Lately I’ve been thinking about selling a few of my domain names. There are a lot of ways to get a good “ballpark” value for your domains but there are also a lot of ways that you can waste your money doing so. For example, there are several appraisal companies who will “professionally” appraise your domain assets and give you a price that you can expect to sell the domain for, or at least an estimate. I have used a few of these and there is only one that I think does the best job and that is Moniker.com. I use Moniker for all of my domain services such as registration, appraisals, selling, etc. They aren’t as well known as GoDaddy but when it comes to customer service, security, and professionalism they are second to none. I have had several domains appraised through them and have found their prices to be dead on so far. In the end though, are appraisals necessarily worth it? There are a few ways to answer that question.
Just when we thought we had SEO in the bag Google announces a big change. They have just announced that they will soon be unveiling a whole new look to their search results page. This will be influenced by several factors but will include multiple search items in the results such as images, news, video, etc. This means that SEO will now expand into video SEO and image SEO, as you can now legitimately count on some traffic from normal Google searches if your images or videos show up.
Do I like this idea? Not really. I hope they have an option for “classic” search because I don’t really want to see images and other media items in my search results. 10 times out of 10 I am searching for a web page. 1 time out of 100 I want to find an image or video. Either way, time will be the judge of this. A change this big could make or break Google if they aren’t careful. By “break” I most definitely do not mean “kill”. If it doesn’t work I’m sure they have a plan B for making people happy again but we’ll see.
If you’ve been around the internet for the past few years you’ve almost certainly seen ads for “The Rich Jerk“. Ex-actor Kelly Felix is the man behind the ugly white suit known as the “Rich Jerk.” On his website, the jerk insults people, tells the world that he is better than them, and basically makes you mad by the time you finish reading. You then start to wonder if what he says is true. The Rich Jerk has spawned hundreds (if not) thousands of copycats since it was unveiled to the public in late 2005. The site has been given a ton of free publicity due to its’ offensive and controversial nature, and yes, if you are wondering I’m blogging about this site today for free as well.
So what gives? Why would I resort to blogging about the jerk of the internet? Well, the big news on the street is that TheRichJerk.com is for sale. Kelly has listed his jerk empire for sale on BizQuest.com for a whopping $8,000,000. Now that’s what I’m talking about! You can check out the sale here and if you have a spare $8M you can become the official rich jerk.
When your site begins to take off and you are faced with the option to place ads on your site there are a few things you should consider. First of all, ads can sometimes make your site look cluttered and ugly. Secondly, your ad space might be worth more to you than to your potential advertisers. What I mean by this is that you could be using your site to promote other websites and services that you have to offer. Eventually you’ll have to sell ad space one one of your sites if you want to turn a profit, but when you are just starting out it’s sometimes more beneficial to keep your traffic within your own websites.
I suggest building a small network of sites. Link them to each other and before you know it you will have steady traffic on more than one site. The trick is to never expand until you have your current sites off the ground. Nobody wants to go to a network of empty sites, but, people will definitely be more likely to show up and stay if you have several well established websites full of content.
How can you optimize your site to work best for you and your visitors when you don’t keep track of where they are coming from, what they are looking for, where they are having trouble, and why they are on your site in the first place? I’ve become obsessed with keeping careful stats on any site that I care about. I want to know what people are searching for to find my site as well as what they are doing when they arrive.
One tool that is still very underused is Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s detailed, and it keeps Google informed of your traffic as well. Now you might be super private about who you want seeing your visitor stats, but, why worry about Google? Each visit to your site calls a script from Google and stores data about that individual’s visit. If anything you should add this to your site just so Google is aware that your site is getting traffic. After all, the more traffic you get, the more search engine spiders Google will send. Why not help them out by giving them a heads up?
If you’ve heard the news lately then you’ve probably been made aware of the impending gas price spikes over the summer. With predictions of an average price of over $4.00 per gallon it’s safe to say that many people will have to carefully plan (or replan) their summer vacations. Some parts of California have already seen prices near $4.50 a gallon as of this last week. Sounds exciting right? Well it is for the oil investors but maybe not so much for the rest of us.
While this is certainly an unfortunate price for gas, one benefit that could arise from this is an increased interest in hybrid vehicles and alternate fuel sources. At this point the “transition” away from gas is hardly underway. Unless there are some major changes soon it looks like we might need to each get our own personal Mel Gibson to go get our gas for us when it runs out. (Mad Max anyone?)
When starting a new website a lot of webmasters will research a niche that will result in some decent money earned from ad sales and advertising in general. One thing I believe strongly is that you should never start a site about something that you do not have a passion for. If you are in it ONLY for the money then you will burn out much quicker than if you are having fun with what you are doing. For example, medical and lawyer related websites make a lot of money. Do I run any websites that cover such topics? Negative. Instead I have websites relating to topics that interest me. You don’t have to be 100% interested in the topic you are covering, but you should know enough that you can enjoy running your site on a day to day basis.
The latest news from Yahoo is that they will be closing their “Yahoo Auctions” next month. This does not come as a surprise. After all, eBay is crushing the market and in many ways is an unstoppable force. This brings some questions to mind though. There were (and still are) several rumors floating around about Microsoft being interested in buying eBay. As far as I know there has not been any new developments in this yet, but, I’m keeping my eyes peeled. Just lately speculation has pointed to a possible purchase of Yahoo by Microsoft for close to 60 billion dollars… Now assuming Microsoft did in fact purchase Yahoo AND eBay, I could see why Yahoo would close down Yahoo Auctions. Seeing as this has not happened yet, and quite possibly may never happen, I’m not sure why Yahoo would do this.
Almost as “timeless” as the Mac vs. PC question is that of subdomains vs. subfolders. What are the pros and cons of each and why will some people benefit more from one over the other? It all depends on the current search engine trends. Right off the bat, the obvious difference is in the appearance of your urls. To those unfamiliar with the terms, a subdomain will appear as sub.domain.com, and a subfolder will look like domain.com/subfolder. Some people make their choice strictly based on appearance, but, others take into consideration many factors.
When I started this blog I told myself in advance that I wasn’t going to have a casual approach. In fact, I set an initial goal of 30 blogs in 30 days. It seems like one blog a day wouldn’t be that hard, and really it wasn’t, but, I have to say there were a few days that I almost forgot or just couldn’t think of anything. I figure the more content I have here the more interesting the blog will be for readers on a daily basis. After all, who wants to re-read old posts?
So my theory is that one interesting blog post a day is all it takes to keep things fresh and active. As of today this blog has been live for 30 days and I haven’t missed a single day of blogging. I never really saw myself as the “blogger” type, but I have to say I’m really getting into it. It’s funny because this blog is getting nice traffic but not a lot of comments yet on each blog post. I guess it takes longer to get the dedicated readers and commentators than it does to get the casual readers. Anyway, I hope my blogs have been interesting enough so far and ideally they will become even more interesting as I continue this blog.
