Blogging Along

Having built a few for certain towns I thought it would be an idea to find a few generic domains such as the one mentioned below and lists town / city areas on them.

Not sure it will have a good uptake from people or search engines but worth a go. The domains I choose were common phrases that people have searched on my Geo sites looking at the stats from the many sites.

• FencingSuppliers.org.uk
• LapFencing.co.uk
• Fencepanels.me.uk

Looking again on Google trends these are common phrases people use to find these types of items or companies.

Ideally they will turn into a directory listings for fence suppliers all over the UK and will use them to back up our other city focused websites.

New Year and New goals will be in the form of a marketing service that weirdly enough rolls all the things I have been doing for the past 2 years into one! SEO, Domains, mini sites, Video, Photos, Content writing etc They goals will be having a ques of businesses wanting to get involved.

First stop will be to create 3-5 example showcases of how it looks and works as everyone likes to see examples of anything they are buying into. FACT!

On the domain front I am letting a lot of them drop if I think they are way too much effort to even start to gain any revenue or are not gems. I would say 5% are niche domains / Websites like PlayParachutes.co.uk (not dev yet) that will become cash cows for advertising rev or actual e commerce sites selling products on stock. The other 95% are the GEO domains like my HullBeds.co.uk which will be slowly moved over from the BIG ‘G’ to REAL – LOCAL companies where they will be featuring on other sites I have.

3 Words I hated since I started out in business in early 2008 is VAT, TAX and Books. If I could give anyone any advice in starting up a business, it’s “Get an accountant ASAP”. You may think £100-£200 a month to do ALL your accounts is steep but boy is it worth it in the end. It frees you up to do other work YOU get paid for and is one less stressful thing in your life.

Be careful (as I have found out) you do get shocking accountants that just don’t talk to you and you get some FAB ones.

Other Goals and plans that I do hope will help Humber TV are ones with local groups or business. I can offer News and video coverage to help promote their services and they can offer me the use of the facilities there. Maybe the use of  a Board room, meeting rooms, Gym, etc it’s a little bit of back scratching that costs both parties no cash.

I have an ever growing list of Geo / Product or Service domains (mainly Hull) and setting them up using WordPress takes time, uses MySql databases and limits how many I can setup in 1 day.

This has forced me to start using a simple  html template to speed the process of getting them LIVE, INDEXED and EARNING!

Hopefully they will perform as well as the ones running on the WordPress installs, but the main reason is to just get them LIVE. I have 100’s of them covering many cities but mainly Hull, I have a few other areas including Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Bradford, Belfast, and Edinburgh.

Latest ones I’m trying to perform as well as the WP sites using html are:

• Hull-Airconditioning.co.uk
• Hull-Hotels.org.uk
• Hull-Kitchens.co.uk
• HullCasino.co.uk
• HullClinics.co.uk

A side step one not a Geo one CommercialPhotographers.org.uk

With having so many domains you do need to get them start paying at least their own reg fee as I noticed 2 years does come round rather quick and before you know it no site is on a domain. Working from a spreadsheet marking down which are live, using html or WP and when was the last time I posted on them helps get things done too.

Looking at what Scott Jones has done with his ideas and efforts it makes me want to see the light at the end of the tunnel for my efforts. But time will tell and do hope within 4-6 months my daily revenue is up from £8-£10 a day to the very ideal £60.

I have even looked at possibly renting domains out but will need to think how best to go forward with that before jumping in with both size 9’s.

I have a growing network (as mentioned before) of Hull domains mainly plus a few other cities and have a solid £9 – £10 a day coming in from a select few with affiliation advertising.

In fact I must have 350+ of Hull domains or similar like ManchesterPrint co uk and know for a fact 90% are NOT live or haven’t been optimised at all for SEO or revenue.

So I do think if all 350 rose to a level where each was getting even a few uniques a day it would add up to over £100 a day. I have noticed with the sites that do earn, very rarely go over just 10 uniques a day to get a click or have a CTR (click through rate) is mainly 10% or more.

But as many of you know 350 + mini sites all take time to build, add content, and maintain. If all sites together earn’t £100 a day, it would be worth the effort/cost to action that .

On a flip side, I think if all the Geo domains (350+) was indexed in search engines and had a fair number of uniques a day I could demand a starting sale price of £500  for the sale of each to local businesses in the relevant area.

You all can add that up to £175k which is a very nice sum (if all were sold) and would only go through with the sales if every domain was sold and not just cherry picked.

So I just need to get people on them and set some time aside to blast them all live!

Moved out from Hull to Gilberdyke into a brand new house a few years back to move closer to work, but to cut a long story short. Got laid off, setup on my own and is at least an hours round trip to anywhere towards Hull.

Been out in the sticks (watching tractors pulling trailers full of carrots and potatoes) I thought would be quite peaceful but when you get a dick of a boy racer bombing around all the time from getting in from work till going on midnight it ain’t! (Needs his exhaust fixing I think) He skidded off the road last year, his car was a right off and luckily no one else was involved as he does think 2 inch from peoples bumpers is acceptable.

COCK!! a doodle doooooooo……

Hopefully he’ll do a better job now the wet weather is back!

Been self employed and only just starting out in April 08 isn’t a great platform to look at moving and so need to start thinking big and up a gear or two into earning some serious cash.

This is in the form of mini site revenue, domain sales, directory building, websites for clients and any sexual favours needed. (last part is a lie)

Been self employed is great at times but can put me on a bit of a downer not been able to bounce ideas around with people face to face. Living in the sticks again doesn’t help that situation, distance, travel, and cost etc.

2010 we should be looking at selling in spring time and then start to rent for a year or so to sort things out and get back to normal living in Hull.

All in all I need to move people!