Incase any potential employers are reading this, let me take a moment to explain why I want to move from freelancing to a ‘proper’ job. The answer is quite simple: financial stability.

Freelancing is fun, setting your own hours, working to your own rules, but at the end of the day, you still have no idea how much you are going to earn from one month to the next, you might go a couple of months with very little and the following month take a large order.

Sales was never my strongest point, I prefered to be given the work, beaver away on it and return a new shiney website that exceeded the clients’ expectations.

When you have a fixed income, it helps you to budget and plan ahead a lot better and removes a lot of the stress and worry on where the next paycheck is going to come from.

It’s a very simple reason to be honest with you, but there have been a few problems with making the transistion from freelancing to getting a full time job which I’ll talk about some other time.

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1. A Life Less Ordinary

You see, Kabizzle has been born out of my frustration of managing and tracking all the PLR products that I own. PLR, for those of you that are not in the know, stands for Private Label Rights. It means I can take a product such as an ebook or piece of software and call it my own, say I wrote it and put my name on it.

I’m a member of at least a half a dozen monthly PLR sites that each month give you hundreds of new articles, ebooks, software or audio products. I also actively buy PLR firesales from the likes of Jeremy Burns or Edmond Loh. All this means my 160 GB harddrive is close to over flowing and worse…I have no idea what’s on it.

Everytime I create a new product I find myself again and again trawling through my folders trying to find all the PLR products on topics like “SEO” or “affiliate marketing” or maybe “list building”. Days can be wasted as I search through these folders.

So now I have Kabizzle…

http://www.peterclaridge.com/kabizzle

It’s a search engine, just like Google or Yahoo, except that this is a search engine for Internet Marketers.

It allows you to type in a keyword (it’s only a proof of concept site and can’t handle multiple keywords yet) and returns all the PLR products that it knows of that matches your searched keyword.

For each product it tells you from which site it came from (the provider) and when it was introduced. This hopefully allows you to then be able to zero in on the files on your computer. It means you don’t have to go through every folder and every firesale to see if there are any related products, you just pop your search term in and it tells you instantly if there are any available products.

As I have mentioned a few times now, this is a just a proof of concept site and is by no means the finished thing or all working the way I want. It’s just a search function with a few products loaded in to it.

If you are an internet marketer, I’m very keen on getting your feedback, whether you think something like this is useful, would you use it and what extra features you think it needs to make it an excellent resource.

Here’s the link to it again:

http://www.peterclaridge.com/kabizzle

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Two months later and I want to come back and look at how the site has got on since we launched it. What has been good, what has been bad.

To start off with, I think the site has done better than expected. We managed to get several core features fixed quite early on after going live so the impact of the bugs has been minimal. There are still a host of bugs that need to be fixed and the programmers have been working on them a bit at a time. Mostly though the members have not been complaining or shown us too many ‘new’ bugs.

I’m not sure if we haven’t received many bug reports because the members are apathetic towards the site or if they simply haven’t noticed them. When you have been working on a site for so long the bugs, errors and little annoyances become glaringly obvious, maybe when you are just a user these things are taken to be part of the site. Who knows, maybe the developers of Google’s Gmail fret over a million bugs that they must get fixed, but I’ve never noticed anything wrong with Gmail.

I think it’s a lesson to be learned here, people are much more accomodating than you might think. Even when there is a glaringly obvious problem to you, the user may just accept it for what it is. There is a similar analogy in music. If a musician plays a slightly wrong note, the rest of the band may pick up on it and cringe, but the audience probably doesn’t know any better and thinks it’s part of the song.

There are still two sections that are in desperate need of fixing. The first is the share trading system which just doesn’t work full stop so has been effectively ‘switched off’ during the launch phase. This is not a terribly big problem as only a few people have shares in HYIPJunction and they are aware of the problems. The second section that we are aching to get fixed is the referral system. In the meantime we have come up with a new referral system based on what is currently working. We have made this in to a feature of the site and launch phase so members probably have no idea that the referral system doesn’t work as it should.

Finally, now that the site is live and being used every day by real people we are able to identify several areas that need to be redone to make it work better or more intuitively. This could never have been done by simply doing endless testing on the site.

On the promotional side of things, we have held back doing our joint ventures until a few more bugs have been taken care of. I think that some of these will get done within the next 7-10 days and if they have been fixed successfully we can begin the promotion of HYIPJunction in earnest.

We are getting a large amount of traffic from the search engines, in particular the site is doing extremely well for many keywords in Yahoo which is nice. The site is also slowly moving up in Google after it dipped a bit for a few months. The average amount of visitors have gone up too, from just over 100 visitors a day in June to 174 visitors a day in August. The traffic is coming from the search engines due to a large amount of SEO work that I have done on the site. My SEO expertise is discussed in other entries on this blog.

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1. HYIPJunction: Project Disaster

A recent post that caught my eye is his one about creating a niche content site case study – a real life example of how one would go about researching, creating and promoting a website within a tightly defined niche for adsense and affiliate income.

What impresses me most about this is not the concept in itself but that he’s willing to put his reputation on the line in a real live example where hundreds, probably thousands of people will be able to see if he’s the real deal or just another wannabe. If he pulls it off, there will be hundreds of impressed people who will pay more attention to what he has to say in the future. If he fails then it’s possible the damage could be irreversible.

From what I’ve seen so far, I think he’s gone about everything the right way. Article marketing is such a fantastic way of generating traffic and the important inbound links and is just one of the many methods I use to promote my clients sites.

To find out more about the Niche Content Site Case Study head over to the original post here:

http://www.jonathanleger.com/niche-site-case-study/

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A website called LiveBluesWorld.com that I worked on nearly a year ago when i was in India has finally gone ‘live’ today. After around 10 months of development I’m pleased to see that it has finally been launched.

The website is a mega-portal for all things in the Blues music genre. My input was to create the original mockups, offer advice and recommendations on the features and to create the programming requirements document. I completed my work on the project around February of this year and let the programmers get on with it.

My first impressions when I saw the site for the first time since I left the project was: “oh dear”.

Unfortunately they have not followed my original mockup layouts and the whole site looks scruffy and confused (although maybe that’s the idea – who knows?). The design is just…wrong.

There is no definition, no borders, nothing to define that one bit of content starts –here– and another bit starts –here–. There is no focus on what the main content is and what is ‘extra’ stuff around it. There is nothing that particularly draws your eye to any part of the website.

The main criticism that I have about this site is the design and layout. I’ve not gone too indepth with the programming and features side of things, but I know if they closely followed my recommendations they will have a good foundation on which to start.

As I look around the site, I fail to see quite how it took 10 months from start to finish…Hmm…OK, that’s a bit of a lie, I know exactly why it took so long: the project was too big and everything got muddled up. There were delays in getting feedback from the client.

I’ve talked before on this blog about outsourcing disasters and why you should absolutely avoid doing big projects without having someone on hand every day to manage the project for you. I think the LBW website suffered from the same problem, too much too soon.

It would have been better if they started off with getting the blog part created and then created each section in turn. That way they could have got the site up and running right away and continuously made adjustments and improvements to the site. Instead they now have a brand new website complete with bugs and will have to start the unenviable task of bug hunting and writing bug reports.

Hopefully they can get the design sorted out soon too

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Here in Brighton (it’s my new home) the last few days have been absolutely gorgeous, in the mid-high 20′s easily. This is what summer should be about, not lashing it down flooding people out of house and home (although if you do insist on building on flood plains do you really have any excuse?!).

I’ve just watched my team, Manchester United beat Chelsea at Wembely in the Charity…Community shield (it will forever be known as the charity shield to me though). It went right down to the wire with United finally beating Chelsea 3-0 on penalties.

Yet again Chelsea played their boring ‘keep possession’ football and don’t do anything clever or creative. United were the more fluid and attacking of the sides and put a lot of pressure on but still we are lacking the deadly touch of a natural striker. Hopefully when he signs, Tevez will help us out a lot. He proved himself at West Ham where he was a star amongst players, but at United he will be a player amongst stars and definitely have to prove himself.

I’ve also been working some more on my new CMS, easyCMS. I’ve created three new templates for the script using open source templates. I hope to be able to add 2-3 new templates each week as I believe that the success lies in the number of templates people have to choose from (because hey, we’re all lazy, right?).

I also have the programmers working on the next phase of the easyCMS development which will improve the poll feature (I’ve removed it for the time being), give the admin the ability to add custom pages, give the software RSS and pinging abilities and one or two minor tweaks and fixes here and there.

The next phase is a good step forward in making this the ultimate CMS that know it can be. After this release there are still a few more bits that need to be added to the core software but after that it’s mostly going to be optional plugins that are going to be developed for the script.

The sun is shining and everything is good with the world

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The next bit of good news came on Monday evening when EzineArticles got back to me and told me that they had approved my recent article submission on SEO. This was the first article I’ve had published by them (my previous attempts at submitting PLR articles was knocked back). You can read the article here:

SEO Mistakes

I’m just working on finalising the last details for my new internet marketing news site and hope to have it launched at some point over the week.

Now to make this the perfect week I want my programmers to get back to me and tell me that they have finally fixed the referral commission problems on HYIPJunction!

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easyCMS Promises To Make CMS Easy (yeah, we’re still working on the slogan!)

I’ve always felt that a CMS should be about managing your content, not about managing your design and layout. A CMS should be a useful tool to make your website interactive and dynamic, not try to control every aspect of your website.

So often I have gotten frustrated with the willingness of CMS developers trying to make the CMS everything to everyone that it becomes so complex and tricky it actually becomes unusable. Take Joomla for example. It’s a great CMS, with tonnes of tools. But why should I be told where the menu has to go and control all the menu options from the admin area? Why is the templating system only accessible to those that have degrees in rocket science? It’s too much.

Or how about Drupal? Another great CMS, but a degree in nuclear physics is a requisite if you plan on using the admin area or attempting to create a complete new design.

Why is easyCMS different?

I have built it to be webmaster friendly. For people that don’t have the time to code strict XHTML sites (even though we all know we should, right?!) or don’t know how to create the XML file to import. It uses basic SMARTY files meaning that you can integrate any design you wish (and I do mean any) and have it be dynamic and content driven in no time.

I have set the price of easyCMS at $14.95 which you can pay with PayPal. It comes with a default design which is pretty awful, I’ll be the first to admit and am working on creating some nice designs for the script.

The default design needs to be changed ASAP to something with a nicer design!

So far I have already created a couple of great designs, but I will not be releasing them to the public as they will be for my own sites. However, to prove that you really can integrate some great designs to easyCMS here are the screenshots to the designs that I have created and integrated into the script.

I created this design for a site called IMCentral which I’m developing and am using easyCMS to run it. I’ll release more details on IMCentral soon

I think I’m going to use this design for a new range of products over on NicheAdSenseSites.com

There are many many new features in the pipeline for easyCMS, infact, when I spoke to the development company tasked with programming this software they reckon that there is about a years worth of development ahead. I’ve broken everything down in to phases though – I’ve learned my lessons from last time with HYIPJunction. Nice short development cycles with lots of testing and feedback throughout. Wash and rinse as required

You can visit easyCMS here: http://www.easycms.net

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Finally, after 18 months of development, thousands of man hours working on this project and tens of thousands of dollars later…HYIPJunction is launched to the world in a glittering and star studded launch party that…oh wait, there was no launch party, that was just Paul and I cracking open a couple of cans of beer to celebrate.

Launch

HYIPJunction will now take it’s place as the ultimate HYIP portal serving investors everything they need from one central location. They don’t need to go to half a dozen different sites to gather all their research for a program because it will all be right here on one site.

To celebrate the launch, we have various ongoing promotions allowing our members to earn money for advertising. We are also looking to take on people to help us run the site (there’s no way we could do it all by ourselves!).

Monetizing

Of course, there are any number of reasons that people should signup for an account on HJ, but true to our internet marketing roots we are offering some fast action signup bonuses such as ebooks and software for all those people that signup and confirm their email account. No other HYIP related site I know of does this.

We are definitely going to be using our internet marketing skills to monetize the site a whole lot more than other sites do. There is already an autoresponder in place with 15 sequential emails that helps guide people through the site…and offers them various free bonuses along the way

As the old internet marketing saying goes, the money is in the list. We will be looking to monetize the list as much as possible with relevant offers as well as throwing in a few free bonuses to keep everyone happy.

Bugs

There are unfortunately a multitude of bugs in the system. Most of them we have been able to work around, others require urgent fixing. Some bugs are quite minor things (such as not displaying comment text on the press releases page – even though it shows the correct number of empty boxes), whereas others are quite large and need time and effort to sort them out (such as the referral commission).

We are going to work through the bug fixes in a methodical manner, taking one bug at a time, getting it fixed, testing it then moving on to the next one. We have found that simply presenting programmers with a big list of problems is not a helpful way of getting things done.

Future

In the future I would like to see HJ being run entirely by other people that we pay. Whether this is outsourced or people in our employment has yet to be decided, but we definitely can’t let ourselves get bogged down with the support and general day to day running of the site. Our skills lie in creating and developing new ideas – not in administration

There is a possibility that we will look to turn this software in to a commerical product later down the line when all the bugs are sorted. It would be a generic product that enables users to easily create niche portals to dominate a particle niche.

If you want to signup to HYIPJunction, just click here

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If you don’t want to read this case study on how the project was a disaster and just want to read my top tips for outsourcing success, click here.

Around January 2006 I came up with an idea to create a super-mega portal out of nothing that focused on the HYIP arena – a underground, murky industry that thrives on the internet, although it’s generally not a very nice place to be. The reason I wanted to create a mega portal in this arena were simple: massive advertising dollars.

I started out as I had done with most projects that I’d done in the past and went about writing down some features that I wanted the site to have. I really pushed the boat out, I wanted it to have everything and be the all singing, all dancing site that would eclipse every other site in the industry (I call it an industry, but the term den of theives might be a more appropriate definition).

Just check out some of the features I was going to create with this site:

• 1. Fully automated advertising system working on an auction basis where the highest bidder wins the advertising position for the week
• 2. Complete trading system that allows business owners to sell shares in their site and let people buy and sell shares. Prices would rise and fall as demand rises and falls
• 3. Awesome rating system with dozens of variables to prevent cheating when people rated the programmes
• 4. News wire system that would let anyone add relevant news items to the site
• 5. Press release system that would syndicate press releases to other sites via RSS
• 6. Articles directory to list articles and let people submit articles to improve the content and the ‘stickyness’ of the site. Users could rate and comment on articles
• 7. Links directory to list relevant links. Users could add links and sponsor links on a monthly basis. The more they paid the higher their listing went. Users could also comment and rate the links
• 8. Every user would get a profile page like on myspace with blog facilities so they could post whatever they wanted
• 9. Integrated chat system to let users come together and chat
• 10. Integrated forum that users were signed up to as soon as they registered on the site
• 11. Membership system that allowed different membership types to earn commission on deposits and upgrades from their referrals
• 12. Portfolio system to allow members to track all their investments

As you can see, the software was going to be the real bees knees; the mutts nuts as it were.

Unfortunately I was not going to have the capital to do this project myself so I took it to my business partner who liked what he saw and we decided to go ahead with the project, taking on some investors (or shareholders) to get the project moving right away.

We spent some time developing the idea further, really thinking about the flow and how everything would work together. Eventually we came up with a definitive 40 page document that we felt detailed every single detail required on the software.

Not only this, but I created a complete mockup of the entire site. Every page we needed was created in static html with every form, every input box and every last bit of text. The entire admin side of the site was created too.

This was the original mockup for the site

So, by April 2006 everything was inplace. The whole programming document was written, complete mockups created and investors were on board to provide some of the capital required. A programming company was contracted and things were looking to go on a roll.

Or so we thought. It was the beginning of the problems.

The site was delivered on 14th July 2006 (just over a year ago…such a long time ago now!) and we went through it and found over 100 bugs. Not only that, but with the site required over 50 changes to the way things worked or things that needed to be added.

By the time we got to mid-August things still hadn’t improved.

This was the first design we had done for the website

A lot of this was down to our doing because we hadn’t explained the features that we required. Some of it was also down to the programmers used because they didn’t understand the hyip arena and obviously had no idea how some other basic scripts like article directories and link directories worked. This was further compounded by them not following the mockup designs exactly as presented.

In a bid to rescue a project that was now 2 months overdue, I flew out to India to work directly with the programmers until things were sorted. However, my plans were somewhat compromised because we delayed in getting some feedback to the programmers and they had already started on another project and it was another 2 months before they could make a start on the bugs list and improvements that we had compiled.

By the time December came around the bugs list was nearing completion and we set about getting a professional design created for the site. The design was completed in record time and with a minimum of revisions – it was quite frankly the only thing that went right with this project. I believe the design was completed so quickly and to my liking because I had worked with the designer on many projects before and he understood my tastes.

Sidenote: Alas, this designer from Romania has since gone AWOL which is a crying shame because he was one of the best guys I worked with and a fantastic designer.

The completed design was sent over to the programmers along with several example pages showing how the design should be integrated. They were under instructions to make the site look exactly how the example designs looked.

I’m not sure if there was any breakdown in communication at this point but when they finally came back to us with the completed bugs list and integrated design the result was a disaster. The design had been converted to XHTML and they had tried to fit it around their HTML framework code…instead of fitting the design into their programming. The site worked well in Firefox but wouldn’t function in IE or Opera. One of the reasons may have been because I didn’t specify which browsers the site should work in.

Fast forward 3 or 4 months and there were still problems with the site. Every time we went back through the site we found more bugs, more changes and discovered more unexpected problems. Not to mention the ongoing issues with the design.

Eventually in April of 2007 – a year since development first began I called a halt to the programming and design integration.

I ended up stripping out all the design code from the files and doing the integration myself. In all it took two solid weeks of work…and you know what? It looked beautiful and worked in every browser flawlessly. To say I was more than a little bit angry that the programmers didn’t do this originally is an understatement to say the least!

This is the final design of the site after I redid what the programmers had done

Now we are in to July and desperate to take the site live…bugs and all. It was due to go live on the 13th July, but more and more bugs were found as we were writing the documentation. It’s incredible that after 12 months of development we are still finding bugs. However, one of the most frustrating things is discovering that something hasn’t been thought through properly and realising that you need some significant changes to a core feature to make it work properly.

Even now, the day we have to launch we are still finding bugs and issues. Even today, we just discovered that there is no way to track how many members a user has referred or no way to deduct affiliate earnings from our income. So many problems, but the site has to be launched. The show must go on, as they say.

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Outsourcing Top Tips

• 1. Plan your site down to the smallest of details
• 2. Plan how every function will work, note how it will affect other functions
• 3. Plan out every page that you will need
• 4. When creating your requirements/specification list, include the functions that are required on every page
• 5. Create a full mockup of every page you require and reference it in the specifications document
• 6. Think big, start small. Even though you might want to have the greatest idea in the world, start off getting the core functions done first and develop the rest when that is done
• 7. Keep your development cycles short – think weeks instead of months
• 8. Get regular updates from the programmers
• 9. Provide regular feedback to the programmers – test and test
• 10. When one cycle is complete, take the site live and test and get user feedback
• 11. Test it again
• 12. When one cycle is complete, start on the next development cycle – remember, keep it short!
• 13. When providing feedback, keep it as a bullet pointed checklist instead of long paragraphs. Provide annotated screenshots if applicable
• 14. Accept that there will always be bugs in the software and work on getting them fixed
• 15. If there is a long list of bugs, prioritise them and get 3-5 bugs fixed at a time

These are my top tips for outsourcing success If you have any more that you want to add, please let me know. I might make a complete article about outsourcing later on and expand on these tips that I have given.

So…if you were to ask me how I would do HYIPJunction differently…I’d probably say I’d shelve the idea when I had it! LOL. No, seriously, if I was to do it differently, I’ll write about it in another post.

You can check out HYIPJunction for yourself by going to: http://www.hyipjunction.com

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