I’m not knocking 401(k)s per se, if your company contributes funds then it would be crazy not to take advantage of free money, but the old analogy “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” has never applied so transparently.

Don’t let your retirement be dictated by the whims of (sometimes irrational) markets, be they US or global, start a business of some sort. Not just only, but anything, to put you in the driver’s seat.

Which brings me to a little status update concerning my EPN / McJiffy websites, discountroombas.com and joshhamiltonmemorabilia.com, both so far have brought in a little money. The discountroombas.com site has been doing much better earning $14.08, and I’ve only paid out $12.35 in PPC campaigns. On the other hand joshhamiltonmemorabilia.com isn’t performing quite as well, it has made only $4.44 after spending $19.63 in PPC campaigns. Not exactly encouraging. But I do think I can improve the Josh Hamilton site by tuning the landing page, it’s currently using the McJiffy default, maybe embedding a video of him from the home run derby and putting some better graphics will excite people more and result in more conversions. I’m not overly concerned yet, with eBay’s 30 day look back window for conversion tracking the site could start to move towards positive ground soon, I’ll need to do some link building to improve organic traffic with that site.

Seeing the success I am already having with the Roombas site I decided to try another high margin product that does well in the aftermarket, Apple MacBooks. I purchased discount-macbooks.com this morning on godaddy.com, I plan on having the site up this afternoon.

My first instinct was that somebody had won an auction via joshhamiltonmemorabilia.com since I have two PPC campaigns, via Yahoo and Microsoft. However it was actually from discountroombas.com, the site has had less than 25 total visitors, most wandering in from digitalpoint so I’m pretty surprised somebody made a purchase, but I won’t complain. This actually validates my assumption, to a purely circumstantial extent at least so far, expensive items will tend to do better on eBay affiliate sites due to the gap between the aftermarket price and the retail price. I had been putting time and money into the Josh Hamilton site on more of lark and interest in him after his home run derby performance.

So feel free to share any stories about your first affiliate conversion, which network was it, how hard was it to get that conversion, was it worth it, etc…

Tim Cadogan introduces OpenX 2.6 from OpenX Limited on Vimeo.

Which brings me to 2.6, which I mentioned previously. I installed it tonight for nichebuilder.net to finally start running in house campaigns for 2goware.com and solostream. While the API functionality is the most important feature in 2.6 as far as I’m concerned, the polished UI is very nice, the previous 2.x interfaces were the very definition of Spartan and while the engine under the hood is what determines the success of any ad server if you or your users spend any significant amount of time trafficking ads or setting up campaigns a nice UI makes things a little more pleasant.

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

After starting an AdWords campaign to increase business Mr. Levitte discovered that 16.3 percent of his AdWord spend was going towards parked domains and “error” sites, none of this traffic resulted in conversions that would have normallay been generated had the ads appeared on a higher quality content site.

As of March, 2008 Google offered a way to exclude ad placement on parked domains and error sites. Mr Levitte is seeing class action status for everybody that has held an AdWords in the last 4 years and served at least one impression.

If, and it’s a big if, Mr. Levitte can attain class action status the lawsuit could be huge. AdWords contributes the lion’s share to Google’s 16+ billion dollar revenue stream so the suit, if designated class action, could be on par with those lodged against major auto manufacturers warranting large scale recalls (think Ford Explorers and Firestone tires.)

Almost every hosting company in business today supports URL rewriting through Apache’s mod_rewrite functionality, and a lot of the more popular scripts out there such as WordPress have URL rewriting baked in. But if you are building a site from scratch or purchase a custom site URL rewriting may not yet be in effect.

I recently purchased an arcade script site, 2goware.com, and the resulting script provided does not implement URL rewriting. I am going to remedy this. One of the sites implmenting the 2goware.com script is thefastball.com which I also got in the purchase. Currently the script delineates games into 1 of 9 categories and all rolled up into a 10th category. The links for each category, as they exist in version 1.2 of the script, direct the user to index.php?cat=[x] where X is a value between 1 and 9 or “all“. To rewrite these URLs into a more user friendly URLs such as /shooting-games.html requires can be accomplished in about 15 minutes with the use of the .htaccess file. With the 2goware script there was no .htaccess file at all created so I started by creating an empty file named .htaccess. I indicated the start of a new rule by adding the line “RewriteEngine On” (see screen shot at the bottom). Then I added a comment line, preceded by “#” to comment what rule I was implementing (comments aren’t required but they increase readability for the most part.) I then create a RewriteRule for each category that translates the CategoryID into the equivalent Category Name.

www.thefastball.com/index.php?cat=1 becomes www.thefastball.com/anime-games.html
www.thefastball.com/index.php?cat=6 becomes www.thefastball.com/shooting-games.html
etc…

This tutorial is just begins to demonstrate the power of mod_rewrite, I’ll be coming back to mod_rewrite in the future but in the mean time you can read more about it here.

Good luck and I’ll see you in the SERPs!