A good example would be bands and their use of MySpace profile pages. An up and coming band is looking to do two main things, get their music out there and grow their fan base. MySpace does an excellent job of this by offering an easy to use interface to edit your profile page and upload songs. The main draw is that bands will be instantly part of a community of millions and can have an attractive looking “website” in just a few short hours. MySpace also offers custom URLs so it is easy to remember and easy to distribute to your fans.

There are a number of other reasons why bands choose this route so you ask why don’t I just create a page for my business? Because of the crowd using MySpace. Although the millions of high school students and younger are exactly what a growing band needs, they may not be interested in your company and you may not want your company associated with them either. For a more sophisticated crowd you can try Facebook, but then again, it all depends on what you are looking to do online and who you are looking to engage.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. will tell the same story, they have a great set of tools for doing a certain activity online, you just have to decide if it is what will grow your brand best. Keep in mind that unattended Facebook pages will cause you more harm then good in the long run. So in short, yes, you can be very successful just using the social tools mentioned above as long as you use them the right way.

I think what really matters is your Click Conversion Rate (CCR). How many people who come to your website end up reaching for their valet. How many of them are willing to buy your product during their first visit to your website? Depending on what you sell, how many people are willing to give out their hard earned dollars on something they may never have seen in person. Your site must be able to accomplish this at a high rate or else it doesn’t matter how much traffic you get, you will never make much money.

Today, the sky is the limit as far as advertising costs go. You can spend as much as you like on pay per click, banner ads, or social media campaigns. Each visitor can cost you anywhere form a few cents to over a dollar. What good will all this traffic do if the majority of them bounce, meaning they click once to your website and leave right a way, or click around a few times, get bored, then leave. On average, if a new browser comes to your site, you will only have a few seconds to capture their attention and convince them that your company’s product is exactly what they need.

To get your click conversion rate for the month, you just divide the monthly amount of visitors you have with the number of sales you get. These numbers are easy to get if you use some sort of tracking software on your site. There are several free services you can use that help you track your progress and measure all kids of useful metrics.

A well optimized website should be able to get their clicks to convert at a rate of 1-4% depending on what they sell. Niche websites will get even better. If the site is very well optimized for a very specific niche, you can get 10% or better. Just think of what this will do to your advertising budget! You can get the same amount of sales on the fraction you are spending now. Lets just take a look at the math quick.

If you spend $5000 a month and get 100,000 clicks where 100 people buy, meaning 0.1% of your visitors actually buy something. A 0.1% CCR is considered very poor so if you are willing to invest just one months worth of advertising expenses and raise your rate to just 0.2%, you just doubled your sales. These optimizations can be done piece by piece so next month you decide to do some more optimization and now you are up to 0.3% and so on.

As you can see, lots of traffic won’t do you any good if your site is not converting well. Optimizing your click conversion rate offers a huge payoff by exponentially boosting your sales, reducing your advertisement needs and can be done incrementally.

To use it, create a file called random_helper.php in app/controllers/components and copy the following code.

<?php
class RandomHelperComponent extends Object {
 
/**
 * Random string generator function
 *
 * This function will randomly generate a password from a given set of characters
 *
 * @param int = 8, length of the password you want to generate
 * @param string = 0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz all possible values
 * @return string, the password
 */     
	function generateRandomString ($length = 8, $possible = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz') {
		// initialize variables
		$password = "";
		$i = 0;
 
		// add random characters to $password until $length is reached
		while ($i < $length) {
			// pick a random character from the possible ones
			$char = substr($possible, mt_rand(0, strlen($possible)-1), 1);
 
			// we don't want this character if it's already in the password
			if (!strstr($password, $char)) { 
				$password .= $char;
				$i++;
			}
		}
		return $password;
	}
}
?>

make sure you include it in the appcontroller as such

var $components = array('Auth','Email','RandomHelper');

then you can call it as follows in any function

$password= $this->RandomHelper->generateRandomString(4,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz');

Enjoy!

Living on the edge

Living on the edge means living a dangerous and/or unusual everyday life. People who live on the edge are very frequently exposed to phisical, psycological, economical, lawful or other kinds of dangers.

Examples for people who live on the edge:
Extreme-sportsmen, gamblers, policemen, thiefs, human-rights-activists, rappers, etc.
-My friend John is living on the edge.
-Oh yeah? He is a gambler or something?
-No, he cleans windows of high office buildings.

Today, I am officially coining a new term called “living on the point” … see when you live on the edge, you got an infinite amount of points to live on. All the sudden you realize that the edge is not as extreme as you may have thought before.

This is where the point comes in. When you live on the point that’s all you got. One single point, making this life style the most extreme. A definition for such life style may sound something like the following. Perhaps this will be on the urban dictionary soon.

Living on the point

Living on the point means living a life more dangerous and/or unusual than you can humanly understand. People who live on the point are in constant extreme phisical, psycological, economical, lawful or other kinds of dangers.

Examples for people who live on the point:
Extreme-extreme-sportsmen, gamblers (playing poker in tank full of sharks), policemen (performing riot control on tigers), thiefs (stealing unstable dynamite), etc.
-My friend John is living on the point.
-Oh yeah? He is a gambler or something?
-No, he jumps off of high office buildings with nothing but a small zip-lock bag and dental floss.

I personally like them because of they offer a nice API and statistics all for free. It is a pretty quick service too. You can generate hundreds of URLs in just a few seconds. All you have to do is register and you get a username and API key which you will need in the following section.

Here is the code … As you can see I only implemented the shorten for now but I will probably add some of the other stuff later. For some reason WP won’t let me post curl_exec( so be sure to remove the extra character.

class bitly {
	/**
	 * A PHP class to utilize the bitly API
	 * through the Bitly API. Handles:
	 * - Shorten
	 *
	 * Requires PHP5, CURL, JSON and a Bitly account http://bit.ly/
	 *
	 * Bitly API documentation: http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation
	 */
 
	protected $appkey;
	protected $login;
	protected $version;
 
	/**
	* Contruct the Bitly Class
	*
    * @param string, your Bitly account key
    * @param string, your Bitly account login
	*/
	public function __construct($login, $appkey, $version='2.0.1') {
		$this->login = $login;
		$this->appkey = $appkey;
		$this->version = $version;
	}
 
	/**
	* Retrieve a shortened URL
	*
    * @param string, url to shorten
    * @param string, version of Bitly to use
	*/
	public function shorten($url) {
		//create the URL
		$api_url = 'http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version='.$this->version.'&longUrl='.urlencode($url).'&format=xml&login='.$this->login.'&apiKey='.$this->appkey;
		//call the API
		$curl = curl_init();
		curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $api_url);
		curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
		$response = curl_ex_ec($curl);
		curl_close($curl);
 
		//parse the XML response and return the url
		$xml_object = new SimpleXMLElement($response);
		return $xml_object->results->nodeKeyVal->shortUrl;
	}
 
}

If you want to use this in CakePHP … you will want to do something like this.
Put this line before the class … I actually use this in a helper since this is a view level class

App::import('Vendor','Bitly', array("file" => "bitly/bitly.class.php"));

Now you can just invoke it in one of your functions somewhere with two simple calls!

$bitly = new Bitly('username', 'your_API_key_here');
$short_url = $bitly->shorten($long_url);

Simple as that … oh and one more thing. Be sure to have CURL installed else this won’t work.

http://www.rewardchamp.com

Reward Champ offers an easy way for you to turn your social network into a cash network with just a few clicks. You can use your social influence to your advantage and promote products and services that your followers might find useful. They have a large set of social publishing features on all offers so you can reach your friends on all major social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, etc. You will be credited for each offer they complete with points you can use for cash payments or gift certificates. By using your social network you can make hundreds of dollars, or even thousands each month and significantly boost to your monthly budget with just a few clicks a day. Making money from home made easy through social networking, and social media marketing.

Registration is free and you also get to compete for a weekly cash drawing on top of all the points you earn already. What do you have to loose?! Try social media marketing.

What good is it you ask? You can use it to pull in information from any RSS feed and do what ever you want with the data. For example I use it to pull the RSS feed from my blog and display links to my latest posts on http://www.rewardchamp.com You can see it on the bottom of the page.

CakePHP makes this way to easy! First you need to download the MagpieRSS files from the link above and then extract to your vendors folder.

You need to put this line at the very top of your controller file you want to use RSS with. Before the class declaration

App::import('Vendor','Snoopy', array("file" => "magpierss/extlib/Snoopy.class.inc"));

Now inside a function you want create a new Snoopy object. I use Snoopy because I’m lazy … MagpieRSS is not constructed as Classes like CakePHP would like it to be … Snoopy is. Snoopy will return XML for you which you can make into an easily usable object with SimpleXMLElement. You can var_dump to see what exactly is in this object. You can figure out what to do from there.

$snoopy = new Snoopy();
$snoopy->fetch('http://www.solitechgmbh.com/your/feed/here');
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($snoopy->results);
return $xml->channel->item;

Something like this will get you the title for example.

echo $item->title;

Happy coding!

MySpace Version: I Am Rich MySpace
Facebook Version: I Am Rich Facebook

Rules of the game
Tip: Please feel free to click here and use our forums if you have suggestions for new items or any other ideas to improve the game

Live like the top 1% and flaunt your money! Start with $1,000,000 and build a huge bank account. The money just rolls in and all you have to worry about is figuring out how to spend it. Buy anything you want and impress your friends with your deep pockets.

You will earn $10,000 an hour by your self and can hire people to make you even more money! To hire someone, just send them an app invitation and watch your earnings grow. If they accept they will become your employee and start making you an extra $10,000 an hour. You can have as many employees as you want. You can all get rich together.

As your wealth grows you unlock more and more items to buy such as cars, houses, jewelry, art, mansions, private islands, celebrities, buildings, famous monuments, ships, and much much more!

You can also sell your items. Item prices fluctuate based on how many people are buying them or selling them. You can make a lot of money by buying low and selling high but be careful, sometime prices might drop dramatically due to unforeseen circumstances. Get your friends to help you inflate the prices and become rich together!

You also get Influence Points for completing Offers on the Get More Cash page. These influence points can be used to drive the price of an item up 5%. So if you are heavily invested in a particular item, you can use your influence to drive up your profits. Just click the info link on any item to use your influence.

Impress your friends with extravagant gifts. Who can refuse a 10 Karat ring or a brand new Ferrari?! You will be able to use them as a tax write off and get 50% you spent back to buy even more stuff.

Your wealth will also be displayed on your profile for everyone to see along with all the things you own. Impress your friends and everyone else with all your cool items.

Live big and flaunt your money! After all, YOU ARE RICH!

You can still complete offers and earn money, or you can share the offers your friends might be interested in with your social network and make even more money. Each one of our offers now features a variety of one click links which you can use to share with your friends. Our offers range anywhere from shopping discounts, free trial offers, surveys, articles, pay per click websites and much much more. Making money online has never been this easy.

All the points you earn will be added up each week and the one with the highest points earns an extra cash bonus. This bonus is the cash pool shown on the front page which grows each time someone makes money on the site. The more people participate the more is up for grabs each week.

http://www.forumvirus.com

We acquired Forumvirus.com about three years ago for $500.00 USD through an online auction site. It was an easy transfer, there wasn’t much to the website at the time. The transaction was completed quickly and we were excited to get workgin on the project.

We were looking to getting into the website flipping business and though jumping head first would be the best approach at the time. The market was hot and we didn’t want to miss out on it. In hind site, I think we paid too much for the website since there was little to no income that wasn’t due to the advertisement that the previous owner was running and there was no organic traffic. The design of the website needed some definite work also.

If you are looking for a good project, those flaws are actually exactly what you would looking for to buy. You want to have identified the flaws and have a strategy to fix them before you buy else your investment will most likely not be worth it in the end.

We have done a lot of SEO work on the site and over time we got into the top five position for forum directory related searches on Google. We have not done any advertisement short of some link building in the beginning. When we sold the site, all traffic was organic which is worth a lot since it is continuous and free. We have also updated the look of the website and made it more appealing and easier to use for visitors and forum owners looking to advertise.

Over all, it has been a fun project and it was fun to see it grow into a recognizned name on teh internet when it came to forum directories. I am happy it has found a good new home.