Diorex.wordpress.com was without peer in the affiliate marketing niche. This guy who calls himself ‘Diorex’ is the stuff that mentors and role models are made off. Each of his posts was gold and it was evident that he spent quality time writing them and that he had a mountain of experience to draw upon. When his blog went down, the affiliate marketing world cried. People started scrambling to retrieve old google archives of his posts, collecting them in word documents and printing them off for reference later - such was the richness of gold in his words.

Last month, I had noticed that diorex.com was about to expire and I had a novel plan to replubish all of diorex’s lost posts on it. Unfortunately, just like losing out on the problogger.com domain, my conviction was no where near strong enough. Turns out though that Diorex had not totally hanged up his boots and he actually backordered this domain himself… lo and behold… I bring you the Diorex blog relaunched at DIOREX.COM..!

• How to Measure a Niche
• The Affiliate Playbook
• Google Content Match - Goldmine or Minefield?
• What would you do if you were just starting out?
• Some Keyword Insights
• The Short End of the Long Tail of Affiliate Marketing

Popularity: 18%

The Dot Asia domains have finally opened to the public this week. Have you grabs yours yet? This is by far the best chance you’ve got to secure the top level domain that you want. I really like the dot .asia extension. It is a proper word (unlike .eu, .ws, etc.,) and covers the WHOLE Asian region including Australia and India!

Amongst the hundreds I’ve spent, I secured myself some rippers include iReview.asia and StudentFinance.asia. I picked my domain names by choosing ones which I have a business idea that I can build around. Maybe they won’t eventuate this year… but when I have the time, motivation, and money, they will eventually eventuate :)

I registered these at godaddy as I have the majority of my domains there anyway so it’s easier to manage. The coupon codes that work for dot asia are

cjcdollar - $1 off Coupon
cjccoupon - 10% off Coupon
cjcdeal35 - $5 off on orders of $30 or more
cjctenoff - $10 off on orders of $50 or more
cjcdeal - 15% off on orders of $75 or more
cjcdeal37 - $20 off on order of $100 or more

Popularity: 15%

Febuary was an intense month for me. I’ve been:

1. Juggling the blog theme redesign
   As you can see, I’ve almost removed all traces of the copyblogger theme I started with - it’s still a work in progress though. I’m glad I’ve done this cos whilst mandigo was nice and flexible, copyblogger loads a million times faster and now I can say there’s no other blog that looks as crap as as unique as mine
2. Searching for and registering domain names.
   My domain count is now at a massive 97! That’s 3 more to crack the ton! Whilst there’s still the temptation for me to grab that exact matching keyword dot NET domain, I’ve learnt that the age of a domain is vastly more important than its keywords. This has prompted me to be buying domains that are at least 2 years or older. Whilst this has costed a bit more, the rewards have been worth it. These domains get indexed faster and I’m finding that (for my cases anyway) google seems to look at the keywords in the path more than the domain name itself. So what this means is that instead of getting a brand new domain like FindASoulMate.com, I’d rather get DatesOnline.com if it is 2years + old. I’ll then make it a mini dating site and have a page with the path datesonline.com/find-a-soul-mate/.

   This actually makes sense to me and I think it’s a smart change for Google. Often the best sites on the net have meangingless domain names (from a keyword perspective anyway) - Take techcrunch and mashable for example.

4. SEO’ing my mini sites
   this has been the most time consuming and boring part of the process. Trying to obtain endless links for my sites has become to labourious and I’m researching the best options to either outsourcing this or automating this. More on this in a later post… I hope.
5. Increasing my PPC and Affiliate knowledge
   There’s a growing tidal wave of affiliate bloggers out there and I’m soaking in all I can. Apart from putting a few ad buttons here and there, I’ve always been lazy about pushing affiliate programs because I’ve had the impression that it’s a dodgy industry and I hate faking / lying in an ad copy just to get the sale. Let’s face it, 90% of people who sell affiliate stuff have never used the product themselves so how can they endorse it with a massively long landing page that proclaims it’s the best thing since sliced bread? Apart from the dodgyness of it, I’ve also lacked to passion to promote stuff that I’m not interested in (online dating??, dieting??, ringtones??, etc.,) Well, in the last few months ( and more so last month), I’ve stumbled across a few programs that I absolutely think rocks, passes my ethical / moral test, and I have no problems pushing to even my best friends. More on this later… I hope again.

So what has all this meant for Feburary? A grand total of $364.31 for the whole month.

I know it’s still way less than what I earn in day offline but I’m happy that it was more than Jan - as you can see I was flat out in Feb and I haven’t had a chance to monetised all 97 of my domains. March looks more promising though, especially with the changes to the Adsense T&Cs (which reminds me, I still need that adsense compliant privacy page) and my affiliate endeavours. I’m aiming to break $500..! :D

Popularity: 44%

It’s been a few months since I moved this blog to jerryhuang.com. In those few months, I noticed that I was not ranking in Google for as many new long tail search phrases as I used to. This has forced me to move back to brilliances.com which I’ve had registered since early 2002. Google absolutely loves this domain… probably because it is a high value dictionary word and that it’s been active for 6 years. It is almost effortless for me to rank for terms like “tag sunglasses” and “guess mega millions today”.

If you subscribe using http://feeds.feedburner.com/MegaMillions, you will not need to change anything you will need to change it to http://feeds.feedburner.com/brilliances. If you used jerryhuang.com/feed, please update it to the feedburner feed. JerryHuang.com will continue pointing back Brilliances.com for another few weeks to allow me to work out which permalinks to selectively redirect.

As you can also see, this blog is getting a makeover. The mandigo theme has gotten too popular and I’ve been seeing it EVERYWHERE. I’ve finally decided to get off my ass and differentiate myself with my very own custom theme. It’s not ready yet but I’m starting off with the famed copyblogger theme and I’ll slowly personalised it as I get time. Chris Pearson’s themes are a gem - He’s also made the cutlines theme which I’ve also used before. Cutlines, however, was bought over and is now managed by someone else so I’m hesistant to use that as my base. Having used my fair share of themes now, I’ve found Chris Peason’s to be consistently clean coded. Some other themes may look more snazzy but they work like a dog in the backend.

Popularity: 40%

Happy New Year guys! It’s been a great break and unfortunately, I haven’t made my millions yet so I’ve had to come back to work. December was an awesome month. The jostling for christmas shoppers meant that every click was worth that much more. I’m now up to 51 domain names and my adsense income for December came up to a grand total of… $263.66. It will be hard to beat this figure in January as I’m already noticing that the returns per click are substantially lower than they were in December. Some people have rumoured that maybe it’s because I’m using the old adsense formats instead of the new ones. Sounds a bit far fetched and I doubt Google has become that evil.

With the growing number of websites that I now own, it’s probably doesn’t add any value for me to keep listing them all and breaking down their profits per site. Suffice to say, I’ve managed to secure some ripper domains, so much so that I’ve started to auction some of these off at my new domainholics blog :) Currently the auction is underway for StumbleMe.com which has a highest bid of $80. I’m finding more and more killer domain names than I can handle so whilst I do have intentions to build a site for each, sometimes it makes more financial sense for me to let some go to give me some immediate returns and cover my hosting and domain rego costs. Next up on the auction list, I’m thinking about putting MediaLeaks.com and SEOpinions.com on the market. Both, I think are high quality dot coms that would be worth $x,xxx for the right end user so it might just be too early for me to give these up…

With all these domains, I’ve also been experimenting with domain parking. From some of the guys over at NamePros, it seems to be making them a lot of easy money. However, after a month of trail, the returns for my type of domains are too low. Mind you, I’ve only used Sedo as my application for Parked.com was rejected. I suspect with domain parking, you really only make money if you have some super type-in domains (like iambored.com or whatever.com) or if you are into adult xxx related domains and poker / gambling where the cpc’s are supposedly much higher. For me, I prefer to ‘park’ my own sites with adsense as this way, I am free to do whatever I want with site design and it has a chance of being on top of Google’s search results for a variety of key terms.

Popularity: 13%

Since I’m going huge with all this domain ‘collecting’, it’s about time I got acquainted with the professionals in this space. First stop was to find the premier domain name forum. A quick search on Google revealed

1. DomainForums.com
2. DnForum.com
3. NamePros.com

And a quick look at DomainForums.com was all I needed to find out that it was only at first place because it’s name exactly matched what I was googling for. It membership numbers were abysmal compared to the other two. DN Forum has 47,390 members and NamePros 76,029. Normally I pick the forum with the biggest membership ( I try to not sign up to too many forums because it ends up consuming too much of my time - you forum-holics know what I’m talking about!). In this instance, I chose DNForum because I have heard more mentions of it recently than NamePros.

What a mistake that was!!! I was a bit taken back when I was presented with a membership payment page. Lucky (or so I thought) rego was free and the membership was only for extra features, like posting on special forums and having a bigger inbox- I can live without that for the time being. If it’s any good, I don’t mind paying later because there might be a good marketplace here where I can make some money by flipping my sites to the members. I took the effort to register but upon trying to post my first post in the Newbies Introduction section, I was greeted with a restricted access page - WTF??? I need to pay to introduce myself in the NEWBIES section!! For Gods sake! It’s no wonder that NamePros has a bigger membership base.

Now I’m a proud member of NamePros and have already learnt a great deal on domaining and have added a few super resourceful sites to my bookmarks

• Seven Mile
• DN Journal

Popularity: 31%

In October, I made about $20 from adsense from 3 sites. I’m pleased to report that in November, I’ve grown my site portfolio to 9 and my adsense earnings have now increased to $86.64 (from 95,636 page impressions)! My domain portfolio has also leaped to 39. I’ve grown addicted to purchasing domains that I think are at least worth more than their purchase price. What do you guys think of

1. stumbleme.com
2. bitminds.com

I particularly like Bit Minds because I think that it’s a great name for an IT company… maybe my new company :)

The formula that I’ve used to grow my earnings has been the same.

1. buy a domain
2. build a site
3. put some adsense on it
4. build some backlinks
5. constantly build more backlinks, experiment with site design, and improve

It’s working well so far but I’m conscious that I’m putting all my eggs in the google search results and adsense market… o well, what can you do when they own ALL the market?

Popularity: 15%