I just re-launched a site which makes buying websites much easier. There are over 20 sites on the web that you can visit to find websites for sale. My new project, SiteViper.com, simplified the process of finding attractive properties. The key features are:

• Consolidated Listings – from over 20 sources – including popular marketplaces and forums such as Flippa, NamePros, Godaddy, DNForum, AQDN, Websitebroker, and many others
• Site Research Tools – SiteViper  gives you easy access to the traffic data from Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa, back link information from SEOMoz, and the history of the site from Google Cache and Archive.org.

While doing some research on renting out my condo in Charlotte, I found a novel technique for making money from Craigslist.  About once a week, someone posts links for a condo for rent. The person’s posts have pictures and a very reasonable price listed. Instead of providing a phone number or email address, he encourages people to contact him through his website. The site is a domain parking page at Sedo with PPC ads for condos in downtown Charlotte. The condo market is pretty hot here, and related keywords are going for over $1.00 per click on Adwords. Even after Sedo takes their cut, he is still doing pretty well. I am curious how much traffic this could generate.

Over the last few weeks, I have been working on a new site to make buying existing websites and domains easier. Tonight, I can proudly say that SiteViper 1.0 is now up and ready for action. I was spending a lot of time scanning forums that listed websites for sale. The process is terribly inefficient, and I am not a big fan of the tools that are already out there to help aggregate listings.

So why is SiteViper worth using?

• SiteViper aggregates for sale listings from around the web so that you don’t have to spend time wading through forums. Listings are refreshed every 15 minutes, so you will not miss anything.

Over the past few weeks, I have come across a couple tools that have helped me to really crank out my latest project. I can’t emphasize how much time these have saved me.

Open Source Web Design Templates – From elementary school on, I have been pretty much a failure at anything that involves an artistic sense. Open source templates are free, and I have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of some of the designs. After muddling through a number of template sites, my favorites are FreeCSSTemplates.org, OpenDesigns.org, OpenWebDesign.org, and OSWD.org. It may take some time to find a good design, but it is well worth it.

The recent posting of Facebook’s allegedly non-existent advertising rate card provides insight into the company’s monetization strategy.

Some of my doubts about Facebook’s ability to monetize their platform were fueled by recent reports of abysmal performance for bulletin advertising (0.04% click through rate). Facebook users are relatively sophisticated, and they just don’t click on conventional advertisements, or even the Facebook specific bulletins. So how will Facebook generate revenue to justify the lofty valuations being tossed around by the media?

I was signing up for a Photobucket account the other day, and I was quite surprised by their aggresive attempt to monetize new signups. On the registration screen, you are asked to provide your cell phone number. If you enter your cell phone number, a pre-checked bx appears which reads “Yes, I would like my chance to win a new HDTV or a $500 Starbucks gift card and other great prizes from Bid4Prizes.”

Some of the details of the .cm domain name monetization scheme have been revealed since my last post on .cm domain names.  Business 2.0 ran a great article about what is going on with the .cm domain space. In my initial post, I detailed how nearly all .cm domain names were being redirected to a landing page on agoga.com that features ppc links from yahoo. The redirects and landing pages are managed by uber-domainer Kevin Ham. He has worked out an agreement with the government of Cameroon to share the revenues derived from the landing pages.

Social Networking site Tagged is going through explosive growth, and they have  an interesting growth and monetization strategy. Last week, a techcrunch profile mentioned that they are signing up 350,000 new users per day and generating 1 billion page views per month.  The site’s monthly revenue is $600k per month.

The first thing that sparked my interest was how on earth they could maintain such a rapid rate of new user acquisition.  During their signup process, they slyly ask users to import their address book to invite friends to the site. The friend invitations are some of the slickest that I have seen.  You can see some screenshots and a full writeup of the process here. I have read that they send out the invite multiple times. Apparently, this strategy has been very effective for them.

Purchasing an existing domain or website can be a great way to provide a spark to your online business. I am always on the lookout for some interesting new properties. This can take a lot of time because there are a number of places where people post their domains or sites for sale. Shoemoney recently created a page that aggregates many of these sites into one source. At his marketplace you can even get an RSS feed of all of the listings. The feed has been a great addition to my bloglines account and it has already helped me to quickly pick up a few properties.

The nation of Cameroon owns that top level domain (TLD) of .CM and they are redirecting all unresolved traffic to a very lame and generic PPC landing page which syndicates AdWords results. You can see an example of it at google.cm. They must get significant traffic from all of the typos of users leaving out the o in .com domain names.