Archive for November, 2007

Up until now, registering a .ie was a really long and complicated process. Only businesses could register them and for that you needed a business name and number etc.. and that cost cash. Plus you then had the cost of the domain name itself, usually €30-€60, so it could end up costing an average Joe like me the guts of €100 just to own a .ie. BEFORE hosting – obviously not worth it.

The benefits of a .ie are purely pride and SEO. They help identify you as an Irish site, plus give you a hand up in google.ie SERPS.

Now, (from this week on) anyone can register their own .ie so long as it’s their personal name – eg i can register seanmacentee.ie, but i still can’t register smemon.ie as that’s not my name. I need a passport or ID to prove my real personal name.

I don’t like hassle and i don’t like costs- .ie’s involve both. So therefore i’ll not be touching them on a personal level until they come down in price drastically (to like €8). This is a step in the right direction but it’s a bit like trying to get Irish people to speak Irish as their first language – why bother when we already speak english and have come to love our dot coms and dot nets? It’s too much hassle and money trying to convert to .ie’s and re-brand ourselves.

Unless you’re very patriotic i can’t see personal .ie’s taking off mainly due to price. Why not lower them to €8 each to sell more and establish the .ie domain further? At the minute, .ie’s are for businesses and it’s going to be very hard to shake that reputation. Maybe i’ll be proved wrong, i doubt it.

Shutting myself off from the world by having my blog as a .ie isn’t the way forward imo. I may buy a .ie and re-direct to a .com, but i won’t do that until .ie’s become reasonably priced.

When i see a .be or .de or .us or anything like that, i immediately feel excluded and not involved with the site. That ain’t good. That’s primarily why a .com is the norm; as it’s global friendly. It’s neutral to location or nationality etc..

I mentioned yesterday i was getting rid of my intext ads by Kontera due to poor results (under $3 in 2 months).

Well, today i’m introducing WidgetBucks widgets on JPEGr. I’ve heard good things about their performance and as JPEGr recieves more traffic than the rest of my sites combined, it’s a pretty good test site.

With these CPC type ads, you need traffic to make them worthwhile. So that’s why i’m gonna test them on JPEGr rather than, say this blog which recieves much less traffic and generally ‘ad blind’, tech savvy traffic.

WidgetBucks offer you $25 just for signing up then they payout once you hit $50, so not too bad a deal and i reckon i can hit the $50 mark, hopefully by the end of the month but we’ll see

I’ve had this current blog theme on this blog for a year now (free theme, made by becarry).

It’s SEO friendly, plain, simple, but very effective. You get sick of looking at the same thing day in day out though… i’m sure you guys feel the same. I feel it’s time to jazz things up a bit and follow the likes of Shoemoney, John Chow, ProBlogger and Tyler in re-designing my blog, making it more pleasing on the eye.

No way am i paying $500+ for a blog design I’m not made of money here! But i’ll see what i can manage with a budget of about $100. I have a bit of cash built up now in my paypal account from my monthly earnings so i’ll re-invest that in this blog.

The main problem i have with the current theme is the sidebar – it’s not enough space… with more and more widgets and links and crap on the go, it’s getting to the stage where the sidebar is becoming cluttered with too much crap.

The page width is also set at about 50%, so i’ll open that out to about 75% and instantly have a bit more breathing space to accomodate the headers, sidebar plus the main body of text.

I’m toying with the idea of getting a logo done up, but i’ll have to put more thought into that. I’m VERY fussy about design and looks so this could turn out to be a very long and expensive process

Whatever the case, i’ll be making changes around here – hopefully to coincide with my 1 year anniversary as a blogger on this blog (Nov 12th), so watch this space