You mean “Real” Estate, or “Virtual” Real Estate?
No, I mean “Real” as in “Real Estate”. I was thinking over the weekend that starting a new blog is not easy. How do you find things to write in the beginning, when readers are few and interaction is limited? That is unless you just write how you spent your day. Anyway, couple that with the fact that I’ve been involved with real estate for a few years now and have been wanting to write a bit about all that I have witnessed, and here it is: a real estate section has been added to this blog.
One thing that I will definitely avoid getting into, or at least I will try avoiding, is the debate about whether domain names and real estate share common characteristics.
Google Ads
I really don’t like the Google ads in this blog, from an aesthetic point of view of course. I just don’t know what else to put there right now. I wonder whether they will eventually become very relevant to the content, but then again that assumes that the content of the blog will be very focused. I guess it will have to be then, just for the sake of AdSense if nothing else 
Sedo Parking
A few days ago I decided to park some domains with Sedo, 48 domains to be precise. These were domains that were just sitting there idle, undeveloped, pointing to one “brochure” page that I had. Not sure why but I never thought about parking them with anybody, probably because I always intended on developing them. Of course I never found the time to do so, so they ended up sitting there, unproductive.
Anyway, a few days ago I noticed that my earnings from a few other domains had dropped, which is normal since I haven’t spent a minute with them in a year, and at the same time I had to register a few more domains for a project that I needed, so the”aha” moment came that I wouldn’t be developing those 48 idle domains any time soon, so I better park them somewhere and see how they do.
It looks like all of them get hits almost daily. A good chunk gets a few hits a day and a few of them get 30-40 hits/day. However, the click through is not that great except for one or two, and even then, the earnings are very small. That means that I need to add some more keywords into the Sedo database to attract more relevant traffic.
Although I am not sure what the right keywords are for domains such as amazingproperties.com and upscaleestates.com. As far as the few domains that actually get 30-40 visits per day, it seems I’d do much better developing them, even a little bit. If only there was time! Let’s revisit this in a week or so.
The Photostream
This Wordpress theme was designed with the option to have a flickr widget, so I thought I make use of it. Of course, deciding what to show in the photo stream was a whole different story! In case you haven’t guessed it, it is random public Buddha pictures. Why Buddha? who knows… just something different.
Hello world!
Indeed, Hello World! Let’s try to make a fresh new start and actually get a blog up and running.
For someone who was running a b2b online publishing network before blogs were everywhere, to not even have a personal blog is a little odd. I think the problem was that I wasn’t sure what to write in the first post! Not that I know now, but I might as well start with something. That’s my 2008 New Year’s resolution.
The Subject:
Even though this is technically a personal blog and as such there is no particular blog focus, I think the real motive is to interact with the community in order to deepen my knowledge about the world of domains, SEO and the related good stuff. That would help me both with growing my new online store, but also make something out of a small (200) domain portfolio I have somewhat accidentally built over the past 10 years.
The Name:
I seem to have opinions about quite a few things, so the blog name suits me fine. But I didn’t plan it. It just happened to cross my path one day when I was looking for another domain I needed. So I snapped it. Who would have know that’d be my blogs name!
The Template:
I’ve got to say, I haven’t found better designed free templates for Wordpress than the ones by DesignDisease and I ‘d like to extend a big thanks to Elena for making such nicely and uniquely designed themes. Very creative. Of course, the folks that she works with, Smashing Magazine, etc deserve a thank you too. Even though this “Gossip City” template isn’t exactly what I envisioned for my blog, it was free! and when you are just starting, free matters.
That’s all for now, Happy New Year! It’s 2008 already… oh boy!
