This post is more geared towards newbs in the field like myself, and will go over both advantages I’ve found and disadvantages. First off lets start by saying that my progress in the website development world has been VERY slow and everything has been self taught. I started out in 7th grade on NeoPets.com where I learned about “NeoHTML” which wasn’t actually HTML at all it was CSS that you used so that you could format your page. Then I actually started to use HTML when I got Archmaille.com which originally was where I tried selling my sterling silver jewelry (if you don’t believe me check out Way Back Machine) I hand coded the site at first, later on some webmaster forums I learned how to combine my knowledge of CSS and HTML to create prettier pages. I finally started to dable in PHP when I got kclanparty.org where I first had PHPNuke installed. Didn’t do much more than the template, and a few custom add ons… but it helped me to learn the interaction of PHP and HTML. Later on I learned of the beauties that come with Wordpress soon abandoning PHPNuke. I mean the only feature of Nuke I really used was the blog so why bother with all that clutter, and growing insecurities?

At this point not only my knowledge of the difference between good code, and the interactions of the different foundational languages was growing, but so was my portfolio of websites. Moving into the upper 20’s the list of domains I owned seemed to be growing month by month. Now with several Wordpress websites, the experience with PHPNuke, (also some PHPBB), and ArchmailleDesigns.com where my jewelry store moved with a custom PHP shopping cart… it was about time that I actually learned how to code a website in PHP from the ground up.

I went out and purchased several books on PHP and MySQL because what I wanted to do you really can’t have one without the other. After several chapters of these books I wasn’t really getting to anything terribly interesting to me. I was learning names of things that I’ve been using for a long time, which is helpful to a point, but not as much as you might think. I could now search for solutions when I had problems which was nice, but I wasn’t having many problems with the few things I knew.

Later when I was working on the security team with MTV protecting their websites I learned of the great world of PHP frameworks. Or rather MVC frameworks in general. I tried many of them but really attached myself to CakePHP since the others were basically worthless as you still had to write 100% of the code how is that quicker? With cake you’ve got the beautiful Bake function where you can bake up a simple CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) website in a matter of minutes (assuming you already have the database ready) What CakePHP really taught me was the importance of good Database Structure, hell it taught me database structure all together, but since it was writing 90% of the code for me and I was once again editing it… needless to say I’ve still not learned any sort of real code.

Which brings me to the downsides of PHP frameworks I still don’t know what I’m doing! I built PetitionsForChange.com in less than 2 weeks! It really is amazing how quickly you can build a website with a framework… but now I am starting to build websites more and more complex, each new project has new complexities that come with it. Now that I’ve become more comfortable with CakePHP it is once again time to move out on my own and start to learn just PHP by itself. I’ve actually learned MySQL very well which I didn’t know before, so I feel more confident to go out and take on the task of building a website in straight out PHP.

haha, okay, so as a lot of people know I’ve used a petition site for years to my advantage. The site used to be really good for SEO campaigns, you’d create a petition (with your own HTML in the body of the petition) and sign it 10 times… automatically you’ve got a PR3 page, PR6, and possibly several PR1 pages linking to your site! Bingo bango! Oddly enough I was the only person who had figured this out… I had used it for a LONG time without anyone ever noticing, or changing anything on the site, as you can probably tell that’s not the case anymore. I’m not really sure it’s possible to get any links from them now… and I have to say it’s probably solely my fault I started to get too greedy, adding the same site to every category, and adding more and more sites they finally stopped that from happening for me

So it looks like LifeTouch is finally hiring some people!?‚?  They finally called me back and I should be starting sometime next week :-D?‚?  I feel fairly confident with the status of all of my websites as of now, and here in a couple of months things will be even better.?‚?  Blogging will be decent on here and Archmaille.com of course as it has been… but I’m thinking of doing a little trickle down LQ for both Archmaille and another site so that I have two at least PR4 sites to blog on, and then here of course… I’d also really like to see Archmaille Designs take off.?‚?  I’ll be promoting it via P3 and trying to get the copper jewelry stuff launched and running… but you know how that goes!?‚?  Already made 10 items this week all copper and ready to be put up on the site for sale!

Have you ever been excited about something that you couldn’t accomplish on your own? I guess I really could accomplish what I want to it’s just a little bit hard… and rather scary with the duty vs desire argument. Alright, so here’s what I’m looking at doing:

• Creating a template for the new shopping cart on Archmaille Designs
• Moving everything over and 301 redirecting all current shopping cart items
• Adding all currently made up items to the stock of Archmaille Designs including chainmail armor
• Creating sub-directories with CakePHP for armor creation, guys jewelry, copper/healing jewelry, and Nerd Bling to add specialized categories for Archmaille Designs
• Promote all new, and old jewelry items to where they get some sort of search engine rankings
• Create PDF’s on jewelry care, chainmail creation instructions, and anything else relevant
• Set up commission tables and get items listed on Commission Junction so other people can sell products for me (mostly PDFs)

Now I can get most of this done by the end of the month… some of it will still need to be done later. The problem comes when at the moment Archmaille Designs accounts for a very small portion of my income. I would like for it to be accounting for more, but in order to do that well I have to get all of this done and have at least 100 products for sale in my store. In order to get all of this done by the end of the month I’ve got to put all my energies into that (besides what is going into the wedding planning and what not). If I do that however I lose income… with the paid postings with blogs it takes 30 days from the time that I submit a post until I actually get paid for it… Right now I’ve got $450 that will be coming in over the next 30 days for my paid posts… that just covers the bills for now in combination with what I’ve already got in the bank, and I need to continue posting to pay them again after January… In order to do that I’ve got to be writing posts now… or I need to have a job in the beginning of January. I don’t mind having a job in January, and was actually looking at either MAST, or LifeTouch… LifeTouch is only seasonal, but if I can get my site stuff done, and promoting stuff while working there things will work out by the time it’s over. The problem is with how the economy is the job market is flooded, and it will be more competitive to get either one of those jobs. So if I take the risk and try to get my site up and running by the end of the month, and neither of those jobs are available… well I’m screwed… if I don’t take the risk, well I’ll be all depressed, sullen and just generally no fun to hang around

Usually I don’t really get how people talk about the bad economy and things… at least for the average worker. I mean you’ve got the chance to get fired, you have that all the time anyways, but your pay isn’t really going down or anything like that. If you’re providing value then you’re pretty secure. I’m really starting to see the crunch right now though… everybody is starting to tighten up, including myself. Being a blogger I make most of my income from advertisements, one form or another. Many of the smaller companies have simply quit advertising all together… which sucks because they filled in the gaps when the bigger companies weren’t going big. And many of the bigger companies have reduced what they pay out in advertising. I do P3 opportunities, and PPC stuff with Yahoo. Just at the beginning of this year my average cost per click was $0.40 nothing spectacular, but with 20 clicks in a day you still make $8 now my average cost per click is $0.11 and I’ve been scrambling to get as many visitors as possible to my sites to capitalize on those clicks… anything I can make is better than nothing. I’m also seeing more and more $5 opportunities with P3 and that’s really starting to strain things. I’ll take a couple, but man, writing that much a day for $15 really isn’t worth it.

I know that we’ll make it back up to that point when the economy picks back up, but it’s going to take some time… and it’s hard right now. Luckily since I’ve been moving up to a minimum of 20 clicks a day up to as much as 50 when things do pick back up I’ll be doing very well. I’ll also start selling more TLA ads! Just have to find a way to hold the fort until that day… I was considering getting a craptacular part time job (Something like McDonalds) for overnight, and then Lifetouch when I can in January… hold both until February or so, then just LifeTouch. That way I can put about $200-$300 a month into nothing but building link quality for my websites, then when the LifeTouch season ends my sites will still be making 20-50 clicks a day, and with some work from me they can start pouring in the cash!

It’s no secret that in internet marketing link quality is king. Anyone who has the highest link quality is inevitably going to be the top of the ladder when it comes to making money online. I have a goal to be making consistently $5 a day by the end of 7 days just from yahoo! ads. If I can maintain that, and make at least one $20 day by the end of the month Rose has agreed to let me stay home and just live off of the internet marketing stuff

My goal by the end of three months (for kclanparty.org), is $20 a day from Yahoo! ads, $2.50 a day from ScribeFire ads, $2.50 a day from popups. (For Archmaille.com) $15 a day for Yahoo!, $1/day SF, $1/day popups, $25/day from P3. (For codysortore.com) $15/day Yahoo!, $1/day SF, $1/day popups, $5/day P3. (ArchmailleDesigns.com) $20/day Yahoo!, $3/day SF, $1/day popups, $15/day P3. For a grand total of $128/day or $3,840/month here before the end of three months. I’m already meeting all the P3 goals besides on ArchmailleDesigns.com and now with building link quality to kclanparty.org I’m really starting to see it blossom with Yahoo! and ScribeFire ads… so that looks very possible to obtain. I need to do the same thing as what I have with kclanparty.org on all my other sites, and that’s when things will really take off. Even making $20 a day from all of the sites with Yahoo! ads, and keeping up with my P3 stuff will put things into a good place.

I just REALLY hope that Yahoo! search marketing doesn’t go completely away, since I can’t get a Google AdWords account right now, and it makes the most money via advertisement banners at the moment. Once I have all of those going strong I REALLY want to put ApplyMyWay out there and just crank up the link quality to it… I might, before this is all done with, get a job at LifeTouch just because it’s a temporary thing, and put $500 a month into P3 opportunities mostly for ApplyMyWay, and a little here and there for some of my other sites just to make sure that they keep their value up too.

So I think I’ve found myself a job! haha, not that I’ve really been “looking” for one… I mean having one temporarily for the next year or two would be pretty nice… but at the Halloween party Rose and I went to we were talking to Travis who mentioned that they have an opening at MAST where he works for a billing clerk. Not that I really know much about billing, or medical stuff for MAST Ambulance, but hey can’t be too bad now can it? haha, it’ll be good. I can’t really complain it starts at $14 an hour and comes with a nice 401k plan, and some other very nice retirement benefits… of course that is assuming I stay there 20 years (not that 20 years is terribly hard or long, but I might get out and do my webpage design stuff again before then).

Anyways, as of right now that’s the plan. Get things going with that, and also get ApplyMyWay up and running! Then once all that is good to go I’ll be saving money as much as I can with while working for MAST Ambulance of Kansas City and if I get out here in two years or so I’ll use a good amount to put into advertising like mad for a couple of sites, or at least build up tons of link quality for several of them. And I’d really still like to be a swordsmith… so that isn’t out of the books. While I’m learning that I’d like to have my websites bringing in a steady income though so that I can just learn things and get them down good.

gah! I’m going nuts over here… I talked about my no log in admin panel, which should work out, if only I could get the URLs to work properly. What I need is for the URLs to look something like http://www.applymyway.com/applications/edit/100/secretid/ and without that secret ID in the URL nothing will happen. All of my attempts at this have failed though… either it shows the page no matter what is there for the secret ID or instead of saving an edited version of the application at hand…

So it’s gonna be back to the drawing board here soon if this doesn’t get figured out.

Running a very small time business myself I know how hard it can be often times to coordinate shipping, especially over seas.?‚?  I’ve had to battle with it myself, offering discount shipping offers that many people believe will ship over seas for $5.?‚?  I would love to offer that kind of service, but let’s be honest with a small business my margins are slim enough!

I got another idea earlier today about how to advertise with the launch of ApplyMyWay.com I still want to do the $200 PRWeb Press Release with a $100 upgrade to the podcast site.?‚?  Then I’ve got $100 sitting in my P3 advertising account, I’d like to bump that up by another $200 but am not exactly sure if that will happen.?‚?  Then, another idea occured to me… What if I advertised on Icanhascheezburger.com??‚?  It’s actually WAY too much for me to advertise on there… I checked, at $950 a week for the cheap ads… I think not.?‚?  What I can do though is advertise on graphjam.com where I can get one week for $35, or two for $60.?‚?  Mix that in with the rest of the advertising campaign and I’m thinking win.?‚?  Two weeks on graphjam has an estimated ad impressions of 1.7 million so it should turn around about 1,700 clicks or so I believe, half of which will either create an application or click other ads on my site.?‚?  So I’d say 300 new apps, and 400 clicks on ads as an hypothesis.

I’d really like to advertise on ihasahotdog.com though… it’s $150?‚?  for one week… so if I can get some backing from Jordan it just MIGHT be possible to do just that.?‚?  PRweb, ihasahotdog, graphjam, and p3.

Of course I still have to finish building the site!?‚?  That is my first task… finish the site, and then go nuts on advertising it to the world.