For the past couple of weeks i’ve been creating. Twitter background, logos, designs for applications, registering domain names, building sites, customizing themes… all of that is ‘creating’ or ‘building’.
photo credit: uncbaseballgirl
Today is the first time i’ve slowed myself down and focused on strengthening what i already have. theleavingcert.com had over 1100 unique visits yesterday, topping the 1,000 mark for the first time in it’s 3 year history.
Over the past few days i’ve been agreeing to take a partner on board and will dilute my own share in it. The timing might seem strange to some (when the site is setting new records for itself) but the move is an attacking one and it should see the site progress further over the coming years.
We’ll have new ideas, more content, more overall drive and ambition. It’s the best thing for the site. From september 2009 – june 2010, it will be the first year i’ve really pushed and tried to establish theleavingcert.com as the no.1 leaving cert destination.
Yesterday, i launched iwantideas.com. There were a few bugs and issues with it. None noticeable, but they’ve all been taken care of. I’ve also SEO’d all the links and added more categories and subcategories for ideas.
Finally, i’ve started adding friends to the iwantideas twitter account. Like any twitter account i use, i won’t just add random people. I spend a huge amount of time reading people’s tweets and asking myself if they’d be interested in the site before i add them. In fact i’ve spent most of today doing that 
Anyway, all of this strengthening is necessary. At some stage, there comes a time when you have to stop creating and focus on improving things you’ve already created. Today is one of those days for me, but don’t expect it to last long – i’ve got tonnes of creating to do next week and beyond!
Tomorrow marks the start of summer for me. No more exams, no more college. I plan on launching at least 2 sites this week, possibly three.
I also want to put together more long term plans so i know what i have to do all summer – i should have no free time whatsoever – if i do, i’m not working hard enough 
I’ve had a pretty relaxed weekend, but that’ll all change starting tomorrow. The real work starts…
So expect new sites and also expect a crazy new ‘offer’ which i’ll be running in tandem (get it?!) with my charity skydive…
I’m pretty sure i’ve never revealed some of these domains i’m mentioning below, but i do own them all
Here are the sites i currently have online and ‘doing something’;
So 10 in total. Most of them not doing a whole lot although i think 4, 7 & 10 are nice sites and domains to have in my portfolio.
photo credit: macha chile
This month alone, i’ll have added at least 3 new sites to that list. The sky is the limit really… i could create as many as i want.
That golfing site i’ve been working on has been irishgolfer.ie. I have another .ie partnership in the works but we don’t even have the .ie domain name secured yet so it’ll be another few weeks before i can talk about that project. CharityBypass.com will be up and running by the end of the month. I’m working on it at the minute and it’s eating up all of my time but just to prove i’m doing something, here’s a logo i came up with;
This was a tough one… i have to very careful with this site and the sort of image i want to get across. First impressions should be one of fun / humour and a little bit of ‘oh that could actually be pretty cool / useful’… if i get that wrong and end up with stuff like ‘poor form, heartless etc…’ that’s not good.
Intially i had just planned on using text, no images. But then i thought that might be bit too risky – a logo is a great way to add in graphical elements which can lighten the mood or explain what the site is about. So i started off with the little matchstick man as the ‘i’. He has his hand stretched out, looking for cash off the ‘r’.
I’d then left it at that, but after looking at it a few times i thought no, that’s still not enough. It doesn’t really explain what the site is about. The text is self explanatory (i feel), but having just the matchstick man doesn’t explain it well.
So i then came up with ‘angry droplet man’. He sees the matchstick man collecting and he’s not happy. I clearly get that message across in the logo and so i feel it does a pretty good job of explaining what the site is about whilst being humorous and not too serious.
In other news, here’s some domains i currently own and am toying with the idea of completing;
Although it seems like an awful lot of domains, all the domains mentioned throughout this post don’t even make up half of the domains i own
I need to strengthen the 10 sites i do have up and running, yes. But i feel that by building sites, i learn a lot and become much more creative. So long as i’m doing something and learning, i’m never too critical of myself – i can’t be.
Working on new sites, particularly in partnership with someone else, makes sure things get done and get done quickly. There’s also the added benefit of additional input, extra skills and a shared workload. Strength is in unity.
I mentioned yesterday i’m also beginning to mine this ‘jackpot network’ of mine – 19 domains in total…. adrenaline alone will get me through that… if my own recorded stats come anywhere close to google’s, i’ll quite literally drop everything and focus purely on developing those 19 sites – it will be worth my while 
But getting all of those other sites above online and fully functional, would be a nice boost. If i were to develop ALL of the above sites and touch a few up, it would leave me with over 20 decent sites to my name.
That would mean i’d have a lot of experience in a lot of different areas. So many niches, so much SEO, so many open source platforms… you can’t help but pick up tips, tricks and discover new problems when you’re running that many sites, that many themes, on many different servers.
Whilst it’s not something to look forward to, it’s all great experience and once again, i’ll come back to the example of me -v- the guy with the same college degree as me going for a tech job. That’s what motivates me. In order to better myself i can’t compare myself with myself, i have to compare myself with others, others that work harder and have more than me.
So there’ll be AT LEAST 3 new sites in april and if i have my way and don’t get distracted, there’ll be lots, lots more. Who says the construction industry is dead
Way back last August i said i’d discovered a ‘jackpot network‘ and almost instinctively went out and bought 19 domain names. The keywords within those domains have a combined search volume of over 2.5m per month (30m per year) meaning if i could rank no.1 in google for all of the keywords, i get a lot of traffic
photo credit: The Cake Engineer
I’m now beginning to test the waters with one site – the biggest niche. These particular keywords have a search volume of over 450,000 searches per month according to google’s keyword tool. Now technically that means those terms appear 450,000 times across google’s entire adsense network, which includes websites and custom google searches as well as google.com, so 450,000 people don’t actually type in these words in to google (i’m open to correction on that – if anyone has a better understanding of how google’s keyword tool operates, please let me know!).
The screenshot below is just one of the keywords i have. I own this as a ‘keyword.com’ domain name and i’m sure many of you will be wondering how the hell i managed to do it if i told you, i really would have to kill you
Also look at the advertiser competition for the keyword – extremely high which also shows you just how popular and sought after this keyword is.
To put this in some sort of context, here’s the results for ‘gordon brown’ – british prime minister;
And here’s the same stats on our very own Irish prime minister, Brian Cowen;
And how about a product like ‘nissan primera’;
Now you know why i called this a jackpot network – i own the equivilent of gordonbrown.com or nissanprimera.com which theoretically means i can rank no.1 for the term ‘gordon brown’ or ‘nissan primera’ and get a slice of that massive search volume. Take one of those domains, one of those examples, and multiply it by 19 and you begin to see the scale of my whole ‘jackpot’ operation
But even if just 25% of people type in these terms, that’s over 100,000 searches in google (20% of 450k). If i can rank no.1 in google, a good 30% will click on the first link = 30,000 visits.
Now that sounds easy, it’s not. There’s a number of ‘if’s’ in that equation.
First of all, i have to rank no.1 for competitive keywords. Remarkably, and this is the exciting part, this might not be a problem. I set up a default wordpress blog on a test site last august and that site (with no content or SEO work) is ranking no.16 in google for it’s keywords. I don’t have traffic stats as i didn’t install any at the time. But that looks extremely promising. I’ve literally done nothing with the site and it’s ranking extremely highly. Just wait ’til i actually start applying my SEO knowledge
Secondly, google’s keyword stats are not totally accurate. They they look good, but they’re complicated… They don’t represent the total number of searches a term gets in google’s search engine. They include impressions on other websites which raises an important question for me – how much of a slice of that 450,000 search volume does the google search engine itself get?
If it’s more than 50%, i’ve stumbled upon a goldmine. If it’s less, i’ll still get traffic and still have a niche and set of domains worth quite a lot in the right hands, but probably not my hands.
However, if this test site works out and the early stats match up with google’s keyword stats, the race is on to develop all 19 of these sites and expand even further. The door is then opened for potentially hundreds of new domain names and sites, which could all use the same technique and tactics to exploit a very large niche.
Although this network is 8 or 9 months old, i hadn’t forgotten about it, i’d just been busy with other stuff. To develop ANY of the 19 sites will take time and in order to gather accurate stats, i need to rank no.1 in google for a pretty competitive term which isn’t easy. There’s no easy way to no.1 spot in google. Unique content combined with clean code and plenty of baclinks is the only way to go without breaking any rules.
I’d be a fool to reveal this niche now or any of the tactics i’ll be using but if it all fails and goes nowhere you lot will be the first to know and there’ll be plenty of lessons learned about google, SEO and domain names.
Although the world is faced with it’s own problems and faces massive changes, ‘global’ in this context, refers to my network of websites.
You see there’s a big shake up in the blogging world and it’s called wordpress 2.7. You guys don’t ’see’ wordpress, but without it, this site wouldn’t exist and i probably would never have gotten in to this whole webmaster thing. I certainly wouldn’t have come 2nd in an SEO competition without it
Wordpress 2.7 allows auto installation of plugins, quicker navigation, rapid fire / handy links all over the place which saves me time plus it’s visually much more attractive to use.
This new version of wordpress will probably inspire me to re-jig all of my sites and put together some sort of ‘umbrella’ plan to keep them all updated and under close control. It’s a bit like the wild west at the minute. 3 servers at 2 different hosts, 50+ domains spread across 3 or 4 registrars… it’s do-able but i just need to manage myself with an iron fist.
Theleavingcert.com continues to pull in traffic without any effort at all. It’s a Google magnet and gets 50+ unique visitors a day from Google alone. That probably warrants a complete redesign and more upkeep. And that’s probably what it’ll get. I could sell it but that would be no fun, plus this is the one site that has sentimental value to me as it was my first ever site.
Whilst BeerChief is still under the knife, the BeerChief blog is not and i’m well capable of upgrading that myself. It’ll undergo a complete redesign with a heavy emphasis on multimedia. Expect a magazine style theme and some ‘made for social media’ content.
My jackpot network is still a jackpot according to Google’s statistics so not only is this a very stable niche, it’s also a really easy one to top it would seem as i have some sites ranking highly on Google without any content at all 
For these sites i have the design in place – it’s perfect in terms of SEO. I just need content and wordpress 2.7 will allow me to speed that process up a bit which may inspire me to work harder.
This is a site i fired up overnight and it’s still pulling in traffic. I plan on hanging on to it and adding more content, not high on my list of priorities though… Google chrome itself is not worth talking about until they start adding plugins – then it starts to play hardball with Firefox.
This site has great potential but it’s only an idea at the minute. Simple idea, relatively simple to put together but it will require several hundred dollars to get off the ground. I think it’s a winner and it’ll probably be on my list of priorities for 2009.
I now have an idea for this and now that this recession is kicking in, ’sacked’ is a term which seems to be growing in popularity At the time, this was an excellent domain i got my hands on, looking back on it, probably THE single greatest domain name i’ve ever bought / owned. Another one to watch in 2009. We still don’t know the value of .me’s but dictionary words are always valuable no matter what extension.
Myalloys.com will be a social network revolving around alloys / cars etc… i’ll probably have a crack at this myself with my experience from BeerChief. It’s a good name, nice niche site and the sort of site i’d be reluctant to sell if i ever get it going.
holidayratings.com is a decent name and something needs to be done with it but i’m not sure what. I’ll probably sell it as a quick flip though once i do come up with something for it.
groundrage.com is a pretty simple concept. Unfortunately the platform i had intended using has become unstable and ‘dodgy’. I put off developing it earlier in the year, although i did come up with a logo for it. It will probably just become a blog now but it should still work well.
The above is more than enough…. it’s over 30 sites combined. Maintaining one is a challenge in itself. One question people ask is why i don’t just focus on one project, one site, one goal at a time – it seems like a sensible thing to do.
Whilst that may get things done quicker i like the ability to float from one project to the next knowing full well i’ll never complete everything. It means i’m continually working on something and if i get fed up with one project, i can just move on to the next and vice versa.
Once BeerChief is complete, it’ll be a massive weight off my shoulders and not only can i start the promotion work on that, but i’ll have more time to get other projects off the ground, using my experience with BeerChief to speed things up.
