Can somebody lend me around $200,000, so I can go buy WT.com? If I ever make it big, I’m going to definitely buy a two letter domain, even if it doesn’t make sense. I’d get it just to make it my personal blog.

Domain real estate is a very funny business; people can sell domains that don’t mean anything for large amounts of money. For instance, if you have a LLLX.com you’d get at least $2,000 for it. There’s probably nothing LLLX can possibility stand for, but it’s a very easy domain to remember.  It’s like selling a piece of land right next to the ocean, worth more than any real house nearby.

I just want to rewind time back to 1994 and buy up hundreds of domains. If I sold them today, I’d be a multimillionaire. Now to find the time machine.
Yeah.

I’m sure ya’ll have heard of Facebook, but check out studivz.net and xiaonei.com. Do you notice anything similar? Well, both sites are 100% knockoffs of Facebook. The interesting thing about both those sites is, they’re making a lot of money.

Studivz is the German equivalent of Facebook and is the 120th most visited site on the internet. Xianonei is the Chinese version and isn’t far off from Studivz, being the 370th most visited site. What’s funny is Xianonei is almost completely like Facebook; it even has the same color scheme.

I don’t know much about international law, but if either of those companies were US based, they would be cooked alive by Facebook. But since both sites are based outside of USA, I’m assuming anything goes; Xiaonei was actually purchased in 2006 for some big bucks and Facebook didn’t do anything!

Usually people build on ideas, but Studivz and Xiaonei show how it’s possible to even make money if you just totally steal an idea.

Yeah.

Yesterday I looked at my traffic and something didn’t seem right. After some investigation I found that I was sending traffic to broken pages; it’s a very depressing situation when you pay for the traffic. Needless to say this is a great method to lose a lot of money.

 
My sites weren’t completely broken, but every other refresh would display “Server Not Found”. This took me a very long time to figure out: First I thought it was the A Records for the DNS, so I changed all my websites’ A Records. Few hours later I was encountering the same problem; that’s when I figured decided to check my nameserver that the site was hosted on. Apparently, it had expired last month and was on redemption period. That would explain why the server wasn’t found, but why was it still occasionally working? DNS records are really complicated and can be masked behind other DNS records; it’s like a map to your website and the map can have different routes to your website. The main routes to my website were expired, but there were other smaller routes; therefore, you could get to my website by taking other routes.

 


 
Yeah.

It definitely takes money to make more money. If you want an college education, you need money for tuition. If you want to start a business, you need money for investing. If you want to work at a pizza place, you need money for transportation. You get the point; we all need money! But in businesses, how much initial investment is the most important thing: It’s a lot easier to start making money with a big cash supply, than a weak one.

 
If you have $10,000 you won’t fear losing a few dollars as compared to a guy with only $100. This may seem common sense, but it’s important when you make daily decisions that can increase/decrease your total $ supply. Take for instance marketing with Google Adwords, a program which allows you to bid for keywords to display your ads on Google. You just start a new campaign, with untested keywords that might earn/lose money. This new campaign targets an offer that that pays $2.55 a conversion; that’s a very slim margin of profit/loss. For instance, you have 1000 keywords in the new campaign and maybe 500 of these accumulate 1 cent each without a single conversion yet. Now you have lost $5 and still don’t know what keywords are profitable. If you have $10,000 you can keep on going: A $5 loss isn’t much to you. But if you’re the guy with $100 what do you do? Risk it or admit defeat with the $5 loss?

 
Scenarios like that happen to me all the time. I have to decide whether or not to shutdown untested keywords, because of a losing streak. Just because the keyword starts off bad, doesn’t mean in the long run it’ll lose you money. In my Adwords account, there are different periods you can view; sometimes during a 3 day period, it will show high costs for bogus keywords but in the 7 day period they will be right on the spot. The only way to know if specific keywords are profitable is to test, and that requires spending money. If you don’t have enough funds, obviously you cannot test everything so you have to play it by chance; therefore, unless you have the money, you have to risk it to make it. Sometimes these decisions can be very regretful and drive men into..

madness.

 
The bottom line is, it’s a lot easier making money with a big initial investment. But if you don’t have a lot don’t be scared lose, because you have to pay to play.

 
I made this post to encourage myself, not to give up when I’m getting gamed by Adwords.
Yeah.