It has been blogged in the past on how to research niche for a blog. Niche blogging talks on a precise topic so all focus can be directed in one area. I have summarized a few characteristics of a respectable niche blog.

niche-blog

1. Focused Content

There is a restriction for what topic to post on and any content added in the form of blog posts must be related to your niche and should it be required, very less mentioning of material from the universal niche available.

2. In-depth Information

Usually niche blogger face problems when looking for content but the main advantage of niche blogging is that a blogger can go in-depth on their niche and talk every small bit of item, example if your niche is Eye Surgery, there are a thousand types of surgeries that can be talked upon.

3. Uniqueness

Bloggers these days use feed aggregators to fill up their blogs with content via search engines or different blogs, but by offering visitors unique content one can get loyal readers and make them money in the process.

4. Advertisement Friendly Themes

A common mistake that bloggers usually make is overload their websites with advertisements so that they could earn money but it seems their greed drives away visitors and in turn their profits. Strategically positioning of advertisements can lead to extensive earning and returning visitors.

5. Having an audience

Choosing a niche that attracts traffic is very important and thought put in so that in time the niche should receive search engine visitors.

What are your thoughts; can you create and maintain such a blog?

Bloggers these days are looking to make money in alternative ways. Not only do they want to sell advertisement and blog posts from there blogs but they too want to earn money from different websites and services that are available and help earn money from selling backlinks. Bloggers don’t mind a little money coming in from their blogs.

Backlinks

I specially like to earn a few bucks from my blogs and specially these small amount help me get a little things that I need. It is an easy way to earn online from blogs without hassle and track keeping. I for once not only use services like backlinks.com (using an affiliate link) but use many forums to advertise freely for my blogs.

I for once have been earning money from backlinks.com (using an affiliate link) and generating over $60 a month from a few blogs that I have. Specially, earnings from these sites have been increasing that I for once have been exeeding money from backlinks.com (using an affiliate link) then the other advertisements that have been sold on my blogs.

There can be only a problem that Google might penalize you and your blog for an excess amount of links sold, which is why you might have to show some diligence and be smart in selling these backlinks. I to at max sell upto 4~5 backlinks at time and not be penalized by Google.  You might have to work on link building a bit but that is normal.

I am using an affiliate account as it could earn me some cash as well? If you think you might have been helped by this blogpost, then do sign up with this affiliate account.

Thanks.

As you know, I had rebranded my old blog domain to Blognamic dot com. I did some research and of course, gathered a few advices from the experienced web guys before i actually did the correct way. Doing the correct way is important as it ensures that you will not lose any SERP rankings and get blacklisted by the big “G”.

The Wrong Way

This is what i have done wrong and is NOT recommended. My old blog name is derek-ang.com, therefore to rebrand the blog, my initial thoughts was to parked my new domain, blognamic.com to the directory in my server that my files is located. So for example, derek-ang.com and blognamic.com will be parked to /sites/blog ( the same directory path). However, this is a big mistake in terms of SEO. For technical aspects, it works perfectly fine. However, in SEO, search engines DO NOT LIKE duplicate content. Parking the 2 domains to the directory will results in duplicate listing in the search engine when they spidered your site. And this ultimately can result in your website being blacklisted by search engines.

The Recommended Way

The following steps are the best practices when moving your website to a new url; rebranding

1) Sign up for Google Webmaster Tool
2) Verify the ownership of both your website.
3)  Create 301 redirects from old url to new url.
4) Submit change of address to inform Google webmaster team that you have change your url.
5) Submit sitemap for new url so that Google can index your new url pages.

How to create a 301 redirect

This is where some technical parts come into issue. Configuring 301 redirects is a relatively simple process that consist of only 2 steps. ( However, configuring 301 redirects differs from different webservers).

Step 1 - Edit your httpd.conf file to allow 301 redirects

Add “AllowOverride All” to the end of the configuration file. After all save the file and restart webserver ( apache) to allows changes to take effect.

Step 2 - Adding .htaccess file for adding 301 redirect entries

To redirect from old site to a new website. Below are entries that you need to enter.

For example,

redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/
redirect 301 /about/ http://www.newsite.com/about/

So what the above entries do is to rediect http://www.oldsite.com to http://www.newsite.com and http://www.oldsite.com/about/ to http://www.newsite.com/about/

After you have create all entries for your page, save the .htaccess file ( name the file as .htaccess)  and upload into the root directory of your old website location.

It is recommended to create page by page redirects so that you can ensure that all pages in your old website are redirected to the new website successfully. After one day, login to Google webmaster tool to see if there’s any crawlers errors.

Just 2 days ago, i finally made my decision to buy the Thesis wordpress theme from DIYTHEMES, INC. Well, Blognamic will be built on this powerful awesome, and flexible framework. With alot of factors taken into consideration; the loading speed, the scalability, the ease of use and of course the most important factor, seo benefits, thesis theme is no doubt a worthwhile investment for serious wordpress blog developers/designers.

I would say that to understand Thesis framework, you would need to have some basic understanding of html/css/php. However, if you have none of the mentioned experience, don’t worry as after all it isn’t that hard to understand to framework totally, you just to take some time and explore the scripts, asking questions in their populated support community. For the plans now, Blognamic will be built using wordpress platform ( Using Thesis theme framework) with a customized bridge to VBulletin 4.0 ( To take advantage of the social community feature). I’m still deciding on the various commerical software that can possibly bring the best social community features out of Blognamic. The reason why we won’t develop our own communtiy software is due to the time contraints factor and money. You know, why bother to create something that you can purchase in the market already? Save time, save effort and of course, money$$.

For me, i have spent a few hours these 2 days, customizing Thesis theme, including our brand logo, trying out the Thesis theme’s functionality. It totally rocks. Now, Blognamic are already reaping the SEO benefits from Thesis Theme. Compared to the old theme, with thesis theme, our code for the blog are now alot cleaner and neater and having neat codings is a crucial factor that affects how search engine spiders crawl your website. Our traffic has increased by at least 20%, having an increase of 100+ unique visitors for the past 2 days daily. ( Confident it will stay consistent). That’s pretty good results right?

One big mistake that alot of websites make  is the failure to develop a unique style to differentiate itself from others. If you don’t believe me, just google ” blog using thesis themes”. I would say that majority of the existing sites uses the same thesis default style. In Blognamic, we wanted to be different, therefore i will be designing a unique theme for Blognamic in the coming weeks. Having a unique style will definitely build value to the site. If you are a wordpress blogger and you ain’t using thesis theme, i would surely recommend you to make a switch. It’s worth the investment.

Beautiful Unique Thesis Theme

Below is some thesis theme designed by some of the awesome designers on the net. Just see how flexible each thesis theme can be.

After months of talking about rebranding derek-ang.com, i finally took my first step in this major project rebrand change over of mine. Derek-ang.com is  my first blog and is started around 2 years ago while i was still in college, doing my final year project. Things started out really well, with alot of support from fellow forum peeps and of course my friends. However, as time passes, choosing the domain (derek-ang.com) seems to cause some downfall in determining the value of the blog. Who would possibly be interested in a blog that is named after derek ang? Is he a celebrity or public figure? Hell NO. That is why i have this plan of mine to rebrand the blog into something that can attract attention and of course brandable.

Blognamic. I chose this name because i think it rocks and it rhymes well. Actually i was brainstorming about powerful expression words like “Dynamic, intensive and ….  finally i settled myself with Blognamic. I will be developing Blognamic into a blogger community whereby bloggers, webmasters or entrepreneurs can mingle around and share their knowledge with one another. Blognamic will serve as an online school for noobies to learn everything about blogging. Of course, i will be building Blognamic from scratch, releasing new, informative articles every week. All my previous blog posts will be dumped into a  ”Blog” section. It’s a section whereby i will blog about my experiences, interesting stuffs,  internet encounters etc. The main theme of Blognamic will be around Blogging, therefore you can imagines the type of categories i will be creating soon.

Well, as many of you know, i had stopped blogging in derek-ang.com for months. Many things happened around me, i had graduated from Nanyang Polytechnic Singapore and now i am serving my compulsory national service for 2 years. ( another 8 more months to go). I learnt alot of things, matured and most importantly, i looked at things differently now. So, I’m taking this really seriously now! It’s a first step.

Finally guys, stay tuned! If you are looking to be updated, be sure to subscribe to our rss feeds. ( Link at the bottom of the post).

Was browsing through the net and find this list. Its a list of failures of famous people in the world.

1. Einstein was 4 years old before he could speak.
2. Iassc Newton did poorly in grade school and was considered “unpromising.”
3. When Thomas Edison was a youngster, his teacher told him he was too stupid to learn anything. He was counseled to go into a field where he might succeed by virtue of his pleasant personality.
4. F.W. Woolworth got a job in a dry goods store when he was 21, but his boss would not permit him to wait on customers because he “didn’t have enough sense to close a sale.”
5. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.
6. A newspaper editor fired Walt Disney because he “lacked imagination and had no original ideas.”
7. Winston Churchill failed the 6th grade and had to repeat it because he did not complete the tests that were required for promotion.

I believe everyone made mistakes in their life. Me too, i make alot of mistakes in my life that lead to failures. Failure in friendship, failure in personality/character etc. Do you guys really experience failure before? Failure that leave a scar in your entire life, failure that leave a scar in your character.

I don’t know about yours, but for me, that mistakes that i had made, i could still remember clearly despites after long years. As the saying goes, “Time can heal wounds”, i only believe in that partially. Yes, time can heal phyiscal wounds, but can time heal mental wounds? Can time heal mistakes? My answer is “NO”. Why? any prove?any evidence? Because time did not heal my mental wounds, did not heal my mistakes. Well, when  a person makes mistakes, people tend to remember it, despite all the good things that he had done. It was like, you are a white paper, just one mistakes in life, make your paper stained with maybe some black ink. This ink will be on you forever and that white paper wont be “white” ever again. A recent e.g will be edison chen incident, i am sure when i mentioned edison chen, people will straightway think of his sex scandal with numerous actress. Did you guys think of how much he contribued to the charity? How many great pieces of work he had done for past few years? Similarly, if you were once a traitor under certain unwanted circumstances, how will you feel like everytime people thinks of you, they think of  ”traitor”? Even though you are forgiven for that mistake, you could not forgive yourself? Have you ever feel this before?

Life is all about regrets, its all  about mistakes. Once we make a mistake, we must be responsible for that mistake that we made for the rest of the life as this little mistake that you made will follows you in your entire life, into your dreams. Thats the power of mistakes. 

Web video is becoming very popular these days. Earlier it was quite costly
for a webmaster to afford vidoes on a website. But with the advent of the latest
streaming video software, one can easily afford cool videos on a website. It is
said that videos on a website can boost your sales or your conversion but it
is still a controversy.

You have to test it yourself and figure out if video really works on your site or for your niche. Not all niches are video friendly, however some niches can definitely benefit from web video. The easiest way to add video to a website is to submit your video to video sharing websites like youtube or metacalfe and then these websites will give you the piece of code to put on your website. Once you put the code, voila! the video shows up on your webpage. However if you want to have total control of your videos, the best is to use some popular streaming video software like Coffee Cup or EasyFLV.

These software specially EasyFLV gives separate solutions like single track video players, multitrack video players and free flv converter as well. If you feel you need to add videos to yourwebsite, get started today!

Visit www.easyflv.com now!

Getting backlink is important for a website as google calculates the PR of a particular website based on the number of baclinks it has. We can build backlinks in different ways, such as submitting your website to directories, link exhange with other websites etc etc. My first strategy for building backlinks for this blog will be creating free wordpress themes. After doing a simple analysis of the different method that i could use to gain backlinks, i came to a conclusion that creating free wordpress themes will be the fastest and most effective way for gaining backlinks for this blog.

Reason is simple. Assuming i spent around 5 hours creating one wordpress theme, i post this theme for downloads to the public. Assuming 500 people downloaded my wordpress themes, i managed to get 500 backlinks. Compare to spenting 5 hours submiting your blog to 500 directories, this method seems more effective and effortless.

For some of you who had been thinking? ” How the hell creating wordpress can increase the backlinks?” Let me explain this. Normally, when those wordpress designers design their wordpress theme, they created a “Credits” section where they put their links. Have you seen the light?

My target will be to create 4 wordpress themes for distribution. Ands that all for strategy one. I will post an update when i complete those themes.

What do you think is the most important factor that makes a website valuable? Is it the design? Is it the features? In the past, whenever i see websites that are well-designed, and look professional i will have this mindset ” Wow! This website Must worth damn lot!”. After that, i learnt that most people value websites through the amount of revenue the website generates monthly, the amount of traffic that the website had, the business model etc. A typical example will be Youtube, which sold for 1.65 billion, if i am not wrong. And for your information, youtube is lossing millions for expenses to pay for their servers and why did google purchased it? I believe its due to its traffic and exposure that youtube has. Its been estimated that in America, every one of the americans watch at least one video from youtube everyday.

See the screenshot below that i had taken from craiglist.com

Looking at the site, it look simples, it look plain, basically its just a site with hyperlinks. Guess how much it worth? It is estimated that it is worth 2.4 billion USD! So the what i am trying to protray with this post is “Do not guide the book by its cover” Sames apply to people as well

Since the advent of internet, billions of domains had been registered and billions of website had been developed. Over these years, Buying/Selling domain names has actually become a profession.

Sounds easy right? You bought one domain e.g example.com for $50 dollars and sold it for $100 dollars and you earn a profit of $50. It may be easy in the past when the market is unsaturated. But today, i believed that the domain market is becoming more saturated and saturated as most of the “premium names” are registered. One will needs to take alot of time to research for keywords etc.

More domain extension are also available, such as .net, .org, .info, .mobi and the recently .asia and many more.

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Below are the Top Domain sales :

Amount         Year   Domain
$12,000,000 2006 sex.com (est) 
$9,500,000 2007 porn.com
$7,500,000 2006 diamond.com
$7,500,000 1999 business.com
$5,500,000 2003 casino.com
$5,000,000 2002 asseenontv.com
$5,000,000 1999 korea.com
$3,500,000 1996 worldwideweb.com
$3,350,000 1999 altavista.com
$3,300,000 1999 wine.com
$3,000,000 2007 creditcheck.com
$3,000,000 1999 eshow.com
$3,000,000 2006 vodka.com
$3,000,000 1999 loans.com
$2,750,000 2004 creditcards.com
$2,500,000 2000 dotnology.com
$2,500,000 2000 tom.com
$2,200,000 1999 autos.com
$2,200,000 1999 coupons.com
$2,100,000 2007 computer.com
$2,000,000 2000 britain.com
$2,000,000 2000 celebrities.com
$2,000,000 1999 express.com
$1,900,000 2000 savings.com
$1,800,000 2007 seniors.com
$1,600,000 2006 branson.com
$1,500,000 2000 deposit.com
$1,500,000 2006 cameras.com
$1,500,000 2007 tandberg.com
$1,500,000 2000 fly.com
$1,500,000 1999 marketingtoday.com
$1,320,000 2003 men.com
$1,250,000 2007 vista.com
$1,200,000 2000 feedback.com
$1,180,000 2007 scores.com
$1,120,000 2007 chinese.com
$1,100,000 2004 mercury.com
$1,030,000 1999 wallstreet.com
$1,020,000 2005 fish.com
$1,000,000 2007 iphone.com

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Instead of just buying/selling domains, companies like Sedo.com offered services such as domain parking. So what is domain parking? Heres an explanation. The domain owner pointed the nameservers of their domains(e.g www.example.com) to Sedo. So when visitors visit the domain name(www.example.com), they will be brought to Sedo parking webpage. This webpage mainly contain advertisments and once visitors clicked on the advertisements, the domain owner will be paid.