Fleeing The Social Scene

Can’t stop my bad habits

I call myself an entrepreneur. If people can sell toiletpaper and be called an entrepreneur, why can’t I sell websites and call myself the same thing? Selling is the key word. If you sell, and you sell regularly, you’re an entrepreneur.

Being an entrepreneur has it’s ups and it’s downs. The good thing is, you work for yourself and it’s easy to take the day off because you have no one to answer to except for yourself (and well, your customers, but 10 minutes online will do the trick and then you can take the day off!). The bad thing is, you have to spend money to earn money. And I’m not good when it comes to money. I earn a lot sure, but for the past few months now, I’ve been spending just as much money as I’ve been earning, which makes me feel like all my work has gone to waste.

I like investing, what can I say. But I go a little overboard. Like, did I really have to buy that abandoned website because the logo was so nice? Or did I really need to buy that template I never even tried out? In the back of my mind, I’m always worried about that dreaded end of month profit and loss calculation. Because I know what it’s going to say.

Loss = Profit

This month I’ve been really careful not to spend money. I had to refund someone for a payment they made, but other than that I’ve done pretty good. The thing is, I’ll still be at a loss at the end of this month. To actually make a profit, I have to stop my spending habits for 3 more months.

That, for me, is impossible.

You get what you pay for

Not all my purchases are good ones. Recently, I bought a traffic exchange site. I wanted to tip the seller because I felt like I was paying him too low. Only now do I realize how much of a traffic-debt the website is in right now! Quite simply, the website has given out more traffic credits than it can deliver and it’s going to cost me hundreds of dollars to be able to give everyone their well earned traffic and to repair the script!

This problem is more common when it comes to PTC (Paid To Click) type of sites. They sell the website to you for say $200, but then you find that you must pay the members $1000 - and realize what a bad purchase that was! I’d advise you to stay away from these types of sites at all costs!

They’re not all good people

Some people you deal with maybe so shady that they sell you copied content, scripts that don’t work, or websites with photoshopped revenue and traffic screenshots. I have a story to tell. A fellow blogger once asked my opinion on whether this person selling a website was a scammer. He sent me a screenshot of the revenue - and guess what - the image was so obviously photoshopped and to top it off - I could see the photoshop tab on his screenshot! I got a good laugh out of it.

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Fluff friends is the latest online phenomenon. I myself spend hours on it everyday. It is a facebook application that lets you adopt a pet, so you can feed it and race it against your friends’ pets. Some people maybe surprised to know that fluff friends has become a community within facebook. Fluff friends users probably have the longest discussion board on facebook where daily trades and pleas for pets take place. There is a marketplace for it where you can buy and sell clip art you’ve earned through petting other pets. The turkle itself is worth so much ‘munny’ (fluff friends money) that you can keep it and sell it on e-bay for profit in a year’s time.

Fluff friends is successful because it keeps people coming back. They’re constantly adding new competitions such as the recent fluff art competition where the people with the best looking habitats won rare clip art - the fox - which can’t be bought with munny. You have to buy it with gold - which is bought with real money! You’d be surprised how many people are willing to pay money just to put a rare clip art on their profile!

Currently, there is an egg hunt going on which has got people hooked. I myself spent days clicking profile after profile to find the hidden eggs just so I can get a pink leppit to put in my pet’s habitat. Then they announced that bountiful baskets will be given for people who find at least 10 eggs everyday for a week, and I clicked so many profiles that my hands and eyes hurt. Just when I thought I had enough, they suddenly came up with a choco leppit and once again sent me on a wild egg chase. And halfway during the competition, word spread that there are secret eggs to be found for those who’ve collected 100 eggs.. I’ve currently got 82.

For fluff addicts like me, this is fun. For fluff owner Mike Sego, this is profit. BIG profit. Think of fluff friends as the next Google. Lately I’ve been searching for eggs more often than I’ve been searching for websites and Mike Sego is definitely the man of the decade! Just ask anyone on the fluff friends discussion board. They’ll be happy to tell you how much in love with fluff friends they are and ask you to pet their fluff friend while they’re at it!

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WPdesigner.com is now for sale at sitepoint for $65,000 and already has a pending ‘buy it now’ offer. I recognize this site as the distributor of the Jello Wala Mello theme I mentioned in my last post.

The reason behind his success is no secret- he designs and distributes free wordpress themes, which helps to bring in traffic and increase his page rank. But this doesn’t mean that anyone who designs and releases wordpress themes will be able to sell their website for $65,000. No. I myself have released a few themes and have gotten absolutely nothing in return accept for the occasional visit or two, and backlinks from a PR0 blog. Yep, after you spend days tweaking a theme to try to make it perfect, you may end up with nothing but frustration.

It takes one hell of a talented designer to get a following that big. WPdesigner has a PR7, and unlike some other theme websites, has cleverly been monetized in a way that doesn’t compete with similar sites. Whereas premium wordpress themes fetch for around $100, WPdesigner.com offers multiple templates for $5 per year. Any new themes they make are made available for download by these subscribers. And judging from their 400 paying themes club members, this marketing tactic works. I didn’t find any themes there that I liked, but obviously other people do and don’t mind paying extra to have access to those themes.

Now, here’s the juicy bit. No one knew how much WPdesigner was earning before the sale, but of course it was disclosed to the public when it was listed at sitepoint. Ladies and gentlemen… WPdesigner, who is a cut above the rest of us trying to earn money online, earns $890/month!

Top executives who work offline earn $8900 per month, but the highest earning people online make $890. It dampens my spirit, it really does.

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Magazine Style Themes require more of your time than other themes because of the time involved in cropping pictures down to the correct size, adding more categories and actually finding a magazine theme to start with. But magazine themes are taking the wordpress community by storm and if you’re ever going to use one, now is probably the best time.Here are the best (and only) magazine style wordpress themes out in the market:

If you’re unwilling to pay for a theme, like 99% of the blogging population, I recommend Darren Hoyt’s ‘Mimbo‘. It uses minimal colors, making it suitable for any blog and for any gender. The pros are the maximum use of pictures, the drop down menu and the subcategories; the cons are the small rss button tucked away in the bottom corner and the search button which looks inconsistent with the rest of the theme. Darren could easily have made a small fortune selling this, but he’s decided not to turn his passion into a money making scheme, which is to be admired.

Another clean magazine layout is called ‘The Morning After‘ and I’ve scratched my head several times wondering why. This is a beautiful theme that can be altered to fit any blog topic, so don’t be fooled by the guitar illustration you see. The only obvious downside to this theme is its dependence on the colors black and white, which would contrast with colorful pictures you upload onto wordpress.

Having seen two black and white designs, it is refreshing to see some color for a change in ‘Jello Wala Mello‘. It resembles a newspaper with a cover story on top and many blog titles under it. I am guessing the reason why it’s not as popular as it should be is because of the lack of a demo. What you don’t see is what you don’t get.

Another wonderful theme is Visionary, created by Justin Tadlock. The greatest thing about this template is that Justin takes you every step of the way helping you to install and customize this template, and is constantly developing it to make it even better than it already is. This marroon and white colored theme has a very balanced look to it - you don’t get a list of long entries and an embarrassingly short sidebar next to it. Maybe it’s feng shui; just makes you feel good.

The most colorful, and probably the best looking of the lot is this ‘Polaroid‘ Theme. Though it requires some customization, it is loaded with features you can’t find anywhere else such as recent readers, flickr photos, 125 by 125 ad buttons and, of course, a polaroid. If you want a premium theme for free, this is it.

However, if you’re an online mogul with cash to spare, or a mogul wannabe perfectionist who wants the best theme there is, I present you the much talked about ‘Revolution Magazine’ theme created by Brian Gardner.

From the demo alone, the pros appear to be the obvious sense of style, the built-in contact form and the picture of Scarlett Johansson. The cons are the relatively boring link boxes left ignored in the bottom right corner and the tiny subscribe button in the header which most people won’t see. The ‘emotional factor’ is also missing. Sometimes the one thing that attracts people into making a purchase is a fun feature that other themes don’t have - such as post ranking. Maybe Scarlett Johansson’s picture is there for that reason. I asked someone about his opinion on the template and that’s just about the only thing he saw, with no opinion whatsoever on the layout itself. Maybe it’s wiser to go and splurge on celebrity pictures instead of premium templates. Just a thought.

Other themes from Brian (from left to right) : The Revolution Sports Wordpress Theme, Revolution Wordpress Theme, Revolution News Theme and the Revolution Tech Theme.

Another designer who sells magazine style themes is Adii (pronounced “ay-dee”) from South Africa. He has done freelancing for Unique Blog Designs, where some of his work is currently up for sale.

He has named one of his themes ‘Your Revolution‘ which inevitably calls for me to compare it with Brian Gardner’s Magazine Revolution. Most of the features are the same, except Adii’s design does not include a contact form, is border less and uses more color. Out of the two, I prefer Brian’s design. Perhaps it would be fairer to compare the Magazine Revolution to Adii’s ‘Block Magazine’ design as it has all the features that Magazine Revolution lacks. The subscription buttons are big and inviting, and my ‘emotional factor’ criterion is satisfied by his ‘popular articles’ feature.

Other themes from Adii (from left to right): Block Magazine and This Is A Grey Day.

Blog Oh Blog has come up with ‘money blogger‘ which features a tab section on top to show recent comments, recent posts, etc. and which also has space for 125 by 125 advertisements on the side, which has become a standard for ‘make money online’ type of blogs. I think it looks a little too plain. I also prefer to have the main sidebar on the right instead of the left because I’m right-handed and it’s just weird to have to look at the left-hand side for links.

Now have a look at the demo for Gridline Magazine Theme by Thad Allender. This is one of the latest themes to hit the market and definitely has a stylish, colorful and futuristic look to it. It is a bargain at $24.99 and if I were to buy a premium wordpress theme for myself, this is definitely the one I’d go for.

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Today, I got this e-mail from Review Me.

We are sorry but the website you have suggested http://www.fleeingthesocialscene.com has been declined at this time. The main reasons a website is declined are:

- The website is a suspected fake.
- The website does not have enough link popularity.
- The website does not have enough traffic.

*Please note that our algorithm that accepts or rejects inventory submissions can make mistakes and if you feel the above criteria does not accurately describe your website, please reply to this email asking for further review by our editorial staff.

My website is a suspected fake. Never mind the traffic and link popularity, but that line just cracks me up. What’s a fake website anyway? A site based solely on RSS feeds? A site where a blogger pretends to be something he’s not?

I’m not a fan of blogs that are based solely on other people’s rss feeds. It’s like taking a few chapters from different books and piling them altogether in one page with no compensation to the authors. I often wish rss feeds didn’t exist. It would take about a million pages of useless blogs off from Google and give us better results. It would give the original authors of the article a piece of mind and make it easier to spot the copycats.

But the blogging world is big on rss feeds. Feedburner has been acquired by Google, which means there’ll never be an end to them. People love spreading their web site’s content, for reasons I will never understand. It’s me against the world in this case.

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The picture I am about to show you will either really motivate you, or make you feel like a failure. Hopefully it’ll be the first. Here is the CJ earnings of fellow blogger Jeremy SchoeMaker, better known as ShoeMoney.

Earning from affiliate programs takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of testing. You can advertise on one website for a year and not make anything, and you can advertise on another website and have dollars in your account within a week. I tend to stay away from affiliate programs because I don’t like taking big risks. I don’t want to spend $100 in advertising just to be left with no earnings in my CJ account. But it does intrigue me that some people are so successful at it, so I do have the occasional banner or two on my websites.

My earnings from CJ have been nilch, so far. While I was browsing a book about affiliate marketing in a bookshop, I read that the same goes for about 99% of affiliates. The only ones making money from such programs are the super affiliates, and they are the ones who don’t use the standard banners supplied by vendors. They are the ones who find unique ways to advertise, such as sticking leaflets under car’s wipers while a big event is going on. Say, there is a surfing competition happenings at the beach.. these super affiliates hire some guys to place these leaflets on the parked cars, and they mention the surfing competition itself on the leaflets. That’s how they make the big bucks. And that’s something not a lot of people would do.

Now take a look at this screenshot of someone’s Adsense earnings.

They can’t be serious! I spent ONE whole year to make 0.01% of their earnings! To get a cheque like that, you need a high paying niche like insurance and a LOT of traffic.. not to mention a high CTR theme for your website. That, for me, is problematic. One, I HATE boring topics like insurance; two, I have trouble getting traffic to my websites because I don’t like spending money on advertising; and three, I think high CTR templates don’t leave a good impression on your visitors and I wouldn’t want to use one myself. *sigh*

Check out more cheques like this at s.eriously.com Make sure it’s not before your bedtime, or else you won’t get any sleep.

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