I'm Write

By gar, it’s been a while.  It looks like this blog has been picked up by Google.  Search for “im write” and I’ll be fourth on the list.  Yea!

I’ve been looking for new hosting lately and actually purchased a too-good-to-be-true plan off of eBay (2 year reseller account for $3.20 total).  Yeah, idiot that I am … didn’t stop to think about that one.  Turns out the seller was from South America and his eBay account was deactivated a day or two after my purchase.   Definitely not a good sign.  At least I’m only out $3.20.

So, I’ve been looking on various we sites at reviews of some (hopefully) more reliable hosting companies.  I’ve almost signed up with several companies.  But, I can always find a site with lots of negative reviews about each of them.  Or, they’re too expensive.  The leading candidates right now are MochaHost and Green Reseller.  I guess the initial goal is to get someone else to pay for my hosting.  The overall goal would be to make money off of the reseller account.  I’d also like to be able to create a new account for each  of my domains instead of trying to host them all under one account.

The question then becomes “how do you get people to purchase your hosting?”  Scrolling through the pages and pages of hosting auctions on eBay would seem to indicate that it would be a great place to start (and it might be), but a quick look through the completed auctions would indicate otherwise.  The vast majority of the auctions were unsold.  Since my current hosting isn’t about to expire, I’ll have to carefully consider my next step.

I also should actually work on some of the sites … like finish freemicrosoftdownloads.com and add to projectwiimote.com.  This easy money sure is a lot of work…

Welcome to BOFOO.COM.  This is the newest member of the Whirlwind Domains family.  I’m attempting to use the Jcore CMS with the free hosting that comes with all GoDaddy domain names.  However, because GoDaddy puts a rather large ad at the top of each page, Jcore isn’t working properly.  A stub of a page is currently all that makes up Bofoo.com.

Bofoo is planned to be a link sharing site with SEO optimization and tools.  But, it may have to be moved to my paid hosting account if I can’t get any scripts to work.

Nothing is ever easy…

IMWRITE.COM was won on eBay yesterday. It’s a good thing too, or I would have had to rename this blog!  I saw the auction posted some days ago and put in my bid.  Of course a few other people tried to outbid me, but in the last few seconds I was able to place the winning bid.   I ended up paying a bit more than I wanted to, especially considering it’s up for renewal soon.

At this point, imwrite.com does have these stats:

• Alexa rank: 19,846,455
• Age: nearly 2 years old
• Incoming links: Yahoo (2), AltaVista (2), AlloftheWeb (2)
• Indexed pages: Google (3)
• Social Bookmarks: Reddit (1)

All-in-all, I’m happy with the purchase.

Well, it’s come to this. I’ve got myself a blog. Not out of an innate desire to share my thoughts and opinions with others, mind you. It’s out of a perceived necessity to promote my newly minted online business, Whirlwind Domains.

The goal here is simple: 1) buy great domain names, 2) get people to go to them & click on the ad links, 3) make lots of money and live financially secure. Turns out, it’s not that simple.

Buy Great Domain Names
To accomplish #1, I’ve taken a two-prong approach. I’ve registered some domain names that I thought were fairly good. It all started with Project Wiimote.

It seemed like a great domain to register because there was an established site at WiimoteProject.com, so I would hopefully get some traffic from confused people. Secondly, this whole create a cheap interactive whiteboard thing is a relatively new concept, so I was (and still am, I guess) hyped about being in on the ground floor of something. The other names I registered at the same time were: WhiteboardWiimote.com, WiimoteTeacher.com, WiimoteProjector.com, and Wiimote4Schools.com. I’ve got a stub of a page up for these sites, but I hope to develop them further in the near future.

The other domain names I’ve registered in the hopes of developing into something I can make some money off of are:

• CannotSilence.us
• CantSilence.us
• CookDF.com
• CookGF.com
• GoogleWaveTo.us
• LookaBookstore.com
• WaveTo.us
• YouSaved.us

My other method of acquiring domain names is to look on eBay. Most of them probably aren’t worth much, but I’ve been finding some good tools to help me rate each domain’s value. These are the domains I’ve purchased off of eBay thus far & the reason for the purchase:

• Bofoo.com – thought it was an easily brandable name
• BrowserDetect.com – keyword rich, easy to make a site for it
• BudgetFlightPrices.com – keyword rich … an early buy that I regret
• ChickenChef.net – had some backlinks & fit with a planned recipe site
• FreeMicrosoftDownloads.com – keyword rich, easy site to make
• GiveForth.com – wanted to make a better FreeCycle site
• hgoProject.com – has a pagerank of 1
• LiteraryConflict.com – seems like I could make some app for education
• MegaballLotteryResults.com – regret this buy … not a lottery guy
• phpDr.com – good brandable site name … if only I knew more php code
• ProperDeals.com – made a site aggregator for all of the deal-a-day sites
• SpywareFreeSoftware.com – keyword rich
• zeCollection.com – pagerank 2 site

Get Visitors & Ad Money
Herein lies the tricky part. Getting listed in Google is a bit more difficult than I thought. Turns out Google wants content (duh) which is where this blog comes into play (look you’re reading original content = a happy Google). Not if my friendly neighborhood GoogleBot would be kind enough to follow the links in this site, everyone will be happy.

I’m still working on the how-to-get-visitors-to-click-on-advertisements thing. If I go with tricking my visitors, Google becomes sad and won’t be my friend any more. I may have to resort to begging. (Hey, is ResortToBegging.com taken?)

Make Lots of Money

Needless to say, step 3 is still a dream. But, I’m working on it. I’ll try to add some blog entries every once in a while as I progress in my company development and site creaton.

Boy, I hope I’m right about all of this …