A week ago I noticed my twitter page could not be found.  I’ve had twitter for a few months now but haven’t updated it in a month or so.  My page now returns a “That page doesn’t exist!” error.  I submitted a support ticket with twitter last Friday and am still awating a response.  Has anyone else had a problem like this?

Another MarketLeverage Contest!

I must say the guys and gals at MarketLeverage went all out in last months sponsoring contests.  I thought I’d just point out one of the last MarketLeverage sponsored contests I can find in the blogosphere.  Tay at SuperBloggingTips had a pretty decent contest going with a Flip Mino, a $50 prepaid credit card and a 2gb USB pen.  The advantage with Tay’s contest is that there aren’t a lot of people entered so I’d recommend you enter today, your chance of winning is fairly high (at least better than any John Chow contest, lol).   Check out the contest here! I heard that Jason (The University Kid) will be having an awesome contest in the future as well.

~ Reid

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I’m glad to see that there are a lot of people still paying attention to this blog.  For the past hour or so I’ve been trying to think of a way to talk about everything I have to say today, but it’ll just end up being a large rambling post.

I Went Flying Yesterday:

I finally got up flying yesterday after 2 canceled lessons due to inclement weather.  This was my first time flying in almost 11 months so I was nervous to start but started to remember all the tricks quite fast.  We reviewed stalls and slow flight while flying in the practice area.  For a power off stall we pull the throttle pack to idle and try to keep the plane flying straight and level.  As the speed falls we need to pull farther and farther back on the controls to keep flying level until the plane can no longer hold level and the nose falls, we then lower the nose to gain speed, apply full throttle and get back to flying straight and level.  On Monday I’m taking my radio operators permit test and will be practicing in the circuit.

I won a Flip Video Mino:

As you saw last week, I posted about The Net Fool’s contest sponsored by Market Leverage.  I won the 1st price of a Flip Video Mino.  I can’t wait to receive it so that I can start testing out some video posts.  I’d like to thank Jim of TheNetFool.com as well as MarketLeverage.com.

MooneyQuest Theme Updates:

Over the past few days I’ve been catching up on some of the blogs I used to read before I went away.  I’ve really noticed how the difference between a decent looking blog and a great looking blog can make a difference on whether you read it or not.  It’s almost a matter of credibility.  I’m going to start reworking the theme I use to make it look more professional.  I’m going to install OIO Publisher and remove some of the old ads I’m running (*cough* TopHostingCenter *Cough*).

Upcoming vBulletin Job:

One of the things that got me started working online was vBulletin forum software.  I’ve been making money installing and upgrading forums for almost 2 years now.  I just got an email from an old customer of mine and he wants me to move 2 of his forums to a new server and upgrade both of them.  This job should net me $400-500.  I think I will write an eBook eventually about how easy it is to make money with vBulletin.  If you have any knowledge at all with FTP and know how to upload a few files, you can easily make $75 for an hours work.

Got a VOIP Number and Looking to Buy a Headset:

I signed up with vBuzzer.com yesterday and purchased a phone number.  For $25 a year I got my own phone number and unlimited incoming and outgoing calling within Canada and the USA, not a bad deal eh.  Normal phone lines cost too much in Canada.  I once called Godaddy in the USA and the phone call cost me $8 for 9 minutes.  Now all I need to do is buy a headset and I’ll be away to the races.  I found a nice set at NCIX.com for $199, it’s the Sennheiser PC350 and it includes a free copy of Quake Wars.  What do you think?

Tomorrow I will be posting part 2 of my “Guide to starting a forum series”.

~Reid

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As many of you noticed by my post 2 days ago, I’m back!!!  I know hope many of you have missed me but I thought I needed to take some time off to recharge my blogging batteries.  I know I could have posted more in the past but I would hate to post short meaningless posts.  I’m going away on vacation for the weekend but will be back Tuesday again.

I’ve given a lot of thought about what I would like to talk about in my next posts.   Some of these topics will include:

• The continuation of my “How to start a forum” series and posts about the launching of my forums.
• My first shot at affiliate marketing.
• My possible attempt at entering the stock market.

I am also planning on writing eBooks again.  Every time I write an eBook I tend to earn $700-1000 off a few hours work.  I’m currently brainstorming ideas of what to write about.

~ Reid

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I’m sorry to have been away so long, I will be posting more about my month off in the next post.  I’ve been wanting to inform everyone about a great contest my friend Jim (The Net Fool) is running.  I’m squeezing my entry in at the very last minute but its not too late for you guys to enter!  The prizes are amazing and would definitely be something I could use.  The first prize is a Flip Video Mino, the new and improved version of the Flip Video Mini.  This new version is much smaller and runs on a rechargeable battery.  The second prize is a $50 MarketLeverage gift card.  It is refreshing to see a contest with physical prizes rather than normal entrecredits and ad spot prizes.  You had better get your entry in soon as the contest ends tonight at midnight!  Entering the contest is easy, just check the list below for ways to enter.

• Mandatory –> Registration and 1 Ticket: Subscribe to our RSS feed via email
• 1 Ticket per Submission: Submit one of our posts to social media networks Digg, StumbleUpon and/or Mixx
• 15 Tickets: Make a 300+ word blog post that links back to this contest at theNetFool.com and Market Leverage
• 25 Tickets: Create a video and submit it to YouTube

You can read the full details about the contest at TheNetFool.com!

PS: Happy belated birthday Jim!

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I first started making some decent money online back in November of last year.  I started to read some of the big name blogs such as John Chow, John Cow, Tyler Cruz, Shoemoney, etc.  I’d like to warn anyone that reads these blogs that reading them is a waste of your time!  They will not help you earn any money online!  Why’s that?

They are already making good money online - The bigname bloggers meantioned above are already making good money off there blogs.  Tyler Cruz is earning $1400+ a month from his blog alone while John Chow is earning over $30,000 a month from his blog.  They already have sites making very good money and have no need to post about there progress.

Their posts are hardly relevent - Lets take a look at JohnChow.com first.  If you read most of his posts, you will find paid reviews, posts about his dinners, and lots of stuff.  None of them will really tell you how to make money online.  As his header says, he makes money online by telling you how much money he makes.  Now lets look at Tyler Cruz, a fairly sucessful web entrepreneur.  He has over 1500 RSS subscribers but almost none of his posts will tell you how to make money online.  If you look at his most recent posts, you will see ones telling you how much money his blog is making, ones about his vacation and his server crash and even more paid reviews, but do any of them give beginners tips to make money online.  Again, the answer to that is no.  I could go on forever with this post talking about MMO blogs which won’t help the readers, but that would end up getting boring.

Why you should read newer blogs - I tend to subscribe to newer blogs such as The University Kid, The Net Fool, etc because they are newer to the MMO niche, yet they blog about their progress making money online.  These guys are the ones who will provide you with first hand information about making money online.  You can follow their successses and failures, while a big name blogger will only bloat about how much they are already making and not help out the reader.

With MooneyQuest, I will try and guide you guys to make money online.  I have written one major tutorial so far and will have many more to come with ways that you can make money online.

As for the contest, I will be tallying up the entries and picking the winners within the next day or so.  Stay tuned for the announcement of the winners.

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Its been over a week since I last posted on MooneyQuest and I feel very ashamed of it.  Basically, I finished my final exam on April 24th and have been working ever since.  I finally got a decent high speed connection setup yesterday, I’ve been on satellite internet for years and finally found a cellular wireless service.  My ping is now down to 100 from 800+, my speeds are up to 1.3mbps from 700kbps and my upload speeds are now 500kbps, up from 70kbps.  Overall, I’m very happy about this.  I can finally use skype!

As I meantioned above, I’ve been working a lot since I finished exams.  Making $13 an hour is nice but I would certainly like to get a long-term money making website going soon.  I’m getting a little sick of people posting on DigitalPoint asking “How can I make $1500 a month online without any investment”.  I see so many of these threads every week.  I finally have an answer for you.  Most of you won’t like it, but here it is!!

wait for it…

wait for it…

wait for it…

still waiting….

GET A F**KING JOB!!!!!

So many kids on DigitalPoint assume that you can make thousands, even millions online without any work.  If you are one of those, you are so wrong.  I won’t deny there is money to be made online, but whether you work online, at a 9 to 5 job, or whatever, you will need to put effort into what you do.  Nothing is easy, but if you work at something hard enough for a long time, you will have a good shot at making a lot of money.

Anyways, I hope to get back to posting daily now.  I’m very sorry about being away for so long.  The contest will go on as planned, don’t forget to enter today if you have not already!

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Over the past week or so there has been quite a bit of controversy between a few people in the MMO niche. Many of us know that One Mans Goal was bought by Marc Galeazzi for the sum of $10,500. Marc has not had any expereince with blogging prior to buying the site. Would I have bought the site if I had no experience with blogging, no, in my opinion wasn’t worth that much.

Once the sale was announced, Vic from BloggerUnleashed.com made an extremely insulting post called “Another dumbf**k is born lmao”, minus the *’s. In less than 100 words, Vic has completely shut Marc down as being a complete idiot and has managed to refer to him as a f**king idiot at least 13 times in his post and comments. I found that to be quite disturbing, so much for the welcome to the community Marc.

A few days later, Garry Conn made a post talking about the MMO niche being full of scammers and assholes. He first refers to a blog which was sold for $2500 with false traffic stats, and then moves onto defend Marc from Vic’s attack. It was nice to see someone defending Marc. Garry goes on to cut up Vic in only 64 words.

Later Garry Conn goes on to cut up John Cow’s blog. He says that John Cow’s “blog is no different that the rest of the bullshit MMO sites that do nothing but spin off the same stupid information found on the other 100 or so other MMO blogs”. I find it interesting that he’d go and cut John up when on the first page was a post promoting Joel Comm’s AdSense Secrets 4 eBook, a similar post to one I’ve seen on many other blogs. I will admit that a lot of blogs post similar content, but I’ve been a long time reader of the Cow and don’t think this insult was necessary. Going down to read the comments, I found that Vic wasn’t the only person being an ass. Garry had changed all Vic’s links to direct people to this picture:

Need I say more? How can you cut a person up for being an ass, and then show yourself as being an ass as well. The word hypocrite suits Garry very well.

Conclusion:

I have not read Blogger Unleashed prior to finding a link to Vic’s post regarding Marc. I did not like what I saw and can honestly say that I won’t be going back to visit again. The same thing goes for Garry, I’m unlikely to go back to read his blog either.

Jason (The University Kid) once told me that the best way to get traffic is to be controversial. While I agree that controversy can drive traffic, being an outright ass will end up hurting your traffic in the long run. Quite a few of these bloggers received a little boost in traffic from these posts, but I bet you that I’m not the only one who was offended by them.

In conclusion, I’d have to advise everyone to watch what they say. I have no problems reading controversy, but if you are a jerk, what you say might just go back to bite you in the butt. So as my rhyming title says, don’t be an ass, show some class =D.

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If you haven’t signed up for the MooneyQuest contest yet today, check it out here, you could win some of the $900+ in prizes.

One of the half dozen blogs I frequently visit is putting on a very nice contest. JohnCow.com, is putting on a contest where you can win an Xbox 360 and a copy of Grand Theft Auto 4. The contest has been sponsored by TopHostingCenter.com. The Xbob 360 looks awesome, it comes with a 120gb hard drive, wifi and High-Definition via HDMI. I would really like to get my hands on one of these, my last console I bought was a Playstation 2 (the old version) probably 5 years ago. The Xbox360 is certainly todays hottest system, my friend has one and I love it.

The contest is very easy to enter. There are a few different ways to gain entries:

• 250 tickets - Write a small blurb about this contest on your blog, 100 words minimum. Please make sure you linkback to our sponsor and to this post so your readers can find it.

• 250 tickets - Become an affiliate with THC for free. This is really a no-brainer as Top Hosting Center offers 50% commission for each sale you make for them! Within a few sales you can buy your own 360 if you don’t win this one! (We’ll check if you have one of their banners on your blog!)

• 25 tickets - Every comment, about this contest, you leave on another blog’s latest post will get you 25 tickets, as will leaving this link in a new forum thread somewhere, or when you mass message your myspace or facebook friends. Perhaps even use Twitter to let all your followers know

• 25 tickets - Subscribe to our RSS feed and THC’s blog feed.

I hope you all will sign up, and if you win give the prize to me since I referred you .

On another positive note, I think I’m going to go ahead with the $15,000 challenge. Shoot me an email at admin -at- mooneyquest dot com if you want to participate.

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I arrived home tonight after my second exam (Yay!, 2 out of 5 exams done) to notice that John Cow’s Alexa rank jumped from 22,100 to over 100k. I went and checked out Alexa and it says that they have updated their ranking system.

After a few minutes checking Alexa ranks on various sites, I can tell you the following. Quite a few forums benefited from this update, while bloggers seem to have been hurt by the update. JohnChow went from 5k to 16k, but surprisingly mine increased a little bit.

I think this update goes to show you how unreliable of traffic stats Alexa produces. I like to look at it for comparison to other sites Alexa ranks, but I certainly wouldn’t rely on its stats. I know a forum earning 500k a year that had an Alexa rank of 80k, while with the update it went up to 50k. This forum usually has 500+ users online at a time, it should definitely have a higher rank.

You can read the full details of the Alexa update here.

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As most of you know, my goals for my online earnings are set quite high.  $600,000 is a lot of money to earn, and it will take a long time to do so.  I thought I would share some of my plans to earn money towards the airplane.  I hope to launch some of these plans when my exams are finished April 24th.

Forums - Most people will tell you right off the bat that forums are a crap way of making money online.  In part, I’ll agree, you will not make money any time soon when you launch your forum.  The click-through-rate on them are usually horrible and without major traffic, you won’t earn a lot.  Before I start making forums sound like a bad idea, you should also know that there are a lot of forums around banking some major cash.  I have a friend who works for some popular forums, earning over $500,000 a year.  Forums tend to make better money off private advertisers / sponsors than they will off of AdSense.

My plan is to launch 3 forums by September, with hopefully more in the horizon.  I’m going to allow for a few months in between each launch to allow time to dedicate to that forum to make it succeed.  Here are some of my forums which will launch this year:

• A Webmaster Forum - most people will tell you this is a saturated niche.  They are right, but I believe I have something which will make this forum stand out.  I also have quite a few people interested in making this forum succeed due to the fact that DigitalPoint sucks (more on that later) and they want a better forum to go to.
• An Aviation Forum - It fairly obvious that I’m interested in aviation.  I would really like to launch an aviation forum to suit the wide range of aviation topics.  I know there are a few forums specific to pilot jobs, but not much in the range of general aviation.  I believe that this is a niche which will earn a lot of money.
• A Detailing Forum - Detailing is a hobby of mine which I enjoy.  During the summer I like to keep my car in pristine shape, and I would like to start a forum about this.  I would likely earn money through this forum with the detailing stores sponsorships and affiliate links.

Other ways to make money:

• This Blog - I’m hoping to get this blog earning $500 a month by the end of the year.  I think this blog will be successful due to the aviation twist I’ve added to it, something that no other bloggers done as far as I can see.
• Proxies - I might be tempted to start up my proxies again.  I was earning $400-500 a month last year with them, what can it hurt to get theme up and running again.  Its only more money in my pocket.
• eBooks - I’ve earned quite a bit off eBooks in the past, I’m hoping I’ll think up a topic for a new one since each eBook I release earns me an average of $600.

If anyone is interested in any of these ideas, more specifically the forums, let me know.  Any help would be appreciated, I think we would be able to make some great communities.

Sorry for the semi-self centered post.  I started exams today and this is really all I could think of, I won’t be online much for the next week but I’ll try to post as often as possible.

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