Adding another VPS to be always up and running
From the beginning, my websites are hosted on a single server. At the start they were hosted on a shared hosting plan but last year I switched to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) so I can have full control over my server and configuration. I decided to do this because I always want to have full control over what I do and because I had multiple problems with the shared hosting (lost of data multiple times). At HostDepartment they are not very professionnal and there servers are slow, they put too many websites and databases on there server. With the VPS I get full control and great performance for about 25$/month, and that is awesome (VPSLand).
Even if now I have my VPS I'm not 100% secure in terms of data loss; the fact is that my VPS got corrupted 2 times and each times all my websites were down 10 days (translated in a loss in traffic and revenue), so recently I decided to buy another VPS to be able to switch from one to another when I detect a problem. Everything is identical between the 2 VPS. To switch from one to another I simply have to change to DNS entries (done by a couple of clicks) to point to the other VPS.
The only thing different between the 2 VPS is the fact that I only backup the data (DB and some specific files and folders) from the first VPS. The other is not backed up because it is only temporary (the time I take to repair the first VPS).
With this solution I will avoid the 10 day down; I can be up and running within 2 hours. Yeah it costs 50$/month instead of 25$/month but overall it covers the oney I lose when the websites are down.
Be paid to post on my forums
I recently wrote a page on my blog for people that want to make money with me. I own the website iSeduction.net and all it's sub-domains; in fact, I created all of them. I have add a forum section like you see on many websites.
Because I don't have the time to create posts, I need help to start populating it. One day it will attract enough people to auto-populate by itself, but presently I'm at the beginning so... I need help.
You can read the article right here : http://blog.webmastersam.net/page/Be-paid-to-post-on-forums.aspx.
I offer you the chance to make 200$ in a couple of days by simply posting on my forums. It's 10 cents per post, but if you write more than 1000 posts it shifts to 20 cents per post. You have the time you want, you can create how many account you want and I pay only via PayPal. You must contact me before starting to post.
Good ideas are the start of every dollar made
The title is self-explicative but let met explain it more. If, at your everyday job, you have to create thing (when activily participating in a software development), you know that finding good idea to solve a problem of create something very useful is normaly not as simple as we can think. Sometimes ideas don't come and you have to wait and wait, thinking of it in your morning shower or when you laid down in your bed before sleep 'till you have an Eureka moment.
With internet, if you have a good idea it's easy to test it. For example, my first idea of creating a dating site as a way to make money online took me a few months to find.
One guy, a college student, had a simple but very smart idea to sell advertising on a webpage for 1 milion dollar. Every pixel was sold for 1$ so the potential of this was huge. A lot of people we interested in buying a couple of pixels for some bucks (minimum was 100) because that page was very popular and very mediatized. This project was named the Milion Dollar Homepage.
When you have a good idea, don't hesitate to make efforts to bring it to life. If you don't have ideas, continue to think, one day it will come !
Make money online: Annual Revenue of different websites
I don't know how many times in my life I heard someone ask me why I spent time to make website. I always answer the same thing : "To make money online". But then comes the question "How can you make money from it ? It's free !". It's not because you don't charge your visitors to use your site that you will not make money from it.
There is 2 major types of income on the web: advertisment and monthly fee. If you want your site to be free you will have to place banners that display ads. Advertising can generate a lot of cash if you have enough traffic. If you don't want to put banners, you will have to make your visitors (members) pay a one-time fee or monthly fee.
There is another way to make money with a website and it is by selling it. If you have enough of running your website and want to retire from it, you can sell it. Normally a website is sold for 5 times it's annual revenue. It can be sold for more or less depending on the potential of your website.
At first when I started my own (dating) websites I read a lot on the potential of those kind of websites. In this article I'll show you some stats about existing websites on the web and their annual revenue. I focus more on dating sites because this is that kind of websites that I have (iseduction and QuebecSexy).
PlentyOfFish.com
POF is a 100% free dating site. It is by far the most money-making free dating site on the web. If you check what it's like you will find that this site is not the best visually-looking website on the web. And it is a lot better now than it was before. If you want to see what it was looking on the past, just visit the WaybackMachine.
Annual Revenue (as of 2008) : 10,000,000$ USD
The man behind this : Markus Frind
This site has been (and may still be) the top AdSense earner, with over 5M$ only with the AdSense program. If you search the web for "Markus Frind Google AdSense", you will find pictures of him holding a huge Google AdSense check like this one :
AdultFrindFinder.com
AFF is a sex dating website. It's only revenue source is the monthly fees their member pays to date people.
Annual Revenue (as of 2007) : 200,000,000$ USD
Sold to Penthouse for : 500,000,000$ USD
The man behind this : Andrew Conru
AmericanSingles.com
This normal dating site is focused primarily on dating American people. It has some intersting features like the "Click" feature.
Annual Revenue (as of 2004) : 35,000,000$ USD
The company behind this : Spark Networks
JDate.com
This normal dating site is focused primarily on dating Jewish people.
Annual Revenue (as of 2004) : 24,000,000$ USD
The company behind this : Spark Networks
eHarmony.com
This normal dating site is a little bit different than other. On normal dating sites you can browse people for free and you need to pay if you want to contact them. On eHarmony, you must pay for everything you do.
Annual Revenue (as of 2007) : 180,000,000$ USD
The man behind this : Neil Clark Warren
Match.com
This is a normal paid dating site. It is great-looking and has some intersting features.
Annual Revenue (as of 2008) : 350,000,000$ (USD)
The company behind this : IAC/InterActiveCorp
Google
Everybody knows (and loves) it. The main revenue of Google is their own AdSense program.
Annual Revenue (as of 2008) : 22,000,000,000$ USD
Annual Profit (as of 2008) : 4,200,000,000$ USD
The guys behind this : Larry Page and Sergei Brin
In the end...
In this article I only showed big websites that has been on the industry for years. If you start a website, don't imagine you will be competing with them at an early stage. You will be among 1000's of litle and medium sites a long time before being big ! I wrote stats for 6 dating sites but on the web we can find more than 1000 different dating sites. Because we can't really count them, the number may be a lot higher than this.
SEO techniques to increase your website traffic
Everyone who tries to start a website gets the same problem : How to get traffic ?
There is many many paid ways to get traffic like using Google AdWords, referral programs like Affili.net, radio, television, newspapers, facebook ads and much much more. But you don't want to pay for every visitor you get on your website; you want people to find your site by the Google search engine (or Yahoo! and Altavista if you bother about the others). So, what to do ?
First, Google will find you site by itself some day, but you can help Google to find it by using the first technique.
1. Send Google a sitemap of all your pages on your website
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/index.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/AutresSites/index.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/Contact/NousContacterAccueil.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/CGU/index.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/Contact/FAQ.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.iseduction.net/Inscription.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>
If your site is not 100% crawlable from the start page, Google (and all other search engines) will not be able to index all the pages on your site. In the same way, if you have dynamic pages, like single pages that accepts querystring parameters and display different content, you can add those complete URLs in your sitemap.
2. Use URL rewriting (relevant URLs)
The more relevant is your URL, the higher your rank will be on searches. Also, if you submit a sitemap (tip #1) with a lot of entries that all points to the same page with different querystring parameters, the search engines will not index all your pages and you will get warnings (on Google WebMaster Tools).
Check
my URL rewriting article to learn more about URL rewriting and how to include this functionnality in your existing website.
For the URL relevantness, if you have an URL like this one "http://www.onesite.com/article.aspx?id=25645151", you will easily be beatten by a URL like this one "http://www.shopcomputers.com/products/HDD/Western-Digital-HDD-WD3200-320GB-16MB-Cache.aspx" on the search results. If you think it does not really change anything because you think only the content of the page counts... your wrong. The URL is the most relevant part of the page. If the URL is long and explicit and have all the keywords you typed in the search engine query box, then the website will appear on the top results for sure.
3. Create links (linking sites)
If you want to be on the top search results, your website has to be linked by a lot of other websites. The more websites are linking to your website, the higher will be your PageRank
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank. In search results, your site will be shown before others that have lower PageRanks.
To get link you have several ways. You can...
a) Add you website URL to your signatures so when you write on forums or blogs, you website URL is put on the site everytime. This has not a real big impact because Google knows that it is not as relevent as a real link placed intentionnaly by the webamaster. But, it has an impact so do it.
b) Write an article about your website on Wikipedia (if it is big enough because Wikipedia will delete your article if your site is too small).
c) Submit your website to many internet directories. Those services are not really used by people to find websites... they used to be popular but now the reality has changed. Those services are mostly used to help you get links to your website.
d) Ask webmasters that have similar websites to add a reciprocal link (you add one, they add one).
e) Write articles of your website on your personal blog (if you have one)
f) Do social bookmarking. There are a lot of websites that offer you a simple and easy way to do social bookmarking for about 20$-50$. Every different services offer you to bookmark to about 100-300 social sites like Digg.it, Technocrati and kick.it. You can check
SocialMarking.com. I personnaly purchased SEO from them and I got my links.
g) Any other idea !? There are a lot of ways to get linking sites...
4. Don't write text on images
Write your text directly on your website pages. Text on images doesn't get indexed; plain text gets indexed so at least 99% of your text must be plain text. Your logo can be an image, but be sure that your brand name is written aa text on your pages too.
5. Stay tuned, check your current indexation level, and linking sites
When you work hard to index your website, and create link to increase your PageRank (AKA "PR") you might want to see if you techniques are working so the best way to check this is by adding the Webmaster tools to your Google account. Those tools gives you the chance to check directly on the Google's database the number of external links pointing to your site as well as every URL indexed by your sitemaps. Without using the Google Webmaster Tools you can check how many URLs of your site are being indexed. Just do a simple Google search like this : "site:www.iseduction.net". The "site:" prefix tells google to show results only for the specified website. You can also type a phrase to search in this site, but if you only type the URL, you will get every URL indexed for that website.
6. Add quality content in your website
If your website is community driven, the content is probably not a problem as the members continuously add stuff in it. But if your site is a dating site (for example, because I currently have 2 different dating sites,
www.iseduction.net and
www.quebecsexy.net), you have to add quality content in your pages around the user profiles. Have enough text with high density keywords to help the search engines really know what's in your site. The more content you have, the more the search engine will have something to index you with.
It looks easy but, if I take my personnal websites I own, only my blog has real quality et quantity stuff. My dating sites only have about 8-10 different pages. All other pages are in fact the same aspx page that displays members' profiles.
7. Optimize the title of your pages
Don't have the same boring title for every page you have on your site. You should have a different title for every page on your website. You can have a fixed part like your brand name followed by a dash and than a dynamic part. When you search with one or two different keywords, the webpages that has those keywords in the title will appear on top of the list. The page title is as important as the URL relevantness so don't neglate these parts. On search results, the keywords that are in the title of the pages appears in bold.
8. Optimize your META tags
Even if Google does not care about this, it should be a good idea to have good META tags on your HTML of every pages on your site. Old web page crawlers maybe still using the META technique to index your pages so, even if you don't really care about other search engines, it may be a good practice to do so. META tags must be placed in the <head> tag in your HTML pages and looks like this :
<head>
<meta name="description" content="your_keywords_here followed by a statement about your product service or organization." />
<meta name="keywords" content="top 10 seo tips, what is seo, resources, seo software, seo ebook, search engine optimization" />
</head>
9. Use heading tags (H1, H2, H3)
This is important. If you all define you own classes and always use SPAN or DIV tags, the analyzer part of the crawler will have difficulty to know which part of the page is more important than which. Using header tags makes defining relevancy more easy because H1 is more important than H2, and H2 is more important than H3 and so on...
10. Assign ALT attributes to all you images
This will help indexing properly your images on your website. Images are not easy to index because there is not always a descriptive text near the image and that text is not always placed at the size position relative to the image. Using ALT tells exactly what the image is all about so it is very important for image indexing.
11. Include a robots.txt
This file needs to be placed at the root of your website. It contains information about what is allowed to be indexed and what is not allowed.
12. Validate the HTML and CSS code of your website
You can do this with the free tools provided by the W3C.
13. Add an analytics link in your pages
If you want to see if your SEO strategy works, you have to track any traffic change. The most powerful (and free) analytics tool is the Google Analytics.
14. Be patient, wait for results
The process of indexing a website is not really fast. The bigger your site is, the faster its new content gets indexed. By the time your site gets as big as CNN or Microsoft (if it happens one day) you can wait 1-5 weeks to see something on your Google Webmaster Tools.
Web technology used in iSeduction.net : ASP.Net 2.0
The technology behind iSeduction.net is ASP.Net 2.0 all the way.
Since I'm a .Net programmer, there was no way I would have picked PHP or ASP for this project. .Net is a complete programming language, not only a scripting language like classic ASP or PHP.
Because I worked for years with the .Net technology I saw many differents ways to create web applications. I personnaly prefer the 3-tier model (explaned here) because it is widely used and easy to implement.
The languages used are 90% C# and 10% VB. Some programmers will say "Why use VB ??". The reason is on the jobs I had they were often using VB.Net so I decided to add some VB. I use this only on the aspx pages. All the modules on the business layer and data access layer are written in C#. There is about 60 modules.
Database used in iSeduction.net; from SQL Server to MySQL
The RDBMS (Relational DataBase Management System) used throughout the website is MySQL.
At first I designed the website to use SQL Server 2000 and it lasted a year. In the first version I was using a lot of stored procedures (about 200). Because I was continously adding new features on the site, I was always creating scripts to update the stored procedures to handle the new tables and new fields. Every time I was running my scripts on the production server I got errors. Every I was trying to backup the production database on my local computer I got errors. Ok I was on a shared hosting so that didn't helped. I rapidly found this very anoying so I starting to think about what I could do to solve all the problems I was having. Allthough I was a big fan of SQL Server (for using it a lot on different jobs) I started to read on MySQL. I was thinking about the day I have to switch to my own server and pay for the license... SQL Server being very expensive, MySQL was a good option.
After reading a lot on MySQL I decided to convert my SQL Server database to MySQL. I started by grabbing a copy of my production database localy and convert data from one database to another with MySQL tools. It took me a while to convert everything because some types (like blobs) gave me some difficulties. After that I started to rewrite all my stored procedures from one SQL language to another. At this time there were more than 200 procedures so It took me a while to convert every thing. After all was succesfuly converted to MySQL, I decided to create a backup of the local database to restore it on the production server. I found that the version on the production server was not accepting stored procedures... bad surprise ! I then thought about the right thing to do and I decided to extract the stored procedures from the database and put them in text files. I then rewrited my data access layer to read the procedure in the text file named like the procedure. I then realized that we canno't have procedural code (like IF, WHILE, etc) when executing a command with the text of the procedure so I had to rewrite every logic from my stored procedures to my C# code.
After all that I was ready to change my database system so I practiced a lot with production copies localy. Because of the blobs (used mostly for encrypted passwords) it took me a while to find the perfect way to convert them so after I've founded the way, I created DTS packages in SQL Server. After the process worked a couple of times I stoped the website, copied my production database localy and executed the DTS package. I them restored the new database in production and... voilà ! Everything was working fine. It was more difficult than I thought but I succeeded.
How I started my own dating site
How I started this site :
http://www.iseduction.net
I was wondering what I could do to generate more money than just my salary. I was thinking and thinking every day and every night 'till the day I decided to create a dating site. It was not my first website. I already did some for companies and for games, like
http://www.aidemyst.info/ (Myst & Riven help site).
(2006-05) Because I wanted to do it all by myself I started to put my ideas on a sheet of paper, putting more and more every day. I knew I was going to use the .Net framework 2.0 and SQL Server 2000, so I read a lot on the net to search for optimization techniques and things to care before publishing the website on the web. I then started to design my database, putting tables, stored procedures and so on. I then took Photoshop to design my web pages. I also purchased some icons and pictures on sites like
istockphoto to fasten to design process, and because I'm not the best web designer, normaly I design entreprise applications (my day work).
(2006-07) I started to add some asp.net code behing all that. It took me about 8 months to get something to work great. It took me a lot of time to make PayPal payments works.
(2007-07-07) I'm not someone who is very superstitious but because my site was ready for publishing in July 2007, I waited for the 2007-07-07 to arrive so I can put my site on the net at this time. For more sevens, I waited for the clock to show 07:07:07am :-). Everything whent great, I started to display my AdWords ads and traffic started to come in. My first strategy was to expose my website worldwide to see where people would came from the most. It appears to me that Africa gaves me A LOT more members than America of Europe so I decided to advertise only in Africa : first mistake ! In africa I can get clicks for 2 cents (that is absolutely perfect for someone who don't want to invest a lot in this). To be able to send message in the site, (int the first version) the user must pay. In africa they barely get 1000$ per year, so charging 20$ a month is a lot too much for them.
(2007-08) I then decided to advertise in America (USA and Canada) but It was about 20-50 cents a clikc !! That was killing my daily budget, so I was thinking what to do : turn into a free dating site ? invest more ? try to advertise on different network (other than Google) ? It's difficult to choose ! I was jungling with ideas, but for the moment, I returned to africa because I wanted to get some traffic, even if they don't pay, I wanted traffic because this is the heart of any working web site : traffic.
(2007-11) In my search of the perfect campain, I opened a Microsoft AdCenter account : second mistake. I lost my 5$ charged to open the account and never got a ad impression on the network... don't even think about a click ! So I closed it. I then decided to stay in Africa and turn into a 100% free to use web site : first good idea.
(2007-12) In the process of becoming free, I also decided to switch from SQL Server to MySQL : another very good idea. For personnal websites, I suggest you use MySQL because it is free and easy to use and performs very well. I also changed to design of the website. Everything has been changed. Everything ! I put some AdSense ads everywhere on the pages. I removed the paypal payment form, I removed some unnecessary functionnalities like changing the visual theme of the site. I remembered something one of my teachers told me : (KISS) Keep It Simple and Stupid. I helped a lot, because with less unused functionnalities, it is simplier to maintain the source code.
(2008-01) I uploaded the new version of the site. I started to see a real difference. I started to get revenues from the ads. I also put some affiliate network ads. It works great too. The only problem was that every clicks I got what giving me cents (1-5)... This is not like this I was going to be rich ! So I canged my advertisement strategy to Canada. I started to advertise in Quebec (where I live), paying about 8-10 cents per click. The revenues I got started to grow. Because competition is better in Canada than Africa, every click was giving me 10-90 cents : a lot better ! Don't pay less to get less, pay more to get more !
(2008-03) Now I get approximately the same amount of money I invest every day. The main source of revenue is AdSense but affiliate marketing pays a lot too.
http://www.iseduction.net