First site is a blog, Work Awesome. The blog is all about the art of being awesome and productive at work. It currently have 12000+ RSS readers and generate an average monthly profit of $1200. Not bad at all, but until know the blog has been maintained by paid guest writers. New owner will have to produce the content himself, or continue to pay the team. At the time I’m writing this article, higher bid on Work Awesome is $11,000.

• View Work Awesome on Flippa

Second site is Snipplr.com, a very big user-powered code snippet site with thousands of snippets for almost all programming languages. I definitely like this site, and would have maybe considered buying it if I had more time and more money to invest.

Snipplr is a popular site, with 32,000+ registered users, 900,000+ pageviews per month and a pagerank of 5. That said, Envato haven’t monetized the site. The current auction is $15,000.

• View Snipplr on Flippa

Good luck to biders!

Today, I’d like to show you a simple piece of code that can replace words of your choice by an affiliate link. It’s simple, it’s free, and it works. I do not give you as much control as the plugins does, but in most cases this code should fit your needs.

Simply paste the code below into your functions.php file. Don’t forget to enter your words/links as shown in the example code.

function replace_text_wps($text){
    $replace = array(
        // 'WORD TO REPLACE' => 'REPLACE WORD WITH THIS'
        'thesis' => '<a href="http://mysite.com/myafflink">thesis</a>',
        'studiopress' => '<a href="http://mysite.com/myafflink">studiopress</a>'
    );
    $text = str_replace(array_keys($replace), $replace, $text);
    return $text;
}

add_filter('the_content', 'replace_text_wps');
add_filter('the_excerpt', 'replace_text_wps');

Have fun! This code is courtesy of Kevin Chard from WpSnipp, so big thanks to him!

Of course, you can use the good old “Save As” function of your web browser. But storing one (or more) HTML pages, separated images, and a whole bunch of JavaScript files is not really user-friendly.

Web2PDF Converter is a very useful tool that convert any webpage into a PDF file. It works great: I’ve converted 5 pages and all where the exact copy of the html version.

This very handy tool have more to offer: You can email an url and receive the PDF back. You can also add a bookmarklet to your browser for faster archiving.

• Visit Web2PDF Converter

Happilly, I found a really good alternative named Oxwall. It’s open source, it’s free, and it’s written using PHP.

Oxwall features most of the things who made Facebook a succesful website: Wall, photo management, friends, activity, groups, and so on. But the best feature in my opinion is that you can either download the software and install it on your own server, or use Oxwall’s Wall.fm service to create your own network just like you’ll create a blog on WordPress.com.

• Visit Oxwall.
• View the demo.

Copy Paste Character make special characters easy to deal with: Simply click on the selected character to have it copied to your clipboard.

• Visit Copy Paste Character

Almost everyday, a new psd file is added to the site. You can download the files and use them at your convenience, even commercially. Quality is always high and the blog, despite being very young, already reached 1300+ RSS readers.

• Visit Premium Pixels

Launched a few days ago, Min.us is an all image uploading service. It’s dead simple: Drop an image into your browser window, and Min.us will upload it, create a short url, and archive it for you. All that in a second. It’s simple and it works great.

A bad point, though: Min.us do not offer upload of non-images files. It would have been a great feature for developers.

• Visit Min.us.

CatsWhoBlog recently turned one, one the past year have been really exiting. Though, since last August I’ve became less interested in the “blogging tips” niche. Why? Because there’s already lots of people who blogs about blogging, and despite CWB reached some success it didn’t became as successful as I wished.

I faced a dilemna: Should I let the site die, or should I sell it? Or maybe, should I change its editorial line? I’ve chose this last option. Now, CatsWhoBlog is going to point out the useful stuff for bloggers, designers and developers. What does that mean? That I’ll share stuff that will make your online life better.

I hope you’ll enjoy the CatsWhoBlog rebirth! First “new” post is comming in a few hours, so stay tuned!

In this article, I’ll show you how to efficiently cross promote your sites and blogs.

Why cross-promotion works

[tweet] When I launched CatsWhoCode back in June 2008, I remember how hard it was to get traffic and readers. I have to submit my posts on all social bookmarking sites I knew, tweet, and post very often.

Now, when I publish a post, I have hundreds of visitors within minutes. Regarding Twitter, with almost 6000 followers, I can tell you that each time I tweet a link, it receive at least 50 unique visitors.

As an example, hear are CatsWhoBlog stats for the ten first days of July. As you can see, CatsWhoCode is the website that provide the most traffic to CWB (Exepted Google, of course)

Tips for efficient cross-promotion

Avoid announcement posts: They suck. Excepetd in rare cases, that kind of post (Which is nothing more than an advertisment) will be extremely quickly forgotten by your regular readers and will not attract new visitors.

Promote the useful way Instead of asking your readers to visit your new site, make them want to go see it. For example, you can introduce your new blog by using it as an example. This is what I’ve done on this CWC post named How to create a side blog with WordPress 3.0. The post is an useful tutorial which use my coupons page as an example. Result: 288 Retweets as I type this post.

Don’t be boring: I may be stating the obvious, but boring your users with repeated announcement or tweets will not make them visit your new site at all.
Making a site popular takes lot of time, even if you already have an established blog. Don’t rush your readers, focus on creating good content for them, and they’ll visit your new blog sooner or later.

Don’t use your ad space for your own projects: Excepted in rar cases, you should sell your ad space, not use it for your own projects. Why? Because as the blog owner you can use your content to promote another site of yours, and this will work better than putting a graphic banner in your sidebar.

And you, do you cross-promote your blogs? Do you plan to do it soon? Let me know.

Launching a new blog is never easy. First, you have to make it known to the audience and get it indexed by search engines. But the biggest part of the work is to show your authority and make visitors come back to your blog. After launching several websites myself, I’m going to show you 5 tips to launch your blog successfully.

Start working before your blog is live

[tweet]Once they decided they want to blog, most people just pick a domain name, buy some hosting, install WordPress and start blogging. Cool, you have a blog, now what?

A young blog have to prove it’s usefulness and the blogger behind it have to show his ability to keep the blog running. This is why you should always have 10 to 20 posts ready to be published when launching your blog.

In order to keep your first visitors interested, it is a good idea to publish often (Once a day or once every two days) but don’t forget to always put quality over quantity.

Don’t waste your time with a “Welcome on my blog” post. Excepted if you’re already well known from another blog, people don’t care about who you are. What they’re looking for is quality content. They’ll get to know you later.

Communicate

While success is definitely not going to happen without quality content, content is nothing if you don’t promote it. People will not guess that you have a cool blog. It’s your job to told them about.

So, how to communicate about your new blog? First, get on Twitter and start making friends. To gain attention from more experienced bloggers, retweet their posts, digg/bump/stumble when they ask for it and then, start the conversation.

Twitter is really a great tool to promote your blog, but of course, that’d be too easy if you just had to create a Twitter account and tweet about how great your blog is.
Another efficient way to make new friends and get your blog known is joining a forum. I just created one on CatsWhoBlog where bloggers can meet with others and discuss blogging or monetization.
Have a look at it, and join if you like..

Cross promote your new blog on your other sites

One of my favorite promotion technique is cross-promotion: The “art” of using site A to promote site B, and vice-versa. If you already own a blog, don’t hesitate to use it to promote your new site. Try to avoid boring anouncement posts and introduce your new blog on a more subtle way.
A good example is this post I wrote on CatsWhoCode, which used my other site PHP Snippets as a live demo.

If you don’t have any other blogs, what about finding a blogger in your niche and cross-promote your respective blogs? I have never tried it myself, but that sounds like a good plan.

Work as hard as you can

Despite what some people (those who try to make you buy their clickbank products) says, success is not going to happen without work. While there’s no miracle formula for success, from my own experience I can say that if you have the following 4 points:

• Interesting content
• Frequent updates
• Heavy promotion
• Strong communication

Then it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be successful. A good example of it is Jad Limcaco, owner of Design Informer.

In less than 6 months, due to his hard work, dedication and strong communication skills, Jad managed to make his blog popular among the design community, even if the competition is particulary hard in that niche.

Don’t give up

I already said it numerous times, but time is the blogger’s best friend. Today CatsWhoCode.com is pretty popular in its niche, but two years ago it was just “one more web development” blog.
I had to work very hard to make what CWC is today. I had to write, promote, and more important, I had to believe the blog had the potential to be successful.

Sometimes you may be tempted to say “I failed. I worked hard but my blog isn’t successful”. It happens to everyone and it happened to me. But don’t give up. A blog is rarely successful before at least one year of presence on the internet.

Blogging is not a sprint. It’s a long distance run.