Getting my knee sorted

Posted by David Whitehouse

I’ve been having problems with my knee for almost 4 years now, I spent 1 year trying to continue karate on it, but in the end I had to stop because the pain was too bad and it really felt like I was doing my knee some damage – plus all the stories of people at karate getting hip or knee replacements kind of worried me!

Anyways, during that time I have been to the doctors twice, the first time was just after I injured it, they told me they’d book me a physio appointment and I waited quite a few months before realising that they hadn’t bothered at all. So I decided to go private, I was given a load of exercises, none of which appeared to help, by this time it had been a year. Then I saw another physiotherapist about it around 2 years ago, again more exercises, again no change. Then I saw another physio late in 2009, more exercises and again no change.

So not wanting to give up I saw the doctors again, he suggested I tried strengthening my quads – yeah cheers doc, like I hadn’t tried that one before!

So again, not wanting to give up, I contacted Andy Wray, a local physiotherapist in Ripon who has only recently gone private full time. So I saw Andy, and he went through the usual tests and checks – and nothing really seemed apparent, until I let out a big girly scream and he suggested I might have a “lunge lesion” – as the pain sounded like it was bone on bone.

So Andy wrote a letter and I took it to the doctors and now I am finally seeing an orthopaedic surgeon, so hopefully they’ll get it all sorted and I can get back to a martial art, WOOHOO!!!

Cheers Andy.

My First “Proper” Facebook Ad Campaign

Posted by David Whitehouse

Recently I’ve been helping out my mum with email marketing for her restaurant, we’ve had a lot of success and she has around 600 opt-in emails now, which is great.

Typically it works out that if she sends out an offer to these 600 emails she gets 200 opens and 20 bookings of at least 2 people, each person averaging around 7 or 8 pounds profit. All in all it works out at around £400 profit per email shot – which is ace.

So I started talking about what would happen if we had that on Facebook – where the disadvantage is decreased attention, but the advantage being that people are more likely to “like it” or comment on the special offer, making it go viral.

So using the stats, we worked out that each email was worth £0.70 per email shot, and that we thought we could send at least 10 emails per unsubscribe, meaning that each email was worth around £7. We used this same figure to work out how much we would be willing to pay per Facebook fan.

So I decided to create a campaign targeting the local area, it happens to target quarter of a million people in the Ripon, Harrogate, Northallerton area – and it only costs me $0.44 per click! About 1 in 13 seem to be subscribing so far, so it could be a little bit on the expensive side, only time will tell. I’ve got around $95 budget left, and our initial aim was to get 300 more subscribers, this seems a little optimistic now, but hopefully it should still be a profitable campaign.

I will let you all know how it goes :)

Monetising My Site

Posted by David Whitehouse

Well I decided to go with my idea of doing an Internet marketing blog in the end, for a number of reasons, but the main reason being that I have a passion for it, and so it should be easy for me to write endless amounts of content for it.

In fact I went for two blogs, but I’ve only set one up so far.  Site Juicer is to be my Internet marketing blog, and I’ve recently pimped it out with loads of ads – the AdSense ones being in highly clickable places (according to Google’s blog heatmap).

I’ve also setup affililate links for all the products my visitors are likely to be interested in, some of them I get paid per lead, which has particularly interested me.

Finally I have created an advertise here page with PayPal subscribe buttons, I haven’t really fairly priced the adverts, if I was to they would be worth almost nothing!! Instead I’ve put the miminum prices I would accept for the hassle, and I plan to increase traffic and page views over the coming months.

My next step will be to create an ebook to encourage email signups, this will then be followed up with a *yawn* email autoresponder series – each one recommending a product or service.

So once I’ve done my ebook (hopefully by the end of next week) I will start writing content and interlinking it. I’ve also got ProBloggers 31 days to a better blog, which I plan on giving a try…

At least it should be an interesting project to work on, I hope to learn a lot about monetizing in the process (I’ve even made £18 this week for referring people to various sites).

Once it gets enough money I plan to pay for a logo and then a design… when it earns enough that is, I figure it needs to pay for itself to justify paying out for a design…

How to transfer your blog from blogger or blogspot to WordPress

Posted by David Whitehouse

Sometime in 2008 I started a blog called Inventive Millionaire had over 120 posts on this blog and it was very similar to make money online kind of blog.  Anyway I have decided to resurrect it because I now wish to make money from blogging and in order to do so I am going to need a lot of content and a lot of blogs.

So in order to resurrect the content I had to remove a redirect from Inventive Millionaire to David Whitehouse and then I had to export the content from Blogspot and run it through a conversion process to get it ready for WordPress, then I simply imported it into WordPress.

There is a simpler way but it didn’t work for me simply go to tools imports and select blogger from there and its pretty straightforward from then on.

New USB Soundcard for Improved Voice Recognition – FAIL

Posted by David Whitehouse

well I’ve got and naturally speaking 9.5 and I produced for a USB soundcard basically it’s meant to improve the quality of the audio because instead of using inbuilt soundcard them using an external on the advantage being that you don’t hear all the worrying stuff coming from the computer so it can get a better sound quality I am also ordered Dragon naturally speaking 10 some hoping to start blogging them using this

anyway I didn’t really correct this you can see how good it is and also by just both her and normal conversational speed so wasn’t like that they’re dictating slowly I was just talking about would normally

Why it is important to buy both the .co.uk as well as the .com

Posted by David Whitehouse

Many people neglect the importance of buying their local domain name as well as the dot com.

As you can see from this example, my colleague Rory is up to no good again!  He’s just bought the unitednationsofsound.co.uk and no doubt he’ll be climbing the rankings to get the number one spot over the next few weeks.

I just hope Richard Ashcroft makes him an offer for it…

Update: Apparently they’ve been in touch with Rory and he is passing it over to them