Guess How Much This Guy's Blog Makes this Month and He'll Give it to You

24 May 2007 - 02:15

Want A Chance to Make Some Easy Money ?

Courtney Tuttle has come up with a novel way to make himself poorer by giving away some money. Is he mad? I don't know, but I doubt it. He writes a neat blog with some useful information and has come up with a competition to allow someone to win whatever money he makes from his blog in May. Last month he made US$293.01 so that gives you an idea of the sums involved.

I congratulate him on his idea and I might try it myself some day ! Not now though 'cause at the moment I really need those $10.

Anyway, this is what you gotta do to win Mr Tuttle's money off him. In his own words :-

"If you can guess within $1 of what I earn in May, I will give you all of my earnings for the month! I will PayPal the money to you the first day of June. If you can’t get PayPal, we’ll figure something out! I fully plan on giving it to someone.

It Might As Well Be You!

Hint: It’s looking like it will be more than last month.

Rules:

Create a post on your blog, copy these rules and paste them into the post.
Make a guess! Link to my homepage with the text ‘make money online $1.00′, replacing the $1.00 with the amount of your guess. Example: make money online $100.56.
Leave this link to the rules page intact.
Use my contact page to confirm your entry by letting me know (make sure to include the URL of your post)! I will find most of them, but let me know to make sure! "

So here is my guess, arrived at by a complex mathematical calculation known only to me
make money online $570.64.

As you can see I've gone high, probably too high but I like to live dangerously :-)

Have a good day and good luck !

Congoo - Interesting NEW News Site - See What You Think

23 May 02:31

Congoo and Claytronics

I've just discovered Congoo.com a cool site with lots of news articles in all areas - technology, news, politics, people etc... If you are looking for news articles I suggest you have a look. They say their mission is simple - "To provide information seekers with access to the most valuable information on the Web."

It has suddenly shot up 140% on Alexa.com for some reason. One article I found there was about 'claytronics' - the possibility of making 3-D reproductions of people you can 'interact' and talk with ! They want to use it for business meetings, but I have other ideas :-) See here -> 3DClaytronics

You Wanna Be A Domain Name Millionaire? Walk this Way.

22 May 2007 - 19:28


So you want to be a Domain Name Mllionaire ? Walk this Way.

Paul Sloan at Business Week bumped into Kevin Ham a “dotcom mogul” with a $300 milion empire, you can read the full article here : BusinessWeek

At an auction in Las Vegas Kevin Ham recently bought weddingcatering.com, christianrock.com and greeting.com.

How much would you pay for these domain names ?

Personally I would have poneyed up $500 for the lot and I would have considered that risky. Well that just shows how much I know. For the first, Mr Ham paid $10,000, for the second $31,000 and for the third $350,000 ! Although he thought the plural 'greetings.com' would have been better, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers.

If you think Mr Ham might be slightly cracked in the head, then think again, he is a multi-millionaire who gave up a career in medicine when he saw he could make more money from domain names.

Until recently domain name buying was a secretive affair which people generally did in the comfort and privacy of their own homes, in the dead of night, using nothing but their computer and a few brain cells, but now live domain name auctions are starting to appear in the 'real world'. The next one is being organized by moniker.com in New York on June 19th – 22nd . They are starting to attract the attention of bankers (spit), venture-backed start-ups, and a variety of other 'investors', all keen to get their hands on some prime real estate before it is too late. Well, don't let them, you get there first! For good names that are already registered you may need deep pockets, but you can still find the odd gem by a bit of lateral thnking. You may also consider getting into .mobi or .tv names as they are still fairly new and so not all of the good names have been registered already.

The big money is being made from names that draw a steady stream of cash from Google and Yahoo ads, some sites get thousands of visitors a day. What people see on the sites are ads for products which they can click on, they do this in sufficient numbers to bring in hundreds or thousands of dollars a day for a good site. This explains why people are willing to pay what may appear to be inflated amounts of money for them. The smart guys were buying up names during the dotcom crash and they now own what has become highly valuable Internet real estate.

Kevin Ham is one of the most successful domainers in the world. He has been buying domains since 2000 and now has a portfolio of over 300,000 domains. In addition to spending hours each day buying up names that were expiring, he also came up with a “cunning plan” all his own. He contacted the Cameroon government and together they agreed to divert traffic from unregistered .cm names to one of Mr Ham’s site, .cm is the country code for Cameroon but it also a typo for .com. Thousands of people each day type .cm instead of .com and end up on Mr Ham’s site where they can generate revenue for him and the Cameroon government by clicking on ads. Very clever and all totally legal. Type in money.cm and see where you end up.
He is also looking to set up similar deals with Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et).

Ham's sites receive 30 million unique visitors a month but he is still something of an enigma who shuns publicity. So much so that he used to use a PO Box in Vancouver for his domain communications.

One of his sites is weddingshoes.com, a site with links from dozens of retailers. According to Mr Ham the site brings in around $750 a month, which may not seem much but if you have 10 such sites then you are making $7,500 a month. Mr Ham has around 300,000 so, if my maths is correct, a possible $225,000 a month ! The name cost him $8 and a similar amount to renew it every year no doubt.

The other way to make money is to own a name someone else wants to buy. In 2002 Amy Schrier bought blue.com for $65,000, not cheap and so she must have known what she was doing. She was recently offered $200,000 for it, which she refused, eventually selling it for $500,000 - cf. Reinvent

You can also try domain names without spending any money. You buy a domain name for a 5 day trial period, then if you don’t like it you cancel it and get your money back. Each domain registrar has slightly different rules so you need to check them out first. Mr Ham of course did this on an industrial scale ! Buying thousands at a time and keeping maybe only a couple of hundred.

With everything becoming more open and transparent it is apparently becoming harder to find great deals, i.e. domain names that you can pick up cheap. To get a cheap domain name you need to find a domain name owner who doesn’t know the value of what he/she has got.
Amazingly Mr Ham still buys 30 to 100 names a day, but he can no longer buy them cheap. He also expects changes in the way domain names are monetized and so is taking the longer term view, he has recently created a company called Reinvent Technology and intends turning his most valuable names into mini media companies. His plan is to become an “Internet Titan” and he believes small players will sell out to venture capitalists and the best names will eventually be owned by just a handful of companies.

selling domain names
kevin ham
domain name auctions

Microsoft aQuantive Deal Good News for Bloggers!

18 May 2007 - 18:55

Microsoft moves into Online Advertising

Microsoft is buying online advertising agency aQuantive for $6 billion in cash, paid for using Bill Gates's American Express card ! (that was a joke). They paid 85% more than the company was valued at on Thursday evening. So we can tell, if someone offers you 85% more for your house than its current valuation, they are desperate!

Microsoft are running behind Google desperately trying to catch up and get a presence in the online ad. business. This has got to be good news for bloggers or website publishers who make their money from the ads. on their sites (like me and so many others, see here - BloggersEarnings). As Microsoft launches an aggresssive campaign to compete with Google , it seems to me prices for ads. will be forced up. I would expect Microsoft at some point to come up with an alternative to Adsense, which at the moment has a virtual monopoly. Microsoft to buy Bidervtiser? You heard it here first !

"This deal takes our advertising business to a new level," said Microsoft CEO Kevin Johnson "it allows us to take a bigger piece of that $40 billion pie that is still growing." (!)

The deal is important, because Microsoft's online services are becoming increasingly dependent upon online advertising. According to David Smith at Gartner the deal had become a necessity for Microsoft due to the changing economics of its business. "This is a big step" he said "but they're still significantly behind Google,"

Microsoft executives disclosed that they were not the only ones interested in buying aQuantive, which no doubt explains the hefty pre-emptive price tag. Though they said they were 'happy' to pay the price they did. In the past Microsoft has been a conservative buyer and it has walked away from deals if they got too expensive. Well, anyone who has been on Ebay will know the feeling.

Microsoft has apparently been trying to buy Yahoo for around $50 billion, but Yahoo refused to play ball, but Microsoft may not have given up yet.

aQuantive's revenue is tiny, $142.6 million for Q1, compared to Microsoft and they will not be revising their short-term earnings guidance as a result, but clearly this was a company they couldn't let get away if they are to compete with Google.

If you are looking for the next big deal, take a look at ValueClick, which is one of the largest remaining independent online advertising firms, (Charts), its shares rose 9.3% percent to $30.46 in early trading today, as people speculated that it may be the next target.

Domain Name Auctions can be Addictive ! But also profitable.

17 May 2007 - 19:23

A Most Excellent and Illuminating Post on Making Money from Domain Name Auctions

Some people get addicted to buying domain names, either new ones, or old ones that are expiring. It is easy to understand why if you have ever bought anything on Ebay. But how much would you be willing to pay for a domain name called seriouscooks.com ?

It doesn't sound like much to me. Two guys who are into domain names started bidding at US$ 150 with a limit of $500 but eventually bid it up to $3,000, fortunately for them, or unfortunately, they were outbid, as it was eventually sold for $3150.

And who was willing to pay that amount of money just for a name? Apparently a company called Sirius Cooks - they were just buying it to prevent other people owning a name that closely resembled theirs.

So what is the point of having a domain name like that? One point is that you can buy a domain name for $60 and re-sell it a few days/weeks later for $1,000 (apparently - it ain't happened to me yet!)

Sedo is a good place to find some current auctions. There are also plenty of companies that let you 'park' your domain with them for free, if you don't fancy developing a website yourself, and you get money for anyone who clicks on the ads. displayed on your parked domain.

The expiring domain name auction for the 'seriouscooks' auction was Snapnames.com The whole blow by blow account of the above frenzied auction and just why they went as high as they did along with readers' comments can be found here Revenews

For a reputable parking company where you can park your newly-acquired, or old, domain names free of charge and generally make some money off them, click here NameDrive

From Blog to Book Deal

15 May 2007 - 12:24

Can You Blog Your Way to Fame and Fortune ?

You learn something new everyday, particularly when, like me, you don’t much to start with. What I learnt today is that there is something called the Lulu Blooker Prize which according to the official website " is the world's first literary prize devoted to "blooks"-books based on blogs or other websites, including webcomics. »"

The first prize is $10,000 so hardly a fortune but it’s a start. Again according to the Lulu Blooker site, blooks are "the world's fastest- growing new kind of book ... a new hybrid literary form". and "Traditional publishing houses, ever in search of the next big name author, have begun to mine blogs and websites for new talent."

The prize was awarded for the first time last year when there were 89 blogs-to-books entered, this year there were 100 entered which is an increase of around 12% but is still not enormous so theoretically you’ve got a 1 in 100 chance of winning $10,000, which is not bad odds really. All you need to do is write something interesting, this year’s winning blog was written by Colby Buzzell a US soldier in Iraq, but second prize went to a fiction writer. To check out how to enter go their website which is, by the way, written in barely legible, disgusting brown on brown ! What is wrong with these people !? Do they think we like looking at something the dog might have sicked up !? Crazy, but here it is anyway BlookerPrize

Even if you don’t win the Blooker prize you might still find a publisher for your blog as happened to both Zoe Margolis (Girl with a One Track Mind) OneTrackMind. In case you were wondering then yes, the one track of her mind is the track you were thinking about, though whether it is factual or exploitative fiction I have no way of knowing (note to Girl if she is reading – the link in your article in the Guardian doesn’t work).

And Tom Reynolds, author of Random Acts of Reality a look at life through the eyes of a London ambulance driver. His blog has been adapted into a book and his publisher made the contents available for free download, yet the book still sold apparently.

It would appear this is the way of the future, so if you want to get published, get blogging and make it good and ’edgy’. Reality TV is all the rage at the moment and I suspect ‘reality’ blogs is the way things are going, and if your particular slice of reality seems uninteresting then make it up ! There's nothing that says you can't write fake reality.

Bandwagons are made to be jumped on but with so many bloggers out there you will need to write something that stops people in their tracks. People who use StumbleUpon generally give your blog around 3 seconds to grab their attention, I know it’s true ‘cause that’s what I do too ! We are living in a world where people zap.

So given that the chances of winning the Blooker Prize are about 1 in 100 how hard can it be? So get writing, check out last year's winners to see what they were like and do something better ! I might even have a go myself.

Check how popular your blog/website is - with recommendations on how to improve your ranking.

10 May 2007 - 15:52

Grade Your Website/Blog

Ever wondered how popular your blog/site is and if there is an easy way to rise up throgh the rankings? Well have a look at Website Grader, it'll tell you all you need to know about your Google page rank, Google links, Yahoo links, Technorati tags etc... It'll also give you straightforward recommendations about how you could improve your site's visibility e.g. I put in Paula Mooney's URL and discovered her blog is graded in the top 96/100 (good) and that she has Google page rank of 5 but it also recommended that she get her own domain name instead of using the 'blogspot' address. If you are using a 'blogspot' address it is very easy to get your own .com domain name, it'll cost you less than $10 - instructions on how to do it are here : RealDomainName

It's fun to find out all the things you are doing wrong :-( , so check out your blog on (it's free and as far as I am aware they don't have an affiliate program so I am not making a cent out of this). You can also be nosey and check out other people's blogs and see if you can discover how they got to be famous.

Happy hunting and have a nice day!

How Much Do The Big Bloggers Earn ? Does Size Matter ?

9 May 2007 - 20:16

Do Big Bloggers Make Big Money ?

Have you ever wondered how much top bloggers earn from their blogs? Well now you can find out without scouring the Internet for hours, because someboyd has done it for you! Not me I hasten to add but Paula Neal Mooney PaulaMooney The list throws up a number of surprises.

First, I hadn't heard of the first five. I was expecting the No. 1 to be TechCrunch or Problogger, turns out it's Markus Frind (over US$3.5 million) ! Markus Who? Shows how much I know. Turns out he runs an online free dating site and earns $10,000 a day just from Adsense (see the interview at the link over at PNM's blog).

Second, I thought Problogger and John Chow would be higher up the list (12th and 15th respectively) although I think the amount of information available has greatly affected this ranking. Steve Pavlina came in 6th but in other rankings I have seen he is behind both Problogger and JC.

Third, the earnings drop off pretty quickly after the first twenty, bottom of the list No. 60 makes US$ 479.88 so a pretty low hurdle to get over to get onto the list. But also a bit discouraging as it means there must be a lot of people out there making not much. As always it seems that the superstars make superbucks and the also rans also ran and huffed and puffed but without the rocket fuel will find it hard to close the gap, note to me - "fame is an interesting concept and is worthy of further study."

A very interesting list and certainly worth looking into in greater detail if you are at all interested in making money from a website/blog to see how the successful ones do it.

Good luck and have a nice day !

Make Serious Money from .mobi Domain Names

3 May 2007 - 22:34

.MOBI DOMAIN NAME REGISTRATIONS PASS 500,000

In just 7 months since it was launched the .mobi domain name had had over 500,000 registrations. It represents a good way to get into the domain name industry, given that most .coms have already been registered, it is still possible to find a good .mobi name with the potential to make a considerable amount of money. Recent .mobi sales include Sportsbook.mobi for $129,800, RealEstate.mobi for $85,000, Stocks.mobi for $70,000, Casinos.mobi for $53,000.

Top Brands lead way with Millions of Pages of Mobile Content

dotMobi is designed specifically for mobile phones and was launched in October 2006. Yesterday registrations passed 500,000 in 104 countries. This rapid growth shows that developers are keen to create .mobi sites for mobile phones. There are now millions of pages of content live on .mobi sites and many of the world's leading brands have set up their own .mobi sites in recent months.

Travel is a particularly popular area, with SAS (Scandinavian Airlines) being the first airline to enable .mobi access to flight and check-in information. Amtrak.mobi will soon have its own .mobi sites. BMW, Ferrari and Rolls-Royce already have their own sites.

Other major brands include ESPN.mobi, Maxim.mobi, FoxNews.mobi, BusinessWeek.mobi and CNNMoney.mobi. There are also social networking .mobi sites such as yolo.mobi and cerkle.mobi. For people on the move there is cabbies.mobi to help find a taxi in the US, UK and Canada and screenings.mobi to find film times and locations in those same countries.

VoteScotland.mobi allows people to vote in elections over the phone instead of going to the polling station.

.mobi sites are designed to ensure that consumers can be confident that an Internet site or service will work on their mobile phones when using a .mobi address.

It seems to me .mobi domain names will become more and more common, so now is a good time to start registering names, which can either be parked with a parking company or developed.

For more information on dotMobi domains and registration information, visit: http://mtld.mobi.Visit the dotMobi blog at http://blog.mobi.

Useful Sites For Improving Your Blog/Site Visibility

3 May 2007 - 18:09

The Most Useful Social News Sites

Like many people I guess, I was wondering which sites were the most useful for submitting articles to, so I thought I'd check out their Alexa Traffic Rank, here's the list I drew up. As you can see some of them are a lot more popular and therefore useful when it comes to reaching the widest number of readers.

Site .......................................................Alexa Traffic Rank

www.Digg.com .............................................................90
www.De.licio.us ..........................................................184
www.Stumbleupon.com ............................................320
www.Netscape.com ...................................................544
www.Reddit.com .......................................................857
www.twitter.com ....................................................1,057
www.43Things.com ................................................1,881
www.BlinkList.com ................................................3,578
www.Newsvine.com ................................................3,775
www.Clipmarks.com.............................................. 5,007
www.Simpy.com ....................................................11,272
www.Spurl.com .....................................................13,227
www.RawSugar.com .............................................26,681
www.CoRank.com.................................................. 31,617
www.SpotPlex.com ................................................33,418
www.Spotback.com ..............................................49,702
www.YooNo.com................................................... 65,452
www.OpenServing.com ......................................237,088

[Yes, I know, I need to learn how to insert a table]

Also, don't forget to ping when you make a new post - mor einfo. here - AutoPingers

Another extremely useful and interesting site for analyzing traffic is WebsiteGrader just type in the URL of your site or blog to find out how you rank in the worldwide cyberuniverse. It gives you information on your Website grade, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank (1,778,891 :-() , Google Inbound Links, Yahoo Inbound Links, Delicious Saved Count, Google Indexed Pages, Technorati Ranking. It also gives you tips on how you can improve your site/blog e.g. not overdoing it on the meta keywords, and you can get the same information of course on everybody else if your nosey, i.e. sites like problogger, john chow etc...

Finally check out this site for 10 Top Tips on how to exploit social news sites for your own benefit ! SBH

BigString - E-mails you can recall

1 May 2007 - 23:34

This is BigString Post Deux [First Posted on 18 April 2007 - 14:56 ]

Keep your eyes open for Bigstring.com a cool new email service that allows you to take your e-mails back. The e-mails self-destruct and cannot be printed.

Their e-mail service is revolutionary as it gives back control of e-mails to the sender. E-mails can be recalled and changed ! So if you have ever sent an e-mail you regretted sending, you can get it back ! And you can send your e-mail via the BigString website or a program such as Outlook.

Their e-mails look exactly like any other e-mail, with the difference that as the sender you have total control over all functions. You just need to click on the “Edit Sent Mail” button.

You can recall, add or delete attachments, erase, and self-destruct your e-mails after you have sent them.

As far as I am aware this is a unique development you no longer need to worry about your messages lingering on in cyberspace or someone's hard drive for ever and a day, when you yourself have moved on.

If you have ever sent an e-mail you wish you hadn't or if you think you ever will, then you should seriously consider BigString.

There is a free 1 GB e-mail service similar to MSN or Yahoo etc... except that it lets you expire or edit messages that you have already sent or there is a pay service if you prefer.

Sounds good to me ! To sign up for free today and take control of your e-mails click here - BigString

Blogging Resources and Tips + an Update

1 May 2007 - 16:15

Adsense Problems

The PSAs seem to have reappeared, but only sporadically - they seem to come and go to be replaced by software or web hosting ads. Under normal circumstances I would remove the previous post Top20 to see if that is what was causing the problem, but unfortunately :-) somebody decided to digg it and it has had 31 diggs so far over at the digging place, which is very gratifying, so I am reluctant to remove it. I would have thought that with 31 diggs I would be able to see it somewhere on the front pages or upcoming pages or whatever they call them, but no, all sorts of other stuff with less than 31 diggs but mine appears invisible. One day I might actually understand what I'm doing.

A Really Useful Site

I went to Google and typed in "blogging tips" and found this really useful site for bloggers LorelleResources - Lorelle has put together a quite amazing list of places to go to find stuff suitable for blogs. She [?] has categorized the lists into ten categories ranging from 'industry news' to 'highest traffic' to 'web trends' and a lot more and each one seems to have about 50 links to News Stories, so a LOT of stuff for you to get your brain cells around and a lot of sources and resources for news and statistics for your blog/website. In fact a bit too much so I'm off for a lie down.

Another useful Site - for Firefox Users

This place has tips for how to double the speed of Firefox I haven't done it yet but I am assured it works FirefoxX2