Steven’s Blog

A couple weeks ago, I drove down to Miami to visit the Miami Metrozoo and research several animals for my websites about them. I knew that the zoo would have at least 4 different animals that I own domain names for. I wanted to take some quality pictures of them, read about them, and just get a general feel for how I want to develop and/or change my sites about them. I am building up a portfolio of animal sites that make great resources for kids researching for school projects and other interested people.

I was most excited about seeing the koala since I have always wanted to see one and I own Koalas.com and KoalaBears.com. I got a lot of pictures of the zoo’s one koala. Here’s it is:

Koala at the Miami Metrozoo

I also got to see the spider monkeys, african elephants, and marmosets. The spider monkeys were sitting out in the sun on a wooden structure, while the african elephants were just wandering around their area. The marmosets were hiding up in the top corner of their cage, so I couldn’t get a clear picture of them.

While I was down in Miami, I was also able to attend the BCS National Championship Football Game on January 8th. The Gators sure made me happy! About 3/4 of the people at the game were Gator fans. UF beat OU 24-14.

Yesterday, I contacted several farms / mills across the southeast US that make real grits to find out if any were interested in a relationship with Grits.com. Grits.com comes up #1 or #2 on the major search engines for ‘buy grits‘ and ‘get grits’ and gets tens of thousands of visitors per month looking for grits information, grits recipes, grits books, and where to buy “real” grits. So far I’ve just had an advertiser and then adsense and amazon affiliate ads, but I think the site would do better with a solid relationship with a grits producer. We’ll see if anything comes from my contact efforts.

Today I decided to update several of my websites. I found a few more state laws regarding fake ids to display on FakeIDs.com. I also searched out some fake ID attorneys and added them to that fake id lawyer page.

Then I transitioned to working on FreeBooks.com and added more sources to get free books, in addition to switching around the layout with the adsense banners. Hopefully this will bring in more revenue as well as help out the site’s users.

Finally I brainstormed ideas for College-Applications.com. I’m trying to figure out a plan for the site. I think users will want links to the actual applications on college websites, application tips, and possibly college scholarship information. If anyone has ideas for this site or any of the other ones I mentioned, let me know!

2008 is over. It was a great year. I graduated and have been working full-time on my business. I made it to my first two domain conferences (TRAFFIC in Orlando and in New York City), and signed up for another one in 2009. I’ve transitioned from an anonymous poster online to someone with a face in real life. I’ve launched quite a number of websites on my domains and plan to continue this trend into 2009. Take a look at grits for an example of one of my sites. Happy new year!