I've never read about or met anyone successful who didn't receive significant help from other people along the way. I know I wouldn't be where I am right now without the people I've met and worked with over the years, and Frank's life is full of similar stories: his family, Vern Jurovich, Rick Schwartz, Russ Horowitz...the list goes on and on. Two relationships in particular stood out in the Domain Name Journal article for me, though.
The first ... Keep reading »
Many of you already know Frank Schilling -- the owner of one of the largest domain portfolios in the world. The portfolio is worth well into the nine figures, and annual revenue estimates have him generating around $20 million dollars every year. That's $1.7M every month.
What most people didn't know until now, though, was that Frank didn't start in this business until 2002 -- long after many people felt like ... Keep reading »
Last month I wrote about how important it is to learn from others who are already successful. Well, this month I decided to make that a little easier for you to do. Here is a roundup of all the posts I've found so far where bloggers listed their earnings for October. Click the dollar figure to see their details.
Shoemoney (~$30,000)
Direct Ad Sales: 50%
Affiliate: 30%
Other: 20%
John Chow ($23,448.59)
Direct Ad Sales: ... Keep reading »
Many women regularly go out dressed scantily and then wonder why they don't get the respect they deserve. Dave Chappelle answers that question with another: "If you're not a whore, why are you wearing a whore's uniform?"
I can't tell you how many sites I see wearing a whore's uniform -- selling themselves out for a quick AdSense click, not realizing that they're sacrificing greater long-term benefit.
Take a good, honest look at your site ... Keep reading »
On some of my blogs, trackback spam has now become rampant. Not content to simply spam the comments, spammers are now scraping content from the RSS feed, posting it to spam blogs (splogs), and sending a trackback to the violated site in order to pick up a free link.
The problem is that you wouldn't realize it was spam in most cases. On the surface, it looks pretty legit.
Why is trackback spam a problem? Well, aside from the ... Keep reading »
I came across a thread on DigitalPoint this morning about the accuracy of Google Analytics and found it interesting that one of the posters assumed that Analytics must be far less accurate than AWStats since AWStats reported many more visitors. Surely Analytics was undercounting, right?
I know that feeling. I'm always anxious to believe the good stats. However, AWStats' counting of every request to your site -- even bots -- means that their stats are ... Keep reading »
If you rely largely on advertising for your revenue -- whether direct, affiliate or contextual -- you're making money by encouraging your visitors to buy or do something elsewhere.
There's an important concept there that we often never think about: If the advertiser is willing to pay you $0.10 per visitor that you send them, then that visitor must be worth noticeably more than $0.10 to them. Otherwise, they wouldn't be willing to pay you that, right? (In other ... Keep reading »
Very often, it can be hard to figure out what products or companies to advertise on your site. Some sites have obvious tie-ins (a site about cars, for example) but others are much more difficult.
If that's your situation, or if you could just use some fresh ideas, check out sites like yours who are successful and see how they're generating revenue. Who advertises there? Where are the advertisements on the page? Use some of the same ... Keep reading »
Man, too often in the past few months I've seen cases where someone sold a website or domain name for far less than I, or someone I knew, would have paid. Had the owner only done even a little checking around, they could have netted themselves several hundred thousand more dollars in some cases.
Never, ever, ever take the first offer without checking around. It is bad form to ask for an offer and then turn around and shop ... Keep reading »
Recently I was looking for the site of someone I met at Elite Retreat last year and ended up typing www.cpaaffiliates.com to get to his site, CPA Affiliates, instead of the correct address, www.cpa-affiliates.com. What I got was the old Server Not Found error. I realized that I had forgotten the dash in the domain name, but it got me wondering who owned the better, non-dash name.
I knew ... Keep reading »