Yes, even more discounts this week. Naomi of Ittybiz decided to give discounts on her products, because she’s having her 5 year anniversary today. Okay…I guess you need to find a reason to give discounts.

(Of course the only reason is to get even more sales, but who cares? Discounts are good!).

Ittybiz has several great value products, yet I don’t own all of them. In fact I only own one: the SEO School eBook. And I recommend it for anyone serious about starting an online business that could use a nice steady flow of search engine traffic.

I learned quite some things from the book and I applied it to my other blog and for my ebook (have work to do on this blog though). My ebook definitely would’ve sold better if I had read this SEO School before writing it. Anyway, you can get it now for just $19 which is great value for the money.

I decided not to enroll in the Online Business School or the Marketing 101 course, for two reasons. The main reason being the lack of time due to my wife’s difficult pregnancy. And in case you would like to use some one-on-one time with Naomi, that’s on discount too.

To sum it all up:

• SEO School – $39 now $19. Use discount code “wood” (without the quotes).
• Online Business School – $397 now $197. Use discount code “wood” (without the quotes).
• Marketing 101 – $188 now $94.
• Consultancy / Brainstorming – $250 now $150 an hour.

The offer is valid until February 5, so if you want to get the discount, you’ve got about a week to make up your mind.

P.S. Yeah, I’ll write posts with real content soon. But you know…discounts are good. Especially on products I own and recommend

P.S.S. Yes there are affiliate links in there, they don’t hurt your discount (the discount does hurt my affiliate cut though…). Read about how and why I hide the affiliate links.

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More discounts: Ittybiz has an anniversary sale this week

A couple of days ago I got an email from Harvey Segal (he calls himself Mr. Clickbank) with a free report, Clickbank for Newbies. To be honest, that report made me look into Clickbank again. I already had an account there, but it’s dormant. And there’s a downside to dormant Clickbank accounts, I learned that from the report. And I learned another important aspect regarding the terms and conditions of Clickbank that prevents a lot of money from being payed to affiliates. Not to the very successful affiliates of course, but for the affiliates that try to earn some money on the side. And face it, that’s the case for most of us.

Important stuff to know before you put in a lot of effort, just to earn money for other people right? I recommend you download the report to find out what these pitfalls are, and how to solve them. It’s a free report and you don’t even need to supply your email address or anything.

P.S. I’ll write about my adventure in niche marketing land soon. It’s too early to be a compelling story yet

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Clickbank for Newbies

When I wrote the tutorial the plugin was available for a one-off payment of $37. In the meantime the price has gone up to $47, which is still a very good deal! But it gets even better! For a limited time (only this month!) the plugin is available for as little as $25! Still a one-off payment, and you can use it across all blogs and websites that you own.

To get your discount, simply click on this image and use the coupon code Jan90-25. You’ll get the package at a nice discount for just $25, no strings attached. We can all use a discount in these financially challenging times, can’t we? So click that image and get the stuff (remember it’s a limited offer for January only).

P.S. Full disclosure: You can also use Jan90-30 to get it for $30 or Jan90-35 to get it for $35 bucks if you’re so inclined to Since these are obviously affiliate links, I would be very grateful for the extra bucks. But I’d go for the full discount if I were you!

P.S.S. I’ve been away from blogging on Scraping Pennies for quite a while again. I have not abandoned this blog, nor have I abandoned my other blog How to be an Original. Over the past couple of months I have been mostly offline due to the difficult pregnancy my wife is having. She’s been very sick (and slowly recovering now), but the baby is doing very well. Our little girl is due in May. Anyway, I’m back at blogging.

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OIO Publisher platform now at a discount

Scraping Pennies was one of the projects that got no attention at all. Well…I did check the stats every now and then. And it amazes me that there are 40 something subscribers that stuck around. A would like to give you a big THANK YOU, I appreciate your loyalty! The wait was not for nothing, because I’m rebooting the blog.

Some changes

First of all, I moved hosts. I consolidated all my hosting to one company, Dreamhost. All my hosting is still in the range of the regular shared hosting plans, and Dreamhost offers a great value solution. Their shared hosting plan allows you to host unlimited sites. So I could host How to be an Original and Scraping Pennies on the same hosting plan (and a bunch of other sites as well), instead of having a hosting plan specifically for either one of them. So this move saves me money.

The second change is the frequency of income reports. I started out doing weekly income reports, but I’m changing those to monthly reports. The weekly reviews are overkill in my opinion. Too much data for people trying to follow the progress of this blog. Imagine reading through 52 posts or through 12 posts to see how the past year has went…

The third thing I’m changing is income related. Initially I worked on getting Scraping Pennies as much of a stand-alone entitity as possible. That turned out to be very impractical. And as you can tell from the hosting move, I have abandoned that thought. I will do my best to seperate Scraping Pennies income from other income, but if it’s too much trouble I won’t. The same goes for cost. I have my hosting for my main online activities, Scraping Pennies enjoys a free ride on that hosting account and as such has free hosting.

The fourth thing I’m changing is budget related. I started out with a $250 budget. But this project is meant to be an educational fun project, and I won’t stop if the money runs out. So I’m going to allow to get below zero on my “funds”. But everything in moderation, this doesn’t mean that I’m going to spend money like a wild man! It’s just that I won’t let it stop me when I’m going to “run out of money”.

Additionally there’s also the thing of the stuff I already own, because I bought them for my other online activities. If they’re relevant to Scraping Pennies and there’s an affiliate program, I’m going to feature it here as well with no money down. It’s not totally ‘fair’, but I will still disclose the money I spent on it and why.

What’s not going to change

The main thing that will not change is that I will still give full transparency, about my investments in and returns from the blog.

The relative priority of this blog will also not change. It is not, and will probably never be, my top priority for getting an income. This is a fun and educational project, that has the goal of making money online. I won’t give a value to the lessons, but they are a large part of the ‘revenue’ of this blog.

What’s next?

The next step I’m going to make is to do get an overview of the financial status of Scraping Pennies and write a report about it. After that report I will start doing the monthly income reports, so the first income report will be early November (that’s about October’s income).

I also need to update the tutorial for OIO Publisher, as it’s outdated. Simon Emery released a new version of OIO Publisher, and made many improvements. Among them a big redesign of the site, so the screenshots in the tutorial are simply not correct anymore. He also raised the price to $47. Good products tend to get more expensive on the net, and OIO Publisher is a good product!

I’m looking forward to this renewed start. You have been patient the last couple of months, but as you know rebooting takes a while too. So I’m going to push that reboot button, please wait a couple of days until the system is up and running again.

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Blog reboot

It’s been six weeks since I updated Scraping Pennies. I wrote about what I did in these Six Weeks on my personal blog How to be an Original. In part it had to do with making money online, because I wrote an e-book and published it. It’s for sale now through the E-Junkie interface. I’ll post about my experiences and the results of the e-book on Scraping Pennies in a couple of weeks.

If you’re interested in reselling my e-book, there’s an affiliate program available that pays 50% of revenue. The book sells for $14, so you’ll earn $7 for each sale. Check out the e-book announcement here, and the sign up for the affiliate program here.

I paused my Google Adwords campaign at the beginning of the six weeks period. I’m going to restart it this week, there’s plenty of credit left for a lot of impressions!

For now, here are the numbers for Scraping Pennies. The numbers are cumulated over six weeks:

Key Performance Indicators

Money spent

Monthly payment for hosting ($8.32) is deducted from the budget, for July and August.
Total cash-out: $16.64

Money earned

None.

Hours spent

No hours spent

Budget status (this week)

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Weekly Income Report – 8

This week I had virtually zero activity online. Not on my personal blog How to be an Original, not on Scraping Pennies and not even on Twitter. The biggest reason is because I started to write an e-book, related to How to be an Original. I’m going to use E-Junkie to sell it. When I set it up, I’ll post my experiences here.

My Google Adwords campaign is interesting. Massive numbers of views for the advertisement, but not that many clicks. Somehow I’m not too unhappy about it, because the blog is shown to a lot of people. I know that there’s a lot of people that don’t even see Adsense ads, but still the name is out there and helping to build the brand.

Key Performance Indicators

Money spent

No cash out.

Money earned

No cash in.

Hours spent

• Creating Content: 0.25 hours
• Monetization: 0
• Design: 0
• Technical: 0
• Marketing: 0

Total hours: 0.25 hours

Budget status (this week)

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Weekly Income Report – 7

This week I spent most of my time creating content. The OIO Publisher tutorial took a lot of time to create, but I learned some more about the plugin while writing it.

I also started experimenting with advertising using Google Adwords. I had $25 worth of credits, because GoDaddy offered that with the sign-up of this account. I have set it up, but it ended up costing me $10 nevertheless, because you can’t start without paying. That was unexpected, but I decided to go ahead with it anyway. I’ll report on it later.

Key Performance Indicators

Money spent

$10 payment for signing up with Google Adwords.

Money earned

No cash in.

Hours spent

• Creating Content: 9.25 hours
• Monetization: 0
• Design: 0
• Technical: 0
• Marketing: 1.50

Total hours: 10.75 hours

Budget status (this week)

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Weekly Income Report – 6

• successfully registered an account
• downloaded and installed the plugin
• configured basic and advanced settings
• implemented an ad zone on your blog
• tested the purchase and payment procedure
• applied for a listing in the marketplace

OIO Publisher currently only supports self-hosted WordPress as a blogging platform. Other platforms are in the development roadmap, but are not released yet.

Registering an account

First hop on over to the website of OIO Publisher Direct. When you’re there, click on the register button.

After clicking that button you get a straightforward form to register your account. I recommend you start using the Pro (full feature) plugin, but as you can see there’s an option to register for a free account. In this tutorial I’m going to assume you’re working with the paid Pro version.

After this you’re ready to go to the next step.

Downloading and installing the plugin

If you’re not logged in already, make sure to log in with your newly created account. You’ll be taken to the “My Account” overview. From there navigate to the download section of the website.

You’ll be taken to another form, where you can choose what parts of the plugin you can download. The easiest is to simply download all parts, but make sure you have the core files, the ad manager and the paypal module as a minimum.

After this, upload and activate the plugin as usual. If you need help installing a plugin, check out this page at the WordPress codex for instructions.

After you have installed and activated OIO Publisher Direct, you’ll notice a new tab in the dashboard.

You have now successfully installed the plugin. Next we’ll setup an ad zone.

Configuring the basic and advanced settings

First we’ll set all the relevant settings. When you open the settings page, you get another set of tabs beneath the previous ones:

In the General settings tab you see several sections:

• On / Off Switches
  There are a total of four switches. Make sure the plugin is enabled, test pay mode and link test mode are disabled. And don’t touch the uninstall switch.
• Global Password
  Here you can set an additional (optional) password.
• Basic Settings
  The basic settings are pretty straightforward. Add your Paypal email address and select a currency (GBP, USD, EUR) for your ad prices.

  The option “Accept Family Friendly Purchases only?” gets a bit confusing, due to the explanation behind it. In short: select Yes if you want to be able to deny ads and tell your potential advertisers beforehand. Select No if you want to accept all ads.

  The redirect page is left empty for now. You can make a dedicated page with a sales pitch, as a portal to your purchase form (like Scraping Pennies has done). How to set that up is going to be part of another tutorial.

• Advanced Settings
  There are several options here.

  The “Pay after approval” setting lets you decide whether an advertiser can pay during pending approvals. Should you deny the listing, then you need to refund the money. You can also decide to let the advertiser pay after approval only. The plugin will take care of publishing the ad once the advertiser has paid for it. I prefer the “Yes” setting, delay payment until the purchase is approved.

  The “Post Specific Purchase Links” ads links to advertisement options, specific for a certain post. This option is left to “No” for now.

  The “Purchase Window Type” is an option for the way the purchase page is shown. Thickbox is fancy (it gives an overlay with the page, while fading out the background), but works only when used in a standard way. “New Window” is the best option.

  “Allow Subscription Payments?” is an option to allow advertisers to subscribe to ad spots.

  In the “Paid Post Disclosure” box you can add a line of text that gets published whenever a paid post is purchased. In this tutorial we will not work with paid posts.

  The “Purchasing Guidelines to Advertisers” text area is where you can describe what you guidelines are. On the purchase page there’s a default line of text, indicating your earlier choice for family friendly ads or all ads. This is where you ad a small sales pitch, or add some relevant stats to convince potential advertisers.

  You can also change the “Folder Name” for OIO Publisher. This can be tricky, so we’ll leave it exactly as we found it.

• Feedback
  In this section you can add the address of your listing in the Marketplace, as soon as you’re listed there.

Setting up an ad zone

This section will guide you through the process of setting up one ad zone with banners. We will setup only one ad zone. When you want multiple ad zones with banners, you can’t use the widget anymore. It will only display the first ad zone. In that case you need to manually add some php code to your blog design. I will show how to do this in an upcoming tutorial. Come back later to check for it, or subscribe to the feed to be among the first to know.

First select the banners section a couple of spots to the right of the general settings tab:

You’ll instantly see that there’s one ad zone already. You can add more zones. The widget however only supports one zone, so for this tutorial we stick to one zone only. In another tutorial we’ll dive deeper into the matter and setup several zones and customize them.

When you scroll down there are a lot of settings for the ad zone. Most of them are pretty straightforward as you will see. When deciding on the size of the banners, take the available space and commons sizes in consideration. 125 x 125 pixels is a very common ad size for blog sidebars.

Make sure the price tag is greater than zero. A price equal to zero will disable the ad zone altogether. Also decide on the rotation factor. A factor of 2 for instance will allow 2 ads in the same spot, dividing the page views among the two.

You can also decide on the length of the ad queue. If all spots are filled and an advertiser is interested anyway, they can purchase a spot. OIO Publisher will automatically promote an advertiser from the queue to a live spot when one becomes available.

This is also the place to decide upon the use of the rel=nofollow tag in the hyperlinks. You can choose between adding it to all links, adding it to no links at all, or only removing it at a surcharge. The removal of the nofollow link might hurt your search engine performance, as they (specifically Google) don’t like purchased links.

If there are no ads sold yet, there’s the possibility to either show a default image (see picture above) or configure default ads. The default ads might be ads for your own products (if you have them) or affiliate links to e-books and training programs like the SEO Book, or ad programs like LinkWorth. There are plenty of options.

You can choose to let them only fill empty spaces, or to rotate them alongside the purchased ads.

The ad zone is now setup properly. The next step is to add it to the sidebar using the widget. Navigate to the design section of your WordPress admin interface. Click on the “Add” link behind OIOpub Banner and decide where on the sidebar you want to show the ads.

Save the settings and your ad zone is now showing on your blog! Go check it out! But don’t forget to come back, because we’re not done yet. We still have to test if the payment process works.

Testing the purchase and payment process

The ad zone is now up, and is probably showing “Advertise here” links in the place holders. Before you click on any of them, hop on over to the general settings tab again. Find the section titled “On / Off Switches” and enable the “Test Pay Mode”. You will see a red line on top of the page warning you about it.

Now click one of those “Advertise here” links on your blog. You’re taken directly to the purchase page of OIO Publisher Direct. On that page you’ll find the pricing information, the purchase guidelines and a simple form to select what purchase to make. Everything an advertiser needs, no more, no less.

For the test purchase, select Banner Ad and click on “Continue with purchase”. You will see the following page. If you allow the removal of the nofollow link at a surcharge, it will be integrated into the form when the zone is selected.

There’s a built in check for validity, so even for a test purchase it’s necessary to use valid information. If you don’t have a banner available, I have one available for you on my server. Add this address (http://scrapingpennies.com/img/125×125sample.jpg) for the image and use http://scrapingpennies.com/ as the “Site URL”. That way you can test the entire process.

Once you followed through with the procedure, and hit the “Submit and make Payment” button, you will get a confirmation instantly. Real purchases will be redirected to Paypal to finish their payment, in case you accept payments before approval.

If you check your WordPress Admin page right now, you’ll find that there’s an alert on the “homepage” of the admin interface.

And if you click on the “1″ you’ll see the following screen with the ad details. This is where you review the ad. Check the image, check the link, edit typos if necessary and approve or reject the purchase. For now click on Approve, so the ad will show in the ad zone.

That concludes the test cycle. Now you’re almost done, remember that friendly reminder at the beginning of this test procedure? It’s time to disable “Test Pay Mode” now. After you did that, go back to the ad management section and delete the test ad. But feel free to keep it in place if you used the Scraping Pennies advertisement

Applying to the Marketplace

The last thing to do is to apply to the Marketplace. This is optional, but it’s a feature that could become very powerful. To apply, head on over to the OIO Publisher page and login to your account.

After you submitted your blog, the folks of OIO Publisher will manually review your submission. You’ll get an answer in 24 to 48 hours. If approved you’ll get an API key, that you can enter in the API Services section of OIO Publisher at your blog.

All done!

That’s it. You have successfully installed your own blog monetization suite! And it looks pretty professional too, doesn’t it?

Should you have any questions or run into problems, don’t hesitate to drop them in the comments. I’m happy to help you out.

I’ll be publishing other tutorials related to OIO Publisher in the coming weeks. Subscribe to the feed to keep up to date, and improve your use of OIO Publisher even more.

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Tutorial: Basic Installation OIO Publisher

Profit is an illusion, cash flow is fact. ~ Unknown

As you know I work with a $200 budget to reach my goal of getting an income from online activities. One of the things I’m doing is monetizing this blog, but there are more ways I will be exploring. In the early stages though, you’ll want to focus on cash flow, no matter what tactic you’re using.

Cash Flow

Cash flow is a term that refers to the amount of cash being received and spent. It’s what you see on your bank statements. Money comes in, money goes out. Earnings and profit are not the same as cash flow. Cash flow is what happens now, earnings and profit are what might happen in the future. Earnings turn into cash flow as soon as someone pays you.

Cash flow is exactly what I’ll be focusing on when directing my energy to making money online. I want to see that cash coming in. I don’t want to see some virtual profit accumulating on some site, without the cash flow associated with it.

The fact that cash will flow out is a certainty for me. For instance, every month I need to pay my hosting. And every year I need to renew my domain registration. Both aren’t really expensive, but on a $200 budget, they nibble away the budget in a steady pace.

Using Cash Flow Characteristics

Some ad programs have several restrictions that hurt their cash flow attractiveness factor. Google Adsense for instance has a payment threshold of $100. If your earnings balance at the end of the month is below the $100, it is carried over to the next month. Month after month after month, until you finally hit the $100. When that happens, they wait another month before issuing a payment. If you’re in one of the countries that’s elligible for electronic funds transfer, it’s only a couple of days before the money hits the bank. If you’re not, you have to wait for the check to come in the mail and then wait before the bank decides to clear the check and deposit it to your bank account (while deducting their processing fee). From the point of cash flow not very attractive at all. Kontera has similar characteristics.

Other ad programs like Text Link Ads and LinkWorth offer better terms. Low or no payout limit, payments to PayPal in the week after the previous month ended. Affiliate programs like those offered at e-junkie or Web Warrior Tools show similar characteristics. From a cash flow perspective this is a lot better already.

And if you provide private ad sales, you get the money in your account instantly. This is what makes OIO Publisher so attractive to me, the money you charge for advertisements is deposited instantly in your Paypal account. This is cash flow heaven.

When you dedicate a part of the layout of your website to show ads, it’s worth checking out the payment terms for the program you intend to use. It could take many months before you actually see any money. For me it’s a deciding factor in the early stages, and it might even be in later stages as well.

I only mentioned a couple of programs in this article, but I’m working on a big list of programs, comparing their cash flow characteristics and more. Subscribe now and be among the first to know about that comparison.

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Early Stage Strategy: Focus on Cash Flow

I worked on implementing OIO Publisher this week. Took more time than I anticipated, partly because I got interrupted too many times. It’s really a job that needs a certain amount of concentration.

Key Performance Indicators

Money spent

Monthly payment for hosting ($8.32) is deducted from the budget.

Money earned

No cash in.

Hours spent

Some design tweaks this week, and backing up databases and upgrading WordPress. But mostly implementing OIO Publisher.

• Creating Content: 2.75 hours
• Monetization: 6.25
• Design: 0.50
• Technical: 2:00

Total hours: 11.50 hours

Budget status (this week)

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Weekly Income Report – 5