Post 1000

Wow! I glanced at my dashboard the other day to see I was just a few days away from my 1000th post on this blog. I made a note that today, was that day and would write a post about it being the 1000th post. I wanted to devote it to what all has changed since starting this blog back in January of 2008 and what I feel has made this blog successful in earning it's keep.

What has changed?

Well, for starters this blog was once centered mostly around the BANS Build A Niche Store Platform for a long, long time. BANS certainly served it's purpose over the years since it was first released, but stopped evolving soon after the switch from Commission Junction to the Ebay Partner Network. There were a few minor adjustments since then and updates, but some glaring problems still existed that made BANS very tough for a new person to use right out of the box. Support basically came to a standstill for the product and if not for some helpful coders on the forum, would of died many months before. Wordpress is now the CMS platform of choice and has been around since 2001 as well as being widely supported and often updated. The modern day Wordpress is much more newbie friendly and if you have Fantastico in your hosting CPanel available, you can install in a matter of 2 minutes. Plugins such as PHPBay & PHPZon make it very easy to pick up where you left off with BANS and there is almost every other imaginable plugin available as well to tackle any type of need. Wordpress is the only platform I use now and unless you are a Joomla freak, you should be using it as well. There are tons of great videos and tutorials available that can get you up in running quickly with Wordpress.

Another out of nowhere right to the head of the class phenomenon is social media and web 2.0 properties as well as video giants like Youtube and Vimeo. When I started this blog I had heard of Facebook, but thought it was Myspace for college kids. Twitter I had no idea about. Youtube I knew and used, but thought of it like most, a place to share funny videos of family or pets or videos about double rainbows. (If you have not seen this, you need to!) Several know it alls will tell you they are nothing but Spam holes, but if you learn to use all of these properly and in unison with a main site or blog, the results are overwhelming. I can attest to it. Social media is here to stay like it or not.

Away from thin, back to thin! OK, not really, but sort of. In the beginnings of BANS you could throw up a site with nothing but product listings, a great keyword rich domain and perfect SEO and build a few directory links and article links to it and you could compete instantaneously almost in Google. Yahoo and MSN were very easy to dominate and in fact are still fairly easy today. Google is constantly evolving in their fight against web spam and the thin aggregated site that they sometimes open back holes that were once previously closed so to speak. Many are back building thin, aggregated, automated sites again in hopes of getting their share of the organic long tail searches. Several have my readers insisted I try WPRobot to test, so I succumbed to the pressure and bought it a few months ago. Yes I am playing with it, yes the sites built with it make some money, but how long this type thing works, remains to be seen. Sites like Mahalo have been getting away with aggregating for a while, but my money is on Google catching on by the end of the year. I could be wrong. It is fun to play with, but I would hate to build my whole empire on it.

What makes this blog go?

As you can guess with 1000 post, this place gets a ton of traffic from the SERPS along with quite a few regular readers. I know how much each post is worth to me and earns for the site. Does every post earn money? Absolutely not. Does every ad scattered around on here earn? Yes. If it doesn't I remove it and try to promote another product I use in it's place. This is fluid and always changing. It is much easier to post nearly everyday for two and half years, when you know that every post has a chance at earning you anywhere from 2 to 500 bucks a day.

The Blogger platform is still used here as you can see. Why? It has always fascinated me. Sure, I do not really own it, only the content which I back up. Sure it has it's hiccups at times and eats comments and post, but it sure has come a long way. Blogger is great for any newbie to get their feet wet with or to build feeder sites with. I would not suggest using it to level that I do, unless you just want something different to play with. You can indeed use it to build niche sites with it as well, should you choose. The templates get better and more affiliate programs like Amazon make it easier to monetize these days. I would suggest Wordpress.com hosted sites though as a starting point for those on a shoe string startup budget or just learning to use a platform. It will be easier for you to transition to your own hosted site with Wordpress when the time is right. Regardless though, I thank Blogger.

I link out a ton. If I find something useful theory,kowledge or idea wise, I link out to it. I know that I do not know everything and I know those that know much more than me and my readers respect that. People can't stand know it alls that project the me, me, me image. Those type usually post only about what they know and never accept other ways to do things. The thing you must accept in this business is there is several ways to skin the cat. There are some basics that are universal, but beyond that several methods work. I try to link out to what I deem good, even if it alters some from my own beliefs. Readers like that.

In the end it is the readers though that make this blog what it is and has been. If no one where reading the post, making purchases through the affiliate links or emailing me questions, it would not of sustained. The first 3 months of any site is tough and the same held true to this blog in it's early days. It slowly snow-balled and has become what it is today. It helped me create a doable pattern and routine for myself as well and I have several other sites I blog on daily as well, all thanks to this place. In closing, continue to send me questions when you feel the need and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks to everyone that comes here on a daily basis as well. Hopefully your business is progressing as well. Here is to 1000 more post. Thank you all!

Dave

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