Archive for the 'Other' Category

The Easiest Money-Earning Sites

Published
by
darcy
on July 8, 2008
in Other and Web Design
. 0 Comments

As you probably know, to earn money with most sites (or blogs) you have to put in quite a lot of work (or money) to get anything substantial back. But! It doesn’t have to be like that. There are a few types of sites that involve nearly no effort at all on your part and can rake in a tonne of money at the same time. The two types of sites i’m talking about a proxy sites and what i like to call “piggy back” sites.


Most of you will probably know what a proxy site is, but for those that don’t I’ll explain. A proxy site is a site that people go to to get to sites that are blocked or they otherwise can’t access. For example, if you’re school blocks myspace.com, then you could go to a proxy site and use that proxy site to visit myspace.com without any hassels! Great stuff, isn’t it? Now this means that the owner of that proxy site will get quite a lot of hits when the kids at school start catching on and using it to visit their favourite sites that they can’t otherwise. The problem is that when it starts getting really popular, the proxy site its self is going to get blocked and your user-base will drop substantially.

If you want to set up a proxy site, we advise that you have a Private or Dedicated Server, because proxies can use up a LOT of bandwidth and resources (especially if you get really popular). You should be able to find a proxy script by searching google. After that, it usually only takes ten minutes or so to install, and then you’re up and running! But you’ll still need to get people to use it. Start by telling all your school- or college-aged friends about it, then try marketing through myspace. Set up a myspace account and start adding every single person you can. After a few days (once you’ve added lots of people and they’ve had time to accept) send a few bulletins, or even private messeges (but don’t spam) telling them about your site and how it will let them go to myspace at school.

Now, “piggy back” sites, as i like to call them, are something completely different. The only real similarity is that you don’t need to write any of your own content, you just piggy back off other people’s content :D There are a few ways to go about this. The easiest way is simply to set up an “autoblog”. This means you set up a blog that automatically posts content from other blogs from their RSS feed. Whilst it is theoretically possible to earn money this way, it generally isn’t very successful (and annoys the shiz out of me when people start posting my content).

The best way to set up a “piggy back” site involves a bit of work. If you know php, mysql and html (and maybe javascript and css) then you can use an API from another site to create your own. For example, you can use twitter’s API to find a unique, interesting or convenient way of posting or reading tweets. For example, you could create a twitter (web) application for the iPhone. Or you could use Flickr’s API to help users find photos that were taken near to their current location (with help from flickr’s geotagging and maybe some GPS magic from the iPhone, etc).

Now for most of you, those two last paragraphs may not have made much sense, but that doesn’t matter. The point is, it doesn’t take a lot of hard work to make a few bucks online.Nor do you need to write all of your own content. Piggy back off someone else’s content!

Apple Ups The iMac Specs

Published
by
darcy
on April 29, 2008
in Other
. 1 Comment

As you may (but most likely don’t) know, I am a fan of Mac products - particularly my lovely MacBook Pro 15″. Well they’ve recently released a new update to the iMac line of all-in-one desktop computers which no top out at the 3.06Ghz 24″ Model with 2Gb RAM, 500Gb Hard Disk, etc. But my MacBook Pro does serve me really well, so I’m not looking at getting a desktop any time soon.

But that shouldn’t stop anyone else. If anyone’s interested, they should head over to apples website and check them out.

Learn From Barack Obama’s Campaign

Published
by
darcy
on April 23, 2008
in Advertising and Other
. 1 Comment

Having a good website in a good niche with good content isn’t everything. Because there are often tens or hundreds of people in the same niche as you, with equally good content. Look at the Make Money Online (MMO) niche, for example. Johnchow, Johncow, Tylercruz, Problogger - there all the same, for the most part. But what blogs in this niche have you been hearing about recently? And what blogs stand out?

Well, I’m sure you heard a fair bit about winning the web recently. Was it because the content over there is better? He has some secret to give away that the others don’t? No! Of course not! What is different though, is he gave his site a twist. He had a new perspective and a new way of getting visitors. He hosted one of the biggest contests the MMO niche has ever seen.

This is very similar to certain US Presidential candidate you may have heard a whisper or two about. Barack Obama doesn’t have any earth-shattering ideas, but the way he presents them is new. As you probably know, politicians are usually lying scum, promising what you want to hear to buy your votes and then more often than not, never delivering on those promises. Some even drive your country further down hill by starting wars and the like (I wonder who that is?). But Barack has been promising the truth. Most of all, Barack has been promising to fix the mistakes of the past. The Iraq war, for example, is seen by many as a big mistake. President Bush and the Republican party have been slowly leading America downhill - their politics is becoming stale.

This is very similar to how certain niches become stale. The video games niche became very boring for a while. Every games site or blog offered pretty much all the same things, maybe with a slight twist or localization. But then two people decided to set up destructoid.com as a gimmick to get themselves into the “press-only” event E3. They didn’t even intend to continue with the blog, but now it has become a major name in the games media, with nearly 6,000 subscribers to their RSS feed, hundreds of thousands of visitors and even a network of other blogs to their name. And how did they do this? They were original. They didn’t start blogging to make money. They started blogging simply to get into an event that they enjoyed, and people enjoyed it. I, for one, thought it was funny and interesting and am now a regular visitor over at destructoid.

This is what Barack Obama is doing. Whether you think it’s a gimmick or not, you can’t deny it’s working. He’s being original and appealing to an audience of intelligent voters who have grown stale of the same old politics. The same way the people grow stale of the same old content, or the same old perspective.

So I guess the message behind this little rant is: If you want to be successful, try to be original and appeal to what people want. But whatever you do, don’t become stale and just regurgitate the same things every else does. I don’t want to read another article about twitter and how it can be a good marketing tool, sorry.

One More Visitor To Hit 100!

Published
by
darcy
on April 12, 2008
in Other
. 0 Comments

Hello everyone! All 99 of you who visited today (so far) :) Just thought I’d update you all to the fact that I only need one more visitor today to hit 100 uniques! That means in just a bit over a month, without paying for any advertising, I’ve managed to hit 100 unique visitors a day! This probably sounds pretty average compared to the bigger, more established sites, but this is still a major milestone. Look forward to some nice upcoming articles, tutorials (!) and more!

What’s In My RSS Reader?

Published
by
darcy
on April 7, 2008
in Other
. 0 Comments

As a sort-of follow up to john cow’s latest post, I started thinking about what is in my feed reader (NetNewsWire) and thought I’d do a sort of post in reply. Here’s what’s in my feedreader:

News
BBC News

Web & Graphics
Mashable
Smashing Magazine
ColourLovers
iLoveTypography

Internet Marketing
John Cow
John Chow
Tyler Cruz

Travel
GoBackpacking
Everything Everywhere

Tech, Gaming & Gadgets
Destructoid
Engadget
TUAW

So there you go folks, an insight into my personal interests for anyone who wants to stalk me a list of blogs I read. You should all check out those sites as well, as they’re all great reads in their own right :)