I just noticed an article on domain name traffic on Sitepoint. If you have any intention of buying a website or undeveloped domain in the future its worth your time reading this article.

Without access to the logs, it can be difficult to determine if a domain is receiving paid traffic, but a savvy domain buyer will look for a few key pieces of evidence: do the domain statistics align with the Alexa ranking and the number of incoming links?

If you’ve been a web user since the mid 90s chances you’ve heard of The Well. What exactly is it? It is one of the oldest online communities thats still around today. Right now Salon.com owns it, but they want to sell. My question is, how can a digital property that is over 20 years old only be worth $200,000?

To me, it looks like a clear cut case of the owners failing to innovate while everyone around them was. Behemoths of today might be the money hemorrhaging hot potatoes of tommorow.

One simple pill to kill your future success? Being horrendously search engine unfriendly. Too bad the site’s owner doesn’t read my blog or bothered to invest $79 for Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.

Just like any other business, growth is not guaranteed. Watching your search engine traffic grow as you sit back in your chair can lead to this illusion. The reality is more site owners are learning about search engine optimization every single day. That means you have more competition. You don’t need to watch your stats daily, but you need to monitor your long term trends. If you wait until your uniques start dropping off, it might already be too late!

Here is a cool video to check out if you have some spare time — Multi-Touch Interaction Research by Jefferson Y. Han at New York University. Not directly related to Web Publishing, but it will give you a picture of where computing could be headed, say, 10 years from now. Very cool stuff, looks just like from the movie “Minority Report”

Wonder why your not being indexed by Google? The answer might be something that even I couldn’t guess. I’ve never heard this one before, but at least one host is blocking Google bot access, by default.

Whether its The Rich Jerk, SEO Book, or the biggest secrets to making money online you can learn it for free. Thats right, there is no reason to buy any e-books, go to an expensive marketing seminar, or pay a consultant in this business. 99% of the skills and tactics that have made online entrepreneurs millions can be learned for free on blogs, in forums, and in personal conversations.

But there is a catch!

Catch #1 — its going to take you a while. I spend hours every single day reading blogs, forums, magazines, and case studies. It would be a lie if I said I spent less than three and a half hours on an average day reading! Thats not all — its taken me years in order to reach the point where I can consume and use this new information I learn daily. If you already have another full time job, this will not happen over night.

Catch #2 — harvesting the truth from a field full of misinformation, and disinformation can kill the novice. What do I mean by kill? I mean send you in the wrong direction, steering you far clear of success. The reality is there is a lot of garbage out there. Until you personally can test out that information, it is very difficult to seperate fact from fiction.

There is a way around this.. thats figure out who really knows what they are talking about — and listen to them. And even that is no easy task.

You may have heard about Howard Sterns half a billion dollar contract with Sirius. An article on MSN Money points out this is about $93,000 an hour. Think thats crazy? Oprah’s deal with XM satellite radio works out to $705,000 an hour. Even after staff and production costs, this is a lot of money.

In the United States, if you make $93,000 a year you are considered very successful — if you make $705,000 a year you are at the very tiny top of the iceburg. Few people even think about bringing in that kind of revenue an hour.

Why did I bring this up, and what the hell does it have to do with web publishing? Here is why its important — your name matters. Howard Stern and Oprah aren’t the only people who have been able to create massive leverage through their own name. Sport stars, musicians, and celebrities do it every day simply by appearing or endorsing a product. But your not a celebrity, and neither am I.

Here is what you should learn from this: don’t forfeit your name for a quick buck. You might be trading a quick $100 here and there today for an easy $100,000 5 years from now. The internet is filled with here today, gone to tommorow “gurus” who are more than eager to sell low-quality products to boost their short term earnings. You might fall for buying their e-books once, but you won’t a second time. Do any of them stop to consider how much more they could make developing and endorsing high quality products? Instead of slash and burn customer aquisition they could build up a portfolio of clients who earn them revenue again and again.

Oprah’s loyal viewers watch her TV show, buy books from her bookclub, and subscribe to her magazine. This would never happen if their first “Oprah” experience was a bad one.

I’ve been tempted to link to products on my blog with affiliate codes or do link exchanges, but up until now, I haven’t. Does it matter? May be not, but for an extra couple of hundred dollars a month (if even that), I’ll pass.

Here is my advice for you, do something only the ultra-successfull have figured out: invest in your name; it will pay off exponentially for years to come.

I was trying to find ImageShack’s website today. Instead of typing in the correct url of ImageShack.us I entered in ImageShack.com. The result was the best looking parked page I’ve seen yet. It took me a couple of seconds to say, hey, this is just a PPC page!

Gone are the days of the blatently obvious domain parking page. Its becoming more common for these sites to have actual logos complete with photographs and other images. More examples: GermanAutos.com and FurCoats.com. What else could domain portfolio owners do to increase their earnings without developing the domain?

If you want to learn about what web-based analytics software is available out there, check this article out at Conversion Rater.com.

Right now I’m using Google Analytics for a couple of my sites and AWStats for the rest. I actually used to use Urchin but my host changed ownership and they dropped it. Regardless, knowing what pages people are viewing and what visitors are converting is critical for any serious publisher or e-commerce site owner.

From Paidcontent.org:

…an interesting experiment from Harper Collins: it is putting the entire contents of a book online for free — but with ads, along with an Amazon affiliate link for those who want to buy the hardcopy.

Its a business book, The New Entrepreneur and they are using a mixture of Yahoo and Google Adwords. As a publisher, how would you compete if it became common place for print publishers to put their books online? (in a very indexable and search-engine-friendly format, I might add.)

If your semi-active on any webmaster message board you’ve probably seen some talk of The Rich Jerk. The common webmaster pays little attention to e-books about getting rich online. So why is “The Rich Jerk” so controversial? Its the attitude in the sales letter. How many sales letters or infomercials have you read where the writer openly insulted the reader?

Another interesting observation, his customers only forum currently has 6,241 registered users. At its current price of $49, that means he’s made at least $305,809 from the ebook. Assuming that not all of his customers registered it could be a lot more. I think that it used to sell for around $100. If the last two facts are correct, he’s probably earned in excess of a million dollars from the e-book.

What do I think about “The Rich Jerk”? I haven’t read it — but that doesn’t mean I haven’t learned anything from it. Most importantly I’ve learned the importance of trying out new things — even if they seem outrageous and stupid.

So who is The Rich Jerk? Here is something I posted in a recent Digitalpoint thread that no one seemed to care about — “The Rich Jerk” looks mysteriously like the legendary Leisure Suit Larry.

Edit: I didn’t factor in his affiliate sales either, which could take away another half of the profits.