I’m not sure if I’ve written about this on the blog before, but it’s something which has been plaguing me in terms of putting a large dent in my funds, and a larger dent in my online business activities due to unproductive Internet speeds.

Who’s the culprit? … Chariot NetConnect: www.chariot.net.au

(eek, just writing the name makes my blood pressure rise)

The Story

The story begins when moving up here to uni. As you can probably guess, being an online browsing/business/technology junkie means that I tend to be quite a heavy Net user especially with the recent emergence of podcasts, vidcast and all sorts of knowledge-juicy media.

Back home (Moruya), we were on a 512kbps connection with a download cap of 20GB and paying $50 a month. That bandwidth would be maxed out for most of the day as I downloaded and browsed, while my little brother played Warcraft3 24/7 (sad I know :)). It was also quite easy for me to go over that 20GB cap in a month and be shaped back down to 64kbps.

Uni begins…

Either I or my mum decided that it would probably be better for me to live on campus at least for the first year, so that I’ll meet a lot of people and make some good friends, which I know I have done more-so than a few people I know who live off-campus. So I moved up here and settled into Campus East (located in Fairy Meadow, about a 20min bike ride from the actual Uni).

It’s not too shabby here, there’s about 500+ people so it’s always lively. There’s 2 big screen TV areas, a gym, a couple of big open soccer and footy fields, a big dining room, and is about a 3min walk to the beach… Although I must admit that the beaches up here are about a 1/10 when you compare them to any beaches down south.

Where it completely sucks is in the prices.

I’m in catered, so that’s 19 meals a week. I think catered is the better option as otherwise I think I either wouldn’t eat or I’d end up eating complete junk food. The only problem is that it costs $200 a week. If I shared a house/apartment with a few people I could probably get through the week on around half of that. But otherwise considering I don’t have to cook, buy food, washup, clean my room, pay for water or electricity etc, it’s alright.

However, Internet access at UOW is completely primitive. To be able to use the ethernet port in my room to access the Net I am charged $14 a week!

Now since my computer was smouldering for the first two weeks of Uni, I was using the computer lab here to check emails etc using my Uni Quota. The Quota they give you is 100MB of download over 6 whole months! The thing is that it’s quite easy to “download” 100MB of data in a day while just surfing websites. So before 0-week had finished I’d used all that quota. Woohoo, I now can’t access any external sites at Uni. I tried to get more quota was denied… maybe they don’t like me browsing the YE forums

So when I’d managed to fix my computer and I’d run out of quota, the campus offers only one option for me to get net access from my room… through a company called Chariot (dead-company-walking!). I’ve since found out that every single UOW campus have this same setup and only have the one ISP to choose from.

What are the prices you ask?

Don’t look at the prices on Chariot’s website, they charge totally different prices for students.

You should make sure you’re sitting down to read this…

Plans Available to Students:

- $1 per hour
- $25 for 500MB (once off, NOT per month, if it runs out you have to buy more)
- something in between (can’t find the price sheet currently)
- $132 for 4GB (same as above and is the maximum download limit available)

Connection Speed:

- 256kbps… the slowest ADSL broadband speed possible in Australia

“OMFG WTFH FBS!”

Yep.

Why not go wireless then? … Well I looked into that and there are only a few providers available in the area. I believe Telstra is the only one available currently, but if you checkout their prices they’re actually worse! Another company is Fish Telecom, whos prices are a lot better, but I would need to fix an antenna on the roof and run a cable out my window and up the wall for it to work. The likeliness of that being allowed is pretty slim.

So I decided since I often hit the 20GB per month mark, a download option would end up costing me around $660 a month. Hmm, I think I’ll go the $1 per hour system.

That ended up being a bad move. Since not only do I tend to download a lot, but I also spend a lot of hours on the Net. I’ve since decided I have to stop downloading things like Diggnation and transferred over to the 4GB option.

Fast forward 3 months and I’ve forked out around $600 for Internet access. That’s around $200 a month. Imagine what kind of plan I could have got for that amount!

The Action

Now I’m not the stereotypical student who protests about everything and anything, but you’ve got to agree with me that this is a monopoly.

So I’ve been complaining to the max.

I’ve contacted the head of Campus East, but he wasn’t terribly helpful and basically said to fill out this survey of the accommodation services (the same one I’m sure they’ve been running for the last couple of years). I’ve also contacted the Uni and the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission).

And to top it off last Friday I had a meeting with an IT staff and accommodation services staff at Uni. Well that was very interesting and I sense many shady deals and contracts in the background here which I plan to get to the bottom of.

To cut the meeting short, they basically pulled out some abusive (definitely not threatening) emails I’d sent to Chariot after their replies to previous emails I’d sent were frustrating. Funnily enough in one of the emails I mentioned that hopefully they enjoy the ACCC knocking on their door. So I believe Chariot must have shat themselves and then forwarded (is this a breech of privacy?) the emails to the Head IT Support Guy to “sort me out” I presume… So they are basically trying to blackmail me.

Rather than kickup a protest, they’d prefer me to keep it quiet and go through the “appropriate channels” which I am yet to be told about… who else do I need to complain to?!

I mentioned I could quite easily setup a petition/survey and have on-campus students voice their opinions, but that was quickly shut-down with comments like “petitions do very little” and “you don’t want to be known as that kid from campus who kicked up a fuss about everything”. Hmm, I don’t really care… I’m still going to setup a petition.

I’ve also setup a thread on the Whirlpool Forums and through there I got into contact with a guy who runs Fish Telecom (who also do wireless). He was saying that they’ve been trying to lobby to be able to compete with Chariot in the campuses for a few years now. So obviously there must be some kind of ridiculous contract in place between Chariot and UOW and some big kickbacks in place for the Uni.

Very shady, very dodgy… but I’ll get to the bottom of it.

Nathan Waters
Net Activist?

As you may have noticed in the forums and on this blog, I’ve been adding little teaser snippets of this so called “pixel advertising site”. After around 4 months of off-and-on work, a lot of coding and a lot of cursing, I have finally finished it! So without further ado, here it is:

Where?

Oh you want to see it? … www.pixTower.com

PS, if there are any issues with displaying the site, please let me know

What?

pixTower is a novelty project that has potential to be successful if not in producing some nice revenues, then definitely in building a profile for myself in the wider community.

If you haven’t worked it out yet, pixTower is a tall virtual tower made up of smaller apartments. The apartments (pixPartments) have been designed and created by either an individual or business and in the form of isometric pixel art. If you hover your mouse over each pixPartment you can see the details of that particular resident or advertiser. Click on the pixPartment and checkout that advertisers’ website… simple.

How?

How did I come up with the idea?

Essentially it is a mashup between the infamous Million Dollar Homepage and an awesome site I found a few years ago called Mr Wong’s Soup’Partments. Checkout the pixTower About page for more details.

So combine them and you get a tall virtual tower (pixTower) onto which people can purchase an apartment (pixPartment).

Why?

Everyone knows the MDHP success, but many clone sites have failed to see their mistakes in entering an over-saturated niche with an idea that lacks any innovation or uniqueness.

Despite this I have noticed that some clone sites have managed to make upwards of $145,000. (makes you think twice before dissing some kid for releasing a mdhp clone :D)

The thing that I saw these clone sites failing to noticed was why Alex Tew’s MDHP actually was a success.

Traffic.

How’d he get traffic? Well in my opinion it was not because people continued to checkout his site because they wanted to look at the ads and click the links… that may have been their second action when visiting the site, but not the reason in visiting it in the first place.

I believe it was because they wanted to see how many pixels he’d sold… i.e how much money he’d made. That and the curiosity factor achieved through word of mouth. (If someone told you a uni student was planning on making $1million dollars and everyone was talking about it, could you hold yourself back from visiting the site? … Probably not.)

To receive traffic to your website you need something to attract people to it. Sounds obvious doesn’t it, but MDHP clones have and continue to fail to see this.

Now Mr Wong’s tower was begun and “terminated” sometime back in 2002, which is a long time ago when looking at Internet trends in places such as online advertising (Google Adsense was only introduced in 2003!). But that tower managed to house 406 residents which is a great achievement. The site has no ability to click on the apartments, website links are displayed as images, there is no blog, there is no newsletter etc… and yet it reached 406 residents before the project was terminated (reason unknown to me). I’m sure the site also received a nice flow of traffic in its day, simply because if you begin to look at the interesting and plain crazy apartments it becomes addictive!

Fast forward to 2006, pixTower is fresh and exciting, riding on the back of the ripples of a potential tide rise (waves have passed). Add linking, hover and descriptions to each apartment, add a blog which helps with SEO, add a newsletter which is a great marketing tool… package it all up, add a few competitions, hit the marketing/advertising solid and hopefully traffic will flow to checkout the buzz and hopefully get addicted enough to maintain steady traffic and give advertisers no reason to backoff paying the small cost for permanent exposure.

Where to from here?

Now begins the advertising and marketing stage … in some ways the fun part compared to the tedious coding of the last few months.

In writing this I am still yet to send out a press release, and yet requests for apartments are rolling in due to an email out I did to those on Mr Wong’s tower (sadly most emails were invalid due to the age of the site). If you’ve noticed that some of the pixPartments are the same as a few on his tower it is because they specifically gave me permission to use their apartment on pixTower. I will make sure I mention this on the pixTower Blog to avoid any possible rumours from spreading :).

I have written a press release and getting ready to send it out to a bunch of online PR sites and also do a few printed copies and send them to local newspapers.

After that I have a 4 page list of other things to do and places to promote pixTower. If the steps in this prove to workout, I’ll be sure to let you guys in on the “secrets”. As again, subscribe to the blog and I’ll keep you posted.

On a side note, I think I found that post very easy to write. Why? … I just checked my feedburner stats for this blog and in the last two days subscribers have shot up from something like 4 to 16! Wow! … It could just be a sudden influx of readers due to pixTower announcements, but having actual subscribers is a great motivator. Thanks for reading guys!

Nathan Waters
pixPreneur or pixCrazy?

Steve Pavlina is on a roll

I would definitely have to rate his latest post, 10 Tips For College Students, as the best blog post I have read this year.

I wish he had written this before I stumbled into uni as it would have been very helpful.

He goes through a couple of very good time management techniques for getting through uni/college and getting the most out of the experience.

I’ve been thinking again lately that next session/semester I might drop Computer Engineering which I’m finding to be very boring so far… since they’re doing subjects such as Physics, Maths, Electronics and C Programming… all of which I don’t believe I will ever need to use in my entrepreneurial career.

I’m not going to completely drop out of uni just yet, I’ll go back to Commerce where I think I’ll find more of a passion for the subject matter. However it means I either have to catch up or complete a few of the missed subjects during the 3 month summer session when everyone has their break.

So if I do decide to go that direction, these tips for uni time management will be very handy.

Nathan Waters
Time is an issue.

All I can say is “wow”, this is an awesome resource. Steve Pavlina, the one-stop guy/blog for all personal development information, has just posted a very lengthy, but very informative article on how to make a good living income from blogging.

He goes through steps he has taken to grow his traffic and income from 0 to substantial levels after just 16 months. He now receives around 1.1million visitors per month and generates around $5000 per month mainly from Adsense.

I will briefly list a few of the things he wrote about, but be sure to checkout his post for more detailed explanations.

Be web savvy

You need to know the basics of blogging. This doesn’t need to include PHP, MySQL or other complicated programming (although basics in these wouldn’t hurt either). But you need to know things like RSS, comments, pings, trackbacks, SEO (search engine optimisation), tagging, traffic stats etc.

Take risks, try new things

Don’t be scared of failing and always be prepared to adapt to change. Experiment with new ideas or sources of income generation. The blogosphere is a rapidly changing beast so you need to stay ahead of it or get gobbled up

Have an income-generation strategy

Write it down. How much do you want to be making in X months time? How will you do this? What sources of income will you use? Affiliate programs, PPC programs, sell products/services?

Traffic… a must have

Income won’t come without traffic. Steve has some very simple advice for how he built his traffic:

1. Create valuable content
2. Create original content
3. Create timeless content
4. Write for human beings first, computers second
5. Know why you want a high-traffic site
6. Let your audience see the real you
7. Write what is true for you, and learn to live with the consequences
8. Treat your visitors like real human beings
9. Keep money in its proper place
10. If you forget the first nine suggestions, just focus on genuinely helping people, and the rest will take care of itself
11. Blog Carnivals!

Don’t blog for money

Don’t do it. Blog for other reasons before blogging for money. Only 1% of bloggers actually make a living from solely blogging, so the probability of you making money is very slim… don’t set your sights on the dollars or it’ll affect other areas of your blog such as article quality and just general motivation.

Multiple streams of income

Having more than just the one income stream is very important. If one happens to fail overnight, then you will always have something to fall back on. The regular methods are mentioned including Adsense, Donations, Text Link Ads, Chitika eMiniMalls, Amazon and LinkShare.

Choose a niche, in something you’re passionate about

Write a list of all the things you’re passionate about, if one of these fit into a large niche and there is little to no competition, then you may very well have a winner. An integral part is having the passion, as it will help keep you motivated for those many months where it seems your efforts get you no where.

Luck and timing

This is my own little point, but I think it holds true for almost any blog or site. There is so much competition between sites on the Net and the area is so rapidly changing, that involves a great deal of luck and just the right timing to build a site from nothing to a successful traffic-generating and income-generating machine.

One major thing I did take away from reading the article was that Blog Carnivals are a great way to build blog traffic early on. I haven’t actually tried out a blog carnival, so I’ll have to give it a go soon and report back on the results.

Nathan Waters
Traffic <> Income

Typical hey!

You get a site right the the brink of being able to launch it, and then you find out that a major function of the site has been ignored and you search hours and hours for a solution, only to find it won’t be so easy to get working.

That’s the situation I’m in

The pixel site has an odd image and linking setup which I thought from the beginning should have been easy to do, so instead of working on getting that particular feature working, I’ve been making the rest of the site “perfect” (I tend to be a little bit of a perfectionist).

So now I’m thinking tomorrow night (Tuesday) I’ll stock-up on coke (the drink lol) and do an all-nighter again and see if I can fix it all. Though this most likely won’t help the sleep deprivation problem that has been growing… especially when they have a 6.45am fire drill as they did today!!!

In other news, I am extremely busy with around 10 projects (some big, some small) running at the same time right now. Which I’m thinking probably isn’t a good thing, but I want to get them out as I figure the smallish projects shouldn’t take too long. But I’ve been finding every time I come back from uni, I get straight on my computer and work non-stop for the rest of the night on the projects I’m doing…. of course except for weekends: there’s way too much fun to be had at uni when excluding the uni-work factor.

Another thing I’ll mention is I came across a potentially excellent online opportunity while searching through the “Sell a Domain” section of the forums on SitePoint. It can be dangerous in there as I found many great domains up for reasonable prices. So I came across a pretty good domain, did a quick Google search for competitors (only found 2), an Overture search for keywords (11,000+ searches for this keyword for the month of March) and an Alexa lookup (both ranked within 30,000) of the competitors I could find. The domain was up for $100, but I got it for $30 which was alright. And so I think I’ve come across a pretty good niche which myself and Tristan will try get going in the next week or two.

It may have the possibility of making some money, but otherwise it has the possibility of becoming a successful site which could bring both of us personal recognition and perhaps some sponsorship and things later on. But I’ve been questioning Adsense recently especially when I read articles like this recent one, so may have to start looking at other advertising outlets.

Nathan Waters
Rants, Updates, Woot!