today I started the re-grouping.  Last week I started a WordpressMU site on a domain that I had been hanging onto for a long time.  With this I plan on starting my own little blogging network, with my own sites, that I will be able to drive traffic to using different types of offers.  At the core it will be a review site with me reviewing a different niche on every sub-domain.  I will be sure to review everything that I have an affiliate account with, and the ones that I don’t I will review only if there is not enough competition.

I have also started dabbling in ZIP offers from AzoogleAds and have been promoting them on Facebook.  I haven’t had much luck there yet since FacebookAds seem to like not approving the ads.  I have even tried re-writing ads for offers that are very similar to what I have researched as already accepted and still no luck.  The fact that they take so long to review the ads is not helping.

Blogging

I am also starting to do more writing and after following ProBlogger.net’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog I have a lot of good ideas.  I have already started on some of them and will be doing the entire series on this blog in the next month.

I feel that this is the site that has the most potential and I will be spending more time developing articles that will help you not make the same mistakes that I am, and hopefully there will be nuggets of information that will help you be more successful with what ever you are doing.

One of the things that am going to start doing is reviews of particular tools and Wordpress Plugins that I use when I develop a site.  Some of these cost money and some are free, but all are very useful.  I will also start updating on what Networks I am using for my PPC Campaigns and Affiliate Marketing.

There has been a lot of talk lately about how this current downturn that the worldwide economy is in is not going to be going anywhere in the near term.  The Western big business philosophy is to recoil and wait for people to start buying again.  The Eastern and entrepreneur philosophy is that this is the time to buy good business cheap and manoeuvre yourself into an incredibly profitable position.

Online Meeting Software

One of the methods that I have been using lately to limit my travel both for personal work and with my day-job is running online meetings using Go-To-Meeting.  I chose Go-To-Meeting by default since it was the program that the company that I work for was using.  I got to play with the software before getting it myself to use for my own meetings, it isn’t that my side projects are to the point that I do a lot of travel meetings, none actually, but it did add a very advanced communications channel.

I don’t just use the software because it is what I started with, but don’t take my word for it there is a decent go-to-meeting review here. One of the tools that I have used a lot when working with designers is the ability to take over the others mouse and keyboard to better explain what I am looking for.  This is almost impossible to do over the phone, and it is very slow when you try it by email.  Using a messenger service is faster, but it is still much slower than using GoToMeeting.

Try out GoToMeeting for 30 days free and if you click here you will also get $10 off when you order. 

You have to CLICK HERE, to be sure that you don’t miss out.

My father finally got high speed at home.  Now it is not like they were avoiding it, it was simply not an option until a WiMAX provider came around.

So I asked him if he has cancelled his dial-up and he said no.  Why?  Well it is because he has had the same email address from the very beginning (10+ yrs).  You know the one, user@serviceprovider.com, and it is the one that everyone has.  He has signed up for some free web accounts since, but most people on his mailing list don’t have them.

I told him that there is an easy way to ease people into using the right email, and it is really easy if you use Gmail.  So if you don’t have a Gmail account, get one.  You will need it for the rest of this tutorial.

This post will describe how to:

1. Add a POP Account to your Gmail
2. Add a signature to all your emails so that people know to update their contact information for you.
3. And that’s it.

Adding a POP Account.

Since you probably use Outlook, Thunderbird or another email program to download your emails from the ISP servers, you most likely use POP to access them.  So go into the email settings of your program and write down your POP server.  It will most likely be either mail.serviceprovider.com or pop.serviceprovider.com.

You will also need your username and your password.

Now sign into your Gmail Account and go to Settings > Accounts

And click Add a mail account.

Fill in the email that you are planning on getting rid of in the future.

This is where you need to dig out that information that I mentioned above.  You are going to want to click the Label Incoming Messages check box.  This will allow you to keep track of the people that are still emailing you to your OLD email address.

Now you simply click the Add Account button and you should be done.

Next you are going to make sure that every time YOU send an email you will be from your NEW address.  To do this you go back to the Accounts tab and activate the radio tab with “Always reply from default address” just make sure that the Default address is the one that you plan on using.

Setting up a Signature

Now you are going to Settings > General and modify your signature.  You are going to want your signature to be clear that you are going to be changing your email address and in the near future you will not be able to receive emails from the old one.

Now What

Well that is pretty much it.  You are going to want to keep your old email active for a month or so.  Monitor the old email label and remind people that are still emailing you to the old address.

If you have any questions ask them in the comments, and I will do my best to help you out.

And if you have other ideas on how to do this let me know in the comments.

I have been neglecting this blog a little more than usual, but that is alright.  I am doing good on other fronts and am actually making leeway.

Here is something to keep you thinking.  I found this cartoon at ReadWriteWeb and thought it important enough to post. It is originally from Noise to Signal.

So remember, safety first online.  Only sign into things that you trust, and you should trust nothing unless proven otherwise.

We are getting ready to go on vacation again.  We are going to the magnificent San Francisco.  I say again but it really has been a long time since I got out of town for fun.

I was supposed to give everyone an update regarding my foray into the Ebay Affiliate Network, unfortunately I was extremely busy with other commitments and was not able to actively pursue it.  However on the advice of a friend, I was told not to stop the adwords campaigns that I was using to drive traffic, but to limit them to something like a dollar.

SIDETHOUGHT

When you go to change the budget on your adwords campaign, don’t do it when you are in a rush and when you do take the time to do it check it twice before and after hitting submit.

When I went to change everything to $1, I accidently changed it to $100 daily, luckily I checked it the next day and only screwed myself one day. 

/SIDETHOUGHT

Even with that blunder however I should end the month by breaking even over the start of the year.  I am starting to convert the traffic that I am receiving which really looks nice on the graph.

Next Step

When I get back from my extended time offline I have a few things in mind that I want to pursue.  One is to expand my network of ebay affiliate sites.  I have a few horizontal niches that I want to test out.

I am also playing with ideas surrounding my profession and have started developing training programs.  With these I hope to have a product that I can actively sell while enhancing my professional brand.  This is something that I will take my time developing as it is more important at this stage to maintain the brand that I have developed than to tarnish it.

When the Time Comes

But really that all is going to have to wait till my rest is over.  I only have one more week before I am back at the grind.  Today we go to Alcatraz and see if we could have figured out a way to escape.

The kicker is that I am failing, not miserably mind you, but I am not getting the return on the investment that I am looking for.  Not so much on the money side as that is doing fine, it is more the time versus profit investment, and to make the matters worse I don’t see that it will get better over time.

So what does that say, well try something else.

Might seem weird that I am switching gears again after not even 2 months of trying out the whole Ebay Affiliate marketing thing, but it just doesn’t seem to be working for me at the moment. 

I recently read The Dip by Seth Godin, and an interview of him by the CEO of seesmic.com (cool idea but not quite there yet) and Seth Godin mentioned that the reason that he is not on Twitter is that he couldn’t be the best at it so he decided not to try it out.  In The Dip he mentions a similar thing about the importance of being the BEST in the world at whatever you do.  This world is not necessarily the Earth, but what ever niche that you are involved in.  For example, if you have $500 to spend on a camera, you are going to go out and find the best camera that you can for $500.  You are not going to go out and buy the 3rd best, that would not make sense.

So what do that mean to me, well it means that I have to put more emphasis on the niches that I am going to be interested in for the long term and that will allow me to become the best purveyor of whatever that I want.

I am still going to be involved in my recently made ebay affiliate sites and try to make them profitable, but that will be played out as more of a diversion rather than a main study.  I already have ideas of what my new site and content that I am going to build into my new business.

I am not sure why I’m not doing it, but I am sure that I should be.  Then a buddy pointed me towards this older post, Do it Fucking Now from SEOBlackHat and was thinking.  I really should be doing  a lot more than I am, but I feel like I am spinning my wheels.  I have made very little progress in the month of January, and I am not exactly sure where I should be moving on from there.

So now what am I going to do?

Well I am just going to do IT!!   What am I going to do?  Well that is a question that I can’t really answer that, but I am going to do SOMETHING every day.  No matter what it is, I am going to do something that will bring me a step closer to my $5000 / month before tax profit.  It may be just researching a niche, getting some ideas on content, sites, maintenance, etc. 

The point is to do something.

If you are spinning your wheels, then try changing gears.  Every little step makes a difference.

So what is it, that you are going to be doing to reach your goals no matter what it is.  Let me know in the comments.

There should be a lot more to this, but I am busy doing stuff.  If you are on Twitter you should be using Tweepler.

What can I do with Tweepler?
Tweepler acts as a Twitter utility to process new Followers quickly and easily. The application consists of 3 areas that we call “Buckets” The first “Bucket” is the Unprocessed Followers “Bucket”. This shows you a listing of all the new people that have started Following you that you have not currently categorized. The other two “Buckets” are the Follow “Bucket” and the Ignore “Bucket”. The Follow “Bucket” is where you put Unprocessed Followers that you have decided you wish to Follow back. The Ignore “Bucket” is where you put the Unprocessed Followers that you do not wish to Follow back. We have found that by creating this Ignore “Bucket” organizing your Twitter followers becomes a much more painless task than if you do this through the Twitter.com website.

Check out @JessyO and @CorySchop on Twitter, they are the awesomeness that are behind @Tweepler.

Choosing the company that will be hosting your website is one of the most important decisions that you will make regarding your web property.  If you are building the site for a business, whether the online presence of your brick and mortar business, or  a completely online business, then you want to make sure that your website is available when your customers want to use it.

There are some things that you should look for in a host.  I am going to list my preferences as as it goes with control panels as such as I feel that they make the running of a website site easy enough for any one to do.

Customer Service

The hosting company should have multiple ways for their customers to contact the people that they need to.  The company should have a phone number, online "chat" support and a ticketing system as a minimum. 

I suggest trying to chat with the "live chat" a few times to ensure that there is someone there.  It is not acceptable if your site is down by no fault of your own and there is no one online to chat with you in real time.

Uptime

The host should ensure 99.9% uptime as a minimum, and there should be refunds given when this is not reached. 

Before you just take that number you see on the homepage for granted, read the fine print.  If the hosting company measures the uptime over the past year, then your site could be down for 8 hours continuously and as long as the host had a good record up till that point then you are not going to get any refund.  If the uptime is measured monthly you have a better idea on the consistent integrity of the host.

What HAS to be included

There are some things that HAVE to be included in the hosting package before you get started, and this doesn’t matter what the price point is.

What you should look for

Above I mentioned some items that you should have no matter what hosting company which you decide to partner with.  Below are some additional options that all good hosting companies offer with their packages.

Conclusion

So what does all this mean? 

It does seem to be a lot of information, but it is usually easy to tell a good hosting company from a fly by night.  One is the too good to be true promises.  These are teasers and are there to get you to sign up and hope to get some money out of you before you wise up and move on.  Early in my online career I was caught in these promises and moved hosts a lot.  It is not fun moving your website, and if you don’t do it just right there is going to be some downtime associated with the move.

If you want my recommendation, I use Hostgator.  I have used them for the last couple of years and they meet all of my recommendations and a lot more.  They are a large hosting company with a lot of servers that are spread over multiple datacentres.  And there CEO is still very involved with their customer service, and not just the big accounts, all of them.

Your comments

So for those that have been around for the last while, what do you think?  Who do you use and why?  Is there anything that I missed that you think is required?

I have some goals for 2009 that I am going to reach.

500 Posts

The first one is to achieve 500 posts on this blog.  Bluenoser.net has been online for years, but I have only around 300 posts and some of those are useless ones that I put up at the beginning just to have content.

MORE PROFIT

In 2009 I have a goal to quadruple my online profits.  This is not an overly ambitious goal, and I think that by the end of January I will be making it a TEN fold increase.  Tim of 4HWW and some of has followers have said that making high goals actually increases your likely hood for success.

More Time

I am in 2009 going to increase my productivity to the point that I can spend more time doing what I want to be doing.  That includes travelling and reading.  This is the first year that I have read less than 10 GOOD books in a year.  I miss reading and increasing my knowledge.

Professional Equity

Along with my various online endeavours I am going to start working on building “professional equity”.  I am not sure if this term has been coined before, if not here is my definition.  Anything that increases your worth to your profession and company which in turn increases the demand in your services.  I have started doing this by achieving my LEED AP designation, and in the first of the year I will be gaining my P.Eng (once I finish my diaries).  There are two more on my list one is to get my FE in April and follow with my PE in Maryland, or another state in the US.

The other BIG thing is staying tight to my chest, but hear is a hint,  it is going to be a teaching program for a tight niche in my industry that I have expertise in, and believe that there is a lack of information available to fellow engineers and industry in general.  I hope for this to be my muse(read 4HWW if you don’t know what this is)

One of the first things that have to be decided when you are getting ready to start a website, whether if it is for a personal site, business site, or a hobby site is whether you are going to host the site yourself and or a hosted service.

If you are building a blog type site this is not as critical at the start.  You can easily start your site on a free hosted blog site and then if you feel it necessary you can more to a hoste solution with minimal headache.  Just make sure that you have your own domain so that you don’t lose too many links that you have built.

Difference between the two. Hosted like going with a host like Hostgator and between a hosted, wordpress.com, blogger, etc

Advantages of the hosted service.

• Don’t need to have any programming experience
• Don’t need to worry about keeping the programs up-to-date
• Minimal backend work needed
• Usually lots of easy to installed themes, and styles
• Security, hosted services are typically very secure.

Disadvantages of hosted service

• You don’t have control of what is used for the site
• You can’t customize certain aspects of the site
• Even though there are plugins and extensions available what you can do with the site is limited.

Advantages of using a host

• You can pretty much put anything that you want online
• You have much great control of the way the site looks and interacts with your audience
• You can use the host for your FTP, email, and many other services that the hosted version does not have
• There are many “unlimited” hosts that allow you to store large amounts of data at no extra cost.

Disadvantages of using a host

• If you are not careful, you may find that the site is down more than it is up.
• Customer service may be a nightmare (Although Hostgator is an exception to this.  They have done everything they can to make my life on their servers enjoyable) .
• There may be bandwidth limitations.
• The cost can be huge if you have a popular site with little revenue as the bandwidth charges can get expensive.
• You are responsible for ensuring that your site is secure.

Conclusions
It really depends on what you are planning on using the site for.  If you are only interested in a content site or a personal site that you can communicate with family etc.  They a hosted service, or using many different hosted services to serve the purposes that you need for them. 

This can include services like Wordpress.com, Flickr.com blogger.com, etc.  If you are interested in having a custom site programmed, want to have a email address with your domain or want to have the choice of how the site works.  If you want to have full control over the type of content, visitors, the script on the site etc then you are going to be looking for something that is hosted.  The other thing that you have to remember is that if you want to ensure that you have FULL control over the content of the site then you want to fully control the host.  The hosted services typically have a TOS stating that they do not assume any risk if you lose everything.

Thoughts?

So you know what I think, what do you think?  Let me know in the comments below. 

Cheers, JM

I was just about to get pissed with my current web host.  A host that I have been using for a few years now, and that I changed to, after flipping from service to service. 

Hostgator has had a few hiccups over the time that I started with them to where they are now.  They have grown and acquired tremendously, and typically you would think that the customer service would decline. 

The last few times that I have talked to the live chat I have noticed a decrease in their ability to help me out.  More and more they are simply trying to get me off the line and to send in a ticket.  In the “olden days” the live chat peeps would put in the ticket for me at the least, and in some cases I had them go and FIND someone to fix it while I was chatting.  That type of service is amazing.

Problems in Hosting Paradise

Fast forward to a couple of days ago, I noticed the other day that Fantastico still hadn’t been updated with Wordpress 2.7 for this domain.  This was important since I tried out 2.7 on a couple of my other sites that I manually install on and I found it was a HUGE improvement(You can search, and install plugins from the admin area AWESOME !!!) ,so when I had a free moment I logged onto the live chat to see what was up.  Here is the transcript from December 28, 2008:

(2:37:24 PM) Joseph Ve: has entered the chat.

(2:37:40 PM) Joseph Ve: We currently don’t have an ETA on the next Fantastico update

(2:37:56 PM) Joseph Ve: Until then you will have to either manually install or upgrade Wordpress

(2:37:57 PM) Jeff: Any guess?

(2:38:11 PM) Jeff: 2.7 has been out for a month

(2:38:51 PM) Joseph Ve: Really can’t tell ya. We’d have to roll it out to all of our shared servers (five or six hundred of em)

(2:39:25 PM) Jeff: Fair, but isn’t it a security risk to have so many out of date scripts installed?

(2:40:36 PM) Joseph Ve: If there was a serious security flaw in the older version of Wordpress that comprimised the safety of our hosting plan, we would roll it out asap

(2:41:33 PM) Jeff: Alright, I will have to upgrade manually

(2:41:39 PM) Jeff: Cheers, Jeff

(2:41:43 PM) Joseph Ve: Okay, take care and have a great day!

(2:41:44 PM) Joseph Ve: Thank you for using HostGator Live Chat. If you could take a minute to rate your experience with HostGator as well as my overall performance, that would help us to improve our customer service. To do that, just click the button that says Rate and Exit in the upper right hand corner. The survey takes less than a minute to fill out.

Twitter to the Rescue

So needless to say I wasn’t very pleased with the outcome of this. 

But I wasn’t going to kick up a stir yet, I am too busy.  I didn’t write a post about it, I didn’t t Twitter or bitch about them on the forums, I simply left a response on that stupid survey conveying the lack of usefulness that I got out of the live chat.

But out of the blue someone at hostgator contacted me on twitter.  So I replied to them and told them what was up.

This is when it got fast and the customer service experience got a lot better.  I told me the domain that I needed fixed and they GOT IT DONE.

When I asked why this was not something that could have been fix eariler.

HostGator Redeemed….For Now

So there you have it.  I should have got the service that I felt was deserved from Joesph (see above) when I went to get some help with the Fantastico service on my account.  It wasn’t done not because they have to do them all at once and they have a lot of servers, (Joseph Ve: Really can’t tell ya. …five or six hundred of em) or that it is controlled by Fantastico.  It wasn’t done because they didn’t want to put in the ticket, either they didn’t know how (doubtful) or didn’t want to.

I feel that when I put in the horrible review that I did after my online chat session, it flagged something.  Not sure how they figured out that I was the right guy though.  Maybe they just searched my email that I sent the survey from.  But going those extra few steps to contact me vis Twitter, and try to remedy the situation.  This puts me back in the good books and prevents me from starting my search for an alternative host.

I was thinking today that something that I may try for 2009 is this.  Work like a crazy person until I reach the $ number that I feel I need to survive for a year and then take the remaining time “off”.  Go on a mini-retirement, read a book, etc.

So in January I am going to do just that.  I am going to start to build a strategy that I can use to gain the income that I require in a short amount of time.  Like the 4HWW disciples say, what you do for your life should not be the same as what you do for work.

There are a couple of ideas that come to mind right off.  One is to build my online business to the point where active involvement will see rapid growth in profits, but a slow monthly decline when I stop being active.  Another is to go freelance with my professional work.  There are a lot of companies out there looking for contract employees for short term work.  The disadvantage to that is that I have to leave the area where I am at now.

There are a lot of ways that I can do it, and I think that it is a great goal.  For now I am aiming for a 6 month year.  So by the time the warm weather hits my home town, I will be winding down for the year.

I am working on my first site that will be purely made for affiliate marketing.  This is a site that I have built after taking everything that I learned from The Black Ink Project.  I am about 6 months behind schedule, but I have the site completely online, with a lot of content in the blog and most of my first campaign on the go.

I have just got my first pass on the campaign online.  I have a lot of tweaking to do after I get my first round of keyword information.  I picked the time that I did to put it online so that I can play with the volume of traffic over the holidays and get some good keyword information.  I am not planning on making much in the lines of cash on this first batch, but with some major tweaking I think that the site will be a winner for me in the New Year.   I have spent approximately $700 on the site design and content to this point, and believe that all that I have left is the marketing and a small volume of blog posts. 

Some of the things that I have learned so far are:

Outsourcing is not the be all end all

As readers of this blog will no I have had some issues with outsourcing.  Some of these issues are my fault and not defining what I was expecting in the communications.  Other times are the freelancers not delivering on schedule.

I actually had one writer tell me that they were not going to be meeting the schedule.  I asked for a discount and they said that I was already getting a deal and to take it or leave it.  I left it.  If you decide to take the contract, and yes it is a contract, then you have a responsibility to follow it.

With writers you get what you pay for, and typically less

I am not a great writer and it shows a lot of the time.  But I am working on it.  SO when I was looking to get content for my affiliate site I decided to outsource as much as I could.  I can tell you this now, you really get what you pay for at best.  I have gone through a few writers on this site alone and I am not completely satisfied with any of them.  There are a few that I have blogging now that I think are the best, but I am still doing some editing to make them blog posts.  This is something that I think will improve.

However like I said above, there are some out there that feel like they are doing you a favour for giving you such a “deal” and expect you to just take what they give you.  If you come across such a writer, dump them.  You are hiring them because either you don’t have the skill or time, and as such shouldn’t have to deal with their BS

Choose Your Niche Well

This is another thing that people tell you to do all of the time, but I never really understood what they meant until now.  The niche that I am developing my affiliate site in seems to be very narrow as it is.  But when I am choosing the content for the site I realize that there is a broad range of customers that will be visiting your site.  So just because the service, type of service or product is very narrow.  The customer that will be visiting your site is broad. 

You might be selling blue widgets, and that would be a very narrow product niche.  However what type of customer are you targeting?  The person that is doing their initial research on blue widgets?  Finding out there is out there for blue widgets?  Or are you looking for the people that have decided on the type of widget they want and you just have to give it to them.  That is really where you want to be.

Then you have the demographic that you have to appeal to.  This could be a lifestyle demographic, geographic, or age and gender demographic.  There is a reason that all “woman” magazines look a certain way, and men’s mags look the way they do, they are targeting a particular demographic.

So why bother?

If you are interested in getting into affiliate marketing then get out there.  The Black Ink Project is a great resource for the beginner.  They are not really telling you anything that you can’t find online for free, and the only reason that I actually signed up was that it was free.

That said, there is something to be said for having all of the information that you need to get started in one place and one resource.

Oh yeah, and if anyone tells you that affiliate marketing is easy, they lucked out and will probably be doing something else next year.  There is a lot of work involved in marketing any product, but the beauty is that you can do it in your home office, or on the beach in some tropical paradise (if they have Wi-Fi).  This is the reason that I am doing this, and spending so much time writing, researching, and producing.  I want to be completely self-sufficient and with a nice nest egg in the next 2 years.  I have a multi-pronged approach to this that I will use to succeed and be diverse.

I am a huge reader and one of the things that I use my Online Profits for is cleaning out my Amazon Wish List.  Now I have a number of new books that I am going to have to add to the list.  ChrisG has written a post on ProBlogger called “5 Influential Books All Bloggers Should Know“.

This is a relatively old post, but I was going through my starred feeds and noticed it again.

There are a number of them that I have not heard of before, but there are a few books that I would definitely add to the list would be:

ProBlogger

I understand why he didn’t (Chris authored the book with Darren) but it is an amazing book for the beginner blogger, and a great resource for the blogger who has been around.  The chapters on “Blog Writing” and “Blog Promotion” were very useful to me.

The Dip

Seth Godin writes great books on marketing, and the Dip is great.  It is all about teaching when to quit and when you persevere.  I hear a lot of people saying that you should get the audio, but come on it is not that long.  I find that if you read it once, you will understand it better than listening to it 3 or 4 times.

And finally The Four Hour Work Week

This book by Tim Ferris is great, and like Chris mentions when talking about E-Myth is great for teaching what you can do to give yourself more time by having others do your tasks.  Like many I was fooled by the title, there is a lot of work to do before you can create a reasonable income only working 4 hours a week, but the book tells you how and makes you excited to get out there and try.

Is there any books that Chris or I missed that you think should be on the short list of every blogger or small business owners wish list?

I have been following Mr Cruz for a while now, and I think that he is on to something.  Now I know that he is not the first person to show how to build a blog up in real time, but he is the first that I have watched from the beginning, and I have a feeling that he really didn’t have much background in the blogging world before he got started.  This is something of a capital that I feel that others that have done the “study” of blogging did have.  They had existing traffic, and industry contacts that they could leverage in their endeavour.  I understand that Tyler wasn’t completely new to the game, but I think that he was mainly involved in the poker world and they typically aren’t the audience that a webmaster blog would be looking for.

Starting in January I am going to be working on my site design, and the type of posts that I am writing to build up a brand.  I need an identity, I have other sites that I can shoot off my mouth, so bluenoser.net has to be about chronicling my experiences and helping others do it too.

What is the brand going to be?

I have been asked in the past on how to do this or that, regarding the building or starting a simple website.  How do they get the name?  How do you host it?  How do you do HTML and where can you learn?  I am going to be writing tutorials and such to help these people out.  This will be right from what is a website, the pros and cons of particular CMS systems and how do you monetize your traffic.  There are a couple of reasons that I feel that this is a great way to do it.  One it gives me great content for the site, two it gives me a definite place to point the people who are looking for information, and maybe they will use my affiliate links in the process and three it helps me build an identity.

What about the blog posts themselves?

The largest issue that I have for a number of sites is coming up with ideas on what to write.  If I can build this site into something that people visit, and I can build a trust with those users, I believe that they will be asking me questions that I can answer through the site.  This helps me build content that I know at least one person is looking for, and it is a big world out there so I am sure they are not the only ones looking for it.

And when there isn’t any questions, I have a lot of other projects on the go that I will be writing about.  Sometimes it will be good things, other times it will be about a business issue that I am having and means that I have used to solve it.

There are a lot of blogs that I read that do a weekly link dump.  I usually think that it is a waste of time, however I am changing my mind.  I think that I understand why people feel that they need to do it. 

There are a lot of great writers out there, and I simply don’t have time to blog about them all.  But I do have time to thumb them, and sometimes Twit them.  Now every Friday I am going to link them on this site.

Marketing

• #1 Pay Per Click Lie – This is all about the discussions that we all read on the forums.  What are the right keywords, or these keywords suck.  Well maybe your site SUCKs, maybe you are not converting because of the user experience and not the keyword.
• Are You on a Mission – What you and your company’s mission statement has to say, reflects a lot on the type of management there is within the company.  If your mission statement has a lot to say about the shareholders and not a lot to say about the employees and more importantly the customer, then you are probably working for a poorly managed company over the long run

Business

• Dilbert December 13, 2008 – Sometimes it makes a lot more sense when Scott Adams talk about it.  You don’t mitigate risk by buying more crap.

Blogging

• Do-Follow Blog Search – This is awesome, I have seen so many of these lists for sale on DP that it was getting stupid.  Now you can just search for the blogs that you want to post to.
• Keywords for WLW – AS you may know I have found WLW and I love it.  This is an old page but it has the information that I believe that I need to make WLW the best thing since sliced bread.

Since John Chow was able to win the coveted Best Personal Blog of Vancouver.  He is giving away a copy of Traffic Secrets 2.0.

This is a product that is on my personal wishlist, and since he is offering 5 entries simply for a trackback to the contest, well I might as well oblige him.

I just installed WP 2.7 on one of my other blogs and noticed some nice, but not crazy fan-boy awesome, oh my god it looks so amazing, changes to the layout and use of the site.  I actually had to think a bit since they renamed some things like, themes changed to appearance, etc.  This would not be a big deal for those just starting with the software but for a long term user, and someone with extreme lack of sleep it slowed me down slightly.

However I did notice the use of Google Gears, which is awesome.  One of the reasons that I fell in love with Windows Live Writer was the fact that I could work on my posts while I was on the go.  Gears allows any blog to do the same thing.  I haven’t tested it yet, but it is on my list.

I don’t think that this will make me move from using WLW.  I really like the fact that you can write you post and know how it is going to look on your page in real time.  I think that this is one thing that the Wordpress editor could have used some work on.  It would be great if it could take in the information from the active theme and use it to help you edit your post. 

All said, 2.7 is a definite improvement and I am sure that it is just one more step into the direction of being the blog platform of choice, and the leader.

It is getting to be that time again.  Time to think about another trip.
With Christmas fast approaching, deadlines piling up and winter coming, it is time to start thinking about getting away from here for a week or 3.  We have been talking it over about where we want to go, and what we want to get out of the trip itself.  I have been following Kim and Rob over at  and thinking that one of their trips would be something fun to emulate.It would be different from the last few that we have went on.  Vegging in DR, shopping in NYC, visiting family in Florida and of course Disney.  These were fun, but I think that I need to go somewhere else and see something else.

So now the question is where? 

I am thinking about a 2 week tour of the Greek Isles, or maybe San Francisco.  Or Spain.  There are a couple of that drive where we go.  I live on the Atlantic Coast of Canada, and don’t want to go too many time zones away.  That might actually negate San Fran from the list.

Timezones are not a big deal for a long trip, but since I figure I will only be able to get away for a week at most I don’t want to spend time recovering from Jet Lag in either direction.  3 time zones I think are max, maybe 4.  So that really limits me to the west coast of Europe and the entire eastern seaboard of NA.

Where would you go?

We really have no idea where we want to go, but we do know that we want to have a blast, and there has to be beaches and warm weather.  the trip is scheduled for February.  So leave us some suggestions and links so that we can get this party started.  Once I know where and when it will be just the motivation that I need to get all of the crap that I have on my plate now DONE.

Cheers,

JM

This is great.  Why hasn’t ANY of the so called authority bloggers that I read on a continual basis mentioned Windows Live Writer to me?  It took Tyler Cruz to write about it the other day for me to hear about it.

Well I am using it, and I think that I will be continuing to use it even though WP2.7 is so slick. 

You see, I don’t have one of those fancy cell data plans and am tethered to hot spots.  So there there is a lot of time when I am travelling that I can’t get online to write my blogs.  I tried to use ScribeFire for a while, but for some reason it wasn’t playing nice with most of the themes on my blogs.  So I simply started to use WORD to write them and then copy them into the Wordpress Editor.  This was incredibly clunky and I still had to play around with the format.

I have been using Live writer for a total of 10 posts so far, and everything looks exactly like I think it should.  I have had to do minimal editing to the post AFTER I published it, to make it look the way that I thought that it should.

So thanks M$ for making a decent product, and TC to helping me find it.

Cheers,
JM

I got a call earlier this week that the coat that I dropped off at the retail outlet to get fixed was back.  I had only dropped it off a couple of weeks ago, and was told that it could take up to 6 weeks for it be get back.  That didn’t even occur to me when I got to the call on Monday afternoon, or this morning when I was heading out there.  I have a hard time keeping track of time at teh best of times, and when I am busy it gets much worse.

So, I get out there, it is a pain in the ass to get to the outlet in the first place since it is located in one of those parking lot jungles on the out skirts of town.  You know what I am talking about, those places that people like to call “business parks” which don’t have the necessary infracstruce to handle the loads, or lack of loads, of people in cars that all try to cram into them.

When I get to the store I wanted to get some gloves, so I go and pick them up, I am a guy so that took me all of 5 minutes.  Then I stand in line, and wait, and wait.

This was not me today

This is the point where I am getting annoyed, there are 4 tills, 2 people manning them and 3 floor people wandering around annoying customers that don’t want there help.  I stood in line for 15 minutes, and there were only 3 people ahead of me.  When I get to the front I explain that i am there to pick up my coat.  They search and search and then come to realize that I was called by mistake.

Opps, but then the lady that took my coat in the first place tries to tell me that there would be no reasonable way that my coat should be there, see they send it out only once a week and it takes………

No kidding, but then why was I called, and why is it my responsibility to quesiton when I am called.

The saving grace of the entire experience was that the one that was serving me at the time gave me her card and told me if anyone called to say that my coat was in, I can call her and she will courier my coat to me at no charge.

All in all, it was a 4 hour ordeal that made a waste of my day and all that I got out of it was a pair of gloves.

It is just about time to start getting ready for the week ahead.  Today I made some great progress with my business plans and starting to put into motion plans that I developed over the last couple of months.

I have re-read the 4HWW, and have developed a list of goals that I am striving for, and bringing the 20/80 to fruitration.  From these thoughts I have started yet another project, yeah I know it almost seems like I am diluting and creating more work, but I think that this project will turn out to be the “one”

For those that don’t know I am an Electrical Engineer by training.  Well, almost I still haven’t finished the paper work to get my P.Eng designation, but I still have a month before my self-imposed deadline.  I am going to start a training course for a very specific field in the electrical industry.  With this course I hope to both help myself by selling packages with it, and also bring more work into my employers coffers by recommending them for the studies.  This is a consulting task that I will end up doing, but I am not ready for the liabilty that this would entail.

Training Courses are the new Black

I have begun the task of the training course by writing a spec for preliminary research, the type of research that should allow me to discover what people are looking to know, and what types of questions they are asking.  This is a very important first step, as I don’t want to spend too many hours answering a question that only I have the interest in.

I have sent this spec to a few of the contacts that I have used in the past and depending on the response and costs I will either engage one of them or open it up to bidding on a freelance site.

From there I plan to start the research, again I will be out sourcing this.  At least at the beginning.  When I feel I have enough of the information I need I will write and format the course.  I will outsource the actual editing and final formatting.  I plan on having a book, presentation, a few tools and an exam to test the “students” knowledge.

I haven’t set a time line for this project yet, that I will do when I have the initial research data.  I will be sure to keep everyone up-to-date on this.

And that first picture? It is a Milk Shed, actually it is THE milk shed of my Grandmother in CB where I was on a weekend not too long ago.

I either have to go in ot out of the tunnel.

I give up, and now I need to find an alternative.

I just spent all of this evening and most of my free time yesterday trying to fix one of my sites.  I still didn’t really fix it, the site only works when there is now www. in the url.  If there is, well 403 everywhere.

Does anyone out there have “people” that do the routine maintenance for their sites?  Ensure that the plugins are up-to-date, and fix any bugs that come up?

I would like to move to hosted solutions, however that limits what I can do with the themes, plugins etc.

Ideally I would like to pay someone in batches to update all of my sites and then fix any bugs for me.  Is this something that anyone out there has tried outsourceing on Enlance or the other alternatives?  If you have any experience with this type of outsourcing please let me know about your experiences.  I would especially like to know how you went about writing the description of work.

I have a couple of old websites that I keep up and that take in some passive revenue from.  That said they can be a pain in the ass when you don’t keep up with the script maintenance.

I am facing the music now.  One of my favorite sites that I use as a general soap box that has both a front end blog and a back end forum, is on the fritz.  I got an email from my hosting service to tell me that there was a complaint that my site was hosting some malicious script.

It turns out that one of the scripts or addons that were installed on the site was out of date, and now there is a bunch of stuff simply not working.  However I think that I am going to take this time and restructure the entire site.  I am not taking entire advantage of some newer addons out there that may enable me to tie the different functionality of the site tighter together.

That is enough rambling for today, I have to get to bed and be up early tomorrow for meetings.

And the pic is just there to remind me to relax and just get the shit done, sometimes you just need to breathe.

It is starting to get to the point again where I need to re-focus both my life, my work and my business.  It really seems that I am doing this pretty often lately, but I am still young so shoot me.  I have been reading the Empress and I feel for her.  I have set some easy goals for myself and I still think that they are something that I am going to get to.

However, there are some things that I am really getting behind on, my day job just didn’t allow me the time.  One of the biggest things was to complete the Black Ink 2 training.  I started the seesions, I started building a site, I even started gathering some great content.  The niche that I was planning on entering was the Online Conference/Meeting space.  This is a space that I see getting bigger, and especially in the turblent economic times.  When money is tight people start to look for cost effective means of sharing information.  Why fly when you can sit there and hold the meeting face to virtual face.

One of my goals to get to before the end of the calendar year is to start having a positive cash flow on InnovativeMeetings.  I have already invested time and money into the site and I don’t think that I can simply flip it and expect to get much out of it as it stands now.  My other goals are not involved in my online business space.  They are to get my LEED AP Certification and P.Eng.  These are two things that will really help my engineering career, and will help me earn the seed money for my online business ideas.

The only way that I am going to be able to reach these goals is to learn how to write specs for out sourcing and learning how to manage that with minimal time commitments.  I have worked on this before and have had some cautious success with it.

I can’t believe that it has been an entire month where I didn’t write a damn thing on this site. WOW

It has really been crazy around here.  The first week of September I was on Vacation in NYC.  If you have never visited New York, do it soon.  It is really a blast and you can do it on the cheap.  The shopping, Central Park, the shows and the people are amazing.  We have been there twice in the last 12 months.

After I got back from there I worked a 60 hour week and then headed to the IEEE sections Congress in Quebec City.  This was a great trip, I was able to hang out with a lot of great people and meet some new friends.  IEEE is a great place for Engineers to network and meet people of the same vein.  Engineers are a odd bunch they usually have to have two lives, one geeky one at work and a “normal” one at home.  When at an IEEE event you can sit down with a beer and talk about sports and the LHC.

I even had time inbetween meetings to tour around the city. Old Quebec is the closest that I have ever been to an old European city.  It has made me decide that I Old Europe is my next adventure.

And then last week I was in Minneapolis to visit a generator manufacturer and get some classes in.  It was a decent trip that involved a very convoluted trip from Halifax to Minneapolis, but that is a story for another day.

I didn’t have a lot of time to spend touring the town.  I was staying directly across from the University of Minnesota, and that place is huge.  I ended up working in a coffee shop across from the hotel, which was a lot of fun.  I talked to some of the students, not locals since I don’t think that I talked to one person who was actually from there.

And then I spent last weekend and this week trying to get everything settled, put out some fires and figure out where all my projects stand.  I finished that by the end of the day today, so now life should be reaching something closer to normal.

So what is next?

Well I am back to developing my business plan.  There are some courses that I have to finish and then I am going to get back to developing my latest project.  I still have the intention of reaching the modest level of $500 of passive proft by end of year.  Currently I am at $200 so it is entirely doable.

Starting to get Frustrated

I am currently working on a brand new project.  I have approached this new project in a completely different way than I would normally do.  I have a plan, schedule, and budget.  The schedule necessitates that I can`t do all of the work myself, which is fine because I made a budget for that.

So some of my content has been outsourced, and it is going great.

My site design template was outsourced, well kind of, I simply went over to templatemonster and picked one that I thought would work well.

My first landing page was outsourced, now I don`t really think that it is the greatest, but that is more my fault with direction than that of the designer, and the price was very ~affordable~.

However I needed to get my Wordpress theme developed to match the template that I picked out.  So I headed over to DP and made a post.  I got a few great offers, too good to be true actually, so I dumped them.  I got some over the top and dumped them too.  Then I picked one that seemed great.  The guy wrote with decent English and wrote respectfully, and the price was mid-range.

However, I would not be writing this post if all went well.  This was supposed to be a job that took no more than a week, it has been more like three, and the guy doesn`t seem to be that interested in getting back to me in a timely manner.  I am starting to think that he has gotten his 50% upfront so now he doesn`t care.  I pay my bills but I am seriously thinking that I need to have a discount on part of the service that I am receiving.

What have you done when your out sourcing project has gone wrong? When the person on the other end of the inter-web does`t give to shits that you have a schedule to meet and knows that they will never meet you face-to-face?

I spent about 15 minutes this weekend trying to figure out why my image align isn’t working with new Wordpress.  It looks cool, but I just couldn’t get it to work without doing it my hand.  Then today I was catching up on my reader and found a great post from Daily Blogging Tips .  Here they explain exactly what you have to do to get your image align to work in Worpress.

It is really simple really, you just have to add the following to your stylesheet.

img.centered {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

img.alignright {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 0 2px 7px;
display: inline;
}

img.alignleft {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 7px 2px 0;
display: inline;
}

.alignright {
float: right;
}

.alignleft {
float: left;
}

It is that simple.  So now get out there and fix it.  And add Daily Blogging Tips to your reader.

I would take the advantage of my growing audience to mention something that you as fellow online entrepreneurs can do to help others around the world. Kiva!

What is Kiva?

Kiva is a person-person micro-lending website.

Kiva partners with existing expert microfinance institutions. In doing so, we gain access to outstanding entrepreneurs from impoverished communities world-wide. Our partners are experts in choosing qualified entrepreneurs. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva, our partners upload their entrepreneur profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them. When you do, not only do you get a unique experience connecting to a specific entrepreneur on the other side of the planet, but our microfinance partners can do more of what they do, more efficiently.

How it works

It is a real simple process, simply get an account, add some cash via paypal (you know you have some in there).  Then you can browse the available loans, and pick an individual that you would like to support.  Once you support the business that you are interested in, you watch everything happen.

When the loan term is complete the money that you gave out is put right back into your account so that you can then use it again to start a new loan, or withdraw it.

So what are you waiting for?  Get over there and get yourself started, make sure that you tell them that jeff{a}hosernews.ca sent you   And if you are interested in viewing my profile simply click here.

Well that didn’t take long.  I guess I have a real problem.

I am going back to Twittering, but I will be sure not to be using it as I was before, a play-by-play of my life.  Instead I will be using it as a micro-blog.  I have a lot of little ideas and tips that I think of during the day, but don’t think that they are “important” enough to write a full blownblog post.

Don’t get me wrong, it is not that these things are useless, it is j
ust that they are tips and unless I put together a bunch of them there is not really a point to fill someone’s RSS reader.

So, Join me on Twitter and find out what life lessons (and affiliate business) I learn, as I learn them.

I was trying to get some work done at home today, but for the life of me it was too nice outside.

You can work anywhere, including a pub with free wifi and music. So I did what any smart Haligonian would do, I headed to the pub. The Old Triangle was my choice.  I walked around the town and this was the only place that had free wi-fi.

I tried the Aliant Brand that was free up till recently.  It really sucks that most of the places that had free wireless in Halifax switched and now you have to either already be an Aliant customer or pay a huge amount to get online….I might as well stay home.

If you are downtown today, come on by, I am probably the only one working on a computer

I finally got Wordpress Link Cloak working on my site.  It took some figuring out, and playing with the settings but all is well now.  One think that is not a huge plus for Wordpress Link Cloak is the cost.  It is $77!!!, however I think that it is well worth it for the time that it is going to save me on many of my different sites.

However the down side that almost had me asking for my money back, is the customer service.

I know that this is probably a one man show, but being a paid plugin means that it doesn’t have much of a community to help people out when they run into problems.  But even being a one man show shouldn’t mean that you don’t reply to your emails for days.  I bought the plugin a week from today, couldn’t get it to work and emailed the support.  I didn’t hear back for a couple of days and when their fix didn’t work I emailed them again.  I still haven’t heard back.

But anyway, if there was a free product out there that did what this WP Link Cloak plugin did, I wouldn’t be using it.  The fact of the matter is that there is only one other plugin that does the automatic keyword linking that this one does and that cost another $20 on top of the $77 of this one.  The free ones out there need you to automatically copy and paste the URLs, which is not a big deal for a new site, but for an old one that can be very time consumming.

I will be writing a more indepth review of the software in the future, but for now give WP Link Cloak a try and let me know what you think

I am finally decided to end my Twitter experiment. I will probably stay a member but won’t be actively building my Twitter community. There is no point. Whenever I have something neat to say it is down.

If they had the ability to scale then I am sure that I would stick around longer. But for now I am going to get out of the micro-blogging space. Maybe when fall comes around I will join up on FriendFeed.

What do you think about Twitter. Are they on the brink of failure, or have they already started on the downward spiral?

So I have decided to jump in and do some CPA Affiliate Marketing.  So now I need a Plan of Attack!

I have a few ideas on what “niche” and market that I am interested in getting involved in. so…

1. Pick out the niche and product that I want to start targetting.
2. Find an “aged” domain that has all of the properties that I am looking for, or add a sub-domain to one of my existing sites (this is the way that I am leaning for these tests).
3. Pick out specific products that I am going to market.
4. Start working on gathering content and keyword related articles.  I am going to use a basic version of wordpress for the CMS as I have found that it works very well, and it is easy to add content to.
5. Start a PPC campaign.  For this I am going to start with Adwords as it is still the Cadillac network when it comes to volume of traffic.
6. Refine keyword list, refine landing pages, repeat.

My goal is to break even in what ever area that I decide to get started in, however I am going to give myself a month to do this.  I am also setting a $$$ limit on what I am willing to put up.  I don’t want to dig myself into such a hole that nothing I can do will get me out of it.

As for timeline I am planning on having my niche, domain and products decided on this weekend.  Then the landing page, contact page, about page and at least 5 other articles related to the product group published.  From there it will be getting some easy links to get spidered.  This will take me about a week or so.  Then the PPC, this I am planning to have started by the second week of July.

I will have a series of weekly posts every Monday or Tuesday as the experiment runs its course.

I wrote a post a while ago about writers block, however it has not helped me very much lately.  I take a note book around with me everywhere.  It sits in my bag and when I think of something that I think that I should write about, or a niche idea that I think I should explore I write it in there.

The pages have been very empty lately.

I think that it may have something to do with the amount of stuff that I do during the summer.  It is really too nice to be inside, and I have also filled my evenings with sports.   This does not leave a lot of time for sitting and thinking, which in turn leads to burn out.   I am starting to feel like I am sinking in a hole, which leaves my mind not relaxed.

I have been trying to get to the gym.  Hitting the weights has always been a good way for me to clear my head of everything.  When you are there the only thing that you think about is the amount that you are lifting, or the speed that you are going.  it really helps to focus for the rest of the day, but I haven’t been doing even that lately.  I have been playing ball hockey and ice hockey very late so that means that I am not getting up early enough to hit the gym.  This is something that I am missing out on, and it is something that I am going to have to make a priority if I don’t want the advances that I have made in the last month to slde.

So now I am off to play hockey, and then it is off to bed.  Tomorrow morning I am going to begin my new workout at the gym to see if I can get focused again, both at work and at home.  I hope that this new routine will get me motivated like I was last month.

Marketing Leverage has gone crazy with the contest sponsorships.  Not that I am complaining I have joined in a few hoping to get something out of them.

The one that I ALMOST missed was John Chow’s.  Today is the last day to enter.  All you have to do is reply to his post or write a blog post with a trackback and a link to Marketing Leverage.

This is my post for the contest

Today I have sold my last link placement through TextLinkAds.  I recommend them if you are interested in selling some text link space.  They are very easy to deal with and the payouts are fair.

Currently TLA is the main way that this blog makes money.  It is about 25% of my total online income currently, but I am expecting more.  I have added the ability to sell private ads using OioPublisher.  This is a great plugin, very easy to install and manage.  The only downfall, if you can call it that, is that it costs money.  I will write a full post on it in the very near future, because it really is worth everything that you pay.

Right now I am offering 3 site wide banners and 1 inline ad.  I have “default” banners located there now, so there are 4 spots available, so get them now before they are gone

My next step in my hobby is to let one site die and build on another.  The killer for me is that the site that I don’t have to time for is the one with the more profitable niche, however I have more “fun” writing for the other site.  Since this is a hobby I am going to leave it this way.  I may not let the other site die prese but maybe I will just let it sit and buy some post for it in the near future.

For my next step I am going to start to investigate my entry into the affiliate marketing space….again.  There seems to be a number of people doing the same, but I am sure that I can succeed.  I have a monthly profit goal in mind that I want to reach for the new year.  If I reach it, I may plan on making this hobby into an actual company.  This has the advantages of limiting my personal liability, but it costs money.

That is enough rambling for tonight.  Maybe in the future when I have more cash flow into this blog I will post my earnings like JohnC and TylerC.

Ciao

I am starting to look for some other web hosts out there.  I am about to begin to dabble in the dark arts of CPA Affiliate Programs and need to scatter my hosts somewhat.  I don’t want to have all of my mini-sites in the same basket, and I definitely don’t want my mini-site experiments to hurt the rankings of my more serious sites.

So along with reading the articles available at WebHostingRating Articles, and now I have found another great webhosting rating site, WebHostingChoice.

If you don’t think that you go enough information at WebHostingRating, there is a good FAQ at Web Hosting Choice.  The other great source of information  at this site is the Cheap Web Hosting page and their Web hosting scams page, here they talk about the downfalls of going with a host that is soo cheap that it is “too good to be true”….Well you are probably right it is.

One of the biggest scams is the Unlimited bandwidth/storage

Unlimited bandwidth/space – it is simply impossible for a company to offer unlimited space or bandwidth to use. As hosting companies and their associated technologies are themselves limited (i.e. bandwidth or hard disk space), unlimited offerings are usually just an advertising gimmick. Often you will find clauses embedded deep within the company’s terms of service contract that negate the unlimited offering. The clauses are usually arbitrary, such as excessive CPU usage will be grounds for account termination.UnlimBand is a good resource to learn more.

So head over to WebHostingChoice and let me know what you think.

I am sure that if you are new in the online community, or are currently on a hosted solution and want to move to a “self-hosted” solution this is a great place to start you brainstorming on the host that you are going to choose.  It is a big decision and your host is going to be a factor in that amount of money that you are going to make online.

I have finially added the very necessary contact page.

Now if you want to contact me regarding this site it is easy as pie.  When you use the form, which is a free Wordpress plugin from Mike Cherim, I get an email that I will be sure to respond to ASAP.  But I, like everyone, HATE spam so don’t try to sell me something.  You can always give me something for free and I will review it.  But I won’t give a recommendation to something that sucks

Happy Blogging

Today I found an interesting resource on cheap web hosting.

There are a lot of places that a beginner can get information on the different types of hosting that is available out there. A lot of those resources are too “full”. WebHostingRating articles is very well organized and has some great articles and tutorials.

I have had some time to browse through some of them and the following are some of the articles that I believe would be the most useful to the beginner:

Concept of Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the type of hosting that a beginner is most likely to use. It is the most cost effective and easiest to obtain.

Intro to cPanel

cPanel is the control panel of choice when it comes to the backend of your website. It is very easy to use, but this article will help you get a head start when you have finially decided on the webhost that you are going to be starting with.

Fantastico Tutorial

Fantastico is known as a popular library for commercial scripts. It is commonly used as a third party add-on that works with cPanel. It was designed to automatically install applications into a website and eliminate the need to upload files through FTP. These scripts are executed from the administrative area of your website. Websites running Fantastico scripts are said to be installed by over 10, 000 servers. With millions of users on a global scale it is easily the most used product of its kind.

Myphpadmin

myPHPadmin is not something that the absolute beginner is going to be using, but take a read because you never know when you are going to have to use it to change a variable in one of you database tables.

Conclusion

All in all, WebHostingRating Articles is a decent new resource that looks like it is going to be growing in the future. Make sure to add its feed to your reader so that you will be notified when new articles are added.

Then when you have figured out what hosting is all about then you can go to the cheap web hostingpage and figure out what webhost you are going to go with.

Thanks to Sean Mulholland for pointing out to me while I was Stumbling that Mozilla has killed its own servers.  In case anyone out there didn’t know, the SpreadFireFox was trying to break a world record for the most downloads over the course of 24hrs.  I didn’t know that this was a Guiness Record but I guess it is.

However, the servers are DEAD, so if you were waiting for today to download FireFox 3, you are out of luck for now.

This is either a good sign, they have already broken the record, or a shitty sign that they are not going to be able to because their server admins weren’t up to the task.

All I know now is that I sent an email to the entire office at lunch today asking them to give Firefox a try and all I got was emails back asking if I got the URL right, that it crashed their computer or that it was just plain slow.

I am starting to get frustrated.

Everyone online is saying how great the new Wordpress uploader is, and all the stuff you can do and all of the media that you can easily integrate into you blog. Well I am here to tell you that it is all hog-wash. Well maybe only a little.

For those of you using a lot of images in your post, the image uploader has been completely overhauled as well. Namely, you can uplopad and insert multiple images at once via a new Flash-based uploader. This will gracefully fallback to the original uploader if Flash is not installed, so never fear. There is now a new “Add Media” link in the header of the post window that handles all this now. For those of you who want to debate the philosophical decision to include closed source Flash into open source, and GPL’ed WordPress, knock yourself out.

10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5
I can’t get it to work.
All I get are errors, and I don’t know how to fix it. I have tried a couple of different plugins that claim to fix it, but no luck. What I really want is the ability to upload me image to the directory, and then resize it on the fly. Simply using HTML to resize the image is no good.

So my solution is to use my Flickr Account. I already have a pro account, so that is not a huge deal, but it just adds another way for visitors to leave since you have to link to the image that you are shows according to the Flickr TOS.

So I am crying out to all of my readers. Please HELP ME!!! I will give anyone that helps a month of free advertising space. Hell I will give you a total of 2 months of free space, either one 125×125 banner for one month or two banners for one month.

Make a comment if you think that you can help

::UPDATE::

My “new” buddy Ryan has fixed my problem for me, and it was VERY simple.  And for proof see the latest pic to my media gallery.

WTF, just when I want to do some Twittering and waste some time till I get tired enough to go to bed I find out that it is down for maintence. I am starting to wonder if these guys need to develop some ways to monetize the site so that they can get a better set up.

I am relatively new to Twittering, so I really can’t say if this is something that has just started to happen or if this is a regular occurance, but it is really affecting my ability to use the service…..

Wait a minute, maybe this is going to be a blessing in disguse, no Twitter means that there is one less thing out there that is going to distract me from making money…….Thanks Twitter

So I think that I am going to end this post with a picture of my cat. He just loves to sit on top of my computer while I work, which is one of the reasons that I can’t get an LCD.

Well I guess the fact that it would be too light and “The Cat” would simply knock it off the desk.

I am always saying that making money is my hobby, well so is writing and leaving reviews. I used to do this over at Epinions, but now I do it at my own blogs. One of the money makers that I talk about on this site and link to in my side bar is PayPerPost. This is a great way to get paid to blog.

PPP is not something that I use a lot, I have a hard enough time finding time to write my own posts than to spend time writing reviews and plugs for other people. However there is the odd lunch hour that it is raining outside and PPP is there. I can log on, find an opportunity that I like and that I think will fit one of my audiences and go for it. It doesn’t take more than a hour to find thing that you like about the site so that you can write about it, and if you genuinely don’t like the site, and the opportunity is asking that you give them a thumbs-up, well, don’t take that opportunity.

So if I have piqued your interest, getting started is VERY easy. All you have to do is head over to PayPerPost and fill out the necessary information. There are some minimum requirements that your blog has to meet before they will let you in, and some opportunities require a certain PageRank, traffic, etc. PPP uses the “tack” system, so you have to have the correct number of “tacks” for the opportunity.

So what are you waiting for? Get over to PayPerPost and sign up today. You will be thanking me when the money starts flowing in.

One thing that is amazing about making money online is that even when you are not working on it you are still making money. I am a big fan of the subscription payment. Pretty much all of the money that I make now is through subscription payments, automated systems, etc. So basically my profit INCREASED when I was not working.

Like I mentioned last week, I have been crazy at the day job. But now it has stopped, something like running into a brick wall, one minute you are going full tilt and the next you are stopped dead and sore. I am sore, but not from work, I was playing ball hockey last night and got a ball off the top of my foot, but I will write more over at HoserLife on that, so go over there and check that out, or just register for the HoserLife feed and get all of the great updates.

I know that this is not something that was going to continue for ever but at least I know that I don’t have to worry about losing everything next time I have to take a short break from my constant online work. This is something that is not true if you do a lot of SEM and such, since that stuff changes on a constant basis.

Now that I have more time to spend I will be completing my blog series on how to start your own site. I am going to try to go into as much depth as I can talking about how you pick your niche, how to start your site with free tools, when you should pay for something, how to get ideas for great content, how to get your first traffic and then how to get your first dollar.

From there it is up to you.

Don’t get fooled by all of the “Get rich today” schemes that will tell you that they have a fool proof way to make money by doing nothing. All they have is what I am going to tell you, for free.

So do forget to subscribe to my feed, either by email (form on the side) or RSS reader. ITS FREE!!

One of the ways that make money online is by using affiliates. One of the ones that I have used since the beginning is Amazon. Back in the day I made a lot of money with Amazon, but lately I have been using it as a filler of sorts. If I see something neat I will link to it and use my aff-id.

Anyway, what I have done now is get paid in Gift Certificates. The last couple of payouts netted me about $70 in gift certificates. So last night I decided to do some cleaning of my wishlist. Some of the books have been in there a while and others I just recently added. Most are regarding business and marketing in general like The Dip by Seth Godin, others are just for fun like the book by Drew Curtis of Fark.

What books do you have in your Wish List? Link to your lists in the comments

I am in the process of writing some great posts, if I do say so myself, on how to start your online presence. One of the things that I have written about on the blogging is working on making your blog sticky. This is something that I realized was lacking on my own site.

So I took some time on the weekend to see if I could remedy that. The first thing that I did was add the WWSGD plugin. This is a plugin inspired by the almighty Seth Godin, I am a huge fan. It basically puts some text at the start of a post depending if the user is new or not. If they are new you try to get them to read some of your better work and of course add you RSS feed.

The second thing that I did was add a Related Posts plugin so that every post I write will have more for people to follow and hopefully get my pesky bounce rate down some. There are a number of them out there, but I chose this one. It seems to do what I want but I may be trying out some other ones in the future.

Thirdly I added the add signature plugin this plugin adds something to the end of every post. Currently I am just begging the reader to add my feed to their reader. I will have to think of something better soon, maybe some advertising.

And lastly I added a bunch of buttons on my sidebar so that people will know how to add my site to the various readers that are out there. With this there is no thought; just feeding.

I did this simply with the Feedburner publize tool. It took a little while, I wish they would simply write a plugin that you can select all that you want and make one cop-paster.

I am hoping to have the start of the posts that I mentioned above by the end of the week. The thing that inspired me to write them is people asking how to start a site, or others asking how I make money with my websites. I am hoping that this series will enable me to simply point them to this site and all of their answers will be answered.

Like my title says, “Making Money is my Hobby”. Unfortunately for a hobby to be successful you need to have spare time. This is not something that I have an abundance of these days. For example I have been 130% chargeable at my day job for the last 3 weeks. This means that my girlfriend is not very happy….Well not really, she is in the same industry.

Anyway, I have some great ideas for posts in the coming weeks and just have to find the 4 hours that it is going to take to put them together. One is a review of some of the free ebooks and stuff that you can get from various webmaster blogs out there. I have signed up for a lot of them, and even though they are free you can get some great information from these experts.

Another is a detailed account on how to set up your own blog, from picking your domain to setting up my recommended plugins. This post is for my friends that have been asking me how to start a “website”.

There are a couple more, so be sure to add my feed to your RSS reader or your get my posts in your inbox so that you don’t miss anything.

I was thinking that I would like to create my own list of FREE Search Engine Friendly (SEF) directories. There are a number of good ones online right now, but I am going to start one from scratch. So if you have a directory that you want me to add please email me at directories@bluenoser.net.

Please ensure that they are SEF, and clean, and user friendly. I will be adding more and more as the coming weeks go on. Also since this is my first list lets limit it to General Directories, maybe in the near future I will start to include Niche too

———————————————-

1. BluenoserLinks
2. FREE Web Directory
3. Webmasters Galaxy
4. UnaDir
5. MK PitStop Directory Resources
6. Best Freebies on Net
7. Real Estate Directory
8. Bloggeries Blog Directory
9. Site Find Directory
10. Power Submit Directory
11. Qettle
12. Index of hosting
13. Monkey Directory
14. Pet Directory
15. The Free Directory
16. Publifacil
17. Las Vegas Real Estate Directory
18. King of Url
19. URL Shack
20. Submit URL Here
21. Arakne-Links
22. Free Webmaster Directory
23. AbiFind
24. Software Directory
25. Erdoo Portal
26. Site Catch
27. Plome
28. MLinkz
29. Cyberbilt Web Directory

———————————————-

If one of these links are broken, or they don’t offer free submission or they are no longer SEF please post a comment and I will remove them from the list immediatly.

One of my sites used to be Drupal 5.x. I recently decided that it was time to convert the site to Wordpress 2.5.x. The reason being that I was really using the site more like a blog than anything else, and although Drupal is a great piece of CMS, it is really not that great out of the box as a blog. Wordpress on the other hand….well it is awesome. There are not that many world class bloggers out there that use anything but, and there is a reason for that.

IT WORKS

So I asked the question over at DP and got a couple of good links. However it wasn’t going to be easy since I couldn’t find anyone that converted to the most current Wordpress. This caused me some grief, until I decided to simply use an old version for the conversion and upgrade from there. So I went right to the version that this guy used, 2.2.2

The thing that a lot of people may have an issue with is the fact that there is no easy way to move over the users that you may have registered. Since I didn’t force users to register to comment or do pretty much anything else this turned out not to be an issue. The only people that registered were there to post spam. I guess they thought that if they registered they would bypass the moderation.

The list/order of things that I did. I am assuming that you have a host with cPanel and myphpadmin

1. Complete backup of old site.
2. Another backup, this time the root directories and the db seperately.
3. Install Wordpress 2.2.2
4. Open phpmyadmin, copy over term_data, term_hierarchy, node, node_revisons, term_node, and comments from the Drupal DB to the Wordpress DB. Alternatively you could have installed Wordpress into the same DB as the Drupal install.
5. Run the SQL from the txt file as found on Alex’s Blog on the Wordpress DB from myphpadmin
6. Delete the node_revisions table (It isn’t done in the above SQL)
7. Download and upgrade to the latest Wordpress Build. (you don’t want to get caught with your pants down)
8. Login in to Wordpress and start cleaning.

So that’s it. The one thing that I am going to have to figure out is an easy way to 301 the old URLs to the new. For now I simply logged into my Google Analytics account and manually 301′d the most popular URLs.

If you are having any problems following the step

There are a number of good Artilcle Directories online right now so I thought that I would start a list of the ones that I have submitted to, or have been recommended. If you have a directory that you want me to add please Contact me and I will see what I can do.

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http://www.article-dir.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.article-directory.net
http://www.article-emporium.com
http://www.articlefarm.com
http://www.articlefinders.com
http://www.articlegeek.com
http://www.article-highway.com
http://www.articlehub.coml
http://www.articlemill.com
http://article-niche.com
http://www.articlepoint.com
http://www.articleposter.com
http://www.articlepros.com
http://articles4content.com
http://www.articleshelf.com
http://www.articleshouse.com
http://www.articlesmagazine.com
http://www.articletime.com
http://www.articletrader.com
http://www.awebhostingprovider.com
http://www.awomaninbusiness.com
http://www.bharatbhasha.com
http://www.blogwidow.com
http://www.business-opportunity.biz
http://www.chiff.com/contact.htm
http://www.cyberindian.com
http://www.digital-women.com
http://www.dime-co.com
http://www.freezine-articles.com
http://freezinesite.com
http://www.home-business-directory.com
http://www.homebiztools.com
http://www.hotarticles.net
http://www.hotlib.com
http://www.jogena.com/
http://www.linkgrinder.com
http://www.linksnoop.com
http://www.marketingsource.com
http://www.media13.com
http://www.organic-rankings.com
http://www.recommendedsite.info
http://www.rectonet.com/
http://www.reprintarticles.com/
http://www.savearticles.com/
http://sbinformation.about.com/
http://www.selfseo.com/
http://www.sierratimes.com/
http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/
http://www.storebuilder.co.uk/
http://www.articledashboard.com/
http://www.articlefusion.com/
http://www.articlepeak.com/
http://www.articlepublishing.com/
http://www.isnare.com
http://www.stickyarticle.com/
http://www.theezine.net/
Zub Article Directory
050 Article Directory

Since I am sure that you think that I am entertaining and you have added me to your RSS Reader, I am sure that you are feeling the need to show your appreciation.  Well, now you can…..I have added a wish list at Amazon that you can feel free to purchase from.  Well truth be told I added some of this stuff a long time ago but never really told anyone about it, but now I am.

I have also settled on a theme.  If you were checking the page out over the last couple of weeks you would have seen me try out a few different themes.  I still have some tweaking to do, but this theme will allow me to do some more private advertising and market myself and any services better.

There are some great posts coming.  I have started a serious for beginners to the web, I am talking about people that have no idea where to start, I am going to give them the tools, or at least where to go and get those tools.  If any of you know of something that I should include be sure to post a link in the comments and I will be sure to review it.

After the beginner posts are up I have some local people in mind that I am going to approach to talk about how they got started online, and what their goals are.  I am also doing a lot of reading on time management so expect some tips about how to get everything that you need to get done, DONE.

I broke down this weekend and got myself a Twitter account. I was going to hold off, but like facebook, I was peer-pressured into it. I am going to give it a 30 day trial run to see if it works out, or if it turns out to be more time than it is really worth.

I even installed a badge on this blog so that you can see what I am doing. I am planning on updating it at least 2x a day while I am giving it a go. I am pretty sure most of the crap that I am updating it with is not going to be worth much, but it should be fun.

Follow me this Month.  It will be a blast.

In other Bluenoser News, I have started writing a couple of awesome tutorials that I am going to post on this blog in the near future. They are all about how to start a website from scratch, add content, start traffic and even cover the costs. This was brought on by some questions from my less geeky friends about starting something up, so I have decided to get them going and keep track of all of their questions. So the tutorials will also have some decent FAQs.

If this is something that you think that you will be interested in, or someone you know make sure that you subscribe to the feed so that you can be up to date.

That is all for now, but I will leave you with this. My favorite picture from my recent jaunt to the Dominican Republic.

He made me laugh.

If you use Flickr as your main source of stock photography, maybe you should think again.

Sure it is great to have such a large source of free stock to use in your blog, but every once in a while the user of that photo will change the license or worse, delete it. When it gets deleted you get the dreaded “photo unavailable” image. That is if you hotlink, and admit it, most of you do.

If you download the image and use it from one of your own servers then you don’t have to worry about the ugly unavailable image, but you still have to worry about license changes.

This is one of the reasons that I have taken to using Crestock. I have mentioned Crestock in the past, and especially like the free image of the day, which I have started to collect to get my personal stock photo database going. This is the group of images that I go to first when trying to find something worth while to add to the post. Sometimes it is just a pretty face

Pretty Face

So keep this in mind next time that you go looking for a picture for you site, maybe what you pay for is what you get, and free doesn’t always get a lot.

Mr Chow has a bunch of Entrecard credits, and wants to give them away. To do that he has started a contest where you link back to his site and you are entered into a draw for 10000 credits. That is quite a bit.

If you are not sure what Entrecard is all about check out John Chow’s post on the subject.

So my first step in “getting serious” has taken place. I have moved one of my more pet like projects to a separate host and installed a blog. The site has always been a forum, and for the last couple of years it has been a vbulletin forum, and of course I had to use Wordpress for the blog. I tried Vblogetinw when it was active, and I just can’t seem to justify the cash to go with VB Blog, and then on top of all of that I KNOW Wordpress.

So anyway, I had to find a way to integrate WP and VB nicely, and this is where the Bridge comes in. It is a plugin I found over at VB.org and it works great. I had a couple of problems getting it to work on my production site (I tested it with new installations first) but if I wasn’t so cocky after my tests I would have read the FAQ and realized the problems.

I am having one more problem with it, but I am not sure if it is going to be an issue. I had to manually give myself, my forum self, access to the dashboard. When I looked at the MySQL it seemed that there was something amiss with the way the plugin maps the roles. But it is only a small thing and I will be doing more of this backend stuff after I upgrade to vb3.7.

The next issue was to get a decent theme on there. I decided to go with Sandpress, it is a nice theme and I think it will work out great until I decide to start one from scratch using the Sandbox theme as a jumping point. I am still not that great at CSS so it took me a bit to get the right logo on there. I still have a bit of work to get everything looking right but I have to get more content on there and then traffic. THEN I will worry about the sidebars

The only thing that I have done that is interesting is that I have added Gravatar support using the WP-Gravatar plugin. So far it is working great, I just need to add a “cooler” avatar for myself.

If you want to see for yourself what it looks like now, check out HoserNews

I think that I have reached the point in my life that I think it is time to get serious about becoming self-sufficient. There are aspects in my day job that I like, including the security, however there is not a lot of potential for movement both within the corporate ladder or around the world on work.

A couple of things that I want to do is move around. I want to have the ability to move around on work or move to one place to live for a year and just work there.

I have a few current websites that I am going to become VERY serious about in the coming months. There are exactly 4 including this one. A couple are sites that I have started worked on, let die, then worked on again. I am planning on getting them to the point where they are going strong and making me a steady income. The first target is my forum. I currently have a lot of members that are not active. My plan is to change the front page into a blog targeted on the theme of the forum and build traffic to that. From there I hope to build a readership base that I can then convert to the forum and have community traffic build content for the site.

The next site on my list is the same idea, but it has not been established at all and has very little traffic. It is in a completely different niche and is related to my day-job. My plan here is to build a professional position on the web and work on becoming an EXPERT in particular niches within my profession. From there I hope to be able to gain some consulting work on the side.

Then finially I have this site. I plan on doing more work on this site by the time that summer comes with better articles and status reports on how my experiments are going and give some fancy graphs using Analytics.

I will also be recommending some of the resources that I have used to get my ideas. This is something that is huge, I am going on a trip in a couple of weeks and will be taking a number of books with me that I hope to gain some inspiration from, I will point them your way when I get them

I think that it would be a lot of fun to be the guy who has to brush the water on her. I wonder how you get that job. I doubt that the guy gets paid that much though, why would you have to

I may be jinxing this just by saying it, but I think that Spring is finally here. We had a very strange winter, lots of snow which was usually followed by lots of rain. This meant that you still had to shovel, but the pile you made was usually gone in a week or 2. Of course I don’t shovel, I live in an apartment

So instead of the huge piles of dirty snow that usually grace the parking lots, we have none. And it is nice.

I walked out the door this morning and could smell the fresh salty air. It is not warm enough for the raw sewage smell yet, but that should be less now that we are doing primary treatment….

So now that it is spring and the NHL Play-offs have started, I don’t think that I will be spending a lot of time online. My plan is to again put some of my sites in auto-mode, and during the first nasty evening where I don’t want to leave the house, update all of my software, and scripts.

My only “new” projects that I am going to be working on is modifying one of my sites to be a blog that I can modify easier, and the other is to start a new blog for some of the things that I do at work. Maybe I will even update my personal site that has my resume on it….

It has finally come to a head. The main stream media has realized that there is something to this Net Neutrality thing. Recently it was brought up in the House of Commons and the Minister of Industry had a less than confident response.

Instead of my writing here what the story is all about I will let Amber MacArthur do the talking. She does a decent job of describing what Net Neutrality is, however I don’t think that she gets across the implications of “traffic shaping”. The fear is that the large ISPs will start to slow down services that may compete with options that they offer. Basically shutting down the start-ups and not allowing competition. This will lead to more monoplistic tendancies and overall will hurt the internet economy.

For some really good articles on Net Neutrailty and theimplications if the net is not neutral read this and this

The first is from the guy that developed the Internet and the second invented the WWW.

I am not a fan of writing sales letters. However it is not something that I am willing to out-source when I am in the testing phase. There shouldn’t be a need for me to shell out mid-$XXX for a decent sales letter when I am not even sure that there is a market for my idea. So that is why I am stuck doing it myself, and it is not easy. I can write about a lot of stuff and simply ramble on, however to write a good sales letter there is a form that should be followed, and at the end I should be able to convince myself to shell out the dough for my letter.

All of that moaning aside, I have almost finished my first. There is some tweaking, design stuff, etc but the content, flow etc is there and done. I am going to spend a couple of hours this weekend finishing it up and putting it live. From there I am going to start research for an AdWords campaign and then get that started for one week on Monday. I still have to get my newsletter software finished and tweaked so that while I am testing I am building a potential list.

If you are wondering how I am planning on doing a reasonable test without a product, I am going to have the same set-up and when they fillin a bit of information to take them to the paynow page, I am going to have a blank page that describes that the check-out is closed temporarily and if they want to hear back via email when it is online they are to confirm there address.

If I they get reasonable conversions I will move onto the product generation phase. Then really start the marketing ?

But, before I can get there, I still ahve to finish that damn Sales Letter.

I have come up with a couple of ideas to get started on to start to reach for my goal of $500 per month of passive income. The big thing right now is that I have to come up with a sales letter that I can use to test the product that I am thinking about. One of the major things that I have learned is that you really have to test to see if there are people out there that want to pay for the service that you are willing to offer.

Writing a sales letter seems like it is a simple thing, but it is one of the harder things that I have done. I can write great articles, ones that people can get a lot of information out of, but trying to convince someone that they NEED to drop some quid on my product is not so easy. I have went back to the sites that I have bought stuff from in the past and I am going to start from there. I hope to have the letter complete by the end of this week and then drive about $100 with of PPC to it and see what kind of conversions I get. I am going to set a certain price point about mid-range from what I would want to sell it for and use that. If the test is successful then it is off to make the product. I think that it will take a good 2-3 months to complete the book, and then some more money to get it edited.

I am wondering how productive people think that they are. If I was going to put a number to it, I would say that in the time that I put aside for my work, personal business work not day job, I am probably around 85-90% productive. However, this is a new thing. I used to be closer to 50%. The reason was that I was in information overload. I spent a lot of time reading other blogs, participating in other forums and basically wasting time. Sure I didn’t think that it was a waste of time then, but now I do.

I am on an info diet. I took the marketing rule of 20/80 to heart and have added it to my daily life.

I have really cleaned house.

I check my business email once in the evening, and take care of everything that I can right away. Moderation of my forums, blogs and directories, following up on business transactions and participating in my forums now take me 30 mins most. It used to use up over half of my work time since I would be going to the blogs and forums immediately when I got an email to moderate something. NOw I do it once a day.

The other thing that used to kill me was keeping up on all of the forums that I participated in. So I have cut that back to only the ones that have served me VERY well in the past, whether that means that it was a great information source, great people or some great deals.

I still have some fat to trim, but I am getting better. I have a hard time figuring out how productive I am when I am researching niches, keywords, etc. But the more I do the more I know when I am “barking up the wrong tree”

So in the end, take a look at what you do with your time, and what makes you happy. There is a good post over at Hoserlife about some reasons why a Low Information Diet is good for you.

I just finished a very interesting read. I wasn’t expecting much out of it when I ordered it on Amazon, I just had some aff money in the US store, and you can pretty much only buy books if you are not in the US. I am doing a review of the book right now, so I will let you know what one it is then

Anyway, it really changed the way that I look at the way that I do online business, and my life/job in general. I think, however, that I tried to jump into the process laid out in the book way too fast. I got into the product creation portion way before I was ready, and before I had the spare time to do such. I have to learn how to “eliminate” before I “automate” (if you read the book, you know what I am talking about), I am working too many hours at the day job, and there are a few of my sites that currently need a lot of TLC. So what I am going to do is use some of the techniques in the book to see if I can raise my productivity at work so that I can get more done and get home at a decent time and therefore I have more time to work on my own projects.

I think that I will have the books review done soon, but if I don’t have time I will simply edit this with the title

It is a recommended read, as long as you have the correct mind set and don’t take the title too literally. You really have to do work, like every successful person online says so, however it is the way that you set up your company that is the biggest thing.

I have had a lot of different ideas in my head but for some reason I was having a hard time getting them out when I opened the word preocessor. I would simply sit there trying to think about where to start and what to write. I knew what it was that I wanted to write about but I kept stuttering off the start. Not really sure how I wanted to put it into words.

Then I stumbled on to a way to get around this, it worked for me and maybe it will help you.

I got away from the computer. I didn’t do this on purpose, I was waiting for someone and had a note pad and pen in my bag. So I took it out and started writing. Before I knew it I had 3 good blogs posts on paper, not to mention a couple of really good outlines for articles that I was hoping to write.

This method may seem to be counter productive since now I have to type them in, but I am a fast typer and the extra time does not affect my productivity much. It really is a moot point if I was going to be sitting in front of my computer for 30 min to an hour trying to think about what to put down.

Does anyone else have a good idea to get around writers block?

I have a goal for this year and that is to have my semi-passive income increased to $500 per month by the end of the year. This doesn’t sound like much, but I don’t seem to have much of an imagination. I can’t seem to come up with an idea for a product. I like writing so I figured that maybe an ebook, but on what? And for who? Since this is to be passive income I want to be sure to pick a demographic that is easy to market to. I am an engineer by trade, and there is a couple of ideas there, but the people that I would be marketing to would not see my credentials as good enough to warrant the purchase. Also the topics that I am interested in, in my field of work, would be very technical and I am not sure if I could sell the books, I would need to sell one a day to reach my target.

So where does that leave me? Well frustrated….

I am not sure where to go, maybe I will offer myself up for some technical writing assignments over at DP, or elance and see if something interesting will come along. Or maybe I will simply try to think up a cool gadget that would fit into one of my hobbies. The issue that I am having now is that I am the type of person that can solve a problem if you give me one, but I am not good at coming up with things on the fly. I make a very good consultant, but service work does not lend itself to be very passive. You only make money when you are working, I would like to find a way to make money while I am out drinking with the guys.

SO what is a webmaster to do? I would like to be able to use the day job more like a hobby, something that I enjoy doing and a place that I enjoy going to, but not really required to pay the bills. This may be wishful thinking, but I am sure that if I really put my mind to it I will be able to come up with something that will enable me to be inspired. I know I will have to hook up with some old buddies and go out drinking. Maybe one of them would have a cool problem that I would be able to come up with a solution and create a product out of it.

Business trips, man are they a pain.  I am in the process of a trip that is basically 4 hours of work, but it is going to take in the order of 3 days to complete it, and since I am alone on this journey I don’t have a lot to do.  I am lucky that my next town is going to be a place that I know people and maybe even get to stop in for some supper, but I am not getting my hopes up just yet.  I am in Newfoundland, and you can never tell when the weather is completely going to turn on you and be stranded.  That said, it is looking good that I am going to make it through the next part of the trip without much headache, it is the flying out that I am worried about.

As far as that goes, the day job is really eating into a lot of my web development time.  I have had very little time to spend on HoserLife and even less on HoserNews. I was able however to get someone to write a column for me.  Its name alone should be enough to stir up comments, if you want you can read the first Cunt of the Month here.

Speaking of HoserLife, I am building a very cool app that is targeted to the people that want to manage their life better, especially their fitness part.  I am building it with CakePHP and am finally getting somewhere.  I was spending a lot of time trying to work out the whole process in my head, but last weekend I decided to just get to it and I am finally starting to see something.  There is still a long way to go before it is ready to go into BETA even, I still haven’t figured out the name, but when I do I will be sure to start creating some buzz for it.  While it is in ALPHA I am going to have a few friends try it out for a month and then do some mods to it and release for BETA.  I think that I have about 200 hours before ALPHA and since I can barely spend 2 hours a day there is a long way to go, especially since I can’t work on it on the road.

Anyway, I think that I am going to go downstairs and try out the lounge, who knows maybe I will even try out some poker tonight, I have been on a big downswing so maybe it is time to go big or/and go home.

Man is the market ever starting to piss me off, I saw the start of the down turn fairly early on and was able to insulate myself somewhat to hold on to some of my gains during the first part of the year. But now I am not sure what I am going to do so that I will be able to see some gains for this coming year.

Since most of my market is in the US, a recession is not going to work out well. I am going to have to hope for th ebest, but realistically I am not expecting to see much growth in my online revenue in 2008. Therefore what I am going to have to do is try to find ways to lower my costs. Become a more efficiently run enterprise.

First thing that I am going to have to do is to find a better CC. The best way to do that would be to compare credit cards for a number of different companies.

Second I am going to have to find some way to keep running and investing into my company. Since revenue is going to be a problem I am probably going to need some sort of loan. Now over at Beat the Quote they have a lot of information on UK secured loans, but since I am in North America I am not going to be able to take much advantage of that. However if you click here you can find out what they do have to offer in your area.

And Thirdly I am going to have to think about taking on some more freelance work if my own ideas don’t pan out. This has been something that I have been thinking about doing for a while. I have a lot of expertise in some very profitable niches that I think that I could become a very good writer for. And on top of that, there is not a lot of writers that can write on this subject, especially on DP.

All in all I am sure that 2008 is going to be a harder year, but I hope to see an over all growth, and stay on track to be completely independant by the time I am 30, 4 years

Cheers

I am starting to notice just how important some visual stimulation is when writing. You can’t simply write a great post and expect people to read it, they will get bored before they even finish loading the page. You either have to do some fancy writing with lists/bolding/etc or you have to integrate images into your posts. You can either have one image for each topic, or a different image for each post.

This is not really something that I do a lot on this site, and probably won’t since I don’t make money here and I really simply use this site for my own thought processing. But one a number of my other sites I have noticed that I get a much better response to posts with an image in the start of the post.

Since I am not much of a photographer, although I have an interest in it, I have to resort to using stock images. Currently my source of choice is CreStock. One reason is the free image of the day, which may not fit all of my niches, but it is a start to a library that I can grab from, and then you have the images that start at $5, which in my mind is pretty cheap, in the run of a good article I expect it to make me at least $50, and if I hit it good on Stumble even more, so a $5 investment is nothing. And there is nothing saying that you can’t use the same image in more than one post, or on multiple sites.

Let me know what you think.

I have just installed a new base theme. Out of the box it still needs some work, But I think that it is cleaner than my old one.

I will be adding some colour to it as time allows. Sure I should have done the majority of the work offline, but I am not that kind of guy

I have finially taken the leap and upgrade Wordpress on this site to 2.3.1. Yeah I know….it is about time, I am actually still behind some but I have some other things that have to come first, like getting this site looking better.

I am thinking about starting out with something similar to what is over at Bluenoser Poker, maybe make two columns on the right, or just widen the first one. I really like the VERY clean look.

I will be working on this for the next little while and plan to have it up and running by the end of the week.

I have decided that the best way to get a couple of my new sites running is to be writing at least one GREAT article a week. I am talking about a 500+ word informative/opinion piece for the particular niche that I am writing for.

I tried doing the one post a day per blog thing, but it started to kill me and I am not sure if I was really getting the results for the time that I am putting in. The one informative piece a week should be enough for people to keep coming back, and it will allow me to judge how the site is going to grow, and what direction I want to take it.

One of the sites has a forum, it actually started mostly as a forum, but I have since added a blog to the home page. This is the URL that I have most of my links pointing to, so I think that it is important to have more than just a summary of what is going on in the blog to get people interested in that 0.5sec that it takes for people to decide if they like the site or not.

The other site is going to be a very interesting site, one that I would add to me RSS reader if I didn’t own the site

I am posting a lot of short articles there too, but I am thinking that they may be better as blog posts and have the long ones as articles. I know that is not what I said above, but I think that shorter posts make better forum or blog posts than destination articles.

What do you think? Are you like me and add feeds to your reader but then are more likely to delete them if they make 5 submissions a day? Or do you delete them if they are not updating enough? And what is the right frequency for you?

PS this site is not one of the ones that I am talking about, the last post being a week ago is just coincidence.

I do think that writing can be fun, but I have so many ideas that I don’t know what to write about. There are some ideas that I think would be fun to research and then report what I find, but I am not sure if they are profitable ideas. For example, I am not sure if they are good ideas such that people are going to search for them, and then when they reach my site they are going to earn me money somehow.

Blog writing is something that I am still not sure what I am doing. I know that the posts on a blog are supposed to be personal, but sometimes I get an idea that is technical, or one that I want to state without bias and I am not sure how to post it. Do I add a little opener and post it in one of my blogs? Maybe a forum? The majority of the blogs that I read do not have the same feeling. I am thinking now that one way to get around it is to have a “newsletter” or online journal that I can compile these type of articles.

Writing as a whole is fun, however I don’t think that I would be able to do it for a living. I look at the amount that I pay a lot of my freelance writers and I am not sure how they do it. I pay what they ask, and I stay away from the cheap ones as I have been burned before, but still $.05 a word and less seems like too little for me to live on. But maybe they are doing it as a hobby like me.

I don’t think that I am ready to become a freelancer yet, but that is something that I am working towards. I am aiming for 5 years where I can work from anywhere. I want to be able to pick up my computer and get out of the office, and work from anywhere there is an internet connection, which with 3G and the like is almost anywhere in North America, and I am sure that I can get a reasonably reliable connection somewhere warm and tropical

Writing…..Something that I think that I would like to do more of.

However life gets in the way. I have a few interesting web products on the go that I would like to get finished, and of course my main goal for my online presence is to make money.

That all said, I am liking this writing thing. I am really starting to enjoy building content for my site. I was relying on outsourcing it, however that said, the quality was really laking. So now I still have the new content that is written by others, but now I am using it for ideas more than anything, and at the most using the articles that I am getting, usually 300 words, for forum posts.

Now the problem that I am having is that I am realizing that making money simply from writing is going to be VERY hard, and to write a good article takes a lot of time. But I am going to be do most of my own writing on a couple of sites/blogs that I have started. This is going to be one of my outlets, and over at the forum that is the constant bain of my online life I am going to continue to write worthwhile posts. It is a great, general purpose place to write what I want.

Let me know what you think about my writing.

Idiot Gets Electrocuted – Watch more free videos

Especially Electrical Engineers.

Since we are still in the beginnings of December I think that I should get some poker goals out of the way so that when January comes around I will have something to come back to.

Well the first thing is that I am going to be sticking with full-ring .25/.50 limit at PokerStars. There should be less variance in this play and I should be able to build my bankroll somewhat. Currently it sits around $80.

My hands-played goal is going to be a measly 1500 hands. This should be easy, but December is a very busy month. So 1500 hands I hope to build my bankroll to $100. It doesn’t sound like much but if you looked at my last two graphes you will see that December has not started out too good.

The only other goal is to re-read a couple of poker books that I own. I will talk more about this later this week.

Well it is one nasty night here. The first real snow storm of the year, so since I couldn’t leave the house I decided to play some of the poker, again on PokerStars.

I played three table sessions in all, so the sessions that I mention in the titles of these threads are really my sit-downs at the computer to play.

The first two sessions I played went alright. I lost some, in one and ran really bad at the end of one.

The first session I played about 116 hands and lost about 10.5BB. This is the session that I had two really bad hands near the end that put me on tilt. One was my KK versus AA on a completely raggedy board and the other was someone calling all raises pre flop, flop turn and river when I had flopped the nut straight and s/he had runner-runner flush.

Anyway my second session ended a bit better, I had made a couple of major mistakes and was down to 3BB when I started at 20BB, but made it back so that my net was only negative 1.5BB when I finished after 104 hands.

FOr my final session of the evening. After taking a break to charge my phone, call the ‘rents and do some dishes I played another short session while waiting for a good show to come on TV. In this session I played 40 hands and came away with 10BB in the black.

So over all today was a loss, but only about 2BB

What I learned is that I really have to keep the number of hands that I play down, pre-ferably at 25% when I am playing full ring. A lot of people may think that is too tight, but at the low limits that I am playing, when you do hit a hand you WILL get paid off.

Here is a plot of how I did.

It is made with PokerGrapher, which is an addon that you can get for PokerTracker. Both great investments if you are looking to find holes in your game, or if you are simply a stats junkie
So now I think that I am going to go off and before I hit the hay, do some reading in Super System 2 and see what Jennifer Harmonhas to say about getting me better results at Limit holdem.

Session one was a short-handed game of .25/.50 limit on PokerStars. And it went badly. I broke one of my rules, I was tired and not all there mentally. Sure I was watching the game, I picked a table that I thought would be alright, but after about 3 rounds my VP$IP was 10%, thats right in 18 hands I played 2 and both those were when I was in the small blind with no raise.

So when I got J10s on the button I thought that it was a sweet hand. So I called….then the BB raised and me, well I closed out the betting. Then the flop, J-10-x rainbow. Not bad, I figured I could play it cool and just called the BB. Then the card of death Q…..

BB checked-raised and I called and then on the river there was a blank, and he check raised again.. I called and he flipped AK….DAMN!

That simply put me on tilt, I was down to 25% of my buy-in and after 20odd hands called it quits.

I think that if I was sharper I probably would have folded on the turn, and saved myself 3BB.

Now I just hope that this is not me going on tilt full time, and the next time I sit down to play I will be sure to be relaxed

The more that I do reading other blogs and working on the design of some of my other sites I am starting to realize that this site is really lame. I really have to do something about the look of this place.

Most of my readers are via RSS, so I am sure that YOU don’t even know what the place looks like. But I think that if I want to build my readership I need to look much “cooler”.

Now I am not sure what to do about this.

There are a number of cool free ones out there, but they all have those stupid “sponsored” links at the bottom of them and make the entire site look un-professional. Some that would be great for a personal site, but not a site like this where I am trying to help people out by learning about my problems with making money online by not doing what I do….

Anyway, I am thinking about starting a contest on Namepros or another site like that where they can make me up a 2.0 type theme. Or maybe I will get a buddy to do it for me. What ever I decide it is going to happen in the very start of the New Year.

Well I have decided that it is a waste of time to start up an entirely new site just to post about my poker playing. I figure that if I do it for more than a year I may change my mind, but for now I will just be posting it here

So here is the plan, I am going to be trying to play a bit every week and I will make a summary post about what is happening after every session. Basically I will post right away so the feeling about the particular session will be fresh. Then if I have the time I will be posting a weekly round-up. Talk about where my bank-roll is, if it is going up or down, and what I am feeling about my play.

The thing about poker is that you have to be in the right frame of mind to play right. You don’t want to have other things on your mind that will distract you from your play. So during those times I will be probably reading about the game and reporting back on what I learn.

The game that I am planning on starting with is low limit at poker stars. I figure something in the range of .25/.50 This is a good range for me to play at because it is not so high that I am going to lose a lot, but it is high enough so that my gains can been seen. Also I am going to try to stay away from the SNGs, I am not a very good tourney player so the cash games suit me better. Besides I like to be able to get up and leave at any point in time.

I had vBlogetin installed on one of my forums for a long time. I bought a license when it first came out and then got very disenfranchised with it since there seemed to be 0 development for the longest time.

Then the guys/gals at vBulletin came out with their own, official product. And then started to get really freaked….

Anyway it seems that the team at vBlogetin smartened up and have started development and they are finially in RC1.

So anyway, I am in the process of redeveloping the site and going to re-install the product. Maybe I can get some new members since they will have their own blog.

I know I just said that I was going to stop developing new stuff, but I consider this maintenance. I make some nice money from the site as it is right now, but I think that it would be great if I could create a community that people would simply want to visit. I am working on some apps that can be used on Facebook, and then I hope to get as many people as I can to use it. Maybe I can get some indirect traffic from it.

It is looking like the stretches of free time I have are going to be getting shorter and shorter till mid-winter. So I am thinking that I am going to be spending my little amount of time that I have. Developing new web-properties take a lot of time, so I am going to be simply maintaining and then spending my little time doing one of the activities in title.

So which one am I going to do?

Well I think that it is going to come down to what one will be the better investment. There are a lot of fish out there even now, so poker would be a great time investment and has a lot of potential.

That said I have money that I am investing in RRSP from my day job and have been thinking about transferring them to stocks and doing more of the management myself. This would take a minimum of 5 hours a week to do it right.

So which one is the better to do? I already play poker for fun and have some books that I have read and could read them again, and “study” them to gain a better insight into the game. With online poker you can play at any time and it really doesn’t matter if I miss some time.

So I think that poker it is. I am going to invest a $100 buyin on pokerstars and go from there. I will post my stats as I go along.

I am thinking about starting a poker blog. I play a lot of poker and read a lot about poker so it seems like a great idea. On the surface….

I am not sure if I want to start a brand new site using an existing domain, or new domain, or just starting posting about poker on one of the sites that I currently run. I am thinking that the third option is the one that I am going to go with. Not sure what site, or what is the best way to do this, but I am going to start thinking about it for the next little while.

Maybe I will spend some time and start writing articles about poker and see how long it takes for me to get bored of it. Not sure if I would want to write 100 articles and then get VERY bored with it all.

Not really much going on in the webmaster world with me. I am currently developing one of my sites themes. I have a bunch of content written, the first few pages are indexed and getting minimal traffic from Google, but I think that the look of the site is not quite ready yet. This is something that I am going to work on for the next month or so, while adding content.

When this site is rolling, I have an application that I am working on that needs to be developed. This is the app that I am going to use CakePHP with. Not sure if I am going to build the entire thing myself, or have someone else do it for me.

Not too much to report on these days. Been spending most of my time at work and my leasure time going to public lectures. So not a lot of work in the online world. I have been thinking about what I am going to be working on in the New Year, and CakePHP is going to be something that I am going to be putting a lot of time in. I have a couple of projects that I would like to develop and if Cake can do this faster I should learn it.

So one of the things that I found was this podcast. Not sure if it is going to be useful yet, but time will surely tell.

So you think that it would be cool to make some money as a “blogger”. Why not, seems easy enough….Right?

Before you quit that day job read, How to Become A Semi-Successful Blogger

The part of the process that I am not very good at is the “Shameless Self Promotion”

Don’t be afraid of shameless self-promotion

I just knew this post, if distributed through the right channels, would be a huge hit. I knew that even the top-tier bloggers in my niche would appreciate the post, because my slant on the topic (humor) was totally unique and well-crafted. Perhaps against my better judgment, I emailed a bunch of the aforementioned top-tier bloggers shamelessly self-promoting my post. The email said something like “Hey [name], I’ve been reading your blog for quite some time now and I thought you’d appreciate a post I just wrote entitled [ultra-witty and attention-grabbing post name]. Let me know what you think!”

To my surprise, many of these people not only viewed the post, but commented on and linked to the post, and the most important blog in my niche dedicated an entire post to describing and linking to my original post – all within two hours of publishing the article. So I found more avenues to shamelessly-self promote my article, including posting a link in a Facebook group dedicated to my niche.

This is something that is not in my nature which if I ever want to move from the hobby blogger, to the business blogger I am going to have to overcome.

John has a good take on the process, but I would recommend going over to Chris Garrett’s site to since he is on of the authorities in the Blogging world.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget to subscribe to my feed to stay up-to-date on everything Bluenoser.

I was stumbling along today and found this great blog post on “Things You Must Know About CakePHP”

There is a lot of great information in here, I especially liked the part on creating simple Admin Sections

Creating a simple admin center

If you need to create an administrative back-end for your CakePHP site and would like all the actions with administrative capabilities to exist under a specific folder, open up config/core.php and uncomment:
define(‘CAKE_ADMIN’, ‘admin’);
This will then make all actions that are prefixed with “admin_” to be accessible via:
/admin/yourcontroller/youraction. For instance, if I created an action in my posts controller called “admin_add,” I would access this via: www.example.com/admin/posts/add
From there I could simply password the admin folder to prohibit unwanted users from adding posts.

This is something that I am going to have to use in the current project that I am working on.

And knowing how to make custom 404 pages is really nice to know

Creating a custom 404 error page

If you need to change the page that users see when a document is not found, create:
/app/views/errors/error404.thtml

I have a inferiority issue. I don’t like to give away link juice. I always feel like I am hurting if I see something and want to link to it. Why didn’t I write something like that, maybe I should.

Anyway, I think that my thoughts and feelings towards this issue is really hurting no one but me. So starting now I am going to be sure to post about cool things that I see online, while I am wasting time at the day job or researching something. I am evening thinking about making a weekly “Link post”, this is something that I see a lot of other blogs that I read do, sometimes I will read them sometimes I won’t but I have found some really interesting articles that way.

So if you think that you have a post/service/etc that you want me to write about send me a note to coolstuff {a} bluenoser.net, if you are selling something that you want me to review however you are going to have to pay for that service So check me out over at ReviewMe

One of the things that I have a problem doing is making buttons, they are a pain in the behind and usually take me longer to make than it is worth, but then I was stumbling along, like I do when I get bored and found this.

Not bad eh?

Simple and gets the job done….

Brilliant Button Maker

There is a site that I have been nursing along for a very long time, however I have now decided that it is time to either get it bake to life, or kill it.

I am thinking that I am going to revive the site, and document everything that I do to make this happen here.

Currently the stats for the site include .25 registrations a day and 2 new threads a day.
So today we start back at zero. I am going to be doing a couple of things to make the site the place to be.

First I am going to make a minimum of 10 posts a day, with a minimum of 5 new threads.
Second, start working on automated post exchanges
Third, redesign the logo and get some online marketing materials made
And fourth, I am going to start working on contest ideas, something that will generate interest in the site.

I will report back in a week to let you know how it is going. Every month for the next year I will post the average number of posts, new threads and registrations per day.

If anyone has any advice, please post it here. I would be very interested in hearing what you have have done in the past to revive a currently dead forum.