John Hok dot Com

Well January 2008 has come to a close, first month of the year and with the renewal of this blog. Here is the monthly report for January 2008’s investments!

Nothing too exciting. My Canadian Money Market made $4.17 and goes from $1,210.82 to $1,214.99 and my US Money market made $1.12 and goes from $1400 to $1,401.12. The beauty of investments is that now the money I made from these, gets reinvested back so that next month the idea is to make a little bit more and a little bit more.

Online wise in January, the highlight of RapidWire and ProfileRenew sales for $2300 was the big thing and also my Google AdSense payment came in at about $150. This will probably be the last of payments I get from AdSense for awhile since RapidWire was what drove my AdSense earnings. No matters. I have also worked and completed my newest site! But that is for another post.

So my first investment with the $2300 I earned from selling RapidWire and ProfileRenew is the purchase of a US Money Market Fund offered by RBC Financial. I walked into the bank a day or two after I sold the websites and invested $1400 of the $2300 I earned into the money market fund, leaving me with $900 left from the sale of the websites.

This is a pretty standard investment, I also have a chunk of my savings from my Canadian funds invested in a Canadian Money Market Fund. I find it easy to just move some money into these investments when I have no real use for the money because instead of getting little to no interest from the bank, investing in the fund at least gives you decent return on your money every month. I get around $3-4 a month from the $1000 I had initially invested in the Canadian money market which otherwise would’ve gotten like $0.01 if I just left it in the bank. Every little bit counts!

Money market funds are usually comprised of investments in different categories. This is what makes them relatively stable investments. The US money market fund I purchased had a minimum of $500 investment which is pretty much standard for most of these more simple type of investments. Looking at the informational PDF gives me some information like the current yield of this US money market fund is 4.35%(Canadian money market fund is at 4.15%) and that since the fund’s inception it has a trailing return of 3.42%(Canadian money market fund is at 4.99%). Good enough for me! What it will do is, at the end of every month, the return that is made from the investment will be reinvested into the fund automatically without me having to do anything. So this is a great way to get extra change from the money that lays in your account.

To give you an idea of how much I’ve gotten back from my Canadian money market fund investment, I initially invested $1200 into the fund in October. In October I got a return of $3.53, November $3.42, and December $3.87 bringing the total to $10.82. Not a lot but like I’ve said before, this is from money that would otherwise be doing nothing sitting in the bank.

Well, here we have it folks. This is what rekindled my desire and enthusiasm to start blogging again with the new focus on making money both online and offline. I recently finished selling 2 websites that I own for a total of $2300 and for a poor university student, I’m telling you, that’s a lot! I realized how much potential there was to make money online. The key idea I thought people would like to hear is how I use this money and how I reinvest it in different places in an effort to make a small amount of money turn into more through strategically reinvesting the money I’ve earned. This is what jump started my desire to start blogging again because I now have a focus on the blog and something to talk about instead of just my general geeky ramblings.

ProfileRenew
The first site I sold was called ProfileRenew and it went for $300. ProfileRenew was basically a free MySpace resource website. It allowed users to come and get free graphics, codes, and just about anything else to help make your MySpace profile look spiffier.

It didn’t really work out as I had planned and due to lack of time, was not able to promote or update the site. Traffic and revenue were minimal and made me decide to just get it off my hands.

RapidWire
The second site I sold was called RapidWire and it went for $2000. Now this is a huge milestone personally for myself. I’ve sold many sites before but they were always in the $xxx range. Never have I sold a site in the $xxxx range and this was what got me really excited. It is my biggest website transaction to date. RapidWire is basically a free anonymous web proxy. It allows users at work, school, or where ever else there are internet filters in place, to bypass these filters and view these sites.

The site has made me around $4000 in revenue over the 2 years of running it (almost enough to pay for my first year university tuition!). But recently the site was plagued with server problems and both traffic and revenue took a dive. So I made the decision to sell it, which in my mind I still believe was the right choice.

The wrong choice was not selling it for enough! My biggest mistake for RapidWire came at the very end. I was too impatient and I decided to lower the BIN price from my original $3000 down to $2000. Now that I look back at that decision, I knew that was a mistake, and that RapidWire could’ve sold for BIN price easily had I been more patient. Lesson learned.

Regardless of the mistake, I am very excited and happy to break the thousands milestone. With this extra cash I hope to make various investments both online and offline. I will keep you informed with exactly how I have or will invest my money as well as posting up exact figures and all those juicy details!

Well one day after changing the focus of this blog into making money by investing online and offline, I’ve discovered that the blog has got top rankings for a phrase related to this new focus already! That was pretty quick, don’t you think?

The phrase is “investing in dot.com”. Although it might not be a really popular search phrase, I honestly don’t know, it’s great to know that the new focus is already being crawled by the busy googlebots already and that the blog is getting a nice ranking at the top position!

Also considering that there are roughly 300,000 other results, I am quite happy with this. My other site Imusion Studio had top ranking keywords for “Free ProBoard Skins” and “Free InvisionFree Skins” each with about only 200,000 other results but recently has dropped in ranking unfortunately. These two top spots really helped Imusion Studio get a lot of organic traffic. So hopefully this blog will rank highly for some other more popular phrases and drive some organic traffic over as well.

Ranking highly for keywords is vital because it helps bring FREE traffic to your blog or website. This free traffic you can then find ways to monetize, through ads, membership sales, product sales, or whatever method of revenue.

Yep, that’s right. I’m back. The past few days I’ve gotten this sudden urge and enthusiasm to come back and blog finally again. I realized how well the blog went at the beginning, how much feedback and comments people were leaving even though the blog was so new and had almost nothing. Which now that I look back and reflect upon is quite an eye-opener. Making me think, this might just work.

Well yes, I’m back but with a new focus. A new chapter in my online venture and this blog. I recently made 2 website transactions, 1 of them a really big one for me and this has what jump started my enthusiasm to start blogging again. This time the focus about making money and investing both online and offline; whether it be making money online by buying websites and flipping them or making money offline by investing in stocks, mutual funds, and money markets. I will tell you all about my money making journey to make the money I earned from these 2 milestone website transactions grow, grow, and GROW!

Hopefully it goes well, heck, I’m new at this investing thing too so hang in on the ride with me! Leave your insights, leave your criticisms, leave your praise, but most of all, leave your voice and let it be heard. Then hopefully I’ll learn a thing or two on this journey as well.

I’ll tell you all about the website transactions another time. In the meantime, to cover some quick business. If you are interested in having a link exchange with this blog feel free to leave a comment here with some details and I’ll get in contact with you. The code below is how I would like mine to be linked exactly. I’m only interested in certain genres such as computers, technology, and making money focused websites/blogs.

Many times when you go onto a site with Adsense you see the same type of ads over and over again. Over time users tend to succumb to something many people refer to as “ad blindness”. This is when you’ve seen the ad in the same place for such a long time that you eventually learn to ignore them. This happens many times on forums.

I just wanted to share some of my personal tips to combat ad blindness.

Rotating Colours
I just discovered this simple, but useful tip that allows your ads to pick from a random set of colours that you sepcify.

Setting your colours like that in the code will allow your ads to rotate from those 3 colours randomly. Add or remove as many colours as you like. It’s best to change minor things like the URL colour or title colour in a subtle manner. You don’t want your ads to be a rotating block of hyper bright colours like pink or neon green where the background constantly changes between these colours. This will just make your site look ugly. Remember, subtle changes!

Image Ads
Adsense has an option to allow image ads to be displayed. I say, use it! The odd image ad mixed in with the text ads gives the ad unit a nice change. Users might get thrown off by this slight change and might be more inclined to click on the image ad. Also the visual images from an image ad are better at attracting attention from users.

Alternative Ads
Don’t just limit yourself to Google Ads. Use the ad unit you have creatively. Rotate your own ads in there. You can advertise events going on your site or that you are planning. Advertise some of your other sites. If you have one big site and one smaller one, you can leverage the traffic from your bigger site to advertise your smaller one. This way you still get a variety of ads but they still benefit you.

Rotating Position
This is a good one sometimes. Don’t be afraid to move the ad unit around. After all if you move it around, it’s harder for users to get accustom to where the ads are and this is a great way of combating ad blindness.

Well that’s all I’ve got to share with you for now. I hope that you can use these tips and incorporate them into your own sites to hopefully help increase your ad revenue.

Big question is why don’t I do this on JohnHok.com? This blog was never meant to be a means of revenue so I could care less about increasing the CTR on the ads located on this site. Plus it takes extra effort to incorporate these well. Effort that I don’t have just now.