eGoldMine: Make Money Through The Internet

update

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Thu, 29 May 2008 07:28:00 +0000

Wow, this is a long overdue update! I've been quite busy lately with building websites for people, being an admin assistant, and living life in general. I'm very proud to say that BANS steadily rakes in about $250-$300 a month!!!

check it out, best $97 bucks i've ever spent.

So far I haven't had time to promote the sites at the moment as I'm still trying to catch up on a mass migration of their revenue program. It's moving from Commission Junction to Ebay's brand new affiliate program. From what I hear the revenue is even better than before so I'm really excited about that, but am dreading properly updating the files for 50+ websites which needs to be done by the 1st of June yikes! So in a nutshell, yes it works, but you have to put alot of intitial work into building, marketing, keyword optimizing, and following trends but I'm at the point now where I just watch sales come in and add some new content here and there to keep the sites fresh for the engines. There were a few sites that I was able to add live streaming videos from online tv stations focusing on a related subject and found sales for those sites increasing by about %10-20.
It seems good multimedia content is holding users's attention in this 2.0/3.0 attention span crowd who crave more then just static content. Since the live streaming video I feed is always fresh, it gives them another reason to keep coming back. mwahahahah yep ill try to get back here for more regular updates. hollur.

5 Seconds

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:30:00 +0000

Ok, so this past month I have been reading about this program almost everywhere, called "Pay Per Play". (Completely seperate company from Pay Per Post which I mentioned in one of my past blogs). The whole concept of "Pay Per Play" is you embed this code similar adsense into your chosen website page. When a visitor first goes to that page, they hear a 5 second audio ad. For instance, if you're in new york visiting my page at 1:00 am, you might hear "hungry? great pizzas at Luigis in brooklyn" It's short enough to not be too annoying unlike those 30 second commercials now being played before streaming video.

Now, I've been reading 2 points of views regarding this program. The nays and the yays. The nays are saying its morally wrong to do this to an unsuspecting visitor. Despite how much money you can make off the exposure. They are not expecting audio to jump out at them. If you wouldn't want this to happen to you, then why the heck would you subject someone else to this? The yays say, hey this is the future of advertisments whether you like it or not. Commercials are moving from television and radio to the internet. There are more avenues and more competition for ad space.

I am in between. I heard one of their test ads and its not that bad. It's not like someone starts screaming at you when you open the page. But I was prepared to hear it. Using it is free so I tried to sign up but I missed their initial beta registration about a month and a half ago (they only allowed 1,000 publishers). Since then they've been successful and have alot more advertisers involved so they've opened up limited registration again yesterday.

I just received my confirmation email and am going to test it out on a few of my bans sites that are getting good traffic but low ebay sales. Who knows, it might be lucrative. I'll let you all know how it turns out.

You're a tool!!

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:34:00 +0000

I am creating yet another new installment this time called "You're a tool!" It will cover useful online management tools and reference websites.

Yesterday I went online to look for a CMS (Content Management System) for all my domain names. It gets to be really confusing when you have bought names at different registrars, then parked them at different providers, and are selling them in different aftermarkets. If you have a portfolio of over 100 names or even just 30 this gets really confusing, especially when it comes to renewing names and services associated with your name! Through online research I found this one called DNzoom and it is a Godsend! First off they link to some major registrars and parking providers and you can import your names and information. You can create multiple folders if you want to come up with different categories to organize your sites into groups.

Dnzoom collects all this data gives you traffic reports as well as expiration and renewal reports. I used to have an excel spreadsheet that I would not keep up with because it was truly the most annoying thing in the world to maintain and excel was created by the devil. This disorganization in turn made me waste some money on auto renewals I didn't even want because I was too confused to deal with it.

This is a completely free program to use online and they go through alot of security measures. I spoke to them on the phone today regarding this and some other questions. They are only 8 months old and are in the process of making as many other domain programs with api keys integrate with them. Oh yeah and did i mention it has daily backlinks and alexa stats as well and etc etc etc.. Peace out EXCEL!! haha

BANS UPDATE

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 23:37:00 +0000

I wanted to give a few happy updates on how some of my projects are doing.

My BANS sites are making money! I am really impressed with this program. It's definately a patience project though. Some of my sites are now making $5 a day (but most are making $0 with plenty of leads though)! I can't believe its only been 2 months. I'm playing the numbers game with it- building as many sites as I can, pimp them out, *optimize them every week, then see who makes the cut. Rinse. Repeat.

They are coming out with BANS Version 3.0 in March and they have alot of time saving and optimization features on it like dynamic sitemaps, better product categorization, and the ability to sell your own Ebay products in your Bans site and still make money off of it!! This program is so flexible. Sometimes, I use the software just to make informational websites and stick adsense up there without having any auctions.

The Domain Stockmarket

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 05:55:00 +0000

This is some great reading: How domaining similar to the stockmarket

A few days ago, Fusu - the Domain Name Stock Exchange launched.

I'm not sure how this new stock market will pan out because the industry is still so young, but I do think that it will make non-domain savvy wallstreet brokers and investors take a second look.

Extra Extra!

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 05:24:00 +0000

Over 80+ names sold ranging from $x,xxx - $xxx,xxx this week.
The highest include:

SkiResorts.com $850,000
Meds.com $470,000
Dvds.com $300,000
Cpc.com $200,000
GarageSales.com $110,000
AutoClassifieds $110,000
Porn.mobi $110,000
Husband.com $100,000
SearchEngines.com $92,500
Niche.com $85,000
Skinny.com $80,000
GoldDigger(s) $80,000
Cotton.com $75,000
ETC...

It is also very interesting to note that there were tons of names with high bids in the 6 figure range as well as 1 bid at $2.5 million (customerservice.com) that did not meet the sellers' reserve prices. Wow.

Hot or Not sells for 20 Million, Bored.com sells for 4.5 Million

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 11:44:00 +0000

Extra extra!! Bored.com Sells for 4.5 Million.

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080208/clf095.html?.v=4

And hot or not sells for 20 million!! This looks like the biggest public sale of 2008 so far...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/11/hotornot-apparently-very-hot-acquired-for-20-million/

ABC NEWS: Dot-Com-Dollars: Web Names Bring Riches

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 05:10:00 +0000

I'm adding yet another segment. This one is called "Extra Extra!" This is a good read. People are catching on to the domain business! Bring on the investors...

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/SmallBiz/Story?id=4263244&page=1

Hoverboard News.

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:05:00 +0000

I'm very excited to announce that there will be a new egoldmine segment called "hoverboard news" It will cover the latest technological advancements looming along the horizon in 2008 and beyond. So here we go.

Apparently, 3D is going to be HUGE soon within the next year or two: http://marketsaw.blogspot.com/2008/01/list-of-new-3d-flat-screen-televisions.html. We've seen 3d technology for a while in movies and amusement parks rides. But it had always been regarded as a fad, and a one time event we experience with wearisome 3d goggles and eye strain. But now a multitude of television and tech companies are coming out more realistic and goggle-less options with stereoscopics, headtracking and laser light technologies. The basic idea is to force each eye to focus on a different part of the screen, combining a special set of pictures so that the brain will perceive a 3D effect from any angle that you watch your tv from. Check out these companies that are paving the way:

Philipps

Mistubishi

Real Life 3d advertisements and vending machines

AND THIS:

Also, everything video related is converging. Let's take a look at the events that are going on and bumping into each other to form little supernovas.

The government is mandating a switch from analog to digital television broadcasting for all stations and homes by February of 2009. You will most likely have to buy digital converters for your analog tv sets.
Live video streaming, independent production companies, and even major television stations are all flocking to streaming on Internet TV. The writer's strike is proving the heavy dependence of major television networks, original content creators, and a growing interest in the online programming alternatives.
Businesses are utilizing more video advertisements especially during the uncertain economic period and recession scares. As a result, online advertising alternatives are being adopted.
Picture quality standards are improving. High Definition is being embraced and hdtvs will soon populate every household.
MultitouchScreen technology is taking shape: iphone, ipod, surface technology

What does this all mean? We can only guess. Here's some predictions. Some things are already starting to happen in different ways. Our computer screen will be our 3dimensional-high-definition-multi-touch television screen as well. This new form of 3d technology will enhance live online video chatting with each other. This intimacy will drastically change the status of the internet from a business and communication tool which is somewhat interactive, to an immersive alternate reality. (which is a bit scary but cool too).

Practical business application- I think companies specializing in online video services will succeed.

I say services instead of programming ventures because there will be alot of companies trying to make money off original content, but they will all be fighting with each other, as well as amateurs with webcams for the same viewer attention. The viewers attention will be so segmented that unless you are vc funded in the millions you won't stand a chance against all the other startups who are trying to recreate the earlier .com website successes. So for me, service providers will have steady income and growth- those video crews, the web developers and designers focusing on video websites. Innovate technology developers will also benefit. For instance, those who can adapt the 3d tech into your computerphone, those that can create and mass produce a cheap hologram video set for your living room, and those than can create some other ridiculousness. I think inventors will start profiting the most from technologies that will enhance this alternative reality experience such as better 4d surround sound for example.

The video and new media related websites will become more valuable, i.e. tv.com, .tv, (and .mobi- if its not made obselete by all these new developments). The entertainment and communications: gaming, voip-esque, porn, and sports, industries will show tremendous amounts of growth as a result. Online will no longer be the alternative means of advertising but rather the defacto. Non-internet related investors will take note and start buying domain names for unprecidented amounts.

So I probably went overboard in my predictions but its just so much fun to speculate about all this. How will the consumer react?? I think there is a high probability that we will react favorably within the next 2 years. Yes, 3D has been around for a loong while, and yes multi-touch has been in the works for a long time as well. With luke warm receptions. But we were not ready because it was too big of a step and the supporting technologies had not been developed yet. But now the foundations have been laid. We have accepted the online video thanks to youtube. We are accepting the multitouch phones and ipods thanks to apple. We are being exposed to 3d concerts through u2 and miley cyrus-sigh. And the new 3d laser viewing work as well on classic 2d videos. We are watching our shows and news online. What will happen with all this technology??? Who knows. I do know for certain, it will be entertaining!! How are you interpreting all this???? Will you develop or invest in these new frontiers??

Keep it LOCKED and throw away the key. This is where its at: Egoldmine.blogspot.com!!

No Limits.

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 21:39:00 +0000

So I hope you have all had enough time to perfect your domain brainstorming and registration techniques!! Vroom vroom!You’ve started the engine and are ready to chase the paper. The next step is now to turn your great ideas into cash. You can do several things with your domain name now and I’ll give you overviews.

1)Park the domain.
Parking programs are a good option if you are not quite sure what to do with your domain yet, for instance if you’re still trying to figure out how to develop it. Instead of letting it sit idly, you can make use of it.

The are many free parking programs out there. All you have to do is point your dns to theirs. They host for free what’s known as a parking page or landing page. You’ve probably seen this if you’ve been surfing the web looking for something. You come across a page that kind of looks like a real website, but when you start clicking through the page, you quickly realize that the categories are all advertisement links to other relevant places. The beauty of it is, they make out to look like a real website with different templates and layouts, and you don’t have to do any work.

You get a percentage of every click from the visitors. Parking can be used as an indicator of the site’s commercial value and most importantly, it gives you statistics on how much traffic comes through your site and their click through rates or “CTR”. So for instance if you have 10 page impressions, and 1 click, your CTR is 10%. Over time, you can get a general idea of your Cost Per Thousand Impressions or “CPM”. CPM is an estimated gauge of your revenue that you can use to compare with your other channels.

These statistics are wonderful pieces of evidence for sales. Often times buyers are looking for domains with traffic and revenue. They will ask for a screenshot of your stats from however long you have had it. Sometimes they will say I would like to buy a domain with x amount of revenue per month. I am willing to buy the domain for the cost of its revenue for 3 years. So if your domain is making $5 per day, they would pay you at least $5,400 for your name.

There a gazillions of parking programs out there. And they all have different payouts and they use different styles and advertisments. Some types of names fare well on one parking provider and do badly on another. I moved my names once and saw the that I was averaging 50 cents per day instead of 10.

I recommend: Parked, Bodis, and Sedo. Because they have pretty good payouts. But over time you will find your favorites as you move around. They always change and remember new is sexy ;)

2)Develop the domain.
If you have spent all this time researching the name as I have outlined earlier than hopefully you will have registered something that has mass search appeal, a profitable niche, good traffic, and something that piques your interest. It is your creative seed. You may have dreamed it up or made the effort to acquire it from someone else. If you have the time and dedication, why not try to profit from it yourself? You have already made the initial investment and have researched the industry, target audience and its potential. If you have had it parked for a while, then you will know that it has some proof of success even if small. A developed domain is way better than a parked domain because you can optimize it yourself. You can monetize off of it in a multitude of ways: i.e. sell your own goods, be an affiliate and sell other peoples goods, and choose advertisers to put on. Instead of a small cut from the parking provider, you will get your whole share of the revenue.

You do have to spend to develop your name though. You can go from a small to a large budget when developing your names. It is all up to you. If you feel that your domain name is strong enough, you can optimize it well, and you will be able to compete with other websites, your chances for success are good.

3)Sell your domain name.
Developing is nice in theory but hey, on the real, you just wanna make a quick buck. Like the housing market, this is known as “flipping”. Register, market it, sell it. This style works best if you have a lot of names because you have a better chance of finding success. But if you only have one name to learn with, its easy to focus your selling energy into it. You can do some home renovation and create your own little promo package. Park the name and gather statistics. Create a sales pitch using what you’ve learned in your research. I’ve seen a new trend lately where people create cool logos using the name, to help buyers visualize the potential of the site. You could say “logo comes free with purchase of the domain name” or something like that.

Next it’s time to put your house on the market and list it for sale. There are a gabillion places to sell names. Here are the most popular domain aftermarkets where you will see a lot of buyers and sellers:

GoDaddy’s TDAM (The Domain Name Aftermarket)
Sedo
Afternic
Moniker
DNForum
NameJet

Some of these aftermarkets allow you to park with them while putting it up for sale on the same page, which is very convenient. The buyer or visitor to your sales page can see see the traffic stats.

Now if you have a really nice home that you are trying to sell to high end clients, you may want to get a sales agent. In the domain world they are called brokers. Brokers are intermediaries between serious domain investors for both buyers and sellers. If your name is good enough brokers will find you, or you could submit your names for consideration. Your chances of making a high end sale goes way up if you get to deal with a broker because they have so many connections and pre-established relationship with big players.

And now you feel good about your name. You have a nice marketing package, and it’s listed and parked in all the major aftermarkets. And now? Now you wait. This is where people pack it up and just start waiting for the bus and chill. You’ve done so much work up to this point that you want to crack open your favorite beverage, go see a movie, and take a nap. But if you want to be a no limit soldier and hunt down the big end users then keep reading.

Go on a full out promotional blitz. Find every domain related forum and become a dedicated member. Then get busy.. bom-chicka-bow-wow, telling other investors why they must urgently buy your domain. Use your sparkly marketing package, jedi mind tricks, and your mountain of evidence to help them see the light. Create your own web page somewhere just for your sales promotions that you can direct people to so they know you are serious about selling the domain. And then hunt down the big end users: Guerilla Styleee.

I know someone who sold a domain for around 10k using this GS method. He spent an entire week searching the internet and amassing the contact information of all the major businesses who could benefit from owning the domain name. He then created a form letter and sent it to all of them. When he received mail back he replied to everyone and told them there was mass interest. This in turn generated a mini bidding war between large companies. Be prepared though to talk to these people on the phone as if you’re someone experienced who knows a thing or two about a thing or two about domains. Keep a straight poker voice.

Once you are off the phone, tie a handkerchief around your head, paint your face red, grab a stick and find a hand drum. Go out to your back yard and start a bonfire. Dance around the bonfire in a frenzy. Then get on your knees ask the money gods to send rain over your cash crops. It’s wrong. You can work it all out later at therapy. That’s what I do.

Now, beyond selling domain names, a new controversial method that is becoming an option is domain leasing. Some people who own amazing keywords plan to hold on to their domain names for life. They believe the market and demand for these names will only go up as the internet grows. This is similar to people buy apartments, rent out their apartments in growing cities, and once the city is thriving and populated, they can charge high amounts for rent. I think many people have problems with it because the business who wants to lease your domain can get screwed if you start raising rent. And you can terminate the agreement at the height of their successes and even profit from it. It’s risky for the owner as well if the business who leases your name is wack and then brands your domain name with that association. But over time, when the world has embraced the concept of domain properties, I predict this will be more acceptable.

Closing Remarks:
If you do end up doing all of this, then I think you deserve a pat on the back, cold micro brewed beer, and a tub of delicious poppycock!!! Cheers!

There are a myriad of things you can do with your name(s) and boundless potential…uh…in the universe, yeah. (Gosh I sounded like Deepak Chopra for a second. By the by, the 7 Spiritual laws of success is one of my favorite books ever. It is a wonderful motivational tool. The book and concept may sound cheesy, but it reinforces your mental resolve to succeed which is particularly useful in online ventures.)

What’s fun about all of this is that you can create your own system and your own approach. This has been my plan of attack: register mass names with potential. Park them while listing them for sale. Take the names that most interest me and develop them to be sales sites. Market all of the names to end users. Sell the lower end names at discounted prices that did not show much promise in parking stats, and did not receive much interest. And remember, “Don’t stop belieeeveen, Hold on to that feeelin!”

Keep it locked Right Here on Egoldmine.blogspot.com
Let’s make money together! ^_^
Next segment we will discuss…more cool money makin stuff !

Picking a Domain Name

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:36:00 +0000

I sold a domain name for $75 today! I woke up and the buyer had accepted my counter offer. Not bad for a 10x return on investment, no? It feels sweet to write this segment..

Searching for the right name can get confusing.

Let's get started on how to find the right name for you. Everyone's method is different and I'll show you mine.

I have what I like to call the 90/10 rule. 90% research and 10% intuition. Despite how much of a hunch we have on a certain industry, words and combinations, one thing is certain, numbers don't lie. It's ok to speculate. I highly reccomend surfing the net with your ideas because you can get initial impressions, news and business trends. Once you have come up with brainstorming ideas, then its time to really start researching. This is where you will find out whether your speculations have any metric values. The following are tools I like to use to analyze a names potential:

Google Search- everyone has google search and its a great place to start. Type in the word or words you are looking for and take a look at the search engine result numbers. This gives you an indication of how popular the term is by showing you how many search pages it shows up in. For me anything above 500,000 is good. If it's in the millions its also an even better sign. Make sure if you have a word combination to search for it in between "" quotation marks. This tells the search engine how many times they see the two words adjacent to each other instead of showing you eveyr page that happens to contain the 2 words.

Keyword Suggestion Tool-to me this is the most important tool. there are many keyword suggestion tools. I like the one you use with adwords. I also like to use wordtracker free keyword suggestion tool This is the most useful tool to me because it shows you how many times daily or monthly that particular keyword has been searched in a particular engine. In addition to this, they also give you other names related to this name that has been searched the most. So for instance if I typed in Wedding Flowers, it might see these on the list: floral bouquet, wedding centerpieces, etc. Looking at these keywords gives you an indication of what people are actually searching for! So if you were originally planning to buy floralbouquet.com, you might change your mind to weddingcenterpieces.com after seeing that it is searched for 10,000 more times a month...I like this tool so much because it helps you discover many niches within an industry. For instance if your looking up rv campers, you might be surprised to find that the 2nd highest related term is rv fridge parts.

Registrars- Registrars are thos websites where you go to buy your domain. There are alot of registrars. Some of the most popular ones that you might recognize are GoDaddy, 1and1, Namecheap, and Enom.

Go to your registrar of choice, and type in the domain you're interested in buying. They usually pop up a list of other extensions and show you whats taken with your name. So if you wanted weddingflowers.com it will show you that it is taken in .net, .org, .info, etc. It is a good sign if it has been regged in other popular extensions.

Then actually check these other extensions and see whether the website is developed or not.

Namebio- This is a good way of appraising what your domain names potential resale value could be. Namebio shows previous sales that have been made public. There are numerous private sales daily that we do not know about.

You may see that floralweddings.com sold for $3,000 a year ago. This doesn't necessarily mean that your domain will sell for as much but it can be used as part of your sales pitch and as an indicator for how high your name could go for. Find enough relatable previous sales and you can get an even better idea of how often these names are sold and its potential market value.

It's also good to take a look at how much other people with similar names are asking for their domain names at this current time.

Tying it all together:
It's a good idea to write all of these down on one sheet of paper per domain name. It acts as a type of diagnosis, and agin is useful in your sales pitch. Now you can choose between your strongest names. Compare this to the diagnosis of the strongest keyword name in the industry related industry. Assess real life market trends and compare it to the numbers as weeks go by. See where you stand.

Often times in the resale market you are marketing other speculative resellers. They will also be gauging the value of the domain on these very same statistics, so the numbers really do matter and always keep them at hand.

However it is important not to lose sight of its end user value. In my opinion, the names with the most potential to be used in sales, ecommerce are always going to be worth something.

It's great to fall back on this end user value because if your domain doesn't sell in the next few years, I still think it's a good investment because you could actually develop it yourself, profit from it yourself, and possibly resell your fully developed website for more down the line. So theres lots of possibilities.

I think its a good idea to start off with one name and go through the whole process to see how this whole thing works.

Later I'll talk about marketing and selling your names. Stay tuned!! :)

****Warning**** There is a danger zone in domaining. Squatting and trademark infringement. Don't ever reg pre-existing major brands, company names, and names of public figures and movie stars for the purpose of holding out and reselling to them, or using their popularity to sell their or your products.. like juliaroberts.com or nike.com. They will sue your ass it's happened before. Sometimes they will just ask you to turn the name over but I don't think its worth the risk.

New Years Resolutions

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 07:33:00 +0000

What's your new years resolution? Does it involve making wads of cash? Hey, mine too! Come rock 2008 with eGoldmine!

I am looking forward to this year. I received a phone call the other day regarding a premium auction. They'd like to sell one or two of my domain names this summer!

I've touched briefly upon domain trading but have mainly been discussing affiliate advertising. For those who are new to hearing about all this, the next few segments will be focused on learning about domaining.

Domains are a big commodity in the Internet world, they are slightly similar to real estate and stocks. There's a whole world of people who make a living off it by acquiring highly desirable names to sell to end users and to other speculators. To give you an idea of their highest potentials, sex.com sold for $14 Million, porn.com in 2007 for $10 Million, and vodka.com sold 2 years ago for $3 Million. But these are a select few a year in that range. Alot of names are sold daily in the $100-$1,000+ range and beyond both publicly and privately. Commonly 8-20 or so domain names sell for around 5-6 figures a month.

Domaining is a always a gamble. (That's why its fun). Because anyone can make lots of money. Some people do massive amounts of research on names to guage their potential. They market it to the right people like end users, industry execs, and stock market speculators who are as of late diversifying their portfolio into online domains. And these people who prepared often get rewarded. Some just register a random silly domain name and someone happens to want it. Some buy tons of silly names and make nothing. But the odds are generally greater for those that know how to play and have a knack for speculation. Some are established with thousands of domain names in a "portfolio" and do this for a living making insane amounts of money. This is a growing industry as real life investors are realizing everything is moving towards the internet, and the internet is only in its infancy.

If you've ever seen the movie far and away, that's what its like when a new domain opportunity comes along. People go crazy registering, and theres alot of initial speculative sales. For instance new extensions that have come of late like the .mobi, .asia, and some **others that you should look into-wink wink, are garnering special attention and tons of speculative trade as internet accessibility is going mobile, and as television and internet merge.

But .com is king because it is a fixture in our lives with a longer history (comparitively) of development, monetization, and acceptance. So the lower quality .com names are worth alot more than the lower quality names of still new and unproven extensions, But keywords are for the most part always going to have a much higher value no matter what the extension is. The market is growing at a fast rate and the rules are always bending.

Stay tuned for the next segment in domaining where I'll talk about how to find good names. I'll also start inserting interesting news and tech articles in between that can give us an insight into industry trends and I'll continue my "What thu" segments.

Here's to 2008! and to sleeping pills which I seem to be immune to at this point haha. I have to get up soon.

Find Your Cozy Corner and Pimp Your Site!

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 05:51:00 +0000

My apologies for not being able to finish my Christmas money making series on time! Too much eggnog and hoopla this holiday season had me away from the computer. I hope you all had a great Christmas..

To make up for it I will give you a big money making program that has been working well for me called BANS: Build eBay Affiliate Websites That Make You Money Some of you may have seen it on tv or advertisements on the internet and dismissed it as a gimick, but it actually works. It is website building program that allows you to create niche online stores.

Your stores contain up to date Ebay auctions- so your content is always new and you don't have to worry about handling any type of ecommerce. You just facilitate it. The sites you can create are extremely customizable from a development and seo perspective. You earn your commission through CJ with Ebay affiliates: when someone wins an auction from your site (a certain percentage of the sellers fee in respect to the price of the item), and you get a $25 referral commission everytime someone creates a new Ebay account through your site. On top of that, you also earn money with any affiliate advertisents you choose to place in the site (like adsense, clickbank, commission junction, etc. )

You buy the website building program once for $97 and you can build an unlimited amount of sites with it, and it is possible to do it all on one hosting account. Despite what they say about it being easy, to someone who has absolutely no technical experience, it will be quite challenging. To get a better perspective, here's what you need to setup:

Your own domain name ($7-$30 depending on tld)

A hosting account (they reccomend Host Gator) ($10/month)

Some type of FTP (file transfer protocol) system (They reccomend Cute FTP) (FREE)

A commission junction account (FREE)

Here's what you need to do to set it up:

Point your domain's dns (domain name servers) to your hosting account and wait for it to propogate-(time it takes switch over around 30mins to 48 hours)

Create a new database and login in your hosting account for your chosen domain

Use FTP to upload the BANS folders they give you from your computer to the database you have created on their hosting. Change CHMOD. Eat poppycock popcorn. Seriously it's addictive yummy goodness and will help you through the whole process. I ate like 3 buckets of it.

Go to your domain, and log in to your database from there and then you can start building on it once you have changed your CHMOD back to its original settings and deleted your install.php file from the database.

You must have patience daniel-san to do all this if you are not used to moving files around and are not familiar with ftp and how it works. But, they have a really in depth 72 page guide with screenshots that will practically hand-hold you through the whole process. For any snags you may encounter they have a very active user forum to help you.

Once you figure out how to do this upload and install, everything else is super easy. It takes me about 10-15 minutes to build a basic site. But you can spend an infinite amount time PIMP MY SITE!!! to go from the bare bones one that you start off with (which is basically a grey and white template), into something like this, playa.

the cool thing about it is you don't have to have any graphic design experience but you do get to pretend you are one because you must play with css and html codes to customize your bans site. Theres a whole world of codes people exchange with each other to make your site do almost anything you want, like adding site maps on each page to help the search engines crawl your site faster.

But beyond all that technical banter and fun customization stuff, these sites are actually useful places that Ebay buyers will want to visit and return to. This is because you do all of the searching for them and choose the categories that will show up in the menu bar. In many cases it saves them alot of time.

For instance, I just made a popular tropical vacation site. My menu bar looks like this: Cheap Flights, Vacation Packages, Timeshares, Real Estate, Travel Guides, Luggage, Bikinis, and Sandals. You would have to do 8 seperate searches and probably several sessions on Ebay to buy everything you would need for your trip. You provide them with convenience and there is built in trust because it is Ebay.

To be successful, you must think up a goldilocks type niche or as I like to call it find your Cozy Corner. It mustn't be too big an industry like ipods or lcd screens for example because you are gonna be buried in competition and buried in SERP. But it mustn't be to small like and irrelevant like 'lime green post it notes'- wow that was the lamest example ever.. The key is finding something 'just right' A successful bans user made thousands of dollars on: I won't give away their niche but it was a type of car part. You can also find a product on the rise without much competition yet.

The proper domain name also plays a part in your success as I have mentioned in previous posts. Your better off with UsedFerarriStore.com than with Used-Transportational-sportycar-Village.info..

Then, you have to promote the hell out of your store online, maintain it with new pages, and do lots and lots and lots of work like a real job. But, some people actually find that insanely perfect niche and make up to $100 a day without much marketing. Then they hand pick the perfect ads to go along with it and make even more money.

There are alot of possibilites with this program. There are actually quite a few people in the $1,000+ club in the forum. It's what you make of it. I bug out at like $10 because it's a rush!! They just give you really great tools and have already integrated with the Ebay affiliate program and yeah, hello sleeping pills! Oh my oh hell yes Im oficially sleepy. Yessir. Trust you me I blow up shop more I have more good money making stuff later *edit edit blog entry needs to be entried

Secrets Revealed Part III

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 08:39:00 +0000

How would you like it if someone handed you the keys to their shop-fully stocked, fully operational, fully staffed and said here it’s yours go make money? That would be pretty cool huh? Well nowadays, anyone can do that on the internet and I’ll show you how. I run an online casino, 6 dating websites, an adult store, and a mobile phone shop. I only started about a month ago and some are now starting to earn a few dollars a day…while I sit around and watch tv!!

Now, I’ll give you the 4 magic words you will need to search: “Turnkey White Label Affiliates”

These sites are pre-made affiliate sites. Here’s how it works and we’ll use a dating affiliate program as an example. This dating affiliate program knows it’s difficult to compete with the True.coms and the Perfect Match.com’s of the world because they have the mass market covered. But, this current saturation of the online dating market has led to the growing demand and appeal of niche dating sites. People are now expecting to have an easier time finding sites for elderly dating, handicapped dating, dating in Iowa, dating for working professionals..and so on you get the idea. It’s in the affiliate providers’ best interest to capture these markets and make many mini websites.

What they’ve done is created premade template websites and bring in affiliates (you and me) to control and monetize of them. You get to do all the fun stuff-like choose the look and theme of your website. You can edit the layout, write your own introductions, design a logo, and add your own news updates. You “run” their shop and get a percentage of all your sales. For instance I get 40% of all $40 paid registrations for my casino, $10 for every phone or plan that I sell through my cellphone site, etc. This doesn’t seem like alot, but when you add up these sales and consider the cost and risks of actually starting up one of these businesses, you definitely have the advantage. Most importantly, you have no capital or initial investment to lose. Hell, you don’t even need a business plan they’ve done all the work for you.

Blah blah- optional to read-->(To give you an even better idea of this advantage, here is what it takes to run an ecommerce site on your own. I once tried to open my own online coffeeshop with tropical coffee that I bought from a small town in Asia. It took me about 2 months to do this. A lot of headaches and red tape just to get it up and running. Be prepared for some run-on sentences. And go: I needed a domain name, a business account from my state with bank account in order for me to qualify to get a $150 online merchant account for my $14.00/month build your own website. Then, I had to make sure the merchant account was compatible with my online shopping cart ($10 per month), and to ensure that my online shopping experience was safe for my customers, I had to buy a monthly secure server certificate, and then worry about the cost of packaging, shipping, and handling customer service…it was the most god awful, time wasting, online thing I’ve ever had to do. I would rather be forced to watch cirque du soleil 20 times than go through that again. Besides initial startup costs, you are looking at around $50/month just to keep up with monthly payments for all these services. I closed my shop within six months for obvious reasons.)

The affiliate dating website I was talking about already has built in members as each mini site is connected to the main inventory bank of all submitted profiles. For most afilliate programs, you don’t even need your own domain name or hosting. You are given a subdomain that you can choose: i.e. www.joesbestphones.mcphones.com or a name with your affiliate code: www.mcphones.com/155482. Some even integrate with your Ebay account.

The affiliate company handles processing and fees. They handle customer service and terms of agreements. All you have to do is design your site, market it, and sell their product. Oh yeah, and usually if you convince other people to be affiliates, you get a percentage of their earnings or a paid bonus! More or less, most TKWLA sites operate in this fashion but with different tos, modes of payout in relation to the revenue structure of their own industries.

With all that said, the majority of people make nothing to very little off these sites BUT some people I know make an average of $1,200+ per month!! Like the other money making systems I’ve shown you, you may think that the trick to succeeding is merely hard work and seo. While that always plays a key factor, there also smarter method plays. From what I’ve noticed in my research and probing on forums, what differentiates the money makers from the non-money makers are 2 major things: Choice of Affiliate and Branding.

1. Choice of Affiliate
There are a gazillion affiliate sites to choose from. Follow the ones with the most reasonable payout terms, and those with a history of success. Most of them have a quick sign up process. But, some of the best affiliate programs require you to go through an application process. It’s like a job interview. To qualify, you have to show what you can offer. They’ll ask you how many years of experience you’ve had in online marketing. Some will want to know whether you’ve run a succesful ecommerce site before and how well versed you are in seo and using different types of development software.

The reason for this is practical. It’s to their advantage to have better control of maintaining their advertising integrity. With selected and dedicated affiliates, they don’t have to worry about having a billion mini sites that all look the same. This comes off looking like spam and people will recognize these layouts mentally, remembering that these websites are places to avoid. They know that the affiliates they have chosen have the software knowledge to completely customize their websites- which will also help the spam and recognition issues. Often, you’ll need to be able to host these large sites on your own, edit their code, and know how to use ftp (file transfer protocol). They also know that these affiliates have a proven track record and are serious about making money.

2. Branding
People trust big name brands and stores over less known ones because they know what to expect. They are aware of the history in these key areas: performance, accountability, relative pricing, quality, reliability, and familiarity. The same goes for ecommerce sites.

You’ll want to build trust in your website. You can buy trust my little bambino. Some of the best keyword domain names have a large amount of type in traffic. Type in traffic means: when you think of cars, you are more likely to type in http://www.cars.com/ rather than go to your google search engine and look it up. If you are lucky enough to acquire keywords like cellphones.com or bestcellphones.com, then you will have a better chance of people taking your site seriously because they subconsciously expect you to be the defacto site on the subject. Developed keyword sites also have an advantage by automatically ranking higher in SERP because the bots take the domain name and its search tags into consideration.

I’ll cover in depth how to acquire these names in the future. Besides keyword domain names, you also can consider names with high traffic from previous development. You can try looking for popular ecommerce sites that have gone out of business and have let their domain name drop.

Any one of these two domain methods will bring you instant customers, search engine success, and build brand recognition without much work.

You can forward these domain names to your affiliate site, or point your dns to theirs, or if you are using some of the more customizable affiliate sites you can build right on the domain.

Theres a lot to learn on this subject, and a lot of options to choose from. I recommend this website to get you started:
They have a blog, informative articles, and they have reviews on affiliate programs.

Like I’ve said before, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Try different methods and products. I find I am making the most turnover out of my casino site, and one of my dating sites built on a keyword domain. There’s a lot of potential here as I’ve seen from people who make a living on this. I’m still in the beginning stages and learning as well…

There’s a lot to grasp in this post, but the best way to understand how it works is by actually trying it yourself. It’s actually a lot of fun. And it’s a lot like that computer game- lemonade stand! Except the money you can make is real. :)

Keep it locked RIGHT HERE on Egoldmine for even more secrets as Christmas approaches.

Secrets Revealed~Blogs Part II The Stocking Stuffer!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:53:00 +0000

Don’t want to wait that long for your adsense? Want instant cash? Another way you can make money off of blogs is by signing up for PayPerPost. It’s been recently put out on beta so get it while its hot!! PayPerPost is a site that connects bloggers and advertisers in one central location. You can capitalize off of the traffic you now bring in and the niche audience you attract. You have to submit your blog first to be approved. Once you are approved, you can look on their bulletin board for advertisers. They may be asking for a review on their company or product in 400 words. If for instance they are a music store and if your blog is about music, then you might be a good candidate. You apply, they accept, you write your blog entry, and its instant cash in your pocket. The payments go from $5,7 to $hundreds.Bloggers with good standing benefit the most from this because they attract advertisers willing to pay more for a PR4+ blog site with a dedicated fan base.PayPerPost has also implemented a new system: PPPDirect which allows advertisers to negotiate directly with you. You put a “badge” on your site that says you accept pppdirect. Advertisers will recognize this and be able to contact you, offer you a price, and you can accept or ask for more, and also negotiate the terms of the post.

Some people make extra spending cash on it and others that put in more time and effort make a lot. Even more SECRETS REVEALED in the coming days before Christmas, that make even more money. Stay Tuned and hope everyones Christmas preperations are going well :)

SECRETS REVEALED. My Christmas Presents to YOU!

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 06:18:00 +0000

A friend of mine has been reading my blog and mentioned that my advice is great...to those who already have a website! But she doesn't have her own. The closest thing she has is her online myspace profile and she doesn't have much technical experience. Don't worry, every little thing is gonna be alright :) Anyone can play this online money game. And the enxt week and a half, I'm going to show you how to with $0-$7. Some of the methods I've just started using, so we can see together if it makes any money. Others alot of people know (like blogging), and some will contain secrets I'm going to reveal: lists, methods, resources I use, that I spent long hours researching online.

In the following days in this week and a half before Christmas, I am going to reveal a new easy and cheap money making method

#1 Money Making Method: Make a blog.

Simple enough. Just like I'm doing right now. You can make money by writing about your favorite topics. The goal of you writing a blog is to capitalize off of the paid advertising you will add all around your blog using Adsense.

Like a business, the best way to make make money is to cater to a demand. Carve out a niche for yourself that you have a passion and experience in. Your goal is to make a blog that people will want to go to for referral. One that is interesting enough to warrant their attention, and one that has cutting edge news and new information that they will want to return. A good question to ask yourself is: Would I want to read this blog? Is it fun to read and will it provide a service to them that is different from other things online? If the answer is OH YEAH! you came up with something good, then you are ready to rock the partay...oowa oowa

It's easy to make a blog just like I have now. Here are a few of my favorite websites for making a free online blog:

Blogger, Wordpress, Livejournal, alot of the social networking sites now have blogs too liked friendster and myspace, but you want to use one that you can put adsense on, and the two best ones for that are blogger and wordpress.

As you can see, I definately prefer to use Blogger because of its EASE of use. It's perfect for someone new to blogging for monetization. It caterscaters to your SEO needs (remember seo? see previous posts). With blogger, you choose a template: a blog layout and design theme. As you can see I've chosen an orange theme because I'm going for an attention getting happy goldmine feel, lol. I dunno-there goes all my blog credibility. Ok, moving on. It allows you to easily manuevre the layout elements in your blog using boxes.

This is how my blog looks on the back end. See on the right in blue at the top of the tan boxes it says add page element. I just click on that and it allows me to choose what tan colored page elements I want under there: adsense, links, lists, html content, and tons of other stuff.

The beauty of blogger is that your blog login is also your adsense login and they are integrated together. Meaning, you can just choose the adsense page element and choose the colors (or the default colors that match your theme) and voila you are now ready to start writing and getting paid with adsense ads on your page!

Besides adsense, another page element you can add in blogger is html. This is useful when you are "link exchanging" and creating blog rolls. (Yay, we get to use what we learned in my previous posts!!) Those little tiny colored blog icons you see right now to the right in my blog are links back to blog directories. If you want to "SEO" part of that process is you'll want to submit to these directories in order to be found by other people. The directories provide you with a code and all you have to do to get it on blogger is 1.choose the 'html page element', and 2. paste the code they give into the page element. You can arrange the order of your page elements simply by dragging them around.

To save you time, I will give you a blog directories (found this on RSS blog directories). They actually work well and I have submitted to alot of them:

2Rss
http://www.2rss.com/index.php
About.com
http://weblogs.about.com/library/nosearch/blsubmit.htm
All-Blogs.net
http://www.all-blogs.net/submit.php
Answers
http://www.answers.com/main/new_blogger.jsp
BOTW Blog Directory
http://blogs.botw.org/helpcenter/submitblog.aspx
Blawg
http://blawg.org/modules.php?name=Web_Links&l_op=AddLink
Blogcode
http://www.blogcode.com/signup.php
Blogarama
http://www.blogarama.com/add-a-site/
Blogbib
http://www.blogbib.com/submit.php
Blogbunch
http://www.blogbunch.com/suggest/
BlogCatalog
http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/submit_blog.html
Blogdigger
http://blogdigger.com/add.jsp
Blogflux
http://www.blogflux.com/add.php
Bloggernity
http://www.bloggernity.com/cgi-bin/add.cgi
Bloghop
http://www.bloghop.com/account/index.htm
Bloghub
http://www.bloghub.com/cgi-bin/add.cgi
Blogintro
http://blogintro.com/?page_id=925
Bloglisting
http://www.bloglisting.com/addablog.html
BlogMap
http://www.csthota.com/blogmap/submit.aspx
BlogPulse
http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html
Blog-search
http://www.blog-search.com/blog-submission.html
Blogtopsites
http://www.blogtopsites.com/register.php
Bloguniverse
http://www.bloguniverse.com/radlinks/
Blogz
http://www.sarthak.net/blogz/add.php
BoingBoing
http://boingboing.net/suggest.html
Bulletize
http://www.bulletize.com/add.php?sid=0
Chordata
http://chordata.geckotribe.com/suggest.php
ContentsMatter
http://www.contentsmatter.com/add.php
Crayon
http://www.crayon.net/using/suggest.html
Diarist
http://www.diarist.net/
EastonWeb
http://portal.eatonweb.com/add.php
Feeds4all
http://www.feeds4all.com/AddRSS.aspx
Feedage
http://www.feedage.com/submit.php
Feedboy
http://www.feedboy.com/
FeedsFarm
http://www.feedsfarm.com/a.html
FindingBlog
http://findingblog.com/add_blog.php?cat=
FyberSearch
http://www.fybersearch.com/add-url.php
GeekPhilisopher
http://geekphilosopher.com/MainPage/gpBlogLinkAdd.php
Globeofblogs
http://www.globeofblogs.com/register.php
Gobignetwork
https://www.gobignetwork.com/blog/AddBlog.aspx
iBlog Business Directory
http://www.iblogbusiness.com/add.html
Icerocket
http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=addblog
Industry-blogs
http://www.industry-blogs.com/submit.php
Kiosken
http://www.esperanto.se/kiosk/engindex.html
LSBlogs
http://www.lsblogs.com/howtosubmit.php
NewsGator
http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/Folksonomy.aspx
Plazoo
http://www.plazoo.com/en/addrss.asp
Portal.eatonweb
http://portal.eatonweb.com/add.php
Postami
http://www.postami.com/rss.finder/submit_feed.php
Pressradar
http://www.pressradar.com/suggest
Rateitall
http://www.rateitall.com/suggest.aspx?WL=0&TopicID=20004
ReadAblog
http://www.readablog.com/AddFeed.aspx
Redtram
http://www.redtram.com/pages/addsource/
Search4Rss
http://www.search4rss.com/
Small Business Blog Directory
http://blogsforsmallbusiness.com/directory/add.html
SmallBusiness.com
http://smallbusiness.com/wiki/Weblog_directory_company_blogs
Strategic Board
http://strategicboard.com/?s=h:addblog
Syndic8
http://www.syndic8.com/suggest_start.php
Tailrank
http://www.tailrank.com/import
Technorati
http://www.technorati.com/ping.html
Topix
http://www.topix.net/member/register
TruthLaidBear
http://www.truthlaidbear.com/addtoscan.php
Wilsdomain
http://www.wilsdomain.com/blogs/wilsdomain9b.php?op=newsubmit
Yahoo.com
http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/my/cgi_rss_submission

Now, you may want to create your own seperate email address just for blog directory submitting because most of them ask you to register and confirm by email. You also want to have at least five posts written before you submit to the bigger, more snootier directories. They require proper dress code: suit and tie for the men, cocktail dresses for the women. It'll also be useful to have a word document of: blog summary around 250 words, blog address, a universal user name and password you'll use for registering. Because it gets tedious and repetitive submitting all this pidley. Keep a checklist to who has accepted you and whom your waiting to hear back by email to complete registration. I did not do this. I just haphazardly applied with different screenames and used my personal email. Trust me, it got very confusing!!!!

Some of these directories are for feeds. Instead of submitting your blog URL, they will ask you to submit your feed url. This enables blog fans to get up to date feeds whenever you update your blog. You'll want to sign your blog up to an rss feeder like Feedburner and you'll get your address from there.

Now, after you've submitted to these directories, wait. Submission takes time, you have to wait to get accepted and you have to give the readers a chance to find your blog.

In your adsense control panel, you can check to see how you're doing: how many people visited your site, and of them how many took advantage of your ads, as well as your revenue for that day. and then hopefully you'll hear $$$ CHA - CHING! $$$

Other ways to make your blog popular are by running an adwords campaign (see previous post :P) and going to online forums related to your topic and posting something useful information along with a linky linky back to your own expert blog.

Make sure you update your blog often and shower me with praises for all the help I have given you. It takes time to see results especially when you are trying to gain the attention of millions of internet surfers reading through millions of blogs. It takes time for Google to list you.

(If you feel you are ready to move on to bigger and better things I suggest you use wordpress. Wordpress has way more customization options. It allows you to even host your own site, tweak their html code from the backend, and do a lot of things that a real website can do;add pages, automate upload posts, and much more. But the interface is more involved. I heard that you can move all your blogger content to wordpress now so it won't be that hard if you want to move around.)

Now, Some common error diagnostic things for your marketing:

If you are getting alot of hits and not alot of clicks (less than 1% adsense click through rate-this i will cover in a future post), you are doing something wrong. Try switching around your layout and placement of elements. Make sure the ads are relevant to your content. If not you may want to change your blog title or place the ads closer to a summarizing statement-because adsense tries to tailor itself to what it recognizes your site to be about. You can also change metatags (ill cover that in a future post).

If you initially got alot of hits after blog submission but they decreased over time, then you are not maintaining your audience. You either need to make your content stand out more, or if its a saturated topic you may want to think of something else.

Remember be patient, persistent, and keep marketing. Do something realted to your blng every day. It takes about 6 months for all of your methods to propogate. Some blogs make 0-15 cents a day some make hundreds. You'll most likely start off on the low end, but if you do see a few cents coming your way in the first few weeks and months you know there is interest and you can only go up from there with hard work, adjustments, and marketing.

Yawn,these sleeping pills always get the best of me. Be prepared for more of my money making presents. They get more exciting!!!!! Wylde Stallyonsbe excelent to each toehr!!

Resources- Google Adsense and Adwords

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 23:30:00 +0000

Here are some websites that will help you make money:

Adsense - Adsense provides you with advertisments for free. You copy ad codes they give you and paste these on your website. They pay you everytime someone clicks on the ads. You need to get approved to join adsense first. This is a simple process as long as you have a legitimate website. Once you're approved, you can publish using many different websites. Make sure you follow their rules though or they might shut down your account. Some common rules are don't click on your own advertisements because thats cheating and don't put up too many of the same types of ads on the same page. Some people like Marcus Frind who created Plentyoffish.com make millions of dollars a year off of one dating website with adsense. I just started a few months ago and I'm now starting to making a few bucks a day.

Adwords - Works the other way around. You are the advertiser trying to fight to get your ads on the best website publishers. The more you're willing to pay for your clicks and your overall campaign budget, the better chances you'll have of getting relevant traffic back to you. If one person pays 10 cents per click and wants to spend at the most 4.00 a day is going to get a smaller network less popular network to advertise on than an someone willing to pay 60 cents per click and has a $500 a day campaign. That's why you see more ads for Cars.com then you do for Barry's Honda's of Ontario. I just started using adwords and it definately has helped. My membership conversion rate skyrocketed with the quality of people who clicked through to my arts and crafts site using adwords as opposed to when I simply bought traffic. Buying traffic doesn't get you anywhere.

Adwords recently came up with radio and print campaigns so you can have radio commercials you upload sent to popular radio stations around the country and newspaper print ads with the click of a button.

Be sure to check these sites out and read their tutorials to get a better understanding of how they can help you make money. In future posts, I'll be talking about the strategies I'm using to get the most out of these in my specific campaigns.

Yoshimi Battles the Searchbots

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:30:00 +0000

Today’s 2nd Installment of “What Thu?” will cover “Link Exchange” Link Exchange is a good way to get traffic from other sources to go to your site. If you have a website selling your original sculptures, you may want to exchange links with an online art magazine. To exchange links you must both simply put up a visible links to each other on your websites. If you are relevant to each other, you will both benefit from this exchange. The art magazine will send buyers interested in scuplture your way, and your loyal customers will want to click on an art magazine you are associated with. Having good quality link exchanges like this can help you in your search engine rankings especially if you exchange with a PR3 (Page Rank 3) or above site. In the long run this reputation could mean more money for you.

Link exchange has long been considered a standard step in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) process, but its value is rapidly decreasing nowadays. The reason for this is because people have started filling up their websites with link exchanges solely for the purpose of moving up in SERP(Search Engine Results Page). Some sites are taking advantage of this process and are acting like portals. The sites who try to cheat this way are often places filled with spam, advertisments, and a lack of quality content. They just want to convert other peoples traffic into quick cash and in turn, they negatively affect the reputation of the search engine. The search engine bots can recognize these things when they “crawl” through the site and as a result will often rank you lower for your association to these “Link Farms”. So be careful! Don’t go link crazy! People have spent months exchanging links with anyone they could find on the internet and while they thought they were moving up, they were really moving down. Find only a handful of the most respectable sources in your field and try to make a quality site that they will want to exchange links with. It will save you so much time.

Nowadays, the best way to maximize link potential is no longer through exchange, but rather anchor text links and one way links. Try to get your link to appear inside the actual written content of other websites. Have your site reviewed in an online journal, make compelling content that people will want to link on their own without an exchange. Just remember, quality counts, less is more, and search bots know your tricky ways. I tried to create many of my own sites with one way links to each other in a straight line, and their rankings all remained static because the search bots can now recognize that the links and websites are all coming from the same IP Address (Internet Protocol Adress).

What thu?

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 05:46:00 +0000

I'm gonna add a segment called 'what thu?' This will cover a word or phrase that makes people, including myself go what thu heck is that and accompany it with a half befuddled, half annoyed look. Today I'll cover: "Web 2.0" and "Link Exchange"

Lets start with Web 2.0
But I thought there was only 1 internet? No one sent me the update to install?! What do I do? Don't worry web 2.0 is this state of mind..there is no spoon! No, its like the city of Atlantis, we know so much about it, and its here but we can't find it. Ok, all jokes aside, it's a phrase that this guy named Tim O'Reilly came up with at a web conference in 2004. According to Wikipedia, his definition:

"the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform." [4]

It's more of a sociological change of how we perceive and use the internet rather than an upgrade. The technology to do what we're doing with it now has always been there. We're now putting it together in different ways as our avenues for using it expand. The internet started off less dimensional that it is now. It was a place to disseminate and exchange information instantaneuosly by the government. There was no feeling involved. Its path has been somewhat similar to the rise of human civilation. Once the public had access to the internet, we started using it as a personal communication vehicle for things beyond scientfic data or archives. We began to use it for emailing to each other and live messaging. Then communities formed on forums and bulletin boards. Online shopping and online banking emerged. We barter on ebay, buy from amazon, mom gets recipes online, we gossip with friends. It started and is continuing to virtually mirror our own society. As we grow together, new types of improvements like larger servers for storing more information, upgrades, and new forms of syndication are being developed to accomodate our growing standards and needs. Big corporations who didn't have their niche trading online have now expanded and are very involved and invested long term. We're now in the phase where business and new applications are growing together vertically and symbiotically online. Businesses are taking advantage of this in the way the market, trade, and in the way the operate whithin their own infastructure. I don't know much on the technical applications like AJAX and xyzlmnop C+ and r2d2, but I do know how the new programs are being applied in business. I will list what I know for you:

Mashups: Mashups are collections of different applications on one easy to access site. How it applies to business: Say you are a hotel and you want to market your site. You can create a mashup that mixes booking information, travel information, weather updates for the time they want to travel, nearest attractions, malls, pubs, car rentals, virtual room tours of your hotel, all on one page. This enhances the customer experience and maximizes their potential for wanting to stay with your hotel because their logistics are worked out for them and their interests are catered to. (What it looks like: Pretend you took cheapflights.com, shrunk it down so it fits in your palm and then pasting it onto your website so it will fit with, all the other stuff you want to provide your customers like weather.com, and so forth and so on.) Now "Widgets" are easier ways of putting these onto your website without having to know alot of programming and worrying about cutting it down to size. If whatever platform you're using to build your website integrates with widgets, you can easily place it into your website using something like widgetbox.com. You choose your say live weather widget which someone else has already created and just paste the say html code into your builder.

Wikis: We all know Wikipedia. It's a place where different people contribute their ideas into a collaborative source of information. In Wikipedias people can create change and add to definitions. What some people don't know yet is that businesses are using it in their infastructure as online content management systems. They store their collective information of directories, changes in the chicago office protocol, meetings that went down, deals that were made, all updated in real time. You can develop projects together online. You can submit your idea and your boss can put a great big X through it, meanwhile your conniving coworker reads this, improves on your idea and gets a standing o. Just like the real world of business. It increases the effectiveness of business communications. Some businesses are also now sharing some of their content to their customers to get feedback on how their company is run to better suit the end users needs. Businesses can be more efficient, and more mobile.

New Media Marketing: The way businesses market is also adapting to the web. A large segment of online marketing is in the form of text, pictures, and banner placements. You see them being placed on the majority of websites now and especially virally marketing through social networking sites like myspace. With the growing popularity of ipod and podcasts businesses are adding commercials, and creating their own podcasts discussing promotinf and explaining their businesses. With the huge explosion of online video and youtube, b2c companies are now placing video commercials and product advertisments on their webpages to allure to customers. Text advertisments are most recently attached to videos like video adsense. With the latest technology of lifecasting (live webcasting of your daily life like on the movie the Truman show see Justine.tv and Justin.tv) quickly gaining popularity, I PREDICT that businesses will start product placement with real people online. Your friends will start wearing hats and mugs of companies and saying one line catch phrases that they have been paid to. Regular people that can garner attention online to a target audience are having the opportunity to benefit from this viral new media marketing. People with expertise on a subject can write blogs (blogger.com, wordpress.com, technorati.com) or demonstrate how to videos (expert village) are also benefitting. Online advertising commerce in itself is becoming a huge industry. Companies are paying to have their ads on websites=Adwords. People are publishing these ads to get money=Adsense. Google having the most control and the biggest network over the internet is the provider and beneficiary of both Adsense and Adwords.

There's so much more add that in Web 2.0 and beyond yeah. But I'm sleepy.

My sleeping pills are kicking in and I think im going to cover anything I may have missed here and seo linking tomorrow it deserves its own elaborate article anyways. Yeah.....

New is Sexy

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 05:15:00 +0000

As Donnie Marshal likes to say, New is Sexy.

I akin this whole internet monitization game to the dating scene. You meet someone new, his name is say Mr. Adsense. You see all of his alluring features. Wow, everyone's in love with him! He's got hot girls left and right swooning over him when he bats his eyelashes. And oh yeah, he comes from blue blood. His dad is Sir Google by the way. Whenever I fall hard for someone too fast and I become irrational I always go back to what someone once told me, and its the age old adage: "Don't put all your eggs in one basket."

While he'll always be rich, and always be hot, Mr. Adsense will grow old. Newer advertising gentlemen will come along, younger ones with fresh ideas and maybe a bit of rebellion and flair. To go along with the changing climate in Web 2.0, 3.0, and beyond.

You must remember, thats how Mr. Adsense's family became wealthy. They were pioneers. They were ahead of the pack, took risks, and gambled on this thing called the Internet.

That's why though I see Adsense feeding everyone's babies and running for mayor, I'm also looking at Commission Junction,Indie Click, and others. When everything becomes homogonized people will want alternatives, especially advertisers. There will be so much competition on adwords now that everyone in the planet is involved. They will look for new campaigns to stick out. While there's money to be made the traditional domaining format of buying and selling your domain names, some domainers are trying their hand at Leasing their domain names in places like LeaseThis.com, and partnering with others willing to provide capital and those with original content plans for their property.

Anyways, to sum this whole thing up, I think the safest gamble in this industry IS to gamble...if that makes any sense. The internet is like the real world except it operates much faster, around light speed. A change here and there in virtual online technology affects real world economics. A new SEO technique can give one internet commerce business the edge in for the month of November. More money to Katz Deli and less to Joe's Deli. That's why part of my plan is diversification and utilizing new media techniques. We'll see how that pans out.

BY THE WAY,
*addendum: ok ok you got me, i still have a soft spot for Mr. Adsense as i still have pictures of him on all my websites and even this one. and, sigh, i keep his love letters scrawled on the sides and bottom of my sites. he cant help it, he's just really really good looking

Plan of Attack

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 23:56:00 +0000

I've determined the sectors that I would like to focus on. They are:

*Domain Trading (buying and selling domain names)
*Publishing for affiliates (making websites and getting paid for advertisments companies want to put on there)
*Providing new media services (secret for now)

I have a nice portfolio of decent names that I was able to acquire when a TLD(domain extension like .com, .net, and .org) remarketed itself with a succesful venture capitalist. I was able to get decent quality names at good prices before many others who are now starting get news of this opportunity.

Among those names, I plan to sell some as they continue to appreciate in value, but mostly develop the rest. I am developing in the following categories: online dating websites, real estate websites, educational sites, and anything related to video.

I plan to SEO (Search Engine Optimize) these sites. SEO is basically a fancy word for marketing your website to everyone on the internet. Your ultimate goal of SEO is ranking high in the search engines. So if you're a Deli in NYC, and we all know there are a ton of delis in NYC, if you work extremely hard in SEO, then hopefully your Deli website will come up first when someone types "NYC Deli" into Google Search. Capiche?

This is my plan. I hope as you read my blog, you'll get an understanding of the basic principles involved in making money on the internet and decipher some of the lingo associated with this whole industry. I was lucky enough to be exposed to all of this and I want everyone to know its not as hard as some people make it out to be! People just try to make it sound hard because there's actual money to be made. I hope you can help me figure some things out too along the way and join me on my journey. :)

Welcome

noreply@blogger.com (Fish in the Sea) — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 17:22:00 +0000

Welcome to my blog eGoldmine! I've just started on my journey to make money online and I am taking you with me. I'm only in my 20's but have worked every job imaginable: secretary, waitress, tea shop manager, web analyst, web development marketing, administrator for a holistic massage center, and department of social services dispatcher. I've learned alot of things along the way. But the main thing I've learned is: I'm tired of working for other people. I am going to be my own boss and use the skills I've learned along the way.

This is my journey towards the end goal making alot of money online. I hope to get there one day with hard work and determination. This is for other dedicated beginners out there. I'll share a few things about my plans, what's working, and what's not working. Have a great day!