If you work in photoshop at all, you’re more than likely familiar with “layers.” Designs can sometimes consist of 100+ layers, all of which contain different elements.

More often than not, other people’s .psd files that I work on haven’t been organized in the slightest. This often leads me to a sharp pain in my forehead and several profane verbs and nouns.

“But wait!”, you say. “You can control+click on anything and the layer will auto-select.” My response…

Here’s a side-by-side of two .psd’s upon opening photoshop:

As you can see, the file on the left has been organized into family groups and each layer has been named. By keeping the groups detailed as pictured it makes changing elements much less tedious for yourself and those who may be using the file in the future. It’s just good manners to organize.

On the right you see a list of non-grouped, unnamed layers . If you can imagine this list of layers extending to ten times this length… each and every one as ambiguous as the next… it becomes incredible tedious and almost like a puzzle game to make the file workable.

In summation:

• Group families of layers.
• Name every layer.
• It makes everyone’s time working with the file much easier.

I know, it’s a tough concept to follow.

Is grouping important to you? I’d like to hear everyone’s thoughts.

Why am I even writing this article? To motivate you to make some money online, of course! I have written a few articles covering two small streams of income I generate, and a common response is “it’s not detailed enough.”

Well, I am not going to hold your hand through the developer’s learning curve, I’m sorry. I don’t know people that have progressed in their skill-sets by just reading step-by-step articles. The best I am willing to offer here are some ideas that will motivate, maybe even enlighten, you to give some of these ideas a try.

I can write all the time telling you about how I make money online, but if you aren’t utilizing the development tools that are readily available, you will be left in the dust. Here are a few tools that I use on a regular basis:

• Adobe GoLive 9 – GoLive is a must if you are doing any kind of work on a server or if you are coding for the web. I recommend this over any other editor, mainly for its ease of use. The other mainstream WYSIWYG option is Dreamweaver. It has its strengths, but I prefer the user interface of GoLive. I went from knowing almost nothing about coding to having a strong competency in CSS fairly quickly due to the ease of use that this program provides. It is extremely easy to make errors when you are coding, so having a really easy way to test and re-test makes the entire process less stressful.

  This program is pricey, so I suggest you either use your student discount, or find a student who is willing to get you a copy under their name. ^_^

• Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended – This is a must have for ANY web developer. Being able to manipulate images, construct design layouts, superimpose the NERDIEST FACE you have ever seen into a banner image… the list goes on. Get this program, you absolutely need it. In fact, I would say you need it more than your second kidney.

  This program is pricey, so I suggest you either use your student discount, or find a student who is willing to get you a copy under their name. ^_^

• Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 – If you are coding for the web, you obviously need browsers to check your work. There is no “or” in this title because you need all of them. These four browsers comprise most internet surfers, and each has their own style of reading your code. If you check out the article I wrote previously about our bootstrapping activities, you can see that Nate sits across the room from Josh and I. We will load up the windows xp machine, connect it to Josh’s monitor, and swivel it towards Nate’s desk. We will generally create a style sheet for each browser, and use PHP to detect each user’s browser so it can properly allocate the style sheets. We could run parallels (allows running XP and MacOS simultaneously) to accomplish the testing, but we already have the tower that I custom-built.

There are some great resources on the web that get into detailed instructions for web dev, and I will be reviewing some in posts to come. I will also talk about some of the other tools I use in later posts. What kind of tools are you using for web development?

We are truly bootstrapping this business as of right now. When you are in this situation, cramming yourself into a room with a bunch of equipment is the best option… at least if you want the best possible margins. Pain before pleasure can sum up the idea behind this setup. Right across the room, you can see a familiar character…

We have four computers in the room, three of which (the macbook pros and macbook) run constantly. The only time I turn on my windows xp machine is when we are testing code in internet explorer… which is no fun.

Although offices aren’t too expensive around here, we see no need to add such a cost.

Aside from showing you our bootstrapped apartment office, there isn’t much to say. How does your office look? Are you in a startup that runs on a tight budget?

Just like the arbitrage method, this is going to require some skills in design and coding. If you feel you aren’t up to par in some skills… this could a great activity for practice! Requirements and recommendations include:

• Intermediate competency in a WYSIWYG Editor (GoLive, Dreamweaver)
• Intermediate competency in Photoshop
• One domain that can support subdomains
• Basic Competency in Wordpress
• 2-10 Hours depending on your skill level
• Paypal Account

Photoshop Fun

We are going to start off by creating a photoshop design of the template. We are looking to create something basic for this walkthrough, so let’s say that the page has six elements (title-bar, header, navigation bar, sidebar, content, and footer). Try to get an idea of who might use this blog template, so you can cater the style to their tastes. I will be using a template that I have made for an example today, so let’s take a look at what it looks like after a basic design.

You can see the elements are there (aside from the footer) in this shot. This design is meant to be for a vacation blog or something along those lines. Really basic stuff to build this design. Total time spent at this point should be around 30-60 minutes for a competent photoshop user.

Chop Shop

Now that you have completed your design, you can begin the task of chopping up individual elements to be used in wordpress. Some elements you will want to cut out in their entirety (title, footer, header img, nav), and some elements will be cut so that they can repeat 1px at a time (content and sidebar should be cut in 1px-vertically/entire body width). This is pretty basic photoshopping all-in-all. If you are completely new to photoshop, you can get your skills to this level within a month, no problem. Here are a few examples of some cut elements:

As you can see, this is pretty simple up to this point. To be honest, the next part doesn’t get much more difficult! At this point, a competent photoshop user shouldn’t have spent more than 5-10 minutes cutting these elements and preparing them for integration into a wordpress theme.

What You See is What You Get

WYSIWYG editors are awesome. I personally use GoLive 9 for MacOS. At this point, you are going to want to install wordpress, or use a domain that already has wordpress running. For this design, you can start with the default theme if you would like (I did) to begin integration. The default template has very basic elements, so it is very easy to add on to. Arrange your “div’s” and what-not accordingly and work out the bugs. This kind of coding is relatively simple, but it can seem like a very steep learning curve. If you don’t have any experience in coding, this part could be very difficult for you. You won’t travel farther than Google to find some great learning resources for coding and even specifics on Wordpress integration. The amount of time that coding takes can vary. Sometimes it can go through without much trouble, sometimes you will want to destroy your computer. That is the name of the game, though. :p

Re-Asses and Test

Now that you have your first draft of coding complete, go back and think of some useful things a blogger might want to include into the template. Wordpress supports a wide range of plug-ins, so you can take advantage of that if you would like. Travel on over to where I keep my final draft of this template to see the changes that were made when coding. Very similar, but not exactly the same as my photoshop design. Test all of the pages for errors in your coding. There are always little things that go wrong the first time, so leave no rocks unturned in your efforts to debug. That all being said, testing the site takes around 15 minutes at the most. ^_^

Links/Money/Completion

So, you’ve designed and coded your template. Well done. Now for the good part! You have some options as to what you can do to either make money and/or build links.

I HIGHLY ADVISE everyone go read a great two-part article put together by Josh Buckley on selling sites for profit. More or less, what you have just built is a website… so his theory can be applied. Here are parts ONE and TWO. If you are selling, start with DigitalPoint.com and SitePoint.com. There are links for these sites in the second part of Josh’s article. What else can you sell besides the exclusive use of the template? Hmmm… sponsored links…? You might try auctioning links that will be embedded and encrypted into the template. It can bring in $50-200 for some templates, so it is definitely a good option.

You also have a great opportunity to build some backlinks here. If your route is the widespread distribution of the template, you can embed your own links into the template, thus creating an army of links. You can distribute your theme at some of these sites:

• Blog Flux Themes
• themesbase.com
• wpSkins.org
• Themebot.com
• Freebies Forum
• Wordpress WoW
• Wordpress Themes
• Free Wordpress Themes

Conclusion

There is a possibility that you wont be able to sell your site or links. You can keep listing it over and over if you please, or you can just distribute for links. This is just one of many things you can do to make a little bit of extra cash. Good luck, and I hope I gave you some inspiration to go out there and make some money!

There are a few things required to follow this model:

• Adwords Account and basic competency
• Adsense Account and basic comptency
• Basic competency in a WYSIWYG Editor (GoLive, Dreamweaver)
• Basic competency in Photoshop
• One domain that can support unlimited subdomains
• 50-100 Dollars to Start (recommended)
• 10 Extra Hours per month (at first)

A Quick Overview

What we are going to be doing here is basically creating landing sites for an arbitrage model. You will be directing people to these sites through adwords or some other pay-per-click advertiser. I recommend starting with adwords because you can do penny clicks (e.g., you don’t want to get caught bidding $.10 per click and averaging $.07 in return from adsense). It is really a simple process, but it requires some basic competencies to do. If you are into making money online, you should be learning about this kind of stuff and gaining basic computer skills anyway. :p

Getting Started

First, you are going to want to create a domain that will be used for the landing page. You don’t have to choose anything related to the niche you will be advertising, but it would be smart to do if you would like to SEO the page as well. How much keyword research you do for this is up to you, but I would strongly advise you spend some time with it. Try to think of something that you know people and companies will be paying a good amount for advertising at least, if you aren’t going to do any research. Let’s just use one of my sites (that is now deactivated), mothers day, for example. I started that one right around Mother’s Day, and I wish I would have known how well it would do. There is always next year, though. I chose that niche because I knew that people would be buying things online like crazy during that time of year. The lesson here is that when choosing niches, use some marketing and e-logic. Oh ya, I almost forgot… make sure you are policy compliant for both adwords and adsense!!!

Build the Template

You can spend your time making your own css template, you can integrate something into wordpress… it is up to you. I personally think that they both take about the same amount of time (less than an hour), and if you are just making a one-page splasher, it shouldn’t matter. It should have basic, BASIC, elements. Place your adsense in your desired configuration. I would love to coach you on how to optimize your adsense, but that will have to wait for another post. The idea is that the adsense can be placed without too much density, and in appropriate places. It really is just a Title bar, Header, two ads, content, footer ad, and footer. I am not going to tell you how to design the template’s style or anything, just make it SIMPLE. The idea is for the person to read or look at something and then follow an ad link, nothing else.

Scrape for Content

You want your site to have some content. Again, this model is not incorporating SEO, so we don’t mind if it is duplicate. I prefer GoArticles.com when I need a quick, 500-word blurb for content. Simply type “mothers day” into the search and you will be presented with plenty of articles to choose from. Wow, this is pretty easy, huh? Put the content into the template and move-on to the next step.

Adwords Time

Begin uploading and taking care of the server-side things. Once you have your template uploaded and adsense has been activated, you are ready to move onto the Adwords. Create a campaign for your newest domain(s) (or subdomains), and start hacking away at keywords. Again, because you are only bidding penny-per-click, mistakes in keyword allocation don’t scar your CTR too badly . ^_^ Whether you decide to do image ads or you decide to do text ads, is up to you. Image ads generally convert better if I am not mistaken, though…

Make sure that you are advertising in the content network. How much you are willing to budget for each campaign is up to you. I would recommend $10 per day to start out with. I doubt you will max it out because you are only paying a penny for each click. Google takes forever to start new campaigns, so after a week if they haven’t started yours, be patient.

Proof is in the Pudding

My impressions from adwords ended up costing me about 117 dollars (11,751/100), and I earned a little over 400 dollars. Thats almost 300 bucks! How much time did I spend in July on this? None, not one minute. Well, I take that back… I spent a minute per day checking to see how much money I had pulled in. You can blog your heart out and not earn that much… and I spent NO TIME at all in July on this.

Disclaimer and Conclusion

Ok, let’s get something straight here. I have made about 15 landing sites for this, and obviously there are two left. This tells you something… you have to adjust from time to time. These are my two rock-solid campaigns that have profited the whole way through. As I said earlier, there is a bit of trial and error involved when finding the sweet spot. If you have a domain with unlimited subdomains you can do as many of these as you want without taking up server space (who cares if you have an unlimited domains account, though) and without spending extra money on domain registrations.

Google is not a big fan of arbitrage, so make sure you are COMPLIANT. You can still get away with it, just be careful. No need to get your account banned…

That 50-100 bucks I required up there? You will pay Google before they pay you. You already know this though, because you have a basic understanding of adwords and adsense…

Aside from the initial time I put into making and managing all of these sites , I have put no time into them. I will be re-activating some of my campaigns when the time is right (e.g., mothers day), but other than that I don’t spend any time.

So here you are, an EASY way to make some cash to pay a few bills. This isn’t my best month, nor is it my worst. One of my best friends and business partners, Nate, has made more than a thousand dollars come in each month for NO TIME spent. I hope this at least motivates you to make some money. Good luck, and let me know if you have some success!

First, I start a new photoshop project. I build the template visually, element by element. When I finish the photoshop file it ends up looking something like this:

After the design work has been done, it is time to dissect the design and build individual elements into a wordpress template. Now, it is time to talk about why this is such a benefit to me and the sites I choose to embed links for.

A huge part of your pagerank is determined by the number of back-links that your site has floating around the interweb. When you embed links into a wordpress template, you are potentially linking yourself to thousands of legitimate blog sites. If you have a site that is ripe for paid advertising, you can leverage yourself with a high pagerank.

This can be an extremely effective method when you are trying to climb a website to the top of the search engines. Converting sales on a site can be difficult, but if you have people searching for your product and they see you ranking somewhere in the top three, you can bet your sales will begin to increase. Targeted traffic is an important thing to take advantage of. You will see your conversions begin to make a turn for the better (assuming you have the right search terms covered).

There are many benefits to taking on this hobby. Enough said ^_^.