I have come across several domain registrars that are cheaper than Namecheap, for example name.com is as cheap as $8.09 with a coupon.

However, there is another little known registrar that I’ve found that has an astonishing $5.45 sale on all dot com’s! That’s the cheapest I’ve ever seen it, you don’t even need a coupon to get this special price. It also comes with free whois privacy, something many other sites charge $5 or more for.

The site is called Whiz.in and it’s owned by an Indian company which is why the prices are so cheap. I’ve been using them for over a year now and they are consistently amongst the lowest priced for any TLD or ccTLD domain registration. They accept PayPal (although there is a small fee) as well, which makes it great for us Internet marketers.

There seems to be about a dozen or so of these automatic website valuation sites, each with their own opinion on how much a website is worth.

The way they work is that they take public data like Alexa, Compete and Quantcast ranks and try and estimate the traffic based on that. They then estimate how much advertising you can sell based on that traffic. There are some other factors like the pagerank and whether it’s listed in DMOZ and Yahoo.

So how accurate are these estimations? I entered my webste, PLRArticleShop.com to get some valuations, and this what I got back.

ValuateMySite.com
Estimates plrarticleshop.com to be worth $241,687 USD
Traffic: 23,126 page views per day

Estimix.com
Estimates plrarticleshop.com to be worth $25,000
Traffic: 9,600 page views per day

RealWebsiteWorth.com
Estimates plrarticleshop.com to be worth $6,589.71 (which is a very precise figure!)
Traffic: 13,523 page views per day

WebTrafficAgents.com
Estimates plrarticleshop.com to be worth $7,957.70 (again, precise!)
Traffic: 11,032 page views per day

WebsiteShadow.com
Estimates plrarticleshop.com to be worth $9,508
Traffic: 7,277 page views per day

So how accurate are these figures? The traffic figures are well out, all of them, about 10x too much. The site valuations are also grossly inaccurate with none of them even close to what I believe the true value of the site site (based on 12 months of revenue).

I think the purpose of these sites are to be glorified adsense sites since the information isn’t really very useful to anyone and has no use when it comes to selling a website.

With that said, if someone wants to offer me $250,000 for my articles site, I would probably accept!

How much is your site worth according to these online site valuators?

Until the 15th March you can buy a .com for $6.99 and get free hosting with it – more than enough space and bandwidth for niche sites.

Just enter the following coupon when you get to the checkout and they’ll make the necessary deductions:

lime2

Pretty simple, right? Just pop it in and you’ll get your $6.99 domain and free hosting, it doesn’t seem to be limited to any quantity either as I’ve ordered several domains at this price.

However, if you want privacy registration that costs $4.99 which is a bit of a bummer when you can get it for free from Name and Namecheap – but hey for just $13 you are getting a domain and a years worth of hosting, I don’t know where you can find a deal like that any where else!

If you don’t need the privacy registration option then it makes LimeDomains the cheapest place right now to register a .com.

I don’t have any prior experience with this company, but the site looks decent and the control panel looks easy enough to use. I got Wordpress setup and installed with just a few button clicks as well which was pretty decent.

Do you have any experience with LimeDomains.com?

Traffic: 1,441 Unique Visitors

Active Subscribers: 813

PayPal Earnings: $1126.35 (after PayPal fees)

AdSense: $6.91 – Down about a dollar, but the Pound is very weak!

Clickbank: $44.37 – Thank goodness! Came from a link on plrarticleshop.com

Amazon: $0 – Lots more traffic, I think March might be the one to crack the first Amazon dollar

(Bear in mind that there was only 28 days in February!)

I definitely think we can see the affect of the SEO work I’ve been putting in, that coupled with creating unique PLR articles and sending them out to my list every Sunday has really pushed up my earnings – to around $40 per day. This cash is virtually autopilot, except for the SEO work I do, but most days I don’t really touch it. Oh and a few dollars came from advertising space that I sold on some sites.

I’ve looked at my known expenses for the next 12 months and it looks like I will be spending $100 – $150 per month renewing domains and hosting accounts, something which I need to budget for when withdrawing money.

I know I keep harping on about the Amazon commissions and I know I still haven’t cracked this little cookie yet, but I’m not about to give up just yet, I’ve started on my 30 week Amazon challenge and I intend to see it through to the end. I’ve now got four niche Amazon websites, each is getting a bit of traffic and I saw 84 ‘clicks’ according to Amazon. I think by the end of March, when I’ll have eight Amazon websites, we should see a sale, but I’m not going to give up until I’ve done all thirty. If still no sales I’ll put them up for sale on Flippa.com and call this a learning experience.

Looking Ahead

For March I will be concentrating on trying to build Amazon niche sites and looking to get at least one more sale in Clickbank.

I think there is a certain mental block and ‘earning money’ and ‘earning money online’ suddenly become two very different things. Where earning money is something you do by working for other people and earning money online is when you kick back, relax and watch the money role in.

The truth of the matter is that you need to do work to earn, there is no such thing as a push button that you can press to dispense cash from the Internet. Even the ‘magic bullet’ products from these guys that are raking in a fortune started off by them putting in lots of hours and hard work sat infront of a computer screen.

I recently read about a guy who claims he makes $50,000 a month in affiliate commissions by ‘just’ doing a few hours of work each week and for ‘just’ $497 he’d give you his step by step guide. Now while I can’t comment on the legitimacy of his claims, he does say that his system took three years to develop and get right. That’s three years of hard work, often with seeing no results at all.

If you have been struggling to make money online by setting up a website, adding adsense, trying your hand at affiliate commission etc and it’s all turning up empty, before you claim that it can’t be done, try this…

Most people can write, a few more of us can string a few words together, and yet more can write really well. If you can write without any grammar mistakes (and know the difference between they’re, there, their) then you can easily make some money online as a writer.

There are thousands of Internet marketers who are crying out for affordable writers – and we’re not talking about a writer who could get published in the Wall Street Journal here, we’re talking about everyday writing.

It would be extremely easy to start earning $50 a day just from writing because you can charge around $8 per 500 article, if it takes an hour to write an article that’s $50 in a day (or there abouts). Even if you do half that, it works out to $750 a month in additional income. I don’t care what part of the world you live in, an extra $750 a month is a decent income!

So how do you find this kind of work you may ask? It’s extremely simple, head over to the Warriors for Hire forum (you’ll need to sign up), post an ad that you are available for hire for writing work and the enquiries will come in.

If you think that you might have a problem writing because you can barely manage to write an article for your own business then believe me, when someone is paying you to do the work, it becomes much easier!

Being paid to do other people’s work might not fit with your idea of ‘earning money online’ but I don’t see why not, you are finding the work and being paid online, it’s (hopefully) additional income for you, so where’s the problem? Once you start having the money roll in to your PayPal account, you’ll definitely get the motivation to do some more work to earn that ‘passive’ income that we all crave

I have had a couple of niche Amazon stores up and running but at the moment they are not optimized nor are they making any money. I’ve sent a few clicks but nothing is converting at the moment – wrong product choice maybe?

Anyway, I’ve purchased a great guide to making money from Amazon and I’ll be following the advice and suggestions in that guide. The writer claims he’s making around $50-$100 a day from the Amazon affiliate program so I’m going to see what I can come up with – surely with all my years of experience I can at least match that!

My aim, as the name of the challenge suggests, is to give myself 30 weeks, starting from now, to make one niche amazon website each week. I want each website to earn $5 in commission each day. Do the maths (or math if you are from America) and that’s a target of $150 per day by the end of 30 weeks, or approximately $4,500 per month, purely from affiliate commission.

The budget for each site is not that large, tiny infact. I will spend $20 per website, $10 on the domain and the rest getting some social bookmarking done.

I’ll be keeping this blog updated each week to let you know overall traffic progress, earning progress and thoughts and opinions about creating Amazon niche sites. At the end of 30 weeks I want to be able to say ‘yes, creating Amazon niche sites works’ or ‘no, some people are able to make it click, but not me.’

Although I won’t be revealing my niches for free, I will let people buy my keyword analysis, competition analysis and niche profitability analysis for a small fee. All my research for a particular niche will be available, however you won’t know what the niche is until you buy it, I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot by creating too many competitors!

The past couple of weeks have been spent learning and perfecting the art of turning Wordpress in to a storefront, learning basic CSS and PHP in the process. Hmm, OK, copying and pasting CSS and PHP and seeing what happens

Right, I think that’s it, I’ll be back here shortly to update you on how it went this week. Oh yes, I had better put up my SEO analysis for the first niche as well!

Traffic: 1,505 Unique Visitors

Subscribers: 804

PayPal Earnings: $894.71

AdSense: $7.98 – Up about a dollar on last month

Clickbank: $0 – Third consecutive month without any affiliate commission and I’ve now got the dreaded penalty which deducts $1 per week till you make another sale.

Amazon: $0 – Still nothing here, but I have a plan which I’ll talk about in my next blog post.

Most of the SEO work is paying off with an increase in traffic and earnings from my PLR articles website. Also, I did three email campaigns in January telling my customers about new articles and updates on the website. I’ve also been investing in exclusive articles written specifically for my site which I can sell at a premium and this has helped quite a lot.

Another reason is I’m promoting a couple of products that pay commission instantly via PayPal and that has added about $150 to my bottom line.

I’m still very keen on the Amazon commission, despite still not managing to generate a single sale, I think the website is setup wrong and it’s not sending buyers but price comparison browsers. I’ve got a plan on how to change all this which I’ll talk about in another blog post.

Traffic: 1,114 Unique visitors

Subscribers: 578

PayPal Earnings: $624.10

AdSense: $6 – wow! AdSense is well down!

Clickbank: $0 – How is it possible to have two consecutive zero months on Clickbank!

Amazon: $0 – despite sending around 150 clicks, earnings are still zero

I think my earnings and traffic are down this month mostly due to the Christmas holidays and the fact that December is usually a slow month anyway.

As with last month I have been investing money in domains and hosting accounts as well as outsourcing some SEO to boost my rankings which have started dipping a bit. Expenses came to $361.97 – more than half my income, ouch!

I meant to try and concentrate on my Amazon earnings, but it seems it’s a whole lot harder than putting up a website and sending a few clicks! I’ll have to think about the strategy for this in the coming month.

Traffic: 1363

Subscribers: 455

PayPal Earnings: $724 – slightly down on last months earnings

AdSense: $16 (approx, converted from British Pounds, up from last month though)

Clickbank: $0 Boo! Down on last month

Amazon: $0 – just set this up, we’ll see how it goes

Incredibly I managed to spend $377 on new domains, hosting and SEO services. That’s higher than any other month previously.

This month I want to focus on earning some money from the Amazon Associate program, with Christmas coming I’m not sure how easy that will be, but I’ll be laying the ground work for next month at least.

You see, although it hasn’t been cancelled, the Peter Claridge show has been moved to a new site.

But don’t worry, the new site will still contain all my usual helpings of dry humour, observant wit and side spliting sarcasm.

If you are looking to get to know the real Peter Claridge, head on over to my new site:

PeterClaridge.me

It’s all about me!

This site will now become my business site, so unless you want to know how to earn $1,000 by sitting in your underwear at home, I recommend you go where the real party is over on PeterClaridge.me