This morning I got some comment from Adam, that he tagged me. I thought what is this, the next social community? No, just an old game “The Pyramid Game”. Normally there are only a few winner in that kind of games and a lot of looser (these players which has joined at the end of the game). This game (check the rules below) is cool and has no looser only winner

The rules:

1. Post these rules before you give your facts.
2. List 8 random facts about yourself.
3. At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names (linking to them).
4. Leave them a comment on their blog letting them know they’ve been tagged!

Eight random facts about me…

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osCommerce is the e-commerce software which can be downloaded for free and makes it possible to setup an online shopping site. osCommerce is a full featured web application and makes online shopping possible easy for the shop holder an the customer. Released under the GNU General Public License (open source), osCommerce came into existence in the year 2000 and is the brain that runs approximately more than 15.500 online stores.

For making an e-commerce site attractive to the prospective customers it is very important that the look of the web shop and the services that it provides are highly professional. osCommerce helps to make this task easier as it has several advanced features that makes it possible to maintain the inventory of the products and display the products online, deals with the payments and processes the orders, thus in effect it takes care of most of the functions of an e-commerce store. The free software osCommerce can installed within minutes and the new shop owner is able to insert his products immediately. (more…)

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I entered the Wordpress Business at the beginning of march and I was one of the first sponsored link sellers on Digitalpoint. At the beginning I made so much money, that I was designing nearly one Wordpress theme a day because I knew that many better designers than me were going to enter this business soon. In fact, only 3 weeks after I started to sell sponsored links, the Link sale section of Digitalpoint became overcrowded with designers and webmasters selling sponsored links. The number of sponsored links in the footer went up from 2 to 4 (and some people were selling even the designer link) and the price started to fall down. This was the point where I decided to leave this business, not only because many of the offered themes were better than mine but also because many webmasters started to copy my promotion techniques (which was the best at the time I was selling those links).

To help other webmasters and designers and to give them the opportunity to make some quick many before the end of this business, I wrote two Wordpress theme related articles:

• One about how to make money with Wordpress themes
• Another about Wordpress theme promotion. I was used to send a list of all the websites I submitted the theme to, to each link buyer. Many webmasters bought a sponsored link only to get this list of websites and to start creating themes on their own. That’s why I decided to write an article about Wordpress theme promotion and let all my readers know how to promote them properly.

Digitalpoint is a forum that I read every day and the link sale section is one of my favourite ones. Already a few weeks ago, the threads about Wordpress sponsor links started to become less. After a quick look today I noticed that there are only a few sponsored link sellers left. All of them make great designs but they don’t succeed in selling those sponsor links for more than 20-30$ each. At the beginning of April, it was possible to earn more than 400$ with each Wordpress theme by selling 3 sponsored links in the footer.

Now this business is dead.

Two are the major reasons for this:

1. It is not profitable anymore to design a Wordpress theme. A quality theme needs many hours of work and selling 3 sponsor links in the footer for 20$ each link is surely not worth the afford.
2. The major websites that host free Wordpress themes and make them available for download to the internet community, does not accept sponsored Wordpress themes anymore (in some cases, they will accept the theme but it will be marked as “Sponsored Theme”). If a theme can’t be pubblished on those websites, it will surely not receive a lot of downloads.

I think you have noticed that I’m still designing Wordpress themes. In fact, it is a very good backlink generator, especially if it gets thousands of downloads like it happened recently to @rctic business. If you are planning to design Wordpress themes in the future, don’t make it for money, but for backlinks and the satisfaction you get everytime a blog is using one of your creations

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After writing about the amount of money I’ve spent to create the Linkrain Web Directory, let’s now talk about the earnings you can make with a only-6-months-old Web Directory. Before I’m going to tell you how much I earn only with the Directory, you should consider some very important keyfacts:

• Even if you have a great website, you won’t earn much if you don’t work hard on it.
• Linkrain has got a few sponsors, don’t expect that they will come to you and ask if they can become one of your sponsors. You have to promote your advertising space and at the same time find sponsors that have a website related to yours.
• The less you work on your websites, the less money you will make
• Before you are going to start a Web Directory, consider that the Directory Business is a really hard one (there are thousands of Web Directories out there) and making your Directory “better” than the others is not one of the easiest things to do.
• Too many webmasters are interested in PageRank. To make money you will need a good homepage PageRank (at least 5) and also innerpage PageRank

After the first 3 months, I did not make any money with Linkrain because traffic was really low and I had no PageRank yet. After the PageRank update in May, Linkrain jumped from 0 up to 5. Also many categories got a PageRank with the first update, which was the reason my first customers decided to add a link.

Ok, thats enough introduction to the Directory Business for now. Let’s talk about the earnings

• 600-700$/month from people that add a link to directory (17-18 regular listings and 2-3 featured listings each month)
• 300$/month from my main page sponsors (other web directories and related sites displayed on the main page of Linkrain)

Total: 900-1000$ each month

These are only the earnings of the Web Directory (blog earnings are not included). To get to this point I spent nearly 2.000$ which I got back within 2 months. Of course I could now stop to invest time, work and money into Linkrain, and earn nearly 1.000$ each month by doing nothing. Earnings would go down each month but I would surely make 5.000-6.000$ within the end of the year. But this is not my objective. Having a blog and a website which is becoming more popular evey day is a lot of fun, the major reason why I started and I’m still running this website.

Regarding the future earnings, I have a very positive prospective:

• The directory is not publishing any kind of advertisements yet. Only by displaying one Google Adsense Block in a good position, I could easily average 100$/month. I’m not going to do this anyway (or maybe not yet) because this could reduce the value of the directory and reduce the number of customers.
• By getting PageRank 6 with the next update or with a future Google PR update, customers would increase a lot and also my sponsors would pay more to list their service on the main page.
• The directory is still using a free template. Once the custom template is up, customers will surely increase.

In my opinion, it is easily possible to create a one-year-old Web Directory which is generating 2.000$ of revenue each month. I will write a new post in 6 months to let you know if I reached this goal

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