Envato is about to turn 4. Are you ready for this year’s huge Envato Birthday Bundle?
To celebrate we’ve scoured our marketplaces for some of the most amazing items we could find, bundled them all up and thrown in a few other goodies as well.
What you will get is over fifty top shelf files from across all of our marketplaces and sites all for the modest price of just $20.
That’s over $400 worth of envato files for just $20
If you don’t want to miss out, click the link above and join our mailing list!
“Tuesday Total Textures is post series that will bring a new life to your Tuesdays. Every week I’ll be posting some free hi resolution textures that you can use in your projects. Check out this week’s textures, download the ones you like and start making your texture collection.”
This week’s featured item is Revolution Magazine by AlexPascal.
“Revolution Magazine is clean, modern, premium WordPress magazine, which also doubles as a community blog, personal blog, or whatever you shall use it for. Premium features, dozens of custom functions, several custom widgets, solid, intuitive look and feel, along with dozens of theme options, shortcodes and so much more make this theme a must-have in your collection! If you have been looking for the spark to ignite your plain old blog into a popular magazine, you have found it.”
How to Build a Successful Blog Business
The Complete Handbook on Building a Blog Business
Written by Collis of Envato
Here at Envato we’re pretty famous for building a lot of successful blogs, like this one! We’ve done quite a few now, so last year I decided other people might find our techniques and systems useful. Today I’m really happy to announce my new book How to Build a Successful Blog Business which is a step by step guide to doing what we do, and it comes packed with case studies for our blogs including FreelanceSwitch!
The book covers everything from picking a niche to hiring staff, monetizing to building traffic. Like all my books it’s very practical, but I think the best part is the case studies because they include things like our income and expense graphs, detailed backstories about how our sites came to be, and much more. To give you a taste of what the book is like, I thought you might like to read a little part of the case study about FreelanceSwitch:
Extract from The FreelanceSwitch Case Study
… Our monetization plan for FreelanceSwitch’s early days can really be summed up as: try everything and see what works. We began with privately sold (via email) banner ads, tried other ad programs like Google Adsense and Adbrite text ads, tried affiliate programs, sold Text-Link-Ads (which these days will get you an SEO penalty), wrote a book and sold it, sold ads on our RSS feed, tried ads on the podcast, tried many variations of all the above and eventually created a subscription based job board.
Some strategies were relatively successful. Text-link-ads yielded a solid, dependable income stream for a long time, until eventually we removed them for fear that Google was penalizing us. The book did well and we spun that off as a book business called RockablePress (which is where you got this book). And of course banner ads have made up the staple of our revenue for most of the site’s life.
Some strategies were less successful and one was a downright disaster. Among the many affiliate programs we tried, one was for a template site called TemplateMonster. While they are a very successful service, it turned out that our audience hated the company. When we added a “templates” section to the site which was a library of 3rd party templates for sale, the reaction in our comments was extremely annoyed. Though it immediately started yielding revenue, we axed it days later. After all our site was about making freelancers happy, not peddling third party products that they mostly despised!
While banner ads remain to this day a great earner, they have always been by nature variable. We get a good return for the traffic we serve, but we’re dependent on a handful of advertisers who come and go and result in some great months of revenue and some not so great.
The Subscription Job Board Model
From the very beginning FreelanceSwitch was meant to have a job board. On launch day I created a placeholder page that just said “jobs coming soon!” Later we contracted a developer to build a completely free job board that had someone approving jobs (to prevent spam) and it flourished – though being free didn’t exactly have a great return on investment!
When it came time to monetize the job board, the standard model would be to charge advertisers for posting a job. This is how most job boards work and it’s great for full-time jobs because the advertiser is looking to pay a large salary over many years, so what’s a hundred dollars or so for a listing fee in comparison?
But for freelance jobs we found that many of the projects that were being outsourced were rather small in size. Imagine if you paid $100 to advertise a project that only paid out $250 to the freelancer! The economics for small jobs just don’t make sense. …
Extracted from How to Build a Successful Blog Business, by Collis Ta’eed
Read More Extracts
You can read more extracts from the other case studies over on Nettuts+, Psdtuts+ and Mac.AppStorm (the other sites covered in the case studies). You can also read a sample chapter by heading to our sales page for the book.
Get the Book!
You can learn more about the book, as well as find out what top100 bloggers like Darren Rowse from Problogger and Daniel Scocco from DailyBlogTips are saying about it over on the epic sales page that we’ve constructed! Get Blog Business!
Build an Incredible HTML5 App: $7000 Competition
Can you write HTML5 code? Don’t miss out on these prizes in Nettut+’s latest competition!
“As HTML5′s popularity continues to increase, we at Tuts+ and CodeCanyon would like to do our part in promoting and rewarding those who are on the cutting edge of what’s possible with HTML5, local storage, geolocation, SVG, and CSS3. Not only that, but we’re also, at the conclusion of this competition, launching a brand new category on our coding marketplace, CodeCanyon, specifically for HTML5 apps.”
The rules are quite simple. Using HTML5 technologies (and feel free to throw in some CSS3 goodness while you’re at it), we want you to build a cutting edge app.
Most Importantly: We want you to build an item that people will actually use. Particle effects are great, but unless you have an argument for why others would have a need for your particle item in their project, it most likely won’t be in the running for the grand prize spot. Think wide-spread, when building your app. A presentation app is wide-spread, video players are wide-spread. Use your imagination!
The prizes are amazing!
Grand Prize Winner
- $600 cold hard cash (paid via Paypal)
- 1 Copy of Camtasia Studio ($299 value; PC or Mac) (TechSmith awesomeness package)
- 1 Copy of Snag-it or Jing Pro ($50 value) (TechSmith awesomeness package)
- 1 iPod Touch ($200 value) (TechSmith awesomeness package)
- 1 Audio-Technica ATAT2020 USB Condenser Microphone ($249 value) (TechSmith awesomeness package)
- 1 Dedicated Virtual Box (Rage) from Media Temple (worth $1200)
- 1 LIFE-TIME Bona Fide subscription to Wufoo ($360 value per year)
- 1 Formstack Professional Plan ($360 value)
- $100 marketplace credit (available at all Envato marketplaces)
- 1 free copy of the up-coming Envato Birthday Bundle (files valued at $400)!
- $25 Amazon Gift card
- 1 Campaign Monitor account (5,000 email credits)
- 1 Year Pagelime Pro Account ($240 value)
- 1 Professional License of FusionCharts ($499 value)
- 1 copy of Snippets for Mac ($40 value)
- 1 2 Month Tuts+ Premium subscription ($108 value)
- 1 copy of “HTML 5: Up and Running” ($30 value)
- 1 year of Miva Merchant SAAS hosting + license
- 1 free pass to Miva Merchant developer conference in San Diego (January 2011)
- 1 copy of “JavaScript for Web Developers,” from Wrox (hardcopy $40 value)
- 1 year Typekit Personal Subscription ($25 value)
- 1 copy of Querious for Mac ($29 value)
- 1 year Ember Pro Subscription ($25 value)
- 1 single-usage license of WP Structure Theme, by contempoinc – ($35 value)
- 1 Notable Basic Subscription - 3 months ($75 value)
- 1 Rockable Press book of your choice (ebook) ($20 value)
- 1 copy of jQuery Enlightenment (ebook) ( $15 value)
- 1 Featured Item spot on the home page of CodeCanyon (exposure)
- 1 Featured Author spot on the home page of CodeCanyon (exposure)
- Item will be featured in a collection on the home page of CodeCanyon
- The coveted marketplace “Won a Competition” badge.
2 Runners-Up Prizes
- $100 marketplace credit (available at all Envato marketplaces)
- 1 Professional License of FusionCharts ($499 value)
- 1 free pass to Miva Merchant developer conference in San Diego (January 2011)
- 1 copy of Snippets for Mac ($40 value)
- 1 free copy of the up-coming Envato Birthday Bundle (files valued at $400)!
- 1 2 Month Tuts+ Premium subscription ($108 value)
- Item will be featured in a collection on the home page of CodeCanyon
- The coveted marketplace “Won a Competition” badge.
To find out more, click the title above.
This week’s featured author is Akay, who is based in Turkey, has 6 ThemeForest items, and has made 2,907 sales.
This feature has been a long time coming for Akay. His portfolio is not the largest, but with only a few files, he’s been able to plant himself within the top 20 list. View Akay’s Portfolio
“A netsetter is an entrepreneur who understands what the Internet means for making money, starting businesses and changing the way they live.”
20 Steps to a Flexible and Secure WordPress Installation
“A comprehensive WordPress installation, albeit simple to produce, often requires multiple steps — many of which can easily be omitted accidentally. How many times have you forgotten to customize your permalink structure? How about adding in a sitemap plugin? What about changing your timezone? If you’ve installed WordPress more than once, chances are you’ve missed something. Take the following steps and you’ll never miss anything again.”
The file of the day is Accentuate Premium Wordpress 3 Theme by BCProducties.
“Accentuate is a new complete WORDPRESS 3 professional business / portfolio theme, jam-packed with an abundance of unique features that takes advantage of the latest WordPress 3 technologies, providing you with super easy and powerful customization options. The theme comes with 3 homepage slider options to bring out the most in your image. Accentuate utilizes many awesome jQuery plug-ins as well as some custom-made fancy hover effects on the portfolio; 2 different hover effects (overlay or zoom and stretch). There is a ready to go contact page with a Contact form and ajax validation; just add your email address. Easily edit the footer business or name.”
WordPress Theme Thesis Maker Backs Down, Adopts GPL
“Chalk this one up as a victory for the free software movement: Thesis, the wildly popular proprietary WordPress theme from developer/designer Chris Pearson, is now available under a split GPL, the license that makes it possible to alter and redistribute this software as you see fit.
“Pearson’s decision marks the end of a high-drama clash between him and Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and of Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and a handful of related software. Some folks wondered if the battle of words might end in a battle of legal precedent as Mullenweg struggled to preserve free software principles and Pearson struggled to maintain control over his highly successful software.”
