Reaper-X .:[ ID ]:. » Blogging

Indonesian paypal users now can withdraw funds too

Reaper-X — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 19:48:44 +0000

I just noticed today that paypal now allowed Indonesian paypal users to receive money using their paypal account (previously Paypal can only be used to send money only)

While this can be considered as good news especially to those who’s participating in online business (read: making money online), but if it’s for me … i’m still not sure if i can use that withdraw function yet

Based from the description on Paypal website, they says that you’ll need US Bank account in order to withdraw funds from your paypal account, and when they says a US Bank account, a bank account located in United States :(

As you can see from the above image, the country name can’t be changed … so that mean the withdraw paypal funds to US Bank option can still be considered as useless as for now (at least for me)

But what about the withdraw to credit card option ? … since i’m still not sure whether i can use my credit card to receive funds from my paypal account or not … i can’t really talk to much about it … my best option for now is to contact my local bank where i get my credit card, and ask them directly about it

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blogging, Opinion, Personal

Finally reached 1.000.000 Page views

Reaper-X — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 16:14:41 +0000

Wheee finally today 18 September (actually it's 19 September in my local time) this website finally reached 1.000.000 Page views (to be exact 1.002.150 Page Views recorded) according to my Google Analytics account (after 1 year, 1 month and 3 days)

While for some people this number can be considered as normal, but if it’s for me … of course i’m really delighted for it because i just never thought that i would reached this amount (beside i never dreamed about it before) … and that’s all thanks to Wordpress. Because if i didn’t create my first blog ever in their free service, there’s no way this site exists (except there’s someone else buying this domain name at the first place)

And here’s the breakdown of this site analytics for 1 year, 1 month and 3 days :

540,031 Visits
428,694 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,002,150 Pageviews

As for the technical profile :

50.66% Visitors using Microsoft Internet Explorer to visit this site
42.83% Visitors using Mozilla Firefox Browser
4.32% Visitors using Opera Browser
and many other user agent recorded, from a Playstation 3 User-Agent, to someone trying to do some XSS attack via their browser user-agent (duh) … and it’s all recorded by Google Analytics (wow!)

And finally here’s an image to shows you what this site statistics looks like until i reached the 1.000.000 Page views taken from my Google Analytics account

Note : The above image shows you the number of visits this site receives since the beginning / the day i moved from Wordpress.com to a real web hosting (15 August 2006) until 18 September 2007 :)

So … at this time i’d like to say many thanks to all of this site visitors for coming to this site, and to those who’s interested on reading my previous journal when i just started this website, or things i’ve learned ever since i started this website … feel free to check this site archives

As for my next target … i’d really love to get 1.000.000 Visits first and then perhaps the absolute unique visitors can also reach the same amount :D

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blogging, Journal, Website

Lessons i’ve learned about making money online with blog after 1 year

Reaper-X — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 07:57:44 +0000

Hurray … today this site turns 1 year old (actually it should be on 6 July but at that time im still using free Wordpress.com blog so i dont count it anymore) :) … at first i never thought that i’d be coming this far simply by just blogging about anything (although most of the time i wrote about Computers, and Game related content). And of course it’s all thanks to those who’s visiting this site (regular visitors or just passer by). And as the title said, this time i’m going to tell you what i’ve learned so far about make money online by Blogging

1. Write Useful Content

Content is king, and that mean if you really want to drive visitors to your site, of course you’ll need to create useful content. Let’s say you love to write about yourself, your cat’s, etc … but think about it this way, what if you’re looking at some unknown blog writing about themself or their cat. Do you really care about it ? … i’ll leave the answer to you

2. Search Engine Rulez

Forget those who says that Search Engine is useless, because search engine is the first source of your traffic no matter if your site has large user base or not, so you’ll need to make sure your site is optimized for search engine because that’s how most people find your site

3. Learn to fix your mistake and never give up to early

Let’s say you’ve set a target on making your site to make specific amount of money after six months of blogging. But when that time come, you didn’t really make anything from your site. Now what you should do then ? first thing is of course look at what you’ve wrote so far and ask yourself, does your content gives valuable information to those who’s visiting your site ?

But what happen if you decided to give up on blogging at this time instead of learning to fix your mistake ? Here’s a good lesson i’ve learned from Electronic Arts (i know EA is on different level than blog, but look at below paragraph)

According to the 1982 business plan, the company’s original business goals were to grow to a billion-dollar company within its first six years and to "make software that makes a personal computer worth owning." At the time, Electronic Arts was the 136th game publisher in the U.S. EA eventually attained its goal of becoming a billion-dollar company, though it took 12 years to do so.

4. If you really want to make money, you’ll need to spend some money first

If you’re really serious about making money, of course you’ll need to spend some money first in order to do it and in this case you’ll need good hosting company (for more flexibility, and control), and a domain name only or perhaps to promote your site by placing your site ads on other site

Let’s take an example, Wordpress.com offer you a free unlimited blog hosting using wordpress (in terms of bandwidth and post storage not image, etc) and top notch server (no problem for getting digged, or slashdotted) but the downside from their service is … you can’t place any advertisement on your site (and that’s including affiliate links)

Now what about Blogger.com / blogspot ? basically they have the same offer just like Wordpress.com, with the exception you’re allowed to place advertisement on your blog unfortunately with this downside :

3 out of 4 Blogger urls are SPAM : source although previously i’ve wrote about it too … which mean most people don’t trust blogger powered blogs anymore (or at least for me)

I knew both of them are offering domain mapping so you can use your own domain name instead of using their subdomain to look more professional, but that’s the point

5. The only thing you need to know from other website that tell you about make money online is what advertisement program they’ve joined

This may sound a little bit harsh, but one thing i’ve learned about making money online is by looking on what advertisement program are used by the big site / or other website, because that’s how you’re going to make money online

6. Do what you love and money will follow you

I think this tips already explain it all,

What tips would you give someone just starting out in blogging if they wanted to build a profitable blog?

First, pick a topic you love, one that you can’t wait to write about every day. If I wasn’t truly obsessed with productivity, I would have never lasted at Lifehacker. Second, center your site on the reader, not yourself. Provide useful, informative, entertaining material that readers will come back to over and over again. Third, measure your success by your readership and the response you get from others, not your Adsense checks. Once you build your audience, the money will follow

If you have your own experience about this, of course i’d be delighted if you could share some of your experiences too :)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blogging, Income Sources, Journal, Making Money

Do what you love and money will follow you ?

Reaper-X — Fri, 18 May 2007 19:11:20 +0000

Lately i’ve been thinking about this after i read Problogger review with Gina Trapatani recently. And here’s what Gina Trapatani said in her review with Problogger :

What tips would you give someone just starting out in blogging if they wanted to build a profitable blog?

First, pick a topic you love, one that you can’t wait to write about every day. If I wasn’t truly obsessed with productivity, I would have never lasted at Lifehacker. Second, center your site on the reader, not yourself. Provide useful, informative, entertaining material that readers will come back to over and over again. Third, measure your success by your readership and the response you get from others, not your Adsense checks. Once you build your audience, the money will follow

And because i always interested looking for another opinion about this, i tried searching for similar keywords using Google and came across an interesting post about this :

Mark Albion cites a study by Srully Blotnick :

A study of business school graduates tracked the careers of 1,500 people from 1960 to 1980. From the beginning, the graduates were grouped into two categories. Category A consisted of people who said they wanted to make money first so they could do what they really wanted to do later after they care of their financial concerns. Those in category B pursued their interests first, sure that the money eventually would follow.

What percentage fell into each category?

Of the 1,500 graduates in the survey, the money-now category A’s comprised 83 percent or 1,245 people. Category B risk takers made up 17 percent, 255 graduates.

After 20 years, there were 101 millionaires in the group. Only one came from category A, 100 from category B

Found at John Kwarsick Blog via George Ambler Blog

And after finished reading it (including it is moral story lesson), i think the above story has a truth in it because most successful (if not all) bloggers i’ve ever seen, does the same thing too on their blog. They think about their site visitors first not the money

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Blogging, Journal, Opinion, Personal

Just when i thought i’m the only one ..

Reaper-X — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:03:38 +0000

I saw the Problogger interview with Tim Ferris, author of The 4–Hour Workweek book … and it writes :

Darren : What have you learnt about blogging since starting yours a month ago? Teach us oh wise one!

Tim : LOL… I don’t claim to have all of the answers, of course. Not even most of them, but I’m a pretty good “reductionist”. That just means that I question what everyone is doing and ask myself: if I ignore what’s popular, what everyone says you “have to do,” what actually works? I cut out all the fat and look at just the highest-impact variables.

For example, I’ve been told I need to post everyday, but when I really looked at the facts, a different picture emerged.

i’ve found that if i post less often, my blog has a sine wave sign-up curve. in other words: if i post just infrequently enough (for me, once every 4-6 days), the comments add up on each post, making the site look very popular, and rss subscriptions spike. if i post too often, it doesn’t look popular (since posts get pushed down and comment-count is low), so it is actually better for my site to post less often! love it when that happens…

Well … at first i thought i'm the only one who’s experiencing this but after reading that post … now i'm sure there’re other who’s experiencing the same situation like me too. So what’s the point of telling you this ? well … im sure that most of you already read various blogging tips, and most of them says write often for various reasons. And as you can see, not all the tips from various sources can be applied to your site, because every site has difference audience (for example, i can be categorized as a full-time lurker and rarely leave comment unless i feel necessary)

Although in reality when i search for Tim Ferris blog and found it at Fourhourworkweek.com … i saw that his site has more comments compared to this site, even i can see comments on all of his post lol …

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Blogging, Internet, Journal, Personal

What topic i should create next ?

Reaper-X — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 18:03:31 +0000

Well .. actually if you read this blog regularly (i'm pretty sure 99.99% of you don’t) .. you’ll notice that in this month i only write several posts. And that’s all thanks to .. my new internet access which is an unlimited access. But why ? if you ask me.

The answer is really simple, because this is my first time getting an unlimited internet access (although its still not reliable because it’s full speed can only be used at night / 6:00 PM ++) while at normal / work time the connection speed is … miserably slow (even downloading 100 kB file takes more than 15 minutes, and if you came from Indonesia i think you already knew who is the provider that give you adsl connection with extremely slow speed even below average dial up connection at work time) .. but let’s forget about that part

And back to the topic once again, because i just getting my first time unlimited internet access i tried everything possible, for example using torrent (and seeding it of course not just leeching it), playing online games (MMORPG) to take revenge because previously i can not level my character because i played it in internet cafe, watching youtube video and more .. lol

I knew that most people think that it’s just normal especially to those who’s already using an unlimited connection since a loooong time ago. But if it’s for me, i never experience this feeling before :D and that’s why i only made a few post in this month

And thanks to all of that, i missed almost everything from the web such as breaking news and so on .. and now because i got confused on what should i write next i created this post and ask you directly on what topic i should create next (if there’s someone reading this)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blogging, Journal, Personal

Three out of every four Blogspot URL’s were spam

Reaper-X — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:37:16 +0000

Now this is a good reason on why you shouldn’t choose Blogspot to blog if you’re serious about blogging :

Three out of every four unique Blogspot.com URLs that appeared in the top 50 results for commercial queries were spam, the study said. Blogspot is the hosting site for Google's blogging service. Blogs created for marketing purposes are sometimes referred to as splogs

Also, one domain – topsearch10.com – hosted many other redirection domains that were responsible for 22 percent to 25 percent of the spam detected during the researchers' tests, the study said – Full Story

If you’re serious about blogging without thinking about anything else maybe you should consider using free wordpress.com service rather than blogspot because of their strict spam policy, other than that they also restrict you to put ads on your website (i know there would be different opinion about this but if you’re really serious, you should try to get a domain name and get real webhosting instead) or using any redirection technique which results in less spam

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Blogging, Internet, Opinion, Personal

Do you get bored with long anime ?

Reaper-X — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 11:22:28 +0000

I found this discussion over at 9rules anime forum although i’ve already replied there, but i just want to post my own opinion about long anime on my blog here because i dont think it’s a good idea to write a long post there :)

I wrote there that i do not mind watching long anime episodes as long as there’s no big gap between fillers and it’s main storyline (if there’s any) beside most of the anime i watched are long for example City Hunter, Yu Yu Hakusho, Dragon Ball Series, Rurouni Kenshin, and so on (most of them has more than 50 episodes). But if there’s big gap between the main storyline and fillers, then i just stop watching that anime

A good example of this is Naruto (no offense to Naruto fans), after the fight against Sasuke, and Naruto decided to help Sakura rescuing Sasuke there’s a big gap there. Even i almost forget the fight between those two (Sasuke vs Naruto). But because i'm interested on seeing how Naruto are going to rescue Sasuke, i keep watching the anime episodes until episode 19x and stopped watching it at EP 19x because .. i just got bored of the fillers

But what if the anime itself has no real storyline (such as Doraemon, Pokemon, City Hunter) .. then of course i’d be glad to watch that anime even if the anime itself has more than 1000 episodes :P .. and of course your opinion might be differ from mine

And now .. what about the anime that has short episode / story such as Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan or Midori No Hibi ? .. most of the time if the story itself is really interesting, i keep on watching them over and over again :) .. now what about you ?

0x87485B96 | Tags : Anime, Blogging, Opinion, Personal

Ahh … Guest Bloggers …

Reaper-X — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 02:42:46 +0000

Darren Rowse writes about Why guest bloggers are great for a blog after reading the Guest post over at John Chow’s Blog written by Matt Coddington. He says that it’s a win win situation because of the following reason :

The blogger who does the guest spot wins : The guest bloggers can get a link back to his site, and that’s including promoting himself
The blogger who owns the blog wins : The owner of the blog can take a break and do not have to worry about posting something new
The reader wins : because they get to hear about the topic of the blog from a new angle

While personally i agree to Darren Rowse statement, but maybe Darren forgot to tell you something important, the first thing that everyone noticed is John Chow’s blog has a big number of loyal readers. And with that condition of course you can get guest bloggers to easily write something for you because they’ll get the exposure by writing on John Chow’s Blog or any other popular blog

Even one of the commenters on that Guest Post over at John Chow’s blog writes this :

Some good points - but it certainly is much easier to get a guest blogger when you have a very popular blog, right?

Now i think you’ll get the idea. Guest bloggers can be useful especially if you’re running a popular blog on the blogosphere and of course they also lining up to write on your blog even if your not asking for it ..

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Blogging, General Blogging, Internet

Links Dump 24 Feb 2007

Reaper-X — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 04:03:53 +0000

Interesting story found from all over the web on 24 February 2007 :

To those who want a PR7 Link from Google, you can pay Google to get listed on their Google Enterprise Page for $10.000 – via ConversionRater
MyBlogLog tracks your visitors Ad Clicks even if you’re not using their pro features – via Shoemoney
European version of Sony PS3 will play fewer old games – via Reuters
Security Scanner can see through clothes (wow this is a cool stuff) :P – via Wired
10 New ways to Make Money Online – via Webworkerdaily
New Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.2 and 1.5.0.10 released to fix several security issues – via MozillaZine

That’s all about it

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blogging, General Blogging, Internet, Web Links

Best Niche to Make Money Online

Reaper-X — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 06:21:03 +0000

I’ve been wondering this for a while (actually not just wondering but by looking various website and judge it by looking at their alexa ranking, site activity, and so on) that the only thing i can find so far which is a real source to get some additional income source (that’s depend on how much you can make from your website) is about website that is telling you how to make money fast, or giving you some tips on how to make money from your website or blog

Although all of that depends on how good you’re writing your article, your search engine position, your site traffic, and your targeted audience. Of course i mean original article based on your personal experience not just doing some CPM (Copy Paste Modify) or even worse just doing some copy paste or using some automated tools to scrap other site content.

And what about search engine position ? simple .. even if you wrote a really good article about making money from the internet. But your page is listed on the last part of various search engine results page .. you’re not going to get traffic to your site. And that’s why you must work hard to make your site listed on the top (or at least in reasonable position) of search engine results page .. here’s an example

And another thing to look for is your site audience. Why did i say that ? Simply because if most of your target audience are the tech savvy guys and gals .. you can safely assume that none of them can make decent enough money for you (i'm sorry i have to say something like this, but that’s a fact) unless you’re really writing informative article and you has a donation button somewhere on your site .. and a good example of this is the Steve Pavlina website

I guess that is all .. but please keep this in mind, this is purely based on my opinion :) .. so it's up to you to decide it :D

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blogging, General Blogging, Income Sources, Internet, Making Money, Opinion, Website

Daily updated blog get a lot of traffic ?

Reaper-X — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 04:50:49 +0000

I think most of you already read / heard from someone or some other site saying / writing about updating your blog daily / frequently because if you post to your blog daily you’ll see an increased number of your site visitors (of course most of them are search engine unless your site already has a returning visitors). But after testing this on my site (for this month), the above condition doesn't apply to this site.

As you already know that in this month i rarely post something on my blog here (24 posts for this month) which is caused by the recent earthquake in taiwan which caused major internet connection problem in Asia. But let’s keep that aside shall we ? Because i'm not going to talk about it anymore :-P

And, thanks to that problem .. i can see how is my blog doing if i'm not writing on it for several days. At first i notice a small traffic drop, but instead of writing a new post i keep waiting for it (by playing game) .. and it goes on like that (and eventhough i post something new, i only post uninteresting article and i'm pretty sure no one care to read it)

And guess what ? after a few weeks doing this .. i saw an increased traffic to this site (and i'm sure it’ll be higher than the previous month (i'm getting 20869 Unique Visitors for December 2006) .. because this screenshot was taken before the end of this month) .. and most of those visitors are came reading / looking (i don't know if they truly read my article or no) at my previous month article or my early article

And the conclusion is (judging from the above condition), eventhough you write something new everyday on your blog, there’s no guarantee you’ll get an increased traffic to your site. But i don't know whether this condition also apply to your website or not ;-) .. so that’s why the best thing to do is always tried it first and see if the above condition also appy to your site :-)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blogging, General Blogging, Internet, Journal, Website

My Deepest Thanks to everyone who’s been visiting this site

Reaper-X — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 14:52:08 +0000

I know that i rarely put something like this (actually this is the first time i'm doing this), but i always appreciate everyone who has been leaving comment or put a suggestion on my blog here or simply by visiting this site without leaving any comments. And like most of you already knew that getting a returning visitors is a hard thing to do rather than getting a new visitors (that’s depend on how you perform on major search engine) ;-)

And the conclusion is .. by creating this post, i want to thank everyone who’s been visiting this site and leaving their comments here eventhough they only visit this site for 1 – 3 times (and rarely visiting this site again) :

And here’s the list :

KlaudiX & Guzeris : He doesn't have his own homepage, but he’s the only person i know of that have been visiting this site for about 1 – 3 times since i started this site a few months ago. And he does leaving comments on this site too :-) .. that’s why i give him my deepest thanks (as a note, i’ve already chat with him using YIM too) other than that he’s a Dragon Ball fans like me too :-P (with the exception Guzeris is not a Dragon Ball fans) :-P
Timethief : She is the first person i know from Blogosphere world :-) .. and that’s why i created a post about her a few months ago
Mr Bink : One of the most frequent visitors of this site (although i haven't seen him leaving comment on this blog again for a while) but like i said before i appreciate him too :-)
CCTech : He’s been leaving comments here for several times (IIRC) other than that he wrote the same topic like this blog too :-) .. and it’s all about Technology, SEO and Web Design (with the exception this blog is not talking about web design or such stuff) lol
Ashish Mohta : I think he found this blog via problogger group writing project, and he also share the same interest like me too :-D .. that means his blog is all about Technology related stuff, such as reviews, analysis and programming related

Well i think that’s all .. and i'm sorry if i didn't put other commenters name here, and that’s not because i forget about you (well i always keep track on every commenters here) but because if i have to write all of the commenters name here on this post .. it’ll be a really looong post

And once again i’d like to say my deepest thanks to all of this site visitors especially to the above persons :-)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blogging, General Blogging, Journal, Personal, Website

Internet Connection Already Fixed and Few Games Left

Reaper-X — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 04:24:46 +0000

Wow .. right now i can access my site again without using australian proxy just like before. And i'm really happy about this, because i can upload files once again ( the australian proxy i list before doesn't allow uploading files .. and that’s including images ! )

And other than that i'm also almost finished playing Final Fantasy XII (maybe because i don't read walkthrough about this game, but right now im still trying to beat HellWyrm and going to finish DeathScythe Quest) .. while the other games ( Guitar Hero 2, Naruto Uzumaki Chronicles, Need For Speed Carbon, Melty Blood act Cadenza, Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi – aff – ) .. well .. i already finished it (not 100% yet) but i think it's still good enough

And that means .. im going to work on this site again in the next few days / weeks .. lol .. unless i'm going to play the other unplayed games such as the Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Pimp My Ride, Guitar Freaks & Drum Mania V2, Battle Stadium D.O.N and finishing The Fast and The Furious Game using my favorite AE86 Trueno .. :-P

We’ll see about that later .. :-D

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blogging, General Blogging, Journal, Misc. Games, Personal, Video Games