Tools

Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest… yet email is still my number one earner.  I promote my blog posts all over the place, but nothing compares to good old fashioned email.  Crazy!

I've been running an authority site for quite a while now.  It brings in a modest $2k+ each month from affiliate commissions.  And I credit almost 80% of this income to the email newsletter I run on that site.

Once a week I put together a collection of links related to the niche.  I also do a quick round up of blog posts from that I posted during the week. And of course I also include a link and quick sales pitch to the affiliate link I'm looking to promote.  And every few days, without fail, I manage to make a sale.

This strategy isn't rocket science.  It doesn't require any special skills and it also doesn't take very long to complete.  In fact I spend less than an hour per week on it.  That's 4 hours a month for $2k of revenue.  Not bad.

Running an email newsletter doesn't also need to be all about selling.  In fact, I do very little selling to my email list.  I do a lot of support – I let people email me back, ask questions and i respond.  It's turned out to be a very personal communication platform.  And people appreciate that.

I thought I would do something similar here.  I usually use GetResponse for my email lists – and I think it works best for large email newsletters.  Because this site is much smaller, I wanted to try something different.  I'll be created a tiny newsletter list.  I want to keep things small so I can keep things personal.   That way I can share more.  You'll notice I don't share too many specifics on this blog (I am trying to change that).  But I will share them through the email list.  So if you're interested in how I make money from sites like etoro, popcash and this one – jump on my newsletter.

I'm not gonna jump on the Godaddy Hating train.  I don't mind buying domains there.  But recently I've found their prices to be too expensive.  Domains are a commodity and I'll go wherever it's cheapest + easiest to register.  Godaddy used to have lots of coupons to get cheap domains, but they've now limited these so you can only use them once.  Which for someone who owns hundreds of domains is not going to work.  So here are my favorite alternatives to Godaddy.

iWantMyName – the minimalist choice

If you're looking to quickly register a domain with all the upsell that you get on Godaddy and other providers, then iWantMyName is for you.   It is focused solely on domain registration.  No hosting, no marketing offers.  iWantMyName also has probably the largest base of domain extensions to register.  It's particularly good for international extensions.  I've registered lots of domains here and never had any issues.

NameCheap – the true Godaddy alternative

Looking for a product as close to Godaddy as possible, then try NameCheap.  Ironically, I've never found them to be as cheap as GoDaddy, but they have a nicely designed website and a similar range of products to GoDaddy.

NameBright – the domainers choice

Looking for dirt cheap domain registrations?  Then NameBright is the place to go.  It's owned by a prominent domain investor and so it's been designed from the ground up to cater to this crowd.  It has the cheapest .com registrations I could find – they claim to offer at cost pricing.    I've used NameBright to handle some of my more valuable domains.

So there you have it three really good alternatives to GoDaddy.  Who do you use to register domains?  Let me know why in the comments.

I've never been a fan of Google Analytics.  I've always found the interface to be too complicated.  And it's just too difficult to get a good overview of what's going on in your website.

I've been using Clicky for the past 5 years, and I think it is much, much better.

Clicky is a realtime analytics platform.  That means there is no waiting to see your analytics reports.  As soon as a visitor hits your website, it will appear in clicky.

It tracks everything you could want – visitors, content, entrance/exit pages, bounce rate, referrer etc.

But what I love best about clicky is its interface – it has what I believe to be the very best interface of all the analytics programs.  It is simple to use and data is displayed in a logical fashion.   Clicky is the best Analytics tool.