Though, I am not a Christian, as a family man with kids, I love the Christmas Holiday. I like to thank all my neighbors near and far for putting up all the beautiful mesmerizing Christmas lights. My wife and I drive the kids around the neighborhood every night looking at the Christmas lights. It is one of our favorite thing to do around Christmas. I also like to thank all the radio stations for playing Christmas songs. It makes me happy listening to Christmas songs. Finally, a heart felt THANK YOU to Bass Pro Shops for the free photo with Santa. We take our 2 toddlers to take a photo with Santa every year. Christmas 
is a wonderful magical time. Hope everyone has a happy and Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas…Merry Christmas…Merry Christmas…HoooHoooHooo…..
I have always wanted to announce to the world how grateful I am to America. Now that I have my own blog I can!
I am a man who hardly cry. I did not shred any tears even when my dad passed away (God bless his soul). Yet, I sobbed and get goose bumps when I hear patriotic songs like America the Beautiful. She is indeed beautiful and generous! As a child of a refugee family who came to America in the 1980′s with nothing, I can speak to its greatness and had experienced its generosity many times over.
Thanks for the roof over our head, the food on our table, and the freedom you provided. Thank you American. May you live Eternally and shine a beacon of hope in all dark corners of the world. God bless America – My country, my home.
Image Credit – Life.com
It has been a few days since I wrote my last post. I’ve been busy with work, and trying to build out a network of websites. It’s really hard work. All things considered, my day job is by far the easiest route and most financially rewarding. Unlike working for others, hard work does not guarantee financial success as a web entrepreneur. Nevertheless, being an entrepreneur is the only way to gain any sort of control over your financial future. Beside, I already have one boss at home, I really really really don’t need another one. Anyway, I digress.
I read an article tonight from the HuffingtonPost and there is this one website I’d like to profile. It is an insurance lead gen website — ZipQuote.com. According to Alexa, it is ranked in the 3 millions and it has so little traffic that Compete.com does not even have its stats. Yet, according to the site owner in the article, he is making between $500-$1000/month. Not bad at all. And, according to Google, there is very little search for its exact keywords: “Zip Quote”.
You key in a zip code for a given category (home insurance, auto insurance, life insurance, etc.) and it display a list of providers. The listing is powered by Sure Hits, which is a well known lead gen ad network for insurance and loans according to my research. It seems pretty straight forward. For those of us who want to try out monetize with a lead gen website. This one seems to be a good fit to model after. In fact, if you like the website design/template, you can contact the designer to see how much it cost. Do share with us what you find out. Good luck!
As a web and WordPress newbie, one of the thing I had a hard time figuring out is what WordPress theme is suitable for me. Like you I wanted to minimize my learning curve and try to spend most of my time on the “making money aspects” of the web.
Today, after procrastinated for many days from developing a new website other than working on my blog. I found out there is an extremely easy way to search for free WordPress Themes without having to use Google.
Sign on to WordPress’s Dashboard, and goto -> Appearance -> Themes -> Click on “Install Themes” and select the features for the theme you are searching for. Yes it is that EASY!!
Here was a theme that I found and installed by using the above feature filter to narrow down the ones that I am interested in. The theme is call Suffusion and it is by far the most sophisticated and elaborate free theme I have seen. Check out what you can do with the header and footer. It’s beautiful isn’t it? I hope this help. Now lets go and create a nice website to make some money.
P.S. I think when we had achieve some success we should donate some of our knowledge and money to those who had help us on our journey to be web entrepreneur.
To use an analogy. Web hosting is like a car, while the domain name is like a custom license plate. You change car, but still keep your custom license plate. When the police pull you over, he will be able to get your information based on your custom license plate number.
You register your domain name with a registrar like Godaddy.com, but you do not need to host your website with them. I thought it was a big hassle to register your domain name with one company, and host your website with another. In fact, I didn’t even know that was possible. I know – I am a real newbie. But, in fact, it is very simple to host with any company. Just goto your domain registrar account and change the NAME SERVER to point to the hosting account’s server name (which is given to you when you sign up with a hosting company). It is like going to the DMV and letting them know that you have changed car.
I recently moved my blog from Godaddy to HostGator. It cost me about $10/month, but my site is a lot faster and I can host as many websites as I want on this one hosting account. I used to pay only $4.50/month with Godaddy. But it was really slow to the point that it wasn’t usable and I can only host one website. I am very happy with HostGator. Its interface is clean and most importantly the speed is fast!
It took me a long time to decide to move away from Godaddy. I even call Godaddy to ask them what needed to be done to speed up my website. The only way was to upgrade to a dedicated server (which means yours website has the server all to itself), which is very expensive! A blog like Pooruncle.com in this early stage does not need a dedicated server. I just needed the response time to be fast whenever one of the few hundred of my readers is browsing my blog.
With my new found hosting speed and unlimited website hosting, the future of my internet venture in domain name investing and website monetizing just got a lot brighter.
I have read a few articles about determining the web sites valuation. I found these articles and the follow up comments to be useful and want to link them for future reference.
Expert Discusses How to Sell Developed Web Sites.
One of the more interesting sessions during the recent Epik Developers Conference was about selling developed web sites. David Fairley, who operates a web site brokerage, explained the fundamentals of buying and selling established sites.
1. Cash flow the site produces (net profit or EBITDA)
2. Organic SEO rankings
3. Traffic stats
4. Cash flow and traffic trends (is it growing?)
5. Business model (ecommerce, dropshipping, affiliate, ppc)
6. Domain name (high quality generics add some value)
7. Average sale on your site
http://domainnamewire.com/2010/09/29/expert-discusses-how-to-sell-developed-web-sites/
At What Revenue Multiple Do You Sell a Website?
http://www.elliotsblog.com/at-what-revenue-multiple-do-you-sell-a-website-9477
Quick update: I spotted on one of the automatic websites valuation that my bargain deal site, bargainsaddict.com, is worth a whopping $603,918! Anyone interested in buying?
I came across a few articles and blogs written back in 2005 and 2007 which seem to summarize the genesis of the domain name industry. I think it’s a great collection of writings to keep as a reference as we web newbie dealt into the world of domain name investing. The last link is an exclusive interview with Frank Schilling posted yesterday. He talked about the current state of the domain name industry.
Masters of their Domains – by Business 2.0 on December 2005
Forget condos and strip malls. Domain names, the real estate of the Web, have been delivering far greater returns. How some of the savviest speculators on the Net are making millions from their URL portfolios. This article was written back in 2005 on Business 2.0.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2005/12/01/8364591/index.htm
Giving the Audience Its Own Domain – by Business 2.0 on March 2007
Richard Rosenblatt helped broker the $580 million sale of MySpace. Now he wants to build millions of sites like it – this time, in vertical niches.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/12/01/8394990/index.htm
The man who owns the Internet – by Business 2.0 on May 2007
Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you’ve never heard of, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Here’s how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm
Making money on domain names: dirty business or brilliant strategy? – by VentureItch on Mary 2007
http://www.ventureitch.com/?p=161
The Domain Game – by David Kesmodel 2007
Find out how an array of dreamers,wildcatters and misfits became rich on the real estate of the World Wide Web. The Domain Game is a 209-page book that chronicles the exploits of the world’s leading domain investors and explains how you, too, can make a foray into this fast-growing market.
http://thedomaingame.org/
Interview with Frank Schilling on the current state of the Domain Name Industry – by IDNBlog on September 2010
http://idnblog.com/2010/09/28/exclusive-qa-frank-schilling/
Here is a step-by-step guide to create a website (blog) like PoorUncle.com with all its functionalities and ad placements. It involved absolutely no programming! PoorUncle.com is powered by WordPress 3.0.1, Mystique Theme 2.4.2, and 11 Plugins.
1. Once you have registered a domain name and bought a hosting account, Install WordPress with One-click Hosting Applications. This step may take up to a couple of hours before it is installed.
2. Sign in to WordPress Dashboard, ie. pooruncle.com/wp-admin.
3. Install Mystique Theme for FREE: Appearance-> Themes -> Install Themes-> by search for “Mystique”, then click install.
4. Install Plugins: Plugins-> Add New -> Search and install each of the following plugins:
a. Ad Squares Widget
b. Akismet
c. Contact Form 7
d. All in One SEO Pack
e. Google XML Sitemaps
f. Really Simple CAPTCHA
g. Tweet Blender
h. Tweet This
i. W3 Total Cache
j. WordPress Related Posts
k. WP-PostRatings
(I will keep updating this post with all the remaining steps, until it is complete.)
When I got interested in domain investing and domain monetizing a few months ago, one of the first websites (blogs) I visited was DomainNameWire.com. The blogger (author), Andrew Allemann, mainly writes about domain news; and his niche is in policy and legal issues. I think he is well respected in the domain industry and a lot of domain investors frequent his website for domain news. If you want to make serious money from advertising on your blog, I think you should study his blog. I don’t know him personally. But just by reading some of his posts and being around his website for a few months, my impression of what made his blog *successful are:
1. The ability to write well.
2. Writing posts in a news reporting format.
3. Concentrate on a Niche within an industry.
4. First to break the news.
5. Ability to attract domain investor readers, hence, attract advertising dollars.
Some stats for your reference: According to Alexa, site has been on line since early 2005, traffic rank in the 16,000′s, has over 900 back links. According to Compete, site has between 40K-80K unique visitors a month, and over 200K visits. Top 3 refer sites: Google (17%), Domaining (7%), TheDomains (7%).
Here is the potential monthly income based on DomainNameWire’s advertising prices. Given that most of its ad space is sold, the potential monthly income is quite close to the actual projected advertising income, AND that’s not including other income generated from the website like affiliate commission and income from its News letters.
As you can see from my very first website, it was really ugly and not very functional. Not to mention, it was a real pain to maintain. I kid you not, it took me half an hour to post one deal. When I first started I’d just go to deals2buy (my favorite deal site) and look for deals that was appealing to me and belongs to a company that I have an affiliate relationship with. Then I’d log in to my affiliate network account (either Commission Junction or Linkshare) and try to find the affiliate link to the deal so that when someone click on the link it would take them to a web page where the deal was displayed. That wasn’t very easy to do. A lot of time, I couldn’t find the deal link and the search on the affiliate network tend to be extremely slow. I will write another post regarding the difficulties I had with setting up and running a deal site.
I manually post deals on my site off and on for about a couple of months, while looking for an alternative. I knew there was something called Web CMS (content management system), but I wasn’t sure how much it would cost or how much effort is needed to install it. From my midrange I.T. background, every piece of software was custom install and it tend to cost a lot of money! So I wasn’t optimistic about finding an affordable solution and be able to install the software easily.
In general, when I don’t know about something, I have the tendencies to read up on all the different products and solutions out there. (I think most of us do it the same way). As I started researching, I found that there was tons of free software out there. The amount of free software I found on line was just incredible. My concern and experience was there always is a learning curve with any new software and the installation is always a real pain in the butt.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I read up on this free software call WordPress. It was a free blogging web software. It wasn’t a CMS, but a lot of people use it as a CMS. It was really popular from what I read. It sounded like a winner, until I read the installation instructions, which included: uploading the software to the host server, creating tables, setting up configuration, etc. Well, I barely learned how to register my domain name and only have some vague idea what a hosting server was. To install WordPress manually was not something I was ready to do. I downloaded the software to my pc and sat on the installation instructions for weeks.
One day, I was playing around with my hosting account on Godaddy and saw a tab called applications. When I click on it, I saw a whole bunch of FREE software I can install. And, the beautiful was, it does it automatically. No need to manually create tables, no file uploads, no configuration. Most web hosting companies offer this feature..and it is called: “One-click Hosting Applications”.
If you have GoDaddy hosting, goto Hosting Control Center, and click on “Your Applications”:
One-click Hosting Applications: As you can see WordPress is the first application on the list because it is the most popular! Just click on it, and tell it where to install. (For example for this blog: to install it at the root directory, would be /pooruncle.com or inside at a sub-directory, would be /pooruncle.com/blog. At first I tried to install it inside a sub-directory. But for some reasons I couldn’t get it to work. But at the root directory it works fine and that’s probably how you want to install it.)
Hope this is helpful for some of you. It’s really easy. Let me know if you have any problems. You can install a whole bunch of stuff. For example, you can install WordPress in your root directory, then install a Forum in a sub-directory. I didn’t install a forum on this blog. But I installed a forum on my deal site.
Here is how my deal site look like. Thank you WordPress, and thank goodness for One-click Hosting Applications.
