Year: 2009

Categories
Rants

ROCK ART BREWERY vs Corporate America – The Biggest Scam of All!

There you go – just when you thought I was behaving – here is the mother of all scams – and this one is an official scam including lawyers! My friend Allyn on his gay vblogger site brought this one to my attention. Basically a small craft brewer in Vermont is being threatened to by a cease and desist letter from a crappy energy drink manufacturer called Monster Energy – like duh – I had to look up the Monster Energy crap up in wikipedia – but its one of the those high sugar, high caffeine things which has nothing do with alcohol – beer does – Apple can’t stop the New Zealand Apple and Pear Marketing Board using their trademark – and neither can an energy drink go after a craft beer brewer in Vermont: Apple computers and the fruit are different: so are energy drinks and beer LOL

So this is a basically a bully-boy tactic – oh can’t afford $65,000 a court case – back off now! So much for the myth that US is  the land of the free and particularly the land of the entrepreneur.

Land of the free? Only if you can afford it!
Land of the free? Only if you can afford it!

Over the last couple of years of being online I have learned a lot more about America than I ever new before. Quite frankly I have become increased amazed at just how hard it is for you guys to run an online business or any other sort of business.

Its hard for you to get started – because your wages are so low – cleaning toilets in Australia pays US$17 / hr – there’s no real safety net if you need a bit of part-time quick cash.  Your barriers to being in business are extraordinary high – you pay higher taxes as a self-employed person, its expensive and complex to file taxes,  you have to worry about getting health insurance because you can’t afford not to be insured. You need lawyers and liability insurance because of – well the lawyers really.

And then you make a success with your craft brewery and take it from a one-man basement operation to a 10-person small business and this carp happens!

Well luck for this guy – there is a way to stop this – bad publicity is really bad for trendy drink manufacturers – so could you please promote this guys site – (not this post – go thru to the guys site The Vermonster ) and twitter, facebook, build anchored backlinks – whatever you need to.

I think Americans should stand up for your rights in the “land of the free” – and the rest of us should help out too – cause that’s what mates do. And as  William Shakespeare said: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

UPDATE – you might want to ask a question of monsterdrink’s marketing department as to why they are letting themselves in for so much bad publicity – you will find their contact form here

Further Update: it looks like Rock Art Brewery vs Corporate America may have ended in a win for the little guy!

Photo Credit

Categories
Rants

Digital Nomads, Passive Income Online – the Reality

I was a gypsy before I discovered what a digital nomad was – I like the name – it was easier to spell… The idea of being able to packup up the laptop and move your life at whim – how alluring is that to so many people? Ben wants to use his success at making money online with SEO and travel the world – he’s clearly been to some places already judging by his stunning travel photos – so he possibly knows what he’s getting himself into – or may be not.

Back in 2006 I had a brain wave – I was earning a good hourly rate in a job I hated and despised. I woke up sad on Sunday because I had to go to work on Monday. I buried three friends that year – two of them were younger than my partner and less than ten years older than me – it makes you think.  It makes you think that life is for living and life is too short to waste it doing something you hate – I’d known that for a while but I managed to persuade my partner to.  My partner asked for leave of absence from the Bank he’d worked for nearly 10 years and for which he always got raving performance review. They turned him down of course, he resigned.

In early 2007 we rented out the house, put all our worldly possessions in storage. We bought one-way tickets to Australia. We arrived in Brisbane, bought a 1985 Landcruiser, some camping gear (neither of us had ever camped in our lives). We hit the road, and 6 months and 36,000 km (22,000 miles) later we got as far as Perth (bottom left if you are geographically-challenged). (BTW I laughably thought that this would be the perfect time to launch my online business! In a word – don’t!). Tired of the long open  road not yet ready to drive across the Nullarbor, we settled down in Perth for a while. Two years later we are on the move again, back to New Zealand.

Swan River, Perth, WA
Swan River, Perth, WA

Which brings me to my point – how in hell can two people who arrived with a Landcruiser full of gear end up with so much crap to sell! Why does the world make it so hard to be location independent? I have fantastic broadband here in Australia  – can I transfer my plan to New Zealand – of course not- same company but you can’t transfer. Can I transfer my phone number? You’re joking aren’t you – well this is the last time I am ever being taken that con again – I am getting a location independent IP phone as soon as I work out the details – I know Skype will do it but there might be other options. At least I don’t have any emails attached to local ISPs anymore (you don’t do you?)

We are lucky, we have 2 month’s notice that my partner’s contract won’t be renewed – double the time they had to give us. So now we just have to get rid of all the stuff, close down the power, the phone, the Internet. Cancel the car’s insurance – oh and sell the car as well. Cancel the subscriptions. Get the notes from the various medical practioners we’ve been supporting over here. Say goodbye, find a flight just before Xmas – and find somewhere to live before we can legally evict the tenants in Feburary. And then we – well lets be blunt here  – I – get to do the whole thing in reverse. At Christmas, while mourning the loss of summer (trust me moving from Perth to Wellington in December will be the end of summer).

Wellington, New Zealand
Wellington, New Zealand

I don’t think I am that excited about going “home” – but then I never am really. It is time we sold some real estate there and probably a whole lot of other junk that seemed important at the time. The weather is probably worse than I remember it, but at least we can do some skiing next year – that will be nice.

At least my business is really not affected – thank goodness I have been using a NZ PO Box as my official business address from day one – so that part just keeps on working. The broadband speeds appear slow and the price sky high -and that’s with the best network in the country – which now limits the suburbs we can move to  to those that they cover.   The tax laws are a great deal simpler but I probably will pay slightly more tax – but apart from that nothing much has changed.  The New Zealand dollar is well over-priced against the US dollar – but far more likely to drop once they cut the mortgage rates – which will probably be better for our overall bottom line.

There will be some advantages too: daylight saving and Sunday shopping are the obvious ones. As is being able to eat out without worrying about the bill, seeing friends and my partner’s family again. Being able to afford a dentist will be nice. But after about two weeks, in my experience, the novelty wears off. And the reality is that my closest family is in Europe anyways – for those of us who have wandering in the blood its highly unlikely that one place really will ever contain all the people that matter to us ever again.

The trouble is is that the little things are really difficult if you keep moving. We have both lost medical insurance – you can only be covered for the first year out of the country – no country recognises your insurance record overseas – so effectively you start again each time you move. Our car insurance will probably go up as well as we haven’t had insurance on the car we haven’t driven for over two-years.  My partner needs to ensure that he spends enough time in New Zealand to qualify for superannuation over the next few years – the fact that he was born there and worked his entire life there is irrelevant – he needs to spend 5 years between 55- and 65 in New Zealand – oh and then when he retires he needs to spend at least six months a year in the country- that could become quite inconvenient long-term.

And remember this is the easy direction: we have a credit record, credit card, mobiles, driver’s licenses, car – all waiting for us in storage. We don’t have to start all those things up again from scratch in an unfamiliar system.   Useful hint – never cancel everything when you leave a country – we will be keeping a bank account here – it was too darn hard to get one setup to shut it down now!

The point of this post? I’m not sure that I have one but it some ways I think I look at the other side of living the Nomad’s Lifestyle and wonder if people realise that sometimes it has its own disadvantages – I for one don’t see too many Western countries making it a whole lot easier any time soon. And relatives who don’t understand travel – about 90%  them don’t who ever you are related to – will never understand your inability to “settle down”. So yes we are going home – but I have a feeling it won’t be for ever.

Some Resources for Digital Nomads

Living in Bali

Working Nomad Forum is very useful – the first forum I ever found online actually.

Categories
Free Tools Online Business Passive Income Tools

Its Spring! End of a Quarter Report – How To Manage the Dollars

So its the end of another month – another quarter anywhere so how is my journey to passive income online.  Well to be honest its been flat-lining since my record of making over $2000 in one month – in July. Bouncing around at the same level give or take in US$ terms, dropping in local currency because of the strength of both my local currencies (yes I run accounts in two countries – I don’t recommend it!).

Oh and finally spring has sprung – downunder in Perth anyways – finally I might add, so much for global warming its been freezing here for far too long. The photos in this post were taken in King’s Park, Perth a couple of weeks ago – yes we have quite a display of wildflowers at the moment.

New Custom Thesis Theme

DSCF4831I’ve been spring cleaning this blog too – a couple of you have noticed that the design has changed a fair bit.  None of my doing – Costa who makes cool custom WordPress themes at blogigs.com wrote to me saying that my previous design hurt his head and here is a new one. Well OK I can take a hint – I never claimed to be a designer – we played with his suggestion a bit so I am now down the beach (Indian Ocean) with my laptop. (BTW for any of you whose dream it is to sit under the sun umbrella with your laptop -reality check – sand is not good for laptops, sun umbrella as illustrated won’t stay up in an off-shore breeze, and won’t stop enough UV to prevent you coming out looking like a lobster. Leave the laptop at home when you go to the beach- but yes the beach is less than 10 minutes walk from my house! ) . Anyway if you want to know techie stuff like how to remove dates from any WordPress theme then check out Costa’s site. And BTW don’t tell me you aren’t technical – go learn how to do this stuff – its not hard and blogs like Costa’s will give you the right information. HTML and CSS are the basics of the Internet and yes you do evenutally need to know a bit about them.

Tracking Your Monthly Income Online

Anyway back to the subject to hand monthly income and managing cash. I don’t know about you – I am yet to see a QuickBooks or similar version which says – this is how to manage your online money – so I have kinda made up my own version – I thought it might help some of you. From day one its been important to me to know how much I made each month – that was my basic aim – $5000/month – so I really needed to see where I was at – even when I didn’t like the answer.

For the last year or so I have run a spreadsheet – its imaginatively named “income” – across the top I have the months : Jan, Feb etc – down the page I list my online income sources for the month. Note I ignore when I will actually get paid  that income – I just record what I earned that month. This is important – clickbank took over a year to pay me out, Amazon hasn’t yet, some affiliates pay 90 days in arrears. All of that is very relevant to your cash flow – but not to my aim in this case: to track my actual income from the month.

DSCF4823I categorise my income into the following block – and use sub-totals so I know what percentage of my income is passive and what is “active” – currently I am running rows down the spreadsheet which look like this:

  1. Niche Website  income
    • Adsense
    • eBay
    • Amazon
  2. Make Money Online Affiliates
    • various things I flog from this blog and my HubPages which you guys are kind enough to give  me the commission on – one line per an affiliate
  3. Freelancing and Consulting
    • Various writing clients
    • Today.com – yup they still pay me  (a little)
    • SEO consultancy
    • Hosting for clients
  4. Website /Domain Sales

The interesting thing when you split your income up like this – you will see the swings and round abouts far more clearly – Adsense tanked for me in September, but I had my best eBay month ever and a pretty good one iwth Amazon. You can step back and see the weakness in your business model. Basically the income in the first two groups are fairly passive income sources. The income shows up at least a month after I do the work – sometimes several months.

I try a lot of stuff in group two some work well but then the product is withdrawn e.g. NicheDevil, some work well but are too cheap and too niche to make me much (Elegant Themes), some are surprise stars (7 Minute Articles), others just trundle on and give me a sale or 2 a month without much effort (Hostgator) on part – everyone needs hosting from time-to-time.

Analysing Your Data To Plan Your Business

This month I went back through my last few months of the new tax year (1 July in Australia) and identified each item for my accountant – I got to wondering about my expenses – I have never tracked them in detail – they have always been lower than my income (i.e. if there was money in my PayPal account I could afford it – if there wasn’t I couldn’t), but I looked more closely this month. My current on-going expenses are;

Hosting: $25DSCF4808

The KeyWord Academy: $33

Various services for distributing my articles $125

Average cost for domain renewals $40 – this is very up and down because last year I went thru cycles of buying domains and then giving up on new domains for months at a time.

So my fixed expenses to stay in business are around $225 – I don’t know about you – but that’s pretty darn cheap rent where I live! For tax purposes of course I add in the Internet, a percentage of my rent, power bill etc etc – but those are the real costs of doing business – doing business online is not free – but its pretty darn cheap.

The obvious thing that struck me once I wrote these figures down is that I needed to spending more money! I am considering a nice resort for Christmas actually – well yes-  but that’s not what I meant. In terms of the business I needed to be investing more money back into it. I don’t know what figures are supposed to be  a good rule of thumb – but  for me I figured I should be spending at least 50% of my passive income into building more of the same – that only makes sense!

Having said that I immediately decided to up my budget for outsourcing writing on my sites and also decided to budget at least five new domains from freshdrop a month – where a dropped dot com costs me $12.45 after using the emma30 code which will get you the renewal for $7.49). Given that I have decided to try look to start selling five websites a month – it seems reasonable to buy the stock at that rate.

I am almost certainly going to buy new hosting – nothing wrong with HostGator but I want to spread my IP’s around if you know what I mean. BTW if anyone is looking for some very cheap hosting check out QiQ who has an offer until the 9 October for a years hosting for £11 ($17) – only one site and only per a customer – but that’s less than $1.50/month!

This turned into another long ramble – but I hoped it was useful to some of you.  As a business owner you need to look hard at your figures to know where to go with your business in the next month. I have found that my start of month routine is less and less about wow I made some money from an affiliate and more and more about he big picture – where is the money coming from – will  it continue?, how can I can I make it continue? how can I diversify? did I achieve what I wanted last month? if not why no? if yes why?

Quick Update

For those of you who are still confused as to which you might want to check out problogger.com – or at least Grizz’s take on Darren’s site!

DSCF4804

Categories
Blogging

New Comment Policy

This is actually going to be a short post – I think … I have an awful lot of comments on this blog – and most of them never see the light of day – the spammers love this blog and I generally wake up to several hundred offers to enhance my sex life. They are easy to deal with. The less easy comments are the ones that are just slightly more than “nice post” but not much.

Sit right down and write myself a letter...
Sit right down and write myself a letter...

There are various plugins available to manage this sort of comment spam – I have tried most of the usual suspects.  But Todd over at Todd’s Tps pointed out a recent plugin which really seems to be the business – its called SEO Super Comments. What it does  is basically redirect the link on a person’s name to another internal page on this site UNLESS I have added their website to a whitelist of “friend’s sites”. In either case the link is do-follow.

This solves several problems for me:

  • it means I can approve comments that I am not sure of knowing that I am not going to linking to a dodgy neighbourhood;
  • I can still reward friends with a do-follow link;
  • it has a nice internal SEO benefit of creating additional internal pages on the fly.

Unfortunately it does mean that I”ve had to turn off commentluv – as it kinda defeats the point of this plugin.

If you want to see what the plugin does if someone’s site is not on the white lis t- click on my name in any comment.

Now I just spent 1/2 hour adding a long list of friends to my white list – but its a manual process I may have missed you – especially if you are a friend with a new website. If you think you’ve been unfairly missed out then drop me a comment or a private email via the contact form. This is a site by site basis not an IP or email basis

If your link was to a site promoting SBI or Teaching Sells – its not a mistake you aren’t on the white list…

Categories
Making Money Online Online Business

Building a Legitimate Online Business – Two Years On

Its been two years that we’ve been based in Perth, two years since I got my partner to agree to support me while I developed my online passive income business – he asked how long – I said Christmas…

In fact this was the blog post on my long-defunct blog of the time:

I think it just hit me that we’ve signed a 6-month lease on the flat! It seems a bit odd being in one place, but it feels even odder not going out and looking for a job. Although I have done the odd bit of travel in fact since I left uni I have either been employed or travelling. So its a little strange to be sitting here on a laptop trying to develop a self-employed online income without actually having an employer! It does have some benefits, like no starting time, but also some disadvantages, like no finishing time. Its weird to be honest – but I do “know” (in the virtual sense) people who are making over US$1000 month doing this so I think its worth a try. I seem to be able to write but at the moment I having problems with the technology setting up another blog.

Its been an “interesting” two years- in fact just after “that” Christmas, I quit thanks to dodgy programs like Teaching Sells and got myself a part-time job – two for a while. But the dream wouldn’t go away – and although I am somewhat of the school of “if you don’t succeed – walk away and don’t look back” – this dream of an online income really seemed like a much better lifestyle than working for real!

So what have I learned in two years? Well I can tell you I rarely have technical problems setting up sites anymore 🙂 And yes I can write – but I prefer to write on topics I like – not necessarily topics that pay me! Also I learned that neither of those skills are very important – better to learn how to do it yourself – but outsource if you really don’t want to.

There are well known phases of learning which you’ve probably heard before:

  • not knowing what you don’t know
  • knowing that you don’t know
  • knowing but having to consciously think about it
  • automatic knowledge

When I started online – I thought that I would write some great content and I would make some money – seriously – those are the only blogs I found – you wrote about stuff you were an expert on and then figured out how to make money later. I don’t even think I realised what search traffic was, I certainly didn’t know what a backlink was!

Here’s  all stuff I’ve now learnt:

  • how to chose keywords which are profitable and not too competitive
  • how to set up websites
  • how to find/write/outsource content
  • how to build links

But that’s still the technical stuff – its easy enough to learn if you are of even average intelligence.

I wasted probably about 18 months learning that stuff – you can save yourself the time by either buying Janet’s Nomad’s Guide e-Book or enrolling  in The Keyword Academy.

Neither program will guarantee to make you money though – no legitimate online businesses do.  But given the cost of wasting 18 months of frustration learning this stuff the hard way they are well worth the price.

But they actually don’t teach you the most important thing that I’ve learnt in the last two years:

You Must Learn How to Sell Online

learn-to-sell
Kids Selling in Cambodia - they are some of the world's best street sellers

You can learn all that technical stuff and still not make money though. And I had an incident on the TKA forum today which made me reflect on that. Someone reviewed a product that I use and am an affiliate for – he didn’t include an affiliate link. Someone else on the thread asked for an affiliate link – I jumped on and provided the link, called myself a  shameless whore and also included a link to a hub which was my fairly long review of the product – I went to bed – its a timezone thing. Someone else seeing my link thought that was pretty spammy of me –  others waded in with views ranging from only the bold win and whores make good money. I saw where the thread went this morning and really did laugh out loud. It was really funny – because two years ago I would never have added my affiliate link. It didn’t seem nice somehow – you know – a bit commercial.  I would have felt uncomfortable about asking for money.

And that people is the key – if you are going to be successful in any business – and certainly in an online business you have to be able to close the sale – how do you close a sale ? You ASK!  Seriously – its really that simple! Don’t laugh that was a huge light bulb moment for me!

I come from an English/New Zealand background where in general talking about money and making money in a “in your face” way is not really considered “nice” – its changed a lot in the 1980’s but still the majority of people would find it hard to ask for money up front. I certainly did. I had to get over that – and if its an issue for you – you need to get over it too.

Does that make you the same as every other spammer marketer on the Internet? Well I hope not – I have a clean conscience – and this is how I do it:

  • I  only sell products that I use and that I like. If you see my name on it here, on HubPages or on  my new blog – I’ve used the product or at least bought it and read it if its informational;
  • I try to explain which people a product will work well for – and who will be wasting their money because they either know the information already, or don’t have enough knowledge to effectively use it ;
  • I try to recommend products which either have a free trial period or a money-back guarantee – this is not always possible but I try.

Think of it this way – if you find a great new restaurant do you tell people to do there? if you have a fantastic holiday do you recommend the destination to your friends?  Would you do the same if you got a commission?  Would your friends follow your advice? Would they be happy for you to earn a commission?

Now don’t get me wrong there are heaps of commission salesmen out there who are close to being crooks – some Mortgage Brokers spring to mind.  But I use a Mortgage Broker and I am happy for him to earn the commission from the banks (you don’t pay a broker direct in my country) – I know which institutions he can’t represent, therefore I know the limits of his advice. But he saves me time and money – I’m a happy repeat customer. He provides me with a service – sure I could get a the loan from the bank without him – but he makes it easier.

So seriously if you are going to do affiliate sales you have to figure out how to provide value to your customers so they will buy from you – in fact nothing has really changed in the whole history of commerce – its just a different media these days!

And I still can’t believe I wrote a post about how to sell online LOL

Photo Credit

Categories
Making Money Online Online Business Passive Income

How Can I Make Passive Income Online?

We were talking last night, my partner and I, considering what we want to do in 2010 when his current contract comes to an end  and the obvious question came up – do I make enough passive income online for him not to work anymore.  The short answer is not quite – but we are getting close. What’s more I am definitely now of the opinion that it would be a huge financial risk for me to go and get a job now compared to my making money online – and here’s why.

Earning Passive Income while crossing the Nullarbor
Making Passive Income while crossing the Nullarbor

Passive Income in the Real World

Every month no less than eight groups of people pay me – they are tenants in various properties we own in New Zealand.  I hire a property manager so I count that income as passive – every month money goes into our account at home. There is a catch though – every month money goes out of that account too – usually just a little more than went in – all going well it will balance – but if you have a month where you need to replace not one but two hot water cylinders – it does not!

We didn’t plan it that way – but we couldn’t control all the variables – the most important variable is having a tenant – we have an excellent occupancy because we bought the right houses, tenants aren’t the problem. The issue is interest rates.

We bought the last time the interest rates were low – and have weathered our floating rate go from 6.9% to 10.45% and now back to 6.45% –  when you multiple that out with borrowings of just shy of $1,000,000 – it turns out to be quite a few thousand dollars a month – small in the scheme of things but large in absolute terms (BTW if the figures look wrong to you I am talking New Zealand dollars and interest rates).   Yes I know fixed rates reduces your risks but in NZ you can only fix for a maximum of five years – so over the 9 years we’ve owned most of the properties the low fixed rates ran out on us.

So in the real-world property is a great way to make passive income – but it has its risks, and for us the main risk is the leverage that you need to use by borrowing money.  The main way to control that risk is of course to pay some of the mortgages back. So its likely now that when we go home we will downsize our home and also sell our worst performing rental to reduce our outgoings to be comfortably less than our income – we will drop from a LVR of 60% to about 30%.

So what on earth does my adventures in  property investment have anything to do with

How to Earn Passive Income Online ?

Well its about not just the basic question about how to earn income online.  Well this is no secret:  my preferred method is to build silly little niche sites and make money while I sleep, drive the Nullarbor or sip gins by the beach!

Because really that’s the only way I know that you work now – get paid later. Sure there are lots of other ways to make money online – I’m looking at building a Legitimate Online Business to help with the expenses – especially if my partner chooses to stop working – but that sort of business does require a bit of customer service and support – not too much, but some.

Obviously there are lots of ways to make income online which aren’t passive – but are still better than a) working for someone else and b) having to get dressed in the morning. Into this category I put activities such as freelancing (be it web design or writing), selling things (either by drop shipping or from your back bedroom), and building a flagship blog in order to become a Trust Agent and kick start your book deal or speaking career.

But if you chose the right keywords (properties) and have more rather than less (diversification) you can make a very nice income from silly little niche websites.

But some people will even say that its almost impossible to build a significant business with just passive income. I disagree. The main reason people end up as tied up with their own business as they were when they worked in corporate hell – is quite simple – personality.

You Need The Right Personality To Earn  Passive Income

Let me explain, I used to think one of my strong personality traits was a negative thing, in fact so negative it wasn’t something I ever mentioned at job interviews – even when prompted to list my failings. It was a big secret, which I kept quiet – but now I’ve come to realise this personality trait of mine is in fact a huge advantage.

So what is my deep, dark secret? Well I’m lazy – yup bone idle. Give me the choice of working or playing I’d rather watch TV, or sleep, or go swimming.  You see my main motivation with this online income thing, is the actually the same as it was with the property investment. Its to make passive income, because I can’t be arsed working.

With property its easy – so long as you have a good credit record, a mortgage free valuable home and two secure jobs – the bank will offer you three times what you are asking for (good thing we didn’t take it we would have been in serious trouble with the interest rates). After a few years lots of people get out of rentals: its too much hassle – the tenants ring up at all hours complaining about broken light bulbs or leaking taps, the houses need painting etc. etc. But being lazy I had set it up right – I’d found a property manager first, found out what sort of property they had the least problems managing – and bought properties that fit that criteria.

We’ve never had the problem – the tenants don’t call us – I doubt they know who we are – they deal with the property manager. Property is entirely passive income if you have the right property manager, the right properties and the right level of debt.

Online income is similar. You can make yourself a slave to your online income business as easily as you can a real-world business. For a long time i.e. 20+ years I said I didn’t want a business. I’d worked for small businesses where the owner took less out of the busienss than he paid me, worked longer hours, never took a day off. I wasn’t delighted about working for someone but at least I chose the right profession, got well paid, normally had a choice of jobs and really should have had it made.

But I couldn’t outsource my real world job – so it was still an issue with my laziness – I still had to get out of bed in the morning and get dressed – that wast he problem.  Obviously I needed to own my business – but I didn’t want to work stupid hours – in fact I wanted to work as few hours as possible.

So now I need to set up a genuinely passive income online. That’s an income where the customers don’t call me – they don’t even kow who I am – they buy from me and they move on. That’s what I like about making passive income online. Some of the A-listers dont’ really believe that its possible – but they have a disadvantage – you see its important to them to work hard in a driven manner – but that’s not important to me at all. I don’t need to work to be important – I need to work to make money. If I won $5 million tomorrow in lotto – would I keep on building  websites – LOL don’t be stupid – I’d put in the bank and live of f the interest! Well I might keep this passive income online website going just to have fun calling out the scams, but that would be purely for entertainment – not work or anything.

Other Lazy Onliners

Phil @ I Need Money Now

Roland @ Online Income

Shane @ Freelance Writing

agrande @ MLM Leads Guide

Categories
Free Tools Paid Tools Product Reviews Tools WordPress

WordPress Themes – Should I Pay for a WordPress Theme?

I’m a fan of WordPress – this blog actually started off on blogger a very long time a go – but I go so frustrated with their technical limitations I moved Passive Income over to self-hosted WordPress and never looked back. WordPress is free and of course there are approximately a zillion free WordPress themes around but I have now spent money on three different options for paid wordpress themes – given that I don’t like spending money – you might well ask why?

Two reasons really – support and re-saleability (is that a word ?). I’ll explain. I had this particular blog on a free theme but the down side with WordPress is that it gets updated regularly – way too regularly sometimes. Its settled down recently but at one stage they were realising updates every week or so. These updates are usually to fix security holes so you ignore them at you peril. The problem that arises of course is that the update sometimes breaks the theme, or maybe its the updated plugins you are using are broken – anyway you can spend many unhappy hours trying to fix the support. And with free themes you get the support you deserve – none – no problem with that, I don’t expect the theme developer to work for free. For many of my sites have no support isn’t really a problem – but on sites such as this one it can be.

Why I Bought Thesis Theme

So I looked long and hard to find something that would work for this site. My requirements weren’t outrageous or terribly unusual and went something like this – I wanted a

  • SEO friendly theme – or would at leasst work with All-In-One-SEO plugin;
  • theme which is supported and updated – it is the new version of Thesis was out the same day as WordPress 2.8 was released – impressive – they have active and helpful support forums;
  • theme which I wouldn’t have to re-do my customisations on if I had to upgrade WordPress and/or Thesis – Thesis uses a smart approach to ensure you don’t inadvertantly over-write your customisations;
  • customisable  theme so it looked like me – but it didn’t actually require any design skills because I don’t have any;
  • theme that could display and nest comments in a readable fashion because I  have quite a lot of them;
  • a theme that let me control the top level navigation
  • a 3 column theme with both columns on the right of the content
  • theme to plaster the affiliate ads in the usual place – top right, above the fold
  • Thesis makes for a pretty good boring niche theme out of the box – but you have to work out whether the cost of a developer’s licence is worth it for you.

Why I Don’t Like Thesis Theme

Thesis allowed me to do all these things. It fulfilled my wish list. But I don’t like it. I know that’s pretty much hearsay because Thesis, is tied up with the A-list crowd and if you Google “thesis theme review” you will find lots and lots of happy people – who are generally running Thesis on their blogs.  And a lot of them have pretty nice designs as well all based on Thesis – and all, I strongly suspect customised by a professional designer who is fluent in CSS and knows how to make stuff look good. I am neither – but thanks to Thesis I am now much more conversant in CSS – now that is not a bad thing – but it was not exactly why I paid $87 for a premium paid theme. What I don’t like about Thesis:

  • It has not one but two Thesis Options panels – this is confusing – I am always going to the wrong one – even after months.
  • I had to use code to add a header image – seriously – I joke not. Now if you don’t want to do anything else most peoole want their own header – and its not a matter of just added the file to the right place in the control panel : instead I have endless options over text styles, fonts, spacing of various elements blah, blah – all I wanted was a pretty header and a background that matched <pout>;
  • Using images is painful – I have to import an image and then cut and paste and add the thumbnail image code so that I can have the combination of having a picture anywhere I want in the picture plus having the thumbnail appear on other pages such as categories – its a nuisance.
  • Thesis is expensive if you want to deploy it. If you want to run it on more than one site you need that developers editions – that’s another $77 over the initial $87 for a single user. Plus if you want to sell a customised theme to a client that’s another $15 per a client theme.
  • Thesis makes a big deal of being SEO friendly – but its SEO settings are no more difficult to use than the free all-in-one-seo plugin – it replaces that plugin – but most people would already be running all-in-one anyways;
  • if you are a designer Thesis really is a framework and you can no doubt do beautiful things -but its a bit like giving me a top-quality blank canvas and a paint brush and tell me go create – I am a rather more paint by numbers gal! You maybe able to do beautiful things with Thesis – or afford someone who can – I can’t do either;
  • the ability to display ads using the “multimedia” box is fine and the ability to control this down to post level is impressive. What’s not is the place you put the code shows at most 2 lines of a narrow column- you have to use a text editor to actually edit and update the code – this is because most of the screen space has been used on the unecessary design elements;
  • their affiliate banners are really. really ugly – yellow is the only option – and this is in the marketplace where people care about design.

I may or may not stay with Thesis – the box below the post content converts well – and I haven’t seen that in another theme – yet. I did however decided that it was just too hard to customise for me to produce unique designs for websites I might sell.

Summary:

Cost:  $87 – one site or $154 unlimited sites

Affiliate progaram: 33% commission 60 day cookie Is now managed by ShareaSale – I haven’t looked into the details

Why I Bought Elegant Themes

So I wanted to start a new flagship site – the site needed to look a bit more professional that this one and I was even going to tone down that language and have a front “landing page”.  To deploy Thesis Theme on the new site was going to cost another $77 – I hesitated. I noticed a few people using and recommending elegant themes and I looked harder. In fact I headed over to their site and spent days drooling over the prettiest themes I’d seen for a very, very long time. Now most premium themes appear to cost from $70 up – these themes (and there are 26 of them at the time of writing ) cost $19.95, total, not each.  In the end I decided I had wasted more than $20 drooling at the shop window and I bought.

Now short of taking off a week or two just to review themes from elegant themes I am just addressing the one theme from their selection that I have deployed – eBusiness – you can see it running live at Legimate Online Business. By the way the newer themes come with options eBusiness has three completely different looks each in three colour ways- so you actually get more than 26 themes.

Now the guy who creates the themes at Elegant Themes isn’t an expert on SEO – but he’s managed to get most things right with eBusiness – I’ve set the them to use a static front page with the lastest blog posts showing. The front page is acutally of a combination of up to four WordPress pages – each page title becomes a H2 header on the front page.  Meanwhile the blog side of things is controlled by making sure each  blog post has a category of “blog” – this I thought was a bit clunky – but it actually works quite well – it means that if I link back to http://netmarketingtoday.com/category/blog  in say comments, plugins like commentluv can easily parse the latest blog post.

Now Elegant Themes don’t claim to be SEO optimized but eBusiness works just fine with all-in-one-seo, postname permalinks all the rest of the stuff you should be doing anyways. What I particularly liked about Elegant Thems is:

  • good support, active forum and, more usefully, very detailed step-by-step videos for the tricky bits: thumbnails and Hostagor (see below);
  • there are enough options for me to customise the theme without expecting me to actually make a  design decision more complex than enable/disable ;
  • eBusiness allowed me to have a static front page but still direct readers to the updating blog;
  • only a few content areas are controlled directly from the theme that is the slider at the top of the front page (not sliding at the moment as I only have one slide- can be up to three) and the “about me” photo and box at the top of the blog posts – everthing else is controlled by standard WordPress widgets which include an (optional) sidebar on posts and pages (can differ) and an (optional) footer;
  • they have some really interesting specialist themes for those who have art galleries or want to show off videos – I am seriously considering putting up my holiday snaps so I can play around with ePhoto! There are some slick magazine/news themes too but I am a bit over those myself.

What’s not to like about eBusiness:

  • out of the box the theme had links in the text only a very subtlly different colour from regular text – I made them blue so people would know to click;
  • this is not elegant themes fault but there is slight issue you have to deal with if you are on Hostgator and want the thumbnail images to appear. I had the problem and worked through the documentation and fixed it – but I will have to repeat for other websites I deploy their themes on (the issue is with a common plugin for managing thumbnails so is theme independent);
  • you cannot resell or distribute their themes legally – if you sell a site that is using the theme the new owner has to buy a membership too.

Its worth pointing out that the $19.95 is actually an annual subscription – when you pay with paypal the subscription is automatically created. You are not obliged to continue with the subscritpion to use the themes but if you cancel you lose access to the forum and future theme releases – you would want to download all the themes before you cancel and used all the support documentation that you require.

Summary:

Cost:  $19.95 unlimited access to 26 33  themes (and more appear to be released every few months) for use on an unlimited number of YOUR sites

Affiliate program: 50% commission.

For both of the above themes  you no one can offer a money-back guarantee – you need to put the cash up and commit before you get access to a premium themes so thing about what you are trying to achieve before you sign-up.

Free Themes for Niche Sites

I should say too that I often use simple, SEO friendly themes for my niche sites – they are pretty boring looking at that is pretty much the point.  Free themes I like and use include:

Grizzly Sniper – looks just like an ugly blogger blog but its WordPress!

Adventure Tour – not as ugly as some but you can easily customise the header!

Zombie Sniper – another boring Justin theme

Dateless Mini – Frank’s boringly timeless theme

Boring Memo – and leaving the most boring of all hard to believe a designer developed this LOL

If you want something in between you might also want to check out Frank’s new site: Templates for Websites for some very cheap options (like $7 cheap!)

I have yet another solution for websites I will setup to sell – but that may have to wait for another post – this one got a little  loooong !

Categories
Rants

Spammers Send Me Post Ideas!

Its really fun sometimes this blog – I enjoy the fun we have in the comments – and quite often I get an idea for a follow up post on the subject of  passive income and online scams. But rarely do I get an idea from spammer – until today. Now this wasn’t just the usual brainless –  “please write more on this topic” comment spam. This was a real life email sent to me via the contact form – and this is what it read – in its entirety:

spire-club

From:
Ruth
email : ruth.gonzales@yahoo.com

subject: http://www.spireclub.com

message
Can you please add the spire club to the list of making passive income ?

Thanks

Hmm – that will be a NO  love. In fact I think I have deleted at least one other of these – obviously I am showing up somewhere in the serps again for “passive income” – cause guess what – the site mentioned above is a passive income opportunity – seriously folks – all you have to do sign up, pay $10 and wait for the dollars to flow in. In fact as they state on the front page:

As a Spire Club member you can even make money doing nothing

Yeah right – I don’t really have to tell you its a classic pyramid scheme do I? I’d suggest you stay a long way away – unless you want to waste $10 and tell the rest of us that you have lost you money – I’m certainly not wasting my cash on it – so this is yet another sloppy, slack review from Lis – who hasn’t even bought the product LMFAO! Nice  graphics though

Oh and they don’t know any SEO either – 4 backlinks for a site registered 9 months ago – way to go guys!

More Scams ForAmusement

Dirk over at his Make Money for Beginners Blog is into a bit of shit fight with those objecting to his Monelis review – this is a classic pyrmid shopping opportunity. Dirk’s also less than complementary in his New SpiderWeb Review which lost him a lot of cash. Be careful out there folks!

Categories
Product Reviews Rants

Brett McFall, The World Internet Summit, Is He Legit?

I had to make this quick post because my mate Mike from Retire Young and Wealthy just published a potentially controversial article on InfoBarrel titled: Don’t Waste Your Money on the World Internet Summit. Now Mike didn’t know this before he wrote this piece but I spent a day listening to Brett McFall and when he did the free version of his “How To Make Money While You Sleep”  in Perth some months back.

1124847_person_questionI had never heard of Brett McFall online but the full-page in the local tabloid that passes as the West Australian newspaper caught my eye in its sheer awfulness – you know the type – 6point type, releaved by the odd large bold – I WAS  BROKE TOO, NO SKILLS NOW I MAKE $100,000 WHILE I SLEEP. I signed up out of curioristy – with about a 50% desire to actually go to the event. As the day nearer I was impresed with their follow up emails and even on the day an automated call to my cellphone (taking into account the local timezone) reminding me of this once in a life time opportunity.

Now as I said on my comments on Mike’s article – I had the same experience as he did – I learned nothing about “How To Make Money In Your Sleep”, the name of Brett McFall’s book, as well as the one-day pitch.  But I was fascinated by seeing how the power of bulding up a dream, relating to your audience by explaining that you were just like them, pretending that something is available only for a limited time – really will make people pay thousands of dollars.

It also showed me – who has learned all my marketing on the Internet – just how much the “real world” is still prepared to pay for information which is either free or available for a fraction of the costs involved in The World Internet summit, not to mention McFall’s mentoring program.

Is  Brett McFall’s How to Make Money While You Sleep a scam – no its not – if you are an experienced internet marketer who wants to get into developing your own product for sale and/or you want to learn copyrighting from a master – then its worth buying – or at least borrowing from your local library.

If however you are brand new to the Internet – know nothing about building a website – then do yourself a favour – keep your credit card locked up and read, read, read – there’s all you need to know available online for free. And yes you can make money while you sleep – because normally the US shops while we sleep in Australia – and most online customers are from North America! That’s not to say you don’t have to do an awful lot of work – if you thnk this is as easy as  making money with property or shares – think again – it is not (and I know I have done all three).

For the rest of you head on over and check out Mike’s review and Brett McFall’s response to Mike’s experience at The World Internet Summit

Categories
Making Money Online Online Business

Do You Have a Plan B to Support Your Passive Income Business?

Now I like planning – its so much more fun than doing. I’m quite good at planning too -just ask anyone who has been travelling with me. But business planning is a whole different game – I know the theory:

  1. Decide what the end is – say $1,000,000 in round figure and by when.
  2. Work out where you are now  – that’s easy just done the taxes
  3. Work out how to get from 2 to 1
changing direction
changing direction

Hmm yeah oops – 3 is kinda the problem in my experience. This blog started as my attempt of at least an online diary of my journey of 100 sites – but got re-named when I figured I was the ONLY person who ever searched for that keyword LOL.I thought that might be close enough to a business plan – I may have been wrong …

Last month I wrote about making $1500 from Adsense and Affiliates this month its pretty much the same – slightly different winners and losers but generally, overall add up to about the same figure. I’m actually fairly happy with that – August is usually a very slow month online and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see my earnings drop,  Also this month I was focused on building stuff which will make money in the future – not right now.

Making an income that was real rather than just a joke made me even more determined to plan B – what if I suddenly was the only income earner in the house? What if we move again and my partner can’t get/doesn’t want a job? Plan B has been SEO consulting to small business. I wasn’t going to do it seriously until we moved back to New Zealand – a real-world business needs contacts and I don’t have them here, and yes I know you can do this all online but my potential clients don’t know that!

I must admit though that SEO consulting has some downsides for me:

  • you have to do a lot of education with clients – and a lot of definition of roles – no I don’t do flash development or even adwords I do SEO!
  • you have to get dressed in the morning

Frankly the second one is the real issue! I thought for a while I might like the human contact – but I came to my senses and remembered that business meetings are not human contact!

So I wanted another Plan B – I way to raise quick cash with a bit more certainity than developing niche sites and better paid than writing articles.

So after some thought and a whole lot more reading I think I am going into the site flipping business. I will build sites, do some other magic stuff to them (SEO) and sell them for a healthy profit. It fits well with my passive income – because if they don’t sell they will probably just sit around and make me money anyways!

If any of your are into real estate investing you will understand the concept of site flipping – a property flipper will usually buy a run-down house, do it up and sell it for a profit. Website flipping is similar – but without the downside  risk of mortgages!

Why do I want a plan B anyway?  After all my little ugly sites make me money while I sleep right ? Yes they do – but if I needed an extra $5000 tomorrow they wouldn’t be able to deliver on that! Websites typically seem to sell for up to 10 times monthly earnings – so if I had a site making $500 a month – there’s my $5000 . At the moment if we needed that sort of cash we’d use my partner’s income or borrow it – because of our excellent credit – again because one of us has a real job. Flipping sites seems to be the obvious adjunct income for me while I build the passive income empire.

By the way I still seem to have some of you confused about why making a few dollars of passive income is totally exciting to me – much more exciting than earning $1000 in a real job. Check out John’s description of why passive income is the best of all possible incomes to have – his story the same as my story – I was delighted in early June to have hit $100 in Adesnse for the month by the 10th – my partner’s reaction was – *shrug*  – in July he was delighted that I made 6 times that in Adsense, in August he was asking me how it was going on a weekly basis! So if you have trouble convincing people – don’t worry they  will understand when youstart making the cash!

Phtoto Credit

Categories
Marketing Online Business Passive Income

Social Media Scam ? Is Grizz A Social Blogger?

Conversation, communication whatever!
Conversation, communication whatever!

Is this the biggest hoodwink of the entire Internet ? We all know that Grizz is the guy that doesn’t do blogging right – he has an ugly blog, it took him ages to get on twitter, I don’t think he’s even on facebook! You can’t take someone seriously who won’t pay for his own domain and hosting can you – not really!

Well today I watched an absolutly fascinating video from Allyn at Bloggerillustrated titled Social Media, Internet Marketing, Organic Marketing and Digital Fellat…. (yeah if your English is not native you will probably NOT want to Google the final word at work..) Basically Allyn compared the visitors he got from a link from Grizz,  to the traffic Allyn’s friend BloggerLens got when Chris Brogan – Mr Social Media himself – picked up and republished on his blog BloggerLens’s Chris Brogan Trust Agent Spoof Video . The traffic figures may surprise you, a lot – short answer – RSS feed subscribers mean nothing.

Allyn’s figures don’t surprise me at all – Grizz put this blog on the map. Before Grizz picked up on SiteBuildIt! post I had under 10 visitors a day- the day he mentioned my Site Build It post he said around 300 visitors directly from his blog to mine. Now I got a lot of traffic from other sources as well from that post but the single biggest source was Grizz.

I’ve been accused of being a mindless groupie of foul mouthed Puerto Ricans and ocaisionally rude, but usually polite, Grizzly’s – that’s half right – I am a groupy – those guys tell me to do it I’ll do it – why?  Because I am their engaged customer in marketing speak – in plain English they helped me when I needed help. They answered my questions in comments and forums,  they helped me without being asked when I really needed it  they asked their followers to help me – many of which did – even when they disagreed with me. Oh and the stuff they teach works and makes me money – that helps customer loyalty quite a lot really – odd because Grizz has never actually sold me anything …

They are real leaders because they tell it how it is – its not pretty – the language is not G-rated sometimes – but the reason my language is bad on this blog – is a reaction to the smooth, elegant sales talk that A-List products like Teaching Sells –  Allyn makes the point exactly – 28,000 subscribers and Chris Brogan has 20 comments – NOT one of which he responds to – says it all really – I wonder what would happen if I subscribed to his blog, followed him on twitter and then asked him a question on twitter – do you think he’ answer? Do you think he’d link to me? Yeah me neither! I remember when Grizz first linked to me – I couldn’t believe one of the big guys would do that – it was almost like he cared or something – like he was a real person not just a blog about making money online.

BTW if you are keen to increase your feedburner subscriber’s you really should check out Frank’s Earn Online Cash with Social Blogging – it tells you exactly how to fake your social proof – writing 500 of your own comments on a post though is going to take forever (you might want to check out Frank’s Blog Content Wizard to help)

And Grizz with his ugly little butt-ugly, boring, free blogger blog sitting at the top of “make money” in the SERPS – it makes him good money – but oddly enough he still has time for the little guys – now thats what I call the most ironic anti-marketing social media joke – and its not on him!

Photo Credit