That Web Man

So that post about adult affiliate marketing and more particularly, the affiliate programs’ links and banners got me thinking: why not go for a full-on site featuring both affiliate advertising, free affilate-provided sample pages and even free content by way of RSS feeds?

And that’s exactly what I did, adding in some regular posts as well as some free YouTube content provided again by their tagged RSS feeds.

As usual, DreamHost got me set up in an evening and I put some banners in place and syndicated some RSS feeds. One of them, though, is refusing to release its formatting so I’ve had to ruin the design by giving the posts a white background so that the formatted black text can be read. Pain in the arse, but the support bods at Traffic Cash Gold are trying to help out now. Affilate links are coming from TCG as well as Adult Pay Master and the Lady Sonia franchise.

Anyhow, fill yer boots with pr0n at Glamorous Matures.

This site amused me a lot: Make My Logo Bigger Cream

Now this blog may be pretty ‘busy’, but I’m a big fan of white space and the “less is more” approach to design without being too heavy (or should that be ‘light’) on the minimalism.

I have two clients who were presented with clean and attractive web site designs that they slowly chipped away at demanding bigger, bolder fonts, in-your-face images and more “stuff” until they ended up with sites that frankly I’d rather I wasn’t featuring on my client portfolio.

Maybe they should buy some of these products

I followed a link to another site and from there to this guy’s site – another WordPress lover like me.

He’s set out his Top 53 Blog Designs of 2007 and there are some fab ones to look at and to get some inspiration from.

On the subject of advertising, two of the main earners on the Internet are gambling sites and adult sites.

Google’s AdSense program, however, does not allow their use on sites featuring “pornography, adult or mature content” as well as other prohibited sites. So the alternatives to such ‘legitmate’ advertising programs are adult affiliate advertising programs, but which to use?

Well if you follow that link, you’ll come across a very interesting blog entry from Matt Peskett in February 2007. He mentioned just how professional Traffic Cash Gold is.

Now at this point, I should confess that I operate a web site featuring adult content. And why not? It’s not pornography: it simply combines my creative side by way of web design and photography, my business side by way of seeking to make some money doing what I enjoy doing and my personal side by allowing me to indulge in what else I enjoy…

The earnings from running the site aren’t exactly massive at a little over $500 since I started it up late last year, but then again it isn’t a full-on, XXX site either so the membership fees are a very modest $13.95 a month for those that continue past the initial $9.95/21 days taster. Modelling fees and location costs have actually more than used up the revenues (let alone the domain names and hosting on top of that), but then again it is a great way to spend a day so I’m not complaining!

So anyway, last week I signed up with TCG and placed three small banner ads. in the sidebar of the samples page on my site so as not to make the rest of the site look too tacky. And I already have one $35 referral fee! So it’s a start and another $35 to go towards the next modelling fee…

The main source of traffic to my site is a channel on YouTube which I started in February 2007 and to which I post a video from the main web site every few weeks (I currently have 11 videos showing there). As of today, it  has 908 subscribers, the channel has been viewed 81,073 times and the videos themselves have been viewed a total of 832,193 times. If only I had been paid a buck or even less per view!

You’ll perhaps have noticed that over there in the sidebar are some adverts provided by Google’s AdSense program: they are based upon the content in the page where they are shown and if a visitor clicks through one of them, I get paid a few cents depending upon what the advertiser is willing to pay Google through their corresponding AdWords program. I run AdSense ads. on all my personal blogs and personal sites and I also serve some on one page of one of my businesses’ sites.

I’ll never get rich from displaying Google Ads – I reckon to average less than a dollar a day but hey, $300 a year is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick – but I had noticed that revenues had been falling.

Now the positioning of the ads. over there in this particular sidebar isn’t that good from a layout perspective as most of them are “below the fold”, i.e. you have to scroll down to see them.

Google helpfully provide a useful guide on positioning their ads for maximum exposure/benefit in their AdSense Help Center. There’s a dedicated page for positioning for blogs too.

So as something of an experiment, I changed the positioning and added another set of ads to two of my sites: one a business listing site and the other a blog-based site for a community project I am involved with.

The results have been surprising with both sites performing significantly better since taking into account Google’s suggestions. My advice? Give it a go if you’re serving the ads.

Not signed up to earn money through AdSense? Click on the AdSense button in the sidebar.

Talking of domain names, one of the best things about my US-based hosts and the .coms I can register with them is the speed with which I can go from ideas to sites.

I use DreamHost in the States. Even on their cheapest hosting plans, they allow me to register multiple domain names and host multiple sites. Through my control panel, I simply register the domain(s), set up the site hosting and then to make things even easier, have them install WordPress with a new MySQL database. I did this with this site yesterday: start to finish was less than an hour. I also did this with a client web site a few weeks ago: start to finish including a fancy photo lightbox and site banner image was a few hours.

The ‘problem’ comes with .co.uk domain names that take hours to get registered (and also cannot be registered ‘anonymously’ or by proxy) and even longer to get propagated across the Internet.

So yes, I thoroughly recommend DreamHost and all the features that come with it:

Oh and if you click that image and proceed to set up a new account, you can have $50 off a year’s hosting fee if you quote the promo code “THATWEBMAN”.

Instant web presence for anyone. It’s the future and it’s here now.

This morning I received an e-mail from my hosting partners telling me the client’s domain names had been renewed and that they’d had a call directly from the non-paying client demanding to know when it would be back up.

By 10.00am, the .com had been renewed and the site was serving up the hosted pages again – the .co.uk had never stopped doing so.

I had also received an e-mail from the client which as a postscript asked if the cheque had arrived. Needless to say, it hasn’t…

One thing that might come to annoy regular visitors {snigger} is the likelihood that I may well use this blog as a testbed for WordPress themes. There are so many really good ones out there and I’m always keen to roll out or adapt new ones to suit my needs (and those of some clients: I’ve done two client sites in WordPress already, one for the CMS aspects and one just because).

I apologise in advance…

One thing that surprised me when I chose to set up this blog was the availability of both the .com domain name for such generic terms. thatwebguy.com had already been taken, as had thatwebdesigner.com but I could have had thatwebdesignerbloke.com if I’d wanted it.

Mind you, I was lucky enough to get a couple of released early domain names before: blogged-in.com and blogged-on.com.

I billed a client back in November for some site updates during October and for the renewal of his two domain names (a .com and a .co.uk) together with another year’s web hosting.

This was due for payment a week later…

Now this client has a history of being a slow payer. The company I use to host his domains and site – I am a reseller rather than paying for the necessary infrastructure myself – has to wait for me to pay them too, so they now don’t renew domain names until I have paid, billing me a month before they are due for renewal and these days looking for payment on invoice.

So by today, my invoice was already three weeks overdue for payment and I got an e-mail from the hosting company telling me they’d had an e-mail from him over the weekend as some e-mails to him had bounced. Hardly surprising, given that the .com had expired a week ago and the .co.uk four days ago.

I popped him an e-mail this morning to tell him what was going on and then at 6.00pm tonight got an irate phone call from him demanding I renew them! It was apparently my fault for not reminding him.

I politely pointed out that the invoice states what the payment terms are and gives both cheque and BACS payment details. I also pointed out that the covering e-mail gives a date when payment should be made by, just in case people can’t work out when “today plus seven days” is.

Clients, eh?