SparkleWise

Following my post about the state of my first passive income website, several people wanted to know specifics about my SEO strategy, or how I get traffic to this website. Most traffic comes from search (Google). It boils down to creating content targeted to user intent. More specifically, it means doing research to discover what [...]

Since starting to work for myself, I’ve watched carefully other people ideas. I’ve watched even more carefully which ideas worked, and which websites got sold. A great place for observing this is Flippa. Flippa is an online marketplace to buy and sell websites. It turns out it’s a burgeoning industry with established buyers and sellers tracking [...]

I set off in February 2011 with the intention to build a few websites to earn passive income, that would enable me to have more freedom to bootstrap more serious web applications without having to freelance to make end meets. It didn’t quite work out as much as expected, so I do some freelancing now [...]

It’s election time in France. We’re going to elect a new president in a few months. What is it for? Are things going to change if we elect the “right” president? It seems to me current political systems are broken in fundamental ways. The society seems to be geared towards even more power distributed to [...]

I hear that all the time. I want to start a web application/mobile application/business. I just don’t have an idea yet. Rob Walling explains in his book “start small, stay small” (yes, that’s a book I quote often around here. You should get it), that there are good and bad reasons to start a business. The [...]

I come from a non-english speaking country (and quite well-known for not speaking english: France). Most of my online information sources are in english, for the sheer amount of fantastic blogs, communities and magazines available. That includes information about SEO, entrepreneurship and online marketing. You can read a crazy amount of strategies and tactics that [...]

When you’re just starting out with Django, it can be overwhelming to see there’s no standard approach to deal with settings. However, there are a few simple best practices that work when you start needing more than the basic settings file. What’s the problem? Django stores all the settings in a project-wide settings.py file. All [...]

After starting my web application business 6 months ago, I’ve decided to shift my focus from 100% working on it  to a mix of freelancing and working on my own project. Why? I’m starting to run low on resources (even though I could keep on living cheaply for almost a year at this rhythm, I [...]

Not too long ago (last June) I was on the lookout for simple ideas where I could leverage two things: my knowledge of software development and my interest for web marketing. In the middle of the crazy stream of ideas I then wanted to tackle, I selected a simple one:  a Body Mass Index (BMI) [...]

Since I’ve had (moderate) success with my own websites (Gift Certificate Factory, Calculer IMC, Partage De Fichier…), a few of my friends have asked me how to market their own websites. I’ll try with this blog post to give a few pointers on how to do it for a specific case study. Thomas runs Flybilletterbillig.com, [...]