Google has a new logo today to celebrate the invention of the first laser.

Elmer runs into Michael Kovach in Starbucks, Michael bought iphone.com in 1993 and kept it until 2006 when he sold it to Apple.

Another hubby puts his cheating wife on Ebay

The BBC reports on a recent online aquisition:

Television company CBS has agreed to buy technology news and entertainment website CNET for about $1.75bn (£900m).

Today’s game is Stunt Plane, pretty cool.
Cool post over at iThinkMedia, are you a geek, well are you? Thanks Wendy.

An older friend of mine Ian, was recently in hospital for a major checkup. He was kept in for over a week
while his doctors did their stuff. He’s a bit of a car fanatic so to pass the time read many a car magazines from his hospital bed and saw an advert for a classic Rolls Royce. He was able to get enough info about the car from the advert and phoning the seller to feel comfortable buying it without seeing it, somwehat scary for a $40K purchase.

I next saw Ian two weeks ago at his grandson’s second birthday, the Roller got a lot of admiring stares in the pub car park. He’d only had the car a couple of weeks but you could tell it was his dream car and he’d made a wise purchase.

This afternoon it is Ian’s funeral, he passed away just over a week ago, another victim of the big C. His life had certainly been cut short but I think he’d had a good one though I’m sure he’d of liked to of done some more mileage in his Roller. It’s times like this that really hammer home to me how short and precious life is. Don’t live your dreams from your death bed, live them now.

Rest in peace Ian.

If the internet is like a shopping mall it’s a big mall! … looking forward and trying to predict the future I can draw a few conclusions:

- Some shops I think will work will not, even with lots of effort & investment
- Some shops I think will fail, will survive and even prosper
- Some shops I just don’t understand

If I agree with the above three sentiments then perhaps I’m safer just buying the shops!

Read the rest of this entry »

Chitika are usually one of my top 3 money makers. Previously , they haven’t converted well on information based sites, kind of like this one. This could hopefully be about to change with their new Interactive Premium Ad units.

The units look like traditional text based ads but have a relevent image to the left of the ad text, giving your visitors graphical information as well as getting their attention (a bit like the old trick some publishers with manually did Adsense until Google forbade it). The image to the right is how the unit would/could look on Self Made Minds, I had to use an image rather than the unit for reasons I’ll explain later.

Presently the unit will only show to your US traffic and even then it’s described as behavioural so will only show to “some” of your US visitors. From our tests and observations it looks like one of the key factors to whether the ads are shown is based on the referrer, primarily is the visitor from a search engine, if so show the ad and base the ad content on the keywords used to find the page. This leads to highly targeted ads which should result in a higher than normal CTR and eCPM.

I’ve only been testing these for a couple of weeks but performance so far has been an improvement. I’d recommend at least giving them a test (especially if you have a none product based site that performed badly in the past) and make sure you specify a default ad (instructions here) to monetise the rest of your traffic.

One of Anybody can apply to Chitika and if you’re already with them, the new ads in the Get Code section.

As Scott has already done a post today I’ll just drop a few links that I have sitting on my desk.

Amusing thread over at Digital Point showing peoples lifetime Adsense earnings.

Another site after your dollars as the million dollar home page, instead of buying pixels you buy words by the letter, simple but cool idea via Net Business Blog.

Adsense has a bit of a hiccup with reporting stats and the forum world panics like it’s the end of the world.

No game this week I’m afraid but if you’re after a bit of fun check out Gaj-It social Friday.

Phew, lot’s of emails and lot’s talking back and forth with business owners has taken a small step forward today with my second lease now signed and sealed.

I have a small furniture domain that I found for sale last year, I emailed the seller and he said he was open to offers, thankfully my first offer of £450 for it was accepted right away and it was added to the portfolio.

There are quite a few companies that specialise in specific types and styles of furniture and this domain was a type of wood, I sent out around 25 emails for this one to the top ranking sites and those using Adwords and had 2 interested companies within 2 days, this domain isn’t ranking yet so perhaps a bit early but I though worth trying.

As I am learning and speaking to people the details of the contract evolve so that everyone is happy, so the main changes I had to make and agree to were

• A 3 year lease on the domain name
• First refusal at renewal so they knew another company wouldn’t take it
• Maximum 50% increase in the lease fee at renewal

Those are pretty acceptable terms and I was happy to write them in, the lease fee I decided upon was £75 per month. That means for a domain that cost £450 I will get £900 in the first year and £2700 over 3 years while still owning it.

Why £75? I would usually intend to get the cost price of the domain back within the first 12 months, so started at a price I could negotiate down from if needed.

What’s next?
A bit early as most of my domains are not ranking, I had one agree to £250 per month on another furniture domain that was ranking top 10 but it’s lost it for now so put that on the back burner and I have another someone is considering for £100 per month. Just yesterday I did manage to buy

• ashfurniture
• redwoodfurniture
• cherryfurniture

All for £300+VAT and all .co.uk domains so they would be good candidates for this type of deal, on the whole I have found many quite responsive to the leasing option, I still got asked if I would sell and to give a price but sticking to my guns I prefer not to sell assets that I find too difficult to value, I’d rather lease for 3 years and see where the world is then and in the meantime build an income that is stable and create a business that is profitable and rich in assets.

Domain lease income : £575 per month

I’ve done a couple of posts highlighting the benefits of networking, especially in person. In this post I want to share a few ideas on finding networking opportunities.

• Attend trade shows and events related to your niche
  There are trade shows for just about everything, for me I visit Vegas each year for CES, various shows in London (Stuff Show, Ideal Home, various inventor events, etc).
• Attend expos related to your business model
  There are various expos for bloggers, affiliate marketeers, SEO, entrepeneurs and more. At these you’ll be able to learn from the speakers but even more from networking with other attendees.
• Contact other bloggers
  Many bloggers post about places they are due to visit, if you’re in the vicinity get in touch and see if they fancy a meetup, this is how I met Romanian super blogger Bobby Voicu, he got in touch with me when I said I was in London for the LG event.
• Local user groups
  Many towns and cities have usergroups for different interests, these often have a monthky physical meeting. One which I’m looking at joining is the Nottingham LUG (Linux User Group), ‘m not that familiar with Linux but as a number of my servers are running it I should be, so what better way to learn and get advice.
• Organise one your self
  If your blog/site has a decent audience or you’re an active forum poster you cpost the question and see who’s interested. I’ve done this a couple of times via Digital Point forums. ‘m still up for doing a Midlands one in the UK over the summer (if interested leave a comment).
• Press events
  Contact the press office of companies n your niche and ask to be sent any press releases. A lot of forward thinking companies throw events especially for bloggers, this is a cool way to meet the faces behind the products and other bloggers with the same interests as you.

This is the first blog post I’ve ever made whilst sitting the garden, so if you reckon I’ve missed anything please share in a comment.

The downturn in advertising revenue is no myth, while small individual publishers can never be sure whether they are just have a bad day, week or month some larger publishers are seeing the same and few are being hit as hard as parking portfolios.

Parked portfolios consist of large companies with thousands of domains parking the pages and relying on parking revenue income from direct type in traffic, companies like DBS Dark Blue Sea with the size of their portfolio can really give you a more measured look into the bigger picture.

DBS releases their financial profit guidance with it’s first quarter performance to March 31st
http://newsstore.smh.com.au/apps/previewDocument.ac?docID=GCA00839750DBS&f=pdf

The report is really quite interesting and well worth a read.

Read the rest of this entry »

With a daily readership of over 100,000 (RSS, email and web), Coolest Gadgets has far exceeded my expectations. CG has enabled me to quit my day job, travel worldwide and earn an income doing what I enjoy. Last year CG generated 6 figures, this year we’re on target to turnover ~$500K.

Coolest Gadgets has been running nearly 3 years. In that time we have gone from a one man blog to having a team of fantastic writers. Key elements for the success are:

• Persistence: It takes 6-12 months for a site to get going, in the early days it is hard to find motivation when you don’t have the traffic or income. Working hard then laid the foundations for future success, I remember sometimes not being in the mood to write but pushing myself to do so, I’m very pleased I did.
• Originality: the gadget niche is very crowded. We differentiated by writing about gadgets that hadn’t been covered elsewhere. This interested our readers and garnered links within our niche (helps SEO thus more new readers).
• Passion: being passionate about your subject makes it so much easier to blog (especially when you need that extra push), I kind of like gadgets
• Networking: Interacting with other bloggers and people in the industry is both fun and essential for building your blog.

There’s more I could write, but this contest has a word limit, if you want further info you can read the history of CG, I’ll also answer comments.

A free Wordpress theme has recently been released by Brian at Revolution who make really nice high end blog themes, this free one is available in 2 or 3 column layout.

MySpace.co.uk has been returned to it’s original owner with the original domain dispute being overturned.

Google announces VisualRank as it’s tool in precision image search.

Great article by Aaron Wall, What is a #1 ranking in Google worth.

Al’s running a simple competition with a cool prize.

It’s great doing what you enjoy, but will you make money out of it. Chris Guillebeau has asked a collection of blogging stars to find out.

All you need to know about running PPC campaigns .

Today’s game is Go Mad: The Escape, it starts to really get harder at level 5.