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.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, WordPress just released version 2.9 aka “Carmen”! I haven’t really had the time, or need, to explore and test out everything yet though.

I have at least tried the one thing that I have looked forward to the most with this release – The Built-in image editor. And I must say that it works nice. It´s by no means an advance image editor like Photoshop, but it lets you do some simple editing to your uploaded files. Like rotating and crop the images as you want them. Check out the video here bellow for the rest of the features…

You can download the 2.9 from WordPress.org, or directly from your blog´s control panel!

One thing that I’ve focused on lately is product domain names. I’ve mainly looked at getting .com and .net domains, as I don’t think the .org fits that well into product/shopping mini sites. But I have made a few exceptions though when the other extensions have been taken; ToddlerSlippers.org is one of them…

I got the idea for the domain while browsing through a list of expiring domains, where I saw ToddlerSlippers.net. I didn’t think it was worth the $69 NameJet price though compared to the reg fee price of the available .org version, so I bought that one instead. I don’t have any big plans for this domain, but I do own some related domain names that I’m going to develop, and I think this one might be a nice addition in the future.

Affiliate Mini Sites

I have a few other product domains that I’ve turned into mini sites, mainly promoting the Amazon affiliate program. Some examples are Portable Mini Fridge and Dual DVD Player, where I’ve tried quite similar setups. So I decided to do some experiments with the Toddler Slippers site and trying out some new techniques. I took the money that I “saved” by not getting the .net domain, and bought myself a copy of the ReviewAzon plugin (not an affiliate link) for WordPress to test it…

Ranking High on Google

Usually when I develop a site I like to do the design/template myself. But since I didn’t want to spend too much time on this little project, I decided to go with a free theme. All in all, installing WordPress and ReviewAzon and making some adjustments to the theme – I spent no more then 45 minutes getting the site online. Adding products to the site is also a really quick task with the plugin, so after adding some products to advertise I’ve totally spent about 1.5 hour on this site.

One of the things that I like about product domain names, is that it is fairly easy to rank well on Google with them. The ToddlerSlippers.org was launched in the middle of November, and it currently shows up on the first page for the search “Toddler Slippers” (with quotes) of about 227,000 other results. I think that is great for a site that I’ve only spent 1.5 hour on, and with no link building or promotion at all. I should also mention that the keyword “Toddler Slippers” has a monthly search volume of more than 22 000 exact searches, locally in the USA.

Revenue So Far

I realize that December isn’t the best month to get any statistical info from, with all the extra Christmas shopping going on. But in the 1 month that ToddlerSlippers.org has been online it has made me around $40 in revenue to my Amazon affiliate account. It´s not a fortune, but it has at least paid for the registration cost and some more!

Toddler Slippers might not be the best paying product as it is quite cheap – But often the visitors buys other products at the same time, and the commission is a percentage of the complete order, so it adds up. As an example I recently had one visitor who bought a pair of $13 slippers along with a $130 compound miter saw. A quite strange mixture there, but I’m not complaining about the generated commission!

I thought that it would be fun/interesting to see what blog platform that is the common domainers choice. So I looked at all the Domaining.com feeds to see what kind of CMS (Content Management System) that are used.

While looking at the at all the 127 feeds that Domaining.com currently aggregates, I took a closer look at the 111 that actually resolved and have a blog. From what I can see, my stats show the following:

• Blogs on WordPress (hosted on WordPress.com or self hosted) – 85
• Blogs on other platforms (including Blogger.com and TypePad.com) – 26

According to this about 76% of the domainer blogs uses WordPress as the platform for their blog. That is quite an impressive advantage for WordPress! The minority choices included TypePad, Blogger and Joomla. Some  examples of blog´s that doesn’t follow the main stream is RicksBlog.com and Domainreport.ca.

Among the few that doesn’t use WordPress one really stand out to me, and that is DNJournal. The reason to that is that it seems to be made with FrontPage, at least according to the generator meta tag. In my world, using FrontPage is equally bad to as using Comic Sans as the font. But hey, whatever works for Ron is best for Ron as the old saying goes!