My earnings are like buses. No sales all month and then 3 come at once. 2 eBooks within hours (most likely the same person) and then a template via a sub affiliate's site netting as much as each eBook did! These 3 sales may have just helped us pass the $100 mark this month as AdSense blindness has dropped our income from PPC by about half and I'm still getting the product info into the database for our digital product selling site.nnIn the other news today, Mark's started up a Wikipedia experiment by using a mispelt word to see how well the content can work and rank. His post prompted me to check on the stats of a site we threw up in the early summer using a mispelt word in the domain and targetting it on the web site. Looking at the stats of the site around 40% of the visitors are coming to the site purely due to using the mispelt word alone or in a phrase. Clearly if you have a highly used misspelling it's a good idea to try and get it into your site somewhere – including the meta keywords tag as Yahoo takes note of this as proven at Seo Labs.

Back in May time I mentioned about wanting to buy a car and hoping to reach a target of £2,500 to help pay for it. However this whole year has been mad for my business. We've been working long hours and weekends and after a long day in front of the computer the last thing you want to do is spend the evening on the computer doing exactly the same thing. We've probably made around 40% of that figure from AIS alone however the last couple of months have found the figures lessening.nnDespite this blow in earnings I still went and bought a car (I'm a woman, what do you expect!). Luckily I have this on interest free for a year, so this now means the plan is to save £600 a month for the next 11 months to easily cover the cost. So £600 a month is £20 a day which should be doable. Of course I can easily top this up with my own wages but it would be nice to say this time next year that I paid for the car by AIS alone.nnPlans to get to this targetn1. Finish off the upgrade to one of our product selling sites. Changing the products from 12 to almost 100. Adding a shopping basket and automated system for sales and distribution.n2. Next year is hopefully the final meeting before a 3 year old business will start. Stage 1 can go online and start earning money whilst stages 2 and 3 are still worked on. Stage 4 will be the real money earner but won't be done for over a year. Initial sales will be good as we've had potential customers asking and waiting for us to go live. This is a pretty automated system besides accounts once a week/month depending on how busy it gets.n3. I want to finish off sites I've already started before starting anything new. I have a half done site which needs to be worked on ASAP as it's on skiing and therefore pretty seasonal between now and April (as far as Europeans are concerned). Hopefully if I can get a few more posts on there between now and Christmas then I can start to get a few rankings in Google and start to pull a few more visitors in. I have other domains from a few months to a few years old, all of which has a plan for!nnNow that business has finally started to ease down I'm hoping to keep the work to a manageable amount giving me time to pursue my AIS sites too and not get stressed out about it all!nnAnyhow, Santa's come early this year and I'll have my new car on Monday. Can't wait

This month has seen a major increase in visitors yet no increase in referrals from other sites. Whilst I'd love to be getting all of these daily visitors I felt that I needed to look into the figures as things looked a bit fishy especially as the most viewed page on the site has been a redundant photo gallery which I installed to review for someone.

So I installed a copy of Trace Watch which was suggested for another job by Matt last month. Whilst I don't think it'll do the job I need for my work's sites it's done a good job for me in tracking the activity on this site. I started to see similar user agents and poxies being used to access various parts of the site, posts that are months old and not that specific being constantly accessed, and unnaturally paths being taken through the site ie. pages that aren't linked together being visited one after the other. Typical bot activity that knows exactly where to go.

So first up was a common user agent that a lot of them had. This was identified as Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90). Whilst this could be human it's a small minority as it's MSIE 5.5 and Windows 98, both of which are very uncommon these days, so sorry to anyone who does use it! Anyhow, after a search around the web I came across a post on blocking spambots using htaccess. Unfortunately my htaccess skills aren't very good so with the help of Khalid I now have an additional line of

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} MSIE\ 5\.5;\ Windows\ 98;\ Win\ 9x\ 4\.90)$ [NC]

In my htaccess before the Rewrite returns a 403 (Forbidden) – if anyone wants to see the whole code let me know. I then continued to look and discovered that this redundant photo gallery (which was deleted at the start of the week) was actually full of spam comments. Stupidity on my part to not look at this once in a while and it had been filled with pretty dire comments (I've only just worked this out after looking at a cached version of a page in a search engine). Anyway, with WordPress if you got a page that doesn't exist it returns the WordPress 404 page, however the only things going to this removed gallery are bots so I'd rather they just go away. To combat this I've simply used a 410 which will also tell search engine spiders that the pages have gone too.

410 is similar to 404 in that it returns a page with a notice on it. 404 of course says page cannot be found, whereas 410 is a lot less known and informs the visitor or bot that the page used to be there and has now been permanently removed. Note this is different to using a 301 that tells the bot that the page has been permanently moved to another location. A 410 simply says this page no longer exists end of story. You can use a 410 similar to a 301 except you just don't specify a second URL to redirect to ie.

RedirectMatch 410 ^/scooch$

So if you now go to http://www.stuffbysarah.net/blog/scooch you'll get a return of 410 Gone. It stops the bots in their tracks and will also start to ease the bandwidth on this site a little.

Well today I bought a new car We went off to the nearest Volkswagen dealer to have a chat about the VW Polos and to see what we could get for our budget and ended up coming home after signing for a new car! Guess I have to admit I'm not really the type of person to go away and think about something.

Anyway what have we got? Well it's an almost 4 year old VW Polo 1.2 SE 3 Door. The price on their website is £7,000, the price at the office was £6,500, the recommended price is apparently £6,750 (helps when you have clients who sell cars!) and we got it for £6,000 so all in all a good deal. Just 13,900 miles on the clock, not bad for a 4 year old car. It's in top nick, without a spot on it. Has air conditioning and a CD player too.

So next Monday we're off to pick it up So that's the last I'll be spending for a while!

I'm currently updating a site that is going to offer digital downloads with payments made via PayPal. I've thought out how to lay out the pages to get the maximum exposure both for visitors and in the search engines, and to also give a professional look to hopefully improve existing sales. Now to me this is all straightforward enough to set up in PHP however spending all day writing PHP code can sometimes put you off spending your evenings writing it out too! I know how to use a few different pieces of off the shelf scripts that could do the job I needed but they're much more bloated and offer a lot more than what I really need.nnBesides using WordPress (as I think it's ace!) I much prefer to write all of my own code however I keep wondering if I'm shooting myself in the foot by being so stubborn over this with my own sites. In theory I could have had the new shopping cart up and running within a few hours using a prewritten script however I keep thinking that if I use a prewritten script then if/when I want to modify it I'm going to have a lot more work on my hands to modify the existing script that I would do if I were to modify a custom script that I'd originally written.nnI'm not sure if this is necessarily being stubborn, taking pride in your work or just procrastination! I don't have the money to pay someone else to do a custom script for me and I also think in the back of my mind if I'm capable of doing the work should I be paying someone else? Of course if I had the funds there then as a business you do pay others to do work which you're capable of doing, but at present in the AIS business our income isn't covering our own time let alone available to pay someone else.nnIt's a dilemma that's giving me food for thought. Do I use a less efficient, more bloated and security unknown script because it's easier? Or do I take a day from everyone else's work and write it all myself and get my own arse into gear.