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In an effort to focus more on the big picture, I’ve decided to sell off one of my smaller forums on Digital Point. I will use the proceeds from the sale towards a few other projects I have going on now that I will discuss later.

Click here to view the listing

Here are some key points about the listing for those who are interested:

AdobeChat.com is a PR2 forum with 419 threads, 1,432 posts and about 800 members.

The domain has been registered at GoDaddy from Nov 05 and will expire in Nov 08 and will be pushed to your account for free.

I will send backups of the site to the new owner and they will be tasked with setting it up on their own server. (I suck at doing this so I won’t be able to provide much help.)

The hosting requirements are not steep at all. I previously hosted it on a shared account from Site5 along with several other forums.

Here are the traffic stats:

2007 and 2008

Adsense stats:

Past 11 months

(I tried YPN in Jan / Feb 07 and it didn’t convert well).

The site currently makes around $30 a month via Adsense and footer links at the bottom of the site. The footer links pay out $15 a month (I’ll get the winner set up with the place I am paid out for these). It could easily earn more if you put more time into promoting the site.

The site also comes with an owned vBulletin license worth $160. If you want to upgrade to the latest version of vB it would cost $30 to renew the license.

The domain is great quality and perfect for discussion about Adobe programs.

Bidding starts at $500 which works out to about a years worth of earnings plus the cost of the vBulletin owned license but does not factor in the future potential of the site or the value of the domain.

Auction runs for 5 more days. Each bid near the end of the auction date will push the auction back one hour so that everyone has a chance to get their bids in. I’ll give a last call for bids and then it will end.

Overall, I think it’s best for me to part ways with the site because I already don’t have enough time as it is to promote it and make it an active community. The first day after I listed the auction I didn’t get any bites until one person offered me $200 for just the domain. I think it’s worth more than that as a package deal and let the potential buyer know that. He didn’t really budge.

Then after that first private message I received three more one right after each other. The first was a $450 offer for the entire site which I responded to the potential buyer that I thought it was worth a little more than that. The second PM wanted to see more traffic stats and the third offer was $600 for the site. Again, I believe the site is worth a little more than that and let the potential buyer know. I sent these messages out late yesterday and haven’t heard back from anyone yet, but I honestly do think that the site is worth more than the highest offer I’ve received so far.

I’ve sold sites before, but this will be one of my larger sales as I am notorious for simply building sites up and never selling them. However, I believe that reducing some of the smaller earning sites in my portfolio that take up my time will allow me to spend more time on building up the big earners.

I’ll let you know what the site sells for in a few days

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Let me preface this post by saying that if you don’t already know by now I’m a huge gamer. I love playing video games and most of the websites I run are focused on the video games genre. So naturally I was looking to start another website about XBLA games (Xbox Live Arcade) and this lead me to purchase XboxLiveArcade.org on Dec 30th 2006. I held onto the domain for a few months while I waited to launch the forum.

At the time, the .com and .net were already taken by someone that just used it as a parked page. On a whim, a couple weeks after I purchased the .org I thought I’d just look to see if the .com was available because I remembered that when I first checked it was set to expire soon. I knew not to get my hopes up as most people renew their domains at the end of the year cycle automatically or at least near to it. However, to my delight, after entering my search I was staring at a GoDaddy screen that stated XboxLiveArcade.com was available! I couldn’t believe it dropped and no one picked it up.

For those of you that don’t own an Xbox 360 or follow video games that much – Xbox Live Arcade is the platform that small less expensive games are released on. You can download trials for every game to test them out or purchase them right from your Xbox dashboard for varying prices. So because of the fact that Microsoft never bothered to buy the domain and it was held by a domain parker for so long I couldn’t believe that I was able to get it for the cost of a new domain fee.

I launched the forum a few months later and I immediately linked to XboxLiveArcade.com from my other game sites using the anchor text “Xbox Live Arcade.” I’ve also shared links with other websites and the site currently sits at the number 5 slot on the front page of Google. Now I do need to make some alterations so that the description reads something like “Xbox Live Arcade Game Reviews, News and Forums,” but I haven’t gotten around to doing this. Anyway, because of the fact that the domain name is XboxLiveArcade.com and I’ve used “Xbox Live Arcade” as the anchor text it was really for the site to make it onto the front page of Google. Obviously the greatest thing about being on the front page for a highly relevant search term is the targeted traffic it’s been sending me. Check out this screenshot from Google Analytics:

This is less than half of the traffic the site receives from search engines too

Now the only thing I have to worry about is Microsoft’s lawyers coming after me for it someday…

Are you on the front page of Google for your key search terms? If so, how long did it take you to get there?

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As many of you know, I’m a part time web publisher. I run websites, forums and blog all in the time I have outside of a 40 hour work week. This schedule leads me to force myself to get work done on the weekend as well as during the week. One of the main things I was working on last week was a guest post for a fairly big blogger. I’ll let you know who if I don’t see it posted soon. I submitted the post on Friday and think that it is just as good or better than some of the other guest posts on the blog (yes I suppose I’m bias). But the thing is you’ll never know if the time you spent working on a guest post will pay off.

What I’ve learned last week is that you should never let the work you spend on a guest post affect the posting frequency on your own blog. I didn’t post as much as I should have last week and it was because of the time I spent working on the guest post that may or may not even get onto the site. Even if the guest post makes it onto the site, I still should not have let the time I spent on the guest post affect the time I spent on my own blog. What I plan to do next time I work on a guest post is make sure I have posts already completed and ready to publish on my own blog before I take on the task of writing a guest post.

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For those of you that may have not read the first post about this contest I suggest you read it here. In the total time that I ran the blog rush widget (about 3 weeks), I received only 5 visitors! This is terrible and the reason why I decided to dump the widget and give the space away for free to two lucky winners.

Well, I just got done going through the comments, my RSS email subscriptions and checking out blog posts for the contest and assembling a list of entries. I assigned a users name with how many entries they had like:

User 1 commented on the blog post so their entry number is 1
User 2 commented on the blog post and posted on their blog so their entries numbers are 2 - 12 etc. etc.

I did this until all of the commenters, blog posters and email RSS subscribers were accounted for and then I went to Randomizer.org to pull two numbers out of my set of entries to come up with the numbers 5 and 31 which belonged to the following two winners:

ContestBeat.com, who blogged about the entry and commented on the post. They advertise Blog contests for free so check them out.

and

FatTony69.com, who blogs about anything and everything. (FatTony69 being his Xbox Live Gamertag.)

So two of the people with the most entries happened to win this contest. Looks like those of you that want to enter the next contest I run you should do a little more than just comment on the post

Thanks again to all who entered. The winners have one week to claim their spot. Please send me your 125 x 125 ad along with the URL you want associated with it to chris [at] chrisguthrie.net. Overall I view this contest as a success especially considering it was only advertised through my blog. If I give out bigger prizes next time I’ll promote it more heavily.

My future contests that involve email RSS subscribers will count towards anyone who has been subscribed to my RSS feed regardless of the time frame that the contest goes under so make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed via email today!

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I’ve been using EntreCard for quite a while now (I’m user 385) and one of the first things I started to see in the EntreCard community was a lot of people with sub par quality blogs or really low RSS counts slowly rising to the top of their respective categories. This is obviously because of the fact that your advertising rate will also go up based not only on how many cards are dropped on your blog or ads that are purchased on your blog, but also because of how many cards you drop on other blogs. I don’t agree with this system and it’s actually something that John Cow had mentioned on his blog recently where he makes a lot of good points. Perhaps EntreCard will hopefully get rid of points for dropping cards or at least significantly reduce their effect on the price of ads for the card droppers blog, but in the mean time we have to make the most of the situation.

However, now armed with the knowledge that sub par and low quality blogs have higher ad rates because of their excessive card spamming dropping their way to the top of the EntreCard categories you just need to be do more research on which blogs you purchase ads on. Some important factors to consider when deciding which blogs to purchase ads on are as follows:

Location of EntreCard widget:
You absolutely must go to someones blog and look for their EntreCard widget placement before you decide to place an ad on their blog (duh!). But for some reason I still see wait times on ads for people even though their EntreCard widget is in the footer! It won’t matter how cheap an EntreCard ad is if they display the widget in the footer. The higher up the sidebar the widget is, the better of course although I haven’t seen a ton of bloggers with their widget above the fold like me

Check out the RSS count:
If you’re looking to find some blogs to place your ad on quickly this is key figure to look at that will help you decide wether or not it is worth spending your EntreCard credits on someones blog. I can’t understand why people will advertise on blogs that show their RSS count in the low two digit range and have a three digit price for an EntreCard ad. They’re obviously dropping tons of cards daily. If you can’t see an RSS count on their blog start looking for these other factors listed below to help you make your decision.

Level of Reader Interaction:
If no one is responding to the entries on the blog then there are likely very few people actually reading the blog. I rarely advertise on a blog that doesn’t have at least one or two comments on some of the more recent entries.

Quality of content:
Make sure you skim over a post or two on the blog you’re interested in placing an ad on to see if he or she writes quality stuff. It’s another indication as to how many people might be reading the blog but it won’t help you as much as seeing the number of comments that are received on each post in my opinion.

Blogs with a long wait time:
Don’t go by this tip exclusively as you’ll still run into really small bloggers with an inflated EntreCard price that still manage to receive lots of people offering to place ads on their blog. However, I’ve found some great blogs to advertise on that have an 8 day wait and around a 30 credit cost.

Find the diamond in the rough:
What I mean by this is to look for bigger bloggers that have recently added an EntreCard widget to their blog. If you can catch them early enough you can get some cheap advertising before their rates go up. This is by far one of the hardest things to do as most of the more well known bloggers have already added EntreCard if they’re going to even do it at all. It will continue to be harder to do the longer EntreCard is around but it’s always nice to get an ad on a big blog that just added the widget.

Please keep these factors in mind when you determine which blogs to spend your EntreCard credits on. Until EntreCard fixes the ability to game the system and bring low traffic level blogs up into the top levels of their respective categories then you need to do your homework before you buy ads through EntreCard. At the very least please just briefly look at the blog even if you don’t want to analyze the content or check out how many comments are put onto each post. I don’t want you wasting those credits on people that won’t send you traffic.

What do you think of my tips?

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This quick blogging tip is one that I used to suffer from back in the beginning stages of my blog. I would frequently write posts on my blog just to be writing something. I never spent enough time to completely think through what I was going to write about and in turn this led to posts my readers weren’t as interested to check out. Bottom line, I’ve found it’s better to have higher quality less frequent posts than a higher post frequency if you can’t maintain that same level of quality whether it be because of time constraints or some other reason. I’ve seen blogs that post just to post and I just get the feeling that they’re just trying to fill a quota. With that said of course it’s important to maintain a consistent posting schedule and post as often as you can, but make sure you don’t post on your blog just to post. If your posts come across as forced readers can see that and will be less likely to subscribe to your RSS or comment on your blog.

Have you ever found yourself posting just to post?

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I am always looking for more ways to bring in traffic (aren’t we all?). So I decided to give Blog Rush a try and after three weeks the results are in.

I heard about a lot of people dumping Blog Rush because of how poorly it performs, but I never bothered to look at how much traffic it was sending me until today. The reason why I hadn’t checked earlier was because when I log into my Google Analytics panel and check out the referral sources, it doesn’t even come close to cracking my top ten referral sources (which is what Analytics defaults at showing you) so I never noticed how terrible it performed.

Because I’m taking off the widget and clearing out some space I have decided to give that space away for free. You can win one of two free 125 x 125 ads that will display in the current spot where my Blog Rush widget resides by three ways: commenting on this post, subscribing to my RSS feed via email or by posting about the contest on your blog. A comment counts for one entry, an RSS email subscription counts for five entries and a post on your blog counts for ten entries. You could even just say “Count me in for the contest” or if you want to go a little more in depth that’d be cool too. For the RSS email subscription to count, you must activate the subscription that is sent to your inbox. Additionally, writing about the contest on your blog doesn’t have to be that long. If you just mention the contest in a “weekly link wrap up post” that would suffice.

The contest ends on January 19th where the winners will be randomly chosen. Your ad will run for one month and I’ll write a post about the winners as well.

I reserve the right to ask a winner to change their ad to something else if I don’t think it’s appropriate although I’m sure I won’t have to do this.

Grab five entries now by subscribing to my RSS via email!

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