Last year, Yahoo rejected a whopping $44 billion offer from Microsoft to purchase their search business. It seemed like a pretty dumb idea for Yahoo to reject that offer even at the time (I criticized it pretty heavily when TheDomains broke the news).  Yahoo was one of the stocks heavily speculated (even by tech stock standards back then) during the Dotcom Boom and never fully recovered when the bubble burst. The last time Yahoo shares were trading above $44 was back in 2000, so this offer was more than fair. 

This new deal reached between Microsoft and Yahoo guarantees Yahoo nothing. Yahoo will receive an 88% share of revenue derived from traffic originating from Yahoo-owned websites for the first 5 years of the agreement.

My thoughts? Brilliant move by Microsoft, another dumb move by Yahoo. Microsoft will be in a position to offer Yahoo an even lower revenue share in the future and there’s not much of an alternative for Yahoo — the U.S. Justice Department already concluded a Google-Yahoo search partnership won’t be happening (at least no time soon).

This is all still pending regulatory approval, however I think it’ll go through. With the monopoly Google currently has on search, what we really needs is a powerful competitor — not a bunch of smaller competitors like Ask.com or Dogpile which realistically haven’t a chance in hell of overtaking Google.

What this will mean in the future for domainers and webmasters remains to be seen — I reported on July 26th that Bing users are much more engaged by advertising. It remains to be seen what the reason for this is and whether the television advertising and other promotions Microsoft is offering to promote Bing are skewing results. As Mike noted over on TheDomains (see first link), this will mean 12% lower paying clicks for those currently monetizing their domains through Yahoo, however, assuming the click-through rate for those monetizing their websites through Yahoo goes up anywhere near what Bing is currently reporting, they should end up earning more money resultant of this search partnership.

It would sure be nice to  see Microsoft force Google to be more competitive and perhaps stop or scale back its bullying of website owners. Don’t know about you but I’m getting a little tired of reading”Matt Cutts said this” and “Matt Cutts said that” on every SEO website.

I’m not sure if this is the first lawsuit resulting from a tweet on Twitter, however it’s the first tweet lawsuit I’ve heard of. The tweet certainly was offensive but did it cause anywhere near the $50,000 being asked for? The person sending the tweet (whose Twitter account is now deleted — not sure if by Twitter or the person’s choice) apparently only had around 20 followers at the time of the tweet.

This is something I think a lot of people aren’t aware of when using social networks — if you’re not employing the features they offer to protect the messages you write from being read by the public, you do stand a chance of offending someone and a lawsuit possibly resulting from that. Tweets such as “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay”, are both pointless and asking for trouble. While this may be the first lawsuit resultant from an inappropriate tweet, I’m sure it won’t be the last. Ironically enough, the massive media exposure this story received has likely done far more damage than the initial tweet did.

edit: Just to update… AT&T has reversed their decision to censor their subscribers Internet — good move, however I’m sure plenty of damage has already been done. 4Chan looks like the big winner here — their site is now working for AT&T subscribers and they got a whole lot of free publicity.

——

If you’re one of the 15.5% of Americans who subscribe to AT & T wired Internet, know that AT & T is censoring what you see online. No, this wasn’t requested by government like my recent post on Australia Internet censorship — this was something AT & T decided to do all on their own. If you use any of the popular social media sites like Digg or Reddit, you may have come across the article — it has 5600+ diggs and 3300+ upvotes on Reddit at the time of this writing.

The website being blocked is certain sections of 4chan.org, an extremely popular website currently ranked #684 on Alexa. 4Chan is a controversial website (due to some of the content it hosts), however so are thousands of other websites online — should they be blocked as well? There’s really no way to know if there aren’t a whole lot more blocked websites — it came to light so quickly that 4Chan had website sections that were being blocked by AT & T due to the staggering number of people who visit 4Chan, so we might very well hear of other websites being blocked in coming days if AT & T doesn’t wake-up and reverse this decision which is causing rage all over the blogosphere and social media websites.

AT&T is as Un-American as companies come, having invented programs for mass surveillance of US citizens, allowed warrantless wiretapping of AT&T subscribers, are being investigated for price collusion on text message pricing, is being investigated for antitrust violations, and cancelled people’s Internet for saying things online they find “objectionable” (don’t leave a negative comment about AT&T if they’re your ISP!). I could go on — see their Wikipedia article if you’re interested in learning more about AT&T and the way they do business.

A study by Chitika, a search-advertising network, was reported on by Tech Crunch on July 24th. Chitika’s report found that Bing users clicking an organic search result were 55% more likely to click an ad on the website they subsequently visited than Google users. Chitika has over 50,000 websites on their network which based their data on over 32 million ad impressions.

If you take the time to read the Tech Crunch entry, be sure to discount the part about the Law of Large Numbers — a probability theory concept which has zero applicability here because there’s no way to determine an expected value when we don’t know the reasons some users choose to use Bing and others Google.

As pointed out in one of the comments, Bing has spent a large sum on advertising — it would seem plausible to suggest that these users may be more open to advertising, granted many of them probably found out about Bing through advertisements.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the possibility of Bing powering Yahoo search — something which would give Microsoft’s search engine an approximately 28% search market share and position it as a much stronger competitor to Google than Bing or Yahoo currently are.

Click Forensics released a press release on July 23rd reporting that click fraud rate was 12.7% in Q2 2009, down from 16.2% in Q2 2008. As domain and website monetization companies become better at detecting click fraud, the “skill” required to get away with click fraud has been increasing. Click Forensics also reported that publisher collusion fraud on ad networds has been on the rise. 

Another interesting click fraud report came from Anchor Intelligence, reporting that attempted click fraud has increased from 21.7% in Q1 2009 to 22.9% in Q2 2009. 

With attempted click fraud on the rise and actual click fraud declining, it’s good to see that domain and website monetization companies are winning the click fraud battle.

I found an interesting article on Cnet about how some churches are embracing 21st century technology with open arms. This article profiles an American church — the New Life Church, and discusses some of the technologies they use to communicate their message which include Facebook, Twitter and podcasting (audio and video). We have a church here in Winnipeg — Spring’s Church, which engages in similar activities.

Religion aside, many businesses and non-profit organizations could learn a thing or two from some of these megachurches. Having a serious message doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun and make use of the latest technologies to stay in contact with existing members and reach out to new members. It makes no sense in this day and age to not make use of social networking — especially if you’re trying to reach a younger audience.

The American Jewish Committee isn’t very happy to see Amazon-Germany supporting authors of Holocaust denial books. The AJC is disgusted enough actually that WebProNews reported that they’ve filed a lawsuit against Amazon-Germany.

Holocaust denial is not only morally reprehensible but also a crime in Germany — a crime punishable by up to 5 years in prison. What’s perhaps even more shocking is to read on people’s blogs some of the comments left suggesting this is free speech and that Amazon should be allowed to sell books like this. If someone killed your mother, father, brother, sister, … Would you appreciate a book being written about it, pretending it didn’t happen and/or glorifying it?

Amazon could learn a thing or two from eBay and the negative press they received up until 2001 when they banned the selling on Nazi memorabilia and Holocaust denial books. I’m not sure what the current situation is with Facebook (I don’t use it), however last I heard, Holocaust denial was A-okay so long as it wasn’t illegal in the countries of members taking part in it. 

I’m not sure what’s wrong with Amazon lately, however they’ve sure been making a lot of bad choices Earlier this week, Amazon deleted what they claimed were unauthorized copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm books without the  permission of Kindle owners who had downloaded them.

I can’t understand how companies can be so unaware of the consequences of their actions. If you did a cost-benefit analysis on what little money you make from fringe users versus how costly damage control when a situation like this comes to light may be, it doesn’t make any sense economically even if you have no moral compass whatsoever like these corporations.

It might be harder to get top dollar for your internet advertising, with advertising of all types having taken a hit along with the rest of the economy. There is one good thing about this recession however —  those that are making a living online will be happy to know that many businesses faced with advertising budget cuts are exploring and expanding internet advertising campaigns. Internet advertising is dirt cheap — so cheap that many newspapers offering access to their content online for free can’t cover their costs by doing such.

I’ve never understood the reason for online advertising being so cheap — if given the choice between online and offline advertising with the same ad budget, I’d choose online advertising 10 times out of 10. When advertising offline for an online business (eg. like Microsoft is doing with Bing), there’s no way to accurately measure your return on investment. With online advertising, I can see exactly how many people are coming to my site via a link or text/banner ad. I can see how long people are staying on my website, what they’re doing on my website, etc. I can even compare advertising campaigns I have running on different websites to see which websites are converting best and cut those which aren’t performing. 

 Reuters reported that despite internet ad spending being down 5% in the the first quarter of 2009, online advertising is becoming a larger share of the ad budget of many companies. If you’re trying to reach the younger generation, don’t even think about advertising offline. Internet advertising has come a long way in recent years, with more companies advertising online than in print media today. According to the latest LinkedIn Research Network / Harris Poll, a whopping 92% of companies with ad budgets spend part of their ad budget online — more than any other form of advertising. Since 2008, 74% of advertisers polled said they were spending more on online advertising than they were last year. We’ve seen mobile Internet advertising really start to take off over the past year as well — 69% of advertisers polled said they were spending more on mobile advertising today than in  2008. See the LinkIn Research Network / Harris Poll link for a complete breakdown of findings by WebProNews.

Word has been going around for some time now that Australia may implement an Internet filter which would choose what content Australians would be allowed to view online. With results from the latest Internet filtering trial indicating filters have had little effect on the speed of the Internet, many ISPs seem quite content to start serving filtered content.

An Australia-wide Internet filter could be implemented in a way most users would likely find reasonable - eg. by only blocking access to content that would be illegal to consume anyway (such as child pornography or websites facilitating illegal downloading). Unfortunately, not only does the slippery slope argument apply but Australia’s Internet filter may go far beyond that if content is filtered by ISPs in accordance with ACMA Internet regulation. Australian content is already heavily regulated, however it could get a whole lot worse with content from anywhere possibly being blacklisted in Australia. 

Not residing in Australia myself, I only know what I’ve come across on the Internet — if anyone from Australia wants to fill us in on what’s going down, that would be most appreciated. To see ISPs volunteering to take part in this trial is worrisome — Australia is a democratic country and if it can happen there, who’s to say it can’t happen in Canada or the USA? 

Like I said earlier, it’s a slippery slope and once we start filtering content, where do we stop? Reading over the comments to the article I linked to in the first link, it’s obvious that most Australians do not want their Internet filtered.

If you’re new to Twitter or want to learn more about how companies are successfully using Twitter, you’ll want to read Twitter 101, a free guide to using Twitter conveniently written by the people who brought you Twitter. Twitter 101 covers everything from getting started on Twitter to Twitter best practices and case studies on companies which have successfully incorporated Twitter into their marketing strategy. The guide finishes by providing you with a list of quality Twitter resources. I’m a bit surprised to didn’t include Joel Comm’s Twitter Power book in the list of resources — ito my knowledge, it’s the most bought Twitter book out there ($16.47 currently on Amazon). If you type “Twitter” into the Amazon search bar, you’ll get a pretty extensive list of books from which I’m fairly certain you’ll be able to find whatever you were looking for.

If you still don’t see how Twitter can help your business, you might want to look into how you can profit from helping other people’s businesses. If you’re too lazy or don’t have time to put in the work to get followers, there are services available to help — do a Google search on “Twitter followers” or “Buy Twitter followers” and you’ll find plenty of websites offering everything from tips on how to get more followers to people willing to microblog for you.

If you know what the people want and how to deliver it, designing an app for Apple’s iPhone might very well be one of the quickest ways to make money online. Not owning as iPhone, I haven’t paid much attention to Apple’s iPhone apps myself until I came across a blog post by Owen Frager talking about how some people are making $10,000 per day from applications such as “Fart a Friend” (whose purpose is apparently exactly what it’s name suggests).

Today, Owen wrote a post about how a new iPhone app has made $1 Million in 6 weeks (about $24,000/day). The great thing about making money online through Apple is that there are no make money online ebooks (aka make money online scams) to buy.

It may be quick money and possibly even easy money if you have a great idea, however there is a lot of competition out there and for every person making the kind of money from their apps that I’ve mentioned in this article, there are a thousand others making squat. Still, your odds are a whole lot better than playing the lotto. I don’t know anything about iPhone application design, however I’m going to look into it — I could sure use an extra $24,000 per day

Virtual credit cards are alternate credit card numbers that can be created for you created specifically with online purchases in mind. With virtual credit cards, you may be able to customize both expiration dates and credit limits. Because of the control virtual credit cards offer consumers over expiration dates and credit card limits, virtual credit cards are a powerful force in fighting identity theft and countering credit card fraud. Virtual credit cards first came out to protect consumers when making online purchases, however they now have other uses such as when making telephone purchases or purchases through the mail.

Be sure to ask your credit card issuer how their virtual credit cards (if they offer them) can be used. By using a virtual credit card instead of your real credit card, any would-be fraudsters will be limited to stealing at a maximum whatever your limit on your virtual credit card is, something which your credit card issuer should end up refunding anyway (Canada/USA) if you report it within a certain period of time which should be listed in your cardholder agreement.

Some credit card issuers have virtual credit cards which are limited to (or have the option of being) single use credit cards, something which severely limits credit card fraud. Even legitimate online retailers have been known to sell data that is made available to them when you make purchases with a credit card — virtual credit cards can protect from this as well. Despite the fact that you may not be liable for unauthorized charges, the hassle and potential damage (eg. to your credit score) which may arise make a virtual credit card well worth considering.

Another alternative to consider for increased safety would be prepaid credit cards. The disadvantage (some may see this as an advantage) with a prepaid credit card is that you’ll need to put money on the credit card to make any purchases.

Whenever given the option, it’s always best to pay via credit card through PayPal, it giving you 2 ways to try and get your money back in the event a fraudulent transaction occurs (credit card chargeback, PayPal  payment reversal).

Whatever you do, don’t ever pay with a bank wire transfer (or debit card for that matter) online unless you completely trust who you’re dealing with and understand the risks — wire transfers are irreversible and offer no fraud protection. I have quite a funny story about wire transfers.. I purchased 2 domains last year for $9000 each and instead of sending a $9000 wire transfer twice, my bank accidentally sent 3 wire transfers of $9000 each (paying for one of the domains twice). This obviously wasn’t my fault and my bank would have been on the hook for the money had they not been able to recover it but to make a long story short, my bank had to literally beg Escrow.com to send them the money back. If my bank had sent the money to someone less honest, it’s quite possible they would have just kept the money. Even a bank is at the mercy of the other party when it comes to wire transfers.

Network Solutions discovered malicious code which somehow found it’s way onto the servers hosting many of their e-commerce clients. According to The Tech Herald, the malicious code has been discovered on at least 4343 websites hosted with Network Solutions. These kind of things can happen to any company and it’s good to see Network Solutions doing what it can to help it’s customers. Network Solutions will be sending notices to affected clients by both email and snail mail. 

As bad as this may already sound, the real bad news is for customers of these websites hosted Network Solutions — it’s believed that transaction data on up to 573,928 credit cardholders may have been obtained from purchases made at compromised websites between March 12, 2009 and June 8, 2009. If you’ve made any only purchases within that time-frame, it may be a good idea to do a do a whois lookup to see where the websites you made purchases from are hosted. If they’re hosted with Network Solutions, make sure you check your credit card statements for unauthorized transactions. It’s also worth mentioning that not all Network Solutions e-commerce websites were affected.

This kind of stuff unfortunately happens all too often, Network Solutions being the latest victim of it. If you make a lot of online transactions, it may be worth getting a separate credit card strictly for online transactions — this will make it much easier to spot fraudulent transactions and minimize the damage that can be done from any undetected ones (so long as you set a low credit limit). Virtual credit cards are something else to look into — I’ll get a post up later today discussing what virtual credit cards are and their advantages over regular credit cards for online purchases. 

Renown web usability expert Jakob Nielsen has released a mobile web usability report which says exactly what many .mobi investors have been saying for a long time — mobile web users have different needs and while a walled garden approach is both unnecessary and far from ideal, the mobile web experience still suffers when websites are not designed with cell phones and smartphones in mind. Unsurprisingly, mobile web usability is reported to suffer most on cell phones with smaller screens and/or lower resolutions, agreeing with the conclusion many domainers have already reached that the iPhone and a few other premium smartphones provide a good mobile web experience, whereas mid-range and entry level cell phones provide a mediocre web browsing experience at best.

For a list of mobile web best practices, visit Mobiforge. While some content on Mobiforge (and elsewhere) discuss using .mobi domains for mobile web development, you can of course make a mobile compatible website out of any domain. I’m not going to get into the debate about whether you should choose m-dot, .wap, /mobile, .mobi — there’s enough reading on Namepros in the Dotmobi forum to keep anyone interested busy for many weeks. The short answer is what I said above — you can develop any domain into a mobile compatible website and you can identify your website as being mobile compatible however you want. 

The mobile web is still in it’s infancy — it’s big winners will be those with sites which go beyond being just mobile compatible and actually are mobile-friendly. Like I said at the start of this article, mobile web users are generally looking for different things online than those browsing the web on desktops or laptops/netbooks. Websites which are merely resized to fit the devices used by mobile web users are missing the whole point of why content was resized in the first place — it’s all about mobile web usability and aside from physical size limitations, one must also consider that most people don’t plan to spend hours browsing websites on a cell phone as they may on a desktop. What this means is that your 3000 word thesis of a blog post best be summarized, site navigation simplified allowing access  to each page on your website in the least amount of clicks possible, graphics and/or other bandwidth intensive media should be reduced in size, quality, or removed entirely, etc — I provided the Mobiforge link above for those who’d like to learn more about Best Practices when developing mobile compatible websites.

CNN reported yesterday that the SEACOM cable is now live, providing East Africa with 17,000 kilometers of high speed Internet. I knew Internet penetration was quite low in Africa and there were some obvious reasons for it — for example, the widespread poverty many African nations are afflicted with. Another unsurprising fact is the lack of affordable Internet access in much of Africa — large scale cable Internet investments (such as with SEACOM) have been prohibitively expensive in the past which has resulted in much of Africa being served only by costly satellite Internet.

With netbooks getting cheaper and cheaper, the SEACOM cable now live, and wireless Internet technologies continuing to evolve, we can only expect Internet penetration to rise in Africa in the years ahead. For African nations struggling with widespread poverty and corruption, this could give people the opportunity to share their story with the rest of the world (eg. what Twitter microblogging did in Iran) and it will undoubtedly in the future lead to a better education for millions of children who will now have access to the world’s knowledge. The future impact this may have is hard to say, however one can hope it may alleviate  some of the problems currently being experienced.

We’ve heard about newspapers planning on getting tougher on people using their content and many newspapers contemplating charging for access to their online content, however what I read today on The New York Times website goes above and beyond that… Reality check Associated Press and newspapers of the world: You need Google, not the other way around. And if you’re going to come after me for linking to your article, guess what — I’m going to paraphrase your article just the same if I find it interesting and not give you a link for your effort. One blog doing this certainly won’t mean anything to them, however if online publishers expect people to pay them for linking, quoting, or paraphrasing their work, they’re in for a real shock.

The currency respectable publishers have always used when quoting, paraphrasing, or otherwise making use of the work of others has been to provide a link back to their source, just like I did above, linking back to the New York Times. If the link above sends them 500 visitors (remember, search engine traffic will mean the occasional click for months and months (if not years) to come so long as the post stays on the website) and they’re making a hypothetical $20 per 1000 impressions (some websites make much more, others much less) on their website, then I essentially gave them $20, if not more (assuming the average visitor browses just 2 pages and that no visitors to this blog who didn’t previously read the New York Times will now start reading it at least occasionally due to my article), for the use of their content. For websites which offer premium subscriptions, a link on my website could very well be worth hundreds of dollars, depending on the conversion rate and the cost of subscriptions.

I have no problem giving people links — if they deserve a link, they’ll get a link, however I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay $20, $50, $100, etc for the privilege of using that content. At an average of 2 posts per day, it could cost me up to $3000/month if I needed to pay $100 per post for the right to  use their content — enough to make pretty much any small-medium sized blog unprofitable if content is largely focused on discussing news. Just imagine how costly a well-researched post could be if it ends up using content from multiple news sources… Costly enough that I probably wouldn’t be able to afford to make them — at least not very many of them. 

One thing many 20th century publishers don’t realize is the long tail of web publishing. This blog might only have 10,000 monthly readers compared to 15 million monthly readers for The New York Times, however in aggregate, smaller publishers pack a powerful punch. According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008, Universal McCann, eMarketer, and comScore all estimated the number of monthly blog readers in the United States alone was between 60.3 Million and 94.1 Million. Numbers are no doubt up since then, however for comparison using Compete.com, that’s more blog readers than The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and Fox News combined. 

How many of those blogs have linked to or talked about an article written on one of the above-mentioned websites before? How many will be doing so if changes were made to make monetary compensation mandatory for linking, paraphrasing, or otherwise discussing content written by the aforementioned websites? Before I go on, please note that I am just using the above online news sources as examples — everything at this point is still very much conjecture and these news sources may or may not attempt to implement said changes some point down the road. I say attempt because I’m not sure how exactly some of this will hold up legally — especially for websites not hosted in the U.S. and whose domain names are not registered with USA-based domain name registrars (eg. GoDaddy) or registries (eg. VeriSign). 

I can completely understand monetary compensation being demanded for the outright copying of articles (like many newspapers already do with the Associated Press), however when monetary compensation is being demanded for something as something so trivial as a link (and for the record, there has already been a handful of lawsuits for “unauthorized hyperlinking”), small quote, or paraphrasing (aka giving one’s opinion), I really start to question whether democracy still exists or at the very least, whether democracy still exists on the Internet.

I’ve written about domain name security in the past and what to look for in a domain name registrar. Despite the security precautions many domainers know to take, many people (including domainers) let their guard down when hiring people to help them and/or solve business problems. Sky News released an article yesterday about computer repair shops illegally accessing the personal data of their customers. In some cases, attempts to hack bank accounts were even made.

Many domainers make the mistake of having their email provider automatically receive their mail and grant them access to the email account based solely on cookie data. Domainers often forget to delete sensitive emails — if you may need the emails for a later date, copy them to some form of removable media and delete them from your email account. The same goes for your contact list — there are better places to keep it than right out in the open where any hacker can gain access.

If you’re sending your computer away for upgrades or repairs, remove the hard drive unless it’s necessary that it be included — the hard drive is of course where all your information is stored. If you’re purchasing a new computer, don’t be so naive as to merely discard your old computer thinking no harm will come of it… Open the computer up and destroy the hard drive. Deleting all information from the hard drive isn’t sufficient to prevent someone from recovering the data previously contained upon it. Giving a hard drive a beating with a hammer is a surprisingly effective stress management technique — at least for me!

Whether it be with outsourced computer repairs as in the example I provided above or whether it’s disgruntled employees stealing data, there’s no reason to trust anyone with more confidential information (or access to confidential information) than is necessary.

A great guest post was written on Tech Crunch yesterday asking whether search engines should be regulated.

Do you think Google has too much power? Many websites receive 25-50% of their unique visitors from Google, something which can disappear overnight with an algorithm change or be manually changed at any time for any reason Google sees fit. Generic .com domains can help a bit here, however the impact from even a small change in search engine position can be devastating for most businesses. Google reserves the right to close your publisher account for any reason or no reason, leaving you unable to purchase paid listings. There’s no set of guidelines on quality scores or traffic quality and how do we even know Google isn’t intentionally scoring people lower to keep more revenue for themselves? Why can’t domain owners know what percentage of Google’s revenue they’re getting from clicks their parked domains generate? Are you worried about how much Google knows about you?

After hearing all that, care to change your mind? I have to agree with the guest poster on Tech Crunch. Almost everyone relies on search engines nowadays to find what they’re looking for. Is it wise to let one company determine what 75% of Internet users find when they do a search? Is there even an incentive for Google to return reliable results — wouldn’t it be better for their bottom line if people had to look around for what they wanted and hopefully end up clicking the sponsored ads more often? Google’s frequent algorithm changes and ever-increasing algorithm complexity have made top SEOs a valuable commodity. The people who need search engines most (small businesses and individuals) don’t have the money to hire top SEOs which can run anywhere from $300-$1000 per hour. Google is now ranking big brands higher in the search results solely because they’re big brands (and maybe because they provide Google with the large majority of it’s revenue through paid search).

Thoughts?

There are many ways to profit from internet traffic, however this post will largely focus on profiting from other people’s internet traffic. What’s better than making a profit from the work of others? I trust that most readers are familiar with domain parking and it has therefore not been discussed in this article. I’ll write a future post on domain parking for those new to domaining. 

AdSense Arbitrage

For starters, despite what Google may like to have you believe, AdSense Arbitrage is still alive, profitable, and also liable to get your AdSense account disabled, so use this at your own risk if you have websites which depend on AdSense as a revenue source. If you depend on AdSense revenue, it might be wise to incorporate a separate business for your arbitraging and have the account registered to someone other than yourself — preferably with a different IP address to protect your main AdSense account. The concept of Adsense arbitrage is simple — you buy cheap traffic and convert the traffic into expensive clicks which more than cover your costs in acquiring the traffic necessary to create these clicks.

As an example, suppose I was monetizing this blog through AdSense. I could for example acquire very cheap clicks through Google Adwords for the keyword “LLLL.com” because there’s little competition for the keyword and send the traffic to a page I’ve optimized to show AdSense advertisements related to “domain parking”. Because there’s no competition (at least at the time of this writing) for “LLLL.com”, I’ll be able to acquire traffic for very cheap, yet LLLL.com is a very descriptive term used to my knowledge only in the domain industry, meaning the clicks I purchase will result in highly targeted traffic which would need only a very small conversion rate for me to profit. Domainers aren’t known to often click on AdSense ads, however I think giving a domaining example has made it this a bit easier to understand.

Converting Traffic

If I’m paying 5 cents per click and have a 3% conversion rate (that is, 3% of people clicking on a domain parking AdSense ad on my site) then it’s costing me $0.05/0.03 = $1.67 per click. If the average click yields more than $1.67, I’m making a profit. What’s important to remember when deciding what to pay for clicks is what you expect the desired action to yield and the likelihood of that action occurring. While extremely low bids won’t normally yield maximum profit, they will minimize losses if you’ve overestimated the value of the desired action or the likelihood of it occurring. You can always increase bids later.

When writing ads for Adwords, it’s important to consider the fact that Google uses Smart Pricing. This means that intentionally writing your ad to discourage anyone unlikely to convert could end up driving up your required bid substantially — I’ve had $12.00 minimum required bids on keywords I had a max bid of less than $1.00 on in the past because I tried to discourage untargeted visitors from clicking too aggressively — it would have been better to have gotten a few of them visiting at $0.10-$1.00 per click. At the same time, making your ad too inviting or targeting keywords too broad could become enormously expensive and unprofitable (eg. advertising this blog on Adwords for ”domain names”).

When I refer to AdSense arbitrage in this article, I’m referring to purchased traffic sent to Made For Adsense minisites which were designed to profit from the discrepancy between what it costs to acquire traffic and what that traffic can be monetized for. While Google frowns upon purchasing Adwords ads solely to redirect them to Made For AdSense minisites, it’s perfectly acceptable to purchase Adwords ads for a developed website which runs AdSense as a monetization method. Developed websites usually have a much lower click-through rate than Made For Adsense minisites, so you’ll need a lower cost per click to break-even.

AdSense arbitrage isn’t much different from many other types of traffic monetization. As an example, Amazon.com’s Kindle eBook reader costs $299 and Amazon offers  10% ($29.90) on any Kindle sales you send them. Affiliate programs often pay far more per conversion than you’ll ever make getting a visitor to click an AdSense ad, however they’re also much harder achieve — it’s much easier to convince a visitor to click an ad to view the Amazon Kindle eBook reader than it is to get that visitor to make a $299 purchase.

Pay Per Click or Pay Per Action ?

It doesn’t matter whether you’re monetizing parked domains or websites, this question will inevitably arise. Both domain parking and website monetization are still very much an inexact science — trial and error is often the best way to go about finding an ideal way to monetize your traffic and/or traffic you’ve purchased. Monetizing traffic through pay per click advertising tends to be a much more stable income source than monetizing traffic through a pay per action model. Call to action domains usually perform best under a well-chosen pay per action affiliate program.

Social Media Traffic Monetization

I rarely use Twitter, yet I get 1000+ uniques to this blog each month from Twitter and a couple Twitter-related websites from using TwitterFeed which automatically shares links to my blog posts with Twitter followers. I can only imagine how many users Twitter would send my way if I used it much more frequently… Twitter isn’t alone in this regard of course — Facebook, Myspace, Digg, etc can all help increase traffic to your websites. You can even look into arbitrage.

Conclusion

This article discussed how traffic can be monetized through pay per click and pay per action ad campaigns, along with an explanation of what arbitrage is and how it can be done. While I discussed Adsense arbitrage in this article, this can of course be done with any search engine or other website. I shied away from suggesting any particular pay per action program, mainly because experiences will vary based on your domain, content, and visitors. The best way to find pay per action programs that will likely work well for you would be to look at what popular websites in your niche are using. In many niches, popular websites will perform best with flat monthly rate advertising or cost per thousand impressions advertising.

Purchasing traffic and redirecting it to a parked domain is not allowed at most domain parking companies. Some domain parking companies do not let parked domains be promoted in any way, including through hyperlinks. Clicking on ads or paying people (or asking friends/family) to click advertisements on your parked domains or developed websites is click fraud and is taken very seriously. Under no circumstances should you ever sell a domain parking account or other traffic monetization account.

We all know about the struggle old media is having finding viewers for their crap content. In this Internet age, we’re no longer restricted like we once were in the news we have available to us. Old media doesn’t get how the Internet works — if you want to charge money for your newspaper, it sure as hell better be better than free alternatives. And often, it isn’t. Find a popular story on the web and watch how many people write an article about it. That’s what old media “journalism” has become — copying what other people have already written. That’s all fine and dandy and back in the days when someone only had access to a handful of papers, they actually thought this was news…

Between Digg, Technorati, Delicious, Google News, Google Blog Search, and Twitter, I can find out just about anything the media ever reports on and often a full day or two before they cover the story. I honestly don’t know why old media even tries to compete with these websites — why not try and deliver more local news or other areas which are underserved? What’s laughable is that the old media thinks we need them — wake up. The sad reality is that the mediocre content journalists provide isn’t something most people are prepared to pay for on the Internet. People nowadays want the facts — not some bonehead that has a degree in journalism (aka a degree in nothing).

What exactly is a journalist? Slate recently published an article on the new domain name extensions soon coming out and on cybersquatting that was plagued with errors in every paragraph. The article read very well and if you weren’t a domainer, you’d probably think Slate did a great job covering the subject — the fact is, they didn’t. I’ll take an expert 100 times out of 100 over a journalist. What we need in this Internet age are more experts, not parrots. Why can someone like Aaron Wall (SEO Book) successfully charge large subscription subscriptions fees online while most newspapers can’t manage to get even $5 per month? Aaron happens to be much more knowledgeable about the topic of SEO than most people out there, while journalists have no marketable skills in the online world — that’s all it really comes down to.

Take a look at how many people wrote about Wordpress releasing version 2.8.1… Now why would I pay to have access to content like that when 200 other people have linked to it and likely written the exact same thing — and for free.? The NY Times has recently been talking about everything from subscriptions to charging you a small fee to access any article. Who the heck is going to pay money to access an article written by a journalist? There’s rarely anything unique there. Do something creative — survey 100,000 people about what they feel is currently underserved online and mark my words, people will pay for that. Writing an article about the person who did such a survey and giving your thoughts on it doesn’t add enough value to command a price. What’s wrong with free? Tech Crunch makes $100,000+ per month from advertising on their free website. If all you’re doing is putting your offline stories online, you can’t possibly have much in the way of additional expenses by choosing to go online.

Old media has work tirelessly and spent enormous amounts of money to build their brands — why would they throw all that hard work away for nothing? Is charging $5 per month for access worth having most of your visitors defecting to a free solution? And now for something even more ridiculous — would you ever link to someone’s website if they charged you money for the privilege of providing them with a link? How about requiring people to pay money for as little as quoting 5 words from your article? Isn’t that a great way to guarantee you get few links and search engine referrals?

Microsoft’s Bing continues to gain search market share – largely at Google’s expense. As can be seen from the StatCounter graph, Google’s market share dropped quite noticeably in early June when Bing had just come out, while Yahoo’s search market share was largely unfazed. It’s a bit hard to see on the graph, however if you copy the graph into an image editing program and drawing a straight horizontal line under the lowest point on June 8th, you can see that Bing has gained significant search market share since the initial hype surrounding it’s release faded, and once again, it seems that Google has been the one from whom most of the search market share has been leeched. Bing has displaced Yahoo to become #2 in search market share — at least temporarily. Most of us domainers, developers, and webmasters would love to see this continue — the lower Google’s market share, the less they’ll be able to monopolize the market. There is quite clearly a very strong negative correlation between Google and Bing search market share — I haven’t researched why this may be, however looking at the graph, Yahoo’s traffic seems to not matter whatsoever how Google and Bing are doing yet Bing and Google almost always perform opposite each other.

We hear a lot of talk about real-time search and how real-time search is going to play a bigger role in the future.. What we don’t hear much about however is that real-time search is already here. To begin this article, let’s go over what exactly real-time search is. I’ll focus on discussing real-time search engines earlier on in this article and will conclude the article with a piece on search engine algorithm history to present the past and present challenges that search engines face and the problems a real-time search engine will be faced with.

Relevant Search Results

When you use a search engine, what you’re viewing is content that has been previously indexed by the search engine. This content might have been indexed yesterday or it may have been indexed 10 years ago and been unchanged since then. Many parts of search engine algorithms currently favor older pages — an older page is likely to have accrued more relevant and trusted links for example than a newer page. Some search engines (eg. Google) even assign significant weight as a ranking factor to the age of a website, putting newer websites at a significant disadvantage for ranking well in the search engine results pages (SERPs). When we speak of a real-time search engine, we’re talking about a search engine that could not only deliver relevant results but also up-to-the-minute results for time sensitive topics. If someone typed something along the lines of “Yankees Red Sox score” (without quotes), they’re most likely interested in the score of the most recent baseball game between these 2 teams — I highly doubt they were looking for the history of the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox rivalry article from Wikipedia which currently ranks #3 in Google. They’re most likely interested in knowing the final score of the game and perhaps the game’s highlights.

The challenge for search engines will be to determine which searches should return real-time results and which searches should return what are considered the best results according to their existing algorithms. If I do a search for “GoDaddy” on Google, it’s highly probable that I want to get to the GoDaddy.com website (I might have just seen their commercial on TV for example), and so news from GoDaddy or from other companies about GoDaddy probably isn’t what I’m interested in. On the other hand, if I do a search for “GoDaddy coupons”, I’m definitely looking for GoDaddy coupons that currently apply — not GoDaddy coupons that might have once been popular but are now expired. How do we find the balance between a search engine which includes little in the way of real-time results (eg. Google at present) and a search engine that contains only real-time results? Whoever can figure that out is sure to make a lot of money. An inconvenient solution in the meantime is to use real-time search engines for results you’d like the latest information on and traditional search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing for results where results are unlikely to be time-sensitive.

Twitter has real-time search functionality, however it’s currently only from tweets on their microblogging platform — not exactly a real-time search engine at this time, however Twitter is working on that. There are some more complete real-time search engines:

• Collecta
• CrowdEye
• OneRiot
• Scoopler
• Yauba

There’s unfortunately nothing on the market yet that’s comprehensive like Google yet returns results in real-time when necessary. The big problem with real-time search is that it would take an insane amount of computational power to keep visiting every website in the index every few minutes to keep everything up-to-date while still comprehensively analyzing the results to attempt to return the most relevant results. For now, it seems OneRiot seems like the best bet for real-time news. It’s unfortunate that it only covers pages linked to on social networks, thus missing out on topics which aren’t frequently discussed on social networks.

Search Engine Algorithm History

There are pros and cons to using a search engine algorithm with has on-page, link, trust, and age components. The obvious advantage is that it’s done a reasonably good job of keeping most spam blogs (splogs) from ranking high in the SERPs for competitive keyphrases (eg. the searches most people make when using a search engine). The disadvantage is that it’s led many people to try and game the system and as search engines increasingly clamp down on such behavior, it only makes it all the more profitable for those able to still manipulate search engine rankings, granted they now have less competition. Back when search engines were in their infancy, ranking well in the search engines was as easy as using the word many times on a page — this is where the whole notion of keyword density comes from. Search engines thought that a page which used a certain word 100 times on a page must be more related to that topic than pages which used it say, 10 times. This would likely be true if people weren’t trying to alter search engine rankings in their favor — it’s pretty hard to use most words 100 times on a page unless your topic is obviously related to that word or you’re willing to sacrifice human usability of your website by using the word over and over again in a nonsensical fashion. Obviously most people don’t want their website spam to come across as being website spam — what do you do when you come across a spam website? Most people hit the back button immediately and no money is made by the website owner who is often monetizing these websites through Adsense. So what came next were increasingly more creative ways of disguising spam in ways that detracted minimally from human usability. People would place keywords in the footer of their websites, hide additional keywords in a color which matched the background of the page so they couldn’t be seen (eg. if I wrote words in a white font, you wouldn’t see them on a white background), and then came the genius idea of serving humans and search engine robots different pages depending on which we identified them as being (also known as cloaking).

These are all highly frowned upon by search engines today and I wouldn’t recommend using any of these techniques unless you really don’t care about search engine traffic. There are plenty of other ways of spamming (such as title and h1 spamming, meta tag keyword stuffing, content scraping) however I really didn’t write this intending to provide a lesson on black hat SEO that works today and black hat SEO which worked in the past, so lets now move on to links and how they’ve been manipulated.

Search engines which don’t return results that visitors are looking for aren’t likely to stay popular for long — that’s the whole reason search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to make it increasingly difficult to unfairly gain a competitive advantage. Once search engines started cracking down on what I mentioned above, the next thing to be manipulated was links. Google’s PageRank algorithm used to play a very important role in the ranking of search engine results. The problem with PageRank is that the whole algorithm was based on links. Assuming a website is more important because it has more links or more links from authority websites is just as flawed as believing a page is more important because it stuffed a keyword 100 times into it’s 300 word page. Link farms were common even before Google gained popularity (most free directories are essentially link farms) due to Inktomi (a search engine which used to feed Yahoo search engine results) being heavily link-based and many observant webmasters exploited this. Many website owners would link up all their sites to each other so a brand new website could hypothetically have hundreds of backlinks from day 1. It was also common for website owners to hide links (using the same method I described above for keyword stuffing) or to stuff the footer with links. People would buy expiring or existing domains for their  PageRank and add links to their new website back to their website (still works with non-expired domains to a certain extent. AOL for example has 1800+ DMOZ links). There was guestbook spam, blog comment spam, wiki spam — all largely done to manipulate search engine rankings. Anchor text was another particularly bad one — Google used to weigh anchor text enormously in their algorithm (it’s still one of the elements with the most weight despite it’s abuse). As would be imagined, once people found out the importance of anchor text, they started making all links with keywords they wanted to rank for.

Imagine I wanted to rank for “SEO” in example — back in the past, a strategy that worked surprisingly well would be to include this word in all my links — for example over in my category section, I could add the word SEO to all the categories (even better if done in white so it doesn’t detract from human usability). Don’t try that today.. We have a similar problem today with anchor text and paid links. I’m surprised Google still puts so much weight on anchor text granted it’s so easily to manipulate. How often do you come across links in a site-wide links that contain keywords instead of the website’s name? That should be a dead giveaway that someone’s bought links. The best way to manipulate the rankings today (and it’s white hat!) really is to just get a domain name which has the keywords you plan on targeting in it. It took zero work to get this blog ranked #1 for “LLLL.com” and very little work to get ranked for “LLLL” — sending me about 1000 search engine referrals monthly between these 2 terms and derivatives of them such as LLLL.com prices, LLLL.com sales, LLLL.com price guide, etc. Obviously much more work will be required if you want to rank first for something with much more competition.

Trust is a more difficult algorithm element to manipulate, however people have even found a way around that by buying paid links on trusted websites — either with money or through other methods such as donations to charities, educational institutions, etc. Age in the index is in my opinion one of the dumbest algorithm elements ever. If we want relevant, accurate information, why would an older site necessarily be better than a newer site? I can understand the sandbox and am not saying 1 day old websites should  be ranked high in the SERPs for competitive keyphrases, however why is a 2 year old website not ranked as well as a 5 year old website? This has been the real failure of modern search engines — a site which is old and has lots of trusted links will outrank websites that are far better (take Wikipedia as an example)

I was just thinking about buying 500 or so iStockPhoto credits last week when I noticed their prices have gone up substantially over the last year. Getty Images is monopolizing the business and it’s nice to see they may have just met their match. They just lost most of my future business anyway, now that Google has released an option to use their image search feature to easily find free images — images that are allowed to be reproduced at no cost. There are a few other free image websites out there, however I feel a lot more comfortable using Google — not to mention having far more selection! I needed to get some more images on my blog — yeah, I’m cheap and don’t feel like paying $2 for images knowing 80% of the money isn’t going to the people who deserve it — the photographers, designers, artists.

That’s about double the broadband users we had in 2007 according to Park’s Associates. The Obama Administration is pledging billions of dollars to see that more Americans have access to high speed internet, yet the Asia Pacific currently has and is predicted to continue to have the largest share of broadband internet users — expected to reach 160 million users by 2013. Akamai released a State of the Internet report (which requires free registration to download) which discusses internet security, network and website usability, internet penetration, internet connectivity, and internet speed.

Q1 2009 global unique IP addresses detected by Akamai are up 27.51% year over year from Q1 2008, with the largest gains recorded by China and Brazil for 37.37% and 40.51% respectively. There were 141 countries which recorded under 100,000 unqiue IP addresses, indicating that internet penetration still has a long ways to go. For comparison, the USA had just over 116 million unique IP addresses. Do keep in mind that multiple users may share the same IP address (for example, a husband and wife using the same home computer) or have multiple IP addresses (such as someone who has a desktop and a laptop), so these numbers aren’t reflective of total online uniques but are best evaluated comparing one country to another. Unique IPs per capita was highest in Norway at 0.46, with a global average of 0.08 unique IPs per capita (USA had 0.38).

Globally, average connection speeds are up 29% year over year since Q1 2008 to 1.7Mbps. South Korea took the top spot with connection speeds averaging 11mpbs, with Sweden and Romania experiencing 42% and 51%  year over year internet speed increases (USA up 15%). Internet speeds above 5Mbps increased 29% globally, with increases of 199% in Switzerland, 148% in Denmark, 144% in the Czech Republic, and 101% in Romania leading the way (USA up 31%). Speeds between 5-10Mbps increased 21% in the USA.

For further information, be sure to download the report. If this all sounded like gibberish, it basically means that global internet speeds are going up and more people are gaining access to the internet all over the world. It’s fairly well documented that websites that take too long to load experience both a higher bounce rate and visitors which browse fewer pages — these increases (and those that will undoubtedly come in the future) will make graphic-intensive, video, music, and other bandwidth heavy websites provide visitors a more enjoyable user experience and with the ever increasing Internet penetration, likely more customers as well.

The full report explaining how Forrestor Research arrived at these numbers costs $1999, so you’ll have to forgive me for not providing anything to substantiate these figures. Social media marketing is currently worth just over $700MM today, so if this holds true, Web 2.0 companies may finally be in a position to earn positive returns on their investments. Another interesting one — mobile marketing is expected to grow from $391MM today to almost $1.3B in 2014. As most of you probably know, I’m a big fan of mobile and have been for quite some time — with cell phones greatly outnumbering computers and wireless Internet plans becoming cheaper every year, Internet penetration stands to increase substantially in coming years and those who find out ways to best monetize that traffic stand to gain enormously. Ad spending on search marketing is expected to increase to $31.5B, up from about $15.4B today. Display advertising is expected to grow from $7.8B today to $16.9B in 2014 — Unsurprisingly, the slowest growing (percentage-wise) online spending will be with email marketing — predicted to increase by just 11% per year to arrive at $2.08B in 2014. I must admit — I don’t follow email marketing trends at all, however I’m surprised to see it’s growing at all — just doesn’t seem as effective as the other options we have available today. All told, online ad spending is expected to rise between 12% and 21% annually over the next 5 years which is a pretty healthy sign that while offline advertising struggles, online advertising is still chugging along just fine.

Google just announced late last night that they plan on entering the computer operating system market. The Google Chrome Operating System will be open source and initially focus on the netbook market — the fastest growing computer market segment. The operating system will apparently be available on netbooks in the second half of 2010, with the open source code being released later this year.

One thing that’s kept me using a pda rather than a netbook has been the excruciatingly long startup times — the Google Chrome OS will apparently fix that, providing a quick startup similar to the “Instant On” functionality us pda users are used to. Since it’s not running Windows, it’ll (at least early on) be less susceptible to viruses and malware and possibly the greatest feature — all applications will be web-based, meaning anything you do on your Google OS powered netbook will be easily transferable to your Mac or PC.

I think Google may be on to something here.. And I couldn’t agree more with what Google says: “People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.”

It’s somewhat amusing to hear people get all worked up when they hear reports about the government spying on them — don’t they realize corporations have been spying on them for a long time? From Google’s personalized search, to Twitter’s advanced search feature. When I type Google.com, Google already knows that I’m from Canada and automatically redirects me to Google.ca instead. Familiar with Google Earth? How about Google Street View? As for Facebook, I can’t read your profile if you’ve decided to make it private, however I can snoop around and get a pretty good idea of who your friends are and if they don’t have private profiles, I’ll have access to all their information, from which I might be able to scrape together quite a bit about you. Looking at my traffic logs, I can see exactly how long people spent on this site, I can see your IP address, and from that IP address, I can often get a pretty good idea of where you live. Cookies on the Internet are even better than the ones you eat — at least for spying on people.  If I can find one of your domain names, say, one that you’re using for your email address, I can then do a WhoIs lookup and if you didn’t privately register your domain, I’ll have access to your name, address, email, and telephone number. I can use DomainTools to find out what other domains you own or even spy on nameserver activity. If you bought your domain off someone in the past, I can find out who that was and using DN Sale Price, I’ll probably know exactly what you paid for it if you bought it at a domain marketplace/auction. I can put a keylogger on someone’s computer and monitor their every word or I can put an internet filter on a computer accessed by minors to make it harder for them to access websites I don’t want them accessing.

How about I develop a software engine that “crawls through blogs, forums and instant messages to eavesdrop on teen conversations online, providing marketers, movie studios and even politicians with detailed, instant insight into the buzz about their products and competitors” or Echometrix with 132 million recorded teen conversations? (See Pulse article on Canada.com). How about an even better way to spy on blog comments? Or how about we just cut to the chase and read your thoughts already?

There’s nowhere to hide

I have 700 four letter .coms to sell over the next 4 days (which is when they expire), so I might not be able to find time to write any other posts until I get that done. What I’d like to ask is whether there are any topics you’d like to see covered — maybe some questions you have that you’d like answered or even a more in depth article on something already covered.

Ray asked me a few days ago if I could write an in depth post on link building — that’ll be the next post.

I’m open to suggestions on what you’d like to see written about next week or what you’d like to see written about more often. I’m perfectly happy to continue covering domain development and SEO and those 2 topics have proven to be quite popular so far, however I’m willing to cover just about anything Internet-related if you’d like to see something different. If I’m not familiar with what you’re interested in reading more about, I’ll find someone who is and can write about it.

The media has been talking about real-time search a lot lately saying it’ll be a huge market opportunity, others going so far as to say it’ll overtake organic search as we know it today… Call me a naysayer. I’ve been predicting social media’s collapse for awhile now and have been very vocal to people I know, saying it’s one big bubble — so what do I know anyway right?

The thing with real-time search is that you’re never going to be able to prevent spam. Sure you can block results containing certain words or company names just like a blog spam filter does today, however how are you ever going to block companies tweeting (or using another service other than Twitter in the future) to microblog about themselves? There are search engine optimization strategies used by many companies to “clean” results up — basically, rank higher in the SERPs with good information about the company than critical information. Getting critical information under the first page fold means most customers aren’t going to see it. The nice thing about the progress search engines have made over the years is that they use so many variables in calculating rankings today, you’re not going to be able to outrank information just because you want to in many cases. How are you going to organize real-time search results? Are you going to list the results which have been written the most recently — as in a company could have 10 people sit at their computers and microblog good things about their company to dominate the rankings all day?

I’m sure that’s far more simplistic than reality will be, however I ask myself this — how often when I’m doing searches do I want to know what happened this very second? This isn’t hard to think of in a scientific manner.. Find a list of the keywords most searched on search engines and think about whether they’d be time- sensitive or not. If I search for “sports scores”, yeah I probably want recent information but if I search for “wood bats”, I probably don’t.

For those who don’t know, Google has a couple services themselves which while not real time are pretty close to it. The first one, Google News, delivers news from strictly reputable websites. If you type “domain” into Google, it will return all articles which have “domain” in their title from websites which have been approved by Google News. For information on domains, you’ll find Domain Name Wire in there, as well as Domain Informer and CircleID. You can do on Google News and find every single article published by Domain Name Wire in the past day, week, month, or even hour by typing: source:domain_name_wire. How much quicker do you need your domain information than that?

The nice thing about Google News is that junk isn’t allowed in there. You’re not going to find any blogs by domain newbies and you won’t even find a blog like mine in there because it’s too much opinion and not enough fact. When you’re looking for information, you generally want facts, not how someone thinks it does or should works. But what if you’d like to know people’s opinions? There’s Google Blog Search for that. Google’s Blog Search is remarkably comprehensive — just a quick look at it search for “domain” once again and you’ll find this blog, Domain Name Wire, eBusinessDomains. You can get more specific and type in say, “domain auction” and you’ll get even more relevant results and once again, more topics covering that within the past day, week, month, hour.

So what’s all this hype about real-time search? In my opinion, it’s largely unwarranted. As a niche, sure. But Google’s gotten good enough in many cases that you’ll already get what you’re looking for between it’s organic search and it’s blog search, on top of having a credible news site (Google News) which you can count on to provide accurate information — how the heck are you going to guarantee that with real time searches unless you carefully select who you allow in your search results? And if you’re going to do that, isn’t it largely going to eliminate the whole benefit of real time search and essentially make it a Google News copycat that maybe gets the information 1 hour sooner? If the people decide 1 hour is too long to wait, I’d imagine Google could trim that time to 30 minutes or even 15 minutes relatively easily with the technology they’re already using and a few more data centers to process all that extra server load.

Personally, I’ll take that 1 hour wait and get the information from a site I know and trust — how about you? And if I’m not looking for time-sensitive information, why the heck would I use a new real-time search engine over industry experts like Google and Yahoo who’ve had years to refine their search engine algorithms to deliver as accurate of results as is currently possible with today’s search engine technology?

Real-time search.. Meh. Reminds me of the hype surrounding WebTV. Probably not the popular opinion, however I see most of Web 2.0 as being a lot of fluff and not a whole lot of substance. I’ve been calling Facebook overpriced since the day analysts were tossing around a $15B valuation based on a single stake in the company being purchased by Microsoft which any idiot (aka market analyst) would have realized was for not only a 2% stake in the company but also the right to sell third party advertisements. I haven’t been following it too much since as I think the whole thing’s a joke, however I believe it’s now “valued” at $4B.

To put a domaining analogy on it, most of these social networks are like LLLL.coms — they produce minimal revenue and have a whole lot of annual costs. There’s nothing wrong with having a few but would you make a whole domain portfolio out of them? We’ve seen Myspace go from being a respectable website to a site dominated by teenage girls and spam in a span of what - 2 years? We all know how quickly things change on the Internet. In a lot of ways, social media is like domaining — there is very little transparency. Sure Twitter can throw around numbers like 10 million accounts, it’s just to bad that a recent random sample conducted on over 300,000 Twitter users by the Harvard Business School suggests 10% of Twitter users do 90% of the tweeting and and internet marketing firm Hubspot noted that 55% of Twitter users have never posted a single tweet and 56% have never followed anyone. Keep in mind that if they posted just 1 tweet in the last year, they don’t fall into this statistic. Maybe that’s why Twitter says the number of accounts rather than the number of active users — reality ain’t so rosy now is it? The attrition rate on social media (and especially Twitter) is ridiculously high, yet these companies are getting valued based on how many users they have rather than how many active users they have — the only statistic that actually matters. If someone signed up in early 2008 and hasn’t used the social network since, what’s the probability they return in the future?

It goes back to that debate of targeted traffic versus untargeted traffic. The offline world still hasn’t understood that what has value is targeted traffic, not untargeted traffic. If your social network business model revolves around selling users products or serving up advertisements, then you’re making nothing off of users who don’t sign into their account at least from time to time. When you have far more inactive users than active ones, you best look at what you’re doing wrong. According to Compete.com, Twitter’s enormous gains came to a complete standstill in May and had been looking like it would in April as well until receiving a mention on Oprah.

Don’t get me wrong — I use Twitter myself and have nothing against these social networks. It’s just these preposterous valuations that seem as ridiculous as those made a decade ago. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Wall Street’s forgotten about this recession and is already lobbying government for an unregulated carbon derivatives market. Who wants to predict the outcome of that one?

If you want to get a small business loan at some point for your Internet business, you may be asked for a business plan. Regardless of  how big or small your domain name, website development, or other online business  is and even if you have no ambition of turning your hobby into a business or are loaded enough you’ll never have to worry about loans, you still need an Internet business plan. When I speak of having an Internet business plan, I’m referring to a plan of action which you will outline and undertake so that you’ll be able to achieve the goals you’ve set for your Internet business. If you haven’t set any goals for your Internet business, you best get started on that now. How will you go about achieving your business goals if you don’t even know what they are? Set short term goals and make a list of long term business goals for your Internet business . If you’ve never written a business plan before, you’re probably wondering how to set and achieve your goals. We’ll get back to talking about writing a business plan for your Internet business a little later in this article — let’s look at some tips on what needs to be done before writing a business plan.

Tips on Setting Goals

When writing a business plan for your Internet business, choose SMART goals — goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Let’s first go over these goal attributes. A specific goal should descriptively outline the goal and how to achieve your set goal. If we take my goal of making this blog a PR5, I could for example say that I will make a serious effort to increase the number of posts per month. Stop right there — do you see what’s wrong with setting that goal? It’s not specific. Saying you’ll increase the number of posts per month doesn’t tell me whether you’ll be increasing the number by 1 or 100. A specific goal would be to say you will put out 1 post per day or 30 posts per month — that’s measurable, it’s attainable, it’s certainly a realistic goal which could be achieved, and we’ve included a time element (posts per day or posts per month). What sense would it make to choose a goal irrelevant to the success or improvement of your Internet business? Let’s discuss different types of goals which may be relevant to our business.. One might be to increase customer satisfaction or to increase the number of repeat buyers by 10% over the next 6 months – both of these goals are fairly easy to make measurable by asking customers if they’re satisfied with the service they received both now and 6 months from now and by tracking the number of customers who made purchases on multiple occasions. Goals on the web development front may include reducing your website’s bounce rate (the number of people only visiting one page on your website before leaving), to increase the number of page views from your average visitor (eg. making visitors more interested in your website), or to increase site traffic and revenue (by perhaps focusing on making more revenue per visitor). We can add in specific and measurable elements to these goals, as the above examples have done to make them good goals to set. The goal of a business plan isn’t to set goals that are easy just so we can achieve them and pat each other on the back — we can set hard time-bound goals, however they should be possible to achieve with the knowledge, skills, and resources you have available at your disposal.

I talked about time-bound goals a bit at the beginning of this post when talking about having short term goals and long term goals — a business does need to have both to ensure they’re going in the right direction. With Internet businesses, short term goals are much more important than long term goals — the Internet continues to rapidly evolve and businesses who rely on it need to evolve with it. Try to set long term goals that are adaptable. Long term goals lacking adaptability are destined to fail. Thinking too far ahead of yourself leads people to do silly things, as we saw during the Dotcom Bust — it’s unrealistic to assume traffic, revenue, etc will continue to grow at a certain rate indefinitely because they’re growing at that rate now and setting long term goals with such an assumption made is setting yourself up for failure. When you set a goal, think of all the ways you could go about achieving that goal. If I take my goal of getting to PR5 as an example, I could say that I’ll focus on continuing to write good content, link building, optimizing my internal link structure, and networking — I’ve left myself a few different options here which allows me to adapt to any unforeseen circumstances which may arise. Make goals positive — it’s much more effective to put a positive spin on any goal than a negative one and if you have more than one goal, prioritize them. Be sure to write your goals so that you’re personally accountable for failure. Why not take that a step further and tell all your friends and website’s visitors what your goals are — won’t that make you feel stupid if you’re unable to live up to the expectations you created? But at the same time, could anything possibly be a better driving force to stay on task and accomplish your goals?

Steps to Prioritize Tasks

The Pareto Principle applies to business plans as well — Can you get 80% as good of results or 80% of your tasks done using just 20% the time? Time management is an extremely important part of goal setting. If you have only a limited amount of time to achieve your goals, then every second you can save is another second you can use towards achieving your goals. Remember to never forget about opportunity costs — if you have 2 goals of equal importance and one will take twice as long to accomplish as the other, it only makes sense to start with the easier goal. Just remember here that we’re choosing the easier goal because we assumed both goals were of equal importance — if the harder goal was of greater importance, taking the easy way out may not be the right choice to make. Prioritizing goals is simple — determine which goals are urgent, followed by which goals are important and so on until you arrive at goals you’d like to accomplish time permitting. This need not solely be applied to business plans nor should it — prioritizing job tasks is an important task for any manager and any worker who can’t grasp the concept of prioritizing job tasks probably isn’t going to last very long. You did it when you had a real world job — bring those prioritization strategies to your Internet business, your Internet business plan, and more importantly, both your online and offline lives. I have several articles about time management on this blog and I intend on adding more in the future because of how important to success it is. If you can learn better time management skills, you’re halfway to success already. Want to learn where you’re wasting time? Write down everything you do during the day and do that for a few days. Then, analyze your list and look for areas where you could improve efficiency. You can apply this idea to business, weight management (eg. Weight Watchers), or good budgeting. When prioritizing tasks, write them down with the same level of detail as when you first identified goals in your business plan.

Writing Action Plans

Now that we’ve written down or goals, elaborated on them, prioritized them, and thought up possible ways we could go about achieving our goals, it’s time to put it all together. Organize all your ideas for how you’re going to go about achieving your goals and then turn them into actions — the whole who, what, when, where, and why. What will be your operating expenses? How are you going to turn a profit? What are you going to do about advertising and otherwise marketing your business? If there are more than just you involved in your Internet business, write down the tasks everyone will have and who will be responsible for achieving which goals.

Website Business Plan

If you were a bank manager, would you lend someone money who had come in presenting your business plan? If not, your business plan isn’t good enough. The fact that your business is an internet business means it’s going to be even harder to secure a small business loan (and this economy isn’t helping either) – especially if your business plan isn’t up to snuff. If you’re targeting outside investors, be sure they’re aware of the financial and legal liabilities associated with your business. Non-disclosure or non-compete agreements may sound like a good idea, however do keep in mind that by doing so you’re telling the person you’re asking for money that you don’t trust them. You’d probably be better off leaving out any information you don’t want others to know rather than make them sign such a legal agreement. A few more things you should cover in your business plan include:

Background information — This is more for anyone reading your business plan rather than for yourself. If you aren’t seeking any form of financing and merely want a clear strategy to follow, you can leave this part out. The same can be said about having an executive summary — you can summarize some of the key problems and challenges your business is facing, it’s current financial situation, and a strategic framework that identifies opportunities for your Internet business. You’ll want to have a vision statement outlining the direction your business will be taking and it’s primary objectives, along with a mission statement explaining the reason for your company’s existence, your projected profitability, estimates of growth, and your target market. You’ll need to assess the risks, competition, and barriers to entry you face as best possible. Do you have a contingency plan or method to limit financial liabilities in the event things don’t proceed as planned?

There are many business plan support services available in most countries — a google search should identify government agencies providing small business services in your area.  There are plenty of Internet business plan templates available online as well. It may seem like a daunting task, however writing a business plan for your Internet business is something well worth undertaking. They say you should dress not for the job you have but for the job you want — does your Internet business not deserve to be treated seriously today?

I was reading a post on Lightspeed Ventures (a popular venture capital blog) recently about how being popular has been found to make you more popular.

In one study of over 12,000 volunteers, researches manipulated what they claimed were the top selling songs and worst selling songs — it surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) had a dramatic effect on what the volunteers claimed they liked. Another study by a Chinese restaurant found that just by calling certain items “popular”, sales on them increased by 13-20%.

There are some well proven real world examples which are related to domain development as well. Take forums for example — one is more inclined to join a forum which appears busy than one that isn’t frequently posted on. This is a well known fact and many people when starting forums will pay people to post to create the illusion that their forum is busy until it becomes busy on it’s own. Similarly, a forum with “exclusivity” or something which makes it “special” will also encourage people to join as they believe (and they might be right) that this forum will provide more value than other less exclusive forums.

I’m not a big fan of tricking visitors, however I’m willing to bet if I created 20 or so fake comments on certain posts all praising the post that those particular posts would get more comments. Just think about those Wordpress plugins which are available such as “Most Popular Posts” — people wouldn’t keep making such plugins unless they produced results.

Look at popular blogs like say, John Chow or Shoemoney — does their popularity not further drive their popularity? Have you ever noticed how easy it is to manipulate social media such as Digg by creating the illusion that something is popular?

Stanley Milgram, a famous psychologist, once demonstrated that by getting a sufficiently large number of people to look at the sky will in turn encourage others to look up — even if there is absolutely nothing worth looking at! Curiosity got the best of them.

I sometimes wonder if that’s part of the reason being green is so popular right now — surely most people didn’t just realize 1 or 2 years ago that many of the things we do are destroying our environment, yet many of these new “green” customers have only been converted to the green side within the past year or two. Does this coincide with corporations and the media promoting green as both a popular and intelligent choice? How might this increase the profits of corporations which are able to create an eco-friendly image or offer products which cater to these green customers?

How might you be able to create or increase your popularity? It’s certainly something worth pondering.

Another article for the domain newbies — don’t be like me and only learn that PayPal isn’t safe after someone scams you through it!

Paypal makes it very easy to reverse payments. If someone’s Paypal account is hacked, Paypal will reverse the payment and you’ll be left with nothing should they complain the transaction was unauthorized. If someone pays by credit card through Paypal, they have the option of convincing their credit card issuer they didn’t receive the goods and again, you’ll be left with nothing (and possibly even fees for the credit card chargeback). Credit card issuers almost always side with the buyer. Simply put, don’t accept Paypal (other than Paypal MassPay) for amounts larger than you would be comfortable losing. While a PayPal rep told me that MassPay can’t be reversed, I have my doubts about whether it’ll protect you from more complex fraud involving multiple hacked Paypal accounts and the participation of third parties who may not be aware of what’s going on. Nevertheless, Paypal MassPay is much safer than Regular Paypal granted it must be funded from your bank account and hence offers no credit card chargeback risk.

Delaying delivery of domains a week after receipt of payment can substantially reduce the likelihood of being scammed with Paypal. Paypal doesn’t usually get involved in digital good disputes. You stand a much better chance of winning if you complain the transaction was unauthorized than if you complain about not receiving the domain that you bought. Unfortunately, many scammers are also aware of this fact and will attempt to reverse charges by claiming the transaction was unauthorized.

Keep in mind that other than with escrow service, security for sellers and security for buyers is almost always inversely correlated – that is, the safer a payment method is for buyers, the less safe it is for sellers and vice versa. One one extreme, you have PayPal who is very pro-buyer, on the other extreme, you have Moneybookers and e-gold who are very pro-seller.

Be wary of Paypal eChecks – much like regular checks, don’t consider yourself paid until the eCheck clears. Many people think Moneybookers is 100% safe – it’s not. If your buyer pays through Moneybookers with a credit card, you could find yourself in trouble. Credit card chargebacks are something one always has to worry about when using a medium which allows and doesn’t guarantee to cover any chargebacks which do occur. To reduce your risk of a future chargeback, consider not allowing payments through Paypal via credit card on domains you sell. Credit card chargebacks can still be filed months after the actual purchase – keep accurate and detailed records of all sales in the event a future chargeback presents itself and considering the fact the item is intangible (and hence comes without a shipping address), don’t be surprised if you lose. You should keep accurate and detailed records anyway, even if you opt to not accept credit card payments in the event you get audited.

Large foreign checks may take much longer to clear than normal checks (up to 2 months) if your bank decides to send them to collections. This is entirely up to your bank, being based in part on your history with the bank and in part on the size of the check. Whenever possible, ask about how a large check from a certain country will be handled prior to letting the buyer know payment by check is okay. Writing bad checks, forging checks, altering checks, and counterfeit check and money orders are unfortunately all too common, so it’s best to let the check clear whenever possible before considering yourself paid. Be aware that there is a difference between the money being in your account and the check having been confirmed as being good — your bank might put all the money or a portion of the money in your account immediately or within a few days, however this doesn’t mean that the check is necessarily “good”.

It’s best not to accept money orders or checks as it both complicates the selling process and exposes you to increased risk of a fraudulent transaction — there’s really no reason to accept either when so many people have PayPal accounts and there’s always the option of wire transfers for those who like to do things through their bank. If you live in Canada, one cheap way to do domain name transactions is via Email Money Transfer — ask your bank about that if interested.

US Postal Service money orders employ a number of security measures in addition to a money order verification service. It’s not scam-free, however it’s much more difficult to scam with than an ordinary check or money order, provided the recipient of the USPS Money Order knows what to look for . If people send you a larger check or money order than the domain purchase was for and ask you to send them back the difference, there’s a near-100% chance they’re trying to scam you.

Unauthorized funds of a different kind – unauthorized funds taken from your PayPal or other accounts, is another all too common problem. Get a Paypal security key to substantially reduce the likelihood of anyone ever fraudulently gaining access to your Paypal account and sign up for any additional security measures your credit card issuer and online payment providers offer. Some examples are: Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode (ask your bank about them if you can’t find a way to sign up for them through online banking). Call your credit card issuer (number should be on the back of your credit card) or online payment provider and ask them if there are any additional security measures you can take to better protect yourself. A few more pointers would be to never give out your credit card number on a site which doesn’t use secure encryption such as SSL and to avoid all escrow services other than Escrow.com. If you’re doing a domain name transaction, you may also use EscrowDNS.com or escrow services offered by one of the larger domain name companies (such as Sedo, Afternic, Moniker, Namedrive).

According to research conducted by Gartner, over $3 billion in losses resulted from phishing scams which took place during the 12 month period from August 2006 through August 2007. Phishing scams generally involve obtaining access to confidential information which phishers wouldn’t otherwise have access to, such as confidential company files, credit card numbers, usernames, and passwords. I would imagine it’s higher still now, however I couldn’t find more current information on phishing trends.

Like Social Engineering, Phishing is a form of misrepresentation. Phishers generally target financial institutions, online payment processors, and popular websites (eg. eBay, Paypal, Bank of America).

As mentioned in my post on Domain Name Security, avoid clicking links in emails — it’s easy to fall for an IDN or even email spoofing. Other than clicking a link to confirm immediately upon starting a new service, there are very few times when you should need to click on a link to confirm anything and more often than not, it will be a phishing scam — that goes for Paypal, your bank, your domain name registrar’s, the email address listed in the whois of your domains, etc.

Watch out for spelling mistakes, missing personalizations (eg. “Dear User” instead of “Dear Reece Berg”), and time sensitive emails (”you must click this link within 48 hours, or else…”). Misrepresentation techniques used during phishing scams include using Internationalized Domain Names (more commonly known as IDN spoofing or an IDN homograph attack) to make it seem as if the email is coming from someone else, using misspelled “typos” of the targeted website, using subdomains containing the domain name associated with the targeted website in it, and using anchor text which has been carefully crafted to mislead readers into believing the link will send them to the website they’re interested in visiting, rather than the phisher’s website.

To get the desired information, phishers and social engineers may employ a variety of methods including: email spoofing, caller id spoofing, pretexting, baiting, DNS cache poisoning, pharming, etc. Modern internet browsers employ security measures designed to safeguard against phishing attempts, however they’re far from perfect and they can’t prevent incompetence on the part of a user (eg. carelessly visiting sites with expired or incorrect certificates which have been flagged, visiting websites which are supposed to have secure socket layers and not noticing the SSL functionality is missing) and of course every phisher’s favorite — people who recklessly click links in emails.

Social networks have ushered phishing and social engineering to a new level, one which many security experts have dubbed Social Phishing.

Social Phishing, also known as context-aware phishing, exploits technical vulnerabilities and human nature of being too trusting of the intentions of friends and family. Most domainers and many webmasters who make their living online are shocked to discover how easy it is to spoof an email — it’s as easy as forging the header, using an IDN, or using a phony domain such as secure-domain.com, where domain.com is the domain the phishers are misrepresenting themselves as being associated with. Social Phishing takes email spoofing one step further, with the social engineer learning about his victim via information freely available on social networks. Gaining knowledge about the intended phishing victim, the social engineer can create more convincing emails which appear (or do, courtesy of malware or a compromised email account) to come from sources the intended target is more likely to trust, such as his friends or family.

Information gathered by mining social networks and other online sources increases phishing success rates by allowing phishers to send spoofed emails which are both personalized as real ones would be and targeted, such as spoofed emails for the correct financial institutions or other online websites that the intended phishing victim uses. Gaining information about individuals (such as siblings) may allow a phisher who’s compromised an account through successfully guessing a secret answer (eg. Mother’s maiden name or place of birth) to simultaneously gain access to a second account, etc.

Another common social phishing technique involves causing a problem and then offering a solution to that problem. As an example, a phisher could commit a sufficient number of incorrect login attempts on the phishing victim’s account so as to prohibit any further attempts from being tried, thereby locking the victim out of his own account. The phisher can then misrepresent himself as being an employee of the company in question and pretend to be trying to help the victim, but first needing to verify his identity via his password – we all know where that ones going. This is but another reason to be careful when sharing information online — usernames can often be discovered by doing a Google search on a person’s name or email address. Knowing one of their domains and doing a whois search on it can be particularly promising for phishing schemes, giving the phisher everything he needs to then phone or email the victim offering “support”.

Research from Indiana University confirms the powerful role social networks are beginning and will continue to play in the future of phishing. Phishing has both financial and psychological costs, destroying trust and embarrassing it’s victims. Be careful what information you disclose on the Internet and don’t let your guard down merely because an email appears to have come from someone you know and trust.

I know that plenty of domainers still haven’t used MassPay or don’t even know what it is, so I’m going to use this post to explain it. First off, let’s see what PayPal has to say about MassPay. For starters, PayPal MassPay allows you to send out multiple payments at the same time. Suppose you made a thread on Namepros offering to buy LLLL.coms at $10 each and 20 different people decided to sell — would you really want to go through PayPal 20 times? While MassPay does take a bit longer to do for an individual purchase, it can lead to some pretty substantial time savings if the number of purchases you need to pay for is large. But that’s not all… Here comes the good part: fees when using MassPay are capped at the lower of 2% or $1and paid by the buyer — you can do a $100,000 transaction through PayPal MassPay if you want and it’ll be just $1 for you and zero for the seller receiving payment!

To send payment via MassPay, the buyer needs needs to have a verified PayPal account and MassPay cannot be funded via a credit card, so the risk of a credit card chargeback is zero. Furthermore, it’s not possible to a MassPay payment reversed — I contacted PayPal about this to confirm as there’s been some different opinions going around regarding this. It looks like the only situation you may have to watch out for would be in the case of a stolen PayPal account. As for sending a payment via MassPay, the best guide I’ve come across is still the first one I came across — Stian’s How to do PayPal MassPay payments and avoid fees. Sending payment by MassPay really is a nice thing to do for a seller, even if not explicitly requested — one dollar and a minute of your time might very well save the seller $XXX. It’s worth noting that not everyone is allowed to use MassPay, so if a buyer isn’t paying you by MassPay, it’s quite possible that the reason for that is because he doesn’t qualify to send payment by MassPay.

Investing in domain names is as much about being smart as it is working hard. How does a domain name investor go about making the best use of his time? Effect time management principles such as making a to-do list and sticking to it, among other things are discussed elsewhere on this blog, however, there are some other things we can do beyond that to increase our productivity and make sure that we’re the best domain name investors that we can possibly be. Who wouldn’t want to be able to work both harder and smarter without feeling like they’re putting in extra effort? All those years that people said IQ scores couldn’t be changed… Guess what, they were wrong. Read on for many tips on productivity and be sure to read the time management section on LLLL.com if you haven’t done so already to ensure that you’re the best domain investor you can be.

One thing I’ve spent a lot of time researching over the past couple years is how to increase memory, focus, and concentration — I spend a lot of time rereading what I’ve already read because my memory just isn’t very good. Exercise (both mental and physical) are great ways to help maintain and even improve your memory (google it — lots of reputable sources backing this up). Physical exercise will likely improve your motivation levels as well, further increasing the amount of work you get done. As for nutrition (and it bears mentioning that nobody should begin taking dietary supplements without first talking to their doctor), the first thing (and easiest thing) to do is to monitor is your diet.

Omega-3 has been getting a lot of press lately for its lengthy list of benefits — I’m not a big fan of fish, so I try to get a little extra in my diet through Omega-3 eggs and flaxseed. Walnuts are another great way to get a bit more Omega-3 in your diet.  Most of us aren’t getting enough Omega-3 in our diets and it’s safe to say getting a little more through natural food sources is unlikely to do anything but help (you do have to be careful with fish and fish oil supplements regarding mercury levels) Like Omega-3, it’s fairly well established that a deficiency in the B-vitamins can cause problems ranging from poor memory to poor concentration. When I recently went to my doctor, I was shocked to learn that my iron levels were about 30% below the entire range of normal iron levels — Iron deficiency is certainly one of the worst there are and many people don’t understand that problems may be apparent even from mild iron deficiencies — some symptoms (it would take this entire page to list everything which can result from iron deficiency) courtesy of WebMD include:

• Feeling weak and tire out more easily.
• Feeling dizzy.
• Being grumpy or cranky.
• Have headaches.
• Look very pale.
• Feel short of breath.
• Have trouble concentrating.

Are you a night owl or a morning person? Why not optimize your domain business to take advantage of when you’re at your highs and lows. If Friday’s are usually tough, why not try and get more work done on Thursday’s? The first step towards achieving your domain goals is to first determine what your domain goals are and then to set out a plan of how you’ll go about achievng them. Don’t shoot for the stars just yet — you certainly don’t want to crash and burn before you’ve even started! The domain business is no get rich quick scheme, however by working hard and keeping at it, you can most likely be successful in the domain business, just like others have done before you.

Effective time management starts by identifying when you’re most productive and assigning those tasks which require the most attention to when you’re functioning at your peak. Over the past year or so, I’ve come to realize that I do my best blogging between 2:00-6:00am, so I now try and get my blogging done each day during that time period. For quite some time, I tried blogging at the end of the day after I had completed everything I needed to complete — it just didn’t work for me and the end result was that I never got around to blogging and even when I did get around to blogging, the quality just wasn’t there. Now, the first thing I do when I get up is start working on the next day’s blog post (I have a very abnormal sleep schedule). Go through your day over the next few days and make a note of when you’re the most productive versus the least productive. It’s important that this be done over a few days to ensure that it wasn’t merely a particular task resulting in you being less productive — hormone levels fluctuate throughout the day, stress levels may rise and fall with certain tasks, etc. Try and plan your day so that when you’re functioning at your best, tasks which require optimal functioning are being handled and when you’re burnt out and ready to call it a day, all that’s left is stuff which isn’t going to stress you out anymore. Don’t bounce around from task to task during the day — pick a task (ideally prioritized as described above) and stick with it until complete.
Goal Setting

Organization and Prioritization may start with a to do list, with determining where you’re wasting time and correcting that, and with better organizing yourself so you can work smarter, however it absolutely does not end there. What better way to keep yourself on track than to set both short term and long term goals of where you want to be? When I say short term and long term goals, I’m not only referring to tasks which you’d like done, rather, where you see yourself being as a whole. Perhaps you fancy yourself making 5 figures online this year — perhaps you fancy yourself making 5 figures a month, or even 5 figures a day, it’s not the goal that matters so much as how you’re going to go about reaching your goal. As an example, my current goal with this blog is to grow traffic by at least 10% per month. I have traffic logging software on my server so that I can see exactly how much traffic is growing. Taking the amount of traffic received so far in the month and multiplying that by the 30, then dividing the result by the number of days which have so far elapsed in the month gives me a very reasonable way to estimate whether I’m on pace to meet my goal or not. If I’m not on pace to meet my goal, I might consider writing more blog posts, trying to write better blog posts, try to better match my blog posts to what my site visitors are looking for, or focus on promoting my blog more. This need not be limited to financial, domaining, and webmastering goals — you can and should set goals for everything you’d like to accomplish within a set period of time.

Personally, I have terrible memory and if I don’t write things down, I soon forget about them. It’s not uncommon for me to read an email and if I don’t make a personal note to get back to that person,  I forget to get back to them entirely (whoops!). Prioritize your goals based on what you want to achieve within each period of time. Optimism is great but try not to be too unrealistic. Make sure your goals are detailed — if you want to make $10,000 more next year, write it down as that, not as “make more money in 2009″. Try to make your goals not too overwhelming. I’m sure we’d all love to be billionaires, however let’s focus on getting first million or becoming a full time domainer, webmaster, internet entrepreneur first.
Smart Goals

Be SMART about the goals you set and make sure they’re Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Avoid subjective goals along the lines of “I will write higher quality blog posts in 2009″ — how do you measure a higher quality blog post? Who decides if it’s higher quality — the readers, you, your Alexa rank? “I will write 1 blog post each day in 2009″, on the other hand, is a very specific goal — a goal of consistently writing a blog post each and every day in 2009, on good days and on bad days, when I feel like writing and when I don’t feel like writing. It might sound like an easy goal but it’s really not and would make a great and challenging goal for most bloggers. It’s a measurable goal — the number here is one, as in one blog post per day. Attainable? Certainly. Anyone who puts their mind to it should be capable of writing 1 blog post per day. Relevant? Yes, I think readers and will be very happy if you’re able to maintain this goal and your blog posts don’t suffer a severe degradation in quality as a result. Time-bound — One blog post every 24 hours, 365 blog posts on the year. Pretty simple and straightforward goal. Make a list of your goals and see if they’re SMART. If not, modify them so that they are. The more specific, clear, and difficult (so long as it’s not overwhelming and is attainable) your goals are, the more likely you’ll be to follow through on them.

Now that you’ve identified your goals, how are you going to go about achieving them? Sometimes the easiest way to go about thinking how you’ll be able to achieve your goals is to start by looking at the end goal and work your way back from there. For example, suppose your goal in 2009 is to develop a domain without any help from others. Ask yourself how you’re going to go about developing a domain without any help from others. What will you need to know to develop your own domain? HTML? CSS? PHP? AJAX? What you’ll need to know will depend on how you plan on developing your domain. Make a list of what skills you’ll need and set these as individual goals along the way to your end goal of developing your own domain (eg. Jan-Mar for learning HTML, Apr-June for learning CSS, and so on).

I hope you found these time management tips useful. There are a lot of tips here, perhaps more than you’re comfortable implementing. Please don’t make the same mistake many to do list writers make in spending more time managing their to do lists than completing the tasks written on them.

Success in the domain business starts by realizing what you’re weaknesses are and making them your strengths. If you have a problem with procrastination or what some would call internet addiction, seek out help if necessary. Nothing should get in the way of your domain business and the only limit to what you can achieve is what you limit yourself to believing is possible. Are you too much of a perfectionist? You might be able to make more money by developing domains quicker — a little less quality, a whole lot more quantity. Read on for more time management tips on how to take your domain business to the next level.

I used to struggle with time management myself (perhaps why I have so many tips to share). Something else I should point out and something I’ve struggled with in the past myself is internet addiction. Internet addiction is still ridiculed by some as not being a real addiction, however believe me, it is, and can be just as devastating as most other addictions and it’s a real shame far too many people don’t take it seriously. If you think internet addiction is getting in the way of living your life to the fullest extent,  go see a therapist or talk to someone about it. Internet addiction is sufficiently widespread that some psychologists want to see it included in the DSM-V, the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Playing online games, gambling, and interacting on forums or social networks can be perfectly healthy, however some people clearly do spend so much time on them that it is detrimentally affecting their lives.

Once you’ve planned out what you’re going to do today — that’s what you need to do and what you’d like to do time permitting, why not make a to do list for tomorrow? You can always add or make modifications to what needs to be done and planning in advance might encourage you to not procrastinate so much. If I know I’m going out with friends or family tomorrow night, I’ll want to make sure I get everything I need to get done that day before then — that might mean doing some of tomorrow’s tasks today if at all possible.
Work Smarter AND Harder

As the example at the start of this article showed, wasting even 5 minutes per hour can result in an enormous amount of wasted time over the span of a year — roughly 250 hours. You might not feel like you’re wasting time but you might still be operating less efficiently than you’re capable of. Wasting one minute each hour compounds to wasting approximately 50 hours every year — Similarly, saving but one minute every hour would compound to saving 50 hours every year. If you could increase productivity by 10% (completing in 54 minutes what currently takes you 60), you could take 4 weeks vacation in the summer and still end up getting more work done than you are at present. How does that sound? It sure sounds good to me. That’s the real perk of working for yourself — if you work hard and work smart, you’re well rewarded for it. There’s no boss here putting a salary cap on what you can earn. Want to earn more? Start working harder and smarter.
The 80-20 Rule

Could you finish 80% of the work associated with perfectly completing a task in 20% of the time? Sometimes being a perfectionist just isn’t worth it. As an example, it might take a student a couple hours to write a paper good enough for a B grade, yet 10 hours for the A grade. Thinking about this rationally, the college student shouldn’t try for an A grade unless he values 8 hours of his time as being less than the value of the difference in the grades. Even if the student isn’t aware of the math or economics behind determining opportunity cost, he’s probably rationalizing something similar in his head — eg. “This paper is worth 10%, this one is worth 30%, I should spend more time on the paper worth 30% because it’s worth a larger portion of my final grade.” Examples in real life aren’t always so simplistic, however it is usually much the same — it’s important that we not only prioritize what’s most important from what’s not but also that we determine how much time is worth spending on each task.
Time Management Log

Keep track of how long it takes you to complete each task with a time management log. Why not ask some of your friends or other people working from home how long it takes them to complete those same tasks to better help you determine if you’re spending too much time completing them? How much time are you spending doing things other than your work? It’s probably hard to even have a ballpark figure until you sit down and write it all down for a few days. The result may shock you. If you ever wished you had more time, writing a time management log and analyzing where time is being wasted may be just what you need. Where are you spending the most time? Could you cut down on the time spent doing that? Is it obvious that you’re wasting time doing anything throughout the day (yes, that was a rhetorical question)? One of the best ways I find to be more productive is not to ask yourself how you can be more productive but rather to ask yourself how you can be less productive — it’s kind of fun too! Make a list of things which would result in you being less productive and through this reverse brainstorming, I’m sure you’ll come up with plenty of things you’re currently doing which are detrimentally affecting your productivity. Reverse brainstorming need not be limited to use in improving time management either — whenever you have a problem you’d like to solve, one of the easiest ways to solve it is often to think of ways to cause that problem. I’ve found that instant messaging and telephones just don’t work for me — I’d rather receive emails and respond to people by email whenever possible. That’s not to say I won’t ever use the telephone or instant messaging — they’re certainly more efficient in certain situations and might be what other people are more comfortable using, however for me they largely result in an inefficient use of time, so I avoid them as best I can.

Everyone wants to get rich and domain investors would like to think domains will get them there, however every domain investor needs to start somewhere and build from there. Some people say time is money — are you throwing money away by not effectively utilizing your time? Making money online is particularly hazardous in some ways — it’s easy to quit buying and selling domains and go read domain blogs, SEO blogs, etc instead. As long as you’re learning practical skills, there’s nothing wrong with reading domain blogs or SEO blogs, however you’ll have a hard time convincing me that music video you’re watching is helping you domain business. How can you earn more value from your time? How can you go about running your domain business more efficiently?

Change your perspective. If you think you can’t do something, you’re probably right, it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy holding you back from actually achieving what you initially set out to achieve. Go big or go home has no place here — we all need to start somewhere and there’s nothing wrong with starting small. You need to earn that first dollar before you can earn a second. Nobody makes $1000 before they make $100. Why are people afraid to start small? Why are people afraid to grow? Why are people afraid that achieving what they’ve set out to achieve might take some time? I like setting goals — not impossible to achieve goals but goals which may be difficult to achieve within a certain time frame. It’s all too easy to procrastinate if you don’t set them.

I’ve started prioritizing how I go about completing my days starting by completing what needs to be done, such as blog posts, checking to see if there are any domains at the drops or on auction that I’m interested in, seeing if any offers have been made on my domains, followed by what I would like to get done, such as replying to emails, other messages, and time permitting, a bit of time to interact with other domainers on Namepros. We shouldn’t all have the same priorities — your priorities might first involve getting your kids up for school, heading to work, picking your kids up from school, making supper, doing any work you weren’t able to complete at work, and lastly, checking if you’ve received any offers on your domains, checking if you’d be interested in any domains coming up for sale or dropping soon, and, time permitting, interacting with other domainers on Namepros, a different domain name forum, by telephone, email, instant messenger, etc. We’ll all have different priorities — we all live different lives. It’s important we all get completed what’s most important for us before we move on to the less important tasks.

I know a lot of people both online and offline who don’t get a great deal done — certainly a lot less than they’re capable of getting done anyway. Many are very intelligent people, perhaps too intelligent and too creative for their own good. It’s great to have lots of ideas, however if you never do make anything of them, of what value are they to anyone? No value. If you don’t take that idea and turn it into something which provides value, you’re generating no value. Who will ever know about your great idea unless you decide to share it with the world?

I’ve been spending more time lately focusing on delivering some value rather than focusing on delivering maximum value per post. If I can deliver 50% or more of the value in a blog post that takes me 1 hour to write that a more researched and elaborated blog post on the same topic which takes me 10 hours to write would provide, doesn’t it just make economic sense to write the 1 hour blog post? If we think of the 2 blog posts as a utilitarian using the example above, one providing 50 units of value, the other providing 100 units of value, would it not make sense to write 10 posts providing 50 units of value rather than 1 post providing 100 units if both could be accomplished within the same time frame? That’s starting to be more my thinking lately and no, I’m not saying quantity is better than quality, it merely was in this particular example. While quantity may not be better than quality at the extreme, a slight degradation in quality which allows you to produce more quantity might very well be worth it.

As an example, it’s much easier to make $100/month from a website than $1000/month, and much easier still to make $1000/month from a website than $10,000/month. For most people, having 10 websites making $1000/month is a much more realistic goal than having a website which makes $10,000/month — only an authority website will be able to make that kind of money and many such sites already exist in most market segments and would be very difficult to replicate. These sites were usually started years ago, have a very dedicated following of readers, and have writers who really are experts on the topics they write about. At the $1000/month level on the other hand, all we really need to do is a reasonable amount of promotion, have a decent idea in place and target our site to a market which both has the potential to drive a large amount of traffic and has the potential to attract advertisers with deep pockets. A website related to loans, credit cards, lawyers, insurance, and other high PPC keywords can easily make $1000/month with a well thought out development and promotion plan — some domains in these segments make $1000+/month undeveloped. Building a small network of connected sites on similar topics will encourage some of your regular readers to visit your other websites on similar topics.

Suppose your main website receives 1000 uniques per day and you can make $1000/month off those 30,000 uniques received throughout the month and suppose you made 10 other websites on similar topics, each capturing only 10% of the main audience of the main site — you’ve now likely near-doubled your income from $1000/month to $2000/month. Simplified? Yes, and there certainly are benefits (such as attracting higher quality advertisers) and trade-offs associated with this approach which I’ll cover another day, however I do believe in many instances the trade-off between quality and quantity is one worth taking. It really does depend on the situation — an authority website isn’t going to want to publish something which appears to be of comparable quality to an outsourced copywriter and an outsourced copywriter really shouldn’t spend his days doing  considerable research for an article he’s being paid $0.02/word to write.

The year 2009 is upon us — here’s some motivation for you to become a better domain name investor or more involved in the domain name industry. The great thing about investing in domains (if you’re good at it) is that you have no boss! Working in the domain name business means setting your own hours. The domain name industry doesn’t discriminate based on age, race, or gender — all we discriminate on are the quality of domains. How can you make your domains make more money for you in 2009? You want to make more money online but just don’t know how? Take a risk in 2009 — if you haven’t started a domain name business, start one. If your domain name sales aren’t satisfying you, work harder or find a way to work smarter. Need more inspiration for why you should make 2009 the year you get more involved in the domain name world? Read on for more reasons why domain names are the way to go.

That certainly seems to be the case for most people. Regardless of whether domain name investing or web development becomes a full time activity or something that gives you a little bit of extra income, that little bit of extra income just may allow you to do what you want with your life. How many people take a job more because they need the money than because they’re interested in the job? Even if domain name investing doesn’t make you enough money to do it on it’s own, what if investing in domains allows you the freedom to not be so limited in what you can do during the one third of your life you spend working? I like domaining — it’s not work, it’s fun. It was a lot more fun before this recession hit, but it’s still something I enjoy doing and wouldn’t trade for the world. I can’t imagine how anyone could do a job they hate for 30, 40, 50 years. Time is money — when you work a job, you’re trading your time for money. If you don’t like the job you’re doing, this is, in my opinion, a trade not worth making. Life is short, find something you like to do and do it. I’m sure you’ve all seen those commercials on TV talking about the freedom that having a home base business gives — it really is true. What’s more liberating than deciding when you want to work?

Don’t feel like working today — then don’t. Most bosses aren’t quite that understanding if you tell them you’re not coming into work today because you don’t feel like coming in.. Of course you won’t get anywhere if you don’t put in hard work just the same, however if you’re doing something you truly enjoy, is it really work? If it’s something you’d be happy to do in your free time just the same — it’s something you consider a hobby, how much better can it possibly get than being able to monetize that hobby and make a part time or full time living off that hobby? Even if you do decide to keep your job in the end, who doesn’t like having a few extra hundred/thousand in their pocket each month? How many of us couldn’t use a few extra hundred/thousand — especially considering the economy we’re living in today.

The thing I hate about most jobs is that they just don’t appreciate what you do for them — you get paid an hourly wage, maybe a small bonus, regardless of how hard you work. The lazy co-worker of yours makes the same as you and does one quarter the work. If you work really hard next year — twice as hard, reckon you’ll get twice as much pay? If you work twice as hard one day, reckon your boss will let you leave when half the day is over? I’m willing to bet no. That’s the great thing about domaining, the internet, and working for yourself — you put in the amount of hours you want to put in and while a bit of luck is involved for some people, more often than not, you’re properly compensated for the time you put in. If you work twice as hard, there’s no reason you can’t earn twice as much. If you slack off and put in 1/4 the work, you might very well earn only 1/4 the amount — seems fair to me.

The great thing about the Internet is that it really doesn’t matter who you are — you can be 15 like Han Sup Yoon who recently sold Zuneboards.com for $62,000 or you can have multiple Ph.D.’s slack off on the Internet, and everyone regard you as a nobody. What I love most about the Internet is that people are recognized for what they accomplish — it’s not about who they are, it’s about what they’ve created. The Internet is a place where all the college degrees and professional designations mean little, if anything — it’s a place where everyone has a relatively equal chance of achieving success. It takes roughly $8-$10 to purchase a domain and that $8 could very well change your life — it certainly did add a few zeros to the bank account balance of the 15 year old I mentioned. That’s what I love about the Internet — you can live anywhere, come from anything, be a somebody or a nobody, and nobody is going to hold that against you. The other great thing about an Internet based business (or any business you own rather than work for) is that you make money even when you’re not working. Even if I do absolutely nothing tomorrow, I’ll still earn a bit from parked domains, I might have a few enduser or domainers email me asking if they can buy domains off me which might eventually make me money when I get back to them, I’m in the process of monetizing some of my developed websites which will also make me money even if I do absolutely nothing. How many bosses will pay their employees for doing nothing other than whatever amount of weeks are built into their contract for vacation and sick days? Being a domainer, webmaster, or internet entrepreneur really is like being an author — you earn royalties from previous books written regardless of whether you write new ones or not. Unlike an author however, you aren’t giving a large chunk of your profits to your publisher. Shared hosting is free — all you need is that domain which as mentioned above will only set you back $8-$10. How many real world businesses can you start for $10? How many can you even start for $1000? The high costs associated with starting a business in the real world cripple many people from living their dream. The Internet cripples nobody. Anyone can start a business, anyone can start a successful business, anyone can start a million dollar business. Now it won’t be easy — that’s true of any business and is even more true online. While the low barriers to entry gives everyone a chance, it also means you have to be all the better to succeed.

As I like to say, we’re all an expert in something –  find what you’re an expert in and share it with the world. The great thing about the Internet and the people that use it is that there’s so many people in the world looking for so many different things that there will always be opportunity for those who know how to find it. Be it presenting information in a different light, giving your thoughts on the information presented by others, sharing your life experiences with the world, … Be it creating a new platform for people to interact on or be it advancing the internet to a new level of interactivity. Perhaps your skills reside in the realm of search engine optimization, affiliate marketing or consulting — how will you really know unless you try them all?

Nobody comes into this world knowing all the answers. A lot of people think a full time job is a better choice than being a business owner because there’s less risk. How so? How do you think all those auto workers are sleeping right now, worrying about what the future holds for their jobs? Not so long ago, my father was told he’d have to work another 3 years before he could retire because, to put it bluntly, the pension manager screwed up. Now in light of everything which has happened in the USA lately, I’m sure some people aren’t so lucky — what they’re probably being told is something more along the lines of “You have no pension anymore”. Less risky? I beg to differ. If you work for yourself, you can plan for and manage your own retirement. Put all your retirement savings in the most conservative investment you can find if you want — it’s your money, you can do what you want with it. Who doesn’t like speaking their mind? I appreciate when people speak their mind to me. If you don’t like my posts, feel free to say “Reece your post today sucks”. Use an expletive if you want if it helps you get your point across and yes, I will publish it. I don’t see how anyone is better off by lying to themselves or others about what they really think. If something is stupid, it’s stupid. If there were more people in this world not afraid to speak their mind, we’d probably accomplish a lot more. The Internet is great that way — if I don’t agree with something, I’m not afraid to say I don’t agree with something. I don’t have to worry about a boss firing me because I don’t agree with him. I don’t have to worry about having co-workers being hostile around me for the next 6 months if I say something which angers them,… Most of you reading this live in a democratic country, however there seems to be little democracy in the workforce. Is it really equal opportunity? Is everyone really given a fair shake? Do you really think if you and your boss have a problem that it just might not be something he holds against you well into the foreseeable future and potentially affect everything from your employment with the company to any bonuses or promotions?

If you’re one of those readers who just stumbled onto this blog from a search engine or if you’re new to domain name investing or making money online, or if it’s just been a hobby for you so far, I really recommend giving an online business a try in 2009 — make it your New Year’s Resolution in 2009 and give it a real try.

Phishing was a bad enough problem, however social phishing takes phishing to a whole new level. What is social phishing? In short, social phishing is pretending I’m your friend so I can gain access to your domain names or anything else I may be interested in (eg. credit card numbers). Social phishing happens more often than people think and the consequences of social phishing can be devastating. Read on for more information on social phishing.

Social networks have ushered phishing and social engineering to a new level, one which many security experts have dubbed Social Phishing.

Social Phishing, also known as context-aware phishing, exploits technical vulnerabilities and human nature of being too trusting of the intentions of friends and family. Most domainers and webmasters who make their living online are shocked at how easy it is to spoof an email. Social Phishing takes email spoofing one step further, with the social engineer learning about his victim via information freely available on social networks. Gaining knowledge about the intended phishing victim, the social engineer can create more convincing emails which appear (or do, courtesy of malware or a compromised email account) to come from sources the intended target is more likely to trust, such as his friends.  Information gathered by mining social networks and other online sources increases the phishing success rate, by allowing the phisher to send spoofed emails which are both personalized as real ones would be and targeted, such as spoofed emails for the correct financial institutions that the intended phishing victim uses.

Research from Indiana University confirms the powerful role social networks are beginning and will continue to play in the future of phishing.

Phishing has both financial and psychological costs, with victims often too embarrassed and ashamed to admit they fell victim. Be careful what information you disclose on the internet and don’t let your guard down merely because an email appears to have come from a friend.