Every blogger loves when their recently posted article gets tons of search engine visitors to the blog. It’s happened to me when just posting one simple article got me 700-1000 unique visitors each day on a different blog. But, what happens when you don’t post regularly on your blog? I can tell you nothing good comes out of it.
1. The most important thing that you will lose is your readers! They want to read something new each day, this why they keep coming back to your blog, this is how you get your blog advertised by “word of mouth”. If you post daily the readers know that you are dedicated and care about your blog. They know that when they visit your blog there will be new information and gives them a reason to subscribe.
2. Search engines love when you update your blog adding more content. This is a great free way to advertise your blog. You will slowly notice that more and more users are coming from search engines such as google because of the content you are adding. As I said before, I had articles get around 700-1000 unique visitors a day just because of the articles title.
3. You will not earn any money. Obviously if you don’t update your blog you lose your current visitors and you won’t gain any new ones. If nobody is visiting your blog, nobody will click the ads. Blogging is a great way to earn money for some people, I started this blog because the name was unique and I have a unique personality. People can relate to that, not everybody knows all the bullshit business/web terms, they just want to make money.
Update your blog as much as you can. Unique content is key!
Let me start off by saying that money is everything. Money gives you the ability to have a good life, a care free life, no worries, buy what you want, when you want it and never look back. Now, let me tell you why people would disagree with what I just said. Some people think that money doesn’t mean happiness because a lot of people with money aren’t happy. Either they are lonely (bad love life) or abuse their money. First of all, think about all the “normal “people who need to think about their significant other plus the stress of paying next months bills. How do they do it? and do it right? How do they stay happy? Imagine they didn’t have to worry about paying next months bills and could focus more on their significant other. Again, you might say, then why do you have rich people unhappy because of their love lives? This brings me to my second point. You must be able to appreciate money, and handle it with care in order to be happy, and so do the people around you. It’s the people who abuse their money who end up unhappy. That’s when things start falling apart, when the freedom takes control. But if you can control it, money means happiness!
If money means happiness, how do you stay motivated to make money? This is how I do it. Find something that pisses you off, or someone. It could be an ex-girlfriend or ex-wife, your parents not approving of what you are doing, siblings thinking they are better than you, etc. Use that and prove everybody wrong! Everybody has a life and everybody can find something to use to stay motivated. It has to be personal, something you care about. I decided not to go to university and rejected my acceptance offers. (check out my “University is Overrated” thread) When my parents find out they will flip, but thats OK. (unless they kick me out of the house…hopefully not..to late to turn back though) So! I use that to motivate myself. I need to make money, I need to be successful in the web industry, I need to prove to everybody that I am making more money than I could ever dream of at such a young age. I also use my future to motivate me. I want to provide for my family, I want my wife to have what she wants and also my kids, besides every girl wants money..whether they admit it or not
Stay motivated and you will never quit, in fact…you will only succeed. Be smart, find something personal to motivate you and go after it!
As I said in the past doing small freelance projects for some money is a great way to slowly build up money to start or buy your first website. I used to do it and my design skills also grew along with my knowledge of web development. Now that I hire web designers, a lot of times I hire new and young talented designers to save some money. One problem…they think they know everything! STFU and listen to what I have to say and do it. If you are designing a website for somebody else, you are getting paid for your services. If I want something…DO IT! Don’t mouth off and think you are the shit. You should respect your client, shut up, and do as you are told.
Another thing I see ALL the time is people changing their prices half way through the job because they “didn’t realize it would take this much time”. What the hell? When you give a quote, you make sure you take everything into consideration and ask every question you need to ask to do the project. Also, don’t take a project if you can’t do it! I see this time and time again. If I’m offering $500 to do a project, don’t take the project if you can only do half of it and then ask for $250 and quit the rest of the job.
Make sure you have a portfolio to show. Don’t expect people to hire you if you don’t have anything to show. Also, don’t use the excuse “I am building my portfolio, give me a chance”. Make sure you design some sample logos/banners/templates for people to see. It won’t be a waste of time because you can just sell them after. Make at least 10-20 samples for the client to see.
O! one more thing that pisses me off SOOO much. “I am looking for a designer from Toronto Canada, please provide me with your Name, Portfolio and Phone Number” And then I get a reply, “We are a design firm located in India, please visit our website here”….like what the heck, I don’t care if you are the best designer in the world offering me a 99% discount, if you are not what I ask for, don’t bother contacting me.
I think I said everything that makes me mad about new young designers. Just make sure you listen to what I need done, provide a fair quote and do some quality work. Setup a portfolio before anything. Most of my clients were returning clients, not new ones. If you do the work right they will definitely return to you for more projects. Which means…MORE MONEY!
Just like real estate flipping websites can really help you get started in the web industry. I know I used to do this a lot when I started off so I could pay for my cell phone bill and continue buying and flipping for greater profits. Buying crappy, old, dead websites can be turned into gold mines! Even just starting off buying websites for $25-$100 each and reselling for a profit of $50 can go a very long way. I was snooping around the websites for sale section on a webmaster forum and saw this one poker site for sale. The domain was worth $20-$25 tops but the owner designed an killer wordpress theme and sold the website for $500 even though it had 0 traffic!
Dead forums are also a great idea to flip. I’ve seen a fairly dead (still active) teenage forum, great niche, with around 1k members and many posts go for $75! It also had a unique skin. These are the types of sites you need to look for. Spend time on different web master forums and catch these good deals. Don’t wait for the auction to end, take the BIN price if its cheap, don’t be a cheap bastard because somebody else will snatch it.
Flipping isn’t only for starters though. I know about people buying sites in the $X,XXX range, rebuilding and selling it for $XX,XXX range. You can actually make a living just flipping websites. Just like real estate you can start off with one small project and in no time be able to deal with 3-5 big projects at a time.
Keep working, and the key is to be patient. Work up slowly and by no time you will have enough to buy bigger and better sites!
Whats up everybody! Couple changes going on at NetBastard.com - First I added a new skin. I think it looks a lot better and the old one was screwing up in IE for a lot of users so this one should work fine. Spent couple hours customizing it to how I like it. All I have to do now is add some google adsense ads in the right places and the blog should be good to go.
I’ve been busy past few days working on some freelance work. Again, I’m saving up as much money as I can to start an adwords campaign for NetBastard and start developing FreeHostPlan.com. I wrote a few more articles that I will post up later on. I’m definitely going to be able to post a new article every day which is very important in the development and growth of the blog.
Traffic seems to be growing daily and is pretty steady. Once I get more articles up I should be getting more traffic from google. Right now the “iKobo” post is getting the most hits on google search.
I’m happy with how everything is going now, hopefully I can continue the growth
Alright so I’m pissed off. Lately had some things happen in my personal life and the stress/pressure is building on me to make it in the web industry. I’ve decided to take out my anger on blogging about all the crappy ass hosts out there.
There are thousands of hosts out there, most of them aren’t legally registered businesses, run by 16 year olds, a lot of them offering unlimited bandwidth (overselling), all for $1 a month. First of all, whats up with the over selling? People say it’s a “marketing technique” I say its bullshit. Hosts should only offer what they can provide in my opinion. Second, usually if you come across a host on a webmaster forum offering unlimited bandwidth/space, 24/7 support and 99.9% uptime for $1-2 a month, chances are its a bullshit host run by a 16 year old that’s going to fail within 2 months because they can’t afford the next months server bill. Not only that but, I’ve been with hosts (currently with asmallorange and have the same problems) that always time out either when accessing the website or the ftp. Come on! All I want to do is upload a new skin and the damn thing keeps timing out half way through. These crappy ass hosts should stop offering their shitty ass service and stupid ass people should stop looking for cheap ass hosts. You get what you pay for idiots, stop complaining. Lets play with the numbers. Lets say your website is getting 500 uniques daily and making $100 a day on affiliate links. You are with your host for 30 days and you had 1 day downtime. You lose 500 uniques and $100 each month if there is 1 day downtime. Thats 6000 unique visitors every year and $1,200!
The only reason why I haven’t switched hosts yet is because I’m waiting to purchased a dedicated server. The only true host that I have had absolutely no trouble with was HostGator, why did I leave? I don’t know, stupidity. Whether it be shared hosting, reseller or dedicated servers, HostGator is a top quality web host. Never had any trouble with HostGator, no downtime, no timeouts, always had somebody on live chat helping me in need. As soon as I am ready to buy a dedicated server, I will definitely choose HostGator.
After getting a huge positive response from my last video “How Scammers Work” I decided to create this video about removing watermarks. Every time I go onto different webmaster forums I either see a post about designs getting stolen or sales threads with no watermarks on the design item. Enjoy this one.
I got a new idea to get some more traffic coming into NetBastard.com - I will be writing an eBook. There’s tons of benefits to this and I can do tons of things with an eBook to promote the blog. First thing I would do is give a bunch of webmaster sites or blogs free copies so they could host a contest or something like that in exchange for a back link. The more contests I host, the more back links I get. Another thing I am going to do is offer the eBook for free to my online subscribers! (only subscribers prior to eBook release) Great way to build that number up. Finally, I’m going to charge $10 for the eBook and use the money for either FreeHostPlan.com or for an adwords campaign.
So, what the hell am I going to be writing about? After making the “How Scammers Work” video and posted it up youtube and other webmaster forums I found out that a lot of new webmasters and even old don’t know a lot of the basics about buying and selling websites. So I’m going to make an intro to web development/how to gain money/how to buy and sell eBook. Stay tuned…
I’ve received a lot of praise and thanks from my “How Scammers Work” video after posting it on several forums. Surprising on how many had no clue about how easy it was to change/edit stats and revenue details. I want to continue doing videos, if anybody has any suggestions on new things to do just send me an email or comment. You can check some of the comments here: WebTalkForums and DigitalPoint - Even though I’m not a fan of many web development forums, I still made an account to try to get some blog exposure.
I want to start a few new things here at NetBastard.com - I’m looking to partner up with other webmaster blogs and start a radio show. I want people to ask us questions about web development, and seek how help. “How should I develop my domain?” Stuff like that. If you’re interested email me or comment
I’m still saving up money to start my free web host. I want to make sure I do everything right and get a unique design made. I’m thinking of original ways to market it and I think I’ll do pretty well. It is, of course, FREE. Once I get the money (I’m 18 but I got my own bills to pay!), I’ll update everybody on the status of the website. My plans for AthleteClinic.com is a lot bigger and will require more money so I put that on hold.
I’m also looking to partner up with different people and their ideas. If you have an idea and need some of my help, I would be glad to help you out and develop with you if I like the idea.
I want to share my opinion on new web developers trying to make it. This is mostly for the 14-16 year olds trying to “make it big” in the industry, but it’s also for anybody just trying to start out. Now, I know I’m not a huge developer, and in a way I’m pretty new. But I’ve learned a lot over the years and I know I can help a lot of people out.
First things first, Save up money! You can’t do anything without money, make sure you can buy a domain, get proper hosting, pay for any expenses needed, and have money left over for marketing purposes. If you don’t have money, get a job! If you cant find a job, learn some online skills (design, coding etc.) and start small. $10 here and there goes a long way. Make sure you have more than enough to start building your website. Why make a crappy ass site when you know it’s not going to earn shit!
Start off with one original idea and turn it into a website. So many developers try to start off with 10 different sites and expect them all to grow into a google empire. Start off with one site. Use your budget smartly. A good design goes a very long way! Money for marketing is also important. Try to do link exchanges or banner exchanges. I see so many young developers with stupid ass ideas! I WAS THE SAME WAY. “I want to start a gaming forum” Why?, Why the hell will anybody join your website? What makes your forum different? Make sure your idea is original.
Don’t expect to earn a million dollars in your first year! Most new developers start off and expect to earn big right away. It takes time. Don’t give up on your site and sell it right away. Let your website grow even if it’s going slowly. Make changes, see what is working and what isn’t.
Don’t be an asshole! Respect those around you! There are so many young and new developers thinking they are the shit. If you don’t want to deal with somebody say Thanks but no thanks, don’t go on a stupid rant about how you don’t need them and how you are bigger than everybody else.
