As 2012 draws to a close, I though I would list how each of my business ventures did in 2012: The Bad Things of 2012: * I setup a bunch of new sites, but none of them have made any money: BigCelebrities.com – Social media rankings for over 15,000 celebrities using a proprietary formula that [...]

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 [...]

I have been using cloud hosting for my sites for the past year, and the short answer is “yes”, it is by far the best hosting I have ever had (see my previous post about my hosting problems). It is much more reliable, and from a webmaster’s perspective is not really any different to use [...]

Sometimes after I create a site, running it turns out to be more trouble than it is worth, so I shut it down. Here are some examples: 1. DigitalCharity.com – It all started in 2002 when shopaholic Karyn Bosnak started asking for donations online to pay off her $20,000 in credit card debt. It worked [...]

I launched a new site today at KindActs.com, to help motivate people to do random acts of kindness. I was inspired when I saw the “Kindness Boomerang” video by the charity Life Vest Inside on James Altucher’s blog, and remembered around 5 years ago that I had bought the domain KindActs.com (I think for $1250) [...]

Google’s recent changes to their search rankings (see details here) to reduce spammy content (mainly from “content farms”) has led to a lot of talk about the importance of having good, unique content. It got me thinking about the topic of adding new content to my own sites. The reason I bring this up is [...]

In two of my previous postings, I wrote about my attempts to create viral videos: http://www.impulsecorp.com/viral-videos-the-story-of-pimp-my-sleigh and http://www.impulsecorp.com/viral-videos-part-2. Mainly, I tried making holiday music videos such as Pimp My Sleigh, and although they were popular, I never made any money from them. So, unlike with holiday videos, it is interesting that one of my holiday [...]

Many of my blog postings are stories about sites that I created. This one is about a site I wanted to start, but never did: BoneoftheMonth.com . I registered the domain in 2003 and the the concept was to create a site where people could buy their pet a luxurious gift, which would a gourmet [...]

I have been running websites since 1995, and I can easily say the biggest headache I have had over the years is web hosting. For the first few years I used shared webhosting (for small sites), but eventually my sites got big enough so I needed a dedicated server. Ever since then, it has been [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]