I’m not a big fan or English or Grammer. I find the rules anoying and restrictive. I am a lot more interested in ad copy and writing to sell. That being said, it doesn’t hurt to know a few things about words.

There are a lot of domain “investors” with absolutely horrendous portfolios. Lets call them domains that stink. If you visit the appraisal sections of domain forums (Domainstate, DNForum, NamePros) you’ll see a more than a few of them. I’d venture to guess stinky domains waiting to be appraised outnumber good domain names 20 to 1.

Here is my theory about what happens. A would be domain name investor reads an article in Business 2.0 or the Wall Street Journal. Thinking, wow, if Word.com sold for $1 million (totaly made up, not sure what it sold for) then ExcellentWord.com has to be worth more than the registration fee, right? And if thats so, what about 123word.com, abcword.com, eword.com, and valuableword.com?

Once and a while stinkers do make money, but its not often. Most of them used to be existing websites with real backlinks — that holds value to search engine optimizers reguardless of the domain name. If you can afford paying $6 a year for hundreds or thousands of domains, go ahead. If you are on a budget it pays to hold out for those needles in a very large haystack.

A general rule of thumb: If your domain name is a made up word or a phrase that no one uses, its value is questionable (with the exception of short .coms) Sometimes something as simple as making it plural can land your domain in this category (e.g. petmice.com vs petmices.com.)

Great domain deals are hard to find. When you do find one chances are high its going to be for 4 or 5 figures, not 2.

I like ideas with hard data to back it up. Here is a tip that can make you more money with minimal effort.

Over at ForumTrends.com Chris Kenworthy wrote that he found out Firefox users are almost 3 times more likely to click on Google Adsense link units on the very top of a page than IE users. Why? Because Firefox users use tabs.

I have been using horizontal Adsense link units for a long time. They perform very well despite sending users to a pretty ugly page and requiring two clicks for monetization rather than one. Personally, I would love to see Google allow Adlink integration like they have done with Adsense for search.

Last month I posted this — “I decided to see how much money I could make by devoting the entire month of August to building affiliate sites. The goal is to work 7 days a week, devoting no less than 10 hours a day to this. Not much to report other than my shoulder and back are killing me right now.”

The results: I didn’t meet my 31 day goal for August, but I broke it and flew past a few days later. I am not going to publish numbers; I will say its definately enough to live on.

I did a few things with Azoogle earlier this year so this was not exactly my first run at affiliate marketing. Additionally, I have run PPC campaigns on Adwords since mid 2004 (with mediocre results.) So to be fair, if you have zero experience in this industry there is a path to be traveled.

Despite focusing on affiliate marketing right now, my long term goals still involve building profitable internet properties.

There are good reasons to expand your knowledge base of making money online. I think I have pointed this out before, but this industry is very segregated. On occasion you have a few people who crossover, dig deep, and reap the profits. At a quick glance, how many “adsense emperors” (you heard it here first, 0 results in Google) are making money from affiliate programs? Or how about domainers, making 10 or 20 cents a click when the traffic buying is bringing in $10 affiliate commisions?

It pays to focus on something specific and get really good at it. The thing that really sticks out to me is how many people in these segments sub-industries of online marketing think the other parties have some racket going on. After all, how many years have we heard about “domain squatters”?

Bottom line — keep learning. Get out of your comfort zone. Find out why and where your revenue is coming from. If you are making money from Adsense, learn about your top advertisers. If you are already successful at web publishing chances are high you can make a lot more money with a little extra work.

I feel like my posts have been weighing too much toward social networking and Web 2.0 lately, but I couldn’t pass this story up. The founder of Mixi, a Japanese social networking site saw his company Tokyo Stock Exchange today making him an instant billionaire.

Online communities have are very vulnerable to geographic segregation. While Myspace dominates the US market, Orkut owns Brazil, and Bebo the UK. eBay owns the US for online auctions, Yahoo owns Japan. Whats the point? Don’t think that just because one company dominates the US market you can’t compete elsewhere.

Kenji Kasahara has now made a lot more money than Tom Anderson or Intermix made from Myspace (assuming that share prices don’t drop like Vonage.) Shoemoney made a good point on his radio show this week. You don’t have to come up with a brilliant idea to make a lot in business. Find out what works for someone else and do it better or tailor it to an underserved market.

AOL is now providing free e-mail addresses on domains it registers at the user’s command — at no cost.

You read that correct, anyone can go to domains.aol.com enter a new domain name and AOL will register it for them if it is available. The catch is AOL owns it, not the user. John DeMayo speculated how AOL could turn a profit on a move that could cost them millions of dollars. I have a few different ideas on how this could help both AOL and impact the domain name market.

First, AOL is making use of an SMS confirmation to use this service. That would make it very difficult for spammers and blackhatters to abuse. (Hmm, wonder if someone has patented this idea yet.) Besides being an effective anti-spam tool could AOL use this number for other commercial means?

Second, how could this impact the domain name market? My guess is very little for most name niches. However, this could have a huge impact on entertainment and human name domains. I’d like to take a look back at this in a year and see how many domain names AOL owns.

Via PaidContent:

“Universal CEO Doug Morris described these sites as “copyright infringers” during a Merrill Lynch investors’ conference speech on Tuesday . “The poster child for (user-generated media) sites are MySpace and YouTube,” said Morris, according to a transcript obtained by Reuters. “We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars….How we deal with these companies will be revealed shortly.””

My prediction: In 20 years News Corp will still be around. Within 15, the big record labels will not be.

As you may or may not know, Google offers a domain parking service for high-traffic domain investors. As an Adwords advertiser a lot of traffic comes from these sites. While some people consider a web site with no content but ads a con or scam, I have found domain traffic to work modestly well.

Since some of my campaigns do particularly poorly in either search or content, I will often change my bids or turn one of the networks off completely. My question was, does Google’s domain parking traffic qualify as the search network or content network?

Here is the response I recieved:

Thank you for your email. I understand that you would like to know if AdWords ads syndicated through Google’s domain parking qualify as search network or the content network. Please note that ads syndicated through Google’s domain parking qualify for both search network and content network.

Google AdSense for domains is part of Google’s family of monetization services that enables effective and legitimate distribution of your ads. It has been proven to deliver high quality and high value traffic to advertisers. Like all our ad solutions, advertisers are only paying for the actual click generated once their ad shows, not for the impression.

Being on both the publishing and advertising sides of the playing field gives me a two-viewed approach to these issues. On one hand, as an advertiser I would like to be able to pick and choose traffic channels very specfically based on how the traffic converts. Since AOL traffic converts great, being able to bid double what I pay on Google’s SERPs could help increase my profit margins.

On the publishing side of things, I don’t want to miss out on potential income because a really picky advertiser thinks my site is ugly. If all traffic is created equally then I can increase my income by sending lower quality traffic to advertisers in volume.

Thats not all. Some publishers are concerned that a massive volume of Myspace traffic (thanks to a billion dollar deal signed with Google) is going to drive down their revenues. PPC advertising is a real market and more inventory between the same number of buyers will impact your revenue.

Traffic discrimination based on the source is an interesting issue. Whether you are an advertiser or a publisher you don’t have a whole lot of choice. Google is looking at these issues from one perspective — their’s.

I just read this post on A VC titled YouTube’s Potential Revenue. I was thinking about posting a comment, but decided to turn it in to a full blown post on my blog.

On A VC Fred speculated that YouTube could right now make a potential of $153 million net revenue a year. Sounds reasonable. However, this number is based on these assumptions: that 80% of the videos are monetizable (ie, no copyright problems) and that YouTube would make an average CPM of $15. Ouch.

First, how about that 80% number?

I have been looking at YouTube a little closer recently, specifically at music videos. I have not yet not been able to find a music video on there. Every single obscure European black metal band I can think of — its there. That is telling me that YouTube is more than the Napster of video. YouTube is more like the illegal Wikipedia of video content. Granted, it would be a lot bigger if they still allowed lengthy videos instead of clips..

Tracking down and striking liscencing agreements with all of these video copyright holders is a huge deal. Often in content production and liscencing agreements concerning the distribution mediums allowed. That means if something goes on DVD as opposed to broadcast TV, contract terms change. Throw in to the mix thousands upon thousands of independent content producers over a period of decades. Its a brutal mess. There are libraries of content — videos, movies, games, music — that is dead simply because no one even knows who owns them anymore.

Ok, now this $15 CPM number. I’m thinking it would probably average out to a few dollars. I don’t know what percentage of Youtube is international traffic. I suspect some “hot” content or geotargetted ads could hit $15, but average that out with everything else — its not happening anytime soon.

My numbers — 15% of YouTube’s content is monetizable. A generous CPM of $2.50 is given. Total revenue from advertising is $6,159,375.00. After bandwidth and other overhead YouTube is deep in the read.

The key here is how much of the corporate branding dumb money YouTube can get. The big spenders can waste $15 CPM. Performance marketers watching their ROI can’t.

From News.com – “Xanga.com, a social-networking and blog site, has been ordered to pay $1 million in a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.”

Scroll down to the last page:

“In response to the settlement, Xanga CEO John Hiler said in a statement that many of the 1.7 million “under 13″ birth dates may have actually referred to pet birthdays, engagement dates and “born-again” dates for religious bloggers. Nevertheless, Hiler’s statement also announced that Xanga is initiating new rules and standards to make the site better attuned to child safety.”

Thanks US Government for keeping our kids safe online!

The past month or two I have been focusing heavily at affiliate marketing. I hope to use some of what I learn to be a better, and more profitable, publisher.

Some people seem to think Adsense is just a scam. Articles in Business 2.0 and other mainstream channels recently have painted a picture of lazy web millionaires filling their bank accounts up with revenue from pay per click advertising. Adsense and now the Yahoo Publisher Network have supposedly created an easy path to wealth for basement entrepreneurs building an “adsense empire” (I *explative* hate that phrase, by the way.)

Mistakingly, many believe that ad buyers are being had. Even pay per click marketing books and turtorials tell buyers to seperate their Adwords search and content bids — so you can lower you content bids.

Surprise, I have found traffic from the content network often converts better than search. Pay per click may very well evolve in to a cost-per-action market. Google certainly would not mind it, nor would publishers.

If you are interested in increasing your online revenue, be it through publishing or affiliate marketing, join me and my friends over at the WickedFire.com Internet Marketing Affiliate Forum.