Triple.com is a hosting company that offers their hosting service for only $3.99 (lowest I’ve seen in a while), as well as gives you an alternative place to register domains. We reviewed Triple.com almost a year ago. It’s a good time to revisit them.

Triple the Thoughts

As in my last review, the domain is great, if thats all you see. The website looks a lot better as they have more services, tools, and a better overall site.

New Affiliate Program

This time what’s new is their affiliate program. There are plenty of hosting affiliates, which can be a bit boring. Nearly every blog promotes a host, because the payout is so huge. However the conversion rate is generally extremely low. So why use Triple.com’s affiliate program?

What pisses me off about Godaddy and the other hosting/domain registrars, is that they don’t give you crap when you refer someone to them and they simply buy just a domain. They actually deactivated my Godaddy affiliate account since my only leads were domain sales.

Triple.com is offering up to 30% of all the payments made by the customers you refer, apparently regardless of the sale. A $10 domain register, is going to (according to this) $3. Now thats not huge or anything, but $3 more than you could get elsewhere.

Of course thats not all they offer, hosting, SSL certificates and more. The minimum payout for each affiliate is only $20.

Refer Your Friends

On top of the money you can earn by referring people to Triple.com. There is money to be made by referring webmasters to the affiliate program. Join now and start referring your friends. You can earn up to 15% of what they earn.

The affiliate program is open to everyone, it took me a minute to sign-up and I was accepted.

Payments are made by paypal, which is a huge plus for me. However since the affiliate program is so new, there currently aren’t many promotional tools (banners) to use.

I like to follow the sales of blogs, I find it interesting. We blogged about Blogging Fingers getting sold a while back. The blog on the block this time was Bloggin-Ads. Mike has become a friend and contact over instant messaging since his blog has emerged. Lately he has fallen on some hard times.

I hate seeing a blogger down, so I did my best to help his sale along. I thought now that his blog has sold it would be a great thing to interview him.

If you missed the sale, he recently sold his blog for $5,000, expecting a lot more (as did I). He cited other blogs being sold.

http://onemansgoal.com sold for $10,000
http://cashquests.com sold for $15,000
http://johncow.com sold for $25,000
http://bloggingexperiment.com/ sold for $15,000
http://bloggingfingers.com sold for $6,000
http://www.blogohblog.com/ sold for $10,000

According to this list, his blog was definitely valued at about 15-20k in my opinion. Whoever got it, definitely got a steal in my opinion.

I interviewed Mike Huang to see what went wrong.

Was selling your blog harder or easier than you thought?

Yeah, it was actually a lot harder to find bidders and potential buyers than I thought. I really thought I would receive bids up to $10,000, but that was out of the picture. Not to mention, the sale was hard on my wife and I especially after all the hard work put into it.

Why don’t you think you got the price you wanted?  The long term advertising promises? Or something else?

From what I’ve been told, it is because of the long term advertising. What I should’ve done was not mention that, just receive bids, and if it goes high enough, I would just refund all the advertisers. I believe I could’ve gotten a least $7,000 or $8,000.

Another problem is the domain, which has a dash in it, which could cause problems with SEO, but not too much.

You mentioned the sale at Mybloglog, Blogcatalog, and Twitter. I also saw it on a lot of forums, which ones? What do you think drove the most bidders?

I mentioned it EVERYWHERE (mybloglog, blogcatalog, twitter, etc). Digital Point, Bloggeries, and NamePros. The most bidders most likely came from twitter or from other bloggers that mentioned it (hopefully BAYB!)

What did you learn from the sale?

What I learned is that you should never expect too much from selling ANYTHING because it may come out different than expected.  A sale is much harder than what it seems and actually requires a lot of work.

Anything else we should know? Is the sale for $5,000 finalized?

It’s pretty much finalized and it’s in progress on escrow.com right now. Another thing to mention is that Escrow.com is the safest way to sell a site. Depending on the amount, if it goes over a few thousand, a seller should use escrow.

My Insight

The advertising slots that were already promised seemed to be the downfall, there were also other negative comments in sale thread.

A few pointers by observation when selling a blog:

• Tie up future advertising. I generally don’t like to sell a year in advance lately, but I have as of late.
• Along with advertising tie up any lose ends to make you look bad. Mike still had an open contest that wasn’t finalized which caused problems.
• Don’t change the blog around, keep the theme and posts going regular so the bidders can see how the blog functions and won’t take over with nothing left.
• Offer to stay on as a paid blogger to keep the “face” of the blog there, if possible.
• Lastly, this goes for Mike, don’t redirect the URL to another site in the closing hours of your auction!

Any other questions you have for Mike that I missed I’m sure he’d be happy to answer!

With August right around the corner it’s time for SES in San Jose.

For those who dont know, Search Engine Strategies (SES) is an expo that educates participants about search engine marketing, SEO, advertising strategies and tactics. They always have the top experts in the field giving presentations and more.

There are tons of websites that we use everyday that will be representing their site. Of course Google and Yahoo, but also sites that I’ve mentioned here like Hydra Network and Pepperjam.

Getting an expo pass is free in advance but $50 on site. You can read about all the swag that Ryan Weidman got last year. Not bad!

However if you want to do participate in the conferences, traning or sessions it runs to almost $2,000. If you buy before August 1st you could save as much as $200.

Whos going to San Jose?!

ok, ok.  So online newsletters have been around for a long time – in fact every decent internet marketer has been using newsletters for years.  But i’m seeing a growing trend in the number of bloggers integrating newsletters into their blogs.

So why are newsletters going to be the next big thing?  Well they are already a big thing.  Newsletters offer a very direct way to reach potential customers.  In fact, I have found newsletters to be my single most powerful sales tool.  If you want to sell anything at all online, consider a newsletter.

The good news is integrating a newsletter into a blog is a piece of cake – its as easy as copy and paste.  Products such as Aweber are great, as they offer a hosted and feature rich solution.    But whats not so easy, is capturing leads and converting these into sales.

Here are my tips:

Capturing Leads

A lead is someone who subscribes to your newsletter.  They have the potential to become a customer and are obviously interested in your product or blog.  The easiest way to capture a lead is to offer an incentive.  For example – “subscribe to my newsletter and recieve a free ebook”.   This is simple, effective and can all be automated.

Converting Leads

You will first need to decide what the purpose of your newsletter is.  Do you want to simply keep referring leads back to your blog? Or maybe you want to sell an info product.  I like to do a bit of both.  Sending newsletter subscribers to my blog time and time again is fairly simple – It just takes a “recent posts” section in the newseller highlighting the best of my blog.  Selling an info product is a little harder and would take many more posts to explain – what I will say however, don’t push a product too hard.  Combine content (such as recent posts) with sales pitch for an effective mailing.

Do you have a newsletter?

P.S – First Peep to @feint me on Twitter gets a $10 GoDaddy Gift Card.  Make sure you follow me so you won’t miss out

I’ve been a bit busy here, I’ve got a few new things in the works. Next week I am going to make an announcement of selling one of my blogs. This will be the biggest blog sale so far, looking forward to it.

If this is your first Comment Friday we give one lucky person a free weekly blogroll spot as our “blog of the week“. Along with that we are also giving that winner 250 entrecard credits.

Anthony brought up a great point about paid posting. I don’t think it’s dead, just in a different form. Some of my posts I don’t “get paid for” but I earn money on. How has ‘paid posting’ changed for you?

My buddy Mike over at Bloggin-Ads is having a bit of a tough time. So unfortunately he has to sell his blog. He’s come under a bit of pressure from the last contest and really just has to sell.

His rss readership is currently at 1375 and posted his traffic as well. The auction has just over a day left with a buy now price of $5,000. That’s a lot lower than we’ve seen some of these blogs go for. I’m sure he’d be happy to stay on as a paid writer for people willing to purchase the blog.

View the sitepoint auction.

Bloggin-Ads Good Bye Contest

As a good bye present, Mike has put together a contest with Market Leverage.

The Prizes

8GB iPod Touch (I want this!!)
$50 Market Leverage Credit Gift Card
$25 iTunes Gift Card

The Rules

There are several ways to enter like joining Market Leverage and writing about the contest and the auction. Since I had already planned of doing both that’s a plus for me. Just want to help this guy out!

Good luck on this contest everyone and spread the word about the blog sale.

Contest ends July 27th, 2008.

Here’s a question – has paid posting died?

I’m talking about sites such as PayPerPost which offered to pay bloggers to post sponsored “reviews” of products and sites.

I logged into my PayPerPost account today.  I haven’t used the service for a long time – I gave up on the concept a while back, and what I saw looked like a graveyard.

The majority of “availiable” opportunities on the PPP site, are for credit cards, loans and other spammish looking sites.  I’m starting to get the feeling that the mainstream advertisers, just like myself, have given up on the entire concept.

So here’s the question – who is still using PayPerPost, ReviewMe or other similar sites?   Has Paid Posting Died?

P.S – Guys follow me over on Twitter.  I have about 20 domains that I want to giveaway and a couple of GoDaddy Giftcards.  Just @ me!  And check out BloggingTheme.com where I’m writing for as well these days.