Thanks to @brainopera for this tip.

The New York Times has an interesting post on YouTuber’s making money from their videos.

While most people are just happy to watch videos on YouTube, some have embraced the medium to carve out successful niches, earning six figure incomes from their endeavors. Take Michael Buckley; who quit his day job in September and now concentrates his efforts on his YouTube WhatTheBuckShow. Moving from a public access channel, Buckley’s show has had 100 million views on YouTube.

Like others, he has become a YouTube ‘partner’. A spokesmen said there are hundreds of YouTube partners making thousands of dollars a month. Buckley himself is making over $100,000 per year from his show.

Another YouTuber cashing in is Cory Williams, known as smpfilms on YouTube, has had one of his videos viewed more than 15 million times. Williams, who has 180,000 subscribers to his videos is earning between $17,000 to $20,000 per month.

What is particularly interesting in his case is the fact that he earns half of his income from YouTube advertisements, with the other half coming from sponsorship and product placements within his videos.

Product placements are traditionally a feature of movies and television shows; have you ever noticed Apple computers in movies and television shows?

Go and take a look at what these two are doing and see if you get inspired to create your own channel and be on your way to online fame and fortune.

As usual (for me anyway), the upgrade was a painless process. It was actually quicker than the last one I did a few weeks ago.

The first thing you will notice is the completely new interface. The developers have spent a lot of time listening and have made usability improvements in every area.

Dashboard

When you login, you are greeted by a completely new Dashboard. In the upper right corner of the screen is a ‘Screen Options. button that allows you to select the options to display in your dashboard by checking or unchecking the various modules.

Another cool feature is the ability to move the items in your dashboard into different positions that suit your workflow. It is a simple matter of grabbing the top of each modules window and dragging it to your position of choice. Now you have complete control of the features you want and the location of them on your screen.

Vertical Menus

One of the most prominent new features is the inclusion of vertical menus. This is a great improvement, as navigation is greatly simplified, with each section using Ajax to display a list of options for you to click.

This provides a major speed improvement, as it means you have far less screen loads to get to the section you want to edit. As an example, the Appearance menu option already has the current theme listed, making it possible to go directly to the theme options in one click.

Top level navigation items are Media, Links, Pages, Comments, Appearance, Plugins, USers, Tools and Settings. If you prefer not to have the vertical menu taking up valuable screen space, you have the otpion to minimise it to the side. Mousing over each icon provides the menu item subset. A very nice feature.

Plugins

Plugin management just got a whole lot better, with the ability to search for plugins directly from the dashboard. Do a search for a specific term, such as twitter and you get a rated list of the available plugins from the WordPress plugin repository.

Installation can now be done directly from the dashboard; you no longer have to FTP your plugin files to the server. This is another great improvement for those new to the technology.

Likewise, future upgrades of WordPress itself can be done in the same manner, so no more uploading and overwriting files.

Threaded Comments

Threaded comments is a welcome addition to the core functionality of WordPress. Many blogs already have the feature via plugins and services such as Disqus. I personally use Disqus on another blog, so this will give me a chance to compare that over the inbuilt system.

Sticky Posts

Another little feature that people have been requesting for a long time, is the ability to make a post ’sticky’, i.e. keep it on the home page no matter how old it is. Making a post ’sticky’ is just a matter of checking the box.

Take a look at the video below and then go ahead and try it yourself. As with all things though, be sure to make backups, just in case you have some problems…..

You may have been stumbling your way around the Web looking for ways you can make money, while staying at home, but are totally confused by all the offers available. There are so many options, that without some guidance, it can be very daunting to get started.

You are also probably thinking that it would be good to get some advice on what to try, or at the least you are searching for some idea to get you pointed in the right direction.

This is the first in a series, where, I will provide a list and review of the various programs, systems and niches that are available so that you will have a better idea of where to begin.

Where To Begin

As I have stated above, it can be very daunting knowing where to begin. With this in mind, I have compiled a list of some of the hottest jobs you can do at home, while keeping your setup costs to a minimum.

As this site’s focus, is on creating online wealth, for this series, I am going to concentrate on working online, more specifically, building your own online business. Working online really does present the easiest and quickest way to wealth.

I am sure you have heard the stories of people making untold wealth online and wishing that you could do the same. Well the truth is, you can and very easily, if you do it correctly. If you think that it can’t possibly be that simple, you’d be wrong. It actually can be very simple and you don’t have to be a computer expert to be able to do it.

There are many individuals who have already become multi-millionaires from doing business on the Internet. There are more still who are just starting out and while not millionaires yet, are making stable incomes online, allowing them to have given up their day jobs and work from home.

You may think that all this talk of untold easy wealth is nothing more than hype; surely it can’t be that easy? Well it can be, if you follow the right techniques and/or programs.

I have searched the Web to find the best information to get you started on your own path to having your own real at home job and so, without further ado, I will show you a simple system to get you started.

The Home Cash Course

The Home Cash Course is a system is designed more for the total newcomer, than the experienced Web marketer. Saying that, if you are experienced and want an automated system that you can apply your own expertise to, than this system is still a valuable tool for you to use and increase your online wealth, as many satisfied users are doing today.

What the Home Cash Course gives you is a complete system, Website, training and tools for getting you started as quickly as possible and on your way to earning. Below is a list of some of the things you get in this product:

• Instant access.
• A stack of training material.
• Award winning members area.
• Bonus material.
• A well designed, Website.
• Resources for growing your business.
• A simple system that is easy to use.
• Tons more…
• Money back guarantee.

The money back guarantee is brilliant with this package, not that you are likely to want to use it, but if you get it and for whatever reason do not use it, there is a huge 8 week money back guarantee, so you really can’t lose.

You can get started straight away, with your own ready-to-go business-in-a-box that includes your very own money making website and step-by-step training materials. The good thing about this product for the total newcomer to Internet marketing is that you don’t have to have any technical knowledge, as everything is provided, literally ready to use, so you can get started straight away.

The training materials have been specifically designed to help beginners and advanced marketing professionals alike. They are so straightforward and effective that a large percentage of our members have been setup in as little as 10 minutes and have started earning profits in the next 30!. Now that is hard to beat.

It is as simple as the 3 steps in the image below.

Click her to find out more if you are serious about a real at home job and get started today.

There are various options that you can freely use, but I had some specific requirements that most of them didn’t meet, thus limiting the choices.

Requirements

I had some fairly simple requirements that had to be met.

• It must easily integrate with the blog.
• It must be able to format the email in HTML.
• It must have autoresponder functionality.
• Users must be able to subscribe directly from the blog.
• User data can be exported for use in external programs, such as in CSV format for Excel.
• The ability to direct to specific landing pages.
• Confirmation email.
• The ability to customize the email layout.
• The ability to broadcast to multiple users.
• There should be some reporting functionality with various statistics and information.
• Reliable email delivery.
• Minimal impact on website.
• Preferably free.

These requirements are by no means exhaustive, but they are fairly essential for effective email marketing. Armed with this list, I went searching for available tools that could meet these requirements.

I can say that I was surprised by the lack of options in this market. After much searching, I came up with the following options:

• shiftthis WordPress plugin. – looks reasonable, but costs $30 to purchase.
• cforms II – quite easy to integrate, but lacks functionailty.
• PHPList Form WordPress Integration plugin – meets many of the requirements, but requires installation and management of separate application.
• Zookoda – meets nearly all of the requirements.
• Aweber – The best of the lot by a far way, but is not free.

Out of the above selection, I chose to use Zookoda, primarily because it met most of the requirements while also being free. Zookoda has many good features, but it appears to be quite neglected since IZEA (PayPerPost) purchased it in April 2007 and does not seem to have had any development since the last time I tried it.

TechCrunch even forecast it going to the deadpool in December 2007, after IZEA suspended the service due to what it called excessive spamming.

The service is functioning again at the moment, but it does appear to be heavily neglected, and slightly old now, which is a pity, as it could be a very valuable service in IZEA’s collection.

Because of this neglect, and the increased features offered, I will probably switch to Aweber at some stage in the future, as it does provide the most complete solution.

I first heard of Brian Campbell on John Chow’s blog. If you are not familiar with John Chow’s blog, he basically writes posts about products or services that generate affiliate income for him.

At the end of April, John had a post on a guy by the name of Brian Campbell who was going to demonstrate how to make $10,000 in 37 days on Facebook.

I read the post and immediately thought, ‘ok, here we go again, some guy is going to suck a bunch of people in to the trap and then hit them with the sales pitch’. As it turns out. I was not too far off.

To condense Brian’s strategy, essentially he searches for appropriate people on Facebook, i.e. people who have an interest in marketing, entrepreneurialism and any associated area with making money online. He then proceeds to add at least 500 of these people as friends and create a Facebook group with these friends as members.

He repeats this process, creating more groups and inviting more people to join them, while promoting his Website, product and seminar series to each group and continually updating his status to increase his profile in each ‘friends’ Facebook feed.

Once his friends list is large enough, he creates and mailing list (not in Facebook) and sends direct email marketing to the list.

Brian explains all of the details on how to achieve all of this in a series of MP3’s and videos. If you are not familiar with this type of marketing (it has been around for years in the form of all those get rich quick books), there is some useful information in Brian’s videos.

I briefly skimmed them, as the general premise and concepts were nothing new to me. I actually thought that if he had a slicker presentation, his scam strategy would be far more effective.

When you get to the end of Brian’s videos, you find out the secret to making money from Facebook; you need to have a product or service to sell; the more expensive the better.

You need to pick very popular niches, with minimal competition. Easier said then done, but don’t fear, here is where Brian makes his money. For an upfront fee of $47 and then a monthly fee between $27 – $297, depending on the package you have chosen, Brian will show you how to do this.

When Brian fist announced this ‘money making scheme’ he said he would show everyone how he did it for free and to some degree he has, but, in reality, he hasn’t. There is nothing illegal with what he is doing, it is just a typical example of taking advantage of people’s susceptibility to be taken in by the prospect of easy riches. Don’t buy into, you would be better off saving your money.

Oh yeah, just to make sure there is no ambiguity, that’s not me in the image…..

Many of you reading this have probably heard of Twitter, but have you may not have taken the time to engage with it, or may have only taken a passing interest and thought, what is the point?

I was like that, thinking, this is just another application that is going to take up time and keep me away from doing more important things.

recently however, I have decided t investigate it a little more and found it to be a great networking tool.

What is Twitter?

If you are unfamiliar with Twitter, or have heard of it, but not had the time or inclination to take a look, I’ll explain what it is.

The best way to think of Twitter is as text messaging for the Web. Below is the Wikipedia description:

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter web site, via the Twitter web site, short message service (SMS), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook.”

Personally, I prefer to use the Adobe Air application Twhirl for Twitter.

Still confused and wondering how this can be of benefit to you?

Why Bother?

Aside from just being able to send text messages of what you are presently doing, eating, reading, seeing, etc, you can also post links tp posts you have made, pics, videos, or any content that you would like to share. Don’t be concerned about the length of the URL, as tinyurl takes care of that.

The really cool thing about Twitter is that you can follow the ‘tweets’ of other people and likewise, people can follow you. For example, you may want to follow all the ‘A-list’ bloggers in your niche. The good thing is, that many of these ‘A-list’ bloggers will reciprocate by following you. You can also see who is following other people, and choose to follow them as well, thus increasing your circle of influence.

You may have emailed some of the ‘A-list’ bloggers in the past and never had a response. That is to be expected, they can receive hundreds of emails a day and simply do not have the time to respond.

On Twitter however, the response is as simple as a quick text message. You may find that Robert Scoble has written a tweet that you just have to respond to; you write your response and may well find that he finds your tweet interesting enough to reply.

Twitter also has direct messaging capabilities for friends who are following each other.

So use Twitter to build a profile and following on Twitter which can greatly enhance your reach and exposure to a wider audience and network of people.

You can start by adding me here: http://twitter.com/RossMaguire

Happy tweeting.

John has a go at Vic from BloggerUnleashed when he ranted about the purchase of OneMansGoal.com. If you are not familiar, Marc Galeazzi bought OneMansGoal from Bryan Clark for $10,500, which Vic seemed to find pretty funny. I have never visited either BloggerUnleashed or OneMansGoal.com before now, so in fairness to both, I will read both sites a little more before passing judgement. What I will say though, regarding Vic’s take on the matter, is that I found his post nearly unintelligible. We all make typos in our posts, but Vic’s is laden with them, possibly because it was written in a state of rage, or possibly because that is the normal quality of his writing. As I said, I need to read the site a little more before I can pass judgment.

JohnCow has written a follow-up post of sorts, where he has a go at Garry Conn and his post on the subject. Once again, Garry’s site is one I had not visited before today, but based on what he has written there, I have to say that if what he reports here is accurate, then I totally agree with his sentiment. Based on his post, the sale of www.blogrepreneur.com does seem like a total scam. the misrepresentation of the site stats is atrocious and as far as I am concerned indefensible.

In defense of JohnCow, he has built a pretty successful MMO blog in pretty quick time. Also worth nothing is that his blog is for sale. You could interpret that he has a vested interest in allaying fears about the MMO bubble bursting, as well as stamping out any negative articles on blog flipping and people paying too much for a reasonably new blog, especially in the MMO niche. I am not suggesting that JohnCow’s stats are manipulated in any way. I would be very surprised if they were, so I do not have an issue with him selling or marketing his site.

Caveat Emptor

One point that seems lost in all of this is that at the end of the day, the buyer or blog reader needs to use due diligence in any purchase they are considering as well as with what they are reading.

In the case of a blog purchase, there are several ways you can check the stats of a site to determine if they are as good as the seller is representing them to be. I use pMetrics for my own site stats and it provides me with a much more accurate representation of traffic then the outdated Awstats. You can read my review of pMetrics here.

Obviously you have a right to expect that you will not be ripped off and in the case of the sale of www.blogrepreneur.com, that would seem to be what has happened, but you also have to do your homework.

Likewise, with the fodder you are being fed by some MMO bloggers; you should use due diligence to determine if the information you are reading is transparent, valid and useful.

MMO Bloggers Need To Make Money

Many bloggers derive an income (some even a living) from blogging. Obviously, if the blog is in the MMO niche, there is a fair chance that the blog is being used to make money for the blogger; there is nothing wrong with that, I do it myself, so you cannot harshly judge a blog just because it uses advertising or affiliate marketing to monetize the site. You need to be aware of this though when reading a blog and for certain blogs, you should be very skeptical about the products being recommended.

Looking through some rose colored glasses, I would like to think that the majority of MMO blogs do really believe that the products they recommend are useful and add value. There are others however, who simply promote whatever gives them the most value at the expense of the unsuspecting reader. This is no different from any other business, there are ethical businesses and others who are less so. As a blog reader, you need to decide whether you are receiving value or jut being fed a line from a slick salesman.

What is unusual about this post is that although I hadn’t previously checked how much traffic it was bringing in, it had never been near the top of the stats, so hadn’t jumped out at me as an effective post. Sure, the day I posted it, it received a quick spike in traffic, but after that, nothing major.

Now though, that one post has brought in somewhere around 30,000 new visitors to the site in the last three weeks and is regularly rating as the top post on most days. Even better, each visitor is averaging 4 page views per visit.

The story itself is not that good, I have, and do post much better content. When I wrote this particular post I set out with the intention of generating a lot of traffic and while the content may have been simple, it took some time to put it all together.

What’s The Story

So what caused this sudden boost in traffic for this ‘old’ post?

Several factors came together at the same time, but the primary one is that I redesigned my theme. The new theme seems to generate a lot more Google search traffic. So it would seem that with the previous theme, the post simply wasn’t being indexed as well by Google. It jsut goes to show the value of a good SEO enhanced theme.

Will It Last?

So how long do I expect this surge in traffic to last? Going by the stats of my other posts that rate quite highly, I expect this post to do the same. It will taper off and eventually drop down to bring in 300 – 400 new visitors a day, but that is still a nice healthy figure.

Capitalize

Now there is not a lot of point in generating traffic, if you are not prepared to take advantage of it. Rather then sit back and simply wait for the surge to drop, today I wrote another post along a similar thread to the previous one. Rather then simply wait for this post to be found by the search engines, or by readers looking at the related links, I put a link in each of these posts, promoting the other one. I also did a couple of other little things…

Now my new post is rating number two on my stats, not all that far behind the top rating one.

Know Thy Stats

Of course, none of this would be evident unless I was actively following my Website stats. I do this several times a day, and it takes nothing more then a quick glance at the dashboard to see how things are going. There are a lot of stats tools you can use for doing this. My favorite though is this one. I have posted about it previously here and I can highly recommend it as an invaluable tool to have.

I received an email from the founders of DealDotCom this morning announcing the launch of their new service, an excerpt of the message is repeated below.

Something BIG is coming. Next Wednesday (April 16th) the founders of DealDotCom are launching a “get traffic” service.

What Is Traffic Kahuna?

I will have more details for you soon. But, in a nutshell Traffic Kahuna is a high-quality network of 650 blogs and 1100 websites that will publish your articles and content (and give you high-quality backlinks).

If you have even basic knowledge of how the search engines work, you are probably jumping out of your chair right now!

Yes, this is VERY exciting.

There is nothing out there like Traffic Kahuna. This has been 2 years in the making.

Look for more details early next week as we move towards featuring Traffic Kahuna on DealDotCom next Wednesday.

As I am a DealDotCom member, I am able to take advantage of the affiliate program when it launches. By the sound of it, it could be very big. If you are not a member of DealDotCom, I suggest you join now, because the affiliate program is closed to the public.

I held off long enough for the hype to die down, but have signed up to DealDotCom. If you are not familiar with DealDotCom, what it does is offer deals on software, PLR, membersip sites, scripts, info products, e-book and more.

What Is The Deal

Sorry about the pun. How it works, is that each day DealDotCom offers one product and only one product for sale at a reduced price. You can see today’s product in the sidebar here. The products they offer are ones I have either bought previously, such as the OIOPublisher WordPress Plugin or ones I have been thinking of buying, like today’s special on the Wp Auctions Plugin.

The other great thing about DealDotCom, is that you get a free product just for joining. Once you become a member, you can then refer others to the site and earn commissions. From their site:

Whenever you refer someone to DealDotCom via your handy-dandy affiliate link, you get paid 35% of DealDotCom’s profit for every item that they buy. If someone you referred to DealDotCom refers someone else, you get paid 15% of DealDotCom’s profit every time they buy something for the rest of your life. This is a big commitment, so we suggest you take it very seriously.

So joining gives you two benefits, cheaper products and affiliate commissions.