Google Hot Trends, Domain Transfers & Moneymaking sites

It's been a while since my last post, and if you're a longtime fan or reader I apologize for that. If you're involved in self-employment or internet marketing, you know just how time-consuming it all can be. Sometimes you find something that is a good thing for moneymaking and you end up putting more effort into that then other projects. Throw in other aspects of "real life" and you've got a busy time of it. It's nice to have a life outside the net right? Luckily, my previous work as a project manager and caseworker helps me figure out my priorities. I'm big on goal setting, writing lists and getting things done. But I do have my "procrastinator days" as well.

So what have I been up to? Well recently, a lot of article writing. Mostly with Google trends which offers pros and cons. The great part is this can give you nice surges of traffic to wherever you want if done right. If you pick the right hot topics and get in on them in time, you can link to offers or seller sites, and generate nice sales for making money online. The downfalls are copycats who steal your material so they can make a quick buck too. And trust me, I've seen it happen quite a bit. I've even had someone accuse me of plagiarism on a site, when in fact it was another site copying my work. Strange but true!

The other thing with Google trends is we know the Big G wants to keep their searches honest. They don't want people searching for a hot news topic and finding someone's 5 sentence article about a story with a link to a news site. I see it often, or I see sites with poorly written content that has tons of grammatical errors and sentences which keep going and run together and they don't make sense but they are trying to make money as fast as they can - you know what I mean? Google will want content as always. In the past year, I've seen the Google Hot Trends listing go from 100 sites to about 40 to the current 20, and I often wonder if it will go down again to 10. I'm guessing that Google has done this to prevent all the "crap" content that gets spewed out. They limit people's ability to prey off 100 or even 40 topics.

So to solve the problems of competition and finding more hot topics, you have to be creative. For that, figure out what the recent hot topics are and then use Google suggest. You know, the tool that will provide you with additional searches. From that you can gauge your own topics to write about, and make post titles based on them. To get traffic flowing you'll probably need authority for your site, or to write for Associate Content as a news writer. Or you can play the social bookmarking game and use Socialmarker to get your site ranked up on page 1, for a bit. I'm not going to go into what topics to look for to make money, because you'll have to develop your own strategies. I'd also recommend Yahoo! Buzz, Bing X-rank and this site News on Rails which lists 100 trends for a day.

Now about domain transfers, I do have a gripe with GoDaddy.com. Over the past year I set up about 5 new sites/blogs and used sales deals with GoDaddy to get the domains. I host with Hostgator. After hearing about the Netfirms site I decided I would switch over to them for the upcoming renewal. Netfirms offers a privacy protection in their deal that GoDaddy doesn't. The problem came when trying to make the transfer.

Netfirms requires that you set up the transfer by authorizing it with the old domain site (GoDaddy), acquiring a AUTH code from them, and then another code from Netfirms. Once you enter all that info into your Netfirms area for the domain, they are supposed to handle the switch. The problem was that GoDaddy didn't allow the transfer, and has their nice little GoDaddy page parking ads on my sites now, offering people to buy the names up when they're available. So lesson learned, the hard way.

I've seen many a domain seller site talk about how easy a transfer is, but it's really a headache. As of this article, I have yet to transfer any domains, and basically GoDaddy has blocked my attempts. Maybe it's good business, but you can imagine the frustration after all the work to write posts, build backlinks and get ranked for those moneymaking sites. But you live and learn and I'll have to go forth from there.

A few other notes of recent interest, WidgetBucks has chosen to close down. If you missed that email they basically are choosing to focus their funds and efforts in a new way. Anyone whose account was over $50 threshold at the time will be paid by the 15th of March. If you were under $50, your money is not going to be paid to you. Also, Squidoo has been adhering to their newer standards and if they decide your lenses seem too spammy or not under their guidelines, they will lock you. I must have missed an email from them at one point, but five of my lenses have been officially locked. But then again maybe that's because I had the biggest payout from Squidoo yet just today. Even in a tough economy these moneymaking sites want to tighten up their purse strings a bit.

I hope everyone else is doing well in 2010. It's been a great start for me despite the problems I've mentioned. Mainly because I have been reaching some big goals and am looking forward to the impending moneymaking season coming up.

Here's to your success,
The Monetizer