Web-Biz Knowledgebase

About

My name is Gary Nugent and I’m the author of this blog, which includes some personal opinions and experiences as an affiliate marketer as well as reviews of products I’ve personally used. Whatever opinions I espouse are purely my own. In addition, the site provides information on various topics that are of interest to webmasters, from ways to get traffic to your site to the best webhosting option to choose, advice on making your websites work harder for you and also gives news and tips from the world of internet/affiliate marketing.

My Story (if you want to read it!):

I’m a programmer by profession and ran my own software contracting business for 10 years. Even though I worked for myself, I was still accountable to the people and companies who hired my services. That meant I still had to do daily commutes, deal with office politics and all the stuff that makes a job work rather than fun. After 10 years, I’d had enough, so I pulled the plug on full time contracting even though I’d negotiated contracts where I only worked a 4-day week, could start in the morning when I liked (but still did an 8-hour day) and had about 6 weeks holidays each year.

So, in 2004 I decided to take a year out and try my hand at this internet/affiliate marketing thing. Building websites were nothing new to me. My first site went online in 1995 and my longest running site (the Night Sky Observer) has been online since 1997. My plan was to build a few sites to sell other people’s goods and services online (affiliate marketing).

I had some success selling my own software products but then, as now, driving traffic to a site was still something of a black art. Of course, there were a lot fewer people online back then. One of the most prevalent ways of traffic was to throw up a few Adwords ads to drive traffic to your page. That was when Adwords was simple and bids were cheap and you didn’t get slapped by Google when they thought your quality score sucked. Nevertheless, having bought a couple of Adwords courses and implemented their techniques, I ended up losing money in the long run (more spent on advertising than taken in sales). Well, it might have been an expensive lesson to learn, but Adwords wasn’t for me and I haven’t touched it since.

The internet was a bit of a wild west frontier back then and all sorts of money-making schemes abounded. One of them was AutoSurfing. These were membership sites (with different levels of membership) and your fees got you advertising credits. Your ads were displayed on the AutoSurf site and other members surfed them for cash. Provided you surfed the requisite number of pages each day, you were guaranteed a return of about 40% on your membership fee (pay $10 a week and get $14 back at the end of the week kind of thing). You can see the problem: they were Ponzi schemes. Did they work? Yes, for a while. The trick was to join one for 3 or 4 weeks, get your profit and leave. I came out a bit ahead on this in the end but those who stayed with the programs lost money, as happens with all Ponzi schemes. AutoSurfs died a death a few years back once tighter regulations were introduced.

HYIPs were another fad back then. The High Yield Investment Portfolios allowed you to invest a sum of money for a fixed term with a guaranteed high yield interest rate paid on maturity. Yep, more Ponzi schemes. While most were simple ripoffs, there were a few that were run for long periods of time, using outside investments to fund the pot, rather than simply relying on members fees. So they weren’t Ponzi schemes in the strict sense. I knew what I was getting into when I tried a couple of these and while I lost money in some, I gained money in others. Probably broke even overall.

I even tried playing poker online for a while. I had a good winning streak and then started to lose too frequently. So I stopped playing before I’d lost all the money I’d won.

The thing about all these (questionable?) schemes, is that they were fun. I knew I stood a chance of losing money in them (as you should if you gamble at all) but I had a blast with them while they lasted.

After a year of playing around on the ‘net, it was time to start thinking about pulling in some real money to pay the bills again. That’s when I launched the Home Based Business Directory, a site that provides information about various aspects of affiliate marketing and affiliate marketing opportunities.

While my LunarPhase Pro astronomy software continued to sell during my time-off period, I went back to software writing and created Clickbank Elite, a desktop application that makes it easy to find hot products on Clickbank to promote.

I then opened an account with Site Build It! who provide a system for building and promoting websites for people who don’t know HTML, Javascript or PHP. I was familiar with HTML and Javascript at the time and wanted to see how the process of building an SBI site differed from building a site via HTML directly. The site I built with SBI was Great Landscape Photography. SBI sites are not cheap at US$299 per year per site, but my site continues to pull in 5-8 times that each year. SBI’s way of doing things wasn’t for me so I didn’t build any more sites with them but they are a great option for a newbie. You can read my Site Build It Review here or take the SBI eLearning Course.

I tried Multi Level Marketing for a while but just couldn’t make it work no matter how hard I tried. The sign-up rate was pathetically small so I could only conclude that that way of doing business was vastly over-hyped or I was simply crap at it (probably the latter).

Anyone who knows me knows I like cats. They’re good companions and don’t need a lot of looking after like a dog. While I like dogs (and had a few during my childhood), I like the cats’ independent nature. And, like I said, they don’t need much looking after. I created a cat website back in 2005 to inform about cat care and health. In 2006, I did a bit of caretaking while a friend was away on holiday and inherited the care of Ginger, a.k.a. RedPuss, a moth-eaten, bedraggled feline that lived on the property. His story was an interesting one.

What did continue to be successful for me, I realized, was building websites and doing affiliate marketing on those websites. I was still building sites the old-fashioned way – in Notepad. I never took to the site builders like Frontpage or Dreamweaver because they seemed to introduce tons of unwanted style definitions and other unnecessary code that bloated the actual webpage code. Notepad gave me complete control over exactly what went onto a webpage. But building sites with it was slow and each page on a site had to be manually crafted.

That’s when I came up with the idea for SiteBuilder Elite – a web-based application that creates multi-page websites quickly and easily and allowed site-wide changes to be implemented, pretty much at the click of a button. Since 2007, the software has undergone two major revisions and I now use it to build all my non-blog sites. The software can be set to future post pages, features dynamic content like RSS content, YouTube and Yahoo answers on pages, can download articles from article directories and has support for Adsense, Amazon and Chitika built in (other ad networks can be used if needed). It does what I want a site builder to do without all the bloat introduced by other builders.

In recent months, I’ve been experimenting with Wordpress. I’m underwhelmed. Providing all you want to do with Wordpress is write a few posts a week, it’s fine. If you want to do anything more extreme, well, that’s where the trouble begins. To add certain functions to your blog, you need to install plugins. Some are free, others you pay for. The more plugins you add, the slower your pages load. And that doesn’t just apply to the actual blog pages but to the pages on the Wordpress Admin area. It can only take a handful of plugins to make editing a time-consuming pain.

What I’ve been experimenting with are autoblogs – blogs with a number of future dated posts schedule to be published over the coming days or weeks. Thanks to bugs in Wordpress 2.9.x, posts that should be published go into a “Missed Schedule” status, so they don’t get published. And of the plugins, fixes and tweaks available to fix this bug (the Wordpress developers don’t seem to acknowledge the existence of this bug), not a single one of them has worked for me. All of my autoblogs are now dead in the water. Wordpress 2.9.x seems to require more resources than previous versions and now quite a number of bloggers who do future posts are experiencing the “Missed Schedule” problem. It’s beginning to look like the webservers on standard Shared Hosting plans just aren’t up to the task of running WP 2.9.x with future posts. I’m moving to VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting to see if that makes a difference.

The other project I’m engaged in currently is being one of Alex Jeffreys‘ students on his Marketing With Alex 3.0 course. This promises to teach students, not how to build a business, but how to run one. It’s been quite interesting so far and he’s discussed things that other so-called gurus don’t or won’t talk about. The course is closed to new members but spots may become available following cancellations. In the meantime, you can see a free webinar that Jeffreys runs here. I’ll periodically post about my progress in the course on this blog.

That’s it for now.

Gary.