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So I’ve decided to revive this little experiment. It will be a struggle to get back to writing regularly, but I have a couple projects that I need to recoup my money on gamersmark.com and 2goware.com. Collectively I’ve sunk about $7,000 (pocket change to some and a kick in the nuts to others) and I would like to work on getting that back. The problem has been that I have a pretty demanding job, and it pays pretty well, complacency has gotten the better of me. It has been easy to write off the purchases as failed experiments and just focus on my job, but I’ve always been interested in business and entrepreneurship so I can’t get past a nagging feeling that I need to keep trying. Also, my two eBay affiliate stores continued to make money these last few months even as I let them languish, so I can’t totally dismiss that out of hand. I started reading the book “How To Get Rich” by Felix Dennis the founder of Maxim Magazine and he stresses that you will never get rich working for somebody else, something I already knew but never had it driven home quite so clearly. I haven’t finished the book yet but I’m enjoying it and would recommend it to anybody looking to control their own destiny.

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This morning the new .ME top level domain (TLD) became available via Godaddy for registration. Apparently Godaddy was ill prepared for the rush of domain name speculators. I tried to register fla.me at about 10:15 this morning, the first try timed out but I was able to register it successfully about 40 minutes later. I was a little surprised the name was available but figured I just got lucky.

Then the bad news started showing up in forums, Twitter, and various blogs. Multiple people were allowed to register the same domain names, over on Mashable Adam Ostrow reports that the aweso.me domains is proving to be especially popular.

Considering that .COM domains can sell anywhere from hundreds to literally millions of dollars there are bound to be lawsuits flying when the dust settles and a single owner per domain is crowned, there’s no cutting these babies in half.

Personally I’m not big on domaining, I have a small collection of domains and have a hard time parting with any of them so I wasn’t going to do much speculation with the .me TLD. But it will be interesting to watch the feathers fly from the sidelines

Image credit: mashable.com

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Today wrapped up my acquisition of 2goware.com that I mentioned in a previous post. There were some issues with the hosting that had to get sorted out relating to the security script PHPAudit and dreamhost.com (af). I was lucky the seller was so professional and worked through the issues for me, if he had just left me to sort through the issue with ionCube and dreamhost.com (af) myself my lack of php knowledge would have made getting the site transitioned successfully very painful.

2goware.com sells an arcade script for hosting flash games. Flash games sites are very popular niche sites right now because of the large amount of games available and the booming casual gaming market. I have a long list of things I would like to change including improving the landing page of the site itself and the template that comes with the arcade script.

As I mentioned in the previous post relating to this purchase I will now have another possible revenue stream outside of display advertising (CPM), text advertising (PPC/CPC), and affiliate marketing (CPA). Diversification is always a good thing, having multiple revenue streams shields you from sudden down turns in one particular market as we are currently seeing in display advertising.

Popularity: 44% [?]

Today I purchased my second pre-established site off sitepoint.com. The first site I purchased, gamersmark.com, is more of a longer term play, it is going to require a lot of TLC to recoup my investment, and I would like to make it one of the top game sites in the not so distant future. The site I bought today, 2goware.com, isn’t a content oriented site, instead the site sells an arcade script.

Setting up a casual gaming site has been on my agenda for quite a while (the agenda keeps getting larger and items rarely come off it but that’s a post for another day), in fact a year ago I registered a site called clockwatchergames.com to try my hand at this particular niche.

I purchased the site off sitepoint, sitepoint being only slightly less tedious than digitalpoint when it comes to auctions. The starting bid was $100 with a “Buy it now” cost of $1500.00. I thought about it for a few hours and decided I wanted to jump on it before anybody else go to it (here is the original auction link.) This kind of impetuousness isn’t exactly new for me, but even I should have tried to get the site cheaper than the BIN. Making it at least maringally easier to justify the Buy It Now (BIN) was the fact that it came with two sites that already implmented the script. Those two free domains, plus the revenue the seller posted for the site, $200 monthly (I assume 3/4 to 2/3 of this to account for “fluffing”), led me to believe that I could make money on this site. The sooner I can move from being purely adveritising oriented the better. There is  the old anecdote about the gold prospectors in San Francisco back in the 1900’s, if you wanted to get rich in the gold rush be the guy selling the shovels, not the guy mining for gold, with this script I anticipate being able to sell a lot of shovels, or more accurately being able to sell a lot of scripts.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Earlier today I was looking for flowers for my girlfriend, because sometimes, that’s just what a guy has to do Anyway, I typed in 1800Flowers.com to look for a nice bouquet to send. Once the page loaded up I immediately scrolled down to the links at the footer and looked for an Affiliate link. I didn’t have any intention of signing up then for an affiliate account and try and make my purchase through it, really I was just curious to see if an affiliate program was offered. Naturally, there was an affiliate program, at which point my mind went off on a little tangent trying to determine whether I thought it this particular affiliate program could be profittable, what kind of site would I have to setup to promote it, how crowded the market was, what the percentages were, etc… I started to ponder all those possibilities before I even began to accomplish what I came to the site for, to buy flowers.

As I learn more about all aspects of internet advertising, monetization, and site development I find myself looking for these kind of things, almost subconsciously, it will open you up to absorbing how other sites succeed and fail. Being cognizant of these things will ultimately, I hope, make me more successful.

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I’m sure you’ve seen all the various internet marketing gurus who tell you you can make tens of thousands of dollars a month in only a half hour a week and without spending a dime, they practically litter the sitepoint and digitalpoint forums, but they never tell you how much they make, all they want you to do is sign up for some kind of program. Their counterparts trolled the real estate market as well, offering to train you how to buy homes with no credit and no money down, selling “instructional classes” but never implementing their own methods.

In an effort to remain trasparent, I’ll be disclosing at the end of the month how much I make in my ventures. Right now it’s pretty insignificant, my total for June is $139.85, ($109.22 in AdSense and $30.63 via direct sales.) Why would I disclose this, it surely demonstrates that I’m no internet advertising mogul (not yet at least :).) But I’m not here hocking some advertising pyramid scheme, or fake PPC site, I’m documenting my experiences for my own reasons and letting anybody that would like peek behind the scenes, if others utilize what I write about here then that is awesome and they won’t even have to worry about me pushing yet another ebook down their throats.

Popularity: 19% [?]

So I was looking into godaddy’s domain parking service and I had a domain transfer I needed to complete. I tried logging into my account twice in Firefox 3 and both times it crashed on login. I finally resorted to logging in through Internet Explorer and completed the account transfer.

I don’t know if it was an SSL issue or what but this is kind of a bummer, it’s not like godaddy is a small site or anything. Having to revert back to IE = lame.

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In my previous article I added “(af)” after some of the links. If you are wondering what that means, it means that those links utilize my affiliate code for whatever affiliate program I happen to be referring to. My intention with this blog is to be transparent when it seems appropriate, if I have an interest in somebody taking action off a link or recommendation I make it should be disclosed. Some people don’t like signing up under other’s affiliate codes despite their interest, I for one feel it’s a validation of the entire business model I and my readers are trying to leverage. If somebody doesn’t like affiliates, then fine, I can’t control it anyway so I may as well make it easy for them to see so they see me as an honest authority on a subject rather than as some kind of huckster looking to sign people up to various programs.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Hi there everybody and welcome to (yet another) blog on the business of the Internet. In particular this blog will focus on, in no particlular order, the online advertising industry, generating income through niche websites, SEO, and general entrepreneurial matters.

I’ll try and make sure that my posts contain actual value, not asinine generalities that come from a lot of the other blogs that are nothing more than common sense. I’d like to address topics like Landing Page Optimization, utilizing Ad Servers to best utilize your advertising inventory, evaluations of various advertising networks, and being that I am a programmer by trade I’ll throw in some actual programming samples to for anybody that really wants to get down and dirty.

Popularity: 20% [?]