Building A Website Is Not Building A Business

One of the frequent conversations I had at the domain conferences was about developing websites. Due to the Missouri.me launch and some of my other projects many people had questions about how to develop the sites, tools used, where we get content, etc. I am always happy to share as much as I can but there was something that I would preach to anyone who would listen and it seems to escape many.

There is a huge difference between building a website and building a business. In most cases people can have many great ideas about what they would like to do with their great domain name, they may even have all the technical abilities to create an amazing e-commerce site or content rich geo site but in so many cases there is no plan for what to do once the site is up.

If you put 50K into a wonderful website, do all the hard SEO work, if you do not have a plan on how to generate revenue after the site is up it is really just a website, not much different than a parked page, I can imagine if you spend 50K or even 10K on developing the perfect website you would want to have a plan for something more than Adsense for revenue.

So, when talking about domain development you need to think about taking it past the web development phase and how to get it into the business development phase.

To understand what I mean take a look at what the Castello Brothers have done, they understand business. With sites like Whisky.com and PalmSprings.com they have created businesses. I have really enjoyed my conversations with Michael and David and love the fact that they focus so much on the business rather than just the website. That is the difference between successful domain development compared to someone just building a website.

Now, everyone has different skills, I know many people much smarter than myself that can create amazing web sites but they lack the skills necessary on the sales and marketing side. This is where partnerships come in. If you have a great idea and have all the skills to implement the product and technical side then you may want to look for partners for the sales side. I know I could not of come close to creating everything my development team did on our state geo platform.

So, what is the point of this post?

Well I have heard so much talk of domain development, as we all have heard over the past year or so, I want to see people be successful. In most cases people will not be able to do it on their own, if you plan on building your domains into real businesses and not just websites you need to evaluate what you are good at and determine what pieces to build a business are missing from your skill set. Find people that you can team up with to fill those gaps. You may find that 1+1=3 when you do this.

Dropped Domain to Minisite in The Same Day

With my focus lately on my geo developments I have not spent much time on domain drops or minisites. In the past week though I spent sometime going through drop lists and one of the names I acquired on SnapNames was DallasTexasMortgage.com which has a solid exact match result in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool with 8,100 local exact match searches and has a solid PPC value as well. For a financial or mortgage name I was pleased with those numbers.

After acquiring it yesterday I realized I had not put one site together in a few months, I thought it may be fun to spend a couple hours turning it up and building a few links. First thing I had to do was determine if I was going to use Wordpress or standard HTML. I chose to base it on one of the templates I had received from AEIOU.com in the past.

After choosing the theme it was time to make the modifications needed, I had someone throw together a quick header for me since I admittedly have no graphic skills and then I started making the proper changes to the site titles (per page), made the proper SEO changes to name of each file of the site, and then started to write the content. By no means is the site full of information, but for the time I was allowing myself I did not expect to have the be all end all of a mortgage resource site, that happens over time. My attitude is if you never start you can never finish.

After writing the content and making the proper title and meta tag changes it was time to load up the site which took less than just  a few seconds since it was a simple 5 page site. After that though a few links needed to be built to at least start the process, a few tweets, a couple stumbleupons, and a few posts on blogs that we have that get reasonable traffic and we were good to go there.

I expect Dallas Texas Mortgage to be a reasonably tough term to get ranked for but with the larger development plans we have for this name and some other links that we have at our disposal I hope to work this one up the Google search results over time. At the end of the day though this was done for fun and it should turn into profit as well, I was missing having my hands on the keyboard and turning up a site. From the time I started to the time I finished was less than 2 hours. Still some more link building to do but I am more pleased with this than I would of been with a purely parked site.

Short Term Website for Long Term Gain

One of the things I have learned recently is the value of short term sites and the value they can bring to an overall web development project. I had never really put much thought into this since most of the sites I had built previously had been long term projects. One thing to keep in mind is if you are doing a web development project for a short term promotion it will likely require a lot of focus during the time of the event.

For our team we wanted to take advantage of the statewide sporting event we just completed here in Missouri to generate unique content, drive awareness of our brand, and build long term backlinks to our site. We determined the best path to do this and then set about implementing the plan. Although we had chosen a sporting event to do a short term event around there are many other events that this can work for. In our case though our goal was to find a way to find an event that would drive large amounts of traffic, we could generate large amounts of content from, and we could directly provide value back to our primary site.

We all know that building a site with no plan to gain traffic is of no value, for us we used a combination of social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon) as well as banners on our main site and Google Adwords during the intial days of the site. Within a couple days of launch we already could see backlinks coming from some high traffic cycling blogs and forums. Then while at the event we were able to jointly promote our coverage which in turn drove them to our primary brand. We made sure that in the majority of posts we made we had links to the community sites that we had created in the particular town or city we were reporting from. This meant that we had targeted viewers from those areas that ended up directly in their community portals.  As a side note we have noticed continued traffic in those communites, long story short, it worked.

For us we were looking for long term content and branding, in other cases you may not need this, it would of been possible to create a site like this and then sell week long advertising spots on it at a profit, or maybe build an affiliate store, or even Adsense to take advantage of the 10s of thousands of pageviews.

One challenge that you will have launching a site like this if it is for a popular or long running event or topic is ranking well in the search engines for the primary terms (in our case Tour of Missouri), as you can imagine it would be virtually impossible to rank on the first page of Google for an international cycling event for its primary search phrase after launching a site the day before the event.  But with some research on past searches we were able to determine what terms to focus on and build our site around as we did posts. That worked, within just a few days we were ranking on the first or second page of Google for virtually any term we chose to target and some that we did not expect. Oh yeah as a side note we did this all on a .ME domain competing against some of the top news sites on the web and in our region, the majority of our traffic was from search by the end of the week. There are certain phrases around video that we even ranked above the site that was solely there to provide video of the event on a day by day basis and is owned by NBC.

One other great way to get awareness of your short term site is YouTube, by putting links in our descriptions of our videos we could get targeted viewers to our site based on the fact they had searched for video content directly related to our site. We received several thousand viewers of our videos and it keeps going up by the hundreds daily, not bad for a niche topic and week long event, and yes we continue to get traffic from that.

We now have over 7000 pictures and 5 hours of video that still have to work from as we post content on this cycling focused site. One other note, do not focus on being the top news site on the web, you do not have to have the best photographer, the top Hi-Def video, our viewers kept coming back due to the grassroots feel of what we did. Although this post was focused on our event I hope this gives you a spark of an idea of what you may be able to do to promote a site you have by taking advantage of a high traffic/short term event or even just one site without a primary site to promote.

The Value of Product Roadmaps when Developing Domains

As much as I try not to put to much structure in place and cause headaches when first launching this little thing called Missouri.me there are certain concepts and ideas that work well no matter how large or small your enterprise/product.

The one that I think is of the most value is the idea of having a product roadmap when developing your product, in this case a website. When developing any major site the first thing that you need to understand is that it will never be done, EVER. If you are dealing with people outside the tech world this may be a new concept to them. But if you think that you are going to wait to have every feature you will ever think of before you promote or sell product on your site you will NEVER make it to market because you will run out of money before you make it to revenue.

What we did was developed a phased approach, where phase 1 was based on core features, phase 2 on major core changes (speed, etc), and phase 3 on nice to haves.

Now within each of those phases we had a point by point description of what the feature would do, complexity, etc. Thats all fine and great but what happens next is once everyone involved starts seeing that their features are pushed out to later phases people start wanting to pull things into to phase one. Let me give you an example of this happening. Last year I was consulting for a group of doctors in the area I live in, they were starting a company and had a rather ambitious plan for a product they wanted to create. At one point in the process I stopped them and said ok, next meeting we have one item on the agenda, we are going to build a road map, I told them up front what would happen, they would all list features, they would agree to structure it in phases but then I let them know everyone was going to ask for their feature to be in phase one. So what happened, you can guess, out of all the post its we stuck on the wall (I used them to make a point), a total of 3 out of 50 or so were not in phase one. Hows that for making a visual impact of the problem.

So, how do you fix this, its natural to think your feature or idea is the most important, but you need to take the personal emotion out of it. Numbers work best. For the first few months of development I spent the largest portion of my time managing the expectations and requests from the sales side of what was being created (I was part of the sales side which makes it real interesting). I always laid out that if X feature was added then Y feature would slip and then did my best to show how revenue timelines or amounts would be impacted. So how do you balance when to add features and when to make a change in the road map, prove how many customers or how much more revenue could be added.

At some point you have to put a line in the sand though and say that phase one (launch product) is locked down, if you do not do that you will never get to revenue and your business will fail before it starts. That happened with that group of doctors, they never could get to launch because they wanted EVERYTHING day one. They could not prioritize features that were required vs nice to have.

At the end of the day your product should always be improving and growing, it should never be done, you need to have a plan and realize that you cannot have your developers changing course everyday, nothing will ever get done. Structure your development plan to get the most bang for your development buck and you will be successful.

Biggest Decision of My Life – Thanks to Domaining

OK, so the title may be a bit dramatic but I truly feel the decision I made a few weeks back and executed this morning may be the most important decision I have made outside of children and marriage.

Today I walked away from a six figure income at a leading technology company to focus on starting my own business. After 15 years in the corporate world it was time to take that leap and believe in the possiblities of what I can create and what has been created over the past several months. I could tell for sometime that I had really lost the passion for next generation telecommunication networks (I had been involved in carrier class VoIP networks all the way back in 1996 at ATT) and my heart just was not in that piece of the communication world.

As many of you know I am a big fan of Geo domains and believe now is the time to act to create a business to take advantage of the shift to "hyperlocal" search that we all have seen as part of the domaining community.  Back in December I had an idea for a business model that would allow for certain customer types to be targeted more effectively than they have in the past and along with some other services would create an online marketing solution for small businesses that could not be matched by other media and technology companies.

Initially I had planned to stay in the shadows a bit and let my business partner work the sales front and I would provide technology and marketing vision and drive the company from that side while I worked a rather demanding full time job. It would not be possible to provide much time to this endeavour and it was only fair to the company paying my paycheck that I gave them full effort on a daily , nightly, every minute of the day basis.

After the intial alpha launch of our site the intial reaction and success showed that we were onto something that would scale well and create a solid revenue stream for the company rather rapidly. But at the same time, once you see the possibilities you see that committing yourself fully could make the business much more than if you focused only part time.

So, after a few months of very deep soul searching I realized, do what I love. If you work on what you enjoy you will be successful, although there will be stress starting a business (Although strangely I feel none), at the end of the day the freedom and fullfillment you get from creating something and watching it grow is so much better than the daily corporate grind.  We have only been operational for a short time but the experience of watching customers react in such a positive manner is that much better when it is something you created (with a team, and never forget that).

Thanks to the domaining community for giving me the ability to create such a business. The support and advice I have received from the domaining and development community has been great.

Lesson learned here, develop, develop, develop, find an idea that is interesting and works from the business side AND that you will enjoy and good things will happen. Find a hole and fill it, provide solid service at a fair price. People will buy.

It is a GREAT DAY!

100 Domains Moved to Whypark.com Today

Although I am a big fan of minisite development  and also use Parked.com and SedoPro for domain parking I have also had a Whypark.com account for a couple years but have never used it to its full potential. Well, today that stops.

Although people have voiced concerns about the potential for duplicate content and also unrelated content at times, the overall upside to using the Whypark.com base services outweigh those concerns from the experience I have had with some past names I used Whypark for.

Although I am still plan to continue development and outsourcing of  both minisites and fully developed websites I think the Whypark.com system is a nice middle ground.  After seeing parking revenues decline and my minisite revenues continue to climb it only makes sense to use the tools at hand (i.e. my lightly used Whypark.com account).

I plan on also taking advantage of their premium services such as content creation and syndication, they announced these services sometime back but I have yet to take advantage of them. When taking advantage of these services the Whypark.com system will no longer be a middle group but becomes no different than the unique content based sites that I have been focused on.

Over the next couple months I expect to report back on initial success with the domains I have moved, it will be nice to see direct comparisons between their parking stats and Whypark.com stats. 

I moved 100 names over today, all keyword rich, all but a few .COM, .NET and .ORG names. I have made no tweaks to the autogenerated sites that Whypark put into place and will be using the Whypark ad feed. 

Although I do not expect Whypark to be the ultimate answer for some of my domains, I do think domainers with keyword rich domains that have seen shrinking parking revenues could use the system to their advantage. I expect it to be the answer to my "needing more hours in a day" request I keep asking for:)

Interview with Web Developer and Domainer Tia Wood

 

With todays push on web development for domainers and the decrease in PPC revenues hitting the bottom line of most domainers, finding a web development partner that understands the mindset of domainers is more important than ever.  With that in mind I bring you an interview with Web Developer, Writer, AND Domainer Tia Wood.

 

Tia, you have an appealing array of interests, whether it be music, writing, or web development: your passion shines through. Can you tell me a bit about your passion for writing and music?

Art is a very powerful form of expression especially when the subject has no words that can justify its meaning. For instance: how does one describe love? Or envy? Or human suffering? Some things are best shown in some form. That's why I believe every individual has an interesting story we can all learn from best told via some type of art medium: writing, music, graphic design, photography, philosophy, etc.

This is a personal side of me many people do not know but stems back to childhood. Art is in my blood. I remember in 3^rd grade, I wrote a poem about the Gulf War and was made to read it in front of the entire school. I won little awards throughout my school years for my writing. I write for selfish reasons: to relax my mind and relieve stress. Other than that, I do not care to be famous by it.

Music is the other beast. I always have music playing somewhere: on my computer, in my car or singing out loud. Even my daughter cannot fall asleep without it. Me and her both sing. Even my extended family has some sort of musical ability in one form or another.

Photography and philosophy are my other hobbies. Photography is about capturing perspectives. The same as with philosophy.  

They must feel I'm rude at church because I draw in an art book while the preacher is talking instead of looking at him.  The point is: I do these things and I do them ALL THE TIME whether it is through writing, music, art, graphic design, etc.

How are you so sure that your reality is the correct perspective if you don't try to look through someone else's eyes? I guarantee you it is not and if you neglect this side of yourself you are missing out on the vast understanding that one gains ONLY by learning what others already MASTERED.  

 

Tell us a bit about the process of writing a novel, the focus and dedication that it takes is impressive.

Novel writing is an exhausting process that requires constant care. You have to be interested in writing, for one and interested in your subject. But all it requires is one page at a time. If you write three pages a day, you can work yourself to a novel over time. Write first, edit later. The same goes for those interested in eBook writing.  Or anything else you would like to accomplish. To build a house: lay one brick at a time. To build out your domain portfolio: concentrate on one concept at a time, one page at a time.

 

Not only do you have the ability to express yourself with words, you also have musical talent. What instruments do you play? Do you have a good karaoke story?

I play acoustic guitar. Several of my family members do as well. When I was a teenager, I would sit outside in the Florida night and sing songs I wrote that day. I never formally learned to play but I play by ear. Which reminds me: it's time to buy an electric guitar, lol! We haven't had guitars in the house for awhile and my daughter is old enough to learn. That should be fun.

The word "karaoke" is something close to heart. When my grandfather, Terri, was alive he would take me fishing at the Florida lakes when I was a kid. I suck at fishing but we had fun. On some nights, he would take me to karaoke.  He also played guitar and had an exceptional voice. He would sing songs such as "White Sport Coat" and "Teddy Bear". The first time I sang in front of a crowd was with him at age 11. I sang Boys II Men, "On Bended Knee" in a room packed full of adults. I was a nervous wreck! To this day, I still get terrible stage fright even though I have been told I'm not a bad singer.

 

So your creative side obviously leads to a talent for web design and vision of what a site can look like. How do you approach the start of a project?

In web development, I would say there is a good balance between functionality and graphic design required. However, if a site doesn't function properly, it's just a pretty photo album. What keeps me interested in web development even though it can get fairly technical is the creative approach to solving problems and developing solutions for a client.

Some people overlook the scope of work and vision required that goes into the backend of development. The initial approach is focused on what the individual is trying to achieve with their site whether it be for profit, promotion or data capture. Each project is a different challenge in its own unique way. No project is ever the same even if it's just a Wordpress installation.

 

So, tell us a bit about your domain investments, what extensions do you buy, what's your thought process on buying a domain?

I tend to focus mostly on .com. I purchase names based on long term goals and choose those I know I can attack with a business plan. It's too late to buy one word generic domains. Buying for development is how I make up for this handicap.

One of the great things about domaining is you can still choose what niche you want to focus on and succeed. Some may buy for SEO. Others may buy for revenue. It doesn't matter. But focus on something and do that something well.

 

Give us your thoughts on mini sites and mass development.

Mini sites and mass development have their audience but are for a specific type of domain and a specific type of domainer. You should never, ever develop a website you are trying to launch a business with in this method. There are better ways to serve your audience versus slapping together pages so it won't sit empty. For instance, an article I wrote titled "The New Under Construction Page" talks about this. If you want your website to do something other than serve a blank page while waiting for development: COLLECT DATA! Which is more valuable to you: a few dollars from a user you will never see again or a guaranteed contact who is interested in your website? Never sell yourself short for the almighty click through.

 

OK, you gotta give the story behind BulkDevelopment.com. Your focus is obviously on full development. What led to this fun little test?

I'm normally a private, quiet person. But lately I see individuals attempting to provide glorified MFA (made for adsense) sites and trying to claim this method is "web development". While technically it is: these types of websites have already been proven a failure when they were branded as MFA sites. I'm not referring to real solutions that attempt to provide alternatives to domain parking such as MiniSites.com, WhyPark.com and AEIOU.com. I'm speaking about individuals who promote these glorified MFA sites but yet cannot provide real examples of their success.

I realize this was partially my fault because I choose not to educate people for so long. It's my fault and the domain developers like me. BulkDevelopment.com was the silence breaker. Since then, I restructured my main blog at TiaWood.com to further educate domainers on the differences. The response has been fantastic. I want domainers to know the difference between mini sites, mass development and full scale development.

There are great consequences if you don't know what you are working with. What if you under develop a domain? You will miss out on how powerful the domain can perform. What if you over develop a name? You lose money and time. There is no "one size fits all" to development.

 

dnRehab.com and BulkDevelopment.com are both fun domainer spoofs, any other sites of your own that may be of interest to domainers?

In addition to those, DomainIdeaBox.com was created for my personal use but I wanted to share this tool with domainers.  The tool sorts keywords into "data sets" or categories and allows you to generate ideas based on keywords before or after the data keywords. I use this all the time, especially for Geo names. Search results are not saved as I highly value domainer privacy. It's a neat little tool that makes hand registrations easier.

 

Who do you admire in the domain industry and why?

Whew! Too many to name. There are a lot of domainers worth respecting for many different reasons. But Sahar Sarid and Frank Schilling always are at the top of my list of people I admire. How they both entered domaining is inspiring and shows their dedication as individuals.

 

My daughter took a particular liking to one of your client sites: LittleSantaClaus.com. How do your sites perform in search engines? Can you give some examples of results?

It's funny you say that because I actually had my eight year old daughter help me with that site.  She was my critic.

For LittleSantaClaus.com, we targeted particular keywords that were commonly searched: santa books, santa claus wallpaper, etc and have already been indexed for those terms. The site is appearing on the 1^st page under multiple targeted keywords. The development is not complete at the time of this interview. We plan to target the keyword "santa claus" by Christmas of this year.

By the way, those of you with kids should check out the site. It's about a book series called "The Little Santa Book Series: The Childhood Adventures of Santa Claus" written by Sergio R. Rodriguez.  The first book available is called "Little Santa and Snowboy" which is beautifully illustrated by Simon Scales. I'm personally excited about these books because it presents a different aspect about Santa Claus and the character designs are amazing.

 

 

You recently learned you had Hashimoto's Disease.  Can you tell us more about Hashimoto's and how it affects you?

Hashimoto's Disease is an autoimmune chronic illness that attacks the thyroid gland and causes thyroid disease. For six months, I knew I had thyroid disease but recently discovered the underlying cause: Hashimoto's Disease. So basically, one disease caused the other. I have had Hashimoto's all my life without knowing it. It attacked my thyroid over the years until it was no longer functional.

The thyroid gland controls many functions in your body: weight, metabolism, mentality, emotions, etc and produces hormones that control and throttle these functions. With thyroid disease, these hormones are either produced too much or too little (in my case too little) and affect a person in so many negative ways.

I am outspoken about having this illness because of my initial misdiagnosis. This illness causes symptoms very close to bipolar disease. Therefore, I initially went to a psychiatrist instead of a doctor. I was diagnosed and treated for a mental illness instead of a physical illness. I was put on lithium and suffered a month of hell from the wrong diagnosis. It is important for people with these symptoms to seek not only multiple tests but multiple opinions from different doctors.

More information about that story here: Tia's Story

Hashimoto's Disease information here: Hashimoto's Disease Info

 

What projects are you currently working on: personal or for clients?

One project is DrugReform.com that debates the topic of drug reform. This site has an interesting social presentation that allows people to present both sides of the opinion spectrum uncensored. We are focusing on social marketing. It will be interesting to see how this format shapes itself.

Another client project is popular.ME; the first in a series of the .me domain extension I'm developing for a client. This, too, has a social marketing aspect and I can't wait to launch it.

For my personal work, I have a couple sites next in queue: NameHoney.com and HashimotosDisease.us. I don't want to mention the development focus for NameHoney.com yet but it will benefit domainers. HashimotosDisease.us will be an awareness and support site for individuals suffering with Hashimoto's Disease.

 

What do you have planned for the future?

Ah, the future is bright and full of possibilities. Last year, I discovered the power of social marketing. Therefore, I have been focusing more and more on using this type of promotion in combination with development. The projects that solely use this method are almost complete and I'm very excited to explore this further. I have discovered new mediums that even domainers aren't fully aware of yet. I'm terribly excited about it but I plan to take my time to explore them fully. All I can say is: watch what happens next! There will be major contributions to the domain industry coming in the future.

 

Thanks to Tia for taking the time to give her views on Web Development and Domaining!

Minisite To Google First Page In Less Than Month

Its been about a month since launched the Mathbooks.net minisite. I thought it would be good to review the results of the launch of this keyword rich minisite.

First off this site was done a little different than others I have done in the past. I had originally planned to build the site myself but due to time constraints I chose to outsource to AEIOU.com. So, this site is a combination of keyword researched content written by a selected writer I use for many of my sites and SEO and site development done by AEIOU.com. I also did a bit of my own link building but the majority was done by AEIOU.com.

Rather than take you through all 15 keyword selections I chose to target we will show the results for the top two: Math Books and Mathbooks. These are the most generic terms that could be chosen other than the singular version of the words which normally means that they will also be the most competitive. Math Books was shown to have a search volume of 90,500 in the month of March per the Google Keyword Research Tool.

Before the minisite I was getting anywhere from 1 to 3 visits per day parked. This created revenue but I knew I could do better with a site if I could rank well for the terms selected.

Well, the results are in, currently if you search for the term Math books the site ranks between 4 and 6 (seems to move around a bit but always consistent) and Mathbooks is ranking in the 4th spot. That is in less than a month, first page for a generic keyword in less than a month is a very solid result and shows that the work and investment can pay off.

Traffic is more than 10 times the visits per day than parked and revenue has obviously increased along with that. I very soon will be implementing Ebay Affiliate Ads on the page as well which should allow for even further increased revenues.

Free Minisite Ebook – Wordpress News Aggregator in 15 Minutes

Wordpress Minisite News Aggregator in 15 Minutes

UPDATE: A new version also now exists at How To Build A Wordpress News Aggregator although not in downloadable format, if you want a PDF this is the post for you.

Minisites for your Domains come in many different forms. One that has become popular is taking a niche and building a news aggregator using Wordpress and the FeedWordpress Plugin which is built specifically to aggregate RSS feeds from sources that you choose. This How-To Create A Wordpress Minisite Tutorial will show you how to create a Wordpress Minisite aggregating news for a specific topic, in this case using Cpanel and Fantastico.

If you do not have hosting with Cpanel and Fantastico then you should head to Hostgator.com, since they have packages that allow for unlimited Wordpress installations at very low prices, I use them for all of my hosting for both my dedicated servers and blog hosting for BruceMarler.com
Originally I was going to paste all pictures and info in one blog post but after seeing the length of the post I feel its best to offer it is a PDF document in a sort of informal E-Book format (for free of course).

To download the Wordpress News Aggregator in 15 Minutes Process click this link (its free) Wordpress Minisite News Aggregator in 15 Minutes

Yahoo Search Results Matter For My Minisites

I very seldom focus on checking my Yahoo search results for my various minisites and developed domains and spend the majority of my time verifying Google search results. I have found that recently Yahoo has been showing certain minsites of mine in the first page of their listings causing a measurable increase in traffic and revenue.

One example of this is my site PensacolaBeach.me . Pensacola Beach is a popular tourist destination in the Florida panhandle. I knew the SEO for anything related to it would be tough up front but have had some success with certain targeted terms but did not expect to rise to the front page of Google (or Yahoo for that matter) for quite some time for the term Pensacola Beach.

I had noticed that mid last week the traffic had went up and that revenue from Google Adsense was also increasing. I took a look through my Statpress statistics and also my Awstats details and figured out that the term Pensacola Beach had increased in the common keywords driving traffic. Looking at referrers Yahoo was now referring a solid amount of traffic. I then went to Yahoo (really cannot remember the last time I used Yahoo for a search) and found that indeed I was in the first page of listings for the term Pensacola Beach.

This is good news for a few reasons, the obvious is that the SEO work that has been done for long tail terms has also paid off for the primary term I expected to wait longer for results on (I just started the development in January).  Also, for you .ME fans, with the results I have had so far I cannot complain about developing this on the .ME extension (more details coming on .ME and SEO in the interview I am posting Monday).

I know that it comes to no surprise to anyone that Yahoo matters, but as much time as I spend focusing on Google search results and placement I really found the amount of revenue and traffic increase I received interesting and actually worth spending sometime researching in future developments. For those that fall into the same camp as I have in checking Google only, you may find it worth the time to spend a portion of your effort verifying placement in Yahoo results as well.

On a side note, I am now only 2 sites away from having all my minisites moved over to my HostGator account. After much pain at my previous hosting provider (outages, changed configurations, DNS issues) all while paying for a VPS I have successfully moved to a HostGator reseller account and have had better performance and the support has been great.

Yes, anything ad you see on this site for HostGator is an affiliate but when it comes to hosting its gotta be right. If you are looking for a good provider or just starting from scratch you really cannot go wrong with them.

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