About 3 years ago, when I was starting my online business full time,  I attended one of Mark Anastasi‘s webinars.
There were lots of great speakers who were even better salesmen.

Mark Vurnum gave a presentation explaining that he had over 6000 websites each bringing in up to $5 a day from passive automated income. This income figure got talked down to $2 per site a day then $1 per site per day after I spent £2000 = about $4000 at that time to purchase his system, tools and training.

The basic idea was to purchase batches of 5 domains in niches selected using the tools provided then use auto-created-content to keep each wordpress blog updated to get and keep the sites ranked and earn money from Adsense.

Teething trouble with the tools was a constant problem for many others using this system but my technical expertise allowed me to overcome these issues. I was able to set up 5 or 10 new blogs a day until I had about 450 when things started going badly wrong.
Traffic to sites was building up (but income was still dripping in cents at a time rather than $) when the automatic content creation tool crashed.
Mark quickly produced an updated version of the tool – but this needed to be reinstalled manually on every site.
Even flat out it took me an average of 15 minutes per site to update – making 112 hours or over 3 weeks of hard slogging boring repetitive ‘WORK’

Unfortunately the new tool didn’t cure the problem and stopped working within a month – which was extremely frustrating.

Expenditure:

• $4000 for system, tools and training
• $3000 for domains
• 600 hours hard work setting up and maintaining the sites ($6000 at minimum wage)

Income: Less than $100

Then the system simply died – until a year later Mark offered an updated automated income system.
Never one to give up I purchased another 20 new domains but the new system failed to produce any traffic or income making another $200 loss for domain names.

Moving on I paid $1000 to purchase Greg Jacobs WP Mage system for creating auto-content for blogs.
These were much more professional tools that seemed to promise better results.
Greg suggested purchasing separate shared hosting accounts for each 20 domains used.
In total I purchased another 100 domains monetized using Adsense, Amazon and Commission Junction.

Results started to look promising and I estimate that my costs were being repaid from income within about 2 months.
This also produced significant enough results to allow meaningful split testing.
My biggest earner was as an affiiliate for lastminute.com through commission junction.

Then disaster. The very month my income started reaching $200 a day, I received a spam email from Trade Doubler saying great news – they were taking over the affiliate account of lastminute.com from Commission Junction.
For me this was terrible news. It meant editing the affiliate links in over 50 websites containing tens of thousands of pages.
To make matters worse, Trade Doublers terms meant payments were made to affiliates an extra month later.

I received no prior notice from Commission Junction that they had lost the lastminute.com account – their view was that they simply provided a market place and anybody could join or leave whenever they pleased.
Lastminute.com didn’t bother to notify affiliates either – a sorry state of affairs.
It was lucky I found Trade Doublers’ email amongst my spam – probably there because they suddenly mailed thousands of affiliate account owners they had never contacted before.

Almost two years on, I had to smile when an email from Trade Doublers arrived last week advising they would be losing their account with lastminute.com from the middle of this month.
That just shows, what goes around comes around!
Don’t expect things to improve – just change how you do business yourself.

Back to a couple of years ago when at the same time, several servers where my accounts WP Mage sites were hosted got hacked and the sites shut down for over a month.
Traffic and income from 60 sites never recovered.
A little later, Greg Jacobs had his servers hacked and needed to rebuild all of his sites and tools.
To this day, I have been unable to use his most useful tool providing detailed statistics for domain names.

All in all an enormous shock that forced me to re-evaluate what I was trying to do online.
The biggest problem was attempting to work with systems that were totally outside my control.

Since my foray into micro-niches, I have been on webinars with guru’s I trust suggesting that income per site is typically closer to $0.22 per site per day than $1

This means about $80 income per year at a cost of about $15 for a domain and hosting – assuming you avoid falling foul of Google.
At 10 minutes per week mainting each site, this works out at $7.80 for each hour worked – hardly enough to support the dream life painted by most guru’s selling online products.

What did I decide to do?
Well, for almost 2 years now I have been creating software products for internet marketers – aids to automate real online work that I actually use myself almost daily.
Now I have products that I own suitable for affiliates to market to help automate my income.

I have also drastically reduced the number of domains down to about 50 and duplicated key files and documents on more than one hosting account.
For example, I use a dummy add-on domain that contains all of my links to Aweber thank you pages, affiliate forwarding links and other key files. Nameservers need to be changed to each hosting account one at a time to initially set up the add-on domains, but then it’s very easy to FTP upload and save all the files on multiple servers.

Any problem with one hosting account going down means I remain in control being able to change the location of every link and file by simply changing the nameservers to a working hosting account.

In summary, I have found working with micro-niches to produce ‘automated’ income to be a mugs game – always at the mercy of others – especially Google.

Instead it’s far more productive to create your own products of value – something most guru’s spend most of their time working on.

Every thing I do is with the aim of keeping me in control of my business instead of being at the mercy of other able to destroy it on a whim.

My inbox was filled with lots of marketing emails this morning – just like every other morning.
And as usual I skimmed the titles and sender info for any that caught my eye.
Clicking on a link in an interesting email sent me to a page that had just a video with no controls.

I never have time to watch random videos on the off chance they might contain something of value – but i was interested enough in this one to want to see their offer – without waiting for the video to end.

So here’s what I did instead:

• Grabbed the page HTML code – from Firefox, click Tools, Web Developer, Page Source
• Copied the page HTML code – ctrl-A then ctrl-C
• Opened up SeaMonkey composer – SeaMonkey, File, New, Composer Page
• Clicked the bottom <HTML> Source tab before pasting in the Html code – Highlighting existing HTML code then Ctrl-V
• Next I checked code at the top of the page and changed “$secondsdelay = 1285;” to “$secondsdelay = 1;”
• Finally I saved the file as temp99 before clicking the browse button

Voila! The Sales page button appeared in 1 second instead of me having to waste over 20 minutes watching a video I had no interest in.

The actual HTML code that needs editing will vary with programmers – but if you search for terms like ‘delay’, ‘unhide’, ‘showwindow’ etc it is usually pretty obvious the value that needs to be changed.

Depending on whether the site uses full or relative urls, you might find chunks of graphics missing – but generally ‘Buy buttons‘ will always appear – because who wants to risk losing a sale?

Opening SeaMonkey

Editing the Delay Time

The order button appears

Once the order button appears, it is easy to see what is on offer – and links to more details.

Like most people, I like a bargain – but problems with web hosting have cost me dearly over the past few years.

I have two hosting accounts with TMZ and their server performance has always seemed fine.
About 4 months ago they started making changes to their servers and I got locked out of one of my account cPanel and FTP.
That shouldn’t have been a problem except their Online support was offline, emails bounced and it took a week to get even a response using their support ticketing system.
In the end it took more than 3 weeks to get access my account again.
Maybe not too much of a problem for social users – but no way to run a business.

Then just over a month ago, something changed and I am still locked out of my cPanel and FTP for the other account.
Now I have no way to make changes to half a dozen sub-domains or, more importantly, a MySql database I use for my software products – and that is a really major problem for me.

These aren’t the only problems I have had.
A couple of years ago I had over 50 real money making domains hosted with Mattie Blaze (who have since passed their business over to Hostgator). Their servers got hacked and my sites were shut down for many weeks and never I recovered this business.

I also made the mistake of buying a low cost hosting account called WeHostForMe that I found on DigitalPoint.
Everything started off well and the guy running it was very helpful – until his server got hacked and ALL 6 of my domains hosted there got burned then disappeared.
About 6 weeks later with his server finally restored I was offered a small discount to keep using this service – but my time and energy recreating 6 websites far outweighed any possible savings – and I would still be at risk of the same thing happening again.

Starting out I used 1and1 – until they started billing me annually for .co.uk domains that only needed to be paid for every 2 years and they made it impossible to cancel anything online.
When I did manage to cancel renewing a domain they managed to put it into some sort of no mans land – where I needed to pay nominet £15 before another registrar was able to recover it for me – before it had even expired!
Initially low cost – but terrible value and expensive in the long run. I will never do business with 1and1 again.

That lesson taught me the value of controlling all of my domain names.
So I now register domains completely separately from any hosting accounts – using Powerhoster, GoDaddy, and DomainCheapsters.
Why do I use 3 companies – all eventually provided by GoDaddy?
For years I have used PowerHoster without problem and they provide an excellent service and value for money.
Then a couple of years back I started buying products from Brian Johnson who bought a license from GoDaddy to offer domain names at cut prices. Everything was OK until I discovered Brian’s renewal costs were much higher than PowerHoster. Since then Brian has reduced his prices, but not before I had moved most of my domains back to PowerHoster.
Greg Jacob’s WP Mage business plan involved buying aged domains from GoDaddy – the only reason I use GoDaddy directly. Without discount codes GoDaddy new domain names and renewals are expensive.
I also use Telivo, now LCN to register .co.uk domains for about half the price of suppliers from USA.

One other thing, I’d like to mention is that the GoDaddy style domain management tools (also used by PowerHoster and Domain Cheapsters)really are world class – far superior to any other I have found

I also have hosting accounts with some of the big players – but even they make changes to suit themselves, rather than their customers.
One recently migrated away from using cPanel – and along with it my Fantastico wordpress details for over 200 blogs.
Now I have to use simple scripts and waste lots of time managing add on and sub domains one by one from their custom control panel – where they try to sell me domain names – instead of being able to make changes in bulk.

The positive side of using a  hosting account from a major player is that once somebody managed to hack into over 400 sites on a server, Justhost restored all 3Gigabytes for me – well worth the annual $10 fee.
This is something they wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t paid extra for daily backups!

Why do I use more than one hosting account?
Well, over the years as an Engineer, I have developed lots of high reliability products – where ‘redundancy’ is the name of the game. A bit like not putting all your eggs in one basket – with a twist that keeps everything working all the time.
Also I paid lots of $ to buy WPMage – tools to automate blogging. Greg Jacobs the creator, recommended not having more than 20 domains on any one hosting account – to restrict any problems from Google to only a portion of my business.
Nowadays, I have changed my business model and dont don’t use WPMage. But I still have lots of domains and like to avoid the possibility of them all going off line at the same time.

The lessons I have painfully learnt the hard way are:

• Buy reputable web hosting
• Avoid using reseller hosting packages
• Pay for your hosting company to provide guaranteed backups – and not just ones they can restore at their own discretion.
• Make regular backups of all your online content – and keep copies on your own PC
• Always register domain names separately from hosting

Today I have just signed up with a hosting company John Thornhill recommended called D9 Hosting.
Hopefully they will manage to copy the data from my one accessible TMZ hosting account and set up their server for me to redirect the domain nameservers. I’ll let you know how I get on with this new hosting account.

UPDATE I’ve now been using D9 Hosting for a couple of weeks and they have so far provided not only excellent performance but also excellent technical support.
In case you haven’t already noticed, I have high expectations from the services I pay $ for and am not slow to comment on any shortcomings – so it’s really great to discover, for a change,  a company that actually exceeds my expectations!

If things carry on the way they have started with D9 Hosting then I’ll almost certainly switch other hosting accounts to them in the future.