Anyway, I’ve found out that it’s a lot more difficult than it looks to post coupon codes on a regular basis! Damn! I’m already running 3 other blogs (that’s a total of four with CouponCodesVault.com) and it sucks a lot of my time considering that I’m still working full time.

So What have I been up to? Well sometime ago I started developing a tracking script in PHP and I decided to put that back on the work table.

Now I’ve called it “Affiliate Tracker Pro” but it’s just a work name for now, I’ll find something better later. What it does is that it creates a unique tracking ID for each visitor based on:

• the referring URL
• search keywords
• PPC or organic search result
• the clickthrough page
• the offer link on which the user clicked

It also handles affiliate links using redirects so I can track clicks and optimize my anchor tags for SEO. Once a user clicks on a link, it appends a tracker ID to the affiliate.

Here’s what it looks like at this point:

click to zoom

So that’s where I’m at right now. I’ve made a small $10 at this point and I sure know I don’t post as often as I should. I should post like 4 or 5 offers a day to have enough content.

I’m getting used to finding coupons and writing faster so once I get to post on a regular basis, the next step will be to drive more traffic through various methods like SEO and social networking.

/web/cgi-bin/php5
/home/content/c/o/u/couponsvault/html/ox/maintenance/maintenance.php
www.couponcodesvault.com

I’ve made a video tutorial to show you how to install OpenX on your GoDaddy account:

Can’t see this video? Watch it on YouTube.com!

Unfortunately the original video lasted longer than allowed by YouTube so I’m gonna have to make another one to show you how to display ads using OpenX.

Stay tuned, I’ll be posting this by tomorrow!

To start this off I will stick with merchants from CommissionJunction.com to make things easier. The only exception will be Amazon’s Associate Program.

Here are the merchants I’ve selected so far:

• Amazon
• All Web Hosting companies available on CJ;
• Buy.com
• Shop.com
• Aperion Audio
• Apple Store
• 123InkJets.com
• Carrot Ink
• StubHub
• Hewlett Packard
• ShoppersChoice.com

I don’t know how these merchants will perform yet so I might add or remove some of them through the course.

I wanted to display some ads from TTZMedia but their service is always down! So I’ve decided to apply for a Chikita.com publisher account. I am waiting for approval and I’ll let you know how it goes.

Next step: install OpenX and to display some ads on the blog and then I’m ready to start adding content!

Stay tuned!

GoDaddy even got a step further by calling me back the day after to make sure I was satisfied with their service and support. I think that they’ve had some negative feedback about their support in the past and now they’re making up for it.

That said, for only $4.29 a month, it just doesn’t get any better than GoDaddy.

Ok so Week #1 has gone by much too fast and I didn’t spend has much time as I would’ve like to on this case study.

We are now going to add some useful WordPress plugins and we’re also gonna add a nice customized theme to our website.

The theme I’ve chosen is from CourtneyTuttle.com and is called News Blue 0.1. I’ve began to customize the theme a little but it’s not done yet. Still you can have a look at http://www.couponcodesvault.com to see what it’s like.

As for the plugins, I’ve decided to install:

• Add Meta Tags: This plugin adds the description and keywords META tags to the front page, individual posts, static pages and archives.
• Akismet: Antispam plugin bundled with WordPress.
• Custom Query String Reloaded: Allows you to specify how many posts to show on the front page, in the archives and in each individual categories.
• Feedburner Feedsmith: Redirects visitors to your Feedburner RSS feed.
• Full Text Feed: Allows to display only excerpts from your posts on the front page while displaying full content in the RSS feed.
• Google XML Sitemaps: this plugin has to be one of my favorites. It builds an XML sitemap of your blog and notifies major search engines when there’s an update.
• WordPress Duplicate Content Cure: Adds the “nofollow” meta tag to the archive and category pages so that there’s no duplicate content submitted to search engines.

I won’t go into details about installing these plugins. Basically you just upload them to [blog folder]/wp-content/plugins and activate through the control panel.

So that’s where I am at right now. I’ve got a an hour or two to finish work on the blog design (hey I know it sucks at this point, I’ve just thrown a few graphics here and there and tried to change a few CSS values).

The next step will be to choose the merchants I will promote. Most of my offers will come from Commisson Junction and Amazon in the beginning but I will add more later. We’re also going to install OpenX, a free ad server, to display ads on CouponCodesVault.com

To upload WordPress, I use Filezilla, a free FTP client.

Watch this video to see how to install WordPress on your GoDaddy hosting account:

Note that the username and password information used for FTP is those entered when setting the website.

Next step: adding WordPress plugins and selecting a theme.

Stay tuned!

The way GoDaddy hosting works is that once you’ve signed up, you must “setup a website” which will be made available in the next 24 hours. I like instant processing better but I’ll survive.

Take note that I’ve chose to use PHP5 as PHP4 is deprecated and no longer supported. Here’s how to setup your website within your GoDaddy account:

Once you’ve setup your account you should get a confirmation email within 24 hours. While I didn’t get this email and since I run my own mail server, I know it hasn’t been caught in any anti-spam. I’ve taken a look at my account about six hours later and the website was active though.

You can check your active websites list by clicking on Hosting Account List from your GoDaddy control panel.

Now if you have registered your domain with a third party registrar, the next thing you wanna do is to have your domain’s DNS changed to use GoDaddy’s nameservers. The default nameservers for your hosting account depend on the day you set up your hosting. Follow this link to find out which nameservers to use.

Once you’ve changed your nameservers, it can take up to 48 hours for all the change to propagate around the globe. You should now have a domain name pointing to an empty GoDaddy hosting account.

So this is the first week into this case study and I gotta choose a domain name and get a web host. Remember that my budget is actually $100 at this point and I will not spend more money than this unless I make profits.

Choosing A Domain Name

I cheated a bit on this one cause I already got a domain name a couple of weeks ago. Finding a good domain name can be a pain cause all the obvious ones are already taken.

Here are the criterias I look for in a domain name:

• it must contain important keywords at the beginning of the domain name (no prefix);
• it must be easy to remember and not too long;
• I try to avoid dashes;
• I try to get a .com since it’s the most easiest extension to remember for most people (this may not apply to every market I’m getting in though);

So based on these criterias, I chose to register couponcodesvault.com. I registered it with VoxDomains since I’ve already got many domains registered there and I don’t want to have a gazillion registrar to deal with. But if I were to start all over, I’d register my domain names with GoDaddy.com.

You can get a .com domain for only $7.95 if you use this GoDaddy coupon code: cjc795dom

Click here to register your domain with GoDaddy.com

Getting A Web Hosting Account

I’ve already got some web hosting accounts with HostGator.com, HostPapa.com and 1and1.com but since I want to start this project from scratch, I’m gonna get a brand new account.

Here is what I look for in a web host:

• reliability and performance
• 24/7 support (phone support is better but live chat is ok)
• a good control panel like cPanel or DirectAdmin
• PHP and MySQL support
• cron job management so I can schedule some maintenance tasks
• the possibility to have a dedicated IP address
• the possibility to host multiple websites on a single account

Usually I try not to make pricing one of my criterias but since I’m on a tight budget, I’ll try to find the right balance between pricing, reliability, performance and features. Let’s not forget that performance is now part of Google AdWords quality score so if I want to advertise on Google eventually, I better have a performing web host.

Also, I mostly never consider disk space and bandwidth since most blog-based websites will not use more than 200MB or 300MB. Most web hosting companies are overselling and offering 1.5TB of storage which you will never use. That said, I prefer reliability, performance and support over storage and bandwidth.

Let’s compare some cheap PHP and MySQL hosting plans:

As HostPapa only have a yearly billing cycle, I can’t go with them or I’ll spend all my initial budget on hosting. HostGator is a really good host but it’s more expensive than GoDaddy. And 1and1 isn’t bad but they don’t deliver enough performance.

So my choice is GoDaddy.com. They’re one of the largest registrar and they offer a good quality-to-pricing ratio.

Let’s register a hosting account with GoDaddy.com:

I chose PayPal as the payment method as I don’t wanna bother with credit card authorization and such. The credit card linked to my PayPal account has a limit of $500.

I wouldn’t recommend taking a monthly hosting plan as this can become quite expensive, especially when you have multiple hosting accounts (I don’t like putting all my websites on a single account). You should go with a yearly plan instead.

Conclusion
So I’ve now got a domain name (couponcodesvault.com) and a web hosting account with GoDaddy.com. Here are my expenses so far:

• Domain Name: $8.95
• Hosting Account: $6.86
• Grand total: $15.81

So I’ve got $84.19 left for my project.

Stay tuned as I’ll show you how to install your blog. If you’re starting out in this business, this is your chance to see it all happen step-by-step. Each post will take you through the whole process of putting up an affiliate website as I’ll document everything in video format.

Click here to get updates by email!

As I’ve said earlier, this make money online case study will be more or less based on the one GoogleLady did lately. The website will focus on coupon codes but I’ll try my own techniques to get it working.

Here’s the plan:

• Get a domain name (already done) and a web host
• Install WordPress 2.5 and slap an SEO’ed template against it
• Write the usual stuff: about page, contact and privacy policy
• Decide on which affiliate programs I’ll use and which offers I’ll promote.
• Put up some initial content so people don’t land on an empty site (about 25 posts)
• Build and / or buy some traffic (maybe I’ll buy some if I’ve made some profits)

At this point I’m running a bit out of time to write additional content on a regular basis so I’ll to wake up an hour earlier every day.

Stay tuned for week 1 coming up!

Anyway I thought about putting on a friendly contest and see who was gonna make more money. Turned out I thought Amazon’s Associate Program sucked and prefered investing time in some other projects.

Needless to say, she made a decent amount of money within 3 months (over $11,000), so I learned my lesson and I’ll shut my mouth next time!

By then I had registered some domain names and made a WordPress template but never got the thing further. Here’s the template I started building back in late November 2007:

This idea stayed in the back of my mind for a while but lately I’ve finally decided to put it to work. I’m going to build an affiliate website and take you through the whole process as I will create as many videos as possible so you’ll be able to learn this stuff easily.

I’m gonna use basically the same rules:

• I will not spend more than $100 except for the money from the profits.
• Amazon Associates account is not really new but has no historic since I haven’t used it since I registered.
• Blog and domain names are new so I’ll start with no PageRank and no backlinks.

Stay tuned as I’ll post my game plan.

I’ve finally found some way to do but I’ll be experiencing for a few days to make sure it works properly.

To implement this, WordPress must be installed on the same webserver as OpenAds. You might also encounter some problems related to an “open-basedir” restriction if OpenAds isn’t installed on the same hosting account as your WordPress blog.

The first thing you have to do is to create a publisher zone in OpenAds. This zone will be used to display ads only in your RSS feed. Then add an HTML ad to your OpenAds inventory and link it to the newly created zone.

I don’t know if you can use javascript ads but I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t work well in some RSS readers.

Next, download the file located in [wordpress root directory]/wp-includes/feed-rss2.php from your website (using an FTP client like Filezilla).

Before editing it, please make a backup copy. Oh and make a backup copy. Just in case anything goes wrong.

Find the line that reads:

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<?php the_content() ?>]]></content:encoded>

Now copy the local mode tag invocation code for your OpenAds zone to your clipboard. You must now paste it between

<content:encoded><![CDATA[

and

<?php the_content() ?>]]></content:encoded>.

Save the file and upload it back on your webserver. If things aren’t displayed properly, simply tweak the HTML code from your ad (in OpenAds). And if you’ve broken WordPress, upload your backup copy back.

Also keep in mind that this does not behave like a plugin which means, if you update your WordPress installation, you’ll have to modify feed-rss2.php again.

I’ll try it for a few days and see if it works with Feedburner. Subscribe up to my RSS feed and let me know how it displays!