The last month or so I’ve been working on getting my own projects back on track. After working for other people so long, most of them had withered on the vine. As I go through and clean them up and get them ready for re-launch I’m also thinking about the future. New projects, how to make money, how to save money and make this whole thing work. One of the most simple tricks to making money is by saving it. Spend less than you make. I do that now, but not as well as I could. So as 2007 winds down I’m looking at what I can do in 2008 to not only make money, but save money!

1. I’ll be chopping bills left and right. Anything that I don’t use or need is history, starting with Cable and Phone services. Cable will be cut back just Shotime and HBO and otherwise, basic digital cable package + internet. With the phones, I’ll probably cancel my Vonage account, just don’t use it enough and I’ll be cutting extra features that aren’t used on my cell package as well (4th line, etc.)

2. Paying off Credit Cards. I’ve been working on this for a while. I don’t have a ton of credit card debt, but I’ve been using them to build up my credit rating for a rainy day. Paying these off quickly will save on interest and lower my monthly payments.

3. Refinancing my house and possibly my car. When I bought the house I had to pay insurance and other stuff through an escrow account. It’s been a year and I’m now eligible for a lower rate and won’t have to pay the extra dough each month. I may refinance enough to fix up a few things that desperately need it, but I’ll still end up paying about $400 – $500 a month LESS than I am now. If that still isn’t as low as I want it, I’ll consider selling it and getting a smaller place. I’m going to do whatever it takes to work less for clients and more on my own projects. It’s now or never. If I have enough money left over, I’ll probably put a couple thousand down on my car and refinance to lower that bill by a 100 or so bucks a month too.

4. “Cleaning House” – Getting rid of things that take up space and use up electricity. I’ve already started with my office and once I’m done, I’ll move on to the next room. Part of the plan is just to reduce the clutter in my life. Things that distract me, and waste space and energy. Some of them I can sell and use the money for better things, like paying off bills or buying things we actually need.

The goal is simple: Save as much money as possible. Right now I support more people than I should and I spend more than I should. That ends now. I’ve spent a large part of my adult life helping everyone around me and while I won’t stop being helpful, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before, put myself first. There are things I want and things I want to do and it’s time that I make them happen. If things go as planned then I’ll be in a better position to help people anyway, which is part of my plans. I just need a couple of years or so to get my sites and ideas in place and then I’ll have more time and money with which to help people. So, 2008, look sharp buddy. I’m on my way.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve forgotten to attach a file that I was sending someone via email. In fact, the one of the worst times it ever happened is when I was applying for my first job as a web developer! I still ended up getting the job, thankfully. I covered pretty good “Oh, that’s odd. Let me try again, let me know if you don’t get it this time.” We’ve all done it.

But here’s a little mind hack to help you never forget to attach a file. It’s simple, really, but it works pretty well. Attach the file first! Before you do anything else, before you type who it’s to, the subject or the message, go ahead and attach that file. Once you get to typing your bound to get off on a tangent and forget what your doing. You’ll write that you’ve attached the file and then get to writing your message only to hit send and forget! Attach those files first and you’ll never forget to attach them. Try it, it works!

I would have left my comment here, but they required login. If I’m going to login, I’ll do it on my own blog ;) Kevin says he cut his finger on his ipod headphone jack. That’s nothing, my macbook has edges so sharp they nearly slit my wrists! Apple has got to stop cutting corners (I kill me) and smooth those edges out. I know I can pay an extra $1000 – $1500 for a MacBook Pro with smoother edges. And don’t try and tell me they aren’t sharp. I know some Mac zealots would defend Apple even if they trimmed their low end models with razor blades.

via Little Green Footballs:

But they delete it in a sneaky way; when you visit the page and are logged in to your account, you still see your comment, but everyone else sees either nothing or a message that the comment was deleted.

I love it, honestly. I know it’s underhanded and sneaky and I would never use it on someone criticizing me or with something I didn’t agree with, etc. However, this is the perfect way to deal with a Troll. Anyone who’s ever run a site or especially a forum knows that banning by IP is about as useful as asking the troll to stop in the first place. Same goes for banning their email address. They’ll be back before you can refresh your page. The idea of making it look deleted to one user isn’t new. vBulletin actually has that feature built in. It’s called Tachy goes to Coventry and it works remarkably well. Tachy lets the user continue posting and responding but only Admins and that user sees it.

This would make a great WordPress plugin. Have it support either Cookies or Logged in users and you’d have a great tool to add to your arsenal to defend against trolls.

• .htaccess Editor
  Very nice.

As I go through my list of sites trying to rebuild my network from the ground up I keep asking myself: Should I build a lot of sites and try to make a little bit of money off each? Should I try to build a handful of sites and make a decent amount of each? Or should I put all my energy into one site and try to make as much as possible off that one site?

The answer will be different for everybody, especially depending on what you are trying to do. But if you are trying make money publishing web sites my advice would be to do as many sites as you can do well. That number will vary depending on your skills and resources but I think it’s a good idea to diversify your income. You can do that even if you own one site and I highly recommend it. Building one site and trying to take it to it’s full potential has a lot of appeal, but for me one of the problems is that even when I love something I lose interest if it’s all I do. So for me I have two reasons to build more than one site: Diversify my income and Multiple Topics of Interest.

Having one site has certain risks, especially if the site is new. What if your main source of income for the site went away? What if your competition draws away a large portion of your visitors? What if the search engines don’t love your site anymore? On the plus side though, having one site usually lets you stay on top of issues like this. By devoting all your energy to the one site you can have the best content, cultivate strong relationships with other sites and know when your market is shifting and take action accordingly.

My plan, however, is to do 5-10 medium – strong sites. Mainly to try a few new things and see what works and what doesn’t. As I see which sites rise to the top in terms of earnings I’ll focus more on those and either apply what I’ve learned from those sites to my others or if their just niches that don’t perform start culling the heard. My plan is to get to a handful of really strong properties over the next year and only adding new ones when the timing is right or a new niche just can’t be ignored any longer. Of course I’ll probably create 25-50 sites over the next year to try and see what works before I narrow it down to the strongest, but that’s part of the fun.

The hardest part for me is deciding which site to do next. To help I looked at my ideas for new sites and my existing sites. I may end up Refreshing my old sites before I launch new ones. One in particular gets pretty good traffic and just needs some TLC: We Heart Pets. It’s always been well liked and linked to and needs to be updated to my new theme style and fresh content and have a look at how I want to monetize it. I’m still pouring over my notes and I’ll have a plan in place by this weekend so I can get crackin.

Review Back sounds like an excellent idea: I review your site in exchange for you reviewing mine. It’s worked well for John Chow in the past, but with Big Brother, er Google, cracking down on webmasters doing what they can to get links is Review Back in danger of getting sites in trouble like Pay Per Post did? For those who don’t know, Google gave more than a few sites a PageRank 0 for buying reviews through PPP. They’ve even banned PPP from the search engines all together. A few weeks before that Google also hit anyone selling Text Links, especially through the Text Link Ads service with lower PR. Review Back is probably still small enough not to be on the radar but I’m sure Google would probably frown on the idea if not down right denounce it. Don’t confuse my opinion on what Google would do with what I think about the service: I love the idea. I’d love to use it.

There are other services out there like this and I’m not trying to disparage Review Back in any way. As I said, I’d love to use it and think it’s a great idea. I fear I’ve become gun shy of trying things lately because of Google’s extreme smack down on links. Will they target trading links next? Thoughts?

Technorati Tags: Link Building, Review Back

• Nip Problems in the Bud with a TOS Page
• the personal tumblelog of Bijan Sabet
  I have to agree here. The focus should be on IP and not about competing. Competition is good stuff.

Facebook recently launched a new service called Beacon which tracks, via participating partners, the purchases of it’s members. The partnership seems to be monetized by the posting of recent purchases to “friends” mini-feeds further driving traffic to affiliates. I don’t think very many people want what they are buying being the business of anyone, let alone being broadcast to all their friends without their permissions. Aside from the obvious problems, like spoiling a Christmas surprise present or a more intimate product purchase, this is just plain wrong. They launched the service quietly and made it OPT OUT, meaning you are part of it unless you tell them you don’t want to be. Opt out just isn’t how things are done anymore. We live in a double OPT IN world. You have to ask me if it’s okay and then confirm that I’m the one that said okay.

But this isn’t my only concern with Facebook and them keeping my data “private”. I recently did a Facebook application for a client and during the process I realized that I had access to just about everything in a users profile that visited the application. Most of it’s just fluff data, nothing personal like credit card info, social security number, email address, etc. But my real name is in there and, if I choose to, my political, religious and other affiliations. Someone could use that to target me in a number of ways that I’m not comfortable with. I haven’t seen an option to hide my data from 3rd part applications. I signed up to use Facebook and granted them and my friends access to this data. The odd thing here is that Facebook used to be a completely closed system and now the door has swung way back in the other direction and in my opinion, is playing it loose with their members privacy. I’m not easily spooked by privacy concerns but fir the first time since I’ve been online (1994!) I’m actually considering closing my account with a company due to how lose it is with my personal data.

Facebook could easily fix this by making Beacon opt in and making data captured by 3rd party developers optional in my profile as well. A simple check box for both would be both easy and make me feel pretty safe. I’m not sure I’d trust it to actually work at this point. I guess with rumors that the creator of Facebook stole the code from friends at college make this seem even more shady. Hopefully they’ll be able to solve all these concerns and make everyone happy. I know they need to make money but that’s never an excuse to violate your members privacy. Not ever.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Privacy

• Stop the complaining about boxes and grids.
• Social bookmarking service. Fast tagging and posting to all major social websites – SocialMarker.com