Well headline story news today, John Cow has been sold for $50,000 at sitepoint. A perfect example of acquiring a typo domain. Put in effort, passion and dedication in the project. Make it worth $50,000 in the end.

Let me begin with this cindrella story. This domain was registered by some domainer who was thinking he will make big bucks from the name. He probably paid the normal reg. fee to register it. The blogger at John Cow decided that he wants the domain and emailed the domainer. Domainer asked for $800 for an undeveloped domain (I used to be this crazy as well in the beginning years). Finally the domainer gave in for $80 for a typo domain. He was thinking that he made good profit from his investment. Saying that the domain was registered for $7 and now he just made 11 times his initial investment. But the real story began once the owner of John Cow started putting his time and effort into it. Blog went live on July 1st, 2007. In less than a year he was able to get about 1500 rss feeders. He made over $1000 from the blog the first month. That was a good record. He put down the blog to be making $2500 / month. So we can call an average of $2000 / month.

9 months the blog was there until sold, so the total income made was $18,000. I don’t know how much money was invested because the hosting was sponsored for quiet sometime. He wrote 1-2 posts a day and thats it. The blog had about 45k backlinks, which is not that much because I already have around that in my first two months. But anywho, he ended up selling the site in one day of which it was listed for $50,000 hard cash. I think even if he would’ve set the price to $75,000, he would easily get that, but o well. He converted his $80 investment into 625 times more to make it $50,000. What a profitable return.

Now come back to answer the question typos domains, is it really worth it? You have just as much if not less chance of getting rich with a typo domain then buying a lottery ticket. He got lucky and so did the original domainer, but will you get lucky? No one can guarantee that. It is just taking a risk and putting your best into it. Results will tell whether the time and capital was worth the investment or not. Just like any other business.

Smart technique would be not to go after a typo and start with your original brand and build it. Because it is much easier to sell later on.

I am having trouble typing because my neck is sprained from the gymnastic gym which I attended for the first time in my life yesterday, and ended up landing on my neck when i did a front flip over a 5 feet 10 inch peice of thick foam, and landed on alot of foam, but the impact on my neck even it was on the foam was pretty hard. Imagine if it was the ground. I would be dead by now lol. I better go relax now and let my neck heal.

Every industry depends on innovation and new ideas to carry it forward. Blogging is one of the industries which is being renovated. The next big step is Video Blogging. As I speak, more and more bloggers are now using Videos on their blogs to explain their points better. Some even use it to make the blog more live and get more interaction. Probloggers even hosted a challenge to bloggers to make a video blog explaining Why do you blog.

I personally like the idea of Video Blogging, and I think it have its own benefits. Tons of people now use Youtube. As a college student, I see so many students here as well as many adults on youtube. If you look at Alexa Stats, Youtube is #2 beating Windows Live and the mighty Google. So you get the picture how big it is. Imagine if you post a video on your youtube channel and get tons of comments and views. Videos are a way to get your brand across. Your videos doesn’t even have to be related to your site. As long as the user come to your channel, and see the url they are most likely to check it out.

Video Blogging is very essential now if you are writing a tutorials. I know screenshot tutorial is a good way to explain, but sometimes video tutorials are the best. You will see me mostly using video tutorials to explain my steps because I just think that most of the people find it easy to follow the steps if I am recording the screen and speak.

In my personal experience, I have gained a few visitors from youtube from my wordpress tutorials for custom page, it got 340 views. I have 7 subscribers on my Youtube Channel. The number is growing slowly.

I mainly use Windows Movie Maker and the built-in camera on my Sony Viao, to record my videos. Windows Movie Maker is a decent software that comes in with your computer for free. It will let you allow slides before the video if you want to add advertisement and so on. I would agree, that Mac makes Video blogging a bit easier, but ah well. I love my Vaio.

There are multiple programs, free and paid to record your screen with audio. The one that I like is Camstudio. It is free. Just an advice for all those who going to be making a video. Use a fixed screen dimensions, not full screen because fullscreen will be blurry.

Good Luck Video Blogging and giving your blog a new life.

In a course of two weeks, I recieved a few emails asking me how to make money from a general web directory. Some asked is it even possible to make money with a General Web Directory? I don’t know why I was being asked so many questions like that until I realized I was getting a few hits from 2Blog.in where he called me a Guru of Directories. I saw this post a while back but that was the one that came in my mind when I wondered about that. Therefore, I decided to write my thoughts about this issue as well as some of the other well known directory owners in the industry.

I believe that it is possible to make money with a general web directory, but those QBC Directories (yes I know the term is overrated) doesn’t stand a chance in making good money as they used to. I would like to start out with the quotes and then present my own view in details.

I asked Mikey of Zorg-Directory the question which is stated in the title.

Mikey Replied:

Yes. It requires a lot of time and effort though. Money can help a lot but is not totally necessary.

I didn’t just want to rely on source therefore I also asked Bruce of Authority Directory

Bruce Replied:

Yes I think general directories can make money, but the directory owner needs to be patient. The directory has to be properly promoted, maintained and allowed to mature. It is not a way to get rich quick.

I also asked Brian of Seo Web Directory

Brian replied:

You can but it’s harder than it used to be. I noticed a drop in submissions since Google reduced PR, seems like people are losing confidents in general web directories. As you know there is more benefits to directory submission than PR. I feel that the way forward is niche directories.

Ok people we know what is going on with Google. Directories used to sell alot of links because people were abusing the resource and was trying to manipulate PR. Which made directory owners greedy and buy links to increase their Pagerank, so they can make ten fold of their investments. Which kinda didn’t work as we can see. Alot of people think it was not good for directories, but I think it was actually better for the industry. Now we will not have any more crappy directories.

How can you not make a crappy directory and still make money. Well first of all…[This post is too long, read it and you will definately learn something]

The goal of every webmaster is to have their website ranked among the top if not at the top for their competitve keywords. A smart seo technique is to gain backlinks, but sometimes gaining backlinks is too expensive. TNX.net has made gaining backlinks a peice of cake (easy and inexpensive). Along with gaining backlinks by advertising, publishers can use TNX to sell their links and make profit. If thats not enough, they have also added an affiliate program which offers some great deals that I will discuss in my post.

TNX for Publishers

I think TNX is best for publishers. Why? Because it have 52353 users. With private ads you might not get as much exposure as you can get with TNX. There are 22854502 links in the TNX system. You can get much more advertisers then you ever imagined through direct sales. You can automatically sells link to thousands of advertisers. It is very easy to install the codes, I checked that out. Their system is secure and credible. TNX pays when you request a payout via paypal, checks, Wire, or “any other payment method”. I definately don’t know what they mean by any other payment method. Unlike other companies, TNX charge commission as well. It is not as bad but it is still 12.5% from each party involved in the transaction. I was going to say that TNX is good for publishers because new website owners want to get exposure to advertisers, but TNX is based on Pagerank! Which means I can’t sell links on Balkhis through TNX because I have a Pagerank 0. Another downside of this program is heavy reliance on Pagerank for everything. Even the prices are generated automatically which mostly depends on Google Pagerank, link popularity, website category, and number of outbound links. Which completely eliminates a new site to sell links. The only reason I would use the system is to get more exposure for my site, but apparently the system requires a website that is build and established. My question in the review is why should the established websites even join the system when they are already popular and can get direct sales. Specially as I mentioned before the wordpress plugin that lets you do it all automatically. I checked out the system interface which was very easy to use therefore I don’t see a user with a Pr 5 site having issues with selling links. I think this program is more beneficial to the webmasters with a site in the range of PR 1 – 3 because those sites are the ones that usually need exposure. Ofcourse excluding John Chow, and after the whole PR thing going on with google I dont even think if it is the best way to determine the quality of a website.

TNX for advertisers

TNX will gain you tons of backlinks for a reasonable price. I was reading the homepage, It says get upto 10,000 static backlinks for only $11. Which is a pretty decent deal. Another cool deal they have is getting 5000 backlinks for free! Check it out here. If you like the offer then join TNX now. With such high quality/quantity backlinks, I am sure you can hit the top of Google in SERPs, but I don’t know for how long because google is going crazy about Paid links. But apparently TNX has its own SEO theories. They have made a tool that generates keywords for advertisers which makes their link look natural rather than paid. Read more about the tool here.

Affiliate program at TNX

TNX pays a high margin to their advertisers. TNX is based on points therefore you get 25 points out of every 100 that your referred advertiser has spent. You can use these points to advertise your own site, sell it to the network, or sell to any individual for your own set price. Join TNX now.

Above are the basic that you need to know about TNX which you could’ve found on their website as well. Now I was asked to review TNX and it is time for me to tell you what I think. Overall layout of this site is decent. Since it is such a big company, I think it could’ve spent some more on their designing aspect to get a more web 2.0 type look. I mentioned above in the publisher section that I don’t like their system so reliant on the value of Pagerank. Specially the fact that they don’t allow PR 0 site as stated here eventhough their own site is PR 0.

Due to the recent storm in the Google world, TNX was also one of the victims of Google raid. TNX doesn’t rank for its own name in Google, and have a PR of 0. Although I see that the owner mentioned that he has banned Google from their robot.txt. (Here). I don’t think the ban of their site will impact your site for selling your links on their site, but there can be a serious issue if you abuse this service.

Hint Hint the owner himself mentioned a few tricks. I believe that post was written before TNX was penaltised. I don’t know the owner personally, but I believe they build their links too quickly to face the wrath of Google. Should you use this service? If you qualify then sure go ahead. Do I guarantee that you will get good results…. Almost impossible to guarantee with any service. But as far as I can see even though the system was shooked by Google, they are doing pretty good. Their alexa is 10,897 and they have tons of members which means you will definately get exposure.

Do me a favor if you join, Join through my referral :p I can earn a few bucks.

Alright, well I like to give credit to people where I am inspired to write posts. I often leave them trackbacks, and sometimes Wordpress is smart enough to ping the sites even when I don’t leave them trackbacks. A while back I wrote two posts about wordpress. One which was giving the sneak peak and the other one was announcing the release of Wordpress 2.5.

I realized while checking my stats, that Wordpress automatically pinged the wordpress site and the fluency admin site when I put a link to them in my website and wrote about it. Giving trackbacks to these sites actually increased the traffic to my website.

Now you can see for yourself. The number proves itself, and I don’t even have to talk anymore about that it does work.

I get alot of trackback spams on Balkhis. Where people on spammy adsense websites, quote my posts and claiming it to be theirs and leave a trackback, so if by accident I approve they get traffic. That is a very shady technique. Therefore, be very careful about leaving trackbacks for no reason because It will make you look shady as well. If someone deserves the credit then give them a credit otherwise don’t try too hard !

I suggest you guys allow trackbacks on your blogs if you are not already doing so. Just keep them for manual approval rather than autoapprove, and It should all work fine. It shows that other people are quoting you and builds credibility to your user.