I started my website VegasHere.com initially to use as practice developing web pages and to have a convenient place to go to for Las Vegas employment links. I thought that after this process, I might return to the computer industry as a web developer. After 25 years employed as a computer programmer, I decided I would like to work for myself. To this end, I first created my simple website, then enrolled in Google AdSense in an effort to make some income. To generate traffic I have created a Facebook page, VegasHerecom, a squeeze page, and a Twitter account, @ndgreek. I am using the Facebook page to simply promote the VegasHere website, but am a few "likes" short of the 30 needed for Facebook promotion. The squeeze page is an attempt to generate a targeted mailing list for a future newsletter I will create about the Las Vegas job market. I am using the Twitter account to inform my followers and followers of relevant hashtags about various jobs available in the Las Vegas area and also to promote the links to my VegasHere job web pages.
I believe I have created some handy lists of links to the employment websites of Las Vegas casinos, technology and IT companies and retail stores. More categories are coming. Eventually I would like to jazz it up a bit, but keep the user-friendly interface. As always, I welcome any suggestions or comments. Thanks again for reading.
Friday, September 6, 2013
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Still Trying to Make Money On-Line
Last week I discussed some of my strategies to get more traffic to my VegasHere.com website. One of them was to get more Twitter followers by tweeting my website address using relevant hashtags. So far, in ten days, I have gone from about 20 followers to 78. I have only tweeted a few times a day, since I don't want to bombard my followers with self-promoting tweets. I have sprinkled in a few tweets with some useful information, because I don't want people to un-follow me if they get irritated.
I get a lot of spam about other people's ideas on their get rich quick schemes. One such scheme involved setting up Facebook ads and only being charged one cent per click. They wanted $47.00 for that information. I did some quick research just using Google and found out how to do the same thing for free. It doesn't seem to be as easy as they spell out in the pay version. One of the first steps is to create a landing page or squeeze page, where you force someone to enter an email address in order to get to your website. I found a web page that will create your squeeze page for free and they will also host it for free. My Squeeze Page asks you to enter your email address and then when you push the button to enter my website, your email address is sent to an email address of my choice and you are then directed to my website. At some point I will use the email addresses for some sort of newsletter or to notify people of updates to my website. In the $47.00 scheme, they have you going to ClickBank to find affiliate links to promote. Since my website has to do with finding jobs in Las Vegas, I can promote any of their Employment/Jobs affiliates, For example, for Amazing Cover Letters, click here. For a Guide To Getting A Teaching Job, click here. For the Ultimate Guide To Job Interview Answers, click here. For The Secret To Getting Hired, click here. For Amazing Resumes, click here. Hopefully the idea is that a highly targeted audience will be visiting my website and those that click on these affiliate links will have a high conversion rate and earn me a commission for each sale. If I can figure out how to put all these ideas into my website I may have some positive news to report in my next blog.
As always I encourage any comments or suggestions. Thanks again for reading!
I get a lot of spam about other people's ideas on their get rich quick schemes. One such scheme involved setting up Facebook ads and only being charged one cent per click. They wanted $47.00 for that information. I did some quick research just using Google and found out how to do the same thing for free. It doesn't seem to be as easy as they spell out in the pay version. One of the first steps is to create a landing page or squeeze page, where you force someone to enter an email address in order to get to your website. I found a web page that will create your squeeze page for free and they will also host it for free. My Squeeze Page asks you to enter your email address and then when you push the button to enter my website, your email address is sent to an email address of my choice and you are then directed to my website. At some point I will use the email addresses for some sort of newsletter or to notify people of updates to my website. In the $47.00 scheme, they have you going to ClickBank to find affiliate links to promote. Since my website has to do with finding jobs in Las Vegas, I can promote any of their Employment/Jobs affiliates, For example, for Amazing Cover Letters, click here. For a Guide To Getting A Teaching Job, click here. For the Ultimate Guide To Job Interview Answers, click here. For The Secret To Getting Hired, click here. For Amazing Resumes, click here. Hopefully the idea is that a highly targeted audience will be visiting my website and those that click on these affiliate links will have a high conversion rate and earn me a commission for each sale. If I can figure out how to put all these ideas into my website I may have some positive news to report in my next blog.
As always I encourage any comments or suggestions. Thanks again for reading!
Monday, August 19, 2013
Trying to Make Money On-Line
It's been a little over a year since I posted my last "weekly" blog. I started my VegasHere.com website a few years ago with the intent to try to make a little money with Google Adsense. Last June I was at $29.88 total since the beginning. Now I am up to $73.13. Still no retirement in sight. I have added a few new Las Vegas employment links to my job pages. To find a casino job, I have the page Las Vegas Casino Jobs. To find a computer, IT or technical job, go to Las Vegas Technology Jobs. To find a retail or sales job, you can go to the page Las Vegas Retail Jobs
Over the last few weeks, I have been researching ways to get my website more visibility. One of the techniques was to use some type of social media marketing. I came across this method using YouTube. The idea is to do a search on videos for your niche and then find a video which has a fair amount of views and has no links below the video. Then contact the owner of the video and ask them if they will put your website link below the video. They may say yes, but for a fee. If the video is popular enough, then the fee may be worth it. So far I have not seen a video for my niche that fits these criteria.
Another method uses Twitter. Find some popular hashtags that are trending for your niche and tweet your website link listing some of the hashtags you find. I tried this with a few tweets and have added one new follower so far and have not really noticed more hits to my web pages. My hope is that my followers will retweet my tweets and that I will pick up many new followers over time. Fingers crossed!
I also plan to share this blog on Facebook and Twitter and hope that it gets shared and retweeted by my followers. Hopefully there is some activity that will be worth reporting soon and my next blog may not be next year. Thanks for reading and if anybody has any other bright ideas, please send me comments.
Over the last few weeks, I have been researching ways to get my website more visibility. One of the techniques was to use some type of social media marketing. I came across this method using YouTube. The idea is to do a search on videos for your niche and then find a video which has a fair amount of views and has no links below the video. Then contact the owner of the video and ask them if they will put your website link below the video. They may say yes, but for a fee. If the video is popular enough, then the fee may be worth it. So far I have not seen a video for my niche that fits these criteria.
Another method uses Twitter. Find some popular hashtags that are trending for your niche and tweet your website link listing some of the hashtags you find. I tried this with a few tweets and have added one new follower so far and have not really noticed more hits to my web pages. My hope is that my followers will retweet my tweets and that I will pick up many new followers over time. Fingers crossed!
I also plan to share this blog on Facebook and Twitter and hope that it gets shared and retweeted by my followers. Hopefully there is some activity that will be worth reporting soon and my next blog may not be next year. Thanks for reading and if anybody has any other bright ideas, please send me comments.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Making Money on the Internet
Another year and a half has passed since my last post. I'm getting good at this procrastination thing. I have still had no success at landing any kind of full time computer job. Hopefully that will change soon after I finish my poker dealing stint at the 2012 World Series of Poker. Before the series started I received a call from a computer headhunting company and they offered me free on-line training courses to help get me back up to speed where I was eight years ago. When I am done with the courses I will take some sort of test and they will try to get me back into the work force. I would still preferably like to learn web development and eventually make money doing web sites.
The web site I started three years ago, VegasHere.com, is really thriving. So far, with the help of Google AdSense, I have made a whopping total of $29.88! Getting so much closer to that retirement I have been dreaming of. I have had 1,886 hits to the front page, most of which I am sure are from me. I do believe I have a couple of useful pages Las Vegas Casino Jobs and Las Vegas Computer Jobs.
Anyways, when I first started playing around on the internet back in the mid 90's, I've always been keeping my eye out for that "get rich quick" scheme. I signed up for a bunch of things, including mystery shopping, chain letters and other pyramid or multi-level marketing programs. Not counting what I spent, I think I made about $50.00. So I kept my day job. A few years ago, my wife saw something recommended by Oprah, so that was the stamp of approval for me to be sucked into another scam. Before I spent anything, I did some research and found it was just a way of using Google AdSense, but I had to spend $99 a month for something I could do for free. That's when I started my web site, but it hasn't been profitable yet.
For some reason, I get this magazine in the mail, Home Business Connection. I looked at all the ads in the magazine with a web address and bookmarked them all. My plan is to research them all and sort out which ones are the scams. The first one I will talk about in this blog is titled "Almost a Secret", which is the Empower Network. I went to the web site and watched a video slide show which went on forever. The speaker was David Wood, who claims a few years ago was living out of a van after years of trying out internet businesses. Eventually he learned enough, with his partner David Sharpe, to come up with this idea to use blogging. All you have to do is pay a monthly fee and they do everything for you except write your blog. I guess you make money by selling this system and getting 100% commissions. So I googled "Empower Network Scam" to see if this is for real. It seems a lot of supporters for this scheme have placed themselves at the top of the search engine. For now it appears that this may work for some people and may require a bit of effort to realize the incomes of the testimonials offered. Will I try this out? I probably need a favorable review from Oprah to get the approval in my household. I may regret not signing up and redirecting you few guys who read this to the system. Please stay tuned for my next post where I will review a few other schemes. And please visit my VegasHere.com web site for a comprehensive list of links to casino and technology company employment web sites in Las Vegas.
The web site I started three years ago, VegasHere.com, is really thriving. So far, with the help of Google AdSense, I have made a whopping total of $29.88! Getting so much closer to that retirement I have been dreaming of. I have had 1,886 hits to the front page, most of which I am sure are from me. I do believe I have a couple of useful pages Las Vegas Casino Jobs and Las Vegas Computer Jobs.
Anyways, when I first started playing around on the internet back in the mid 90's, I've always been keeping my eye out for that "get rich quick" scheme. I signed up for a bunch of things, including mystery shopping, chain letters and other pyramid or multi-level marketing programs. Not counting what I spent, I think I made about $50.00. So I kept my day job. A few years ago, my wife saw something recommended by Oprah, so that was the stamp of approval for me to be sucked into another scam. Before I spent anything, I did some research and found it was just a way of using Google AdSense, but I had to spend $99 a month for something I could do for free. That's when I started my web site, but it hasn't been profitable yet.
For some reason, I get this magazine in the mail, Home Business Connection. I looked at all the ads in the magazine with a web address and bookmarked them all. My plan is to research them all and sort out which ones are the scams. The first one I will talk about in this blog is titled "Almost a Secret", which is the Empower Network. I went to the web site and watched a video slide show which went on forever. The speaker was David Wood, who claims a few years ago was living out of a van after years of trying out internet businesses. Eventually he learned enough, with his partner David Sharpe, to come up with this idea to use blogging. All you have to do is pay a monthly fee and they do everything for you except write your blog. I guess you make money by selling this system and getting 100% commissions. So I googled "Empower Network Scam" to see if this is for real. It seems a lot of supporters for this scheme have placed themselves at the top of the search engine. For now it appears that this may work for some people and may require a bit of effort to realize the incomes of the testimonials offered. Will I try this out? I probably need a favorable review from Oprah to get the approval in my household. I may regret not signing up and redirecting you few guys who read this to the system. Please stay tuned for my next post where I will review a few other schemes. And please visit my VegasHere.com web site for a comprehensive list of links to casino and technology company employment web sites in Las Vegas.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
What's been going on for the last year and a half?
Well, I think I have procrastinated enough! My first and only other blog post was back in July of 2009 and I guess I should follow up on my "progress" since then. I did go through most of the course work on W3Schools.org and created a crude website at www.vegashere.com. The website is basically devoted to resources in Las Vegas, such as casino job links and links to Greek and Filipino things, since I am Greek and my wife is from the Philippines. My grand plan was to fill up different web pages with specific content and use Google Adsense to get targeted ads on each page. It took a couple of months, but Google finally approved me and I did get ads on each page. So far I have made a grand total of $10.50. I can see retirement is right around the corner. I did submit my website to several different search engines and did attempt to insert relevant keywords into the meta tags.
I just brought up my site and all the ads on each page are public service announcements. This must be new, because not too long ago, there were normal ads on each page. How do I fix this?
I am most proud of the list of casino job links I put together, but I am nowhere to be found in the search engines if you search on "las vegas jobs" or "las vegas casino jobs".
If you search Yahoo! for "las vegas baseball cards", I am actually number five on the first page, and on Google I am at the bottom of the second page. The search for "baseball cards in las vegas" is on the third Google page.
But mostly I have used the site to store the pictures of baseball cards for my eBay auctions, which I ran regularly up to April of 2010.
So, how is my progress towards finding a job back in the computer field? Not so good! For a few weeks back in April and May, I did some consulting for a hopeful on-line poker site, but they ran out of money and offered me a stock deal. I had to turn that down because I like to eat and stock that may or may not be worth something in three years, doesn't pay the bills now. It's a real shame because I think I was a real good fit with what they were trying to do. As a poker dealer and player and a former C++ programmer, I believe I had all the tools to help make their site what they envisioned.
My website is currently on hold, since I have dealt poker at several different tournaments around the country over the last year. Traveling for two to three weeks at a time was a big sacrifice for me being away from my wife. Unlike some husbands, I actually like being with my wife and miss her terribly when I am away. But the money was good and necessary to help cover the bills my wife's salary did not. It does seem that my traveling will be significantly less this year, since the group I was working with no longer needs my services, despite the effort and sacrifices I put forth. But that is another story and this probably isn't the right forum to vent.
Now, what about getting work as a web developer? I thought I would first try to help some friends get started with some sort of web site, but after a few expressed interest, nothing ever came of that, even after some pestering from me. I was hoping to put together some sort of portfolio, so that I could then try to apply to web developer ads. I have applied to a few anyways, but to no avail. For now, my game plan is to just play around with my website some more and add a few bells and whistles and hope to get someone's attention.
But now I need to figure out why Google is only giving me public service ads...
I just brought up my site and all the ads on each page are public service announcements. This must be new, because not too long ago, there were normal ads on each page. How do I fix this?
I am most proud of the list of casino job links I put together, but I am nowhere to be found in the search engines if you search on "las vegas jobs" or "las vegas casino jobs".
If you search Yahoo! for "las vegas baseball cards", I am actually number five on the first page, and on Google I am at the bottom of the second page. The search for "baseball cards in las vegas" is on the third Google page.
But mostly I have used the site to store the pictures of baseball cards for my eBay auctions, which I ran regularly up to April of 2010.
So, how is my progress towards finding a job back in the computer field? Not so good! For a few weeks back in April and May, I did some consulting for a hopeful on-line poker site, but they ran out of money and offered me a stock deal. I had to turn that down because I like to eat and stock that may or may not be worth something in three years, doesn't pay the bills now. It's a real shame because I think I was a real good fit with what they were trying to do. As a poker dealer and player and a former C++ programmer, I believe I had all the tools to help make their site what they envisioned.
My website is currently on hold, since I have dealt poker at several different tournaments around the country over the last year. Traveling for two to three weeks at a time was a big sacrifice for me being away from my wife. Unlike some husbands, I actually like being with my wife and miss her terribly when I am away. But the money was good and necessary to help cover the bills my wife's salary did not. It does seem that my traveling will be significantly less this year, since the group I was working with no longer needs my services, despite the effort and sacrifices I put forth. But that is another story and this probably isn't the right forum to vent.
Now, what about getting work as a web developer? I thought I would first try to help some friends get started with some sort of web site, but after a few expressed interest, nothing ever came of that, even after some pestering from me. I was hoping to put together some sort of portfolio, so that I could then try to apply to web developer ads. I have applied to a few anyways, but to no avail. For now, my game plan is to just play around with my website some more and add a few bells and whistles and hope to get someone's attention.
But now I need to figure out why Google is only giving me public service ads...
Thursday, July 30, 2009
This is the beginning!
I recently decided that I wanted to get back into the computer programming business. In April of 2004 I got laid off from my C++ programming job here in Las Vegas and was unable to find another job in the months that passed and I eventually gave up. I was actually able to make a living playing video poker. Since this didn't provide any health benefits I decided to try and become a poker dealer and went to poker dealing school. To this day I have been unable to find a full time dealing job but I have managed some work. I dealt the World Series of Poker the last four years. I also have dealt in tournaments at the Venetian and the Orleans. I remain on-call to deal at the various Harrah's properties here in Las Vegas if they need me for marketing events or for the poker rooms if they get busy. Still, this hasn't provided any benefits or steady income.
Now it's been five years since I programmed and I suspected that the technology has long passed me by. So I began investigating going back to school. I decided that I wanted to learn web development. I found one of those web sites where you fill out a form and you get a list of all the schools that match your criteria. Even though I specified that I wanted to be called in the evening I started getting bombarded with calls every day at eight in the morning.
The first school I looked at was the University of Phoenix. I visit their office here and even filled out the FAFSA forms to see about financial aid. Since my wife and I hit many large video poker jackpots the year before, FAFSA would not offer me any aid. Of course student loans are available. It would take about two years to finish a degree, assuming they would transfer my credits from Notre Dame from back in the seventies. The loan amount would be $30,000 and I wouldn't have to start paying it back until six month after graduating. After awhile I decided the curriculum wasn't quite right for me so I looked elsewhere.
I then looked into ITT Technical Institute which has a campus here in Henderson near where I live. After getting the grand tour and taking some stupid test and signing a bunch of forms I decided against them too. They wanted me to go for an associates degree in web design and take all the classes on campus and pay $45,000. I really want to be a web developer and study on-line. So time to do some more research.
While trying to find the right on-line school I started to think about what curriculum I wanted to study. After putting together a list of all the things I would need to learn to begin web developing I came across a lot of free on-line resources. Between Wikiversity, W3Schools and others, I figure that I can probably learn everything that I need to begin creating web pages. Whether or not I will learn enough to land a job as a web developer some day is another story.
I have been studying the HTML tutorials on W3Schools. I picked up the internet domain vegashere.com from Fatcow and I have begun creating a crude web site to practice on. Maybe someday this could turn into a business or give me the skills to do this sort of thing for other businesses.
I know this is probably all boring, but you can continue to follow my progress through this blog.
Thanks for reading,
Jim
Now it's been five years since I programmed and I suspected that the technology has long passed me by. So I began investigating going back to school. I decided that I wanted to learn web development. I found one of those web sites where you fill out a form and you get a list of all the schools that match your criteria. Even though I specified that I wanted to be called in the evening I started getting bombarded with calls every day at eight in the morning.
The first school I looked at was the University of Phoenix. I visit their office here and even filled out the FAFSA forms to see about financial aid. Since my wife and I hit many large video poker jackpots the year before, FAFSA would not offer me any aid. Of course student loans are available. It would take about two years to finish a degree, assuming they would transfer my credits from Notre Dame from back in the seventies. The loan amount would be $30,000 and I wouldn't have to start paying it back until six month after graduating. After awhile I decided the curriculum wasn't quite right for me so I looked elsewhere.
I then looked into ITT Technical Institute which has a campus here in Henderson near where I live. After getting the grand tour and taking some stupid test and signing a bunch of forms I decided against them too. They wanted me to go for an associates degree in web design and take all the classes on campus and pay $45,000. I really want to be a web developer and study on-line. So time to do some more research.
While trying to find the right on-line school I started to think about what curriculum I wanted to study. After putting together a list of all the things I would need to learn to begin web developing I came across a lot of free on-line resources. Between Wikiversity, W3Schools and others, I figure that I can probably learn everything that I need to begin creating web pages. Whether or not I will learn enough to land a job as a web developer some day is another story.
I have been studying the HTML tutorials on W3Schools. I picked up the internet domain vegashere.com from Fatcow and I have begun creating a crude web site to practice on. Maybe someday this could turn into a business or give me the skills to do this sort of thing for other businesses.
I know this is probably all boring, but you can continue to follow my progress through this blog.
Thanks for reading,
Jim
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