Middle-Aged Computer Geek Mind-Dump

Been using this forum for years and years, signed up a few years ago and never did anything with my account. Now, I am a paid member and wanted my first post to be of value to everyone (I hope).

Used to build, fix and what not for customers and then got tired of making money for them and not being taken seriously when I ask for a large advertising budget to make more so I fired them, yes all of them! 10 years of building clients, hosting, websites out the door in favor of doing it on my own. I have the technical skills but I am lazy, like most I don't implement anything I learn, but then I go looking for more ways to make money when I have it all in front of me.

Here is a mind dump of things I have learned over since I started building sites way back in 1995!

• Perry Marshal - Look him up online and buy his book, subscribe to his newsletter. He will teach you Adwords like nobody's business.

• Postcard marketing works, just ask your local real estate agent.

• Build a site for your local city like Vancouver-plumber.com and when it gets to the first page, rent it out to a middle sized plumbing business (don't bother with the big boys, harder to reach).

• Hire a programmer to build a plug-in or extension for your favorite open source software and sell it to other users of the same software. It needs to be unique and fulfill a need so the easiest way to figure this out is to search their forums for users asking for features that don't exist.

• Continuing on the software built above, if you are smart, you can find a service that isn't yet connected to your open source software and make the extension available to bridge the gap between A and B. Now, sign-up for the service affiliate program and then have people sign-up via your new extension or from your sales page. You will make money on both ends, by selling the app and by recommending folks to the service.

• If you want to be recognized as an expert even if you are not, most folks will perceive that you are if you sell an app. When I started selling my plug-ins, I would get personal messages asking for service, installs, updates and I turned them all away for lack of time. There is lots of money there for someone with the time and skill.

• Login to every single forum account you have and update your signature monthly at the very least. Nobody will read you signature after a few times so change it often, offer deals and switch offers around.

• If you just want to create quick HTML sites that rank well and take only minutes to do, purchase XSitePro.

• If you use WordPress then you should purchase Pretty Link Pro to cloak your affiliate links. if you don't know why you should do this, then you are losing money and sales by being ignorant about the subject. People will cheat you, remove your affiliate ID and many won't buy anything if they see an affiliate ID attached to a link.

• If you have a network of sites that are sort of inter-related then link to your other sites from each site. Take a look at Gizmodo as they do this well with all their sites being cross-promoted.

• Social bookmarking isn't just for sites you like and want to remember! You should have all your sites bookmarked (delicious for example) and made public. Then go to another bookmark sites and link back to your delicious links and vice-versa to add more link weight to your seo. Confused? OK, bookmark site a on service a. Then bookmark service a from service b. Then go back to service b and link back to service a. Keep doing this for all your sites.

• Stop trying to spin content all the time, I am positive this will if not already is being recognized by various algorithms. Use them to make a quick buck, but i would say this will not be a viable form in the future and you will be stuck with all those spammy pages. Can you say back to square one?

• Yes you really can get paid to take surveys and at the same time, it keeps you up to date as to what is happening in the world that you could take advantage of and monetize. Many big timers will laugh at me saying that you should answer surveys as it only pays like one dollar for 15 minutes of your time. I say the information I gather while doing these surveys is well worth my time. Sometimes, they even send survey results! Get it yet? Free survey results...someone else did the work and shared the end result with you free.

• Sites that do user testing are getting popular and they pay about 10 dollars for 20 minutes of your time to criticize other peoples sites. I've tested Wal-Mart a few times, you know... the biggest retailer on the planet pays people to criticize their site over and over again! Maybe they know something that you don't think is worthwhile? Why aren't you doing it? Testing other peoples sites doesn't make a lot of money and gets old fast but I have made several hundred dollars quite easily doing this method. And I learn a lot about bad site design and great site design. Many of the sites aren't even live so you get the advantage of peeking behind the curtain of many upcoming projects. How much value would you put into someone letting you watch them work?

• Know your USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Why should I buy this widget from you? This widget will save you 500 dollars a year on electricity costs. My USP is not that my widget is pretty, inexpensive, blue or red or even really small to fit in your pocket - those are features and specs. The USP is what does your widget do for me? Another example, if an airline wants to introduce a new flight from Montreal to Tokyo departing twice a week, how would they convince me to use this new flight if I have already been using other flights to get to Tokyo? Well, their reason for introducing the flight is that there were no direct flights available and you could only leave on Tuesdays. So, to recap, this new flight segment would have a USP of: Fly to Tokyo direct, twice a week! Leave Tuesday for a meeting and be back Sunday. Save time, money and sanity. There, I easily came up with three USP that could be used in different campaigns to promote that particular new flight.

• Use Google Alerts to help you improve your sites by subscribing to the terms your are trying to target. I don't remember exactly but I think you can have something like 500 alerts setup, so don't put too many keywords in one alert. Let's take the flight to Tokyo from above as an example again. First, I would subscribe to a couple Google alerts such as: Tokyo flight / Montreal, Tokyo / Montreal direct. When you release new content, do you get that content in a Google alert sent to you or are you just seeing the competition show up? That's what I thought, it's not only the search engine you need to worry about, but are the alerts able to find your content?

• Keyword targeted domains that have aged should do well. Let me say that again, you have a keyword targeted domain like Montreal-Tokyo-direct.com and it's at least a year old would show Google you aren't going anywhere anytime soon, so may be worth giving more weight to your content. What I do is register a bunch of domains at a time and then park them so they can age and possibly collect some advertising fees at the same time. When I get around to working on them, they aren't just two weeks old and a new kid on the block, they are older and wiser at this point lol.

• Give something away in exchange for an email address and you will see your newsletter sign-ups increase significantly.

• When you give an eBook away for example, add links inside the eBook to the order page that links to the full version available for purchase. There are PDF apps out there that will 'brand' your eBook for you if you aren't technical.

• Don't pay more for file storage on your host, instead pay for cheaper hosting with less storage space and use Amazon S3 to store and serve all of your files. It's fast, it's global and it's scalable. Did I mention super cheap and affordable?

• Do all your email addresses have a signature attached? Even the one you use to send jokes to friends? Why not, I bet most people have no clue what you have on offer, especially if your run dozens and hundreds of domains. Attach a Sig to all outgoing mail to capture even more eyeballs to look at your content. Don't forget, people will forward good jokes to others and now they will include a link to your promotion.

• Put lots of free content on a file-sharing server and ask people to sign-up for a premium account in order to download unlimited files at faster speeds. You make money from the signups for the file-sharing service, not for the content you offer. Unless of course you are smart and you include links back to your products in the free content on offer.

• Use Google and Bing webmaster tools available for free and make sure all your domains are being monitored. Don't forget to add your search engine friendly sitemap to take full advantage of this.

• Claim your sites on Alexa and possibly even install the Alexa toolbar so you can help your rank go up every time you visit your own domains.

• Use sites like Fiverr to hire people to install WordPress on the cheap, or make banners, write articles even videos and voice-overs! Most of my work on this site came from translation services.

• One of the first places I look for images I can use commercially without paying is stock.xchng - the leading free stock photography site.

• Need lots of super cheap labor to do repetitive tasks, hire them from sites like ShortTask or MicroWorkers. You can have them comment on your videos, post on your new forum so as to not have it appear empty or even submit links to this that and the other place. I am talking like offering 5 cents per task - super cheap is super cheap!

• A great way to get lots of back links without lifting a finger is to offer coupons for products. All the coupon related sites will start linking to your site, possibly even including your deal in a newsletter. How is that for free exposure, and you didn't even lift a finger!?!

• There are people that need some kind of trust factor before they part with their cash. Adding an SSL certificate should increase your sales. Any kind of service that can prove you are legit can only help your sales. Verisign, BBB, SSL, an address and phone number on your site, this all leads to trust.

• Visit instantssl.com and look for 'Free Trial SSL Certificate', sign-up and get one to use with full encryption for 90 days! 3 months is a lot of time to get to learn and play around with a service that is essential on many sites, if only to convey trust to your many many visitors / clients.

• Maybe you just want a free one for a full year because you are a cheap...errr frugal person like me. Startssl.com offers a free one for a full year, no catch. If you want to pay, you can get a full 2 years of class 2 certificate for only $60 - bet you can't beat that anywhere.

I saved the best for last! At only pennies a month, pay to upgrade your current membership on the warrior forum. It's one time fee and had I known how great it really was, I would have paid 10 years ago! Look, like I said at the beginning, I just joined yesterday or the day before and this is my first post and I wanted it to be really useful for anyone just wanting to try something new or possibly learn a method or two they haven't heard of yet. Just browsing the topics available without reading any content proved this was no hype, the content you want to be there is there. I read one post that thought me an angle that was fantastic and will for sure generate way more money over the years than what I paid to become a lifetime member of this site.

So, what was so fantastic, what was the angle I learned inside the paid members only section? I could tell you, but then all the other paid warriors would probably have to put a contract out on my head for giving away the secret and I can't have that, not yet anyway. So, to recap, if I did tell you, I would then have to kill you to protect myself and my family from being offed by a contracted killer... wait, wait, wait, I watch way too much TV. Join the site you cheapo, sometimes it is worth paying for information that is real, and that is what you will get with your paid membership - real information from real people doing the same thing you are - trying to earn a living online.

I leave you with the quote that has kept me going for the last decade. Sure I gave up at times, but it turned out, it meant I needed a few months off to come up with new ideas and go back to it again.