In the early days of the internet there was a service started called Usenet, it’s a lot like a distributed forum.

Usenet is still in use today, although a lot of people do not know about it. A number of the forum systems out there have plugins that enable you to import Usenet posts into your forum.

I’m helping a Kiwi (2 actually) get started in the online working world. One of their sites is a forum. This forum is just starting out and is facing the standard problem of a forum, chicken and egg.

People won’t join/post unless there is a reason for them to do so. The reason can be as simple as it appears to be a good community with interesting things going on, but how do you do that with a new forum?

Some of you will be in the same situation as me and run servers instead of having an account on a web hosting site.

I currently have 2 servers located in a datacenter in America and then a couple of backup servers in my garage that take regular snapshots of my production servers. The also act as backup MX (mail exchanger) and DNS servers so that I can quickly and easily move my hosting should something fail in the datacenter.

It has been quite a while since I wrote anything here in my working blog.

It has been very hectic, things were looking fantastic, I was going to hit my next milestone and my target of $70 a day by December, and then everything went belly up.

I became far too focused on making money, the result that amount I was earning dropped, which resulted in me trying harder and harder to make money. It seemed that the harder I tried the worse it got.

Over the last couple of days I have been trying various locations for Chitika eMinimalls on one of my sites.

For this site the ideal location appears to be at the end of the content, which is not normally a hotspot. I’m guessing that people were ignoring chitika above the content because they wanted to read the content and so they skipped the ad.

On the other hand, when Chitika is placed on the bottom of the page they see it after the have read the information and actually look at it, decide it’s interesting and click on it.

A few people, both online and offline, have asked how I’ve managed to get where I am in only a few months, and believe it or not it is not that hard.

There are actually 2 components to getting where I am:

The 3 P’s

I’m sure you have all heard of the 3 L’s with regard to buying a property, well I have the 3 P’s for money making websites. The P’s stand for Problem, Potential, and Price.

Knowing what to do to improve the Potential, and/or fix the Problem.

You don’t need the ability to do the work, but you do need to be able to identify what the issues are and get them fixed, obviously it is cheaper if you can do it yourself.

Another useful site I found is a backlink finding tool. I suspect they are just querying google with the right search terms but I’m not sure.

This is quite handy if your looking for sites that in your subject that will link to you. I’ve had a bit of a play with it, and it’s not bad.

Most of the sites it finds are of the kind that want you to put a link to them up before they link to you.

Site Address: www.webconfs.com

I came across this site the other day, very useful for getting colours that work together, especially if your like me and have no visual design gene. Anyway enough waffling, check it out at colorcombos.com

Earlier this week I was approached by a guy who had purchased a site from the original developer, he’d bought it a few months ago and it still wasn’t up on his server in a running state.

In my last weekly update (here) I mentioned that my new site had received a huge surge in traffic by a single post on a forum by someone who found my site.

What I didn’t mention was that it was a negative post.