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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

The previous design for this blog has been terrible and we never intended to keep it online for so long. 

Today we have removed the HTML pages from the front of the site and replaced them with this blog instead.

Every day we gain new marketing ideas and skills online.  We’ll be using this blog to keep you updated on these.

One of the big resaons we created this Truepot.com blog was because Google delisted the domain about 4 years ago. At the time this was entirely our fault.

We’d built a few thousand doorway pages using a pretty crude program (with great success though) and, despite removing them, completing reindex requests etc it’s been a real ordeal getting Google to snifff around the new site again. It’ll take a bit more time to actually get ranked and I’m sure we’ll wait another year for PageRank but it’s a good start.

For anybody else who find their site delisted here’s what we did.

1. Remove all offending pages
2. Modify robots.txt to teach google that those removed pages are definitely not online
3. Request re-inclusion via Googles Webmaster Tools
4. Add a blog and pump in new content to it
5. Submit the blog posts to social bookmarking sites to force Google to pay attention to you

We’re amazed that our Goodbye Kitty site is now generating over 500 unique visitors a day.

Amusingly we’re getting a lot of publicity for the site through Hello Kitty fans who link to the site and tell people how much they hate it. We’ve enjoyed upsetting a lot of die-hard Hello Kitty fans with the site and am always amused to receive emails from them …

Why do you care about how middle aged women dress unless you are fat and ugly like tons of American women? I dislike how you promote animal abuse with your icons. It may be parody to you but animal abuse is REAL, you bastards. Read the rest of this entry »