Projects I Am Working On – Summer 2012

By | July 31, 2012

Since the goal of my blog is to give people an inside look at running an Internet business, here’s a somewhat random list of some of things I am working on right now:

1. I recently bought 19 websites from 15 different sellers over a one month period. Prior to that I had purchased maybe 2-3 sites in the past 5 years. I will blog more about this later, but dealing with buying the sites, moving them to my servers (which then overloaded and crashed several times), changing them to have my ads, fixing bugs, optimizing them, learning how to run them, etc. has taken a huge amount of my time lately. It is inconclusive so far if it was worth it.

2. A few months ago I completed a new site at Indexed.com that I spent several months working on, but have not officially launched it yet. I then had two different people interested in buying the Indexed.com domain name (not the site) so I decided I was better off switching the site to use my BigCelebrities.com domain instead and trying to sell the Indexed.com domain.

3. I have been working a lot with facial recognition technology. I already have a site at http://www.watchmovies.com/celebritytwin/ where you can upload your photo and it will tell you which celebrities you look like, but for BigCelebrities.com I now show 25 people from Twitter who look like each of the 7500 celebrities I have listed on the site. The matches are good, but need improvement so I am waiting until the next version of the software is done before I launch the site.

4. Related to the face matching work, I am working on a site that will be an online game similar to hugely popular Draw Something (drawing with friends), but instead of having your friend guess what you are drawing, the computer will guess.

5. I am working on an online 20 questions type game. There are already a few sites that do that, but mine will be a little different (hopefully better). I already have a site at GuessTheName.com where the computer guesses which TV show or movie you are thinking of, so this will be similar.

6. I created a site at PickStocks.com, but have not launched it yet. It ranks stocks based on the social media buzz (Facebook, Twitter, to try to predict which stocks will go up. The site is functional but is still a work on progress. If you’re considering trading stocks and are looking for advice on buying Canadian stocks, you may want to take a look at the information over at Stocktrades.

7. Soon I will be adding movie reviews to my site at WatchMovies.com that are automatically obtained from Twitter. Right now I have reviews that I paid people to write (via Amazon Mechanical Turk), but I have not added any new ones in a year.

8. I will soon be adding a “six degrees of separation” game to WatchMovies.com, where it shows how various actors are connected. This is also known as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. I will also be adding a musician based version of this to Dumb.com.

9. As always, I am working in selling my domain names. I get several offers a week and negotiate back and forth with each buyer.

10. I have some WordPress article type sites with great domains and unique content, but so far they get hardly any traffic:
Pastries.com
Weights.com
AdvertisingAgency.com
Physical.com
TattooShops.com
Feminism.com
SchoolPsychologist.com

I have lots of articles on them already, but I have not added new articles for over a year, so I am going to try updating them more often in the hopes that search engines will rank them higher for being updated frequently.

11. WatchVideos.com – This site shows the most popular videos on the web. It is still a work in progress, but is functional.

12. Some things I am looking into creating are:
A) A computer vision lip reading system
B) A site that ranks youtube type videos by the popularity on social media sites, but uses a neural network to detect the videos, because when a video goes viral many times it gets edited into many different versions and has many similar but different titles, so it is hard to detect exactly how many times the video has been viewed.
C) Software for transcribing web videos and podcasts. There are several open source programs out there already for speech recognition that do this, but none of them are very good.
D) A Facebook or iPhone app that rates how good looking you are, using a neural network. There are some out there already, but they are not very good.
E) An iPhone app that guesses your age, using a neural network. I already have a non-automated site for this at MatchAge.com.

17 thoughts on “Projects I Am Working On – Summer 2012

  1. rob sequin

    Wow. Talk about having lots of irons in the fire.

    Great insight into the work life of a true domain name entrepreneur.

    Great update. Thanks.

    Reply
  2. Gnanes

    You’re one busy guy. Thanks for the updates.

    Suggestion: Featured Lists links color on BigCelebrities should be darker. Other than that site looks great.

    Reply
  3. @Domains

    Do you do all these projects yourself, or do you have employees? It looks like far too much work for one person to handle, and do every project well. Wouldn’t it be better to pick one or two and just focus on those til they’re done?

    Reply
    1. admin

      I don’t have any employees, but I have several independent contractor programmers who pretty much work full time for me. I run/manage everything myself though. It is very hard to predict what will make money, so that is why I try a lot of different things.

      Reply
  4. nobody

    Where have you bought those 19 websites? Are you still interested in buying good/established websites with more than $2000 profit/month?

    Thanks!

    Reply
  5. Daniel

    Where do you find the people to write your content for those WordPress sites and how much do you pay?

    Reply
  6. Matt

    Eric,

    There’s a lot of simple things you can do to better monetize those premium domains by getting more traffic.

    I looked at Physical.com as an example.

    – Site structure is inconsistent
    – Page structure is inconsistent
    – Content is duplicated on a number of pages
    – Lack of correct titling tags

    All of this is pretty easy to fix.

    Looking at the link structure, it looks like you’ve used some of the automated SEO tools that claim to deliver everything and actually only get you Google penalties. With this said, you PR, DA and SA are all pretty good – maybe you escaped penalty so far? Some quality natural links would go a long way.

    Hope this helps
    Matt

    Reply
  7. Daniel

    I’m looking to do some article writing, I’ve done some before, so can provide you with testimonials and also samples. I charge $1/100 words, not sure if you’d be willing to pay that or not but let me know if you have any work going.

    Reply
  8. Sajid

    Hi, Eric i am really motivated to see your work and your online working experience. I have been in blogging for a few months and checked in that you bought a new top 10 lists blog named poptens. Can you please tell how much did you bought it for?

    Reply

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