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How It All Started – Part 2

Written by Brandon on February 1st, 2010 | 3 Comments

This is a continuation of part 1…

Before I continue, I just want it to be known that I will not write about and list every website I own, for obvious reasons. Although there are some I do not list, the methods used in them will be discussed in future posts.

Back in the summer of 2008, me and my brother decided to start up our own link shortening service. At this time I was entering grade 12. I had big dreams with this, create a link shortening service, make a framed bar on top and toss in some ads. Then spread the site around and start making thousands of dollars. Yeah, I was inexperienced at the time and was not fully sure how all this worked. At this time I didn’t even have any coding experience, we bought the script! That site is still up and can be found here: http://link-shrink.com. The site gets 100+ unique hits a day, where some days it exceeds 1000. It makes enough a month to keep the domain going as well as cover some hosting.

In December 2008, I wanted a place to share my programming projects as well as tutorials. Bncapps.com was born.

I was introduced to DigitalPoint shortly after. Here I spent hours reading, I was so interested in the idea of making money on the internet. I heard that Proxy sites make a decent amount and pretty fast. I set up BlindingProxy. Within a day I was getting 2000+ unique hits. It remains around today. Jumping way ahead, while on the topic of proxies I also have ByPassThe.Net

In February of 2009, I noticed the domain Tibia.Mobi was available, since it was the same as the popular game Tibia.Com, I decided to register it. I got permission from Cipsoft to be able to create a mobile version of their site. I had no knowledge of PHP at this time, but it seemed similar to Java.

Immediately I thought about how I was going to do it, I decided to use iWebkit to create an iPhone/iPod Touch style site. I started with the character lookup, I had to learn how to take user input, filter it out to prevent sql injection and process it. I had to learn cURL and all the string functions to be able to split out the data I needed to display.

This site was quite the learning experience, I was so eager to start bigger and better projects that I never got around to fully finishing it.

Next up, which started about a week after the mobile site, was http://TibiaVIPList.com, which also was related to that game. This taught me SQL and databasing from PHP. The site indexes all of the users online the game every 10 minutes and databases it. Users can add their friends to their web based friend list to see when they are online, without the need to login.

Skipping ahead 2 months into April, I had the idea of a URL shortening service that would redirect through a proxy if the link was created in that way. I created TinyBy, short for “Tiny Bypass”.
I coded the majority of this in a day or two. I never really promoted it, but currently there is more than 20,000 shortened links.

A few months after that (not giving the details of the sites that sprung up during that time just yet!) It was June. I noticed all of these Twitter Train sites coming up. They seemed to be making quite a bit of money and I wanted in on it! I looked everywhere and there was no script available, so I spent 7 hours in one day to completely code it and get it up. It failed at first as people started thinking they were phishing sites. July 10th I started to sell the script and have been making active sales since. I guess my success in selling the Twitter train script and being responsible for all the new ones caused it to be one of Shoemoney’s worste ideas of 2009, sorry!

I will hopefully have 2 new and unique Twitter related scripts for sale within a month. Both are near done (and have been for months), but again, I am lazy.

Since October I have been working on another huge Twitter related projects. After 2 servers being forced shutdown by Twitter, it was back up shortly after. This site caused some disclaimer changes as well as headaches for the employees at Twitter.

I could have probably filled out more details, but I am anxious to get into writing about how YOU can be making money. I’m sure this as well as the previous few posts wont even be read by many.

The next posts will actually be either directly or indirectly related to making money on the internet. Everything will be given out of the perspective of me, an 18 year old. If I can do it, why can’t you?