Mike’s Blog - My Internet Life

I had a brief showing on page 1 of Google yesterday for my main website, bluesfear.com, on my keywords “digital art”.  But it only lasted about an hr then I got pushed back to page 2, spot #13.  Still not bad considering a month ago I was at #28.  Hopefully Im still climbing and will get back to page 1 soon.  My goal now is to place in the top 3 =)

On a further not, the end of the month report is coming out soon.  Will have it for you Saturday afternoon with plenty of details.

Last week when I applied to 2 Parking services and all my domains were rejected due to no traffic except www.problem-credit.net.  So after a week of being with them here are my first impressions of http://partner.dotzup.com. 

For one their parked sites are definitly better then most that I’ve seen, which is what attacted me to them in the first place.  Second, my visitor to click ration is huge.  Now the site only gets about 5-10 people/day but thats already enough to post some decent earnings.  I’m not going to post any numbers because I’m not sure where their TOS agreement says, but I’ll check it out later and post what I can. 

So I give Dotzup an A- for now.  If you have any domains laying around that get some traffic I would definitely try them out.

I created a very simple template layout that I will be using for all the domains I purchased over the last week.  Since the Parking services I applied to won’t accept domains without some traffic, I decided to setup 1 page sites for all these domains and hopefully within 1 month I should have enough traffic to get accepted.  You’ll notice none of these sites have ads, since its against TOS for both Yahoo and Google to display ads on sites with no content.  But its no biggy, I plan on have all these domains parked soon anyway.  All the domains listed under “My Inactive Domains” will be using this template.

I also setup Halothemovie.org with ads.  I spend a little more time on this site finding out some Halo info and other things.  Not much info out there yet about the movie, but theres enought content where I won’t get in trouble with Google.  Plus since this is a really good domain, I’ll probably setup a full blown site as the Halo movie gets closer.

I signed up to Chitika on the 16th and by the 18th I was accepted and ready to go.  I signed because I had a few ad spots that were just not generating much income and I wanted to see if these new type of ads would change that.  After 1 week I have to say I am very disappointed in these ads.  While very innovating these ads just did not perform as I had hoped.  Without giving away to much information, lets just say my profits dropped about 90%.  Now if these had been high generating spots, I would be pissed right now, but since these spots didn’t make much to begin with so I didn’t really lose too much over the last week.

To be honest I was very suprised at how poorly they performed.  When I first saw these ads I thought, WOW, great idea.  But I suppose most people just play around with them and never click, which seems to have been the case with me.  So I give Chitika.com a D-.  I couldn’t give it an F because I only tested it for 1 week in crappy spots.  Who knows they might be performing well for others.

As of right now I have switch back to either Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Networks, depending on the site. 

Up next Adknowledge.com.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Well I’ve been going a little domain crazy these last few days and have managed to purchase another 10 domains today.  Making my total owned domains 28.  Heres my newest 10

HALOTHEMOVIE.ORG
HALOMOVIESOUNDTRACK.COM
REALESTATEAGENTSECRETS.NET
REALESTATESECRETS.ORG
GOCHEATCODES.NET
GOCHEATS.ORG
NINTENTDOGOCHEATES.COM
THEBOURNEULTIMATUM.NET
MYHANGOUTSPOT.COM
PSP-WALLPAPERS.ORG

I plan on making actual sites out of 2-3 of the 20 I recently purchased, the others I will either sell or park.  I even bought 3 Nintendo ones on the rumor that the Nintendo Revolution was changing the name to Nintendo GO, but they didn’t so now I have 1 worthless domain and 2 which still aren’t too bad.  Gocheats and Gocheatcodes aren’t that bad domain names, I’ll probably park both.  Now I just need to stop buying domains.

Ok, so I have been rejected by both of the parking services I applied to.  Seems that they only accept sites that already have traffic and since I just registered all these domains yesterday they have no traffic.  Although www.problem-credit.net was accepted since I registered almost 2 weeks ago and it has a little bit of traffic.  So that 1 out of 8. 

Not a big deal, just a small set back.  This weekend I’m going to make a quick template that I will use for all the other sites, SEO each one and upload it.  Then hopefully within 2-4 weeks all the sites should have enough traffic where they can be accepted by the parking services.  Then we’ll see if this actually works. 

I’ll let you know what happens with this experiment in 2 weeks.

Since I have parked problem-credit.net for this experiment, I’ll announce that experiment #1 has ended with a failure. Although 10 days really wasn’t anywhere near enough time to really tell.

Ok, so I’ve always know about parked domains, but never really gave them a second thought until I ran across Dotzup.  There a domain name parking service and from what I’ve read there pretty good.  Basically what parking services do is take inactive domains and put up a page filled with link ads.  So when someone goes to the site, no matter what link they click you get paid cause there all advertisments.  The catch is that you need a domain name that receives natural traffic, meaning search engine traffic or people typing the name directly into the address bar.  But since all the good domains are taken its not easy finding a name that will do this.  Plus most parking services only accept com, net and org domains which narrows down your selection even more.

But I’m curious so I’m going to be giving this a try.  I’ve contacted 2 parking services and am waiting to be accepted, hopefully.  I purchased 10 domain names to start with.

AIRLINEAIRPORT.NET   
AUTOREPAIRCARS.COM    
COMPUTERCONSULTINGTRAINING.NET   
COMPUTERHARDWAREEQUIPMENT.NET 
FREECOMPUTERWALLPAPERS.NET  
INHOMECOMPUTERSERVICE.NET  
ONLINECOMPUTERCOURSE.ORG
PROBLEM-CREDIT.NET
PLAYSTATION3CHEAT.NET  - REJECTED
MYSPACEICON.NET - REJECTED

Two of which have already been rejected because parking services do not allow domains that have trademarked names like Playstation or MySpace.  I wish I knew that, but I’m sure I can turn the Playstation site into a nice cheat site, its a great domain name.  Or if Im really lazy I could probably sell it for at least $100.

Conditions for this to be a success:
- Make $1/day per site in 1 month

Its been 10 days since I started this experiment and since someone asked, heres an update. 

Income: $0.00
Daily Visits: 1-2 uniques

It doesn’t look like this is working.  Im going to wait a few more weeks to see if any seach engine picks up on the keywords since thats what Im counting on.  If after 1 month traffic does not increase I will add 2-3 more links from my other sites and see what happens.

Well this month is shaping up to be the best month ever!  Traffic is continuing to increase across the board and so is income.  We’re a little past the half way point and already we have past last months total income.  Re-adjusting the ad positions on some of the sites and switching some low yielding ads from Google Adsense to YPN really helped out. 

I still have a few ad spots that are just not performing well so I signed up to chitika.com, another ad service that is trying something new with their ads.  I’m going to be integrating these ads into these low yeild spots and hopefully this will crease income even more.

I also recently ran across adknowledge.com, which has some pretty nifty ads, so I plan on signing up there too and seeing how it goes.

I started my new job this week in NYC for a Software firm doing tech support.  Its ok so far, but its really cutting into my internet time to work on my sites.  I still have time to update them, but not much time to develope and start new sites.  Hopefully traffic and income won’t slow down too much cause I’m hoping to quit this job in a year and run my sites full time.  I want to wait until I hit the $4000/month mark, then I’ll quit.