Some thoughts on my Beijing website
August 27, 2008
The Beijing Olympics are finally over and some people have asked me how the blog went. Financially the site didn’t do as well as we had hoped. The site started well during the opening ceremony. It also did well the first week when Michael Phelps won his medals and then traffic tapered off a bit.
If calculate the costs and time of running the site, then we did come out in the red. In terms of the knowledge I gained from promoting and marketing the site, living in Beijing while the Olympics were on, I don’t think you can put a dollar value on. We also now have a site that has thousands of links, which will be useful to launch other sites from and it will still continue to make money, although obviously not as much as when the games were on.
Even though the site wasn’t as successful financially as what I would have liked, I still think I will go ahead and try to put together an ebook on the methods I used to build traffic to the site. We had a lot of success using Web 2.0 sites like Facebook and Youtube to drive traffic.
Huge spike in traffic
August 4, 2008
I am happy to say that we are getting a great spike in traffic this week on the Beijing Olympic website.
We have also put together a medal tally widget that can be easily added to your blog or website.
Things are going to be very busy the next three weeks, but I am looking forward to reporting back after the Olympics as to how much the site made and the levels of traffic. So far everything is on track.
A very inspiring podcast
July 26, 2008
Yaro Starak has recorded a very interesting and inspiring podcast with Alborz Fallah who started the website caradvice.com.au.
Caradvice is ranked in the top car websites in Australia, just behind sites that are run by big media companies like NewsCorp.
Alborz created a blog on a topic he loves and is passionate about and has turned it into a successful business. I think we see people all of the time creating websites purely for profit, sometimes they work, but mostly they fail. Just check out the sites for sale on sitepoint, most of them are crap. I am just as guilty as anyone though.
I think a lot also can be said for just working on one or two websites at the most and putting everything into them. Running multiple websites in many ways is just not practical and I think you waste time running from one niche to the next. Pick a niche that you love and write good content - it can be as simple as that.
This has worked for me to some extent with my Beijing site. At first I was running around trying to get links, but after a while I realized that if I wrote a funny/interesting/informative post, people would just link to it naturally. I think Google also prefers this. Link exchanges, link swaps and blogrolls are basically dead.
The hardest part to this of course is finding a niche that you are passionate about and is profitable. It is something I am going to have to spend some time thinking about once again when the Olympics are done.
My first media interview
July 24, 2008
A Brazilian journalist contacted me this morning about my Beijing Olympic site. I answered a few questions by email and he followed up with a phone call.
It’s exciting to finally have people interested in the site and getting different emails from people. It was a pretty long wait, but I am starting to feel more confident that the site will do well.
And if anyone would like to help out blogging about their favorite athlete, team or country in exchange for some links, please drop me an email.
Finally some love from the big G
July 17, 2008
It has only taken three years, but I am finally getting some love from Google with my Beijing Olympic site. Perhaps it is too early to mention this, but I couldn’t help writing about it.
Search engine traffic has jumped from 10 to over 70 per cent overnight. It’s weird because I have ranked well in MSN and Ask for some keywords.
I have some good inbound links and have done everything above board. I have spent zero on advertising but have spent many hours writing guest posts and trying to craft good content that gets links.
Persistence is the key to anything. I think many people would have given up long ago if they were in the position I was in with my site.
It might sound corny but I believe:
persistence + passion = profit
I know you can make money from researching obscure, long tail key word phrases, but if you have no interest in that particular topic, I think your only passion will be in making money rather than making a website or info product that is any good.
Success in small steps
July 2, 2008
I have been battling away now on my Beijing blog for nearly a year now and it is just over a month until the the games start in August.
The Wall Street Journal linked to the blog today and Problogger published an article I wrote on Facebook.
Traffic from Google still isn’t great, but I am expecting that to change when the Olympics are on and in the next thirty days as media networks go into Olympic coverage overdrive.
I still have no idea as to how the site will fare, but I am fairly confident I have done enough to at least get it to a point where it should do well.
I keep thinking of the analogy of someone publishing a book or releasing a movie - no matter how much work you put into something you have no idea as to how successful it will be until it is actually released. The site is live of course, but the start of the Olympics is going to be our “premiere”.
Shoemoney quits webmasterradio
June 11, 2008
Just after I wrote about how much I enjoyed listening to Shoemoney on webmasterradio.fm he quits. I can understand though, as I am sure a lot of work goes into preparing for the show, getting guests and writing a recap every week.
I have been pretty diligent lately working out everyday and one thing that keeps me going is having interesting podcasts to listen to. If anyone knows of any good ones, please let me know.
Podcasts are great, but they seem to be overshadowed a little now by video. Video is also great, but if it is only a shot of an internet marketer speaking, I can’t really see the point.
My blog hacked
June 8, 2008
Thanks to Mid life travel and Work on a boat for email me about this site, I found that it had been hacked. The hack is very sneaky as no matter what I did I could not see the re-direct.
Do a search in Google on wordpress and anyresults.net and you will see that this is a common problem and you are still vulnerable if you are on the latest version.
There seem to be a few variations and my case seem to be the same as described here.
This is pretty scary. Spammers and hackers seem to be going out of control. I hope the owner of anyresults.net is investigated. I seem to have spent most of this week fixing script related problems because of increased security from Dreamhost, which of course is a good thing, but it is taking time away from writing content and marketing my sites.
Shoemoney and his Fighters website
June 6, 2008
The Shoemoney show on webmasterradio.fm is currently one of my favorite podcasts. Shoemoney is doing live shows regularly and just by his nature you can pick up some great tidbits of information from his interviews and him just ranting.
He has been talking a great deal about his latest project fighters.com. Shoemoney could make plenty of money now by selling ebooks or internet marketing courses, but he doesn’t. He focuses on projects that he has an interest in and goes all out doing it.
Having lived in Japan for a long time I used to be a big fan of K1 and Pride. I could really get into doing a site like fighters.com if I lived in the U.S. Shoemoney recognized the importance of getting a good domain name and he paid somewhere from $50,000-$100,000 just for the domain. The previous owner originally wanted $250,000 for it. Since he bought it, he has already been offered three times what he bought it for. If you are going all out like he is on a site, I think it is worthwhile getting a domain which is memorable, especially in an area where people might not be tech savy.
He is also doing a lot of off-line advertising like sponsoring events and doing ads on radio through Google, which again having a domain name which is easy to remember is really going to help. If you look at the site they have anything from 1000-2000 people online at anytime.
Listening to the podcasts has given me motivation for my next website. The domain I have for it, is not as good as what he has, but I think it will still work well.
I will be happy when the Olympics are over.
30 day challenge preseason starts
June 3, 2008
I did the 30 day challenge last year and the pre-season is just starting up again now. I learnt a lot about online marketing and has really helped me with my websites.
If you are an experienced marketer looking for something new or totally new to internet marketing, I strongly suggest you take part. It is a lot of fun, a good opportunity for networking and you might learn a thing or two.
The 30 day challenge (30DC) site is here: www.thirtydaychallenge.com. It is free to take the course and there is no pressure to buy any of their other information/courses.
