Are you afraid to involve other people in building your websites? Don’t be.

Recently I worked out a deal with an artist to lease his work. It was a very, very good deal. Had I custom commisioned this work without letting him know what it was for it probably would have cost me thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of dollars.

This wasn’t just a good deal for me — it was a great deal for him too. Because he agreed to help me out now thousands of people are being exposed to his work and his name.

It is clear to me that this guy is going to be successful in his career. When I first started looking for an artist I e-mailed many. I told them I was looking for commision work and would pay them up-front. Only two artists ended up sending me work. The other guy gave me his art for free — because I told him about the site.

I am more than happy to help people who want to help me. As a website publisher you have the ability to reach audiences that are unreachable to the average person. That is your leverage. Don’t under estimate your site’s value — it goes far beyond the average CPM Adsense or Fastclick gives you.

You heard it here first! The million dollar plus domain market is still alive and well. Back in 2003 men.com sold for $1.3 million. Here’s a general rule: 3 letter domain names, worth a lot of money; 3 letter domain names that are a word, probably worth over a million dollars.

The guys at paidcontent.org are unhappy. Today the Wall Street Journal reported on a possible iFilm buyout by Viacom, a story paidcontent.org broke. Not a bad thing — expect the Wall Street Journal didn’t credit paidcontent.org.

They have every right to be angry. I had a similar experience happen to me several months ago. A TV station’s website posted an article (which I suspect was on their local nightly news broadcast) The article contained a direct quote from one of my websites which I had personally written. How did they credit me? As a “website.”

Online writers have been breaking stories since Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky - President Clinton story on drudgereport.com. (To be fair, the networks were sitting on the story at the time and he decided to let the whole world know about it.) Today the tables are turned and “big media” is regurgitating the stories that online bloggers and publishers are writing.

Getting credited in a major newspaper or other news media provides a huge amount of credibility to your website and maybe even a temporary boost in traffic. As an independent web publisher you need all the free publicity you can get.

Established “old media” companies are all struggling to succeed online. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has been on a shopping spree this summer. First they dropped $580 million on Myspace.com and then $650 million on entertainment-network IGN.

The Wall Street Journal has been successful online for a very long time. It would be very unfortunate if their new strategy is to take all the credit for themselves and ignore the independent guys doing all of the work.

(update: the WSJ has issued a correction for this story)

Domain Name Journal lists Lofts.com as the top selling site last week at $100,000. WebDesign.co.uk came in at #2 with $45,000. Oddballs include WoodenSpoons.com for $2,988 and WettingTheBed.com for $2,174. Getting a good domain for under $10 is getting harder every day.

Every good entrepreneur has an exit plan. If you want to sell your business and retire in 5 years you will run it differently than if you plan to retire 30 years from now.

I’ve never asked any fellow web publishers what their exit plan is. Judging from their attitudes I think I think its fair to say that most would like to see their current revenue grow and continue on until they die.

For me, I have seen my revenue grow anywhere from 25% to 30% a month this year. At that growth rate it won’t take me long to reach every single one of my life financial goals.

I don’t think it is realistic for me to expect this kind of growth to continue indefinitely. In fact, it is already showing signs of slowing down. Unless I build some new sites that can really bring in killer traffic my income is going to plateau and maybe even drop.

Most independent web publishers rely almost entirely on free search engine traffic to make money. If the traffic dries up so does the money. For this very reason many web publishers keep their day jobs (along with the fear of being booted from Adsense.)

Due to this instability the re-sale market for content-based developed websites is weak. There are a few exceptions to this. First, premium domain-name sites such as men.com which last sold for over $1 million; second, just plain huge websites (such as IGN and Myspace which each sold for over $500 million this year.)

Personally, $500 million sounds like a great exit plan to me. I suspect most website publishers are too preoccupied with “the next Google check” to even consider making this a goal.

I believe that the domain-name investors are dead right when they talk about the concept of “virtual real estate.” Web sites have a real future value just like any building or plot of land. In the last decade the value has grown at near hyper-inflationary rates. Perhaps you could even compare the dot com bust to a mini-great depression.

Until now it has been the premium domain names and mega-sites that have shared the majority of internet real estate’s value.

I think that might be changing. Take a look at these tools at Jim Boykin’s SEO blog. Here is a tool which displays the top ten results on Google and include the website’s date. Its clear that age plays a big role in search engine ranking. If you want to be on the first page for “poker” on Google you might just be better off buying a site that has been around since the late 90s instead of starting fresh.

So, do you have an exit plan?

Keeping up with one or two blogs is no big deal. If you are like me and read about 30 blogs a day things can be a little bit difficult. Sign up for a free account over at Bloglines and you can view your subscribed blogs all in one page.

Bloglines conveniently shows you a list of your blogs with numbers by any blogs that have been updated since you last read them. This can cut an hour long blog-reading process into 10 minutes a day.

I’m sitting here trying to think about something catchy to say for the first post of this blog. Instead I’m going to cut to the chase — I made this blog to help independent website publishers be successful.

Before I get started I want to send out a special thanks to Chris at Website Publisher and Brendon at Tailored Consulting. These guys have been a great inspiration and help to me (and hundreds, maybe thousands, of others) since I’ve started building websites for money.

There are plenty of other people who have been just as helpful and I’ll be sure to plug them in the future