A joint project by Jordan and I, Indie Read is a site producing reviews on indie rock albums as well as sparingly reporting on industry news.

Check it out.

Client: J&G Automotive
Website: www.jandgautomotive.net
Work: Design, content creation, photography, management.

This is a site done for my local mechanic. We basically brought his business online and opened up a new channel. The yellow pages are outdated nowadays (who still reads that?). It’s how he’s been advertising and now he can just send people to a website that lists all of their services.

I’ve always had a hard time when it comes to selling a website. The problem is POTENTIAL. Have I gotten the most out of a website that I could have? Is there still potential left in it? And if so, can I reach it?

I’ve always sold my websites when I felt like there was nothing more to be had in the niche. Maybe someone else could take it to the next level, right? Selling a website does not work like selling cars/houses and other things, because you can’t just “sell when the demand is high”…You sell when you don’t see a clear future for it anymore. Will the niche die down in a few months? For examples, proxies are generally sold before summer comes because traffic is literally dead come summertime (in comparison to the rest of the year).

I have always had a hard time maintaining this blog. I have moved servers countless times and not bothered to retain the old archived posts. I just end up starting with a fresh install of wordpress and I’m off again. I think the reason why I haven’t kept the old posts (even though many of them were extremely informative), was because I never bothered monetizing this blog. I have never had ads on here. I think that if I could see a visible stream of money coming in (basically passive income), then I’d be motivated to continue posting useful things. Even if it’s only a few dollars a day, that’s all the proof I need that the time I spend is worth it. Unfortunately, when I am working online, I only see things in $. That’s more gas for my car, more food for my belly, and more money in the bank.

blogaboutyourblog.com has a post up about his blog making $1200 in 10 months of inactivity. This is more than four times the amount that he made in his five months of active blogging. I assume the income was all from adsense, and with his poor ad placement, and only 120 uniques/day, these numbers are very surprising.

I am going to implement adsense sometime soon.

I have to say, Band of Horses is my band of the moment. They are definitely hitting the spot for me. If you are an avid listener of indie rock, then you will certainly adore them. They sounds somewhat like The Shins; every song is epic. Like any great indie band, they are simply amazing live. I hope they visit Los Angeles sometime.

Band of Horses - Is There A Ghost (Live)

Band of Horses - No One’s Gonna Love You (Live)

Band of Horses - The Funeral

Band of Horses - Monsters

thesixtyone.com is an awesome music social network of sorts. It’s like digg, but for music, and much more involving. I love how I can just open up the page, pick a song, and it will just continue down the list.

If Guitar Hero™ is about shredding, thesixtyone is about scouting.

Visit thesixtyone.

I just came across a post on SEOlogs.com that was written a few months ago. “B Jones” documents the growth of SEOlogs and provides screenshots of his adsense earnings quarterly. I thought it was a very clever post not only from the information it provided, but it’s also one of those posts that provokes readers to interact more with the blog and perhaps grow “attached” to it. In a broader view, this is how the big web 2.0 players do it. Apple probably does the best job at product attachment. They hit our emotional nerves and this is why they have so many fanboys. If you look at popular bloggers like Shoemoney, they blend informational posts with personal ones. One of his most popular posts is about his Duodenal Switch (fat surgery, basically). Readers like some insight on the person behind the monitor.

Going back to the SEOlogs.com post, his first month (July, 2005) showed earnings of $7.52 - not even enough to buy the lunch I just finished eating.

In March of 2007, he was up to $2,321.62 - almost enough to live on.

I think it’s very inspiring that in under two years, a simple website can grow to earn so much. This actually got me thinking back to when I started on the web - around the same time. Last year, I was making about 3-4k every month. It’s hard to believe, even now. It’s also hard to believe where all that money went…

Read the post over at SEOlogs.com

By the way, whoever I link to is lucky as hell. My blog has a PR6!