You might remember way back at the end of Feb/early March, I started a project on RentACoder which subsequently went belly up due to the coder who was good at first turning out to be a bit naff and being unable to follow my instructions. The project went to arbitration and I have finally won and been awarded all my funds back ($500, so not a small amount!).

I’m trying to fathom what lessons I can learn from this. I think I did everything right when choosing the winning coder, but still ended up in a nightmare. What I might do differently next time (if there is a next time) on a project the size of this is set a number of milestones that have to be met in the course of the project. That way I have something to hold the coder to and would be able to cancel the project earlier if any of these deadlines were not met.

Anyway, onwards and upwards…!

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I know, no posts for over a month, very bad indeed! The reason? Well I didn’t actually do much for most of May and I was on holiday for a week too. Towards the end of May and the start of this month, I’ve got the motivation back though and have cracked on with a couple of projects. Offline, I’m still trying to buy a flat too (that’s only been going on since January!), so here’s a quick round-up of what I’ve been up to:

The RentACoder Project
This has gone a bit wrong unfortunately. I thought I had a good coder and he was good to start with but he kept doing things how he thought they should be, not how I specified. I made a mistake in that after the deadline had passed and it wasn’t complete, I should have cancelled the project and got my money back. Anyway, it’s now in arbitration. I’m sick of the project and just want to get my money out. The coder has until tomorrow to deliver or else forfeit. I hope the later will happen. If I end up having to pay for it, I will try and flip it ASAP to cover the costs and maybe a little profit.

New Project - Facebook Application
I bought a Nintendo Wii about a month ago (highly recommended btw!). Some of the games you can play online but your have to swap “Friend Codes” to do so. Anyway, I went on Facebook certain there would be an application already available to do this. And there were a few, but they were all out of date or had errors. So I set about coding up my own…it was a steep learning curve, but I managed to put something together in just over a week. In the week since I made it live, I’ve got over 100 users already which I’m quite pleased with and the feedback about it has been very positive. Of course, I’m now thinking of ways to monetize it!

Reality TV
For those of you who live in the UK, you probably know that the new series of Big Brother starts this week. I’ve been busy setting up a blog and a news aggregator to take full advantage of this and hopefully make some nice cash.

That’s all really - the Facebook app has been the most pleasing of all this as it was quite a challenge even though it hasn’t made me any money yet!

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Well, as you may have gathered, I haven’t had much to blog about recently. In fact, a lot of the blogs I read seem to have gone quiet too except for the recent excitement over the AdSense Secrets alleged scam. The reason I haven’t had anything to blog about is because I haven’t been doing anything particularly new - a lot of my current projects are still work in progress:

The site I’m having done at RentACoder isn’t going particularly well and I’m close to cancelling that.

The site I’m doing for a colleague at work is going very slowly as it’s turned out to be a bigger job than I thought. Turns out that the membership script I bought is appaulingly badly scripted and I’ve had to totally re-write parts of it. Unfortunately this was the lesser of two evils - the other being write the script from scratch myself! Anyway, that is nearly done now, and it’s working quite nicely.

The adult niche site I set up in Feb continues to go from strength to strength with over £275 earned this month. I really can’t believe the success I’m having from this! I’m now trying to rinse & repeat this on another niche to see if I have similar success and, to that end, put a new site live earlier this week.

The niche site giveaway experiment was a success. Certainly a lot of people downloaded the free site and we covered our costs by up-selling the article packs. Next stop on that route is to repeat the formula but try to sell the niche site rather than give it away!

In the offline world, my flat purchase still hasn’t happened and I’m getting more and more frustrated by the day…!

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It’s sometimes funny how an innocuous blog post about one thing can spark off a series of interesting comments about a related topic. Burt’s post about being busy did just that with some interesting comments about peoples’ motivation.

This got me thinking about what makes me come home from a day working in front of a computer…and spend more hours working in front of a computer!

My motivation is three fold:

1. Money - the extra income I earn from the online world enables me to live a more comfortable lifestyle with a few extra luxuries - to indulge in my hobbies (snowboarding & mountain biking) and to buy more gadgets & clothes than I otherwise would be able to.
2. Knowledge - I enjoy learning new things and there’s always something new to learn whether it be PHP, SQL or CSS etc. 
3. Challenge - similar to knowledge, I enjoy figuring out solutions to problems and get satisfaction from getting a site to do exactly what I want it to do.
4. Ego (wasn’t sure what to call this one!) - I get a bit of a kick from creating a site, publishing it on the web and then seeing how popular it becomes. It’s also a sort of culmination of gaining the knowledge and overcoming the challenge which ultimately leading to making some money.

However, sometimes even these aren’t enough, and I do just come home, sit in front of the TV and not even turn the computer on (or just go to the pub!). Remember, for me, this is extra income - I’m not relying on it to pay the bills or to buy my food which I suspect gives you that extra kick if you are full-time self-employed.

That’s just me though - it’s always interesting to hear why other people are doing it and what keeps them going - what are your motivators?

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Well still nothing too exciting to report from me - I’m still going through a period of creating new sites.

The big site I’m having done at RentACoder is coming on nicely but still a couple of weeks from completion.

The tipsters venture is going at a snails pace, largely because my first customer still hasn’t chosen a domain name, although I have been developing the nuts and bolts of the site locally. Off the back of this, I also have a second customer lined up who wants their own tipping site. The idea is to simply offer him the same site with different graphics etc - nice and easy! Both of these will be run on a revenue share basis.

The new site I put up last month has now made over £110 ($220) this month, which has massively exceeded my expectations. When I get some spare time, I’m going to try to find some similar products to repeat this formula on.

Finally, in conjunction with an old online friend, I’ve knocked up a little niche site based around a few unique articles she had written. We are going to give this away to our mailing list for free, with a small up-sell of some extra unique articles on the same topic. Depending on how this is received, we may do a similar thing on some other topics, perhaps changing for the initial site too with a limited number of copies for sale. It’s a bit of an experiment, but also a thank you to our mailing list, so we’ll see how it goes.

Offline, my flat purchase has been delayed again, very frustrating indeed

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Today turned out to be a day of opportunities as I happened upon two new possible projects:

1. I think I mentioned that I work in the betting industry… well my office has a number of people who fancy themselves as “tipsters”. For those of you who don’t know, a tipster is someone who advises what bets to place and how much to stake. Most tipsters charge a monthly fee for access to their tips. One of the guys has been offered a deal to put his tips on an existing tipping site and to be possibly paid for this. I suggested he should set up his own site meaning full control and 100% of the revenues. I then offered my services of course! So we’re going to work on a membership site for him to post his tips, with subscriptions via PayPal. I’ll take a percent of the revenue and I’m also going to suggest I take any affiliate sign-ups to bookmakers. He has a nice niche so I think it could be quite successful with a little promotion. I’ve just been doing some searching for a script and this looks quite good - anyone used it?
2. I got home from work to find an e-mail from an online associate floated the idea of setting up a paid members site - the idea is in its’ infancy but sounds like it could be workable - watch this space for any updates.

The beauty of both these projects if they happen is that they will provide recurring monthly incomes - something none of my current sites do at present with any kind of certainty.

All in all, a promising day. Now I just need to make them happen!

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Apologies for the lack of updates this week; I work in the betting industry and this week it has been the Cheltenham Festival - the biggest week of the year for the industry with predictions of £600m+ in turnover ($1.2bn) across the 4 days - so things have been somewhat busy in the offline world. I’m also in the process of buying a flat so that is taking up any spare time (and money!).

Anyway, on the online front, here’s a quick summary of what’s going on…

• The new site I launched almost a month ago is starting to make money. I was beginning to think it was a dead dog, but it’s suddenly started earning with £55 ($110) made in affiliate sales in the past 4 days. All visitors are from an AdWords campaign with an Avg CPC of 2p. I’ve had 45 clicks costing me 84p ($1.68) so a very nice return so far!
• The site I had an idea for and then comissioned through RentACoder is chugging along and seems to be going ok. Following my Top 10 Tips for Buyers on RentACoder has paid off as I seem to have a decent coder.
• New site - I’ve got an idea for a new site which I hope to finish this week. It’s in a very competetive market and, again, UK focused but I think I have a unique slant on it. The idea is to code a “wizard” type site where users can enter some details and it will choose the right product for them (to buy through an affiliate link of course!). I hope to get this finished by next weekend.

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No posts for a week and then 3 in one day? I know, just like London buses!

Anyway, for some reason, I just remembered an article I read in the Guardian a few weeks back about a guy who has been very successful at building one-way in-bound links using “viral” techniques. It’s an interesting read:

How To Get Online Advertising for Free

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Just over a week ago, I posted about how I’d had an idea and had posted the project on RentACoder (RAC) as I did not have the time (and quite possibly the knowledge!) to do the work myself.

Having used RAC in the past, I thought I’d post my top 10 tips for buyers through from posting your project to choosing a bid for your project:

1. Attach your own specification. And make it detailed. Take your time to think through all the functions and pages you need and write it down. The advantages of doing this are that you should get more accurate bids, it should cut down on your cost rising throughout the project and your project is more likely to be finished on time.
2. Set a maximum bid. There’s no point in attracting bids from coders that you can’t afford, but make it realistic.
3. Set a deadline. Setting a realistic deadline is important as you can then set your coder key milestones within this time-frame to keep the project on target. Setting an unrealistic time-frame will severely reduce the number of bids you receive.
4. Don’t choose any bid posted within 15 mins of your project being approved. Anyone who bids within this time-frame cannot have possibly looked through your spec, thought about it and come up with a realistic bid.
5. Don’t choose anyone who bids but does not send you a message. I find this to be extremely rude and I can’t be sure they have a clue what my project is about.
6. Avoid any bids that send an obvious cut n paste message. Examples of this include details about their company, URLs of sites unrelated to your project they have “worked” on.
7. Don’t use coders who send a message with a poor demonstration of the English language. How are you supposed to communicate accurately throughout the remainder of the project if their English is poor?
8. Avoid bids that are too high/low. Never choose a bid for your maximum amount. I always avoid the stupidly low bids too but this is personal preference as some very good new sellers will bid low in order to get projects to establish themselves on RAC.
9. Don’t choose anyone with no or low rating. Harsh but true. You’re taking a massive gamble if you do (sorry new sellers who are trying to establish themselves).
10. Check feedback. Always check feedback for a buyer before choosing them. In particular check any mediation’s/arbitration’s carefully. Note: you shouldn’t dismiss a buyer because they have been involved in mediation/arbitration but if they have been involved in many, this should set alarm bells ringing!

Using these points I have selected a guy from India for my project who has a 10 rating and posted a bid in the mid-range of the bids I received. He speaks good English and appears to have read and understood all that was required from my spec.

We shall see how things progress - the deadline I set for the buyer is one month…

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Just a quick post to say my second attempt at flipping a site has failed - the auction ended without a single bid I’m going to extend the auction and lower the start price to try and off-load it.

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