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Who is Kevin Ham and how does he have $300 million dollars?

I am an avid reader of money.cnn.com and they recently posted an amazing article on Kevin Ham, the most powerful dotcom mogul in the world. You can read the full article here. Basically Kevin is the perfect example of the American dream. He started out going to bed school and built a small domain business as a side project. A couple years later he left his residency to pursue his online dreams. And also because he was making more domaining than being a doctor. Crazy huh?

Here is an excerpt from the article. If only we could all do this…

When Ham wants a domain, he leans over and quietly instructs an associate to bid on his behalf. He likes wedding names, so his guy lifts the white paddle and snags Weddingcatering.com for $10,000. Greeting.com is not nearly as good as the plural Greetings.com, but Ham grabs it anyway, for $350,000.

Ham is a devout Christian, and he spends $31,000 to add Christianrock.com to his collection, which already includes God.com and Satan.com. When it’s all over, Ham strolls to the table near the exit and writes a check for $650,000. It’s a cheap afternoon.

What I find interesting is that several of the sites he owns that I went too aren’t even that appealing. In terms of graphics and design appeal, they score like a 2 out of 10. So I guess we can say design doesn’t matter. It’s all about traffic. In fact, having an awful design might entice people to click an ad to get off your site!

That’s pretty much my take on the story. Be sure to read the whole article though. It’s very eye opening. Of course, he did all this pre-dotcom bust. Accomplishing something like this now would be virtually impossible.

Sitevoter was a digg style site a friend of mine and I created a few months back. The idea behind it was to provide webmasters a place to submit newly created websites so they could get feedback from other members. Tips on how to improve their site and what not. Webmasters would also get a free link on a PR3 site and possibly get some traffic. It sounded like a win-win site.

However, it was hard to promote. No one was using it and eventually we let the site die down. There hasn’t been a front page post in almost 50 days. Quite pathetic really..

I still think the site is a good idea. We could also give out Site of the Month banners for sites earning the most votes.

I’m just curious what everyone thinks. Should I try to bring this site back from the grave, or let it stay there?

A funny clip for the Saturday viewers. Pablo Francisco doing a parody of the movie preview guy.

Over the past month or so … pretty much since college hoops ended… I haven’t been paying as much time to my Gator Forum or my Mass Effect Forum. Traffic has died died considerably on the Gator site mostly because there are no sports to talk about right now. No spring football practice, no more recruiting, more more basketball… summer months are slow for sure.

The thing about forums is you can’t leave them out to dry. I’ve learned that the hard way in the past. Whether you have mods/admins or not, as an owner you still need to be active in the community. People look up to you and expect you to be there.

I really need to kick start my Gator site. It made me over $100 in April, so really it’s not something I should ignore. It has potential to be a big time community, I just need to put the man hours into recruiting members. It will be a lot easier once football comes back, but until then I need to keep the forum populated so that by the time football does start, there is a solid member base.

It’s hard work, but I’m going to try and dedicate an hour a day to building this site. It gets around 100 uniques/day currently. If I can just get that to 500-1000/day, then I know I could turn it into a big money maker… around $500/month.

Mass Effect on the other hand is a bit different. It’s a forum for a game that hasn’t come out yet. And the publisher, BioWare, doesn’t release a lot of information on it. It’s hard for me to build discussion topics on a game I don’t know a lot about. Hopefully as it gets closer to launch I will start getting more members who want to be involved in the game. The official Mass Effect forums are pretty active… if only I could find a way to attract some of their members to come to my site without spamming anything.

I thought I would give everyone an update on the wedding process. For those of you new to the blog, you can view my I’m Getting Married post to catch up. It’s been almost 2 months since I’ve been engaged. Compared to most couples, I think we’ve got a lot accomplished.

First off, I just want to say ‘Damn weddings are expensive!!!’

OK, now that I got that off my chest I can move on. So what have we done? Well, most importantly we have the church and reception hall booked. We are getting married at a small Catholic Church and will have the reception at Jacksonville Golf and Country Club. It’s a very nice club and is moderately priced. Don’t even ask me how much I consider ‘moderate’ because you might poo your pants.

We also have a photographer booked and a DJ. We are taking our engagement pictures in 2 weeks at a park on the beach in North Florida. Once I get some pictures back I’ll be sure to post one for you guys. And about the DJ…the one thing we both didn’t want was one of those loud, obnoxious DJs that makes everyone do the chicken dance and the electric slide. We told this guy to play music and be invisible.

The limo for the night is also taken care of.

The most important thing we’re missing is the honeymoon. We’re still looking over possible destinations, but we’re leaning towards somewhere in the Caribbean.  Tropical is the way to go when planning a honeymoon. No cruises though…to many people fall overboard or get shipwrecked.

So that’s pretty much it for the wedding planning update. We’re ahead of schedule in my opinion, but that’s ok. Better to get it taken care of now then to be rushing or have something you want already booked.

I am always coming up with wacky and creative business ideas. Most of the time though, they are already taken. Is there really anything out there that hasn’t been thought of already? Sometimes I wonder.

Anyways, everytime I think of one of these ideas I always run it by my dad because he’s a very successfull business owner. You know what the first thing he always says to me? “Where’s the business plan?” I usually respond with something like “screw the business plan… this idea rocks.” Unfortunately, that’s not how it works in the real world. As much as I hate business plans, and I’m sure you do too, they are absolutely necessary when starting a business. You could have thought of the wheel, but if you don’t have a plan for putting that idea into action you will never succeed.

Without a business plan, no one will listen to you. Want a small business loan from the bank? Show me your business plan. Want to sell products in a new store? Show me your business plan. Want to lease some space in the mall? Show me your business plan.

In today’s post I want to provide all the to-be entrepreneurs out there a couple of sources for business plan structures and templates. These sites will help you organize and write your business plan.

• Business Plan for Start-ups by Microsoft
• Business Plan Examples by MyOwnBusiness.com
• Standard Business Plan Outline
• How to Write a Business Plan by the SBA