Domain Magnate

Over the last 4 years I’ve been using freelancers, a lot. Hundreds of different projects with at least a few hundred different programmers, designers, writers, data entry guys etc.

It didn’t always go well - in fact the first few times I was charged large sums for not working scripts or crappy looking designs. But I’ve learned from my mistakes and now finding good, reliable and affordable programmers, designers, content writers and data entry people is pretty easy for me.I use scriptlance.com for most of my new projects, be it writing, seo, or development. Like all other freelancing sites scriptlance is full of time wasters and people looking for quick money without work. However if you stick to the guidelines below you’ll be able to avoid them easily and find the best people for you work.

Here is my fail proof method to getting any programming/design/writing/data entry work done:

1. Register an account at scriptlance.com
2. Post a new project with a reasonably detailed description and be sure to use the prepaid option to show you’re serious. Make bids open and viewable to let the bidders compete amongst themselves. No need to enter budget unless you have a strict range in mind. Also note that you won’t be able to delete the project details later, so if you want to share some sensitive data in the description you can either upload a file - files are deleted after the project is closed - or send it through the message board privately.
3. Give it at least 1-3 days to accumulate enough offers.
4. Check the members with the best reviews. Simply ignore people who have average rating below 9-9.5 out of 10, or if they are very new and have less than 5 reviews - you don’t want that kind of service.   Pay most attention to those members who have perfect 10/10 feedback with over 10 reviews or at least average 9.8. Also pay closer attention to the feedback comments, freelancers with more comments implying that the webmaster would hire them again usually provide the best quality work and service.
5. Pick some of bidders with top reviews, reply to them for more details. You can request examples of their previous similar work, a quick demo (if it doesn’t take more than ~15 min to make they’ll usually do it with no commitment from you), or more details on how they plan to complete the project.
6. Discuss the details through pmb with at least 2-3 bidders you’ve picked and once you’re clear on all the details and got the best price quote - pick your winner. Do not, under any circumstances, agree on paying part of the money upfront. Use scriptlance escrow to place the whole amount, or 50% of it in escrow and it will only be released when you’re satisfied with the project.
7. Be sure to agree on all details before choosing a winner - requesting additional features afterwards might be too late.

To sum it up:  pick freelancers with best reviews, who did related projects and discuss all details before closing. Good luck!

Affilicon, Affiliate Marketing Conference & Exhibition in Israel, is taking place next week on Nov, 24-25. Around 1000 people are expected to visit the conference.

I’ll be there as well, so if you are attending drop me a message and we can meet up and chat, or just say hi.

And now you can do it on Sitepoint premium marketplace there is one for sale.

PR6 sites are seen for sale very rarely and PR7 even less than that. But here is a real PR9 site! With this SEO weight you can rank in google for pretty much anything with limited amount of content and work put into it.

The sales thread also reports some $4,5K monthly revenues, but you can probably get more by just selling a few links on it.

This little quote at the start of the sales thread reveals a bit about the buyer interest: read more »

BankRate Inc made a few surprising purchases lately, paying millions of dollars for small one man sites.

First was CreditCardGuide.com, a site that provides credit-card comparisons. According to compete.com it receives close to 200K monthly visitors from US. Still hard to imagine the site revenues being able to justify the $32 million pricetag the company paid a month ago. read more »

Lets admit, most domainers don’t have a clue about SEO and while many know links are important for better google rankings, finding these links is no easy task. There are many guides, ebooks, online courses and all kinds of heavy stuff to help you educate yourself about search engine optimization, so I’m not going to do another one of those huge and mainly useless lists, but rather I’ll show my favorite method for getting good quality, on content links.

First a few guidelines for beginners: read more »

Now that I’ve found the designers and content writers, after a bit of testing the mini site building is proceeding at full force. Most sites are just 7-8 pages, but I’m also doing a few that will have a substantial amount of content, some 20-50 pages, articles, videos, news, flash and other elements.

Here are a couple finished mini-sites: Go Oslo, about the Norway capital with a few short articles and MyNamibia.com - about the Republic of Namibia in Africa.

Next step is to add links from some other sites, directories and social bookmarking services to get them all indexed and well places in google. It’s also good to avoid the nofollow links as they don’t contribute much value in google and are used by most social bookmarking and news sites, like digg, propeller, wikipedia etc.

The Bethel Park site I’ve posted about earlier is getting 75-85 uniques per day, but while the adsense clicks are rather high, the ctr is not so good. Probably the ads are too “blended in”, so I might change that one.

What do you think about the designs and content?

NyTimes has an interesting story on a guy who flipped a site for an awesome $173K, after buying it for $1800 and doing some changes. According to compete.com traffic estimates the site bird-cage.com only has 5-6k monthly visitors from US, so it’s strange that just 200 visits per day can provide such nice income. Besides the site only has 257 links in yahoo and doesn’t seem to have any decent google rankings for the top keywords.

So it really looks strange why would someone pay a healthy amount of money for a small site, without much traffic.

On the other hand it shows that development could bring nice profits and e-commerce sites are the money makers!

here is the article: read more »

Since I’ve started developing my US city domains I’ve been positively surprised by the adsense clicks.

In general my average adsense clicks are between $0.20-0.30 through out my sites, but the US city names had many clicks in the $0.5-$1 range. The traffic is as targeted as you can get and it’s easy to understand why advertisers would be willing to spend more, but these are relatively small cities, so the number of advertisers is quite limited.

These clicks are definitely nothing compared to what one could earn by attracting direct advertisers. I just read on dnjournal that PalmSprings.com earns over a million dollars a year only from the homepage! This definitely shows the potential in geo domains and pretty clear plan: get a top city domain, make some site and make it rank well in google, find advertisers to purchase banners for some annual fee. read more »

Dnjournal has an interesting story today about the recent GeoDomain conference.

Highly recommended to all geo domain owners. Among the contest nomination for top developed city domains were such gems as:

Vegas.com
Richmond.com
Hawaii.com
Branson.com read more »

I’m finally getting more into developing my domains and at first I’m planning to build a few small adsense sites on the city names and generics.

Here is one I did this week BethelPark.com - Bethel Park is a city of 33.5k people in Pennsylvania.

This one is a small site with 10 content pages. I’m currently testing different templates to see what gives the best ctr, but I think this one should do good. The trick is to make ads blend in and fit the theme. read more »