Catch me if you can!

Posted by stuart as On the punt, Burt's competition

UPDATE: It seems I’ve been given the ass from Burt’s competition, because I was silly enough to think that it had started, so I’ve jumped the gun. Not to worry, I’ll still join whatever competition he does, whenever he does it, but I’ll still “keep on punting” as they say here in Oz, so you can follow my progress here if you’re interested.  

 

Well I’m off to a flying start with Burt’s Challenge, I’ve made a grand total of AU$0.60 today, for an overall increase of 1.818% on my starting pot.

Bets went as follows:

Bet $5.00 paying $1.02 on Sharapova to beat Krajicek - US Open tennis. Won bet for $0.10 profit

Bet $10.00 paying $1.10 on Haas to beat Kuznetsov - US Open tennis. Won bet for $0.50 profit.

Next bet - AU$10.00 on the USA to beat Greece in the FIBA World Basketball championships, paying $1.11

You can see my current progress in the right hand sidebar.

Get those damned kids out of here, I’m trying to write!

Posted by stuart as stay at home dad, online marketing, make money online, copy writing

There’s an excellent article over at the Business Opportunities Weblog (found via problogger) about working at home, and how to be productive.

I consider myself to be a strange creature (and so does Mrs. PimpMyPageRank!), somewhere between a SAHD (Stay At Home Dad) and a WAHD (Work At Home Dad), definitely more on the SAHD at this stage, but working towards the WAHD thing.

I’m working hard to get my income from my online ventures up, as Mrs. PimpMyPageRank has me under strict instructions to “Go get a damned job” when I’ve had my (long awaited) kidney transplant.

I have my PC in the loungeroom, at the back of the room. I have it there for a couple of reasons. Since we got our broadband connection, the PC seems to have become the centre (that’s right, it’s spelled centre!) of the household, the 3 year old can play on it where we can keep an eye on him, I can write without leaving the family, and Mrs. PimpMyPageRank can buy other people’s crap on ebay.

This is obviously not an ideal situation, but I don’t really want to move the PC, so what do I do? I have a laptop (well, sort of, it’s a Mac Powerbook G3 with 256Mb of RAM, which I was silly enough to install OSX on, this renders it virtually unusable, not to mention the flakey wireless connectivity I get using one of those dodgy Belkin USB thingies).

So I think I need to buy a new laptop, a PC one, so I can go anywhere in the house and work. So I get out my pen and paper, and start doing some sums: I’ve finally cleaned out my AdSense account - around $200, I just got a $500 payment for a site I put together for a friend a couple of years ago (that was a nice surprise), and I’m about to be paid another $500 for the whole podcast blog site thingy that I’m working on. So I’ve got $1200 to buy a laptop. (Lucky I don’t play games!) Off to dell.com.au we go!

Anyway, I digress. What’s the biggest impediment to me putting my head down and working on my online projects? Unfortunately, it’s the fact that I don’t make much money. If I just had one good month (over $400), Mrs. PimpMyPageRank’s ears would prick up, and when I said “can you sort out the rugrats, I’m working?”, she might actually do it, instead of scoff at me and say something along the lines of “working or playing?”

All my blogs are belong to me!

Posted by stuart as pay per post

Dan Rua has written a very interesting article about the Consumer Generated Advertising Revolution. This article struck a chord with me, as trying to make money blogging with  PayPerPost is something that I’ve been playing with of late.

He makes some interesting points about the “elite” bloggers looking down their noses at those of us who have decided that this is a good way to monetize the work that we are already putting into our blogs.

The thing is that this platform must be working for advertisers, as the number of new “opportunities” for bloggers seems to be increasing exponentially. As consumers become more and more “blind” to all forms of advertising on the web, schemes like payperpost may be the best way for advertisers to reach potential customers. I find that most of the paid posts I’m coming across online are of good quality, and quite genuine. I think that no-one wants to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Payperpost provides a good opportunity for up-front monetization of your blogs, meaning that if we don’t make much from them in the longer term from other schemes such as CPC ads, there is not such a great concern.

What I do find interesting is the “elite” bloggers who will carp and moan about paid posting killing the integrity of the blogosphere, whilst themselves posting affiliate link laden “reviews” of products and services. How is this any different. There’s still only about half a dozen ways to monetize a blog, and all of them involve trying to get your visitors to buy a product or service.

Jumping in with Burt’s competition

Posted by stuart as Burt's competition, make money online

Well I’m in!

Burt is running a competition to see who can turn US$25 into the most money before Christmas, using only online means.

So I’ve chucked AU$33 (US$25) in my old, unused sportodds.com account, and I’m going to try to double it before christmas using the rule that I only bet on virtually “sure things”

I know, I’ll miss out on the possibility of a big payout betting on the outsider, but I want to see if betting on the $1.10 favourite all the time, you can actually make some money doing this.

I’ll add a progress meter over there in the right hand sidebar tonight, so you can follow how I’m going.

Get on over to OSWorld.biz and join up!

Podcasts, iTunes, SmartCast, and K2’s broken RSS2 feed

Posted by stuart as podcasting, wordpress plugins, feedburner, rss, blog, itunes, wordpress

Well, I’m well on my way with the podcasting project, and I’ve learned some interesting things along the way.

It seems that this kind of work is much harder when the client a) Doesn’t understand the technology,and b) Doesn’t know what they want.

I was given a brief pretty much like this: “I have a podcast, make it go in iTunes and the other podcast directories.”

Sheesh!

Having never had anything to do with podcasts before (other than listening to them), I really had no idea where to start. So after a lot of reading, I came up with this:

1. All based on a WordPress Blog
2. Run the RSS feed through FeedBurner’s “SmartCast” to make it compatible with pretty much everything
3. Give the client a secure upload page to upload their mp3’s to the server
4. Use The “PodPress” WordPress plugin to facilitate the proper iTunes tags, mp3 enclosures etc.
5. Provide the client with written instructions on how to do pretty much everything with WordPress.
6. Charge a freaking fortune to host the whole shebang.

So, it’s all good, right? Wrong. It would appear that the WordPress theme I chose for the job, the ever popular K2, breaks WordPress’ RSS2.0 feed, which is required for podcasting. So after a day of buggerizing around (I wouldn’t know a piece of PHP code from a swarm of ecstacy munching pygmies), I eventually found the problem in the wp-rss2.php file, and fixed it.

So I now have a working podcast feed, what next?

Client wants podcast listed in iTunes. OK, no prob, I just go there and fill in a form, and they list my podcast, right?

Wrong again, stupid!

I need to give apple my VISA card details to open an account there to list my podcast. Hmmm, not too happy about that, but as apple pretty much have the market cornered with iTunes for podcasting, I really have no choice.

So I’ve now done that, my “application” has been succesful, and we’re rockin’!

We’re up to the K2 theme tweaking stage now, as we have all the functionality working as we want it.

Looks like we might make our target of a fully functioning podcasting platform up and running in a week.