Kinix - Webmaster tips, ideas, making money online + more

Below are my goals for 2008, I have tried to set attainable goals for a newer blog that hasn’t been around very long. I have a pretty simple philosophy when it comes to making goals and even to making money off my blog. That goal is to get better and get bigger. I have lots of things in store for this blog over the next year and hope to learn a lot along the way.I want to develop this blog into something that’s worth reading, I want to improve my writing skills as well as gain new readership. I have to write interesting things to keep readers coming back. I hope to increase this blogs rating into the top 25,000 technorati ratings by the end of the year. This will take a lot of hard work but I think its possible.Currently I have 6 readers at the time of this post. I hope to have over 150 by the end of the year. If I can get 150 people reading my blog every day that is a great accomplishment for the first year. I plan on staging monthly goals which will be posted each month.

New layout

Get a professionally designed and coded layout. I hope to do this as soon as possible this year and maybe even have something live by the end of this month. It could be before then its hard to say so keep coming back for that, trust me you will like it!

Unique Visitors

I would like to get the unique visitors up from 15 a day to over 200 a day by the end of the year I think this will be possible. I am going to break it into mini goals and try and see what I can do to get more traffic. I have alot of ideas for this and I think 200 by the end of the year is very attainable.

Make more online contacts

While I have some good contacts in place from 2007 I would like to get a lot more in 2008. It would be nice to meet some of the bloggers from my area last year there was a meet and there was 200 + bloggers who attended. Maybe I will attend it this year and see if it brings me any new contacts that might be nice to have

Make Money Online

One of the goals I have set is to make a nice back up income online. This could be though this website or other sites that I plan on starting up through out the course of the year. I hope to make $x,xxx online this year I would be really happy if I could make $xx,xxx online this year but my goal is to make $x,xxx.

Summary

 I have lots of smaller goals along with the bigger ones above. Starting in February I will be posting monthly goals which will give me more of a challenge on meeting my bigger goals month by month. By the end of January I hope to have a new layout up and in-place. As well I hope to have at least 15-20 RSS Readers why not sign up to the feed now?

I started and restarted this blog more then once in 2007.  Currently it stands at 11 posts and 5 comments, which I feel I did not do my best. Everyone has to start somewhere and I believe I have gained great knowledge from making the previous 11 posts. I have also learned from my experiences in 2007 and I hope to apply that knowledge in 2008 starting today January 1st, 2008! Wow that feels weird saying January 1st, 2008.

Last year I would start to write a post or two and put them in the queue to finish later. However I never really got around to finishing them off, or I just wouldn’t have anything to write about. I have several strategies that I hope will improve my posting rate as well as quality. I will describe those ideas in a few weeks time and let you know how they worked for me and maybe you can apply them to your own blog!

Over the next few days I will be making my goals for 2008 and I am looking forward to sharing them with you.

 There is going to be many intersting things in 2008 so keep checking back or better yet subscribe to the rss feed to stay updated!

I thought it would be nice to start something new! I decided I am going to make a post every Friday called the link round up! I want to point out some of the posts I enjoyed in the past week and I feel that some of them need another look. Some may be funny, some may be helpful and others you might think why did he even post this?

 The first post I would recommend is a post Tyler Cruz wrote today, he tells us how much some of the bigger bloggers are charging for advertise and he then compares his own advertising prices its pretty interesting, John Chow is at the top of the list!

John chow wrote a post about  why people are going to be dumping adsense soon, its quite interesting, Google is going to reduce the area that’s click-able on its ads, to find out more information head on over to John’s site and check it out!

Lastly I would like to point out to a decent article on domains written by wrevenue, if you are new to domain’s you should check out this post as it has lots of useful information for people to learn, you can find the article over on Wrevenue!

 Sorry I dont have that big of a list of articles to check out I just decided I was doing this today! Check back next friday for a list with more articles!

I am a big CFL fan and the division semifinals are this week, so I was thinking whats the so different from managing a football team from managing a website? Well there are a lot of similarities let me point a few of them out!

Preparation is key if you do not prepare you are going to get blown out. The more time you put into promoting your blog and making posts the better the end result is going to be. Blogging is not easy, take your time and pretty soon you will have something special.

You can not predict the unpredictable! Anything can happen at any time. You never really know whats going to happen or when. Things are constantly changing and you always have to make adjustments, do not keep doing the same things or you are going to get left behind!

You only get so many chances to make it right, if you don’t do your best to your capabilities every time you get a chance pretty soon you are going to run out of chances and if your competitors make better decisions on their chances they are going to beat you out!

People usually ignore the good things and pick out the bad things. Some times as a blogger people will call you out on a mistake you made and wont let you forget about it just like the media would in a football scenario.

Good posts are bad posts sort of like winning is better then losing, make sure you are putting lots of time into your posts and make sure they are well thought out.

That’s all I can really think of for similarities for now! If you have anything you think is similar please post a comment!

I love to get feedback from my visitors, its usually one of the first things I check when I turn my computer. As soon as it loads up I pop open outlook 2007 and see if there is any new emails on any of my accounts. Feedback makes it all worth while. Here is part of a message I received today:

Thank you for your reply, your web site is great and has really helped me! I will surely be able to win against my friend. He won’t know what’s hit him and I doubt if he will have better ‘ come back ‘ . Unless a physical one ! ha’ ha’ Yours sincerely,

I was pretty excited after I read this message it gave me a good feeling that what  I was doing was making a difference to some people. Feed back just makes it all worth while.

Have you gotten any positive Feedback lately?

I thought it would be a good time to plug the greatest domain name register out there in my opinion. http://namecheap.com Over the last few years I have switched all of my domains over to them, they were cheap only 7.98 with a coupon, however the prices just increased a few weeks ago! They are still cheap and they offer a great service with great support.

 Give me the Namecheap coupon!

Namecheap’s coupon for this month is GOBBLEGOBBLE Feel free to check out their service!

I have sat quiet and just took it all in as blogs were going off the wall with posts complaining about PageRank’s going down. Only one of my websites has gone down and the rest have gone up. This site has went to a PR 1 from a PR 0. However this website used to be a PR 3 a few years ago. I guess its my fault in part 2 years in inactivity will do that to a site!

The majority of the sites that lost their high page rank deserved to, however some of the sites that went from 5 to 4 or 4 to 3 didn’t really deserve it. It really makes me wonder what Google is basing the penalties on. Some sites do not even link to other sites but then again just a mention or a link in a blog post could be enough.

 A lot of people make a good living by selling links just for their PR. Google is screwing over a lot of people here and its not very nice. PR is pretty valuable in the web scene and Google will only be screwing them selves over if they don’t get their act together.

 Page rank didn’t really effect me to much I had one unhappy advertiser but that was taken care of quickly. How has the PageRank update effected you?

Some of my readers already know that I used to make modifications for the popular forum software phpBB. However as everyone expected phpbb 3 to be out over 3 years ago I stopped developing for phpbb and deleted all the mods I did make as I no longer wanted to support them. If you look at phpbb3, its currently in RC7 and has been in development for years.

Such a successive project like phpBB would make you think there must be a way to pay someone to develop the software full time. They have a very popular website, in-fact it is ranked the  2,476th Top site in the world by alexa.com. Surely a popular site as this one could find a way to make money when John Chows website which is ranked at 2,439 is making up-to $20,000 online a month which could pay many developers for the forum software.

10 Things phpbb should do to make the most money off their website and pay some developers to speed things up:

I see many people making websites and trying to make money off them because other people did. The market is so saturated for some keywords now. Such as proxies and myspace sites, sure its debatable that you can still make money off these websites but you need something unique that not other site is already offering or else you just are not going to make it.

There are so many proxy and myspace sites as well as tutorial index sites now. While the main ones stick out from the rest its hard to believe how low some people will go to make money off their site. example: pop under ads etc. If you truly want to make money online you should make a site that is unique and update it frequently and you should be making money off it in no time.

When I say make a unique site don’t make something like vaselinefansite.com because that’s going to get you nowhere. There is no interest in it, if you think there wont be any interest in your site or you don’t think you can make money off it, if your intention is to make money off it, then simply don’t do it!

With out further rambling here is the top 10 kinds of websites not to make if your intention is to make money off them.

1.  Myspace resource site, there is to many of these already!
2. Tutorial Index, unless you have something unique to offer your not going to beat the big guys
3. Personal Blog, Unless you are someone famous ie john chow and write interesting stuff no one is going to read it.
4. Digg clones, people will hate you!
5. Joke sites, these are beaten to death, you might as will light your money on fire if you make one of these.
6. Dating sites, who is going to visit your little dating site when there like 25 out there already.
7. A site about making money online, unless you are making serious money online you shouldn’t make a site about making money online what do you have to offer?
8. Made for adsense sites, sometimes you can make good money with these sites, but they are totally useless and just piss people off. If you can get a good keyword domain go for it.
9. Image host - Your not going to make big money online making a Image host, its pretty hard to beat out the top guns on this one.
10. Webhosting - Unless you know someone already in the biz its hard to get into. There are so many great hosts out there such as http://bluehost.com

That’s it for my top 10 list of sites not to make if you plan to make money off them! If you agree or disagree leave a comment and let me know!

I was reading a blog tonight and the blogger said he had lost his data due to host issues, I will continue on with this a bit below but first I just want to say that I have lost important data in the past from not backing up data. One perfect example is this site when it used to be a fairly popular forum. The hosting expired and I couldn’t get the database but still had the domain. It was pretty rough knowing what I had and all the work I had put into it was gone down the drain.

Alex Mould says in his blog that he had problems with his host over charging him and the suspended his account all together, and he can not back up his site as he doesn’t not have access. If he had taken the time to make a daily or even a  weekly back up he wouldn’t be in this situation right now.

I think the point I am trying to make here is always back up your data you never know when someone or something is going to throw a curveball from the middle of nowhere. It has happened to me in the past and I will never let it happen to me again!

If you are a wordpress user all you have to do to back up your information is select the mange tab in the wordpress admin then click export and export it and you will have all your data ready to go in-case you ever need it. I would also recommend using a ftp program to back up the wordpress files so you have everything ready to go. Even if you only update the wordpress files when a newer version comes out and just do regular exports you will be able to restore your wordpress with ease if anything ever happens!