Only Four Hours

My Journey Towards Living the 4-Hour Workweek


Archive for October, 2009

PPC V’s SEO – An Enlightening Read

I found this article very interesting. I’ve met many PPC-Practitioners and SEO-Practitioners who really seem to hate their counterparts.

Personally I don’t see anything wrong with doing both. SEO takes a lot longer to undertake but, once it’s working, all traffic to your site is effectively free. I like the idea of running PPC campaigns to test a market out. if it becomes profitable then it may be a sign to build a more elaborate website and to conduct SEO on that afterwards.

Anyway, this article below is an enlightening read for those of you scared to put money into PPC.

The Paid Advertising Syndrome On Digital Point | Finch Sells: “”

Popularity: 6% [?]

36 Great Domains For Sale

After migrating a lot of websites over to my WiredTree hosting account I’ve decided to put 36 domain names of mine up for sale.

Some of these domains really are excellent and I’m sure somebody with experience in selling domains could make a great profit from some of them.

Being practical though, 36 domains costs me $360 a year in unnecessary registration fees and for now I’d prefer the cash.

I may be reluctant to say goodbye to a few domains as I’ve held on to some for a long time with the intention of using them, so, even though I’ve listed a minimum selling price for each domain, I’m not committing to anything just yet.

My favorite domains of the group are:

AllVideos.biz, AllScreensavers.biz, AllSoftware.biz and AllGames.biz

I actually have custom-built sites on these domains and planned to monetize them with Zango’s pay-per-install service. Unfortunately I never quite got the hand of marketing them and probably won’t return to them in the future.

IsBlogged.com, AreBlogged.com, IsReviewed.com, AreCompared.com

I bought these because they’ll be fantastic with subdomains e.g. Viagra.IsReviewed.com, Cellphones.AreCompared.com etc. however now I’m actually making landing pages for affiliate offers, I’m preferring to buy one .com domains for each page.

CheckForSpam.com Check4Spam.com

It was a sad day for me when the site I had custom-built for this domain got irreparably hacked and I gave up on it. With the need to control spam increasingly important, these domains could be of great long-term value.

You can view all the domain details here.

Please Contact Me if you’d like to make me an offer.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Free Website Monitoring Service With Uptime Dog

Although I’m pleased with my web hosting at WiredTree, I’m also a little paranoid about how often my websites are online.

Sure WiredTree has 24/7 monitoring services but just recently the entire WiredTree server went offline (this was for scheduled maintenance). At this time I didn’t receive any email alerts telling my sites were down so I’ve been looking for an additional monitoring service too.

There are a lot of services out there but most of the free services only check your sites every 30 minutes (or longer) or are restricted to just one or two sites.

Uptime Dog is completely free to register for and checks all your websites every 2 minutes from two separate locations.

If any of your sites fail you’ll be sent an email immediately.

The only thing Uptime Dog ask for in return is that you link to their website.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Why I Don’t Need a Virtual Assistant

Ferris considers hiring a virtual assistant essential, however, I’m reluctant to hire one.

  • First of all, even for $5 an hour, working part-time, I’d still be paying at least $300 per month.
  • I’d need to be ultra-organized to be able to allocate enough work to the VA every few days, and I’m wary of making a commitment to them and then putting myself under pressure to constantly allocate work for them.
  • Whilst checking bank statements and paying bills is a hassle, the short time it takes to do it v’s the risk of handing out such sensitive information doesn’t seem worth it to me.
  • I’m living in Thailand. Every day is like a holiday here. I work for myself, I have no deadlines for any of my businesses except self-imposed ones so I’ve never felt overwhelmed with tasks that a VA would do for me anyway.

    Popularity: 4% [?]

  • How To Filter Job Applicants

    Our most recent job posting on oDesk has returned 86 applicants in the last 4 days so it’s vital to be able to filter out the weak candidates as efficiently as possible in order to dedicate time to a few on our shortlist.

    My goal usually is to be able to shortlist 10 applicants for any posting in order to provide them with a test.

    Continue Reading →

    Popularity: 17% [?]

    Firefox For Remote Working

    It just so happens that Tanner Morrison has written a great article about how best to configure Firefox (and its goldmine of add-ins) so that, when traveling you can have complete access to your instant messengers, twitter, Gmail accounts regardless of whose computer you’re using.

    The article forgets to remind readers that by visiting Portable Apps you can download a version of Firefox that you can install and run from a USB drive. If you do this and follow Morrison’s advice you should have no problem setting yourself up with a functional workstation on any computer you get access to.

    I have a lot to add to this article, but until I do so, it covers enough to get everybody started.

    Keep Your World Together With Firefox :

    Popularity: 3% [?]

    Reducing Telephone Disturbances

    Based upon advice in The 4-hour Workweek I’ve modified my voicemail message today to …

    Hi, This is the voicemail of Martin Pavion at The True Potential Group Incorporated. I’m not available right now so please either:

    Leave a brief message with your email address so that we can reply back to you outside of office hours if need be.

    If the matter is urgent then please contact me by cellphone

    Otherwise please send a brief email to [EMAIL] and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

    Thank You

    I’ve deliberately not provided my cellphone number because, the only people who’ll ever need to contact me urgently will already have it.

    Now that this message is in place, I’m a lot happier logging into Skype now. Previously, when I’d been busy, I’d leave Skype unchecked for days, knowing that as soon as I switched it on I’d face a queue of messages where customers would expect me to stay up past midnight to return their call.

    Popularity: 3% [?]

    Store All Your Messenger Chat Logs Online

    [Software: Windows / Mac / Unix, FREE]

    I was discussing the idea of remote working with a programmer friend of mine and he lamented about how one of his days was disrupted because a particular password was embedded in a Windows Messenger chat log on his home computer and he couldn’t access it from where he was working.

    The solution to this seems to be a free program called Dexrex which has versions for Windows, Unix and OS X.

    Dexrex works in the background and logs all your messenger chats to your online account that you can access at any time.

    I’ve been using it for the last few weeks and it’s working great.

    Popularity: 5% [?]

    Stay On Top Of Affiliate Marketing News

    I recently added AffBuzz to my bookmarks and my RSS feed.

    AffBuzz is an aggregator that lists posts from numerous affiliate marketing websites together.

    There is way too much information online about affiliate marketing and it’s easy to get overwhelmed or to waste hours every week trying to keep up to date.

    By regularly visiting AffBuzz, or by viewing it’s RSS feed you’ll be able to keep on top of the news efficiently. You’ll probably not need to view anything more.

    Popularity: 4% [?]

    How To Store Your WordPress Password

    I’ve noticed that the current version of Wordpress insists that I enter my FTP password every time I use the WP interface to install a theme, plugin or make an upgrade.

    This never used to be the case and as I use the most ridiculously complex passwords it’s been a bit of a headache.

    Thankfully you can hard-wire your FTP details into the wp-config.php file by pasting the code below …

    define("FTP_HOST", "domain.tld");
    define("FTP_USER", "username");
    define("FTP_PASS", "password");

    This may save you a little frustration and time.

    Popularity: 3% [?]