In my last blog post I mentioned how I was on my way to Washington DC to spend the summer. Well, June, July, and August flew by in a blink of an eye, but it was an eventful and fun 3 months…

Summer In Washington DC

My wife and I rented a house in an absolutely amazing location in Cleveland Park just a couple minute walk to the Metro and dozens of restaurants. We were also a short walk to the Uptown Movie Theater, Rock Creek Park Trails, and other shops. To say it was a convenient location is an understatement. It took almost the entire 3 months, but we managed to try every restaurant in the Cleveland Park area.

My favorite restaurants turned out to be:

Ardeo Bardo

Indique

Spices

Lavandou

Byblos Deli

Out of the Cleveland Park area Founding Farmers took my favorite restaurant prize.

We also attended several events over the summer:

3 Washington Nationals baseball games

Sugarland at JiffyLube Live

Alan Jackson at WolfTrap

Roger Waters The Wall at Verizon Center

Adams Family at Kennedy Center

Memphis at Kennedy Center

The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs at Woolly Mammoth Theatre

Beauty and The Beast at National Theater

CitiOpen Tennis Tournament at Rock Creek Park Tennis Center

Martina McBride at WolfTrap

Sheer Madness at Kennedy Center

We also went to the National Zoo, Air and Space Museum, American History Museum, Natural History Museum, National Archives, Arlington National Cemetery, and walked around The Mall several times.

So, if I was culturally starved before, this filled that void. I’ll miss the amazing cultural diversity of Washington, DC: theater, concerts, sporting events, etc, but San Diego has a pretty good touring theater scene, gets most major concerts, and has the Padres and Chargers.

I’m mostly going to miss having my family so close. My mom and dad are about 2 hours west of DC and my mother-in-law actually works downtown. It was awesome having them so close all summer. However, we ultimately remembered why we left the area to begin with and will just have to make an extra effort to fly back a few times a year to visit. San Diego’s weather and lifestyle just suits us to well to pass up.

What’s Next?

Over the next several weeks my wife and I are going to be RVing – heading west to San Diego. We’ll finally take a new route across the country, which I’m really excited about. We’re looking at cutting though West Virginia and Kentucky on I-64 on the way to Saint Louis. Missouri is one of the few states I haven’t been to, so I’ll be happy to finally cross that one off my list. From there we’ll shoot across Kansas on I-70 heading west for Denver where we’ll spend at least a week taking in the sights before heading south on I-15 towards Las Vegas and finally San Diego.

If you would have asked me on May 1, 2011 if there was a even a sliver of a chance that I would take on a new business partner, move to Dallas, sell our home in California, have a whole bunch of stuff happen that I’m not going to get into here, and realize it was by far and away the biggest mistake of my life less than a year later – I would have told you that you were certifiably insane. Well, that’s exactly what happend and less than one year after moving to Dallas, we’re leaving Dallas.

Discussing the particulars of anything that transpired in a public forum like my blog would be highly unprofessional and not make me feel any better in the end. Regardless, with the exception of learning from my mistakes, this is something I’d rather erase from my memory and move on with the rest of my life.

There was one thing, and one thing only, that lead my wife and I to Dallas in the first place – that was to become business partners with someone. Since that no longer exists – there really isn’t a reason to be there. I only know one other person in the entire Dallas / Forth Worth Metroplex and we have zero family there. So, as soon as we got back from our trip in Costa Rica on April 14th we began preparations to leave Dallas. The thought of packing everything back up that we just took out of boxes 9 months ago was daunting, but it had to be done. Our last day in Dallas was this past Saturday.

Over the past seven years we’ve lived all over the place (mostly at my suggestion), so this time I left things up to my wife. She really wanted to spend the summer in Washington, DC so we could be near friends and family for awhile. So, we pulled out of Dallas on Saturday with our RV pointing east on Interstate 30. We rented a pretty amazing place right in downtown Washington DC and it’s within walking distance to almost everything, including the Metro. Right now we plan on being there June 1 – Aug 31, but have a month-to-month option we might exercise if we really like it. We already have a pretty busy summer planned with friends coming to visit us from South Dakota, Isle of Man, Charlotte, Philly, etc. We also have dozens of friends who still live in the area along with my mom & dad and mother-in-law. It should be a good summer and I’m looking forward to it.

As to what comes after that, I really have no idea. I’m still going to leave it up to my wife, but I certainly have my favorites. We’ve kicked around all sorts of ideas from taking the RV to the Florida Keys for the winter to moving to San Diego, from staying in Washington, DC to moving to Hawaii. At this point nothing is even close to firm and it’s really just a good time in our lives to have some fun and clear our minds…..

Considering we went to Costa Rica from April 7th – April 14th, this post is more than slightly delayed. Since we got back I just haven’t been able to find the time to write this post. Since were getting ready to take another trip, and I want to talk about that, I figured now would be a good time to write this post.

As most of you know, I lived in Costa Rica for almost 3 years from 2006 – 2009. While I lived there I purchased a condo in Manuel Antonio with some friends and business partners. Since leaving in 2009 I’ve gone back once or twice a year to use this wonderful condo. This trip in particular was one of my favorites because some good friends of mine from California were able to join my wife and I for the week.

The week started off with a little relaxing, but by midweek we found ourselves doing activity after activity – and it was a lot of fun! We started off with some hiking on Tuesday through Manuel Antonio Beach Park. This park offers some amazing views and lots of wildlife. Wednesday was reserved for an ATV trip through the mountains to a great zip line facility. Since I did the zip lines last year I was able to enjoy them a lot more, instead of fearing for my life a whole time. On the ATV ride back I found out how well ATVs perform in 4 feet of water – it wasn’t my most brilliant moment. On Thursday we took an amazing white water rafting trip through the Costa Rican jungle. On our last full day, which was Friday, we rented 4 high-powered ATVs and took a private guided trip through the mountains. These ATVs were like nothing I’ve ever driven before; they had 5 speeds and topped out at over 50MPH. The day ended with an amazing two-hour massage.

All in all it was just about a perfect trip. My only regret is that I didn’t have time to see my friends who still live in Costa Rica. it was a stupid planning mistake on my part. I should have dropped my friends off at the airport on Saturday and spent 1 or 2 extra days in San Jose. Next time I’ll be sure to plan better.

While pictures never do any justice in a place like Costa Rica I’m including a few of my favorites from this trip below.

Trip to the Mid-Atlantic

It seems like my wife and I don’t sit still very long and that trend is about to heat up again starting today with a trip to the Mid-Atlantic. We will be on the road for 9 days in a combination of Washington, DC, Atlantic City, and Philly. We’ll be spending the first part of the trip looking for a summer home right outside Washington, DC in a great little area know as Old Town Alexandria. I used to spend a lot of time there as a kid and I’m looking forward to hanging out in the area again this summer. Our goal is to find a rental we can use for 3-6 months and then get out of town before the weather turns cold again. Of course we’ll take the RV during the summer trip and stop in several locations including Shreveport, Atlanta, and Charlotte. Anyway, after our 4 days in Alexandria we’ll be heading up to Atlantic City for a few days to visit family. It’s my grandma’s 85th birthday and I’m really looking forward to seeing her. We’ll wrap the trip up with a couple days in Philly to visit Nat Arem.

Trip To Costa Rica

Not long after we get back from our Mid-Atlantic trip we’ll be heading down to Costa Rica for a week to spend some time with friends in our beach condo in Manuel Antonio. It’s a relatively easy trip and I’m really looking forward to a little R&R. The view from our condo is simply amazing and the activities in the area are awesome too. We’ll do a little hiking, zip lining, rafting, etc. There are also some great restaurants in the area too which I’m really looking forward to. The best part of the trip is some good friends will be joining us that we only get to see a couple times a year…. really looking forward to it.

Sunset From Condo

On The Road Again

Not long after we get back from Costa Rica we plan on heading out of Dallas for several months via our RV to the Mid-Atlantic. The exact dates and stops will greatly be determined based on our trip this week and what we can find to rent this summer. However, the tenative plan is to take a leasuery RV trip to DC this summer, stopping at several places. This will be a great opportunity to promote RVParks.org and see some friends.

As most of you know, I’m a pretty big fan of Apple products. I’ve had pretty much every Apple product that’s come out the past 5 years including the iPod, iPhone, iPad, iMac, Mac Book Pro, MacAir, Mac Pro, etc. So, it’s without a lot of surprise that I preordered the new iPad when it was announced a few days ago.

I’ve been getting smarter and more cost efficient with my Apple upgrades by promptly selling my old version when the new product comes out. Apple products hold their value surprisingly well, and the trend held true when selling my old iPad 2. I paid $599 for my iPad 2 wifi 32gb when it came out last year and I was able to recover $340 by selling it this week. I used a new eBay feature called Instant Sale which worked perfectly. They even pay for shipping, so I was able to net the full $340.

This time I decided to get the iPad with the 4g LTE incorporated – it was a no-brainer for me to go with Verizon vs AT&T. After traveling the country in our RV last summer it’s pretty clear who has the better coverage.

When my iPad 3 arrived today my first thought was “Wow, this is heavier”. That lead me to the Apple website where I was shocked to find out I wasn’t imagining things. The new iPod is 1.46 pounds (662 g) vs the iPad 2 at 1.33 pounds (601 g). That’s a full 10% heavier and it’s VERY noticeable, I’m honestly kind of annoyed by the extra weight; I assume the extra weight is because of the new high res screen.

Before getting the iPad 3 I wondered to myself how much better the screen could really be. I thought the screen on the iPad 2 was perfectly fine and couldn’t really imagine how it could be noticeably better. Well, I was wrong. Within seconds of looking at the new screen it’s undoubtably clearer. For a device so small it’s really amazing. I’m actually convinced that it’s clearer than the monitors on my desktop – it’s a truly amazing screen.

The main reason I wanted to upgrade to the iPad 3 was the new 4g LTG features. We’re going to be traveling again this summer in the RV and I really wanted the added functionality of having the iPad with 4g built into it. I must say, the 4g sure isn’t a disappointment. It’s almost as fast as the Internet in my house and will make a welcome addition when on the road. The best feature of the Verizon version of the iPad 3 is that you can turn your iPod into a hot spot. I tested this out too and I’m very impressed. This will replace all the BS we had to deal with last year when on our RV trip. With the iPad 3 I can go on the road with decent Internet access and it will be about 1/3 the cost of what we were paying for crappier service last year. You can also terminate your contract for the data plan at anytime. So, as soon as we aren’t traveling I can just turn it off.

iPad 3 Verizon Personal Hotspot

Overall Impression

Overall I’m happy with my purchase if nothing else than for the 4g LTE features. However, if you have an iPad 2 and you are thinking of upgrading, I would just hold off. The screen is nicer for sure, but it’s not that much nicer. I think if you upgrade just for the better screen you will be VERY disappointed. However, if you travel a lot and are looking to get the 4g LTE functionality, I think that’s well worth it. I also think that if you have the original iPad this is the time to finally upgrade. It’s a major jump up from the original iPad when you take into account the better speed, screen, cameras, etc.

This is the first flight I’ve ever been on that has wifi access, which is pretty cool. In years past I’ve been traveling exclusively on Continental and they are still in the dark ages when it comes to having Internet on the plane. It’s been over a year since I’ve flown with them, but as far as I know they still don’t have it. It seems like most of the other major carriers have installed wifi, which makes traveling so much more enjoyable. For people like me who have a hard time staying “unplugged” it helps even more. Anyway, today I’m heading back to Dallas from Philly and this American Airlines flight has wifi.

If it feels like it’s been ages since I posted to my blog, that’s because it has! My last post was in early December and since then a lot has been going on in my life. I’ve obviously been really busy with work, which never seems to change, but there has been a string of people visiting us and then some traveling too. The reality is setting in now that this is going to be a really long post to catch up on everything….

Google News Update

Since the last post I made was about getting accepted into Google News I think it’s fitting to lead off with that… Since getting accepted into Google News in early December we’ve been posting about 3-5 news articles per day Monday – Friday and then a couple over the weekend too. The traffic results are simply stunning. I predicted a traffic increase of 2x-3x once we got accepted, but it’s been more like 5x or even 10x on some days. Some individual articles have brought upwards of 10,000 unique visors in the 48 hours Google News was giving that article exposure. The image below is from Google Analytics and shows the impact Google News has had. The dips are the weekends and / or holidays.

Google News Traffic

SEO Update

The next thing I wanted to update everyone on is the progress we’ve been making in terms of SEO across our sites. I feel like we’re right on track, or even ahead of the game in some instances. Remember, we’re going after some pretty competitive terms, so we have a 12-18 month outlook for a lot of these terms. Here are some examples of some of the rankings we’ve been able to achieve:

IRA.com – “Rollover IRA” – 1st page, 2nd position
IRA.com – “Open An IRA” – 1st page, 9th position
IRA.com – “IRA” – 1st page, 4th position
OnlineDegree.com – “Online Degree” – 2nd page, 1st position
OnlineStorage.com – “Online Storage” – 1st page, 6th position
OnlineStorage.com – “Best Online Storage” – 1st page, 2nd position
GraphicDesign.com – “Graphic Design” – 1st page, 7th position

A trip to Hawaii

One of the reasons I’ve been absent from blogging is because of some traveling I’ve been doing. My wife and I went to Hawaii from Jan 3 – 15th and the weeks before that were kind of crazy with work. I wanted to take as much time off in Hawaii as possible, so that didn’t leave time for much else. I did a pretty good job taking off the first week we were in Hawaii, but the second week it was a little work and play. Overall it was a really great trip. It was my first time to Maui, but my 7th trip to Hawaii overall. It’s by far my favorite place on Earth and if I had it my way I would be living there. I love the warm weather and the water – it’s a perfect combination. The issue is I’m married and my wife is against being a 12 hour plane ride from family on the east coast.

I could write a 1,000 word post about this trip alone, but this post is already getting too long. In a nutshell, it was a really fun trip packed with SCUBA diving, sightseeing, hiking, swimming, diving off cliffs, swimming to waterfalls, snorkeling, boating, lots of good eating, etc etc. There are some pictures below, but they are only a small sample of the 1000′s we took. None of them do any justice of just how pretty this place is.

7 pools

Sun Set In Clouds

Road To Hana

Road to Hana 2

Haleakala Crater

Blow Hole

A Trip to Philly

I spent the past week in Philly with a good friend of mine / business partner going over various Terran Marketing projects. It was a very fun & productive week. My friend lives right in the middle of the action in downtown Philly near Washington Square. It’s a great location that makes it easy to walk pretty much everywhere; I estimate that we did over 12 miles of walking in the 7 days I was there. It was pretty cool seeing Independence Hall, Reading Terminal, a 76ers game, the Italian Market, and much more – not to mention all the food. I’m scared to weight myself when I get home, but I wouldn’t doubt that I gained 2-3lbs this week – even with all the walking.

In addition to the time in Philly I took one of the days to take a ride down to Atlantic City to visit my family. My grandma, uncle, aunt, and several cousins live in the area, so it was nice seeing them.

Finally, I also got to visit with another good friend of mine who lives just north of Baltimore. Since it’s only a 50 minute drive for him, he packed the family in the car and made a day out of it. It’s been close to two years since I’ve seen them, so it was a nice treat. My friend lost almost 50lbs since the last time I saw him (which I’m ulta proud of him for); it was such a big difference I didn’t recognize him at first. Not to mention his kids who grew almost 2 feet! One thing that sucks having friends scattered all over the county is stuff like this. Hopefully it won’t be almost 2 years before I see them again.

I’ve written several posts about the importance of good content and the power of getting your site accepted into Google News. In fact, I wrote a detailed post about how to get your site submitted here. Not every site is a good fit for this strategy, but if your site has a theme that naturally posts a lot of content, especially news content, then Google News might be right for you. We were in the process of getting websitehosting.com submitted to Google News before we sold it, but none of our other sites really had the breadth of content needed; that is until we purchased ira.com.

We’ve been writing an average of 2-3 posts per day on IRA.com since we purchased it; about 2.5 weeks ago I decided it was time to submit it to Google News. Then, yesterday, I got the most wonderful email:

“Thank you for your note. We’ve reviewed your site and will be adding it to our index for Google News. In order for your content to be included in Google News, please follow at least one of the two options below:”

To say the least, I was really happy and excited to get approved. We put a lot of work into this project over the past couple of months and getting accepted to Google News is going to bring a welcome increase in traffic. I estimate that we can get at least an additional 1,000 unique visitors to the site each day. Not only will this traffic undoubtedly translate into more sales, it will also attract more natural links. We’ve had sites in Google News before and several of our articles got links just from the exposure there.

I plan on making a followup post in about a month to document the increase in traffic we see. In the mean time we are going to ramp up our content efforts even more moving forward. It will be some trial and error to see what kind of articles attract the most attention, but I hope to have a good handle on that within a month.

First off, I want to start by giving a major shout out to the guys over at BlueLayerMedia. They are the ones who helped us get this site coded and they did just a fantastic job. I’ve worked with a lot of developers though the years and these guys are simply some of the best. Their code is super tight and they have the uncanny ability to push WordPress to its upper limits. I told them that I would be making this post, so they offered 10% off to anyone who mentions this post on their first project. Their rates are fairly reasonable to begin with, so this will make it even cheaper. If you end up using BlueLayerMedia feel free to comment on your experience via this post to let me know how it went. ***DISCLAIMER: I’m not affiliated with BlueLayerMedia in anyway.

In regards to IRA.com version 2.0, well I’m pretty excited about it. The new site features a full-featured accountant and financial planner directory. We’ve pre-sold almost 200 entries for this directory and we’ll be busy populating that data over the next few days. It also has some pretty slick videos (2nd one is in production now), an IRA basics section, and an Ask An Expert function. Via the Ask An Expert page users can post any questions they might have and then only the experts in the system can reply. This ensures that users are getting good sound advice and it’s a value-add for those in the directory. Finally, I’m really excited about the design of the new site. It’s just got an amazing look and feel to it that I think will rival the competition.

Today I’m really excited to be able to announce that Terran Marketing has purchased ira.com in what I hope will become our flagship website. For those of you who read my blog from outside the United States, an IRA is an Individual Retirement Account. These accounts provide a tax shelter while your money is in them, allowing your money to grow tax free. About 70% of people in the United States have an IRA, or some form of retirement account. That’s a lot of people searching for information related to this subject, but I’ll get more into that later. In addition to the search volume the financial industry is one of the strongest on the Internet – in terms of Cost Per Click advertising and Cost Per Acquisition commission payments. Having an exact match domain like this should be a category killer and we’re looking forward to building this project out.

History with IRA.com

We actually closed on this site on September 1st, but haven’t been able to talk about it publicly because of some legal mumbo-jumbo. This deal was accompanied with a fairly lengthy legal agreement which requires us to stay tightlipped about the terms of our deal. However, now that everything is official we are allowed to come forward as the new owners of the site. This is also a good time to give a special shout-out to Derek Giordano for helping us broker the deal.

When we purchased the site on September 1st, it was more of a placeholder for the domain than anything. It wasn’t exactly a parked domain, but it wasn’t much more than a couple of steps above that. Most of the content on the site was fairly weak (short snippet news articles) and wasn’t SEOed at all. Then, there was the issue of the design, which looked like something out of the late 90′s. There is a picture of the original site below as it was when we took it over on September 1st.

Old IRA.com (9/1/11)

I know I’m biased, but if you take a look at what’s on the current ira.com I think you’ll notice a marked improvement. It wasn’t an easy project:

• Over 100 articles had to be written to prepare for the move.
• A new design had to be created.
• The new design had to be turned into a WordPress Theme
• We had to put in 100′s of 301 redirects

Launching this new site taught us a lot about our traffic – thanks to Click Tale. With this in mind we set out to redesign the site again. This time we found a new designer who does absolutely amazing work. I’ve been looking for a designer like this for years – literally. I’m crazy about design elements, but could never quite find the right designer to take my thoughts to the screen. This designer has already done 2 other sites for us that are in the production pipeline. One is a better design for freewp.com and the other is another new exciting project. I’m convinced that with his designs we will be able to take Terran Marketing projects to new heights. To say the least, I’m very excited. You can see a preview of the new version of IRA.com that is coming out next week below:

New IRA.com

By The Numbers

The numbers in this space are absolutely fantastic, which is one of the main reason this site appealed to us. “IRA” gets searched 74,000 times (exact searches) in the USA with a CPC of $22.32. Then, there are 1,800,000 searches if you check the “phrase” box. This includes all kinds of juicy searches such as roth IRA, traditional IRA, rolloever IRA, IRA rules, etc. The site is already getting close to 1,000 unique visitors per day and is currently ranking 4th for “IRA”. That adds up to about a 100% gain in traffic since we took the site over – that was just two months ago. I’m really excited to see what we can do with this site over then next two months as we head into IRA season, which is Jan – Apr.

What We Paid

I talked about this a little bit above, but our agreement prohibits us from talking about the exact deal points of our arrangement. The best I can say is take a look at estibot.com. This is one instance where I think their valuation is at least in the right ballpark. It’s unquestionably a 7 figure domain name.

Future Plans

After we launch the new version of IRA.com next week, which I’m calling version 2.0, we will get to work on version 2.5. This version is going to have a robust retirement calculator / planner that will blow away anything else on the Internet. It will take the place of the quick tools area that you see on the version 2.0 mockup you see above. This planner will ask questions such as how old are you?, what age do you want to retire?, how much money do you make?, do you own a house?, how much do you have saved right now?, etc, etc. After visitors answer all these questions it will put together a custom report that they can use to plan their financial future. It will also make several suggestions that leave the door open for affiliate marketing / lead-gen opportunities such as life insurance, mortgage refinance, brokerage accounts, etc. This is something I’m really excited about and think will be the cornerstone of the site as we move forward.

In addition to the retirement planner, we have some neat features for version 2.0 of the site. The two biggest features are a Financial Expert Directory; over 200 experts have already pre-subscribed. It will be a great resource for visitors on our site who are looking for additional help. In addition to that we have an “ask a question” section where visitors can ask any question they want – only experts in our directory will be able to respond. Again, there is nothing out there that comes close to this and we are really looking forward to launching these new features.

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been over 6 weeks since my last post. That’s because a) we’ve been having a horrible time with getting the right programmers in place. b) we’ve been working on a major project that I haven’t been able to talk about. Nonetheless, I’m happy to report that we finally launched version 1 of onlinedegree.com. We still have a lot of improvements to make with the site, but it’s a good start. Let me get into detail about each of these subjects….

Programmers

When I first launched this blog I vowed to talk about the good and bad going on at Terran Marketing; this is one of those times where I must confess things haven’t been going as smoothly as possible. As a SEO and Internet Marketing company, having good programmers is like the engine of our company. Over the past several weeks we’ve been dealing with programmers who were:

- once good, but later flaked out
- claimed to have a certain skill-set, but really didn’t
- grossly missed deadlines
- weren’t paying attention to details
- or were difficult to work with

The good news is I think we’re finally past a lot of the issues we were having. We’ve been using one company who’s consistently provided good work for us along with a new full time programmer and 3 contractors. If all goes well we’ll be able to catch up on the backlog that was created and get everything back on track again.

Major New Project

As I eluded to at the beginning of this post, the main reason I haven’t had time to post anything on the blog is because of a major new project we’ve been working on. Due to some legal issues (contracts and NDA) I just haven’t been able to post about it. However, I’m happy to report that everything is signed now and I’ll be able to make a post about this project tomorrow. It’s our first 7-figure domain name purchase and something I hope will be a “category killer” as they say.

Launch Of OnlineDegree.com

Through all this we finally got onlinedegree.com launched. It ended up taking a few weeks longer than expected, but we’re really happy that it’s live now. The site is currently ranking around 25th for the term “online degree” and even with the relatively low traffic we have right now it’s already converting leads! This is a very exciting project for us and it’s clearer than ever that we made a really good investment. We’re already working on several improvements for the site and I’ll post about those once they are live.