Blogging With David

I was looking through the list of top 100 “Make Money Online” blogs and failed to see my blog on the list. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting it to be in the top 100, but the site 45n5 actually lists 346 blogs on their rankings. Not being in the top 346 is quite said, especially when you click through and look at some of the blogs and notice they haven’t been updated in months. And some of the blogs they listed don’t even exist anymore?

Why doesn’t make blog rank? For awhile I considered this blog a “make money online” blog. I posted tips on how to improve rankings and gain traffic. I gave my opinions on top Wordpress and Vbulletin plugins. I did just about everything most “make money online” blogs do. However, lately, I’ve steered away from doing that. This site has turned into just a regular blog where I write about anything. I mostly just post about how my network of websites is going. I can’t remember the last time I actually wrote a long “how to” post or gave tips on doing something that can help you.

The truth is, it’s not really worth it for me to do that. There are so many good “make money online” blogs out there, that newbs don’t need my advice. It’s best for me to just keep this site as a journal of my progress in the internet world. I enjoy helping people and mentoring other aspiring webmasters, but I don’t necessarily have the time to write long “how to make money” posts every day. I work a full-time job, am married, and run these websites on the side. It’s much easier for me to give my advice via email or IM on a personal level. If that means this blog suffers and never gets to 1,000 RSS subscribers, then so be it.

Those of you still reading my blog do so probably because you’ve been there since the beginning when I was making $0.50 a day and you like to keep tabs on what my websites are up to.

Maybe I’m just crazy, but I could have sworn like 2 or 3 years ago you could actually go to a webmaster forum like Sitepoint, Namepros, or Digitalpoint and find a quality site for sale. Now, Sitepoint does have a Premium site sale section, but either the websites are $70,000 or they’re scammy sites anyways. Where have all the quality websites for the little man gone?

I have a few theories. One, webmasters who build quality websites just aren’t selling them anymore. Or sites are being sold privately. Seeking out private buyers and sellers ensures that the visitors to the website will be unaware of a sale. This is ALWAYS a good thing. I sold a site once, and as soon as the members found out, they all started spamming the forums cursing me and saying that I’m a sell out. So, now I firmly believe that they less a visitor to your site knows, the better.

Quality sites are extremely hard to build from scratch, so I can also understand why webmasters might be reluctant to let them go. That’s why all you see for sale on webmaster forums are proxies, made for adsense sites, auto blogs, image uploaders, and other crap.

If you’re looking for website ideas. Come up with a way for buyers and sellers of websites to be connected for quality site sales, and for people on the outside to not know what website is being sold.

Since I was murdered by Google, my traffic has been shot on my two biggest sites. In the past, these sites each required their own dedicated server (each dedicated cost me $150/mo). I’ve kept these servers for 6 months now just in case my rankings came back. But this morning, I finally canceled my two dedicated server subscriptions and have moved those two sites each to their own $50/mo VPS.

I made this decision because I now believe that my rankings will never come back. I wouldn’t have spent the hours and hours needed to move this sites to a new host if I still had hope. And the move isn’t entirely bad. By doing this I go from paying $300/mo for the two dedicateds to only $100/mo for two VPSs. That’s a monthly savings of $200! And who knows, maybe by moving my sites to a new host/IP… Google will un-penalize me?

Just like every other business in the world, it’s all about downsizing and improving the bottom line. You need to find ways to cut costs, whether it’s new hosting or doing work yourself (instead of outsourcing it). Also, it’s time to trim the fat and sell of websites that don’t produce for you. It’s pointless to spend time on a website that doesn’t give you anything in return.

Check your network out for yourself. If you have excess diskspace/bandwith on your server, try downgrading or selling off some of the extra space. Don’t leave anything for waste.

For those of you wondering… I now have 3 VPSs all hosted with Servint. They are an awesome company. Have super fast servers and the best customer support I’ve seen. If you’re looking for a VPS, check them out. Put my name down on your order form and I’ll get a referral discount!

Google recently updated their Pagerank a couple of days ago. Not that page rank means anything, but some webmasters still like to use it as a means to buy/sell links. That’s really all it’s good for. SERPs and traffic are what matter the most. Anyways, I just wanted to post a quick update on several of my sites that saw PageRank changes.

Sports Highlight Videos - PR0 –> PR3
Knowshon Moreno - PR0 –> PR3
Xbox 360 Games - PR0 –> PR3
Fred Taylor - PR0 –> PR2
Philip Rivers - PR2 –> PR4
Fight Music Ringtones - PR0 –> PR3

Those are pretty much the only changes worth mentioning. I think it’s funny that my Fight Music Ringtone site got a PR upgrade when it is in the Google Sandbox. This site has 0 SERPs and gets 0 traffic from Google… when just a month or so ago it had awesome SEPS and got 50+ uniques/day. So how does Google reward the site with a good PR, but slap this shit out of it in the SERPs?

History is one of my interests. It was always my favorite subject in school. I’m mostly into American History (Revolution and Civil War), but do enjoy ancient history as well. My passion for the subject led me to build Historum almost 2 years ago. I sold the site back in December of 2006, but regret doing so. The forum is still active and probably producing nice revenue for the current owner.

Several months ago I bought a history domain. It’s just been sitting in my account, so I finally decided to do something with it. The site I’m launching today is called History Facts. It’s a brand new history facts website run on wordpress. My goal for the site is to update it 4-5 times a week with a couple of history facts. Sure there are a ton of history websites out there and since history doesn’t change, there may be a lot of dupe content too. I plan to get around this by listing my own comments about each fact I present. Maybe just a sentence or two, just so the search engines pick up the unique content.

The site still has some work to do (pictures, videos, contact page) before I start actively building links and promoting it. I plan to have it completed by the end of the week. It should be a nice little site that I hope to get to like 100 uniques/day. History is a decent paying keyword (not like the terrible 2 cent keywords I get on some myspace sites), so with enough uniques this site could turn into a $50-100/month site in a few months.

So check out History Facts and let me know what you think.

Just a week ago I posted about getting some of my Google Love back. Well, this morning when I woke up I had a nice little surprise. The few rankings Google returned to me are now all gone again… and this time it seems even worse. Even more of the pages on my site Myspace Tweaks that I had indexed in Google are gone.

No way to tell if this is just a dance or if Google just bitch-slapped me again for another 6 months. Either way I’m getting sick of it. This site was getting 7,000 uniques/day before the penalty. It dropped to a low of about 1500, and then the past few weeks had climbed back to 2500. Now today after the second penalty it could be even lower then 1500 uniques.

What to do? What to do?

You work so hard to achieve something and then overnight it’s all gone. And there’s nothing you can do about it. I know some of you probably share my frustration, and others probably have been lucky and never had a site just disappear from Google. I’m not usually one to complain or whine about things not being fair… but this is really starting to piss me off.