Take More Risks

I think the thing that depresses me the most about flipping sites is that there are only about 10 common formats. Forums, blogs, splogs, image upload etc. There isn’t anything really new out there. So I’m trying to develop something at least a bit unique. It’s a community site but not a forum. I’ve been developing it with the Zend Framework since Monday and I’m really pleased with how it’s going. I’ll give you one clue – it’s related to sin…

I don’t have much else to say really at the minute. Oh! I got my new computer! It’s a beast. 4GB of ram and a Core Duo. It’s brilliant for developing with. The monitor is the sex too. I should really take a picture of it.

Being yourself

It seems as though you need to be yourself to succeed with blogging. Ha! I’ve found the reverse to be true. Take More Risks has been a complete failure compared to some of my other blogs where I’ve adopted a ludicrous identity. I’m not listening to gurus anymore. Or reading any e-books. I’m tired of reading blogs about making money. It’s like eating money instead of buying food with the cash and eating the real food.

It’s all fucking boring. If I read about ALGOCO one more time I swear I’ll boot the fucking cat.

And On Gurus

My biggest mistake was holding any guru in esteem. Anyone can make it that level or past it, it’s really just about finding what you are good at. Or better, what you enjoy. If I’ve learnt anything in the last year it’s that you need to go out on your own and make your own mistakes. Become your own guru.

And from now on I’m never typing the word guru in this blog again. If I do, comment on the post and I’ll give you $50 via Paypal.

And no, I’m not drunk and I haven’t lost the plot.

websemantics.info

Why I bought it

• In the coming years the Semantic Web will be huge.

Why it sucks

• It’s far too general in focus. There’s no indication of what parts of the Semantic Web it will focus on. Will it cover Microformats? XHTML 2? Overall, it has limited resale prospects as the new owner would have to create content that covers web semantics as a whole and that’d require too much effort. It’s a .info too which doesn’t help matters.

spacemissions.info

Why I bought it

• Space is the sex and the money!

Why is sucks

• I know less than balls about space. In fact I’m pretty indifferent about space exploration at the minute. I don’t care much for Jupiter and our solar system. I’d like to see the outer reaches of the Milky Way……..Oh yeah and the domain’s far too specific and the nasa site already does a great job of reporting space missions.  The .info certainly doesn’t help.

London was great if not one big headache! So anyway it turns out that my Dell has been delayed by a month meaning I won’t have it until the end of June (and I’ve sinced cancelled it!). Had so many great ideas on my break it’s hard to know where to start. It might help if I went through the backlog of emails first of all.

So I’m gonna have to choose a new PC to buy and it’s proving to be a bit of a pain in the ass. Most UK computer companies suck according to the CIAO ratings.

The best thing about breaks is that they puts everything into context. If I develop a successful website I can then use it to fund another trip to somewhere and that’s a real incentive because at the moment that’s all that matters to me. I do love website development but it really comes second to travelling in my priorities at the minute. I know the best is yet to come in terms of revenue and I don’t think it’ll come from Take More Risks.

I’m gradually gonna move away from blogging on any grand scale and instead focus on developing community driven websites. I’ll still keep Take More Risks updated 2-3 times a week however. I think I always intended my blog to be a labor of love rather than some money making experiment. That market at the moment is completely saturated and in order to succeed in it you must be dedicated. I now realise I’m not dedicated to blogging. It just isn’t for me. My strength lies in generating off-beat ideas and developing them in a unique way.

I feel much more comfortable writing in this free flowing style. Sure it isn’t easy to digest but should we always be seeking out information from every possible sources. I think sometimes you need some brainless respite from the net. I’m tired and pissed with writing factoids. I don’t think every blogger should be writing using bullet points. There needs to be some variation otherwise the entrepreneur blogosphere is likely to become a bad parody of itself.

Tomorrow I’m off to London to see the Manic Street Preachers at the Astoria and the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. It’ll be good to get away from things for a while and clear my head. I must remember to charge my Ipod beforehand and put on a few webmaster podcasts for the plane (how thrilling!).

Besides that, I haven’t been doing that much business. Last week I sold mykewlspace.com for $350, unix.pro for $150 and webdevelopment.pro for $110. It might have been worth keeping hold of the .pro’s if I knew more about the market but unfortunately I don’t!

Domain tasting

Very few of the domains I’ve selected so far have been generating traffic. I think I’ll delete them tonight as I’m not sure if I’ll have access to the net in the meantime. Sometimes I feel like I’m making the same mistakes over and over again. It’s hard to remain persistent and positive.

Where the hell is the Dell? 

My computer has now been in “pre-production” for 12 days. This would worry me more if I wasn’t in London. It’ll probably arrive whilst I’m away. I’ll make a post about my experience with Dell when I get back. Heh! I’m still tempted to buy a 2 x 1GB kit for the new PC. I’ll just leave it until I’ve seen how it performs with the 2GB. I won’t be running a nuclear submarine off it after all!

It’s now part of my daily routine to visit the Google Hot Trends list to try to find some cool domains on emerging topics. I haven’t found anything of note yet bar marilynjojenkins.com (named after one of Bill Clinton’s many mistresses). I assume this story was in the news because of the new book on Hilary Clinton. The domain’s had about 4 typeins over a 36 hour period which is alright but I’m expecting the traffic to die off with the story but you never know!

I’m experimenting quite a bit with domain tasting recently. I’m only gonna learn more about the industry by finding out for myself what works and what doesn’t. You can only learn so much from secondary research! Domain tasting’s cool as it gives you a second chance. You can learn a lesson without losing anything which is invaluable!

My PC still hasn’t arrived unfortunately! It’ll come when I’m in London this week no doubt. Ah I’m not in a big hurry to get it.

Oh and I forgot to mention, I got Guitar Hero II. My Xbox 360 addiction is now officially out of control. Lord help me.

From now on I’m gonna focus on domaining and web development as topics here. I don’t feel qualified to write about blogging and I harbour no illusions of becoming a problogger. I seriously suck at it! Besides there are loads of problogger sites out there.

I’m just tired of blogging at the minute. I’m tired of writing lists. I’m tired of giving advice that I’m not even sure of myself! So from now on I’m gonna cover a lot more on domaining and web development/site flipping. These are the topics that interest me most.

I’ve made so many mistakes with domaining since I’ve started. I think it’s time that I did a little more research before regging more domains. I’ve spent a lot of time reading through Frank Schilling’s Seven Mile recently. It’s a goldmine of information. As is the Namepros.com forum.

Hopefully my PC arrives tomorrow. I’m currently writing a PHP script that’ll make domain searches a bit more efficient. My plan is to turn the new desktop into a development platform. I’ll be installing XAMPP and developing in PHP locally. I’m still unsure over whether to use the Zend or Cake PHP framework’s for development. I’ll probably opt for Zend as it integrates better with the PEAR libraries.

So yeah I don’t want this site to disintegrate into another tips blog. I wanna discuss things I’m interested in, in my own way. When you start to feel obligated to something and it becomes a chore there must be something wrong. I want this site to remain personal first and foremost. Even if it involves boring y’all from time to time.

I’m working on a tagline too! At the minute I’ve thought of…

“Madcap Entrepreneurial Adventures In Domaining and Buying, Selling and Developing Websites”

What do you think of it?

On Thursday my student loan came through which led me to buy a new PC! It’s a Dell Dimension 9200 Desktop and I’ll be using it from now on for development. I’ve ordered it with 2GB of RAM and I’m thinking of adding another 2GB although that’ll probably be waste.

In other news here’s what I’ve done with the fartnoises.info money so far.

A Nintendo DS

An Xbox 360 (With Table Tennis, Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion and Gears of War)

Ipod 80gb

I’ve also bought 2 new sites, an e-book and a few new sites. I could have spent the money wiser as I’m now back to square one with the business. In the future I’m gonna concentrate on developing sites with custom backends rather than simply blogs. I’m so bored with using Wordpress!

It really is beautiful outside today. I think I’ll go for a bit of a walk now and rest my head!

Remember how I spent $125 on a John Chow review from Reviewme.com back in February? Well, after the review was published, I started to question whether it was a wise investment or not. I felt as though my blog wasn’t ready for the influx of visitors that the review provided.

Well it seems as though the review was much more valuable than I had anticpated! The most impressive thing is that even though my posting frequency has taken a dive recently the subscribers tally has remained steady since the post-Chow peak, even increasing in recent weeks. I was expecting subscribers to drop off like flies after February!

I think this goes to show that paid reviews can be effective if you even have a little bit of interesting content, especially if you buy a review off a blog with a readership as devoted as John’s.

1. I regret buying blogs that have potential but are related to topics that I have no knowledge of interest in.
2. I’ve spent too much time worrying about grammar nazis and what they’ll make of my writing. This has stopped me from writing entries in the past. It’s my aim to write in a way that I’m comfortable and that can be understood by the majority of my readers. A few spelling/grammar mistakes aren’t that important.
3. As I mentioned yesterday, I should have started postdating entries much earlier!
4. I feel like I’ve neglected interacting with other bloggers. I rarely comment on blogs and it can take me a few days to answer emails. I guess that I’m just a little bit shy.
5. I’ve placed too much emphasis on post quantites and word counts. I need to evaluate my work with a more goal orientated approach (How many new subscribers should each new post attract? How many backlinks on average? How much revenue should each post generate per day?). Word count isn’t strictly tied to post quality. Aaron Wall is great at getting a point across using very few words.
6. I need to reintroduce a weekly “Powerful Posts of The Week” entry that links to some of the best stuff out there. This will be especially useful when I’m struggling to come up with ideas for posts.
7. I need to stop proscrastinating and actually implement ideas instead of getting boiled down in the specifics and doing nothing.
8. I’ve undervalued feed subscribers for far too long. Some of you might remember this ill-informed rant a few months ago which questioned the need for subscribers. Since then I’ve realised that review sites take into consideration your subscriber tally when they decide upon your price, which is only fair as it’s a reasonable means of gauging a blogs popularity.
9. I regret adding only reciprocal links to my Blogroll in recent months. I think it should contain links that are useful to people out there.
10. I regret spending too much time writing articles for Digg rather than my readers. Although to be honest from August 2006 to February 2007 I didn’t have very many. I still think it’s crucial to cater for your existing readers even if they are in single figures. It’s far too easy to overlook word of mouth as a means of popularising your blog.

Buying the Xbox 360 along with Elder Scrolls Oblivion is the dumbest decision I’ve ever made. I’m literally glued to the game and I’ve done damn all since Friday. The worst thing is I can’t just dump my Xbox since I only bought it last Tuesday. I’ll just have to ride this one out!

Anyway I think it’s time I took stock of where I’m at with regards to site development and earnings. I’m creating a spreadsheet which will store how I’m gonna develop my remaining names. It currently has the following fields.

Domain : (e.g. takemorerisks.com)
Update Priority : (high)
Type : Blog / Content
In A Network : No
Income : $0 / per month

The idea behind this is to priortise development towards sites that actually have potential. It’ll also mean that it’ll be easier to identify the deadwood in my portfolio and sell it on.

Memo to self : begin postdating entries! There are days where I’ve at least 3 ideas for posts but only ever choose one in fear of overwhelming you all with content. From now on I’m gonna write the posts and date them for periods where I’m usually inactive, like at the weekend. I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of this before. D’oh!

Anyway I’ll be back tomorrow with a more thorough post and word on how the spreadsheet is progressing.