I’ve been flying solo lately, trying different things - trying to find that “gold mine” on the internet so I can get rich doing what I love to do (code and geeky things like linux). I am, of course, part way there, working at home since 2002 with profits from my first product ListMailPRO, an email list management solution for your site.

For the last 6 months I’ve taken all but a break from ListMailPRO. I did work on it for a week or two, starting some great and long-awaited additions for my clients, and of course kept doing ongoing tech support (~1 hr/day) but neglected further major development.

Now that I’m done “exploring” I’m back, resigning myself to the “grind’ of developing ListMailPRO for all it’s worth. One of my clients once told me to forget about everything else and that ListMailPRO is my gold mine. After where I’ve been lately, I think that person may be right! This is a hot program in a conquerable niche (do-it-yourself opt-in email). My clients are starving, and I am feeling their need. I am re-tripling my efforts on the program to provide many long-promised features (not that I haven’t added a few doozies before!) As long as a flood doesn’t hit look out for a new version within a few weeks.

Of course, I do keep many other projects and will continue to maintain and improve them. I think the hardest part about working online is organizing everything! I’m still intimidated by all the bookmarks I keep. :) This same organization must also be applied to programming. Developing ListMail in 2002 I made a lot of mistakes. Now, I know a lot more and can apply it to everything I do in the future.

Before I get cracking again on ListMailPRO I thought I’d take the opportunity to write in my blog. Here I will summarize everything I’ve worked on for the first half of 2007. Perhaps you will be able to use some of the things I’ve learned for yourself:

FeedFury RSS Feed Directory & Reader
This is one of my boldest efforts yet for web 2.0. FeedFury takes RSS feeds and displays them, updating the content live (>12 feeds per second!) I loved creating this site and I love maintaining it. It continues to bring in decent traffic, over 200,000 hits per month from search engines. With just one AdSense ad on each content page I take between $500-$600 per month. (Note: Super-powerful server cost is ~$250) I’ve added a few more ads now, trying to improve conversion beyond 2% (That’s a 98% loss of potential monetization!). AuctionAds based on category seem to be getting a really good click-thru rate of 2-3% without affecting AdSense clicks at all. AdBrite hasn’t taken off yet, but I’ll try it for a month. I’m staying away from Text Link Ads due to Google starting to crack down on unrelated PR-based link purchases - I don’t want to suffer a search engine penalty. I hover around 300,000 -> 320,000 pages indexed at any time. I create a full sitemap (over 5,000,000 URLs as of now) every 6 hours which Google seems to love - they add the newest content very quickly and seem to prefer it for their live index, which is great because it serves the sites purpose of getting attention to the newest content.

Blog Article Ping Service
With the parallel-processing and server optimization techniques learned through developing and optimizing FeedFury, I went on to create a simple blog ping service similar to the popular Pingomatic.com. I named mine Pingsalot. The service is fairly popular but a vertical wide skyscraper on the right generated an effective CTR of 0.00% with thousands of views. I removed the ad. It looks like if I do decide to place ads again I need to place them between each section, more in front of the user, and maybe add a few link units. It’s important to use all the ad impressions Google allows and work it into your design. I am not sure if I will ever offer the RPC service used by many-a WordPress users and pingomatic, because I can’t monetize it, but it is a consideration for the future.

Proxy Web Sites
These are sites that are created to avoid blocks and “surf anonymously”, routing all of your browsing through a 3rd party server/domain/IP that does not forward your originating IP. Proxy sites are popular in China and Iran where censorship is the norm, and with high-school students and people at work who are evading filters. Due to an ongoing war with filters there is always a HUGE demand for fresh new proxies.

I bought the hype and more - in fact, I created a proxy with 10 mirrors and purchased a bunch of pre-made sites with proven traffic. The proxies did well - I paid about $300 to achieve $5-6/day, plus $50 in advertising. Now most are blocked… plus its summer, when kids are out of school and proxy traffic is known to drop. I’ll know more about the longevity of proxies in a few months. My thoughts now are they are good source of supplemental income. No matter what you do there will always be a few people using your proxy and clicking your ads - whether its kids at school on MySpace or that guy at the office surfing porn. If you’re lucky and if you market properly (ie. over MySpace - I have a cool script that requests ME as a friend if you login to MySpace using my proxy… evil? :P ) you will be picked up by high-schoolers in the US / UK, countries which Google, and most other advertisers, will pay more for per ad click and impression. Traffic will be great, until summer, or when the school IT administrators block your domain(s), at which point traffic drops dramatically. Blocking at schools is more common when the proxy is well-known and a lot of students are using it - growth can be a curse. Nevertheless, I expect to make at least a few extra hundred per year from AdSense and pop-unders (Adversal) on my proxies.

To take over the proxy niche one must register a lot of domains or create an advanced custom proxy solution that is more difficult to detect. You need to keep supplying your visitors with fresh working proxies. (That, or come up with a really catchy domain name) I may expand on my proxy services in the future, but for now I want to keep trying new things and working on my bread-and-butter email list management solution ListMailPRO. :D

Pay Per Click -> Made-For-AdSense
I bought the hype. I purchased videos from AdsenseDecoded to get all the secrets that most people don’t tell you for free, and they were good (really good - I highly recommend them). My effort, not so good. I took a simple WordPress theme, threw it up on a site, and created my very own MFA site. I removed all the unnecessary links and I placed the ads in all the right places. It was basically a single page original article surrounded with ads. I proceeded to purchase some PPC traffic, and completely wasted my money. The site didn’t work. I didn’t achieve 1% CTR let alone the 50% CTR that I thought was possible. The problem, I think, was mostly due to the poor site design. I didn’t have a header logo, and I didn’t use a theme that had any cool faded menu headers, etc. People these days expect graphics. In fact, I would go so far as to say they need graphics and a pleasant design so they are not as likely to identify your ads as ads. I think I could definitely do better with a better site, especially a site with more content, however I do not want to have to write a lot of content.

I kept working on another thing mentioned in AdsenseDecoded and that is buying clicks at $0.01. (Just think, if you can -guarantee- a 2 cent return on a 1 cent click that’s doubling your money - very exciting!) I’m still working on mastering this, but have had little success due to high competition. Even with advanced home-grown keyword tools (utilizing combinatorics, etc) it seems very difficult to get clicks at this rate. I think $0.05 is a better estimate of what the average click will cost these days if you want somewhat reasonable volume - more if you want high volume.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the ideas I come up with… but I need to get back to ListMailPRO and that’s what I’m doing now. :) I will try to update this blog in a month or so with details about my earnings from AuctionAds, AdBrite and ContentLink on FeedFury and my monetization efforts for Pingsalot.

Bye for now,
DW