BobBuskirk.com » Make Money Online

Launched the Official ThinkComputers YouTube Channel!

Bob Buskirk — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:00:31 +0000

ThinkComputers has really not done that much video, although we should! All of the videos on ThinkComputers prior to a month ago were mixed in with videos on my personal YouTube page. This was an issue for many reasons so I decided one to create a channel specifically for ThinkComputers and to produce more video content.

So the ThinkComputers YouTube Channel was launched! I have done a good job so far keeping it updated. I want to post at least 1 video a week if not more. Right now we are doing a lot of unboxing videos, but we also will be doing video reviews, game reviews, and event coverage!

Another great thing about having a separate YouTube channel for ThinkComputers is that I am able monetize the videos to start making money from them. This not only will put some extra money in my pocket, but keep me more motivated to keep on producing videos.

Check out the ThinkComputers YouTube channel and let me know what you think! If you like the channel make sure you subscribe!

How to Start a Tech Site Webinar

Bob Buskirk — Wed, 11 May 2011 01:48:12 +0000

I get this question all of the time, “How can I do what you do?”. That question is not always the easiest thing to answer. This Thursday I will be partnering with John Chow, Stephen Fung and Gary Ng to explain how you can start a tech / review blog or site. Many people think that you need to big one of the biggest sites out there to make money, but you really don’t need to be. I know I make a very comfortable living off of ThinkComputers. I assume that Stepehen and Gary do off their sites as well. John got his start on the internet with a tech site and actually showed me how to make money with ThinkComputers.

In this webinar we will be showing you how we started our sites, how we have been able to maintain them, and some tips and tricks we are using to keep the money coming in. After the presentation we will also have a Q&A session. Here is all the information you will need about the webinar…

Title: How To Start a Tech/Review Blog
Date: Thursday, May 12, 2011
Time: 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM EDT
RSVP: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/186093102

The webinar is 100% free to attend and we will not be pitching you anything and there will be nothing to buy at the end. If you ever were interested in starting a tech or review website / blog I highly recommend you attend!

Getting back in to Affiliate Marketing

Bob Buskirk — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 20:26:43 +0000

I have been quite busy since the start of 2011. ThinkComputers is taking up much of my time, which is a good thing, but it has consumed me at times. I am finally starting to delegate many of the tasks off to other staff members to free up time for myself and make my life less stressful.

A lot of my friends do affiliate marketing to earn extra income and some make a living off of it. I know it is a very profitable market to get in to if you know what you are doing and I think that I can make some extra money doing it. The thing is how am I going to compete with the super affiliates out there bringing in six figures a month from it. I really need to learn the basics and how to get back in to it. The other day I was told about Commission Crusher.

I found the video on the site very compelling and I decided to purchase the software and video guides. Commission Crusher is system that teaches you the basics about Affiliate Marketing and selling ClickBank products. It was created by Steve Iser and he goes through how to set everything up and teaches you the basics of affiliate marketing.

I hope this system will help me get back in to affiliate marketing and of course make me some money! I’ll keep everyone updated on my progress. Wish me luck!

The Wait Is Over! Blog Profit Camp Opens!

Bob Buskirk — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 22:48:55 +0000

The wait if over! John Chow has open his Blog Profit Camp coaching program for registration. However, it’s only open for 4 days so you need to sign up now to ensure you get a seat!

Blog Profit Camp is a 12-week interactive course that will show you step by step how to make big money with blogging. John started blogging in December 2005 and within two years, took his blog from making zero to making over $40,000 per month!

Today, he runs one of the biggest and most profitable blogs in the world, with over 100,000 RSS readers and over 56,000 people following him on Twitter.

In this new course, John will detail everything you need to do in order to achieve the same level of success. You will be given every tool needed and most important, you’ll have direct access to John and his team to answer any questions you may have.

Blogging has allowed John to have time, money and location freedom. To most people. this is just a dream. But it’s a dream that you can achieve if you put your mind to it and be willing learn.

Limited To 150 Students
The first round of registration is limited to 150 students. The program will sell out so the sooner you sign up, the better your chance of getting in.

Blog Profit Camp is covered by a 30 days no questions asked money back guarantee. Try Blog Profit Camp for a full 30 days and if it’s not all that you hope for, send John an email and he’ll give your money back, no questions asked.

Free $500 Review To The First 50 Students
To make this a can’t lose deal, John is giving $500 reviews to the first 50 students. Companies pay $500 for a review on John’s blog. However, if you’re among the first 50 to order Blog Profit Camp, you’ll get the review for FREE!

This is truly a can’t lose deal! However, you must order now to take advantage of this offer. Don’t wait until the last minute because you will lose out! Go get it now!

How to Make Big Money Bloggin!

Bob Buskirk — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:00:01 +0000

I’ve known John Chow for quite some time now, even before he started blogging! After meeting him he showed me how to make money with ThinkComputers and ever since then I’ve been doing it as a full time job! He really knows a lot about making money online and how to do it the right way. His blog has grown from just a simple personal blog to a business that makes well over $40,000 a month! He only works around 2-3 hours a day on his blog too! This means he has a lot of time for other things like family, house shopping, and of course enjoying good food. This is what we like to call the dot com lifestyle.

Recently John has released a new E-book called the Ultimate Blog Profit Model. This new E-book shows you exactly how John has been able to make a very comfortable living from just blogging. The best part is the E-book is FREE! Also one random person that downloads the new E-book will win an Apple iPad! Here is a video of John explaining the new E-book…

If you are looking to make money from blogging this is the E-book that you are going to want to check out. John Chow is no gimmick, no self-proclaimed expert in blogging, he is the real deal! I’ve known him for many years and he knows what he is doing! Get your copy of the Ultimate Blog Profit Model here!

How to Turn Your Hobby Into a Business

Bob Buskirk — Tue, 18 May 2010 15:00:55 +0000

[ad#right]If you have been reading this blog for a while you probably know that before I was running ThinkComputers full time it was just a hobby. I feel very fortunate that I was able to take a hobby and turn it into a full time job. It’s not often that many people get to do what they love for a living. I’m not sure if I would call myself lucky, because it did take a lot work to get where I am but I guess I feel lucky that my job really does not feel like a real job. The thing is anyone can really do what I do, and anyone can turn their hobby into a business. The thing is, it just takes WORK! I worked on ThinkComputers just for fun, without making any money for almost 4 years before I learned I could make money with it! Here are some tips that should help you turn your hobby into a business.

Dedication
If you want something to succeed then you have to be dedicated to it! When I decided to go full time with ThinkComputers thats all I did. I worked on it 24/7 and rarely ever went out. I’m not saying this is the best thing to do, but you do need to be dedicated. You need to choose whether you want your business to succeed or just let it slide along. My dedication has really paid off, if you read my post How to Work Less and Get Out More you will see why!

Goals are Important
Goals are important when it comes to almost anything. When I decided to go full time with ThinkComputers I set a definite goal of posting at least 3-4 review a week. Since then we have not really gone under that number, unless something serious was going on with me or the site. If you have a goals setup they keep you on track and you feel great when you are able to accomplish them.

Treat it like a Business
This is probably the most important thing you need to do if you want to succeed in making your hobby a business. If you act like your hobby is just a hobby you are never going to be able to make it your business. If you treat it like a business you will see that it will become more successful. Treating it like a business means defining goals, being dedicated, and actually really caring about it. Not doing it whenever you feel like it and putting it second to other things.

My 2009 Year in Review

Bob Buskirk — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 18:16:57 +0000

Wow it’s 2010! Not only a new year, but a new decade! This past year was a very good year for me, there were all kinds of ups, downs, and in between’s. If you have a blog you know how great it is that you are able to look back on things you have done and be able to see the good times, reflect on your mistakes, and just remember some things you may have forgot. So here is my 2009 year in review, hope you all enjoy it!

2009 started off like most year’s with my trip to Las Vegas for CES. Some of the highlights from that trip were the Night before CES Party, IANteract Dinner at Rum Jungle, and the PC Race for Charity. While in Vegas I also experienced my first In-N-Out Burger! It’s the best fast food ever!

The Steelers won their 6th Super Bowl! They have won more Super Bowls (6) than any other NFL team! I talked about being productive on the road. It is very important, the first couple times I tried to do work while on the road it did not work out so well!

I’m really hate negative people and I hate when I get in a negative so I gave you some ideas about how to get out of a negative mood. Celebrating St. Patty’s day in Pittsburgh is something I think everyone should experience, it was so much fun! Crazy Mocha is a local Pittsburgh coffee company and I started going there a lot.

It is always nice to get out of town, so I took a small trip to Great Falls Park and Washington, DC. I definitely need to go back there soon! As many of you know I’m a big hockey fan so I went to Pittsburgh’s first NHL Tweetup. I discovered another great sushi place, Sushi Too in Shadyside. When you work online your income streams can change a lot so I let everyone know what was making me money in 2009.

Twitter really exploded in 2009 and I showed you how to easily get 1000 followers. Brand recognition is very important and I talked about how to get that brand recognition. Star Trek was a big movie in 2009 and I gave you my thoughts on it.

The Pittsburgh Penguins have been building their team for the past few years and it all payed off when they won the Stanley Cup this past year! Since I’m a hockey fan I went crazy! I was out that night too and Pittsburgh was sure a party city! Working from home can be annoying so I told you some of the things I do to escape.

Since the Pens won the Stanley Cup they had a parade downtown, you know I wouldn’t be missing that! I moved once again, this time to a more urban area very close to the city, I really like my new apartment. I was invited to Pittsburgh’s first TasteCasting at Melange Bistro Bar and it was great. I was able to give myself a vacation this year. I went to Myrtle Beach with some friends and it was a blast!

I turned 25 this year and it really gave me some time to reflect on the past 5-10 years of my life. Over the past year I really started getting into tea and now I drink it almost daily. I went to another Pittsburgh TasteCasting, this time it was at Castaways Outside Inn.

The G20 Summit was held in Pittsburgh this past year and those few days were full of surprises. It was definitely a once in a lifetime experience! I started using Seesmic Desktop in 2009 and I’m still using it. The best twitter app that I’ve ever used! This summer was really a fun one for me and I did so many things, Labor Day weekend was no exception!

I finally attended PodCamp this year in Pittsburgh and it was definitely worth it! I can’t wait to go next year! I hung out quite a few times at Schenley Plaza over the summer, it is a great place to relax and even work since they have WiFi! I did some maintenance on the blog and I changed the header image to ones that rotate every hour with different sayings on them.

bit.ly is a great URL shortening service and I use it basically every day. ThinkComputers finally got a new redesign and we moved the site over to WordPress. It was an annoying process, but totally worth it! Everyone likes ThinkComputers so much better now!

Well that was my year, crazy to think that I’ve been blogging since 2005. Here is to 2010!

SEO 101 with Jami Broom

Bob Buskirk — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:43:29 +0000

While at PodCamp Pittsburgh 4 this past weekend I was able to attend Jami Broom’s session on SEO for WordPress. Jami is an Internet Marketing Strategist at ClicksToMySite.com. I already know a lot about SEO, but I figured I would sit in on the session to not only learn more, but share what I learned here on my blog.

Permalinks and Robots.txt
What SEO is all about is making it easier for search engines to find your content. Not only that, but for you to rank higher in the search results. One of the easiest ways to do some easy SEO with WordPress is to change your permalink structure. On a normal install WordPress will by default have your permalink structure like thisL http://www.bobbuskirk.com/?p=123. That is not a good permalink structure for search engines. To change this go ahead into your WordPress admin panel and go to Settings -> Permalinks and you are given the option to change the permalink structure. Right now I am using the custom option on this blog with this as my structure /%postname%/ which seems to be the standard for many blogs. Jami also pointed out that if your site does not have a robots.txt file you should create one. The robots.txt file basically tells search engines what part of the site they can index. A basic robots.txt file should look like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Keywords
Keywords are extremely important on any website or blog. They allow search engines to know what your website is about and provide better navigation for your users. I know from experience that keywords can really help with your search engine traffic. About 2 years ago on ThinkComputers the title of every page was just ThinkComputers.org, obviously that is horrible for SEO. Now if you go to any review on the site and look at the title it is the product being reviewed. This way when someone searches that product in Google we come up in the search results. We have seen our traffic from search engines go from 20% to 60% in just a short time and of course a large increase in traffic because of this. So when you title your posts make sure that reflects what you are talking about in them. To make sure your keywords are effective make sure you have something like Google Analytics installed to track keywords.

Plugins
Now that you know a little bit about SEO let’s make it a little easier for you. If you are running WordPress there are many plugins that will improve your SEO automatically. Probably the most popular one out there would have to be the All-in-One SEO Pack. I use this plugin and it works great! Some of the other plugins that Jami mentioned were Google XML Sitemap, which will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. SEO Friendly Images which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. Redirection manages 301 redirections, keeps track of 404 errors, and generally tidys up any loose ends your site may have. There are a ton of other SEO plugins out there as well. Another helpful plugin that Jami talked about was Google Analyticator, which adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. They way if you don’t know much about editing your blog template this is the easy way to get Google Analytics running on your blog.

Content is King
Even though SEO is very important you need to remember that your content is very important. People are not going to return to your site if you barely have any content on it. Also the more content you have on your site the more posts there are for the search engines to index. So essentially the more you write the more you are getting your site out there and noticed by search engines.

Thanks to Jami for leading the session on SEO!

Image is Everything

Bob Buskirk — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:31:59 +0000

I’m writing this blog post because something interesting happened this past week when I was grocery shopping. I was at Walmart walking down the snack isle looking for some stuff and I walked by a large section of Great Value chips. At first I did not realize that they were the Good Value brand because of the new packaging. Usually when I would see Good Value I would just walk by and get something else, but because of the new packaging I decided to pick up a bag of chips. Its crazy that just because the packing was different I got chips that I would normally not get. I’m sure some of you have done that before too. This really shows how important your company logo is…

Identity
Your logo really is your identity. What do you think of when you see the Nike “Swoosh” or the Apple logo? When you see those logos you instantly think of the brand, whether it is good or bad. Usually when I would think of the Great Value brand I would think of the crappy food. Now with the new logo I think of sort of hip good priced food. The logo really helps the brand I think. That is why you see so many brands that will update their logo after a while to bring more people in.

Spend the Money
Getting a new logo or rebranding something can cost money, but if it is going to get more people interested in your product or service then it is definitely worth the cost. That is why Walmart invested some of their 250 billion dollars in sales and expanded and rebranded the Great Value brand. If you look at some of the before and after pictures of the Great Value brand you will see the difference, which is much more appealing to customers. Branding something is all about the logo so whether it’s for your company or for your blog spend some money on a good logo that when people see it they will instantly think of your brand.

Getting that Brand Recognition