Programming Coffee

I first ran across PayPerPost while perusing Css Remix, and thought the idea was pretty cool. Then, I see it pop up over at TechCrunch, where there seems to be a little bit of controversy going on as to whether or not PayPerPost is devaluing the blog community. What’s the big deal? Advertising on blogs is now acceptable. Hiring corporate bloggers is now acceptable. Paying blog authors based on revenue generation is now acceptable. Heck, blogging for profit is now acceptible. Most people don’t care why someone blogs, they care about the quality of the content on the blog. PayPerPost doesn’t discredit or tarnish the blogging community, they just allows bloggers to earn some money while doing what they enjoy doing…blogging.

To get started making some money, visit PayPerPost at: http://www.payperpost.com

Ok, lets get some assumptions out of the way. From what I’ve read, and experienced, only 60% of the time you spend ends up being billable. If your percentage is different, adjust things accordingly…but realize the point is still the same.

So you are charging $25/hr, $50/hr, $75/hr, $100/hr, or lucky enough to be able to charge more, you will notice that your income is purely based on how many billable hours you can work. At $50/hr, if you are lucky enough to have 24 billable hours per week (based on a 40hr week, and lets assume you want a 2-week vacation every year), your annual income will only amount to $60k. Want to make $20k more per year? Well, that will cost you 3 more hours of work every day (which will only add 8 more billable hours based on our assumptions).

Most of you probably aren’t fine with a $60k income, because lets face it, depending on your type of incorporation, your income will probably be comperable to $54k after paying company-related taxes. To jump up $20k per year, you have to work more hours…or raise your rates to roughly $67/hr. How will that affect your current client base? How will that affect your ability to attract new clients? If it won’t affect anything, and you are content with your income, then you probably won’t find much value in my solution.

What is my solution? Residual Income.

Not just any residual income though, you want the kind that isn’t directly proportional to the time spent to accrue it. You would probably agree that $2k/week in residual income would be nice, especially if you ony had to put in a couple hours of work to keep things rolling. What does it take to generate $2k/week in residual income?

An idea that you can sell.

It doesn’t need to be the best idea, the most unique idea, or even a good idea. It just needs to be something that you can sell. Some people sell information, some people sell their perspective on how to get things done, and some people sell access to a service. You will notice that my examples aren’t 1-man companies…but that shouldn’t affect your ability to create your own idea to sell.

So what does it take to make $2k per week? A $50 product that can be sold 40 times per week. A $25/month service that can have 20 new customers per week. And the neat thing is that you don’t have to do this with just 1 product, or 1 piece of information. You can mix and match to your heart’s content. You need to increase your income? Just add more streams of revenue, and sit back.

If you haven’t heard about or noticed the latest Google PR update, let me fill you in a little. During the last PR update, many young sites with very few inbound links received very respectable PageRank. I’m not talking about a PR2-PR3 here, I mean more like a frikkin PR4-PR6. Other sites have noticed that their interior pages have a higher PageRank than their homepage, which I will admit is possible, but definately not by the order that is being seen. Some of the sites have a home page with a PR2, and interior pages with a PR4-PR5 and have fewer (and less prominent) inbound links than the home page.

My take on all this? I think 1 of 2 things are happining.

1. Google is playing a big April Fool’s joke on us. Yeah, it’s all fake. Perhaps this new PageRank is just a facade that’s being shown to the public, while the real PageRank is still being used in the algorithms. I guess if May rolls around, and so is the inflated PageRank, then perhaps my second option is more viable…
2. Google is trying to curb link purchases based on PageRank. They are tired of everyone scamming the system to alter the search results, and have decided to throw a curveball. Now, people everywhere will be paying for inflated PageRank, that probably isn’t even being used in the algorithm.

Any other idea’s?

So I hear you have a great idea. You claim that it will revolutionize your industry. You admit that your approach is unique. You boast that it will make you and your team rich. You gloat in the featureset that you will be offering your users.

So frikkin what. Your idea means nothing.

You haven’t taken a single step towards reaching your goal. You haven’t done any market research. You aren’t willing to make the time or spend the money necessary to see your idea become a reality. You have accomplished nothing.

Why haven’t you done anything?

Too busy with other work? Not willing to risk anything? Are you lazy? Are you scared?

Get off your butt and do something! Make the time, spend the money, take a risk, be the best…or shut up!

The key to making your idea a success is not the uniqueness of your idea (though that helps), its not the efficiency of your idea (though that helps), its not the revolutionary qualities of your idea (though that helps), its the implementation of your idea. Actually taking your idea and doing everything within your power to make it a success.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m scared. My idea isn’t revolutionary, it isn’t all that unique, and it won’t make me insanely rich. I’m just afraid of it being successful. I’m afraid of the unknown. I came to this realization the other day after talking to my wife about one of my “wouldn’t that be cool” ideas, and it really irritated me. I plan on facing my fears here in the near future.

What’s your excuse?

Thats just funny. Read More Here

In an article pointed out by Seth Godin, a company, Kinderstart, is suing the search giant because their search rankings dropped for no apparant reason. The drop in search rankings caused a huge drop in revenue, since they can’t charge as much for advertising if they aren’t bringing in the traffic.

What’s wrong with these people? Why can’t they stop acting like little kids and suck it up. If they wanted a consistent source of revenue, then they probably shouldn’t have built their revenue model on an inconsisten, uncontrollable source such as search traffic.

I’ve been pretty lucky so far. Up until recently, I’ve averaged a couple spam comments per week on my blog. For some reason or another, things have changed and now I receive several per day. What happened? I’m not too sure. It happened roughly the same time I started blogging more frequently. Along with the traffic increase, the comment spam also increased. So how do I stop comment spam? Easy, right? Just install a wordpress plugin that handles comment spam protection. But wait, that’s a long frikkin list! Which one is the best? What do other bloggers recommend?

I have yet to figure out what the real value is in comment spam. Most Wordpress blogs use the rel=nofollow tag, which will prevent any search engine from following links in the comments, and any pagerank from being distributed. Are comment spambots created for the sole purpose of frustration? Or is it really a secret plot of the pharmaceutical companies to increase brand awareness by any means necessary?

Google unofficially announced that anyone using their AdWords program that has suffered from click-fraud, since the start of their program, will be eligible for reimbursement for those clicks. I don’t know the details of the original case that spawned this proposed settlement, but it sounds like the settlement is beneficial for those who have suffered from click-fraud, and comforting for those of us who have not. And since the reimbursement is in the form of future credit in Google’s AdWords program, Google has a chance to redeem themselves to those advertisers.

So if I were to click on one of my own ads (whether it be due to my distrust of their software, or testing my own tracking software), would those clicks be eligible for reimbursement? And if so, I want my money back! (Google, if you are reading this, I’ll settle for a $25 Starbucks card)

There are probably millions of blogs out there that I have never read, and thousands that I would probably enjoy reading. It’s a shame that I don’t have the resources to find all of them, or the time to read them (if I could find all of them). When I read John Scott’s $10k Blog Challenge, I figured it would be a good opportunity for me to take the plunge and seek out many of these undiscovered blogs…and if I won the contest doing it, that would be the icing on the cake.

Here is how I will be approaching this task:

• First of all, I have to actually enjoy reading the blogs. I think that good blogs should be rewarded, and bad blogs shouldn’t.
• The blog has to focus more on content than on advertising. If the site has more Google ads and banner ads than it has content, then I’m not interested.
• The blog cannot be in Technorati’s Top 100. I’m looking for the lesser known bloggers of the world. I’m also going to try and stay away from blogs that belong to blog networks, but its not a deal-breaker.

I will be searching for blogs on my own, but if you have a blog, or know of a good blog that fits my above requirements, put the blog’s name and url in the comments below.

Am I an expert at this? No Way! I’ve done my share of research on the subject, and now it’s time to put some of these methods to the test.

My goal is to get 1k unique visitors per day. I want my visitors to visit my site on a Volunteer basis (not through some forced clickthrough scheme that many Increase Your Traffic sites might try to sell you). Currently my site hits an average of 50 unique visitors per day, and around 300-500 total page views.

How can you accomplish your goal?

• Writing solid content about stuff that interests you, that other people might find useful as well.
• Connecting with other like-minded bloggers
• When referencing another blog, utilizing the Trackback feature
• Find out why your visitors are reading your blog, and cater more to their interests
• Try to offer your visitors something that they won’t find anywhere else