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My Almost-daily Journal |
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| About I love trying out new things, especially when it comes to internet technology. I never really kept a journal, but it's something that I've always wanted to do. Now, everybody will get a chance to look inside my twisted, and somewhat-warped mind.
I've also subscribed to Audio Blog, so a few times a week, I'll leave actual voice blogs. Very cool!XML Newsfeed Previous Posts
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Thursday, August 04, 2005
Domain Sale - Cheatcodes.netAfter seven or eight years of ownership, I finally parted with one of my first domain names ever purchased during the birth of the internet. Back then, domains cost $35/yr to register, with a minimum of a two year committment, so they weren't at all cheap. I forgot exactly when I bought cheatcodes.net... it was either in 1997 or 1998. But I do remember my reasoning: Peter was making money hand-over-fist publishing game cheat codes using pay-per-click advertisers to generate revenue. And it wasn't difficult... most of the cheat content was free to grab from other sites and newsgroup postings. Back then, I was still an internet neophyte, so I hardly knew what I was doing. But, I was a fast learner. In just a few months, I was hitting $1000/month in advertising revenue! I was doing everything possible to keep my traffic up, including posting new game cheats as games came out, as well as trying to optimize the meta tag keywords, descriptions, and any other html component that would raise my site above the rest in natural search listings. It was an obsession. I used every tool to make sure my site remained on the first page of a game cheat search. The obsession faded, as did the $1000/month haydays, and revenue started dropping. Life got in the way like it usually does, and my obsession was ultimately forgotten. I was still pulling in monthy revenue at a minimum of $100/month until around 2002. When the revenue fell to double digits, I decided to redo the site to see if it bumped my traffic and revenue. Still, free time was pretty rare, and I had bigger fish to fry. The redo did help traffic, and it spiked back up to reasonable levels. I switched over to Commission Junction for advertising, but that didn't fare very well. I don't think I ever received a check from them because I never gave them my social security number for tax purposes. They ended up cancelling my account, and their ads actually remained on the site doing nothing. The site still generated sick traffic. It was the number one bandwidth hog of our server. Peter kept on telling me that my site generated so much traffic, it was crazy not to throw Google ads on it. Working on cheatcodes.net was the last thing on my mind for the last three years. Finally, I took his advice... and that's what I did... last Friday evening. I cleaned up the site, registered with Google Adsense, and on Saturday morning, I was approved. So by Saturday afternoon, Google ads now littered (very fashionably) cheatcodes.net. Revenue started piping in very quickly. Saturday through Tuesday, I was making a mighty $5/day, which is remarkable, knowing that I haven't updated my site since with any new content since 2003. And that trend started going up as I added a few more of the newer game cheats like GTA San Andreas and Battlefield 2. Life was good! A montly residual income of $150 is nice! A little work and updating, and I could probably double or triple that! Then I decided to check my cheatcodes.com public email, just to see if I missed anything. I haven't checked that email since 2003. Wow. Most of it was junk and "submit-a-cheat" user-submitted cheats... but a few of them were inquiries into buying the site. Wow! Some of the emails were pretty old... going back to 2003... and some were very new. I responded to all of them, asking the requesters what they had in mind. Most of them were in the $500 - $3,000 range. No way I'd sell it for that. But... a few of the offers were much higher! So, to make a long story short, the early years of getting the site saturated on search engines finally paid off! I ended up selling the domain name to someone that was looking for a high-traffic site, that could recreate a new game cheat site, and pull in revenue from Google ads. The beauty of the deal was that I was able to keep my site and source code. As of right now, my proceeds for the sale are still tied up in escrow. I worked pretty swifty to close the deal with the buyer. Hopefully he'll return the favor and release those funds without much of a delay. So what's next for me? I'll probably put my old site up on an obscure domain name like game-cheat-codes411.biz and see if I can raise the site's popularity in natural search listings. That's going to be extremely tough, since that's usually an eight year process. Needless to say, Danielle and I have a baby coming, so time will be a little limiting for me to be a game cheat site webmaster. I can say that the sale of the domain will be put to great use. Some of it will go toward our kitchen redo, and the rest will probably go into our soon-to-be baby's college fund. Oh yeah... I can now justify buying a Nikon D70s with two lenses! Life is good! posted by Dino at 10:21 AM (permanent link)
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