How to cash in on a stampede of elephants.

Posted by stuart as , , , , , , , , ,

Been doing a lot of thinking since my Reddit Experience the other day.

13,000 page views, 2,500 uniques, and one AdSense click.

As Burty pointed out, my AdSense placement wasn’t the best, but I don’t really expect the people who read this blog to be regular ad-clickers, so I just put them there to kind of fill up space. I’ve now added a 234×60 AdSense text ad just below the titles of the articles, except for the home page, but I doubt that this will make much difference.
So how do I turn that sort of traffic into cash?

If I was getting $1/1,000 impressions with CPM ads, I would have got around $13, not bad when considered against the $0.20-odd I got for my click.

Affiliate sales? I would think not. Although the people that read reddit would not be averse to buying stuff online, they tend to have a herd mentality - they’ll rush off to the blog in question, read the article, hang shit on it, then go back to reddit.

I guess I have to look at this as a long term thing - my Alexa rank jumped to 50,000-odd for the day, from averaging around 100,000 for the last couple of weeks, I also got a shitload of links through the whole shamozzle, so maybe there will be a long-term PR benefit?

It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few weeks, what with all of the above, plus a significant increase in subscribers to my feedburner feed.

Maybe with an increase in traffic, Alexa, and PR, I’ll be able to sell a few more beers? Who knows, but it was fun while it lasted

Holy furking shite!

Posted by stuart as , ,

Sheesh! Wanna get some major traffic? Get a blog post to stay on the front page of reddit.com for ten hours.

I posted this post about ICANN floating the price of domain names about ten hours ago, and decided to submit it to reddit to see what happened. I’d submitted a couple of stories before, and got a trickle of traffic, but this one just blew my mind!

Here’s my performancing stats for the couple of days:

That’s right, about a zillion percent traffic increase. Have a look down there on the left hand menu bar - that’s right, nearly 2,500 views of that post in 10 hours. That might not be huge to a lot of people, but in this neck of the woods, we’ve just had a freaking stampede!
Wow!

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Get ready to pony up big time for all those domain names you own!

Posted by stuart as ,

Very interesting discussion going on over at at webmasterworld about ICANN “floating” the price of all those domain names you own. (I have 15 at last count)

I won’t bother quoting great slabs of text, you can go read the thread yourself, but this does raise some interesting issues for those of us who manage domains on behalf of others. I have five or six domains which I look after for clients, they just want to pay someone to “make a website, get a domain name, and put it online”. I charge AU$20 for this service at the moment, as the domain name costs me about AU$12 (US$8.50), and it takes me a few minutes to set everything up and delegate DNS etc.

How do I now explain to my client that ICANN has decided to charge US$150 per year for their domain registration from now on, therefore I have to charge them AU$200 for something which last year cost them AU$20? I know I can point them to the ICANN website, but then I have to go through all the bullshit of explaining that they lose all the SEO goodwill, bookmarks, backlinks etc if they change their domain name to “something cheaper”

The potential implications for the domain name market are staggering as well, imagine all those domain names flooding the market. I know I have a pile of domain names doing nothing at the moment, the ones I registered for a specific purpose, but never got around to doing anything with. If the price for me to re-register them skyrockets, I know I’ll be just letting them go.

As well as this, we’re all going to need to take a much closer look at the profitability of those AIS sites we have. No longer will a sites profitability be calculated by the simple old (profit=income-hosting-domain name), we’re going to have to factor in possible increases in the price of the domain name.

Scary times indeed.

Anybody wanna buy some slightly soiled domain names?

Don’t forget to pop on over to BlogWhore to list your blog for free to be seen by potential advertisers. No commissions paid - EVER!

Buy stuff!

Posted by stuart as

Mrs. PimpMyPageRank is an avid ebayer. Show me a woman with a fast internet connection and a VISA card, and I’ll show you a woman with a penchant for buying other people’s crap, and a bloke with an inbox full of “You have been outbid” notices.

I downloaded an interesting price comparison tool for her today, it’s completely free, as well as being spyware and adware free.

The cool thing I discovered about this tool is that you can actually compare ebay prices with prices at other online stores - so you can see whether you are being ripped off or not. It also tracks the time till the auction ends in real time!
Now for someone who’s trying to double their way to a million dollars, this is really cool, as I intend to (down the track, when I get up to a couple of hundred dollars) start buying things on ebay to re-sell offline. The ability to compare and track prices all in one place will be really useful.
This is actually a really impressive piece of kit if you do any sort of online shopping.

20 percent of my way to one MILLION dollars

Posted by stuart as

Well, not really. I’m up to step six of 26 on my way to my million!

I took my twenty cents from the previous step to my sister’s place for a coffee this morning, which she graciously exchanged for fourty cents.

I then took that fourty cents to dialysis this afternoon, and swapped it for eighty cents with one of the dialysis nurses.

w00t! I’m on my way!