I am brand new really to affiliate sales but with a set of furniture domains that need something on them I decided to start and it was also part of my list of goals for this year.

I paid around $1000 for my programmer or coder or whatever you would have him called to make my own script for my domains that easily lets me pull in product feeds and display the content. I couldn’t find anything off the shelf that I liked especially with a nice admin area and my script makes everything really simple and efficient and is custom designed to deal with my feeds, I wanted the look of the homepage to be more of a store look with good categories instead of a price comparison type of site.

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Nice little bit of recycling done recently that allowed me to create a new website.

I do translations and often get phrases that make me sit and think for a second when completing them, many I have heard before but I get some new one’s popping up which are quite cool.

I also get a steady supply of new one’s I have never heard off.

Phrases like

• Being different isn’t the same as making a difference
• When a child is born so is a mother

• You cant use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

I know there are lots of word or the day sites & famous quotes but I still felt I could put this data to good uses and create a Phrase of the day website, checking the domain I found phraseoftheday.co.uk was available (13th March) which was nice and I already had the phrases so a free template and a free quote script and about 50 minutes later I had a new website.

A couple of links and one stumble later and it’s doing just over 100 visitors per day

Around 6% of the traffic is direct type in traffic as well which is nice for a brand new UK domain, the traffic is a good mix of from my own network, Google, direct, other sites and Stumbleupon. Again with a new site like this I like to leave it for the first 6 months with no advertising or Adsense so that other webmasters are not put off linking to it.

As a test I decided to use Sedo’s featured listing to see whether it helped offers or sales, it’s quite apparent they are not a broker in the sense that they would seek out a buyer for premium domains however they are the only real shop window so worth a test I felt.

I don’t have a great deal of domains for sale, most are for development in one form or another but chose TVs.co.uk which Sedo had previously appraised at £22,000 for this test, 2 weeks ago I paid the €39 for a featured listing.

When you order a Featured Listing for €39 your domain listing will rotate between the Sedo homepage and featured listings page for 30 days. Thirteen randomly selected Featured Listing domains are displayed on the Sedo homepage each hour while the remaining domains are displayed on the Featured Listings page.

Half way through my 30 day listing and the stats are as follows:
893 visits to the sale page
2 bids on the domain

I have to say both bids were for $100, so unless it’s a really crappy domain, which I don’t believe then it would suggest this premium is likely a waste of money, Sedo upgraded the domain to a ‘Top Domain’ which probably accounts for the larger amount of page views on the sale page.

What strikes me is why on earth would people low ball to the extent that they do on Sedo when making offers, I have had it numerous times on domains, offers like $50/$100 on domains clearly worth 4 figures, it’s not like most people using such a specific service as a domain marketplace would be blind to the value of their domains, maybe sending emails to owners but on a domain marketplace? If you can’t make a serious opening offer then your unlikely to get a serious counter bid.

How long does it take Google Images to update…

Around September 1st, pretty much when Google Images implement their image labeler my Google images traffic plummeted on my tattoo site.

Unlike many others, I always benefited pretty well from the traffic that Google images supplied, probably because my site is image based, that traffic converted well into Adsense earnings and library subscribed members so I quickly felt the pinch.

The traffic briefly came back and then flatlined, nothing on site had changed.

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It has been an interesting week for me so far, I was feeding my daughter Eve and with no warning she managed to throw up her milk all across my keyboard, there was no saving it so I had to do some research for a new one, I wanted something that was ergonomic after last year when I changed to a vertical mouse which helped a slight RSI.

With that in mind I opted for a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 which is a split keyboard, it arrived this morning and I have to admit I am finding it tough at the start to adjust so I’ll be a man of few words today until I get used to it. (more…)

I’ve mentioned in a few posts how I experimented with ClickBank last year, I never went into any great detail as it was one of those things that would of been really easy to duplicate. However I find you don’t see many real life example on how programs convert and as I’m not really pushing it any more I thought it would be good to share my findings and results.

The page in question is this one on iPhone Games and it pushes the ClickBank program iPhone Nova (a pay once, download as much as you like service). The page came about when I received this email from a guy called Silver:
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I am going to do an update on a little sideline project that covers a couple of points and posts that I have mentioned before.

Last June while having a  game of snooker with a good friend of mine Ian who runs his own joinery company, we talked about wanting to invest a bit of cash with each other into something different as a bit of fun and an experiment, a bit like those stock clubs you used to get which would give us a good reason if we ever needed it to meet up and chew the fat.

Investing in LLL.com domains

I suggested that we could buy an LLL.com as an investment which we did and still own, tucked away for a future investment, we paid $9k for it and I would expect it to be worth $10-$15k just now, so that is ticking along fine. (more…)

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been running a test between a few different inline advertisements. The ones I’ve been testing are:

• Chitika Linx
• Kontera ContentLink
• Amazon.com Context Links

All of the advertisements work in a similar way, they double underline relevent phrases on your page which when hovered over popup an advertisement balloon which includes an appropriate image and text which when clicked takes your visitor off to a suitable shop. Both Chitika and Kontera pay you per click whilst Amazon pays you a commission on any thing that is sold.

I only display inline text ads on a subset of my pages (I do not display them on my main index page or new posts as I feel they could annoy regular readers), for the purposes of this test I split page views equally between each network, so there would be only one sort of inline ad on each page. So here are my findings:

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I set myself a goal for this Christmas season and that is to earn an extra $50K over November and December. To achieve this goal I’m using a few techniques that are new to me, so far some have been very successful whilst others proved a good learning experience. For obvious reasons I don’t want to share everything that I’m doing (probably will in the New Year) but I’d like share something I’ve been running for the last couple of weeks, it has broken even but I am certain with a few tweaks somebody could make a lot more out of it, I’m going to call this “The Coolest Blog Ads Experiment“.

In my daily gadget search I came across what I think is a very cool product (in a “I’m a complete geek” kind of way), the Wi-Fi Detector Shirt, it’s an animated T-Shirt that, you guessed it, displays the strength of any Wi-Fi networks that you’re within range of. So I did the obligatory gadget post and earned a bit of commission by selling a few but it also got me thinking.
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My plans for world domination ran into erm…… a bit of brick wall this week, if you want a laugh then I suggest you read on

This is on the subject of leasing domains and my previous post where I talked about becoming an internet landlord, if you remember that post I mentioned a domain I was going to test it out with, I had spotted replica weapons on Sedo and I had bought it for £261. I liked this product related domain.

I gave the domain a simple homepage and gave it a few backlinks to get it spidered, within 2 weeks it was indexed and showing up at around No.7 in Google.co.uk for ‘replica weapons’ nice! (more…)