Internet Gangsters

The open-source ecommerce solution, Magento has just released a new version in time for all those online Holiday stores(woot!!).  You can download the update within the Connect Manager in the admin portion of Magneto.  It includes:

• Google Base integration
• Scheduled DV logs cleaning options
• Google Website Optimizer Integration

and more, its pretty slick, i sound like an advertisement - but im not, its that great.  Here is a fancy little video showcasing the Google Website Optimizer options within 1.1.7.

Full 1.1.7 Patch Notes here.

Who is going to be picking up some of these new .tel domain names? And yes, the article below is from 2006 when the .tel started making it’s move, but the sales are finally going to be happening. Check below for the dates.

An Internet regulator has approved the creation of the .tel domain, the company that proposed the domain announced on Monday.

Telnic, which proposed .tel to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 2000, said the domain will give individuals and businesses a naming and navigation structure for Internet communications.

The idea is for people to use .tel as a way of communicating directly with the person or company behind a particular Web site, using technologies such as voice over Internet Protocol, e-mail or Short Message Service (SMS). Telnic used the examples of AdamSmith.tel or Hertz.tel.

“The .tel domain offers the first genuinely different use of domains since .com was first created. It will provide seamless integration of existing methods of communication, with emerging technologies like voice over IP,” Telnic’s chief executive, Khashayar Mahdavi, said in a statement.

“The days of needing to remember several telephone numbers, numerous VoIP or instant message identities and other points of contact for our social and professional networks are over. By leveraging innovative DNS (Domain Name System) technology, the .tel domain will allow anyone to publish and control, in real time, how they can be reached,” Mahdavi said.

Telnic, whose mission includes developing a text-based naming and navigation system for Internet communications, hopes to start awarding .tel addresses in 2007.

A similar initiative, called ENUM, already exists. It uses an architecture based on the Domain Name System to resolve telephone numbers to domain name addresses.

Last week ICANN rejected the adult-oriented .xxx domain, a move that was welcomed by adult industry insiders but criticized by the European Commission, which accused ICANN of bowing to pressure from the U.S. government.

Sunrise Registration (Trademark Holders Only)

Pre-booking available Now to December 3, 2008
Sunrise Registrations open December 3, 2008 & continues until February 2, 2009

Landrush Registration (Open to Everyone at a Premium Price)

Pre-booking available Now to February 3, 2009
Landrush registration opens February 3, 2009 & continues until March 24, 2009

General Registration (Open to Everyone at a Standard Price)

Pre-booking available Now to March 24, 2009
General registration opens March 24, 2009

source: CNET

I just read an interesting article over at Tech Crunch about online ad growth grinding to a halt and at first it had me a little worried, but after I read what they were getting at, it didn’t bother me as much. The article is really short so head over there and read it really quickly, it’s more charts than words. First of all the article is only dealing with the 4 large companies, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL and we all know that you don’t rely on one type of ad on your websites to pull in the cash. Not to mention that the economy all of the world is in a steady decline right now and therefore not everyone can be pulling record profits like the oil companies. If you look at the graphs in the article, these companies are still growing, just not as much as they had the previous year. With everything that is going on right now in the world, I think any growth for a company is good.

Now I don’t rely on internet marketing and advertising as my sole source of income, if I did I would barely be able to afford the cost of cable internet every month, ha! While I do make a fair amount, I haven’t seen any decrease lately in sales due to anything outside of the time of year (my niche is a spring/fall type niche). Recently I’ve actually seen an increase in sales and income, but this could be due to the revamp of my site and the focus on SEO, but none the less, this proves that if you still work at it you will be able to pull money.

So don’t worry when you see articles like this one stating that internet advertising is in decline, focus on what you are doing and don’t stop working at it. Things will get better around the world and industries will thrive again, so why not get in on it now when other people are getting away from it.

source: Tech Crunch

One of my biggest money making websites had been on a “.info” domain for over a year and was pulling a fair amount of money. I know that “.info” domains are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to quality and they are usually picked up by spammers for cheap. When I initially started the website I didn’t anticipate the amount of revenue I could generate with it and therefore didn’t want to spend the extra money on a “.com”. This was a big mistake!

A dot com domain costs anywhere from $6-10 per year, depending on what GoDaddy promo codes you can dig up, where a dot info domain runs you $1.99 per year. I was trying to save money but had I known that meager $4-8 for the year would have had me pulling in much more money I would have done it right the first time.

Earlier this month I decided it was time for this .info site to get a makeover and a new domain. It was starting to become cluttered with ads that didn’t need to be there, information that nobody clicked on and so forth, plus it was out of season and I wasn’t making a lot of money. First thing I did was secured a brand new .com domain for the website, making sure to use a good keyword. After that was secured, I got a different layout going and setup everything how I wanted. I did a few tests to make sure everything was going well and setup all the plugins and other stuff I needed. Everything was done, I switched the RSS subscribers over the new site, the twitter feed, all I needed to do was make a post on the old site letting people know that we’ve moved and then start updating the new site instead.

Keep in mind that I hadn’t been making much money on this site over the summer, it’s off season for this niche. As soon as I turned on the new site and started making posts there I was getting a ton more visitors than I normally had gotten. I was coming up way higher in SERPs and getting more click throughs which in turn was generating more revenue. I also had more people signing up as followers on twitter and subscribers to my RSS feed. I was certainly happy with the way things were looking.

It’s been about 13 days since I’ve launched the new look/domain and I’ve made more this month than I did all summer. I can’t put a finger on exactly what caused the massive change in visitors, but I’m pretty confident it has to do with the the SEO tactics I’ve implemented as well as the dot com domain. People seem to trust a .com more than a .info. The site is also not cluttered with ads anymore, although there are still a few minor issues I have to fix. Overall I’m amazed at the turnaround of the site over the past few weeks and it seems as though it’s not slowing down.

So my advice to you is if you’re going to start up a website and are debating between a .info and a .com due to the cheaper price, I would always go with the .com (.net if you absolutely have to). Just from my personal experience this month I can tell you that you will regret it if you go with the lesser of the two.

I recently signed up to receive a free subscription to Website Magazine which is dedicated to bringing you information on Website Success. I’m actually impressed with the first issue so far. This month it has a lot of good articles on how to manage your PPC campaigns as well as some alternatives to Adsense. If you’re just getting into this kind of internet marketing it’s a good place to start.

You can get your free subscription over at their websites http://www.websitemagazine.com unless you live outside of the US, then it’s $49/year, sorry guys. It’s definitely an interesting magazine and although you can find most of the information on other websites and forums, it’s nice to be able to have something physical that I can take into the bathroom to read instead of having to lug the laptop in there, which is kind of gross.

Website Magazine

So im at a unique crossroads in which I have the opportunity to not only create, design and manage two large online storefronts, but im not getting paid in anything other than equity for both, so naturally, I’m trying to keep my costs low. Enter Magento. A rock solid, open-source alternative to things like CS-Cart, osCommerce and more. Not only is Magento free, but its a breeze to install, configure and update. No wonder it won Sourceforge’s “Best New Product,” last year. It can be downloaded and uploaded straight to your ftp, and with a few tweaks, you can have a running storefront within minutes (minus the incredibly long ftp upload times).

Let me sum it up in one sentence for you, Magento is a pretty hot situation.  Yes, I just called an open source, e-commerce solution a “hot situation.”  It has EVERYTHING the big dogs have, countless shopping cart features, multiple shipping addresses per cart, all kinds of reporting, individual product ratings, suggestions, up-sales and cross-sales, its basically wonderful.  It also is a breeze to customize when it comes to layout.  There are several places to procure fancy themes and plugins, some cost money and some don’t, but when you are getting the expensive part of this set up for free, you can part with some green to make the site look fancy.

Time to go play with the wonder that is Magento, Ill post more impressions tomorrow after I’ve become a bit more savvy with it.

Wordpress is an amazing tool if you want to start up a content driven website without having the knowledge to code something on your own. Actually, even if you do know how to code it’s a simple, quick and easy way to manage a website.

Wordpress can be used in two ways,

1. You can setup a free blog at Wordpress.com which will give you a web address of http://yourblog.wordpress.com, which you can have any domain forwarded to. This will allow you to have free hosting for your blog if you don’t want to spend the money right away.

2. You can download the Wordpress software from Wordpress.org and install it on your own hosting server. This will give you full control over all aspects of your new site. This is the method that I would recommend.

Once you have the Wordpress site setup and ready to go, before writing any content at all, figure out how you want to go about getting traffic to your site. At this point you should not be focused on making money, it will only discourage you when you don’t. You should already have some idea about what the site will focus on, since I’m assuming you either bought a domain or registered a free blog based on the topic you will be writing about. This article is obviously focused on bringing organic traffic to your new website using SEO and a few effective plugins for Wordpress.

Read the rest of this entry »

So I’ve had TTZ Media ads showing on my sites now for about 10 days and I must say they are doing pretty well. You can tailor the ads that show up on your site based on keywords, so most of the ads are always relevant to what you are promoting on your site. Each click seems to be worth a little more than adsense pays, which is nice, and people seem to click them a little more than adsense. I don’t know if it’s because they look a little different or what, but it’s working out pretty well. I’m going to start pushing it a little more on a few sites in place of adsense and see what sort of numbers I can pull through this month, but so far I am very pleased with the results and am in the process of replacing everything that used “shoppingads” with TTZ Media ads.

P.S. Stay away from shoppingads.com, they were good before a larger company bought them out and now I don’t seem to make anything off of them.

Alas! It has been sometime since I have posted on the greatness that is InternetGangsters.com but I do have a good reason.  Starting an IT consulting business is hard work.  One of the hardest parts being picking a name.  Since I started the business right out of college I was a bit more interested in coming up with a “cool” name instead of a marketable one.  After lots of thinking I came up with the name Chasing Squid.  Now, I know what you are all thinking right now. “Hot damn Michael, that is one of the coolest combination of two words I have ever heard!”  I agree with you.  However, it most certainly is not very practical.  Several of my clients asked me what it meant, and I wish I had a better answer then, “I just have a bizarre obsession with the giant squid.”  (I do, but this is neither the time nor place to discuss that wonderful sea creature)  Anyways, I was able to grab a good amount of clients out of the gate, most of them being friends of friends, so I initially wasn’t too worried that my IT company sounded like an expedition led by an old Sweedish guy.  Once it came down to getting new clients, Chasing Squid wasn’t looking so hot.  I had a sweet logo, pretty cool website(75% done @ www.chasingsquid.com) and a handful of clients but I wanted to grow.  So I had to think of a new name and completely rebrand the company.  As I sit here on Monday morning, I am deciding between a few different new names and I will keep you all updated with what I choose.

Lesson to be learned here: Think before you name your company. Pick something inline with the others in your industry.

So I signed up for a new ad service last week, TTZ Media. From what I understand it was started by John Chow of johnchow.com and actually pays quite well. It uses a pay per click business model similar to adsense, so anytime anyone clicks on the ads you make money. In some niches you can make quite a bit for each click and obviously in some you don’t make as much, but so far I feel like it’s working out much better than adsense has.

I have added it to a few of my sites so far and replaced a lot of my shoppingads.com banners with TTZ banners. So far I am pleased to say that it is working out well and I am going to add these banners to a lot more of my sites in the near future. So if you feel your site can generate some cash from banners that promote products, then check out TTZ Media.