Can’t Get Rich

Remember the other day when I said I wanted to write a social networking site in PHP? I think I need to start with something a bit easier, so right now I’m coding a fairly simple app that I’m calling Pagerank At-a-Glance. It’s ridiculously simple, and it won’t make you any money, but it’ll give me some practice with PHP syntax and I plan on releasing it for free when I’m done.

Basically, it’s going to be a program that displays a list of all of your domains with accompanying page rank. It’ll work like this:

• First, you define your database settings, much like you do with Wordpress.
• Then, you run the installation file which creates the database structure and assigns a username and password.
• You log in (can’t have other people seeing all of you domains, right?). There are two options: One takes you to the admin screen, and one takes you straight to the list.
• The admin screen allows you to add and remove sites from the database, and also contains a link to the list.
• The list displays all of your sites with PR badges similar to those found on sites like this.  I’m really not sure how it is that sites and toolbars pull PR scores from Google, but once I figure that out I’ll see if I can add a function to sort highest to lowest.

Why create such a useless app?  Well, like I said, I’ve never written anything in PHP before (other than a page that pulls data from a database and displays it in a table), and I need practice.  Also, I figured that there’s someone out there with a bunch of sites that would like to see all of their PRs on one page.

Now that I’m done with finals, and I’m almost finished moving into my new apartment, I’ll have plenty of time to work on this.  I hope to have it out by the end of next week.

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Hey look!  I have a PR3!

(That’s all, go back to whatever you were doing)

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Ideas haven’t really been flowing for this site recently, but that doesn’t mean my head has been completely empty. I’ve got three new sites that I’ve been working on, and I’m hoping to have all of them up and running within the next few months.

An actual content site

I’ve already put this one online, and right now I’m working on cranking out articles. I’ve picked a subject that I’m fairly knowledgeable about (web hosting control panels), and I’m writing how-to articles for end-users and admins. Right now I’m up to 10 articles, and I’m hoping to hit 50 by the end of August.

Content is everything here. I’m relying on organic traffic 100%, so I’m writing original, unique articles with appropriate screenshots (and for the first time ever, I’m actually using the alt text attribute with images. Maybe that’ll score a few points with Google image search). As usual, I’m using the standard Wordpress sitemap and SEO plugins, paying careful attention to actually using all of the features All-in-One SEO has to offer.

The goal for this site? Get some decent Adsense revenue and then sell it. I still need to consider how to build some decent backlinks though. Right now my only strategy is to go to forums where applicable questions are being asked, write up an article to answer them, and then link to the article on the forum.

Time to learn some PHP

I have an idea for a social networking niche site that is fairly unique and 100% awful. I’m not going to elaborate too much. Suffice it to say that it would appeal to the scum of the Earth (completely legal though). Anyway, I’m way overdue for learning PHP, so I picked up PHP & MySQL for Dummies the other day, and I plan on coding the whole thing myself. Possible time frame = Forever.

Obviously, this one is still in the planning stages. Right now I’m busy designing the database structure and layout of the site, and coding the backend will take me months. I’ve learned something very valuable from the design phase though: Giant erasable whiteboards are awesome. Go buy one.

Goal: The goal is to develop a decent-sized userbase, and eventually to start charging a monthly membership fee. Goals are easy, it’s the execution that’s the hard part. Right now it’s way to early to plan anything specific.

A new blog

3 Bucks for Brendan has inspired me.  Since I seem to be incapable of saving up enough money to take a two-week trip to Japan, I’m going to see if the Internet can pay for the whole thing.  Not sure how I’m going to pull this one off.  Right now I’m thinking that donations $5 or more get a thank-you postcard from me, and donations $50+ can specify a souvenir up to 20% of their donation value that they’d like me to bring back for them.  In addition to that, my thank you page would contain names and backlinks if appropriate (although that might run afoul of Google, effectively killing my site).  I’d also keep a blog where I talk about my attempts to learn the Japanese language, things I plan on doing, and other such topics.  Will the Internet be generous enough to fund my (estimated) $3,000 bill?  We’ll see.

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Everybody else seems to be getting into the eBay niche store business, so I thought I’d give it a shot too.  Lots of failure later, I thought I’d give you guys a few tips to help you avoid the mistakes I made.

First of all

Here’s what I did:  I registered a fairly generic domain with the word ‘auction’ in it and set up Wordpress mu.  I then created twenty blogs, each with a different niche, and setup FeedWordpress on each one.  From there, I created 20 auction feeds through EPN’s feed creator tool, plugged them into FeedWordpress, set it to update every hour, and turned everything on.

Note:  FeedWordpress seems to have some issues with the feed URLs generated by EPN.  I ran each of mine through tinyurl and that seemed to fix the problem.

Anyway, while I was doing this I missed some fairly obvious problems.

Problem 1:  Gigantic Database

I picked some fairly popular niches for some of my stores.  Within three days my Wordpress database had reached half a gig.  Huge database = slow site.  What did I do wrong?  Well, my site was pulling each and every listing from those categories, meaning I had tens of thousands of auctions (with images) in my database.  Oops.

How to fix:  Limit your search results to 50-100 items.  Possible ways to do this include only searching for items that already have bids, minimum price range, etc.

Problem 2:  Not getting indexed

By default, FeedWordpress directs all permalinks to the original post, ie the eBay auction.  This does not bode well for getting indexed.

Solution:  Change this:

Problem 3:  Sitemap is being overwritten each time you add a new blog

An automatically generated sitemap is a very useful thing.  Most blogs use this plugin, which is fine for a single blog.  When you try to use it with Wordpress mu, however, it only creates one sitemap which is overwritten every time a blog updates.

Solution:  Use this plugin.  Someone was nice enough to rewrite the original XML sitemap generator to be compatible with Wordpress mu.  Now every blog gets its own sitemap.  Very handy.

Hope that helps

Now go out and make some autoblogs.  Watch your traffic to see which keywords are bringing you the most results, then create a real niche store for that one product.  Rinse, repeat.

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You know what’s totally awesome? Kittens are totally awesome:

I named them Shade and Leon. They’re little fuzzy balls of pure cocaine, judging by how much they run around my apartment.

Also awesome: I won a contest. There were only six entries, so maybe some of you guys should have entered.

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