DomainsBot Labs has published some interesting domain name data. They’ve found out some interesting stuff such as, “Two-keyword domain names gain in value as they grow longer, up to about 11 characters, then descend in value.”

One of the most interesting, and perhaps most useful, is their “average value by keywords” chart. Average value for a one-keyword domain? $3,289.

Also worth noting, is their split it tool. There are a few website owners who probably should have used this tool.

Several weeks ago a CEO of a magazine contacted me requesting help getting traffic to their newly re-launched website. I’m not going to say the name of the magazine, but its a magazine I’ve enjoyed reading most of my life.

I did a little research on their business, asked them a series of important questions, and then made an offer of what I could do for them.

It was not cheap, but it was quite reasonable considering their goals. I offered to write a custom report for them and provide a full month of follow-up support.

The CEO’s response was that they could find this information for free on the internet anyways.

He was 99% correct.

I am entirely self-taught. With the exception of a few print books, nearly all of the information I know is gathered “for free on the internet.”

But there is a catch. I run and own my own sites. That means I am able to read free information — and then test those things out.

Here is some of the information that is available for free online: stuff that used to work, stuff written by amateurs who are regurgitating something they read somewhere else, stuff that is completely made up, stuff that is illegal, and stuff that is disinformation created specifically to stifle competition.

This isn’t like picking up a college textbook. It never will be. The online world changes daily. Google’s engineers decide they don’t like something, bam, a year of search engine optimization in the trash..

Because I’ve been doing this for a while, and because I have my own very profitable websites, I am able to seperate the garbage from the truth.

The answer I got from the CEO is partially my fault, I don’t think I communicated this message as clearly as I could have.

Fortunately with a little bit of work they will be able to find this information out. In fact, just by contacting me, I know this guy was looking in the right places. This blog hasn’t been around for very long and only a select group of webmasters and internet entrepreneurs know about it.

The unfortunate part is that its going to take them time to figure this stuff out. Can they afford to spend another year or more testing things out to figure out what direction they should be headed? I don’t know.

I don’t make a living from consulting. I am, however, happy to help people who ask for help. If you have a quick little question and I know it off the top of my head, you will probably have an answer in 24 hours. But, if you want to know how to make your website #1, and I am going to have to put all my other work on hold for 2 weeks to answer it, that answer isn’t going to be free — but I guarantee it will be good.

Making sure you aren’t breaking the law isn’t easy. Making sure you aren’t breaking the law in every country in the world is downright impossible. For web publishers who want to safely travel abroad its a serious issue — unfortunately the issue just got a little more complicated.

Declan McCullagh has an interesting article over at CNet’s News.com concerning an international cybercrime treaty. The treaty allows foreign nations to investigate other country’s citizens.

Requiring dual criminality would let the FBI investigate actual transnational crimes, such as computer intrusions and virus creation. But trumped-up offenses, like a blogger “questioning President Putin,” would not trigger U.S. aid…. Unfortunately, neither the Bush administration nor the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been willing to make that change, calling it too “rigid.”

Its clear to me that the current U.S. administration wants to see expanded personal freedoms in countries such China. In other cases, they’d like to see much more (ie: North Korea and Iran.) Other countries aren’t nearly as bad, such as Russia, but still apply strong pressure to critical voices, often resulting in the use of the law to silence these voices. Its no secret, dissidents are using the internet to communicate. That makes them cyber criminals.

Here is the problem — according to the treaty “the FBI must conduct electronic surveillance “in real time” on behalf of another government.” So what happens if I want to start up a website on human rights and China decides I’m a criminal? I’d like to know, because as it stands right now, I’d be an international crook.

I’ll take it a step further, why should your money (whether you are a U.S. citizen, or a citizen of another country which has signed this treaty) be spent to enforce another country’s political speech laws?

You might have noticed that I pay close attention to Rupert Murdoch and his company, News Corp. I do this for a very good reason — he’s been on a billion dollar online spending spree this year, snapping up monsters like MySpace and Gamespot. If your serious about this biz you need to listen to the people who can buy you out.

In this article from Australian IT (a News Corp owned publication) Murdoch goes talks about the slow deflation of print and its loss of relevance to those under 30.

Murdoch said internet development was his top priority. It was not a panic reaction, he insisted. “It was a very careful strategy … if you take the number of page views in the US, we are the third biggest presence already.”

I like to read magazines. My two favorite are Wired and Business 2.0. Besides being entertaining they are jam packed with valuable and relevent information for online entrepreneurs like me.

There has been a lot of discussion about the article on domain investing in this month’s Business 2.0 came in the mail. There was another article that caught my attention even more.

There was a very revealing interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In it he discussed Google’s “70-20-10″ rule. That is, 70% of time is spent on their core business (Adsense, Adwords, and Search), 20% spent on related projects (Froogle, Google Local, etc.) and 10% spend on new businesses (Blogger, Google Talk, etc.)

After reading the article I divided all of my projects and businesses into 70 - 20 - 10. 70 is very clear to me. There is a single site that is doing very well. I had a little trouble with the 20 and the 10. Clearly my other sites fall under the 20, but what about my consulting and design side-jobs? From a revenue standpoint, my consulting and design jobs might even belong in 70.

I am going to be testing this rule out. Already, I have made some big changes in my priorities. I’ve been spending too much time focusing on things to bring in additional revenue rather than the things that are bringing in the majority of revenue right now.

The bad news is, this blog falls under catagory 10. Considering there are other projects under 10, that means this blog comes closer to 2% or 3%. That means out of a 14 hour work day I can’t even spend 30 minutes on this blog. Just writing this post has used up all of my time. Since today is Thanksgiving here in the US, and I have to take a break to go eat turkey, its going to be more like an 8 hour work day.

Think about how you can apply the 70 - 20 - 10 rule to your business. (and pick up the newest copy of Business 2.0.)

So, you are making money at web publishing — now you want to sell products online. Where do you start?

Lucky for you, Chris Beasley made a very comprehensive post about this on his Sitepoint Website Revenue Strategies blog! Besides being a very successful content site owner Chris also runs a successful e-commerce site and is expecting lots of sales this Christmas season.

I often recommend people to first try to find out what is made in their area. If you can work with a local manufacturer you’ll have a tremendous advantage. You will be able to save on freight costs, thus making it easier to compete on a price basis. You will also be able to keep less inventory on hand, because the manufacturer will be so accessible to you. Finally you might be able to cull a special relationship with the manufacturer to get further discounts and or first notice of new products.

This isn’t exactly breaking news, but Google implemented a new option to make it easier for advertisers to bid seperately between search pages and the content network. This news isn’t really revolutionary either. Before, you could bid seperately but it meant setting up two seperate campaigns and opting each out of the other catagory.

JupiterResearch has posted a graph advertisers bid preferences when Adsense first launched. At the time 56% said they would pay less for content ads, while the rest said they would pay the same or less.

The question is, are these answers still relevent? I don’t think they matter. There are so many variables in effect now, including smart pricing, that “opinions” don’t really matter any more — conversion rates do. Of course some advertisers pay little attention to conversion rates. I wish I had some data on this, but I don’t.

Its a wide open question as to what effect this will have on publisher revenue — if there is even any effect at all.

I’ve noticed that this blog seems a little bland with its lack of images. I recently started adding royalty free photos to one of my other blogs and, visually, it makes a big difference.

I was searching for Google Press photos to use for the last post. To me, none of them seemed even close to fitting the story.

Being a blog about digital web publishing, most photos would look out of place here. Perhaps thumbnail screenshots of sites will have to do.

Over the past year there has been a lot of discussion of what Google is up to next. In certain ways Google seems to be an open company — yet in other ways, very secretive. Today I read a very interesting article by Robert Cringely entitled “Google Mart.” If you are curious about Google’s long term plans, you need to read this.

Wonder why Google has bought up thousands of miles of dark fiber? No, Google doesn’t want to be a super ISP. According to Cringely ISPs profit margins are too small — and this just isn’t what Google is good at. Instead, Google is going to be using the fiber to create a redundant internet & locally host web-based apps (hello, AJAX.)

Google is manifesting all the hype we heard back in 1999 about the web changing everything. The difference is, this company really is doing it. Scary? Good? Bad? Downright ugly? You decide. For me, Google is where my paycheck comes from. Right now, I’m leaning toward good.

Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound. Take Internet TV as an example. Replicating that Victoria’s Secret lingerie show that took down Broadcast.com years ago would be a non-event for Google. The video feed would be multicast over the private fiber network to 300+ data centers, where it would be injected at gigabit speeds into each peering ISP. Viewers watching later would be reading from a locally cached copy. Yeah, but would it be Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime? It doesn’t matter. To Google’s local data center, bits are bits and the system is immune to protocols or codecs. For the first time, Internet TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still offer soemthing different for every viewer if they want it.

Tony over at HookedOnGolfBlog.com is happy about Google’s page caching. His server’s hard drive crashed. His recent back ups weren’t recent enough, and he was having a hell of a time getting everything returned to normal. After loading Google’s cache of his site he was able to copy over the newest code and recover his site’s settings back to normal.

You don’t realize how many times you tweak a site like this in between backups