Nobody can say I was early to the twitter party, then again I was very late to the domain one and that never stopped me looking at things and playing catchup in my own way. I reluctantly joined twitter very late and am not that social tbh, I wouldn’t follow me, put it that way.

Over the last 24 months one thing has become crystal clear though, the public and businesses in general have really adopted it as a way to interact and keep up to date, furthermore I have noticed quote a few good twitter accounts ranking organically in search engines, all this means one thing to me = money, I’m not sure I’m entirely up to speed on how this is all going to translate to cash but it will.Continue Reading

Found a company doing a novel new trick, well new to me anyway.

They scanned my authority website for dead links
Then put up some content relative to my dead outbound links on their own site
Then email and ask if they can quote my site with link back to me (naturally I agree)
When I confirm it’s ok they tell me about the dead link saying they know how hard it is to run large important sites and monitor everything and offer their (new) page as an alternative link.

I can see that working for them.

My thoughts on the advantages that working on a geographical domain has over starting a product based or aff website.

1. You don’t need the same traffic numbers, if trying to appeal to local B&B’s/Guesthouses & businesses for advertising you don’t need to be aiming for 10,000 visitors per day, getting 100-300 visitors per day can suffice. That makes the return on investment and time spent much quicker and more appealing. From the few sites I have up that are around a month or so old they all get around 50 visitors per day just based on the few articles each site has. Almost time to start looking for advertising, that’s not the way it usually works.Continue Reading

Searching for unused domains can bring some good finds and rewards, sometimes the domains are actually quite nice and generic, sometimes they have lots of age and old links and sometimes they have traffic, in the past I have found a domain bought it and bought the previous content and put sites back together.

When looking for unused domains you can search for standard template and placeholder text in the search engines, so your searching for things like:

“Under Construction. The site you are trying to view does not currently have a default page.”
“Directory Listing Denied”
“The requested object does exist on this server”
“Why is this page displayed?”
“domain login”
“does not exist”
“cannot be found”

You can get inventive and creative when trying to narrow down domains that are not properly parked or in use, for example if a domain name owner has name servers down for sedo or some registrars but don’t park the domain properly you get their standard text which shows a possible forgetfulness or possibly that the domain is neglected or forgotten about.

You can also find old websites that have stopped working through neglect using searches for typical ASP and PHP errors which can turn up some real gems!

In the current economic climate I think it’s fair to say a lot of people are tightening their belts, food and fuel prices are forever breaking new records and the banks & finance are suffering as much as they have been for decades.

It is therefor the perfect time to go on the offensive, you will not go a week without seeing several rumours of takeover bids for weak and vulnerable companies and we do have billion or million dollar budgets the same opportunities still exist for those that are proactive on a smaller scale.

Sellers of websites are more open to negotiation, in fact I am finding cold call emails are being met more favourably as money can be tight it’s a great time to build up contact with a site you wish to purchase, online business venture are being closed down every day. Businesses that could be 1-10 years old, have old backlinks and good rankings but the business model has run into difficulty.

You can pay to get lists of companies in administration, these companies more than often have domain names, those domains are not expiring and could have traffic, rankings & value, some companies trade under their name but also hold category killer generic domains, you can use tools such as DomainTools to find other domains a company in administration has.

Administrators try and sell the business as quickly as possible when they are taken in however in many cases if a buyer is not found their job is to get as much money as possible for the creditors and that’s a golden opportunity to contact the administrator and offer money for a domain name, you do that enough times and you will find a diamond in the rough.

After a few years of working online I think it is only prudent to have an exit strategy, well it is for me seeing as I want to retire early, or at least have the option to retire when I wish instead of when I have to.

So far I have managed to make money online for which I am grateful and working from home is a blast especially with the summer coming up, can’t complain at all. I have managed to think outside the box and offer products and services and pretty much along the way I have had a basic strategy or plan but nothing that would be classed as a business plan, I think many of us have floated along trying to make the best of what we can with limited means and knowledge, after all how can you have experience of something that has just been invented!

For the most part my plan if it could be called one was along the lines of

1/ Get good rankings
2/ Therefore get lots of traffic
3/ Monetise that traffic through various income streams
4/ Then constantly worry about stability and losing traffic and income!

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It can be unproductive and often boring sending out email after email to try and lease out some of my sites, so many companies seem to be making contacting them by email nigh on impossible! Spam has played it’s part in that I am sure.

Still, I often get the feeling my emails never get in front of the right people, customer services would likely be the wrong people who could just as easily dismiss my email as marketing spam so I have been trying to reach for the top and although nothing concrete as yet, it seems to be paying off.

I have emailed companies like overstock.com in the past but no response, this time I googled for the CEO’s name of the company I was contacting, which is usually easy enough to find out from press releases etc, I would then send 3 emails and check for them bouncing in the form of:

johnsmith@company.com
j.smith@company.com
jsmith@company.com

These seem to be the most frequent used formats used and it’s been very successful with 2 emails usually bouncing and one getting to the right person, so instead of responses like this from customer services;

We’re always looking at ways to make xxxxxxxx.com even better and your comments are a big help to us. I’ll make sure to share them with the right team.

Thanks for getting in touch with us. I hope you’ll visit us again soon.

Best regards,

I have been getting responses like this from the CEO:

Hi Scott,
 
Thanks. xxxxx and xxxxxx will be in touch.
 
Regards
xxxxxxxxx

(Names have been xxxxx’d out)

This is much more encouraging, I would also guess that my email being passed down the way from the CEO to someone in charge of their marketing would be looked at closer than an email going through customer services and being sent upwards. I have now spoken to 3 companies regarding a lease this week which at the very least makes me feel I’m making some headway and being a bit more productive

I was speaking to an old friend this morning who has had nothing but trouble with his hosting/webmaster and was asking for advice as he is treading water, at present he pays a monthly fee to cover small website changes and the hosting but anytime he needs something done it is never carried out.

So a possible opportunity lies there for anyone in the UK reading this that wanted to run his sites and work on them a bit SEO wise.

Steve does all sorts of custom gifts, mugs, keyrings, clocks, aprons, coasters, mousemats and many more with text/images as per the customers wishes, always done well with clubs and national events. Two main sites, one for retail and one for the trade.Continue Reading