A lot has changed in my ‘pension building online’ activities since I wrote the last post. I’ve really started to focus on the ebay affiliate side of my plans and I’m delighted to report good results.

I’m a member of a site called One Lung Thin. They offer training & an awesome forum centred around ways to make money by building websites that send traffic to ebay. There are lots and lots of information and lots of help, it’s terrific.

When I wrote last I had just built 30 sites and considered it a mammoth task, in the 6 weeks since I have built a further 120 and am now at 151 total. This is a numbers game and the numbers work well as long as you are willing to invest the time in building sites. 

The other major change is that I have had to take on a server. My little shared hosting accounts nor my reseller account would handle these sites so I am now a very happy customer of Servint who have been terrific at getting me setup and providing 24/7 technical support. I have cPanel/WHM and fantastico and for that money anywhere else, you’d be having to check the apache manuals yourself. Great stuff. The sites zip along on the server now whereas they were grinding before and causing multiple clicks as people got tired of waiting for pages to load.

Regarding the sites themselves, there are different types of sites being built on One Lung Thin but all variations on the theme of ‘thin’. Affiliate sites are required to have contact us and privacy pages but apart from that the ‘TNS’ only have one page and a search list. It sounds pretty spartan and it is, however it is made that way on purpose.

Here’s the purpose: My sites focus in on a specific niche, they display it in a specific way that suits a particular group of customers with a specific intent – Purchase.  The way I look at these hand-selected niche sites is as specialist shelving for ebay’s vast content. It is another way for ebay to help one customer, the vendor, interact with another customer, the buyer.  

When you are in a store looking to purchase, you don’t need to know lots of information about the product on the shop floor. Just: Is It Available?  How much is it? Can I Buy It Now?

…previous post …where a person is looking for the actual product to purchase, then the best thing I can do is to connect them and not put anything in the way or distract them with additional offerings. 

The sites are MUCH smarter than just that though and they use some very creative techniques to ensure that before someone gets to the sites they have indicated they are likely to purchase. This is primarily done through keywords and key phrases. The keyword detail in the phrase and the length are two critical factors. Basically, long tail keywords are good because they are very specific. Specifics searchers have a specific reason for searching and that is very often to purchase.

OLT can make lots of resources available. A Keyword tool is available to subscribers that finds out what are the most popular terms on ebay – I bought Jarb’s Bot at $20 that with a single click will update all my 150+ wordpress sites with all the plugins to the latest versions -  another will submit new sites for indexing and yet another will check for sites that have been de-indexed. I auto-pool info with others to auto-protect my sites against attacks by bots. Malicious pieces of code that click on every link in every page and can really mess with the quality score of the account or get your account suspended – That’s not a problem now. It’s a slick operation

In terms of the workload It does not take long to build an individual  OLT site, it take a little time to do the keyword research, pick & purchase a domain, set up the account etc. However when it comes to site building, there is one specific form, the Thin & Spin that really is fast to roll out and very effective at bringing traffic to ebay. It’s the most popular form in use as you can imagine and it is how I managed to achieve 150 sites and I’m not finished building yet. I can create a site from scratch on a new account & new domain in 15 minutes and I can have a clone in 5. It’s amazing.

It all sounds too good to be true eh? Well Yes and no.

Yes – There is the not-so-minor hurdle of getting into EPN and then you are at the mercy of ebay and the search engines, particularly Google.

Yes – you will need to roll up your sleeves and start playing with code

No – it IS true that if you follow the plan laid out at One Lung Thin and invest the hours it takes to build a hundred sites, you will be making a good stream of money every month from that one time effort. Yes I said Every Month. That is until the rules change. Who knows when that may happen but the sites are flexible and can be re-used in many ways such as with alternative programmes such as Amazon.

How well the sites do in the long term depends on the niches and the keywords that I’ve picked. I have tried to select ‘evergreen’ niches. Things that will always be popular. I avoid fashion and fads but invariably tastes will change and as I have been learning my way along, I will definitely have backed a few donkeys in amongst the stable of racehorses that I hope I have. I’m also building sites in some ‘out there’ niches, a scatter gun approach and maybe a few will hit the mark. I’ve had some nice surprises so far that have led to sites in other niches.

If you have tried and failed to get into EPN or you wantto promote Amazon, there is another alternative but it does mean that you can’t use the TNS sites. Skimlinks would definitely work well if you have existing informational or useful resources online and wanted to monetise them. I have a number of sites recently put onto Skimlinks who are an ebay super-affiliate so they get an enhanced EPC click rate from ebay. That is just as well because they take 25% of your earnings for the service! Before you say anything, after their cut is taken off, it does largely equate to, or improve upon, the payment a normal affiliate would receive so you end up with the same take-home pay for that click as a regular EPN member, you just can’t use TNS. The nice thing about skimlinks is that you can also access affiliate schemes by Amazon and I think 25 other major online retailers.  Check it out..

The Skimlinks approval process is much less onerous than EPNs but they will only acept sites with ‘an amount’ of actual information that supports the listings. Nobody is quite sure how much is enough. I have a feeling they don’t know themselves! That of course means that our “highly specialised niche shelf displays” built for the shopper & not the reader, just don’t cut the mustard - despite our specific customer not requiring the info they insist we provide. They’ve already passed that info stage - They’re at “Is it available? How Much is it? Can I Buy It Now?”

In any case, my progress in terms of this becoming a financial viability has been positive since I started this programme. I continue to build sites and graphs continue to rise, I obsess about statistics and I’m constantly searching out niches and keywords. I am building Amazon sites at the minute to spread the risk of ebay not being available to me and I’ll look further afield to see how I can maintan my momentum, putting little roots in the earth so the plant may be nourished. It’s working and gathering momentum but I’m not about to put a deposit on a yacht any time soon.

Check Out the One Lung Thin Site For Yourself

So several months have passed and although there hasn’t been much activity around my blog, there has been a lot of activity off-site. Most of it has been related to bingbangbong and keeping a wee ship afloat in heavy seas but I’ve also been expanding my web work. I’m a long way off generating a retirement income, I’ll tell you that!

Late in January I was approved on the eBay Partner Network. This permits me to access ebay and display their items on my sites. The benefit for them is that they get increased traffic from having many more outlets and the benefit for me is that I earn a few pennies when a visitor goes on to purchase something.

As a member of the Partner Network there are many ways of using the ebay content, but for me I look on it as trying to provide a relevant service to those who come to my sites.

I know myself from experience of trying to find something on ebay and having to trawl through hundreds of irrelevant listings to find what I am after. I mean how many bodhran-playing porcelain figurines does the world need!

I help my site visitors by providing the ebay data BUT only after running it through a series of filters that remove the dross. This means that if you go to a site like fiddle.tradauction.com you will see only real fiddles. No paintings, brass ornaments or figurines. If you look at fiddle strings, you’ll see only strings, not skimpy underwear; Rosin brings violin rosin, not dancer’s rosin etc etc

For some sites we don’t just filter! in Tradauction, If you want to look at items for sale in a different part of the world, you don’t have engage in a .com / .co.uk / .ie / de shuffle. Simply select which country’s auctions you’d like to view- 1 click!

Want to see finishing soonest / recently listed / cheapest / most expensive? no problems, we can choose to do that

A lot of the filters are automatic using the software and then I manually build the detailed filter to ensure that the signal to noise ratio is very high but nothing is 100% perfect! The sites do take time to build and the filters take time to set up. It takes effort to bring traffic and maintain the sites, particularly when there’s a major software update. It is easy to build sites quickly but it’s time consuming when you need like 100+ of them to make it worthwhile.

So how is it made worthwhile? Under a system called ebay Quality Click Pricing (QCP) the affiliate (me) is paid on the basis of the number of clicks I send to ebay… but …each click’s value is calculated on the value of the merchandise sold historically and is adjusted daily. Basically if my site drives through lots of clicks but nobody buys anything then those clicks are of less value to ebay. It is vice versa if everybody buys of course and therefore the key is to work toward having mainly purchasers click on the links.

The nature of the relationship is between ebay, me and the customer. The way to make it work best is based on the pretty simple convention of being the right site in the right place at the right time. Here’s a hopefully helpful explanation.

When people are considering purchasing an item online we usually fall somewhere along the following research path

• Broad subject research (Benefits)
• Segment Area research (Features)
• Product Type research (Product Makers)
• Product Model research (Model Options)
• Product detail search to Purchase (Specific product model number & colour etc)

I build various sites for most of these levels.

Sites like Bodojo.com or drumdojo.com for example are useful for someone looking for information on bodhrans or snaredrums and to find out what makes one different from another. However ebay would not work well there because the majority of the users are researching the subject and not considering purchase. Any clicks to ebay would be less likely from buyers and therefore have a lower overall click quality.

Commercial sites can however usefully come in at the third level dealing with a product group for example www.tradauction.com which displays the instruments commonly in use in Irish Traditional Music. In the guitar sectionot jn, you canbuy not just guitars but 6 string, 12 string, strings, cases, tuners, and no wee figurines in sight. Same for concertinas, banjos, uilleann pipes and the rest

Clearly the last two sections of the list above are where I need to be placing my sites to catch those with the greatest likelihood to purchase. People here are looking for more specific searches, often times ‘x product model xyz blue’ or ‘wingwang ltd, model WingWong-abz/001 pink’

Once we know that more specific searches generally happen closer to purchase, there are a range of techniques that we can use to attract those visitors to our lovely filtered site and to ensure that we have the specific product that they are search for – I have to say that without the scale of ebay and the huge product breadth and global presence this would not be possible.

When I am building a site that is specifically for the very last stage in the process, where a person is looking for the actual product to purchase, then the best thing I can do is to connect them and not put anything in the way or distract them with additional offerings. The final-stage sites at the bottom of the list above are extremely basic and not at all pretty. They display listings and not much else. No global site distractions, no ‘sort by’, just the listings. These usually provide the best quality clicks because the buyers are more targeted and there is nothing to do apart from click to ebay.

Since February I reckon I’ve built around 30 sites.  Half in February and half on the last week of April, in the time between I have been building the tradauction structure so that eventually it can be more than trad listings. That project alone had required 9 sites. Some sites take 15 minutes from start to finish, others suck at your life for weeks.

Here are some other examples of sites that I have built.

IrelandRugbyShirt.com – Yep Irish rugby shirts – very specific search and lots of sales during the 6 Nations

weseg.com A simple Segway listings site – this is the most basic tytpe of site that I build, these are fast to make but not pretty.

Snaredrumsticks.com umm…Drumsticks another super-basic site

Vintage Zildjians.com – This is a thicker site with useful unique articles based on my research

So there you go, thats my update. I’m really just scratching the surface because there’s a whole load of keyword and niche data research to get you to the point that you build a site but that’s the fun part – where’s the next niche.

30 sites down 70+ to go then we’ll see where we’re at!

Watch this space

Stereographs are three dimensional photographs visible when two separate images are viewed in a particular way.

 The first image above is a very good example that I took recently on a short visit to Amsterdam. To me this really captured a lot about the city and I think it is far more powerful because of the 3D.  The perpective with the tower in the distance is amazing especially when the bell and handlebar on the bike seem to jump out of the image. 

FRUSTRATION ALERT! 

Most people will take a little practise to work out how to do this, and many will give up before they do. The first time you see it for real is usually recognised by the “wow” that invariably accompanies it! I’ve also seen too many people fake it, it’s not easy, there’s no failure but it is well worth trying :)   This is what our eyes do every day but just at a different focal point. If you have regular working binocular vision then you CAN see these!  If you don’t see these at first, persevere! 

How to View Stereographs

 Face straight on to the image as much as possible. 

You will be focusing on a point that is half way between the image and your eyes but seeing the image that is in the background. Let me explain that in a slightly different way. Your eye muscles are focused on the half way point but your brain is focused on the image. It sounds confusing doesn’t it. 

Try this… 

hold a pen somewhere around the half way point with the tip in line with some part of the image. Move the pen toward your eyes and focus on the tip – observe in your peripheral vision what is happening in the background as the two images of the stereograph become three. Yes? 

Now at one point only you will see the tip of the pen in focus and ALSO the third image in focus. That’s the point. 

Checking alignment 

When a child (or an adult?) did you ever touch noses with another person and move your head slightly to see the other person’s eyes move in a humourous way? no? just it’s me then… 

Try rotating your head a little but still focus on the pen – can you see the two outer images rotate as you move? what happens to the center one? 

If you can maintain this focus on where the pen is but remove the pen you might now see the center image in 3d, more than likely it’s not there yet because your eyes will want to change focus to the screen not the imaginary spot where the pen tip was. Keep trying. 

Taken over the shoulder of the late Paul Phillips in 2007. He is videoing an amazing gig by the Tea Merchants featuring our own Rob Forkner in the video with Chris Buckley and Charles Branch giving it loads! We miss you big lad.

Most often we initially lack the fine muscle control to maintain the focal point, it gets much easier. Watch out for varying image widths which mean that you have to adjust how much you ‘cross’ your eyes. When I occasionally have difficulty in seeing a new image I pick something in the images that is very distinctive, an obvious fixed point like the snowman’s hat in the image above and then work on simply aligning those two elements in the central image. It takes a second to get the fine tuning and then it ‘pops’ into 3D. (see wow effect above) 

How To Take Stereographic images

They are dead easy to take. Simply move the camera to where your two eyes would be. … pick a left eye image - CLICK. Move 2 inches to where your right eye would be CLICK. That’s it. All done bar the photoshop or screen grabber and MS paint to place the 2 shots side by side! 

It costs just a few seconds extra to capture any image in a stereographic manner, so I now take them almost instinctively and they really add to my enjoyment of looking back at stuff.  Really it’s a significant thing for me and so easy to do with modern memory cards – I love having an iPhone with lots of memory! 

• TIP#1 – It’s easier on the eye if the images are taller then they are wide.
  • -It is much more strain on the eyes to overlay two wide images so go tall where possible
• TIP#2 – When you arrange the photos side by side you need to put the right eye on the left side of the pair and vice versa obviously.
  • -If you view them the wrong way around it will look odd – check them out both ways and pick the better version for you.
• TIP#3 – Try to make the two images as close as possible in composition when taking them.
  • -Later on you will have to trim off bits at the sides that aren’t in both images so save time by taking to seconds to define the edges of the shot now as you compose it.
• TIP#4 both images should be of the same size and image quality.
  • -Often modern auto-exposure cameras will compensate for even small focus changes so you can end up with two very different images. Photoshop etc can fix a lot but sometimes it just doesn’t work – Take plenty – pick the best.

Here are some more stereographic images that I feel make it particularly accessible (e.g. focus on the end of the tape in the inage below) or just are good examples of using the effect to draw attention to the main object like the video in the image of Paul Phillips. 

Feel free to comment and if you want to try to take some images yourself, have a go & send me the results. If you can’t join them or have problems  I can do a few. 

I’ll be adding these to my facebook stereograph page  

BTW Most of these are taken with my iPhone4 & some with my well-loved Nikon D70 

You can focus independently on the end of the tape and on Matt. whichever you go focus on, the other will be unfocused

 

  

Rob Forkner & Andreas Transo examine a heavy blue plastic ring for the benefit of 3D stereographic research

I really like the strong 3D effect here being so high up and with the lighting half way providing a very definite middle ground, you’ll see what I mean

A collection of various percussive bits in a hasty still life thingy – notice how I didn’t know to trim the edges of each image to be the same and therefore the edges are funky in 3D

Anyway, I have many more that I have collected but I hope that these have been interesting, I’m loving the fact that I can record memories and situations in three dimensions. It’s useful professionally when visualising a work site or a piece of equipment in the design stage (yes it even works on my wee cad programme – more on Sketchup in a different post. 

Hope you enjoyed these, send me yours and I’ll post them here or develop a gallery or something if there are a few people interested. Feel free to comment below.

-P

 

All images (c)Paul Marshall 2005-2011

 

 

So I thought I’d share another site of mine with you that I built recently www.jointswood.com.

1927 Woodworking Joints

It is a republished book from 1927 of  all woodworking joints used in carpentry at that time. I have learned a lot by working with the material in the book whilst building the site. Some very smart stuff indeed, practicality rules!

I loved the puzzle joints so much I have a separate site coming on those puzzlejoints.com - there’s a bunch of stuff on youtube I can collate as well but there’s nothing to see for now

Anyway, I wanted to explain how I could could get access to a document of I guess about 25,000 words and 400+ images. The answer is it was in the Public Domain. Existing Copyright laws according to a fixed set of criteria permit for documents & media with un-renewed copyright to fall out of copyright into the public domain. There’s an amazing array of stuff available

When something is in the public domain it is made available for general use and the benefit of mankind…kind of. Such material is available widely in words, images and video and may be used in a wide variety of manners, including being developed, resold, repackaged and many other ways – visit the Gutenberg Project for much more information and a goldmine of free reading. The works of Shakespeare are one example, the Bible is another but there are many, many less significant works.

Arising from my searches for interesting stuff in my niches of drums and instrument building, I happened upon a public domain woodworking joints document that I felt would be appropriate to dust off and re-present.  Woodwork Joints from 1927. I did some keyword research on the subject and settled on the name jointswood.com. Why jointswood? well woodjoints .com was taken (and in fact is just parked with some cheap ads on it). But google looks at people’s searches for ‘wood joints’ as being the same search as ‘joints wood’ ! Therefore the keyphrase ‘joints wood’ carries the same traffic potential as ‘wood joints’, which is pretty significant, but there are also existing sites to compete against for position.

Of course I need to get the site ranked for all of that optimisation to mean anything but I am confident that the keyword.com domain plus heavily optimised pages & images mean that it should rank well when I focus on spider love.

Why am I doing this? well a couple of reasons. Yes it is fun, I admit and I like the result but primarily, it’s a brick in the wall of an online pension-building plan. I create small niche sites on interesting (to me) topics and place advertising on them. With a rare exception, the information I provide is free but I get a small cut from someone clicking on an ad. Many small sites with good search engine rankings that contain low-maintenance information that stays ever-relevant should over time equal a contribution worthy of the initial effort to create. I hope.

Sites I built 4-5 years ago on a whim are now ranking well with little optimisation work. Solid evergreen information supplying a niche with low existing provision will plant roots in search engines that will feed traffic for years to come as you develop niche authority.  I’m just sowing those seeds, some will take, some won’t :)

So in line with my www.f1circuits.com task, I’m looking for top 10 in google.co.uk & .com for my keyphrases wood joints (easier) and woodworking joints (much harder) although I should pickup a lot of long tail and specialist traffic with the unusual tools and joints discussed. There is competition in this niche because most hobbies are well catered-for online.

10 unique visitors a day is a good target (thank you Matt Levenhagen). 50 impressions/pageloads a day is successful enough to let a site ride indefinitely building traffic & authority as a mature base for future development later. If a site pays for its hosting costs and renewal it can stay, generally.

Ok that’s that, www.Jointswood.com another brick in the pension

Premium Drum and Drumming Domains

I have  made about 50 of the 200+ drum domains I have collected over the past 10 years available to purchase. Domains are sold with 1 years free hosting, free WordPress/Joomla site install, free email setup and lots of traffic / search engine / marketing advice.

To access the list, use the page link to the right or Click on this Drum and drumming domains for sale link.

List includes

• Bongodrummercom
• fingerdrummer.com
• drumshells.co.uk
• howtoplayhanddrums.com

and many, many more equally cool.

These are available on a first come first served basis & when they’re gone they’re gone. If 2 people contact me about a domain I’ll ask for sealed bids over the price given.

P

The Drumdojo Logo - Did you know it's an Ambigram? reads the same either way up!

One of the projects that I have been working on for a long time now  is Drumdojo.com - a drum information site. It was started because at one stage drum information was hard to find online, believe it or not.

Drumdojo is the parent of Bodojo, TunaDrum, DrumBits, StreetDrummer, JunkDojo(now gone) and many others that have been & gone.

Iwas a member of RMMP usenet newsgroup and started writing and publishing drum info online about 1997 (I think) through my powerhaus website. in 2001 I created Drumdojo and 2011 is the 10th Anniversary. 

Anyway John Ward* & I undertook a lot of work on the main drumdojo site to disentangle it’s informational content from 10 years of my learning web design. The site is due to be relaunched in a few days.  I should say updated, not relaunched…I’m saving the fireworks

A significant feature that has been lacking on the site is a discussion forum. The bodhran forum on Bodojo is the largest on the web and has proven that this relevant and social interactivity is the most useful part of an online community. I have received many comments over the years about creating a forum on Drumdojo to cover all things drums, and now it is to happen.

The site is always in need of new material (articles & reviews gratefully accepted). I do put up new content from time to time but I have been working hard on a new extension aspect to the suite of sites.

New Drum Building Site

I will shortly be releasing a new Drumdojo family site on the topic of drumbuilding about which I have said very little. It  is a significant addition. I’m witholding the name and URL for now pending a formal launch when it is through beta testing. (Now Fireworks)

The new site is a subscription site and will deal with all kinds of drum building. This not simply assembling a snare drum from a purchased blank ‘Keller’ shell - often misnamed ’drum building’; instead I am referring to sheets of plywood, woodglue and power tools. It requires actual effort, the making of mistakes and the achievement of skills and experience. How proud will you be of your first drum?

The result of the site’s own-shell building approach is that you can then take a few extra steps to make bodhrans or frame drums. Eventually cajons & taiko drums and we’ll add more as we go along.

Who’s it aimed at?

The site  is aimed at beginner and amateur builders, We’re trying to get it down to a method where you can build drums on your kitchen table with hand tools and still get a half decent result although you’ll need plenty of time .

For sure pro level tools really do help immensely but the site’s about enabling budding and hobbyist drumbuilders – not just about building drums. Not everybody has a router table & table saw, but everybody wants to learn. If you just want a new drum, it’s cheaper & MUCH less effort to buy one, honestly.

Drum-Building Beta Testers Wanted

I would like to invite 100 or so people to beta test the site. You will have access to all of the existing material – 20,000 word wiki, hundreds of videos, blank forum, 3D CAD drawings & files, Ebook download…  Basically I am looking for your suggestions, comments and feedback. It’s not yet finished but its looking pretty good structurally and I need some people to use it for a while and let me know where it is broken and how it can be improved.

If you do wish to join the Beta Test team to help improve the site and you can agree to provide meaningful feedback then please email me via admin at drumdojo.com and I’ll send you the URL. There are other benefits to being a beta tester but I’ll save those for later to save people joining just for the freebies

Because there will be 100 testers, when you register with the site you will also be signing up to our newsletter which is our primary form of email contact with the team. You may be asked to confirm this by clicking an email link, standard kind of thing…

Subscriptions

The site started out as an ebook about drum building but the supporting material that I felt obliged to provide quickly mushroomed to overshadowed the ebook alone.

The book that became a site has taken over 2 years to compile. The book had an intended selling price of £20 and this is the annual subscription for the site. Yes you will get the ebook but also the wiki, forum, videos, cad files, help… 

I’m very excited about the site enterng this beta stage after weeks, months & years, I hope that a few weeks of beta testing will see it go live and I hope to be seeing YOUR drums not long after that.

…oooOOOooo…

Note to non-beginner and already-accomplished drum builders

There are multiple ways of achieving any task, particularly in instrument building and therefore if a you have built a drum before, the ways I show may be very different. But they work  If there are better ways then join us & discuss them on the forum  – all information is good and that’s what the drum building site is there for.

—————————————————————————————————-

*Thanks to IT consultant John Ward for bravely tackling broken links and a .htaccess file with thousands of redirects with me. There’ll always be more to do but for now it’s a massive improvement. The job was bigger than I had anticipated and John was very patient and lenient in his invoicing. He is a former Network Solutions employee and highly recommended.