Take More Risks

With the guidance of David, I’ve spent the last night or two scouring the for sale listings on both Namepros and Digital Point without much luck. All I’ve seen so far are Myspace proxies and directories! Even when I’ve found something I’m interested in, the contents never unique. Gah. Actually I’ve just seen a nice Photoshop tutorial site up on auction at Namepros with traffic starting at $400. I’m tempted but it’s just a bit out of my price range.

It’s cool the way that you can request people to send offers on their sites to you on Digital Point. I haven’t made enough posts though to take advantage of this and I’m feeling too antisocial to start tonight.

I won’t give up though. I’m looking to invest about $600 on 3 established sites on subjects I’m interested in. Well the interest part isn’t strictly necessary but it’ll help in the long run with maintainance. If anyone knows of any other sites listing developed sites for sale (bar Ebay) feel free to leave the address in a comment.

And on the subject of Ebay……..eughh! I’ve never seen such trash for sale on my life. Most of the sites look like scams. I bet there are some bargains in there though. It’s just finding them that’s the problem……

Right, It’s about time I set myself some real targets! If I am to work at this full time I’ll need to be earning a minimum of £10,000 a year by June 2008 which is when I graduate from my course. At the moment I’m earning approximately £8 a week off Adsense. 4% there…..and that’s discounting all of my other sources of income including Allposters, Amazon, Namedrive and Affiliate Future.

It’ll take time to draw up a real plan which’ll include provisions for domain name sales and so on. I’ll probably just end up using Excel unless people know of anything better out there.

It’s hard knowing where to start. I’ll have a think about it over lunch and get the foundations of it down later in the afternoon.

And welcome back Ol’ Googlebot. I hope you’re enjoying the show.

Having only briefly flirted with Google Sitemaps before I decided to take the plunge to try to find out if there were any crawling problems with this site. It’s a brilliant tool, I love it’s interface especially, with it’s elegant use of Ajax being a key factor. Anywhoo back on topic! After verifying that I was the actual owner of the site by uploading an HTML file I set about creating an XML sitemap.

Well thats a lie, I used the Google Sitemaps Generator for Wordpress plugin. I can’t recommend this enough! I had no problems uploading, installing and activating the tool and Google read the resulting file without kicking up a strop! If only everything was as easy as this! I’ll have a look later on to see exactly what the plugin generated just out of curiousity.

With any luck this should at least give Googlebot a better idea of the sites structure.

Oh……..I just realised that I had my Blog Address in General Options set to http://takemorerisks.com, whereas I’ve been actively promoting the site as http://www.takemorerisks.com. Maybe this is causing part the issue? It’s fixed now anyway so we should soon see.

A selection of my new sites (including this one) are no long appearing in Google when I type in their name into a search. Well that’s not completely true, some of my pages are showing but it’s usually not the index page. I haven’t seen anything like this before and I’m worried about it. Googlebot’s been scouring the site as normal. All of the pages are returned when I type in this command site:takemorerisks.com. I wonder what could be up?

My older websites are appearing…….fine. Maybe this is down to placing backlinks from a few of my authority sites to the new ones. Its hard to tell. I’ve removed the “Domains For Sale” page just incase that’s the cause. Googlebot might have been following the links on the domain and thought I was linking to a bad neighbourhood or something.

It’s strange because my sites were ranking better this time last week. Hopefully it’s just part of the Flux.

Spiffy Corners

I haven’t toyed around with rounded corners in design before as it seemed a little ackward. That’s about to change with this great little tool!

I must say that I’m impressed with some of the form controls proposed in the new Web Forms 2.0 specification. I downloaded the new version of Opera this morning after reading that it was the only browser to implement the standard yet.

I hope Firefox and IE incorporate this into their upcoming browsers, it should reduce the amount of client side validation that is necessary. As an example, you can now specify an input as an email type meaning that it will only accept valid addresses.

You can now embed a calendar into your form by specifying the input’s type as date. Once you click on the control a list of dates pops-up and selecting a time will automatically set the inputs value as desired. It’s a great touch. I don’t know how it will work with regards to CSS. It would be cool if you could format the spacing between dates and so on. At the moment (in Opera anyway) the controls look a little generic without any styling.

I’m still going through the draft at the moment myself. Instead of waffling on about the various amendments for the next hour I’ll let you read about it yourself if you haven’t already done so!

As some of you may already know, I set up an Adwords campaign for the first time a few months ago which turned out to be largely unsuccessful. I won’t go into the reasons on why this was so as it isn’t relevant to this article.

There have been a few others instances where I have readily invested money on the internet only to see little or no return . It can be completely demoralising. Your money just seems to vanish.

You have three options, quit now from affiliate marketing, sit around and sulk or respond positively. The 2nd option is an easy trap to fall into and often kills productivity. Its common to think along the lines of “Why should I invest money on the Internet for nothing? My last project failed as will the next one. This is useless!”

Well yes! It is useless but only if you remain passive! If you have a blog and are upset and disillusioned about the outcome of a project, bitch about it on your blog! Where did you go wrong? What faults did you perceive in the system? What advice would you give to others who are planning to invest in it for the first time?

Aim to double the amount you lost on your investment by supplying content and critique that will intrigue your visitors. Believe me, it’s a lot more worthwhile than sitting mumbling to people who aren’t interested.

Each time you take a risk you are opening up a wide window of opportunity. You aren’t simply squandering money! In fact if you look hard enough you’ll see other possibilities shooting off in all directions!

Calling all of you Google dance obsessives! Just found this cool tool which fetches a URLs pagerank from a large number of Googles datacentres. I like its interface.

I keep hearing rumours that a PR update is imminent and I’m exactly sure if I care or not. I’ve run one or two PR6 sites in the past and they’ve done hopeless in the search engines and well……..just generally.

I can’t handle people who brag constantly about their sites PR! Its wrong to equate it directly with a sites success. If a page is pulling in loads of visitors and they are finding the information they want there then it doesn’t really matter what that sites PR is, its already served its purpose.

Half arsed rant, over. Bed time but teeth first.

Mwhahaha punkhairstyles.info has recorded a massive 2 hits today thanks to it completely disappearing from the SERPS in MSN. Emohairstyles.info is nowhere to be seen either. Literally! It’s yet to be indexed at all…..hmmmmm. At least the latter is performing reasonably well in Google.

Something strange happened with Adsense there too. Around 10 clicks showed up all at once. What the hell? I wonder if Google are having server issues or something.

God damn it I feel really deflated about punkhairstyles dropping in MSN. Before today it was registering approximately 150 uniques per day. Maybe it’s just a temporary glitch……I’m hoping its just a temporary glitch.

And in other news…my server is currently being hammered by the MSRBot. There isn’t anything on the web about what it actually is. Microsofts FAQ only describes the basics i.e. that it is a web crawler. Duh!!

I am quite annoyed all in all. It’s been one of those days where I feel like I’ve been pissing money down the web drain for no reason.

My first article over on ezineArticles went live in the early hours of yesterday morning and so far it has received 32 views. Not sure if that’s good or not and I guess it doesn’t really matter, the important thing is it got approved.

I’ve just read it back and the tone is a little forced. Ah well, I’ll update this post with the URL’s of my other articles as they go live throughout the next few days.