Interesting article:How To Build A Popular and Profitable Forum CommunityFrom the article:You may have heard that having a web community is a great way to increase sales, customer loyalty and word of mouth for your web business. In fact a web community itself, if large enough and targeting an affluent demographic (or one that advertisers like to target), has the potential to bring in revenue.
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Let's say that you have looked through Lessons 1 through 14. You have chosen an idea and you have created a site. You have called in every favor you have to get some friends to link to your site. Now what?Now it is time to find out if your site resonates or not. You need to know this BEFORE you start trying to get links on large sites like Digg, Slashdot, Fark, etc. The reason why you need to
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People have started sending in links to blogs and web sites that they are creating. They come to WebKEW, get inspired and get moving. They are excited about getting started.Here is an example of such a web site -- in this case a blog called "Our Technological Future":jwbats.blogspot.comThe blog's first major post is called the Singularity FAQ for Dummies.This is a very simple and straightforward
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When you think about different business ideas to work on, there are many different angles of approach. Most people, however, would not neccessarily have "start an airline" on their short list because, mentally, it seems like a lot of work to start an airline. That's what makes this article particularly interesting:British teen launches airline from bedroom.From the article:A British teenager says
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Amazon is having a contest to name the best nonprofit web site. They have 10 finalists:Amazon.com Nonprofit Innovation AwardThe interesting thing about it from a WebKEW perspective is that these are 10 good web sites. Let's look at the sites and ask some questions. How do they feel? When you first open each site, does your gut say "good" or "bad"? "Interesting" or "boring"? "Cool" or "Uncool"?
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The tech world is abuzz this week with this:Earning MilestonesFrom the article:I went to the PO Box this morning to grab my mail and found my monthly cheque from Google’s Adsense had arrived for earnings in the month of May. May was my biggest earning month since I started blogging (June was a little lower due to me being away for the full four weeks).The check was for $14,000. The author answers
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We have talked about several different sources of visitors in previous lessons: Resonance, Links and Advertising. In this lesson we will talk about the most powerful form of free traffic on a long-term basis: Search engines. If you are creating a typical content web site, perhaps half of your daily traffic will be coming from search engines. In other words, if you have a content web site, about
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This site is interesting to me simply because it has taken an idea that is as old as the hills (recipes) and added a new twist to it to create an interesting web site:Visual Recipes - Community of Cooking EnthusiastsIf you are trying to come up with new web site ideas, think about this: Is there something old and familiar that you can do in a different way to make it fresh and unique on the Web?
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At the two-month point, we took a look at the progress of WebKEW in this post. At that point, 60 days into this project, WebKEW had 383 links in Google. Here we are about a month later, 90 days into the project, and there are two things to note:The number of links is continuing to grow. On June 17, WebKEW now has 4,940 inbound links according to Google: [Click for larger image]What kind of sites
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As I mention in Rocket video, the kids and I have been doing a fair amount with rockets lately. David is interested in this rocket, which has a small lo-res video camera built into the nose cone. That got me wondering what else is out there in the world of rocket video. Going to Google, I typed "rocket video" in as my search term. I didn't really find what I wanted on the left-hand side of the
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Top 500 Sites Have All the LuckFrom the article:Every two months Alexa's crawlers go out and scour the web bringing down 100 Terabytes of Web content and over 4 billion URLs into the archive. In the process we discover over 18 million unique sites on the Web. These are e-commerce sites, blogs, news sites and more. Virtually anything you can imagine is on the web spread out among these 18 million
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Nine Truths That Can Set You on the Path to Financial FreedomThe article contains several good points that are worth repeating. From the article:The general population has a love / hate relationship with wealth. They resent those who have it, but spend their entire lives attempting to get it for themselves. The reason a vast majority of people never accumulate a substantial nest egg is because
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Here is a letter that came in from a reader recently:Hello. I have read your article on "how to make a million dollars" article and I disagree with your article. The "tone" of the article seems to be that it is easy to make it a million dollars, and that we are oblivious to the obvious. As the article suggests, I have read some of the titles listed on your articles. Your article and the books
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Here's one way to get a lot of traffic -- launch a satellite that crashes into a comet:Comet collision a historic oneFrom the article: "NASA's Deep Impact Web site registered nearly 1 billion hits when the space probe collided with comet Tempel 1 late Sunday -- about twice as many hits as the twin Mars rovers got when they parachuted to the Red Planet last year."If you look Nasa.gov up in Alexa
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The following email came in the other day:Hi Marshall. Love your Blog. I was reading your entry titled "15,000 page views per day". Letter E of 26 steps to 15k a Day says...E) Content:Build one page of content and put online per day at 200-500 words. If you aren't sure what you need for content, start with the Overture keyword suggestor and find the core set of keywords for your topic area.
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In a comment to Lesson #12, Pat said, "I'm always amazed at the degree to which realtors are willing to buy a stock website with essentially no personalization at all." And this is true. So what could a realtor do if he/she wants to create a great web site? As with the dental sites discussed in Lesson #9 - Creating a custom web site, the first thing I would do is a survey of the best realtor
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Of all the ways to attract visitors to your web site, advertising may be the most interesting. The advantage of advertising is the fact that you can directly control it. Unlike resonance and (to a lesser extent) links, advertising is completely under your control. Unfortunately, advertising may also be the least interesting because it can be expensive. There are many, many cases, however, where
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Toothpaste for Dinner - A slide-show tour of the most addictive comic on the Web.Further proving that there is no way to tell what will resonate on the Web, we have toothpastefordinner.com. Slate is calling it "the most addictive comic on the Web," which means that it is pretty resonant. Alexa seems to concur, giving it a rank today of 25,000 or so.
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Wiki Targets How-To BuffsIf you are thinking about starting a new site, one thing to consider is the Wiki model. From the article:Hannah launched the wiki in February as an extension of eHow.com, another website that he bought last year. EHow had once been a promising internet startup, but the site fell into disrepair following the collapse of the dot-com bubble four years ago. Its database
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WSJ.com - Threatening eBay's Dominance, More Online Sellers Go It AloneFrom the article:In 2002, John Wieber started worrying about his business, which sold refurbished computers through Internet auctioneer eBay Inc. Although he was earning $1 million a year in revenue, profits had started to slip as competitors flocked to the site. EBay also raised its fees, further cutting margins, and fraud
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If you are building a Web site and you need things like web site design, icons, graphics, animation, Flash graphics, etc., here are three places where you can find people who work on a freelance or contract basis:ContractedWork.comElance.comGuru.com
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Wanting to get your own business off the ground? This article shows you the steps:12 Months to StartupThe steps are:Understand yourselfResearch and Evaluate Your IdeaChoose a Business, a Location and its Structure, and Name ItCalculate the CostsWrite Your Business PlanIdentify Sources of Startup FinancingWork Through the Startup Paperwork MazeDevelop Your Marketing and Customer Service PlanCourt
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Tools and resourcesReaders have been sending in different tools and articles that they have found useful for various reasons. Here's a collection of links. If you have other favorites, please add them in the comments or send them in. Putting a Del.icio.us, Digg, technorati and Slashdot button into your blogStealth Start-Ups SuckGood list of adsense alternatives - see both this article and the
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In Lesson #4 we talked about resonance as being one way that visitors use to find their way to your site. Resonance expresses itself in a number of different ways. For example, people might talk about your site while "standing around the water cooler" at work. They might email your site to several friends. If someone likes your site and they have a website of their own, they may also link to your
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What happens if you get mentioned in a major web site like Wired? Last week we had the chance to see. Wired published this article:Artist Cranks Up No-Name RantsThe article talks about this web site:www.onefreeminute.net/On the day that the article appeared, the onefreeminute.net Web site was totally unranked in Alexa (all rank columns had "--" marks in them). Its one-day rank stats rose to about
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