As I said in my previous post, I sold all my sites about a month ago. It´s been a kind of slow month, with me pretty much staying away from everything… But now it´s time for me to get back in again, new site launched today!

The site launched is a product review site for Mp3 Speakers, located at mp3speakers.net. This site is kind of a new setup for me. I’ve decided to skip the ReviewAzon product listings that I’ve just on quite many sites now. Instead I’m focusing more on just displaying unique reviews written for me, outsourced through TextBroker. Of course each review also links to a buy now page on Amazon, so hopefully I’ll get some sales that way.

The product listing part has instead been trimmed down to only having a normal Amazon Astore on one subpage. I haven’t tried this before, and it’ll be interesting to see how it performs. If it doesn’t give good results I’ll probably switch to ReviewAzon, or something similar in the future.

I’ll keep you updated on the progress. Hopefully the site will index and rank somewhat well before all the Christmas shopping is over!

Right now I’m kind of re-grouping/starting fresh again. I will do a little more planning, and then probably focus on developing just a handful of sites and give them 100% of my focus.

Trading for Development

Even though I really enjoy the process of developing my sites on my own, and also think that I’m quite good at it, I’m going to let Epik.com do some more sites for me. Time has been “quite” limited for me lately, and I just can’t produce sites for all the domains that I want. I’ll stick to a few that I’ll handle myself, and let Epik take care of the rest!

There is a quite steep $249/site cost for setting up the sites, but I’ve traded some domains for Epik Bucks, so I have credit for about 10 more sites + 5 that I already own (3 of them in development right now). Though this might change since I have some bids in for the SwapFest auction tomorrow, but that just gives me sites as well and domains that go along with them.

As it has been reported on some other sites, the earnings hasn’t been great from the Epik product portals. But I like the setup, and I think it will come around eventually as Rob and the guys tweaks the setups and features!

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.

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.

I’m very proud to present what I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks… The Kiditect Network! It is a small network of sites that I’ve recently launched. It currently consists of 4 sites, all of them are affiliate stores selling products for toddlers.

I have put in a lot of time and work into this, the first site (ToddlerBoots.net) took me a little longer than I had expected. But once the ground template and work flow now has been build up I can quickly launch new sites with a little less effort and the following 3 sites took no more than a few hours each to put together.

You can check out the different sites currently in the Kiditect Network by going to the main network site. That site itself might not seem like much to the world, but it serves it´s purpose. I’ll spice it up a little in the future as I go back to refine and tweak things.

Domains in the Network

As I said there are currently 4 sites live, all using keyword rich domains and with good search volume. All in all I have 5 more sites that is going live in a few weeks. With the exception of ToddlerBoots.net which I picked up at NameJet a few months ago, all the domains are handregs. So it’ll be interesting to see how they perform. They are already starting to rank on Google, with 2 of the sites already on the first page of results. I’ll make sure to follow up on the performance as the sites settles in!

The numbers are based on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman.