Crikey, a year old.

• 254 posts
• 160,266 words
• 4501 comments

If you want to read through old posts they can be found via the sitemap, I would say there is a lot of good info to be found there, some light posts, some long posts and some gold dust. Lot’s of lessons learnt and a few mistakes to boot.

One of my favourite posts would be Al’s at the start if the year in which he breaks down his December income, we are all learning but everyone loves those big numbers. Talking of big numbers Al did an excellent link bait post on the top blogs by subscriber numbers which brought truck loads of visitors, subscribers, links and over 200 comments/trackbacks.

The posts I enjoyed writing the most were the property developing online one’s because that really can be done on a budget by anyone and took up a fair bit of my time or the minisites post which I picked up on a few times. UK domains don’t get the type in traffic that .com’s do and therefore developing a domain even into a small minisite can generate enough traffic and income to pay for it’s own renewal fees which makes it an attractive option and one I would think the parking companies have been trying to develop if they are to remain in business in the future.

I plan on doing a good case study soon once a domain purchase goes through which will be transparent and updated as it will be a big focus of mine for this year. In the meantime if you have questions or topics that you would like our view or opinion on then please get in touch, if either of us are to make a post it’s better done on something people find interesting so send in questions and we will try and make sure all get answered as long as they are not the blatant self promotional type of spam.

Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy, peaceful and prosperous New Year from Al and myself.

Let’s ensure that we leave behind all negatives and reasons why not to and make 2008 a doing year that builds on what we have already done and sets us up for the future.

Quick thought on 2007
In 2007 I have personally gone through a fair dip in Adsense, like many others, but that has been no bad thing for me, it gave me the jolt to open my eyes and realise I needed to make moves right now to ensure a more stable and an overall greater income in the future which has prompted me to invest in some good generic domains to build, earn from and lease.

It is clear there are limitless possibilities for everyone right now, probably the best time to invest a little time, a little money and some energy for great future rewards regardless of your financial position there is space for everyone, the key is to choose your battles, play smart and do more than the next person, over the last few years both Al and I have spent long hours regardless of short term returns building full time incomes on our own websites.

I expect to see more progress in the .co.uk domain market in late 2008 and I think it has to be said there are some amazing bargains to be picked up on forums, auctions and by going directly to owners for all domain extensions.

Quick thought on domains
The biggest change in my mindset is to STOP, beg or borrow the money to get the best possible domain name you can, a true generic that describes your market or product in the best way possible, whatever it takes!.. and then build your website.

If bedroomfurniture.com seemed overpriced 4 years ago at $15k is it any less so when it sold for around $150k this year? If you look at true generic domain sales in the past it is hard to spot many, if any, that seem overpriced looking at them now, but at the time many do. If I was to build 5 websites in 2008 I would make sure they were on the best domain names possible even if I had to borrow money to get the domains, whatever happens in the future the value of your generic domain will in my opinion appreciate whereas the value of a website will always be bound by it’s organic rankings and income. If you build 5 websites that ranked well, earned a fortune and then lost their rankings you would have nothing left, if you build them on generic domains then you are still holding a winning lottery ticket.

Quick thought on links
Last night a thought came to me on backlinks, donations – surely there are millions of local cause websites throughout the world with a charity, appeal or good cause and a website then a donation in return for a small banner (& text link) would seem like a great way to promote your site, donate money and some of those good cause websites get great links and trust which could really boost your website.

Looking forward to 2008
Overall I am pretty happy with ‘07 and I have lots of things in the wind that may or may not come off including a really fantastic .com domain from 1996 that could one day easily be a 6 figure domain in my opinion – but the owner won’t sell at my opening offer of $800 for fear of it being just that! And won’t sell for $5k which is was my last offer and limit for it. What to do, exchanged about 10 emails so far and working hard on it, either way it should make for a good post and the deal is not dead yet! No way.

Thanks

• I’d like to thank Al for sharing his gadget earning milestones and experiences, I have enjoyed reading about the affiliate sales especially and hope to get a piece of that action in the future! and doing over $1k a day just in Adsense should be inspirational to everyone.
• Thanks to Rob for helping me with my first lease getting me a contract and answering a few questions I had along the way.
• Thanks to Acorn domains for giving me a place to read and try and learn from.
• I’d like to thank all readers of Self Made Minds in 2007, it can be very rewarding just sharing highs and lows and sharing our learning curve, so those that read, comment and give us feedback really do make a difference.
• Special thanks to my wife Elaine for putting up with all that talk about domain names and trying as hard as she could not to look bored senseless Looks like it isn’t going to get any easier for you in ‘08

So have a very happy and prosperous New Year! … Slange Var

Al mentioned last week after working together on a few sites for over a year we had arranged to meet up for the first time this weekend in Edinburgh with our families. It’s a funny thing working online with someone and then meeting in person for the first time, you half meet up as strangers but don’t do small talk as you already know where they live, what they do etc, quite surreal. Then again not quite as surreal as going out for a meal and seeing Al’s daughter order a 50/50 pizza with baked beans and cheese on one side and marshmallows and chocolate on the other, it was a pleasure to meet up and enjoy good company staying in an Apex hotel with a view of Edinburgh Castle from our rooms, a great excuse to get out of the house for a few days on a ‘business trip’.

It was also refreshingly the first time I could speak to someone apart from my wife on subjects like websites, development & monetisation, I get the feeling my family & friends just humour me when I get excited and talk about buying domains and the like so it really was good to site down have a few pints and chat.

Sometimes a productive chat is one where you have to agree to go back to the drawing board and with one site it’s time to re-think our base code as the script used on it has been disappointing in it’s performance, so a learning curve and a lesson learned, it is the type of site we can post about later, once we get it sorted and in a healthier direction.

On the subject of Self Made Minds we agreed on things to be implemented in the short, medium and long term and it’s overall direction. All comments and their various merits and pitfalls were discussed so we appreciated the feedback a great deal.

Site Clinic – Free Website reviews
This is something we will be doing, if you have a website that has a good original idea and unique content and you have just hit a brick wall or find yourself struggling to take it up a level or languishing in the search results then by contacting us with the site and giving us as much information as possible with it’s stats we would take the time to have a really good look through the site, the genre and your competitors and look to offer ways of taking the site up a level and pushing it on to further it’s success.

It can be a case of you can’t see the forest for the trees at times when you work in an insular manner so a fresh pair of eyes or two could be just what you need, we have also done this in the past on a profit share for those that needed privacy with great success.

So if you think your website fits the bill for a free website review then please do contact us with the url, traffic & income stats and where you feel you are at with the site and it’s main problems and if selected all we ask in return is that you write an update once you implement changes and recommendations so we can revisit how it went.

Scott and I have been in business together for just over a year but we’ve never actually met or even spoke on the phone, all communication has been via PM’s, email and MSN messenger. That’s all about to change this weekend as we are meeting up for the first time, which means we can talk shop whilst the other halves actually shop.

One of the things that will be up for discussion is the direction that we’ll be taking Self Made Minds AKA “this site” so this post is to get a bit of input about what you think we should talk about (over a beer or three). Ideas from me are:

• SMM Idea – Case Studies – Creating new sites from scratch and documenting their progress but what sort of case studies would our readers like to see?
• Discuss sharing statistics from other sites that we own (jointly or individually)
• Re-investing profits
• SMM Marketing – How to increase our readership
• Does beer taste better in Scotland or England

So if there is anything you’d like to know or stuff you think we should talk about now is a great time to ask. I’m really looking forward to the weekend and just hope I can understand Scott’s Scottish accent.

Comments and Commentators Links
After fair bit of feedback on this post, on whether using keywords in names looks spammy I’ve modified the comment system and added a Title field. This will be used as the anchor text on both the comment title and list on the sidebar.

If the title field is set the comment will appear for example as

Martin of Community Building Blog

I’m sure none of our regular readers will abuse this but please use a bit of common sense with what anchor text you want to be associated with.

Sitemap
We now have a sitemap, this is mainly to help with indexing but is also useful if you want to quickly skim done all post titles in any particular category.

Related Posts
At the end of each post there are now links to 5 related posts (well what mySQL think is related), this should also aid in indexing and help interested readers find related info.

Supplemental Results
We’ve not been all that interested in SE traffic in the early days of the site (perhaps wrongly) and we now have a fair few pages in Googles supplemental index. This is a common WordPress problem so we’ve implemented a robots.txt file to prevent Google indexing pages that are purely duplicate content and are of little value in themselves.

Thanks to Not So Boring Life and ChrisG.com for the great info and tips about this.

Normally posting will resume tomorrow

The first two promotion methods we tried cost a bit of cash, the others cost our time.

Press Release
We paid a pro to write us a press release about the site and distribute it via PR web. The total cost of this was around $200 and a bit of time was spent by Scott sending it manually to various related sites. Traffic on the day was up slightly and we picked up a couple of decent links including one from entrepreneur.com But I don’t think it created anything like the traffic we were hoping for. It’s a difficult one to get exact figures for but the link on entrepreneur.com did bring us 476 visitors.

Paid review on John Chow
We forked out $300 to get a paid review on John Chow, we did approach John direct with an offer of $200 but after John’s polite reply we had to go via the $300 Review Me route.

The review we received was very positive and as it was on a very related site any traffic it sent our way should be well targeted. In total the review on John Chow sent us 1,441 visitors. We were going to go for a review on Shoemoney but as those cost $3,000 a pop it was over the budget for this experiment.

Digital Point forums
We announced Self Made Minds over on the webmaster forums Digital Point, it received a pretty decent response and generated a bit of traffic. Shortly after the launch of SMM I enjoyed my first 5 digit Adsense month (I did it last month as well (just) so that’s 2 in a row ) which I posted about on DP hoping to inspire other people (I know when I first started I enjoyed reading posts like that) as well as promoting this place a bit.

The $10,000 Adsense thread received a lot of attention (~230 replies) and sent a fair new visitors our way (3,122 visitors to be precise) and unlike all the other methods this traffic didn’t consist of just one peak. This was the cheapest promotion strategy we tried, both financially and time wise.

Digg
When we wrote the top 100 subscribed feedburner sites we did it with both Digg and link bait (more to follow in a future post on that one) in mind. It took about 10 man hours to research and write and then a similar amount of time to maintain as more and more suggestions came in

The post achieved a front page on Digg and a crazy amount of traffic but more importantly put us on the radar of many of the blogs we mentioned, a number of which also linked back to us (thank you). The Digg traffic alone totalled 8,434 visits but the links and mentions on other blogs in the long run will be a lot more valuable.

Conclusion
The first obvious conclusion is that the most traffic was generated by a bit of hard work rather than paying cold hard cash. I’d also like to share how many of these sources became repeat visitors or readers, the best way I can do that is by means of a poll. So if you’re reading this please let us know how you first found us by voting (if you are reading via a feedreader you’ll need to visit the site to vote). Thank you.

The purpose of this site is share some of the things we’ve done right and also mistakes we’ve made along the way, if you don’t make mistakes you’re either doing nothing or doing something wrong.

Comments and suggestions are always more than welcome.