Buying parked domains

November 15th, 2009

no-parking

This is a mixture of both how to buy parked domains and a rant about why I really hate domain parking. If you’re not in the mood for a rant, skip straight to the ‘how to’.

The rant

It really gets to me how there’s some great domain names just left parked for the sake of profit. It annoys me so much to see domains wasted that could be used for providing real value to people whether that be through shared information or the sale of products.

I know the domain name is just a small part of the equation and it’s the content you create that makes the real difference, but why should people be forced to buy obscure domains with a tenuous relevance to what the website is actually about when people are sitting on the really good domains and asking stupid amounts of money for them.

The internet is about freedom of information right? If so, we should be able to get the tools that allow us to publish that information at a reasonable price.

Personally, I think parking domain names without a legitimate reason other than to make profit should be banned. And anyone parking a domain for longer than 6 months should have the ownership revoked and their money refunded.

The how to

Don’t get too attached to one particular domain. If the owner is stubborn or greedy, accept that it’s time to let it go or you could end up spending an unreasonable amount of money.

Before you start contacting companies or individuals about buying parked domains, you should have at least 6 different domains in mind so you can compare the prices given to you and use it to your advantage to negotiate with sellers.

Browse to your chosen domain, sometimes you’ll see that the domain is up for sale and contact details or instructions of how to go about buying it are listed on the website. Other times, you may just get a holding page which has been put up by the company the domain was bought from.

If there’s no clear indication that the domain is for sale, do a whois lookup to try and find the contact details of the current owner. DomainTools is really good, there’s some interesting stuff on there. There’s one other way of looking for contact details if the whois information is incorrect or if the owner is using whois privacy. You can use the Wayback Machine to browse websites that used to be hosted on that domain name. On them, you might be able to find more contact details.

Don’t sound desperate for the domain or the owner will crank up the price. Just let them know you’re considering a number of different domains and would like a quote on the price. You could try searching for the domain on DN Sale Price to get an idea of how much the domain has sold for in the past.

Once you’ve negotiated a price and the sale has been confirmed, in most situations the owner will be reluctant to transfer ownership to you before receiving payment and you may be equally reluctant to transfer money to someone without a guarantee that you’ll actually received what you’ve paid for. In this situation, it’d be good to use an escrow service. Escrow.com and Moneybookers.com are couple of examples, I’ve never used either of them so do your research first.

Posted in Blogging |

Using H1 as your post title

November 12th, 2009

Incorrect post title markup is such a common problem with many Wordpress themes. And the use of <h1> to markup website or blog names seems to be a tradition that’s hard to give up.

If you think about the semantics of the HTML header tags <h1> and <h2>, <h1> is the main title of the page and <h2> is the subtitle.

So if on every page you have your blog name in <h1>’s, then semantically every page on your website is about your blog name, and your blog post just becomes secondary, rather than it being the true topic of that page.

There’s a problem. The post title is one of the most important pieces of information you can serve to the search engines about what an individual page is about. It should be marked up accordingly with <h1>, the most prominent header tag.

If you’re serious about SEO for your blog, you should be using <h1>’s for the post title on any page showing a single post. On static pages, your “About” or “Contact” should be in <h1>. While on a homepage showing multiple posts, it’s ok to use <h2> for each of the individual post titles.

So that might leave you thinking, “how should I mark up the title of my blog then?”. If you take a look at Darren Rowse’s problogger.net and Chris Pearson’s pearsonified.com, they’ve both used a separate <div> with its own id just for the logo itself, and in it put a link to the homepage. In the CSS, the background of the <div> is set to the logo of the blog.

The difference between them is that problogger has some text inside the link and pearsonified doesn’t. The text is then hidden using a text-indent: -5000px.

If you’ve noticed, my blog’s still incorrectly using <h1>’s for the name of the blog! I’ll be changing that soon.

Posted in Blogging |

Back up your blog, save your ass

November 11th, 2009

mule

It’s easy to back up your blog.  With a backup you can easily reconstruct your blog if anything goes wrong or jump ship to another hosting provider.

Back ups are essential in the corporate world of IT, so much time and money is put into ensuring there’s a reliable backup and disaster recovery system in place. In the world of blogging, its a rarely mentioned topic.

You should especially do back ups if you’re running a new-ish blog still on relatively cheap shared hosting. 123-reg, Bluehost, Gatorhost, whatever. You get what you pay for, and obviously if something goes wrong due to your fault or the hosting company’s, it’s doubtful they’re going to put in the time to recover your files.

Here’s a weekly back up plan for your blog that takes no more than 15 minutes to complete. Well worth it to save losing hours of hard work and leaving you looking as depressed as that mule.

1. Download your Wordpress export file

Under ‘tools’, ‘export’ in your Wordpress admin you can download your export file which will contain your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags.

2. Download all the files in your website directory

Download yourself a free FTP program such as Filezilla, set up FTP access to your webserver and pull everything off into a folder on your laptop/PC. If you don’t already know what FTP settings to use, check on your hosting provider’s website.

Okay, so the download may take longer than the 15 minutes, but once it’s started you can go away and do something else.

Posted in Blogging |

Wordpress permalink format for SEO

November 11th, 2009

Wordpress permalinks are important for SEO. The default permalink format is meaningless and should be formatted correctly to improve SEO and help readers more easily navigate your blog.

Get rid of dates, use categories and post titles instead

The default wordpress permalink format is to use post numbers, which is the worst option you could use. It can be confusing and isn’t very descriptive to the reader or search engines. Some blogs use the date along with the title of the post, which is slightly better.

To change permalink settings go to ‘Permalinks’, under ‘Settings’ in the Wordpress admin to setup your custom format.

The best option is to select ‘custom structure’ and enter one or more of the following:

%category% – displays the category the post is filed under

%postname% – displays a hyphenated version of your post title

%author% – displays the author of the post

When entering the custom permalink format, you have to include the leading and trailing forward slashes. So to just show the postname in the url, enter: /%postname%/

Wordpress is installed to the root of my website, but I wanted the blog to appear to be in a subdirectory. So my permalink format is /blog/%category%/%postname%/.

If you have multiple people writing posts for a blog, you could also try out %author% to group all posts by that author together.

Use hyphens instead of underscores.

Wordpress is good and automatically uses hyphens out of the box. If you’re using any other blogging software, ensure that individual words in your urls are separated by hyphens and not underscores.

The reason for this is that Google treats words separated by underscores as one word, while it understands that words separated by hyphens are separate words.

The problem with that is if you have an url that contains grey_cat, the page will only be returned if the user searches for grey_cat. However, if your url is grey-cat, the page is returned if any of the following are searched for: grey, cat, grey cat or “grey cat”.

And of course, if you write a really informative, relevant page on grey cats, your url could be irrelevant but still rank really highly due to relevant page content.

Matt Cutts, a Google engineer has written a more in depth article about it (hyphens, not cats) here.

Posted in Blogging |

5 reasons why a ‘make money blogging’ business is so attractive

November 9th, 2009
3684571169_aca07c8fa8

Why so many people are in on the ‘make money blogging’ game and the reality of doing it properly.

1. No initial investment required

Other than a few dollars to register a domain name and buy some cheap hosting for the year, there are no costs. Bluehost sell .com domains for $10 per year, about £5.95, and yearly unlimited hosting packages for $59.40. A total business start-up cost of $69.40 or £41.50.

As John Chow points out so often, the low barrier of entry for starting a blog has its downsides. Because there’s nothing to lose, what’s going to make you work hard at it consistently? If you had invested $100,000 in starting up your blog, would you still be treating it in the same half-assed way as you do today?

2. Work whenever and from anywhere

You could be anywhere in the world with a laptop and internet connection and still be able to work.

In fact, you can automate every Facebook update, tweet and blog post for the next 2 weeks while you’re away on holiday if you like. Write a bunch of posts and use Wordpress to schedule when they are published. Use Twitter scheduled tweets and Facebook scheduled status updates to promote posts.

As long as you put in the 42 hours of work before you go away on holiday, yeah you can automate it.

3. Seemingly little time required each day to maintain a blog

Spend a couple of hours a day writing a blog post or two, anyone could do that.

Then there’s guest posting on other blogs, networking, creating informational products, optimizing the website layout and content for SEO, and attending business events all to build traffic.

The money doesn’t come in just by writing the posts and sticking a few ads on the site. Still got time after all that to create a clear business plan and monetization strategy?

4. The bigger bloggers make it look easy to become an overnight success

Chris Brogan produced a great video series on this. Too many people start up blogs and become discouraged after a couple of months when they’re still only averaging around 20 unique hits per day.

The success of your blog isn’t 100% based on the quality of content. What use is good content if no one is reading it? It can take months of plugging your blog, establishing authority and reputation to build a following.

The reward of earning $40,000 a month from a blog comes after years of hard work.

5. No shipping costs, no production costs, no customers

Okay, so in a way you do have customers.

They’re the people who buy your informational products, click on your ads or buy other people’s stuff through your affiliate schemes. And you have to provide customer service in the form of answering emails and contributing to discussions.

But unlike other businesses there’s no need to waste time putting together quotes, tendering for contracts, and giving sales talks to clients who may never actually sign up for your service or buy your product.

Have any other ideas why?

Let me know on Twitter. Id be happy to make this 10, or even 20 reasons why blogging is such an attractive business model.

Posted in Business |

5 ways to make daily blogging quicker

November 7th, 2009

1. Keep a list of ideas
Keeping a list of future ideas provides you with topics to blog about on days when ideas on lacking. You can also write down lots of ideas without having to commit to finishing them straight away.

2. Make blogging a part of your daily routine
If blogging is your main source of income, this will already be the case. However, plenty of businesses want to start a blog, or already have one but don’t blog regularly because it takes time and doesn’t directly make money for the business. Instead of seeing a blog as just an ‘add on’ to your business and treating it with the least priority, include it as part of your daily work routine.

3. Write more than one post per day
Some days it’s easier to write than others. Take advantage of this by getting more than one blog post finished and keep them as drafts in Wordpress. On days when writing is more difficult or you’re short on time, use up one of your already finished posts.

4. Always keep a notebook with you
Ideas and inspiration can quickly come and go. Keep a notebook (and pen) with you to jot down ideas.

5. Read more
Books, blogs in your niche and completely unrelated blogs. Build your vocabulary, ideas and improve your writing style by reading more.

Posted in Business |

Achieving success in life at what you love – part 2

November 6th, 2009

Be consistent

We all have days when we feel demotivated but the best way to pick yourself back up is to just power through it. This doesn’t mean burn yourself out by over working but instead get yourself back into the positive mindset and have confidence that you’re making progress by persisting with your work.

Initially, your ideas of how to achieve what you want in life may be rough. But over time, as you start to learn what works and what doesn’t, you’ll be able to refine your techniques. The key is making the first step, and then continuing to make progression each day towards your definition of success.

Network

The best way to do this is to get out from behind the screen and go talk to people. Go to business events with a positive attitude and you’ll soon find someone with things in common. It’s good to promote your business too, but don’t over do it as people will start to feel like you’re there to sell to them rather than build a relationship. Build relationships first, selling comes later.

Networking doesn’t just apply to businesses either. They can be great for creating motivation and ideas when on a course or studying for a qualification.

Formal education vs. experience

“Just do it then” is the single piece of advice which I love giving the most. Especially when I speak to a college or university student who thinks the only way of landing a successful job, becoming a writer or learning a foreign language with the hope of one day moving abroad to teach is to complete a degree.

I’m not completely anti-university; I’ve a lot of respect for doctors, surgeons and dentists, to name a few. What needs to be decided upon is whether or not you could achieve what you want in a much shorter amount of time by doing it yourself right away, rather than through formal education. Does the subject lend itself well to classroom teaching, in my opinion subjects such as web design and IT don’t while science and medicine definitely do. Don’t let the drudgery of turning up to classes and handing work in on time kill your passion.

Posted in Personal Development |

Business Link event review

November 4th, 2009
business_link

Business Link run regular events to encourage new businesses and help support existing ones. Here’s a review of a Business Link event I went to called “business ideas”.

If you’ve never heard of Business Link before, they’re an organisation funded by the government to help support business in the UK.

I was sceptical at first, with it being free event, only lasting three hours and never having worked with Business Link before.

There was a mixture of people there, all at different stages in developing a business or becoming self employed and all with an interesting and varied background. It was interesting to hear peoples’ stories and discover how in a room of only ten people there can be such a wide variety of experience and skills.

The content was alright, but nothing new to anyone already reading into business and entrepreneurship. Some of the topics covered included SWOT analysis, finding the right target market, looking for new opportunities and writing a business plan. I recommend a copy of Duncan Bannatyne’s Wake Up And Change Your Life for more information on developing a business idea.

The handout was not so great, just a print out of the Powerpoint slideshow. It’d have been better if we’d have been provided with some details of books or websites for further reading on each of the topics discussed.

For example, OK, we’ve been told to do some market research, but what are the best tools and methods for doing so, and what books or websites do you recommend for market research? Again, we should write a business plan, but where can I find out what needs to be included in it and what are banks looking for in a business plan in order to approve a loan?

Overall, the event was well worth the time just for the networking opportunity for anyone currently in business or looking to start one and I’ll be keeping an eye on the upcoming Business Link events in sheffield. The best parts of the event were the interesting ad hoc discussions on real world problems that people were having. I came away with contact details of five really good people, who I’ll be keeping in touch with.

I think it’s important to remember when considering signing up for a course or event, even if the content isn’t so great, there’s bound to be people there with similar interests as you who you can learn from and exchange contact details with. It’s all about the networking.

I’ve booked another event through Business Link called “How to turn your Website into a Customer Magnet”, that’s on December 1st at The Source in Sheffield. It was fully booked nearly a month before the event and I’m definitely looking forward to it.

Posted in Business |

The economy, chickens and connectedness

November 3rd, 2009
chicken

You could ask how this financial crisis is going to change everything. There’s been plenty of others in the past but we just keep making the same mistake again and again.

And you know what, it probably isn’t.

The difference is that this time, people are more connected. Communities exist and are much more accessible than ever to allow people to share ideas. And as people share more and learn more, we’re starting to realise that there are alternatives to wage slavery, consumerism, the corporate life and everything else that fuels banks and corporate giants. There are options out there so that next time, you don’t have to be part of the mistake.

There’s some clear evidence that peoples’ values are changing. They’re taking more pride in becoming self sufficient, keeping chickens and pigs as well as growing their own vegetables and making jam. I think this makes a real statement of how people are searching for a simpler more rewarding lifestyle.

A person’s social status is becoming more dependent on their connectedness and less so on their monetary wealth or the amount of material possessions they own. Connectedness is all about the projects we get involved in, the people we know and the events we attend both socially and professionally. I definitely recommend watching this video on connectedness to get a better idea of what it’s all about.

People are starting to realise that who we are and how others perceive us is worth a lot more and is a much bigger indicator of success than our monthly paycheck. People are looking more towards ethical companies and those that treat their customers with trust and friendship rather than as a number.

Of course there will always be the people who give nothing back to their community, are 100% focused on profits at all costs and love the thrill of office politics. There always has been.

What we’ve learnt is that the economy fails us, and it’s no place to look for happiness. Invest time in yourself and others around you, not the economy. Give some value for free, stay connected and any negativity you have on the world around you will soon start to disappear.

Posted in Personal Development |

Achieving success in life at what you love – part 1

November 2nd, 2009
sky1

This was written with those in mind who were ever told they couldn’t achieve something in life, or for those who have an idea or an urge to do something but constantly second guess as to whether it’s actually a good idea or not.

It started out as a few ideas jotted down on paper then developed into a much longer piece than I expected. This is part one of a three part series. I’ll be posting the other two later on this week.

Deciding what success is

A large part of what success means to each of us has been learnt through social conditioning, tradition passed down through generations.

Go to college, learn to drive and buy a car. Get a degree and a good job, save up, buy a house, get married and have kids then retire with a good pension. That’s a lot of stuff to achieve just to fit in with everyone and still have the possibility of coming out at the end of it all with a feeling that something is missing.

By creating your own definition of success it will be much easier to achieve than trying to conform to that of others. You don’t have to be confined to the amount you earn or the title of your job. Because you have chosen for yourself what you need to work at or acquire in order to feel satisfied, it will feel much more natural carrying out the steps required in order to get there.

A big obstacle to overcome when deciding on your version of success is going against the lifestyles of our parents and grandparents. We’ve looked up to them all our lives, learnt from them what is right and wrong and now we decide to go against what they have taught us with the fear of creating disappointment. Every generation is completely different so don’t expect what worked for others in your family to work for you too.

Over time what you define as success may change in line with your values and beliefs, but always keep a clear mind on where you want to be. If you don’t decide what you want, you’ll end up with a lot that you don’t.

Make the first steps

If you make no effort at all to work towards your idea of success, there’s a 100% chance of failure. A lot of the time, people feel stuck in a position because they don’t know how to get out of it. First of all, do what you think might be the right thing to do. If that doesn’t work, try something else. The more steps you take to change your situation, the greater the chance of success increases.

Be positive

Positivity is reciprocal, surround yourself with positive people and you in turn will become more positive. Get back in touch with old friends, speak regularly with best friends and make the effort to meet new ones. It becomes all too easy to get wrapped up in yourself and spend weeks without speaking to certain people.

That motivational boost from some positive feedback on your work could be just what you need. Take some time out each day to speak to people, even if it’s only online. As you build up your authority and credibility in whatever area that may be, appreciate your followers and the ones that keep you motivated by staying in touch.

In the way that positive feedback can provide a boost of motivation and inspiration, negativity can have the opposite effect.

Pay no attention to people who criticize your current work or position, especially those who know nothing about your long term goals. I would go as far as saying aim to have no future contact with anyone who breeds negativity.

Pay full attention to people who have already achieved what you have set out to do. Read as much as possible about how they did it and emulate their techniques.

Read part 2…

Posted in Personal Development |

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