Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

I just have to give a little shout-out to Yaro Starak who writes great content over at Entrepreneurs Journey. He was on his way back to Australia after being in Canada for six months and had a stop over in Hawaii for a few days. He happened to be staying in Waikiki, where I live, and we were able to meet up for dinner and some great discussion.

It was really nice to have a networking meetup like this and discuss blogging, entrepreneurship and many other things with someone who has had a fair bit of success in those areas. Yaro offered many tips to help me on my way building my blog network. I imagine I made him laugh or his head spin with my randomness and subject jumping that I often get myself into when I begun talking about all the crazy things I claim to be doing.

I did manage a picture via my cell phone that I hope to have up sooner or later but can’t figure out how to get it onto my computer without sending it and god knows what else I have to do.

Anyway, thanks again for meeting up Yaro, it was great. And all you readers make sure to stay up to date with his Blog Traffic School as I’m sure it’s going to be well worth it.

I know, I know. I should be happy I have such a problem as feeling the digg effect. But truth be told, it sucks. I’ve been getting slammed once again via digg and my server can’t handle it. It’s time for an upgrade.

I’ve spent the better half of the evening searching around for solutions to the digg effect for dynamic pages such as those served by wordpress (which is what I use) and have come up with one main solution. Get a dedicated server. However, I’m not quite ready for what I would consider the big-time solution of a dedicated server and have been searching around for other solutions.

One that I’ve found is Dreamhost.com. It would appear that several large traffic sites use dreamhost and I would assume that not all of them use dedicated servers. But I could be wrong?

Is there a shared hosting solution that my readers could suggest to alleviate my digg effect woes?

I recently told of one of Blogtown Presses articles getting dugg all the way to the front page. I was, of course, super psyched and was able to track the progress through digg’s interface and our stats.

It was interesting to see that over the first 10-12 hours of it being crazy dugg there were 1000-1500 uniques per hour. (That’ll give the network traffic a sweet boost). Then, as the article slowly made it’s way down the pages of top articles and slowly out of the entertainment section, the traffic went down with it. We’re almost back to normal traffic levels for Aloha Update.

But another long term effect is that out of all those diggs the article also got picked up by some bloggers around the world in various subjects. They wrote about Dog as well as Aloha Update. Hopefully that will give us some good Google Juice when the next run of Google PageRank updates hits.

In my recent series about buying and selling domain names I talked a lot about the basics of where to look for an easy revenue earning domain name. The thing I didn’t really talk about was what are optimal click through rates (CTR) or how to optimize domain names that might not have optimal click through rates.

I again stress that I’m not an expert in this subject and have limited experience (6 months) and above that know only as much as I’ve read, which is freely available information. However, since I wrote that article series I’ve had several people inquire about what optimal CTR’s are for domain names at parking sites. So I’ll dish what I feel I know.

First off, when you’re buying a domain name like I described in part 4 of the series using low earnings multiples to buy domain names as well as few other tips, you need to also think about what keywords the domain names are using as well as the click through rates the domain names are receiving.

Before you Buy

I’ll start off by looking at CTR before you buy a domain name and how

From my experience an average CTR of 20% is good, that’s what I strive for in my portfolio and I feel like that’s a good benchmark for parked domains. If you can get 1 in 5 people that visit your parked domain name to perform an action, you’re on the right track. Of course there are ways to boost this and some people boast 50% returns, but if you look for a modest 20% CTR you’ll be good.

Before you buy the name or while you’re looking at names, as I explained in part II of buying and selling domain names, you’ll want to look at what the seller has for a CTR. If it’s around 20%, considered it optimized, for your own sanity. Of course if you have a way of turning parked domains into a 40 or 50% return, consider a 20% CTR a bargain, but that’s not what I’m talking about here and you probably wouldn’t be reading this.

If the domain name has a lower CTR like 10% or even 5%, then you need to put in some more research. Find out the keywords that are used if any, look at the category used. Do you have a similar name in the same category, but using a different keyword that you’ve optimized for cost per click (CPC) and/or CTR? If so, then you might have found a bargain.

But be careful, sometimes names just don’t receive a high CTR. Especially certain typo’s. Some typo’s that people get to aren’t going to people clicking. They get to the parked page and realize it’s not where they’re going. However, you may be able to coax them into a click if you choose the right keywords, so be on the lookout.

After You Buy the Name

If you’ve found a domain name that has a lower than 20% CTR or that isn’t using a high paying keyword you may be able to change some things around to increase one or the other.

A lot of parking services allow you to change the look of the parked page. Surprisingly, different looking pages can have different effects for different categories of domains. You need to play around with the page layout to get the highest CTR you can. I usually choose a standard search result looking page but have begun to venture into other layouts as I do more research in the forums.

Another method of increasing the CTR and possibly the CPC is to futz with the keywords used at your parking service. Like I mentioned earlier if you find a domain name that wasn’t optimized with high CPC keywords but is in a category where you know of high paying keywords, you might have found a bargain. Be weary though, the keyword might not work with that domain.

In closing, if you stick with the rule of thumb for 20% CTR, you’ll be doing well. That’s what I work off of and it’s served me well so far. I’m going to venture into higher paying and higher conversion rate methods for domain name monetization, but that’s a whole nother series in itself.

Thought I would share some exciting news. Blogtown Press had it’s first article to make it to the front page of Digg, all news! The article is from Aloha Update and is about Dog “The Bounty Hunter” Chapman and his recent back and fourth with the Mexican authorities. You can see the digg article here and vote or comment. At writing this it’s been Dugg 1,234 times and commented 233 times.

The article was briefly at the top spot overall, stayed on the front page of all topics for a few hours, and now is slowly working it’s way down the top all news. It’s still on the front page of Digg-Entertainment News and the screenshot above was from earlier this morning (HST) where we were the fourth.

Many people have top digg articles all the time but for Blogtown Press it’s a first. We were receiving about 1200 hits an hour and that’s slowly tapering off to the mid 100’s. Every once in a while the server gets a little bogged down but not too bad.

I’m anxious to see what this does to incoming links. We’ve picked up on about 3 or 4 trackbacks so far and there are over 45 comments on the article alone.

Just thought I would share some excitement with everyone else.

I found this post via problogger, I know shocking, blog news found first on problogger.net, but I had to share this with you all.

Since my audience is predominantly Internet entrepreneurs I thought you can never have too many buying and selling websites articles. I mean, most of us would sell off all our Internet real estate for the right price, and people are realizing a blogs value more and more as the days goes by and the “blog fad” doesn’t fade.

Well, how much is a blog worth, and how do you compare one to the other. Although a lot of what a blogs worth is tough to quantify a recent article on the Blog Herald titled Selling Your Blog: What Others Are Looking For is an amazingly comprehensive article on just that. Figuring out what blog buyers want and what they’ll pay for.

The article covers a ton of topics, tells of what might be weighed more than others and why, and gives examples of how to begin the valuation of your blog. Or at least begin tailoring your blog to bring greater value to it.

Head over and check out the article. Oh and to give credit it’s an article by Lorelle VanFossen who writes Lorell on Wordpress, a blog I admit I’ve never been to but have added it to my “keep an eye on if I have time to read” list. Nice work Lorelle!

Becoming an entrepreneur is tough! But it’s a fun journey. I just wanted to give a shout out to all those people who help others cause they want to see others succeed, and cause helping others allows you to learn more. Which rocks.

I recently wrote about why I’m hiring bloggers and how it’s helped me build my blog network traffic 4 fold in three months. Sometimes when you’re trying to reach for big goals you gotta look for some help along the way.

Bringing on some extra help with the writing has made a huge difference in my ability focus on building my blog network as a business both from a financial standpoint as well as a promotional standpoint. As I’ve mentioned previously I don’t want to start a business where I’m the business.

With that said I’ve also realized that my coding talents only go so far and that there are really only so many hours in the day. I still work a 9-5 job (sometimes way later) at a biotech company as a biomedical engineer, I’m working on planning a wedding (mine), and I also love to help other people realize their entrepreneurial dreams. Currently I’m helping, in as much as I can which probably isn’t enough, my brother and another friend with various aspects of their companies.

Some may say I’m spreading myself way too thin, which I admit I am. (Especially my finance, who I know would love me to get my nose out of my computer.) But the reason I can’t say no to people is one, cause I can’t say no; and two, cause I love helping people that have energy towards doing cool stuff. If someone came to you and said I wanna start my own company, you wanna help me create a website, market my stuff, sell my stuff, would you say no?

I look at it from some other angles as well. If you help them work on their projects, you’ll learn more about all the aspects of business you might not have otherwise learned on your own. And also, they may be able to help you with your stuff. Which has happened numerous times with the current people I’m working with. I’ve gone in gung ho to just help and ended up having them help me just as much as I’ve helped them.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking of a way to write all this down, but just wanted to let everyone know that if everyone helped those around them out just a little more each day, everyone could get a lot more done

So thanks to all those who’ve helped me thus far and to those who will help me later, an early thanks.

As you know my brother and I are trying our hats as entrepreneurs, me building a blog network on the Internet, and he designing a clothing line. I have mentioned before that he got the art-creative side of things in the family and is super talented when it comes to design (although he won’t tell you that, and will probably smack me for saying so).

He launched his clothing line about 3 months ago with a limited edition run of shirts he hand designed. He’s also teamed up with SurfAid to donate some of his proceeds to their great cause of helping impoverished towns brought together through surfing. His concept is awesome as he is using his creative talents to help the world and bring people together.

He recently announced the addition of two sponsored riders, a surfer named Chase Fisher out of Southern California, and a surfer out of Hawaii, Morgan Hoesterey. These are great additions to the As One team to help spread the word about helping others.

Check out the surfers and check out his newest releases of clothing over at the As One Shop.

I’m thinking of undertaking a large shift in my blog network development and I’m finding the need for a Wordpress and Database Guru. I’ve thought about using a CMS like Joomla but I don’t think that it will be quite what I want and have too much extra junk that I don’t need.

So what I’m looking for is someone who knows the ins and outs of Wordpress really well, knows MySQL and also knows Java fairly well too. I know enough to get me by and I’m sure if I had about 40 more hours in the week to work on just programming I could find a way to develop what I want. But I don’t and I need to be efficient.

Therefor I’m asking my readership if they are or know anyone who is very keen at tinkering with wordpress, setting up and interacting with PHP and MySQL, and knows how to integrate all of that as well as throw in some JAVA. If you or they know how to and would like to do the design work as well that would be great!

I’m sure there’s a lot of small groups of people that run design “houses” but I just don’t know of them and would love it if any of you could point me in the right direction.

Thanks all, hope I get some good responses. I of course would offer money, possible profit sharing from the network, and maybe even some ownership of my to be formed corporation.

OK, it’s the wee hours of the morning out here in Hawaii but I have to get this posted. Several people have inquired about my earnings after I reported a 400% increase in visitors around the blog network so I can’t dissapoint “the people.” (Thanks by the way for all your support!)

As I said it’s 1 am here and I finished up a 14 hour work day at my real job as an engineer at a biotech company so forgive me if the verbage here gets a little jumbled. But without further ado. Here’s the earnings…

Adsense - $173.53
TLA - $12.55
Namedrive - $63.48
Other Link Sales - $53.31

Total   $302.87

Yipee! I increased money coming in from December’s total earnings $165.07. As you can see from last months, AdSense went way up by over $100! Sweet!

I was also able to sell one more link through TLA (thanks to my own promoting) and I’ve been finding other means to sell links through some of the webmaster forums out there. The $53.31 is for permanent links, which I could amortize over the life of the blogs, but I’m lazy and don’t want to put estimates on, or change values every month. That’s for when I hire an accountant.

The other links that I sell as month to month links, even if I sell 3 months up front, will be amortized over the life of the link and counted as such.

Now let’s take a look around the blogosphere at some earnings.

Internet Cashflow Guy $524.02
Video Post at 45n5.com tells of $1095.00