LinkMoney.org

First off, this is about me, but I do NOT do any of the aforementioned things.

However I made a major snafu recently, late at night, that has changed my latest plan to become the next Kevin Rose. Hmm, wonder if he ever did?

Any way here’s what happened. I had this idea of setting up a social circle, you know friends helping friends, wink, wink. Sort of a you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Well this crashed into a not so happy ending, (pun intended.)

I was going to set up a site where registered mail list members could post their site or article url and then other members would hump it, oops, I mean help promote it with various social networking tools. I wanted a cool name, so during the night I got up thinking about it and said, something like “social.”… Easy to remember…. Hmmm…

Eureka! I got it. “sosso dot com”! It’s cute, rhymes sort of with social, easy to remember, and I could get it out as a Buzz word. You know what I mean?

Great! I had just read a Blog about how NAME dot com was the cheapest registrar and so I went there and bought it and a dozen other domains all in one day. Then I read another Blog about how great Hostgator was, and though I have sites on three other domain hosting companies already, I wanted to try out Hostgator.

So I said to myself, self, this is going to be HOT! He he he… Can’t afford a private server, not yet, so I purchased the high end shared account for 13 bucks a month, with the first month only costing a penny. Pretty good deal right?

So I set up sosso dot com as my primary account on Hostgator and then read the instructions on how to point the DNS on NAME dot com to my shiny new hard disks at Hostgator. Did that and saw the warning that this may take 24 to 48 hours to resolve. No problem. It isn’t like I don’t have anything to do in the meantime.

So I checked it the next day and the next day and it still had not resolved. What’s up with that? Forget it, I’m already into a dozen new projects, will fix it later. Well that was August 3, 4 & 5. Now this morning I said I’m going to find out what the Hell is wrong.

I checked sosso again and it was coming up on a GoDaddy parked domain website. Huh? This didn’t have anything to do with GD, or so I thought. I checked again with Hostgator tech support and they said it was NAME’s problem. Checked with NAME but had to wait two and a half hours because they don’t get out of bed until 9am mountain time, and they don’t offer 24/7 phone tech support.

Finally it turns out that I did not OWN sosso. I owned a domain named “sossol.” Naturally I got a little testy and said what do you mean, I registered sosso. So sorry, we only have sossol.

I finally figured out what happened. Remember when I said I did this during the night after I had woken up thinking about it? Take a look at where the “L” key is, right next to the “O” key. I did not purchase the right domain and it was ALL my fault! Turns out GD had registered that name years ago, and it was not even available.

So here’s my point boys and girls. Make absolutely SURE just what you are typing during domain registrations and hosting setups. If you screw up, it can’t be fixed. Now I just went through the procedure of taking sosso off my Hostgator account and setting up a different domain as my primary account. It is mostly done but has been a few hours and there is still a little more BS that I have to do to get the damned thing working.

So point number two is. I did this totally clean, honest! Other than being sleepy I should not have made such a stupid mistake. I wonder what people do that have a few beers before going through this procedure?

Oh well, I only lost about a half a month’s worth of my first penny right?

I’m Rich

(New info:  Here is a new website where you can purchase currently owned

domain names for sale.)

There, I’ve said it. No apologies.

A year ago you would not have been able to force any level of computer programming down my craw. That is actually still the case. I HATE programming!

I was a Blogger Blogging Blog aficionado. I owned a full featured authority website in a certain field that had been active for many years, that was built by a professional company using Joomla! I had a strong user base and still do. That site led me to wanting to be able to have a more casual connection with my fans and users, so therefore I Blogged using Google’s Blogger.

I never thought about actually being able to make money off this thing called the Internet. Man, what a mistake. I will tell you that I am not one of those Eureka Kids that made a gazillion dollars, er, not yet anyway, but there is a steady stream now that I never dreamed would happen in my life time. It can only get better.

So I forced myself to learn how to install WordPress, purchase domains and hosting and build websites. You will recall that I wrote about this previously in another post: Make Money Create Blogs for your Neighbors

Well this is an update. I have built way over a hundred websites and with each one there are new challenges and new things to learn and accomplish. It seems to me that Matt at automattic probably knew what he was doing when he unleashed this fabulous free software to the world, but I could not see it at the time. Now I get it.

The old way of creating a website page by page in an editor, then uploading and debugging it are over. This Content Management System (CMS) that is open source, (as in Free,) is something that almost anyone that can dial a telephone is able to learn a little at a time. This is causing a world changing event that is progressing even as you read this.

I still figure that it takes about 40 hours to bring a site to it’s full value with all the little features and goodies that you would want, but it actually only takes a couple of hours to install the rough content of a website that even if someone were to fall off a barstool and come up on this domain by accident, it would still look like a real web site.

I have set up sites now in fields that I know almost nothing about, but they can be populated by the new owners in just a matter of minutes, well OK hours. I have built sites in cars, sports, health, history, medicine, saw mills, machine tools, hunting, camping, scouting, sales, bargains, credit, wine, geo based (like city names,) travel, dogs, weddings, antiques, art work, collecting… Get the picture?

You can do this too. Make a few bucks setting up sites for your friends, families, neighbors, and local businesses. You can do it!

First and foremost, in my opinion, is get yourself comfortable with using an ftp program. I held out on that one, and realize that was my weak point. I had played around a little with file transfer protocol in the late 1980’s. That is when I grew to hate programming. Well the ftp programs of today are not your typical father’s ftp program. There’s dozens of them and I’m not going to try to influence you with one over the other. They all do the same thing. Join a forum. Google the Hell out of any questions you might have. The ftp program will be your new best friend.

If you are just starting, pick a domain registering hosting company, (not GoDaddy,) buy one of their cheap programs, and get started. Sure the cheap ones will have you parked on a Tinker Toy server, but you get what you pay for. You can always upgrade, which you will soon do.

I now pay for hosting with three companies, two average ones with average services and bandwidth, and one super duper one that costs more that I ever thought I would pay anyone for anything, almost. But the Damn thing works and never is down. I recently struck gold with setting up a news story related website that I was able to get in on the first floor with. As an early adopter with a keyword rich url and dozens of posts, I am on the first page of you know who in just one week. I haven’t started to monetize this site yet, but I will after a while. With any luck you will be reading future posts, say in a year or so, from the South Sea Island pictured above.

Most of all, read good Blogs in the mmo field to get the impetus to get off your butt and get going. Join some forums, take some online courses, and learn from those that have been successful. I have been doing all of the above for only eight months. Now I are not quite an expurt, but I’m gaining on it.

Here is my recommendation for one of the very best programs on the Internet, and I am not even going to use my affiliate link, I believe in this man and what he does so much that I want you all to join. Like TODAY!

Yaro Starak! What a great name! This guy is unforgettable by having a name that is so like poetry that it will make you want to change your name. But that is not the reason to remember him best by. You absolutely MUST join his Blog Mastermind program! He just started one up again a few sessions ago. You will not have missed anything because all of his mentoring sessions are recorded and downloadable to the students.

You will be tied in to a Blog Mastermind forum, where you can post questions and get real excellent answers from those that know their stuff. You will be tied into a major group with a well known company, that will give you a way to help other students with social networking and to receive the same in return. That in itself is almost worth the price of admission. You want traffic? You can’t handle traffic…! (Oh no, that was from an old movie, I think.)

How’s that for a rant?

It all starts by learning WordPress. It’s not just for Bloggers you know.

I’m Rich!

(Oh by the way, in case you were wondering, you have my permission to give this post a little Link Luv by using your social networking tool listed below.)

I have several old Blogs in Google Blogger under various subjects. They are well known, firmly entrenched and are my major traffic generators for the fields they are in. I use Feedblitz to handle the subscribers on them.

If you use Feedblitz as an email subscription handler, then you probably received an email similar to the excerpted parts below.

Hello, (yaddy yaddy…)

Custom domains are fully functional micro-sites that make life simpler for your subscribers by simplifying access to your newsletters and (, yaddy yaddy…) To make things even easier, we have reserved the following domains for you (these default reservations expire Aug 10, 2008, 23:59:59 EDT, which is why I’m writing to you now.)

(Entered here are various versions of your website’s partial url, the main keyword from your website, your email name, etc. all with the dot feedblitz.com extension.)

(For instance, but not offered for this website because I do not use Feedblitz on this one, eg: linkmoney.feedblitz.com and richhill.feedblitz.com.)

For under a buck a month per domain you get branded pages, simplified access and brand security. Even if you do nothing else, we recommend buying the domain for your main blog. Go to www.feedblitz.com/ (, yaddy yaddy…) now to see the reservations we’ve made on your behalf and activate the ones you want before they expire.

(Inserted here is a warning that someone else might gobble this up and become your competition.)

Thanks,

Phil Hollows,
Founder,
FeedBlitz, LLC.

————

Does any of that smack of extortion to you?

Actually I don’t see anything to worry about, because this same sort of thing will be happening with all of the new TLDs that are coming out in a year or so, this just sort of caught me off guard and I was upset to see the samples shown, with my own hard earned domain names in them.

Oh and when you click on the sample it takes you to a demo site that does not say anything at all about the dot feedblitz extension, it just plain says something like “Welcome to LinkMoney!” (Again, used as an example, not actual.)

I bet that email will piss more people off than Phil ever expected.

LOL

Shoemoney posted a blog yesterday about the new TLD .ME to become available on Thursday July 17, 200 at 8:00am Pacific time. I knew that this was going to be happening soon but had not paid much attention to it.

So after a lot of discussion in the comments section of Shoemoney Blog, I got hooked.
http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/07/16/me-landrush-starts-8am-pst-tomorrow/#comment-77594

Last night I made a hot list of about a hundred domains that I thought would be really really cool, knowing full well that I would not be buying more that two or three, but Hey I can dream can’t I?

Well naturally even with all best plans to lurk over the keyboard with my finger poised watching the second hand just like on an Ebay snipe, I totally forgot about it. LOL

So about noon Eastern time I signed on to GoDaddy and sure enough the dot ME was being sold. So I started down my list, SOLD, SOLD, SOLD, SOLD, etc, etc. You get the idea. Then lo and behold I got one! Then another, then another! What a shock. I’m not going to brag about what they are yet because some of the discussion on Shoemoney was that if domains had multiple requests, they would go in a bidding war.

I don’t know if that bidding war stuff is real or not, I can’t find anything in the fine print, and I did get a receipt and then a confirmation email. Incidentally I used the coupon (gdp0422v - Save 20% off $75 or more.) It saved me over twenty bucks.

You pay $19.99 per year with a two year minimum, so it isn’t exactly a bargain domain name.

What do you think about this new domain name .ME? It is the country domain name for Montenegero, but anyone may purchase one, as far as I know. We reported in a previous post on this Blog about ICANN opening up possibilities for any TLD name that you want. Read about the ICANN Paris announcement on a previous Link Money dot org post.

Can you think of some good .ME names? As I understand it there are no two letter names available, but I did snag a good three letter one.

Would you take a gamble on a dot ME domain name? It might tie up your money for a while and then if the scuttlebut is any where near true, you might even lose it after you have made the purchase. In that case I guess GoDaddy would likely have many millions of dollars in their interest bearing accounts before they have to issue a refund.

Let us know what your thoughts are on the .ME domains.

(Click on comments below.)

Read more on this dot ME Fiasco on another Link Money dot org post.