We all read the book by Ferris or people posting about working 4 hours a week. And we all would love to do that. Well, not all, and actually it is possible to really love your job in a way that it is also your hobby, but it should be possible to work 4 hours a week.
If it is possible to do this all depends on what you are doing and how much you are making. In the book Ferris is selling a popular product and when you see people online talking about doing this successfully they usually are selling something discrete and easy to outsource as well.
The most difficult thing, for me is the outsourcing of my work.
This question is often asked on internet marketing, web master and other forums. In fact, almost every time you present a new product a new product, a bunch of people post replies asking this exact question.
It is quite a logical thing to ask, because if you can get something for free which is identical to the product you offer, it would not make much sense in offering it for money, right? Well, not exactly.
I know a lot about offering stuff for free; I admin and run huge free hosting sites, file sharing sites and image sharing sites. The market for such sites is incredibly hard right now; ad spendings are down, hosters are getting strict with their policies and hosting costs, in most free giveaway markets, are always rising.
Jeff Bezos (of Amazon) is one of my favorite gurus. The guy has charisma, vision and is very smart. He was, on many occasions ahead of his time and it proved to be very lucrative on all (as far as I know) of them.
Having said that, I must say I’m an avid hardware and hosting freak. I run more than 200 servers in different locations around the world and a lot of those servers I built with my bare hands (yep, I risk the static electricity stuff; you don’t look quite so cool putting in dimms with a little bracelet on; never went wrong so far. knock-on-wood).
I run mostly Debian on my systems (Etch or Sarge) and it usually runs fine. We don’t have many hardware breakdowns (buy expensive hardware; it really is better) and be nice to your systems; don’t overload them, use monitoring etc. Problem is, small sites sometimes grow big and then the scaling thing starts. Although we don’t sell cheap hosting accounts, we don’t have resources to buy SANs, solid hardware load balancers etc. We do everything with open source software and it works, mostly.
When you are a hardworking individual, paying for your own servers, tweaking your sites etc to make ends meet, it is really frustrating seeing people abuse your hard work.
Although you take basic measures to prevent hackers from misusing your site in a lot of ways, they always find new and faster ways to get on top. The easier your site is to use for real users, the easier it is for spammers to get in.
What drives these people? Do they tell their parents; ‘look ma, pa, I have a cool job, I f*ck people over and make a few cents with it for some unethical person on the other side of the world!’? Or do they keep it quiet and no-one, not even their spouses know about their profession?
I have been running my automated blog for 2 weeks now. And the results are great. I am running at more than 1000 uniques per day now, people are commenting, posts are being pinged.
The reason why this works seems because I am not using standard software to get to the content. I wrote all code myself to search and scrape content and put it nicely into the blog.
While there are many plugins that do exactly the same, these really didn’t have the same effect. With a same quality .com domain name and the same kind of content, the results of Google, Live and Yahoo indexing were far (far!) worse than with my new software.
One of the projects I have been most involved with in the past year is a social network. Yes, another social network. I know there is Facebook, hi5, Myspace, Linkedin, Xing, bla bla bla and all of those, but still I am sure there is plenty of room for plenty more social networks.
Why do I think that? Well; social networks are still kind of new and they are young technology. There is a lot to learn and a lot to do. As people get overwhelmed and actually bored by the big ones, the smaller ones seem to thrive until they are big and then people go, in small groups to a lot of smaller ones. Of course they stay on at the big ones too, but they’ll be using them less and less I believe (at least the people I know do).
As I set out to ‘generate’ content in the stealing sense of the word, I started working with tools that are available. These tools work with RSS feeds from the web to form web content. Unfortunately I found out that these tools mostly suck.
For my purpose I used Wordpress and some of it’s plug-ins, like WP-O-Matic to consume RSS feeds and show them on the WP page. This turned out not to be so straightforward.
Update (16 october): the automated test blog traffic is growing very fast: 2000 spider visits/250 uniques/1300 pageviews yesterday. Seems the experiment is working.
As I wrote in my mission statement in this blog, I was going to launch some concept sites. This post is about the first one I’ve launched. Read about the ups and downs of it.
In many forums, one of the most often recurring questions is; what is my site worth? This is not an easy question to answer, especially if you don’t know the site in question and it is totally impossible if you don’t know or don’t get the business model behind it.
There is at least one type of site of which it is quite possible to estimate the value within reasonable bounds and that is a site which derives income from CPM (get paid per 1000 impressions) ads. These kind of sites run completely on traffic and traffic alone. More traffic is more money for that kind of site.
I have been working on a project to get as close as possible to the value of a CPM as I possibly could and I think we have succeeded in doing that. But we also created some interesting side effects.
Because I am searching for making money online, I was hoping to find some easy guides to get to my goals. Unfortunately there are very little of them, at least very little that really tell it like it is. And the ones that are very good cost a lot of money.
Fortunately it doesn’t have to be like that. Everything that is needed for making online money and starting online businesses can be had for free. It is just not a step-by-step plan that works. And we all need a step by step plan that works ofcourse.
So ofcourse I decided to make one and offer it for free. All knowledge I pick up and all knowledge I use to make my monthly income offline and online I will give to you over the coming 12 months including all links, ebooks, videos and so on. There already is a lot and that will grow very fast as I continue my quest.
Check out this site for getting into my radical moneymaking system 
I have over 200 sign ups currently; most of the things I will tell do not expire nor get saturated, but just keep it a tight bunch, i’m quiting the sign up process on 300 subscribers.
It seems that most people still do not know that you have to protect your affiliate links from your users. Most users are quite focused on the kind of links that are typical for affiliate codes; for instance, links with ?aff=johndoe in them. In forums and on websites it seems as if people actually do not realize that their prospects cut off these kind of references before going to the site of the product or service they are looking to buy.
While it is not exactly clear (it is not as if they are paying more or anything…) why people cut off these links, it is very common for sites with affiliate programs to get questions like; ‘I am sure I sent 10 people your way, yet I have no one in my downline, your system must be broken’. Of course the system isn’t broken but they all simply cut off the link.
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