I’ve recently reserved some other domains which hopefully will fall into this category and they are:

Vonca.co.uk
IronmanComics.co.uk
OffersandDiscounts.co.uk
Snogged.co.uk
TheSpermBank.co.uk

At the moment, there are just holding pages up for these domains and content will be added shortly. The holding pages plus the links above will allow the sites to be picked up by Google, and the content and Adsense will get it ranked hopefully quickly for keywords.

Your website should have detailed stats to allow you to see visitors numbers and cross referencing should allow you quickly pickup on big changes in traffic.  Some people say that you shouldn’t check your stats every few hours, and I’d agree or you’ll start to get paranoid - but checking once or twice a day won’t do any harm.

I tried a little experiment on one of my sites which in theory should have boosted traffic, but infact it had the opposite affect.  The experiment was to change the Title Tag and Meta Description of the pages to all upper case text.  So when my site appeared in the search results, Google would have shown this text in upper case for my site.  Users would have seen the uppercase text and their eyes would have been drawn to it.

Within about 3-4 days of implementing the change (across all pages on the site), traffic dropped by about 40-50%.  I kept it going for about another 10 days just to ensure that the peak/trough wasn’t down to something like good weather and people being outside enjoying themselves and not using the internet as much.

When I reversed the change so that the Meta Description and Title Tag fields appeared in propercase, within about 10 days traffic went back to the same level as before - phew!

Although I’d lost Adsense revenue during that period from having less visitors, the leads to sales conversion rates actually went up - so I was getting better quality leads - just not as many.

So I think the moral of the story is that if you do big changes to your site that search engines would notice, then check your stats regulary to assess any negative impact on traffic to your site and act accordingly.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been extending my portfolio of domain names and the chance of registering a good domain name is quite rare as millions of domains (even .UK domains) have already been registered.  LLL or three letter domains are extremely scarce and even if they don’t make sense, e.g. UZK.com, then they can still go for money.

A lot of people reserve domain names, and loose interest or forget about them and when the domain comes up for expiry, they let it lapse and after a period of time, the domain gets deleted and is available to reserve again by anyone.

Existing domain names will have a history, potentially back-links from existing websites and other “factors” that can be of value to a new owner.  They may want to quickly get traffic and start earning money from it (see my article on lots of sites earning £1 per day).

Some registrars (e.g. Network Solutions, Nominet) provide services that allow people with a technical background to programatically do the same as what you can do to check domain names but hundreds of times per minute.

I spent a few hours this weekend developing some program code that uses Sockets to look for available domain names (I’m being deliberately vague with some details as I don’t want to give away too many secrets), and after finding a dictonary of words, I was able to scan over 26,000 terms/words in just under 30 minutes and see whether the domains were already registered and give me a report on what was available to register.  One word domains are often valuable and one of the ones I’ve just reserved is snogged.co.uk.

What I’m now able to do is to extend my little program to check for when existing domains expire and get deleted and then try and reserve those domains..  The technique is known as Drop Catching - effectively catching/reserving a domain as soon as its been dropped/deleted.

One problem I do have is not enough time to try all these things out, but with more domains being reserved each day, the number of good domains not already registered is diminishing fast and anything you can do to give yourself a headstart is got to be worth a try.

What makes me say this?  Well I subscribe to 40 or so blogs, and my RSS reader lets me know when they’ve been updated.  Its quite nice to “feel” that there is something new to read - but 98% of the time I’m disappointed.

I think in the last week alone, I’ve seen a handful of new blog entries entitled something like “10 things that bloggers must do”, and “10 things you need to do to become a fulltime blogger”.  Virtually all of the things that bloggers write about are regurgitated.

Having said that there are a few what I’d class as good bloggers who don’t rewrite what someone else has previously written and pass it off as their own.  These people don’t post something just so that they a post in that day.  Each blog entry is informative, but ultimately different - either giving their viewpoints on a controversial subject, or giving advice.  Well done to all those!

Before I get any comments, I know I probably fall into the 98% that I talk about!

works by storing anonymous tracking information in the web browser of the user’s computer. Operating in this way means the tags cannot be blocked, as cookies can.

Its apparently available immediately, but looking at the “get links” for several merchants, there doesn’t seem to be any difference in the links that are generated. 

I’m intrigued as to exactly how this new tecnology works and if anyone knows, please leave some comments.

It happened a few minutes before 1am on 27th February and there is no mention of it on Sky, BBC News or any other of the online news websites.

There could be complete cities flattened across the UK - but none of these websites have any update.  Perhaps I’m expecting too much for things to reported that quickly online - 15 minutes later I suppose may be a bit quick if they need to validate any reports before it gets published.

I’d say it was about a 3 or 4 on the richter scale and lasted about 5-10 seconds - although it had a few seconds build-up too where I thought a lorry had come to park next to me!

UPDATE: I’ve just seen a site appear on Google which details that the earthquake was a 4.7 and 6 miles underground… The co-ordinates are 53.32N, 0.31W which looks to be near to Lincoln in North-East England…  More info here and map below.  Initial mention has just also appeared on the BBC News website, but remember where you heard it first!

View Larger Map

Some more info can be found on another blog at http://johnleach.co.uk/words/archives/2008/02/27/300/

Check out Road Traffic Problems which is updated in real-time 24×7 with details of delays or problems on the motorways, A roads and dual carriageways in the UK.

How is it different?  Well its no hastle - simply a list of traffic problems around England and Wales.

But with Christmas soon to be out the way should you sit back and do nothing until autumn next year? 

Think ahead for the other big events where gifts/purchases are made - such as Valentines Day, Mothers Day, Fathers Day or Easter.

Without functioning DNS servers, people typing in www.company.com for websites hosted with 123-Reg would fail - so even websites would be up and running, there wouldn’t be a way of getting to them.  According to a statement from a 123-Reg representative, the problem occurred due to high demand on the servers and then hardware failure.  I think customer’s frustration was exasperated by the fact there was no-one you could contact to get an update.  No phones answered, nor messageboards/forums updated.  Problems happen, but I would have expected a multi-million company such as 123-Reg to have hardware immediately available to replace ones that fail - I’m sure they will from now on though!

For people running websites on those servers that couldn’t be reached, the results were disasterous.  As its now the end of November - well December in about 2 hours - ecommerce sites are getting busier and the last 6-8 weeks of the year are the busiest with sometimes more sales generated than the rest of the year.

So downtime of 48 hours can cost money.  A very good blog that I read called Self-Made Minds is run by two UK based lads who detail what they are doing to make serious money online - not through running ecommerce sites, but through affiliate marketing.  Al is current hitting the $1000 barrier each day through Google Adsense (with other incomes streams too), so profit wise he could have lost out on $2000+.  Some relatively modest websites that Zarr have developed and host are turning over £5000-£7500 per day and making 40%+ profit on those sales each day

My dad has always said that if something looks to good to be true, it probably is.  So with 123-Reg’s hosting at a few pounds a day, you get what you pay for - well thats just my opinion anyway.

If you are looking to host a web, the advice I would pass on is:

1. ask for customer testiimonials, or speak to their existing customers as their experiences and comments could sway you.

2. ask about uptime % or availability.  If they guarantee 100%, then they are lying!

3. Ask what methods are available for you as a customer to speak to someone technical who can help you if you get a problem.  If they say its purely email support, then that should ring an alarm bell - are you too important to speak to?

Good luck!

Alternatively there are several auction sites that auction existing domain names to the highest bidder and I noticed today that Christmas.co.uk is on sale for £12,000 - and I suspect the bidding will go much higher. 

That may seem like a lot of money, but over the last few months, records have been broken in the .UK domain world with fly.co.uk selling for about £85,000 and recycle.co.uk sold for £150,000.

For Christmas.co.uk, I’d guess its too late this year to get anything worthwhile revenue from it - although I’m sure a PPC campaign could do quite well if the content of the site could be generated quickly enough.

But baring in mind that the new owner could then have 9 months after this christmas to perfect their site, put on a lot of content or products to sell, or link through to affiliate programmes - next christmas they could make some serious money and could make back their investment easily within the first year.  From that point onwards it could be a real money generator.

If only I had £12,000 to spare, I’d be queuing up to buy it…