While there is a cost to backup to Amazon S3 servers, the cost for the four fairly large websites has been averaging  $0.03 a day – which averages out to $2.74 per site per year!  Definitely worth the peace of mind I’ll be getting from having a secure offsite backup of the website created each night.

The most prominent company offering  free WordPress hosting right now is DreamHost.  They are a established, well known hosting company.  You can sign up for their free app hosting at: https://panel.dreamhostapps.com/signup/ .

Too keep it free (remember we’re just testing and learning here) pick a name to use with their free DreamHosters.com domain name.  FOr my example I picked  “mycooltestsite”:

I then made some changes to the default settings in step 3 – I clicked the “X” next to Drupal to deselect that program and changed the address in WordPress from “blog” to “www” – this is how I normally set up my websites.  You can certainly feel to leave the settings how they are or make any changes you want to.

Leave step 4 unchecked – we’ll talk more about hosting options in a future post. We’ll keep trying this for free for now.

Enter your information in step 5, and once you’re all done you should come to the payment page – which should show a grand total of $0 due.

DreamHost will email you instructions on how to get into the WebPanel of your new free hosting account, but for now click on the “Continue to our web panel” button.

The next step is to wait 15-20 minutes or so.  Go grab yourself a bowl of ice cream or a slice of pie to celebrate!

In a little while, you should find a gazillion emails from DreamHost in your email notifying you that your apps are installed and ready to use:

Open the one titled “Success installing wordpress…” and you’ll get the ID and password for your WordPress software:

There may be more information below this about making changes to DNS, but unless you used a custom domain name (not *.dreamhosters.com) you can ignore all of that.

Click on the management link in the email and you’re ready to make your first blog post or web page!

For help on getting up to speed on using WordPress, I recommend First Steps With WordPress for a quick tour of it’s features and functions.

I found an extremely easy way to do this via JavaScript with Feed2JS.  Just fill in a simple web form with info about your website, generate some JavaScript and paste it into your html.  I had the titles of my 4 most recent posts up in less than a minute.

If you’re interested in posting the content of a world-class blogger, you’ll have to look elsewhere, but if you want to see what the code for my site looks like, here it is:

<script language=”JavaScript” src=”http://feed2js.org//feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Ftjschmitz.com%2Fblog%2Ffeed%2F&amp;num=4″  type=”text/javascript”></script>

My initial research said that I would need to get my hosting company to increase the memory allocation of PHP on the server, or add the line ini_set("memory_limit","16M"); to any offending .php file. Since my hosting company is takes days to get to any problems, and I was having this issue with every .php file in the /wp-admin/ directory, these seemed like non-solutions. When I came across the idea of adding php_value memory_limit 32000000 to my .htaccess file, my hopes of a quick fix were restored. I added the line to the .htaccess file in the root of my website (/public_html) and the problem disappeared instantly, for all of my blogs hosted on this server. Hurray for quick, easy fixes!

Adsense: $34.21
eBook Sales: $44.87
Amazon Affiliate: $0.
CJ Affiliates: $0.
WidgetBucks: $1.05

All time highs for both Adsense and eBooks. I think Jenny McCarthy’s media blitz really helped the eBook sales and traffic to the Autism/gluten-free cooking site considerably. I’m happy to say I finally have a month where I made over $1/day with AdSense, a goal I set for the 2nd month of CuteBabyFix.com being online – it’s six months late, but at least I finally made it.

WidgetBucks is a new advertiser that I started with about 1/2 way through October. I already have $1.52 for Nov, and hope to see steady increases as the months go on. If so, it will be my 1st decent profit on an affiliate program so far. I have made NOTHING through Commission Junction despite averaging over 30K ad impressions per month. I thought I had some great product placement in October, however I only had a click through rate of 0.22% and no conversions… pathetic! Hopefully WidgetBucks’ run-in with Google won’t come back to bite me in the butt!

Other October highlights include PageRank promotions of both CuteBabyFix.com and Woggle-Bug.com to 3 (from 1 and 2 respectively). I’m pretty jazzed about that, especially since many blogs took a huge PR hit this update. We continued to see a slow steady trickle of traffic from being posting on National Review’s Corner Blog, although nothing like the 3K hits we got in 2 days at the end of September. I think it helped bring our average RSS reader count up to 18. Finally, we hit the magic $100 number in our adsense account, so we’ll be getting a nice Christmas bonus from Google in December.

The most interesting observation is that I’ve had my best financial month ever, yet my traffic either stayed flat or dropped (depending on the site). I think there were two main things that brought that about. First, the Jenny McCarthy thing really drove more targeted traffic to Woggle-Bug. People were really looking for what we had and the cookbook eBook sales reflect it. Second, I dropped about 1/3 of my competitive ad filter from my AdSense settings. I got a lot more $0.01 clicks, but also a lot more clicks overall, boosting my total revenue for AdSense. This month I’ll weed through the rest of the list and see if the trend continues. I’m definitely skeptical of blocking the low-paying clicks after October’s income improvement.

Future plans: With my next major goal being $300/month, I’m hoping to make math work in my favor . With two active sites (I really haven’t monetized this one much) making an average of $1.36 a day, I’ll need 18 sites to hit the $300/month goal. Assuming we can keep performance like October’s going, I could do it with 7 sites. My goal for November is to get two more sites up and running, and post more regularly to this one (so I can monetize it as well). The new sites will be a Mormon Clip Art site (which I’m seeing fairly low CPM ads for so far, but I’m hopeful to find other revenue streams) and the re-birth of our Removing Cat Pee site (which I lost in a bad server crash). I may also try my hand at another couple of eBooks, as we’re having some great success with the Gluten Free Cookbooks. I know it will take a while to get the sites fully populated with content and making decent money, but getting the structure in place will be the first step!

1. Figure out who to send the DMCA letter(s) to. Ideally, you’ll send one to the site owner, one to their web hosting company, and one to Google (cause Google rules the world, right?). You can get the site’s owner and technical contact info by running a ‘whois’ search on the URL. Sam Spade is my favorite, but any of the thousands of sites out there will work. Your results will look something like this (fearaid.org runs a splog that scrapes my sister-in-law’s blog – this tutorial is dedicated to her):
   

   (Asked whois.pir.org:43 about fearaid.org)

   Domain ID: D134551157-LROR
   Domain Name: FEARAID.ORG
   Created On: 07-Dec-2006 21: 09: 48 UTC
   Last Updated On: 13-Sep-2007 22: 49: 07 UTC
   Expiration Date: 07-Dec-2007 21: 09: 48 UTC
   Sponsoring Registrar: Directi Internet Solutions d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.Com (R27-LROR)
   Status: OK
   Registrant ID: DI_4999251
   Registrant Name: Catherine Martinez
   Registrant Organization: N/A
   Registrant Street1: Providencia 2113
   Registrant Street2:
   Registrant Street3:
   Registrant City: Santiago
   Registrant State/Province: Atacama
   Registrant Postal Code: 234213
   Registrant Country: CL Registrant Phone: 562.315631
   Registrant Phone Ext.:
   Registrant FAX:
   Registrant FAX Ext.:
   Registrant Email: catherinemartine@gmail.com
   
   

   Especially if the site owner is not in the US, you’ll want to send a DMCA letter to their hosting company as well, which has a better chance of being US based. You can do a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address of the site – in Sam Spade, just click on the ip address in the listing and it will take you to the information on the company that ‘owns’ the ip address their server is running. You’ll end up with something like this:

   (Asked whois.arin.net:43 about +209.163.229.240)

   OrgName:    Time Warner Telecom  Inc.
   OrgID:      TWTC
   Address:    10475 Park Meadows Drive
   City:       Littleton
   StateProv:  CO
   PostalCode: 80124
   Country:    US
   ReferralServer: rwhois: //rwhois.twtelecom.net: 4321
   NetRange:   209.163.128.0 - 209.163.255.255
   CIDR:       209.163.128.0/17
   NetName:    TWTC-NETBLK-12
   NetHandle:   NET-209-163-128-0-1
   Parent:     NET-209-0-0-0-0
   NetType:    Direct Allocation
   NameServer: NS1.IPLT.TWTELECOM.NET
   NameServer: NS1.MILW.TWTELECOM.NET
   NameServer: NS1.ORNG.TWTELECOM.NET
   Comment:    ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
   RegDate:    1997-11-12
   Updated:    2004-02-18
   OrgAbuseHandle: TWTAD-ARIN
   OrgAbuseName:   Time Warner Telecom Abuse Desk
   OrgAbusePhone:  1-800-898-6473
   OrgAbuseEmail:  abuse@twtelecom.net OrgNOCHandle: TDN1-ARIN
   OrgNOCName:   TWTC Data NOC
   OrgNOCPhone:  1-800-898-6473
   OrgNOCEmail:  support@twtelecom.net
   OrgTechHandle: NST12-ARIN
   OrgTechName:   NOC SWIP Team
   OrgTechPhone:  1-800-898-6473
   OrgTechEmail:  swip@twtelecom.com
   OrgName:    Virtual Internet Systems
   OrgID:      VIS-66
   Address:    1307 Robincreek CV
   City:       Lewisville
   StateProv:  TX
   PostalCode: 75067
   Country:    US
   NetRange:   209.163.228.0 - 209.163.229.255
   CIDR:       209.163.228.0/23
   NetName:    TWTC-VISY-3
   NetHandle:   NET-209-163-228-0-1
   Parent:     NET-209-163-128-0-1
   NetType:    Reallocated
   Comment:
   RegDate:    2006-05-15
   Updated:    2006-05-15
   OrgTechHandle: VIS4-ARIN
   OrgTechName:   Virtual Internet Systems
   OrgTechPhone:  1-972-221-8416
   OrgTechEmail:  chris@visy.com
   
   

   If you end up with multiple companies, it’s best to contact all of them. In this category, most of the email and fax listings will be accurate, so it’s not a major expense.

   You’ll also want to keep Google in the loop, as they can carry a lot of clout. Their DMCA information page has their address and fax number as well. They do requite notification in writing, so you’ll need to warm up the fax machine or scrape up a stamp. You can also contact the Adsense Team, cutting off the revenue stream of the splog.

2. Compose your letter(s) – the simplest could be something like this:
   

   Subject: DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement

   To whom it may concern,

   I am writing to inform you that the site spamblog.com contains copyrighted content from my site(s). Specifically, the text and images appearing at www.mysite.com/index.html and www.mysite.com/content.html

   The offending copyrighted material is located at www.spamblog.com/index.html and www.spamblog.com/clicktheads.com

   If you need more information, I can be reached at myemail@mysite.com or via phone 216-555-5555 and my mailing address is John Doe, 123 Main St., Schenectady, NY 12345.

   I have sent email requests to the owner of the offending site at spammer@spamblog.com requesting the offending material be removed, but have not received any reply.

   I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

   I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

   My signature below serves as my legal electronic signature.

   John Doe
   October 16, 2007

   If you would like more formal letters to be sent via fax or snail-mail, some excellent templates are available at www.mcanerin.com:
   Google DMCA – MS Word Document (32k)
   ISP DMCA – MS Word Document (38k)

3. Follow up. You should give the recipients an appropriate delivery time plus 5-7 days to respond. If you don’t hear back from them re-send your letters. If you are mailing them, you might want to send them certified mail – it costs $2.65, but will definitely get the attention of the recipient. Those little green tags can put the fear of legislation into companies who assume that you are starting to gather official documentation for a case against them. Also move up the food chain as much as you can. Often cheap, inexpensive, spammy blogs are run on the cheapest possible hosting available. Cheap hosting is often provided through a reseller, who buys bulk hosting from a big hosting company and re-sells it. Many resellers are shoestring operations who don’t respond to any email from anyone for months. As you move up the digital food chain you’ll eventually reach a company with enough lawyers hanging around that they are appropriately respectful of a DMCA notice. They’ll let their reseller know that unless they want their entire operation frozen that they need to take care of the problem in a timely manner.

I’ve seen this process work in as short as a few minutes (email sent, and content removed by the webmaster almost immediately). I have also heard of cases where both the registrant and hosting company were internationally located and thumbed their noses at the DMCA takedown requests. Of course, if someone is stealing your english-language content, they are probably targeting US readers, with US based advertisers. Keep hitting the advertisers and they’ll have no reason to run the blog.

If this helps, leave me a comment and let me know how it works for you.