Few Bucks

You better get a bloody good web host for your proxy

2007-11-18T21:32:00.000+01:00

Hello everybody. I was just watching TV, we had Discovery turned on here and what I saw there reminded me of this blog again, just like I was thinkning about it minute ago. The reason is, American Chopper was building Go Daddy chopper and I have some Go Daddy experiences to share.

It is all about my proxy. I calculated that I can easily make a few bucks in a year or less if I invest about $45 USD to GoDaddy web host plan and one .info domain for a year. So I did and here are the results.

Just after few months of running my proxy I reached few hundreds of visits per day. And that was generating some traffic. Actually some more traffic. So at maybe third month of my proxy running I reached bandwidth allowed without any problems and transferred few GBs over my limits. So I thought, ups. And after that I've received payment invoice from GoDaddy. They wanted me to pay something over $400 USD for those few GBs over limit. Ups. I got scared at the moment, I ignored it and I'm still ingoring and not making any money from my proxy. They turned me off.

I made about $40 USD all together. So I am still missing few bucks. Not good. But I'm still a domain owner (I guess so) so I still might try to get a new host - special one, for proxies (and adult sites :) - and give it a try again with some small investment. I might get luckier than this last time. And I'll try to think of something different that could make me my few bucks. Any ideas? What's making money for you?

Everybody, let's BlogRush

2007-09-20T12:07:00.000+02:00

Let me introduce BlogRush to you - new web service that can help you increase your traffic exponentially.

How it works?

It is pretty simple. You get code for your blog, you place it on your blog, the code generates widget and for every impression you earn some credit. Widget displays few articles from related blogs and as you earn some credits, your articles starts to display at other topic related blogs. By the way, you can also earn credits from your BlogRush referrals.

The idea is very simple and by my experience with very similar service I can tell you that rush about BlogRush is there from a reason. John Chow can tell you what is the result.

Don't hesitate and register you blog to BlogRush.

Juicy links #1, August 7th

2007-08-07T12:21:00.000+02:00

So far I had that luck of seeing so many great sites and reading so many great articles and I didn't share them with you. But today I feel like I should share some of them with you.

Juicy links will be irregular mash up of the best ones. Let's start this session with these:

Enjoy!

Posting Frequency vs. Quality Content

2007-08-06T00:18:00.001+02:00

This is real, friends, we have a fight here. In the left corner of the ring, there is Mr. Posting Frequency, very fast fighter, can get really angry. And in the right corner, here we have standing Mr. Quality Content, big and strong fighter, has won many fights, as well as his opponent Mr. Posting Frequency. But now, this is day, today, we will find out who is the best. Again - Posting Frequency vs Quality Content.

And the bell rings, fight is started. Mr. Frequency approached closer to Content and gives him several very fast hits. Ouch, that hurts. Okay, okay, so far it looks better for Frequency, but Content is really strong guy and can take some more, I guess. And watch him now - "Ouch" is only thing that Frequency can say, Content hit hard, only once but very hard and Frequency took it bad. But he's getting up and let's see the response. Bang, bam, bom, and the Content is on the ground, Frequency staying proud on his feet. But Quality has it's fans and they want him back. Yes, he's getting on his knees and Frequency is just waiting for exchange some more punches...

If the fight like this happens, who will win? What do you think? What's more: posting frequency or quality content?

Make your first $10

2007-08-02T08:47:00.000+02:00

That's was Thirty Day Challenge is about - Make your first $10 in 30 days without a dime spent with help and advice of some skilled guys. Even if you're making more than $10 dollars in less than 30 days, you're welcome to join. I did. And for newcomers - com'on, what your waiting for? Go for it.

30DC (30 Day Challenge) has already begun but you can still become member a try that challenge for yourself. First day, yesterday, was very light introduction with video, podcast and some more ideas about what is going to happen. Looking forward to checking today's stuff.

So guys, newbies and gurus too (except gods) there is always something to learn and people behind 30DC are right people to learn from. Join challenge here. Check out 30DCs blog.

How am I doing?

2007-08-01T20:07:00.000+02:00

Hello, everybody. I would like to apologize for not giving you my attention through to whole July. Of course, it's holiday season, so I guess you took some days off too. But still, I was thinking of few bucks blog and got an idea about sharing my secret of current status of my money making projects. Well, to be sharp, it is no secret, but I don't see many people doing that. Here is what I am doing, how is it going, what are the results, traffic, earnings - everything.

Okay, so I have two WordPress based autoblog (geek related and operating systems and software related) that syndicate content from few major sites. They create, I don't know, about 15 posts per day. Of course, credit (and linkback) for those posts is given to their authors, not to me. The problem is that they are getting two little traffic (10 to 20 uniques/day) and earnings are low according to that. Monetizing method here is PPC from Google AdSense. I am also doing heavy link building, mainly by exchanging links at Digital Point forums.

I also have new young and pretty proxy. I did some link exchanging, submitting to many toplists and we'll see what will happen. This is like the first week and proxy is getting about 15 unique visitors/day. Hopefully it will grow by few zeros in number. Monetizing way is also PPC, bud BidVertiser this time.

And, not forgetting, this is my third project. I'm not trying to monetize it any way, because I'm thinking of more long term business plan. Firstly, create some content and get some regular readers. Probably the most difficult but (could-be) best earning project of these three.

Some short term plans? I'm trying to get some traffic for all of my sites. For first two mentioned I'm basically doing link building and last days also stumbling-upon. Heard that it can get you guys pretty good traffic. One of my friends mentioned 1200 uniques/day mostly by StumbleUpon.
And for Few Bucks, I'm just going to keep on writing, creating hopefully interesting content and gaining you - visitors and regular readers.

See you some time again, with updates and news about my projects. By that time I would love to hear about your projects, your problems, your earnings and your plans and models.

Grab my RSS feed, please.

Step 3: Be a part of community

2007-06-23T10:21:00.000+02:00

This post is part of "Tuning your blog: From regular to ultimate in 7 steps" series. Today's, third part is about being part of community.

In my country, we have some old legend about king and his sons. King gave his sons a task to complete after which he would decide which of his sons will become a new king. Task was to broke 3 canes. When they were tied up together first two sons were not able to broke them. But when third some untied them, he was able to brake them, each separately. This story teaches us about how important it is to be a part of some fellowship. Even fellowship of bloggers. You can have a good, well ranked blog, but when three other blogs appears, in a cooperation they can easily beat you and become better ranked then you. Community creates strong background for you.

Community in blogosphere means comments, personal contact, links to others, visits, subscriptions and so. Always be informed about what is going on, blog about it, links to others, to their posts, comment at their posts and join discussions. Another point of view: Do what you expect others to do.

Join services like MyBlogLog, it can help you become more visible in community if you browse other blogs. Join discussion groups, be active wherever you can be. Remember, not your own blog is a place for you.

I could tried more to create some list of things to do, but actually I thing that it is more important to get that idea and you'll find ways how to be a part of community.

You have just read first part of series "Tuning your blog: From regular to ultimate in 7 steps".

Make it attractive
Promote (previous post)
Be a part of community (this post)
Be a writer (coming soon..)
Count
Do some link love
Repeat steps 1-6

Blog review: CarloCab.com

2007-06-23T09:23:00.000+02:00

"Make Money with 13-year old" says Carlocab.com slogan. Wow, I am amazed. If I started making money at age of 13 I would be really good (and rich) now. Good for you, Carl.

Carl, owner of carlocab.com left comment here at Few Bucks inviting me into his blog review thing. I have found out that there are so many blogs that offer linkbacks for reviews that I am going to have a special category for that. And I am going to try to review as many good blogs as possible.

About Carl's blog, he is a real pro, he can help you with your blog, teach you how to ask bloggers for link exchange or give you perfect howto start a blog (worth reading). So, don't hesitate, go try out Carl's blog.

Fake comments or not?

2007-06-18T07:54:00.000+02:00

Darren Rowse from Problogger is answering readers question about faking comments to help your blog at the start.

If you have just started a new blog (like I started this one) and you are considering if to do something like this or not read what Darren says. He will encourage you to do it old good way. I think I will take his advice. What about you?

Step 2: Promote

2007-06-04T21:20:00.000+02:00

This post is part of "Tuning your blog: From regular to ultimate in 7 steps" series. Today's, second part, is about promoting your blog.

Everything needs promotion. Great things do promotion by themselves, but with if you put some more effort into that you can just do better. Let's see some ways of making it more visible and promoting your blog.

This is probably connected with topic of "first step" of this series, but your blog layout is first place where you can promote.

Make it easy to subscribe, put some subscription text to the visible, good position, ask people to subscribe to your blog.
Ask them to comment, don't put nofollow on comments and let people know that if they leave a comment they have link. You will gain regular commenters . You can also create a list of top commenters.
Encourage people to link to you, to write about you and your blog, maybe think of some kind of exchange service, like John Chow's reviews for links or Kumiko's Cach Quests.

On the other hand, there are thousand of great ways how to promote your blog at other sites or blogs. So, do anything you can. Leave comments, linkbait, link to others, maybe they will link to you, ask, subscribe, take part in some link exchange with other blogs. If you have a chance of getting something bigger like one link, for example banner, ad space, or anything else, take that chance. If you invest some time (and/or money) to your blog and you do it wisely, according to others and yours experiences, it will repay you back.

Remember, any kind of blog promotion is worthy! Don't be shy to live your blog.

You have just read first part of series "Tuning your blog: From regular to ultimate in 7 steps".

Make it attractive (previous post)
Promote (this post)
Be a part of community (coming soon..)
Be a writer
Count
Do some link love
Repeat steps 1-6

Don't write about John Chow!

2007-05-31T23:03:00.000+02:00

The title is kinda tricky. It says: "Don't write about John Chow because he stopped his Make Money Online Reviews for links, because of Google Algorithm change." And what it doesn't says, but it means so: "Write about John Chow because he is famous and talking about famous things you make your blog cool :)". This is just a small point that I wanted to make, before bed time (I'm in different timezone). For more information on Google Algorithm change (causing John Chow dot Com ranking at 12th to 50th place instead of 1st) read his article about it. For more information how famous John Chow is read his blog.

Step 1: Make It Attractive

2007-05-31T16:11:00.000+02:00

This post is part of "Tuning your blog: From regular to ultimate in 7 steps" series. Today's, first part, is about making your blog attractive.

You can have good ideas and great content, but when people do not notice it at first site your risking too much. Always be sure, that nobody can tell "Oh, this blog is terrible, I'm leaving.." before getting to first paragraph of your article.

Think of these three things:

Accessibility
Usability
Attractiveness

In that certain order. First thing, is to have have accessible blog/site. Get rid of annoying and huge flash ads, be sure that all links are working, nothing is missing, and rather have accessible blog than tons of ads, blinking banners and maybe worthy content, if no one can get to it. After assuring of this you can move on.

Usability talks about something like websites that are easy to use, intuitive and you don't get lost browsing them. It is not only to have accessible blog, but to have usable and well designed layout, visible links, big headlines, less important text of smaller size, etc. You can ask somebody to visit your blog and watch him. If he will have no problems, job is well done.

And last things after accessibility and usability as breath-taking look of your blog. Web site's design should take every visitor's attention that they would say something like "Great, cool blog!" and then go on reading your posts still noticing perfect small details of your blog. I know, not everybody is talented graphic designer, but we can help ourselves with some free templates and themes.

So, go through these steps, try to think of how you can improve your blog from the graphical point of view and do think of it every day. You'll see, you'll get ideas and improvements will come. But firstly start with a good base of accessible and usable website.

You have just read first part of series "Tuning your blog: From regular to ultimate in 7 steps".

Make it attractive (this post)
Promote (coming soon..)
Be a part of community
Be a writer
Count
Do some link love
Repeat steps 1-6

Write about John Chow

2007-05-30T13:38:00.000+02:00

One of my blogging tips: Write about John Chow

Write review of John Chow dot Com, link to his homepage with anchor text "make money online", link to his post on how to write these reviews and send him an email. That's how easy it is. He will than link to you and you'll surely get special traffic from one of those John Chow dot Com Make Money Online Batches. It is amazing, isn't it?

And not only to waste a post with how amazing is to write about John Chow, let's actually write something about him. I have already mentioned John when he published his e-book on making money online and now I'm talking about him again. He must be really important someone.

Well, I don't know how important he is, but well known and well earning he surely is. John is running his own blog called John Chow dot Com (at johnchow.com, in case you didn't figure out) about making money online, blogging and related topics. If you are interested and you don't have his feed already, go, check out his blog and subscribe to him. Beyond all great articles you'll see some inventive marketing ideas like "Get NoFollow Removed On Your Comments!" for $10/month, "Buy me a beer" or already mentioned e-book).

Good luck, John, your interesting person, definitely.

Tuning your blog: From regular to ultimate in 7 steps

2007-05-30T11:59:00.000+02:00

"Tuning your blog: From regular to ultimate" was the best title for series of posts that I could think of. If it is not clear enough or good enough, I'm sorry. Here's the full idea.

Zillions of photos, videos, blogs and more
(Some of them have to be good)

Says Technorati homepage. And they are right. There are zillions of bloggers and about two zillions of blogs, but only some of them are good. How do they become so good and known? I don't know. But I will try to find out.

This "Tuning your blog" series of posts will take care of several things about blogging that I consider very important. They might find these topics discussed at other blogs, but I want to give my point of view. Here are the things:

Make it attractive (published on may, 31) - Get a nice template for your blog or do it yourself if your skilled, organize your content, make it attractive, usable and even better, give it a flow.
Promote - Talk about your blog, share it with others, make it easy to subscribe, to give comments or to contact you. Each time your blog is mentioned somewhere, it is good for you.
Be a part of community - Get a feed reader, fill it with other blogs feed, subscribe to them, read their articles and give your comments, help your name to be known in community, be part of it.
Be a writer - Hold up, you need some kind of talent here. But if you had started your blog it means, that you want to do that and that is sometimes more important than talent. Improve your writing skills, read blogs that blog about professional blogging or writing and.. read books! Novells, dramas, poems by professional writers.
Count - Count visitors, pageviews, subscribers, posts, comments, referrers do anything to know your how your blog works, who is sending you traffic, how do you get subscribers and learn from it.
Do some link love - This is modern age, hypertext age, text is not enough, we need and we want links. And not even links, we need to see that love, people need to see that you are generous, willing to share and that you know that you can do better if you join your potential enemies instead of ruining them.
Repeat steps 1-6 - That is the magic successful blogging.

Each of topics in this series will have an article on in next few days/weeks. You can look forward to. Hope, that it will help. Stay tuned. Good luck, for now.

Download John's E-Book on how to make money online

2007-05-29T11:14:00.000+02:00

John Chow, famous money making blogger has written an e-book. Good for him, you think. He will be selling it for like $97.0 dollars or so, and he will just make more money. If you think so, you're wrong. John is smarter than that. You can download his e-book for free (download here). He knows that free things are great and free tips on earning money are even better and people will hurry to visit his blog and download that book. And they will come again because the book will help them and they will link to him, love him, buy him a beer... That's how smart John is. Free e-book on how to make money online will make huge amount of traffic and traffic means bigger income from all his money making activities. Good for him. But also good for us. We have an e-book!

John's e-book is basically sum of all what he had written and published on his blog. He mentions some of his recommended money makers, gives some blogging tips, helps you with WordPress, gives some ideas about blogging, getting visitors, increasing number of subscribers, monetizing your blog, Google tips (mainly AdSense) and at the end, he tells his story.

Official title of book is "Make Money Online With John Chow dot Com, How I Went From Zero To $10,000+ a Month By Blogging and How You Can Too" (click the link to download it in PDF). It does have nearly 60 pages of 9 chapters.

And to give you bit more information, here is table of contents of his book.

Chapter 1 - Introduction

What? No One Time Offer?
Someday Never Comes

Chapter 2 - My Recommended Money-makers
Chapter 3 - Beginner’s Blogging Tips

10 Blogging Mistakes To Avoid
The Seven Habits of Highly Successful Bloggers
How To Handle Negative Comments In A Blog
Post Length & Post Frequency
Creating Content - Proofreading
Five Things To Do When You Have Nothing To Blog About

Chapter 4 – Must Have Wordpress Stuff

Stand Out From The Crowd With A Favicon
Time Stamping Your Posts
Using SEO Friendly URLs For Better Search Results
Setting The Preferred Domain

Chapter 5 - Pumping Out the Content

How To Increase RSS Subscriptions
How To Get RSS Readers To Visit Your Blog

Chapter 6 - Monetize Your Blog

The Proper Way To Do Affiliate Marketing
How To Hide Affiliate Links
How To Get More ReviewMe Reviews
How To Make Money With Kontera ContentLink
How To Get More Text Link Sales

Chapter 7 – Google Optimization

The Easiest Way To Add Google AdSense On A Blog
The Google Bid Gap
Google Section Targeting
Using The Competitive Ad Filter

Chapter 8 - Promotion Ideas

Six Top Linking Strategies
The Art Of Link Baiting
The Importance of Deep Linking
Commenting Your Way To The Top
Using AdWords To Get Traffic
Driving Traffic With Free Article Services

Chapter 9 – My Story

The Dot Com Boom Goes Bust
Google Brings The Internet Back To Life
Coming Full Circle

Download "Make Money Online With John Chow dot Com" e-book here

Top 25 blogs: Subscribe to them!

2007-05-29T07:28:00.000+02:00

Big part of the bloggers job is blogging and writing articles but probably bigger part is reading other blogs.

DailyBlogTips has published list of Top 25 blog about blogging. Blogs are ordered according to sum of Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Bloglines subscribers and Technorati Authority scores.

Go through the list and subscribe to these blogs. You don't have to subscribe to all of them, but pick some of them and become theirs readers. I have found some good resources in that list.

Start your own blog!

2007-05-28T12:07:00.000+02:00

If you are at least a bit creative you can start your own blog. Let me tell you how to start your own blog and make money online by blogging.

Whatever your blog topic is, you need a place where to blog and some blogging tool(s) to use. There are two ways how to do this: paid or free.

Paid: With some money to start your blogging career you can get your own domain name, some web host plan. After that, install WordPress or TextPattern or anything similar to be able to write your posts in modern, comfort way, to publish them and play with blog layout there. This way you need money for domain (paid yearly) and web host (paid monthly, but usually charged yearly or so). There are tons of blogging tools as I have already mentioned so you won't have any struggles at this point.

Free: Go to blogger.com or wordpress.com or any other similar blogging service where you can build your own blog from preinstalled tools and templates just in a few clicks. This way, it costs you nothing.

Of course, you need to think of a name of your blog (this one is called "few bucks") and topic you will write on. If you are skilled with internet some of the popular topics are "making money online", "seo" (search engine optimization), technology news etc.

Go for it, choose a topic, decide about money (if you want to spend some or no) and start your own blog! In next few posts I will talk about improving your blog and getting more of it's abilities. We will take a look at personalizing your blog, getting some traffic to your blog, becoming part of community (so called "blogosphere") and finally earning few bucks.

Welcome to "Few Bucks" blog

2007-05-28T02:06:00.000+02:00

This blog should be about making money online. Since my online earnings haven't made me rich (yet) this place is called "Few Bucks".

I am going to share my experiences and knowledge with you, maybe to help you to make some money, maybe to decide that you don't want to live this life and you want to get a real job, or to have a real job and to make some money this way to help your wallet getting thicker and to have fun. Please, welcome!

If you want to try this out, I am going to serve you as a example (good one ;-). I already have a few ideas to post them here. Articles you will be able to read here in a short time will be probably named like "Start you own blog", "Get and AdSense account" or "Exploring PPC systems", what are exactly the ways that people make money online. So grab my RSS feed to be always informed and get ready for the trip.