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. 

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

Many months ago I wrote a 4-page report for my Geekcrets.com website called How to Get Free Money From Online Casinos. Although the article itself took me some time to write, I wasn’t especially pleased with it. After about 3 weeks of testing I concluded that it’s not such a clever way to make money.

To monetize the report, I added some affiliate links to casino sites. I added about 10 in total. After a week or two a friend - with considerablly more experience than me in the Casino industry offered to suggest some better casinos. I agreed to his help, and in exchange, I replaced about half my affiliate links with his.

I send news of the report to about 2,000 people on my mailing list and forgot about it. I forgot to even keep track of which affiliate programs I’d even used and didn’t expect to gain anything. In fact I didn’t get the page added to any search engines and there is no way anybody else would have discovered the page.

In the middle of August I received this email in my Spam folder …

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I sold Phone-Guide.com last week as I’ve got no plans or motivation to develop it any further. The buyer’s going to develop the site so it will be uplifting to see it being used productively.

I’ve got over 20 ‘proper’ websites now and although I’d love to develop them all, I really don’t have the time or the concentration to work on them. I’d be happy with a bit more money in my pocket to spend on outsourcing so this sale will hopefully be one of many.