MangoXL’s Blog

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491078

Th profit margin is 50% or so but a lot of work…

200% profit isn’t very common though. 50% profit is probably a realistic average. I may end up getting rid of Billy Joel/Elton John tickets soon at just a little over cost

I’ve got into ticket scalping lately. It’s not legal in many states but it is completely legal in my state as long as you do it online and conduct business using your real name. Check your local laws.It is really, really easy. All you do is check http://ticketstumbler.com/blog/ for upcoming sales and refresh ticketmaster at 10AM when they’re on sale. I don’t use a script, though a simple one to get you direct to the CAPTCHA would save 2 seconds which definitely makes a difference in quality of seats.

Some intuition about what will be instant sellouts is needed. This is the best one going on soon: a legendary performer known for rarely touring and he is playing tiny venues. http://www.ticketmaster.com/Leonard-Cohen-tickets/artist/733…

Don’t buy seats at the back of large amphitheaters unless it is for Phish.

It’s easiest to sell on Stubhub but using Craiglist can add 8-10% to your margins. It’s annoying to have to email/call back and forth with the people though.

A lot of people said the domain name game is over. However, again and again, people are willing to pay a high price for a domain name. Toys.com just sold it for $5.1 million.

There may be a way to break the whole .com naming game. May be a better directory service or may be something which is good enough for deployment so we don’t need to type in the URL anymore…

ToysRUs Buys Toys.com At Auction For $5.1 Million

Business idea is always one step away. A lot of time, you will wonder why I have not think of that. However, think of that is one thing. To actually execute it and make it happen and successful is another thing.

Here is something interesting from the article:

At 16, Zucker started a business enticing people to pay $1 to take a swing at a golf ball. The prize for a hole in one from 150 yards: $1 million. He rented space from a driving range and persuaded an insurance company to allow him to pay a premium for a million-dollar policy. No one made it, but Zucker made some extra cash.

In college, at Miami University in Ohio, Zucker started a discount card company, pitching local businesses to give students bargains. He collected revenue from advertisers that paid for space on his discount cards, and from college bookstores that bought the cards and gave them as loyalty gifts to customers.

Link to the article: “They’re drinking it up in New York“. A guy is selling purified New York Tap water.

A lot of people wonder does backlinks work or not? A group of people think that Google will penalize their website if the website is selling links. However, if you think about it, the whole idea of the Google search engine is based on backlinks. One of the factor which Google determine one website is more popular that the other website is based on how many people read it and how many backlinks is pointing to that website.

Of course, sites CNN.com, abc.com does not need a lot of backlinks to increase the page ranking. However, they still need backlinks to improve their orangic search engine ranking. For example, if I search for “miracle on hudson river” in Google, why will msnbc.com links show up and then abclocal.go.com. Where is CNN, NBC, New York Time articles? How about the blogs which write about “miracle on hudson river”.

Search Result For "miracle on hudson river"

Part of the reason Google weight office news sites like msnbc, abc, cnn higher in search result ranking and part of the result is because the MSNBC url has a lot of backlink links to it.

However, for small guy with  a website which nobody even hear of. How can we promote our websites to the top of the search result?

Remember, Page Ranking is nothing. Organic search result position is everything. If your website is Page Ranking 5 but when I search for the keywords, you are page 2 or 3, the traffic is still will not get you a lot of sales. So, the goal is high in organic search result. Good Page Ranking will help. But it is better to be page 1 on the keyword search instead of high page ranking.

So, small guys like us, we need to build the backlinks. A lot of way to increase your backlinks count. However, make sure couple things:

1. You already optimize your website
2. The keywords which you specify in your anchor text is correct
3. Have big site links back to you.

You can do a lot of small thing to get backlinks like I described here. However, can you get a PR4 and PR5 link back to you? You can always ask them but nobody will listen to you and do link exchange will you. Save the engine. The easy way is just to buy your way in. Go to the link broker and buy it. You pay a price and it get the job done. Simple.

Here is another case study about how CNBC.com and 1800flower.com and ProFlower.com buy their backlinks.

By the way, we just created a brand new domain for electronic components 2 weeks ago, we spend 20$ in backlinks. Now, it is PR 3. We are in page 4 on our some of the keywords. Still need some works but the result is amazing.

Everybody is using the free facebook ad code and this is why so many get rich quick scam show up in facebook. In fact, I will put up my get rich quick scam in facebook too. May be some suckers will bite it.

Facebook get rich quick scam busted

Facebook says it has removed ads for a get rich quick scam that appeared for weeks on the social networking site before it discovered the ruse following reports from defrauded users.

But some users have reported that, despite Facebook’s assurances, some of the ads remain on the site and are being re-published at a rate faster than the site can review and remove them.

The ads - complete with bogus testimonials - purported to make Facebook users rich if they simply signed up to post links under a “Google advertising” program.

Clicking on the link in the ads took people to another page, run by a company dubbed “EMillionaire”, which invites users to submit their details to see if they are eligible to take part in the program.

The details included credit or debit card information as those interested in the scheme would have to pay $US1.90 to take part.

But the entire venture is a scam with no ties to Google, designed to trick people into handing over their banking details.

Two affected users who published warnings on the RipOffReport.com website said they were immediately charged $US197 by a company called “Marquilife”. Calls to the company requesting a refund proved fruitless.

The ordeal has called into question Facebook’s ad vetting systems, which should have discovered the scam before the ads were accepted.

In a statement, Facebook said it encouraged users to report any advertisements they find offensive or misleading. All reports were followed up by a dedicated team.

“In this case, users informed us about misleading offers in many ads with promotions related to working at home,” Facebook said.

“We have removed ads with these types of misleading offers as they were brought to our attention.”

You know, everybody is using the Facebook 100$ free ad coupon. Here is the detail. It is free. You should use it.

The Visa Business Network helps small businesses flourish. Here is how you get the free 100$ Ad credit.

• Go to Facebook
• Head over to the Visa Business Network Page.
• Just fill the form with your details and submit it.
• You will get a conformation email along with a coupon code.
• Thats it, just follow the steps in the email and 100$ worth advertising on Facebook is all yours.

The coupon code is valid for the next 3 months and should be redeemed before that.

However, I find the facebook ad is not very effective. But it is free…. so use it!

Once upon a time, I tried some adwords marketing. I create multiple adword groups with something like this:

408 200 0001
408 200 0002
408 200 0003
...
408 999 9998
408 999 9999

I create 40-50 ad groups to target the top cities in United States. For example, New York, Chicago, LA, San Francisco, etc..

I hope that when people type in the phone number in Google (for example, people looking for 408 234 2345) to search for the phone number or do reverse phone lookup, my adword will so up. The ad price is cheap and it is only $0.05 per click. I point the URL to reverse phone lookup

Hmm… the result is interesting. After 500 clicks, I got 2 sales and 2 refunds. Does it work? I don’t know. I think more testing is needed. However, cheap google adword is different to find.

I hate the Godady domain parking service. If you want more income split, you need to pay godaddy for it. When I have enough income to cash out, godaddy said that my domain has unnatural active and cut all my profit. Are you kidding, godaddy? I promise that I will never use godaddy domain parking service anymore. godaddy domain parking sucks! Here is an alternative for domain parking service. whypark.com

I have many unused domains. I hope that one day I will develop them and make some money out of it. So, while the domain is sitting there and do nothing, I am using whypark.com to park my domains - hundred of them. It is not free. It cost 99$ forever but it is a great service. Because it automatically fill the websites with content and hopefully, it will increase the page ranking of the domains so I can also use it to promote some other stuffs.

The user interface with whypark.com is very simple. Point your domain DNS to whypark and specify the keywords which you want to develop, it will fill with interesting content. Instead of getting the bear minial domain parking income form google. I think whypark.com is a good choice.

What is Social Bookmarking & Why is it so powerful and different from other web promotion tactics?

Social Bookmarking websites are basically sites that categorize and store ‘bookmark links’ (links which take one to a specific website). Millions of visitors flood these Social Bookmarking sites to search for information. Some of the common one are Digg.com, Stumbleupon.com,  del.icio.us.

So the idea of bookmarking is to post links back to your web page from these Social Bookmarking websites. You need to specify some keywords (we call them TAGS) which categorize your bookmark.

This allows others to search and even vote for your bookmark. Social Bookmarking is in a league of its own because of its ability to generate traffic by sharing links.

The benefit of Social Bookmarking are:

• More Targeted Traffic because the sites are added by “keywords”
• Faster Search Engine Indexing
• Higher Search Engine Ranking
• Better PageRank

However the problem with Social Bookmarking is that it is very time consuming.  Creating account in different social bookmarking websites. Then add your website to their sites one by one.. one by one. Lucky, there is tool to help you out. For example, bookmarketingdemon.com.

For more information about social bookmark, you should read this: The Complete Guide of Social Bookmarking.