Rory Hansen

The Vancouver 2010 Olympics are just a few months away, and there will be tonnes of people flooding Vancouver looking for places to stay. The hotels will fill up, and people will be looking for private properties to rent for the 2-week Games. They’ll be scouring rental websites looking for listings that match their needs. But, before these renters start looking, Vancouver home owners will have to get their listing online for these perspective renters to find. And that’s the opportunity.

Your money making opportunity:

Rent2010.net, the #1 Google result for “Vancouver 2010 rentals”, lists Vancouver 2010 Olympic rental properties for Vancouver, Whistler, and the surrounding areas. For $25, homeowners can purchase a full-page listing on the website, complete with pictures and a customized description of the properly. This gives the homeowners access to the thousands of people that will be flocking such rental sites looking for a place to stay.

Rent2010.net offers an affiliate program that pays out $10 for each “sale”, where a sale is when a homeowner purchases a full-page listing on Rent2010.net for $25. This equals a 40% payout, which is pretty decent.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Rent2010.net Affiliate Program, check out the information on their Affiliates page.

How to advertise this opportunity:

Google AdWords may be a good advertising vehicle, so long as you target as local as possible to the Vancouver-area. But, you might have better luck through your own personal network, on Facebook, MSN, or your own email contact list.

Another strong place to advertise this opportunity is on Craigslist, specifically the Vancouver Craigslist site. Of course, you’ll have to be careful about how you script your ads, or you’ll be flagged for spam.

Good luck!

Have you seen PPC Bully? As a relative new guy to PPC advertising, to me it seems like an incredible tool for uncovering profitable niches and the EXACT ads that people are using to profit in those niches. Just input your keywords and wait a few days and PPC Bully will tell you what’s working and what’s not.

The guys behind PPC Bully have come up with this term called Profitability-Indicator. The idea is that if an ad is showing for a long period of time at a high ranking, then one can assume that the ad is profitable (because no one would keep an ad up so long, unless it was profitable).

The PPC Bully team even published their algorithm. From their FAQ:

Ad “Birthday Flowers” was seen 12 days out of 18. The Ad was last seen 2 days ago.

• Number of Days Seen: 12 days
• Percentage Seen: 12/18 = 66.6%
• Number of Days since Last Seen: 2 days
• P-Index = (12 * 66.6%) / 2 = 4

Profitable Ad is an ad whose PI is at least 7.

Similar to Aweber, the only reason I’m hesitant to sign-up for PPC Bully is because of the monthly cost. At $49 US per month, it would be the most I’ve ever paid for a web-based service subscription.

Here’s the Pros vs. Cons thinking that’s currently running through my head.

Cons: It’s $49 US (so, about $60 CDN) and I don’t even know if it works. What if I sign up and don’t like the tool? Or, worse, what if I don’t even have the TIME to use it?

Pros: But it’ll save TIME. I’ll have just to make the time to use the tool. And, as everyone knows, time is money. Using my current salary as a benchmark, it works out to LESS THAN TWO HOURS OF WORK per month to cover the cost of PPC Bully. From the looks of the demo video, PPC Bully would save a lot more time than just 2 hours per month. And with a 60-day money-back guarantee, even if I don’t like the tool, I can get my investment back.

You know, even just going through the exercise of typing out those Pros and Cons makes it clear that at the very least I should try the service. If nothing else, I’ll gain some new insight into some of the cutting-edge tools that other affiliate marketers are using to rake in the dough.

Embedded below is the PPC Bully demo from their website. Take a watch and let me know what you think.

Everyone seems to be using Aweber nowadays, from Darren Rowse for ProBlogger.net to John Chow to half the blogs I subscribe to. From all accounts, it seems to be the defacto standard for e-mail newsletter delivery.

I’ve been researching Aweber this morning to see if it would be a worthwhile service to sign-up for. It costs $19/month to use their newsletter services, but with estimates of newsletter subscribers “worth” at least $2/year each, a newsletter subscriber list of just a hundred people could already offset the Aweber annual costs. And, with A-List bloggers like Darren and John compiling newsletter subscriber lists in the 10,000 to 20,000 range, it’s clear that you could earn huge profits from a successful newsletter strategy.

The one Aweber feature that has gained a lot of attention in the last couple weeks is the ’Pop Over’ signup form, which has been proven to improve newsletter signup rates by as much as 1000%. The common usage of the Aweber ‘Pop Over’ so far has been to have the pop-up appear on page load over-top of your blog’s regular content, enticing the user to submit their email address. Testimonials suggest that accompanying your newsletter sign-up “call-to-action” with an image (such as the SLR camera photo on Darren’s photography blog ‘Pop Over’) helps to sell the idea to your site visitor.

The Aweber website also suggests you can increase sign-up rates by:

• Changing the pop-up delay. Instead of having the pop-up appear directly after page load, try changing the delay value to 15 seconds, or 30 seconds, or higher. Of course, whether this will be successful will largely depend on the “Average Time on Site” for your user base. Google Analytics does a good job of compiling metrics like this, so I’d suggest taking a peek at that value before playing with the pop-up delay.
• Changing how the pop-up appears. The pop-up can be configured to either immediately appear, or you can add some nice transition effects to make the pop-up fade or slide into the page. These kinds of transitions are obviously a little more intrusive, but depending on where your users are concentrating their attention on the screen, they may be more appropriate for your blog.

Of even greater value is to read over the comments section for this particular post, as newsletter owners have submitted a wealth of feedback about what has worked for them.

I haven’t yet reached a decision about Aweber, but it’s clear from Google research that they are in a class of their own for newsletter management. I just need to determine if I can build a subscriber list in a timeframe that would offset the $19/month service cost.

Are you using Aweber? What has your experience been so far?

Earnings
AdSense: $166.53
Clickbank: $437.58
Text-Link-Ads: $89.56
Sedo, Amazon Associates: ~$2
Paid Reviews: $22.54
Total earnings: $718.21

Costs
No AdWords costs this month.
Signed up for Findology, but have yet to start any campaigns.
Total costs: $0.00

October Earnings: $718.21

September Earnings: $335.79
This represents a 214% improvement month-over-month.

Mortgage Goal
As you may recall, my goal is to earn enough each month through AdSense and affiliate marketing to cover the cost of my monthly mortgage payment. For the sake of the experiment, we’re saying it’s $1500/month.

This month I earned $718.21 profit, which is 48% of the way there. I have until June 2009 to hit my goal, so that leaves me with 8 more months to make up the remaining 52%.

Concerns going forward
As I had mentioned in a previous post, my main contributing site has seen it’s traffic dive in recent days. By dive, I mean traffic has reduced by about 75% (natural, search engine traffic). This concerns me because unless things pick up again, November earnings could potentially be 75% lower than October earnings.

I first mentioned CodeIgniter back in February 2007 as something that really excited me, but it took over a year and a half for me to actually use it!

Well, after a 2-day programming blitz, I launched my first CodeIgniter website yesterday. It’s hosted on the keyword domain www.PremierLeagueShirts.com and is an affiliate site targetting those looking for English Premier League jerseys. While still under heavy construction, the primary features are now available for use. The remaining changes will mostly be cosmetic and UI-related.

Here are some of the features that I programmed into www.PremierLeagueShirts.com:

• SEO-Friendly URLS - Each and every URL is search engine friendly. Take for example some of these URLS:
  • http://www.premierleagueshirts.com/store/subcategory/Shop_By_Player/Beckham_David
  • http://www.premierleagueshirts.com/store/subcategory/Teamwear/Womens
• Product Search – While still quite simplistic, will return a list of products which matches the user’s query.
• Completely Database-Driven: All content is stored in the Premier League Shirts database. No real-time webservice calls to the main affiliate site which may slow down page loads.

And what’s left to come?

• Improved GUI – Yes, the UI is plain. But my goal was to get the site out there and crawled by the major search engines. Now that that’s done, I’ll see what can be done about the look-and-feel of the site.
• Improved Search – The site search currently only looks at the Product Name, and not the Brand, Category, or Description. This will be looked into.
• Stats – Record what products are being looked at, what’s being searched for, and store that all in the database. Spit that out onto new pages on the site for further crawling by Google.
• Additional Content – What is on the site right now is strictly affiliate products and their descriptions. Obviously Google may not like that so much, so will have to look at additional sources of related content.

So, what do you think so far? Since this is my first forray into the world of CodeIgniter, I’m please with what I’ve accomplished over the last 2 days.

One of my niche sites, which helped me break the $100/day barrier, just got Google slapped pretty bad. At least I think it was!

Visits are wa-ay down over the last 3 days, from about 600 uniques to about 125 uniques a day. The reason is because traffic from Google has shrunk to basically zilch.

Google Analytics shows that traffic from my top 10 search queries is down to just a few hits a day, from HUNDREDS!

Just my luck. I brag about one of my sites, and then a few days later, it stops performing.

I’m really hoping things bounce back.

A friend sent me this video tonight. I think it’s amazing.

Today, I created my first website using the Code Igniter PHP framework and, oh boy, do I like it a lot more than Ruby on Rails. But I’ll dig into that further in a future post.

The purpose of this post is to shed some light on a problem that I wracked my brain over for a few hours last night.

The problem: After installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL and configuring the Code Igniter framework, you get a blank web page when testing your first controller, model, and view.

What I discovered were two issues that, when combined, create the perfect storm of an installation problem:

1. First, MySQL is no longer enabled by default with PHP 5. Says the PHP website of MySQL in PHP 5:
   

   MySQL is no longer enabled by default, so the php_mysql.dll DLL must be enabled inside of php.ini. Also, PHP needs access to the MySQL client library. A file named libmysql.dll is included in the Windows PHP distribution and in order for PHP to talk to MySQL this file needs to be available to the Windows systems PATH.

   It’s been a LONG time since I’ve programmed in PHP let alone installed PHP, so this was news to me. Anyway, if check out the MySQL installation notes on the PHP website if you need help enabling MySQL.  

2. Unfortunately, that was the easy part. Once I had an error message to work with, Google lead me to the PHP website, and I was in the clear. But, for the longest time, I wasn’t even getting an error page. Remember, all I was getting was a blank HTML page. So what was the cause? Code Igniter…
3. Using some creatively placed die() calls, I found out that the application was dying when trying to connect to the database. (Previous to this, I had already double- and triple-checked my MySQL username and password in the Code Igniter configuration file, and had even tried out alternate accounts, like my MySQL root account.)What I found out was that the MySQL drivers in Code Igniter were suppressing errors when attempting database connections.

This is what the code looks like in the Code Igniter mysql_driver.php file:

function db_connect()
{
   if ($this->port != '')
   {
      $this->hostname .= ':'.$this->port;
   }
   return @mysql_connect($this->hostname, $this->username, $this->password, TRUE);
}
The “@” symbol before the mysql_connect() function call supresses any errors that may be returned. It is that symbol that wasted a good 2 hours of my life.Anyway, after I removed the “@” symbol from the code and re-tested my web application, PHP spit out the error message that I should have been presented with hours ago, and I was well on my way to fixing the problem.
 If you’re experiencing the same problem that I was, I hope this helps you correct it faster than I did! Best of luck.

Oh, and did I mention how much I prefer Code Igniter over Ruby on Rails? It’s messier, but with my C and Java background, it makes more sense than Ruby and Ruby on Rails does!

This post is by guest contributor Jay Lee, an aspiring filmmaker and creative writer who provides commentary on movies, literature, and video games through his blog, TrainWreckIdeas.

Vulgarity and crude jokes are the basic ingredients of a great Kevin Smith movie, and never have they been used so fittingly.  Funny while funny looking Seth Rogen, alongside up and coming Elizabeth Banks, star in Silent Bob’s “Zack and Miri Make a Porno”. 

Two lifelong friends find themselves in a monetary crisis and make an amateur porno to dig their way up.  As with all solutions, it includes pitfalls that can trap you in a deeper hole than the one before.  Bye-bye money issues, hello relationship issues.  “Never thought of the repercussions of sleeping with someone you’ve known your whole life? What are you, slow?”

Seth Rogen had always been a funny cat with his unforgettable roles in “Freaks and Geeks” and “Undeclared”.  In the last few years, he had proven himself to be Hollywood’s newest comedic powerhouse with his roles in Judd Apatow’s “40 Year Old Virgin”, “Knocked Up”, and “Superbad”.  Now throw in some witty dialogue from Kevin Smith’s repertoire, and you get comedy’s hottest dynamic duo – a funnier, not quite Oscar-esque version of Depp and Burton if you will.

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and has been the hype for the last couple of months.  With great reviews outside of his core audience (unlike Mallrats), Smith might be looking to crack the $30 million barrier on the opening weekend (His previous highest grossing flick was Dogma which grossed approximately $30 million in total).  With a gut busting supporting crew that includes: Jason Mewes (Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back), Jeff Anderson (Clerks, Clerks 2), Craig Robinson (The Office, Pineapple Express), Justin Long (Live Free of Die Hard, Accepted), Brandon Routh (Superman Returns) as well as adult industry superstars Traci Lord and Katie Morgan, that barrier doesn’t look too hard to break at all.

My friend Keith, who is an avid contributer to a few technology podcasts, is working on a new mission: To get his KickJoey website to PageRank 1 within the week.

For those that follow PageRank updates, you might already know the unlikeliness of this happening, considering that Google hasn’t updated PageRanks since July (or February, depending on what info you follow). But, hey, a mission is a mission, and you never know!

Anyway, head on over to the KickJoey website and share your PageRank opinions. Does Keith have a chance?