Mike’s Blog - My Internet Life

I just got back from a weekend in Montreal Canada for a friends bachelor party.  It was my first time there and I have to say it was FANTASTIC!  Dropped a bucket load of money though, damn those strip clubs   Anyway, Im too tired right now to do my end of the month tally, but I’ll do it tomorrow.  Im taking off a day from work cause Im just too exchasted, I got about 3 hrs of sleep the whole time and had to drive back, 7 hr drive. 

On another note, I’ve gotten some crappy offers on a few of the Nintendo Wii domain names I got, very low $XXXX amounts.  Obviously Im not selling for that.  $XXXXX is what I would consider, but I’ll still probably hold on to them until the system is out, cause I’m sure the prices will jump even higher.

Yes its true that the Revolution is now Wii and I got some NICE domains! Not selling any currently, but might change my mind for the right price.

NINTENDO-WII.NET
NINTENDO-WII.ORG
NINTENDOWIICHEATCODES.COM
NINTENDOWIICHEATS.COM
WIICHEATCODES.COM
WIICHEATS.COM
WIIGAMES.ORG
WII-GAMES.COM
NINTENDOWIIGAMES.COM

Working a full time job and now making a nice amount of money from my sites has allowed me to save a decent amount of money these last few months. I have most of it sitting in a savings accoung earning about 4% interest per year, but I’m not satisfied with 4%. So a few weeks ago I decided to get into the Stock Market.

I have so far invested $3000 spread over 3 companies. Yahoo (YHOO) purchased at $32.27, Gateway (GTW) purchased at $2.15 and Netopia (NTPA) purchased at $4.70. So far I’m doing pretty well, +2.8%, +5.4% and 0% respectively. I plan on investing some more over the next few months if things go well.

My newest site went online today, its called Tutorial Directory. Basically its a resource site for tutorial writers and publishers.  The idea is that publishers submit their sites to the directors making it very easy for tutorial writers to find sites to submit their tutorials to.  This way tutorial writers are able to bring traffic to their sites easily and publishers could beef up there tutorial databases.  

The way the directory works is it ranks site by Pagerank and Alexa rating.  Pagerank has be bit more effect then Alexa rating does, so depending on those factors your site will appear higher up in the list.  Right now the directory is free for the first 20 websites, after that there will be a one time fee of $10 to submit your site. 

Well I have a new site that should be up either by this weekend or next week depending how much time I have to work on it.  I hired someone to do the coding and now I just have customize the look and tweak a few things here an there.  Its a niche directory site, I’ll give more details once Im actually done with it.

Well I was rejected on 2 of the 3 networks I applied to.  Although 1 told me to reapply in 3 months so maybe I’ll get accepted then.  Anway at least I got into one, sorry not going to say which one until I give them a try.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

I submitted the BlueSfear Art Worm (http://worm.bluesfear.com) to Shoutwire.com 3 days ago and after I few hrs it didn’t look like it wasn’t going to get enough shouts to appear on the front page, so I stopped checking.  Today there were a extra high number of people signing up to participate in the worm so I decided to check my stats and noticed the Art Worm page received 11,000+ uniques today!  Checking where the traffic came from it showed that 1/2 was from Shoutwire.com and 1/2 from Torrentspy.com, which syndicates Shoutwire.  Looks like after 3 days it managed to get enough shouts to get on the front page.  Nice boost in traffic for me, hopefully it will carry over to the main site.  

On the downside it used over 35GB of bandwidth in 1 day, hopefully I won’t go over my monthly limit.

Last Thursday I was contacted by someone at Google Adsense stating that one of my websites was in violation of their adsense policy.  As I was reading the email I was sweating bullets thinking I had just been banned, but it turns out they only disabled ads on this 1 website.  I promptly replied that I have removed the ads in question and asked more details on exactly why I was in violation.  I was very suprised that by Tuesday I had receive a reply with why I was in violation as well as suggestions.  I made the changes and sent a reply Wednesday night asking for a check so I could get my site enabled again.  Thursday morning I received a reply stating that the changes have been accepted and my website has been enabled again.

Pheew! That was a close one.  I’ve read a few stories with people getting banned and receiving no help or replies, but from my experience I was very pleased with Google and I’m glad they reaccepted my site so quickly. 

Today I decided to sign up to a few ad networks, specifically Tribal Fusion, Casale Media and BurstMedia.  From what I’ve read these are the big 3 ad networks next to YPN and Adsense. Plus these are pay per impression and not click. So this should help my earnings out on those spots that are getting very low click percentages but have a lot of page imperssions.  Each takes about 2-3 days to get accepted, so hopefully I’ll get in all 3.  Keeping my fingers crossed.  

I purchased this site about a week ago, LostShow.com and the domain finally transfered over this morning to my registrar.  Haven’t had much time to work on it, basically all I did was add some ads to it and some slight changes in the coding.  I have a lot of work to do here.  Almost all the pages need work, I have to redo the CSS and there is no SEO done either. 

On a good note the domain name is great and the site already has page 1 placement on a few good phrases and some decent traffic.  I should make all my money back within 2-3 months tops. 

Still have 1 more site in the works.  This one won’t be finished for 2-3 weeks.