Today creatively started with me building a solution in visual studio 2010 that had projects for…

• Downloading an affiliate window product feed
• Unzipping the file to the local file system
• Scraping content from the merchant site using the deeplinks in the feed to have a more comprehensive end result to this whole concept
• Using the parsed content via an agile xpath project reference to build a SQL compact DB
• Building an MVC3 c# site from the database and a theme based on an existing competitor that I know is doing well
• Automating all the above on a daily schedule…. I can see that my more appropriate, memorable domain name would do better, and the site has several obvious improvements that could be made.. Even things as basic as sorting the drop down list items..

However the usual daily drag got in the way and my after was wasted doing…

• Emails through a messy ticketing system clarifying what someone wanted until I got him to admit he didn’t even want the report in the first place…
• Working out why an access 97 DB is misbehaving… Yes.. Access 97 by a wannabe developer
• Being asked to fix something I fixed in the morning..but didn’t get told it was fixed and they had infact started talking about someone completely separate which they did not test when asked to do so a month ago….

There’s a big gap between what I want to do with my days and what I end up having to do…. Very frustrating…. If you read this.. And are based in London doing the kinds of things that are mentioned in the first half… PLEASE hire me!!!!!!!

P.s. iPad2 seems surprisingly fast to type on!

What challenges will tomorrow bring….

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

First post with my ipad2

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

Business man

In programs such as a web browser where you type something into a textbox and it lists all the things you have typed before, if you are like me and actually use those to save you typing what you are looking for in full this is for you.

To remove stored entries in almost any of them just highlight them using the arrow keys and press the delete key to remove them from the history of that individual textbox so you have less crap to scroll through as you use your computer efficiently.

This probably works on mac and linux computers too, logically it would but I only have time to use one PC OS.

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

Quick tip you may not know about windows

But sometimes they worked, and I guess that has a lot to do with why computers have been such a massive part of my life.

I had a massive purge of facebook friends to strictly people I know, and changed the RSS feeds import to just posts from this blog rather than my network of sites, I’ll keep stuff like Bingo for by bingo facebook alter-ego marketing login etc which makes far more sense all round.

Only a couple of days left until we are all off to Turkey – and me and Natasa got the sneezes… had the doctor check us out this morning and we are not growing pig snouts… just a bit of a cold which will hopefully disappear before we fly out.

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

I have been trying to remember this for years…

Today I heard a techno mix by “technics2000″, looked him up and found his blog where I didn’t quite get the mix I was after but he has a shiteload of other mixes that are cool, I am listening to the vocal house vol1 while I update my laptop to vista SP2.

Another artist I heard today is Tadox, although that will be too hard for some of you :), some MP3s are there for free too. Remember the good old days of audio galaxy when you could search for almost any music and find it on mp3…

Wonder when my new keyboard will arrive from china for my Dell 1520 after I spilled some Beer on it one night, managed to flip it over quick enough to save the bits inside but a sticking enter key can be a bit distracting :), ebay is the best place to buy little tech bits n’ pieces.

Edit: next day, and I find myself remembering I like the Classic Rap channel too!, I like listening to this while painting the house…

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

What I listen to at work

This method will earn you at least a couple of hundred pounds a month direct to your bank account every month with very little effort from you. First you need to get a couple of things to be up and running:

A domain name, the cheapest place to get this is GoDaddy, all providers are pretty much the same so why pay more than the cheapest?, use this tool to find your ideal name, generally go for a .com, but if you are in the UK it’s probably best in my experience to get a .co.uk domain nam

You then need reseller hosting, I recommend EUK Host, I find them very reliable with great online chat support and nice and cheap. I have a coupon code that will get you a 10% discount with EUK host, to get that enter 10%new when you order.

We have hosting and a domain name now what?, we research a niche. Now there are 4 ways I go
about researching what is hot and what people are buying.

First you check out Google trends, find out if the trend is stable enough to actually make a blog on e.g. if it was swine flu You can generalise it and make a
website on flu remedies.

Another great source for ideas is yahoo buzz . This never fails to give me an idea for a niche to crack, there is an “upcoming” section that can give brand new ideas to work on.

I head over to sitepoint and see what niche

blogs are selling and for what price. Sometimes you are lucky and find a niche where people are paying a fortune. These you want to get into as fast as possible or else you may miss the opportunity.
Then lastly if all else fails I take a trip down to good old Digital Point and find out what the people there are
buying. The people buying will be your customers so you MUST give them what they want!, this will help you beforehand :)

By this stage with these free online forums and research tools you should have a niche by now!! so let’s us bring this idea TO LIFE. To start this process we will need our first domain. Once again I recommend GoDaddy. Now there are many ways to actually get a nice keyword rich domain name. I personally do not like to spend all day on this so my choice is yahoo domains, just type in a keyword and go as long as it has at least one targeted keyword in it, it should sell. When you register your domain DO NOT forget to point the domain name to the nameservers that your host gave you.

Alright we have the domain & hosting now what?, time for a nice over view of Web Host Manager.
Some of you may not know how to operate it so here is a short guide for you .

• Log into cpanel – different host may vary but this is if you host with me this is how it is set up .
• At the bottom of the page you will see a section entitled advanced . Do not let the name fool you . I am gonna make this simple for you . Click on the ICON that says WHM Web Host Manager .
• Logged into your WHM panel you should see a link entitled account functions . Scroll down that section until you see the add new account function . Click that .
• Input domain name into the domain name field .
• Choose a username
• Choose a password
• Choose a package as I set one up already for my hosting clients . It is called NEW .
• cpanel theme – Leave this ALONE
• Language – English
• Leave the DNS settings alone .
• Hit Submit – Congrats you just made your first account .

Now let us log into the cpanel we just created, simple steps I know but as a new person
some may not know these steps so I am listing them here for convenience .

• Log out of WHM
• Log on to you newly created domain’s cpanel located at domain.com/cpanel.
• Input your information that you created into the prompt .
• There you do all logged in now .

Now we need to install WordPress.

• First we want to go down to where you see the section called
  SITE SOFTWARE, go there and there you will see a icon entitled “site software” – click that.
• Next you will be brought to a list of software available for you to install that is on my server, click blog from the list and then you will have 2 choices, pick WordPress and click install.
• Now while installing the blog you will see some options since we
  are flipping this (flipping is quickly making a blog then selling it on as a product) we want to get rid of the default install directory which is yourdomain.com/wordpress, we want this installed directly on the main domain which is yourdomain.com so the search engines will love it more. Erase everything in that box. Now it talks about database just clean out that box as well as it is not
  needed, fill in all the other input fields and click install .
• Now congrats if you did it right
  you can go to domain.com and view your hello World post !!

Now Let us clean this default content up a bit so we have a clean base to work with.

• Go to yourdomain.com/wp-admin and enter the username and password you set up for it
• Go to edit post
• Delete the hello world post
• Go to pages .
• Delete the About Page .
• Now go to your settings .
• Enter a Keyword rich name for your BLOG
• Enter a catchy Tagline that is easy to remember .
• That is it close that out for now .

Now for a nice little FACE to our BLOG, go to google, type in google yourkeyword wp theme, there are literally thousands of wordpress themes out there just run a search in google.

We have a nice design face for your blog now we have to put it on your blog .

• Log into cpanel.
• Go to file manager .
• Look for wp-content folder .
• Inside that folder you will see another folder called themes,
  go there and upload your zip file with your theme to that folder .
• Now go back to yourdomain.com/wp-admin
• Login and click on the appearance tab .
• Click themes, find your theme, click on it, then activate it.

Go to your blog, take a look at it and see if it is really what you want . Ask yourself “would you buy
it?”, if the answer is yes then you are ready for the next step.

Content ohh who was that that said CONTENT is KING, they are correct as the more and better your
content the higher the price you will get for your blog . So there are a few ways to get this. The quick and easy way – and the right way . Choice is yours .

RIGHT WAY!

Write about 10 or 20 articles yourself and post them on the blog .

THE GREY WAY

Find some articles and rewrite them .

THE QUICK AND EASY WAY !

Switch on the auto pilot!

Yes auto blogs make cash for people who are pretty LAZY. They do not want to keep finding new content for
there blogs all the time . They want a blog that updates all buy itself on auto pilot.

There are a few ways you can get content quickly and automatically, my recommendation is Caffeinated Content. Another helpful
plugin is pingcrawl, lets have a look at those.

CC or caffinated Content

One of the best plugins in the world it can pull data from 3 diffrent places.

• Yahoo Answers – not good for blog flipping .
• Youtube – this is ok for blog flipping on some blogs like gaming and anime .
• Free article directories- Best for Blog flipping .

Pingcrawl is a very powerful tool it finds blogs that have track back urls and leaves pings on them, which gets you a free link.

Now for some reason it only works with CC if the post are set to post in the future . But anyway it
goes you can still sell it as a self advertising blog!, I recomend you BUY CC and pingcrawl is free just run a search for it in google.

Now we have these plugins downloaded on our hard drive we ned to get them on the blog.

• First log into cpanel
• Go to file manager
• Go to wp-content folder
• Go to the plug-in folder
• Upload the zipped plugins there,
  extract them,
  delete the zip file
• Now go back to domain/wp-admin
• Go to plugins
• ACTIVATE the plugins.
• There ya go now follow the read me in the plugins set them up you are ready to roll.

Now let us simplfy this as much as possible.

• Log into your cpanel file manager .
• Compress the file wp-content
• download the compressed zip file .
• Now every blog you make from now on just delete that folder and upload your compressed file and extract it .

How easy and fast is that ?

Now the next part is selling your blog, there are many ways to do this.

• Digital Point is free and has some chance to make sales.
• Sitepoint costs but you can make a lots of money there.
• Ebay you can unload numerous websites there at once.

There are others but those are the main ones, but I like sitepoint so let me talk a little bit about that.
Your title MUST BE CATCHY, go to sitepoint and check out some auctions browse startup auctions . Which title catches your eye?,
Why did it catch you eye?,
How can you do the same ?,
Make sure title is in caps as you will get a better response rate.

Putting special characters in title also catches the eye.
Keep It Simple Stupid!.
Make sure that you do not go into great detail just give them just enough to buy.

Post from: Personal Blog of Brad McAllister

Make Easy Money Online with Blog Flipping!