Niche Switch

Alexa rankings are completely unreliable, except few top-ranking sites.

Yet people are trying to cash on them every day. It sounds great to have a website that is in TOP 200.000 worldwide, available for a modest price. What’s wrong with such offers is that all that’s necessary is your own traffic to achieve that. Of course, the entrepreneurial minds behind offers stressing Alexa ranking sometimes followed by few exclamation marks, will usually omit to mention this rather important fact (that 90% of their traffic is them visiting every few hours).

I’m visiting a very niche portal every few days. They are around the rank of 500.000. Great ranking for a place that covers an extremely niche topic that is of interest to only few people.
I have just found that according to Alexa, I alone represent 50% of their traffic (I know because there are no other visitors from my country, completely sure about that). Now I rarely visit daily for a longer timespan, it’s usually once or twice per week. Most other users visit more frequently.

Funny thing is, while many still don’t know how easily Alexa rankings can be pumped up (there were some news going around months ago that it’s not that easy anymore, well - it’s still is), there are many that know it well.

A well known Alexa toolbar tool for Firefox, SearchStatus, had this note on their site:
“please upgrade to the latest version to avoid losing alexa rankings”

Clear and self-explanatory.

After working through a number of my notes, I have finally got around to post the How to make money of your directory guide. All and any suggestions are welcome. I hope to continue updating it as time allows and new resources and informations emerge.

I guess it would be possible to make it two or three times longer….but aimed at providing as much info in as little space possible. I for one tend to postpone reading large guides, not matter how valuable, almost indefinitely.

On directory forums and other professional discussion forums, it’s more and more being talked about low-cost bulk directory submission services that are ruining the directory owner’s joy from running their pet projects (a.k.a. directories), by submitting hundreds and hundreds of bottom quality websites, and generally doing rather poor job with submissions for their clients.

Thus The Pagerank God came forth and ruled, “though shall be your ten commandments from now on”:

1. Thou shalt not ignore each directory’s rules.
2. Thou shalt not put your interests before your client’s.
3. Thou shalt not use autosubmitters.
4. Thou shalt not promise unrealistic acceptance rates, and generally misguide the client, just to get the job.
5. Thou shalt not use one email address for all your clients jobs.
6. Thou shalt not accept clients with junk websites.
7. Thou shalt not submit to top categories, when relevant subcategories are available.
8. Ask your clients to ammend their websites, description and titles, whenever you think it is appropriate.
9. Honour the directory list you use.
10. Do not worship the Pagerank God.

Hey….you see that Pagerank God is a tough guy, but has some sense of humour at least . What? Nah, that’s not me, I just helped him transcribe for us earthlings (either telepathy or sql injection vulnerability in my brain’s operation system, not sure what it was). And no, I don’t worship him (I’m almost certain it’s him, not her).
That’s what happens to those who worship the directory devil. It has something to do with the Holy Hand Grenade, hehe.

StevePavlina.com is two years old today. Congratulations! At this occasion, Steve shares his earning stats.

Let’s take September: $7.200 revenue from Adsense, per 1,3M visitors, that makes it $0.55 per 100 visitors. His website is top quality so I bet visitors usually view plenty pages there.
Now…Steve has rather more aggressive Adsense setup. While he is covering many topics, his mainly target field is self-development. So…where’s the trouble? It seems to me that the ads that get displayed, are those 5 cents per click ones, at least judging from few pages I managed to quickly review.
Are there money in blogging? You bet. Don’t use the numbers above as a basis for your website, though. You don’t need millions of visitors! If you have a decent well-defined niche, and at least half of the article quality that Steve has, you shall be earning much more per 100 visitors, than he does. His site is of course big success, but he might suffer a bit income-wise due to the kind of ads Adsense chooses to display. He has an interesting niche, but maybe too broad one? I’m by far not an expert on Adsense optimization and tweaking, but one thing I can tell you, there are people earning close to what he does by blogging, from traffic that’s several times lower.

The difference? Very narrow, well defined and lucrative niche.

The resemblance? High quality content from leaders in their field.

How to make it? Learn from Steve Pavlina’s drive, persistance and wisdom.

Ron Garret covered top ten geek business myths very nicely.

Quick extract of my favorite myths, but do yourself a favor to visit the original post:
- brilliant ideas will make you rich

- people will come on their own if you build good product or service

- someone will steal your idea if you don’t protect it

- it’s what YOU think, not what customers thinks, that matters

- what you know matters more than who you know

- you need lot of money to get started

- the idea is the most important part of your business plan

- no competition is good thing

and, IPO will make you finally happy

This really annoys me a lot.

Well…sometimes I only laughed at it in despair.
People will purchase a domain name like free-directory.tld, guaranteed-free-submission.tld, a-free-link.tld, etc., all with the intention to start a directory, and all names presupposing it to be a free one.

Then, they only allow paid submissions.

Paid-only submissions to free directories make as much sense to me as going to a jazz concert only to get a punk rock band delivered as a last-moment subsitute.

And I don’t even believe in last-minute subsitutes (aka change of plan decisions) in this case. It’s just about tricking people.

If you see such, even if you got a budget for paid links, I highly advise you NOT to pay them a cent. Paying to tricksters will usually only benefit you for a very very short time, if ever.

Every single time I login to any webmaster or seo forum, there is someone looking for secrets. Because, it surely can’t be hard work coupled with a bit of publically accessible knowledge that’s behind the success of most. There are virtually thousands of people (who will ask, and millions hanging out who don’t even bother) out there who think you need to know a special sleight of hand, that you need to trick search engines into whatever to rank well.
Shoemoney runned a 6 tips to having a successful website podcast, and, oh well, besides the six tips, he talks about if you come up with something that really works, don’t tell anybody.

Now forget you are the one on the search for pain-free tricks, try to put on the shoes of the “seo guru” who just hit the nail:
1] Yahoo and Google and other big players, are reactionary. They are closely observing the playground. If you tell your secrets on any popular forum, be prepared that that leak or whatever you found, will be fixed quickly. Especially when everyone who listened to what you was disclosing, will use your idea on the battlefield. Which brings us to next point:

2] Even if it will not or cannot be fixed, expect tens if not hundreds of people to jump on your idea - let me introduce you your new competitors.

If you still think someone will tell their secrets, reread the above two paragraphs. If they had enough business sense to make any money, they would have more than enough brainmatter to figure out what’s going to happen if they told their secrets in the public.

Too bad this is the only thing I picked up from Shoemoney’s podcast 6 Tips to Having A Successful Website.

oh wait…

here is one secret:

make a tiny progress with your website every day

Hot off the press: PayPal users in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Thailand will be able to receive funds into their PayPal accounts as well as withdraw them to a local bank account as of September 14th, 2006.
This will have an impact (though supposedly low) on directory business, and seo and sem industry in general, as plenty of people in the field come from the above countries, especially from Poland, and Paypal is the prevalent payment type for directory transactions. I guess some of the Polish free directories will turn to paid one, and maybe we could expect the coders behind one or two directory scripts, to come with Paypal payments extension and subsequently, release their script to the English speaking market. Not a direct corollary, but closely related after few longer thoughts (Paypal integration with English interface I mean).

People from many other countries are still prevented from the ability to receive money by Paypal, they can only use it for payments. In light of the extension over above named countries, the question is why for example Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Cyprus or South Africa, were not included in the extension batch.

This is just a rant. Paper will stand anything, they say. Leave it to the paper, let it out, others say. Some call it brainstorming. I call it not knowing how to solve a problem, and not knowing what to write about, thus merging two seemingly discreet problems. One can do that in a blog that no one reads, without even blushing.
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Soooooo…… you got this what you think is a great business idea, and the dilemma you face is, sell the idea right now for what seems to be an OK sum of money, or develop it yourself and face an uncertain outcome, maybe nothing, maybe much more than for what you could sell it right now, but certainly not a dime for next few months. On top of it, you are in a situation where something right now would be a godsend.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, they say. They didn’t have an internet when this old adage saw the light of the world, but I can’t think of an environment to which it would fit more than the internet business.
That’s not the first time I’m facing such a situation, thus there are all kinds of thoughts and possible solutions popping up in the head. How would have the wise King Solomon solved it? Where I live, if you approach a problem with a solution that will cater to all major possibilities in often a somewhat foxy manner, it’s called the Solomon’s way. In that tradition, both selling the idea now and developing it long-term myself, would be the way to do it.
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Hey…maybe that “leave it to the paper” method really works! This post cost me an hour, but solution seems to have crystalized, or at least an approach how to solve the dilemma. I didn’t know you can use blog for that kind of stuff!

a citation from the classic : “There is a new directory born every minute.”

But why? Isn’t ther plenty of them already? Isn’t market saturated? The answer would probably take a committee of seo experts, directory specialists, psychologists and economists, but I will inmodestly try to tackle it by myself:

1. pure boredome
2. to take a sneak peak on and inspiration from the website and topics others are working on
3. to make money
4. for swapping links with others
5. to feel the power and satisfy the ego (well….you will not get the power over others lifes, but power over approving or disapproving their links can be also satisfying for some)
6. to start another DMOZ or Yahoo
7. because they hate DMOZ and want to take it by storm
8. because they have a domain name they have no clue what to do with
9. to test the directory script
10. because a friend and neighbour have one too
11. to collect the email addresses of chicks (oh…..sorry ladies)
12. to collect email addresses and spam submitters
13. to promote their services
14. to collect passwords
15. just because they can, like someone pointed out on their directory