Quick review of 2007
December 31, 2007
This year marked the first year for me earning a living online. I didn’t earn an extraordinary amount of money and I doubt I would have been able to earn enough if I lived in Australia. Perhaps that is not a bad thing as I did a lot of traveling - Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia and finally China for the last 3 months.
I also invested a bit of money back into my sites by buying some scripts, spending some money on marketing them and buying a couple of nice domains. My biggest launch for the year was Australia Forum. Stand-alone forums are notoriously difficult to start. I ran a couple of competitions (that performed pretty poorly), paid someone to help start new threads and bought a little bit of advertising. In the process I picked up some loyal posters and the site is now running pretty much by itself.
I experimented early in the year making lots of different sites - most of which went no where. I have a better idea now of what will work for me in terms of my interests and how I can make money. In the future I think I will be focusing on city/country travel/living guides. I now believe it is important to get into a vertical (rather than niches) that you have an interest in and is profitable.
I have learnt quite a bit by just focusing on my Beijing Olympic site the past three months. It is really much more effective concentrating all of your effort, especially your marketing efforts on a single website. Of course I keep maintaining all of my other sites, but whenever I seen an opportunity to promote my site, I give it a try - even if it brings in only a handful of new visitors.
So for 2008, other than covering the Beijing Olympics, my aim is to set up a bunch of city/country based travel sites, driven by useful features and user generated content.
Quick new site
December 27, 2007
I have been working on a new site today - Cebu Flights. Cebu is an international gateway to the Philippines - second to Manila. It didn’t take me long to put the site together and I think that it shows that people with zero technical ability can still put an interactive site together.
Domain: I saw this domain listed somewhere that it was on sale for $500. The owner must have let it lapse as I was able to register it from Godaddy for the regular fee.
CMS: Most people will be able see that I am using Wordpress with a free theme.
Content: I wrote a brief introduction. The flight information is coming from FlightStats.com. Flightstats has some great widgets that you can add to your website to show flight details for a specific airport.
Happy holidays!
December 26, 2007
Happy holidays to everyone. I have been working on a post to recap the year but haven’t finished it yet. I have spent the last couple of days with my family. I haven’t been doing much work the past week or so, but will probably get back into this year and also work on a post setting my goals for the year.
It is interesting to note though that this year Christmas Day wasn’t my worst Adsense day for the year.
Back in Melbourne
December 19, 2007
I arrived back in Melbourne yesterday. It is great to be back in warmer weather!
It is amazing how a change in scenery can help increase your motivation. If you don’t have the luxury of being able to change cities every few months, I think it is important to try and change your working location/environment every so often. Whether it is a friend’s place, a library or a coffee shop.
Options for creating your own social network
December 14, 2007
This year really has been about social networks. Blogging, forums, personal webpages, groups and information sharing have all started to merge. Of course Facebook has dominated the space this year, but with privacy concerns becoming an issue, people might start looking for alternatives in the new year.
I would expect lots of niche social networks to start appearing in the coming year. I have some ideas to run my own social network and I have been exploring the different options available.
The first one is Ning. This is a fully hosted solution, that is probably best for the novice or someone just looking to add some social networking functionality to an existing site. You can get access to the code but you need to apply and probably need to show you have experience with PHP. To start making your own money from the site you need to pay certain fees. $19.95 per month to run your own ads, or to remove Ning’s advertisements. $4.95 per month to use your own hostname, instead of using a subdomain of Ning. $7.95 per month to remove the option to remove, “create your own social network”.
As you can see, if you want to make money from it you could be looking at around $33 a month. Since this includes hosting it is a reasonable deal, but then you would need to spend money and time promoting your network and you are going to have limited ownership rights. Ning is basically the blogger for social networks.
Drupal is something which I have played with but not used on a site yet. It seems to have everything, blogs, forums etc, but people still seem to use vbulletin to run the forum. Using bridges is one thing I want to avoid. It has a reasonable number of add-ons but nothing like Joomla.
PhpFox is a MySpace type clone. It is not cheap at $300 and I have read pretty mixed reviews about it on forums. I have never used it, so I can’t really comment.
Vbulletin is forum software, but they are offering more social networking mods like blogs, photo galleries, classifieds and individual user pages. If the forum is going to be the main emphasis of your site, I would go for vbulletin. It is very search engine friendly with the VBSeo module.
I spent yesterday looking at the new components and modules available for Joomla. I was very impressed with what I saw. The community builder component is really the core of their social networking capability. The many other good modules available have some tie in with community builder. I have an idea for a site that would include things like property classifieds, general classifieds, galleries and forums. The new fireboard forum is getting some good reviews and you don’t have to worry about bridges. A good multi-user blogging component is one thing which Joomla lacks.
Ok, my review is a little biased as I am already pretty familiar with Joomla, but in the time I have been away from the Joomla website, I am very impressed with the developer support it is getting. Lots of fantastic new modules. Most of them are free. You don’t have to be a programmer to set up your own site, but you do need to follow instructions and if there is no instructions, well you just need to be someone who likes playing around with this kind of stuff 
Joomlashack also have some very nice new templates that can give your site a professional look.
One more week in Beijing
December 7, 2007
The time has gone incredibly fast here and I will be jetting back to Australia in just over a week. I remember it was just a few weeks ago when I was suffering from the cold and feeling like I couldn’t wait to get back to Australia quick enough.
I haven’t been able to do everything that I had wanted, but I am reasonably happy with the results so far. It could be better, but I think what I have done so far on my Beijing site is a reasonable framework moving into next year.
The other night I couldn’t sleep as I was thinking about the different things I need to do for the website. I decided to start writing down everything I am doing for the website, mostly with regards to marketing ideas and techniques I am implementing. Obviously it is not a good idea to write about it here. I know there are a few competitors lurking out there also looking to cash in on the Olympics!
If the site is successful, I think the ebook could do really well. Everybody loves to read a success story about exactly how someone made money. It could also become a good blue-print for creating a site based around a single event and how to go about marketing it. The goal is also not to spend any money on advertising - just my time.
If the site was really successful, maybe even a publisher might be interested? And if the site does poorly… well let’s not even go there…
Facebook marketing podcast
December 3, 2007
Ed Dale has recorded a great podcast on marketing with Facebook. I had read a couple of blog posts by people saying they weren’t impressed with Facebook’s new PPC offerings. Ed’s podcast sheds some light as to how Internet Marketers might be able to make money from it.
When you have something as popular as Facebook, you really need to learn how you might be able to leverage its popularity. I have some ideas as to how I could promote an ebook I have written.
One thing I didn’t know about was Facebook pages. You can create a page for free to promote your business. Here is one I just started to promote my Beijing Olympic site.
