How to… | Affiliate Blog Online

How to… Archives

How to Sell a Domain Name

Saturday, September 19th, 2009 at 6:13 am

Comments (2)

Recently we have been thinking about selling some of our domain names. We probably have about 50 of them at the moment – of those about 30 of them are just parked with no website attached.

It kind of comes with the territory when you develop niche websites so you buy the domain with the full intention of building that website in the near future. Unfortunately there is never enough time so the domain names sit there year after year until one day you really you are never going to get around to building them.

So today we decided to put a few of those domain names on the market. Now we aren’t in a rush to sell so we probably overpriced them a bit but we are just going to test the waters and see if anyone bites.

So how do you go about selling your domain names?

There are really only 2 ways to sell a domain name:

1. Sell it yourself – The advantage of this method is that you don’t have to pay a commission on the sale. However the downside is that it can be a little risky if you don’t know what you are doing

2. Getting someone else to sell it for you – the advantage of this method is that you can rely on someone else to do the work for you. You simply list your domain name and then wait for the sale. The payment is made securely and there is less risk of something going wrong. The disadvantage is that you have to pay a commission on the sale.

How Much is My Domain Name Worth?

In order to sell your domain name, you need to know how much it is worth…or at least have a basic idea. Most domain name sellers like Godaddy provide appraisal services. However, oftentimes you will have to pay for the privilege. If you want to get a basic idea of what your domain is worth you can try this free service. But remember that it is only a computer spitting out an answer here so don’t take it too seriously. Your domain name could be worth a lot more or a lot less – it all comes down to how much someone is willing to pay for it.

There are so many factors that come into play when valuing a domain name including:

the length of the url
how many words are in the url
the type of extension ie. .com, .net, .org etc
does it have hyphen

A good way of determing a price for your domain is to check out past sales for domain names similar to your own. One of the best places for this is Sedo. This is one of the biggest buyers and sellers of domain names so you are sure to find a domain name or two that relates to yours.

Where is the Best Place to Sell a Domain Name?

Good question. There are hundreds of different brokers on the net but one of the biggest and the one that I use is Sedo. They have over 11 million domains on their site so they must be doing something good.

It is easy to add a domain and the commission for a sale is 10%. You simply set your price and then sit back and wait for a sale. There are a few different methods of selling your site – you can auction it, set a fixed price, or choose the Make an Offer option. I like using the fixed price but I also combine it with the Make an Offer option.

How to Create Your Own Blog Voting Contest Using WP-Polls

Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 1:47 am

Comments (3)

We are going to be holding a contest on one of our blogs and have been looking for a WordPress plugin that will give our visitors the ability to vote for their favorite blog. My initial thought was that I would have no problem finding something suitable and I was even willing to pay for it! But unfortunately the options were limited and very disappointing.

However, I did end up finding a WordPress plugin called WP-Polls which as the name suggests provides the ability to add a poll to your blog. The only problem was that I was looking for something that would allow me to add an image of each blog so that our visitors could see exactly who they were voting for. My initial assumption was that this plugin wasn’t capable of doing that so I kept looking for something that did.

During my search I came along a blog post at the zebida.com website written by Hesham. It describes how to add thumbnails and links using the WP-Polls plugin.

YES!…now I had the answer I was looking for. So my initial assumption that I couldn’t add images was wrong but I didn’t care as I now had everything I needed to create the blog contest.

How to Use WP-Polls

If you want to create your own blog contest using WP-Polls then this is what you need to do:

Step 1: Upload the WP-Polls plugin to your blog and activate it.

Step 2: Click on the Polls option on the left hand menu on your blog Dashboard and select Manage Polls. It will most likely be at the very bottom of the screen.

Step 3: You should already see a Poll listed. This is just an example poll but you can use this one instead of creating a new one. So go ahead and click the Edit link next to that poll.

Step 4: On the Edit Poll screen you will be able to enter the details of your contest so just overtype the information in the Poll Question and Poll Answer sections and select the options that suit you in the remaining fields. In the Poll Answer fields you will be able to add html in order to add an image but we will get into that in a little more detail below. For the moment just enter text into these fields.

Step 5: Click Edit Poll to save the changes.

Step 6: Add a new post and in the html part of the post add the following code: [poll id="1"]where ’1′ is your poll ID. You can find the poll id in the Polls list on the Manage Polls page.

Step 7: Now save your post and preview it and you should now see your poll on the page.

Now for the Good Stuff…

So if you are like me you are probably wanting to add some images to each option. The code below is what I used for my blog competiton. It displays the radio button above the image, provides a link to the website and also includes a horizontal line under each image.

To use this code you just need to paste it into the ’Poll Answer’ fields in the Manage Polls section. Obviously you will need to replace the links to correspond to the correct urls and image sources that you will be using. You can also play around with this if you know a bit of html – bold the text etc. I did notice that these fields were limited to only so many characters so you won’t be able to go too crazy here.

Title of Blog Here<br>&nbsp;<img src="wp-content/uploads/2009/10/imageofblog.JPG" ><br /> <hr>

You can see in the image below exactly where to insert this code. Once the html has been entered just click the Edit Poll link to save your changes.

So now if you have done everything right you should see something like this on your blog post.

Beware of Scams Online

Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 9:46 am

Leave your comment

Just a word of warning to anyone who decides to start working online from home. Beware of the scams.

My daughter has been sucked into a number of schemes simply because she won’t take the time to research emails that are sent to her promising untold wealth if she signs up and sends money.

Unfortunately she refuses to listen to me. I have been working online for a number of years now – but what would I know.

So many hundreds of dollars later and with nothing to show for her effort, she has finally woken up to the fact that maybe her mother does know what she is talking about.

If it appears to be too good to be true, you can bet your boots it is.

Never send bank details to anyone without ensuring that you are dealing with a reputable firm and NEVER send money to anyone offering to set you up with an online business that will make you wealthier than Bill Gates.

Here are some Legitimate Companies that we work with and they have all proved to be totally reliable with both opportunities and payments.

Shareasale

All of these companies are free to join and as they are all well known in the online business circuits and have a reputation to uphold so you will get paid for your endeavours.

It takes time and effort to generate a reasonable income online but perseverence will pay off.

How to Automatically Add Your Blog Posts to Twitter Using Twitter Feed

Saturday, February 21st, 2009 at 1:28 am

Comments (7)

Twitter has been something that I have had a hard time getting my head around. I dabbled with it in the past but never really got into it enough to see whether it had any real value. But lately I have been testing it out with one of my niche websites and have noticed quite a bit of traffic coming in from it.

I didn’t want to spend too much time on there however so what I did was just automate it so that the blog posts would automatically be posted to Twitter. This reduced the amount of time I needed to be on Twitter but also added regular content to it.

Now just adding blog posts is probably not going to be as successful as getting in there and being part of the Twitter community. But at the moment, for that particular niche blog, I don’t have much time to be socializing too much. I’d rather do that for the blog you are reading now.

I had created a Twitter account for Affiliate Blog Online some time ago but had not done much else. I thought that the time was right to get in there and so something with it. So today I logged into Twitter and updated the profile and also added the blog to Twitter Feed so that the posts would automatically be added.

So for those who want to do the same this is how it is done:

1. If you haven’t already done so, head over to Twitter and create an account.

2. The next step involves logging into Twitter Feed. If you already have an Open Id then you will be able to just log in but if not you will have to spend some time creating an id. This Open Id system is, my opinion, the worst system ever invented – they’ve taken a simple process of logging in and made it as long winded as possible. It takes three pages to actually login to Twitter Feed…but I digress!

3. Once logged in to Twitter Feed you’ll get a screen with a link to create a new Twitter feed. Just click on that to get to the Feeds page.

4. Click on the Create New Feed link. You should now be on the Create New Twitter Feed page.

5. Complete the fields on this page as per the following:

Username – Enter your Twitter username
Password - Enter your Twitter password
RSS Feed URL – Enter the RSS Feed URL for your blog. If you’re not sure what that is just head over to your blog and look for an RSS image. It will look something like this . Just click on that and you will be taken to your RSS feed. Just copy the URL for that page and paste it into this field. (To test it just click on the ‘test rss feed’ link next to the field.)
Update Frequency – This depends on how often you update your blog. One of our blogs is updated every 7 hours so I just leave it at every hour. If you update your blog once a day then you might select every 24 hours.
Include Item Link – I leave this one checked.
Shorten Link Through – I leave this one as TinyURL.
Post New Items Based On – I have this one set at pubDate.
Prefix Each Tweet With – I haven’t tried this but assume it means you can add some text that will automatically be inserted at the beginning of each Tweet. This might be useful if you want to let your readers know that this is a blog post so you might add “Today’s Blog Post” to the beginning of each Tweet.
Filter by Keywords – This is handy if you only want specific posts to go up on Twitter. So you can add keywords that will ensure that only posts with those keywords will be displayed.
Active – Obviously you will want to leave this one checked.

6. Once you have completed each of the fields click the CREATE button and you are done. Your blog posts should automatically start posting to Twitter.