I find that in the midst of all the trees that I sometimes forget that I'm in a forest. What do I mean by this? I get so busy doing stuff that I forget why I'm doing it. Do you ever get this problem or is it just me?

My wife Roselyn normally notices that I've managed to get myself into this situation before I do. I end up being grumpy and generally not very nice to live with as I slog away at my forever growing "things to do" list.

What is it about "things to do" lists anyway? I feel more often than not that they are the stick that keeps on whacking the donkey (ie. me) in the backside. No matter how much gets done there just seems to be more things that pile onto them.

It's at this time that I go and have a chat to the referee and call "time out". I did this yesterday and headed off down to the beach to take some time to get my thinking sorted out and the priority of things to do under control.

After going on a great walk up and down a glorious beach, sitting staring at the ocean for a few hours and filling over ten pages of notes that covered some of my "to do" items I felt a heck of a lot better. Rather than all of the things to do flying through my brain in some chaotice fire-fight the little time out seemed to organise them so that at least they were now flying in formation.

I came back home and sat down with Roselyn over a cup of coffee and feeling a lot better about life. The first thing I had to do was apologise for being almost unbearable and the second thing was do the same to the kids.....a little humble pie is often a good thing to eat.

The time I took out to survey the forest did wonders for my perspective on why I was doing what I was doing and the short breather made sure that I was feeling a lot fresher before going back into the fray.

My advice to anyone that is feeling stressed. Take some time off and get your head in a right place. I can almost guarantee you'll feel a lot better and make much better decisions. The world of the Internet moves incredibly quickly but it doesn't mean that we have to forget to take a refresher every now and then.

I took my son down to get his hand X-rayed today. You may ask whether he has a broken bone or there is some other problem with his fingers but you'd be completely wrong. The problem that he is having has to do with braces and teeth.....so what does the doctor ask for? An X-ray of his hand. Go figure?

This reminds me of the way domains traffic is handled and why domain owners get paid what they get paid. For some reason we all believe that a user clicks on a link on a parked page that generates a certain amount of advertising revenue....but is this actually the case?

Could it be that what's really happening is something completely different? For example, the reason why my son's hand was being X-rayed was because it has a growth plate in it that is easily viewable which helps the orthodontist determine whether his jaw has stopped growing.

In all my years of domaining no one has been able to clearly articulate why we get paid how much we get paid. I do believe that like my sons hand and teeth there is a tenuous relationship between clicks, earnings per click and my bank balance but I'm ultimately convinced that it's only tenuous.

Just ask yourself these questions:
1.    Why is it that despite the global world meltdown the amount of online advertising dollars spent continued to increase and yet a domainers income has been slashed?

2.    Why is it that there is a direct relationship been EPC rates and the Google/Yahoo share price?

3.    Why are CTR different depending upon how the traffic is routed through to a parking company?

After a bit of a break I've decided that it's about time that I did another data dive and try to get answers to the unanswerable. There is one thing that I'm becoming more and more convinced about....domain owners should do whatever they can to avoid the major advertising aggregators and if possible develop direct relationships.

In the meantime I'd better head off to the dentist with a few snapshots of my sons hand so that they can work out what to do with his teeth!

This is the fourth article in the series on building out domains. The other three can be read at.....
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

So what's happened now at Downwind.com.au? Since the "Avatar Awards" I've now rolled out something that I've been working on for quite some time.....an aviation shopping mall.

Here's a few of the restrictions I placed on building the mall:
1. I didn't want to deal with products - stock takes can be a real pain!
2. I wanted to empower other aviation businesses to sell their products (ie. have a shopping mall).
3. I wanted to have quality products for sale so that members were happy.
4. Flexible billing system so that I could adapt my business model on the fly.

I spent a couple of months researching the best plug-in for Joomla that seemed to cover all of the bases and found the most incredible application I've ever seen. It's "Mighty Commerce" and you can read up on it at mightyextensions.com.

When you first read about Mighty Commerce it comes across as one of the most confusing applications that you could possibly find but after spending a little bit of effort you suddenly realise that it's not confusing but powerful and flexible.

Mighty Commerce is not just a shopping cart system but a database management system that gives you the ability to build a shopping cart, content management system, community (like facebook) or even a forum. It's fantastic!

I worked with the excellent Mighty development and support team (they are based in Kyrgzstan) and after a couple of weeks of part-time work I had my shopping mall. Since then I've approached a number of businesses that jumped at the opportunity to add their products for sale. It was a pretty simple sales approach. I have traffic and shopping system, they have products for sale - it works for them and for me.

I've elected to charge $25 per month for access to the system plus 3% of the retail sale value....you guessed it the system is flexible enough to do this and a whole lot more. As more products are loaded by "Sellers" into the system it will become an incredibly valuable resource for members.

I'm also selling Downwind polo shirts and plan on using the system to sell tickets to an event I'm running at a simulator center. It's now much easier to think up ideas that can be sold....such as aviation screen savers (yes it can do downloadable products as well).

Right at this moment we have several hundred products up for sale and the number is growing. The challenge is to now market those products to members and let them know that they are for sale in the Downwind Aviation Shop. Nothing like a newsletter and a front page article to get things moving along!

This is the fourth article in the series on building out domains. The other three can be read at.....
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

OK, I admit it, I planned to stop this series at part 3 but just so much has happened since then I thought that I'd have to share it with all those people wanting to build out a domain or two.

Downwind now has a thriving community of pilots coming to each day discussing everything that relates to aviation. That's good.....but we found that there was a problem in the fact that many of the members didn't really have an emotional stake in the site as yet.

I sat down with my wife and we came to the conclusion that the best indicator of members buying into the site was if they put something up about themselves.....what better thing than a photograph.

This was nothing to do with the movie but with encouraging members to upload an "Avatar" (ie. photo) of themselves - the catchcry was stamp out the "Green blob" (the default image for members).It was then that Roselyn had a great idea to run a competition which was titled the "Avatar Awards".

The competition involved a period of nominations where anyone could nominate a members avatar as a good one for one of 3 categories; funniest, personal, aviation. To make it a little more interesting we put a prize up of a Downwind polo shirt for each category.....it's not much but it helped spur things on.

After two weeks of nominations we had two weeks of voting (via the community polls plug-in for Joomla). A couple of things happened during this process. There was a rapid increase in the number of avatars being displayed by users (ie. they'd emotionally begun to buy-in) and there was a great feeling on the site as people had a lot of fun!

After counting the votes we announced the winners on the site and via our weekly emailed newsletter. We've received fantastic feedback which has made it all worthwhile. We're now contacting the winners and we would like to feature them on the site with a picture of them with their Downwind polo shirt on.....with any luck we'll get them. We have also added a "Avatar Winner" medal to their profile so that whenever people view their posts they can see that person one the Avatar competition for 2010.......you guessed it.....it's going to become an annual event!

Roselyn and I are now dreaming up some other great ideas for advertisers and members to get them all involved in making the site even better. What we have learned is that marketing doesn't have to be expensive....just innovative to capture the imagination.

I've just returned home from a game of Netball that my two daughters play each week....it's sort of like basketball without bouncing the ball. I'm sitting at my desk, staring outside and as normal my mind begins to drift to the topic of domains.

I've noticed that there have been a number of auctions recently that have suggested that domain sales are back and thriving once again. High value sales such as dating.com at $1.7m are all really exciting (especially if you were the seller) but the reality is for the great majority of domain owners then encourage the "wait for the pot of gold" mentality.

What do I mean by this? The average domain sale is more in the vicinity of $750 rather than millions so when you look at your portfolio of domains then think more in these terms. In addition, if you have 1,000 quality domains (who really knows what quality actually means?) then you are doing really well with a stock turn in the range of around 2% per year.

So let's do the maths. 2% x 1,000 equates to 20 domain sales per year or about 1 every two weeks. If the average domain sale is $750 then that means you are selling about $15,000 per year. If all of the domains are dotcoms and the registration cost is $8 per domain then you have about $8,000 in direct costs. Ignoring your time and every other cost then your profit is $7K. In Australia, the government says give me 30% which leaves around $4.9K in profits.

This means that if you are doing exceptionally well that for every  1,000 domains you own you can earn a profit of $4.9K per year. If you want to earn a living like this then my guess is that you'll need around 25,000 domains to have a reasonable chance. I know that my maths is a little out of whack but it will be reasonably close.

Everything really depends upon "quality". Here's a definition for you......if you got into domaining in the last 5 years you probably don't have it. I know you love the domains and you think that there really good but for some reason buyers aren't agreeing with you. I also know that it can be immensely frustrating as you see the big numbers for some domains that you think aren't really that good.....but let's face it beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

The only people that purchase domains for hugely inflated prices are those people that have a business model behind them and have put together a business plan to justify the expenditure. They need to get a return for the whole business plan that makes sense of the high price.

The next time you think that you're going to make a killing on a amazingly brilliant domain think again and reappraise your selling price. My advice is if it's over $750 then you're unlikely to sell the domain.....but then again there are always exceptions....after all beauty IS in the eye of the beholder.....

This is the third article in the series on developing out a domain. The first two articles can be read by clicking on the following links; Article 1, Article 2.

So what's happening on the traffic and revenue side of Downwind? The traffic being generated by the Downwind has largely come from word of mouth. I think that I initially spent about $100 on an adwords campaign because I wanted to run a test with Google Analytics. Right now the site is getting nearly 6,000 unique visitors per month with over 30,000 page views. I reasonably confident that these figures are continuing to increase as the Downwind brand awareness expands into the aviation community.

One of the best things that we did was to build a screensaver (with some software that cost about $30) that we gave away as a Christmas present. The screensaver has aviation pictures that I've taken as well as an RSS feed that  updates what is happening on Downwind. If the member clicks on their screen when the screensaver is activated then it takes them directly to Downwind.

At the beginning of February my wife Roselyn began sending a weekly newsletter to the members each week. It has funny YouTube videos, latest Downwind news plus we have now just introduced a competition on who has the best avatar for their profile. The traffic spike each week is instant and what's even better is when people begin to complain if they don't get their Friday newsletter.

We now have a number of core advertisers that are paying a monthly fee for their advertising positions. This is in the aviation directory, the front page and other parts of the site. This has been really good news and we now have a nice sustainable revenue line coming in each month.

As an after thought I put a donation button on the site where members can choose a level of donation that they would automatically like to pay each year. This has been really successful and we're providing a reward back to donators to show our appreciation in the form of a "medal" that appears whenever they make a forum post. This also identifies those members that haven't donated to the whole community....nothing like some peer pressure! The result has been that we have only had the top level gold donations and no silver or bronze level donations have been taken out. As an aside, I think that it's really important that it's an annual donation and that future donations are automatic.....this effectively means that it's a "soft" membership fee.

A number of the articles on Downwind are being sold to the Australian Aviator magazine which is a great way to directly monetize the content. I think that content is often just looked on as a way to get people to come back to the site but it should also be viewed as a way to earn revenue or some other benefit.

The gross revenue run rate is now about $2,000 per month so it's starting to get up there. I get a sense that we are beginning to reach a critical stage where advertisers are starting to take real notice of what Downwind is doing.....fingers crossed!

Whether you have a portfolio of ten domains or ten thousand you need to think about your domain portfolio in terms of value and thereby business model. If you don't then I can guarantee that you're leaving a lot of money on the table.

Each domain needs a business model applied to it that will assist you in extracting the maximum value. The primary business models are traffic domains (PPC earnings), high value domains (wait for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow), domains as stock items (sell a domain for $1,000) or build out. When you look at your domains you need to think of them in those terms.

For example, if you have been holding a domain because it will be a great domain to build out and you've done nothing with it for the last 5 years then you'll probably do nothing with it in the next 5 years. My advice is to either sell it or build but don't just sit on it. This sort of domain becomes an expense and drains the profits of your business.

So as I'm sitting looking at my own portfolio I have a stack of domains that I'm actively wanting to sell which means I'm out there pushing them to potential buyers. I have a large number of domains that generate PPC revenue and a very few that I'm pouring energy into building. Each one has a business model and I'm pursuing a course of action for them.

A few thoughts on the PPC traffic domains. I would highly recommend that domainers look at non-Google/Yahoo based solutions. Both Google and Yahoo have been reducing payouts over the last 18 months and the level they've come down to means that some of the second tier providers are actually quite viable. Give it a thought.

That's it from me this Saturday.....I'm now off to help my son out with some Maths.....joy of joys....sigh.... I feel like I'm doing my high school all over again....the lot of a parent. Wish me luck in doing well on the next test :-)

This is the second article in the series on what I did to build out Downwind.com.au. Click on the follow link to view article 1.

The best part about Joomla is that it has a very powerful area called "components". These allow you extend the functionality of the system enormously and thousands of them are available. All of the components are available via joomla.org and click on the extensions menu. Let me go through some of the components that I have installed and why I did so.

For a start you get some standard components such as "banners" that allow you to setup banner advertising for potential advertisers on your site. This is a brilliant little component that just works. A couple of the other standard components are contacts that allow you to segment how you want people to reach you and polls for doing surveys and other fun things with your members.

So what components have I installed?

Kunena Forum - this is a fully functional forum and once again the best part about it is the price tag of $0. This means that my members can now have some discussions with each other which means they are more likely to return to the site.

JomSocial - this is an absolutely brilliant component that allows you to provide members with a facebook like experience on your site. The professional addition costs $149 but in my opinion it's worth every penny.

MyBlog & JomComment - both these components were developed by the JomSocial team and will empower your members to write their own blogs on your site and place comments at the end of articles. Myblog costs $35 and JomComment $20 so they are unlikely to break the bank.

Sigisiu - yes I know that it's a strange name but the German developers have done an incredible job in putting together a system that allows you to create directories and other database driven systems for your members with no development experience. The best thing about it is that it also has a charging system built into it that links directly into paypal. The price is $0.

Mighty Extensions - when I first came across mighty extensions I was a little confused about what it actually did. The reason for this is that it just does so much! For instance, I installed the membership component and I can now automatically bill members for access to different services in my site.

I'm now getting into their shopping mall commerce solution which would have to be the most flexible piece of software I've ever seen. For example, you can run a shopping mall and members can have their own shops within it. You can then charge them a percentage per transaction, a fixed amount or a stack of different ways. The commerce solution will set you back around 200 euros but from my perspective it looks well worth it.

The total outlay for my site has been around $500 dollars and I now have a professional looking site with all of the features that any of the major websites would be proud to incorporate.

The next article will go into what I've done on the traffic and more importantly revenue side. See you then!