I rarely ever buy websites, but this time it was just too good of an offer to pass up. Occasionally, I will solicit offers to competitors of my current websites. You never know when they’re looking to sell, but just never actually list the websites on a forum marketplace. The two websites I recently purchased are Mass Effect 360 and Assassin’s Haven. I purchased these websites for a very good deal simply by emailing the owner.

I was originally interested in Mass Effect 360 only. Most of you know I own Mass Effect Forums, so having an additional Mass Effect fan site with a solid traffic/user baser would be a perfect tool to help build the forum.  After contact with the previous owner about Mass Effect 360, he told me he was also looking to unload the Assassin’s Creed website too. He gave me such a good package deal on both sites I couldn’t pass it up.

I got a great deal on the sites because the previous owner hadn’t posted on them in about 2 months. Traffic and revenue was dropping because he wasn’t updating it with content. Also, the wordpress themes he had were not attractive IMO and they were littered with ads. I immediately uploaded new wordpress themes, created custom headers and added new content to give the sites a boost.

I had planned on flipping Assassin’s Haven right away… like after two weeks of owning it. But not I’m not so sure. I may end up keeping it. It has already made me $5 from Adsense in the like 48 hours I had it redesigned.  I haven’t even added Valueclick, Adbrite and affiliate offers to it. With all of that, this site should turn into a $100/mo earner in no time. Making it a valuable asset in my network and not something I’d want to sell.

The Mass Effect 360 site, on the other hand, I had always planned on keeping. It only gets a fraction of the traffic Assassins Haven gets, but that’s not why I bought it. This site gets like 60 or so uniques/day as is. Once I start posting steadily I think the traffic will at least double or triple. I bought this site just to fuel my forum, because having a popular forum is way more valuable.

I still have work to do no both sites, like adding more wordpress plugins and doing some link building. But if you have any questions, comments or suggestions about the two new sites I picked up, please don’t hesitate to ask.

US Laws confuse me sometimes.

I like to play poker every now and then. We have a legal poker room not too far from my house. I’m not good or anything, I just enjoy the entertainment you get out of it.  Well, I’ve always had accounts with Ultimate Bet and Full Tilt Poker just to play the free games. I hadn’t been on there in awhile, so last night I wanted to check it out. I decided to look at the Real money games and was quite surprised to see 90% of the people playing in there are from the United States.

What’s going on here? As far as I know, online poker in the United States is illegal. How can so many people be playing it? Why are they not scared to show they’re from the US?

Maybe I missed something in the law? Maybe there is a loop-hole?

There’s so many Americans in there playing for real money. It’s fun to watch the high rollers in the 300/600 NL games betting thousands of dollars each hand. Those people live in a different world than I do.

I never really understood why gambling is illegal in America but legal pretty much everywhere else in the world. America is supposed to be the land of the free, right? So why can the government tell us what we can and can not do with our hard earned money. If someone wants to play a game of skill, like poker, with other consenting adults then what is the big deal. Shouldn’t that be your right? Ughhh.. like I said, US Laws are confusing.

I tried out Kontera ads a long time ago on some of my websites, even this blog if I remember correctly. It wasn’t much of a success. It made a few cents every now and then, and ultimately provided a poor experience for the website visitors. However, like 10 days ago, I decided to retry it on two of my websites: Pimp Myspace and Myspace Tweaks. Since these are myspace resource sites, the visitors are probably used to getting bombarded with ads… so a couple inline text ads won’t affect user experience.

Since I started back on the 14th, I have earned $10.39. It started out a little slow, but each of the last 5 days have all been over $1 earnings. $1 is peanuts, but I’m also the guy that stops to pick up a dime no the street, so I’ll take anything. That’s an extra $30 a month for doing nothing. Here’s a screenshot of the earnings. I had to black out certain parts because I’m not sure if their TOS allows us to post number of clicks and CTR.

I don’t plan on running Kontera ads on any of my other websites, like my forums. They’re just a pain in the ass and really annoying. If the earnings from them ever drop to below 50 cents a day I’ll probably just remove them.

I was reading a post on Shoemoney last night, that peaked my interest. Well, it wasn’t really the entire post, but merely a sentence or two. Shoe was talking about negative publicity and why you should embrace it. Near the end of the post, he says:

The long term effect - Long after the buzz from the post has gone away visitors will still return to your site. Odds are they wont even remember how they got there.

This is so true. After reading that sentence, I stopped to think…how did I find shoemoney’s blog? I really couldn’t remember. So then I’m thinking back, how did I find other websites and blogs? Did I just stumble across them in Google? Find them on a forum or through someone else’s blogroll? How did I find out about Digitalpoint? I have nearly 1,000 posts on that site and I can’t remember how I even found out about it. How did I find out about John Chow’s blog? No idea!

It’s so funny that we can be such big fans of websites and visit them every single day, yet have no recollection of how first visited the site. Some people may remember how they found out about sites if a friend referred them to it, but really that’s about it. If you go back to sites you’ve been visiting for a couple of years, odds are you won’t remember how you got there in the first place.

Do you remember how you first stumbled across this blog? Did you come from another site, or find it in Google?

A great way to market niche sites is through Yahoo Groups. Yahoo defines Groups as:

It’s where people with a shared interest meet, get to know each other, and stay informed. Your group gives you instant access to:

• Shared message archives
• Photos and photo albums
• Group event calendars
• Member polls and shared links

Best of all, Yahoo Groups are free.  So how can Yahoo Groups be beneficial for your websites? Two ways: Traffic and Links.

Most Yahoo Groups will have a place for members to add their links. Adding your link to the Groups directory is free. It may not drive a lot of traffic, but it will give you an important relevant backlink to your site.

You can drive traffic to your website by posting messages in the Yahoo Group. Every time you post a message it will send out an email to all the members in the group. If you have an attractive sales pitch in the email, people will click your link and visit your website. Some Yahoo Groups have thousands of members, so you can imagine how much traffic a quality email can drive.

I’ve used this method to promote proxies sites in the past. I don’t own proxies anymore, but at one time I did, and was making a couple bucks a day with them. What I did was joined the top 10 biggest proxy Yahoo Groups and then submitted my link to them all and posted daily messages on the message board. People in these groups wanted access to working proxies, so by constructing an email targeted to them and their needs (fast, anonymous proxies), I was able to drive traffic to my site daily. If the group is big enough, you can post messages several times a day.

Yahoo Groups can be used for all types of sites. Automotive, financial, blogs, forums and more. Be creative and you will benefit from them.

I was checking out DigitalPoints marketing forum (ya i know it’s strange, DigitalPoint was actually loading for me today…). Anyways, I came across a thread by some guy named dfsweb. He talks about his traffic building mantra. Here’s what he had to say:

Spend some time each day looking for ONE backlink. Yes, just one! Spend time on this to ensure that you can get a backlink from this location. No shortcuts. Register with the site if you have to. Link to them if you have to. Email them if you need to.

All you need to do is ensure that the link is good enough to get you ONE visitor per day from that site and you will be getting 365 unique visitors to your site within 1 year from referral traffic alone. Plus, you will have 365 links pointing to your site which can only be good for your SE rankings.

It is very easy to find such resources. Simply start with high PR directories, then move on to exchanging links with sites in your category. You will soon see that you will get better and better at finding such resources and when you get fast enough, move on to finding TWO resources per day and your traffic will skyrocket before your eyes!

Lately, I’ve been avoiding this. I don’t know why though. I mean how hard is it to find a link a day for your website? Well, I do have like 20 websites so that could be somewhat time consuming. But if I just concentrated on the big websites I have, then surely I can find a free link every day.

I think this is a great method for everyone to use. Just head to all the webmaster forums you know and spend 20 minutes looking for link exchanges or free directories. I’m going to start doing this. It’s time to get back to the basics. So if anyone has any sites related to mine (see my network in the sidebar), let me know and I’d be glad to link exchange or work something out.