Technology Reports

I was just looking thru the server logs on one of my personal blogs and found out that one of my posts had been stolen!

My first thought was the B*stards, quickly followed by what to do to get the offending content removed.

As a regular to several webmaster forums, I did a few searches and came up with a few resources as to what to do. I searched the forums, and from everything I found I put together a series of points to follow on how to pursue the matter:

• Make screenshots of the offending website
• View the website source and save it to a text file
• do a whois on the offending domain name
• look up the domain name to determine where they are hosted
• do a traceroute to find out what datacentre they are hosted at

At this stage, we have simply done nothing more than gather information, and this is only the start. In order to request the offending content is removed you need to start writing some letters. The order of requests should be as follows.

• The website owner
• The Webhost who is hosting the website
• The datacentre where the site is hosted
• Search Engines
• Advertising agencies of any advertiser on the offending pages

You need to be professional at all stages of your contact and clearly state what you want and when you want the action to be taken. An Example email might include:

• your full contact details - name, postal address, phone number, email address
• Details of the site/page where your content is being displayed
• Details of your site that the content was stolen from
• The requested action - such as removing the offending content from their site
• The time in which they have to take the action

Now, I would use a set of timelines for action and if the requested action is not taken within that time, then you simply move down the list and contact the next person. If you can find the website owner (quite often this is not possible), then give them no more than 72 hours to remove it.

You will need to add some additional information to your email if you get no response from the site owner or if you cannot identify the site owner.

• a statement by you that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright or intellectual property owner, its agent, or the law
• a statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information in your Notice is accurate and that you are the copyright or intellectual property owner or authorized to act on the copyright or intellectual property owner’s behalf.

Next, the host, give them the same 72 hours to remove the offending content. You will usually have a very high degree of success at this point and very rarely will you need to contact the Datacentre. Hint: you might want to initially contact the host and ask how you can report a copyright violation - this will make sure that you present everything that they want the first time, meaning that the site will likely be removed quite quickly.

Now, you will probably also want to contact any search engine that has indexed the site with your copyright content on it and request that they remove it from their index. It is a little bit tricky here, as you need to collect a little bit more info - such as where in their index the content is. I requested that the offending content be removed within 28 days.

Finally, you will definately want to look at the offending website and see if they have any obvious advertisers on the site. I do not like the idea that someone who stole my content would be making any money off using my content. Gather the contact information for the advertisers and send them a similar letter advising them of the situation.

The biggest tip I can give is to keep a level head, keep a full paper trail of everyone you contacted and be professional at all times. It only takes a few hours to collect the required info and start sending email messages.

Resources:

Digitalpoint Legal Issues forum ( do an advanced search for “DMCA take down” in that forum for the last 30 days to start with)
Another Site that deals with Stolen Content - some excellent information here
An example of a webhost’s complaint steps. * Note - find the same info for whomever hosts the stolen content.
Google DMCA information
Yahoo Copyright Information

In part I we looked at at setting up our blog and doing some initial promotion.

Now that the blog was ready, the next thing to do was to look for various ways of finding people to purchase a post on the Blog. My first place was to advertise on various webmaster forums to promote my services. I spent some time reading the advertising sections and settled on a price to charge for the posts.

The intial price I set was fairly low as the blog was new and I also needed to get a reputation for doing a quality post about sites, and ensure that the post was valuable to the purchaser. The response was positive all the way as I worked quite hard to ensure I only accepted sites that I felt I could write something good about.

Over a 5-6 week period I continually did reviews that built up the content of my site and eventually after around 7 weeks, I had made my first $100 from the site. Now a $100 doesn’t sound like much, but lets examine it a little. My domain cost me about $10 to register and hosting costs around $60 for a year. So, with $100 income, all my out of pocket expenses had been covered. Sure, I had spent a fair bit of time and effort to set up the blog, write the posts and promote my services at this point. I had nowhere near made any real money yet, but from experience, any new website generally takes around 6 months to turn a real profit (after expenses).

My blog was proving to be rasonably succesful at this point from the perspective of making me some money, so I further set out to improve the popularity and ultimately the value of my blog. I signed up to technorati and set up my blog to ping every time I wrote a new post. I was getting so many requests for posts and only wanted to do at most a couple of posts per day, so the logical thing to do was to increase the price a little bit.

With a small price increase, I saw a small drop-off in requests, but still had enough posts to keep me going. At this time, I also set out to look for other places to promote my services and signed up to PPP (payperpost), Blogsvertise and reviewme. I was rejected from 2 out of the 3 sites because I didn’t meet their minimum requirements!

Well, after bing rejected, I read up on the requirements and set about getting accepted. For PPP, I just needed to wait a bit longer - they rejected me because my blog was not 90 days old, I met all other requirements. Reviewme didn’t say why I was rejected, so I simply forgot about them.

I kept up doing what I was doing and advertised my services and kept writing posts and kept earing money. Once my site was 90 days old, I re-submitted to PPP and I was accepted. About this time, I also set up ads on my site as well - not that I was expecting to make much from it, but everything helps!

What I was hoping for was to get a decent Google PR on my site so that I could charge more per post. I was unlucky, and missed out on getting a toolbar PR during an update. So, with no PR, I knew that I needed to continue to work on further promoting my site and continue to write posts for a slightly lower income.

At this time, I set about getting further links for my site and submitted it to some directories. The promotion obviously paid off as my site finally got a toolbar PR of 5. An added benefit was that all new posts were being indexed by the 3 major search engines and were quite often in the index within 1-2 days of me making a post.

Now, with a PR of 5 and a way to show people that a review on my blog and the links in the review would be of real value, I was able to increase the asking price of my posts. I also went back and re-submitted my site to reviewme and this time it was accepted.

In around 9 months, I had built a blog, made regular posts most of which were paid for, or in exchange for quality incoming links, been accepted by 3 sites to do paid posts and made around $750! I had several potential places to look for post opportunites from the sites I signed up to and also by posting on various webmaster forums.

A bit of hard work in building and promoting, some ongoing marketing has resulted in a blog that will earn me upwards of $1000 within a year. While I will not be able to retire (or even quit my day job) on $1k a year, it all adds up with the other online Income that I am making.

A side benefit I get from my blog is that I get to see a lot of sites that I would probably never have seen. Every site offers me some learning as well - I can always find something that I like and something that I hate from each site, which means I have more Ideas on how to build and improve my other sites.

A blog, or even a blog network is certainly one way of increasing your online income, but it will need to be quality so that you attract the right clients.

about 9 months ago, I decided to start a blog with the specific aim of making some money from it. Now in order to have a blog to make money there were basically 2 business models that I thought I could take. I could opt for creating great content on a regular basis and display advertising and hope that some site visitors clicked thru or I could go about setting up a blog that accepted payed posts. I settled for option 2.

My blog was going to be a “review” blog, in which I would write a review about websites and in that review I would have a couple of targetted links to the site I was reviewing.

Step 1 was to go and register a domain and set up a blog on it. That was pretty straight forward and I chose to use wordpress for the blog engine. A simple clean theme and SEO url’s, set up the categories and I was ready to start.

The first thing I did was to write a couple of posts about some of my own sites and friends sites to get a bit of content happening. I also set up a few static pages making sure that I had a way for people to contact me and a bit about my services.

Now, I was ready for the initial stages of site promotion so that I could build the long-term value of my blog. My aim was to make a profit from the blog, so I had to make sure that it was valuable in itself. In order to kick things off and get started I did a few exchanges - I did a few free reviews in exchange for high PR links to my blog. I did this not only to get some good incoming links, but to also get a range of sites to blog about and further improve my writing skills.

After about 3 weeks I had a blog, I had set it up how I wanted it, I had some content on it, I had some incoming links to my site. The basics were in place ready for me to start making some money from it.

In Part II, I will go thru the steps and some of the places to seek out paying opportunities.

The latest and greatest Advertising affiliae program to come out is AuctionAds. It allows you to put targetted Auctions on your website, and if a site visitor clicks thru and wins an acution, you get a percentage of the Auction fees.

What is great about this program is that it is really easy to get started - signup takes less than 30 seconds and you can have targetted ads on your site within a few minutes. You can change most aspects of an ad - such as text colour, link colour border colour and also choose from several sizes.

As the ads are not contextual in mnature, you can use them on the same pages as other ad programs. You choose the keywords for the ads you wish to display.

Every Ad unit also has a link on the bottom back to Auction Ads - and this link could be quite valuable to the publisher - as it is an affiliate link

When the program came out, I thought why not give it a go. So after signing up, I put up a couple of ad units on a few high traffic web pages that I hoped would be reasonably targetted. It has been a little over a week, and I have had around 150K impressions, around 700 Clicks which has resulted in a few $$. While not a lot of $$, there is still a lot of peotential for me to earn from these clicks. Each time someone clicks thru, the affiliate cookie is set to 30 days - if they are the winning bidder anytime within 30 days you will earn.

I have only picked just 1 keyword for ads that I thought would be appropriate to my site visitors but anyone with a lot of visitors and targetted traffic has the potential to do pretty good with AA.

I guess only time will tell how good it is and like any program it will take a bit of fine-tuning to ensure that the right sort of auctions are displayed, but like everything, I guess it will work better on certain types of sites.

Now we have our proxy sites online and running, a plan in place to create another proxy each week and to promote it the next challenge is to kick it into top gear. While so far, the strategey has been OK, the amount of traffic is paying the bills I am in search of different ways of promoting the sites.

At the moment, my strategey has been to build a new site, do around 8-10 submissions to topsites and do a few other submissions to directories and freebie sites. for each new proxy that I am building, I have also started to look for something a little different as well. I have tried getting a few myspace bulletins posted - with mixed results.

My current method is to purchase some targetted visitors - well demographic targetted anyway. I will see how this goes over the next few days to determine if it was succesful.

I guess, just like everyone else, I am looking for that method that works for me and can be repeated for greater success.

I am not saying that the current methods I emply are not good - they are. They involve very little time and end up bringing in some income within a few hours. I am looking for the ways of taking things to the next level so to speak - and find new and interesting sources of free or cheap traffic so I can work less!

Well, I have completed my first month of running some proxy sites and after having gone over the results, I am reasonably pleased with the outcome. Ok, it has been a little over a month, but a complete month has now elapsed, the results are in and I have been able to sit down and see how it all progressed.

Firstly, I started the month with a proxy that was about 5 days old, I purchased a new server to put it (and others) on as it was pushing my current server to the limits! So I had some expenses to contend with. My strategey for the month was to launch a new site over each weekend and have it ready for the new working/school week. Proxy sites get blocked fairly frequently, so I always had a strategey in mind to regularly launch a new site.

Now onto the ledger. My first expense was to purchase a heap of domain names - I went for .info domains as they are nice and cheap to register. The second and biggest expense was a server to host the proxy sites on. Next, I spent a small amount doing various promotions on each newly launched site. My final expense was to get some nice custom header graphics created.

The revenue side of things I took on a 2-pronged approach and that was to display advers on the proxy site pages, and on the actual proxied pages to have a pop-under display. This has so far worked out reasonably well, with about 50% of my income coming from each source. It is always good to have multiple income streams for your sites.

Over the month, I was easily able to make enough to cover my biggest expense of the Server. I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that I was also able to cover all other expenses, including registering the domain names (which will get a full Years worth of use), all of the promotion and recover the costs of the design/headers for not only the 4 site I have online but a couple of extra ones as well Once everything was paid for it left a small profit.

Now, I have 4 proxy sites contributing to this income and only 1 is older than 1 month. The other 3 came online at various times during this month. One of the sites is only 4 days old and hardly contributed to the bottom line. As I plan to continue down the path I have already started on, I would hazard a guess that next month will be even better. I will have the current 4 proxy’s bringing in an income for a Full month, and I will deploy another 4 or 5 new sites as well, further improving my chances of an increased income.

Now a reflection on how much work was involved. I had to set up and configure a new server and I had to skin and promote each new site. The server took around 4-5 hours of effort to set up and secure and each site took around an hour to skin and about 1-2 hours to promote. Promotion includes things like submitting to topsites and directories and doing a few link exchanges.

If I take the time I spent into consideration for this month, then I was really working for very little return. I would have earned more flipping burgers. This is not to say that I won’t continue, but it is more of an observation that building and running proxy sites is not about immediate and fast profits. Just like any other web business, you need to work at it and grow it from month to month. I am guessing that after 3-4 months of doing pretty much the same as I have been till now will see a reasonable return on the time I will be putting into this whole proxy business.

Building and running a proxy network is a bit of a risk for someone who has no experience. If things had gone badly, I would have had expenses totalling a couple of hundred $$ and not be able to pay. It is a fair bet, that someone with a little bit of experience in running websites and running Servers, has $500-1000 to fall back on to cover the first 3 months expenses (in full) should be able to build a proxy network to compliment their other online income streams.

Well, it has now been just over 3 weeks since I launched my first web proxy, and I just wanted to recap a little as to what I have found has and has not worked with building and promoting them.

First, I started with a proxy in a sub-directory of this site and found that it was using a lot of resources. It was also reasonably profitable, so I got another server to put it on. The next problem I had was that It was in a sub-directory and this was causing some other problems. So, when I moved to to the new server, I put it on a sub-domain.

Whatever you do, if you plan on running a proxy or a proxy network, make sure you get a reasonable server to run it on. For the 4 days I was running it on the server with my other sites the performance was terrible and all the other sites on the server were affected as well.

I always planned to set up more than 1 proxy, so a few days later I set up another proxy on the server as well - this was after the first proxy had been running for a bit over a week. I basically duplicated what I did with the first site and just re-wrote a little bit of the content so it reflected the “branding” of the new domain.

Proxy number 3 was put online at the start of week 3, but this time, I tried a few different things with the actual proxy site. I experimented with the colours and layout etc - only time will tell if this will be succesful.

Promotion of the proxys has been a fairly simple process. In all cases, I have submitted them to 2 or 3 common sites including proxy.org The next thing that I did was to submit each proxy to 5 or 6 topsites - making the submissions to different topsites for each proxy. This strategey was to maximise the spread of the traffic sources for each site. The first proxy, I had a couple of myspace bullitens done about the site - and had mixed results. Yes, I had a lot of traffic, but very little return traffic. I basically broke even on that method.

Regarding traffic, I have found that the traffic is reasonably good and continues to grow without further promotion.

Proxy 1 went from nothing to about 3K visitors when I had the myspace bulletins done. It has settled down at around the 300-500 visits/day now.

Proxy 2 went from nothing to around 300 visitors for 1-2 days after launch and dropped off a little. It is slowly improving and now getting around the 500 visits/day as well.

Proxy 3 has only been going for about a week so far and is getting around 200 visits/day - I hope it slowly improves next week.

What I have noted is that the traffic is slowly improving without doing any further promotion after the initial launch.

The daily traffic is normally around the 1200-1500 visits/day during the week and drops off quite a lot over the weekends. My strategey of launching a new proxy each week is quite easy to do and I am currently spending around 2 hours to skin and promote each site. I plan to continue to add a new site each week until I reach the resource limits on the server that I am running. When I get close to fully using the resources, I will do a bit more evaluation of the profitability of the network and if it is going well I’ll keep doing more of the same. After all, for the time and effort I have put in V’s the income made I am pretty happy so far with the results.