Death isn’t something anyone likes to talk about, but is something we must all plan for. So I ask you, what happens to all of your websites when you die?

What happens to the income and value of your websites and domains?

My wife and I are having our first child in less than 3 weeks (2011 change: My daughter will be 4 years old this week). I have life insurance so they’ll be taken care of, but what happens to my websites? What happens to the income that I make every month through my business, Adsense, Amazon, Azoogle, ShareASale, etc?

I currently have almost 100 websites (2011 change: over 350 sites now!), about 30 (2011 change: now about 100) of them make money every month. Some make money every quarter, and almost all of them make something yearly.

If I do nothing, my income will slow down, my wife will still receive checks (or deposits) for some future months, but eventually my domains will expire, my landing pages will become outdated and the link codes for my affiliates will change. Then the money will be gone, and someone will pick up some sweet domains when they expire.

You’ve put in thousands of hours into your web sites and now, nothing. Horrible right?

There are a few things you can do to stop this from happening, I do all of them to some extent:

1. Trust a friend with your account info.

If you have a friend in the business, he/she would be a great asset in your planning. I have such a friend. This friend isn’t as experienced as I am, but would be able to renew my domains and hopefully either keep them going or sell them off for what they are worth. Either way, my wife doesn’t lose out on all my hard work.

I have encouraged my friend to sell all of my websites one by one on at various places like such as Flippa, forums, or a brokering service. I have made it very clear that selling one by one will take a lot of time, but will also bring in a lot more money than a bulk sale will. If he were to try to sell all of the sites as a group, the amount of people with that much money would hinder the total amount of the sale.

This plan could very easily backfire on you.. Remember, your friend has access to your FTP, affiliate accounts, maybe even bank accounts. A lot of power. The only way to now remove this power is to change all of your passwords. For me, changing all of my passwords would take a long time.

There is one way to avoid this however, tell your friend you have a file or printout physically located in your house or safe deposit box in the event of your unexpected death. Then he can get the file that has everything he will need. This will give him access to all of your accounts, but only after your death.

2. Write down everything and hope your spouse can remember what to do.

This is something else that I have done. I’ve written down all of my account info including passwords, direct deposit information and how the accounts should be managed. My wife however won’t be able to change anything on my websites, she just doesn’t know how. So even though she has this information the income will dwindle if this is my only after-death strategy.

The other option in this strategy is to create very detailed plans of what to do with your website(s) and clearly write down how to accomplish these things.

For me, I would write something like, “Open Cyberduck FTP. It is the little yellow duck in the dock at the bottom of the screen.” With instructions like this, my wife would be able to follow along. However, writing these instructions down would take a long time, and I doubt my wife would want to maintain my websites.

3. Sell everything now for market value.

I know you didn’t build your website portfolio just to sell it now. You plan to keep it, make more money from it, and maybe someday sell it to Yahoo! (2001 note: Google’s probably the better buyer now) for a million bucks. Isn’t that everyone’s exit strategy?

If you go this route, your after-death losses will be minimal, but your future potential will also be seriously hindered. There is an increasing amount of value in domains and websites that are old. As Jim Boykin says, “I like ‘em old.” If you don’t consider the value of your domain age, you’re losing money on every sale.

Obviously these are not the only methods that you can use to play for your untimely death, but hopefully they’ll get you thinking about that unfortunate day and planning ahead for the sake of those you care about.

2011 change: There are now a few companies that provide a service for distributing your information after your untimely death.  A few of the popular ones are Entrustet, DataInherit, and AssetLock. This will not help with handling your website business, but will distribute the information to the correct people.

Do you have any additional ways to plan for that unfortunate day? Would you be interested in a service that handled your websites after your death?

Related posts:

1. Creating a Strong Brand with Twitter
2. I Have Too Many Websites, What Do I Do?
3. Intro – Great Websites, Limited Funds

Let me give you two unnamed examples. Example 1 is a SEO that sells SEO services. I have no doubt that he is great at what he does, but when I view his twitter stream, it’s full of tweets about getting drunk, having random sex and not remembering much of every weekend.

Example 2 is a friend of Example 1, I know this because Example 1 frequently references Example 2 in his drunken tweets talking about where they are going and what they are doing. However, Example 2 never tweets about anything inappropriate.

If you were going to hire someone, aren’t you going to do a little research? For both men, their Twitter account ranks #2 or #3 behind their blogs and company websites. Googling someone’s name is the first thing I do to find out about them. When I find Example 1′s twitter stream am I going to hire him? Definitely not. Even though Example 2 is partying with Example 1, I don’t have any clue because his stream is professional (with occasional personal tweets).

What does your Twitter stream say about you?

Related posts:

1. How to Brand Yourself Online
2. I Give Up…

Anyone?

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1. If you’re going to spam…
2. Add Digg This! Button to WordPress Posts and Float Right
3. How to Add Unique Meta Tags in WordPress

<br /> – doesn’t work

<p>&nbsp;</p> – doesn’t work

The only method that I have found of adding extra line breaks in your WordPress posts is to use the following code.

<p align=”left”>&nbsp;</p>

Copy and paste that as many times as you want.

See?

Another one that seems to work just as good is: <p style=”text-align: left; font-size:1px”>.</p>

.

.

.

.

See?

Related posts:

1. Add Digg This! Button to WordPress Posts and Float Right
2. My Most Underused WordPress Feature – Post Slug
3. WordPress – Add DB Queries and Loading Time to Footer

On a side note, is it weird that I think about #tagging things in real life? The dinner my wife made last night was great! #awesomedinner

No related posts.

Title: I used to make $412/day
Content: Now I make over 12k/month. Read how I’m doing it now.

For those of you a little slow… $412 x 30 (days) = $12,360 (over $12k)

Apparently you don’t need to be able to use a calculator to make $412 a day. I think I would take the $12k/month rather than $412/day. $412/day isn’t very much…

No related posts.

So with that said I’m going to be shifting my focus away from “making money” to “earning money”. I still do everything the same, but with a focus on what kind of work you need to put in to get the desired results.

Earning money though web based ventures isn’t for everyone. I have a family member who told me that he had extra time and wanted to try to turn that time into money with the internet. I spent hours with him explaining what he needed to do, we bought a domain, got hosting set up, installed WordPress and wrote him a sample post. I detailed everything he would need to do over the next month in order to make it a successful month.

At the end of the month I went back to his site and guess how many posts he had…1, and it was the post I made for him.

I called him and asked what the problem was and he said, “I don’t think this is for me, it’s a lot more work than I thought it would be.”

Therein lies the truth. Making money online is not easy, but earning money online is possible. You’re not going to get rich overnight. That PPC campaign will not take off, your website will never rank number for for “laptops” and you will never be paid $50,000 to speak at a conference. However, you can make a very good earning online.

You’ll need to be prepared to work hard for little return in the beginning and trust that one day down the line it will pay off. That’s what I’ve been doing since 2004 and I can tell you that it has truly paid off!

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1. Make Money Online – Blog Refocus
2. How To: Make Money Online (Intro)
3. Make Money Online by Writing for KnowMoreMedia

Open up your WordPress admin and navigate to Appearance > Editor.  Click on Footer on the right side.  Find the bottom of your footer, near your copyright.

Put this code in wherever you want it.

<?php echo $wpdb->num_queries; ?> queries. <?php timer_stop(1); ?> seconds.

There you have it. You can add something like this if you want to:

This page called the database <?php echo $wpdb->num_queries; ?> times and was loaded in <?php timer_stop(1); ?> seconds.

Post a comment if you have problems.

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3. In Her Own Time

If there are too many competitors (some irrational or inexperienced), even if you’re the best it’s a lot harder to win.

Being the best at something doesn’t mean you’re going to be #1.  Consider the 1980 Olympics when the USA Hockey team defeated USSR for the gold medal. The Russians were heavily favored, they were clearly the best, but in 1980 they weren’t #1.

So what does it take to be #1? Hard work and picking the right horse. Some people think that determination will suffice with hard work, but you can be the most determined player in a niche market and still not be #1. There are people with more money, more time, a better team, an older domain, more backlinks, and an established foothold in your market.

Here are a few things I look at when determining if I can become #1 in a niche.

1. Number of SERP results. If Google lists 64 million results for your term, it might be time to narrow it down. Google “computer parts” vs “laptop computer parts”. Which do you think would be easier to become #1.

2. Is there a name brand involved? I always avoid a trademark because they’re obviously the market leader. Consider “laptop computer parts” vs “hp computer parts”.

3. Age and authority of #1 domain. For “hp computer parts”, HP.com is the #1 site. HP.com was registered in 1986, has over 1,000 Wikipedia mentions, is ranked in the top 200 for all websites by Alexa and is clearly the best choice for “hp computer parts”. What makes me think I can beat HP at their own game? What advantages do I have over them?

4. Knowledge of the industry. Do I know any other webmasters that own similar (but not competing) websites? Can I look to someone for a few links to kick start my link building? Am I familiar enough with the market to come up with creative link baiting and viral ideas? If not, what separates me from the other 1,000 niche sites in the industry?

When you find yourself stuck in a market where you’re the best, but not #1, consider this…you may never be #1. We like to believe that if we stick with a site long enough that we’ll eventually beat that big competitor, but you might never win. I’m not trying to be a downer, I’m just being a realist. That’s tough to handle news. You might never beat NewEgg, TigerDirect and Geeks.com for top rankings for “computer parts” no matter how determined you are.

So even if you’re the best SEO, link baiter and viral marketer, there is a great chance that you’ll still be ranked #12 at the end of the day. Switch to a niche or product with less competition, or weaker competition and become the top dog!

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1. Rent Audio Books – Free Niche Idea #2
2. Another Way to Find a Niche
3. Fun vs. Profitable – Finding Your Niche

I don’t want to spend $20 to convert movie files into something usable so I’m searching high and low to find something. I bought found QuickTime Pro, but that isn’t helping.

UPDATE: Here is a quick how to convert your .mod files to just about any format for FREE!

1. Download ffmpegX (download).

2. Download necessary files. ffmpegX will prompt you and give you the links to the necessary files. I won’t link directly to the downloads incase they change.

3. Put Files (3 total) into a folder.

4. Select location of the files in the ffmpegX window.

5. Drop .MOD into ffmpegX.

6. Select desired format. Usually .MOV or .MP4.

7. Click “Encode”.

8. New file will be where the original file was.

That’s it! Like screenshots? Check out my 1334 Comic Life skillz.

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