TRADE on a WEBMASTER FORUM with SAFETY!
Hi Folks,
one of the major problems that buyers and sellers face when trading on Digital Point, Sitepoint or any other major webmasters forum is that there is no security in place against scammers.
There are literally hundreds of cases where innocent buyers or sellers are scammed out of their money on a daily basis, and in the last 12 months it has reached epidemic proportions.
Well, I THINK I have come up with the solution!
At my new webmasters forum http://web2.0webmasterforum.com I have created an online currency system for traders to use that precludes any scammers from operating!
The way it works is: you buy WEB2.0$ with paypal funds OR you earn them for FREE by posting, inviting new members, voting on polls and much more, then you trade using the WEB2.0$ instead of the paypal, there are no chargebacks using WEB2.0$ (W$) so illegitimate buyers cant just reverse a paypal transaction a few hours later, and scam vendors if reported will be investigated before they can withdraw their W$ back into paypal!
OK - It sounds Good, but what does it cost?
Buying W$ is free. 100% Free. If you buy US$50 worth of W$, you get W$50, so it is traded on a 1:1 ratio. Also, you can earn W$ by posting in our forums, inviting new members and much more (you can check all the different ways you can earn W$ clicking here) so it really is totally free!
You could just start posting today on the forums, then withdraw real money when you have enough to do so, so you can really earn money just for posting on our forums, and not just as a special introductory offer, anyone can earn, anytime!
So - Support your New Webmasters Forum and sign up today!
Make Money on Facebook - 3 EASY STEPS!
We all know that facebook is the hot new internet app and the main barrier that most people have to making money with it is the lack of knowledge as to how it works. Well for all those people that havent got up to speed with the new platform yet, I am writing this SUPER EASY to follow step by step guide to actually making money with the facebook platform.
Before people start reading this guide, I would just like to reinforce my authority on this subject, my various apps have over 250,000 installed users in the last 33 days (since the start of this year) and have netted me a decent four figure sum so far this year.
1) You NEED an application.
You cant make money on facebook without an application. You can go about this in a few different ways, basically its not hard, there are quite a few good guides to setting up a facebook application, and if you have good prior knowledge of php then you can custom code pretty much anything to work in the facebook platform. For those users that are au fait with coding, check out these great guides to setting up your first facebook app: Building Facebook applications or Create a facebook app in 10 minutes. If you DONT have coding knowledge, or if you just want to get started a whole lot quicker, then you can buy turnkey sourcecode for many different popular facebook apps at the site Turnkey Facebook Apps - this will save you time and get you started with a decent app a lot quicker, and would be my recommendation.
2) You NEED Users installed
Your application is worthless without users. Users are the lifeblood of facebook apps, to put it in more general webmastery terms, all you need to do is think of it like this: your facebook app is really just a website, and its users are your surfers. You can have the best possible website in the world but no surfers, it is then worthless in comparison to one that has a thousand unique viewers a day.
The Great thing about facebook though is that user installs are actually a lot cheaper to buy than anyone thinks. There are loads of different facebook specific advertising companies, BUT A WORD OF WARNING: I have seen bad or poor (even downright awful) reviews of EVERY company on this list, so use them at your own discretion.
On the plus side, you can buy traffic (read installed users) for as little as $0.05 per person if you shop around a bit. The list is:
http://www.adblade.com/
http://www.adchap.com/
http://www.appvert.com/
http://www.cpastorm.com/
http://www.cubics.com/
http://www.fbexchange.com/
http://www.rockyou.com/
http://www.socialmedia.com/
http://www.facebook.com/apps/applica…39088&b&ref=pd
http://www.videoegg.com/
Also, as long as your app is viral, then your user numbers should multiply, so for every thousand users you buy you should get another two thousand users over each month that your app is active, at least.
To put these numbers into context lets assume that you have paid $50 for a turnkey app from www.turnkeyfacebookapps.com and $100 on clicks from one of the facebook ad companies above. So far that has cost you $150 and you have an app which by the end of week two will have two or three thousand users installed. Naturally if you can afford to spend say $250 then you would buy an app and $200 worth of clicks and have four or five thousand users installed after two weeks.
3) Cash in on your app
There are two ways to do this, one long tail one short term. As an online entrepreneur I personally prefer cashing in quickly to avoid any uncertainty in the marketplace on the longer term, regardless I will look at both ways of earning money:
Sell your App: simply put, a facebook app is worth far more than the sum of its parts - all you need to do is check the valuations that facebook apps get sold for on www.sitepoint.com/marketplace or forums.digitalpoint.com to realise that facebook apps with active users are worth MORE than the cost of the app plus the cost of the users! This is a REALLY EASY way to cash in and make a few bucks, if you invest $250 then you should be able to turnaround the app for $750 to $1,000 in as little as 10 to 14 days, thats a 300% increase in your money on the short term - which really cant be beaten by ANY other online business I have ever run.
Sell advertising on your App: Using any of the companies that I mentioned above you can SELL clicks on your application. Ofcourse the advertising company take a cut and you wont make hundreds and hundreds of dollars, in the first week like selling your app, but you would expect to recoup the total cost of your app + users in a two to three month timescale, then everything you earn after that is pure profit.
Of the two methods I recommend selling the app, as you can always start another one, after all you already own the source code to do it again, and this time you would have more money to spend on PPC installs. Also you never know whats going to happen in a month on facebook, so by cashing in you are guaranteeing a profit margin.
4) Notes
There are a few extra side issues to think of. 1) you will need hosting, so bear that in mind. Most webmasters already have hosting so I havent looked at that separately (but if you buy your app from www.turnkeyfacebookapps.com you can also buy hosting from them for $10, which seems a good deal to me) . Also, regarding the PPC companies I mentioned, I have seen BAD reviews of each of them, not paying their publishers, not giving good tracking etc. I think that turnkey facebook apps are offering a $25 free clicks deal when you buy an app from them this month, so perhaps that would be a wise way to test the waters before you commit to spending hundreds on a PPC campaign with one of the other companies.
Anyway, so thats my step by step guide to making money off facebook apps, if you have enjoyed this post PLEASE bookmark it using one of the links below, or link to it from your own blog or website, any links or bookmarks would be gratefully received!
Good SEO is priceless - in the right context.
I have been having a discussion with a fellow SEO’er over the last few days about how he should price work for a prospective client.
I personally prefer to work within a clearly defined set of goals, that are measurable and can provide palpable results. He was suggesting that his work for this client should be done based against earnings that the client would generate from his work.
I totally disagreed with him, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is clear that many industries have high potential profits, for example, real estate (as was the actual case in point) - I know people whom have earned literally tens or hundreds of millions of dollars through good SEM (not strictly SEO), but the problem that you will encounter if you are pricing your job based on results is that there are far too many outside factors that are beyond our control as simple search engine optimizers.
Lets take an example: lets imagine SEO guy one provides a real estate office with the worlds best SEO, now their website is getting huge traffic, highly targeted towards buying properties on the Costa Del Sol, but the website is poorly designed - and thats the webdesigners fault, not the SEO professionals responsibility. Lets imagine then that the company has the worlds best converting website, and each hit results in 0.5 calls to the Realtor, well if their sales staff aren’t up to scratch then the traffic is again wasted. Even if the sales staff could close like no others, they might have no inventory to actually sell - as I am illustrating, pricing SEO work in the conventional world against sales results just isn’t an option as there are far too many obstacles between the surfer clicking and making a sale that are outside the remit of a Search Engine Marketer.
That is why my advice to him, and to any other SEO professional is not to get lured in by the promise of big bucks and bright lights (ahhh, those bright lights are sooo pretty though 
) - in the long run you are always better off clearly defining goals, and then delivering the results that you negotiate pre-contract. Examples that I use would be:
1) an increase in measurable inbound links from context sensitive sites (measured using yahoo LD)
2) an increase in total traffic yielded by certain PRE DEFINED keyword combo’s with a specified Google address (ie. google.com or google.co.uk)
3) an improvement in SERPs for certain keywords on specific google sites
4) an overall increase in traffic from all search engines, based on actual statistics for the months leading up to the campaign, above any organic growth.
Essentially, the problem is that Search Engine Optimisation as a product is quite hard to define, and unless you have it clearly mapped out in advance what your tasks are you might end up getting blamed for not providing increased sales, when you have nothing to do with the front of shop sales structure - or in other words - it always makes sense to have your customer understand what it is that you can provide, and charge accordingly.
Anyway, enough of my musings, off to have a beer!
MM
Make Money with Facebook, part II.
Hi Readers!
This is the second time now that I will harp on about facebook applications and how they can be used to make money. In the first installment I looked at how to build a facebook app up and sell it on, which is done quite easily by building a PPC campaign for your app, sitting back and then selling up when you get to 10,000 or so users for a nice healthy profit. (Anybody that DOESNT know where to get a facebook app, try out Turnkey Facebook Apps)
Well, its not the only way to monetise a facebook app, the other easy money route to cashing in on your app is by selling the advertising space on the application itself. The only problem is that the CTR for adsense is about the lowest I have ever seen anywhere, so what to do? Well the best bet is to sell your clicks privately, advantages: you get 100% of the profit, disadvantages: its complicated to control and keep tabs on your earnings, as everything has to be done by hand (and you need coding knowledge to actually do the banner rotation/tracking software). Another thing you could do is to sell your advertising space to a facebook specific advertising company.
I am aware that Turnkey Facebook Apps will be incorporating such a feature in the next few weeks into all apps that they sell, so it might be a good idea to buy one off them and then benefit from the advertising platform as well. I have also heard that each app sale from now on will get $25 in clicks when they launch their platform, so you can even put that against the cost of your app and save money as well.
A decent app with 100,000+ users can earn as much as $4,000 per day, so the money could be rolling in sooner than you think!
Anyway, off again for my calimocho
Costa Del Sol SEO
As is normally the case around this time of year, most people should be taking stock of that this year will have to offer. This is perhaps more important this year on the Costa Del Sol and specifically Marbella than it has been any year since 1989/1990 and most people dont remember that far back, or werent living on the coast back then.
Either way its fairly immaterial as SEO didnt exist back in 1989, but lets study why search engine optimisation on the Costa Del Sol will be important this year.
Well, the coast in my opinion is headed for tough times. The last 10 years particularly the local micro-economy has been boosted by the strong pound, great economy in the UK, Germany and Scandinavia, and relatively weaker local pricing on everything from Jamon to Hotels. Marbella and to a slightly lesser extent the rest of the coast has enjoyed a huge boom, with property prices going from incredibly cheap to fabulously expensive, on a world scale.
Why will SEO be important on the Costa Del Sol in 2008? Well, lets look at the last recession in the UK/Northern Europe. Well when this hit the places that got it worst overall in Europe were conversely the CostaDelSol and Mallorca - as all our money and investment comes from outside the area. We have no industry other than real estate and tourism, there are probably 100,000 empty two bed apartments on the coast right now, and as soon as a recession hits in the UK whats the first thing that goes? Not the family home, but the family HOLIDAY home.
Estate agents throughout the coast will go from making €20,000 per sale to €200 per sale, and the market will become so much more competitive that ANY advantage one agency can make over the other will be greatly magnified.
Why is this important for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in Malaga? Well, its time to start battening down the hatches and developing those property SEO websites now people!
Anyway, off for my calimocho,
MM
How to make money with facebook!
Well, its a new year, happy 2008 everybody!I have been slack on the old blogging for the last week, but I blame it on an overindulgence of mince pies, mulled wine and assorted cold turkey sandwiches.
Now that the whole holiday season is regrettably past us, it would be time to focus on the year ahead and try and replicate the successes of last year, and improve upon them. The first thing that I am looking at this year, is extending my facebook businesses further.
So far I have created/launched/sold 7 apps, and so far I have made around $5,000 in the last three months with facebook - not through selling advertising, but by selling the apps themselves.
Whats the secret? Well, there isnt one really, its just you need to realign your expectations and ambitions when you move from traditional web based marketing to facebook marketing. Fb isnt a platform where you should be happy with 500 u/v per day, you should be totally distraught if you have that level of users. With the way the facebook platform is underdeveloped as far as available apps is concerned, you should be concentrating on having 20,000 per day or higher - it really isnt that hard!
Not everyone can program a facebook app though, it is a new and therefore relatively uncommon skill set, that is why I am writing this blog post, because I have a way round it! Here is the 3 step plan to marketing success with facebook:
1) Buy a turnkey facebook app from Turnkey Facebook Apps
Cost: $29.95 to $59.95
2) Launch the app and buy installs, these can be bought for as little as $0.05 per person. I suggest investing a few hundred dollars in this bit:
Cost $200 to $300
3) Wait a week for the viral marketing to run its course, by now you should have no less than 20,000 users installed, and your app is worth around $1,500 to $2,000.
Thats a NET PROFIT of NEARLY $1500 PER WEEK, PER APPLICATION.
It really is that simple, but what are the drawbacks?
Well, at the moment it is possible, but this system will no doubt only work for a few months, maybe 3 maybe 4 but this new goldrush will undoubtadly close up or be swamped by apps, so for the time being get in, and get in big!
Dont say I never told you!
MM