Think Visibility Conference – Saturday 12 September 2009

I was speaking to my friend Dom AKA @TheHodge a few days ago about the next Think Visibility conference that he’s organising. I thoroughly enjoyed and benefited from the first one and for the one next month I am lined up on some mystery panel alongside Chris Garrett, Patrick Altoft and Kieron Donoghue (I’ve no idea what the panel is about but knowing Hodge it will be fun).

Anyway it turned out that Think Visibilty still didn’t have a primary sponsor and as it’s pretty related to my latest site Conference Calendar, I thought it would be a good marketing experiment to offer sponsorship, so that’s what we’ve done (I will report back after the event about the ROI).

I was able to talk Dom into giving our readers an awesome discount code of 30% (details on the Conference Calendar Think Visibility page), so if you haven’t booked your ticket yet now is the time (it was good value before, now it’s a must see).

I’ve also got a few tickets I can give away, the first of which will be to a SMM reader. Simply leave a comment on this post explaining why you would like to attend and we’ll choose a winner that we think has the best reason.

Good luck and if you don’t win at least you’ll be able to benefit from the 30% discount.

It’s been a while since we’ve done a Friday round-up and as I’ve seen a few interesting things this week I thought I’d care to share, so here goes:

Analytics360 – This nifty little WordPress plugin lets you view your Google Analytics data in your WP dashboard (found via BlogStorm).

Introducing Rich Snippets – Google are rolling out some changes to how certain SERPS are displayed (namely reviews and people). If you have a review site, you can now provide Google with extra information to display in the snippet. (via Rishil on twitter).

Sometimes Quitting Is The Only Way to Win – Interesting read on why it may be a smart move to quit.

Think Visibility – Tickets are now on sale for this excellent mini conference and I am certain it’ll sell out. If you can get to Leeds on September 12th I’d strongly recommend it.

Bing using DMOZ Description – For those of you living under a rock Bing is Microsoft’s new(ish) search offering. This article demonstrates how the SERP snippets are extracted from DMOZ and more importantly how to ensure they are not.

Call to action experiment – Great post showing the results on how changing the wording on a call to action statement increased actions from 4.7 to 12.81%, nice (via ChrisG).

Even found a game for you to waste a few minutes with, Neon Maze.

This is just a heads up that tickets for Elite Retreat New York are now available. It’s on 1-2nd October 2009 and if you’re in the position where you can afford the $5,000 admission fee it is well worth attending.

It is aimed at entrepreneurs that are already successful and to help them take their business to the next level. I attended last year and gained heaps from the experience. Due to a packed schedule I won’t be attending this one unfortunately.

As a side note there’s is a good chance of there being one in London next year, so if you’re in the UK and not quite at that level yet make it something to aim for.

More info over on Conference Calendar (Yeah yeah I’m plugging CC).

My friend Glen Allsopp contacted me last week about a product he was working on and asked if I’d review it for him. I get a lot of requests like this and generally turn them down as I simply don’t have the time, however Glen is a friend and we’ve been in touch a few times in the past via blog comments, email and twitter so I’m happy to help out. This is one of the big reasons why it’s beneficial to attend conferences and interact with people online.

The product that he’s been working on is called Cloud living:

Which is basically my way of saying ‘making money online.’ Cloud being the term people
are using more and more these days to reference the internet. I also believe it invokes images of freedom and that kind of thing.

Anyways, the product is:

* A 177 page eBook
* 6 Tutorial Videos
* Free Affiliate Site Template
* 8 Page eBook on How to Tweak the Theme

The eBook is pretty meaty and Glen goes into details on exactly what he has done to achieve 5 figures of revenue per month. He uses two different approaches, blogs and mini affiliate sites and the eBook is split between the two methods (there is a bit of duplication between the 2 parts). It makes an interesting read and is aimed at people just starting their online careers.

One of the features I particularly like is there are check lists of actions to take and the tools to use. Glen managed to create his business in the space of 12 months so he certainly knows what he’s doing and the examples he gives are what has worked for him. Oh and he’s only 20 years old, the young git.

The book is also jam packed full of screen shots and accompanying videos which really help spell out the exact actions that you need to take.

You can buy Cloud Living from eJunkies for $37, to be totally open this is an affiliate link. I lose trust in a lot of blogs (often very popular ones) that purely promote review products for the commissions, this is not the case here I think the book is worthwhile to people starting out and I also want to help Glen out (I ‘may’ have other sites where I do review products purely for commissions).

Congratulations Glen on a good product and I wish you the best of luck with sales.

Hello strangers, I’ve had a somewhat hectic few months hence the lack of updates. I’ve been emailed and tweeted at on numerous occasions for an update on what I’ve up to so here it is:

Travel
So far this year I’ve spent over a month out of the country or just away from home. I was in Las Vegas for 8 days (way too long), been to New York twice, Amsterdam, Cyprus and I’ve lost count the number of days I’ve spent in London. Majority of these were for conferences and business meetings. Cyprus was a holiday, which helped me get caught up on reading and recharge batteries. I spoke at a4u in Amsterdam and I will publish my slides with a bit of narrative here in the future (the post has been started).

I also have a few more trips planned for this year, next month I’m off to Montana for a week on business and pleasure, I’ll be attending Think Visibilty in Leeds in September and then flying off to San Diego for Think Tank. There’ll also likely be a few more trips to come

Current Projects
My portfolio of sites continues to grow, with a few acquisitions and new sites launched. Coolest Gadgets is still my busiest site and usually most profitable, though I have certainly seen a dip in revenue which I’m putting down to people not spending as much on gadgets at the moment. I’m combatting this by experimenting with different stream, diversifying and building more traffic. I’m also playing with a fair few different affiliate schemes on various sites and platforms.

New Business Partner
I’ve entered into business with a good friend Shannon Poole. Shannon specializes in marketing and is a great compliment to my skill set. We are both somewhat conference junkies which led to our first project which is approaching final stages now:

The aim of the site is to provide all the information you require to find and attend relevant conferences. Top level categories include Internet Marketing, Technology conferences, Business and more are being added on a daily basis.

I’m happy with the way it’s progressing, however this is a long term project and I don’t expect instant results. I’d love to hear any feedback and ideas you have that you think could improve the site.

The Flexibility of WordPress
I’ve been doing a fair amount of work with WordPress. Conference Calendar is not a blog but I’ve still developed it using WordPress. I’d like to share more about this in a future post but to show the sort of things we’ve done without modifying ANY of the core WordPress code:

- A very customised post page showing a conference details.
- There are 3 different views for what would normally be standard archive pages: Details (the normalish archive), Monthly View and Annual Conference View.
- As usual there is a whole load of automation and re-use of information.

Some of this was done using standard plug-ins, other bits a combination of plug-ins and custom code. I could get really techie here but I’ll leave that for a future post (I promised it won’t take as long).

Anyway I’d love to hear some feedback, I’ve missed you guys! I still twitter (maybe too much) at @alcarlton and I got the FaceBook vanity URL facebook.com/al.carlton, did everybody get the ones they wanted?.

It’s been a busy month.

Just want to cover a few questions, is Al still alive? Yes, you can follow him on twitter as always, both Al and my self are pretty busy with stuff at present, it’s easy to talk about things you do in the past as we did in the early days of SMM, it’s not always easy or advisable to discuss current projects that are maybe under wraps or things that are not for the general public.

I have sold a few domains over the last 2 months for 4 & 5 figures, notebooks & netbooks (.co.uk) are sold, that isn’t a reflection on the market or niche, in fact if your in the UK you’ll probably find another domain I own in the top 5 (usually 3rd) for ‘netbooks’ and that domain sells a netbook every day or so. I had a good offer for netbooks/notebooks so decided to cash them in, as I say though still selling netbooks every week. Also sold a site so had a few good enquiries in the last month which is refreshing including a pretty good offer for PCs & PCgames.

Since my last post on my 2 purchased established sites I haven’t found anything else of great value or potential. Still looking and still open to being contacted if you are selling. The two sites I bought cost $20,000 USD ($10k each). It’s been just over a month since I bought them. Looking at the stats May 14th to June 14th they earned $2513.35 for Adsense content & search so obviously very happy with that. With Animalinfo.org I have joined DMG as they run affiliate programs for people like WWF where you can earn commission on donations or subscriptions so I am looking to test that in the coming months to see if it can up earnings.

Apart from that the only other thing I can really comment on was that I bought a few small geographic domains, Ayr.co.uk which is a town with around 50k people, just up from Ayr is West Kilbride.co.uk where my gran stays a ferry trip away is Arran.co.uk a close by island that I used to live on and Largs.co.uk which is just up from West Kilbride. So basically 4 places all pretty close by each other. Initially I am going to get a few basic posts done and a similar theme on each one. They are not huge places, although Ayr is a decent size, however they do have a tourism angle and after speaking to someone who ran a small town website with a population of around 10,000 very successfully I can see their potential so a nice set to work on. Geo domains seem to be more popular than and easy to check/contact & mine so I doubt I’ll buy anything more than my small set which has sentimental value as well as business/future income appeal.

I know the blog’s been neglected, not a great deal happening recently on my end. A few good deals worth low to mid 5 figures have fallen through for various reasons over the last few months, it’s clear a lot of companies and individuals have cash flow problems and for some that may get worse.

From what I can see there will not be a great many high value deals done this year in the domaining world and the low/reseller market has dried up a great deal, thankfully that doesn’t really affect me as I have for the most part bought domains for developing and long term investment in.

2 lease deals have fallen through due to the companies actually shelving plans to open new websites they had been developing, again another sign of tightening their belts and reducing risk but you can’t blame businesses wanting to reduce their costs & exposure.

So with all that in mind I will be raising capital and buying up some existing websites, they offer the best return. Getting a 33% yield is no mean feat in any business, while there is risk, there is no better way to spend time & money than researching and buying older sites even if they are already monetised. There are often little changes you can make to turn a website bought on 3 years income pay itself back in 2 years. If you do feel anything over 12-24 months net income is too generous for zero maintenance websites that are established with good stable stats then get in touch because I am buying

One site has been bought for the best part of 20k, another for £5750 agreed to be purchased within the next 2 weeks which I am quite excited about. Moving on from there I spoke to my bank this morning and they are happy to give me £50k based on my home equity with no references all sorted and agreed in principal within literally a 10 minute phone call so it’s not all doom and gloom, it can take 2 to 4 weeks to arrange but pleasantly suprised by the efficiency of C&G, borrowing against my home equity is a cheap way to raise funds for me to acquire faster than I can naturally, I already have another website or 2 in my sights with rough numbers done on them which again would likely be looking at paying 3 years income to buy them, as they are not start-ups it means I won’t share the url’s here I am afraid.

That’s the basic strategy for me, there will be deals this year so having funds ready to buy is what I am sorting out. With that in mind I plan to have a larger variety of established sites in the next couple of years, along with the domain leasing and a good potfolio of valuable generics which will spread my risk & potential, it’s not the time to have all your eggs in one basket. For info generally speaking any sites I would purchase would not be for sale, more a case of me contacting website owners out of the blue, which brings it’s own problems and challenges and of course rewards but you can get a better quality of site by going looking for it rather than waiting for them to be listed for sale.

Remember, old leads are worth chasing up this year, people who refused offers for domains and sites in the past may not be so bullish or on the same financial footing today as they were over the last few years so going through any old leads making fresh contact offering hard cash can give you a favourable outcome at a cheaper price.

It’s been something of an eventful few weeks on the business front, so I’ll summarise stuff that I currently have going on.

New York Trip
I spent a very long and enjoyable weekend in New York discussing plans for a new business in a totally different niche for me. Domains are registered, artwork and theme are in progress, now waiting on content before official launch. I will do a case study on this in the near future.

Think Visibility
Last weekend I spoke at Think Visibilty, an absolutely amazing mini conference organised by The Hodge. Tickets cost £30 and I think every attendee would agree that was awesome value for money. I won’t do a full review here as many people have beaten me to it, check out posts by:

• Kieron Donoghue
• Chris Clarkson
• Lyne Foster
• polr
• Tom Critchlow
• mmmeeja.com
• Andre Burnett
• Dan from PowerDosh
• Shaun the hobo
• James Inman
• Anybody I’ve missed leave a comment and I’ll add a link

The next Think Visibility conference is already taking shape and a venue is booked in Leeds on September 12th 2009, so make a note in your diary as you don’t want to miss it (I will announce when tickets are available (hopefully with an affiliate link )).

Congrats again Dom you did a sublime job organising your first conference.

Added Another Blog to the Portfolio
I was approached by an old friend to see if I wanted to buy one of his blogs, after a bit of bartering and a price I could not say no to, I am now the proud owner of TechCult.com. Due to an NDA I cannot go into exact details but it gets between 5K and 10K visitors per day and is a great addition to my tech network.

Earnings Disclosure
I’ve been asked by a number of people to post another earnings breakdown report. Generally I don’t mind sharing this sort of info but things that are going on in my life at the moment I’d be foolish to document my earnings. Suffice to say I’m doing okay and re-investing heavily into other sites and ventures. I am also enjoying the continual slide of sterling against the dollar (though I did suffer when in NYC). I am now heading to the bank to pay in a backlog of US$ checks, including Christmas commissions .

Have a great week everybody!

If your looking to sell your website and it is primarily UK based with good history/stats then I may be able to pay up to 36 x monthly net income. Cash waiting for the right sites. Open to all topics, preferably 40% + UK based traffic. Low maintenance an advantage. Email scott atsign selfmademinds.com

I could do with a bit of coding work, if someone has some time please mail me with a price if you can do it straight away.

Basically I have a terms & conditions in Word that I need to make available online to someone who has to add their name, email adrdess, date and check a tick box to say they agree to the terms & conditions at the bottom, upon clicking submit both they and I get a copy by email to confirm the agreement.

Should be easy I guess, the form/terms will change so I need to be able to paste the text or upload the main part of it each time for each new client.

Edit: Sorted now thanks