I have recently been enlightened to a new serivce that promises to make you money just for posting links on websites, blogs, forums, etc. This new service is known as LinkBee.com.

At first glance you will notice that there are three types of links and each type pays out at a different rate. These rates appear very low but they have a referral program that allows you to make money off the people you bring to the site. This is how the service shines!

These are the three types of links you can create:

1. Interstitial – puts a landing page between you and the destination. Payout is $1 for every 1,000 visits.
2. Banner – ads a banner at the top of the destination page. Payout is $1 for every 2,000 visits.
3. None - a straight link to the intended page. Payout is $1 for every 100,000 visits

It makes sense that the none option is going to be the lowest payout because there’s no ads being show. The only benefit I can see to LinkBee is the exposure of the link.

With referrals you can make some serious cash. Here is a list of how the referal system works.

Level   Percent (of referrals revenue)
0          50%
1          15%
2          10%
3          5%
4          5%
5          5%

As you can see there is almost unlimited potential as to how much you can make. I’ve never been a big fan of referral programs but this time I think I just might make that leap because I can see great potential in this system and since I use many social networks and forums I already have the place to use it.

Here is my LinkBee.com referral link. If you read this article and sign up for LinkBee, using my link, please leave a comment here and let me know

~TheNerd

Recently I have decided that I want to get into the e-commerce business once again so I set out to look for a good, free, and open source website script that would be easy to install, maintain, and administer. Apparently, this wasn’t going to be easily accomplished so I posted a message on the Digital Point Forums and asked for some suggestions.

In the end, I settled on three scripts and then I would decide which one out of them would be the best suited for what I wanted to do. The three scripts I opted to try were Freeway, Magento, and Prestashop. Please don’t forget that this is not an in depth test, it’s more of a first impression test.

Freeway

I’ll start off with my least favorite of them, Freeway. The installation was easy enough (although the interface could use some work) and there weren’t any major problems. I did find that the installation was a bit cumbersome and asked you to test things that it really didn’t need to (like the connection to the MySQL server before even trying to install).

Out of the three systems I tested, Freeway was the only one that required me to log in and change the permissions on certain files and folders before the notifications on the main page would go away. For most products the install script takes care of this without any problems.

Once the installation phase was completed I was able to log in to the control panel and start configuring. The administration portion of the script is comparable to most other systems I’ve used. It had all of the usual configuration options such as currency, localization, themes, and whatever else you would need for an online shop.

The problems with Freeway started when I tried to view the front end of the site. For some reason all the images were broken and I noticed it was referring to a template folder called osCommRes. Come to find out osCommRes was the original name of the project and it was closed source. I checked the archive I had downloaded to see if I had passed over that folder for some reason but it wasn’t there. I even went as far as downloading the archive, all over again, and reinstalling it. No such luck, it was still broken and referencing this non-existent template. I decided to post a message in the Freeway forums. I got one response in two days and all it said was to go an change the default template to the one called Freeway. This was already done so that was not the problem. I have yet to receive any further help via the forums so I have decided to shelve Freeway and move on.

Magento

The second script I tried is call Magento. This is a fairly new e-commerce package that just reached version 1.0 very recently. It was suggested to me by a friend who spoke highly of it so I thought I’d give it a try.

The installation was far easier to look at and went much smoother than did that of Freeway. It was just a matter of a couple of minutes and everything was done. I didn’t have to re-name, delete, or change the permissions on any of the files or folders. This to me is a great thing because it shows to me that the people writing the script don’t trust users like me to make these changes properly so they do it on their own to make sure it gets done and the site is more secure regardless of the person who installed it.

Again, as with Freeway, the administration of the site was straight forward and contained all the usual configurable options. The one thing that bugged me was the default look of the site. There is a templating system in the site but the problem is that it’s so new that there aren’t many free templates available yet and I wasn’t about to pay $50 – $100 for a custom template from Template Monster or another site like that just to for a test. I hope that this problem will go away as more and more people use and hack around with Magento.

It’s hard to describe in writing, but there was just something that didn’t suite me quite right with Magento. It seems to be too Prim-and-Proper or something of the sort.

Prestashop

Last, but certainly not least, I tried a script called Prestashop. I had never heard of this one until it was suggested to me by one of the respondents to my thread on Digital Point.

The installation of Prestashop was by far the easiest and quickest of them all. It took no more than two minutes (including the creation of the SQL database) and it was ready to go. Again, with this script there was no mention of the need to delete or change permissions but the one thing I did find was that I had to rename the admin folder to something of my own creation. This is a neat security feature that none of the other scripts seems to have implemented. It’s a sort of “security by obscurity” tactic. If the hacker doesn’t know where the admin folder is he has less chance of finding it.

After the installation I, as normal, proceeded to the administrative back end to play around with the configuration. As with the other two scripts this one also had the basic options. What I really liked about this script was the ease at which one could find these options. It also comes with a ton of highly configurable modules that can be enabled or disabled at will. I can tell that there’s a lot you can do with this and that it can be very complex but doesn’t need to be if you don’t want it to. The theme of the back end was very easy on the eyes which makes the initial setup that much easier.

From what I can tell Prestashop is fairly new and hasn’t had a whole lot of exposure so the templates are limited at this point but the default template is very clean and crisp so it could, at least conceivably, be used on a production site.

Conclusion

If you are going to take any of my advice then I would suggest you use Prestashop. Out of the three I’ve tested this one was the best for me and my specific needs. If you have different needs than me then you will naturally evaluate those products that you think would better suite your situation.

There are two obvious e-commerce solutions that I did not test. This was done on purpose. For one, I did not test osCommerce. The reason being is that it’s been stuck at version 2.2 for what seems like years. They are in the process of re-writing the whole system from the ground up to accommodate for some new php5 and php6 stuff but they are still only in alpha stage and I didn’t think that evaluating an alpha product was worth my time right now.

The other one I did not test was CubeCart. CubeCart would have, at one time, been on my list. I’m actually running version 3 of CubeCart on ecomstation.ca but since they released version 4 they no longer offer a permanently free version of their software. At least in the old version 3 tract you could use it for free as long as you left their markings on your site.

Another setup that I was suggested was a combination of UberCart and Drupal. Although I have a good opinion of Drupal I am not sure that having to administer a Drupal site along with an UberCart install would be the best thing for me at this time. From my experience, Drupal takes such as long time to learn and administer that it can become very time comsuming.

I hope this simple review may help you in deciding which solution best suits you.

~TheNerd

For just over a year I have been a member of the Digital Point Forums,I must say I have very mixed feelings about the site.

For those of you who don’t know what it’s about you should probably take a few minutes and browse the link above but, in short, it’s a webmaster forum. Actually, it’s not just a webmaster forum, it’s THE webmaster forum. Here are the stats right off the main page “Threads: 1,067,691, Posts: 9,431,474, Members: 224,631, Active Members: 61,021″. Pretty impressive indeed.

So you are probably wondering why I have mixed feelings about it. First off, there are lots of people, too many people perhaps because the trolls get in the way of the good folks. I don’t know the exact stats on the amount of banned users but I suspect it’s astronomical because it’s hard to browse a single thread without finding the word “banned” under one of the user names. The amount of “just Google it” answers is crazy.

Secondly, there are too many kids. The amount of tweens and teens is huge and they (at least most) don’t understand the concepts of money or technology. There is a right way and wrong way of asking for help and more often than not the youngsters are too lazy to do any amount of research on their own they just want someone to do everything for them.

Don’t get me wrong, there are good people there, you just have to dig for them and weed through a million threads and responses to find the good stuff. It takes a lot of time to get used to the site and find out where the good people hang out and who they are.

Occasionally, you can find really good deals in the buy and sell section too. Lots of times the goods there are way overpriced but, again, if you are patient and persistent you might just pick up a little golden nugget in disguise.  You definitely have to watch out for the dumb asses who try and sell you stuff they don’t have the right to sell. I’ve seen anything from the open source (and freely downloadable) oscommerce script to obviously ripped off images, icons, and software for sale. It’s worth the little bit of time it takes research something before you buy it so you don’t waste your money.

Anyway, as I have said, the DIgital Point Forums can be a treasure trove of information if you spend some time and learn the site and it’s people.

Cheers for now!
~TheNerd

I love the videos on NoHardware.com. They make me laugh so I thought I would share the latest one with you. Enjoy

A reader who stumbled upon my blog article about cloud computing sent me a link to a site called NoHardware (nohardware.com). It appears to be an ad campaign for GoGrid.com which is a supplier of a sort of “cloud computing” server solution.

What is neat about NoHardware is that it’s a video campaign akin to the “Will It Blend” stuff. The videos are little skits featuring Dr. GoGrid writing prescriptions for better server performance. Most of the prescriptions consist of a “cloud computing” remedy for a common problem such as up time. Take for example, the second video, where Dr. GoGrid says that your servers will blow up and then they take a huge pile (of what appears to be decommissioned gear) and put it out in a field then blow it up. They literally blow it up with some sort of explosives.

At the present time there are only two videos on the NoHarware site but I suspect that they will continue adding some as time goes on. In my opinion it’s a very clever marketing campaign and should bring lots of attention to the GoGrid.com products. For more information on the GoGrid cloud computing packages you can visit their site at GoGrid.com

That’s right. I’ve launched another website. This one is called Yarmouth Trader and is an online market place where folks can gather and trade good and services in the Yarmouuth, Nova Scotia area.

There are already a few users signed up and people are starting to list their items. I’m very confident that this site will turn into something quite popular with the proper promotion and maintenance.

I have also created a Facebook group, called Yarmouth Trader, to compliment the website and give the users a place to comment and share ideas. As far as promotion is concerned I am running an ad on Facebook (I had a $100 credit to use up anyway) and I will probably be putting the URL and site name on my car.

So far the Google ads are doing fairly well also. I am seeing a few clicks here and there.

Cheers!
~TheNerd

If you often chat on forums you probably know that most people use their signatures to promote their own websites or mailing lists. I know that I’ve certainly noticed it and I even use my signature already for this. There are many ways to use these forums to your advantage to drive visitors to your site (you can even use your signature on my site to help) but you may not know them all or there might be things that you didn’t think we acceptable to do.

During my quest to figure out how to maximize my forum posts I ran into a lady named Cindy Battye and her program called Forum Traffic Gold. This is a great eBook that teaches you how to make the most of the time you spend posting on other people’s forums. You can use these methods to promote almost any type of site, mailing list or affiliate programs.

You can sign up for this ebook on Cindy’s site at ForumTrafficGold.com. You will also get access to a great, member’s only, forum where you can get help for the program or just chat about just about anything with the great people there. Cindy and David are great moderators and will help you with any problems or issues you may have with your account or the forums.

Cheers!
~TheNerd