Blogging Along

In life and looking back at points in it you will always ask yourself “What if I had not…..” or “What if I had done that…..”

I do think I have made some mistakes that I do wish I could have changed and other things not too bothered about.

As I’ve grown older I do feel myself getting wiser and stable with decisions I make but at the same time I’m always looking for the next free meal ticket or step up a ladder in life. Maybe with not as much risk attached to it.

In just over 2 years I will be 40 and feel far from it to be honest and would like to think I have all my life to live again and live to a ripe age of 85+.

I do feel I haven’t reached my peak of success in life / business and would like to hit that some time soon ideally before I’m 40  with my current plans.

Unfortunately or fortunately depends how you look at it, I do everything with 100% focus, enthusiasm and effect. Then when someone comes on board with me they never seem to reach my bench mark. Recently I gave someone a great opportunity to work with my current ideas who had been out of work and so seemed happy to make an effort with no pay but good perks.

With them been out of work for nearly a year this was a great position for me and them, and so I was a little put back when they decided they needed to look for a part time job 16 hours a week to help pay the mortgage. It was as though i’d prompted them to look but was left as a reaction.

My thoughts to end this entry is to think BIG and aim high. Not to just get by and let others take over or take the cream while you bust a gut.

A domain is only worth the amount someone is willing to pay for it or what revenue the domain is making each month multiplied by X amount of months.

What prices do domains go for and how do you appraisal a domain?

The best way to judge how much a domain is worth is to visit domainprices.co.uk and see what domains have sold for and where the sale took place.

Domains on the secondary market can vary depending on if the sale is to a reseller (someone who deals with domains) or an end-user (someone who will use the domain directly).

If you deal with domains you may see the domain personalinjurysolicitors.tv as a good investment and would only be willing to pay £1000 for it.

If you are an enduser or a Solicitor that figure (because you really want it) maybe 5 fold and be £5000.

Domains are hard to price unless they have a website on them generating revenue, which then can then be calculated from it’s monthly income.

The owner of a domain is always going to think it’s worth more than the buyer is willing to pay.

Ask yourself this – Will it make any money undeveloped and are you going to develop it? Is it likely that another buyer will come along and offer the same amount or if not more?

If you answer no to both, sell the domain for the best price possible today!

If you have domains and haven’t set it up with a mini site or a full on site, get one up NOW!

Having a domain and it not been indexed by search engine is a number 1 fail in my eyes as it takes a year or 2 to really break into the search engine results with relevant posts.

Even if it’s a 1 page website Google and alike will index it if you post a link on a busy website and the rep of the site will only increase with age.

A lot of people buy domains to do something with them but never do, which is a bit of a shame.

First rule for me, register or buy a domain – get a WordPress install running on it within a few days. You never know it may have some history from a previous owner.

When I create an Adsense unit to insert into a blog post or product page, I always seem to opt for a banner style or square that seems to get placed underneath and always looks out of place.

I thought by floating Adsense units within the text so it wraps around the ad will give the better exposure and make it part of the article.

Here’s what you need to add to your post at the start of an article or page in HTML. This is what I’ve added to the top right of this blog post.

<div style=”display:block;float:right;margin: 10px 10px 10px 10px;”>

Your Adsense code or advert script from Google

</div>

Google also recommends you place at least 3 adverts on every page for maximum results and sometimes prompts you do do it when logged in.

See how many more clicks you get by making this small change to your postings and pages Adsense blocks.

Having built a few for certain towns I thought it would be an idea to find a few generic domains such as the one mentioned below and lists town / city areas on them.

Not sure it will have a good uptake from people or search engines but worth a go. The domains I choose were common phrases that people have searched on my Geo sites looking at the stats from the many sites.

• FencingSuppliers.org.uk
• LapFencing.co.uk
• Fencepanels.me.uk

Looking again on Google trends these are common phrases people use to find these types of items or companies.

Ideally they will turn into a directory listings for fence suppliers all over the UK and will use them to back up our other city focused websites.

Ownership of a domain and control for technical reasons are 2 different things. Ownership is overall control and legal status on a domain. In the UK Nominet would look at the Who-is to see WHO owns a domain.

This brings me to a local person/company that is in the field of web design and support that’s been going for some years now and their actions with some domains the control.

Going through their client portfolio and doing a who is look up on each of them I’d say 90%+ are registered to him personally. I found this out and dug deeper, this was brought to my attention when I spoke to an EX client of his who explained he wanted to offer a new website and they wanted to leave it and get quotes elsewhere been a current client of his.

In refusing to carry on HIS service and not to go ahead to have a new and quite expensive (for the quality) he suspended hosting and took the website down. He could do this because he had control of the hosting & domain but more importantly he OWNED the clients domain name.

As mentioned above the owner of a domain has overall control and ownership which in a legal and professional world the company commissioning/paying for work on a website should be the legal owner.

So a tip for me, go to http://www.nic.uk and enter your company domain name (if UK domain) and http://whois.domaintools.com for all other extensions.

Ask this question do you legally now own the domain name? Now approach the company you paid our to build your website and ask them to transfer ownership to your company. What response did you get?

Good luck and always think economical websites may have hidden pitfalls.

In the mean time why not visit BabyBabyBaby.co.uk

Came across this website that sells Vintage watches and seem to stock a huge collection from all manufactures.

To name the main selection of them these include – Asprey, Breitling, Cartier,- Dunhill, Eterna, Girard-Perregaux, H. Moser, Harrods, Harwood, Hermes, Heuer, IWC, Jaeger LeCoultre, JW Benson, Longines, Mappin & Webb, Movado, Omega, Rolex, Tiffany & Co, Ulysse Nardin, Universal, Van Cleef & Arpels, and Zenith.

Vintage watches or the top end of the market are usually identified by Joe Bloggs of the street as your Rolex’s and Omega’s. These guys seem to have all areas covered and if your looking for a vintage watch you’d be unlucky not to find it on their website Vintage-Watches-Collection.com

Completed a few short 45 second long promo videos for the Freedom centre. These just highlighted future events and turned out really nice. Gave me a boost on pushing this type of video to other businesses and the good thing is they can use them on their web site and are featured on Humber.TV too.

Looking to cut back on my domains I’m letting a lot drop that in my eyes I could do without renewing as 10 would cost £70 for 2 years! On the flip side all my Hull domains are now listed on HullDomians.co.uk and give the ability for visitors to show an interest and place an offer in through a form system. To start my campaign off to either rent them out or sell them I’ve placed an Ad in the Hull Daily Mail for a week starting 19th February.

Just bought 2 domains YorkshireSEO.uk and YorkshireDesign.co.uk for £60 which I thought was a bargain and should be able to get them ranking and sold on to a local business. (if I don’t use them myself)

Looking through my SAGE accounts I noticed I’d dropped a bombshell and missed nearly everyones hosting renewals from last year. #fail But should be a nice boost for a few bills I have come up or have now.

I took a punge and turned off my shop plugin for JokeShop.org.uk and made posts as normal posts but mirrored the path so not to upset Google etc. Instead of actually selling products myself I’m giving” Paid on results” affiliate links from Silly Jokes. Traffic from my site is directed to them I make a sale and I get a cut of it but has proven shite TBH.

I may turn the shop back on if by the end of this month I don’t make one sale.

I’m quite a laid back “do anything for anyone” kind of guy, but over the past few months I’m seeing more and more reason to look after No1 more. Dog eat dog world it’s turning into I just need to look at every situation a little more before jumping in to the rescue or offering.

I found my CV on an old memory stick and decided to apply for a few jobs in SEO, Marketing etc just to see what response I get as theirs no harm in trying to see what bites I get from it. I actually wouldn’t mind going into a decent company to work on SEO and online marketing for companies. I would do a bad job too! ;o)

I decided to pull the internet connection from Beverley as I was only using it twice a week for 1 or 2 hours and was costing £40 + a month. So just a waste really.

Final thought for me about my Hull Domains, I may need to educate business about mini sites and “do what you say on the tin” domains buy hopefully enough will get it and opt for the rent option to try and test.

Always good to get clients websites live even on a Sunday evening.

A shopping e commerce site selling photo prints, art and frames was the request of a local “Doug” from the company Bay Tree Image.

What I came up with is Baytree-image.co.uk Using WordPress and the “ShopperPress” theme made the job a lot easier for myself and Doug to understand how to manage it.

As a keen photographer but not so keen techie guy proved a little bit of a battle to get round issues and for Doug to follow how things work. I previously setup and started the site in Magento which would have been a big mistake due to the intricate options and CMS structure.

I have a few sites myself that I will be using ShopperPress on including PlayParachutes.co.uk which will make any future sales of the site a little easier for maintaining and demos.

New Year and New goals will be in the form of a marketing service that weirdly enough rolls all the things I have been doing for the past 2 years into one! SEO, Domains, mini sites, Video, Photos, Content writing etc They goals will be having a ques of businesses wanting to get involved.

First stop will be to create 3-5 example showcases of how it looks and works as everyone likes to see examples of anything they are buying into. FACT!

On the domain front I am letting a lot of them drop if I think they are way too much effort to even start to gain any revenue or are not gems. I would say 5% are niche domains / Websites like PlayParachutes.co.uk (not dev yet) that will become cash cows for advertising rev or actual e commerce sites selling products on stock. The other 95% are the GEO domains like my HullBeds.co.uk which will be slowly moved over from the BIG ‘G’ to REAL – LOCAL companies where they will be featuring on other sites I have.

3 Words I hated since I started out in business in early 2008 is VAT, TAX and Books. If I could give anyone any advice in starting up a business, it’s “Get an accountant ASAP”. You may think £100-£200 a month to do ALL your accounts is steep but boy is it worth it in the end. It frees you up to do other work YOU get paid for and is one less stressful thing in your life.

Be careful (as I have found out) you do get shocking accountants that just don’t talk to you and you get some FAB ones.

Other Goals and plans that I do hope will help Humber TV are ones with local groups or business. I can offer News and video coverage to help promote their services and they can offer me the use of the facilities there. Maybe the use of  a Board room, meeting rooms, Gym, etc it’s a little bit of back scratching that costs both parties no cash.

Need website Advice? Give me a call 01482 247123 quoting this site.

Vebra helps customers find property that is for sale and rent in the UK. By adding properties visitors can search for property and Estate Agents with ease.

What a lot of Estate Agents don’t realise is as soon as you ask your website developer to add a feed from Vebra, you stop your website getting credit from search engines. The feed isn’t seen as content on your website and Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo know this and isn’t great for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Here’s a test you can do just to prove what I’m saying is correct.

In Google search for the Phrase “Your company name 4 bedroom houses” e.g. browns property agents 4 bedroom houses

You’ll find it comes back with many websites with property on but NOT yours.

Sites such as:

• findaproperty.com
• rightmove.co.uk
• zoopla.co.uk
• primelocation.com
• homesandproperty.co.uk

When entering all the property details into Vebra’s system it goes on many sites such as RightMove.com and if embedded it will appear on your own site in what’s called an iframe.  As mentioned above this isn’t seen by Search Engines on your site only Right Move.

When people search for property and maybe your company name they will more than likely (if the company uses Vebra) end up on Vebra or Right Move etc amongst other estate agents listings and potentially going with another agent.

Here’s a good example of a site that does’nt rely on Vebra. Search again like the above example but with a company that doesn’r rely on Vebra.

Plum Properties 4 bedroom houses as you can see in the results the company website is top of the search engine and has the visitors full attention. Not listed with other agents.

I’m not saying DONT use Vebra just don’t completly hand over your websites content over to a simple feed from them add property to your own like Plum do.

Need Advice? Give me a call 01482 247123 quoting this site.

Looking back from March with Humber.Tv and the whole idea I do feel we have some good direction towards HOW the idea and company will make it’s living. Advertising is good but you need to offer twists and extra angles to secure advertising deals with local businesses.

I was once told as a young man by a local boss of a company…

It’s so easy to loose money but very hard to make it.

This is so true with the ideas and the paths I’m going down testing and trying out new ways to put shows and video onto the internet. Some things just don’t work and will never be worth the effort but you’d never know that unless you try them out to see.

Research is all very well but doing it and trying and testing ideas is good first hand live research!

I need to ge the few dozen postcode named sites up and LIVE ASAP so people can see the network I’m trying to create and get more people involved. First site live is HU15.co.uk covering Brough, South Cave, Gilberdyke, Newport etc and will grow to be on the same scale as Paul Smith’s HU17.NET along with all the others set to be put live.

Local news is key to keep people using your websites and updated regularly and people will find it through Google.

Build it and the will come

That’s sort of true but still need the  right kind of site for people to find it sticky enough they do come back for more.

I joined BCC or Business Community Co-operative Group which has NO annual fee, and only costs £10 per week to cover room hire and a hearty breakfast. Best networking group I’ve been to from just the feel and welcome you get from the people there and isn’t competitive with 5 web designers, 3 accountants, 10 life coachers. The categories are locked down so thats your area and is unchallenge “Video Production” been my area of business and category.

Just offering show reel videos to businesses in a certain area of business, Gyms and fitness for example and will be made up of 12 companies in that sector for an hour long show reel on local “Gyms and fitness” This will be ondemand from Humber TV and also showing as a schedule when nothing is showing live.

All in all I have lots of ideas and good interest for our road forward – Think Positive!

My Photo above by Pixelcreations.co.uk – Klaus Selke – Photographer

So it’s been a week or so now since Coco (the puppy) arrived and has forced me to have many sleepless or broken sleep nights. Problem with the pup waking up,  it also wakes my 2 year old daughter up too :o( Not good as it works vice-versa. Life goes on and I need to catch as much shut eye when I can.

One of the interviews we recorded with Jackie Cowie, she said about weather having an affect on our happiness and well-being . Sun comes out people tend to be happier etc, well

WHAT THE FREAKING HELL IS GOING ON THIS YEAR?

The sun and temperature just needs to get it together and give us a summer we all deserve this year.

I’m finding a lot of clients are now GETTING “online marketing” and are warming to Twitter, other social media and Generic domain mini sites. This is great to see my clients I help and offer support to doing well. This made me think I maybe missing a opportunity for offering a service to all companies that need to up a gear on the online roller-coaster and maybe need to shout out a bit more.

I am finding more and more that besides other CMS’s Word Press out performs a standard html in many ways I mean

• Indexed into Search Engines faster (tried and proven)
• The ease of having 30 pages indexed with little effort to create them compared to the standard way of producing pages in HTML say using Dream Weaver
• TAGS you add to posts or pages to help identify what that post is mostly about
• You want some new feature WP will have a plugin to do it if not someone on the planet will be able to build it

The only downside is a Data base is needed to run every WP install.

So I’m off to ERBN.co.uk tonight for 7pm in the hope to spread some Humber.TV love and either get people interested in the whole idea or actual on the shows for interviews. Fingers crossed !

I have an ever growing list of Geo / Product or Service domains (mainly Hull) and setting them up using WordPress takes time, uses MySql databases and limits how many I can setup in 1 day.

This has forced me to start using a simple  html template to speed the process of getting them LIVE, INDEXED and EARNING!

Hopefully they will perform as well as the ones running on the WordPress installs, but the main reason is to just get them LIVE. I have 100’s of them covering many cities but mainly Hull, I have a few other areas including Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Bradford, Belfast, and Edinburgh.

Latest ones I’m trying to perform as well as the WP sites using html are:

• Hull-Airconditioning.co.uk
• Hull-Hotels.org.uk
• Hull-Kitchens.co.uk
• HullCasino.co.uk
• HullClinics.co.uk

A side step one not a Geo one CommercialPhotographers.org.uk

With having so many domains you do need to get them start paying at least their own reg fee as I noticed 2 years does come round rather quick and before you know it no site is on a domain. Working from a spreadsheet marking down which are live, using html or WP and when was the last time I posted on them helps get things done too.

Looking at what Scott Jones has done with his ideas and efforts it makes me want to see the light at the end of the tunnel for my efforts. But time will tell and do hope within 4-6 months my daily revenue is up from £8-£10 a day to the very ideal £60.

I have even looked at possibly renting domains out but will need to think how best to go forward with that before jumping in with both size 9’s.

Again another late night and feel I should take time to post here as not to let it slip into a stale state.

So I buckled and have let my partner get a puppy dog which is a cross between a poodle and a shiatsu (quite cute actually). A small chocolate brown “shoodle” I think they call it and it had best behave and not yap too much! ;o) That all happens on 2nd May so the world could end before then and won’t have to suffer having a yap yap yapping dog!

Humber.TV hmmmm Well lets just say it’s a FAB concept, people warm to it, it does “Bridge the gap” as our slogan says and guests think we’re doing a grand job :o) But the thing is I’m lacking a few things to more forward – help, funding, sleep, day light and light at the end of the tunnel! This is due to the time taken up by myself setting live shows up, recording and streaming them live and then editing them ready for the site for on demand. Not to mention anything else involved in getting guests and running the site mechanics.

It has reached a point where I have been doing EVERY show LIVE and putting the webcam stream up straight away for on demand viewing after a quick edit (then when possible editing the HD camcorder shoot later). I now feel I need to go out and about to record items that arn’t LIVE but ARE up and viewable the same day. Again this is more of my time.

So 4 things I’m wanting interest for, from near and far around the Humber.

1. Big Main Sponsors or Advertisers for the site to enable me to buy extra kit and improve shows
2. People willing to shoot video and take down local stories from across the Humber region to include on the site.
3. Interviewers or Guest harvesters for up and coming shows. (booking Guests / Advertisers)
4. Anyone wanting to learn the very basics of how we stream, edit video and anything I know about what we’re doing here at Humber.TV to help in any way possible (tonns still to learn but hey we’ll get there, as I’m far from an expert LOL).

Do you meet or maybe smiled at any of the above requests? Then contact me through Humber.TV web site stating this blog. I then do hope we can work together to make the Web site work it’s ass off for the people/businesses of the Humber and make it a name people talk about.

Hopefully this will stop me going over the edge and ease my work addiction/need from 6:00am till very late every day and I may just be able to get a life and sleep back so I can enjoy the trip that Humber TV is taking us on.

Final Thought to self! I do have 100’s of Hull and other Geo service domains as mentioned before and really need to get my finger out and get them earning. Which if I did would earn I would say £60 a day between them all! Visit Hull Local to see the effort so far and one of the mini sites may fit your area of business.

Sorry if it’s all over this blog but been a long day/week ;o)