Make money online
Archive for April, 2008
StockExpert: more money for royalty free images
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
From time to time I need images for my sites or for my clients’ designs. I like using StockExchgange most of the time (a free photos site). Still, sometimes I need a better looking image and I come to stockexpert.com for that image. The good thing is that the images would cost 1 USD, a small price when we think about the hundreds of dollars we can get for a design.
I have been using the site for 1 year I think and was able to get some pretty decent images for 1 USD. All with a nice resolution (just good for web): 800×600 pixels.
Some weeks ago I downloaded one again for a new design and was shocked to see it’s a smaller one. Yes, it’s just 400×300 pixels (half of the ones I was able to get all this time for the same price). I thought I did something wrong, but then, after another download I noticed the increased price.
So, the same image I’d get for 1 USD now comes for 2 USD. 1 dollar for a small image, maybe it’s a tad too much. Or maybe we just have to settle for this till we find something better.
Do you have any ideas? Is there a better service?
Content is King: save yourself from a checkmate
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008I know you got sick and tired of hearing the same thing: “content is king”, but let me tell you ONCE again, you have NO idea how true this is. A good site is important for us because of the GOOD UNIQUE content, because it’s useful and we need all those informational articles in order to be able to understand a topic and gain as much knowledge as possible.
A good content is now one of the most sought for commodities on the web. People pay good money for unique articles, for re-writing (when they can’t hire professionals or are just too cheap to pay for something good, but they still want to fool the search engines into thinking the content is original), translations and many other options.
Most of the bloggers and article writers who create unique articles are already in a huge advantage: they create something original that draws people in and can also bring in revenue from advertising or any other money making plans. And still, I am shocked to see how many such good bloggers are too lax when it comes to protecting their own content.
Even if a unique article is just 5 minutes of work to you, its value is HUGE. Because it’s UNIQUE.
I started creating articles 6 years ago with a Karate site for the Romanian people who were into martial arts. In just weeks I saw my work being copied by others. I got mad and demanded for the duplicated plagiarism to be deleted. It was. Sure, I got some response like “yeah, you’re so mean, why can’t I use the article too?”, but I knew I was right. I am mean indeed, but that unique article that’s too good to be stolen, is also good to bring ME traffic and revenue in time and establish me and my site as an authority.
In some months I started a webmaster project (forums with unique articles) and got even more interested in creating content and also protecting it as much as I could. There are tens of articles I wrote and tried to make them interesting and useful. Sure, I am not a professional writer, but this didn’t stop my visitors from learning something from me and be able to improve their web design skills.
From time to time I still have people who steal content from me or try to scrape my blog articles. My content, even if copied partially, can bring some traffic to them and revenue. They do try to steal our content to make their sites content rich and earn money from our work. I still have to see such content thieves who have NO ads at all on their site (since most try to fool us into thinking they are just good samaritans and wanted their visitors to get more knowledge blah-blah-blah). Sure, with Adsense all over the site and tons of affiliate links. All with my own articles. Cute!
So, maybe it’s time for most of us, (good or bad) content writers, to realize the IMPORTANCE of our content. For our site that would have more visitors, a good image and why not a good revenue and for ourselves too since all our articles do have VALUE. In this case the value is for our site only. We don’t have to pay tens of dollars for an original article, we have it created in few minutes by our talented minds. The others, who can’t create articles are invited to PAY for a unique article and we’d surely provide them with the best article we can create.
But our work is ours and will be used ONLY in our projects. As Google gets more drastic with duplicate content and as the content market grows each day, a good unique article is like a jewel that needs to be protected. Even if some think I am mean, I don’t allow re-publishing. UNDER NO CONDITIONS. I don’t care what site you use, I don’t care how much of my article you are using. You can’t do this.
What can a visitor do if he/she really likes one of my articles? The same I do: I just link to it and write a nice short personal presentation recommending it to my visitors. I do promote that good article and still don’t steal the content another author created.
Maybe it’s a good idea to be “mean” and try protect that king. We don’t want other sites (stealing our content) to get better traffic than we do, we don’t want others to earn money from our work. If it takes you and me 5-10 minutes for an article, this doesn’t mean it’s worthless. It means we might type fast and just have the ideas flow. The fact we don’t spend 5 hours into making an article, doesn’t mean the article has no value. And this value, even if sometimes we fail to understand this, is big enough to attract others to use it for their own profit.
What do you think about this? How important is your own content to you?
Aren’t we socializing a bit too much?
Monday, April 28th, 2008I like to see the “daily blog tips” from time to time, so this morning I was greeted with an article I thought about for quite some time too: Twitter Less, Blog More!
Even if in this case the author has Twitter in mind, I think we can go further and expand this to almost all social networks that exist at this moment. And let me tell you, they are in quite a number.
I read a lot about tips of submitting your content to tens of social media sites, about how to get into the top spots in digg, mybloglog, blogrush, entrecard, sphin, technorati etc. How to add as many friends as possible, how to click on cards, enter “what I am doing now” messages, see how many people follow you, how to follow others, how to vote, click and blink.
Even if all these DO help us to get our content and blogs out there so that other bloggers can see them, we WASTE a lot of time by doing this. In my first days of Entrecard I wasted 3-4 hours a day dropping cards on others, reading and commenting, since I was trying to Get something more from that crappy Entrecard traffic
In all social networking sites in order to have success one needs to spend time and effort. It takes work to get those top results in network that are saturated with people who DO THE SAME as you do. They are all there, adding friends frantically, voting, exchanging hellos and trying to get their own content as high as possible.
Each minute you spend OUTSIDE of your blog, you spend it NOT working on your blog. It’s also true that these networks do bring in traffic and exposure, but it’s also important to balance this promotional effort with the content creation. It would be sad to spend hours a day promoting a content that’s getting less and less valuable, since you can’t spend too much time writing from all the efforts you are making to get the word out.
Maybe it’s a good time to start spending more time reading useful content and preparing our articles, then run to FEW sites that would help us promote, send a link and spend few minutes and then get back to our blog. Maybe this would slow down some of that big less quality traffic many of these sites bring in and it would attract some visitors who would come back to read that good content we spend a lot of time creating. GOOD content will always attract, that’s the secret.
How to attract clients: would you like to drive this?
Sunday, April 27th, 2008Would you like to drive this car? What of you had access to it from the moment you take driving lessons? Would you like to learn how to drive on such a car?
I have a client who is a driving instructor in my city and he taught me how to drive too. He would be our example of the best way to drive clients to your door as a business. He’s done it and maybe we can learn from his experience too, about how to offer our clients something that would make them COME to us and WANT to work with us.
He is a “crazy” guy, he just bought a Peugeot 307 Coupe (135 HP) and he’s using it as a “school car” for the clients who want to learn how to drive a car. And let me tell you: THEY ALL WANT TO DRIVE THIS BABY.
He started with a small car that has no value (as compared to this one). Then he got better cars and he realized that clients are picky and want more and more for their money. 6 months ago, when I took driving lessons he used a Volkswagen Passat car (a great one too) and the reason I chose him (from all the instructors he had there on all kinds of cars) was the fact I’d be able to drive such a nice car.
Sure, in the end I had to learn how to use a car in the city, but I got something more: the chance to “ride” an over 100 horse-power engine on an “almost luxurious car”. It was a blast: a good car is a pleasure to drive.
After some months that “maniac” took his business to an even greater level: got a “jewel” of a car, a coupe that looks amazing and attracts people like a magnet. I drove that “baby” and let me tell you I was in huge ecstasy. Now, he’s not teaching people how to drive (as tens of other similar firms do in my city only), he’s the ONLY one to let his students drive a convertible. Even if the car will have to suffer (it wasn’t new, it cost 13 thousand Euro, just like my new Opel Corsa, 90HP), he’ll be able to make lots of money to cover the car’s “use” and also bring way more clients to his school and secure a good profit.
What did he teach me and all of us now, since you know the story too? That in this business world thinking outside the box and offering something better and different can be the secret to success. Such a “perk” drives people to your door. It brings you recognision (you’re the “crazy” one to offer this and that) and clients who’d kill to work with you.
The only thing is to be able to understand what might make your business special and “push it”.
Learn web design by doing it!
Thursday, April 24th, 2008I own several webmaster related forums (both in English and Romanian) and maybe because I am the admin and have the highest post count people consider me to be something like a “yoda” and direct the questions to me. Of course there are other members who are as good as I am in this and some are way better, but I seem to attract the questions like a huge eye-glasses wearing magnet.
One of the most important questions in many members minds is “How can I learn web design?”.
We have a lot of possible ways to learn this, there are several well known sites with articles and tutorials, there are online books and even those books we don’t read as often as before, the “real” ones with paper pages and that smell of “print” on them. There are many webmaster forums all dealing with the aspects of running a site (that would include web design too), chat rooms and blogs.
And still .. nothing beats the good ole’ practice you can do on your own.
I never would imagine learning web design and knowing what I know now just from reading and discussing. And I am so glad I didn’t waste time with a lot of planning and I just started doing something.
6 years ago I started Karate and wanted to teach the others some of the things I was also learning step by step. This meant working on a Front Page template (back then), then work it on dreamweaver, passing through the “heavy java scripts” time and the flash intros trend, animated gifs and all the jazz. And then I started learning more HTML, some CSS and working with the layers that made it possible to be able to come up with some decent designs in Photoshop.
I was able to modify that site and also learn step by step all about site design, forum management, traffic, SEO, things you can just learn in theory from the books, but you need to experiment.
Reading articles and tutorials is a great thing since you can be informed and solve all kinds of issues, the forums have been one of the best place for me to exchange ideas and ask for help, but nothing beats your own experience and your own work.
Even now, after 6 years, I can’t tell anyone “you learn web design starting from here, and then go there and there”. Web design is something hard to “define”, it’s not a map or a road, where you just see your destination and checkpoints. Web design means a lot of things and can be mastered in different ways by all people. Some people work well with following a tutorial step by step, not changing a pixel, not moving a colour. Others can’t keep themselves from experimenting and always end up with something new. There is no right or wrong in learning web design, there is no “bad way” to achieve beautiful results.
The only thing I was able to advise all my members and soon-to-be-awesome-web-designers was to “start a site” and just do it. Find a topic they love and think about a project. Try to work on that design, see how the layers look bad and try to understand what makes a design beautiful. Slice it and use tables or (even better) divs and see how horrible they look in IE as compared to FF (Internet Explorer and Firefox, for my readers who are not as familiar as I am with these “shortcuts”). Search on Google for tips of browser compatibility and then head to the SEO side. Learn how to bring in traffic, low quality traffic through all kinds of schemes and then that good quality traffic.
I can’t imagine learning web design from the books, I can’t imagine driving my car just from discussing this. Just as I have to learn how drive safely, avoid other cars, keep the car on the road and even park without destroying my wheels, I also have to open Photoshop and work on the layouts, the program I use for coding the layouts and scour the internet for new ideas of CSS effects.
If you wan to have a shot at learning web design, then you’ll just have to start … web designing 
