RoyalRadande.Com

The folks over at Unique Blog Designs are having a contest to celebrate their 1 year anniversary! These guys have worked with over 200 clients including John Chow, Shoemoney, Zac Johnson, Uber Affiliate, and even Yahoo.

Here’s some more information directly fron UBD:

Enter the UBD 1-Year Anniversary Contest

In celebration of our one-year birthday, we will be running a contest for the remainder of August (until Sunday, August 31st). The contest is open to everyone on Earth! If you are not from Earth, you are responsible for the cost of shipping. So, what are the prizes?

• 1 grand prize winner will win a brand new 8GB Ipod Touch and the soon to be released UBD Citrus Theme for wordpress.
• 3 runner up winners will get the UBD citrus theme.

Entering the contest is extremely easy. Right now, there are two ways to:

1. You simply have to reply to this post with a comment. Only one comment per person will be counted. Commenting on the post gives you 1 contest entry.
2. The second way to gain 5 entry points is to write a blog post about the contest

Altogether, you can get up to 6 entries for your chance to win. So if you’re feeling lucky, enter the UBD 1-Year Anniversary Contest for your chance to win an Ipod and a great wordpress theme.

Other

If you’re looking to make some extra money each month, but don’t really know how, here’s an idea for you: design websites for people and companies who don’t have an online presence. Even if you don’t know how to design websites, you can still make some money every month, if you find some clients. There are thousands of small businesses who do not have websites and will pay a reasonable sum to have one created.

You are going to make money by charging local businesses to have their websites created and outsourcing the job at a lower rate to virtual assistants. The difference in what you’re paid and how much you pay your VA is your profit.

With the use of virtual assistants, you can pretty much find someone to perform any task or project you desire, at the right price. Whether you need a site designed, logo created, or content written, there’s someone out there who’s ready and willing to perform the task.

Find Local Small Businesses

The first thing you want to do is find local businesses that do not have a website. If you just take a look at your local yellow pages, you will find hundreds of potential customers. You could even target businesses that already have websites and upgrade their websites to a more professional looking one. Like I said before, there are many businesses out there that do not have websites. Think about all the small pizza shops, moms who run their businesses from home, the landscaper, carpenter, etc, they are everywhere!

With professional web designers charging $1500 - $5000 to create a site, you can easily charge $600-$1000 with no problem. Of course you won’t charge the same price to everyone, it will depend on the business and how much they can afford.

Outsource the Job

Now that you’ve found a customer, it’s time for you to now create the site. You can get a freelancer to design a site for you for $100-$200 on sites such Elance.com, Rentacoder.com, Guru.com and more. Not long ago, I had a site designed via a freelancer on Elance. The designer did a wonderful job and it only cost me $180. You can probably get the job done for less if you find designers who are new and eager to prove their skills.

Another thing you can do to get a cheap website designed is to create a contest on one of the numerous webmaster forums out there, such as forums.digitalpoint.com, sitepoint.org, designcontest.net, and more. The good thing about starting a design contest is that multiple enter and you get many good quality submissions. Pick your favorite design and declare it the winner.

Even if you were charging $600 per website, and were paying $200 to have it created, you would still net $400 per sale, all without ever spending an a minute on desiging the site. The amount of money you can make is up there. Let’s run some numbers:

As you can see, the numbers add up pretty quickly. The more sites you create, the more money you make. This figure might be higher or lower, you won’t always make a $400 profit. Sometimes you’ll make more and other times you might make less.

Make Extra Money

There are a number of ways to capitalize after you’ve sold the site design. Here are some of them:

1. Hosting - You can get a dedicated server and host each your customer’s websites. $10-$15 per month from multiple clients quickly add up and is a great source of passive income.
2. Content Creation - You can charge to create content for the site.
3. Site Updates - You can become the webmaster of the site and make changes as needed.

This model doesn’t have to be just for web design, you can practically apply it to any job that can be outsourced. The possibilities are endless. Just charge a decent amount and find a cheap virtual assistant. Do you know anyone who is doing anything similar? Have you tried doing this before? I would to hear your thoughts. Leave a comment below. Thanks.

Other

Twitter is a great tool that allows you to post updates and network with people. You can post updates via instant messenger, sms, the twitter site, or from any of the twitter clients that are available. It is a great concept; follow a bunch of people, when ever they update, you get a notification of the update.

How do you twitter?

There are many ways to twitter. You can post updates via sms, twitter’s website, instant messenger, or one of the twitter clients available. My personal favorite is instant messenger.

At first I tried twittering via SMS; it was a great idea until people started updating more often. Getting hundreds of text messages per day gets annoying! My favorite way to twitter is via GTalk. This is great because I get updates as they occur via instant messages. I also use Gtalk on my phone, so when I’m away from my desk, updates are sent directly to the gtalk client on my blackberry.

Twitter Tips and Commands

To start receiving updates, simply send on and you will instantly start receiving updates from the people you follow. To stop receiving updates send off

On - turns on twitter updates

Off - turns off twitter updates

If you’d like to get a person’s last update, simply sent get username (username being the person’s username) So if you wanted to my last update, you’d send get royalradande

Get username - gets the person’s last update

To follow people on twitter, simply use the follow username command. Once you follow someone, you will automatically start receiving updates from that person. For example, to follow me on twitter, send follow royalradande.

To stop following someone and no longer receive their updates, send leave username.

Follow username - follow a person on twitter and receive their updates

Leave username - stop following a person and stop receiving their updates

Other Commands

Stats - shows you statistics about your twitter account. Such as the number of people you follow and are following and also the words you’re tracking.

Track Keyword - when you track something on twitter, you will receive a message when ever an update contains the keyword you’re tracking. You do not need to be following a person to track keywords. So for instance, if I wanted to track my name, Jonathan Radande, I would send track jonathan radande, and when ever anyone using twitter included the words jonathan radande in their messages, I’d get updated.

Similarly, you can stop tracking keywords by sending untrack keyword.

Direct Messaging

Sometimes there’s a need to send direct messages. When you send a direct message, nobody but the person you’re sending it to receive it. You can only send direct messages to people who are currently following you. To send a direct message send D username message. This will send a direct message to the user.

These are all the twitter commands I know. If you know of more commands, feel free to comment.

You can follow me on twitter.

Other twitter

Since its official release, Wordpress 2.5 has already been downloaded 100,000 (as of this writing, it’s only going to increase by the time I finish writing this post). I also downloaded a copy and upgraded this blog to version 2.5. I haven’t really used the new version much, but I can tell you that it looks really nice.

Installing version 2.5 is pretty easy, just make sure you backup your blog before doing so!

Changing Hosts

In addition to upgrading to Wordpress 2.5, I also switched hosting companies. This blog, and some other sites of mine used to be hosted by Westhost. The majority of my sites, including this blog is now hosted over at HostGator . I made the switch to Hostgator for a number of reasons:

• Price - Hosting at Westhost was simply costing me too much; I’m not saying that it was a lot of money (I believe I was paying $12.50 per month), I just think that other hosting companies were offering way more features and services for half the amount. With Hostgator, I’m now on the Baby Croc plan which is costing me $8 per month. I can host unlimited domains, unlimited emails, and unlimited databases. I definitely think it’s worth the move!
• Speed - This is one of the main reasons I’m leaving WestHost. Uploading and downloading data via FTP very slow! Seriously, it takes about 15-20 minutes to upload the entire contents of a wordpress install. With Hostgator, it takes me no more than 6 minutes. On top of the slow transfers, the connection would often break during mid transfer, causing me to start all over or to upload one directory at a time.

Moving the site from Westhost to Hostgator wasn’t hard at all. At first I was worried since I’ve never moved a wordpress installation before, but in the end, it was fairly simple.

The first thing I did was back up the wordpress database. Backing up the database was extremely easy thanks to the detailed instructions provided by the folks at wordpress.org. Once I had the database backed up, I proceeded to back up my entire directory structure. It is important to also backup the directory structure; the wordpress database doesn’t contain any images, themes, or plugins you’ve uploaded.

Once everything was backed up, I created a new mysql database on my hostgator account and also added the domain to my account. When you create the new database, make sure that you update your wp-config.php file to reflect the new mysql database name and connection information (if it changes). Once the database was created, I did an import of the database. Once I did that, I just needed to change the DNS information to point the hostgator name servers instead of westhots’.

So it’s official, I’m running on hostgator servers, and I like it!

BTW, Wordpress 2.5 was downloaded 761 times in the time it took me to write this post. So what are you waiting for, download Wordpress 2.5!

Other hostgator, west host, wordpress

if you’re interested in meeting other internet marketers in your area, I highly suggest that you check out www.meetup.com. I never thought about meeting locals who were trying to make money online until Wes Mahler posted an entry on his blog about a meet up for ppc marketers in the Bay Area.

After reading that post, I decided to see if there were any such meet ups taking place in my area. Sure enough, there is a meeting on March 25. This meet up is all about making money online, although from the looks of previous meetings, many people are interested in making money via ebay.

If you’re in a bigger city, I’m pretty sure that there is a meetup taking place in your area. Check out meetup.com and see if there’s something related to making money online and go out and meet other like-minded people.

This meeting is taking place in the Lehigh Valley on March 25. For more information, visit the Internet Money Strategies Session information page on meetup.com

Online Marketing, Other

Paul of UberAffiliate.com is starting something new on Tuesdays. It’s called Charity Check Tuesday, and I think that it’s a brilliant idea. It’s kind of similar to Shoemoney’s Free Shirt Friday, except you send in a check, and in return, you benefit by getting some link love and a charity also benefits at the end of the month.

For more information, read the post on Charity Check Tuesday

I will definitely take part of this for two reasons:

1. I will get some exposure.
2. The money I send will be put to good use.

Expect a check from me!

Other

I finally got an American Express Card of my own. For the past year, I’ve been a secondary account user under my mother’s Amex card. She recently cancelled her card, which meant that I had to get a card of my own. Thanks for letting me use your card, Mom.

If you’re going to use PPC to make money with affiliate marketing, you’re going to need a great card with rewards and no spending limit. This American Express card offers both. The reward program is great and there’s virtually no spending limit. When you initially get the card, there is technically a spending limit. As you use your card and build your spending/payment history, your available credit gets increased each month.

The last thing you want to do is stop running a profitable PPC campaign simply because you’ve run out available credit. That has happened to me once already and it sucked. To think that I could’ve been making extra money but couldn’t simply because I didn’t have enough credit. It really hurts. Hopefully, with my new Amex in hand, I won’t run into this problem again.

My goal after this card is get the American Express Black Card. I have a long way to go before I get that one. The day that I get that card is the day I’ll be resolute with my affiliate marketing abilities.

It will happen one day. Give me a few years.

Other

First of all, I want to wish everyone a happy and wonderful new year. I hope that you accomplish all of the goals you’ve set for this new year; and remember, at first you don’t succeed pick yourself up and try again.

Secondly, I’d like to apologize for not writing more on this blog. When I first started this blog, I had plans to write as much as I could about affiliate marketing and making money online. I wanted to learn everything I could about affiliate marketing and at the same time, teach others what I knew. Unfortunately things didn’t go as planned. I didn’t blog, I didn’t teach, and I didn’t learn much! Well, I did learn a little but I just didn’t write about it.

2008 is going to be different. I promise.

Once again, Happy New Year!

Other