Check this blog; we’ll keep you posted!

I did that a lot. $1000s lost on domains which I don’t use and don’t have time to monetize or build out.

One of my ideas for 2009 is to quit that kind of behaviour and make profit on every and any single domain in my porfolio. Well; I have a more general idea; make profit on anything I do. Every investment I do must be met with at least that amount of revenue.

As readers of my blog know, I am busy with autogenerated sites. I have had some success with them. But only with the ones I actually promote manually. Which is not really automated in my book. I want things to be automated totally, including promotion.

But let’s say I spend $200/month on promotion of all my blogs and other ‘domain rev sites’, and I spend $8 per domain per year. Let’s say for that $200, I can have 10 blogs promoted well, I need;

10*$8 + 12*$200 = $2480 / year = $206,7 / month = $7 / day = $0.70 / domain

to play even.

With $200 / month promotion, that is very easy. Basically making $1-$3/day should be breeze. Meaning;

10*$2*365 = $7300 or $7300-$2480 = $4820 / year = $400 / month

But this is ofcourse forgetting the work I have to do myself on them and the hosting. Hosting for me is almost free, meaning that I won’t have to count it that much.

For the work involved in setting this up; the thing is, that most people are not technical and need tech guys to do everything for them. Because even if you have Fantastico running, there is a lot you need to do and know to get autoblogging working profitable.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress on my work, but so far I monetized 5 urls with 5 different techniques, and they are all doing $2 or more per day on average. This is not only autoblogging but also other means which I’ll describe later.

If Cloudfront wouldn’t work as expected for now (because of it’s beta status), we could always move to using S3 urls until the Cloudfront release.

Starting to use S3 from our own CDN (Infiniscale) seemed quite simple; I simply had to rewrite the file/directory drivers of our frame to support S3/Cloudfront. As I have no idea how to support direct authentication to Amazon urls (if that is even possible), I made a Cloudfront driver instead of an S3 driver, as the client is ok with full access to all files, no authentication.

As I have been working on our own panel to support most of the Amazon products, this would be a good one to add. Some nice and easy way to add buckets, appoint some of them to be  used as CDN nodes etc etc. The tools delivered by Amazon are quite tech and the software written by other folks is not that good mostly (for instance; S3Fox is great, but I have noticed it to be very instable, on different computers and different networks).

The writing of the driver took about 1 hour and it was working fine for small tests. But when I started with the big testing, I ran into quite a lot of problems. For instance, when my connection wasn’t fast enough, I would get back all kinds of errors which really mean very much. And good ‘ol Google had little answers about them either. The Amazon manuals tell you that, for instance, InvalidArgument means, well Invalid argument passed. Yeah, I know that. But I am using standard software make by them ; what can it be…

Eventually I had to debug some stuff and fix it on a lower level. After that it seemed to work nicely. All files are automatically sent to the S3 Cloudfront buckets and show up there when I call my methods for retrieval.

The video files and images are very very fast on Cloudfront. That part works really well; you get uncached stuff almost instantly to your computer, which  rocks.  Sometimes it seems to miss a beat though; I’ll go into the Amazon forums (I typed forest here ….) and ask what that could be.

Again, they have something very nice here. Something which could worth gold when used correctly.

I’ll keep you updated to see if it’ll work in real life, as the site will be launched soon and then the pain might/will really start. Luckily I have a combined mode as well, which allows the system to use 2 (or more) filesystems at a time, allowing us to maintain both local and S3 storage.

But I don’t just postpone it; I can tell my brain it is almost done, while it is not at all done. I go around telling people it is almost done and, as a consequence, work myself into a kind of pickle. A pickle which causes a lot of stress. Because you make expectations for people that cannot be met; they think you are almost done, while you have not even (or just) started.

Usually I get things done actually, in the end. And when the deadline is really pushing, I just work myself crazy and finish it.

With marketing stuff, this is not so bad; I just postpone it, get less visitors and/or less money. I can live with that; with programming it is bad, because programming jobs are underestimated anyway, the timeline to finish them is shifting rapidly and the urge to get them done diminishes while the urgency grows rapidly.

To fix this I had to kick myself and get into gear. And ofcourse find some tech way of solving it as I am a gadget/software/web/tech person. I also am a programmer and I need things to be flexible and configurable. All the time and everywhere.

This basically means simple todo lists do not work for me. They are too simple and do not allow me to work effectively. That is the technical side of things.

Mentally, I just don’t look at todo lists, calendars and so on; they are extremely boring to me. I put stuff in the Google Calendar. And just don’t look at it. Ever. At all.

I put stuff in rememberthemilk and then I forget about it.

But I thought of some way to solve this all, and I can tell you; it works like a charm. Really amazing that I never did this before.

1. Per type of task (software project, choir, marketing thing), I create a specific list in flexlists.com; the system is very flexible and allows me to make the list exactly as I want it, without the rigidness of traditional todo lists, really rocks for productive people
2. Every morning when I get up, I put Todo items for that day into the lists; I can put items for following days as well and make a filter for today ; same thing. Notice that I put everything in there; take a shower, do shopping, program a new feature to xxx, make a blogpost about enhancing your productivity
3. During the day, you work through all the points
4. After a point is done, you set it do ‘Done’ and archive it

That’s all.

But no, that is just a To do list; that doesn’t work for me as I said already.

The ‘magic’ things for me are ;

1. I Do Not Stop Until All Points Are Done.
2. I Cannot Be Interrupted By Anything During A Task, however urgent and whatever it is (even food, sleep etc)
   

So no sleeping, no going out, no adding new points (like going out), until all points are 100% done. You have to do that rigidly for this to work. And it does work.

The first few days you put too many points on, and you’ll sit working till 4-5 am without sleep and food. But you’ll get better; you put smaller and less points on. Eventually you get to fill your entire day as you want it and have time for nice things.

How to prevent putting very little and only nice things on? I guess that is your personality; I do want things done and I do want too much, every day. My problem was, it somehow didn’t get done. If you have the problem that you don’t know what to do, that’s a different thing.

This works for me, hope it helps you as well.

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.

Outsourcing seems very easy. You simply find someone who can do some part of your job, you agree on a price and that’s it, you’re on your way to do nothing. But that’s really not true most of the time.

When you have your own company you are used to doing things a certain way and you are probably quite a perfectionist when it comes to running things. The person you hired most likely has a completely different sentiment and most certainly doesn’t have the heart for your company you have.

So often you end up doing it yourself anyway and losing a bunch of cash in the process; so while you were aiming for less work and more money, you got more work and less money.

When someone tells he/she can do a job, often this is basically the case, but doing the job and doing the job like you expect to are two completely different things. This person doesn’t know you, doesn’t know your company and will most likely not do things the way you want them to be done. Endresult, again, is losing money, time and energy.

The right way of handling this, I have found, is to threat the person like an actual employee; training him/her, helping them to get everything worked out as you want it to be. Explaining why you want that. Making instructional videos for them. Make how-to’s and step-by-step plans to complete certain tasks.

Time you invest the first few weeks is crucial to the total time a person will remain with you. If you keep that in mind you should be fine to work with anyone. Working with people is really worth it as it makes you more scalable and allows you to focus on process and maximizing profits and efficiency instead of drowning in the details!

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.

It is like the owner of Plentyoffish (the free dating site) said; Free doesn’t scale; your income doesn’t grow with the amount of work/hosting/hardware/bandwidth (anymore). It is true, though not for him; with his $10 million/year income he shouldn’t complain; if he cannot do it for that and have millions of profit he is an idiot.

For a while it was a hype to start a free site, get 1 million uniques a month and sell on Sitepoint, that won’t work anymore as the economy is down and people are not buying sites. They used to sell very well as everyone knows; if you just have traffic, $ will come, right?

The advantages of free:

• Easy to get people to sign up
• Easy to obtain massive amounts of traffic => traffic means ad income
• Because of the below disadvantages, you’ll have little competition; the competition dies off quite fast in most free markets, so if you are able to pull through you will be the only big one

The disadvantages of free:

• Most popular / easy free giveaways (web hosting, file hosting, image hosting, …) take huge amounts of storage and bandwidth (and thus cost)
• People signing up for free stuff are signing up there for a reason; they don’t want to pay, so a list of freeloaders is worth about as much as no list at all
• You will be giving free support all the time, and if you are blessed with over a million members, this support will be a fulltime job; note, freeloaders nag a lot more than paying customers for some reason
• You will grow, but probably the income won’t grow at the same pace, leaving a (fast) growing gap if you didn’t plan for this
• If you grow really big, the letters from lawyers, movie studios, record companies, private investigators and so on will come flying in; before I implemented my anti scam system on my free hosting sites, I used to get 800 complaints / day
• Most people start an online company, totally bereft of technical prowess; usually trying to get rich etc; when you grow bigger chances are you don’t have money to hire a tech guy and yet you need one
• Your services will degrade fast; abusers, spammers and normal ‘hardcore’ users will make sure of that

And there are a lot more of those.

For me the worst one is that you don’t have time/money to build features, work on new ideas and so on. You cannot really extend your service or spend money getting people to extend your service.

So while I was telling about my new project Deskuploader, people started asking me that question; ‘why pay if you can get for free?’. I usually reply with the above rant about free services and then ask ; what would you want from such a service?

The deskuploader is what it sounds like; an application to upload files, images etc from your desktop to a server and getting URLs for downloading them and the ability to give those URLs to other people. The application works on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows and is not written in that horrible Java environment.

Things people want from such an application:

• Easy/ier to use
• Multiple ways to upload, download and get to your files
• Automated conversion (docs -> HTML/PDF, video conversion, image scaling/conversion)
• Always fast download/upload
• Nerdy stuff like commandline / serverside uploaders, rsync/delta compatibility, scheduling
• Encryption
• etc….

When making such a project for free, you have a time when you are passioned about it; you’ll build all features you can think off in a short time. Including bugs.

Then you launch and people start mailing you bugs and feature requests. You’ll be making $0 at that time and doing all for ‘the future’. You are still running on passion, but the passion is waning. People are annoying and complaining about your very cool work!

Now it is time to continue, quit the project or open source it. If you choose to continue, it will be quite painful and you might never get money to pay the server bills, let alone your (and/or the programmer’s time). Most (free) projects don’t.

Making this is a paid (monthly fee) project for the storage of the uploaded objects, the bandwidth and the support work, it can be made the best system in the world. Only thing you do is get clients. Accidentally every tutorial, ebook and video about marketing on the web, free or paid, is about getting clients for paid products.

I am not sure if it will sell, but it is a great product already and, although there are free alternatives (not as advanced/intuitive though), I am sure this will sell to people who need and use this kind of tool every day. It is simply a tool everyone could use. And it will grow, helping you to get more efficient.

Edit: Rapidshare is free and doing fine; a lot of people become member and pay. Ofcourse this is because the entire reason RS is successful is warez; apps, movies, series etc. Remove those and they won’t have any members left. So yes, if you add enough warez, any site will sell. And they seem to get away with it too

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.

It works until the real scaling starts. Databases grow, diskspace get’s eaten away by media files, iostat tells me 99-100% all the time now on all nodes etc and those kinds of things. This doesn’t happen with ‘normal’ sites, but with some sites I host, this is more rule than exception.

When it comes to big media files, we wrote our own software solution. It works like Amazon S3, kind of and it is quite robust handling the millions of media files across nodes, serving them up fast. However for databases we, like so many, did not find a solution yet. In our brains we have one, but that is not working (yet).

So I decided to check out what the current ‘cloud hosters’ have to offer. What my dream of hosting always has been and still is; get an account for a site, attach some domains (DNS managed by the package you get), click run and that’s it. 100% uptime, whatever size it grows too, how many db connections, how big the db etc will just scale. It’ll scale, you pay. Never any software tweaking/fixing, no more hassle with moving stuff to different servers, no more partitions, no more… dream…

Anyway; I actually like tweaking and optimizing, but a bit less hands on in the server room would be nice and my hosting dream is based on that. Who delivers that? No one indeed.

I started, as I like hardware etc, requesting offers for this ‘kind’ of solution. A few hosters were very accommodating, notably Rackspace; they wrote down a whole plan for arranging this kind of thing. Ofcourse I gave them some input to the scaling parts and they were very helpful in working it out for me. The end result was upwards of $50.000 / month unfortunately. Not that expensive in fact, but too much compared to the income from the services I am delivering.

Dedicated servers, and, in fact, most dedicated server companies didn’t seem to really mesh with the idea of scaling. They just want to move servers and don’t care at all what happens after that.

Because my services deliver more money to me when they are used more, I would like something that scales with my needs, meaning, in my mind, I need ‘cloud hosting’.

The service that looks to be closest to my hosting dream is Mosso or Google AppEngine, after that GoGrid and after Amazon EC2. This solely based on marketing materials. Which are, ofcourse, really not truthful.

As Google doesn’t support enough ‘features’ yet for me to work with (we have our own, enormous, framework and really need to run that; Google cannot do that, yet), I skipped them and went on to Mosso.

Mosso seemed very nice. Install-and-forget. Just get their site package for $100, point your domain to their DNS servers, use their hosting panel to get all up and running and there you go. Great fun. It is. If you don’t need anything else than they installed on your image. As you don’t get root access, what they put on their for you in terms of OS software like Apache, Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP and MySQL is it. You cannot touch any of it. Either your stuff is there or not. The presales guy told me, via the phone and chat (I have records!) that all popular stuff, including what I needed, was on their systems. Unfortunately, after buying, it turned out there was no way to convert videos; no ffmpeg or anything like it. Making it usable only if I use one of my other systems as conversion webservice. Although that is still an option for me, this kind of took the wind out of my sails.

Naive as I am, I always think someone did something magical to MySQL to make it scale without intensively rewriting/fixing my software.  Ofcourse this also turned out not to be the case. Their MySQL severs are tweaked, but they have nothing special; they can (meaning the will) break.

I still like the Mosso idea and philosophy and I would advice people to try it out when looking to run their standard site on a cloud, but for me it was not really happening at the moment.

GoGrid seems to be Amazon, but more userfriendly and with more features. Their pricing model is based on memory use and outbound traffic; diskspace and inbound traffic are ‘free’. Great for backup, right? Not really ofcourse, these guys at ServePath are not insane. Memory usage is linked to the diskspace you get assigned. So when you get a 512mb server, you end up with 25 gb which you cannot (!) enlarge without creating a new server. Nor can you snap one server to another; hell you cannot take snapshots at all. They provide no backup options or space (just start another server for that; meaning, spend a lot of money for a backup). For web traffic load balancing/failover they provide a free load balancer (nice), but for MySQL they couldn’t give me any options except ‘get a custom solution at ServePath’.

All in all; GoGrid is an operation that can turn out nice, but they are miles away from providing anything more than a, very basic, VPS management system. Throwing HyperVM + XEN/OpenVZ on a few machines gives you *a lot* more for a lot less.

I ended up at Amazon. I am a programmer and a Linux admin, but I really don’t like weird proprietary tools to manage systems. Especially when they are written in *cough* *cough* Java. If I do use those kind of tools I want to see a nice shiny interface and do a bit of clicking.

The setup seemed annoying to me at first, but as usual, I put everything down in scripts the first time I do it and, if I am in a good mood, and I was, I put a web interface on top of them. After a few days of fooling around with EC2 (and such) I had a webinterface to:

• Manage machine instances (create/destroy)
• Set/Reset root  (and other) passwords
• Install tools on the instances automatically
• Create Elastic Block stores on instances and mount them
• Take/Restore snapshots
• Create/Destory AMI’s

I know there are open source tools to do this, but they really weren’t that well suited to what I set out to do and I needed to learn everything fast which I did this way.

Things To Do are automated snapshotting for fail over, load balancer/fail over installation, but I’m already quite happy with this.

Personally I am convinced this kind of thing is the future. It is not the cheapest solution, but it is really scalable, easy to use, backed by a big company and created for building large scale applications and infrastructure on. Although they were down a few time (they were/are in beta stage with some of their products) the idea is very solid and tempting to use. I will give it a try with one of my main services and let you know.

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?

Spammers are clever people, sometimes. I should rephrase this. Spammers are stupid people, almost always, but sometimes they are really clever. The not so clever ones follow simple patterns;

• somehow send mail with a personalized message in it anonymously
• putting links on some PR-higher-than-0 site anonymously

They only find sites that have openings for these kinds of things without ‘annoying’ things like captcha’s. Or hackable captcha’s for the people who have contacts (most captcha’s are hacked anyway so if you can get to software for reading them, it is just as simple as if there was no captcha at all…). All very sad for hardworking people who want to make nice, easy sites for people who appreciate that.

The best way of preventing spammers from posting stuff to your site / application is just making it paid. Make people pay $1 for a lifetime subscription to post on your site.

Unfortunately that is not really possible for most people so they need to find other ways to fix the problem. A well known site called cubestat.com got into problems a week ago when many spammers got onto it to post their crap and they asked me to find some kind of strategy to resolve it.

What was the problem? The site has become very popular for fast indexing in Google and thus SEO. Getting your site on Cubestat is one of those steps you have to take when you start a new site. And, because it was completely open and easy to use, it was easy to get into Google and to get a good PR rather fast.  So people started to post hundreds and even thousands of subdomains to it. The recipe in the ‘blackhat community’ was to get some domain, any domain, make a lot of subdomains with names related to your subject and content related to your subject and auto-post them to Cubestat. Simple software was written for auto posting it etc.

For the owners of Cubestat, ease of use is very very important, so putting some kind of unreadable captcha in front is not really an option, nor is paying any kind of amount before posting / requesting a URL.

It took me 2 weeks to come up with a solution, but after reading this article I was sure; I shouldn’t be too clever, but just use the data itself to come up with a solution for this dilemma. We have several factors; we have some data about the URL poster, we some data about the site, we have some data about the context (date, time, subject etc) the site was posted in. This should be enough to stop the spammers. Because this kind of spamming is (much) more limited than mail spamming, the solution can be (much) better than something like Bayesian statistics.

Ofcourse I already did something similar for a huge free hosting company and they currently get 2 or 3 complaints per day instead of around 600, so I had some code lying around to attack the problem from a few angles.

I still hope spammers get caught and get their punishment, but after some small personal victories, I think analytical thinking can and eventually will stop most of them in their tracks. There are always better and more clever hackers/crackers and I am sure they look right through me, but the monkeys that are hired to these kinds of jobs are beatable IMHO.

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.

So what’s new?

First of all a bit of bla about the ethical implications of this as people are asking me about that. With the state of the current blog I am only sending  the traffic to the original source. They originals are getting more traffic because of me and because their SEO skills suck.

I am not making money with this currently; this, for me, is just  a simple experiment to see if it is easy to do or not. And it easy although you need to be a programmer as you need original software to pull it off. More about that later when I want to start making money with this.

Second thing I am trying is generating content from scratch a lot more, trying to get a complete 100% original site going which makes money. That is my original goal and that will happen in the future. I hope.

The new site has been launched today and I’ll add my findings to this blog as I always do!

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).

I am a strong believer of picking niches and working from them; I believe in building up an idea in a specific niche and growing that, cultivating that, working to get more people who think and are like you. Getting together a tight-knit group of people who you are can market products and services on. And they can on each other. Giving the whole thing much less of a ‘advertising your face because we need to make money too!’ feel.

As I am interested in making money (see my previous post on my plans to ‘make money online’), I only work on systems that have a potential to grow into something large or that are great fun. This new thing is both!

I would recommend all my readers to sign up on Viralnetworks.com to see how this venture unfolds.

What exactly is ViralNetworks.com? It is a very targeted niche site bringing together mid and small sized internet marketeers and entrepreneurs. The concept is very simple; learn from each other, work with each other and let’s earn a lot of $ together! Let’s call it a kind of secret society of marketeers.

One thing is sure; the model behind the site is sure to make everyone money. Even though it is currently only in prelaunch, it is already making people a lot of cash by putting highly targeted banners up. This is nothing compared to where it is going though.

So I would urge you to sign up and check it out; don’t miss out!