It looks like there could be a trend here — last last Thanksgiving the top domain sale was $52,000. Last week the DNJournal’s top reported sale was only $23,380. This stands in very sharp contrast with the previous week where Macau.com brought $550,000 along with five more domains bringing in six figures. I suspect this slow down had more to do with the recent TRAFFIC Silicon Valley conference than the recent holiday.

The journey to online success is travelled at a desk seated in a chair. That means long days sitting in the same position clicking and typing, again and again and again. After about a half day of driving this weekend I pulled a muscle in my neck, reminding me just how critical a good computer set up is.

When I really got serious about making money with website publishing I knew immediately that my existing set up was no good. The truth is you should be able to sit at your computer all day without pain (although frequent breaks are ideal, the reality is they don’t always happen.) Worse yet, continued stains often results in dreaded carpel tunnel.

If you are uncomfortable with your current setup, take a look at the steps I took:

For more very good info, with detailed about ergonomics take a look at OSHA’s Ergonomic Solutions page: http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/computerworkstations/

In December I posted a story of a Japanese bank employee who made a typo that resulted in $223 million of stock being accidentally sold. Today I’ve got a story from Indiana where an Indiana home was accidentally valued at $400 million. When the correct value was discovered it created an $8 million projected tax revenue shortfall.

Here is where the story gets wierd:

Lippens said the outside user changed the property value, most likely while trying to access another program while using the county’s enhanced access system, which charges users a fee for access to public records that are not otherwise available on the Internet. Lippens said the user probably tried to access a real estate record display by pressing RED, but accidentally typed RER, which brought up an assessment program written in 1995. The program is no longer in use, and technology officials did not know it could be accessed.

30 years from now, how many websites will have programs that their owners aren’t aware that they exist?

Is design a good business to be in? It seems everyone with a computer and a copy of Photoshop is a designer. That includes people anywhere in the world, be it downtown Manhatten or Bangkok Thailand.

Something thats been popular in webmaster message boards for a while now is logo contests. The way it works is someone says, logo contest, winner gets $X (usually between $100 to $300 max, sometimes lower.) They give a general description of what they are looking for and wait. If the payout is over $200 designers frantically submit their designs, usually filling up a couple of pages. The contest ends, and a winner is chosen by the person who started it.

The downside is, if you didn’t win you get no money (although you might get a job request from someone who liked your work.) Other than that slight upside, its a pretty crappy deal. Its kind of like construction companies bidding for a project, but they all have to do it and only one gets paid. Ok, there isn’t nearly that level of risk, but the point is the same. You are working for a chance to be paid. I could draw some comparisons to other “careers” like professional sports such as golf. However, in this case the stakes are a lot lower.

To me this process shows desperation on the part of designers. No legitimate search engine optimizer would ever agree to do the same, nor would many other service businesses.

If you want to make good money online its critical that you do something that is in high demand — and has a high barrier to entry. In this case the demand for logos is high, but the barrier to entry is low. A computer and a little understanding of art is all you need.

As a business owner you want to be in a position to benefit from cheap services, not be hurt by them. Today its logo design, tommorow it will be something else. There are major forces at work right now that are spreading wealth globally. To some people these changes are painting a dark future, to many more, its looking very bright. Over the next few weeks I will be blogging about how to welcome and benefit from these changes rather than fear them.

Straight from MarketingSherpa’s ContentBiz:

“By ContentBiz estimates, online publishers who placed Google’s AdSense contextual ads on their sites in return for a cut of the revenues, made about $1 billion last year.”

The cats out of the bag, web publishing is a legitimate business. And that $1 billion from Google is just one slice of a much larger pie; it doesn’t include the other ad networks or affiliate marketing. Together, those added billions more onto publishers revenues in 2005.

Heres how much I’ve spent on my newest message board to date:

1 copy of vBulletin leased License - $85
1 copy of vBSEO - $149
1 copy of Photopost PHP Pro Image Gallery software - $129

Thats $363 so far. I could have done mostly the same thing for free — but I’m no programmer (nor do I like to rely software thats vulnerable to hackers.) Taking the “free” route would actually take up days or even weeks of my time. Instead, I’ve been able to spend that time focusing my energy on making the board grow.

I am not saying that phpBB and other free software is worthless — far from it. This board was originally started with phpBB. I quickly rolled it over to vBulletin when I saw how fast it was growing. If you are considering starting a board (or lots of them) I’d recommend you do the same.

The truth is, $363 is an absolute bargain. The software is regularly updated, very usuable, and has a huge user base who develops plug-ins and modifications. Contrast this with dropping thousands on having custom software developed to do the same thing. On some level I wish I was developing sites ten years ago, but at the same time I’m very happy to be here right now instead.

Here is a good piece of anecdotal evidence from DNJournal’s TRAFFIC Silicon Valley article.

Bhavanie noted the incredible value of leads that can be generated from a good generic domain. His brother is involved in manufacturing in Asia so Bhavanie gave him a related lead that came through his CellphoneAccessories.com site. His brother told him that one lead resulted in more than $2 million worth of business in the last 8 months. On a PPC page, the click might have generated 10 cents!

In a few days I’m going to make a big post of the real evidence why developed domains are better than parked ones.

I’ve been predicting a strong year for the domain market for the past few months. As you may or may not know, I dropped several thousand dollars on a single domain right before this past Christmas (and its coming along better than I even imagined.)

Thats not to say that thousands of domains out there are overpriced. There is no shortage of terrible deals out there which are best avoided.

That being said, the already hot domain market is only going to get hotter. TRAFFIC Silicon Valley wrapped up, and DNJournal has an inside look at what went on.

While Marchex was the first public company to make a large purchase in this space (the $164 million buy of the Name Development portfolio last year), Bayme said giant media companies like Time Warner, Fox and Viacom could eventually enter the space as the industry consolidation that is just now beginning plays out.

There will still be a few years left where average guys can pick up really good domain names. Those days are passing. If you see a sweet deal, don’t hesitate to grab it.

Most search engine optimizers agree that .edu and .gov sites carry a lot of weight when it comes to link value. Presumably, sites, as well as links from, either domain extension tend to be pretty authoritative. If you look up a site on breast cancer, its probably going to be pretty acurate.

Today I ran into a story about a Northwestern University professor who told an Iranian newspaper that the Holocaust didn’t happen.

This was the part of the article that caught my eye:

Butz, a tenured Northwestern professor since 1974, is known for denying that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews during World War II. He promotes his views through his Northwestern-affiliated Web site, including a link to his 1976 book, “The Hoax of the 20th Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry.”

I did a search and quickly found his site, yes, on a .edu: http://pubweb.northwestern.edu/~abutz/

If someone who denies the Holocaust happened can get a page on a .edu site, theres a pretty strong chance that you can get .edu links to your commercial site, and get away with it. In fact, Jim Boykin often talks about getting .edu links on his blog.

I don’t think I’ve touched on security in this blog once. This is ironic, considering for many years I was a loyal reader of 2600 and had an almost obsessive facination with these issues.

Well, here is a good reminder of why you should take security seriously. Besides burning embassies, it now looks like Islamic hackers are targetting websites.

The number of Danish websites alone - those carrying a ‘.dk’ suffix - knocked offline in the past week numbered 578 between 30 January and 6 February, according to Zone-H.org, a cyber-crime observatory that tracks website defacements. Hundreds more websites of European, Israeli and American companies and private citizens have also been defaced during that period, with the vast majority occurring after the re-publication last week of the cartoons in European newspapers.

As a publisher, the most important thing you can do is regularly back up both your website files and databases. If you are using cPanel you should be able to download an entire dump of all your files in a couple of clicks.