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.

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.

Today we learnt of a clever way of sending PayPal funds to avoid the 3% transfer fees by using their Mass-Pay feature.

This is only practical if you want to save the RECEIVER paying funds but it’s a nice and legitimate little work-around that most PayPal users don’t yet know.

The only downside to this is that it only works if you are paying from your PayPal balance.  Credit-Card funded payments do not work.  It is also only available for Business and Premier account holders too.

Read the full information here.

After 14 months of frustrations we are delighted to now have a US business bank account with a reputable bank.

This is extremely valuable to us because most of our clients are based in America and, undeniably the $US is the currency of e-commerce.

Aside from accepting bank transfers to our business name, we can now use Google Checkout as a payment processor and, should we choose to, we are one step closer to being approved for a merchant account.

We experienced problems today adding our business credit card to our PayPal account.

It eventually transpired that a company, we made a previous purchase from online, used our email address and credit card number to open a Czech PayPal account.

Stupidly, by using our email address they weren’t able to effectively verify this account but learning that this happened came as a shock.

Kudos to PayPal for their fantastic customer service.  Wait time was less than a minute, the three people I had to speak with were all extremely professional and we didn’t have to explain ourselves from the beginning when being transferred to the next operator.  They identified the rogue account once I gave them my credit card number and were happy to wait online whilst i reset the rogue account’s pasword, took a look inside it, removed my credit card info and closed the account down.

We know exactly where the information came from because we use unique email addresses for every business we deal with.  There is a possibility that this company got hacked and were unaware of it, but seeing as this new PayPal account was set up in Czech Koronas and the company we orderd from is also based there, we’re inclinded to think that this was a deliberate attempt at misusing customer information. 

No harm was done so this isn’t something we’ll take time to investigate but it is in PayPal’s hands now and we’re curious to know if the origin company will reply to our enquiry into what may have happened.

This blog post is extremely useful if you spend a lot of money through PayPal fees every month.

By applying to receive ‘merchant rates’ you can cut your fees significantly.  What is incredible is how easy the application process is (you should be automatically approved after just a few mouse clicks).  It’s interesting that the application page is so deeply hidden within PayPal’s many pages that you probably will never find it without help.

The original article is called ‘What PayPal Won’t Tell You’.

We incorporated our business ‘The True Potential Group Inc." on May 10th this year in Nevada, USA.

Here are a few resdons behind our decision:

1. We are asking American resellers for our Art From Steel business to send often more than $5,000 to an overseas personal bank account. We expected that by Incorporating we ‘d increase our credibility in the short-term
2. In the medium-term we plan to get certain accreditations for our websites and businesses which require a third-party to verify our business background. We can only do this if we have an established company that’s been active for a few years.
3. We ‘d be forced to keep accurate accounts and to take our income and expenses seriously.

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I’d committed to a dedicated server earlier this year when I had every intention of building literally thousands of web sites.

I’d subscribed to a membership forum to learn how to create (and - most importantly - how to market) made-for-adsense websites and followed the challenging tutorial up to the part where I actually needed to build these sites.

I’d worked tirelessly creating a network of 90 ‘blogfarms’ at this stage and I had over 300 self-populating Wordpress installs over the 500 domains I’d bought. It was about then that my enthusiasm died down. I’m not one to give up on any projects but I realized that working any harder would take time away from my other sites and, for every month the sites lay unfinished I was throwing away $175 for a dedicated server and faced a $500+ domain renewal fee in the next few months.

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