Originally, I thought it was a cool idea to have a “company name” to stick on all my web development work. I’ve had a few decent names in the past, but they all usually get stale and boring to me after a while.

The idea of having to manage a company with employees isn’t nearly as attractive as earning a good living on my own. But, a one-man company doesn’t seem to attractive either. At the same time this thought came to me, I also realized there was one potential “company name” that would suit my needs and has never gotten old - my own name, Kevin Ingersoll.

So, I’ve bought two domains containing my first and last name:

• keviningersoll.com
• kevin-ingersoll.com

The first domain would obviously be a type-in traffic, word-of-mouth, business-card type of domain. The second would be more for SEO and I like how it looks in lowercase compared to the first.

I can’t decided how I want to configure them. Should I use strictly keviningersoll.com and ditch the other? Or should I use keviningersoll.com as above and redirect it to kevin-ingersoll.com? I’d love to hear what you think - please take a minute and reply to this post with your opinion.

My dad asked me tonight if I could develop some software to help my grandpa fill out non-interactive PDF documents. I guess he has come across a few PDF documents with forms that you can fill in with a PDF reader. But most of the forms he has don’t offer that interactivity. My grandpa has horrible penmanship so a piece of software like this would be priceless for him. I did a little digging in Google and found PDFFiller, an excellent piece of web 2.0 software that does exactly what he wants:

• You upload the PDF document from your computer or somewhere online
• You click anywhere and begin typing
• You can then fine tune the form by moving your text around, change the font face, size, and color
• Save, print and enjoy!

To use the software, you must register and pay $1.49 per use or $12.99 per month for unlimited use, but it’s well worth it for someone like my grandpa.

I was disgusted with Network Solutions’ decision to “reserve” domains after they were looked up through their website. Fortunately, it stirred up quite a bit of controversy among domainers and it looks like ICANN has decided to put a stop to it. This is awesome news for domainers, like myself, looking to make an honest living from investing and/or developing domain names. Hurray!

I’ve been using Bloglines as my preferred feed reader since the start of the Thirty Day Challenge. I’ve been reading and subscribing to more and more blogs lately, and I think it’s time to find something better suited for my needs.

One thing I would like to see in a feed reader is very frequent updates - ideally checking feeds for updates once every minute or more. Another thing I would love to see is alerts (like most instant messaging programs) for certain feeds. I’d like to be notified by a little box at the bottom-right corner of the screen the instant certain feeds are updated so I am one of the first to know about it. With Bloglines, I have to have a tab dedicated to it and I have to switch to it to check for updates instead of it notifying me when it’s updated.

I haven’t done much exploring with other feed readers, so I am open to suggestions. I’ve heard good things about Google Reader but I am not sure it’s exactly what I’m looking for. We’ll see!

A few of Erica DeWolf’s posts and some of Frank Kern’s free videos have motivated me to start building a list that I can actually market to. My current lists aren’t that big and they usually consist of cheap gamers which I’ve found hard to make much money from. I’ve decided to take another approach.

Two and a half months ago, November 2nd to be exact, I bought a website for $5,000. It was the biggest purchase I’ve made since I bought my car and a huge hit to my bank account. But it was expected to earn around to $1,000 per month and I wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. I figured I could spend the next few months improving the site, increasing its revenue, and using its current revenue to recover from the initial purchase.

Well, the moment I got the site, I pulled an all-nighter and gave it a complete overhaul. That ended up being a good and bad thing. When I bought the site, it was running on a default Wordpress install - a few weeks prior it was running on a default Mambo install. Everything was rusty around the edges. Using the content from its database, I gave it a fresh design, a fresh URL structure, and good on-site SEO. I spent a few days gathering all the old URLs and 301 redirecting them to their new pages. It looks and functions a lot better now.

The bad news is the sales dropped, and by quite a bit. I was suddenly only making about $400 per month. Buying the site for 10-12 months revenue is still not a bad deal, but I was hoping to earn back what I paid within 5 or 6 months. With the holiday season, the monthly revenue bounced up to $800-900 per month, but it looks like it’s starting to slow down again.

I think the good news really makes up for it, though. When I bought the site, it was getting around 900-1,000 unique visitors a day (all organic) and had the top position in Google for its niche keyword phrase. Since then, I have:

• Tripled its traffic - it’s now pushing 3,000 uniques a day
• Gained several above-the-fold listings (and double listings) in Google for my niche keyword phrase
• Gained decent SERP ranks for many new long tail keywords
• Increased the average time spent on the site by a few percent
• Lowered the bounce rate by 4-5 percent

All of that thanks to many SEO tactics I’ve been pounding into my head for the last year or two.

So, using this experience, I’m going to build a list of people interested in search engine optimization. For now, I’m just going to focus on the list building and giving out quality information to attract new subscribers and build a relationship with them. I’ll worry about the money maker later on. I am thinking of kicking off the start of this list by giving away a report and maybe a few videos that outline the SEO tactics I used to triple my site’s traffic in 2.5 months. I’m just not quite sure how to go about it, how detailed I should be, etc. If you have any suggestions, leave me a comment and let me know. I’d greatly appreciate the help.