I'm Write

As expected, once the full-time job started up again, it has become much more difficult to devote time to the Whirlwind Domains business.  However, some progress has been made.

WhyPark
After a slow start, October turned into a relatively profitable month.  The final total was over $3.  While this is a vast improvement over September’s paltry earnings, it’s nothing to write home about.  Hopefully the varied articles will at least be building credibility with Google and the other search engines.

Adsense
FreeMicrosoftDownloads.com continues to be the cash cow that keeps the business afloat.  Both September and October averaged just under $1/day in earnings.  I had hoped the addition of knopfler.info, which gets very limited traffic, would also generate some revenue.  But so far it hasn’t performed very well at all.

New Additions
At the start of November, I purchased HostTeachers.com and ProtectKidz.com off of eBay.  The idea behind HostTeachers is a free (with advertising) web space or a paid web space without ads.  We’ll see if it materializes.  ProtectKidz will be a collection of resources about online safety.

I found out that 1and1.com sucks as a domain registrar.  One of the auctions I won had the domain through 1and1 and stated you could register for a free account there.  It turns out after much searching around their confusing site that you can’t register for free.  Luckily, they had a sale on .info domains, so I’m now the owner of 1and1blows.info.  I had wanted 1and1sucks.info, but it was already taken.  Steer clear of 1and1.com.

I also purchased some turnkey sites off of eBay.  I’d like to maybe get an ebok store going, or add that functionality to LookaBookStore.com.

Development
FreeMicrosoftDownloads has gotten some minor tweaks and content added to it, mainly around Windows 7.

ProjectWiimote.com has been developed, but there’s something wrong with the jcore configuration that should be straightened out before further changes are made to the site.

That’s it for now.  Hopefully another month won’t fly by before I get around to posting again.

Well, its been a few weeks since my last post, and I’ve got exciting news to report. The dollar value of my WhyPark account has skyrocketed to $0.18. Yes, you read that correctly eighteen cents. The adsense account is doing a bit better though. FreeMicrosoftDownloads.com is averaging up to $2.00 a day in ad revenue. I’m pretty pleased about that.

I’ve also purchased (off of eBay) Knopfler.info. The winning bid wasn’t placed because I’m a big Mark Knopfler fan — I didn’t even know who he was before vetting knopfler.info — but because the site had some traffic to it and was an established site. So, I knew what those existing visitors were looking for from the archive.org entry for knopfler.info.

I also applied to be an eBay affiliate, but was rejected.  Oh well, I’ll just have to expand my amazon affiliate account from LookaBookstore.com to FreeMicrosoftDownloads.com (sell software) and Knopfler.info (sell memorabelia).

It’s also nice to see that Google has made some progress on Wave.  A while back I registered GoogleWaveTo.us and WaveTo.us.  Both sites are just parked right now, but are ready for when Google releases Wave to the public, instead of just a select group of beta testers.

Encouraged by my limited success thus far, I’m just going to keep plugging away at building some of these sites.

It was not a good week on eBay. I attempted to win a few auctions of (what I consider to be) really nice domains. Turns out other people thought they were pretty good too. My biggest disappointment was losing willshakespeare.com. But it jumped $350 in the last minute to sell for over $400. I don’t know that it was worth quite that much, but I’m a beginner at all of this …

I did win an auction for silentcollision.com. It has a small amount of traffic and some back links. But, I probably shouldn’t have bought it. I was watching two auctions and lost the first one so I bid on silentcollision. Oh well. I’ve got it parked at whypark.com for now.

I also purchased a script on eBay which automatically checks page rank, back links, alexa rating, etc.  However, I can’t get it to completely work correctly.  Parts of it are working.  What do you expect, I guess, for $2.25?  I’ll dig through the code to see if there’s anything I can do to fix it.  It’s taken over bofoo.com right now.

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I also read an article from the NY Times on how Google plans to make in-roads into the display ad business.  So, I jumped over to GoDaddy to see if anything related was available.  To my surprise googleexchangead.com and googleexchangeads.com were both available, so I snatched them up.  Hopefully, as Google’s initiative picks up its pace I’ll start seeing more hits.  These are also parked at whypark.com for the time being.  I hope to write some custom articles on their whypark pages to help in driving traffic to them.

Speaking of traffic, I’m starting to see some on freemicrosoftdownloads.com.  And, it’s not solely from me!  I’ve even made a little money off of the visits.  My total adsense revenue is now up to thirty-some dollars.  Of course, I’ve spent over $200 so far, but you can’t make money without spending some, right?  My total whypark revenue is at a whopping eleven cents (yes, $0.11).  But, I’ve only started it a week or two ago.  I do have thirteen sites parked with them now, so I hope to start generating more income fairly soon.

As promised, here’s a mini review of WhyPark.com, a domain parking site that has three levels of service.  I signed up for their free service and was prompted for the customary information (name, password, email, address, etc.).  After confirming my email address, I received a notice that I needed to supply five to twenty domain names that I owned which were not listed privately in the registrar.  WhyPark manually confirms these domains for additional account confirmation.  This additional confirmation was completed within one business day.

After full activation of my account, I was able to login and use the bulk setup feature on two of my undeveloped domains to quickly create some dynamically generated pages.  I then went back to modify the pages by adding custom text links and custom content.  There are a variety of templates from which to choose.

So far I”m happy with the servies offered by WhyPark.  Time will tell whether the dynamically generated content will move me up in the search engine rankings.  There are no contracts and it’s free.  So, check out WhyPark.com.

After much searching, testing, and internal debate, a script to power one of the recipe domains has been selected and installed.  I wanted to go with rbook, an open source recipe book on sourceforge.  But, I couldn’t get the required PEAR database component configured correctly (at least that’s what I think the problem was).   I also looked at cookdojo and really liked some of the features like printing note cards and creating recipe books.  However, after asking the opinion of the chef in the family, I was told those features wouldn’t really be used very much.

So, the winner (at least at this point in time) is maian recipe.  It’s got a snazzy flash picture slideshow and is pretty simple for the end users.  I wish it was more customizable in terms of themes and it had some of the features of cookdojo.  But, all-in-all, I think it’ll do the job.  It will still receive some tweaking, but you can find it at cookgf.com.  Drop off a recipe while you’re there!
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In other news, I’m looking at a way to better park some of my domains.  I’ve signed up for an account with whypark.com.  I’m going to use their free service to generate dynamic content for my parked pages.  I’m currently waiting for them to manually verify my account, so I’ll post later this week with a mini-review of their services.