Mike’s Blog - My Internet Life

When I heard that Blizzard was making a Warcraft movie I quickly went to my domain registrar and got some decent domain names.

WarcraftMovie.org
WarcrafttheMovie.org
WarcrafttheMovie.net

I then setup a Warcraft Movie site at the Warcraftmovie.org domain and forwarded the other 2 domains to it.  I ended up using the same layout I made for the Halo site because I just really like the design and I was too lazy to make another site.  The Halo site has quickly become a good earning site and hopefully so will the Warcraft site.

If you don’t see the site yet, its because I just updated the DNS about 20 mins ago, so it will take some time to propagate.

As some of you know, I have been experimenting with Parking domain names, I started off parking 1 domain at Dotzup about 2 months ago.  I only started with one because most of my other domains were rejected and they don’t allow domains with trademarked names, which a lot of my domains are.  Anyway I recently signed up to Sedo.com another domain parking service.  They are much large and less restrictive, mostly because they are a domain selling service as well as a parking service, so they can get away with more then a pure parking service can.

I’ve been with them for 2 weeks now and have 34 domains parked with them.  The good thing about them is almost any of your domain names will be accepted and they have great report system.  And since they also sell domain names, you can sell your domain if someone makes an offer.  In only 2 weeks I’ve recieved about 10 offers, ranging from $200-1000 from some of my domains.  Although I’ve declined them all.  The bad, the payout per click is extremely low, ive been averaging $0.05 per click. 

The best thing about the service is that it helps you decide which domains to develope.  One of my domains which I thought wasn’t very good receives about 10 unique visits/day.  This is pure natural traffic, I’ve done absolutly nothing and there are no links anywhere on the internet to this site.  Thats 300 uniques/month without me doing anything.  So why wouldn’t I develope a site around this domain? 

So I rate Sedo as a B- because it allows for quick turnaround time on new domains and provides nice data on traffic.  But because of the low payouts I can’t rate this any higher.  I would definetly recomment signing up if you have a few domain name sitting around, although don’t expect to make any serious money unless you have a few hundred decent domain names.

I’m back from by trip to St Lucia and I have to say it was the best vacation I’ve ever been on, I really didn’t want to come back.  I didn’t think I could last having no computer access, but I was wrong, when I got back the last thing I wanted to see was a computer.  But like all good things, it had to come to an end  

While I was away it seems like my forums at bluesfear.com were hacked.  Im working on getting them back up, I have a backup from 10 days ago, so its no biggy, just a pain to fix.  Besides that everything else is good.  Checked my earnings/traffic and everything is in line. 

Well tomorrow night or Wednesday morning however you want to look at it, I’ll be leaving to go to St Lucia in the Caribbean.  I’ll be gone until Sunday, so no updates until I get back.  Can’t wait to get on the beach and have a drink.

It seems that Google has updated its SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages) today and most of my sites have gained BIG TIME. I now have 4 sites that have page 1 results for my keywords, 2 sites that are on page 2 and one site that was non-existent to page 7. AH, feels so good. Its still updating so depending what server you connect to you still might be seeing old results. Looks like some of the money I spent last month wasn’t such a waste. Hopefully this will continue and I can see some nice traffic gains this month.

Here it is, my earnings and traffic report for April.

Earnings
- - - - - - - - - - -
Google: $419.05
Yahoo: $629.88
Intelli: $248.63
Tribal Fusion: $178.46
Parked Sites: $8.98 (1 site)

Misc Earning: $564.00

Total Earning: $2049
Advertising Spent: $301.03

Total Profit: $1747.97 (8.4% increase)

Traffic (Growth of Unique Monthly Visitors)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
3D-Tutorial.com - 3.9% Decline
Best-Freedownloads.com - 12.1% Decline
Bluesfear.com - 4.2% Decline
Totaltutorials.com - 9.9% Growth
Mikes-Blog.net - 13.8% Growth

Although it looks like traffic decreased this month, when adding the traffic from the 3 new sites I launched in April, overall traffic actually increased.

Total Traffic - 2.5% Growth
This includes, Halothemovie.org, TutotialDirectory.org and LostShow.com

Well it was a pretty good month, earnings and traffic both slightly increased, although I was expecting a bit more.  The fact the 3 of my 4 major sites decreased in traffic is a little concerning, I think its because I spent all my time working on the 3 new websites and almost no time on my old sites.  This month I’m not planning on launching anything new, instead I’m going to concentrate on building traffic to my current sites. 

I also spent more money then I wanted this month and didn’t really see much of a return.