Jim over at theNetFool.com contacted me recently.  He had a nice little proposal for me that I was down to try.

Over the next 15 days Jim and I will try and see who can get the most RSS subscribers to their blog.  I really agreed to do this little contest so that I can be motivated to post more.  There is nothing like victory to move you along.

Basically the looser of the contest will have to clean out his toe jam on live camera and eat it by the spoon full… Yeah that was sick sorry… No the looser just has to make a post about the winner. A “review” of sorts for the winners blog. It’s not too bad, but its enough to get me to give it a shot.

Here are the screen shots from the 15th of January verse the current results!

	Starting Results	Current Results
CashTactics
theNetFool.com

**I’ll get the screen shot of those numbers up asap.**

I mean Year. It’s the end of the Year!

This year has definitely been a productive one. I hope that everyone had the opportunity to start at least one project (hopefully more!). While everyone gives their end of the year best or worst list, recaps their progress on goals, or tells you to have a good New Years… I instead will tell you this…

Get a good CPA. If you made decent money this year and have an LLC or Inc I hope you have your duckies in a row.  My CPA set me up this year to pay myself minimum wage while giving myself bonuses throughout the year.  This cuts taxes WAY down.  Now I am not a CPA and so I say don’t take my advice until you speak with your CPA about this.

Here is the little trick.  (This is for Texas, you’ll have to check your local tax laws on this.) The IRS needs to see your business grow.  They also need to see that you are paying yourself.  So you pay yourself the least amount possible.  Either minimum wage or a small salary.  While the Government takes out their federal, state, and selfemployment taxes on that money, they cannot take the self employment tax out on bonuses.  Now… I don’t know how this works but my CPA said that I can be saving 50% of my taxes by doing this.

Don’t forget to write off your home, car, phone, electric bill, water bill, Internet bill, any time you go out to eat and mention work… The list goes on.  As an LLC I have some 300 write-offs I can use.  The key is to get as many write-offs as possible, while not going broke doing it.  Just be practical and again… Talk with your CPA.

Since you all will be wearing the t-shirt, I would like to know which designs you all liked the best.  The contest is being held at 99designs. Here are the two main designs that I am deliberating against right now.

If you can please jump over to the contest and then return back here and voice your opinions that would be much appreciated.  I’m really tied right now and don’t know what to do.  The contest is over in about 9 hours.

Here is the direct link:

http://99designs.com/contests/14743

Thanks guys and gals!

I have had a terrible last couple of days… Not only did I just shatter a tooth about 3 hours ago but I had one of my large sites hacked two days ago. So I just wanted to give a little word of caution on server security.

Most bloggers/affiliates use WordPress as a standard website platform. Whether it’s for a general blog creation or for our landing pages. However, because WP is so widely used many people (both bad and good) have easy access to the code. This can be a HUGE issue. Many plugins even have exploits to SQL injections.

“SQL injection is a method that exploits the vulnerable layer of an application that relies on SQL, and is performed by injecting SQL commands into an input field that SQL unknowingly executes as a result of programming errors. Trusting user-input without validation is a cause of this.”

-V.A.P.T

Not all plugin developers are professionals. This leads to mistakes that in turn lead to opening a giant security hole leading access to the WordPress administrator console, your database, and even worse your server as a whole. Many of us, if not all usually just keep our website content in one place. Many of you probably make landing pages and think to yourself “What’s the big deal? They’re just simply landing pages.”

The problem is that although using simple HTML and CSS for a landing page, you may still be vulnerable if those landing pages are hosted on the same server your core websites are existing on. Websites like myipneighor.com allow people to see all other websites hosted on your IP. If you have 100 landing pages setup on a single server and one of your primary websites are hosted in the same environment and that main website is exploitable to any web attack, then your entire network can be compromised.

I’m going to give a little update to the contest.  I’m also going to give more information on the blog post for the contest.  There is only one person that has told me they made a blog post for the contest so maybe I wasn’t too clear.  Also there isn’t really anyone participating in the forum so that prize may just go unclaimed.

Here are the leaderboards!

CD2851 is taking the lead right now.  However, in the last couple of days CD2874 has begun to catch up.  These are the only participators right now so not much of a competition.  On well though.  I’m most excited about CD837.  I have had the opportunity to talk to this guy a few times.  He also goes by cablekid in the forum.  This is his first attempt at CPA offers.  Not bad if you ask me!.  He has begin to make about $50+ profit a day for just a few hours of work.  Maybe when this is over with he can jump in the forum and share with us his secret ;)

These are all of the participators so far.  Sillybilly has sent the most visitors to the blog so far, however, xyberthebizbum has sent the most unique amount of visitors.  Whats really kool is I get to see all of your methods for sending visitors.  Cablekid once again pops on the board here.  His method is the funniest to me because he is basically diverting traffic from his website via a popup.  AMagz is a forum poster and blog commentor galor! Xyberthebizbum is a traffic exchange junkie! And sillybilly is a little of everything from what I can tell.   Great work guys! Keep it up!

Here’s a little technique I won’t be implementing on this blog. But is very white hat and very legit to do.

RSS readership is important to any blogger that is looking for mass exposure.  By raising your RSS readership you get the wonderful opportunity to charge more to advertisers because more people will see your blog on a regular basis.

…So have you noticed lately that the big boys like John Chow and Shoe Money are popping up a window in your face?

John Chow made a blog post a few weeks back on aweber and how they interface with feedburner stats. Basically what happens is when a person signs up with something on aweber it will automatically subscript the person to the RSS feed.  Your aweber broadcasts the RSS feed to your readers.  The problem with this is that it reall does inflate the numbers.  Imagine that you have 10k people sign up with the RSS feed.  Now pop up a window in front of them so that they can get a free ebook…

Do you see the problem? People are signing up for an RSS feed 2 times. The first time on purpose and the second time to get some sort of incentive.    While this method is really kool but it is also a bad way to tell real RSS readership numbers.  However… if the blogger is also posting his aweber sign up numbers then you can just subtract that number from the feedburner count and you are good to go.

** Oh as a side note… if you are on someones blog and you want to know their feedburner count cause they aren’t showing it you can always ad ~fc like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/CashTactics     The actual link looks like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CashTactics so just add that little ~fc and your good to see their information.  This doesn’t work on all accounts as some people have the feature blocked.

Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to be interviewed by Andrew Wee. Andrew runs the blog Who is Andrew Wee. The interview was about 30 minutes long.  We had talked about getting into the subject of PPC before the interview began but we ended up going off on SEO and some basic SEO strategies for link backs and directories.

It’s a pretty good interview if you ask me and if you are in the SEO mood I suggest listening to it at Andrew’s blog. It’s full of some great tips and my personal opinions on back linking and other aspects of SEO.  So, go check it out and tell me what you think!

http://www.whoisandrewwee.com

Okay so after my post on my favorite WordPress plugins I have received several emails on developing an iPhone application for blogs and submitting the app to apple. So I am briefly going to explain how this works.

The first thing you have to do is sign up as an Apple Developer. That’s a pretty painless process. You don’t have to sign up for one of the expensive memberships. Just sign up as a free member and you will be good to go.

Okay now your an “Apple Developer”. Here’s the funny thing… YOUR REALLY NOT HAHAHAHAHA… okay enough of that… If you have a wordpress plugin you can grab the plugin that I mentioned in the original post.  The plugin is called WPtouch iPhone. This plugin is FREE and best of all you don’t have to do anything but install it and activate it. WOOT easy peasy.

Okay once thats installed you basically just have to go in to your apple developer account and submit a new iPhone webapp. Now if you don’t have a webapp you can get one developed for you from an oDesk person.  You won’t need anything but a Web Designer and a simple CSS-HTML or PHP coder. Nothing too extensive.  There are specifications for an iPhone friendly website.

Anyways, you can see the CashTactics web app by visiting apple.com/webapps/news. Scroll down to about 14 or something. Not bad for a PR 6 link and 700+ extra visitors the first day up.  Seems to bring in an extra 150 visitors everyday which isn’t too shabby at all for one link.

Here’s the link to the actual app page on apple.

Any questions please post them here or in the Discussion Forum.

Yeah Shoemoney and John Chow ain’t got nothin’ on me! I’m an Apple Developer… HAHAHA