Typically when I read articles or press releases like this is checking the whois and finding the obvious domains were register years and years ago.

However personalsupercomputers.co.uk was free to reg today and just in case anyone else is interested in such domains/technology there are some possibly decent domains with potential still available.

personalsupercomputers.org
personalsupercomputers.net
personalsupercomputer.net

DigitalPictureFrame.co.uk £2500
PhotoFrame.co.uk £4000

Both product based with tens of thousands of exact search traffic, they are not high on my development list so perhaps a project for someone else.

Watching tv there was a bit about how more people are staying in the UK for holidays and caravanning is on the increase, these are the types of analysis that get me heading for the keyword tool!

It’s heading off season now but I typed in ‘caravan’ and as expected the top results coming back were

1/ caravan 368,000 exact searches per month on average -sheesh!
2/ caravans 165,000 exact searched

Now both of these are very expensive domains so moving down the list in 3rd place

3/ touring caravan - 135,000 exact searched per month - ouch! that’s quite a lot still

Check with my wife ‘ what’s a touring caravan?’ she confirmed it’s just a normal caravan that goes on the back of your car, ie not a static caravan, okey dokey that looks interesting!

Checked the domain and it’s parked, email the seller - I email an offer of £750, very respectable I think, turns out a domainer owned it and recognised my email address and sent my a private message saying I could have it for £1000 plus VAT. Hmm, fair enough, chunk of change but I like it and I ain’t going to be buying caravan.co.uk or caravans.co.uk so 3rd best in a growing market at an acceptable price.

Deal was done and I was happy, that was until I was doing so more reasearch on the domain to see if it had been used before, I googled the url and found this post from March this year on a domain forum that went like this………..

Donkey! if only I had found that earlier I could have bought the domain for £50! I paid a price I was happy to pay for a domain I wanted but I felt pretty stupid when I found that post, so after yesterday’s post i’ll just call it evens More due diligence required when thinking of making offers!

Blog Blazers - 40 Top Bloggers share their secrets

It’s an interesting book (as far as I’ve read so far) and from a personal point it’s the first time I’ve had an interview published in traditional media which is cool as I can show my mum, my daughter is also ecstatic as she took my photo that’s used in the book. I have a number of copies give away so keep reading or skip to the end to find out how to get one .

The book consists of interviews with 40 pretty successful bloggers and it’s a real honor being featured alongside these guys:

• Aaron Wall from SEO Book
• Ades Tynyshev from Ades Blog
• Al Carlton from Coolest-Gadgets.com (me)
• Alex Papadimoulis of Worse Than Failure
• Andy Brice of Success Software
• Anita Campbell from Small Business Trends
• Asha Dornfest from Parent Hacks
• Ben Casnocha
• Ben Yoskovitz of Instigator Blog
• Bob Walsh author from 47 Hats
• Dan Lyons from The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
• Dane Carlson from Dane Carlson’s Business Opportunities Weblog
• David Armano from Logic+Emotion
• David Seah
• Derek Semmler
• Dharmesh Shah from On Startups
• Eric Sink
• Ian Landsman of Userscape
• James and Alex Turnbull from Google Sightseeing
• JD from Get Rich Slowly
• Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror
• Jeff Clavier from Jeff Clavier’s Software Only
• Jennette Fulda from Half of Me
• Jenny from 101 Reasons I Hate Being Fat!
• Jessamyn West of Librarian.net
• Joel Cheesman from Cheezhead
• Jonathan Snook
• Manolo from Manolo’s Shoe Blog
• Neil Patel from Quick Sprout
• Pamela Slim from Escape from Cubicle Nation
• Patrick McKenzie from Micro ISV on a Shoestring
• Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist
• Ramit Sethi from I will Teach You to be Rich
• Rob Walling from Software By Rob
• Rohit Bhargava from Influential Marketing Blog
• Seth Godin
• Stephane Grenier of Follow Steph (the author)
• Steve Rubel from Micro Persuasion
• Trent Hamm from The Simple Dollar
• Yaro Starak from Entrepreneur’s Journey

[thanks Mert Erkal for originally formatting the list]

You can buy the book from Amazon or the Blog Blazers site however we’ve also got 10 copies to give away. To enter simply answer the following question:

“What would you most like to learn from reading Blog Blazers?”

You can leave your answer in a comment here or via Twitter, we’ll give 5 away to our favourite answers from each (so double your chance by doing both ). Good luck.

9th November last year I received a reply:

Scott, £1000-£1500 is not really of interest to us at this point.

It went on, suffice to say what I felt was a reasonable offer did not make selling it of interest to the owner. Fast forward a year almost to the day and on the 6th November the domain drops, freely available and I hand register it for £5.

The lawn sign based business is a great article where the author investigated the origin of multiple dating lawn signs, an enjoyable read.

Humour: This video is old, unrelated but pretty damn funny.

The Pirate Bay has always filled a gap that Hollywood seems reluctant to fill, rather than withhold and sue they could embrace the online world, The Pirate Bay broke a new record recently with 22 million users.

Freeporntube.com sells for $34,800 crickey that seems a tad expensive.

Make sure when you download your versions of Wordpress you do it only from the official site, seems to be some trojanised copies being offered for download which would make for a bad start to your new site. I presume that should also apply to downloading plugins as well.

Game: Build the highest tower possible with 99 bricks, tetris with a spin.

A 2 page website/minisite had been purchased for $7000, based on about 2 years income at the time, the great thing about this site was it could have done with 10 minutes work on the on-page SEO, no major surgery. It already had a lot of backlink work done and was ranking semi-well but with a little on page work I thought things could be improved a great deal.

The site is zero maintenance, I had hoped it would pay for itself in around a year and I’m glad to report it pretty much did that, as of October 28th 2008, 13 months later the investment has been paid back.

This means every day from here on in is pure profit, it’s doing $20 per day. On top of that if it was to be sold as a zero maintenance site even on 2 years income it would be worth around $14,000 twice what was paid for it.

The current exchange rate also helps, last year $7000 was about £3685
Doubling the value would be £7370 however if I was to sell in USD for $14,000 today that would be worth £8774 with an improved exchange rate.

When I was a child I had a speech impediment which made me very self conscious of speaking in public (though on the plus side did mean I learnt to code at a young age). This still affects me now and there are words I intentionally avoid saying and group situations I’m uncomfortable in. So when Kieron invited me to speak at a4u my first thought was no f’ing way, however it was an opportunity to leave a comfort zone I should of left years ago. So in the end I accepted, did my presentation and it has certainly given me more confidence when speaking in public, so thank you Kieron for the push.

In my life I’ve had had 2 jobs that I kept for 5+ years. I worked at Barclays Bank for around 5 years (holy shit) and left that to go to Uni to study software Engineering. At the time I was comfortable on an okay wage (well I thought it was okay at the time), so moving city and losing a reliable wage was a hell of a shock to the system but one of the best moves I made.

In my previous job I was earning a steady 6 figures ($) per year and giving that up to do “web stuff” full-time was a somewhat scary experience. I did have a contingency fund in place but it still wasn’t the most comfortable of times. The end result of both these career changes was well worth leaving each respective comfort zone for, the only regret would be not doing them sooner. In fact Barclays ended up laying people off just after I left and the other company I worked for was sold shortly after my departure.

I’ve still got a few comfort zones and barriers to break down and I will over the coming months and probably years as new ones keep popping up. If I’ve learnt anything from past experiences it is always better and easier to leave the comfort zone at the earliest opportunity, and if somebody offers you a scary branch of help, take it with both hands.

Are you currently in a comfort zone that you’d benefit from leaving and if so what’s stopping you and what can you do about it?

I have talked before about domain leasing and having some good domains ranked being my preference and for some of those I have been using aeiou.com which at $250 for a mini site isn’t cheap, I have 3 sites done now by aeiou.com and 2 more in production, all 3 rank which raises their profile and makes them more desirable.

Just agreed a deal on a domain to lease it out for 3 years at £100 per month with an option to buy it written in for £30,000, even with spending $250 on the minisite it means that after 2 months I’ll be paid back completely and at the end of the lease agreement I’ll be £3400 up with the possibility of an end sale of £30,000 or the lease could get renewed. As per my last lease I added to option to raise the rent a maximum of 50% and first refusal to renew to protect the lessee.

It’s a great deal for both parties and again shows that there is a demand for this if it’s done right, it’s slow progress though, this is my 3rd lease and again it took me sending out quite a few emails to make contact, it’s not easy and not for those that lose interest quickly.

2 of my lease deals have options to buy in them so at present the state of play is:
£675 per month in lease income (with £37,000 in options to buy written in)

Talking of leasing I decided yesterday to get my head down and start working on lease cars, it’s my second voyage into using Wordpress and I think this site is looking good, it was a very productive Sunday but entering the 600 car models is proving really boring which I’m meant to be doing today and tomorrow, kind of looking for any excuse to take a break  .. still better get back to it……. “I’m a one man band”

If you use WordPress you need to sign up for Joost de Valk’s free email newsletter (top right of page) and if you don’t use WordPress you need to download it here.

On the subject of newsletters another couple that are well worth reading are those from Patrict Altoft and Shoemoney’s, they both feature useful content that is not available on the respective sites.

Google Tutor reports on an interesting update to Google Reader, writing trends (probably doesn’t look that healthy for SMM at the moment).

At recent meets and conferences I’ve been asked a few times what tool I use for automatic affiliate links, I’ve covered it here before (and is still available) but I’d advise doing a search on Google for a more polished script.

Jamie Harrop has released his “One Killer Interview With 10 Killer Bloggers” as a free eBook.

Cool interview with Richard Millington about building online communities (if you like, Sphinn here).

Courtesy of Red Save I’m giving away 5 digital picture frames to CG readers and another $100 in this week’s coolest gadget.

If you’re a programming or enjoy logic games check out Light Bot whilst if flying and shooting stuff is your cup of tea then give Dogfight 2 a go (I’m stuck on Level 19(?) where you’ve got to guard your bombers).

That’s all folks, have a great Halloween and weekend.