Before using CB Stats, I used 1password to access my ClickBank accounts because it allowed me to easily store my passwords. It was just a workaround as it wasn’t really straightforward and was kinda cumbersome.

CB Stats made clickbank accounts management easy. Launch the app and add the login information for up to 5 accounts and that’s it. Now everytime you launch the app, it will load the daily revenues for your different accounts for the last 2 weeks.

This is truly a very usefull application. I think what I like the most about this CB Stats is how fast it is. It usually takes 2-3 seconds to load the data, whether on wifi or 3G.

It is very simple. Maybe too simple… Like I said, I like this app, but I’d expect a little more from it…

First, I’d like to be able to store the login info for more than 5 accounts. Most power affiliates or publishers that do business on ClickBank have more than 5 accounts. I personally have only five but I plan to create a new account sometimes this weekend. I think you should be able to have unlimited accounts.

Also I’d like to be able to go from account to account just by swiping my finger across the screen, just like you do to swipe to the next picture on the iPhone. Right now, you have to tap the account number at the top and the numbers are so small that I sometimes tap the wrong one. Not a big deal but it’s another simple improvement that could be made.

Another feature that I would expect to see is the total weekly revenues for the last 4 weeks, like the web version. Finally, I’d like to be able to view paychecks history.

CB Stats sells for $9.99 (download link) and I think that given the lack of features, it’s a little expensive. Now if the developer decided to add new features like the ones described above, that would be way worth the 10 bucks. At any rates, CB Stats is the best ClickBank iPhone application in the App Store at the time.

I started a site called iPhone Download Blog to replicate what I had done with iPod softwares. At first, I set up the blog like a store and only had products for sale. I didn’t have content per say, except descriptions of softwares. So I started creating content just so search engines could see that my site was legit. I expected to write just a few articles but I quickly got sucked into it and started blogging about the iPhone for fun.

I found my niche

I had an iPhone so I knew what I was talking about, I wasn’t just bullshitting people with some useless content. In the same time, I started hacking my iPhone and learned how to jailbreak it. I wrote mostly about this topic, and I started realizing people really liked what I was doing, and most of my traffic was coming to learn more about how to hack their iPhone and how to get the most out of it. That’s when I realized that I had found my niche.

I was spending a lot of times reporting about iPhone news; the same news that most other iPhone blogs were already talking about. At this point, I kinda stopped blogging about iPhone news. It was pointless. I was clearly wasting my time. So I really cut back on the posting of iPhone news and I didn’t notice a traffic decrease at all. It was very stable. I received a few emails from die hard readers who were pissed because I wasn’t posting news anymore so I wrote a post explaining what the situation was. I was pretty honest and told them that people were obviously not coming to my blog to read iPhone news and that writing these articles took a lot of my time (sometimes up to 2-3 hours a day). Looking at the comments I had on this post, I think people understood the situation and were cool with it.

These days, I still write about iPhone news from time to time when it’s a big deal or when I feel like it’s important but I mostly focus on my niche: iPhone hacking.

I hired free staff

In the meantime, I posted on my blog saying that I was looking for writers/bloggers to join me. I thought that even though people mostly came to my blog to learn how to hack the iPhone, it wouldn’t hurt to have other people blog about news, applications, and other stuffs. For a while, I had 3 bloggers that were posting quality content, but like most bloggers, they got tired of it and after a few months, they completely stopped writing for me.

What was really cool is that these people were writing for free. They were writing very good content, which to date still drives large amounts of traffic.

Today, I have only one guy who writes on a pretty regular basis about iPhone applications. I also have a few people applying to write for me every once in a while but it’s very hard to find good bloggers. I’m really not looking for quantity anymore. I’m all about quality now!

What about money?

When I started my iPhone blog, my only income stream was the Regnow affiliate program to sell iPhone softwares. I have to admit that it was performing very poorly. Let’s say that a $100/month was a good month at the time.

Then I set up the blog with Adsense. It was working ok, making about $10/day on average. The problem with an iPhone blog is that visitors are young and are pretty much adproof, meaning that they don’t even see the ads anymore because they are too used to them. I tried optimizing my ads but it didn’t improve things much. Then I heard about The AdSense Code, a best-seller by Joel Comm, a pretty successful internet marketer. I bought it from Amazon and implemented a few of the techniques described in the book. Results were astounding. I went from making $10/day to making between $20 to $30/day, sometimes more.

The last few months, my checks from Google have been between $700 and $800. I created a special banking account for all the money I make with Adsense and it is my girlfriend and I’s travel found. For example, we’re going to Costa Rica next month for 2 weeks and it’s all paid by Google Adsense!

I also signed up for 2 other affiliate programs: one to sell iPhone screen protectors and one to sell custom iPhone skins. The first one brings in about $150/month and the other one about $100/month. Not too bad considering that I don’t have anything to do at all for these.

The biggest move was probably to set up an iPhone store where I sell hundreds of accessories for iPhone. The best thing is that, again, I don’t have anything to do at all. It’s all managed by a third-party company. They set me up with the store integration, they add products as they come, they take care of billing, shipping, and customer service. I basically have nothing to do but sit back and wait for my monthly PayPal payment. The iPhone Store brings in another $150/month on average.

I used to be an affiliate of the iTunes App Store as well, which started working very well for me but the assholes at Apple cracked down on every affiliate that had an Apple trademark in their URL. Since my URL contains the trademark “iPhone” (www.iPhoneDownloadBlog.com), they suspended my account. I wasn’t the only one having this issue. Many other iPhone and iPod blogs had this problem and were forced to stop marketing the App Store applications. Why would Apple do such a thing? I have no idea, but all I know is that they’re leaving a lot of money on the table by doing that.

Where am I today?

Things are doing pretty well for my iPhone blog these days. I get about 12,000 unique visitors a day on average and I usually spend a couple hours a week working on it, except when there are major events such as the release of a new model, new firmware, or a new jailbreaking or unlocking method.

If I add up all the revenue streams from this blog, I make an average of $1,100/month, which is more than decent. I really want to keep growing the site without compromising its integrity. I think it’s very important to stay true and don’t be a total sell out.

Yellow Sn0w is ridiculously easy to use, assuming you’re already on a jailbroken iPhone. If you’re interested in unlocking your iPhone so it can run on any cellphone carrier, then hop over to my iPhone blog where I wrote a post about how to unlock the iPhone 3G.

Well, it took about 24 hours for our favorite iPhone hackers to release updated versions of QuickPwn and PwnageTool, making firmware 2.2 jailbreakable again.

So I wrote a few tutorials over at my iPhone blog on how to do this. If you have any interest in dowbgrading, jailbreaking, or unlocking your iPhone, check any of these links:

• Downgrading From iPhone 2.2 to 2.1 Firmware
• Important message from the Dev Team about 2.2 jailbreak
• iPhone 3G 2.2 Jailbreak Using QuickPwn 2.2 Guide
• iPhone 2G 2.2 Unlock Using QuickPwn Tutorial

For those of you who don’t know yet, I operate an iPhone blog that’s getting quite some attention lately. We average between 8,000 and 10,000 visits per day and I had to hire 2 co-bloggers (Alicia and Cody) to help me satisfy our readers’ hunger for iPhone news, tips, hacks and cracks.

I got in touch with the AllTop.com team to help them put together the iPhone page. I sent them a list of the best iPhone websites and resources out there. Obviously, they also included the iPhone Download Blog on their page.

It’s nice to be able to participate in the iPhone community and to make it better, little by little. If you go to the AllTop iPhone page, you will see that my blog is right at the top, in second position, which gives me PR5 links to 5 of my most recent posts as well as a link to the homepage. That’s some solid SEO juice!

Next step is to get my company’s franchising blog on AllTop but I’m going to wait a few weeks since we just launched the blog a few days ago and it doesn’t have much content.

The demo (see video below) is of a mobile application in development that puts virtual earth software on the iPhone. The app runs locally on the phone, so you will have to download updated geo-spatial information over WiFi or 3G, which would take a ton of bandwidth and effect performance.

TechCrunch reports that:

What you see in the video is not Google Earth, although it looks very similar. Earthscape has created its own virtual earth program that it describes as a social geobrowser. As with Google Earth, it allows you to tag places with text, photos, restaurant reviews, and Wikipedia articles. It also lets you see different image overlays of the same spot during different seasons and different times in history.

The software is available only in private beta (sign up here).

“They have never before reported this product on their customs declarations,” says Ryan Petersen of ImportGenius.com. “The fact that they are importing millions of units, combined with dwindling stocks of the first generation of iPhones, clearly supports the Citi analysts predictions.”

On March 19 Quanta delivered ocean containers of merchandise, described on the Bills of Lading as “electric computers,” to Apple, Inc. Neither Apple, Quanta, nor any other company has ever used this product description for any shipments to the U.S.

The advanced features of the iPhone make it perfectly legitimate for Apple to declare the products as computers, rather than telephones.

This unusual large shipment of 188 containers could well be our new iPhones…

Photo Credit: Gizmodo

However, while you’re waiting, you may want to check out FlyTunes.

FlyTunes is a free service that gives you portable music and talk radio that’s better than Satellite radio, easy to use, and works on the iPhone.

FlyTunes has over 375 unique channels of music, news, & sports that you can listen to and watch anywhere. Most FlyTunes channels work on the EDGE network, so you can listen even when there’s no WiFi around.

It is very fast to start the streaming and no hiccup so far…

I chose to only show the top 5 Twitter mobile apps. Visit ReadWriteWeb for the full list.

Top 5 Twitter Mobile Apps:

1. Hahlo (that’s the one I use on my iPhone)
2. Cetwit
3. Twitter Answers
4. Twapper
5. Twittai