Most of you might not know this but I’m a big poker player and play online quite a lot (it’s perfectly legal here in the UK which is nice).

This afternoon is the World Poker Crown and if you watch it live they are giving people a chance to win a trip to play in the World Series of Poker in Vegas later this year.

The prize includes a $10k buy in, travel and 10 days in the Palazzo amongst other things.

Get full details by clicking the “Vote to win” button here.

Apparently the v7n.com forum and directory is up for sale at Sitepoint priced at $500,000. To me this seems like a bargain.

The site gets 700,000 uniques per month and ranks very well in Google, revenues are $40k which means the site is selling for about 12 months revenue, that is amazingly low for a forum.

The issue gets more clouded when you look at the revenue sources, a lot of the revenue comes from people submitting to the directories which is hardly a sustainable business model. Monetizing forums is almost impossible and judging by the price of v7n the users aren’t worth much either. V7n values it’s users at around $10 each.

An interesting statistic is that if v7n was monetized as well as JohnChow.com it would earn $300,000 per month.

What do you think? Bargain?

The owners of MySpace.co.uk have lost the domain after Myspace launched a challenge via Nominet.

Interestingly the domain was registered 6 years before MySpace was invented so how on earth did Nominet rule in favour of MySpace you are probably asking?

The case heard that the domain was an abusive registration which I’ve had experience of trying to resolve in the past. This case (and the case I worked on) both hinged on the fact that the domain was parked and full of PPC ads related to the legitimate domain.

Had the owners of MySpace.co.uk set up a service on the site then it is highly probable that they would have been able to keep the domain for ever, in 5 years time that domain and the site it was on could have been sold for a lot more than whatever they earned in domain parking revenue.

A couple of years ago I decided to stop targeting niche affiliate revenue streams and went after one of the biggest money terms on the web with a brand new site. This was December 2005.

Straight away I used all sorts of SEO methods to compete with the major sites and used some of the most aggressive tactics available. I’m a firm believer that unless you have tried every SEO technique you can never know how to use them to your full advantage, it is hugely important to know where the line is with SEO and to make sure any important sites stop pushing before they get to it. How can you stop a site getting banned if you don’t know where the line is?

My tactic was to get top organic rankings quickly in MSN and Yahoo and hope that these held until Google followed up a couple of years later. As you can see from the income report below by April 2006 things were picking up nicely and by June the site was making a nice income. These figures are for the previous month so the income for June was paid on 17th July. Some payment codes have been deleted from my screenshot, this is all from organic traffic so no PPC costs.

Ranking number 1 for a search term like this (I won’t tell you what the site was but it is in the finance industry) was great and for a few months the site did very well. Then the income and traffic started to tail off. First the site was banned from MSN (it was reinstated a couple of months later but didn’t ever rank as well) and then Yahoo decided to use the sites Yahoo Directory title as the title tag and traffic nosedived.

Even after these issues had been resolved the site was still not ranking in Google due to the aggressive link building strategies I had been using so the income was totally reliant on MSN and Yahoo. Of course the last few years have seen such a large downturn in the UK market share of Yahoo and MSN that the traffic is now pretty much zero even though the site still ranks in the top 10 for most of the major search terms. The amount of ads showing on Yahoo and MSN means that traffic below the 5th result is pretty much non-existent.

This reduction in traffic combined with more competition in the marketplace (some merchants using PPC are paying a cost per acquisition of more than twice my affiliate commission) makes it almost impossible to compete.

The net result is that this site has made $0 so far in 2008. Luckily I don’t rely on this money for my income but it just goes to show how the internet marketing landscape doesn’t just make you rich quick it can make you poor quickly as well if you only have one income stream.

Here are some things I learnt from this:

• Google is like an elephant, it never forgets
• Diversify your income
• Diversify your traffic
• Don’t upset a search engine with 90% market share
• Don’t be afraid of targeting competitive search queries

This is my entry to Daniels blog tutorial project so please vote for it!

Etienne emailed with a question today about how new bloggers can get started in a tough industry:

What will be your advice to a new blogger who intends to start on a niche that is already saturated eg. “Make Money Online”?

My first advice is that the more competitive the industry the better. Why? Because the more blogs there are in a niche the easier it is to get links and readers. If the biggest blog in your niche has 500,000 RSS readers then it is very easy for you to get 500 readers. If the leader in your niche has 1000 readers then it will be much harder for you to build any buzz for your new site.

The next piece of advice is to approach things from a different angle. The only dedicated make money online blog people really need to read is John Chow’s. I’ve yet to find any value in most of the other blogs because a lot of them post about the same things. This problem exists in most industries but over the last few months the make money online industry seems to have filled up with blogs whose purpose is to help the owner make money online rather than the readers.

If I wanted to start a blog in a competitive industry I would make sure people had a reason to read my blog over all the others. For example if you have a news blog you need to write news before it gets featured on the major news sites and blogs, be original and break the stories first.

If you want to start a blog about internet marketing or making money online you need to write top quality content and somehow persuade the really big bloggers to link to your site rather than other peoples. Larger sites frequently write about news they have read on smaller sites so if you can consistently be that smaller site you will find people wanting to subscribe to your feed so they get the news quicker.

The only way to build a blog is to get as many links from other blogs as possible. How you go about that task is up to you.

Despite not ranking for it’s own name on Google*, online takeaway website hungryhouse.co.uk won £100,000 of funding tonight from 2 of the Dragons on the BBC’s Dragons Den.

Duncan Bannatyne and James Caan invested for a performance related stake of 25% each with a 20% stake to be returned if targets are hit.

The site is still very new and doesn’t cover many areas outside London but it’s interesting to see Dragons investing in affiliate sites again, even one like this where the potential revenue is only 9% of a sale which probably averages around £15.

What do you think about the site?

* Since the program finished 2 hours ago the site has come from nowhere to 1st for the term “hungry house”. Google using query and toolbar data to correct itself in real time?

WidgetBucks has announced via ProBlogger that they are no longer giving credit for traffic originating from outside North America and Canada.

The good news for those of you running php is that my guide to geotargeting with php will help you make sure you only display WidgetBucks to people in the areas that you make money from.

This morning I’ve been playing with WeatherBill and it seems like a pretty neat idea.

For £77.06 I can bet that the temperature near London will get to 33 degrees next July. For every day that this happens I get £100.

If its cold I lose £77.06, if its hot I could make £3100.

When Tesco launched a property website allowing people to advertise their houses online for a fee of just £200 everybody thought it was a great idea, apart from the estate agents.

Over the past 10 years property prices in the UK have skyrocketed and estate agents, who charge a typical 2%, have had a massive increase in revenue. Most will simply take some pictures of your house, upload it to Right Move and pocket £4000 for a days work.

Tesco was the first big name to launch an alternative style of property website and pretty much guaranteed its success by uploading hundreds of thousands of properties, employing property experts and giving the site a big advertising budget.

Last week Tesco was forced to shut the site down after The Office of Fair Trading decided that TescoTropertyMarket.com is actually an estate agent and therefore must comply with the same laws as all the other estate agents. The decision was somewhat ludicrously based on the 28 year old 1979 Estate Agency Act.

The problem is that under the act Tesco would be liable for any inaccurate information its users write on their website, so if I lie and state my house has a swimming pool Tesco would be liable. Imagine if a buyer travels from abroad to see my amazing house only to find it’s a run down shell, Tesco would have to pay their travel costs and maybe additional compensation. Normally estate agents check the information before publishing.

Today we hear that Tesco might be entering the estate agency market with a revised service:

Whilst being an on-line estate agent was never our immediate intention we are so encouraged by the positive reaction from customers to Tesco’s entry into this market that we are now reviewing our business with a view to launching a new and exciting on-line estate agency service.

This would enable us to offer our customers personal advice on the sale of their home and give them access to the leading property portal websites which accept listings from estate agents but not from private sellers.

As a result customers would get their property in front of hundreds of thousands of potential buyers.

If they can get properties listed on Right Move for less than the estate agents charge the service will be a winner.