Tuesday, June 1, 2004

NicheBot.com Recently, Google.com and WordTracker.com joined forces to create a site that makes it simple to do quick research for finding niches that may be profitable for your website. You can test it at NicheBot.com. It's easy to use. If you need more detailed research, they refer you directly to WordTracker.com. Last October, I wrote an article on building web traffic, and I updated it earlier today. You can learn more about finding niches and building traffic to your site there. I recommend several tools that I use on my sites. The updated article is: Building Website Traffic. Finding a niche and building a site with real, helpful content is the only way that I know of to compete with the big companies that have much more time and more people than we'll ever have. They can control the general keywords and can afford to spend thousands of dollars in advertising every month. For those of us with smaller budgets and less resources, we have to be more agile and look for treasure in the niches. If you can identify a niche and build a website that has great content, you can build traffic and eventually monetize that traffic by selling your products, services, or recommending products for sale through affiliate programs or arranging to get finders fees for sending targeted leads to other companies. You can learn a lot more about this from Ken Evoy. He teaches you how to find profitable niches in his Affiliate Masters Course which you can download free. It's in PDF format. 6:04:43 AM    comment []

Built my version of the SFI Veriuni Store Back in January, 2004, SFI Marketing Group introduced their new Veriuni Store, which makes well over 700 products available for their affiliates to sell. I started analyzing the store in February and researching keywords and phrases in March and April. As soon as I finished the emergency work I had to do on GeorgiaDragRacing.com in May, I turned my attention to building my version of the SFI Veriuni Store on JohnDilbeck.com. I did this for a couple of reasons. Some of the affiliates on my sales team were having trouble finding all the products they could sell and building links to them. So, I, to the best of my knowledge, built a site that links to all the current products using simple HTML. Now anyone on my sales team can find a product they want to link to and use my code as a sample they can modify by replacing my SFI ID with theirs and posting the links to their sites or blogs. The other reason is so that I can attract new customers and sell the products myself. Please feel free to visit the store and purchase whatever strikes your fancy. We offer hundreds of magazine subscriptions at competitive prices. I invite you to subscribe to the magazines of your choice. 5:50:42 AM    comment []

Rebuilding GeorgiaDragRacing.com I got side-tracked in May. For several months, I've been fighting one or more hackers who have been breaking into my brother's site at GeorgiaDragRacing.com and installing software that attacked other computers and ran an Internet Relay Chat -- both of which are not allowed by our hosting company who have been working with us to put a stop to this. On May 5, 2004, I received a notice from our SysAdmin that the hackers had installed software once again and he had detected and deleted it. He told me that he'd been patient for a long time, but this was the final notice. One more break-in and our account would be cancelled and we'd have to find another company to host the site. There are over 2,500 pages on that site! Since I didn't know how they were breaking in and I'd done everthing I knew, it was time for drastic action. After a long talk with David, my brother, we decided to completely rebuild the site and remove all the scripts that we were using to power the photo album, bookstore, forum, and news updating. It was going to be a big job, but it would be less work than moving everything -- including thousands of photos -- to another site. So, I looked for alternate ways to do what we'd been doing with PERL and PHP scripts. We decided to create a blog at blogger.com for the news updates, which can now be found at gdrn.blogspot.com. The photos will be hosted at ImageStation.com until we find another site that is easier to use. The bookstore was completely rebuilt using javascript and direct links to Amazon.com and the forum was deleted in favor of the mailing list hosted by Yahoo groups. So, I had to completely redesign everything and rebuild all the pages of the site. It took about three weeks of working around the clock to get it finished, but now we're moving on using the new tools. Most of the functionality was saved, but it was a huge job and it pulled me away from the other tasks I had scheduled for this month. There are probably quite a few broken links on the site and I'll have to find and squash those bugs as they come up. So, why am I telling you about this? When building a business on the Internet, you may not always have total control over what happens. We had to make a decision and I had to do a lot of work to do our best to keep the site open. Now, we're running no custom scripts and nobody but me knows the password to the site. Hopefully, that will foil the hackers. In this case, the bad guys won the battle, but I still intend to win the war. 5:37:29 AM    comment []