Devil Works

Back here I wrote about my retirement project status saying it had slowed down, well it’s continuing slowly, life has been getting in the way a little, and I’m easily distracted while I’m online.
So far it’s like this:

1 site fully effective (ie all text link ads sold)
3 sites have gained a PR rank of 2 in the last Google update and will be listed on TLA shortly
1 site (this one) awaiting a PR rank of some sort before I add to TLA

2 sites that I’ve recently started and will need more work and a google PR update before I bother submitting them to TLA

93 more sites that I need to create

One of the things that is slowing me down is the Wordpress CMS I am using to create these sites. It seems that every second week an update is being issued that is critical for security reasons. If I get to the stage where I have 100 sites I don’t want to be updating the software on them every two weeks.

I’ve got a couple of options, Wordpress have a multi user version that I can upload but as far as I can see it means that all my sites would have to be on a subdomain. I have a domain I can use for this but I’m not sure if I have the tech skills to maintain the software as it isn’t as well supported as the standard wordpress version.

The other option I haven’t fully thought out is paying someone to write a script that will update all the sites, though this also might be a pain and I could be better off paying someone to help me maintain the multi user version.

Several years ago I looked into setting up my own ringtone business. What freaked me out was that the telco’s were taking about half of what the consumer was paying for the ringtones. A small amount went to the original artist and/or the songwriter, another small amount went to the ringtone service provider and whatever was left over was what you had to run the business on. I’m sure on a larger scale that you could bring these costs down but paying half the income to a telco just to provide a billing service didn’t seem right to me. For various reasons I didn’t go ahead with it and I’m kinda glad I didn’t.

My concious wouldn’t rest easy charging $6 plus for something that cost me less than fifty cents to provide.

And since I looked into the business the ripoffs are continuing to grow. I’ve seen some providers advertise “membership for $6 a week” in the really fine print of their advertising.

So I’ve started a site to educate people on the ringtone ripoffs and show them how easy it is to get ringtones fo free.

The downside of this site is that due to my beliefs I won’t be adding adsense to it it. They are saturated with overpriced and misleading ringtone offers and I don’t have the energy to filter them out.

I’m going to look for some affiliate offers for cell phones, data cables and other cell phone accessories, and should be able to sell off some text links once the traffic gets more established.

Several months back I made a bid on a domain at afternic.com. My bid wasn’t accepted and I ended up finding a better name for this particular site.

About once a month I would get an email from Afternic saying the domain I bid on has had it’s price changed. I already had the name I wanted so I wasn’t worried. But since the start of the year I’ve received 23 emails inviting me to bid on this name again.

And these emails are basically spam, they have a bit at the top about the domain I bid on over six months ago and then they waffle on about their web design and hosting services.

There’s also a lovely little line about not replying to the address the email was sent from as email can’t be received at this address.
I can’t find a link in the emails to cancel these notices, and I checked my account on Afternic and I can’t find anywhere to stop these messages either.

The polite thing to do would be to use their “contact us” page to ask them to stop, but I get enough regular spam (8000+ per month) that I really can’t be jacked sending them an email asking them to stop sending their crappy offers to me.

I’m tossing up either marking the emails as spam and letting Gmail bury them or filtering them so I don’t have to look.

On the bright side the joker who owns the domain is asking somewhere around $2400 for it. I think the one I have is more brandable and is definitely easier to remember so I think it’s worth a bit more than whatever he ends up getting it for.

It’s that time again when Google does it’s merry little page rank dance. I’m hoping a couple of my sites will increase their pagerank which will help me market them on Text Link Ads
I’ve found Live Page Rank to be a useful tool to check my pagerank. It shows you your page rank at various data centers to give you an idea of where your site will rank once the google dance is completed.

What a lot of people don’t realise is that your pagerank is in a constant state of change and it’s only the visible pagerank that gets updated every three months or so but it’s the visible page rank that your Text Link Ads prices are based on so depending on how your earning your income the update can be important.

Another great little tool I’ve found is Visual Pagerank. It shows you the pagerank of all the links on a given page. It’s handy as a one stop shop to see what pagerank your sites internal pages are.

Text Link Ads are currently offering $100 in free ads for new customers. So if your not currently a customer it might be worth taking them for a test drive to see how they go.

I’m a forum member and occasional poster at Wicked Fire. I was surprised when I saw this post in my bloglines feed that the owner had been offered $16 Million.

I checked out this thread and it appears to be entirely true. The owner, Jon, turned down the offer without a second thought which has surprised a lot of people.

Personally I can’t see the value of $16M in the forum as it currently stands. Jon said himself that it’s an incredible offer for a site that doesn’t have any income yet. The site is less than a year old which makes it more amazing that it received such a high offer.

So why did he turn it down ? you’ll have to have a look at all thread for all the reasons, but Jon basically says that he didn’t need the money and has bigger plans for the site.

What it does however show is the value of User Generated Content (UGC) and how much web 2.0 investors are valuing it at. I’ve got my own plans for a UGC site when I have the time and motivation to get it programmed. I don’t think it’s going to be ready for the web 2.0 demi bubble but hopefully it will gather some interest when web 3.0 comes around.

I’m currently on holidays from my day job, I should be working flat out on my sites and stuff but after a hectic Christmas period I’m taking it easy for a little while.

To be honest the weather is too damn nice to be sitting inside on a computer and I need to take advantage of it while it lasts. There’s a few cooler days forecast for early next week so I’m going to make those my “work” days
However I’m not being completely idol with my mind, I’ve got a thousand ideas, and a few of them are almost concrete.

The concrete ones are as follows.

• Create PPC arbi pages until they come out my ears.
• Use the income from the arbi pages to get a script customised for a user generated content (UGC) site. I’ve got a thousand ideas for it so I’m going to have to sit down and work out what I can afford to get done now and what will have to wait until the site starts to get self sufficient.
• build up a couple more of my blogs so that they can get listed on Text Link Ads, I’m not expecting to make a heap of money from them but it’s a reasonably stable source of income that doesn’t take a lot to maintain.

On a personal level I’m aiming to grow my online income to the point where I can take extra leave from work and maybe even cut back to part time. I’m getting the urge to travel again. Last year I only left the state once and that was for a rushed 36 hour work trip. I need to get out more.