Kevin Muldoon

It’s a bit ironic that my last post was entitled ‘An Overdue Update‘ as I wrote the post about 6 weeks ago. Thankfully, I am finally getting back into a good routine.

I’m settled in my new house and focused on making WordPress Mods a success. The site has started to make a little money through affiliate commissions already. Probably between $50 and $100 a month, which is nothing to shout about but is encouraging considering the readership of the site so far.

I now have to step things up and try and get the site making at least a thousand dollars a month by the end of the year. With less than 4 months left this is perhaps a big ask but it’s what I’m going to aim for.

Traffic

Traffic has been growing steadily. Back in June I posted some stats to show the sites growth.

Below is an update of traffic for WordPress Mods.

Webalizer

Since the start of June traffic has almost tripled according to Webalizer to around 1,500 daily visits. I’d like this to increase to around 5,000 by the end of the year.

AWStats

From around 350 uniques a day at the start of June, AWStats are no showing daily visits of around 1,000. This is about the same rate being shown in Webalizer.

Google Analytics

In June Analytics was showing around 150 unique visits per day. It now stands around 500. Traffic jumped on August 31st to around 3,000 uniques due to one of my posts being heavily stumbled.

RSS Subscribers

At my last update RSS readership was only 43. It has increased to around 135, which is a bit disappointing, but it does seem to be following the same growth patten as traffic.

Essentially, traffic and readership has tripled in 3 months. This is the kind of growth you would expect with a new blog. If I keep the momentum going then I see no reason why I cannot triple traffic again within the next 3 months.

Guest Posts

I have been trying to write a lot of blog posts in advance. This allows me to free up time and work on other things. Guest posts are going to be my main way of promoting WP Mods so it’s important to write good posts and spread the word about about the site.

Two posts were published today: one at Flipping Websites and one at John Chow.

I have also just finished a post for Blogging Teacher and have written the majority of a post for Daily Blog Tips too. I will hopefully continue to write the odd post for these sites plus write for several more.

Due to this, I have added a guest post information page which lists all the articles I have written. It should provide a good reference for future collaborations.

I hope you have enjoyed this update. I will do my best to keep these updates up, as over time they should paint a good picture of launching, developing and monetizing a blog.

Thanks for reading

Kevin

I can’t believe that I have not updated this blog for over a month. Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to work much over the last month. I bought a house on 18th June.

Once I got the keys I noticed a lot of problems with the house that I wasn’t aware of. For example, when I viewed the house the bathroom suite was small and basic but it was good enough for me. However once I moved in we noticed that the shower was leaking badly. The previous owners had placed a plastic sheet underneath to stop the water but there was a real danger of it soaking through and into the kitchen (the sheet was behind the bath panel).

There was also a few problems with the electrics. The living room ceiling lights were wired so that 4 lights were on and 2 were off but when you switched the light switch the 2 lights went on and the 4 went off i.e. lights were always on. The previous owner had resolved this issue but simply unscrewing the 2 backlights a little so they wouldn’t work. We also discovered that the light switch in the downstairs hallway would switch the bathroom light on and off.

Luckily my friend Michael is good with this kind of thing and was able to fix most of the issues.

My parents have been pretty good over the last month and have been helping me a lot, particularly my dad with fixing things and painting etc. I spoke with them and we decided that it was best to fix all of the little problems before moving in instead of having to work around them later.

It’s not been too bad though it has been very time consuming. It took time to rip all of the plywood up from the floors, fix the floors, remove tiles from the bathroom etc. Shopping for materials etc can get time consuming too.

I have always had a strange working schedule where I fit my work around my social life and training etc, though I usually manage to work 30-45 hours per week, but during the last month I’ve only been able to do about 5-10 hours work a week.

This has obviously affected my work. I had planned out lots of high quality articles for my new blog WordPress Mods but most have not been written. I’ve kept the site going with short posts though I feel like the site has stalled since my schedule became so busy. It just isn’t possible to develop a new blog properly with only 5 hours a week in my opinion.

More importantly, when I did find time to work, I was usually quite tired so I spent twice as much time researching and writing my articles.

Thankfully, my house is close to completion. My friend owns a joinery called Vision Joinery and has done a great job of fixing the problems which need resolved. The bathroom suite should be completed by Monday and the carpets should be fitted the following week. Then I can move in, get back into my usual working routine, and start writing quality articles.

I have been able to publish some good posts over the last month. A few weeks ago I published 200 Professional Corporate WordPress Themes From Theme Forest and today I published 500 Creative 404 Error Pages.

A guest post I wrote in June for Daniel Scocco also published today on his popular Daily Blog Tips website entitled 11 Email Marketing Alternatives to Aweber. I will need to write more guest posts of this quality in the next few months to attract new readers to my blog. If everything goes to plan, WordPress Mods will be making a small profit by the end of the year.

I will do another update of WordPress Mods in the coming weeks and let you all know what I’ve been working on.

Good luck,

Kevin

Luke Moulton posted a fantastic on offer on Flippa yesterday. To celebrate the one year anniversary of the site they are offering all members $10 worth of free credits. This will reduce your next auction listing from $19 to $9. The offer is only valid until 12 noon, 28th June, 2010 (Australian Eastern Standard Time) so make sure you take advantage of it.

To claim your voucher all you need to do is:

1. You’ll need a Flippa account (you can sign-up here if you don’t already have one)
2. Login to your account and click on the Redeem Credit Voucher link in the admin navigation bar at the top of the page.
3. Past the following code into the promotion code field: 1F56261BE2B8

I received a comment on my auction for TaekwondoPatterns this morning. When I logged in to Flippa I noticed that the auction listing has been improved.

The new design has a noticeably smaller font. The main details of the auction are now at the top of the auction page instead of the sidebar with traffic and income details remaining on the right hand side.

I like the new design as it’s quicker and easier to see important details of the site without having to scroll down the page. I’m sure many will not as keen on it though (people fear change!).

What do you think of the new listing page design?

Link: The New-Look Flippa Auction Listing Page

Daniel Scocco is one of most well known bloggers and marketers within the blogging advice niche due to his Daily Blog Tips site. I’ve never met him in person however I’ve spoken to him several times on messenger and he comes across as a nice guy. This came through a few months ago when he gave me some great advice about selling BloggingTips.com (initially I wasn’t sure whether it was the right move).

One of Daniels major projects is Online Profits – an internet training program which covers everything from web design to affiliate marketing over 24 modules. Daniel will also be showing members live case study’s so you can see how to make money with a new site from start to finish.

At the start of the year I announced the relaunch of the program. At that time the course costs $392 (payable in 4 installments of $98) however a few days ago Daniel announced that the course is now free. The only catch is you need to sign up to a cheap hosting package through his affiliate link.

If you are new to making money on the web or are interested in starting then I recommend checking Online Profits out as it has a huge amount of information.

Link: Online Profits

Most affiliate programs have minimum payout limits for referring their products in order to reduce payout fees.

Some affiliate managers set their limit sensibly however others price themselves out by making their limit too high. This is a sneaky tactic that is used to vastly reduce the money paid out from their affiliate program. The result is that many publishers bring in only a few customers. If dozens of publishers do this it means a lot of sales for the company but none of the publishers get paid because they didn’t break the minimum payout threshold.

I do appreciate that some raise their minimum payout so that they only attract top affiliates but I am sure they lose out on a lot of sales because webmasters who own smaller websites won’t promote their products.

Others are a little more blatant about it. For example, programs which pay a few cents for an email sign up but have a $50 or $100 minimum payout. These programs help add thousands of people to newsletter lists but the owner needs to pay very little out because such a high percentage of affiliates don’t make the minimum payout.

Stupidly Priced Minimum Payout

I came across a premium photo theme for WordPress today so I made a note of it in order to review it over the next few weeks on WP Mods. I then noticed they had an affiliate program so visited their information page and noticed that they paid out $20 for every sale of their product (which costs $79). 25% isn’t amazing for a theme referral as many competitors pay out 50% but it is by no means terrible either.

However I quickly noticed that the minimum payout is $100. I will probably still post about the theme as I want to write about designs and plugins which visitors of WP Mods haven’t come across. Though I must admit that from an affiliate point of view it is very discouraging. It means that you won’t get a penny unless you refer 5 customers.

If you only referred 4 customers then you would never get paid. That means you would have generated $316 worth of sales for them but you would never get a penny back in return. As I said before, I’m not too bothered about the affiliate program for this product as I am writing the article for readers rather than to push a sale (but I usually include an affiliate link if there is one). Though I would not promote the site in any shape or form otherwise as I stay clear of affiliate programs with high minimum payouts.

It’s easy to miss the minimum payout when you sign up to an affiliate program though it’s something you must do. Make sure your website has the traffic to generate a lot of sales if it does have a high payout threshold. If it doesn’t it’s maybe worth looking at another program. If not, you could be one of the millions of affiliates with commissions sitting in their account they will never get their hands on.

Good luck,

kevin

Whenever I gave advice to new bloggers about promoting their blog I always told them that ‘The first few hundred subscribers are the hardest’. This is something I have believed for years and something which I believe still holds true today.

It can be very infuriating at the beginning of a blogs life. You spend hours writing top quality articles yet no one leaves a comment because no one knows your blog exists. Essentially, you are writing for the search engines, so the initial articles aren’t wasted if they bring in good traffic at a later date.

Once you get more traffic and more subscribers, everything gets easier. Pretty much any article you write will get a comment, a tweet or a digg, simply because your audience is bigger. It’s usually much easier to get from 500 to 3,000 subscribers than it is to get from 0 to 500. Everything snowballs and grows exponentially, though at the start, it’s an uphill battle.

You can avoid a huge amount of hassle promoting a new blog if you already have a successful website i.e. a platform to launch your new website from. Looking back, this is something I wish I did with WordPress Mods. Unfortunately, I didn’t plan ahead. I thought about selling Blogging Tips and a few days later it was listed for sale. Had I waited a few months I could have started my new site and told readers and newsletter subscribers about it.

Darren Rowse from ProBlogger did it the right way with his Twitter blog TwiTip. He launched the site in November 2008 and told all his loyal readers about it. Thousands had subscribed after just a few articles. According to the sites advertising page it had 5,700 RSS subscribers in 11th February 2009.

Nearly 6 thousand subscribers in 4 months is impressive any way you look at it, and 15 months later the blog has over 36,000 subscribers. Not bad for a site which he rarely posts on himself (guest posters mostly write articles there).

Again, I didn’t take advantage of the platform I had with my old site. I started planning the site as soon as I decided to sell but didn’t launch til 2 months later. Therefore, I need to do things the hard way

The blogs RSS subscriber growth is painfully slow. I get the impression people are less likely to subscribe when compared to other niches such as making money online and news. However, traffic is growing every day so I’m sure RSS growth will happen in time.

To encourage this I have wrote lots of long premium articles such as ‘How to Integrate WordPress and bbPress‘ and ‘The Ultimate Social Media Icon List. I’m also publishing an article this Monday which I spent about 4 days on (no joke!).

I am also writing another article for my old site Blogging Tips this Monday and will hopefully get enough time to write a post for Daily Blog Tips too.

The bottom line is, you can’t really afford to take your foot off the pedal until your blog has been established. Getting the blog off the ground is really half the battle. Once the site has more traffic and a loyal readership everything gets easier.

So if you have just launched a new blog or are thinking about doing so, don’t be too disheartened if the site isn’t a success right away. This does happen occasionally with some blogs though most of the time you need to keep plugging away at it until the blog reaches a good level.

Good luck,
Kevin

Recently I’ve seen a lot of websites I sold years ago being listed for sale on Flippa. The strange thing is, most of the buyers never did anything with the sites. It’s no skin off my nose though it’s seems silly to purchase a site if you don’t have a long term plan for it.

Cards on the table, I’ve did this twice myself (more on this later), though the most I’ve spent on a site I didn’t want was $200. The rest of the time I made my money back or made a profit. The times I didn’t update was purely down to me not having the time to do with them what I wanted i.e. they weren’t priority. Though you’d think that if you were spending decent money on a site you’d make a point of investing some of your time on it.

The first old site of mine I saw listed was WebSiteTrading.net. I created the site as a forum in early 2004 and sold it a few months later. Buying and selling websites and domains was really taking off back then which is why I was trying to capitalise on it. The weird thing is, the new owner changed it from a forum into a Ning network site. It looks like a Made-For-Adsense mini site rather than a community though it’s good to see the logo I got designed is still being used

The site has little to no traffic, a small monthly income from adsense that hasn’t been proved, and pretty much no content. The minimum offer is $500, which I guess isn’t too bad if you value the domain only as it’s a PR 4 and is pretty brandable. Though the owner is seriously delusional if he thinks someone is crazy enough to pay his $8,500 buy it now asking price.

Poker Discussion Forums

Next up is some poker forums I sold around 5 years ago. The same guy purchased FreeRollForums from me for $6,000 and PokerPlayerForums for $600. However, he hasn’t done anything with them

What I found very strange was the investment this guy made with these sites. He purchased FreeRollForums for $6,000 (which wasn’t a bad price at the time). The forum had a unique design and flash logo at the time which I had paid $1,500 for. The design was less than a year old when he bought it however he decided to get a new design for it and paid another $1,500 out. This really confuses me. Why would you spend another $1,500 on a design for a site if (a) you don’t have time to develop the site and (b) it already has a good design.

Now, this is where it gets really confusing for me. He had already purchased FreerollForums from me for $6,000 and then spent another $1,500 on a new design (which it clearly didn’t need), plus the $600 on PokerPlayerForums. You would think that he would spend all his time trying to develop these sites (at the very least FreerollForums since he had invested $7,500 for it).

But he didn’t. Instead he created a new poker forum in 2007 called BetCamp. He claims to have spent over $3,000 developing the site (design/promotion etc). With less than 3,000 posts it’s safe to say that it wasn’t money well spent. Now all 3 sites are as dead as Dillinger.

He recently listed all 3 sites on Flippa. No one was really bidding so I put in a bid of $1,000. I was the highest bidder for a day or so until yesterday, which was the last day of the auction. My last bid was $1,500. There were few higher bids but nothing much higher so he dropped the Buy It Now to $4,500. With the highest bid at $3,200, someone paid the buy it now to avoid losing the sites to another bidder. He managed to get $4,500 back, however this pales in comparison to his $11,000+ investment.

I have cut my losses with several websites in the past. Just like any business, you learn a lot by the mistakes you make when working online. On one level, I have a little sympathy for him for the loss he made and a little admiration for deciding to cut his losses and move on. Though I cannot comprehend why he kept throwing good money after bad and why he started a new forum from scratch instead of developing the first one he bought. At the very least he could have sold the older one before moving on.

A lesson Learned

It’s important to learn from this kind of mistake when working online. I now research any website I’m interested in vigorously to avoid being ripped off. The two sites I made a mistake in buying before was a blog called ZuneZag and a discussion forum called RetroWheels.

ZuneZag could have been a success if I spent some time on it, but I didn’t, which is why I sold it about half a year later for around a $75 loss (not much I know). I still own RetroWheels. I got ripped off with that a little as the owner said it was an original design (which was one of the main reasons I was buying it). I had checked elsewhere and hadn’t come across it so didn’t think the owner was lying. It wasn’t until after the sale that I came across the design in a theme store for about $30. I had only paid about $150 for the site (if I remember right) but I still felt really ripped off. What can I say: Every penny’s a prisoner

RetroWheels does actually get a little traffic and some genuine retro car fantastics have signed up to post. However, I have not taken advantage of this since I know very little about the subject. Hopefully the small targeted traffic and the age of the domain will get me most of my money back.

Another lesson why I’m sure both of these sellers have now learned is to never create or buy a site in a niche that you (a) know nothing about or (b) have no interest in. One of the reasons I did so well with gambling and poker sites is because I loved playing poker and played the game 4 or 5 times a week. Therefore updating the sites never felt like work. Clearly the guy who bought the site from me didn’t feel the same as he rarely posted and tried to get moderators to do a lot of the work.

It’s easy to get up in the thrill of the auction. Though on many occasions it makes more sense to create a site of your own from scratch, particularly if you have more time than money. When you do find a site you really want (need), make you do your homework and research everything so you don’t get ripped off.

Good luck,
Kevin