Cash The Checks

I put up the advertising page for Dating Services Guide. So ads are now for sale if you have dating traffic.

I’m going to begin the process of selling advertising spots on my network of sites. The first site up is

Free Auto Loans Guide

The numbers will show where ad spots will go. Since I’m just starting selling ads, I’m putting a really low price to start. $5 per month for a top banner spot on the front page is a good deal. Even just for the Google Page Rank it’s well worth it. The prices will most certainly go up in several months as these sites continue to gain traffic and I get more interest from advertisers.

I also added a link exchange section with a form which I’ve always wanted to do but never got around to it.

For processing I chose Paypal because it was easy to set up and they offer recurring payments, which Google Checkout does not. Perhaps in the future I’ll set things up with a “Shopping Cart” and use 2Checkout.com for processing. But I like to start things off small and build up as I go along.
Over the next few weeks/months, I’m going to add these sites to all of the sits which list sites with ads for sale. These include Adbrite and Text-Link-Ads along with many many others. The downside is that they take a percentage of every sale derived through them.

If I’m successful at selling ads on sites I’ll spend more time creating sites and driving traffic for the purpose of selling ad spots instead of worrying about trying to find the right sponsor and tweaking ads. I’ll be slowly adding ad pages for each of my sites and posting them here as I complete them.

51% of College Humor.com has been reportedly sold for 20 million dollars. Just how big is College Humor? They sell ads to HBO, Comedy Central, they have their own clothing line, Busted Tees and there’s a movie in the making with Paramount Pictures. That’s what 6 million unique visits per month gets you, $20 mil for selling just half of the business and keeping operational control over it.

It’s not like “College Humor” is that good of a domain, it was only registered first in December of 1999. They just created a site with good content, updated daily, got loyal bookmark traffic, and branded their site wonderfully. If you’ve got a unique idea and are willing to put the time and effort into the project, you might end up like the folks over at College Humor or You Tube.

For a few hours Cash The Checks was hacked. Luckily I was able to see it within 5-10 hours. It happened in the middle of the night or else I would have caught it sooner. I was able to restore all of the posts and get everything back up and running within an hour. It’s a good reminder to always back up everything that is of importance to you.

Every few weeks I back up all the posts on my blogs and every few months I back up everything I own on an external hard drive. You never know when you might suffer a catastrophe and it would be awful to try and start over from scratch.

Below is a part of what the text said:

“We are as Turkish-muslims, for 1000 years following the way of Muhammad (peace be up on him). Our ancestors, Seljuks and Ottomans taugth the World what is humanity and tolarance, with their heart and sword. Don’t forget that we are 1.5 billion muslims and we are on the same way.

Come to Islam ! Come to being human!

Cartoons of Jyllands-Posten aren’t same with other paintings those of muslim artists. These cartoons are insulting our Prophet. It wouldn’t be approved in freedom of expression. This is just cursing? You’ll pay for it!”

I’m seeing more and more movie companies using MySpace to promote their movie. Borat did this successfully. He did several MySpace video blog postings and had his MySpace updated often.. plus had a ton of people on his friends list.

I’m also seeing movies using a MySpace URL instead of their own domain name. The big movie companies are getting the hang of this viral marketing thing. It makes sense and it works, however they are giving MySpace free advertising. MySpace should offer a paid MySpace service where users pay to remove the ads from their profile, unlimited pictures and extra profile customization.

This brings up an idea, maybe you could register a bunch of MySpace URL’s (myspace.com/tvshow, myspace.com/movietitle, myspace.com/simplename, etc) and put up a For Sale sign on each. When somebody wants to register their name on MySpace to get a short easy MySpace URL, they’ll go to your page and perhaps want to buy it off of you.

MySpace URL’s are nowhere near as valuable as domain names, but to the right individual, it could be worth a pretty penny. Who knows maybe in a few years MySpace will get bigger and better than it already is. If I only had the ability to register domain names back in 1995 I’d be rich by now. Maybe in 10 years I’ll be saying: “If I only had registered a bunch of MySpace URL’s back in 2006 I’d be rich by now”.

Due to being hacked one too many times, I’ve switched this Cash The Checks blog to Dream Host. Their best feature is a one-click install of the latest wordpress version, plus over a hundred pre-installed blog themes. I’ll be installing all future blogs at Dream Host plus moving my old ones over ASAP.

I’ve dealt with another host (MidPhase) and their mysql server kept going down, so I’ll be keeping the blogs at DreamHost for now. The only downside I see is that I notice that sites load slowly at times. That’s a lot better than a site going down for days though.