September the 7th 1998 with $100k and four computers Google started up.
Today they are worth $xxxxxxxxxxx … let’s say for arguments sake $150 billion

Whatever way you look it it …..it makes me feel like I’ve been in a coma as far as productivity goes, Google has managed to penetrate almost everyone’s lives from mail to maps to writing to even a browser. Personally I have not been overly impressed with much Google has done in the last 2 years apart from the very recent browser Chrome which I have totally switched to and love, that aside considering their muscle, wealth and power they can waltz through failures without breaking a sweat which can be a bad thing, but when they get it right and sometimes they do…they are very very good.

Either way….. for tomorrow………. Happy Birthday Google

My first speaking gig has been confirmed at the a4u expo, I have a mid-day spot on day 2:

Million Dollar Blogging Strategies for Affiliates
Speaker: Al Carlton • Founder, coolestgadgets.com
Learn from Al Carlton as he shows you how he made $1m from blogging as an affiliate. Discover how to use blogging as an affiliate platform, learn strategies, tips and monetisation methods that you can use on your blog whether established or yet to be born!

I can’t take any credit for the title or description

I am really looking forward to the conference as there are a load of speakers that I want to listen to and learn from, though I’m pretty nervous about my bit. If you want to attend and haven’t registered yet use the code SPK10 for a 10% discount (wonder if other percentages work ).

Also in the news on the Internet grapevine this week is that eBay are suing Shawn Hogan AKA Digital Point (and others but I don’t know them) over cookie stuffing (big thread on DP). Going back a few years (well 4) when DigitalPoint was not quite as busy and you could read most threads (and the majority weren’t shit), I remember seeing (and being inspired) by a post from Shawn (a guy I like and have a lot of respect for) where he explained how he lost $4,500 when the eBay affiliate tracking was down for 8 hours. Back then he was on Google’s first page for ‘ebay’ and #1 for ‘eBay registration’ which I’m sure netted him a fair amount, those ranks were achieved somewhat black hat from an SEO perspective back then but I’d be very surprised if he knowingly broke eBay terms with the cookie stuffing, time will tell I suppose.

Game courtesy of Scott, Sling Jumper, he’s stuck on level 14 can you beat him?

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

There’s a lot I like about living just on the edge of town, large garden, more space, no noisy neighbours etc but there are drawbacks and one of the smaller drawbacks caused a near fatal problem for me… namely a mouse

Recently my computer started making more noise than usual, it was never quiet but even so it was getting painfully noisy, it would seem that a mouse had got into the back through an open pci slot on my computer and must have been hungry as hell because it had chewed all sorts of cable and transistors around and on the motherboard, all this culminated in complete hard drive failure on Monday, it’s a sickening feeling to see your computer die.

Thankfully spurred on by this post Al made about Tyler’s hiccup I decided to buy a USB drive a couple of months ago and started to make weekly backups which windows can do automatically, phew. Pity it happened on a Monday morning which means my most recent backup is a full week old but I’ll live with that gladly!

I have restored almost everything, a weeks worth of emails gone which is annoying but it could have been worse, my whole business, emails, contacts, accounts, receipts could have been taken down by a tiny mouse, little xxxxxx!  I made sure my computer wasn’t the only thing that died that day. So back to normal almost for me, starting to be back into gear and I’ll be looking to be much more productive over the coming weeks.

Image source

The school summer holidays are finally over and though they have been highly enjoyable (boating, skiing, safari park, countless shopping (not so fun with an 11 year old shopaholic), demolishing house, making stuff, relative visiting, etc.) I am looking forward to getting back to the fun of business. It also makes me thankful for choosing the business that I’m in, there are not many jobs or businesses where you can reduce your productivity by 95% for 6 weeks and still enjoy a growth in revenue .

A bit of good news for all us publishers in the UK who receive a large portion of our income from the US. The strength of the dollar means more pounds in our wallet (~£2K up last month) and with the falling house prices it looks like a good time move in the next 12 months, every cloud has a silver lining as they say.

I assume everybody that is reading this has already heard all about Google Chrome, Google’s new web browser. I’ve been giving it a try and am very impressed with the speed of it. If you frequent sites heavy in Javascript (GMail, Analytics, etc.) it is worth downloading purely for those, for me the improved performance is staggering, you can read a decent review over on Geeks are sexy.

Anyway hoping everybody has had a fun summer holiday (let us know what you did or went), more frequent post frequency will now resume.

March 2007 bought a .co.uk domain that I first saw posted on Acorn, the domain in question can be seen here. Bought for around $700.

There was a famous Scottish footballer called this and around March last year I was less focused, buying any .co.uk domain names that seemed good value rather than one’s I can develop out, so I bought it.

Just completed the sale of the domain through Escrow with the buyer paying the fees.

The buyer sent me a UPS letter from America to enquire if it was for sale and my asking price, I did a bit of research and the buyer seemed genuine, I also checked and confirmed they owned the .com version of the domain, that was good news confirming for me their interest was genuine.

Next was to do some research and I found the .com version previously listed for sale on DNForum, I contacted the previous owner to see what he sold it for, he was kind enough to let me know he sold it for $20k, nice sale. Still not sure how this would compare to the value of a .co.uk

I replied to the registered letter to say I wasn’t actively looking to sell the domain however if a suitable offer was made I would give it due consideration, if I had to put a price I’m not sure what I would have went with, no matter, a few hours later he got back and offered $10,000.

Now there’s a time to haggle and a time to deal, sure I could have countered and got more or countered and lost out completely, I decided to deal and Escrow has just been completed, $10,000 …kerching

The lesson I learnt here was for once it was a much better strategy to let the prospective buyer come with a suitable offer as a starting point, it may just be higher than your target price.

I am still learning everyday about domains, dropcatching & developing. At some point I’ll probably do a post that details the process to catching UK domains, costs and what’s involved but for now I’ll just share my main thoughts on what I’ve learnt generally on domaining and specifically the .co.uk extension.

1. If you want to rank in Google.co.uk (which is much easier to do than .com) you really do need to get a .co.uk  …. simple as that, I know you can throw 100 examples of good ranking info’s com’s net’s and org’s but in my experience it makes life so much easier. Yes webmaster central lets you specify that your domain/site is UK targeted but again in my experience that’s about as useful as a one-legged man at an arse kicking contest, get the country specific domain if your outside the US.

2. Not all one word domains are valuable or the holy grail, doesn’t matter what extension we are talking about. I’d much rather have a 2 word product domain like patiofurniture.co.uk than a one word domain like curved.co.uk

3. Domains need to serve a purpose and they are generally only worth something if there is either a clear development opportunity for them in a brandable way, so something like sailingworld.co.uk works for me as very brandable and describes itself well, or if they are keyword rich and searched for like Genes.co.uk, domains like pissypants.co.uk or shoeshere.co.uk are worth zero, if you add two or three dictionary words together that does not an excellent domain make, not to say you couldn’t develop them to build traffic and add value but as a domain with nothing else value =£0

Read the rest of this entry »

Unlike Al it’s not often I get the chance to receive free products so I was pleasantly surprised to get an Omni Chair which is a giant pillow or bean bag, as you can see my son gives it the thumbs up and I have to admit it is real comfy, my sister in law is 6 months pregnant and offered to buy it there and then so would also make a good gift for anyone expecting, they claim there are at least 10 ways to use it!

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Extend Firefox 3 competition winners have been announced which awards the best new extensions for FF and also includes updates to extensions.
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I remember hearing earlier this month about the sale of OD.com for $220,000 and many on the forums saying it was a good sale in current times but also a good buy, what many people presumed is that this was an end user buying it, I just found out in the last few days I know who bought it which was a slight shock! and it wasn’t an end user.

The guy that bought it has invested in it and will look to sell it on at some point, imagine dumping that much cash into a domain, don’t get me wrong I think he will make a 6 figure profit on it, just that it could take a while and that’s a lot of money to tie up but if you can afford it (and he can) best of luck.
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My dropcatching is stumbling along, I am going to test a different setup next month and can then perhaps report back, it does add a bit of excitement to each day never knowing if you’ll get something good. It also makes me aware of domains not on the forums which I had not previously considered.

For example I was trying to catch SailingWorld.co.uk which I had seen was dropping, I also had it booked with catchers, no joy, however I saw who caught it & made some enquiries and bought it for £500, now that domain would never have hit the forums so there are lots of deals to be done on these domains freshly caught that had previously always gone unnoticed by myself.
B.T.W. JourneyAdvisor.co.uk is for sale for £250, contact me if your interested.
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From reading the domain forums PPC seems to be down around 50% for many people from last year, I see more and more domainers are developing and Julia mentioned as much on her excellent blog. There really is a turning of the tide and I think this will really ramp up overall domain and website prices and domain prices in the future, it always struck me when buying domains that I felt I was getting many of them cheap considering how much value you can add just by developing, even poorly. Once ‘domainers’ become ‘developers’ the bargains will become even harder to find, such is life.
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This game looks really interesting if you have.. em, a job you don’t want to do, if I worked a night shift and just needed to be somewhere I reckon I could kill hours with this no problem. However foir something a bit quicker try parking lot.
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I’m in Escrow at the minute for a domain that I am buying, if anyone knows of any white label or good affiliate programs for car leasing in the UK I’d appreciate a link, contract leasing over x months type of thing.

I’m currently getting ready for a holiday next week and child spoiling this week (hence infrequent posts) but I’ve just heard the Yahoo Buzz is now open to everybody so needed to make a quick post.

Yahoo Buzz is a bit (some would say a lot, others may even say clone) like Digg, where people submit stories, people vote, stories get promoted etc. Previously only a limited few could submit stories, now it’s open to all so well worth a look and possible submit.

Yahoo Buzz thanks to David (CPA Affiliates) for the link (not so sure about the public CCs though ).

As mentioned earlier in the week I am now registered with Nominet and have my own TAG which cost £587.50 to setup and then £100+VAT per year, as a registrar I can register domains directly with Nominet making them slightly cheaper, it also gives me access to their DAC (domain availability checker) and with a TAG it means I can query/check and try and register domains that have not been renewed or have been cancelled.

This improves my chances of getting a nice one word domain for £5, some interesting things to know about the DAC are:

The DAC is limited to four simultaneous connections per member, or group of related members.
Queries can be sent to the DAC without waiting for the previous query to return. 
The DAC will just queue the queries.
The maximum query rate is 1,000 queries per rolling 60 seconds recalculated every 5 seconds and a maximum of 432,000 per rolling 24 hours, recalculated every five minutes.
If you exceed the query limits a block will be imposed.

There are so many people trying for the same names some using techniques or judgement to try and improve their chances by using their allocation at certain times of the day, still looks like a bit of a lottery. Yesterday there was an LLL.co.uk which dropped early, the only other decent domain I knew of that I was interested in I managed to register, my first catch on the drop! …

‘Happy days dad’ as my son would say
A nice one word domain that describes a manner of things, a period in time, furniture, good name for a hotel or organisation. Possibly the only decent domain I’ll ever catch but the governed board of elected gods were smiling on me yesterday and in that millisecond made sure my fees to date have been more than covered.