Found My Sister Blog
A minor aside today, nothing about my Squidoo based project. I was doing some research and I discovered a blog on a similar topic to my own - e.g. start with no knowledge about making money online and record the steps taken to earn money.
Okay, there are blogs on every topic so I’m not surprised. However, I was hoping that my Unique Selling Point was the fact that I’m a technical guy (I’m actually a developer) and I suspected that most people would come from the marketing side. However, being an ex-developer, Caroline has that nailed too.
The numbers from the blog make pretty grim reading. She has been investigating making money from the internet fulltime for more than a year, she writes well and she has more than 5,000 subscribers. Despite this, she reports average earnings per month in the low thousands of dollars.
Yikes! If I follow the same vector, and I only have 10-15 hours per week available, it definitely is not worth it for me. I’d rather spend my time playing Everquest.
I’ve also revisted an earlier post. I wanted a way of transferring multiple files to my webserver with a single command so I’ve updated the myscp function to enable this.
My First Squidoo Success
You know something, there might be something to this "Google Loves Squidoo" thing. I made my third lens recently based on a three word keyword phrase that has around 25 searches a month. There are approximately 2,700 results for the quoted phrase.
Well, surprise surprise, my dinky little lens is listed at number 20 (34 for the unquoted phrase) less than 24 hours after I created it. My previous two lenses are still unlisted and to be honest, prior to this lens I was starting to doubt the power of the squid.
Even with the minimal competition 20th place isn’t that great, but remember this is without any promotion or external backlinks.
I created a Squidoo group at the same time as the lens and the results were even better. The group was the first listed page of 757 on Squidoo for the far more competitive two keyword phrase (1,180,000 results listed on Google).
I need to do some analysis to see what the differences between this lens and the previous ones are.
The First Six Week Plan
So I’ve done it again - despite vowing not to buy any more make money ebooks I bought another one costing $47. This brings my outlay to $120 for domains and $160 on ebooks. Damn! Okay, this time no more spending until I’ve earned (and hopefully learned) something.
The latest ebook is a book on Squidoo. Why squidoo? The primary reason is simple - I won’t have to spend anything on hosting and domains for any experiments. I’ve decided that I am going to give this one my best shot to the exclusion of any other money making plans.
Six weeks will take me through to the start of February next year and I am hoping to spend at least 10 hours a week that will give me 60 hours to play with. What can I hope to achieve in that time?
My primary goal is to create at least 30 lenses and get some traffic. As each of the two lenses I have created so far have taken at least an hour and a half (and are still not complete), I have to get much quicker. Some of these lenses will point at my blog and some will sell affiliate products.
There are Squidoo related activities other than writing lenses I need to get involved with - joining groups, reviewing other lenses in my area, setting up my bio, updating current lenses.
I hope to write at least one post for my blog every three days which over 42 days is 14 posts. Currently it takes me around 30 minutes to write a post so that is another seven hours. I want to get started with article writing and a target of six articles, 1 per week, seems reasonable.
Do I have any monetary goals at the moment? Let’s say I want to sell on average one product per week. If I sell all six in the final week, that is fine, but any fewer than that and I will be a little disappointed.
Squidoo Tags Were Nerfed Ages Ago
So, Squidoo Tags were nerfed, and a long time ago at that. That is extremely disappointing news. I had read that Squidoo Loves Google but I suspect a lot of that was down to the tags pages.
My understanding is that the most popular tag pages used to have a lot of page rank. Adding 40 relevant popular tags to a new lens meant that it was born with 40 high quality backlinks which will no longer be the case. This change happened on Jan 10 2008. The fact that it is listed as a recommended technique in The Secret Cash Machine on Squidoo (copyright 2008) does not give me much confidence in the rest of the ebook.
I am going to continue with Squidoo for now. The new recommended technique for getting lenses listed in google seems to be to link to them from your blog. As I was hoping that Squidoo would provide good links for my blog and reciprocal links are discouraged that isn’t going to work for me. I will need to find another way.
To Start With, I Choose Squidoo
It is time to start. I could spend hours reading and preparing but in the end, only action will make a difference. So, what is the plan? I’m very close to exhausting my initial $300 budget already so I want to look at free or at least very low cost methods of marketing.
I found an interesting thread on the warrior forum when I was looking into Squidoo. It lists a number of free websites that can be used for running a campaign. The sites that appeal to me particularly are Squidoo, the articles directories and perhaps blogger depending on the terms and conditions.
Of these three, Squidoo appeals as they are not anti-affiliate marketing and everything is completely free. They have a high page rank and links from there should be fairly valuable. They also get a lot of traffic although according to Alexa, the amount in the last three months has dropped by almost 20%.
On the other hand, as anyone can use it (and that must attract spammers), surely Google would automatically devalue links. As always, when working with free sites you are making the effort to improve someone else’s property. The site could be gone forever tomorrow. Of course, with your own site if tomorrow Google decide they don’t like you, your site may as well have gone forever anyway!
I decided to buy The Secret Cash Machine on Squidoo. Together with the earlier purchases, unfortunately that blows the budget and means that I won’t be buying any other material until I’ve earned something from this project. The guide was extensive - I will write more about it after I have put the recommendations into practise.
Sensible Shortcuts in Ubuntu
I find the standard shortcuts in Ubuntu fairly useless. They don’t take me to the location they point at in the way that (for example) Windows shortcuts do. Once you have followed a shortcut, you cannot traverse the directory tree as in Windows. If you followed a shortcut to /u/websites/blog and then went to the parent directory, rather than pointing at /u/websites you end up back at the desktop. Not helpful.
There is a way of getting reasonable shortcuts. You need to create a location launcher. First, right click on the desktop which will bring up the menu in figure 1. Select the Type: location and enter a name and a location as in figure 2. Once you have created the launcher, arrange it on the desktop.
You can edit the launcher’s details in a text editor after it has been created. It will be stored in $HOME/Desktop
[Desktop Entry] Version=1.0 Encoding=UTF-8 Name=pages Type=Link Icon[en_GB]=gnome-panel-launcher URL=/u/websites/pages Name[en_GB]=pages Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/gnome-folder.png
A Script for Creating Custom Wordpress Templates
How many wordpress blogs have you created? If you’re an affiliate marketer I bet it is a few. Most of them start the same way by setting up wordpress, then adding a few plugins and then some themes. I use the same plugins and themes on all (three!) blogs so after going through the same steps for a third time I figured I would write a script.
As I didn’t want to write anything too complicated, the script depends on everything being in a particular location. It needs to be run from the same directory as the wordpress tarball and plugins and themes need to be in directories called plugins and themes respectively. Therefore, the directory structure will be:
wp-maker/ wp-maker/plugins wp-maker/themes
When I looked at the files in my directory it looked like this:
$ find wp-maker/ wp-maker/ wp-maker/plugins wp-maker/plugins/wassup.1.6.3.zip wp-maker/plugins/google-sitemap-generator.3.1.0.1.zip wp-maker/plugins/clean-archives-reloaded.zip wp-maker/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack.zip wp-maker/plugins/stats.1.3.5.zip wp-maker/extras.tar.gz wp-maker/themes wp-maker/themes/my-code-blue.tar.gz wp-maker/make-tarball.sh wp-maker/wordpress-2.7.tar.gz $
The script also adds any files in a tarball called extras.tar.gz if present. You can download it here. Note: all code written by me in this blog is licensed under the GNU GPL which is the same license as Wordpress itself. The license states (amongst other things), you are free to use it but I provide no warranty and accept no liability. You can read the license here.
This function extracts files from either zipfiles or tarballs. It isn’t particularly important to understand how it works but if you’re interested, let me know in the comments.
extract_files()
{
SOURCE=$1
if [ ! -e "$SOURCE" ]; then
return 1
elif [ ! -z "`echo $SOURCE | egrep -i '\\.zip$'`" ]; then
unzip $SOURCE
elif [ ! -z "`echo $SOURCE | egrep -i '\\.gz$'`" ]; then
gunzip -c $SOURCE | tar -xvf -
else
echo "Unrecognised filetype: $SOURCE"
fi
}
Set up some useful variables including the list of themes and plugins that are present.
TOP=`pwd` EXTRAS="$TOP/extras.tar.gz" THEME_DIR=$TOP/wordpress/wp-content/themes PLUGIN_DIR=$TOP/wordpress/wp-content/plugins THEMES=`echo $TOP/themes/*.gz $TOP/themes/*.zip` PLUGINS=`echo $TOP/plugins/*.gz $TOP/plugins/*.zip`
WORDPRESS=$1 if [ -z "$WORDPRESS" ]; then WORDPRESS=`echo wordpress*.tar.gz` if [ -z "$WORDPRESS" ]; then echo "Error: unable to find wordpress tarball" exit fi WORDPRESS="$TOP/$WORDPRESS" fi
# Extract files from tarball gunzip -c $WORDPRESS | tar -xvf - if [ -e "$EXTRAS" ]; then gunzip -c $EXTRAS | tar -xvf - fi
cd $TOP/wordpress tar -cvf $TOP/wp-basic.tar * gzip $TOP/wp-basic.tar
# Extract the required themes into the theme directory echo "Info: Extracting themes" cd $THEME_DIR for theme in $THEMES; do extract_files $theme done # Extract the required plugins into the plugin directory echo "Info: Extracting plugins" cd $PLUGIN_DIR rm hello.php for plugin in $PLUGINS; do extract_files $plugin done
# Create the final tarball echo "Info: Creating the tarball" cd $TOP/wordpress find . -name RCS -type d | xargs rm -rf tar -cvf $TOP/wp-starter.tar * gzip $TOP/wp-starter.tar
My extras tarball contains the following shell script called init.sh which creates some handy files.
#!/bin/sh # Create empty files that will be populated by wordpress later touch .htaccess sitemap.xml sitemap.xml.gz chmod 666 .htaccess sitemap.xml sitemap.xml.gz
Webserver Management using SSH
My webserver permits access via ssh or ftp. I like to use ssh and scp for the additional security. I could use a graphical client to transfer my files to and from the webserver but I find the command-line more comfortable. However, the full command to transfer a file to the webserver is not easy to remember.
$ scp me_mysite@long.and.difficult.servername:~/
I create shortcuts to both scp (copy) and ssh (connect to remote server) that mean I only need to enter myscp filename mysite. The shortcut will also echo the password to the screen so I don’t need to remember it. To avoid security problems, I only interact with the webserver in my own home. When I am out and about, I develop using the local server. There is a way of setting up ssh so that you don’t need to enter a password at all and the server validates the client using a shared certificate but so far I have not needed to set this up.
I split my shortcuts and variables into seperate files.
.shell-fns
myscp()
{
FILE=$1
SITE=$2
echo "Password is: $SSH_PASSWORD"
scp $FILE ${SSH_USER}_${SITE}@${SSH_SERVER}:~/
}
myssh()
{
SITE=$1
echo "Password is: $SSH_PASSWORD"
ssh ${SSH_USER}_${SITE}@${SSH_SERVER}
}
Update: I often find I want to transfer multiple files at the same time and it would be useful if I could do this with a single myscp command. I fixed the function to do this, but I’m not particularly happy with the method of extracting the parameters using sed. Perhaps there is a better way.
myscp()
{
FILES=`echo "$@" | sed -e 's/ *\w\w* *$//'`
SITE=`echo "$@" | sed -e 's/.* *\(\w\w*\)$/\1/'`
echo "Password is: $PASSWORD"
scp $FILES ${USER}_${SITE}@${SSH_SERVER}:~/
}
.env
PACKAGES=/u/packages PATH=$HOME/bin:$PACKAGES/bin:$PATH PYTHONPATH=$PACKAGES/lib/python:$PYTHONPATH HISTSIZE=10000 HISTFILESIZE=$HISTSIZE PS1="`whoami`@`hostname` \$ " export PATH PYTHONPATH HISTSIZE HISTFILESIZE SSH_USER=not_my_real_user_name SSH_PASSWORD=not_my_real_password SSH_SERVER=very.long.and.difficult.to.remember.servername
Then add the following to the .bashrc file and it is ready
. $HOME/.env . $HOME/.shell-fns
Apache Setup on Ubuntu
I like to have a copy of my blog hosted on my local computer for two reasons. The first, and most important, is that I can try different configurations of the blog without them being visible to the world. The second is that making changes is more immediate on a local server.
The Apache setup on Ubuntu is quite unusual. To activate a module you need to create a link. And, as mod-rewrite isn’t enabled by default you need to execute the following:
$ cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled $ sudo ln -s ../mods-available/rewrite.load rewrite.load
For each of my local websites there main setting I need is AllowOverride all to allow .htaccess to set various parameters on a directory by directory basis.
Here is a section of my /etc/apache2/httpd.conf:
ServerName localhost <VirtualHost *> Alias /images "/u/websites/images/" <Directory "/u/websites/images/"> Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks AllowOverride all </Directory> Alias /test-blog "/u/websites/blog/test-blog/" <Directory "/u/websites/blog/test-blog/"> Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks AllowOverride all </Directory> Alias /timepoor "/u/websites/blog/timepoor/" <Directory "/u/websites/blog/timepoor/"> Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks AllowOverride all </Directory> </VirtualHost>
Introduction
Welcome to TimePoorBlogger.com. I am interested in making money online. I understand that there isn’t a magic key that once discovered delivers money with no effort expended. However, I have a very common problem - I am not a creative person. By this, I mean I have never independently thought of a way of making money and because of this, I am looking for a system that I can follow.
What differentiates me from all the other people hoping to discover the gold in the internet? I’m a technical person but at this stage I have no experience in affiliate marketing or any of the other typical methods. Another limitation is the small amount of time per week to realise my goals.
This blog will chart my progress from zero income to either zero or infinity and beyond.