Morgan linton's blog

Hello and welcome to a little weekly segment I’ve decided to call WordPress Wednesday’s. People always ask me what WordPress themes I like so as per usual I like to turn these into a post rather than just share this information with one person. For my first WordPress Wednesday I thought it would be fun to share three of my favorite Business Themes.

WordPress can be an excellent way to build a professional looking site for your business that is easy to update, and best of all, looks good. Let’s face it, too many businesses have old, junky-looking websites, many don’t realize that something like WordPress could completely revamp their site without a lot of work. Of course using a business theme doesn’t mean you have to be boring, I’ve picked out three of my favorite creative business themes that can really make your corporate site look a little less corporate and a bit more fun. The themes below are all top-notch in my opinion and for under $100 they cost a heck of a lot less than hiring a web developer to revamp your site.

Empire – WooThemes

Empire is a slick yet simple business theme. It literally takes under an hour to completely configure and the front slider looks great if you have a nice high-res image (think $10 or less on iStockPhoto). I really like that they have the “Get In Touch” section on the front of the page. Great spot in the upper right-hand corner to give a personalized touch by introducing visitors to your team. Like all WooThemes you don’t have to write a single line of code and the customized dashboard module is incredibly easy to configure.

Envisioned – Elegant Themes

While this theme may be a bit too artsy for some companies I think it looks incredibly clean. There’s something about the simplicity of this theme that’s always really spoken to me. It is intended as a theme for a personal blog but I think it would make an amazing theme for any business that builds websites, takes photos, videos, etc. Let’s face it, some of the standard business themes don’t quite fit for the more creative companies out there, this one does and it looks great with a simple text logo.

Momento – ThemeForest

This is another very visual business theme and a great one for any company looking for a more Web 2.0 look. The three text boxes underneath the photo are great for focusing the visitor on the three key items you want your customers to focus on. The navigation at the top doesn’t steal the show allowing your visitor to focus on what’s important. Theme Forest themes are great but not a good choice for beginners so if you’re just starting out I’d stick with one of the others I’ve mentioned above.

Note: I do have affiliate links in this post for these themes. If you feel like cutting me out of the equation simply visit the site directly. 

One of the newest and most active blogs to enter the Domaining Blog space this year was DNFBlog.com written by Puranjay, a domain investor and blogger. The blog launched in January of this year and quickly ramped up with 58 posts in March and 61 in April. The blog covered a variety of topics from industry news to tips and tricks for investors.

In April they added a video intro that launches every time you go to the site introducing the blog and DNForum itself. I found the video a bit cheesy but at the same time can understand the value of it for new visitors who might not know much about the blog or DNForum. Since the focus of this blog was educating new Domainers I could definitely see this making them feel more comfortable.

Now it looks like the blog has gone dark with no posts coming out since May 1st. I was a fan of this blog and thought it was a great addition to the community, now the question is, what happened to DNFBlog?

I have been thinking about this for over a year now so decided to share it with all of you before taking the next steps. This idea initially came from a new blog reader who asked me if I had anything with my top blog posts in physical book form. I told him that I did not but did send a recommendation of a few of my most popular posts. He then responded saying, “Well if you ever make a physical book with your top posts in it, I’d like a copy!”

Now a year later I’m seriously thinking about doing it. The question for me is, are more people interested in buying something like this, and what service should I use to do it, if of course people are interested?

My thought was to break the book into four different sections:

1. Buying Domains
2. Selling Domains
3. Developing and Monetizing Domains
4. Running a Domain Business

There are a number of services that can turn your blog into a book but since I have no experience with any of them, I thought I’d reach out to all of you for some advice. Here are the services I’ve look at so far:

• Blurb.com
• Blog2Print.com
• CreateSpace.com
• Lulu.com

Let me know if any of you have had experience with these services, and most importantly, if you would want to buy a physical book like this!

 

At the beginning of this month I did a post about the difference between exact and broad match search volume. The post was inspired by all the readers who submitted names to my domain contest who didn’t know the difference. It was actually sad to see in some ways as there were a good number of people who thought they had names with great search volume that actually had none.

After the contest I had a few panicked domain investors email me. Most of their stories went something like this, “I bought all these domains thinking they had incredible search volume. Nobody wants to buy them and I’m losing money, I read your post and found-out I was using broad rather than exact, what should I do?”

These are great examples of why no matter what you’re investing in, be it domains, stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. it is absolutely critical to take the time to learn before jumping in. The silver lining is, better to find-out now than two years from now when you’ve wasted even more money. So I decided to take my previous post a step further and show a video illustrating exact vs. broad match search volume to make sure everyone is crystal clear on the difference.

As many of you know I held an exciting contest on my blog to buy a domain name for $1,200 from one of my readers. With over 120 comments this post caught a lot of attention and had some great names submitted to it. I spent the weekend crunching the numbers and picking a domain from those submitted. In the end I choose WeddingFlorist.com as the winner and sent a congratulations email to the owner.

A day later I hadn’t heard anything back so I sent another email this time trying both the email address on the WHOIS as well as the email address used to submit the comment. The next day, still nothing. So I tried calling the phone number on the WHOIS record, wrong number.

Of course I know people are busy so I waited another day, still nothing. I tried emailing again over the weekend but am sad to say that I don’t think the owner of this domain exists, or if he does, he doesn’t seem to have the correct WHOIS information or email address in his blog comment.

I would still love to buy this domain so if anyone reading this post happens to know the owner, let him know I’d still like to buy the name. If not then I will be buying my second choice name which I’ll announce later this week. Still, I’m a nice guy and fair is fair so I want to make sure I’m giving the owner a fair chance. Heck I know that this is a great time for a vacation and many of us unplug on vacation so I’d hate for him to miss my emails while he’s enjoying some R&R.

So I’ll give it until Wednesday of this week. If any of you happen to know the owner if you could be so kind as to ping him that would be great. Either way it was a very successful contest and I will be buying a name from one of my readers for $1,200…that name might just not be WeddingFlorist.com.

Well I decided to cancel Small Business Sunday today because this day should be about one thing and one thing only, Mom! Right now we are nestled in the woods in a beautiful house getting ready for a day of wine tasting with my Mom. After that we’ll be coming back to the house where we’ll be making a feast and relaxing in the hot tub enjoying some of the great wine we discovered during the day!

For those of your reading this post who are Mother’s I would like to wish you a very Happy Mother’s Day. Without you none of us would be here today and I know for me, I wouldn’t be half the person I am today without my Mom. Our Mom’s inspire us and show us the magical adventure that is life!

If you’re reading this right now, stop. Today is not about Domaining, today is about all the Mother’s out there. So close your laptop and spend some quality time with your Mom!

Wow – what a week! A lot has happened this week and a lot is happening this weekend, in fact right now I’m sitting on a plane cruising along at 35,000 feet. This week has been exciting with some major appraiso announcements on the horizon, one nice five-figure sale, and two end-user sales that look like their going to close next week!

Yesterday I was in a kayak on Big Bear Lake, a lake at the top of  a mountain less than two hours from LA. Now we’re on our way to Sonoma for a wedding and followed by a weekend of wine tasting.

Since this weekend really is all about spending time with Daina and my family I’m going to keep this particularly short and sweet, okay maybe it won’t be sweet, alright, I’m really bad at short too, here we go!

• We launched a new kayak store on Kayaking.org that is run by our partner, Outdoor Play, the first website on the Internet to sell kayaks! This has been one of the top requests from our visitors and I am very excited with how it all turned-out.

• BlogAboutWine.com crossed the 3,000th fan mark on Facebook. This feels good, we’ve turned something that we love into a resource that other people truly enjoy, and we’re still at the very beginning. This weekend we will be doing some great coverage of what Sonoma has to offer.
• The top story in the Domaining world this week was .CO and some statements made by Juan in a video. I have stayed-out of this one but will say that like many of you I was not a fan of what was said. Still I like .CO and think that they are doing some very innovative things to build their brand.
• I’ve been getting a lot of questions from readers about the Google Penguin update. If you haven’t had a chance to read my post about 3 ways to rank better after the Penguin update, make sure to check it out.
• I am blown-away by how fast WPEngine is, seriously, it’s insanely fast. Next week MorganLinton.com will be moving over to WPEngine so get ready for a much faster experience with my blog!

Last, but certainly not least, Happy Mother’s Day to all the incredible Moms out there! Have a great weekend, now back to the flight!

(Photo Credit)

Like it or not, Panda came and changed the face of search forever. Now Penguin has come and it looks like once again, the search world may never be the same. While many people are frustrated with Google as their sites dipped in the rankings, many others are looking for the opportunities ahead now that search works a bit differently than it did before.

I’ve been getting a lot of email from people wanting to know what they can do to rank better now that Penguin is here. Many of you will be surprised to see that some of the main ways to improve your rankings are tips I’ve been giving for years now. It all centers around building a site for users, not for search engines, and this can be a very good thing.

Below are three ways that you can help your site rank better and hopefully bring your blood pressure down just a bit. Don’t worry, it’s all going to be okay, heck, I’ll go a step further, there’s no reason why you can’t even leap ahead of where you were before. Follow the tips below and you’ll be well on your way:

1. Fresh, unique content. This has been #1 on my list for a long time now. Don’t buy cheap poorly-written articles, and don’t even think of using one of those funky content spinners. Get real writers that are passionate about the subject matter to write great articles. Fresh is more important than ever so you’ll need to keep the quality content coming.
2. Backlinks to Internal Pages. Too many SEO companies focused on getting backlinks to the main page of a site. This doesn’t look organic to Google and it shouldn’t! Think about it, there should be more interesting things on your site than just the front page, Google knows this and that’s why they expect to see a reasonable amount of backlinks going to internal pages.
3. Go Easy On The Ads. Users are instantly turned-off when they encounter a site laden with ads, you want to build for the user now so go easy on the ads. If you’re closing direct ad deals you might be in better shape but filling your site with adsense and affiliate offers isn’t going to help.

As always I’d love to hear from you, feel free to share your own tips or ask any questions you might have below. Comment and let your voice be heard!

(Photo Credit)

For those keeping score, .ME has been having one heck of a 2012 with strong support from major startups and big sales happening every single week. One of the areas where .ME has really shined is mobile where app developers are seeing .ME as a great extension to build their brands on. Given that mobile is probably the fastest-growing industry on the planet, this is a very good sign for .ME and .ME domain owners.

Starting on May 24th .ME will be holding a premium auction on Sedo with some absolutely incredibly domains. There really is no limit to what a one-word .ME can sell for which was very clearly illustrated with the $450,000 sale of Meet.me, a domain purchased for under $6,000. I will definitely be bidding in the auction this month and while I don’t want to give-away all my favorites I would like to share some of my top picks.

Boats.me – boats are expensive and there are plenty of people that are fanatical about boats. This has great development and end-user potential and would be perfect for an boating-related app.

Cruise.me – while we’re on the topic of boats, let’s not forget the cruise industry. I can already see a daily deals site for cruises or a slick app to find a great cruise near you.

Debt.me – nobody likes to be in debt, everyone who is in debt wants to get out of debt. I think this could be one of the names to go for the highest price, and I’ll definitely be one of the bidders.

Graduate.me – the education space is big money, this is one of the top category-killers in the entire niche.

LosAngeles.me – I live in LA and love this city as do millions of other people, this would be a great domain for an “Around Me” like app specific to LA.

Rap.me – turn the videos you shot on your smartphone into a rap video with Rap.me, I can already see it now!

VentureCapital.me – what VC wouldn’t want this for their blog?

Traffic.me – we all deal with it, some of us more than others, traffic apps are huge and this would be the perfect name for the next big traffic app.

There are many more great names in this auction. I am writing about this because I think it does truly represent a great opportunity for investors. Think about it, three very savvy Domain Investors bought a .ME domain with each spending less than $2,000, and each walking away with over $100,000. Mobile is hot, .ME is hot, put the two together and there could be some future six-figure sales on this list, and you have a chance to get one for much less in a few weeks!

I had an interesting experience this week that I wanted to share with all of you. It’s a great lesson in Business 101 as well as a good example of how to screw-up your chances of making a sale to an end user. It all comes down to the fact that at the end of the day, businesses don’t do business with businesses, people do business with people.

So here’s what happened. As many of you know, I work with startups and Fortune 500 companies to help them acquire domain names for their business. I do not broker domains for investors but instead help real businesses get the domains they are looking for. This year alone I’ve done close to $850,000 in deals, I can’t talk about any of them, but if there’s any way I can in the future you can bet I will!

One of my clients contacted me inquiring about a few domain names they were interested. None were category-killer by any means, in fact most were mediocre three-word .COM, but the client really wanted one of them and had a six-figure budget for the name. So I emailed all the domain owners asking what price they might be looking for.

Of the people I emailed (six in total) three came back with a price range, two said they didn’t want to throw-out a number but would consider an offer, and one guy was just a complete jerk. It was the guy who was a jerk that I didn’t quite get, he wasn’t sitting on a six-figure domain, it was a name worth maybe $10K-$20K (and only to the right buyer) but if he got six-figures I can tell you he’d be jumping with joy. So what did he do?

Rather than throw-out a range or ask me for an offer he responded by saying, “If you really wanted the domain you would have made an offer.” Poof, no deal. We emailed six people and sure, not all of them gave a range, those that asked for offers, we submitted offers to, but this guy lost the deal by being a jerk. While I myself also push potential Buyers to make an offer, I simply ask for an offer. This rude response let me know right-away that this was not someone I would ever want to do business with, and since my client had plenty of other options, we bought a different domain.

If you want to lose a potential end-user sale, be a jerk right away and watch people avoid you like the plague. Not only did we not respond to this email, but I’ve marked down the owner so I know in the future to stay-away from this guy. If he would have simply said, “I only accept offers and will not throw-out a price.” We would have made an offer, but by being rude and showing he was someone that would be a complete hassle to do business with, we looked the other way.

Now just to be clear here. I’m not talking about a category-killer one or two-word .COM, and I’m not talking about any big Domainers that we all know. I’m talking about a guy with a mediocre name and a missed opportunity. Like I said in the beginning, businesses don’t do business with businesses, people do business with people. Responding rudely to an inquiry is a great way to lose a potential sale, and you never know who is making the offer or what their budget is so you might just miss that one big chance.

I am excited to announce that the second edition of my free guide, Domain Monetization 101 has arrived hot off the press! Actually, there is no press since it’s an eBook but let’s just pretend that it is! While this is the second edition of the guide almost the entire book has been re-written so it might be more fair to call it a whole new book.

The idea behind Domain Monetization 101 is simple – people ask me all the time how to get started with Domain Monetization. Rather than trying to share everything I’ve learned in an email or short phone call I put all the basics together in one guide that I give-away for free. The guide covers Monetization from start-to-finish and shows anyone coding experience or not, how to build something meaningful on their domains.

To get your free copy of the book all you need to do is sign-up for my newsletter. Oh and don’t worry, I don’t send-out Newsletters every day, or even every week. My newsletter is all about education and when I do send it out it’s jam-packed with articles about Monetization, SEO, and Domain Flipping with a focus on specific techniques I haven’t covered yet on my blog.

So if you’ve been waiting to take the next step and start monetizing your domains, or if you’ve been trying to monetize your domains without making much progress, I am confident Domain Monetization 101 will help! If you are already a newsletter subscriber and you would like a copy just shoot me an email and I’ll send it over. Of course feel free to ask any questions you have in the comment section below, I’m always here to help!

 

Out of the sites we have developed roughly a quarter now run on WordPress and about eight of those are very important to us. We’ve tried a variety of solutions for managing these sites and keeping up with all the myriad of updates WordPress needs from plugins, to themes, to the entire platform. Right now it’s an incredibly manual process and while there are some tools that can make it easier, I haven’t seen any great end-to-end solutions.

Yesterday I saw a tweet about WPEngine, a fully managed WordPress hosting solution. Along with keeping your sites secure and up-to-date, they also make sure that your sites are insanely fast, and I mean fast. After doing a bit of research I kept finding really positive reviews with some serious accolades for the kind of speed increases people saw moving their blogs to WPEngine.

The first step for us is moving the eight sites over from their current hosting provider. I am going to pay WPEngine to do the move since it is critical that sites (like this blog!) don’t go down. I’ll let you all know how the move goes and hopefully you’ll be able to notice a nice speed increase and I’ll enjoy the peace-of-mind knowing that my WordPress sites are being looked-after by a team of specialists!

You can try WPEngine for 60-Days which is what I’m doing now, but based on what I’ve read it looks like this is the solution I’ve been looking for. Oh and the links in this post are affiliate links, if you want to cut me out of the picture completely go right ahead and simply visit WPEngine.com. Right now I can’t say I recommend this service yet since I’m only just getting started with it myself. What I can say is it looks like a great solution and if you’re not ready to make a decision now, you can wait until my next update to hear how my experience is going!

Last week I tried something new, it was a simple idea, write a post asking for readers to submit domains that met a specific criteria. I had no idea if the concept would work or not but as always I thought, “let’s give it a shot!” 118 Comments later it now holds the record for my most-read, most-commented, and longest time-on-site per visitor, oh and of course it was a lot of fun.

I spent a lot of time this weekend analyzing the submissions and I’m happy to say I’ve picked a winner. What name did I pick? Watch the video below and find out!

If you guessed yesterday that this was the domain I was going to buy, congratulations to you too, you’ve won a free copy of my book!

Phew! Well it’s taken a lot more time than I thought to go through all the submissions for my offer to buy a domain from a reader for $1,200. I’m about three quarters of the way through and already have a few good candidates. Along with evaluating the domains that met the criteria, I have also had a fun time picking some of the worst names submitted that really missed the mark.

Now I don’t want to make fun of anyone, but at the same time I do want to make the process a bit more fun. So here’s what I’m going to do. Tomorrow I will announce what domain name I will be buying for $1,200. Along with announcing the domain I will be buying, I will also be awarding three prizes to the people who did the absolute worst job of following the instructions. Once again, my point here really isn’t to make fun of anyone, but more to have fun with some of the submissions that just completely ignored the instructions, hey I can take a joke so you should be able to as well!

Along with prizes for the people who really missed the mark I will be holding an open contest that anyone can enter in to guess which domain I will be buying. The person who guesses right will get a free copy of my Domain Investing Handbook, if multiple people guess right, you’ll all get free copies, it’s that easy!

So now the question is: what domain will I be buying for $1,200?

So you’d like to go a step beyond a simple WHOIS search and become a real Domain Detective, good, you should! I play detective several times a day whether I’m looking at buying a domain, looking at a potential deal, or protecting my own brand. I’ve tried every single tool I could imagine and Domain Tools has been my go-to tool for years now, and for good reason, it has everything you could want and a whole lot more.

Today I thought it would be fun to show some of the features that have made me such a big fan of Domain Tools. So watch the video below and in under five minutes you  will be ready to be a Domain Detective yourself.

(Make sure to click the gear icon and bump this up to HD for the best viewing experience)

Unless you’ve been living in a cave you know that Google has made a great number of changes to their algorithm. Panda was the first algorithm update to really get media attention as it knocked many of the article directories beyond the coveted first page. Many of the old SEO techniques like forums profile backlinks, comment backlinks, etc. became much less useful.

Now Google has rolled-out Penguin, an update that seeks to go a step further identifying suspicious link-building campaigns and sites that are “over-optimized”. Here’s the issue, over-optimized used to be okay and SEO firms would optimize like crazy and charge through the roof for it. In fact, many SEO firms still over-optimize like crazy which means their clients sites are getting penalized.

As a small business going from page one to page two could be the difference between making a profit or dipping into the red. Since many of these SEO changes are incredibly new, many SEO firms haven’t had the chance to change their techniques and focus on the new SEO world that Google has just created. Yes, it’s all about building sites for users, not for search engines, but many SEO companies haven’t made the change left leaving their clients in a bad position.

For this Small Business Sunday I thought it would be a good idea to talk about questions you can ask your SEO firm to make sure they’re doing the right things. You can’t be afraid to ask these questions, it’s better to find-out now rather than wait until later when you’re on page four, five, or even worse – de-indexed. So be confident and ask the questions below to make sure your SEO company is up to snuff.

1. Where are the links coming from? This is the most important question to ask. If their answer is – forums, blog comments, high PR sites, you might want to dig a bit deeper. These techniques used to work like a charm but really aren’t the right way to do SEO anymore.
2. How many backlinks are they adding each month? Understanding the rate at which new links are added is very important because Google is looking at the exact same thing. Add a bunch of links one month, or even worse, one day, and you could throw-up a red flag.
3. How has their strategy changed since Penguin? Forget Panda, have they made a change based on the most recent algorithm changes?
4. Examples of client’s sites on the first page of Google. Don’t be afraid to ask your SEO company for an updated list of client sites and rankings. This is probably something you got when you first hired them, but have you seen an update? What if all the sites they originally showed you on page one are now on page six?

Hopefully you’re SEO company is on the ball and has great answers to these questions, if not, you may want to look for other options. I know a few good SEO companies so anyone looking to switch is more than welcome to shoot me an email and I’ll send over my recommendations. Now go send your SEO company an email now, you’ll rest easier knowing they’re doing the right thing, and if they aren’t, you’ll rest easier knowing you found out about it now!

Hello and welcome to another video weekend musings here on MorganLinton.com. I have been really enjoying doing more videos lately, and I’ve finally optimized the process so this actually takes me even less time than writing a post. This has been an awesome week and there’s a lot on my mind, so come join me in the loft office and enjoy my weekend musings!

Hello and welcome to a brand-new feature on my blog. First let me say, I know that I come-out with new features all the time and some stick and others don’t. That’s life, sometimes your ideas really resonate with an audience, others don’t. If people like this and watch it every week I’ll keep going. Of course if nobody watches and most people think it’s a waste, I won’t – at the end of the day it is all about you!

So enjoy my first weekly domain news update and please let me know what you think and if you’d like to see this happen every week.

Oh and yes I know that I failed to do this one in under five minutes, the goal will be to be about a minute shorter going forward

On Monday of this week I did a post that now holds a new record for number of comments received on a single post. The post was an open invitation for people to post domains that meet  a specific criteria with a chance to sell one to me for $1,200. I was very excited to see the number of people who submitted domains but also pretty amazed to see how few people took the time to follow my instructions, and actually shocked at how many people didn’t know what exact-match search volume was!

I was so surprised how many people misunderstood exact-match search volume that I did a post titled, Understanding The Difference Between Exact And Broad Match to shed some much-needed light on the subject. It actually started to get a bit sad as I saw people who obviously thought that they were buying great domains, when they were actually buying complete junk with incredibly low search volume.

Along with a misunderstanding of search volume, many people ignored the rules and posted domains that didn’t come close to meeting the criteria. I knew a bit of this was going to happen, but it really happened a lot more than I thought. Still I published every single submission since I feel that if you want to take the time to comment on my blog, I’ll publish it!

Now this has turned-into a bit of a project for myself since I have to check every single submission to understand if the search volume and CPC actually matches what people submitted. I’ll be spending a few hours this weekend organizing this all and on Monday will be reporting the following:

• # of domains submitted
• % that met the criteria I specified
• Domain I will buy (if there are enough that meet the criteria)

I still don’t know how many domains met the criteria I specified so I don’t know whether I’m picking from a pool of 50 domains, or 5. My plan is to buy one of these domains but I do need to make sure there’s enough of a selection to make a good purchase. If at the end of my review I find a few good domains that met my criteria, I will absolutely buy one, or more, but it’s a bit too early to tell since I still have a fair amount of work ahead of me to verify all this data! Even though many people didn’t follow the directions, and yes, a ton of people turned-out to have no idea what exact-match search volume is, I am still incredibly grateful to everyone who participated. I am excited about digging deeper this weekend and sharing the results with all of you this weekend. Stay-tuned and of course if you have any comments, anonymous or not, please feel free to share them below!

 

It is with great excitement that I announce publicly on my blog the next major pivot for Linton Investments. Pivot is a word that gets used a lot in the startup world and it’s used to describe a change in direction of shift in focus based on your own experience or customer feedback. Some people confuse pivot with a complete abandonment of an idea, that’s not a pivot, that’s a new company!

This pivot is one that has arisen purely from experience and changes in where I see the income coming into my business. Some pivots come from failure, others from success, I’ve had a few failure pivots, this is a success pivot. As you all know 2011 was an incredible year for me, I broke the six-figure barrier which was a great feeling, and now in 2012 my business is growing at an even faster clip, in fact we’re about to eclipse our 2011 revenue, and it’s only May.

When something like this happens you have to look at your business, your team, and your time, and determine how to maximize everything. I learned a long time ago that you can’t do it all at once, which is why I started hiring people back in 2009. There are now 12 people on the Linton Investments team allowing me to focus on strategy while they run the day-to-day. It’s awesome for me because I can work on other projects like appraiso, Employeo, Startup Nook, all while my business keeps moving forward.

Of course it is critical to always look at your business and fine-tune your approach. What I’ve noticed this year is that a handful of our best sites are making a vast majority of our passive income. The money the business makes passively from our sites now pays for our condo, car, weekend adventures, and of course all the business expenses, with money left-over to put in the bank and of course into more investments.

On top of the passive income, there’s the active income, which has grown dramatically this year as I have been working with major companies closing some incredible deals. What I’ve learned about six-figure deals is you don’t really get to talk about them much thanks to good old NDA’s so some of my greatest successes will probably never be discussed, even though I really really really want to tell the world, but I can’t!

I now see three main ways I generate income:

1. Online Brands – this is our #1 income source and it’s going strong, these are awesome sites that people all over the world love and they bring in passive income every month.
2. Domain Sales – this is the largest growth area for me and with over $50,000 in revenue this year from sales I’m feeling pretty darn good about it.
3. Startups – I have been very fortunate to be part of two hot startups right now appraiso and Employeo. Both are on an incredible growth path and this is where a bulk of my time is going.

So what’s the pivot?

The next pivot for my company is the decision to stop building-out any more brands. Like I said, this isn’t a failure pivot but instead a success pivot. Are top brands are doing so well, I’d rather put more money into growing the existing brands, than adding any new brands, plus 220 sites really does feel like more than enough right?

Most of the focus will go on our top ten brands, sites like Kayaking.org and TrackCredit.com, DebtEliminationPrograms.com and our network of tax sites. The way I look at it is I could spend the money I’m spending now to build new brands, put them into our already successful brands, and really take them to the next level.

Doing this will not involve me, but will involve my team pivoting and changing their focus from building new brands and instead working on our existing brands. As for my time, most of my focus now goes into the startups I am involved in and the domain sales side of the business which has grown too large to not put some serious focus on.

Does this mean Mini-Sites are dead?

No, it doesn’t. It does mean though that I am now less interested in building sites that make hundreds of dollars a month, and more interested in sites that make thousands of dollars a month. By having the team focus on existing brands rather than new brands we can take our existing troops, and build an incredibly army.

What about all the undeveloped domains?

Of course this pivot doesn’t mean that we won’t be putting valuable resources on our undeveloped domains, but it does mean we’ll be doing it differently. Starting this month I have one team-member completely focused on building-out our undeveloped domains using Protrada and Domain Apps. Both of these solutions represent an incredible way to put something much more formidable than a parked site on our domains.

Coupling this with the incredible content we’re getting from Media Piston will allow us to take these undeveloped resources to the next level. The total investment in content will be close to $5,000 and I can tell you it’s worth every penny of it.

So while one team-member focuses on platform development, the rest will be laser-focused on our top brands turning them into world-class businesses.

So where will your time go?

As I said above, most of my time will go into two very exciting startups appraiso and Employeo, along with the domain sales and acquisition-side of our business. I have been working with some very interesting startups and major companies to help them acquire domains as well as doing some very lucrative domain flips of my own. This blog will always be high on my list and will most-likely occupy an hour of my die from now until I’m 110.

So it is with great excitement that I set my team on a new path and the business in a very similar direction, just with a different mission. For me and Daina, it’s time to really make a splash in the startup world and these startups need real time and attention. A new version of appraiso is around the corner and at Employeo we just made a major splash at NYC Uncubed which is taking our little company to much bigger playing fields.

When I started this business an extra $1,000/month blew my mind, then an extra $10,000/month. Now in 2012, a $20,000 is small, it’s a whole new playing field, and making $50/month from a site just doesn’t mean as much as it used to. This is how life works, as you grow and your business does you have to look at where the opportunities are. I don’t want my brands to just rank well in Google, I want them to be written about in newspapers and magazines all over the world, I want our startups to change people’s lives, and as always I want my blog to inspire more people to take their lives into their own hands and show the world what they can do!

Thanks for reading and following-along in the evolution of a hobby that turned-into a business, and now has transformed into something that really has changed my life forever. It only gets more exciting from here and as always, I’m taking all of you along for the ride. Ready to rock? Let’s go!