Sorry for not posting yesterday. I really didn’t have much to talk about, and I was rather busy at work. Not much going on today in development either, but I do have an interesting topic to discuss today. That is post exchanges and paying for posts to help start up a forum.

• Are Post Exchanges Bad?
• Space Tweaks is Growing
• Thinking of a Business Name
• Phantasy Star Universe Mod Needed

Are Post Exchanges Bad?
A buddy of mine (we’ll call him Rob) approached me on MSN last week about problem he was having while selling a site of his. This just so happens to be a site I originally created and sold to Rob back in March/April 2006. Rob was listed this same site for sale on DP, and apparently several people interested in the site (it was a forum) asked him if he had ever done post exchanges or paid for posts. So after some research on webmaster forums Rob finds posts that I made back in January asking for 10:10 post exchanges for this particular forum. I have often used the post exchange method to help boost a brand new forum. I never thought it was a bad thing.

Rob told me that if he had known I did some post exchanges (and we’re talking with like 15 people maybe) he never would have bought the site from me. He told me that doing post exchanges and buying posts will give you a bad name and a bad reputation when you try to sell a forum.

I am curious as to what most of you think about post exchanging and buying posts at the beginning of a forum’s life. Is it an unethical way of getting members? Needless to say Rob was able to sell the forum for a couple hundred dollars more than what he bought it for from me.

Space Tweaks is Growing
Space Tweaks is experiencing steady traffic growth as of late. 450+ uniques in the last few days. We are loading it will all original content on a daily basis. It should only be a matter of another week or two before we starting seeing 1000+ uniques daily. We are getting hits from all over the place, but we are mostly excited about the nearly 100 profiles that are using our material. If you’re looking for unique content, check us out.

Thinking of a Business Name
The creative thinking part of owning is business is TOUGH. I have all my forms printed out for the LLC, I have my $130 ready… the only thing I am missing is a business name. Seems simple right? Wrong! This is a name that will be seen by thousands of people. It is the face of your business. I have seen a lot of people come up with creative names. I don’t want to just use my last name and stick Web Development after it … but I may end up doing it if I can’t think of anything catchy.

Phantasy Star Universe Needs a Mod
Finding people to post on a forum for a game that won’t be released for 2 more months is rather difficult. I need some help! If you have experience playing Phantasy Star Online and would like to be a moderator on my Phantasy Star Universe Forum, then please let me know asap!

I am also looking for link exchanges to all of my sites, especially Historum. If you are interested please drop me a line or send me a message on MSN.

Anyone else have a case of the Mondays? If anyone wants to know what it’s like living my day to day life at work, just watch the movie Office Space. Another weekend has come and gone. I was able to squeeze in some web work, but not as much as I was hoping for. The Jaguars looked awful again against the Tampa Bay first team defense. Leftwich just can’t get it done. Don’t be surprised if this is his last year. Sunday, the battery in my car died! I’m just glad I found out yesterday rather than this morning when I left for work. I got angry because stuff like this always happens to me. It seems like lately I can’t catch a break. I was able to go to Wal Mart with my girlfriend and we picked up a new battery for $50… pretty cheap if you ask me. I have a lot of experience installing car batteries, so I was able to put this one in in a matter of minutes.

Well on to the topics you probably read this blog for:

• New Forum Developments
• CPA Empire Week 1 Update
• Forming an LLC
• Adsense Update

New Forum Developments
Forums are probably the most time consuming and demanding web sites that someone can make. If a website’s subject matter is not an interest of yours, it will be very hard to find the time and will to dedicate in bettering your forum. After reading more of Lee Dodd’s posts about how the forum biz is on the rise… I decided to invest some of the capital I raised into building new forums.

I bought three domains on Friday to build forums from scratch. I am only going to reveal one of them now, because it’s the only one I have set up. The first forum I am going to launch is for the highly anticipated XBox, PS2, and PC video game Phantasy Star Universe. It is the latest installment of the SEGA Phantasy Star Online Series that dates back to the early 1990s. I spent 4 years of my life playing Phantasy Star Online 1 and 2 on Dreamcast and XBox. The game is just sick. I might buy Phantasy Star Universe if I find the time to play it.

Anyways, you can view my Phantasy Star Universe forum at PSUForum.com. You might not get the domain name unless you have played the game. Everyone calls Phantasy Star Online, PSO for short. There are several big PSO forums out there, but I couldn’t find one dedicated to just PSU. This forum will be hard to promote since 1. The game isn’t out yet and 2. Tough competition and 3. It’s a niche that you can’t just advertise for on any webmaster forum.

CPA Empire Week 1 Update
I have now had CPAEmpire on Layout Pimps for 1 full week. The results are not nearly as good as I was hoping, but my account manager told me it’s about trial and error and find out what the visitors like to click on. I made $4.05 in my first week. I was hoping for $10+ considering the traffic I get is nearly 300 uniques a day.

Forming an LLC
One of my best friends from College is an accountant for Price Waterhouse Coopers. I was discussing with him some of the benefits of forming an LLC. I know many of you out there have an Inc or LLC already so this might be boring for you. But anyways, I’m going to research and file the papers this week to become an official business.

Realistically, I probably don’t make enough money online to have an separate business, but there are tax benfits that I am looking for. For example, since I do all my online work at home, I will be able to write off part of my rent, electric bills, internet bills, and even phone bills on my taxes. Having my business pay for these expenses instead of my 40 hour a week job, will allow me to save/invest more of my salaried income. I’ll keep you updated.

Adsense Update
This August marks the first month I have earned $100+ in Adsense in a 1 month period. This is a milestone in my opinion. When I started out making websites back in December I was making maybe $15 a month in Adsense, and now in less than 1 year I have increased my Adsense EPM by almost 700%. Imagine if I could do that every year! It will be interesting to see if I can maintain the progress after my sales of Sonic Wild Fire and Medieval II.

That’s it for now… until tomorrow!

With the recent sale of two of my sites, I have now gained about $370 in capital I can use to fund new projects and/or existing projects. I am still debating on whether or not to continue with my “fire sale” and get rid of Fight Song Lyrics too. With college football season just around the corner (that’s my prime time) it would be a really tough decision to sell it. I am also $10.30 short of the $100 mark needed in Adsense to get a monthly deposit. If I sell Fight Song Lyrics I will never get to $100 by August 31st.

• SonicWildFire.com Sold
• Million Dollar Idea
• Historum is Dying!
• Buccaneers vs. Jaguars

Sonicwildfire.com Sold
I was able to complete a sale on Wednesday morning for sonicwildfire.com. Oddly enough, the same person who bought Medieval II from me, is the same person who bought Sonic. We agreed on a BIN price of $200. $200 is a lot less than I originally expected to make from the sale. One of the DigitalPoint members brought to my attention that the name of the game might be changed in the future. Sega officially denied the name change, but who really knows? So instead of getting the $300-400 I originally planned for, I was only able to get $200. An absolute STEAL if the name of the game stays Sonic Wild Fire.

Million Dollar Idea
After talking with Andreas Bard on MSN yesterday, he said something that sort of stuck into my mind. He said “50% of a lot is more than 100% of a little”. A simple, yet very powerful statement when trying to earn revenue online. After thinking it over on the ride home from work, I decided to work on an idea I had with a friend who is not in the internet business at all. In fact he works as an energy trader accountant in Jacksonville where I live. I’ll reveal more about the idea once we get a domain and set up the site… which hopefully I can do this weekend.
Whether or not it’s a million dollar idea … I don’t know? But it will be fun to have a business partner that is not in the industry. Getting an outsiders perspective on things can open your eyes to new avenues to reach people. And don’t worry, this isn’t a myspace resource site or arcade or directory or ring tone site. It’s totally fresh. I plan on using some of the money I raised for this venture. It will use free Joomla though, so the design and launch of the site won’t cost much, just the advertising will.

Historum is Dying Down
The past week or so has been rough on Historum. Memberships have slowed down… traffic has slowed down, and revenue has pretty much stayed the same. Activity on the forum is also dwindling. One of my best posters went on vacation for 2 weeks. So it’s tough replacing him, as he is very knowledgable in history. I know forums take a long time to grow generally, but I just don’t want to see my site dying after not even 3 months.

I need to promote it better. I think A contest is in store. I have money from my site sales to offer something like a $50 Amazon gift card. I will have to research the best type of contest to run … Referrals? Number of Posts ? There are a couple of options I need to look into.

Bucs vs. Jaguars
As some of you might know I have season tickets to the Jacksonville Jaguars NFL games (that’s American Football for those of you out of country). This Saturday the Jaguars play the Buccaneers, so I will be going to that game. The 3rd preseason game is always the best because the starters play almost 3 quarters worth of football. If the Jaguars first string offense doesn’t score at least 1 or 2 touchdowns … we could be in for a loooong season.

That’s it for now. If I don’t post later or tomorrow, I hope everyone has an awesome weekend! I know I will being at the Jaguars game!

My Medievall II fansite didn’t last long on DigitalPoint. It sold within a few ours for a BIN of $150. A lot more than I was expecting. Don’t you hate it when you sell a site for BIN after only an hour or so. It makes you feel like if the site sold so fast, that maybe you could have got more for it. O-well, I am happy with my $150. I know have a little over $170 in paypal. I am still debating on what to do with the money. Buy a new site? Desposit it in the bank to pay bills (nahhhh) or use the money to advertise my other sites?

Any suggestions?

In other news, Google is hitting Space Tweaks more and more. We are ranking near the top for a lot of sports layout searches, such as Dale Jr and Edgerrin James. The site isn’t making us much money yet, but we are getting more and more uniques everyday. If you are looking for a link exchange, let me know.

I’ll post another update later today with more info if I have time. I just wanted to get the news of my sale out there to all my loyal readers.

Every so often I get bored with my websites, so I decide to sell them. This way I can concentrate on a particular site of interest … in this case my Easy Golf Tips. I see the potential in that site and want to devote most of my time to it. I can’t do that when I have a bunch of little sites getting in the way.

• Medieval II Fansite For Sale
• Raising Capital
• Layout Pimps Update

Medieval II Fansite For Sale
The first site I have decided to part ways with is Medievalii.com I haven’t done anything to it since the day I launched it. Not one link exchange, not one bit of promotion or advertisement. It’s a nice domain and a decent enough site that it might fetch me $50-100. It has brought me in a couple of bucks and has low to mid xx traffic a day. The best part is all the traffic is genuine. 100% of the traffic is from Google or type-in. You can view details of the sale here.

Raising Capital
Depending on how the Medieval II sale goes, I might also sell Sonic Wild Fire and Fight Song Lyrics. If I get rid of these sites, my daily Adsense earnings will be exhausted and I probably won’t even make $1 a day from my other sites. However with the sale of these two sites I can possibly bring in $600. Combined with $25 I already have in paypal and the money from Medieval II, I will have raised about $700.

There are several things I can do with the $700. I can attempt to buy one big site making $70/month. I could then spend my resources and time on that 1 site instead of worrying about several others, hoping to build it into a $100/month site. Another option is to spend some of the money on buying a custom template for Historum and spending money to advertise that site as well.

A decision about whether or not to keep or sell my sites will probably be made by the end of this month.

Layout Pimps Update
I have removed all Google Adsense ads from Layout Pimps per CPAEmpire Terms of Service and added new CPA advertisements. I do not get money by people clicking on the ads. I only get money if they fill in the form (zip code or email submit) on the advertisers page. Some of the leads pay $2 and some pay $11 per person. So far in almost 24 hours I have not had any leads. Hopefully things improve, but I do not want to go back to Adsense. Adsense on Myspace sites pay like 1-2 cents per click. It’s not worth it IMO.

Sadly my weekend is over. I hate Mondays! Nothing is worse than waking up in the morning and having to drive 20 minutes to work and sitting in a cubicle all day. I hate routine. And I am jealous of every one of you who do not have to work for “the man” everyday.

My weekend started out awesome. I played golf with my dad and two of his friends on Saturday morning. I’m still taking lessons so I don’t want to reveal my score just yet. My game is improving greatly though. I’m hitting the ball high and with a draw. I don’t chunk the ball anymore and I never slice. Saturday night I went to the Panthers vs. Jaguars game at Alltel Stadium in Jacksonville. The game was exciting because it was the first preseason home game, however it got boring fast. Neither side made any explosive plays.

I didn’t get much done on my websites over the weekend. Unless my girlfriend is out of town, I hardly get to work on my sites on the weekend. I mentioned in an earlier post that my friends and I were working on a new project. Well, we launched it and are already getting close to 300 uniques a day without hardly any promotion.

I am pleased to introduce Space Tweaks. Not your typical MySpace resource website. We actually have UNIQUE content that is created by us. We have custom contact tables, layouts, and more. Every week we will add fresh designs requested by our visitors. We have already earned a couple bucks from Adsense. We are hoping to be at the $10/day mark by the end of the week. This site is going to spread rapidly because of it’s unique content.

In other news, my CPAEmpire account manager called my this afternoon and wants me to get set up with their ads as soon as possible. He gaurentees I will make a ton more with them than I do with Adsense (which is at $5.50 already today). Some of their clients pay $11-$37 per lead! If I had 2-3 leads per week I’d already be making more than I do with Adsense.

Golf Tips also continues to grow for me. It might reach 30 uniques today, and all those uniques are search engine generated. Google really does love unique content! I need to finish writing the articles for that site and get the shop opened ASAP as people are starting to flock to my site.

That’s about it for now. Another Monday is almost in the books.