For the love of god are all of the good____taken? This is often how I feel in just about every endeavor I attempt. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in domaining. So often we are forced to ask ourselves questions like “should I just settle for .net?” or “is .biz is even worth the time to reg?” and “I wonder if CASINO is still available in any of the foreign extensions?” People like me weren’t around, for whatever reason, during the 90’s when these retirement makers were being regged left and right. Most people participating in the domain industry today are similarly situated I suspect and likely didn’t get involved until long after.
Consequently most of us are required to settle for one or more of a few options: a. zero in on the various markets and invest in the higher priced domains, b. hope for some good expired domains or c. set out to do some good old fashioned hand regging. The latter option is truly a test of our creativity and forecasting abilities. We need to be creative enough to put together some language combinations in a coherent enough fashion that they will hopefully make sense to the average buyer/internet viewer such that those combos will make good website addresses or titles. Beyond just sounding acceptable, the names have to be appropriately descriptive, not trademarked, and/or potentially brandable. This is some analysis. I mean hell, anyone can think of CHOCOLATE.com. It takes real moxie to think of names like BITCHTOAST.com and actually have them relate to identifiable and tangible products or services. I mean seriously, I’d want the guy responsible for the second name working for me (then again, the guy that owns CHOCOLATE.com doesn’t really need to work anyway).

It really is tough finding anything worth a damn. I do however believe that the good ones are still out there. I think at any point in history in any field of endeavor people have asked “are all of the good [fill in the blank] taken?” Time and time again people were there to answer that question by inventing newer and better technologies. Had Edison answered this question in the affirmative we may never have had many of the wonderful technologies that we have today. It’s likely an ingrained condition of humanity to think, at every stage of our technological progression, that we have reached our apex and there is thus nowhere to go but down or sideways. Obviously, this notion has never been accurate. We keep moving forward with stunners like BITCHTOAST.com and the bar is raised higher.

Where the next bar will be placed in the domaining industry is the question to ask.

Technorati Tags: domaining, expired domains, hand regging

The thought occurred to me awhile back that I’ve never really heard of a domain share exchange. Granted, there are many exchanges where sales of domains occur every day. Companies likeSedo, Afternic, and Monikerfacilitate the sale of thousands of domains every month.

The type of market or exchange that I’m referring to is really a different sense of the word and is more akin to markets like NASDAQ or the NYSE. On these markets fractional shares of ownership in companies are traded in the form of stock shares. I was thinking of how interesting it would be to have the equivalent of these types of markets but with domains taking the place of companies in traditional exchanges.

How great would it be to have an IPO in PORN.com. The owners would offer thousands of shares in the name and those shares would fluctuate in value based on the revenue of the domain or the speculated value. Naturally, the incentive of the owners would be the promise of a greater return from issuing shares to the investing public as opposed to a straight sale. I’m not exactly sure how it would work but it would be quite an exciting thing to be able to own percentages of names like PHOTO.com or CASINO.com. We could check the ticker tape each day in a publication like DNJOURNAL at the closing bell to see if our shares of TV.com and TABLE.com had changed in value and consequently whether or not we should sell the domain shares in the secondary, or over-the-counter domain share exchange.

There could be several different types of domain securities. We would have domain mutual funds and different asset classes for different types of names. There would be an LLL.com fund, LLLL.com funds, NNN(N).com funds, single word generic funds, NNN.com, two word premium combo funds as well as the various industries. Industries such as tech word domains would need their own funds, as would energy, and, of course, adult domain funds. There would be composite indices composed of many names representing valuation classes (domains over a $1 million), industries, or other categories. Obviously, from there it would be logical to assume that there would be domain name index funds composed of combinations designed to track the various indices mentioned above. There would need to be people studying and designing these funds and that’s where domain fund managers would come in. There could literally be an entire sub-industry built from domains and these types of markets.

Maybe it’s crazy and maybe it would have no chance of success…hell, maybe it actually exists already. I haven’t seen it but I would definitely like to. I would love to open the Wall Street Journal or the DNJOURNAL and check my investments in PHONE.com or SEX.com because god knows it’s as close as most of us are ever going to get to names like this. More on Domain Share Exchange

Technorati Tags: domain share exchange, Sedo, Afternic, and Moniker

Domaining and monetization sites and strategies have shown, as an industry, to hold a great deal of promise for those individuals creative and savvy enough to capitalize on trends and patterns of the past several years and the future in general. I’ve waded through the many domaining forums and looked at many of the blogs and monetization sites that abound these days. I, like many others, wasn’t immersed in the industry in the early days, thereby securing an early retirement for myself by grabbing thousands of one word generics and insuring a highly successful future. However, I do believe that opportunity exists and we’re all hoping to find it.

One thing that has struck me as particularly hilarious are the number of people with delusions of grandeur and aspirations of riches. These are the ham and eggers who blindly stumbled into domaining after hearing stories about PORN.com going for however many millions of dollars and similar sales like TANDBERG.com (something like 1.5 million). They’ve shrewdly purchased such winners as “jims-coolest-dating-site.com” and have channeled this brilliance on to the rest of us by asking the “one time only price of 55,000 for this and similar premium domains.” Any industry jammed to the hilt with champs like this has to be one worth writing about. So the idea struck me that these folks, and others like them, should really be the ones with the microphone, so to speak. I think an area that is ripe for countless hours of entertainment would be these Rockefellers of tomorrow, kings of industry. Don’t get me wrong, there certainly are many domain sales that defy logic and leave us all scratching our heads and maybe these sales are the seeds for the aforementioned brazenness. Maybe our champions of tomorrow are just capitalizing on a market with too much money and they will be the ones laughing in the end when the owner “Jim’s Coolest Dating Inc.” buys this goldmine for 12 million. Somehow I doubt it but there’s no accounting for taste in this industry.

Similarly, the many folks pawning other services should have their say as well and I fully intend to give them their due. In the days to come I would like to do some research into the always entertaining and often hilarious world of domains and internet monetization sites and strategies and see what I come up with. I’m interested in hearing about other people’s observations and any areas that I may not be touching on and welcome such comments and stories.

Technorati Tags: domain humor, domains domaining, monetization, internet monetization

I wanted to write this post to record my own experience with ppc arbitrage and what I’ve learned so far. I’m a regular viewer of forums like Wicked Fire, WebMasterWorld, DN Forum, NamePros, and several others. These are great places to get a feel for what arbitrage is and what the typical strategies are.

When you begin sending and converting traffic it can be somewhat daunting. Hell, even learning the language and the alphabet soup can be intimidating. If your interest is strong enough you’ll persevere and begin to pick up some of the jargon. Eventually most of the items being discussed in these forums will seem intelligible. You can learn a great deal from these forums only don’t expect to pick up anything that will enable you to retire. Those tidbits are not disclosed for obvious reasons. The second they become public knowledge their effectiveness will cease as everyone will begin using those techniques. You can pick up the basics and apply them to your own ideas and hopefully end up with something worth a damn that you too can withhold from the masses. Also, you can learn from others mistakes.

My own experience has been in attempting arbitrage to several different platforms or types of landing pages. Some people use content scraping templates that derive their material and articles from places like Wikipedia. These sites are built around a specific topic like mortgages and prominently display ads and articles. Typically the only options that the reader has are clicks that will lead to further ads and similar articles. The articles (content) lend to the reader’s experience of acquiring knowledge and thus, in theory, satisfying Google’s idiotic policy of “a better internet experience” or some similar sanctimonious, holier-than-thou horseshit (see previous post). This content is essential to maintaining some standing with Google that will prevent the arbitrageur from being booted off of Google’s Adwords network (more on this later). Other people drive traffic to sites that promote affiliate offers or coupons of some kind. These strategies have a similar premise: buy traffic at a cheap price to send to a site+feed said traffic high paying ads under the guise of relevant and enriching content=make money. This is a bit of a simplification as there are many more elements and complexities that go into the equation but the gist is pretty much accurate.

My most successful campaigns have been completely devoid of content as they have focused strictly on sending traffic to parked pages or parking arbitrage. This is really the most basic way you could really do arbitrage as the only work involved with the domain is pointing it at the correct server and knowing which keywords will result in the highest payouts for resulting ads. This isn’t always easy as even slight variations of the same thing can result in drastically different ad values.

I don’t recommend this strategy for those individuals who have their domains parked at all but a couple of parking companies as it is totally against most terms and conditions. There are a couple that will allow this and they also happen to have the best payouts in my experience. Send an email to mackristo@searchiot.com if you’re curious who these are.

If you are interested in this technique, I would recommend focusing on such niches as insurance and other financial services. My typical earnings per click within these niches have been roughly $1.50-$2.80. For more specific just do some testing. ALWAYS, and I cannot emphasize this enough, make sure that you are only sending traffic from the United States. Traffic from other countries will often pay shit. I’ve had click values that stayed consistently at $1.65 per click that dropped all the way to .04 cents a click when the traffic started coming from other countries. You can usually control this on Google (while you have an account there that is), Yahoo and many other search engines.

Sending traffic to a parked page is only one way of doing arbitrage but it has been successful for me. In order to be successful you need to research the hell out of a lot of different things, experiment with different keywords, ads, niches, and general strategies. You need to understand what you can afford to spend and what degree of risk is present in each campaign, or put another way, how many visitors must click on an ad (or convert) for you to break even with your spending on the ppc search engine that you’ve chose? Put even another way, how many people out every ten visitors must click an ad for you to avoid losing money? Obviously we’re not doing this to break even, so taken even further what level of conversion will be required for you to make money. Even further, how much will you need to spend to convert enough of those people at the calculated rate for an acceptable return. Some may say any consistent profit is acceptable provided that it can be replicated over and over again.

These issues present many more issues and offer a lot to discuss. In the coming posts I hope to tackle some of them and also focus on other areas of the arbitrage equation such as traffic generation.

Technorati Tags: ppc arbitrage, arbitrage, Adwords, parking arbitrage

In the course of my arbitrage campaigns I have tried traffic sources spanning the tiers of search engines. I would like to give my analysis of these engines as candidly as possible. As mentioned in previous posts there are currently some issues with Google’s Adwords, but before they figured out that I was trying to actually earn money with their engine (I know, the mere thought of it is nuts) I had used it quite extensively. Right before the end I had figured out a couple of techniques that afforded me very cheap clicks (in the neighborhood of .01 to .05 cents a click) consistently. I’ll begin with these techniques. I’d like to also point out that I did not pioneer either of these but it always helps to have more sources of instruction for aspiring arbitrage patrons.

The first technique involves the use of banners. A simple yet effective technique for getting Adwords clicks for .01 to .03 cents a click is to use the image ad option. You will want to find a program to create banners. I used a free web program though the name of it escapes me. Simply type in “free banners” on Google and explore the results and I guarantee you’ll find something acceptable. Remember, if you’re using this for purely arbitrage purposes you’re not really going to be concerned about creating a masterpiece. Just enough to grab a reader’s attention and get them to click the ad to direct them to your shitty arbitrage site. While I’m thinking about it, you’ll want to keep in mind that unlike your typical Adwords ads, these can take several days to get approved by the Adwords staff so be sure to give yourself plenty of lead-in time.

Anyway, back to the creation of the ad. Once you’re on said free-banner-making site you’ll want to create a 468 x 60 Banner with some kind of relatively generic phrase and your site’s url. For example if you were creating a banner for a debt consolidation site you would want to create the banner to say “Debt Consolidation Resources” on the first line, on the second line “Bad Credit Help”, and on the third line your url. Again, this is nothing special and really, the only aesthetic merit that may accompany the banner is the crappy free pattern that you’ve chosen as your banner background. Once you’re done writing the ad you’ll want to download the .gif file.

You are now ready to create your Adwords image ad. While in your Adwords account, select the “keyword-targeted campaign setup” rather than “site-targeted.” When I tried using the site-targeted approach I only got impressions and no clicks but feel free to try it to at least experiment if you’re so inclined. Select your countries and territories (preferably United States only for optimal click ad values-I’ll explain later). On the next page you will select “image ad” as your preferred medium. As mentioned, you will upload the 468×60 banner to your listing and simply include your URL when prompted by the system.

Next you will want to include your keywords and bid appropriately. Include something like a thousand keywords. When I’ve done this method I have bid .03 cents for all my keywords and got pretty good results. I have heard of people bidding .01 cent for each keyword but for starters I would try .03 cents just to test the waters. If you’re getting a lot of clicks then feel free to move down to either .02 or .01 cent bids.

You’re Done!

A few things to consider with this technique, and on these points I speak from personal experience. This technique does work. I feel it is important to mention this as I’ve heard several people say in the past that they were not having good results, or no results for that matter. You will want to create a few separate banner ads because it is possible that some will be slower than others on their uptake. I believe the way this works is as follows. It takes a few days for the Google rep to approve the ad. Upon approval it may take some time for the ad to sink in and effectively penetrate the best places for it to run. So you don’t have any unrealistic expectations you should expect that the ads will take approximately 3 weeks to really begin showing any tangible results.

I ran these ads to parked pages which I don’t recommend if you plan on keeping your Adwords account in working condition. Do however, use this technique with your other arbitrage sites and remember to be patient as it will take some time before it is running effectively. For me it took something like 3.5 weeks. When I finally started getting clicks it worked wonderfully. I was getting around 100 clicks a day at .02 cents apiece.

In the next post I’ll discuss another (even better) technique that is sure to get you .03 to .05 cent clicks on Adwords. Feel free to post any questions.

Technorati Tags: arbitrage, traffic sources, Adwords

I read a lot of forums and articles on various internet marketing tactics. Some (or many) are considered blackhat tactics and some are whitehat or even grayhat. The more I read the more people I’m exposed to who have been the unfair recipients of Google’s imbecilic policies. To put it bluntly, Google are a bunch of fascists. Vast numbers of people who have been dropped from both Adwords and Adsense and usually for the appallingly ludicrous idea that they were trying to make money from either of these industry leading technologies. Google’s mantra may truly be to do no evil but it seems that they have become intolerant fascist megalomaniacs that they likely swore not to become years ago.

I mean think of it, if you are even so much as suspected of driving to drive traffic to a site for the express purpose of making money off of said site you are summarily dismissed from the program without so much as an explanation, save the canned blurb that you may get if you’re lucky. When last I checked the market was responsible for determining the intrinsic attractiveness of one’s money making efforts in a capitalist society. If that market determines that ones efforts are shit it will respond accordingly and the individual will be washed out.

What is especially unnerving about this issue is the fact that other search marketing companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft have felt it necessary to let Google’s policies dictate their own. These companies should serve as a haven to those huddled masses who have so wrongly been cast away by tyrants like Google.

This led me to the conclusion that the time is truly right for a company to come in and serve a search marketing technology and the corresponding ad feed to those individuals who had the gaul to attempt to earn money from their websites or domains and have since become the disenfranchised many, left out in the cold by the Google juggernaut. If Yahoo and Microsoft will not stick to their guns and instead will continue to let Google dictate their policies someone else will need to come in to do this. I invite you readers to take up the mantle of pay-per-click change and revolution. Those who have ideas please feel free to contact me at mackristo@searchiot.com and I will gladly sign on to help you.

Technorati Tags: blackhat, Google are a bunch of fascists, tyrants like Google, pay-per-click

More and more people booted from the evil empire. I really do believe that it’s time to start an ad network solely devoted to those who have unjustly been removed from the Adwords and Adsense ranks. Honest to god, I’m hearing this kind of shit left and right about people just being axed for seemingly no good reason as if the SS had come in the middle of the night to remove certain “unsavory” elements for “questioning.” This kind of fascism has to be stopped. I realize that no one is in any position to do it right now as no one really comes close to Google’s skill or quality level but similar Goliaths have been taken down, or at least kept in check.

Talk about a built in sales force, the number of people kicked out of the program have to be in the hundreds of thousands by this point. Granted there are those who have been kicked out for legitimate reasons but frankly those folks are probably vastly outnumbered by others who simply wanted to make money and couldn’t wait for the organic type-in traffic that Google espouses and mandates. These people simply wanted to attract the attention of the ad-clicking public and employed more heavy-handed tactics such as paying for folks to come see their ads. I think that the market should be free to determine the effectiveness of these strategies and not Google’s elitist policies.

I think an ad network should be started to cater to these discarded advertisers and publishers. There are many, many good people who have been banned from the big G with only Yahoo and MSN to turn to. While both of these companies provide decent alternatives, they can’t hold a candle to Google’s systems. There has to be another way that doesn’t involve turning to second or third rate networks where the publisher maybe can get a couple of cents per click for even the highest paying niches.

I see many people earning vast sums of money in affiliate marketing and I truly feel that it is reasonable to reach this level.  The problem however is that though I know there are many people earning lots of money, I don’t know how the hell they’re doing it.  Not only do I have no idea how they’re doing it, I don’t even know where to look to find clues.

I spend a lot of time in forums like wickedfire.com and there are many great ideas being discussed to be sure.  Despite these ideas no one in their right mind is about to disclose their own successful strategies.  In fact the very mention of a desire to ask about these strategies will likely subject you to a verbal beating the likes of which you haven’t experienced in recent memory.  To the curious mind however useful information does exist in droves on this forum as well as several others.

One such piece of information is the necessity to create effective landing pages.  From everything I’ve heard you simply must know how to create these landing pages to really separate yourself from the average affiliate marketer.  In order to create landing pages you must know how to code.  Yes you can always go with a Wordpress blog and a predesigned theme but this likely this won’t be enough to really separate yourself.

That being said, one must learn to code, at least somewhat.  I guess there are such content management systems (CMS) as Joomla and Drupal but again, we’re working with preconfigured and predesigned templates.  This gives the site a preconfigured notion of originality.  I know that these CMS platforms are fantastic but I don’t know how much customization can be done or how effective or useful they are when it comes to creating sites for such purposes as affiliate marketing landing pages.

Again, this brings back to the mandate that one should have at least a rudimentary understanding of one of the scripting languages.  Which scripting language is another question that has prompted volumes of discussion from developers throughout the world.  Having settled on the certainty that I must learn one of these languages I decided to take a course in ASP.NET at a local continuing education program.  There weren’t a lot of choices for programming classes at the time given my scheduling needs.  In performing my due diligence on the language I quickly found that there are a lot of job opportunities out there for ASP.NET developers.  Getting a job as a developer was not my goal but I figured that if there were so many jobs out there surely the language must be worth a damn.  In reality it is a great developer language but what I’ve found is that it isn’t so much a language as it is a platform or framework for web development, at least as far as I can tell.  This framework can potentially take advantage of several scripting languages such as C# or VB.NET.  Since my initial goal was to learn a language for development I’ve since started to study C# for various reasons.  I figured that since I was already taking the ASP.NET class I should at least stick with that development path.  I plan to continue down this road partly out of intellectual curiosity.

The alternative path that I’ve begun is to also learn PHP.  I’ve heard so many great things about this scripting language and it seems that if one truly wants to learn a language that is prevalent in affiliate marketing then PHP is a good choice.  From everything I’ve read it seems that it is also an easier language to learn than many others.

Additionally, I will have to learn CSS and possibly Javascript in order to properly design the sites that I intend to create.

I can’t think of a better set of skills to learn than these development languages.  Having the tools to create your own high-functioning and dynamic affiliate marketing sites is a luxury that can truly lend itself to financial freedom down the road.  I don’t mean to refer to any of the bullshit that you hear about in your spam box or those idiotic (but entertaining) infomercials that are on at 2:00 am.  I don’t mean that one will make millions with this technique or that product, though I guess it’s possible.  The dults that are buying into that crap are the low-hanging fruit of the consumer world, and as they say…a sucker is born every minute.  If you can retire living off of the fat of these imbeciles then all the more power to you; I certainly am not one to judge.  One can, however, arm himself with the tools to create sites that command respect among the internet purchasing public and ultimately make a good living by catering to this public.

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, wickedfire.com, affiliate marketer, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, affiliate marketing landing pages, scripting languages, ASP.NET, web development, C#, VB.NET, PHP, CSS, Javascript, development languages, dynamic affiliate marketing sites

I’m a-sufferin my share of ppc terrors. I’ve tried several things with varied degrees of success.  I keep hearing how we can all make millions and it so EASY!  What a load of crap.  Who are these people?  I can’t believe how many people are millions of dollars online and yet they never say word one about how they’re actually doing it.  Oh they say plenty of other things, but nothing that’s really helpful.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t necessarily blame folks who are making money for not divulging their methods as it certainly wouldn’t help for everyone to be doing the same thing.  On the other hand, fuck em, I’m tired of hearing about them and how much they make.  We’re all responsible for ourselves, as it should be and we make our own luck but for christ sake stop telling everyone that you can help them make millions when really you’re just going to regurgitate the same shit that 1000 other ebooks already have.

I came across this this little nugget when looking for a way to get some free damn ads from Yahoo.  First, you’ll need an existing Facebook account.  Sign in to your Facebook account and sign up for the Visa Business Network.  Go through the sign up form and answer all questions (don’t worry, you’re not being required to buy anything).  Once you have finished with this sign-up you will receive an email to activate your account.  Just click on the activation link where you should be taken to your Visa profile page.  Once you are on this page, you’ll see section that says something to the effect of “don’t forget about your $75 in free Yahoo ads.  Now, when I went through this process I had to create a new Yahoo Search Marketing account, so I’m assuming this will be the case for everyone as I’m not sure how to have the credit applied to your existing account.  Frankly, this is fine, there’s nothing wrong with having a couple of these accounts anyway.

There you have it.  Now go forth and make yourself some damn money.