I have a webmaster secret that I will reveal here for the first time. As far as I know, I am the only webmaster to have ever done this. Here it is: Almost everybody has used a site where you get a username and password, but you probably don’t know what a pain in the… Read More »
One of my crazier business ventures was buying a florist even though I had never owned a store before, never worked in a store before, and knew nothing about flowers. On top of that, I bought the store through a business broker over the Internet without ever seeing it (the store was in California and… Read More »
In the late 1990s, virtual currency sites such as CyberCash.com and DigiCash.com were all the rage, where they offered alternative payment systems for consumers to use on ecommerce sites instead of paying with a credit card. At the time, consumers were a lot more cautious about giving out their credit card information online. Plus, there… Read More »
Many people will probably disagree with what I am about to say, but I think people place too much value on giving a website a makeover. Obviously it is always good to improve a site, but people tell me all the time that if I do this or do that to my sites, the site… Read More »
I have owned the domain name FindInfo.com for many years, and have tried creating various search engines on it, but none of them have ever made any money. I know it is hard to compete with Google and Yahoo, but search engines are a billion dollar business and with a killer domain like this I… Read More »
In January 2008 I sold Bored.com and 170 related sites for $4.5 million. This represented over half of my company (I still have 200+ smaller sites and 9000 domain names), and the vast majority of my profits. Bored.com was easy to run, had 10 years of steady growth, and there was little risk that the… Read More »
In 2001 I created a virtual pet site at AdoptMe.com, where kids can adopt free virtual pets (dogs, cats, horses, fish, etc.) and learn the responsibilities of pet ownership by feeding, walking and taking care of their pets. It quickly became popular, with around 10,000 visitors per day and 2000 new members per day, but… Read More »