Alright, who remembers the whole Save Toby frenzy?  This website has been around for a while, but I think it was sometime last year that it was on the online news sites, in the newspapers, and even on TV.  The owners received hate mail, jealous praise, and death threats, along with well over $50,000 in revenue for their idea and their trouble.  The publicity free-for-all has died down by now, but savetoby.com built up an enviable amount of backlinks and PR because of it.

And now you could be the one who saves Toby and owns a little piece of AIS history (not to mention all the backlinks and PR).  Check it out, the site is up for sale at SitePoint.

Technorati Tags: ais, forsale, monetization, internethistory, savetoby

Yesterday I received my first payout from NameDrive.com for the domains I have parked with them.  It arrived quietly in my PayPal account without my having to life a finger, and while it’s not an amount to get excited about ($35.17 for a month and a half), it is a new stream of income for me.  And this month I’m already at $18.34, which is just about $1 a day.
Until about a month and half ago, I had been parking all my domains (50+ now) at Sedo and feeling quite frustrated at my results.  Most of them had no traffic, but the handful that did have traffic were getting low clickthrough rates and very low pay per clicks.  In fact, after several months, I hadn’t even reached the $20 target required for a payout, so I decided to switch parking services.

So about a month and a half ago I switched all my domains to NameDrive, and I’m quite happy with the results.  The average PPC (pay per click) is much higher, and the clickthrough rates are also a bit higher, I imagine because of their more targetted layouts.  It makes me wonder how much better I could be doing with one of the serious parking services such as  Fabulous, DomainSponsor, or even Google, which have traffic requirements that I don’t yet meet.  Anybody out there have some insight on this?

I do want to point a few points for those of you already itching to jump in.  I’ve spent several hundred dollars  buying names - both brand new names from registrars, and after-market names in forums.  Most of those dollars were spent on names that didn’t pan out.  That is, they don’t get any traffic, so they can’t create residual income.  I chalk those up to a learning experience   What that essentially means though, is that it is still going to take me 15-20 months to recoup my investment (up to this point).  But, once I allow the non-performing names to expire, the handful of names with income will more than pay for themselves yearly, and provide a stream of income that I will continue to grow.

As you might expect I’ve been busy delving into the world of website design over the last two weeks.  I love learning new things, and with design being outside my area of expertise, I have to say that I’m enjoying the challenge.  And let me tell you, it’s a real challenge.

First off, things have changed a lot since the days of CoffeeCup HTML editor, tables, and <font> tags, so I’m learning the details of CSS and xhtml.  Second of all, I’m not a photoshop wiz, so creating good looking graphics is still a work in progress for me but I already see some improvement.  Also, the design process is long and challenging.  It has a different structure from software design and development, and I don’t yet have all the tools I need for it.  Lastly, I keep bumping into sites that are screaming at me to just give up - there’s plenty of people out there who already know what they’re doing.

But despite all that I am enjoying myself and I am getting better.  You might notice that Kokua Design is no longer broken in IE 6 And the sites I’m putting together for the three contest winners promise to have much more depth to them.  I have to say though that the projects I took on are much larger than the time I alloted for them.  It’s fine because I will have a more complete portfolio to show, but it’s going to take longer than the afore-mentioned two weeks.

At this point you might be wondering, “Ok, but what’s that headline all about?” The idea is to remind myself (and you) that good design is only part of the equation when building effective and profitable web projects.  It’s not even the most important part.  If you want some proof, just surf over to Craigslist.  Not so pretty, huh?  Or to the hundreds of Internet Marketers making money with their ugly sales letters.  Or for some more impressive proof, check out Plenty of Fish.  Plenty of fish is a free dating site, and let me tell you, it’s not pretty.  But here’s the kicker, it pulls in over $10,000 a day in advertising revenue.  That’s over $3.6 million a year.  What do you think of ugly now?

The moral of the story is that I want to develop competency in building effective and profitable websites.  That’s what I think is important, and what I suspect my clients want.  That competency is going to involve an understanding of the technology, marketing savvy, and also design skills.  The question to you is, how would you rank those three in terms of importance?

First of all, I’d like to thank everybody for entering.  I have to admit that at first I was a little worried whether anyone would be interested at all, even if I was offering webdesign for free.  Luckily, they were.  It was a hard choice to make because there were many great projects that I would’ve liked to work on, but in the end it came down to these three.  In no particular order:

1. Dinah of TwistClothing


2. Joshua Gordon of Part of the Solution ADR


3. Blaine Moore of Financial Moxie

I plan to get these projects done over the next two weeks, and I’ll post the results on Kokua Design and link to them from here.