Heres Your Info is a very simple 1-page site that we created to get some value from the domain name.

Unfortunately with our personal Adsense account still suspended (and we’re not optimistic about it being restored any time soon) the custom search engine we previously created no longer worked.

Instead we’ve inserted the search form for ‘Google Scholar’ to the page.

We won’t do any marketing for this site but hope to at least generate a little page rank and adsense revenue to cover the domain renewal fees each year.

Forward to Us is one of a few domains we were pleased to have acquired.  We have no plans to make money with the site as really we’re just hoping that it’ll gain page rank and generate enough passive income from adsense to pay for the registration fees.

Although the site’s been online for a few months already today we added banners, adsense and a logo so that we can remove it from our to-do list.

We plan to just watch the site and maybe do some simple marketing of it over the coming months.  Ideally we’ll be able to sell the domain in a few years time for a profit.

Rather than spend time updating the Adsense code for Calls.in.th we looked at the traffic stats and realized that this site has had it’s day.

Calls In Thailand was the first web venture we created and was once responsible for generating profits of over $5,000 USD per month. 

The site was written in a now-discontinued CMS package called TTCMS and we’ll always remember the fun we had with the main web designer who had a nervous breakdown as he worked with us.  One memorable conversation was when the man’s wife packed her bags and left him as he was communicating on messenger to us.

Calls in Thailand was created in 2001 and it’s a site we were very proud of.  In 2001 CMS scripts were quite rare and our site really was cutting-edge for its time.  We generated money by referring visitors to our United World Telecom website (where we earnt residual income on member’s telephone calls.  We also had a very exciting time pioneering VoIP calling-cards in Thailand - many years before this became legal :o).

Unfortunately we awoke one day to discover that the Thai telecom monopoly had decided to compete against low-cost providers like us.  Overnight they slashed their call prices from about $1.50 per minute to just 35c.  We were offering calls for about 60c a minute and we couln’t in good conscience keep recommending the services we offered to our clients.  We still retained some very large clients who preferred working with us and needed the anonymity that our callback service provided but our client base dropped from many hundreds to about a dozen over the space of a month.

To overcome this challenge we then commissioned our United World Telecom website to market the same international callback service but to a worldwide market.  This business has generated residual income over $500 every month with zero work for about 4 years now and will be expanded in the coming few months.

We have now redirected calls.in.th to our United World Telecom website. 

After an unprecedented number of obstacles we’re delighted to announce that Art From Steel is now processing retail orders online.

We still have a few more revisions to make to the site which include …

1. Adding Google Checkout
2. Implementing a completely new coupon system
3. Reducing the number of products displayed per page
4. Re-formatting the ’search results’ page 

Things appear to be working well however we’ve not yet announced the updated site to our existing members.  We’re gonig to spend a week bug-testing, training staff for the back-end order processing administration and then we’ll make a more public announcement to members.

We appealed against the closure of our Adsense account on the basis that it was completely unjustified.  Seems like Google’s policy is to imply that you’ve done something bad but "for security reasons" they won’t tell you what it is.

Our appeal was met with Google’s automated response of …

Thanks for providing us with additional information. However, after thoroughly reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, we’ve re-confirmed that your account poses a significant risk to our advertisers. For this reason, we’re unable to reinstate your account. Thank you for your understanding.

The Google AdSense team

Again we’ve responded but, after much research online it seems that the simplest thing to do is just to look for other revenue earners.  Our monthly income from Adsesne has never been more than $200 and we’ve only ever used it on site’s that we are lazy to update.

As an experiment though we applied and were accepted for a new Adsense account in our business name.  We’ve listed exactly the same websites as with our previous account and got approved within 24 hours.

Whilst it will be impossible to trust Google Adsense again we’re going to replace our now-expired adsense codes with our new codes.  We are curious as to whether Google will acknowledge that our sites are legitimate and adhere to their terms now that we are presenting them with a corporate face instead of a personal one.  Over the next few months we’ll likely phase-out Google Adsense and replace it with advertisements from other providers.

Our Make-Money-Online website Geekcrets.com is now back in Google’s index after a holiday of about 3 months.

Although it’s a low-priority site, we’ll be completely re-writing everything in Joomla 1.5 so that nearly all articles are updated and available immediately for free.  Monetization will be from contextual adverts, affiliate links (and maybe Adsense).

There’s no immediate plans to revive the site but it should be within the next 4 months.

Art From Steel Ebay Store” />

We registered for our own eBay store last week and are in the process of populating it.

So far adding products is time-consuming but straightforward.  We’ve yet to uncover the advances store management tools yet but will be playing this by ear until we get the hang of it.

Unfortunately a lof of items listed are expensive to ship and I’m sure this will cost us sales.  We’ll be overcoming this by packaging a few items together as special promotions but this is a few weeks away.

We’ve added about 50 items so far and itend to add 5 - 20 each day until our complete catalog is listed here. 

Whilst sales from eBay would be great, we conside our eBay store as a compliment to our main Art From Steel site and hope it will bring us brand recognition and new site members. 

Vist the Art From Steel eBay Store Here

We weren’t 100% happy with our previous wordpress theme and have decided to upgrade it today.  We are much happier with the style and layout now - although we’ll be tweaking the greens to orange later in the week.

We discovered that our old ‘IsBlogged.com’ website had a number of security flaws and today we took the aggressive step of removing all spam blogs from it.

We’ve rebuilt the site using the lastest version of Wordpress MU and have filled it with 73 templates and 20 plugins.

If you are interested in having all the flexibility of Wordpress without the cost of hosting or or the time to set it up then visit the new IsBlogged.com site here.

For no discerible reason our Google Adsense accout was suspended today.

The only explanation we could possibly think of was that since registering for a US VPN perhaps Google believes us to be deliberately trying to hide our IP address when registering with them.

Fortunately we are not dependent on Google at all with any of our sites however, whilst the issue remains, a lot of these sites have gaping holes in them where adsense no longer is displayed.

Apparently we should have received notifiction from Google explaining the suspension but we certainly never received anything.

We are 100% certain that we’ve not done anything in breach of Google’s terms because all the sites that use adsense have been left dormant for many months as they’re not our big earners at all.

Now it’s a case of waiting a few days to be contacted by either a Google representative or (more likely) some automated email service to tell us what’s happened.

Our first instinct is to replace all adsense from our sites.  Google Adsense have twice now suspended accounts of ours without providing a reason and both times have been when the sites in question have not been modified in any way.