TTD's Design Blog

Make Money Online in Only 3 Months?

2008-04-06T09:22:00.004-05:00

I've been dabbling with web sites, ways to make money online, and other little adventures for a couple of years now. I've got 2 fairly profitable sites, a couple that barely stay afloat, and one or two that are "just for fun".

Now, I want to delve into a slightly more challenging task: Seeing if I can do a successful conversion of a static, made for AdSense site to a Blog in less than 30 days. Now, I'm hearing the chorus say "Well, that's just too easy!"... I forgot to mention: I want to start making money from the site in that time frame.

The site in question is one of my oldies, but goodies... Well, except for the traffic and making money part. You can see how this site looked originally at:

2WineSnobs Old Site

Tools That I Plan to Use:

Wordpress. It is a blog, isn't it? Wordpress is probably the best blogging tool out there, so I'll be using it.
Amazon Affiliates. I've had a small amount of success with other sites using Amazon affiliates, so I'll be giving it a go, as well.
Google AdSense. Google AdSense will provide text based, contextual CPC advertising.
LinkSynergy Affiliate Program. The original 2WineSnobs site used LinkSynergy to tie into Wine.com's affiliate program. It didn't make me a penny, but I'm planning on changing that quickly.

Rules: There are no rules.
Goals: To turn this site into a cash flow positive site in less than 3 months.

The new version of the 2WineSnobs.com site is at 2WineSnobs.

Ole Miss Rebel Blog Launched

2008-04-05T13:16:00.002-05:00

I've just launched a new blog all about my favorite sports team, the Ole Miss Rebels. I'll be talking about Ole Miss football, basketball, baseball, and just about anything that comes to mind.

Rebel Ramblings Blog

New History Site Launched

2007-03-20T23:04:00.000-05:00

Wow... I have to admit that after redesigning my Civil War Battles site using Textpattern (see my previous blog for an overview of this cool CMS) that I found it much easier to get my next history project up and running.

This time, I've published American Revolution Online. It's a site that I put together containing a summary of the American Revolutionary War, biographical information of important figures in the American Revolution, a timeline of events, and overview information about each of the major campaigns of the Revolutionary War.

I'm already planning my next couple of history sites. I'm thinking of a survey type site containing summary type information about different ancient civilizations from across the globe. Also, a sort of hub site with general historical information, history related news items, and even some other features that are bouncing around my head.

I love Textpattern!

2007-02-06T19:52:00.000-06:00

It's official, I've now found my favorite content management system. I've always kept my eyes out for good content management systems for future and current web sites that I am working on.

With the recent redesign of my Civil War Battles site (www.civil-war-battles.com), I decided to give Textpattern a shot. Let me tell you, once I had the idea of sections and categories down, it was a breeze to get the site back up and going.

Things I like about Textpattern are:

Simplicity of adding multiple page templates - it's as simple as creating a new template in the Pages tab and creating a new section. Simple.
Multiple categories for articles, designation of a specific section, and the ability to add custom fields to an article and use those fields when displaying articles or lists of articles (See www.civil-war-battles.com/battles).
The ability to customize the way Textpattern displays individual articles. For example, I created a custom display form for my book reviews that automatically inserts an Amazon affiliate link to buy the book being reviewed based on the ASIN number I've stored in one of the custom fields.

To find out more about Textpattern, head over to www.textpattern.org.

Good luck and good designing!