Google allowing other webmasters to damage your site . Have been a victim of online sabotage for so long, that I have learnt to ignore it. If others cannot predict your future actions, there is little they can do.
Web18 buys In.com - The Whois data shows that the domain data was last updated on Feb 12, 2008 (as of April 12, 2008). I own a *OM.IN domain, a Web 18 employee contacted me on Feb 13, 2008 and wanted to buy the domain. He claimed to be “a poor student” , wanted the domain cheap, when he was actually a “Senior Interactive Designer ” at Web18.
Indian companies will readily shell out large amounts to buy things from foreigners , but if you are an Indian in India, they expect you to sell cheap . Some of my websites have been under a DDOS attack for 2 months now, since Feb 12, I wonder if it is related.
Blown away - the story of Geosign . One of the things I learnt while working offline – never depend on a single vendor or revenue source. It may be more convenient , but you do not know what will happen in future.
Another relevant post - Domain revenue disappearing - when every thing is fine, it is easy to become complacent.
When you have a single large website, you become a target of negative SEO
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Websites on sale, close down
Soon many of these social networking websites will close down. So much much time and money is spent and it all is wasted. If only people had thought about where the money is coming from, instead of following the latest trends.
If it is someone else’s money, you can be careless with it, hype matters more. If it is your own hard earned money , your savings after doing a 9 to 5 job for years, you are far less likely to waste it, profits are important.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Adsense Decreases Does Not Mean I Should Settle For Less . That is the problem dealing with large companies, you are just another number.
I have diversified my revenues to some extent, by this year end Adsense should hopefully be a small part of my total revenues. It is always better to work with smaller companies, you are likely to get much better support and they value your business more.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Protecting against DDOS attacks
I’ll be spending a lot of time researching DDOS attacks now that my sites are affected, I wonder how much they cost the attacker. My sites are all Web 0.00 so only the forums are offline.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Google clamp down on publisher adsense “so called” minisites . Interesting post, I had guessed this in December, so I have been exploring other options. I first made money online by selling directly to my customers, and they still are willing to pay. Earlier I would do every thing manually which was very time consuming, now I should start examining automated systems.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Threats to the Domain Name Industry
I have spent a lot of time studying the domain industry and find that most revenues seem to be from parking or sales. Parking revenues are from only a few sources and a policy change can adversely affect you.
Last year, I spent a lot of time experimenting to find non-Google, non-parking revenue sources and was able to diversify to some extent (Yahoo is not an option if you are non-US) . If you are not a big company, there are many disadvantages but there are a few advantages also.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Vanity portals set cash registers ringing
.in fits in with internet , international , but selling .in domains in India has its pitfalls. I own some .in domain names , yesterday I got a call from Mr XYZ who wanted one of the domains. He claimed to be “a poor student with a limited budget” but a Google search showed that he was associated with one of the largest portals in India .
You may be a very good story teller, but the other person may be better at fraud detection. It is always better to tell the truth, however unpleasant it may be.
That is one of the other problems in .in , you have to list your real telephone number and then get crank calls, I wish the .in registry did something about it.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
There’s a lot of money in domain tasting
Some interesting and concrete figures – making money with domains is a numbers game. If you register a domain and make $10/year, you can make some profit. I can’t afford to taste domains – most of the registrars I use charge $1 for deleting a domain, so I have to more careful registering a domain.
Social Network Inventory Not Monetizing
There so many stories about social networking websites, but I feel it will not take off in a big way as there is no use for the “friends” you make, many profiles are fake anyway. For teenagers and students, they are a good way to spend time, but they really do not serve any purpose. They are just a fad, which will fade away after some time
Social networking sites are very resource intensive and difficult to monetise. I had a fairly busy forum, but it was not worth the effort, since maintenance and taking backups is very time consuming. So now I try to reduce activity on the forum to a minimum, page views are not important for me, my time and revenues are.
There are many disadvantages of not knowing anything about the internet initially, you start later , you learn everyone from scratch . But the big advantage is that you can focus on what you feel will work, instead of bothering about short term trends.