John Gall Internet Income And PC Tips And Tools

I hadn’t worked an automotive related project for awhile but decided to jump back in to see how well it works. I purchased domains to cover Ford dealers in various Illinois cities. Many times people will search by city name so I figured i’d create a web site based on the city name that provides name, address, phone number and hours of operation for several popular Chicago area Ford Dealers. The dealers I covered are in the list below. It will be interesting to see if the concept works as it could be repeated for other states or expanded in Illinois. Each website cost $7.47 for the domain plus $5.00 to launch it at a directory I use. I figure my break even is at around $120 so it will be interesting to see how long it takes to reach that point.

Melrose Park Ford Dealer
Franklin Park Ford Dealer
Glenview Ford Dealer
Midlothian Ford Dealer
Downers Grove Ford Dealer
Calumet City Ford Dealer
Orland Park Ford Dealer
Homewood Ford Dealer
Carol Stream Ford Dealer

I’m experiementing with using Wordpress blogs vs static html websites to see if they work as well.  I’m hoping they do because once setup, I can update a blog alot easier than a regular website.  I like websites for the way you can arrange pictures but blogs are so easy to update that I can crank out content much faster.  Lately i’ve been doing a mix of adding blogs to my existing websites but I recently started a new blog only site about the City Of Minnetonka where i’ll write about restaurants, shopping, government and anything else of interest.  I have high hopes because with a blog like this you can just tour the city writing about what you see and experience.  If successful it will certainly become a model for how I grow my business.  The risk is small, just time to get it started and time to wait for results.

Each year when I do our taxes I get an unpleasant surprise, though I should expect it. My wife’s employer never withhold’s the correct amount of taxes from her paycheck and I end up paying in alot more than expected when I do our taxes. Basically it has to do with whether a person chooses to claim 0 or 1 on the W-4 form which controls the amount of tax the employer withholds. This year the government decided to stimulate the economy by reducing the amount of money withheld from each paycheck. They didn’t cut our taxes however so it means that each person now must pay in more at the end of the year due to less withholding and this is whether you claim 0 or 1 it won’t matter you’ll get less of a refund or pay in more by the same amount. So I decided to look further into when a person might claim 0 or 1 depending on their situation and document that in a new blog.

Holidays are great ways to provide useful content. They do require yearly updating but can be a great way to provide a service and generate revenue. A great example is my USPS Holidays 2010 website. A year ago I discovered that every time there is a holiday people want to know what the USPS Holiday dates are and whether they’ll get mail on certain holidays. So I created a website that lists all the holidays in 2009 that the USPS celebrates and does not deliver mail. This makes for an easy lookup for folks to determine if they will get mail that day. I just updated the website for 2010 and it took about 5 minutes and is good to go for another year. I may start a blog on it to deliver more specific information each holiday.

Today I found a great directory to submit sites to. RR-TT Directory categorizes sites by topic and if approved will let you submit your website to their directory. Obviously if approved this is excellent as links act like votes in the online world. So if you have a site to submit, check out RR-TT Directory and see if you can get your site approved.

Periodically I come across a problem that requires time and attention to solve. Eventually I usually find a solution and to not document it would be a waste. That’s another reason I keep a blog so I have a place to note the problem and resulting solution. I of course have Google Adsense ads on my post to generate revenue but i’ve also found that I can use my past blog posts as a source of information when the problem reoccurs. That saves me a ton of time. To illustrate this, recently I ran into some spyware or malware that put a file on the PC called uacinit.dll and I could not get that file deleted even with the best antimalware tools. I needed to find a way to remove the uacinit.dll file from the PC so that it would not become reinfected with malware. Eventually I found a solution and removed the offending dll file. Knowing others would be looking for ways to remove this piece of malware I documented what worked for me and sure enough traffic to my blog has increased. In your day to day life you likley solve various problems and you should have a place to note your solutions. This helps yourself while helping others.

I recently completed a project where I created 50 websites about unemployment. Each website covered one of the 50 states in the United States. A couple I recently completed covered Wisconsin Unemployment and West Virginia Unemployment but there are many more similar. I had not yet arrived at any new ideas for more websites so I changed my focus. Unemployment is a hot in demand topic right now but the USA is only so large. I recently returned from a business trip to Ontario Canada and it got me thinking, how do they handle unemployment benefits in Canada? This was interesting as I had to do some research to see how Canada provides employment insurance benefits to their citizens. It turns out that much like the USA Canada provides unemployment benefits but they call it Employment Insurance or EI. Canada provides employment insurance as a country not provisionally so I was able to make one site about all of Canada and how they handle EI. What would normal be a formula type site fairly repetitive took a bit more work ast I had to learn the in’s and out’s of obtaining employment insurance compensation in Canada. I also included some formula type pages for the 10 provinces in Canada. Looking to expand a bit further, I learned that Mexico and Jamaica do not offer any form of unemployment benefit to their citizens. The expansion into Canada has thus been profitable so i’ll look to take some of my earlier successes in the USA and apply them to Canada.

So you’ve finished work on a new website, now what? Well you need to point the search engines to it and you do that with links. The easiest way to do this is to maintain some sort of blog that you update regularly. I use a free Blogger Blog called Beer234 where I just keep a diary of the projects i’m working on. Usually when doing research for a project I learn things that doni’t end up in my website. I just write a little bit about them on my blog as a post and put a link to my new website. This creates a great launching point for your website. Search engines love blogs because they are frequently updated so they visit often to check for new content. This ensures your new site is visited by search engine spiders sooner than later. If you develop some inbound links to your blog you can improve the power of the link that you add on your blog making it an even more powerful tool. Again this doesn’t have to be anything fancy, a free blogger blog regularly updated will go along way. I recently used this to blog about Idaho unemployment which i’ve worked on lately on a website.

For anyone who wants to jump into something with the least amount of technical effort it doesn’t get much easier than a Blogger Blog.  Google owns Blogger which makes it another way to use Adsense to make money.  Blogger.com lets you create an account and start one or many blogs.  If you don’t mind your blog ending in b logspot.com you can create unlimited blogs like mine http://beer234.blogspot.com  Blogger offers a great non-technical control panel to help you write posts and publish and even add Google Adsense ads to your blog.  This requires 0 technical skills.  If you can write an email you can publish using a Blogger blog.  The other nice thing about portals like Blogger is that you can do it anywhere even at work.  This makes creating updates anytime you get an idea for a new post.