RORY HANSEN

The other day, I mentioned BlogRush, which is a new service that hopes to drive more traffic to your page through a multi-level blog advertising widget.

Another new service that is gaining a lot of publicity as of late is DealDotCom. Unlike BlogRush, whose goal is to increase your website traffic, DealDotCom is a pretty typical affiliate program, that will hopefully let you use some of that new traffic to make an extra buck or two. What makes DealDotCom attractive are two things:

1. First of all, their affiliate program pays out at 35% for tier-1 referrals. Tier-2 referrals pay out at 15%, which is still decent.
2. Secondly, the products they sell are generally of interest to other bloggers, especially those hoping to make the leap from blogger to “pro-blogger”.

Just take a look at some of their recent deals:

• BayRSS 2.0 – Affiliate Plugin for WordPress (Sold for $22.87) - A WordPress plugin which allows you to “outsource” the creation of content to other authors, and share revenue with the content creators.
• Product Blueprint (Sold for $7.95) – An eBook and 30 minute video which explain how to find profitable markets fast and what to charge for products in these profitable market spaces.
• WPAffiliatePro – Marketed as the “Ultimate WordPress Affiliate Solution”, this is a WordPress plug-in which allows you to better manage affiliate links and understand how your links are doing.
• Long Tail Traffic Secrets (Sold for $39) - Another eBook, this one talking about blogs, podcasting, and social networking and how you can cash in on these forms of media. Provides expert’s secrets and tips to get top search engine rankings.

I just signed up for the DealDotCom affiliate program, to see if I can get a piece of this 35% pie. Heck, who knows, maybe I’ll actually even buy one of the advertised products at some point. I almost bit at WPAffiliatePro, based on some of the feedback that JohnChowDotCom had given the plug-in.

Like what I plan on doing with BlogRush, I will keep you posted with the results.

Have you heard of BlogRush? It’s a new service that’s designed to promote your blog posts on other blogs, and vice versa. They do this via a widget that some prominent probloggers like JohnChowdotCom are pimping on their websites. 

Essentially, this is how it works:

1. You earn credits each time the widget is viewed on your blog.
2. You also earn credits when the widget is viewed on blogs of those you refer to BlogRush.
3. You earn even more credits when the folks you’ve referred, refer others to the service.
4. The more credits you earn, the more times your blog headlines will be displayed on the BlogRush widget on other people’s blogs.

The idea is that the more people that see your blog headlines, the more people will visit your blog, and the more money you’ll generate from AdSense and other revenue-generating schemes you have going on.

While I’m not using the BlogRush widget on this blog, I’m experimenting it on a couple of my other, revenue-generating blogs, to see if it has any success in generating additional traffic. I’ll post my results at a later time.

If you’re interested in checking BlogRush out, please sign up through my referral link. I don’t make any money from you doing this, but you’ll help me gain more credits!

I’ve spent the last couple hours debugging an authentication issue with LinkShare‘s Link Locator Direct web service. My console app was throwing the following exception:

System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: org.apache.axis.AxisFault:Pass in username/password

The error message seems straight-forward enough– “Pass in username/password.” But what do you do if you know you are passing in the username and password?

This was the code I was using:

LinkShareTextPromotion.EJBTextPromotionServiceService tp =
     new LinkShareTextPromotion.EJBTextPromotionServiceService();
tp.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(username, password);
tp.PreAuthenticate = true;
LinkShareTextPromotion.Text[] results  = tp.GetAllLinks(sid);

Anyway, I finally lucked out and stumbled onto this link on the LinkShare forums, which lead me to Gordon Weakliem’s blog that had a working solution. Apparently this problem occurs due to how .NET authenticates.

If you’re experiencing the same error and got here via Google, then I hope this helps you get on your way.

Back in April, I wrote on this blog how, after just a couple months, I was making over $20/month using Text-Link-Ads.com. Even back then, I was happy with $20/month, as it required no work on my part at all. Text-Link-Ads.com customers would search the Text-Link-Ads.com directory, find my site, and then choose to advertise. To borrow a phrase my old math teacher used to say, “It’s like money for jam.”

Five months later, my monthly income has increased to $39.10/month, which is nearly 100% more than what I was making when I posted my initial review of the service. And at what cost? None! Have I invested hours of my time grooming my site for Text-Link-Ads? No. Essentially, the only time I even remember I am using their service is when I get emails from PayPal informing me that I’ve received a new $40 deposit into my account.

Anyway, I guess my point is, if you’re looking for an easy way of monetizing your site, take a look at Text-Link-Ads.com (Non-affiliate link here). For me, the income has proven to be steady and reliable, while still growing month-over-month.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve done any web development in my free time– at least, any non-work related web development. Well, after batting around a few business ideas with buddies these past couple weeks, I’ve enough motivation to actually go ahead and see what happens with one (or two or three) of them.  But first, I need to prepare my development environment.

My aging laptop has been by my side throughout university and the first few years of post-university employment, and, well, has seen me use a myraid of tools for the many different development phases of my life. Lots of these tools have since aged into obsoleteness, so the first phase of my development environment preparation saw me ridding my harddrive of many of these tools and/or turning off services that are no longer used. Gone is Eclipse, as well as Apache 1.3, PHP 4, and that old version of MySQL. Cya later Ruby and Python. IIS? Disabled.

I’ve decided to use Code Igniter as my web application framework for these ideas I’m going to pursue. If you don’t already know, it’s a “powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications”, or so it’s website says at least. As such, after cleansing my laptop, I installed the newest versions of Apache, PHP, and MySQL. (Truth be told, I was surprised at the relative ease at which they were installed. No configuration mess at all, although I’ll probably have to do a httpd.conf refresher in a few days.)

Has anyone ever used one of those pre-configured WAMP installation packages, such as WAMP5 at WAMPServer.com? What are your thoughts? Worth using? At first, I was tempted to use one of these packages, rather than installing each of the tools separately, but decided that I wanted the freedom to upgrade whenver, rather than when the WAMP5 distributable was updated.

Anyway, my laptop is now almost all set to go! All that’s left is to set up some virtual directories, install Code Igniter, and then refamiliarize myself with PHP. Wish me luck!

Now that I’m living on my own, I’m tasked with doing my own grocery shopping each week. While my weekly purchase is fairly small (a few pieces of fruit, some meat, and lots of prepared foods), I find that I rarely get to take advantage of the deals that are available at the supermarkets. So, instead of buying the bulk peanut butter, I buy the mini jar. Or, I buy one or two buns, rather than a dozen. Or I get the pack of 12 rolls of toilet paper rather than the 36-roll pack. In doing so, I don’t get the same cost-per-item deals that most families would take advantage of.

At the same time, I realize that in my apartment building, there are probably many other young, single professionals like myself that are facing the same dilemma. A possible solution: create a website which allows singles living near each other to find each other and share grocery and supply lists.

Don’t need a full bag of sugar or salt or pepper or any other seasoning or spice? Log into the website, find people in your area that are looking for the same ingredients (with hooks into Google Maps for convenience), and see if they’d like to share.

Understandably, we’re often just talking about fractions of dollars here, but to help with that, make the website credit-based. For example, I buy $10 worth of credits and when I need some salt, I pay $0.25 for a few tablespoons worth and that credit is then dropped into the supplier’s (ie. one of my neighbours) account (with the site taking a small margin).

As the site would be completely localized to the various parts of each city, there’s a great opportunity for local grocers to advertise (coupons, ads, etc.) through the site and target residents that live in the surrounding areas.

Thoughts?

Have you heard of Text-Link-Ads.com? They are another way of diversifying how your website is earning you income each month.

I started using Text-Link-Ads.com about two months ago, and so far, I’m up to earning just over $20/month and it’s still increasing month over month.

How does it work?
Essentially, you earn money each month for linking to other websites. So, you might have a technology blog and, using Text-Ad-Links.com, you’ll advertise other technology websites by linking to them from your blog. The websites that you link to benefit by (potentially) higher search engine results positions (SERPs), as each backlink that they get from other related websites can boost their page rank and keyword ranking for the niche that they are targetting.

In the end, everyone benefits.

My experiences:
In the first month of usage, not even one other website wanted to advertise on the two blogs that I submitted to TLA. But in the last few weeks, I’ve managed to sign up four links…. with each link earning me just over $6 per month. NOT BAD, EH!?

How do you sign up?
If you’re interested in signing up, please consider using my affiliate link. Not only will you be earning new income each month, but my earnings will increase too.

Sign up for Text-Ad-Links.com and earn yourself additional income from your website each month!

Otherwise, here is a non-affiliate link.

Scenario 1: I’m walking down the street and an idea for a new website pops into my head. I even think of a great domain name, but have no idea if it’s already taken. But I’m forgetful and chances are, will have forgotten the whole business idea and associated domain name before I get to a computer.

Scenario 2: I buy domains and sell them for a profit. While in line at Starbucks, I think of a great one, but don’t know if it’s available. In my industry, domains are disappearing quicker and quicker and my window of opportunity may not exist when I get back to the office.

Solution: Create a service which allows people to check the availability of domain names via text messages from their cell phone. If available, also lets them purchase the domain name.

How would it work:
1) User sends a text message to service containing the domain name their interested in.
2) Service responds with “Available” or “Not Available”. If available, service also sends back numeric reference number and message that says “Please reply if you’d like to purchase this domain name now.”
3) If user replies with intention of purchasing the domain name, an automated phone system calls the user back, takes reference number (to avoid re-typing of domain name) and credit card info and processes the purchase.

Target customers:
1) Those that make purchases based on emotion, gut feeling, or instinct.
2) Domain squatters.
3) Brainstorming entrepreneurs hoping for the next YouTube.

What do you think?

Adsense: $236.07
Firefox Referrals: $793.10

Yahoo! Marketing: $167.39
Google Adwords: $271.80
MSN AdCenter: $5.62
Ask! Sponsored Listings: $68.38

Profit: $515.98

Stumbled across 3 things this week that have me excited:

• Yahoo! Pipes
• Code Igniter
• Facebook API

I’ve been looking for a quality, light-weight PHP framework for a while now, and Code Igniter seems to be exactly what I’m looking for. I’ve known about CakePHP, but never bothered with it… seemed to be bloated with a bunch of crap that I’m not interested in. A bonus is that tests indicate that Code Igniter is faster than CakePHP.

With regards to the other two (the Facebook API and Yahoo! Pipes), it’s just plain exciting to see companies releasing fun, geeky tools and making their APIs publically accessible.