One of the factors we are aware of with Plug and Save is that we need to work hard to establish credibility.

We are in the process of completely rebuilding the website in Joomla and have already installed a reviews and testimonials section that will feature prominently on the homepage.

We decided to email our most recent 800 customers today to ask them to submit a testimonial to us. 

In an ideal world perhaps customers should submit testimonials independently.  For Plug and Save however, we are asking for; photographs, recordings and even videos from our customers, so we decided to offer each of them a cash incentive to compensate their efforts.

From now onward all of our sites will have a strong emphasis on testimonials, proofs and customer reviews.

Today funds arrived into our escrow account for the sale of our United World Telecom For Me website.

We have sold the domain, the website and the existing customer list.

UWT4me.com was responsible for our full-time income a few years ago, however we’ve let the site go undeveloped and unpromoted for the last few years as other projects stole our attention.

The buyer and ourselves made a fair deal to both parties and we now have a lump sum that we can use to develop our other sites.  We have not left the telecom industry entirely, however our focus will be on Art From Steel and Plug and Save for the next few months.

Whilst …AreBlogged looks identical to our …IsBlogged at first glance the two sites are very different.

…IsBlogged is designed to allow members of the public to build their own free Wordpress Blog whereas …AreBlogged is for use exclusively by us.

…AreBlogged has been installed with some powerful plugins and templates from DataFeedr which allows us to create Wordpress Affiliate Stores very quickly.  We’ve so far experimented with two stores and although they require content to be added and marketing to be done the one we are most happy with is …

babyproducts.areblogged.com

We have many customized templates already and we’ll be adding and improving stores periodically. 

Our intention is to host about 50 stores on the site, each making money from affiliate links embedded in the products. 

Should you be interested in doing something similar then we recommend DataFeedr which works with both Wordpress and WordpressMU.

Whilst we respect the concept of a written agreement it seems that a legally written contract is designed very much to discourage other parties to read them.

We are currently creating a distribution agreement for Plug and Save.  Whilst we know exactly what we want to include, the template, created for us by lawyers is unecessarily pompous, confusing and suprisingly ambiguous.

Much of our overseas business entails working with non-native English speakers.  It seems somewhat disrespectful to provide confusing and lengthy legalese to such companies, knowing that they’ll likely not understand the complex wording.  This gives us an unfair advantage and we’ve resolved to translate much of the default terms to something a little clearer.  To us, these documents are intimidating and don’t instill much confidence of a fair trading agreement.

Whichever lawyer chose to phrase this paragraph deserves to be shot …

"The individual contracts for the sale of Products formed by Distributor’s submission of orders to Company pursuant to the terms and conditions hereof shall automatically incorporate, to the extent applicable, the terms and conditions hereof, shall be subject only to those terms and conditions (together with all terms in orders which are contemplated by this Agreement) and shall not be subject to any conflicting or additional terms included in any documents exchanged in connection therewith."

We have replaced it with …

"This contract takes authority over any other agreements made, unless specifically agreed upon in writing by both Company and Distributor."
 

… if only contracts were designed to show how one company wishes to demonstrate that it’s created a fair and respectful contract then we’d have no need for the pompous and verbose contracts that seem so common.

This site took us no more than 10 minutes to create.

IsInvestigated.com offers a comprehensive reverse telephone lookup service which works for both land-lines and cellphones.

We have little plans to develop the site although, as with all our sites; we’ll be starting a link-building campaign over the next week.  The domain itself was one that we owned already and the scripts cost us nothing.

We don’t have big ambitions for this site, however if it can at least earn its registration fee each year we’ll be happy.

Thanks go to Charles for bringing this opportunity to our attention.

Click Here to View IsInvestigated - Our Reverse Telephone Lookup Site

Unfortunately with the time it takes to actually administer our sites, we have not had much opportunity to market ourselves as much as we’d like.

Today we’ve begun a very large link-building project that will cover 20 of our existing sites - even the smallest ones.

This campaign is planned to last for at least 6 months and should increase the visibility of all of our sites over time.  We’ve begun by adding a small number of links to a few of our completed sites and will add links pages to pending and upgraded sites over the next 2 weeks.

If you wish to exchange links with us for ANY of our sites please get in touch.

Today we completed a sale of 420 .info domains that we registered at the end of 2007.  We sold them at Digital Point within 24 hours of advertising them.

Whilst we made a loss on the sale, we’d written off the domians after we learnt that we would not be able to effectively profit from them in the way we anticipated.

We’d undertaken a 1-month course in portal-building with PGInsider at the end of 2007.  Portal-Building is the creation of junk sites that contain hundreds of pages of rubbish but the creators add adverts at the top of the pages that they can capitalize on or redirect visitors to other sites.   

We were planning on using these domains to build a huge network of websites that generated passive income or increased traffic to our whitehat sites.  Sadly PGInsider omitted to mention that the methods they were training us with are pretty much unworkable and unprofitable nowadays.  The company dramatically closed its doors, removed all records of the support staff ever existing and alienated all it’s members.  It was a remarkable example of how a long-establsihed website could lose all customer loyalty in only a 24 hour period.

We are actively looking to clean up our domain portfolio now, we have about 30 domains that we actually use and a lot of domain names we plan to hold on to.  The rest we are looking to sell for a modest amount just to clear away the clutter.

It’s getting very difficult to find good domain names these days and we’ve strugged recently.  CommunicationInspiration.com - one of our sites in development - is a horrifically long name but, seeing as there’s no synonyms for ‘communication’ we were left with very few options.

After spending a lot of time and money on modification to Art From Steel we learnt that the current setup cannot run under PHP5.

Our webhost will be disabling PHP4 next month and rather than spend more time patching up the current site, we’ve taken the plunge and upgraded both Joomla and VirtueMart. to version 1.53 and 1.1.1.  Whilst these numbers don’t seem like much, those with experience can attest that the upgrades make huge leaps forward from what we’ve previously worked with.

We’ve spent a lot of time with Joomla over the past few months and have an excellent understanding of how to configure it.  We are able to put a functional site together with a nice template, valuable components and modules within a couple of hours now.  We then need to add content and get custom graphics created.

We’ve built 4 sites in the last 3 days.  They all require more content, graphics and tweaks before they’re ready but we’re delighted with the increase in our productivity.

We are working on these new sites in the background and once things are ready we’ll activate them.

A few features we’re excited about on most of these sites are:

• Improved site designs with modern clean images and styles
   
• Improved coupons and gift vouchers
   
• An integrated blog for each major site
   
• Improved shipping cost calculations
   
• Accounts for wholesale and retail clients with different prices and order quantities
   
• Testimonials:  text, photos, audio and video
   
• Reviews and star-ratings for each product
   
• Integrated link pages
   
• Mailing list subscriptions built into the member registration form.
   
• An RSS Feed for each site

As these sites get completed, expect more updates from us. Realistically we’ll be moving nearly all of our significant sites to Joomla over the coming few months.  We are huge Joomla fans and love how easy it is to modify and expand site that use it. 

We have over 20 websites online and have this week been updating and adding links pages to many of them.

If you have related websites then please get in touch if you’d like to reciprocate links with us.

If your websites are relevent to ours then we will both benefit by gaining traffic from our sites and also by indirectly increasing your search engine rankings.

We were delighted to have acquired the domain Telecommunication.biz today.

It was available for auction at fortunately for us it did not attract much attention and we got an excellent price for it.

We are already developing a brand new communication-based website however Telecommunication.biz is an excellent domain that we’ll build a simple 1-page website onto this week.

We don’t have any immediate plans to sell the domain as it should increase in value over time.  We do however have some good connections in the telecom business and may consider selling it in the future.