Making Money Online : Myth or Fact?

Most people seem to be of the opinion that making money online is only for those lazy people that want to play World of Warcraft all day whilst their google ads are feeding their addiction. Well, it’s not that easy but it can be done.

In my previous article about making money online I discussed how so called experts of the “online money making” business become rich in the first place. But never mind those people, lets focus on the topic at hand.

Recently I’ve read this success story about someone earning $15,000 a month from adsense. Sounds unbelievable ? Well, at first it does you’re right but then there comes the explanation.

Here’s how this guy did it.

Step 1
Spend lots of time gathering keyword usage data from month to month. Grab a set of keywords use the Google Keywords Suggestion page to see how much people are searching for those keywords and record their trends from month to month.

Step 2
Forget the most common and obvious keywords that everyone targets and focus your energy on long tail keywords and yes…spelling mistakes. You won’t believe the amount of spelling mistakes people make when searching.

Step 3
Find a domain with your main keyword in it.

Step 4
Create a blog about it.

Too easy huh ? Well here’s the hard parts.

Step 5
Pay writers $8 per article to fill your blog with useful, original content. This guy spends $1000 in articles for his blogs.

Step 6
Find out potential competitors and other relates websites, contact the administrator for a link. This guy even goes as far as finding the domain registrant details and cold-calls them.

Step 7
Optimize your blog to revolve around your keywords and submit your sites to as many social networking sites as you possibly can.

Step 8
Repeat the above for 40 times. Yes, that’s right, he makes $15,000 spread over 40 websites and blogs and spends most of this living time updating them to keep them fresh.

Does making money online still sound easy to you ?… yeah..me neither.

10 Secrets of an IT Career

Having a career in IT can be nice but…

10. The Wage
The pay is often good but many companies think they own you! Up until the day you hand in your resignation letter and slap them smack in the forehead with a nice, tasty, reality-check.

9. The Scapegoat
Who’s fault is it when users make idiotic errors? Yours for not explaining well!

8. The Personal IT Butler
Your co-workers invite you over for dinner. Sweet huh? Then mid-dinner the topic of discussion suddenly morphs to computers and how he’s hating his PC lately for giving him trouble. Next thing you know you’re eating dessert off the computer tower while cleaning his Windows XP from the pesky spyware that got lose while he was watching his “favorite” websites.

7. The Zero
Guess who’s a hero when you do your job flawlessly everyday? You are! Now, guess who’s a zero when you mess up that one time?

6. The Babysitter
You will spend more time babysitting archaic technologies and fix obsolete hardware than implementing new stuff.

5. The Boss
You will spend more time explaining your technical actions to your 50 year old,commodore 64 loving boss, then to actually build a whole networking infrastructure.

4. The Thank You
It’s funny how when you do something good, a nice Email steps into your inbox from your superiors thanking the IT department for their collective effort, but when you screw up something…That's NEVER a collective effort is it?

3. The Idiots
You will always find the nice friendly fella’ that because he just got a $400 cell phone is suddenly transformed into this IT Guru and interrupts you mid-sentence to continue your explanations (thinking he knows anything) only to discover he just fell flat on his face with his stupidity.

2. The Budget
There is never any budget for IT but there’s definitely enough money for your superior to fund his “personal assistant’s” trip to some random town where that really cool expo is happening ;)

1. The Nights
Finally, your day is over…or is it ? The Email server broke down and you’re sitting there writing a Text Message to your wife, telling her not to cook, while your co-workers have a smile on their face from ear to ear waving at you and saying “see you tomorrow”. The sun rises, quite quickly I might add, and the first funny-guy comes in and says...”wow, you’re in early”.

You then fade away into a slow, uncomfortable mental sleep mumbling to yourself “I was here all night fixing this crap so you can come in the morning and spend your first hour chatting and making coffee”

Till next time :)

3 Tricks To Speed-Up Firefox 3

Firefox 3 is undoubtedly a great browser however with a few tricks we can speed it up a lot  more.

Trick 1 – Pipelining

Usually Firefox is very gentle with web servers. It waits for a response before sending in another request. Pipelining is basically the opposite. You’re instructing Firefox to not wait and instead do more requests at once. (Consider this as the browser is multi-tasking). To achieve this do the following :

In the address bar type “about:config” (without the quotes). Set the values of “network.http.pipelining” and “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “True” and set the value of
“double-clicknetwork.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to “8”

Note: Some servers don’t support pipelining. Reverse the procedure if you have any problems.

Trick 2 – Fast Rendering

Firefox waits a certain amount of time after it starts downloading a website before it shows you what it downloaded (thus making you wait longer to start seeing something). This is called “Content Notify Interval”.

Type “about:config”, right click somewhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type “content.notify.interval” as your preference name, click OK, input “500000” and click OK again.

After you’ve done the above, right click the window again and select New > Boolean. Create a value called “content.notify.ontimer” and set it to “True”.

Trick 3 – Faster Loading

If you do not use Firefox while it’s loading a page, the page loads faster. Yes, it wasn’t your impression, it really does that. It’s called “Content Switch Threshold”. After 0.75 Seconds, Firefox goes into a low frequency interrupt mode and which makes the interface less responsive but dedicates more resources to page loading.

To fix this do the following. Type “about:config”, right click in the window and select New > Integer. Type “content.switch.threshold“ and click OK, input “250000” and click OK to do the trick.

That’s it! Enjoy a faster Firefox :)

A Developer’s 8 Best Friends

Often, a very common question on web design forums pops up by developers. “Can someone help me facelift my application?” or “Can someone help me with graphics?”. Well, many times they either get the cold shoulder, or are given the half-assed answer- LEARN. Oh, and occasionaly the “How much are you willing to pay?” too.

Since a developer’s area of expertise (and rightfully so) is exactly that…developing, many lack the design skills to create something that looks decent. It’s a pity because there are so many excellent devs out there that create amazing applications yet they struggle to make it look presentable. In this post, I’m going to list a few tools/generators that not only will make you present your web-apps better but will also save you lots of time in “modifying” that button found on Google images *Wink*

1. Logo Creator - http://creatr.cc/creatr
2. Buttonator - http://www.buttonator.com
3. Form Style Generator - http://www.formstylegenerator.com
4. Menu Maker - http://www.izzymenu.com
5. RoundedCornr - http://www.roundedcornr.com
6. Color Scheme Designer - http://colorschemedesigner.com
7. Image Reflection Maker - http://www.reflectionmaker.com
8. Menu Tabs Generator - http://www.tabsgenerator.com