Take More Risks

Happy New Year to everyone. Hope you enjoyed the last “festive” post there. I thought it had to be said as I’m sick and tired of 1and1 bullying people. And I noticed I’ve lost 14 subscribers in a day after the post. Huzzah!

Anyway onto something useful. I highly recommend you all check out WinSCP if you haven’t already. What it allows you to do is to access your webspace with an Windows Explorer like interface making editing webpages on your server easy. This is especially handy if you’re managing multiple sites like myself.

The best bit is that you can associate files to open with certain programs within WinSCP. In the screenshot below I’ve illustrated how I’ve set up WinSCP to open html, php and css files within Dreamweaver.

With this association created everytime I double click on a file within WinSCP it will automatically open up in Dreamweaver and the best bit is that any changes that I make to that file whilst Dreamweaver is open are saved. This is a much more flexible approach than simply defining a site for every website you create within Dreamweaver itself. You can associate any file type to open with any application on your computer too so you could have images open within Photoshop or text files within Notepad.

Many thanks to the Vitty for introducing me to this app. It’ll hopefully change the way you work for the better if it hasn’t already done so.

I’m finally moving to a VPS after thinking about doing it for God knows how long. Spent most of this week selling some of my smaller websites on Digitalpoint and it has went pretty well. So far I’ve used the money mainly for hiring copywriters for a few of my other sites. I’m not gonna buy any new sites. I’ve wasted a lot of money buying pages on subjects I know nothing about. From now on I will invest my money into my own project ideas. And I have a lot of them. I just can’t create them at the rate I think about them.

Things are going pretty well at the minute although I’m spending a lot of my time on final year uni work. I’m actually enjoying this year so far. It’s been cool.

I’m gonna move this blog over soon to the new server in a minute so comments will be disabled until then. Although this place is something of a ghostown since I haven’t updated regularly in about 60,000,000 years.

If you remember in November last year I unsuccessfully attempted to create 50 sites in 50 days, with each earning $1 a day. I’ve been thinking more about why this failed recently and it’s because each site wasn’t based around a long-tail keyword. Instead most of the sites were band pages which never would’ve got any exposure because of the competitiveness of the band names as phrases in the search engines.

Now if I was to try this again I’d first make sure I was targetting a primary keyword which is easy enough to rank for and which would produce 10-20 visits a day for that phrase alone. Then I’d set about creating a blog with 5-7 pages/posts of unique content, insert the Adsense units and then guage the popularity of the keyphrase by my earnings in the first month. I’d then focus more of my attention on the sites that show promise over time. This is what I’ve been doing so far with Ouijaboard Online, which after a week is earning over $1 a day.

The plan is to create around 10 of these sites over the next month, which can then be developed more if I decide to.
I logged into the Digital Point forums too for the first time in ages over the weekend. Gonna sell off a few of my old sites and acquire 1-2 established sites over the next while.

1. Try to prepare for the sale at least 2 months beforehand. During this period you must log all of your traffic, earnings and expenditure preferrably with screenshots. Proving income is essential if you want to get a fair price for your site as it effectively guides them towards the true value of your site based upon multiples of monthly earnings. The first thing potential buyers ask is “how much is this site currently making?” followed by “how much traffic is getting” and then “how could I increase both of these effectively?”. If you leave the last question unanswered in the buyers mind they will be much less likely to make a bid. It isn’t enough to say that a site has potential, you must provide examples of this. For example as a guestre of goodwill you could forward on a few concrete ideas for linkbait to the buyer.
2. If you buy a site with the purpose of resale in mind, wait 2 months and create truly explosive/controversial content. Remember your reputation isn’t as much at stake as it would be with blogs that are easily attributed to you so you can get off with a lot more!
3. If you want a quick sale, don’t start your auctions at ridiculously low prices. Buyers are probably more impatient than sellers and want to resolve the deal quickly, so set a realistic start price (for me this is normally the Reserve Price – 20%). I’m tired of seeing auctions start at $5 on Digitalpoint when the seller is expecting $1,000+! This isn’t Ebay! You aren’t selling fucking lampshades!
4. Be completely honest about your site. If your site is in decline, provide valid explanations along with some suggestions to stop the rot. Be open with your motives for the sale in order to reassure buyers of the site’s stability. Everything you can do to reassure the buyer will make a BIN bid that much more likely.
5. Be realistic with the BIN price. If you can only provide proof of 2 months of income then you’ll be chancing your luck setting the BIN at monthly revenue x 10.
6. Monetize your blog properly before listing it for sale. Technology blog owners are particularly susceptible to receive poor prices for their websites especially if they have only implemented contextual advertising (usually in the form of Adsense). For example Take More Risks earnt around $2 in February in Adsense. That doesn’t mean that Take More Risks is worth $20 at most (although some would disagree). The best way to monetize tech blogs is through paid links and reviews. Experiment with as many different revenue streams as possible before creating a listing. However if you’re still hellbent on giving away your 2 year blog with 200+ posts for under $100, feel free to give me a ring. The market certainly needs a few more seonewsblog.com’s.
7. From experience Sitepoint.com bidders seem to be a little more generous with bids than their counterparts over on Digitalpoint. This alone can justify the $20 listing fee that Sitepoint imposes.
8. View your site portfolio as a sports team. Always ensure that you have at least 1 strong site that “holds the team together” during the rough periods through diverse sources of income. Don’t be afraid to buy promising young sites just to flip them on again for a premium. You can use the profit to strengthen your best sites by buying paid reviews, Wordpress plugins/templates or text links. Experiment with what formation works best for you.
9. If you acquire a blog that hasn’t been updated in a while be sure to update it regularly for a few months before selling it on again. It’ll make it easier for the new blogger to maintain the posting momentum.
10. And finally, if you’re selling a blog try offering incentives shortly before the sale for posting comments on your posts. Install the Top Commenters plugin if you haven’t already. The idea is to make the blog appear as lively as posssible in turn helping to attract more generous offers.

I was chatting to Nate a few weeks ago about an idea I had for buying established websites on the cheap. The premise was pretty simple, I’d use Google to try to find sites that were put up for sale by their owners informally through an announcement on their website.

For example if you do a Google Search for “take over this site” you are presented with 570 results, some of which are pages that have annoucements stating that the website in question is up for sale. The reason why I’ve used “take over this site” rather than “this site is for sale” is that “take over this site” implies that money isn’t in question, the owners will often be willing to transfer the site over to you for a nominal fee providing you gain their trust (which is the hard part, after all they don’t want to see all of their hard work ruined by a babbling, incompetent lunatic who wipes everything and places ads everywhere.).

Let’s assume that you’ve found a website that you like that’s still available. You can increase your chances of acquiring the site if you can prove that you’re passionate about the site’s subject area. It’ll help to have existing websites in this particular niche that you can forward on to the site’s owner. A better approach would be to visit DMOZ and scour the niche directories for out of date yet popular websites that correlate with your interests.

For example I could visit the Dmoz Farting category and look for pages that haven’t been updated in the past few years and ask if they are interested in handing over their website in exchange for some money. Your chances of a successful handover are increased dramatically if the owner is unaware of the value of their site. You can gain a fair impression of whether this is the case or not by simply analysing their pages. If the site is well designed and features some variety of ad links then the chances of the creator handing over the site are remote since they are probably aware that there website is worth at least something.

Ideally the website should look horrendous, have no ads but a lot of content and backlinks. DN Scoop is your friend here.

Of course, part of the fun is typing in keyword phrases that webmasters will use to signal their disinterest with their current site. Here are a few ideas that return 50 or more results in Google.

This site is dead

No more site updates

Anyone want this site?

Giving my site away

Take care of my site?

Site is closed

Need a new webmaster

This is my last post ever

And finally an extra special bonus search term.. 

So far I’ve made about 5 email enquiries with no success. Have any of you tried this before? Do you think it’s ethical? How would you respond if someone asked you to hand over one of your old websites for next to nothing?

In August I set up ia.mthebest.com a site that would allow me to demonstrate (sarcastically) to the world why I was the best. Inevitably it was a failure and here’s why.

1) No focus

In order to attract significant search engine traffic to a site, it must be targetted towards a theme. Ia.mthebest.com is just a hopeless collection of idiotic rants with zero consistency. It will never rank well for any of the individual topics I’ve ranted about as there isn’t enough coverage of one particular issue.

It would be different if I was writing a blog which ranted about religion, at least that way Google would know what the site’s about. Taking it from Google’s POV, the first thing it encounters is the title “I am the Best”. What exactly is that meant to mean? I am the best at what and why? There are no indicators there at all.

2) No value, unknown audience.

You can’t expect to receive something in return for nothing. The website offers very little to it’s potential audience. I mean who cares about what some jerk-off thinks of the world? It’d be different if the posts were well-written and humorous, but most of them aren’t, and that brings me on to my next point.

3) 1 post is often better than 6

It was during my ia.mthebest phase that I challenged myself to write 6 posts in an hour. Sure enough, I achieved this quite a few times with little effort. The problem is that the posts were all reasonably short (150-250 words) and weren’t interesting enough in their own right to catch the attention of other bloggers. My posts weren’t very search engine friendly either, mainly due to their length (pesky duplicate content filter!). Short posts can be effective in search engines if they are provactive and you have an audience who contribute regularly through comments, but this wasn’t the case here.

It’s better to have 1 comphrensive kick-ass post than 6 weak entries as it makes it much easier for another blogger to justify linking to your work.

Summary

The failure of ia.mthebest.com taught me that it’s important for a site to have a coherent theme and that it’s not enough to try to rank for popular phrases with single articles on an unrelated site. Even if visitors arrive at your site, they likely won’t be targetted, increasing the likelihood of you being smartpriced on a Made For Adsense site similar to this.

My Fart Noises blog was established back in September as somewhat of a joke, never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that it could have been profitable. From September to October I spent a while each day developing about 15 pages of content targetted at what I thought were keywords with serious traffic potential. Alas, I was wrong! The keyphrases brought in very little traffic which led me to hastily abandon the website.

Fast forward to December when I decided to overhaul the website with Cake PHP. Well that was the idea anyway! I ended up ruining the website leaving only unformatted text where the blog articles used to be. I thought the site was dead for good and I was a little upset.

Now in March I accidently stumbled across the Awstats for the fartnoises.info domain. I wasn’t expecting much to start with, I would have been reasonably happy with maybe 20-30 visits a day. It turned out that I was wrong! Fart Noises was receiving at least 100 visits a day. At this point I converted the site back to Wordpress, sought out a new template, slapped in the Google Analytics code and began writing some silly posts related to farting.

Throughout March the traffic began to climb like hell, as did the earnings. The trend for April has been much more stable. You could almost say that I’ve hit a plateau with traffic. Still with that said Fart Noises is now one of my best earners, bringing in on average $10+ a day. Not bad for a site that I’d almost given up all hope on, eh?

I think it goes to show that it’s possible to resurrect a dead blog and bring it back to the attention of a new audience. If you feel like you’re falling behind with your blog schedule don’t let public expectancy cripple you.  Instead focus your energies on creating cool content that your audience can gain value from. Even if your audience is a bunch of fart-loving teenagers……

Tonight I erased the Implicit Gaming forums for a number of reasons which I’ll get to later in the post! I must say I’m relieved as well as disappointed. Back in January I acquired the forums for the grand sum of $610 and I’ve barely made any of my original investment back. I tried listing the forums for sale earlier last week but not many people were interested and I can understand why. I really didn’t want to rip anyone off.

Anyway I’m past feeling disheartened about the site’s failure. I think I realised that it was a bad investment after a few weeks of buying them.

What went wrong? Well …..

• The forums were based around the online gaming niche which is overcrowded enough as it is. If you want to succeed in this arena you have to offer something special to your visitors. Implicit Gaming.com didn’t offer anything unique.
• The original owner of the forums gained much of his userbase through spamming other boards. People flocked to the board to download files rather than take part in discussions. A core memberbase never materialised and the forums quickly became a deadzone. This shows just how important it is to attract members early on who love your niche. The emphasis should be placed on giving them a cool place to interact with like minded individuals, not on ad clicks or attracting fair weather friends with free files! Special downloads can be added at a later date as a reward for your loyal members.
• I took over the forums when I was inexperienced with moderating and administering forums. I was immediately thrown into the deep-end. Be wary of buying a large forum if you have no prior experience with managing forums, it’s better to let your knowledge grow with a new forum.
• I don’t really have an interest in online gaming so I couldn’t join in on the discussions. This in itself condemned the site to oblivion. It also made advertising the boards hell as I didn’t know of any authority sites in the niche. Sure enough I could have bought some Text Link Ads but I doubt they would’ve magically brought the site back to life.
• The introduction of the IPB Arcade didn’t help matters either. I accept that game arcades look pretty neat but I believe they distract people from posting. Implicit Gaming was meant to be a forum, not a games arcade. The discussion should be the main attraction.
• The branding of the forums was pretty poor too. They were meant to focus around the online game Neopets which isn’t reflected in the domain name, nor was it reflected in the skin I used for most of the site’s life.
• I didn’t know the moderators well enough. One of the super moderators suspended everyone from the board and I didn’t notice until a week or two later. By this stage visiting the forums had become a chore as I’d be plagued constantly by new members asking to be made moderators.

It’s pretty hard acknowledging that one of your projects has been a failure, but it’s the truth on this occasion. My plan now is to transfer the licence of the board over to another site so that I can start a forum from scratch around an uncompetitive niche. I might as well salvage something from the wreckage.

So really that’s it for Implicit Gaming. I can’t say I’m sad, it drove me fucking nuts and ended up losing $600. It won’t deter me from taking more risks though. I just need to evaluate these things more carefully.

Before buying a site it’s important to ask yourself why the person is selling it in the first place. Why would you sell something that’s thriving? Usually the seller will explain that it has potential, but if that’s the case why don’t they just hold on to it? This isn’t to say that there aren’t any bargains out there, it’s just good practice and it may prevent you from being burned!

Recently I’ve been depending a lot on Wordtracker’s Keyword Researcher to identify niches. The process has been fairly hit and miss in the past with some of my keyword targetted domains receiving little to no traffic for supposedly popular keyphrases.

The phrase “spirituality information” is a perfect example.

Wordtracker predicts that 2490 searches will be performed on this keyword alone. Wow. Now I could go ahead and register spiritualityinformation.info, create a website and sit back as several thousand visitors flood my site daily! Well in theory, at least. It would be foolish to register that domain based on this evidence alone. It’s important to cross-reference traffic stats with the help of other keyword suggestion software.

This is where the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion tool comes in quite handy. It automatically provides you with the phrase’s monthly Overture score, along with links to other tools like Google Trends and Google Suggest.

Hmmm, Overture doesn’t seem to recognise the “spirituality information” keyphrase and instead recommends “information on spirituality” which has 1,148 searches. It should be your aim to find a keyword that is reported consistently across all of the tools. In this case “spirituality information” just isn’t good enough. It’s hard to know whether to target “information on spirituality” or “spirituality information”. Of course you could type each of the phrases into Google Trends and see how they perform against each other.

Let’s try that now!

Based on this evidence, it wouldn’t be worthwhile targetting either of these keyphrases. Use your common sense here. Would 2000 people type “spirituality information” into Google a day?

The morale of this post is to be thorough with your research. Don’t start registering keyword domains until you’ve done your homework!

I’ve went mental with GoDaddy’s $0.99 .info deal and bought about 40 new domains so far. I would have had so many more if I’d found phrases that I could develop for. Ach well. I’ll concentrate on building what I already have and then I’ll have another look.

Site News

Fartnoises is going from strength to strength and I think within the next 2 weeks I’ll start breaking $10 a day consistently. I’d like to eventually break $20 with it before the summer.

On Sunday I discovered that everclearalcohol.info is generating 50-75 unique visits a day which is pretty cool. I still can’t find a decent affiliate program for it though. I’ll have to sign up for CJ again and try to create some links this time, heh.

I’ve now made enough to receive my first Adult Friend Finder check. Wahey, I’ll scan it in when I receive it.

New Goals, Re-Structuring

March 2007 – Consistently average $10 a day on Adsense by the end of the month
April 2007 – Average $22 a day
May 2007 – Average $37 a day
June 2007 – Average $60 a day. This is important as I’ve got a few ideas for a vacation in August and I’ll need about $1500 alone for the accomdation and flights.

This is easily achievable, especially if the recent growth rates are anything to go by. I just need to keep my focus. I’ve got a vague idea where I want to be in a years time, but I’d rather concentrate on fufilling these short term goals first of all and then set new targets that coincide with my overall objective once I’ve achieved them.