In 2012 I am making a number of key upgrades to my blog. Many of these are based on survey’s that I have conducted getting feedback from blog readers on what they like and what they don’t like. One of the biggest pieces of feedback I received from readers was frustrating with anonymous commentators that would start fights or insult them without providing their real name. This was a very tough decision to make since I have always been a fan of letting just about any comment through giving my readers the voice they deserve.

So I decided it was time to go the way of some of my own favorite blogs like AVC, Engadget, and many many more and upgrade my comment system. I am using the Disqus comment system which is one of the most highly-rated and interactive comment systems out there. Not only are anonymous commentators a thing of the past but my comment stream will become much more interactive and usable. It’s a major upgrade and it’s already been great using it on my post from earlier today.

Since I started this blog back in 2007 I have always been passionate about giving a voice to my readers. I am still more passionate about that than ever, but in doing so I want to provide my readers with a comfortable environment to share their thoughts and ideas. Heck, let’s face it, I’m giving full disclosure and sharing my first and last name along with many of my private business dealings from domain sales to development income, the least you could do is let me know who you are!

The exciting thing about using Disqus is that you can login using just about any service you currently have an account with like Facebook or Twitter. This means that you don’t have to share your real name so you can still remain personally anonymous since Twitter accounts, Open ID, etc. can be used without exposing your name, location, etc. There are some very cool features for following the comment stream and responding to specific comments that I think will make commenting on my blog a lot more fun.

This is one of many upgrades coming to MorganLinton.com in 2012 based on feedback from you, my readers! With the first upgrade in place on January 2nd it’s onto the next – enjoy and happy commenting this year!

I am adding some awesome new features to MorganLinton.com in 2012 and one of them that I am really excited about it live chat. In fact, I got so excited about it that I decided to add it to the blog a few days early. As you scroll down you will notice the window on the right sidebar. Along with including it on the sidebar I’ll also be adding live chat to specific posts which I will hang-out and chat with people about after I write them.

I feel this goes a step beyond responding to comments and actually lets me and my readers have a normal conversation. In general I will not be setting specific times that I’ll be available, instead I’ll just pop on and start talking to readers. If you happen to be on my blog when this happens then we can have a conversation. This is a great chance to ask me any questions you have or get advice on a specific project.

For my Newsletter Subscribers I’m adding a little bonus. At least once a month I will be holding a scheduled chat but the time will only be available to newsletter subscribers. These will usually be focused on a specific topic with my first chat coming-up in January! If you are not yet subscribed to my newsletter make sure to subscribe now!

Now every time you visit your blog you might find me here available to say hello. 2012 is going to be an exciting year and it’s only a few days away! Stay-tuned and I look forward to chatting with you soon!

Merry Christmas! There’s something magical about Christmas, maybe it’s the focus on family or friends, or the magic of children who believe a fat man in a red suit goes down their chimney at night. Either way it’s a very special day and a time to relax and be with family, so honestly, you shouldn’t be reading this post! In fact, as you know if you read my post yesterday, I’m not writing this post on Christmas day but instead on Thursday night three days before. Ah the wonders of WordPress…

Right now Daina and I are in cabin in the snow in Big Bear enjoying a beautiful Christmas morning. I want to keep this post short since your focus really should be on your family and friends. I usually do a lot of reflecting on the year around the holidays and this year I feel very thankful, so I wanted to take a moment to thank some of my most active readers and people who have been following along with my blog since 2007.

Francois – first I want to thank Francois! If you look back at the very early days of my blog you’ll see Francois as an early commenter. Domaining.com has changed the industry and really brought us together in a way that other industries aren’t.

Leonard Britt – Leonard has been reading for a long time now and always posts some of the most detailed and insightful comments. I read every comment I get and have found Leonard to continually post some of the most well thought-out comments out there.

Jason Thompson – Jason has been following my blog since probably around early 2008. He reached-out early on for us to meet in person in LA and we’ve been friends ever since! We run the Los Angeles Domaining MeetUp together and have had some great adventures from New Years at a Bel Air Mansion to VIP seats for the Clippers. I consider Jason a true friend and he’s also one of the most insightful commenters I have!

Louise – Louise has been a major supporter and was the first person to comment on StartupNook which gives her all star status!

Uzoma – Another consistent commenter who’s been following along for long enough for me to not remember how long that is!

Poor Uncle – You’ll see Poor Uncle as a major commenter on a number of blogs. Poor Uncle is one of my favorites because he speaks his mind and shares in the conversation. That’s what it’s all about and I look forward to all the conversations ahead!

DomainFuze! – A new reader but very active commenter this year and a great voice to adding to the mix. I always like it when I see DomainFuze! show up in the comment list!

Ted Olson – this list would be incomplete if Ted wasn’t on it! Ted was one of my first blog readers as he commented on my blog a few months after I started writing it. Ted took the time early-on to respond to one of my posts and really inspired me to keep writing as these comments were one of the fist signs my blog had a pulse!

Teen Domainer – Brian and I have been blogging buddies for quite some time now and he’s always been a great commenter on my blog. I like that Brian can get into the tech-side of Domaining with me. Keep you eyes on Brian, he’s already done big things and something tells me he’ll be going even bigger over the next few years!

Jeff Schneider – Jeff’s been a avid commenter for a few years now and always has great feedback. All his comments also end with (Metal Tiger) which just sounds cool!

AndyO – Andy rocks! Read Andy’s comments and you’ll see that he is a really bright guy and we need more people like him in the industry. Andy – tell all your friends to become Domainers, we need more people like you!

I’m sure that I missed a number of people and I just want to say thank you to absolutely every one of my readers. What started as a way for me to keep notes for myself has turned into a blog that has become part of my everyday life. I can now say that I write every single day and have done so for more than four years.

This Christmas I am thankful to all of you who have followed my blog and kept my energy level where it is. Here’s to the next fifty Christmas’s! Okay, now this shot post really didn’t end-up being short, but I do get pretty darn reflective around the holidays! Now get back to your family and friends, they’re probably looking for you by now!

(Photo Credits: baltus15 on Flickr)

Last week I took a survey on my blog asking readers to share their feedback on a number of different areas. I was very interested to understand which topics where most interesting to my readers and which topics bored them (or you) to death. I was also interested in understanding if there was a particular time of day and number of posts that people preferred.

The results for this survey have been incredibly helpful and allowing me to stay focused on what is of the most interest to my readers. At the end of the day whether your running a blog, a bike shop, or a Fortune 500 company understanding your customers is critical to improving over time. So here they are – the results, keep reading to learn how I’m applying this feedback to the blog – that’s right, as Dr. Frasier Crane would say, “I’m listening”

So what were my main learning from this survey and how will it change my blog?

• It is clear that Domain Development is the topic my readers enjoy the most. I’ve been all over the place this year from development to SEO, to startups. Time to get focused and give the people what they want. Going forward you’ll find a majority of my content to be focused on Domain Development. Don’t worry, I’ll still be talking about the other topics I’m passionate about but I’ll be giving Domain Development it’s rightful fair share of focus. My Domain Development 101 post is a good example of the direction I’m going in and based on the feedback I received on that post I feel confident I’m moving in the right direction!
• It is also clear that nobody wants to hear me talk about venture capital deals. It was quite surprising to see that this was the most disliked topic but I hear you loud and clear and posts about venture capital and companies raising millions of dollars will be few and far between going forward.
• Posting once a day, in the morning. This year I’ve gone back-and-forth between doing one or two posts a day, and picking the right time of day to post. Based on the feedback I’ve received it looks like one really solid post in the morning is better than two posts throughout the day. I looked back ay my analytics data and you I can see in the traffic patterns as well, days with one really good post do better than those with two pretty good posts.
• It might be time to start selling developed sites on my blog. I’ve been thinking of this one for a while, what about selling some developed websites on my blog. I could verify all the stats myself and make sure that only fully legitimate and valuable sites are listed for sale. Since this is a space I’m passionate about and very active in I think it might be a great feature to add. I’d ask what you think…but you already told me and 78.4% is a good indication that there’s an interest here.

I’ve been talking a lot about customer development on my blog – the process of really getting to know your customers and finding-out if the assumptions you have about them, are true. In many cases your assumptions are really just that, assumptions, it is testing your assumptions that can allow you to learn how to build a better product or service. While I’ve done customer development with many of our top brands, I haven’t yet done it with my own brand and this blog!

In 2007 when I started MorganLinton.com I thought it would be a simple blog that nobody would read. I could use the blog format instead to keep a log of what I was doing in the domain investing space so I could access it from anywhere. In close to four years this has become more than a blog for me, its a new part of my daily life and a way to connect with people all over the world. As you all know I’m a passionate guy and what began as a blog about Domaining has expanded to now cover SEO, startups, venture capital, and more.

Now I’m one of those guys that likes to keep everyone happy…I know Bob Marley says that you can’t please all the people all of the time, but I can at least try right? So I thought now was time to ask you, my reader, what you like, don’t like, and would like to see on my blog. I’ve designed this survey to be short and sweet so it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes of your time. If you want to help make my blog better, or even just complain about what I do that drives you crazy…this is the place to do it!

Thanks in advance for helping do real customer development. At the end of the day my blog may be called MorganLinton.com but the articles are for you my readers! Your opinion means the world to me and since I plan on writing my blog for at least the next 50 years (yup, I’ll retire from blogging at 80) you can play an active role in making this blog the best that it can be!

A reader sent me an email recently saying that they loved my blog, loved Domaining, loved startups, but wanted to learn more about blogging. This reader mentioned to me how he really loves reading blogs, wants to start his own, but doesn’t quite know how to put all the pieces together. That’s when I realized…I’ve never really done an introduction to blogging post, and it’s long overdue.

I’ve been blogging for almost four years now (started this blog in October of 2007) and since then I’ve learned a lot about blogging. That being said I never close my mind to learning new things and honestly think I learn something new about blogging just about every day!

Over the last couple of years I have consulted with several new bloggers to help them get started. So I thought now is as good a time as any to share my advice with all of you. Blogging can be an extremely satisfying thing, however it is a real time commitment, and it’s not always easy, but if you stick with it, I think you’ll find it to be an incredible experience and part of your life.

This is the first in a series of Blogging Basics posts I’ll be doing here. I figure that what I share can be useful not only to people starting blogs, but also to those of my readers who already have blogs, or companies who have been thinking about adding a blog to their site. In this first post my goal is to give you the basics of starting a blog so you can first validate if blogging is for you.

Starting a blog can be divided into a few simple steps:

1. Pick a topic – make sure you pick a topic that you can write about. Your blog should be about something you find yourself talking and thinking about all the time. I think about startups, Domaining, SEO, etc. all the time so I always have a million different posts I could write. If you love marathons and read marathon magazine and attend tons of marathon events, you probably have a lot of interesting things you can share on your blog. The point is, pick a topic you’re passionate about, not a topic you think will make you money.
2. Pick a Domain Name – pick a domain name that is memorable and easy to type. The domain name is the most forward facing part of your blog so you want it to be as strong as possible.
3. Setup WordPress – if you’re going to have a blog you really should go with WordPress. The theme and plugin library is huge which makes it easy to get a great looking, feature-rich site using the platform. You can easily install WordPress with a hosting service like Hostgator. Another great thing about WordPress and Hostgator is that you don’t need to know anything about servers or a single line of code – it’s just point and click.
4. Install Essential Plugins – I recommend you install the following plugins right-away: secure wordpress, all in one seo pack, bad behavior, Akismet (installed but needs API key). Secure WordPress will help keep your blog secure, the all in one seo pack is great for optimizing your blog for search engines, bad behavior will prevent brute force attacks (bad), and Akismet will get rid of spam. Bam! It’ll take only 2-3 minutes to install these plugins and you’ll have added some serious power and security under the hood of your blog!
5. Start Blogging – start blogging – don’t spent twenty years designing the most amazing-looking blog. You can often find a theme that looks good for free, but, if you want to look really professional right-away you can also use WooThemes which has WordPress Themes made by professional designers.
6. Blog Every Day – if you really want your blog to take-off, you need to blog every day. When I first started blogging I only wrote a post every few days, sometimes even a week would go by between posts. I spoke to a pro blogger than I knew who said, “are you crazy, if you want your blog to take-off, you need to blog every day!” This is the truth, if you can’t keep-up with blogging every single day you can still have a blog, but if you want your blog to really take-off and grow readership, it’s all about blogging every day. Just think it about why this makes sense. As you develop readers they want to know the next time you post, if it’s ever few days they may check back on your site from time to time, but it won’t become part of their day. Real hard-core blog readers love daily bloggers, they read them every day, and every day there is fresh content for them to read!
7. Keep on blogging – the #1 reason why so many bloggers fail is that they lose steam. In the beginning it can be exciting and blogging daily is a new adventure. However if you miss a few days that may soon become a habit and before you know it, you’re not posting much any more and thus people stop coming to your blog. Now I’m not trying to tell you that your blog has to be a huge success, but if you want it to be you’ll have to stick with it! In the beginning it can be discouraging because you won’t have many visitors or comments…but wait, the day you get your first comment will be exciting, and the beginning of the next phase of your blog.

These are the basic steps to starting a blog and one important golden rule to remember – blog every single day. Happy blogging and of course feel free to comment below, this is a blog after all!

Hello everyone and welcome to another branding case study! Based on the traffic and feedback it is clear that these are some of my most popular posts ever. Since I have so much fun writing them I think this will become a Wednesday tradition. In case you have missed my last case studies you can find them below:

• Case Study: Building a Brand on DebtEliminationPrograms.com
• Case Study: Building A Brand On Kayaking.org

Today I’m going to talk about a brand I’ve been really passionate about and one that has been a lot of fun to build. This brand is CivilizedTravel.net and it’s all about how to make travel more enjoyable. Now I know what you’re going to say so let me clear this up quickly…while saying what it is you’re going to say. “But wait, Morgan, you just told us you were going .COM and that .COM is now the focus of your business, what are you talking about crazy man!”

In this case this is a brand where I really loved the concept of “Civilized Travel” and I am the owner of facebook.com/civilizedtravel and twitter.com/civilizedtravel and I’ve made countless offers on the .COM but the owner doesn’t want to sell. That’s okay – in this case I’m building a great brand, yes I’d love the .COM but you can still build a great brand without the .COM however having the .COM is better and I’m not going to lie and tell you I don’t care, because I do! There are HUGE brands run on .NET and .ORG domains that couldn’t secure their .COM’s and I like the term “civilized travel” so much that I’m willing to make this sacrifice.

Okay, now onto the good stuff, building a civilized travel brand!

First things first, why build this brand. For those who know me you know that I absolutely love to travel and I do a lot of traveling. While I’ve shared some travel adventures on this blog from time to time I really wanted a place to share my love of travel along with my approach to travel. Since I’ve been traveling heavily for the last seven years I’ve learned a lot about how to make travel more enjoyable and I really enjoy sharing that with other people.

I also know that there are other people out there who also love travel and have a similar mindset that would love to share their stories as well and one of them, Kevin Fink, is sharing his travel adventures as well. This brand is not a store, it’s not a page full of links, it’s not all about money, it’s about building a brand that I really care about and this brand happens to be another blog. We’ve been seeing some good traction lately with over 800 Facebook fans and some good friends on Twitter that we now correspond with regularly.

There are a lot of things we are doing to build this brand both in the search engines and social media so as with all my case studies, I’ll share what I’m doing with all of you! Of course feel free to ask any questions you have about the process or why I do things the way that I do.

1. It all started when I came-up with the idea of “civilized travel” – I was in an airport watching stressed people panic and freak-out in front of me. One guy dashed by late for a flight, a mother yelled at her kids, and someone was arguing with someone else on the phone. This doesn’t look like fun, I thought! However for me it was fun, I love traveling, I expect things to go wrong and I’m prepared for it. Flight delayed – great! I have a bunch of things planned already. Flight canceled! Cool – I wanted to check-out a restaurant I read about in this city anyways. Yes, I’m one of those glass half-full kind of guys.
2. For me securing the brand meant really bringing meaning to the term so I got the domain (yes once again wish I had the .COM but the .NET is just fine for now!), securing the facebook name, and securing the Twitter handle.
3. The next thing I did was installed WordPress, in this case it’s not because I think WordPress is great for building sites, it’s actually terrible to scale with since having a million WordPress sites means having a million sites that can easily be hacked. I choose WordPress because it’s a blog and WordPress is the best damn blogging platform on the planet, period.
4. The great thing about a blog is you just start blogging. I travel all the time so I had plenty of things to share and I just started writing.
5. I got on Twitter and started following a few people I liked in the travel world and started retweeting articles of theirs that I liked as well as sharing my own.
6. I did the same on Facebook making a Facebook page and advertising it through Facebook Ads to attract more people to the brand.
7. Rinse, repeat. I’ve got a lot to say when it comes to travel, I read travel blogs and travel news every day because I love travel so it’s really just been a lot of fun.
8. I’m also tracking the site in SEOMoz Pro as there are a number of keywords that we’re trying to rank well for, this is the best way to keep track of your rankings and better understand how to build your organic traffic the right way

I think one of the keys in building this brand has been social media. I spent five minutes every morning on my twitter account and probably 15-20 minutes/day writing my post. Now I’ve expanded to a second writer re-investing some of the profits into staff. As I’ve said before I really like doing this and it’s a great way to create a business. In the beginning I like putting in my own blood, sweat, and tears until it starts generating revenue, once revenue starts coming in I think it’s wise to invest some of those profits into you doing less, or in this case, the site getting more.

The next steps are adding a third writer and doing some guest posts on other travel blogs. The nice thing is that since I’ve been active on Twitter for a while now I have some great connections that I can reach-out to for guest posting both me on their site, and them on mine. I also created a “Recommended by CivilizedTravel.net” badge that I send to people that I provide to anyone that I review on the site.So what’s ahead for this brand?

1. I’ll be adding a Civilized Store that’s all the travel gear I myself use and love (Tumi is high on the list!)
2. Like I said above I am looking for one more regular writer so there will be three of us
3. I am also making business cards this month for myself and my writer so when we visit somewhere that we’re going to blog about, we can leave them with a card
4. There are some great travel-related tradeshows and I plan to attend one in 2012
5. Direct Advertising – right now the revenue for the site comes from Affiliate Ads and AdSense but I’m in the middle of negotiating our first direct ad deal, this will most-likely replace both the Affiliate and Adsense ads in the future
6. Civilized Travel Social Network – I’m going to be making a Ning Social Network that plugs-into the site so it’s easy for people to communicate with each other and share ideas

This is by far one of the most fun brands that I run and we’re seeing a steady increase in traffic and revenue each month which is a good thing! It’s always more fun to work on things that you love and I look forward to updating all of you as this brand continues to grow and develop. Now it’s your turn, comment and let your voice be heard!

This is something that I never like to see but if you head on over to TeenDomainer.com you’ll see the following page:

It appears that a hacker going under the name “Silent_Hell” has somehow gained access to Brian’s server/Wordpress Install and put-up this page. As someone that has had many sites hacked over the years I know how frustrating this is and I am reaching-out to Brian to help-out.

I have found that many of these hackers have .CN or .RU email addresses and can be very hard to track-down. This is one of the main reasons I use VaultPress which is a great WordPress plugin that constantly backs-up your blog when something like this happens.

While I will be lending a hand today I would also like to reach-out to any of my readers that have experience fixing hacked sites along and tracking down hackers like this. Brian is a really nice guy and TeenDomainer.com is one of my favorite blogs in our space so it’s always sad to see something like this happen to someone that is doing so much good for our community. If you want to lend a hand or have some expertise that might come in handy please comment below and I’ll pass your information along to Brian.

Well there’s never a dull moment around here and as you may have noticed MorganLinton.com went down for about 15 minutes today. The reason? Traffic on my blog has grown far and beyond my wildest expectations and finally out-paced my shared hosting account. In an effort to fix the performance issues and get MorganLinton.com back up to full-speed we moved it to a high-performance VPS this morning provided by Hostgator.

Unfortunately in the server move about ten comments made on my post about Epik yesterday got lost in the ether of serverland. If your comment was one of the comments that was lost I’d like to first apologize, and then ask if you want, to post it again. Ever since I started this blog I’ve made sure to always post every comment that comes in, good or bad, loving or hating, if you want your voice to be heard – my blog is the place!

It looks like my post about Epik yesterday stirred-up some great comments and interesting conversation. I hope that everyone who lost their comment in the server move re-posts so we can keep the discussion going.

At a time like this I can’t help but get a bit reflective because while this is a problem, it’s a good problem to have – too much traffic for a server to handle. It’s taken me on a short trip down memory lane which I thought I’d share with all of you. So I started this blog (originally called DomainFlipBlog.com) as a way to keep a live journal of my progress in the Domain Investing space. I never planned on blogging every day or really having this blog reach more than a few people. Over the last three and a half years this blog has grown beyond my wildest expectations but the entire time I’ve tried to stay focused on my original goal, sharing my experiences with my own business.

I started my company with an initial investment of about $30,000, money that was originally intended to be the down-payment on a real estate investment. Less than four years later I have a six-figure business and around 180 active online brands. It’s been a dream come true and an absolute blast to share this growth and excitement with all of you.

What has been interesting to see is that through the evolution of this blog some people have started to considered me a blogger. While I would love to claim that I make a fortune blogging the truth is that 90% of the income from my business comes from monetized domains and sales and less than 10% of my income comes from my blog and my book. I blog because I love writing and sharing my successes and failures with all of you. Please remember though, my blog occupies about 30-45 minutes of my time each day, my business about 4 hours of my time, and my day job 8-10 hours…yes I don’t sleep much!

This year I’ve been working on much bigger projects than I ever have before and teamed-up with my fiance to create a software company that we hope will change the world. No, I’m not talking about Xelot, although that is getting ready for primetime – I’m talking about something much bigger. This year since a number of these projects have been in stealth-mode I haven’t done as much sharing of what’s been going on within my business and I wanted to let all of you know…that’s going to change soon as these projects get ready for public viewing.

This started as a blog for me to keep track of my own progress but has evolved into a resource for a truly global audience as I have regular readers from over fifty countries! I would like to take this moment to thank all of you for reading, commenting, emailing, and everything else that you’ve done to make this blog what it is today.

So welcome to a new, faster version of MorganLinton.com with a server that is ready for the next stage in my blog’s evolution. The next 4-6 months are going to be the most exciting moments of my life, I’ll be showing you what’s been going on behind the scenes all year…and I think you’re going to like it. What started as a business buying domains and building mini-sites has turned into a real company, complete with employees, contractors, and most importantly – real brands with a global reach and customers on every continent. I didn’t do this with just one hour a day of time, this wasn’t some get-rich-quick scheme that I can pass-onto anyone that wants to learn it. This took three and a half years to build, sacrificing mornings, nights, weekends, and many of the things we take for granted in our daily lives.

Was it all worth it? Absolutely. I wake-up every morning more excited than ever to get started with my day. I look forward to Monday and honestly I live a life I dreamed of with the woman of my dreams. We still go wine tasting once a month, enjoy time at the beach, and travel the world, but most of the time you can find me doing my best to change the world that we all live in together. Are you ready? I sure hope so because the adventure is really only just beginning!

So TechCrunch is a site I read daily, okay, a million times a day! They recently did a major overhaul to their look-and-feel as well as the logo. The redesign started last year before the company was acquired by AOL last year. It’s pretty cool to see a project survive an acquisition considering that AOL could have canned the whole thing. Their goal was to make the site more simple. That’s right, in case you haven’t noticed simple is in, complex is out. Or as wired would say, complex is getting tired.

They are still using WordPress which shows just how darn cool this platform is for blogging. The new logo has drawn a lot of controversy, their goal was to make something bold, simple, and versatile. Overall I’m a fan of the new design but not as much of the new logo however I do understand their reasons for choosing it. What do you think? Did TechCrunch take a bold step forward with this new design and logo, or will you still be reading the cached version and catching-up on your favorite stories from 2009?