A few weeks back I launched two sites that I'm involved in, topcommentator.com and lucky.ie. Lucky.ie has thrived and between myself and Sean we've been able to produce 60 posts in 25 days. It's also been great fun working on it.

I'm afraid the same cannot be said for topcommentator.com. The idea behind the site is to generate traffic by posting on other blogs. It's pretty experimental and I suppose it was always going to be a long term thing but so far we've done nothing with the site apart from create it.

photo credit: Stephen Hackett

We've even had a free plug for Leo over at LeoFogarty.com (go and have a look at Leo's site - there's loads of great info on there), but we just haven't got round to actually going out there and commenting on other blogs. As I say it's a long term project and hopefully I will take some time to start some of the experiments we have planned for the site some time soon. At the minute I don't really have much time as I'm getting ready to move over to England. One thing I have done for topcommentator.com though is to prepare some posts for it. So I'll roll these out over the next week or two just so the effort doesn't go to waste and we have some nice content for search engines to pick up.

Anyway, I'm just letting you know that I haven't forgot about this site. We may need to devise a new strategy to grow the site but won't thing that won't happen no matter what is that we'll throw random spam like comments about to try and gain traffic. That was never the idea behind this project. The idea was to promote traffic by commenting on other blogs. These comments will be genuine comments that hopefully promote discussion on other people's blogs and our own site too. I'd rather leave the project as is than become recognised as a site that 'only' comments for our own benefit!

So far, apart from the first week, I've been able to turn a profit every week while taking part in the online betting competition I'm involved in over on lucky.ie. It's great fun placing the bets and blogging on the site and because I've won for 3 weeks in a row, I'm questioning if I could consistently make a profit by betting online?

photo credit: Will Palmer

Make no mistake, I'm under no false impressions here. I'm not getting carried away and I'd need to be able to consistently turn a profit over a 6 month period before ever contemplating trying this out full time. In fact, if you were to ask me now for a definite answer I'd say that it's more probable that I'll loose than win in the long term. My fellow contestant on lucky.ie, Sean has said that gambling helps decision making and improves your knowledge of probability, statistics and chance. This is definitely true and to really ever have a chance of consistently winning you need to be constantly studying form and increasing your knowledge.

photo credit: Kristian M

So far, here's what I think will give me the best chance to win money and hopefully succeed on lucky.ie.

These are just my observations. Professional gamblers may tell me I'm wrong but until operating like this stops working for me I'll continue to bet within these rules. I have broken my own rules at times over the last few weeks and sometimes this might work if I need to get bigger wins. However, I have regretted breaking my rules as it could have made me go broke, and in the long term risking you're entire bankroll will not work. Yes, you need to be prepared to loose everything if you're gambling. If you don't risk it all at once though, you're definitely decreasing you're chances of going broke. No matter what, you'll definitely need a bit of luck now and again!

I mentioned that I had two new sites going live yesterday in my previous post. You'll see I've added 125x125 image links to both sites at the top of my sidebar so go and have a look. I've teamed up with Sean at Smemon.com for both these projects and you can see what Sean wrote about them here.

So both sites are now live. We agree that they both need work over the next few weeks and in the long term and we're pretty open to how each project develops over time. Obviously there is a good bit of work running 3 different blog sites so eventually we'd like to open at least one of these sites up as a community based site if we get enough visitors. Here's a bit more about each of the new websites.

TopCommentator.com: If you've been reading my blog, you'll know that I've had this idea for a while. Sean designed the logo for topcommentator.com and I asked him to team up on the project as two heads are better than one (he also designed the logo for lucky.ie, I think they both look very well). TopCommentator.com will be used to comment on top blogs on the internet in the hope that we gain traffic back to our own site. We need to be careful with this one so we're not seen as spammers but the idea is more to have a useful base to use as a blog reading platform.

We're both reading these blogs anyway so we'll be provided comments that promote discussion on other sites and hopefully we'll be seen as adding value to these sites as contributors as opposed to just commenting for the sake of a link back to topcommentator.com. There won't be any "nice post" or "good idea" comments coming from us!

Lucky.ie: This idea came about as a result of discussing Betfair and domain names at the same time. Lucky.ie is a site we're myself and Sean compete against each other each month to see who can win/loose the least as online gamblers.

This site will be the easiest of all to run as we'll basically be detailing every online bet that we place .As it's a competition, we'll both be trying hard to out do each other with plenty of bets, so content for this site shouldn't be a problem. In the first day alone, we've had 5 posts, so you can see the benefits of partnering up on a site already if you're trying to develop content for a website. We're probably not going to win or loose a fortune, but it'll be great fun running this site!

There's a couple of other sites that we're talking about teaming up, so hopefully you'll see me adding some more sites to my portfolio before the end of the Summer.

I'm involved in two new websites that are launching on Saturday. I've mentioned TopCommentator.com earlier this week and the other site is a .ie website aimed targeting Irish readers although we'll be happy to get as many international visitors as we can to the site also. I've teamed up with Sean at Smemon.com on both these projects and he's wrote a little bit more about the .ie project here.

photo credit: TopTechWriter.US

I suppose with TopCommentator.com, I've been mentioning it for a while and it's probably not the best move in the world to be mentioning a site that isn't live yet. But we've agreed that this is a long term project and we can develop the look of the site over time. For the launch on Saturday we just need enough content on the site to establish the idea behind it before getting down to a bit of work to move the site onwards. The general idea is to get traffic for the site but we'll be approaching it slowly and letting the traffic grow naturally over time. We're hoping that we can produce stats on this project that are valuable to others that are looking to build traffic for their own websites.

For the .ie project, this is very much a fun project where myself and Sean will be competing against each other online and blogging about our experiences. With this one, again we want to establish the site over time and we're open to the idea of getting more people involved as the site grows, with a view to eventually making this a community based site. I'll be updating this blog with a link to the .ie site on Saturday, and you can keep checking back on both it and TopCommentator.com to track our progress.

photo credit: Will Lion

I had it in my mind at the beginning of the Summer that I'd have at least 3 established websites by the end of the Summer. With Rudevid.com, TopCommentator.com and the .ie project I've already achieved this. All these sites as well as my blog will only get better over time but I'm slowly building a small portfolio of sites, so this blog is working well for me as a control centre for running my projects from. There's at least 2 more sites that I'll have up and running before the end of the Summer, so there will a good bit of work maintaining all these sites. If I keep working at all of them and get each project whipped into shape then I'll be learning new things all the time and hopefully I'll be producing better and better sites as time goes on.

Domain hunting again today and thinking of a few ideas. Came up with a new one: prepaybay.com. This could be used for an auction site where the bidder must have enough money in their account before bidding. Bidding on an item locks down the bidders money and ensures that the seller gets paid every time. The selllers prepaybay account then gets updated with the money and they can withdraw if they like. I just came up with this idea after seeing an auction on ebay where someone had made a fake bid and wrecked the auction. A website like prepaybay.com would eliminate this kind of thing. Anyway, I'm not going with this idea as I have a few other projects coming up over the Summer. If you read the rest of this article you'll discover that when it comes to domain names I'm capable of coming up with the odd gem (even if I don't always register them ). If you like the idea of prepaybay.com, why not paste it in to the box below and go register it!

	.com .net .org .us .biz .info .tv .cc .ws .ca .de .jp .co.uk .org.uk .co.nz .net.nz .org.nz .mobi .eu

I did however come up with another domain name for a novel idea relating to Twitter. I'm going to ask someone else for advice before going ahead with it. I actually messed up big time a few weeks ago. I was looking at ripmichaeljackson.com and michaeljacksonrip.com and was going to buy both. I ended up not buying either of them! If I would have asked advice on this I maybe would have snapped them up! So why did I mess up? Well ripmichaeljackson.com just sold on ebay for $1025 and I see it's up for sale again, although it's not doing as well this time. If I'd have bought both of them I'm sure I would have been able to selll both together for a lot more. Now, I'm not saying that prepaybay.com is going to be worth this kind of money. An idea is nothing without the hard work to complete the project (and maybe this has been done before?!? drop me a comment to let me know if it has). But it just goes to show that there can be money made on domains names if you think and act fast! This makes me think, would it be worth registering webregrets.com as a forum where people come to admit mistakes they've made online... I'll leave it for now.. no regrets if someone else goes ahead with it! I also updated the domains section of this site with this idea.