JohnHok.Com

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.

<a href="http://www.johnhok.com" title="How I Make Money by Investing Online and Offline - John Hok dot Com">Make Money with John Hok</a>

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.

google_color_link = ["000000","FFFFFF","F0F0F0"];

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. ;)

Well I’m here to post the first iReview and I’m here to review a blog that is hosted on Blogger.com called eBay Fanatic.

Right away, when you get onto eBay Fanatic, you’ll notice that in terms of look that it is nothing special. It’s your typical blog but it’s the content where I think it really shines. Everyone knows how popular eBay is and you’ve always heard about all those outrageous things that happen in auctions on eBay. eBay Fanatic is there to point you to all those crazy things that go on at eBay.

I see that there is an entry about this guy named “Steve” who for a starting bid of $500 will give you the privilege of hanging out with him for a day. See? Outrageous things!

In addition to the fun things eBay Fanatic also has a more serious side to it. Since eBay caters to such a wide group of individuals, some who might not be as literate, eBay Fanatic gives many tips to users about using eBay. For someone who has never used eBay before, I find these tips very educational. It’s nice to get insight from someone (who I’m assuming) has had a lot of experience with eBay and it’s nice that eBay Fanatic has decided to share that knowledge with it’s viewers.

If there is one complaint though is the lack of content on the blog. eBay being so big and intricate I would expect to read about a lot of tips and such but at this point so far there is not a lot to read. This can probably be attributed to the age of the blog since it appears to be very new still. I’m sure over time though, with the amount of things to write on about eBay, this blog will be a wealth of information for many people.

Want your own iReview?
All you got to do is leave an entry on your blog telling others about JohnHok.com and how they can get their blog reviewed. You must make sure that you also link back to http://www.johnhok.com or http://www.johnhok.com/2007/03/11/want-your-blog-reviewed referring to this offer as an “iReview”. Then leave a comment on this post and I will get back to you with an iReview. It’s that simple. For more in-depth information about it you can also view the full details on the link where you leave a comment.

Well I wrote about this before but not many people seem to have been interested or at least participated in the offer. So I’m here to repost the details for the “iReview” offer again. I will also lower the number of required participants from 10 to 5.

Update: Taking a suggestion from Ben Cass I will change the iReview offer so that it will act as a review for a review type thing. I’ll see how it goes and maybe make more modifications to this in the future.

——

I may not give you a lot of traffic, I may not help your page rank increase by linking to your blog, and heck, I may not even like your blog, but here’s how it goes.

If you want me to give your blog a review, leave an entry on your blog telling others about JohnHok.com and how they can get their blog reviewed. You must make sure that you also link back to http://www.johnhok.com or http://www.johnhok.com/2007/03/11/want-your-blog-reviewed/ in your blog post and reference the review as an “iReview” offer. The review can be as long or as short as you wish!

Once you have done this, leave a comment in this entry with a link to your blog entry and I will post a review with a minimum of 200 words for you. That’s all there is to it. If you have any questions feel free to ask as well. I’m looking forward to seeing your responses and participation.