You’re in luck because Inc.com is having a contest sponsored by Alibaba. The startup that wows enough people and has a proven concept will win the coveted $100k. See here and here for more details.

1. Offer special features that only premium members can use. Charge the premium members $9.95 a month to use the service.
2. Place Google Ads at the bottom of every summary post. This gives you a wide range of keywords with varying Earnings Per Click. And with an average user having 15 feeds you can have several hundred ad impressions through just one user depending on how many feeds he read in a given day.
3. Another way to monetize the site without invading your user’s feeds would be to place Google Ads in the header of the ExtJS feed viewer and at the bottom near the footer.
4. You could use a combination of Google Ads and Text Link Ads. With text link ads your income isn’t based on clicks its based primarily on Google PR and your Alexa rank.

I hated English class –almost always got nailed on papers for plagiarism. And I know you’re not supposed to start a letter or a blog post with an apology, but hey this isn’t English class so I can do whatever I want. Besides I started this post with a slam on English class –so there.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a month, I have been very busy. I am still working with a group here locally on a new jobs site called ENG.com which is taking up some of my time and I am trying to finish up the initial draft application for Alliteration Plus. Anyway…

What if you have an idea which I usually do, but you are totally booked like the list I mentioned above plus a few other things that I didn’t mention. Wouldn’t it be nice to see if your idea had any merit?

Depending on the site you are thinking of building it may take you a couple hundred hours in development time, and then you have to hire out someone to skin it and make the site pretty for you. Not a lot of time there, but there is money spent –unless you skin it yourself which takes even more time. I suck at graphics and I rarely come up with a color palette that looks good –so I don’t do this anymore.

Building a new website like this is a waste of time especially since you have no idea if the site will work or not. Now you may think well if I don’t build it first class and pretty then no one will use it. Not true there were plenty of sites out there that sucked and they made it. In fact even after they made it the sites overall functional flow and look just blew. But it satisfied a need that people had and provided value –so they overlooked the obvious flaws. (I knew some girls like that –you know had obvious flaws but they satisfied a need. Just kidding –or am I?) So my point is that a simple website that performs the unique functions that separate this site from another is all you need to test your idea and determine the sites potential.

So knowing that doesn’t it make a lot more sense to build a web site as plain Jane as possible and get it online? Make it functional and get some backlinks to it, perform some SEO on it and then go back to your other projects. Don’t wait for the result or you will be waiting a while. But at least this way the concept application or website is up there and if it works it works and people will come and do whatever they are suppose to do on that site. As your member base grows you will see your profits grow. Then you can take “new” money and use it to put a face-lift on that web site.

What have you accomplished? Two things: you built a new website quickly, usually in under a week and you have had your web site tested by the market. They will decide whether it’s a good idea or not. If the market likes it, upgrade and optimize it. Then move on to the next one.

Yes, I did it again. I started another site. But I just had to. It’s for this project I am working on to collect something from users (can’t say what) and no it’s not cash. Well not right at first.

I found this absolutely smokin’ niche that looks like its got close to no competition. Oh yeah, and it gets like 74,000 searches on Google each month. Nice! So I’m going to work my magic and see if I can get a site up.

I’ll offer the user’s two of whatever I am asking for. So if I want x, I will give them two bonuses or freebies specific to that niche. That should help me get what I need and help them at the same time. Plus with that much traffic you know I could get some sweet affiliate cash from that.

Oh, and since I don’t have the site up yet, I went ahead and secured a domain and created the account on my Virtual Private Server (VPS). I use Liquid Web -they are super great! But the site itself isn’t up and working -so I put up my “Coming Soon” app to grab emails while I’m building it.

It would be nice to have it completed in a week, but I’ve got other commitments as well my awesome day job that absolutely rocks ICE! But, hey I’m working on it right? We all are. So press on people -success is just around the corner.

One of the projects I am working is using Code Igniter. It’s a Model View Controller for PHP.

I’ve used PHP a lot in the past, but I am new to Code Igniter. I was looking for some tutorial videos to see what exactly is happening between the view the controller and the model. The user guide is ok, but when you’re new and don’t know where to look a video always seems to help.

Granted this is for programmers and advanced users. So, if your just putting up sites and grabbing cash from affiliate sales this is probably beyond you. No offense.

Here is a list of some videos that I found online: Code Igniter videos