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Woo hoo it's Friday again and that means the weekend is just hours away. Last weekend we took a break and went touring to places we'd never had a chance to visit before and this weekend we're going to do the same. Getting away from work on the weekend is a dangerous habit to slip into because you just might find that you don't have to work all day every day after all.

But before we can head out tomorrow there's a heap of stuff to get through today so it's heads down and tails up for both of us.

Working Smarter
Yesterday, when I was talking about worn out words, I suggested that one way to overcome the lack of impact that our words begin to have on surfers is to develop our own brand. If you brand your sites and people learn to recognize and trust your brand then, even though the words you use may be a little the worse for wear, surfers will still buy what you're selling.

Not only will they trust you but they'll come looking for more of your sites and if you develop your own branded traffic hubs you won't have to work quite so hard for the traffic that you want to have flowing through your sites. That concept is something that many smart business people have known for many years.

It costs less to sell to the customers that that you already have than it does to sell to customers who have never dealt with you before. Therefore it's to your advantage to keep the customers you already have. Think about it and look for ways to make that principle work for you.

Universal Search
It's just over six months since Google introduced what it called universal search. That's the term that Google uses to describe the way it amalgamated all the different search engines that it had up to that point. They brought together the web search that we are so familiar with, book search, images, maps, video etc. to change the face of the Google search engine results pages that we had become so used to.

In December they added in two more of their search engines to make universal search even bigger. Google has also spent a lot of those six months playing around with the way results are displayed on the search engine results pages. Sometimes parts of the page have been shuffled around, sometimes different parts of the page have been increased and sometimes there have been many more than just 10 results displayed on a page.

At one point in time during the last six months some experts began to wonder if Google had actually moved away from universal search but what we were seeing was just some more experimentation. I'm sure we'll see a whole lot more of that in the months ahead and we shouldn't be fooled into thinking that universal search will simply go away. It almost certainly won't so we have to learn to live with it.

If you haven't spent time looking at universal search then I suggest that you do because there is now much more competition for a place on the first page of just about any of Google's search engine results pages and if you want to make free money from search engine traffic then you need to be on those first pages.

Making Money From Domains
Steve was in the bank yesterday when the only other adult webmaster in town wandered in. Of course you're hardly going to stand in a bank and discuss adult webmaster issues but, like us, Dan is heavily into mainstream as well so they had plenty to talk about.

One interesting piece of information Dan passed on was that a tourist website for a very popular area not far from here had recently sold for $1.5 million. Now this site had a prime domain name and if the owner had been satisfied just to sit on the domain I'm sure he would have made a nice profit but he had obviously wanted more out of it.

Over a period of a few years he had put quite a bit of work into that site and developed it to the point where it was sitting at the top of the search engine results pages for important tourist terms. That work that he had put in lifted the value of that domain out of the tens of thousands of dollars right up there into the one million plus mark.

And there's a lesson for us. Undoubtedly there are a lot of people making money from buying and selling domains ... but you can make a whole lot more money if only you're prepared to put in some hard yards and add content that will attract surfers.

Now what value does that sale put on the website that has all the number two listings for all those important tourist terms?

Have a great weekend - even all of you who are still stuck in winter.