Welcome to OFJZ!

This blog has now been live for about 8 months. I can’t say that I’ve updated it really often during that time, just about 20 posts totally, but this is my first “a little bit of this and that” kind of post. I’ve always enjoyed reading them on other blogs, but never gotten around to write one myself before. But here goes…

BargainDomains.com auction

I listed a couple of domains on the BargainDomains.com site a few days ago, and I was really happy to see one of my domain getting send “directly” to auction. The domain is CrayonSet.com, and it has met it´s reserve price of $150. It is still 2 days to go on the auction, so if you´re interested head on over directly to the auction and place your bid! Also make sure to check out HomeTheaterAudio.net, FlashLightLed.net and EntrywayMats.com among others!

More of the Kiditect Network

I got a little inspiration from writing my post a few days ago about the Kiditect Network. So I decided to launch another site in the network – Toddler Sunglasses. I’m also working on another one right now that’ll go live quite soon.

Sully´s Blog – A new favorite of mine!

When I got involved in this industry about a year ago I read just about everything that anybody posted on every domaining blog. Now I’ve narrowed it down to reading just a few selected ones regularly. “Sully´s Blog” is the newest addition to those! If you haven’t seen it yet you really should give it a try. He mixes some great interviews with his personal dealings in the domain industry. Make sure to add that blog to your rss-feed and blogrolls and whatnot!

Another 2 iTect Networks Getting Born

After branding together my Toddler sites into the Kiditect Network, I decided to do the same with some other sites of mine. The first to get a collective network is the Petitect Network. That is the place for my dog/pet sites. I haven’t yet re-branded everything into this, but the recent TerrierGrooming.com design incorporates the “Part of the Petitect Network” in the footer at least.

The other one is the Shopitect Network (main network at shopitect.com isn’t live yet though). This is a new take with a brand new theme by me. It has the same basic function as the Toddler sites, but it´s branded more for tech/computers and so on. The first site to get re-branded was Window Air Conditioner, and then followed re-designs of MiniFoodProcessors.net and LcdAlarmClock.com along with a brand new launch of Multimedia Computers.

After seeing a very low CTR on TerrierGrooming.com for about a year, I decided to take the bull by the horns and try to do something about it. Turns out that I managed to double the CTR and income!

Before and After

After buying and then re-launching the Terrier Grooming site in the summer of 2009, I decided to re-design it again about a month ago. The reason behind this was mainly because of the bad optimization of the previous version. It did/does get quite many visitors – just around 4000 unique visitors so far this month. But the CTR was horrible before, AdSense showed 0.3-0.4% earlier, something had to be done!

Since the re-launch a month ago, the numbers have improved to around 1% instead, or in other words more than double the amount of clicks, which I think is an awesome result. It could be higher for sure, but a very high percentage of the visitors are coming in from Google Image results, and considering that I think it´s an fair amount of clicks! It´s without any doubt my best performing site right now if you only count AdSense.

Right now I’m thinking about putting the site up for sale at Flippa to see what I can get for it, and to free up some cash for other projects (I know that is a very common excuse for trying to sell crap sites/domains, but in this case it is actually true (come to think about it, that is also an common excuse for excusing a excuse)). Anyway, I’ll let you know if I decide to sell it!

It has now been quite exactly 3 months since I launched the first sites in my Kiditect Network, so I thought it might be time for a little update on how it is going…

Initially I had plans to quickly launch a number of additional sites to the network, but due to other projects taking up time and somewhat lack of inspiration, it is still only the 4 initial sites that are live so far.

3 out of 4 are Performing Well!

I can’t exactly say that I can quit my regular day job based on the income from these sites. But in my eyes they are still performing quite well.

As I wrote in my first post about the launch, all domains but 1 where hand registrations by me. I bought ToddlerBoots.net as a dropping domain on NameJet. So far, kinda to my surprise, Toddler Boots is the least best performing domain. It don’t seem to get any advantage from Google what so ever, rather the contrary.

I’m not going to share the exact income figures with you instead I’m showing an estimate of combined income from AdSense and Amazon. I’ll also have a look at the Google ranking for the sites… The searches here bellow where made without quotes, for the keyword in the domain:

• ToddlerSuits.net – Ranks as #3 on the first page. Has made high $XX.
• ToddlerWatches.com – Ranks as #1 on the first page. Has made mid $XX
• ToddlerUnderwear.net – Ranks as #4 on the first page. Has mid $XX
• ToddlerBoots.net – Ranks low on page #6. Has made $0 so far!

From the about $8 invested in each domain (except ToddlerBoots.net), I think it is a nice return. I have totally made about x10 return on my initial investment… And that is including all the domains not yet launched, which is 6 more ToddlerKeyword domains.

I must say that I’m quite excited… WordPress 3 “Thelonious” has just been released! It comes with “quite” many new features, actually 1.217 bug fixes and feature enhancements.

The first thing that hits you when you setup a fresh install of the new version is that the default theme has been changed. It really is a change to the better, I really like the new “Twenty Ten” theme even though I always tend to create my own custom themes.

New Menu Functions

Apart from this, one of the new features that I’m most glad to see, is the ability to create custom menus. It might not seem like a big deal to some, but for me it is. I often find myself wanting to add for example both categories and pages to the menu of sites that I create. Previously this was kinda tricky to achieve, and either required each menu item to be hard-coded into the template, or some plugin to handle it. But now it is just a matter of a few clicks to get it done!

Check out the video here bellow, from the WordPress blog, for a more detailed walk through of some of the new features.

As always, make sure to backup your site before upgrading to avoid any unfortunate problems! I’ve already upgraded most of my sites without any problems whatsoever, but you can’t be careful enough.