barefoottech Encore

Blogger is 10

2009-06-21T22:23:00.001-07:00

I am taking the opportunity of Blogger.com Tenth birthday. Google has offered bloggers the chance to share their experiences. So this post is about the continued lack of response to my repeated requests to regain access to my original Blogspot.com BLOG.
It was removed by blogger for spammy content (mea culpa). But gogle still allows it to run and it indexes quite highly for several search terms , including my username.

SO google either allow me to regain access so I can remove all the old,spammy and stale content OR remove it from the active list.

Various Ways To Make Money With Domain Names

2008-02-11T18:36:00.000-08:00

By David Underhill

As more people and companies than ever are investing in domain names, it has become evident that not all of these names will realise their full income earning potential. As a Domain reseller and investor with a reasonable sized portfolio ,I have often been asked the best way to make money from these investment domains.

The following are the most common ways to create an income stream or maximize resale value.

Park the name with a parking service

These places pay a percentage of the advertising revenue derived from ads placed on a page displayed when someone visits your domain. Also most of these parking services also offer a sales listing service to enable easy resale marketing of your domain.
Make your own park page

Similar to the above ,only you create your own small Website with ads and get 100% of the revenue. This however will not be as profitable because the parking services get a much greater traffic flow.
Develop a small, but content rich minisite

These small minisites are usually filled with articles and contextual ads from Adsense. Also often called AdsenseSites
Develop a full featured web-site

Selling services or products and also have some ads and paid links.This can be either selling your own products or as an affiliate for an existing online website.

Factors that increase value

At any of the above stages of development and Value adding,you can make money by reselling the Domain/Site for an increased value above the purchase price.

Keywords & brandability of the name

i.e. http://Become-rich.org is Keyword rich and is valued higher than http://CrappyNames.com
Amount of Visitor Traffic

Simple equation More visitors = More Income = Greater Value
Return from site

(Income for Ads,Sales or Paid Links) . Higher Income earned ,Higher value for the site
Current Demand for similiar names

If a particular type of name is hot property ,all the similar names increase in value because of the demand.
Current Search Engine Ranking

If the Name is Not listed by the major search engines or is on page 346 than value is low, conversely if it is listed on the first page of the listings than value will be higher.
Number of Sites linking to your site

Related to Traffic and S.E.Ranking , More links = more traffic + higher rankings
How keen is the buyer for name

Buyer may want the name for a specific purpose and will pay a premium to ensure they get it.

Ways to Lose money on Domains

Register a trademarked name

like "P*yP*lFees.com" because of the Legal hassles. Most High profile companies can afford an expensive legal battle ,can you?
Pay too much for Domain Name

Just because http://ReallyGreat.com sold for $Big-bucks , doesn't mean paying $bigBucks for any old name will mean reselling it for an even higher price.
Get scammed by Email and other types of fraud

Domain investors attract more than their fair share of Scammers A common one is an email claiming to be someone wishing to buy your name ,all you have to do is use their preferred Appraisal service to confirm the offered price. It is just a ruse to get you to pay an inflated price for this appraisal.

About the Author: David J Underhill aka BareFootTech is an Australian based domain name reseller and MiniSite developer. He has a minisite network including Become rich Visit his home site at Barefoottech.net

Source: www.isnare.com

Blogging Wars - Wordpress Vs Blogger Part 1

2007-11-16T16:30:00.000-08:00

By Gobala Krishnan

There's a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with bloggers dissing each other on their respective websites. The war is about control of the blogosphere by several great, many good, and tons of terrible blogging platforms. The average newbie now has "too many" options to choose from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is hotter than ever.

At my website and blogs, I'm always asked the question "Is Wordpress better than Blogger?". The answer, of course, is "Yes". But to really understand why, it's important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need.

You also need to understand that there are different versions of Wordpress, the earliest now termed as "Wordpress" at Wordpress.org, and the hosted version similar to Blogger now termed "Wordpress.com" which is of course available Wordpress.com. Only the latter comes with free hosting on a sub-domain account. We'll discuss this in Part 2.

For Part 1 of this article, we look only at the self-hosted version of Wordpress. Here's the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it's much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you're set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer's touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing Wordpress however can be a major headache if you don't know what you're doing. Since you're going to host it on your own account, you'll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your Wordpress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn't allow categories. You can't sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With Wordpress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your Wordpress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can extremely furstrating. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you're making changes to the entire website. With Wordpress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating.

With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like "Shout Boxes" that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that's as far as you can go with Blogger.

With Wordpress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional "plugins" and advanced tools, you can also extend Wordpress to far beyond just a blogging platform.

The talk today is about using Wordpress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS. Unlike complicated predecessors like PHPPostNuke, B2, Mambo or even Joomla, Wordpress is user friendly. Plus, the availability of source codes in this open-source system coupled with a strong community makes it possible to use Wordpress as an article management system, classifieds system, direct-selling site and even a paid membership site.

4) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won't say that it's bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here's why: Google Owns Your Content

Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don't like what you're blogging about. You don't have absolute control over your own blog. With Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not Wordpress.com), you're free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don't forget that!

5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There's this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won't say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there's no such favoritism.

I've heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only "ping" a limited amount of sites, whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that Wordpress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

6) Money-Making Potential

There's no doubt that it's easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You'll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there's even "Adsense revenue sharing" plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense websites, you'll soon discover what I mean. It's something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though - when you go Wordpress, you don't go back.

About the Author: Gobala Krishnan is a micro-niche blogging specialist. Get a copy of his report "Wordpress Adsense System" at http://adsense.easywordpress.com

Source: www.isnare.com

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2005-11-06T17:46:00.000-08:00

Barefoottech.blog is now at Blog.BareFootTech.com.au