Chris Porter

I have a couple of hundred “crappy” domains – domains that have terrible keywords and only real value lies in the fact at some point in the past they were owned by a company who then let it expire for one reason or another. This usually means they have links and traffic.

Domain names is something I’ve got into quite heavily since June of this year after spotting a marketplace of domains completely untapped. I started hunting for domains with value to sell on and created SavedNames.com – I’ve found selling to the end-user directly can be a quick way to flip domains without too much initial investment.

A while back I bought a domain company-llc.com at auction for $20 and parked it. The old owner had shifted to companyllc.com (not something I realised at the time) and didn’t care about the hyphenated version anymore. At some point we email corresponded and they rejected my offer to sell them the domain for $100.

I later realised not only did the domain rank first for their company name (with the non-hyphenated version nowhere to be seen) but after, what I can only assume was some new marketing campaign or piece of press, the domain received 1129 visitors in one day. Resulting in 142 clicks and $72.08 revenue for the day. It’s quickly dwindled down but this month alone it’s earned over the $100 I was asking for it.

And it still ranks first for the company name.

Maybe it’s time to offer them the domain again.

The use of scantily dressed women to attract advertising clicks is nothing new but some titles just shouldn’t go with some pictures.

An ebook on ‘how to PIMP yourself out in 5 easy steps’ anyone?

… I didn’t click the ad, so maybe they were selling that. Time to research a new niche?

I just got a delivery from UPS and wasn’t expecting anything. I checked he had the right house number and name before I took the large parcel.

Now I’m like a kid at Christmas! A surprise delivery and it’s way to big to be a lawsuit, good times. I open it up and it’s an early Christmas gift from one of the affiliate companies I send most of my online dating traffic too. Thanks to Huge Traffic for the ..eerrr.. beer cooler thingy with cool LED display.

This is typical of being an affiliate at Christmas. If you do good amounts of sales for a company they’ll keep you sweet with a present but listen ‘Huge Traffic’, a little tip – next year just send me the beer (or a macbook pro).

I’ve been a fan of Tim Ferriss since the 4-hour-work-week, a book about being more productive with your time and becoming part of the ‘new-rich’. Tim does experiments in lifestyle design, from outsourcing your life to firing your customers.

What really interest me about Ferriss is his insatiable desire to learn how things work or maybe more specifically, how we learn. He is fluent in 6 languages and has some rather unorthodox methods for learning that he claims can make you fluent in as little as 3 months.

And Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com among other things (rev3, pownce) – the fresh faced poster boy of web development.

I’m not sure how Tim and Kevin came together to do this video series but I’m glad they did. In this video Kevin explains how he got scammed by some Chinese ‘art students’.

China Part 2a from Glenn McElhose on Vimeo.

I’ve been planning a direct mail campaign for the last few weeks and it got me thinking about something my Dad used to say: “Always use 1st class stamps for your customer’s mail, after all you don’t have any second class customers.” It’s a sentiment I can get behind but how much does using a first class stamp really increase profit?

Direct Mail campaigns have many barriers to being profitable.

You have to choose the right prospects, at around 35p+ per mail you don’t want to send to uninterested people.

You have to hope it gets there. 14.4 Million pieces of mail were lost or posted through the wrong letterbox in 2007. So say goodbye to at least 1% of your mailed out letters.

And you have to hope that your mail gets opened. There are many visual clues that indicate your mail is a sales letter (or as the customer will call it… spam!) and it then goes straight to the bin.

Then once it’s open it’s got to sell! My sums are showing that at 50p per mail we’ll need to have a 0.5% close rate to break even. Beginning with a test batch of 500 we’ll see how it goes. I’ll be changing the variables to see what makes a good sales letter and will report back my findings.

One of the main things I’m interested in trying out is novelty stamps or international stamps. Something that costs around the same price but gives it such a flair you open the letter out of curiosity. I never throw away a letter with a USA airmail stamp because it might be something from my Aunt in the US – I’m a 100% open rate customer when there’s a US stamp involved!

Whether it increases profit or not I’ll be respecting my customers by using a 1st class stamp to ensure, at the least, a quick delivery. I’ll just be using 2nd class to pay my bills.