Blogging Along

I found this .tv site Twit.tv and have found all of the content shown on the channel very interesting. Guests on it like Matt Cutts and talk about as you’d guess mostly about up to the minute tech related subjects.

TWIT your probably thinking ahh they’ve copied off Twitter,

well your wrong TWIT.TV actually pre-dates Twitter by years!

The US based shows are hosted by Leo Laporte and looks to be ran from someones spare room but runs great and is great to just have in the background while working.

I have found some great links from watching the programs and is a great way to keep up to date with the digital, Tech, online, sofware world.

The show is sponsored by big companies from the online world like Carbonite.com and GoToMeeting.com and I guess keeps the whole show free and running.

Have a read up on Leo, how the show started, and why he gets such great guests on his show.

I registered PriceCrunch.net to develop a discount code and affiliation site, but have never got round to it.

Although it’s a .NET it is a catchy domain and a great one to own and develop as we intend to soon.

Along with Anti Virals, and many other commonly used phrases nowadays we have a few others like PricesCompared.co.uk which would make a FAB comparison site if fully branded and developed.

If would give Money Super Market a run for their money I bet ;o)

Big sites that compare lots of items and products are so much harder to get earning for you compared to a niche area such as a Wormeries site. I do know of a few people that have made the bigger sites work and are earning £xxxx’s a month from natural traffic and not paid for clicks.

I feel a head ache coming on so screen rest and brew me thinks!

I started out in buying domains at the beginning of 2007 with 123ABC co.uk from a drop, where someone had let it lapse and didn’t renew it.

Over the 2 years of buying domains, developing some and selling them on has had me thinking at stages

AM I MAD? Will it ever pay off?

In the early days when I was buying rubbish domains and not really doing much with them, yes, I did think OMG I’m addicted and am never going to get a return.

I turned to trying SEOing a few of them, which I had great results for Google rankings and Page Rank. So in  nearly 3 years I’ve chomped my way through at least a 1000+ domains. On the flip side have made many £xxxx’s too, and increasing more so now I sort of understand from Affiliation and selling domains.

To get a domain to earn,

1. It’s reg fee back
2. It’s hosting cost back

Is a good feeling, knowing what ever money comes in after that, is pure profit or at least in exchange for any extra time you spend on it on development. I now have 3 accounts with (cheap) Blue Host which allows me to have upto 300 domains, with a WordPress install on them.

Limitations are in place with them like I said your limited to a huge 100 Mysql Db’s but also your file count, as I found out the other day with an email from them…..

your file count is ideally 50’000 but MUST be below 200’000!

100 WordPress Installs = 80’000+ files with no plugin’s, no theme’s and no content/pages and so over the 50’000 straight away! But hey ho fair enough as I cut back what I can to keep below the 200’000.

Back on track with my plans….

Latest plans are all based around local mini sites like HullPrint.co.uk, I started in Hull as it’s my local city and am now moving to the other larger cities by population.

• Birmingham
• Leeds
• Glasgow
• Sheffield
• Bradford
• Liverpool
• Manchester
• Bristol
• Wakefield
• Cardiff
• Leicester
• Belfast
• Brighton

Out of the 200 Geo domains I have, if 50% of them perform ok and bring in at least £5 per day through Adsense and Affiliation

I’ll be a happy man!

I’ll keep you posted, but just a snap shot of todays earnings from just 4 of the GEO sites that are performing ok.

• Site 1 = £6.43
• Site 2 = £1.11
• Site 3 = £0.46
• Site 4 = £0.34

Just a quick post on Amazon’s conversion.

Put links, product feeds, images in a mini site or affiliate store and people just flock to buy.

Latest buys from my sites in the past 2 days include:

• Toshiba SD290EKB DVD Player
• Trust Slimline Design Tablet TB-5300
• Horrible Science Shocking Rocket
• Horrible Science Spooky Stars
• Horrible Science Violent Volcano
• Match Attax 2009/10 Tins
• Nerf Mega Dart Tag Refill
• Nerf Nstrike Switch Shot EX-3 Yellow
• Waddingtons “Number 1″ Playing Cards
• Yada Yada Yada Voice Recorder

Christmas is always a good time for making money from affiliation and if you haven’t given it a go, you should. Pick a niche market, check on Amazon their are plenty of them on offer and start posting info and links for them.

Maybe try Sleeping bags or tents to start with as a niche area, register a relevant domain name  like CampingSleepingBag.co.uk (which is available at posting) post articles with links and photo’s from Amazon on a daily basis if possible.

2 months later traffic should be flowing along with revenue!

I’ve been using WordPress for quite a while now and upgrading seems second nature TBH. I’m quite lucky all my upgrades have gone swimming well. WordPress is a nice CMS to setup, upgrade and keep tip top but agreed your first time can be a bit “now what”.

Just recently I’ve been getting an upgrade error in WordPress on one of my budget Blue Host servers used for mini sites when attempting to auto upgrade with WordPress’s built-in upgrade option. To version 2.8.5

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2354671 bytes) in /home6/main-domain/public_html/domain-name-co/wp-includes/http.php on line 1331

Basically I think the server is throttled and WordPress kicks off because of it.

Few ways to get round it.

1. Deactivate all plug-ins and retry the built-in WordPress upgrade.
2. Download this plug-in “WordPress Automatic Upgrade” and try this method. With the upgrade happening in small bites the server isn’t using as much memory I guess.

Hope one of them works for you but a few other plugins I’d suggest to install to safe guard your WordPress install are

1. WordPress Database Backup run before an upgrade and schedule to run every day.
2. Limit Login Attempts which blocks out people who are persistant in trying to guess your login details and mess things up for you.

Keep backed up, updated, be careful of rouge theme’s with dodgy coding and all should be fine!