Daniel Felice

July Mid Month Update

// July 13th, 2008 // No Comments » // Making Money

We are nearly half way through the month of July, so I thought it would be a good time to asses how my attempts at making money online are going for this month.

Based on danielfelice.com, this month has started strong. Hits are up by about 130%, and revenue so far is already way beyond what I made last month.

I have not changed that much so far this month. I am still using MarketLeverage and Commission Monster as my two main affiliate networks, as well as adding Domaining Manifesto and Blog Mastermind over the past week.

I have stopped using Bidvertiser as my main PPC provider, which I replaced with Google Adsense half way through June. Google Adsense hits have been fairly good in July, but is on track to be about the same as June if things don’t pick up for the remaining half of July.

I have not been happy with the quality of ads from both MarketLeverage and Commission Monster lately, so I am on the look out for a new network. The problem with MarketLeverage is that most of the top performing ads are restricted to an American audience, where as the Commission Monster ads are mostly aimed at an Australian audience. Hits are about 50/50 between users from Australia and the USA, so I need to advertise products and services that cater for a wider audience. I will continue to use Commission Monster for Nameseek as 98% of the audience are Australian.

I find that ads showcasing products based around blogging and domaining are bringing in the most hits, so if there is a product that I use and am willing to support, then I will look for an affiliate program related to it and blog about it to promote it. I am not into recommending products and services that I have not tried – and I would not recommend something I have not and am not using.

Hopefully things will continue to improve over the remainder of the month, and a few more affiliate sales won’t hurt. Hits are constantly on the rise, which is great to see – I must be doing something right!

Smart PageRank

// July 12th, 2008 // No Comments » // The Internet

I came across a website today that I think is a great resource for any webmaster – Smart PageRank. As you can guess by the name of the website, Smart PageRank tells you the PageRank of your domain name, or any other you choose to search on for that matter.

Not only does it tell you a websites PageRank, you can also get valuable information about how your website is seen by the search engines for both the www and non-www version of the domain name that is being searched.

Smart PageRank will tell you:

• Page Rank: Checks whether a PageRank is fake or valid, and also lets you enter your e-mail address to be notified when the PageRank gets updated.
• Age of the domain name: When the domain name was first registered. Age shown in YY/MM/WW/DD format.
• Directories: This will tell you whether the domain name has been submitted to directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo.
• Traffic: Traffic is determined by your Alex site ranking.
• Backlinks: Provides the number of pages that have backlinks to the domain name that is being searched.
• Indexed Pages: How many pages are indexed in search engines.
• Website Value: This tells you how much the domain name is worth based on all of the above statistics and also “other items that are not shown”. I am not sure what formula is used for this calculation.

As well as being a great resource for webmasters, domainers can also benefit from Smart PageRank. If you are looking and buying domain names and want to verify information given by the seller then this one website will tell you everything you need to know about the domain name.

I don’t think I would trust the “website value”, however the rest of the statistics shown are very valuable. Best of all is that it’s free!

http://www.smartpagerank.com

June Nameseek Stats

// June 30th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Projects

As the month of June draws to a close, it’s time to look over what was month number 1 for nameseek.com.au. After a few months of planning, the website was finally launched on June 2 due to a few delays. Hits were decent all month, and to be honest it went alot better than I thought it would.

In its first month over 700 unique visitors took to the site, totaling over 1000 visits, 6000 page views and over 17000 hits. I would like to say that the hits increased daily, however there did not seem to be any patterns. The weekends were slow, and Wednesdays seem to be the most popular, but apart from that there was hits were up and down all month long.

The majority of hits came from Google, with some from Yahoo! also. Top search engine keywords seemed to be  “domain aftermarket, “australian”, “nameseek” and “www.nameseek.com.au“. Other hits came from this blog, Australian Webmaster, NamePros and DNxpert.

As suspected, Australia’s made up the majority of the viewers, with the USA and Asia making up most of the others. A few hits here and there from Canada and the UK.

I am not going to bore you anymore with numbers. To sum it up, it was a better month that I thought it would be, hits were very good considering the site was not known until June 2. The daily average is good, and it seems as though there is some discussions about the site on a few domain/internet forums both based in Australia and around the world.

As far as revenue goes – well the site did not make any money this month from domain name sales. It still has not had its first sale, however from what I have seen over the past month since the auDA relaxed the domain name policy, the uptake to selling/buying .au domains has been fairly slow. I think it will take a good few months for the market to build.

I am happy with the first month and I look forward to July. If all goes to plan, the site will continue to build and generate interest, however I am making no predictions!