All of us know the quality of Hostgator hosting and the command it has over the hosting market, so I’m sure all of you are eager to try it out, for this purpose I’ve created a few coupons by partnering with Hostgator using which you can get hosting there at an extremely cheap cost, below I’ve listed the coupon codes with instructions on how to use them.

Some of the key features of Hostgator Shared Hosting are,

• UNLIMITED Disk Space
• UNLIMITED Bandwidth
• FREE SiteBuilder
• EASY Control Panel
• 1-CLICK Script Installs

• 4,500 Free Website Templates
• 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
• 45 Day Money Back Guarantee
• 24/7/365 Technical Support
• $100 Google AdWords Credit

One Cent Hosting

This coupon allows the user to use Hostgator hosting for $0.01 for the first month, its extremely simple to use and I’m sure many of you can get your site up and running for almost nothing with the use of this coupon.

DUMBBLOGGER

Go to Hostgator shared hosting and go for the cheapest plan ($3.96/month) and while configuring your domain options, which is the first step you’ll see an option to place a coupon code, this is where you’ll have to enter our code “DUMBBLOGGER” and you’ll be able to buy hosting their for $0.01 for the first month.

25% Discount Hosting

The above coupon was for those who were looking forward to start their sites with no investment, but they will have to pay the normal price the month after that, but if your looking for buying for one whole year or if your planning on buying a much more advanced plan, you can receive a 25% discount using the coupon below.

DUMBBLOGGER25

Follow the same process for whichever plan you choose and add this coupon in the coupon section and follow the same process as the above and you can get a 25% offer on your total billed amount.

Contact Us

If your facing any sort of issues with the coupons above do let us know and we’ll surely do as much as we can to help you out with it, do contact us using the contact form and if this is your first time visiting this blog do subscribe to our feed.

This is pretty old news, I had heard about this 6 months ago, but sadly I failed to see this closely, it was just a week ago that my partner came up with this idea while we were working on our content development plan. Bankaholic, was a pretty interesting blog, with a catchy name, design and sticky content and like most other blogs all its content came from its sole writer and owner Johns Wu, but today the blog gets millions of hits, has got more than 20 full time writers and its 23 year old founder considered himself retired.

Ofcourse he just had to retire now, as he got an extremely sweet deal from Bankrate which offered him $12.5 million upfront and $2.5 million over two years, and he went on to make history as the owner of the most highly valued blog on the internet. In 2006 Johns Wu started a stock market and personal finance blog and according to our analysis he got most of his traffic from SEO.

While he started this blog he was still in college and like most teenagers had been struck by the idea of internet business, though science was his strength he decided to go with a stock market blog, which I bet made all the difference. This is a case study on the factors which contributed to the high valuation of this blog,

Content : the key asset

The value of any blog can be judged by the quality of its content, and if it succeeds in providing sticky and catchy content it would surely have a good sale price as quality information has always got its own price tag, even if a particular site fails to get in traffic.

John’s site provides great quality content from the beginning, and at the time of sale it had over 600 posts of the same, which is actually one of the key reasons. Seeing his first few posts I feel he combined quality content, with entertaining articles with a few posts that actually sell.

I also feel that their was heavy keyword research taking place behind all of his first few posts, for example take a look at this post, he has stuffed keywords such as APY, CD rates etc and he has dominated search results for that particular keyword, many blogs which do this will look extremely spammy, but he has made it look creative and of great quality.

Traffic : SEO & SEM

Johns already knew a lot about the internet and internet marketing, although this is just my simple assumption as till now his influence in social media is extremely low for an internet celebrity. I’ve also mentioned in a few of my previous posts that blogs which started off during the period of 2006 to 2008 experienced high growth rates due to heavy growth in internet usage and low search competition, that also was the time when Google’s search results got pretty mature.

As I’ve mentioned above, most of his earlier posts were highly keyword researched and during those times Google provided high search rankings for all quality posts all of which surely got him high traffic.

In an interview with SeoBook he has also claimed to have launched many Adwords campaigns in the beginning, which I think was a great idea. You can grow your blog heavily if you target the right keywords, the Adwords competition was extremely low back then, but still he has done what people were extremely skeptical about.

Very soon he ranked pretty high for high traffic keywords which was again a reason for such high valuations. Bankrate knew that it was next to impossible to rank for such keywords in today’s search market, so they decided to go as far as possible to get this blog.

Monetization : earnings potential

Bankrate surely expects good returns for such a huge investment, as expected they had expected more than just returns and profit by this investment. Bankaholic’s high rankings in search results is surely a great asset, and its content too was no less. But something tough to find out about the site was their initial monetization strategy.

The site got upto 200,000 visitors, so a combination of CPM, CPC and performance based advertisements would have resulted in great income. I’m sure Johns earned a solid passive income even during his first few days of blogging, but Bankrate cannot wait for years to reap back their earnings, as these monetization methods will hardly earn a six figure yearly income.

So far Bankrate has been using the same methods, and I also think they are selling sponsored reviews and promoting various finance related affiliate programs which are surely high paying. I wouldn’t be surprised if their revenues have tripled than the time when Johns used to run the site. But Bankrate already has a lot of financial sites which earn them heap loads of advertising and affiliate revenue, so I have a feeling that they are on the verge of launching a digital product to thoroughly monetize Bankaholic.

Finance niches are meant for success

A few niches on the internet are just made for success, even if my blog got 3 times the traffic Bankaholic did I surely wouldn’t even sell for even half that price. I few niches like finance, stock market, healthcare and education are extremely profitable, your adsense earnings will be comparatively higher, affiliate programs have high payouts and in the end the valuation of ones blog is always high.

This is infact an ugly truth about the internet, I am a strong advocate for the wealth and potential of the internet, but I must agree that all this isn’t divided equally as even today the geography, locality and niche of a blog have a lot of influence.

So in 2006 at the time when the competition for all niches remained low, Johns was lucky enough to chose the lucrative personal finance niche, soon the CPC rates for this niche was sky high resulting in a huge valuation for his site, so his success was partially due to luck.

On to our readers

This is surely one great example of what dedicated blogging can bring in, though Johns Wu had partial luck he had worked pretty hard on his site in the beginning. This case study is purely based on research and assumptions and cannot be back with any proof, but I bet all of you can use the above methods to build a successful internet business.

We’re sure to write more on this topic in the future, so to keep up do subscribe to our feed and also follow me on Twitter.

Its almost 2 years into my internet marketing career and till now I have no other valuable asset other than my own blog, I feel two years were a lot of time and many people come up to my stage within just 3 months of starting.

The past

I had made many attempts to grow and do something bigger, but till today nothing has worked well for me, I started to create a gaming site, with which I earned money only after selling it, and there were a few blogs which I had started all of which failed to run, most of it was due to lack of time and knowledge.

I entered niches which didn’t knew much about and I often kept taking too much work in my hands without an organized time schedule. Being a student was one of my main problems, my timings were never flexible and I often failed to plan time and investments according to my academics.

Partial success – unethical success

Three months ago I started internet marketing services, which was financially very profitable, but my problems reached an all time high, I started getting handful of projects and I still do, all of which earned me a lot of money which I never dreamed off, but I was never able to provide quality service and many of my clients were disappointed, this resulted in the spoilage of my hard earned reputation in the internet marketing community. Right now I have outsourced all of them and earn a small margin as my fee, and I’m also planning to shut the services down.

The present – Optimistic road-map

Now I would like to introduce my new venture Farrrt.com which I’m extremely optimistic about, I have been working on it since a month and it was accompanied by a lot of problems and delays.

The majority of this site is owned by my best friend and partner Bittu Nandi, who had begun making this as a custom made site, but was forced to revert back to wordpress, during the past one month we’ve had bitter arguments, but have managed to sort it all out and finally we were able to launch it, being very optimistic about its results.

The future – something great awaits us

This site is basically a community driven humor site, where people upload images and videos of funny accidents, fails and bloopers, often just for fun and it also contains people who are looking to make money online by allowing us to showcase their content, via our unique and attractive partners program.

The most unique thing about our site is that we provide a revenue share if you put up posts with images and videos and a huge amount with royalties if you make images and videos yourself, we also provide people to run their own internet show, while we promote and monetize it for them.

I have well sort out promotional strategy for Farrrt, something which I lacked with the others and I’m sure we can go and reach our goals within a few days. Most of it includes social media, one positive element I’ve gained so far all these years is a highly influential social media network.

Just a week ago I heard a series of good news which made me more optimistic about this, firstly one of my friend confirmed that he might provide us our seed funding and already we’ve made 12 content partnerships with a few individuals and organisations which I feel would be very beneficial.

On to our readers

I’d like to thank each and everyone of you for providing great support and loyalty for this blog, I haven’t been able to blog much in the past one month due to the effort I was putting in on my new site, I promise to keep writing on this blog and provide great content as a network on the whole.

I had promised more videos in the future and I bet you’ll love this one, of course like the previous time the voice quality is low, but I’m sure you’ll love the content. This was something I had posted a long time ago, but that post had a lot of negative feedback, but recently Newsweek wrote about this and I thought that this would be the right time to break the issue again.

This video basically concentrates on the previous dot com bubble, why it happened and a few things similar which are occurring now and also tells about why I consider Twitter a failure.

As usual your feedback is very essential, I know the quality of this video is low, but please do bare with me for a few more days as I’m still learning this. We urge you to subscribe to our Youtube channel and also to follow us on Twitter in order to keep up with future videos.

Hey there people, I guess many of you are annoyed about my un-organized frequency of posting which I’ve tried to plan out in the past, but in the past 2 weeks there hasn’t been a single post, but this was basically due to my exams, which are due to end by this thursday, so you’ll have to bare this for another week.

Actually I’m happy that even though their are literally no posts, traffic is still pretty high and for the first time I’m getting emails from users who seem to ask the reason why I haven’t posted anything for such a long time, so this is truly a positive problem as this is the sign of a mainstream blog, and I do admit my mistake of not informing earlier about my exams.

After this thursday I’ve planned out many things to take this blog to the next level, one includes making this into a complete video blog. I have updated my content development and maybe with this I will be able to make plenty of posts in a week, many of you also contacted me asking for guest posting opportunities which I rejected because of my concern for quality, but very soon I’ll be providing share in revenue for authors in return for good quality content.

So please don’t mind this, I’m sure things will change soon and I really urge you to subscribe to my blogs feed and also to follow me on Twitter.

I had started vlogging a few months ago, but stopped it as it consumed too much time, but I did get the necessary equipment a few days ago and this time I could do it much faster, but still it took me 5 days. So from now on I’ll create videos for as many posts as possible so do subscribe to our Youtube channel.

This video here deals with the Clickbank niche, and its not another how to make sales as an affiliate video, but this video is a guide on how you can increase sales of your own product via Clickbank, it includes building an attractive landing page, a secret tip to manipulate  your product gravity, promoting it on your own and recruiting affiliates and creating a huge sales army to send your product viral across different networks with the help of their time and money.

I know there were many flaws in this, your tips and feedback will be extremely valuable, but we are sure to improve it in the future, so do subscribe to our Youtube channel and also follow me on Twitter.

I’ve seen many of my friends who get free review copies of new softwares, hardwares and books by other firms in order to get them reviewed. All of them usually keep me updated about their latest assignments, which makes me terribly jealous of them as the biggest fun of blogging comes from such incentives itself.

Money is also a great incentive, but nothing can beat receiving world class products at cheap prices even before they are released for other consumers. Though their were many sponsored review networks, their weren’t many which provided services like these, this surely a great step and would force many more people to become active bloggers.

This service is being started by O’reilly Media which I’m sure most of you would have heard about, as their technical books are spread out all over the world and used by millions every single day. Its an initiative to improve reviews about their products online in order to get more leads. Basically all it does is provides free ebooks of any one of their premium books and requires you to review the same, after the review you can place a request for another book.

This is really fantastic as you’ll have access to titles which cost hundreds of dollars for free, till now I haven’t see any restrictions on traffic and quality of your blog, but I’m extremely sure that it is going to come in order to prevent spam. They also require you to review the book on services like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Such reviews aren’t really sponsored reviews, as they don’t pay you for it, moreover you can keep up the quality of your site as you choose what you want to review and do it in your own way. I also found a way to grow my traffic using this, that is I will provide one copy of the ebook for free to one of my readers who comment, ofcourse you can’t do more than one as it would be against their terms and service, but it would surely boost user interactivity.

Click here to know more

On to our readers

These are few things which keep me motivated in blogging, this is just amazing to keep the books you always wanted, I have no idea if all of their book collections are part of this offer, but I’m sure I’ll find a few which I’ll need myself. My advice would be to try and get in as soon as possible as this offer would be limited for a few as they don’t a majority of their buyers using this method.

To keep up with future posts of this sort please do subscribe to our feed and also follow me on Twitter to keep yourself updated.

From the time I’ve started networking with bloggers I’ve known that most people have the same dream of making it to the front page of a social bookmarking site like digg, after repeated failures most of them have started to give up, they say “Its not fair, we write better articles than them, but they are the ones who usually make it”, over here ‘them’ is referred to big online publications such as Guardian, Techcrunch, Mashable and BoingBoing.

Most of these poor guys (including me ) have the same thought that they are the ones who accumulated traffic first and thats why they get to the front page with the use of their existing audience. Well that is pretty much true, thanks to the early start all of them had the advantage of being the most influential on all social networks.

Due to 14 years of experience in life, I always believed in the concept that there are always brighter sides (or darker) of everything, it was just recently that I discovered about what was happening, I mean just two days ago from one of my friends who is a Digg power user and a highly skilled developer. As a web addict he couldn’t stop his curiosity and that lead to a shocking discovery.

“They haven’t provided me any justifying answers till now” says Daniel who has been using Digg from the time it got its popularity with a screen name Hediggme. He was a constant user of the Digg API and his suspicions made him look closer into the Digg algorithm, his fantastic developing and analyzing skills revealed that from the time the new Digg has been made public there has been 175 fake Digg accounts which have been the main source of front page submissions, moreover these accounts have been used together to boost popularity.

The first thought which occurred to us was that maybe Digg wanted to keep up their reputation of having thousands of diggs on their front page stories by making these fake diggs, or maybe because people have stopped digging in the new Digg. This would have been fine as we too are born spammers , but my not so social partner, Bittu N who himself is a great Digg fan and developer made another observation after he went to investigate about the news I gave him.

According to him, the fake accounts have a similar pattern of submissions and Diggs, that is most of the time they boost the popularity of a few selected domains, and as expected they were – Techcrunch, Guardian, BoingBoing and Dailymail.co.uk, I really don’t know if Mashable also was a part of it.

Another common thing in these sites is that they are all Digg’s publishing partners, it could have worked like a swap of fame as most of these sites helped promote Digg by writing and creating a huge buzz and this maybe Digg’s return gift to them, but something much worse is that they are actually filling up the front page with stories which they are paid for, without the users knowing. Digg’s revenues have fallen a lot since Jay Adelson left, so this maybe a solid way to grow.

In the past one week many Digg users have written about this to Digg and its been followed by a few blog posts as well, unable to take the pressure of the tech community, it was forced to make a blog post claiming all of the accusations as wrong, but lately he had to agree that they did create fake accounts, but for the sake of testing and identifying security loopholes and errors. This truly wasn’t justifying as submitting their publishing partners to the front page is not a part of testing.

This blog post was more like adding fuel to fire, it actually brought in more attention towards this and it resulted in a lot more buzz on this. Maybe thats where Digg misses Jay Adelson, who had managed such situations extremely well in the past. The highly frustrated Kevin made two comments on his post, which didn’t result in much either -

We’ve never taken a single dime from a publisher for any activity on Digg (outside of standard ad units). We’ve used test accounts since day one and will continue to use them as we validate our various spam/promotion algorithms.

I know you love a good conspiracy but it was honestly a developer testing a slew of different things. To think we would have to “game ourselves” is silly, we’d just write code to put a story on the homepage, we wouldn’t need test accounts.

Also a developer named Thirumalai reported this on his blog and I think he was the first to have observed this, his blog has got huge fame after he reported this and you can see 5 to 6 posts on this topic from the past 5 days. You can read his posts here.

Conclusion

This makes it really frustrating for marketers, as most of us have spent hours together to create influential accounts and promote our stories on Digg, and such news breaks the user’s confidence in web 2.0. Digg is still a huge source of entertainment, traffic and news, but I have a feeling that this may no longer be in the future. We try our best to provide you with such news, so in order to keep yourself updated do subscribe to our blog feed and follow me on Twitter.

From the beginning of my blogging career I was driven by a few strong motives, and one of them was mainstream fame, but in the past 3 months I had abandoned all such hopes and decided to concentrate on my earnings rather than fame, but two weeks back I was hugely surprised to find a reporter on phone asking for an interview.

Previously we have been featured on small online publications, but this time it was really huge as Deccan Herald is  a hugely popular Indian daily which claims a circulation of about 145,000 copies only in the Bangalore area. This was a fantastic opportunity and I couldn’t have afforded to let it go out of my hand, so I did my best to get the best answers and spent about 45 minutes on phone with a journalist.

The journalist Ruman Qamar had done a fantastic job, she had read through almost everything on my blog and asked me questions which made sense for only those who had read my blog from the beginning. We first met at the Indiblogger meetup, after which she saw my blog and got interested in going ahead with the interview.

If you’ve been through the article on Deccan Herald and seeing this blog for the first time, I would like to welcome all of you, do subscribe to our feed and do keep visiting as I will surely create valuable posts from here on.

The traffic on that faithful day was in the sky and kept coming for the rest of the week, I started to get a hell lot of friend requests on Facebook and I was asked for another interview on a smaller Indian daily. Though this was a huge step to start off, I feel this was by pure luck as I just took advantage of my age. But I did gain a few clients and a few potential advertisers. This was a huge milestone in my blogging career and it’ll surely be my most memorable one.

You can read the online version of the edition here.

Its been almost a month since I stopped blogging consistently though I made a post last week, but many of you will also notice that my consistency in blogging has reduced from the past 3 months, the ultimate answer was my school and hampering studies, and the reason for this month was known to you all as my exams, well that was one of the reasons, but the many others were that I had accepted failure in blogging, I had worked my ass off from the past one year and all I had earned was a few bucks each month, I was convinced that I would never meet my dreams this way and my life was filled with other problems as well.

So now let me make it clear, above I had said that I had accepted failure, but I never said that I was about to quit, the entire time I was trying to get my grades up from below sea level to atleast average, I’m really not sure if I am successful at that, but the time I spent creating deals and pitching new opportunities really paid off,

In the past two months  I have attended 4 tech meetups all consisting of high profile people, as I networked there I started learning about many new projects and a few people were also interested in making me a part of these.

Almost all were small and were about to get out of the table, but there was a lot to learn and gain from these. Firstly I became part of a developing blog network which had a dream to turn blogging into an industry in India, they agreed to include my blog in their network and promised to provide me with all marketing services as well as new revenue models. It hasn’t started yet but work is going fast and efficiently.

One of my biggest dreams was to sell seo, social media and web design services on my blog and after days of hard work I successfully started services on my blog with a big bang, I didn’t expect a full flood of projects so I had got what I had expected and within two weeks I had 6 clients in my portfolio. This is surely a bigger earner than blogging, but its a lot more work, I had to face many problems due to my lack of organizing, but at last I have started to run all projects smoothly and established a few permanent clients, so right now my revenues have touched a higher pace.

The services was one of the main reason I had to stop concentrating on blogging, but now I have made it pretty much automated which would require very less effort from my side. I also became part of two big blog takeover deals, which were unsuccessful though, I would have made good money for sure if I had got those blogs, surely I wasn’t investing my own money but my role would make me a beneficiary of both those deals.

I had experiences on owning a hosting company and once I had started it here at Dumb Little Blogger itself, but all those were just for the sake of education, but now two of my tech brothers Rizwan and Nicholas offered me to accompany them in their new venture. The company hasn’t started operations yet, but plans, tools and resources are ready and all we have to do is click on the ‘GO’ button. None of us invested much on this either, but we’re sure it’ll earn us a lot.

How this is going to help us rule?

All of these ventures are new and currently unprofitable, but it’ll surely help me build up my financial muscle in a few days. The blog network is going to provide me everything for growing my blog’s traffic and also new monetization methods which weren’t applicable for my blog when it was alone. The integration hasn’t been done yet but we are doing it as soon as possible.

My services and hosting business will be integrated together for full benefits and very soon that too will be profitable, this is that I became a part of all these businesses without investing anything. I remembered Robert T Kiyosaki’s quote that it doesn’t take money to make money. My hands are currently filled and I’ll be forced to work 12 hours a day during these vacations, but this is surely a key to hand filled with money.