Nice people thread 2 - now even nicer

lostinrates

wageslave wrote: »

You bu ggered off:)

So did you. I've missed you

Exocet

PasturesNew wrote: »

End of the month nearly ... "tot up time" - and a quick look at the initial stats shows a massive 30% increase in income over last month. Not sure if I did anything differently, I don't think I did. However, this will in some way be some result of my continued efforts and tweaking and trying things and working hard 20/7 for a lot of this year.

I had "my best ever day" too this month, it's always hard to pin down precisely "how much..." but it was about £120. Not too shabby at all ... if only every day could yield that... and that's the thought that keeps me going, if it can happen one day by a series of "peak days" in 3-4 income streams, then logic says it would be feasible to do it again. *dreams* ... £120 ... that's like £44k/year for sitting on your bum eating biscuits.

Any tips to share PN? Other than hard work, etc. Good blog sites, or other clues maybe?

Edit: Er.. I checked your site.. lots of good stuff in there. But do you have pointers just for me, where could I take my output and market it for instance?

Try to be polite...

I'm bored with house prices btw, there's a bigger world out there and it's time I got a bit of it.

Edit2: Looks like Hubpages could be the place.

LydiaJ

Yay! Wageslave is back.
It's so good to "see" you again. How long has it been? Did you know I'm buying a house?

PasturesNew

Exocet wrote: »

Any tips to share PN? Other than hard work, etc. Good blog sites, or other clues maybe?

Edit: Er.. I checked your site.. lots of good stuff in there. But do you have pointers just for me, where could I take my output and market it for instance?

Try to be polite...

I'm bored with house prices btw, there's a bigger world out there and it's time I got a bit of it.

Edit2: Looks like Hubpages could be the place.

Not really. What I do, I've realised, most others can't. It's a lot of faffing about ... and, there's new stuff all the time.

However, my strategy is: look around, see what's out there, if you fancy it, try it. Then, think about where your income comes from - spread the risk. e.g. most of my income is from one site, through Adsense. I have to think "what if traffic stops coming there; what if Adsense changes the game and pays only 10% in future".... so I have built other sites, tried other things.

I think the real secret is: pick ONE thing - and stick with it, plug it mercilessly, focus on it and do it all the time .... rather than my "spread yourself so thin you always have too much on the go and can't begin to focus" approach

Yes. Hubs

I'm doing all right with those, traffic arrives without my efforts (too much), it's residual. Winner.

One of my sites is just for writing up about stuff I've investigated and think that somebody could use. Another site brings together stuff that people couldn't find together anywhere else (main site). Another one uses filters and rss feeds to provide up to date information on a particular market. One's my local town site (just doing that one this week - spent 6 hours yesterday just investigating 9 different rss feeds to try to do something simple before I got it half working). One writes itself entirely. One writes half its own stuff. One writes 90% of its own stuff. Oh - and two are set to decide that if I've not produced anything new for 4 days they'll dig out the oldest item and republish it as new

I'm just kind of playing around with stuff that intrigues me really - and it happens to make money because as I am "playing", I've got ads dotted about.

Then there's the writing ... well, that's the "surprising find". I've written over 200 pieces now and it's really building into something terribly useful as a residual income. I figure now that everything I write will make me £30 on average (at least), so I do try now to write 2-3 pieces a week ... but if I focussed on one niche and wrote 1/day it'd earn a LOT more.

I've got domains coming out of my ears... too many to do anything with, but I discovered this fantastic (free) Wordpress theme, best I've found so far, called Atahualpa, from here: http://wordpress.bytesforall.com/ - it's really advanced and slick looking. Lot of learning there to configure that beast.

As I've wasted most of my time fannying around with free themes, this one's a real find - and when I've cracked the layout/functionality I'll be using it on all my sites I think. Especially as there's an import/export feature so I can simply build it once and export the settings to the next site with one click.

PasturesNew

Here's an anecdotal about the market ... well, some market, some place.

Mate of mine is, apparently, according to OK magazine, the best celebrity gifting company on the planet. Well, this is all alien territory for me. It seems that celebrity gifting is going through tough times. What happens is: he hangs out with all the top celebs at the top events/awards things in Hollywood. He gets given an inside room, in the venue itself... his clients pay him £000s and give him at least £20k of top freebies. He shoves all these expensive freebies in the room, with 3-4 photographers and opens the doors ... celebs roll in, grab freebies, his photographers snap photos, photos go out to all the press. And he also blogs about who got what.

And this is ... a proper business. Isn't it amazing how the other half live.

So, anyway, business is taking a downturn, clients aren't keen on giving away £000s of goodies in the hope that celebs will be snapped holding them... even though his gifting room is IN where the action is and he's well known to the celebs.

I caught him begging for website traffic 2 nights ago, which is why he explained the business model to me and why he was touting/begging and needs to increase his website traffic.

GDB2222

Care to pm me with your website, please PN? Or put it here for all to see.

PasturesNew

GDB2222 wrote: »

Care to pm me with your website, please PN? Or put it here for all to see.

No, I'm thoroughly embarrassed about them to be honest - and links to your own site aren't allowed.

My websites aren't brilliant, they're for particular people looking for particular information - and using freebie themes they're quite dire, if I'm honest.



As for what I do, I am here now 'resting' as this morning I have:
- identified and added a new news feed to my local town site; applied to yelldirect's affiliate program for that too.
- refreshed/updated and added to two old postings on one of my rss-fed sites. And added two entirely new pages to that.
- tidied up one site where reuters seems to have run amok, must be a glitch in the feeds somewhere, but it's OK now
- turned on a campaign on the ad server that I'd turned off last night as the site I was referring to was down for maintenance
- checked my income for October/spreadsheeted it ... and had a smug 2 minutes looking at the annualised figure.
- bunged in (technical term!) some relevant ebay listings to about 3 postings on one of my sites
- spotted a new opportunity, followed it up - liked what I saw and have already blogged about that. This is so good I might actually turn this into a complete n00bs "how to make money online, without spending a penny ever - and knowing that your efforts are appreciated - for people who really haven't a clue and have never done this before".


I've also responded to an email I got where somebody tried to suck up on one of my direst blogs by emailing me how great my blog was and can they make a guest posting... to which I replied: Yeah, go on then....

Income wise today: Very Happy.

GDB2222

PasturesNew wrote: »

This is so good I might actually turn this into a complete n00bs "how to make money online, without spending a penny ever - and knowing that your efforts are appreciated - for people who really haven't a clue and have never done this before".

This is the bit we are all getting interested in

You bandy around words like adsense, and I have a rough idea what it means, but how do you implement it? Also, there was some mention of some site like hogpages, which I had a look at. There are a couple of things I'd quite like to blog about, but doing that and being paid to do it sounds much more compelling. :T

Exocet

Thanks PN for excellent explanation as always. And thanks for being a bit of an inspiration. I spent maybe too long on here making jokes, trying to be creative when actually it might have made sense financially to be spouting off and possibly earning a few pence.

If I can add my new found 'expertise' to these pages here is what I have been doing for the last six weeks or so.

1. Found Google Sites. Lets you set up a website for free. You choose a name, choose a template (basic design) and start typing stuff in. That's a web site created. Incidentally creating one of any use that someone might want to actually visit is a whole other story of hard work and busted dreams.

2. Buy domain name, if you want, from Godaddy. Couple of pounds a year gets you www.imatoerag.com or similar to point to your site.

3. Join Facebook and encourage people to look at your site by plastering it over every appropriate group.

4. Whoops. I forgot the Adsense step. In your Google Site you choose an option called Monetise (don't you love these Americans). Fill in your paypal and name and then you can insert Adsense adverts the same way as any other image. So now your prose has adverts attached. IF anyone ever visits your site and IF they click on an advert and IF that is a paid advert (some are charitable) then you get a few cents in your Adsense account. Fifty dollars and they'll move it to your Paypal.

Blow me down sideways I thought - there's money to be made here. There's a billion or two internet users and if some of them visited my and some of them clicked... well... scrub that.. it's pipe dreams. I have worked very hard for six weeks and ended up with a mish mash of rubbish (as some of you might expect), that I can't market.

So, sorry to go on, but v. excited about the possibilities of this still. So.. anyway.. PN's Hubpages suggestion - you write magazine style articles and they host it and give you a % of the Ads sounds rather easier than trying to go it alone. You still need visitors, something to write about, a decent style, hard work and probably some luck - but it seems an interesting possibility.

One other thing as we are on <ahem> MSE. In my journey I have been appalled at the number of scamming, phishing and otherwise neer do well sites out there. Be careful.

PasturesNew

Exocet wrote: »

Blow me down sideways I thought - there's money to be made here. There's a billion or two internet users and if some of them visited my and some of them clicked... well... scrub that.. it's pipe dreams. I have worked very hard for six weeks and ended up with a mish mash of rubbish (as some of you might expect), that I can't market.

pfft ... 6 weeks. Slacker!! Hey - here's a fact .... I've been doing it for 4 years and mine still look like sh1te. See what you've achieved, not what's bad about it.... build on it, learn stuff, change stuff, tweak. That's what I do. None of my sites are "right", you're right about a mish mash, but at some future point you'll get the energy to re-hash it ... or something.

The question is: Are you having a bit of fun, are you making a few pennies? If you're making a few pennies then you just need to make a few more.

OK - here's your starter for 10: asterpix searchlight .... go figure

Want to step the game up a bit? .... openx.org InRamp/free hosted adserver.

And the king of tips: STATS. You can never ever ever have enough stats. Get them all. Get your hands on all the stats you can - where are your visitors coming from? what keywords are they after? ... and does YOUR website/page give them what they're after? If not - write that d4mned page because you've got traffic for it!

Exocet wrote: »

So, sorry to go on, but v. excited about the possibilities of this still. So.. anyway.. PN's Hubpages suggestion - you write magazine style articles and they host it and give you a % of the Ads sounds rather easier than trying to go it alone. You still need visitors, something to write about, a decent style, hard work and probably some luck - but it seems an interesting possibility.

One other thing as we are on <ahem> MSE. In my journey I have been appalled at the number of scamming, phishing and otherwise neer do well sites out there. Be careful.

OK. In turn....
Visitors - with hubs join the 30 day challenge. Answer the questions (find the questions section, go to answer them, click answer with a hub).
Something to write about - answer the questions in the questions section wtih a hub. Also - lists of stuff are good. Top 3 beaches in Manchester (OK, so wherever)
Decent style - not really. You're not trying to win Author of the Year Award
Hard work - kind of, although answering a question with a hub can be a breeze. More important is persistence and tenacity - that's why joining the 30 day challenge is good as it keeps you on target. Oh - and the other month I picked up $200 in winnings by entering one of the regular contests where they tell you what to write.
Luck - not really.... if you do the above, and find out more about writing/keywords/etc, then over time you'll make your own luck.

You do need to know which are making you the most money though - it's not always those with the most traffic. Install Google Analytics - and set hubpages as your primary domain and you'll instantly see the income for every one you write. Although this is frustrating to set up, you might like to just know it can be done when you've got a couple of hours to get your head round it.