Daniel Felice

Fantastic February

// February 28th, 2009 // No Comments » // Project Blogger

The past few months have been tough at danielfelice.com, with hits and revenue being very slow since October last year. We had a great month in September and for some reason it went downhill in October and November and has been slowly recovering since.

I am happy to say that even though February is a few days shorter than most months, it has been the most successful month to date in terms of traffic. Traffic this month skyrocketed and surpassed the September high, although revenue seems to be virtually nil.

It is good to see that although I am not posting as much each month as I was in September, hits are have been on the rise since the October slump. This just proves that content is king – you should attempt to create quality content than have hundreds of posts that no one wants to read.

Revenue has been slow for the past few months. I do get very good clickthroughs on the ads that I do display on the blog, however no one seems to be buying. That indicates to me that my adverts don’t appeal to you, my audience, and that I need to evaluate my advertising methods – or drop them all together.

As this blog is seen as a personal blog because it bares my name, I think I am going to leave it as a personal blog and stop trying to make money off of it. I have a few other blogs that have a better money earning potential so I am going to concentrate on monetising them rather than trying to make money from my personal blog. I will still continue to use this blog to tell you how I do it.

Just like every other month, I am hoping that March will continue to bring in more traffic and generate new readers. I will concentrate on building new content for you to read and also keep you up to date with my projects.

Thanks for all the support!

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Hire Me

// February 24th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // General

I have been getting a lot of questions lately regarding WordPress MU and BuddyPress which is starting to take up fair bit of my time. I have helped a number of people over the past few months to setup WPMU and BP, customise themes to their own specs, integrate custom themes with BP and so on.

A lot of the BP/WPMU community rely on the community to help them get their blog up and running and troubleshoot any issues they are experiencing. Users who have never installed WPMU/BP can gain a lot from asking experienced users questions on the forums – this is how I learnt everything I know about WPMU, BP, blogging and themes.

I enjoy helping other users with their issues, and I like when people check out “Explore With Me” and ask me how I did this or that, it makes me satisfied with the job I am doing developing these sites.

As I mentioned above – I have spending a lot of my time lately to questions and helping people and it is starting to impact my own work. I don’t mind the odd question here or there, but spending a few hours working on someone else’s issue starts to hamper my own development, especially as I work full time and only have a few hours a night to do what I have to do.

I have decided to sell myself as outlined below:

Pick My Brain

• 1 Hour
• Ask anything WPMU/BP related
• I’ll help you to resolve any issues you are experiencing
• Flat rate

Installation

• Installation of WordPress MU, BuddyPress or both
• You must have suitable host
• Flat rate
• Estimated time 2 hours

Freelance

• Installation of WordPress MU, BuddyPress or both
• Custom theme configuration
• Theme modifications
• Issues resolved
• Hourly rate

E-Mail Me if you are interested!

Invisible Children

// February 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // General

Building Content & Getting Hits

// February 19th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Project Blogger

I have taken a step back lately from the making money aspect of this blog. If you have been visiting here for a while you’ll probably notice that I haven’t done my monthly earnings report for the past two months or so - and not only becuase I am not making much money!

I thought it would be a good idea to try and continue to build content and traffic before I looking for private advertising, find more affiliate partners and run contests.

The way it stands at the moment, this blog covers a range of topics covering the likes of WordPress, BuddyPress, making money, my projects, blogging tips, and so on. It doesn’t serve an information source in one particular area, but numerous areas, which I am not sure I like.

I am trying to concentrate on building up this blog as an information source on one particular area – and the way things are going at the moment it looks like it is heading into the direction of becoming a blog about WordPress and BuddyPress.

But I also want the blog to cover the projects I am working on and then I also want to share my MMO tips. So what do I keep and what do I stop blogging about?

I don’t want to ask people to advertise on the blog until I figure out what direction I want to go in. I think it will easier to find private advertising/sponsor once I do define a niche.

So instead of forcing myself into a niche that I think I should go, I am going to keep doing what I am doing for a while and see how the blog evolves over the next few months. I want to make sure that whatever I choose as the “niche” for this blog is something that I enjoy blogging about rather than being pushed into it.

Maybe this is just a blog about blogging?

Projects Update

// February 13th, 2009 // No Comments » // Projects

Explore With Me

Project Explore With Mewas launched in October 2008. Since then we have been testing and adding features to the site such as WordPress MU, BuddyPress, forums, various plugins, new themes and a whole lot more. The site is about 95% complete and we want to launch as soon as possible.

I had originally set my launch date for early January but then decided to wait for the final release of BuddyPress and WordPress MU 2.7. I updated the site to WPMU 2.7 two weeks ago and now we are also running BuddyPress Beta 2.

BP v1.0 was due to be launched yesterday however they have decided to release it as a “Release Candidate” due to pending changes to WordPress MU.

The site is fairly bug free at the moment and everything is ready to go. We do get very good traffic and also are finding that users are joining which is a good sign.

I think we will hold off the “official” launch date until BP v1 and WPMU 2.7(.1?). That is when we will start pushing for advertising and concentrate on bringing the traffic in.

Free BuddyPress Themes

Project Free BuddyPress Themes went live in early January. It was an idea that turned into reality in about 2 hours so there wasn’t much planning involved. The good thing is that I have had time to work on small updates to the blog as BuddyPress is yet to be in final release so the uptake has been a bit slow.

I am happy with the blog in its present form, it is effective and gets the job done. Small updates here and then are always something I’ll do.

At the moment we have 6 themes available for users to download, with 2 of them being the default BP theme. We got three new ones this week so I am hoping that once the word spreads about BuddyPress designers will start designing custom themes and upload them to the site so other users can download them.

I am thinking of putting together a BuddyPress Theme contest to try to encourage users to start designing. I am just trying to put some prizes together. Once I get a few responses I will launch the contest. It is still in its very early planning stages but hopefully we can run the contest sometime in March if all works out well.

Wanted: BuddyPress Themes

// February 10th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Buddypress

I launched “Free BuddyPress Themes” about a month ago and so far the uptake has been fairly slow. While hits have been fantastic, there are still only 3 themes available for download and two of those are the default themes that are packaged with BuddyPress, the third is the member theme that I modified for Explore With Me.

With the imminent release of BuddyPress v1.0 I am hoping that theme designers start submitting their themes to the site. I have seen a few themes that users have created for their own sites, however they are not being made public. The majority of BuddyPress site I have seen are using the default themes however there needs to be some custom themes created otherwise every single BuddyPress based site is just going to look the same.

As far as I know Free BuddyPress Themes is the only site that is offering BuddyPress themes available for download, but there are a few other BuddyPress related domain names that have been registered lately that will most probably offer the same service. But for now we are in a  good position.

I am hoping that with the first official release of BP that theme designers will get started designing some themes that they want to share with the BP community. I might even have a crack at it myself!

So spread the word – we want your BuddyPress themes! I might even have to have a contest in order to encourage users to develop some themes to share with all of us. If you want to donate a prize to the content then let me know!

Introducing BuddyPress

// February 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // Buddypress

BuddyPress 1.0 is due to be released on February 12…for those of you who have yet to see it and use it, then check out the below video.

Will you be using BuddyPress?

Chasing the Dream

// February 5th, 2009 // 5 Comments » // Project Blogger

When I first started blogging about 9 months ago, it was an experiment to see if it was possible to make money from the Internet. I can confirm that it IS possible to make money online, however whether you can make enough money to support your lifestyle is another thing all together.

However, when I started blogging I didn’t have any online contacts and since starting this blog and a few other websites over the past few months I have met a lot of people who have helped me create my online “empire” and who have opened up doors that I wouldn’t have had access if I didn’t start this blog.

I am currently employed in an IT infrastructure support based job which I do enjoy and I think I am capable of making a life long career out of it. But my passion lies in web development/design and that the direction I would like my career to head in the direction of.

Over the past few months I have made some contacts online that can make that dream come true. At the moment I do some part time web development and my workload is increasing week to week – all from having a few online contacts that I wouldn’t have if I didn’t start this blog.

If I can increase my level of web development work over the next year or so and can make enough money to survive (and more hopefully) I might be able to leave the normal everyday 9 – 5 and work on my own terms, run my own websites and develop sites for other people – all while working from home!

The way things are looking it is looking like I am heading in that direction, however it would want to be 100% secure before I up and leave my full time job. Running your own business is difficult, and I think it is even harder to run a web based business as things change very fast and you always have to stay ahead of the game and learn the new tricks.

Fingers crossed….what dream are you chasing?

Weird Stats

// February 2nd, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Project Blogger

I had a quick look at my stats a few minutes ago and noticed something weird. Normally I can expect the same everyday, with some growth week to week- however I was not expecting this…

I had a look at the referrers and it doesn’t seem any more than normal so I cannot explain this increase..

Where did you come from?

Advertise on danielfelice.com!

// February 2nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Project Blogger

I made a few changes to the “Advertise” page over the weekend so I thought it would be a good time to give it a bit of a plug!

Why not advertise on danielfelice.com? Check out your options here. You can also donate to the blog if you think haven’t got anything to advertise. Just male sure you drop me a mail so I can mention you.

If you don’t want to advertise here then why not check out Explore With Me and Free BuddyPress Themes?