Mini-Series postponed

Well I wrote a short mini-series on how to squeeze some cash out of your blog. I was planning to run it from mon-fri but realized there’s no point this week due to xmas and the like, so I’ll be running it from the 4th of Jan as I’m on holiday

A hectic winter and a lack of updates

So lately I’ve been a bit off the mark with blogging, my post frequency has fallen and joining it slowly is my traffic. For those who check here for an update and get the same post, I’m going to try change this pretty soon. I’ve got a series of short posts lined up on simple ways to increase blog monetization coming soon!

This last week or two has seen a lot of deadlines at university and a lot of coursework (almost 90 pointless C programs written =/ ) along with moving back to Nottingham and catching up with friends and family. Everything is a bit rushed, but now I’m back home and settled, I’m sat by the fire with my feet up, listening to some chill out music and just taking a breather, we all need one.

I’ll be updating more soon, check back shortly for my mini blog series I’ll be starting on monday!

Before the Volcano Erupts

Spotting niche’s before they go mainstream

This post was inspired by a tweet I saw recently by a friend of mine. The tweet was about the website F My Life, which went from around 6,000 hits a month to over 50,000,000 in a space of 2 months. For *anyone* in internet marketing, that’s phenomenal.

A surge like that is incredible, now in summer they managed to get a book deal sorted and started selling a book, can you imagine if it was monetized properly how much a site like that could of raked in. We’re talking about 1.7 million users a day seeing your page purely from SEO. The return from a site like that is staggering.

FML (Fuck My Life) as a phrase has been gaining popularity a lot recently, it seems we have buzz words that come and go, the word pwning or pwnage from gaming was really popular a few years back (thanks to the brilliant first series of PurePwnage).

As the title suggests, it’s all about spotting stuff like this before it explodes, if something is slowly becoming popular, or even if you think something could become popular this year, buy a domain and get a simple site up. If you did that for 20 phrases like FML, it’d cost you like $200-$300 for domains and hosting, if one of them even slightly takes off you could be rolling in tens of thousands.

I’m not saying every silly meme will make you thousands like FML or icanhascheezburger, but if you hit one you’ve hit solid gold. Remember this isn’t just phrases, if somethings becoming popular then try jump on it, if you fail you’ve lost $20 bucks or something, this game is all about losing and learning to start earning (poet and I didn’t know it).

Stay vigilant and keep an eye out for those rumbling volcanoes!

Review of Predictably Irrational

Now I’m not a big reader of books. At all. My bookshelves are lined with books to a very specific taste – my own. Along my array of titles you’ll find “PHP and Ajax”, “Advanced PHP/MySQL Programming”, “The C Programming Language” and “PHP Essential Security” among others which are pretty similar. I think the furthest I ventured from this type of book was Harry Potter as a kid and that was probably the last time I read something that didn’t have a chapter on functions.

So anyway, I’ve paused my usual 5,000 projects and focused on 1 or 2, this gives me some spare time (which is a virtue) to read a new book, which I do enjoy, so long as it’s technical. However this week I stepped outside my boundary thanks to my good friend Jonathan Volk, you might of seen his review of it not so long ago, well here goes mine.

Predictably Irrational, threw me in the deep end of a topic I’ve never really paid interest in before; behavioral economics. Sounds pretty scary. I was a bit skeptical about reading something like this because I thought as a programmer and affiliate marketer, how useful is it to me? The answer? Invaluable.

I was signing up at the new local library (opened last week by the queen, feel free to mock American readers) and decided to run a quick search for a book, since Jonathan recommended it the night before I searched for Predictably Irrational and found they had 1 copy (which ended up being in some store room).

Now the only problem I had with this book was my inability to put the damn thing down. I mean I thought it’d just be a load of marketing tosh, telling you how to write the perfect sales pitch, but I was so wrong. Behavioral economics for those who don’t know, is the study of what we do and why we do it. For example (from the book) why is it that when we take a $5.00 tablet for headaches, we’re cured in minutes, yet when we neck a 5 cent tablet, it’s rubbish? Or why when we spend $1 on a coffee from a street vendor, isn’t it as good as a $5 frapalappamochaloolacino from Starbucks?

Understanding why people make decisions can be a key part in affiliate marketing because you understand what people will do in certain circumstances, but this book goes a bit further in to that and looks at how we can change their decisions subconsciously.

Dan Ariely who wrote this book embarks on some interesting studies in this book with his fellow professors and MIT/Harvard students to find out what makes us tick, why and how it can be altered without us ever knowing. In the first chapter, Dan discusses a fantastic example where he offers us a newspaper subscription in print for $120 or email for $50 (I think they were the figures) yet manages to make a majority of a surveyed group pick the $120 option.

I was really impressed with this book, especially as it’s outside my usual comfort zone of techy related reading. It was thought provoking and insightful and gave me quite a few ideas I could apply to my own marketing strategies.

I’ve since ordered the book from Amazon and it should be here in the next couple of days and I can’t wait for it to be the first non-technical book on my shelf! The only downside I could see to this book, is if you’re really interested in behavioral economics then it doesn’t go that in-depth, it’s more a skims the surface kind of book to give you an insight, further reading would definitely be advised, but this is a great start.

You can find the book by clicking here, there are so many great reviews for this book, definitely check it out! Thanks Jonathan!

Basics of using Twitter’s API

Note: this tutorial was originally intended to be posted on Nettuts, they originally accepted it but then realized it relies on an existing PHP library – they prefer if you do that sorta stuff from scratch so fair enough. Anyway I know it’s a bit different from my usual content but no point letting it go to waste!

Integrating with Twitter’s API using OAuth

Making your web application work with Twitter is one thing, but using OAuth for a secure login looks more professional and makes your users feel more safe, a priority in todays web application design. Today we look at making a simple application that utilizes Twitter’s API that you can use in your own applications.
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