Kevin Muldoon

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

This week I have been reading John Chows 144 page ‘Make Money Online: Roadmap of a Dot Com Mogul’ book (edited my Michael Kwan). It is available from Amazon in the UK for £9.32 with free delivery and in the US for $10.85 with free delivery.

If you saw this book in a bookshop you would think that it was just a general book about making money online. That is until you see the back cover and you realise that it’s about making money with blogs. Whilst I do like the title of the book, I think something like ‘How to make money online with blogs’ would have been more descriptive. However, I’m not one to judge a book by it’s cover so let’s look at what is inside John Chows first printed book.

Book Contents & Introduction

The book has 13 chapters in total and a small links section at the end. It’s well written, easy to follow, and has been written from a personal point of view rather than a journalistic/news style. So you should be able to finish the book quite quickly.

• Chapter 1: The Best Time to Get Started
• Chapter 2: My Story
• Chapter 3: Blogging 101
• Chapter 4: Top Essential Blogging Tips
• Chapter 5: WordPress Basics
• Chapter 6: WordPress Techniques & Tools
• Chapter 7: Content is King
• Chapter 8: Promotion and Search Engine Optimization
• Chapter 9: The Importance of Branding
• Chapter 10: Optimizing Google Adsense
• Chapter 11: My Top Mopneymakers
• Chapter 12: Private Ad Sales
• Chapter 13: The Formula for Success

The first two chapters deal with how John fell into the world of making money online in 1999 with his first website Moto’s Project 504. This quickly led to the creation of The Tech Zone, which was making him over $2,500 within only a few months. John then talks about how he weathered the storm during the dot com bust of 2001 and leads on to how he started making money with his blog.

I really loved this section of the book as I love hearing about how successful online entrepreneurs got their start. It reminded me a lot of Joel Comm’s book ‘Click Here to Order’ (who happens to have wrote the foreword for this book).

Blogging & WordPress Basics

In the next 4 chapters John explains the basics of blogging and gives an introduction to everyones favourite blogging platform WordPress. If you already own a blog and are familiar with WordPress then you won’t get too much from these chapters other than the good recommendations for wordpress plugins.

I also think that these chapters lack something for beginners. There are no images in the book, which is something I believe beginners really need to help them through the basics. And he doesn’t seem to go into enough detail with his beginner tips either. Which I can understand from one point of view as the book is primarily about making money online, though I feel that this section could have been greatly improved with some basic screenshots of screens and more references to books and online resources which will help the beginners install their blog.

There was some poor advice in this section too:

• John recommends that users create a 16×16 pixel favicon. Though as I noted last month, it is better to use a much larger image for your favicon.ico file as it is frequently being used in feed readers and as desktop icons too. I must admit that I am lazy sometimes and have just used 16×16 in the past but I think it’s important to advise beginners to get in the habit of saving a larger favicon.ico image since the favicon is used for desktop icons too. And a 16×16 favicon looks awful when it’s magnified to 64×64 pixels.
• When talking about using the preferred domain (i.e. www vs non-www) John gives the code to be used in your .htaccess file to set a domain to use www. There are two problems I have with this. Firstly, there is no need for any WordPress user to do this manually. Once you set the WordPress address (URL) in the general settings area of WordPress (i.e. www.site.com/wp-admin/options-general.php) the .htaccess file will be updated with your preferred domain. Secondly, there is no explanation of what a .htaccess file is or what it does. I strongly believe that if you mention the .htaccess file to beginners you need to warn them about how things can get messed up easily with just one character out of place. Put simply, no one should be tampering with the .htaccess file until they understand some basic commands for it.

The section will prove useful to beginners though I believe that it could be improved in future editions by adding screenshots and providing more links to other resources.

Promoting your Blog and Making Money Online

The last part of the book begins with John stressing that ‘Content is King’. He talks about what you should be writing about, where you can find writers, and why you shouldn’t use free articles from article directories.

In the next chapter John talks about something he knows a lot about – promotion. He speaks about social media promotion topics such as link baiting and older established marketing techniques such as news releases. He then moves onto offline promotion tactics: ranging from free pens and business cards to lesser used techniques such as branding your laptop or your car. The chapter finishes with some basic search engine optimisation tips and is followed by a chapter on ‘The Importance of Branding’.

Experienced bloggers will be aware of most of the tips in the promotion and SEO chapters, though it’s always good to go over the basics as it’s easy to forget that sometimes the simplest promotion methods work.

Whilst most of ‘Make Money Online: Roadmap of a Dot Com Mogul’ is targeted towards beginner and intermediate bloggers, chapter ten is all about optimising Google Adsense on your blog. Adsense is an ad network which most bloggers are familiar with though I’m aware that many experienced bloggers are not experts with it.

So I believe that this is a chapter that most bloggers will benefit from reading, even if you only use Adsense sparingly. John talks about many Adsense topics such as the bid gap, section targeting and section ignoring, competitive ad filters and PPC arbitrage. It’s a subject which he clearly has a lot of knowledge on.

Next we have Johns top moneymakers in chapter 11. In this section he mentions his own ad network TTZ Media and well known ad networks such as Kontera and Bidvertiser. Those who have been blogging for a while will have come across all of them.

I must admit I was surprised that he only mentioned 8 ad networks. I appreciate that the chapter was called ‘My Top Moneymakers’ and therefore should include the sites which John uses to make money. Though I think newbies would have benefited with references to alternative (and established) blog revenue solutions such as Buy Sell Ads, BlogAds or Chitika.

Finishing the book off is a useful chapter on private ad sales and a summary of what you need to do to make it as a successful blogger.

Small Inconsistencies

The book also has some small inconstancies within the book which were not picked up in the proofreading process. For example, the back of the book states that his blog makes $40,000 a month but in chapter two, ten and thirteen he says this figure is $30,000. He also states in chapter five that his blog has 20,000 subscribers but as I write this post today it boasts well over 90,000 subscribers.

Neither of these small errors should disuade you from buying the book. They’re simple human error mistakes which were not picked up. No doubt they will be addressed in the next edition.

Overview

As someone who ran a blogging advice blog for 3 years and is now running a WordPress related blog, I didn’t get much from many chapters in this book. Though I am obviously not the target audience. This book was clearly written for beginners and those who are unsure about how to monetize their blog. I don’t think that this is a worthwhile purchase for experienced bloggers as John doesn’t cover enough advanced topics, though they should find the Adsense optimisation chapter useful.

If you are looking for general blogging and blog promotion tips then I would recommend Darren Rowse’s Pro Blogger Book instead as it has lots more images and explains a lot of the subjects which John briefly speaks about in more detail. Similarly, if you want some practical advice on how to install and maintain WordPress then I would buy a WordPress specific guide about that as although John touches upon the subject, he doesn’t delve deep enough for beginners.

Though if you are looking for a good overview of what blogs are and how they make money on the web then I would encourage you to check ‘Make Money Online’ out as it’s worth it’s relatively cheap price. It would be the perfect book for someone who has no idea what a blog is or is not sure how to make money with the blog they already run.

What does come through in all the book is Johns passion and drive. He doesn’t give you any false hope and tells readers right from the start that if they don’t work their butt off they aren’t going to make any money. I seriously believe this no holds barred approach to giving advice will help a lot of people as there are millions of people trying to make money on the web using get rich quick schemes. As John rightly points out, no such thing exists.

If you are thinking about buying the book and have some questions about it please let me know and I’ll do my best to answer them

Thanks,
Kevin

Additional Bonus

As an added bonus John gives a link to a presentation he gave at the Vancouver Business, Marketing and Entrepreneur meetup. In this 56 minute video he details how he makes over $40,000 a month from his blog.

Purchase Links

• UK – £9.32 with free delivery
• USA – $10.85 with free delivery

Jason Schuller, owner of Press 75 and ThemeGarden, wrote a good post about how hes making a living online from developing and selling WordPress themes.

In response to this article Jeff Chandler wrote a very honest article entitled ‘Jason Schuller Did It – I Can Do It To‘. In the article Jeff explained at how hes moving into a house with his wife to be and is feeling the pressure of having to make more money. He currently works in a grocery store but is looking at ideas as to how to make money online.

My situation is a little different but there are many similarities. I’m also moving into a house in a few weeks and I’m concerned about the increase in expenditure. At the start of the year I sold my previous main site for $60,000. Which, granted, is a lot of money (It was around £37k). However I didn’t really see any of it as the money went towards my tax bill (which was larger because of the sale) and my deposit for the house.

Because I sold the site, my monthly income has dropped. This has happened to me several times in the past when I have sold a big site however I have always had the safety net of my referral income from the gambling sites i created between 2003 and 2007. Unfortunately, this income is starting to drop. If I rented instead of buying a house then I would have had a lot more money saved to invest in new projects or to buy an existing website which has a decent monthly income. However I really wanted to get ‘my own place’ and get a foot on the property ladder, particularly with how cheap houses are just now.

Though because of this I find myself in a similar situation to Jeff i.e. I’m starting from scratch. This is something I’ve done before as my backpacking trips a few years ago to Australia, New Zealand and most of Asia were funded through selling sites which were making me money. If I hadn’t sold any of these sites then my monthly income would probably be $10k+, but I don’t have any regrets as I had a great time.

I do understand that it takes time to get a website established i.e. to get it to a level where it is making decent money online. Though I’m positive that I can develop WP Mods and get it making money a lot quicker than it took me to monetize my last site.

Thankfully, I do have savings to keep my going until my online income improves. Though obviously I don’t want to be on the breadline either. If I do find I’m struggling to pay the bills then I would simply get a part time or full time job to supplement me until my online income is back to a good level.

In fact, I was interviewed for a 3 month contract with a bank recently for a complaints job which paid £150 a day (around $220). Unfortunately, I didn’t get the job as there were other contractors available though the interview went well and they are keeping me in mind for future positions.

At first I wasn’t keen to take a contract job, even if the money was good. In many ways it felt like giving up. I gave up a career in the financial services to work online not because of the money, but because I love working online for a living. If I had stayed in the financial services industry I’d be making around £300 a day or more, but I don’t believe I would be as happy in my job. So going back to it, even if it was only temporary, felt like I had given up my dream in many respects.

Thankfully, common sense prevailed. I realise how this additional income could really help me, both in the short term and in the long term. The money I earned from such a job could let me invest in new projects and buy an existing one to help secure my long term future online. So this may happen in the future.

I’m going to work my ass off in the next few months to increase my monthly income through WP Mods and other new sites. I know I will make money, it’s a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’. If I do struggle to increase my monthly income as quick as I would like then at least I am in a good position to take a part time job or a full time contract job to help me. At the end of the day, bills need to be paid. I will let you all know how I get on regardless and tell you all about the ups and downs

Also, I’d like to wish Jeff the best of luck with his online venture. I’m sure once he finds a good plan for his site he will find his feet and start increasing his income.

Good luck,
Kev