There are quite a few services out there that provide a mechanism for digital downloads, most of them are cart based or even store based (their store on their site). This puts you at the mercy of their approval process and can shut down your income in a flash if they don’t like what your are selling. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could just sell some digital file on your site, receive the money directly in your PayPal account and automate the file delivery?

Try BitBuffet.com For Selling Files Online!

I’ve been using BitBuffet.com to sell my Wordpress themes at GazelleThemes.com and haven’t hit any snags at all. I just upload the zip file containing my theme and copy the button code onto my website. I even get email notifications when I receive a sale and nice flash charts showing my past sales (including a massive database for searching past sales).

I can set how long the download links are active and how many times they can download. After the time is up, the link no longer works. I can send freebie to friends and resend lost download links. Each download link is unique and expires according to your settings.

Sell Albums or MP3’s On Your MySpace/Band Website

Since my band Glass Cannon is getting ready to release our debut album, I can also use BitBuffet.com to host and sell an album. Again, all I’ll need to do is make a zip of the file, upload it to BitBuffet.com and copy the button to my bands site (or MySpace). All they have to do is click, pay through PayPal and check their email!

Sell Photos From Your Online Portfolio/Flickr

Although I’m not a photographer (I just play one on TV), I can see photographers selling their high resolution files to interested buyers. Since the files are securely hosted, you don’t have to worry about people stealing your work by sharing a download link (each is unique and expires according to your settings).

Sell Any Digital File From Your Site

It doesn’t matter what it is! Software, images, designs, HTML/CSS themes, Wordpress Themes, Joomla! Themes, Woopra Themes, MP3’s, Albums, eBooks, vector images… you name it! If it is digital, BitBuffet.com offers the easiest way to deliver the file with after PayPal payments!

Some of the Features:

• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Sales
• Keep Your Profits
• Pay Flat-Fee Month-to-Month or Yearly
• Payment Directly Into Seller’s Personal PayPal Account

Check out BitBuffet.com today and let me know in the comments what you think!

A sample email. Simple easy.

Finally, after months of tweaking and building, I’ve launched Rankiac.com, a super charged automatic Google rank checker. It’s a dandy little SEO tool that doesn’t do a whole heck of a lot, but what it does, it does well. At the moment, it (1) tracks rankings in Google, (2) watches your important links and (3) keeps track of backlinks (and lets you know when it finds a new one!). Oh, and it emails you an update every morning! That last feature was key for me.

So, what’s it do?

Well, it does just what I mentioned before! Tracks keyword rankings in Google (hundreds of them!), hyperlinks between sites (we watch out for pesky no-follows), and backlinks (from Yahoo’s Site Explorer). But my favorite feature is by far and away daily emails.

Daily Emails!

How I love rolling out of bed in the morning (or lately is been afternoon…) and checking all my ranks from my iPhone’s email app. Anywhere you want, its easy access to a simple method that keeps you in the loop. I tend to forget to look at my other keywords, but Rankiac never forgets. Its handy.

Charting

I also love charts. Rankiac has ‘em. See how each of your keywords is doing over time and plan accordingly. Link building making your domains slowly increase in rankings? Double check with one click. Oh, also, you can download all the data in CSV format as well, in case you wanna play with the data yourself.

If you’re interested, here’s a coupon: zr6voq1y. Just sign up and enter it in your profile!

It’s good for the first 25 users and gives you 91 days free (in addition to the 14 day free trial!). After that, I think it runs about 11 cents a day, or less that 3 and a half bucks a month when you buy a year!

So what are you waiting for, go sign up at Rankiac!

PS: I’ve also built two little baby sites for those who want a simple Google rank checker or fast reciprocal link checker on the fly!

I run a few websites (lets just say over a dozen) so I generally spend a lot of my time optimizing and tweaking these sites. My first site, a free guitar lesson resource, survives solely off of Adsense. I like Adsense, its easy to use, is extremely popular, and there are is no shortage of willing advertisers.

I receive decent traffic from all three of the big search engines, and while the night may still be quite young, I can already see which site I am leaning towards as my favorite search engine…

A comparison of revenue earning power.

Thanks to Google Analytics’s handy Adsense integration, I can see exactly which keywords will give me better eCPM, or “the estimated revenue from AdSense per thousand ad page views”. Out of my largest referrers, the highest eCPM earners are…

1. Bing with 425% of average eCPM!
2. Yahoo! with 188% of average eCPM.
3. Direct (no referral) at 98% of average eCPM.
4. Google with 71% of average eCPM.

Now these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, I haven’t controlled for other variables, like landing pages, keywords or traffic numbers. However, a cursory overview tells me that any set of numbers with a extreme deviations from the average warrant further investigation. Discuss this, I will.

What’s going on?

Well, Bing and Yahoo! both rank me much, much higher on my target terms than Google (think top 5 vs. top 50). So right off the bat, I am thinking of this in a couple ways:

1. Bing and Yahoo! are both sending me much more relevant traffic. Therefore the users are more engaged with the site, and are more willing to explore relevant advertising offers.
2. Bing and Yahoo! are both sending me much less relevant traffic. Therefore the users are less engaged with the site, and want to click away from the site through advertisements.
3. Google users are more web savvy, and tend to ignore the branding of the the Google Adsense ads (they do have a distinct look).

Well which is it? Well, let me bring in some more information: bounce rates. Bounce rates are great indicators of whether people stick around on your site or not, the lower the bounce rate, the better. Low bounce rates mean users spend more time on your site, time that is likely to translate to favorable actions (bookmarking, ad clicking, etc.), so there might be a little harmonizing amongst the data… Let us explore:

1. Yahoo! with a BR of 38.06%.
2. Bing with a BR of 39.52%.
3. Direct (no referral) with a BR of 45.37%.
4. Google with a BR of 50.98%.

Anyway you slice it, this doesn’t look good for Google. Google has the highest bounce rate of the bunch, even higher than the site average. Yahoo! and Bing are both neck and neck. And they make me more money per click-through, Win-win! However, in all fairness, they are sending traffic from different search terms. Yahoo! and Bing just seem to be better at choosing relevant search terms at the moment.

The last theory I put forth was one that suggests that Google users are a little less advertisement prone than their counterparts at Bing and Yahoo!. Perhaps this is true since most folks are learning of Bing through Microsoft’s big ad campaign. Sheeple in, sheeple out. Coincidence!? Probably. Who knows.

Why is it so?

Well, in reality, it may not be so. The data isn’t very normalized. In fact, as of right now, both Bing and Yahoo! combined only send about 1/5 of the traffic Google sends. But this number is growing everyday, so we’ll have to come back in a couple months to see if this changes.

But as for now, I am thinking Bing and Yahoo! are both ranking me better for keywords I know my site is good for. Google just seems to be pickier (and a little less efficient in this case). My suggestion would be to get you some Bing traffic and see for yourself.

Whoever is reading this and has a soft spot for statistics of any sort, perhaps you can put forth some clarifications or suggestions. I’d love it.

Edit: Now with the Yahoo!/Bing deal, let’s hope these numbers hold up and more traffic comes pouring through.

Just this weekend, I launched my take on collaborative music online. I am sure there are already sites out there that do this, but I wanted to focus on the layering concept of creating music with a multitrack editor. Anyone who’s ever recorded with a single microphone knows the process of layering subsequent tracks well. You start with a click track or something similar and build up from that, one layer at a time.

I really think that this process opens up a ton of new possibilities in music creation by allowing people from all musical backgrounds to share and mix increasingly unique songs. We even provide the free drum samples if you can provide the beats.

It’s 100% free and you can check it out at http://letsj.am. I encourage you to log in and post a few tracks or layers yourself. There’s also a tutorial/wiki if you want to learn a little about the process. Feel free to leave a comment or suggestion here, or drop me a message.

This has been added in 2.8! Don’t install this if you have 2.8! Read this instead.

This little plug-in adds a fancy little description field to the “Edit Tag” pane in Wordpress. It also adds a function called single_tag_description(); that does just that but only on the tag page. Not really sure why the tag description isn’t available by default, seems like it would be pretty useful. Basically, you can describe your tags and echo that description on each tag page with the above function; pretty simple!

Please enjoy and note that some of the code came from a thread I read on Wordpress.org, but some of it came from extracting similar core code, I just made it into a Wordpress plugin. Download it now.

If you’d like some customization done on the theme, I refer you to the stellar Magatheme Pro Package Wordpress Magazine Theme with customization! It’s got all the options you all asked for, built-in! Everything from an awesome tab slider and homepage layout to drop down menus and a couple subtle color schemes are ready out of the box. So check it out!

Well, I just got finished with the brand new Magatheme (1.0.5)! Ultimately, I’ll incorporate a full front page outline (Pro Edition), just like your favorite magazine themes have, but until then you’ll just have to enjoy this classy, minimalistic Wordpress theme just like any other Plain Jane theme.

But wait! If you download within the next 15 minutes you get…

• A classy, minimalistic design!
• 3 column, golden ratio deduced layout!
• A cool, slightly blue ice color scheme!
• Six sidebars! Count them, six!
  • Wide Sidebar
  • Left Sidebar
  • Right Sidebar
  • Left Footbar
  • Mid Footbar
  • Right Footbar
• Completely valid XHTML and CSS!
• Wordpress 2.7 compatibility!
• Zebra striped comments!
• Highlighted author comments!
• (Pro) Selectable magazine or blog style homepage.
• (Pro) Over 15 widget ready locations.
• (Pro) 4 color schemes.
• (Pro) No-edit ad and tracking integration.
• (Pro) Feedburner integration.
• (Pro) Drop down menus and fancy homepage tab slider.
• (Pro) Hide/show author, date, categories, tags, and comment sections.

Leave a comment below and let me know what you think of the theme! I’d love to hear it. Perhaps your suggestions will make it into the next version.

PS: I haven’t tested IE6 yet, let me know if it works for you! It works in IE6!

Download it now! or View the Demo! or View the Pro Demo!