Seamless way to make money with your website - especially forums

In my recent blog post Making money with your website - without gimmicks I mentioned VigLink as a viable source of generating revenue on your website.

Now that I have had it for a couple of months, and have already seen a payment, this is certainly an excellent source of income to pair with your Google Adsense or another main revenue generator.

Forums will benefit the most with VigLink since forum users often post links to products and services. VigLink dynamically turns those regular links into affiliate links, links you can actually make money off of.

Though you would make more money per action if you singed up to the specific affiliate program yourself, where VigLink succeeds is that you don't have to sign up to any affiliate or have to maintain/monitor links. Everything is dynamic which = easy. Easy money :)

Making money with your website - without gimmicks

There are a billion websites about making money on the internet, and I think almost all are gimmicky.  The formula will always be to build real traffic, and to do that you need a good website that provides good content or resources that will attract and keep people coming to your website.  Making your website easy to use is just as important.

There is no easy way to do that, using the spammy "get more traffic" gimmicks won't do that for you.  It will take actual work.

Picking a niche subject to base your website about can help, but it is hard to start a website from scratch.  If you are lucky and pick a niche that doesn't already have a popular website, things might be a bit easier for you.  You still have to provide good content and resources.

If your website already has top tier competition, try to find things those websites lack and focus your work towards that.

For instance, steelsoldiers.com is the defacto when it comes to former military vehicles.  Huge following, lots of traffic and lots of repeat visitors.  Though this site rules the fmv land, there is quite a lot of lacking qualities.

The biggest is the almost non existent updates from the admins.  There are broken things on that site that have been broken for years.  Another turnoff, silly rules and "cliques" that hammer newbies.

Post a question and you will be bombarded by annoyed long time members, telling you search for it and do your own work.  That would be fine in dandy if the search was actually good and all the "old" posts links to the site itself weren't dead.  The holier-than-thou attitude is a big turnoff.

I created FMVowners.com and am basing the strong points of the site to the weak points of steelsoldiers.com. It will be regularly updated, problems will be fixed promptly, new resources will be added when called for, etc.

I also own RamchargerCentral.Com and pride myself on how that site is run, no silly rules, no bashing, no giving new people a hard time.  That is how all of my websites will be run.

There will be no silly rules, all in all it will be an easy to use no hassle website.  I have also added a technical manual download area (steelsoldiers was broken for years) as well as a NSN part number database, where users can look up parts and get the NSN and part numbers.

Now comes the hard part, get traffic.  It has started to pick up, and hopefully it will keep up.  Right now there is no advertising, no way to make money off of the site, so this may have been a bad example for this article :)

Now on to making money.  Google Adsense is the best way I have found.  Get it and use it.  Affiliate programs are good to, but it is a pain to register with the thousands of affiliate programs and stay up to date with them.  I have found a better solution, VigLink.

VigLink is a Google invested company that finds links to companies they are affiliated with and dynamically changes those links to affiliated links.

This works great with forums, if a user posts a link to Amazon.com, it gets changed to an affiliate link so when someone clicks that link and buys something in the next 30 days (or whatever the time frame is for their affiliate program is) you get credit for it and receive a percentage.

These are both great and easy ways to make money from your website.  I would love to hear of ways or success stories you may have about your own website.  I am always open for ideas :)

Other Advertising Powerhouses should be keying on Google's current "no payment" issue

Currently scores of Google Adsense publisher's are going nuts because they have not received their September payment, which was to be paid in October. Google pays the publisher if the revenue they generate is over $100.00. They claim you will be paid within 30 days of the end of the month your revenue tops $100.00.

Google is changing their Adsense interface, which was causing some issues about displaying how much your finalized earnings are, this was the case back in September as well.

However, the non-payment is a new one, something that hasn't happened since the Adsense program has existed. The worse part...Google hasn't acknowledged the problem.

The Help forum is being flooded with people asking what is happening and nobody from Google is answering.

This may seem to be a little paranoid to a non Adsense user, though keep in mind this has never happened, and payments are usually already deposited into your bank account well before the end-of-the-month.

A simple response or even blog post from a Google employee stating they are aware of the issue and it is being taken care of, or maybe give some sort of time frame, people would calm down.

While people are hectic, other advertising powerhouses, like Yahoo, should be stepping in. There is a small window here, at least I am assuming a small one, where Google is keeping it's Adsense publishers in the dark. No better time to take advantage than now :)

“Google + a Facebook Killer?” Question Answered

“Google + a Facebook Killer?” Question Answered

Is your time spent in the social network worth anything? Apparently in the currency of "eaves" it is

This is a little different from all the facebook games like Farmville, this is actually your social media usage converted to the stock market.

It is called Empire Avenue where you basically turn yourself into stocks. The game of Wall Street played and grown by your activity in social media.

But it isn't just a game, it is actually social media in itself. It gives you the opportunity to meet and interact with cool and sometimes famous people. A game you play to grow your social outreach, what a clever idea :)

Now go on, go look and play, and buy my stock since I told you about it :)

HTC EVO 4G have battery issues? Root it, problem solved

I love my EVO, but hated how fast the battery drained. I had the app killers and battery monitors but nothing helped. On the stock battery I could manage almost eight hours of use between charges.

So I ended up buying one of the extended batteries, which require a new case back since the battery is larger. I was pulling about 14 hours at first, but it crawled down to a measly 5 hours eventually.

I decided it was time to root my phone and take advantage of the custom kernels that help save your battery with voltage scaling. Basically that means it turns down power useage when it isn't needed.

With the help of a guide on Good and Evo I rooted my phone, got a custom ROM and kernel and now I am on 18 hours of uptime with 60% of the battery still there. This is with the same battery I was getting 5 hours from before.

There were some problems with the root that the guide didn't cover. I initially read through the comments and saw one of the problems had to do with apps, so I removed a ton of them, but that didn't help. The issue was one of the files not getting deleted between the boot ups and hanging. Then making it fail if you tried the process again.

The name of the file slips my mind, but you get an error that the process died unexpectedly. Just find that app (the name is in the error) and just remove that app, and run the root application again.

UPDATE: With average phone and internet use I am netting 29 hours of uptime with 14% battery remaining. This is with 4g off, leaving 4g on all the time drains the battery fast, I haven't tested the life on that yet though.

Slimbox hiding animation/flash and not unhiding it

I am actually using Clientcide libraries lightbox (mootools vers 1.2), which is slimbox made into a class, but should all be the same.

Slimbox is suppose to auto hide flash and animation, but show it once you close the lightbox. Unfortunately it didn't work, and flash was hidden forever unless you refreshed the page.

Here is how I fixed the issue.

Search for

var vis = (open ? 'hidden' : el.retrieve('lbBackupStyle') || 'visible');

and just remove el.retrieve('lbBackupStyle') ||

var vis = (open ? 'hidden' : 'visible');