While providing mini site updates, I figured I would provide an update on CabCompanies.com, another mini site I launched last year.  I bought CabCompanies.com on Snapnames in August of last year, and I used the services of Kevin Leto from Big Ticket Domains to build a database driven “mini site” with cab companies listed from around the US.

I believe I paid around $65 for the domain name, and I paid an additional $250 for the website, which includes the graphics, data, and the Adsense placement. Kevin has also been good about adding listings when companies have contacted me during the past year asking for a listing.

From October 12, 2009 to today:
Total Traffic: 2,853 visitors
Average Monthly Traffic: 238 visitors

Approximate revenue: Between $100 – $150 in revenue. It has also earned a bit more revenue from paid listings I added.

I think this is a great success for a couple primary reasons.

First, it’s earned somewhere in the ballpark of a 50% return on the development costs in a year. I believe I got a good deal on the domain name, but it wouldn’t have made much (if anything) as a parked domain name this year. The revenue isn’t much in the scheme of things, but if it can make $100 with no effort, it can certainly earn much more with added content and promotion.

Second, it’s set me up to where I could legitimately sell listings like I do on DogWalker.com, since traffic has been good without any publicity, link building, or other traffic driving tactics. If I was inclined to do more work, I could begin to offer upgraded listings with coupons, website links, email addresses…etc. Right now, I am not inclined to take on additional work.

I could also probably change tactics and sell leads instead of doing a database listing site – or I could add a lead gen form to each page and sell leads in an automated fashion.

One of my friends and colleagues runs a successful airport car service referral website, and he’s going to be the first person I email about this. Perhaps he’d be interested in buying the site to better monetize it since he’s already got the infrastructure in place.

I was having a few problems on the back-end of my blog for a couple of weeks. I assumed it was because I recently updated my blog to WP 2.8, and although I was kicking myself for upgrading, there wasn’t much I could do. After a couple of weeks, I was faced with other random problems, and it began to get more than annoying.

After my designer was unable to access the admin panel of my blog, and I couldn’t even access it unless I was on my personal laptop, I began to worry. What if my laptop suddenly lost access, too, and I was blocked from my own blog. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but I was lucky to have the help of Kevin Leto, who taught me a trick.

While I had assumed my problems stemmed from a faulty WordPress upgrade, Kevin wasn’t convinced. He had me go into the appearance section of the WordPress dashboard and select the default theme temporarily. Once I did so, all of the problems disappeared, allowing him to determine that the fault was in my current theme coding rather than WordPress.

Once Kevin isolated the problem, he was able to search through my files to find a really small error that was throwing off a lot of back-end functionality and he quickly rectified the error.

If you use WordPress and encounter problems and errors, switch it to the default theme and try to replicate your errors. If the errors disappear, the problem is in your theme – not in WordPress.