Internet Gangsters

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

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 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.

In all honesty I never really understood RSS feeds. I always just saw them as a lame way to read a webpage without going to it. I mean why would I want to read some poorly formatted text version of a site when I can just goto the site itself and read it the way it was meant to be read… Well I still kind of feel this way, but even if I don’t really use RSS feeds that doesn’t mean that the people reading my sites don’t use them. And as I’ve found out, a lot of my readers do use my RSS feed to get the content from my site.

So here is what I’ve figured out, and it’s basically common sense but not everyone may think it will help, but trust me it does. Gather email addresses anyway you can. The easiest way I’ve found to do it for blogs is Feedburner.com they handle everything. They will take the url to your RSS feeds, give you a piece of code to put on your site, confirm email addresses and send out emails daily based on your updates to all of your subscribers. You can even tell them at what time you want the email to go out, it’s that simple and it will help you push your posts to people that may not come back to the site everyday to check for new posts.

I didn’t even think of doing this on one of my main sites, not really sure why, but as soon as I did it my conversions have gone up, I get more visitors every day and after about 3 months of allowing people to subscribe I’ve now got over 150 subscribers that get my emails every morning! If you read my previous post about my record days, this is the site I’m talking about, so it helps. You can also push affiliate links to all your subscribers and maybe get a bite or two, who knows, you’re not doing anymore work than you were doing previously with updating the site, so there’s absolutely no reason not to do this.

You can see an example of the feedburner subscription box in the upper right hand corner of this page and while you’re checking it out, why don’t you subscribe! It only takes a second and you will only get emails if we’ve updated the site here. So if you’re interested in what we’re doing here you might as well sign up, it doesn’t cost anything and you don’t have to remember to keep checking the site! Plus we’d appreciate it.

My previous record for a single day was back in February and it was around $185 or so over 2-3 sites (I can’t remember for sure). I was extremely happy when this happened, I’ve only been doing this stuff since last Fall and to hit almost $200 in one day already I was amazed.  This was achieved through a combination of affiliate programs over a few sites. I can’t give away all of my secrets/niches so I won’t tell you which ones, but most of the programs came from Commission Junction, Linkshare and one other affiliate network.

So after that day I figured I would drop back down to my normal daily range which is usually between $10-50 per day, but I was pleasantly surprised when the next couple days all averaged over $100 per day. So things were going well for a while and then, as I knew they would, things dropped back down to around the normal range.

So fast forward to last week while I’m on vacation. I had internet access and was updating my other sites while I was gone and it turns out one of those updates hit big! I made over $200 in one day, a new record for me! The actual number was around $203.xx and it was all from 1 of my sites!  I was ecstatic, especially since I wasn’t even doing “full”updates since I was on vacation, but either way it paid off. So now I had a new goal to reach, breaking $203 in a day, and it only took a week to do.

Yesterday currently stands as my most profitable day yet. I pulled in $215.xx in a single day on a single site! And it could even be more since Commission Junctions reporting is a little delayed I still don’t have the numbers from them. So overall, yesterday was a good day and when I have a good day it always makes me wonder how much I could be making if I spent more than an hour or so every morning updating the sites.

So with that in mind, I plan to try to update this site a lot more in the future and hopefully the things we write here will help you make some money on the internet as well. It’s not as hard as everyone thinks, but it’s also not a get rich quick scheme. It takes time to start building up money and figuring out what is working and what isn’t, which is why we’re here. We’ll try things out and let you know how they work so you don’t have to waste the time.

So if you haven’t heard of BANS or Build a Niche Store, it is basically a software/script that creates a storefront completely based on eBay links. It uses Commission Junctions affiliate program with eBay to give you commissions per sale. So basically you find a niche, purchase and setup BANS, tell the software what category to use on eBay to populate the store and that’s it. The software will automatically pull the sub-categories from eBay and populate the website with all the auctions that can be found under it. The idea here is to find a good niche, as always, once you’ve found that, the software basically does the rest. It has many good tools for SEO and to help your site gain some popularity. Some niches will produce sales as soon as you set them up and others will take some work. I purchased the software last week and have since setup 2 BANS sites. 1 of the site is based off of another site I have and gets most of it’s traffic (for right now) from that site. They are both in the same niche but cater to different parts of the niche. The other site I set up doesn’t seem to be doing as well, but I’m not going to give up yet, so we’ll see. In less than a week of setting up the 1st site, it has yet to make a sale, but I have a feeling that will change soon. So I will keep everyone updated on how this experiment is working out.

I just wanted to make a post about my best day so far, which was yesterday. Most of the money was made on one site, which was started at the end of December. I think I found a pretty good, unsaturated niche with a lot of potential for making money. It has only been averaging around 500-1000 hits a day, but I’m offering something that people will come back for daily, which is what you want to do. If you can gain loyal visitors that will continue to come back and use your site, then you’ll have that steady income for awhile. Now yesterday was in no way a ground breaking number, but being the best single day I’ve had so far.

For all of my sites I only spent about $8 on advertising through adwords and msn adcenter yesterday and profited ~$140. In one day for only about an hours worth of work updating all the sites in the morning isn’t bad. Hopefully this number will continue to grow and I can monetize this new site a little better to maybe pull a little more cash out of it, but I’ll keep everyone updated.

According to a study done by Starcom USA, 6% of people account for 50% of ad-clicks and banner clicks on the internet. They claim that it’s mostly users between the ages of 25-44 who live in a household with an income of $40,000 or less. These people are apparently more likely to click on ads about gambling, auctions and career services… It’s an interesting read and not too long so I figured you guys might want to check it out. Now if you create a site that doesn’t rely on banner ads to bring in revenue this wouldn’t apply to you, since if a person doesn’t know they are clicking an affiliate link/ad it’s not really the same.

source: Starcom MediaVest Group