So we saw Shoemoney and John Chow do it. Now, everyone seems to be throwing free Flip Mino HD’s everywhere. Of course, I don’t have a problem with that (although I do have a problem with not winning any of them!) so by all means, if you feel like giving one away, hit me up and I’ll take part in it. 
Talking of Flip Mino HD’s, Ryan McLean from Smarter Wealth is also giving out a Flip Mino HD to one lucky reader. The steps are pretty simple because all you need to really do is subscribe by email and if you have a blog, post about the contest. Heck, he even gives you what to post, so technically, it should all take at most 5 minutes.
Talking of Smarter Wealth, I’ve been a subscriber of this blog for quite a while and I can assure you that although Ryan is no Shoe or John, the substance he delivers to his readers is just as good. It is rather unfortunate that his blog is not read as much, because I’d prefer another tip on growing the number of subscribers over a pretty decent restaurant menu.
Anyways, it also happens to be Ryan’s birthday today, so go and congratulate him too if you feel extra nice. Maybe he’ll give you some bonus points for the drawing. 
Okay, so WordPress 2.7 has been out for about a while now and since it’s the beginning of a new month, I’m sure there are old and new bloggers looking for some decent themes compatible with the latest version. After all, threaded comments are a must, which makes WordPress 2.7 a must. Using an old theme potentially stops you from being able to use such new features, so it’s pretty important to staying update with your themes.
Some notes! These 50 themes are themes I chose, want to share, and feel are quality themes. Thus, these 50 were chosen based on my personal preferences, so if you think one of them looks ugly, still take a look further down as you just might find one worth checking out. Also I haven’t tested all of them myself. I chose them after checking out either the screenshot or the demo, so don’t come to be asking for theme support! 
While I could, the theme authors are the best to approach! Click “Read the rest of this entry” to check out all the themes. I did this to prevent the first page of my blog from crashing down badly due to an overwhelming long list. Read the rest of this entry »
So I decided to try this out too and maybe see if this can help me get my blog a bit more organized for my readers.
Post Roundup for January 2009
So this month I did get back to my posting routine. Hopefully this routine will stay alive as I’ve set my 2009 resolutions for this blog. Also, I’ve pumped out a few articles from time to time as hey, recalling my experiences and doing some further research for my readers helps me too. Some of the highlight articles include:
Link Love for January 2009 Week 4
It seems like everyone is full of love these days. Anyways, before Valentines comes around, let me share some of the posts that caught my attention over the last week.
- Why Blogging Is the Undisputed Culture? is actually a guest post on thou shall blog, so while credits go to Yan for accepting the awesome post, credits go to Donny too as he wrote it in the first place. Anyways, a great article on just the reasons behind blogging. Why do you blog?
- What Kinds Of Posts Generate The Most Traffic? is a post from Iron Blogger and it makes you think… “Am I writing a post that actually would cause some vibe in the blogosphere? It is definitely one of Iron Blogger’s best posts (in my opinion, although he has too many!) and it definitely is worth a read!
- Hiatus Vs. Selling Your Blog from Enkay is a pretty good post to read if you are kind of lazy blogging and are even thinking about potentially selling your blog. I’ve had this debate many times myself too, so if you are like me, check it out.
Top Commentators
Well, this blog still needs to pickup its pace, so this place is empty for this the previous month. However, I’ll be sure to give free link back to the five top commentators aside from the link they get from the blog page itself.
Conclusion
I feel somewhat thankful that I’ve now found a time to blog. Last quarter, just entering the university and all… it was crazy and I really missed this place. Some things that I’m hoping to focus a bit more starting next month is putting out some quality content and receiving a steady stream of 5+ comments per blog. Help me by commenting, will you?
So in mid-2002, I built my very first website with FreeWebs. Later that year, I tried out Lycos.eu’s free hosting as they provided PHP and MySQL. On January 1st of 2003, I bought my first every domain, gamersfortress.net and my online adventure as a webmaster really began. Sometime midway through the year, I picked up the domain evee.net to ambitiously start a hosting company run by a kid. Anyways, obviously, it didn’t work out so well, so I pretty much gave the domain away for free. Now, that is one of the bigger regrets I have.
Why am I talking about this all of a sudden? Well first off, let me apologize for using the term “newbie” in the title as personally, I don’t think that is a great word. However, as I consider my days then as a “newbie newbie”, I just thought that I might as well put it there in the title. Second, well, it’s that time of the year. It’s the domain renewing season for most LLLL.net holders.
About a year or so ago, after a match of soccer, I was heading home when one of my closest friends sent me a text message saying that the quad-premium LLLL.net’s are nearly all registered. When I got home, as I had a pretty good .net TLD registration price with Moniker, I spent about $130 dollars investing in 20 quad-premium LLLL.net’s. Since then, I’ve sold three for a price of $5 per domain and I have 17 domains that I’m thinking whether I should or shouldn’t renew. It is not the money part that is bugging me. It’s the entire future of LLLL.net that I believe I don’t fully understand or see. At the moment, I’m feeling myself more and more leaning towards dropping this buying domains for investment purposes thing. Let me tell you why.
You Can’t Win, Win, Win
At least to me, this is what the domain industry has been. I guess you could say that the stock market is similar, but I would have to disagree. I personally believe that the domain industry is, in most parts, for those who were there from the early days. Unless you are planning on coming into the market with some money that you can afford to potentially lose, it is just not worth the risk. You need to learn the tricks, have the tools ready, and simply be ready to make this your living, which most people can’t. If you have a short domain or some premium domain, the chances of someone just knocking at your door asking for a quote with a blank check for you to write is just not possible. This takes me to my next point about time and how domaining as a newbie is definitely just not worth the time.
Too Much Time Consuming
For the amount of time you would need to expect, you probably won’t get a lot back. Chances are that you may just have to renew and renew and renew. I’m not just saying the domain names, but I’m saying the tools, the subscriptions, and a whole lot of other stuff to keep yourself updated. Forums just aren’t going to cut it. You need to spend that extra time to reach out even further to even make a slight impact on the sale of your domains.
I guess that could be the same with all things, but something I learned was that even if you do put in a lot of time into it, you won’t learn much. If you put your time into a field of science, a business, or even a blog, you actually find numerous opportunities to learn. As a domaining newbie (not anymore, but still) you won’t learn too much. The person that buys a domain from you at a reseller price isn’t too interested in you. They are interested in the price. Sad, but true.
No Real Exponential Growth
If you’re doing business, you want your revenue to rise per year. From what I see in domaining though, not many people see this increase per year. I think the problem lies in the fact that not much affects the price of domains except for time, which in this field is availability. Even if you decided to invest some time to seek out end buyers, there is just so much that you can do in regards to the revenue. I just don’t see an exponential growth, which is probably why most people I’ve talked to do this for a hobby (which then, you can pretty much forget exponential growth as you’re just hoping for some few pocket money) and not as a full-time thing. Anyways, the point is that exponential growth does not seem possible with domaining, especially for newbies and not so newbies.
I guess this could be considered one of my sore loser posts after not finding any good sales for my LLLL.net’s… or a post where I am sharing my not so pleasant all the time experience in domaining. You can choose, but personally, I think it’s the latter. Domaining is definitely cool and for those out there that are successful with it, props to you. However, I just feel that for someone without (or sometimes even with) a huge capitol and just a newbie in domaining, I just don’t see the market as being a profitable market.
Think differently? Hit me up with a comment as I’d love to try my skills in this industry again. However, at the moment, I think I’ll either give these domains away on this blog, just drop them, or renew only a few that I feel I could maybe turn into a website (as I have a few pretty nice ones).
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), we all have 24 hours in one day. As a blogger and a whole lot of other stuff online, that is just not enough time a day to reap all the profits into my pockets. When I calculate the amount I make per dollar, it just isn’t worth it to do this all the time. This is why you need friends, partners, employees, and a lot more. This is why you need those people who will do what you would need to spend your time doing.
I first started outsourcing about a year ago and found that I had a lot of time in my hands. But exactly what do I outsource? The primary product I outsource is content. As a strong believer of “Content is King”, and that quantity is in fact just as important as quality, I am always on the lookout for quality writers who are looking to get consistent jobs at a decent rate. (Hint: If you are a writer, contact me and I may have a job for you.) Also, aside from the quality and king part, content is one of the most time consuming parts, which is also a reason why I outsource it.
Anyways, through outsourcing, it pretty much buys me time to focus on other aspects of development. So far, it may not seem convincing to throw (or in from my view, “invest”) money out there in hopes of making more while doing less work yourself. However, before you keep that thought, note to the wise: You can’t make free money. Even if you are outsourcing, you will need to do some degree of work to get things done. However, the benefits of that “free time” (and by free time, I don’t mean time to get on World of Warcraft, but I mean time to work on other parts of your business) are quite immense.
This post seems a bit unorganized, so let me quickly organize it a bit before I move on further.
- If you have a lot of stuff to do, you outsource some that would be time consuming and not worth the time for you.
- You pay the employee a bit.
- You make sure you make money off of that outsourced product.
- Simultaneously, you use that “free time” to work on other things.
Still not convinced to outsource? Let me then try to throw some numbers around. These are highly theoretical numbers, but hey, usually you can get something similar to work if you keep on tweaking it and optimizing it.
Let’s say that you allocated $50 into getting some content up to kick-start your blog. We’ll ignore the niche here as that is not so important right now. Anyways, with $50, you can get some pretty sweet content and aplenty of them too, especially at various webmaster forums. Usually the rate is about $0.01 per word, but as more and more writers are emerging, the rates are just dropping. In addition, if you buy in bulk, writers will usually give great discounts.
So with that in mind, let’s say that with $50, you can get yourself 12 articles each 500 words. That’s 6000 words right there and although the rate of $0.01 per word shows that it is worth $60, as I said, discounts and lower rates for quality articles can be found. Anyways, with this 12 articles, you are pretty much ready to go and kick-start the blog. Now, just for easier explanation purposes, let’s make the niche a bodybuilding website. Despite the niche being a bit saturated, it is still quite profitable if you know what you are doing.
With the 12 articles, you can pretty much copy them over to WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, or whatever you are using. That should take you 15 minutes maximum. Now, with the content in its place on the web, you can focus on other parts of developing this blog. Publicity is definitely one you should and would be interested in. Marketing related products like muscle milk is also something you can look into.
I won’t go further down this road on explaining it as that is another completely different story. But, can’t you see how beneficial that $50 was in respect to time and stress that would have been on you? Hey, let’s admit this, but most of us aren’t professional writers and aren’t exactly research kings. You would have probably had to go through several HOURS of research, and then crafting your article with keywords and all those goodies to make it an “attractive” and fun article to read. IF you get finished with that maybe you would have some time to get your blog’s popularity up. After that would you really start to make some money. Why not cut the majority of the work and outsource?
At the moment, I have about $100 or so amount of work being outsourced only in the content area. I won’t disclose anymore regarding SEO, designing, etc., but I can tell you that I outsource a lot of work (and I do mean A LOT) which gives me a lot of time to connect online with others in my niche while also primarily focusing on the monetary side of the website. That isn’t to say that this blog is not written by me of course.
Anyways, hopefully some information in here was helpful and somewhat motivated you to try this path. If dishing out $50 is not something you are comfortable with, try it out first with a $5 article or a $20 design (to sell sponsorship links). In the case it doesn’t work, it’s not like you are losing an arm, so there isn’t much pressure on you. G’luck!
So with the month of January quickly coming to a close already, today, I thought I might as well check up on how I was doing with A Few 2009 Milestones I set earlier this month. To simply sum it up, I’ve been pathetic. That’s right, simply awful.
Looking at the five main goals I set, sure they are long term goals that are to be achieved by December 31, 2009, but looking at the pace that I have been going this month, I’d be surprised if I even reached half that milestone. Sure, my other online projects have had its usual ups and downs this month. I’m currently working on getting some soccer articles up and even potentially a music related website (as money always follows passion). However, for ahnternet, things have certainly not gone so well. Thus, I’ve decided to take things bit by bit and actually post them on here for all the readers here because I found myself following commitments that I post publicly. I did this with BloggersWalk before (it has been a while since I typed that name) and it worked out pretty well. Therefore, Static now presents you his weekly posting schedule.
While I’ll have weeks where I post more, it will be most likely off this blog’s niche, which as of is somewhat personal and somewhat making money online blog. Anyways, the days that I’ll be posting are Thursday and Sunday/Monday. These are the two days (or I guess not really days considering a post can come up either on Sunday or on Monday) when I will guarantee a quality post that will hopefully be helpful to you guys.
When does this start? I’ll start it starting this weekend with a post that I meant to publish earlier this month. Let’s see how this goes.
Today is finally the day that the first African American president is born. He worked tirelessly up to this day, breaking all stereotypes and impressing all those around him despite his unfortunate conditions at a young age.
Watch it LIVE!
Stream is now off air.
So I just read the post over at WordPress blog that WordPress.tv is now open. It seems like a pretty cool visual support/help center for all things related to WordPress.
However, one thing that I’m wondering about is whether this may begin a closing of more and more WordPress tutorial blogs. Sort of like that effect that the WordPress themes database had when it first re-opened…
I guess we’ll have to see, but so far, I’m liking it.
So apparently, my well functioning host had some problems that I didn’t know about. I was with Qoozz for 28 months (that’s right, over two years of excellent service), but a few weeks ago, I stumbled on a thread about a month old over at WebHostingTalk. Pretty much, there was a harddrive crash at Qoozz, it wasn’t recoverable, and Leslie, the owner, wasn’t responding at all for over a month. What was funny though was that the server I was on wasn’t affected or at least I didn’t notice any downtimes or any loss of data. Which was good!
However, still feeling a bit insecure after this unexpected (as if hardwares will give you a notice before failing) disaster, I decided to submit a ticket to just see if Leslie was there. Nope. There was a database error with the support desk and there was just no way of submitting a ticket. So, I decided to check what was up on their forums. Again a database error was the only thing that showed up. Hmm… No support?
Pretty much, instantly, I checked over the offers at WHT and picked myself a new host with a real 24/7 support and a company history of over 5 years. It wasn’t an easy move because being at one place for 28 months, even if you don’t know anyone there other than this one owner, you sort of grow into that place. But sometimes you just need to get practical. Of course, I wasn’t emotional over a tiny hosting account there, but it is just that it felt weird.
Anyways, what am I trying to say? It honestly never hurts to be too careful. Now, although this blog is not a big blog, I have quite a few sites, which I won’t disclose, that do pretty well. A data loss would have a critical hit on the websites. Personally, I don’t have a good backing up habit (the last backup is from November 2008) so for sure a data loss would have affected by revenue, traffic, and potentially even the reputation of the sites.
I wasn’t going to risk any of that after having to go through all that work trying to get these sites where they are now. Anyways, that was my primary reason for a switch. Some of you may have noticed a downtime, although I don’t think there should have been any as I moved the site’s files over before changing the domain’s nameservers.
I’m really glad that I was able to dodge a potential disaster.
Do any of you have any bad stories with hosts? Any stories of backing up? Any stories of you barely dodging what could have been a major tragedy? Well, comment away! Oh yeah, and before you go commenting, please make a backup of your site.
Although I wouldn’t consider myself a complete geek, I do know a thing or two when it comes to preventing a virus or a spyware from overtaking the computer. I haven’t had an infection for as long as I can remember. However, when I got up this morning to watch a football match online, I guess I stumbled into a wrong site with my recently bought Samsung NC10, which was somewhat unprotected.
The game was supposed to start at 8am, so I got up accordingly, brought my netbook to my bed, and logged on to the school campus’s wireless connection to watch the game on my bed. While doing a few searches here and there for the game, all of a sudden, I saw that “svchost.exe” was trying to gain access online. Of course, at first, I was a bit skeptical, but something went across my mind and after a few alerts (this was non-activated McAfee preinstalled on my computer alerting me), I allowed it.
Immediately, the computer wanted to restart and I knew that I had made a mistake. Well, considering that the atch today was a big one (Man Utd. vs. Chelsea), I was pretty mad. As both were important, I got on my other laptop and started to work on the NC10.
To cut the long story short, I had to activate McAfee (which I wasn’t so happy doing as I was waiting for my Kaspersky to arrive. Ironically though, McAfee partially got rid of this trojan and gave me enough time to install Ad-Aware 2008. Ran a test with Ad-Aware 2008, deleted TWO suspicious files and am now running McAfee SecurityCenter. It seems like it has noticed two additional suspicious files.
What a great way to start a Sunday.
Static is a teen blogger who runs the blog, 
