WP Review Site continues to sell well, enough that I spent the time to give it a proper payment form instead of just a PayPal redirect. Those that can't or choose not to use PayPal can now
pay directly by credit card. By several requests, WPRS is now available in a multi-site license ($199) and developer license ($299) that lets you develop sites for clients or sale using the plugin. I just took out paid reviews with a few popular internet marketing blogs and posted in a few forums' marketplace sections to spread the word.
Tip for using WordPress as a CMS like I do for that site: Never make a field in a form called "year". It took 30 minutes of tracking throug WP's core to figure out that overrides all routing and tries to find an archive or something. My credit card expiration date was causing the POST to always go to a 404 until I renamed the field.
WP Review Site is selling even better than FeedLines already... it's nice to put 4 figures in your pocket for a bit of coding work. Some of the customers have already sent me the URLs of their sites so I could see the plugin in action! In other news, I made another site with
FeedLines, this time styling it to look like
popurls. It's up for auction on SitePoint in the startup sites section. See
faveurls.
WP Review Site, the plugin that turns a WordPress blog into a powerful review site engine, is now available for purchase at the new
wpreviewsite.com. If you want to run a site like
Award Winning Hosts, allowing users to submit reviews and ratings, check it out. It's also a great
WP affiliate plugin.
The script alone has sold three copies in the first day, not bad for a few hours' work.
I've gotta say it feels good to make money somewhere other than
Visitor Boost, which is a nightmare to manage and never feels like stable income despite its performance.
This is my first attempt at building a simple product of my own to sell, rather than a service or subscription. I watch the
SitePoint Marketplace on an almost daily basis, and I see so many simple, turnkey sites sold and resold on a consistent basis. While the scripts behind these sites may seem simple to a programmer like me, there seems to be a market out there for any type of unique site.
Today I fleshed out the script I wrote for
Website Goodies' Industry News page into something generic enough anyone could use it.
FeedLines is the result — an RSS feed aggregator much like
PopUrls or
AllTop, two pretty high traffic sites.
FeedLines serves as a demo of the site and links to a page where you can buy the script for $49.95. I am going to give selling copies of this as turnkey sites on the marketplace a try later this week.
A new report I'm considering adding to
W3Counter is a "Live Map" — a Google map that shows visitors arriving to your website in real-time. It updates every 3 seconds with an AJAX call, instantly recenting the map on each new visitor and popping up their information. I've had fun staring at it for half an hour now. I've also got a new website design in the works, as I seem unable to let go of it to an outside designer...
It's now been just over 6 months since I made PayPal the primary payment method on my ecommerce sites in an effort to reduce losses to fraud (see
Will 53% of customers switch to PayPal and
Betting on Igor). It takes a long time to see the effects of something like this, since chargebacks tend to occur weeks or months after the fraudulent transaction takes place. That was part of the problem — by the time someone realizes their credit card was used by someone else, the service has already been rendered, so the loss is not just the original payment but also the costs of the service sold. I've now been able to take a closer look at the long term effects of sending all new customers to PayPal rather than accepting credit cards directly.
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I need a new website for W3Counter, and I can't design it. I need to reorganize the site and there are going to be lots of new service plans and features to show off.
I'm thinking of holding a contest at SitePoint, but I don't know if I'll get good results from this. I'm not 100% sure what content should be on the homepage yet, and designers entering a contest they may not win won't take a lot of time to think through the functional/marketing aspects of the design for me if I can't pin it down in the brief. Even though I'd offer at least $700-1000, which would bring in some of the better designers in the contest area, I'm still unsure if this will result in locking me into buying a design I don't really want.
On the other hand, hiring a designer/agency with a decent portfolio is probably going to run at least 3 times that much to start. W3Counter doesn't turn much of a profit right now, so that's a lot of my own money to invest in the design.
What do you think? Contest or designer? Any recommended designers you've worked with?
Like every year since spinning off
W3Counter from
Website Goodies in 2004, it's exceeded its hardware capacity once again in December. Initially the service shared a Celeron 2.4/512MB server with all of my websites. It then grew into its own Pentium 4 3.0GHz/1GB server, then into a 2-processor 4-core Opteron/4GB setup. This time it's outgrown the hard drive IO capacity of a single server, evidenced by maxing the IO wait stat on `top` and the daily afternoon site slow downs.
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Midterms are over, assignments are in. I set up a wiki, Subversion repository, trac and Bugzilla for my senior design project team. Time to work on the business again. No time to sleep in, though... Saturday morning I'll be up early for a workshop on testing business concepts at the Baida Center.
Drexel University's Lebow College of Business was ranked in the top 10 schools for entrepreneurs in the nation by Princeton Review. The college's Baida Center for Entrepreneurship runs classes as well as workshops, business plan competitions, and actual incubation of winning startups with office space, mentoring and funding. The center has a large network of contacts and brings in experienced business leaders to teach and run workshops. That's what earns the college its recognition.
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