Internet Business Blog

If you’re going to be running high profile advertising campaigns on a Windows-based system then you must ensure you’ve got something in place to watch out for the unexpected.

Whilst walking through Liverpool city centre, I spied one of the new digital advertising banners doing a great job of promoting Windows’ reliability by displaying the infamous Blue Screen of Death. This banner happens to be located on one of the busiest shopping streets in the city and regularly sees thousands of people walking by.

Great stuff!

If you celebrate Christmas in any way, I’d like to wish you a very merry one.

Merry Christmas!

Domain name prospecting can be a very lucrative source of income. Every day, domain names are traded for thousands of dollars. Considering the cost of registering a domain name can start from as little as under $10, it’s not surprising why people can see great opportunities.

I’ve registered hundreds of domain names over the years, but my experience in trading domains is limited. A lot of the domains I’ve registered were destined to be partnered with an idea, but most were to become virtual real estate/advertising platforms. I’ve sold a number of domains, some with and some without websites attached. More recently, I sold a domain name without a website for a 4-figure sum, which I think is an excellent return on the $18 it cost to register it for two years.

Done badly, domain prospecting can land you in hot water and make you the recipient of a letter from a lawyer. Done well, you can quite easily make a nice return on a speculative investment, turning a pizza meal into a mortgage payment or more.

So just how do you find a winning name that you will be able to register and sell without ruffling anyone’s legal feathers? Well, I’m not an expert on the subject, but one thing for sure is to steer well clear of other people’s registered trademarks unless you want to risk legal action.

What I’m going to show you is a tool that I use to find all of my domain names. As well as making it very easy to come up with great domain names, it also tells you whether or not a domain name is available to be registered or who it’s already registered to.

The following has nothing to do with the domain I sold, but here is an example of me searching for a domain name based upon three distinct keywords; London, Olympics, 2012.

The tool I use in this video is Domain Name Pro and it’s the best piece of software I’ve come across for checking domain names even though I probably use less than half of its functionality.

Once you’ve registered your domain name, you need to let potential buyers know it’s up for sale. That’s where the likes of Sedo come in useful. Not only do they have a very active marketplace where you can list your domain and take you through the entire selling process, but they also allow you to display a sponsored parking page and offer you a share of any ad clicks.

If you’ve got any spare domains that aren’t being used for anything else, you could do worse than parking them with Sedo, collecting a share of any click-throughs and potentially finding a buyer for them just like I did.

As part of my new interest in the stock market, last week, I bought a share in Google at just under the $700 mark. With hindsight, the stock would have been an excellent purchase back when it first went public in 2004 at sub-$100 or even just a few months ago like another blogger whose 5 shares bought at $2399.80 are now worth in the region of $3465. That’s a 44% return in just 7 months, if that stock was sold now.

Some say that due to Google’s current position in the market as the USA’s most popular search engine, there’s not much hope for future growth or a return on any investment, but considering their stock was priced at sub-$500 at the beginning of 2007 means they’ve increased in value by 40% in the last 11 months alone so I’d say there was still plenty of potential left.

One of the great things about Google is their ability to diversify. They may have started out as the geek’s choice of search engine, but just look at them now; email providers, domain name registrars, payment processing, offering their search technology to the corporate sector, telecommunications, mapping, social networking, and even renewable energy.

No growth potential?

Now, Google don’t pay out any dividends so the only way for me to make any money with the stock is to sell my share. I guess time will tell whether I get a return back on my investment.

Here’s an interesting read; see what people were saying about Google stock just before they went public.

Email spam is quite a popular topic at the moment. Not only are there a few mentions in my feed reader, but just this week I decided to route all of email for my main client hosting server through a dedicated email filtering appliance which is basically a dedicated mail server kitted out with a Bayesian filter. It’s quite an advanced piece kit which is not only very accurate when it comes to identifying true spam, but also has a nice user interface to allow easy access to the quarantine and white/black lists.

As well as more accurate email filtering, it means that the web server doesn’t have to process the thousands of emails it would otherwise have to every day and can get on with serving websites. So for my web hosting clients, it’s a big plus. For me, it’s a little extra cost, but the web server is more stable and there are more resources available.

Personal Spam

Moving on to spam that I receive personally, well, I don’t really get any or at least hardly any ever gets through to me and I personally use dozens of different email addresses. I can’t even remember the last time I saw an email flagged as spam in my copy of Mailwasher Pro - a truly excellent piece of software which I use to monitor all of my active email addresses.

How’s this possible? I used to get spam, like most people do, but then I spent a lot of time researching the subject and coming up with practical ways in which to avoid it. The key to avoiding spam is prevention. Keep your email addresses as secret as possible by using CAPTCHA’d contact forms and if you really have to show an email address then take some measures to prevent it from being harvested.

After advising friends and family on how to avoid spam and them seeing a drastic reduction in the amount of spam they got, I decided to put down what I’d found into a guide…

How to Avoid Spam

How to Avoid Spam is a 40+ page PDF ebook on the topic of spam; what it is, why you get it, how to spot it and importantly how to avoid it. It also comes with an email encoder desktop application to make your email safer to publish online.

The ebook bundle is just $7 and you can promote it to others and claim 100% of each sale. The email encoder application displays a brandable link back to the sales page so you can give that away to people to use for free. If they should click on the link and make a purchase you’ll receive the proceeds of the sale!

How to Avoid Spam Contents

Here’s the table of contents from the ebook:

Introduction	5
Chapter 1: Spam - What is it?	6
Chapter 2: How Spammers Get Your Email Address	8
    Harvesters    8
    Good Spam    8
    Not Hiding Your Email Address Properly    9
    Reporting spam    10
Chapter 3: Email harvesting techniques    11
    Dictionary or Brute Force    11
    Web harvesting    11
    Usenet newsgroup harvesting    12
    Email lists    13
    Web browser leaks    13
Chapter 4: Once They Have Your Email Address    14
    How to beat spammers    14
    Why you shouldn't open or even preview suspected email    14
Chapter 5: Prevention - Tactics to Avoid Being Spammed    16
    Don't publish your email address in plain text    16
    Encode your mailto link with JavaScript    16
    Encode your mailto link with Character Entity encoding    17
    Display your email address as an image    18
    Display your email address as a flash animation    18
    Display your email address so only a human reader will understand    18
    Use a server-based contact form.    18
    Be careful with who you give your email address to    23
    Use a free email account if you absolutely must provide a real email address    23
    Use email forwarding (redirection)    24
    Domain registration details    25
    Screen Your Email    26
    Educate Your Friends and Colleagues    26
    Challenge-Response    26
Chapter 6: Cure - How to Rescue An Email Address From Spam Hell    29
    Server-based spam filtering    30
    PC-based spam filtering    30
    Bayesian filtering    32
    Using a Desktop Based Email Filter    34
    What's The Best Type of Filtering?    34
Chapter 7: Why Do Spammers Spam?    36
    Scams    36
Chapter 8: Don't Get Classed As a Spammer    39
Final words    40
Appendix A – Anti-Spam Resources    41
Anti-Spam Information    41
Internet Tools    41
PC-based Spam Filtering Applications    42
Server-based Spam Filtering    42
Bayesian Filtering    42
Challenge-Response Systems    42
Encoders    43
Obfuscation    43
Contact Forms    43
Spam Statistics    43
Email Harvester Poison    43
Email Clients    43
Glossary    45

Get your copy of How to Avoid Spam today and get ready to say goodbye to spam!