Alex Pooley's Blog

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Wow. That’s all I have to say after reading “this”:http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,1132510,00.html article. This guy has been buying up domain names for 10 years. He’s making $2 *million a year* from 5,000 domains.

You can purchase a domain for $8.95 from “GoDaddy.”:http://godaddy.com So from a $44750 investment (plus whatever hosting+other costs?), he’s returning $2,000,000 per year. These are _huge_ numbers particularly when you consider the Australian stock market and property industry have grown on average at about 12% each year for the last 30 years.

I have been saying it for a while, domains are very similar to property. In fact I did a quick search and it turns out you can even lease domains now! _Eventually_ the domain market will turn in to the property market. Throw on your extreme hat and project from now in to the future given the current direction - all useful domains will be owned and there will be more and more people needing to use them.

All these figures are in US currency.

People often confuse problem solving with creative thinking. Problem solving uses logic to derive a solution where as creative thinking does not necessarily have any logical basis. To innovate and invent you need to be able to think creatively and not just join the logical dots.

“Edward de Bono”:http://www.edwdebono.com/ is an authority on creative thinking and teaching thinking as a skill. One of his famous techniques is the “Six Thinking Hats.”:http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_bono_six_thinking_hats.html The idea of the six thinking hats is that you look at your problem from six different perspectives in an attempt to widen your vision and consider perspectives outside your usual consideration.

I do not use the six thinking hats but I do something similar where I look at a problem from all the extreme points of view. To an entreprenuer this may mean that you look at the best and worst case scenario of a potential strategy, or perhaps what you stand to gain versus what you stand to lose. VIewing the potential future from these perspectives provide you with a greater awareness of what could happen. Extremes act as a guide in the future that would otherwise leave you in an abyss of uncertainty.

In terms of thinking creatively, extreme points of view give you a straight forward way to view your problem from a different perspective. You can still remain logical in projecting your extremes based on what you know now, but you can also *push the limits of reality and find the potential in anything*.

I recently signed up with Google analytics. It’s a _free_ service from Google that allows you to track visitors to your web site. There’s also pretty tight integration with Google’s Adwords so you can manage your advertising campaigns more effectively.

I find the utility a nice addition to my set of packages. The statistics are only updated every day it seems, though I’ve read reports that they are meant to be updated every 6 hours. The service is entirely free and you just need to whack in some javascript to every page you want tracked by the service.

To complement these stats I also use “analog”:http://www.analog.cx/ on my web server to collate and present me with up to the second web usage. An alternative to analog is “awstats”:http://awstats.sourceforge.net/ which is written in perl. Analog is written in C and is consequently much faster parsing your log files than awstats.