CoinTalk Hitting all of the Targets

Hitting all the Targets

When I founded CoinTalk.org in the fall of 2002, I simply wanted to provide an alternative to the USENET newsgroup that I had been participating in, as an escape to the burgeoning load of spam and trolling that are ubiquitous in an unmoderated newsgroup.  I’m amazed at how far it has come. [Read more]

Online Community Platforms

When I first started building online communitiies, there wasn’t much choice.  For me, the choice came down to phpBB and vBulletin, though there were a few others.  They were, and still are, fairly basic message board software.  And, I do have to say that neither of them has evolved much over the years since I launched my first online community (in 2002).

I do try to keep up with what new platforms are becoming popular, what’s on the horizon and such.  And, for a practical reason as well.  I’ve mentioned that the platform I use has not evolved with the times, and over the past year I’ve gone from having a portfolio of over a dozen communities on the vBulletin platform now to just three or four.  Three if you count only the ones that have actual communities on them.

Look at all the options available now.  I’ve been looking at Ning, Community Server, Expression Engine, and many others.  I just found one called KickApps today.  I got a start at a new community site with Expression Engine, but then heard about the upcoming new version of EE and decided that I should just wait and get the ball rolling when that is out instead of doing it once and doing it again when the new version comes.

But that presents me with a problem.  After so many years of developing online communities using vBulletin as a platform, my eyes are open to the new possibilities yet there are so many good choices that I’m having trouble settling into one.  I’m comfortable developing with vBulletin, and that provides some drag with making the decision.

What has really been helpful in the past is seeing what others have done before.  What have you built with an online community platform?  When I visit one of the software company websites I usually click around to see if they have a portfolio where they list client sites.  Some do, some don’t, some have just a few listed.  A lot of them just list corporate sites and those don’t fascinate me so much as the ones that individual developers build.  You know, if Coke or Nike is developing an online community there’s millions going into it and the way I see it is that it just has to look good, and if it doesn’t there’s a serious problem there.  But, if the platform can allow for smaller companies or individual developers to build something great, then that’s the kind of platform that gets me excited.

If Jelsoft thought like this, I might still like vBulletin

I used to evangelize for their brand. Now, I’m trying to get rid of that bitter taste they’ve left in my mouth by dumping my vBulletin licenses, and moving on to other services that compete with them.

Zealot.com Crowdgather Merger

About the Zealot.com Deal

This is one of my longest term projects.  I’ve put a ton of heart and effort into building up this community to where it is today.  As it stands, Zealot.com has over 30,000 members all of whom are very zealous about their hobby. [Read more]

The BloggerTalk.com Relaunch

BloggerTalk Gets a Facelift

I put a bunch of work into BloggerTalk.com over the past few weeks.  It had been a while since I took the time to do any work at all with BT, so it was well overdue. [Read more]

How do you verify stats when buying a website?

One of the ‘gotchas’ about buying sites is stats manipulation. I’m speaking specifically about website traffic, but this could equally apply to revenues or any other statistics that you take into consideration when buying a website. How do you verify what the seller is showing you is true?

With traffic stats, I think the best measure is to have them add Google Analytics to the site, if it’s not already on, and have them grant you access (Analytics allows the owner to share the stats with anyone who has a Google account) and watch it for a few days (or just look at the historical stats if it’s been in place long enough).

Other ways to verify are not as satisfactory. You can look at Alexa rankings, and that might help. For example, there was one site for sale in Sitepoint’s marketplace recently in which the seller stated hundreds of thousands of unique visits per month, yet the Alexa ranking shows above 500,000. So, that seems a bit absurd. I don’t consider Alexa very accurate, but you can get a good rough idea that a site getting hundreds of thousands of unique visits probably should have a sub-100,000 Alexa ranking and if not something is smelling fishy with the sale.

In addition to factors such as checking a site’s PageRank and backlinks, this is something I look very closely at when buying a site. Because in my opinion the traffic is one of, if not the, most valuable assets of a website.

You might also be interested in finding out where to buy and sell websites.

Matt Cutts says Link Buying Still Works

In an interview with Stephan Spencer, Matt Cutts, the Google Spaminator admits that aggressive link buying is “more likely to help” than harm a website. Look for the quote a bit over half-way down the interview.

This may be just stating the obvious, because anyone who is still buying links will be able to produce the evidence for themselves and not need affirmation from Matt Cutts, but I think it’s an interesting point to make after such a turbulent few months in the SEO industry.

Personally, I think if you’re in a competitive industry, you have to buy links. If you don’t, you won’t compete. That goes double so for newer websites, and websites without massive marketing budgets.

Knowing where to buy your links is now the real test.

Can You Predict Google Knol’s Demise?

I say 14 months, 3 days.

It’s going to take up too many resources for Google to make a go of it.

It’s going to get spammed to death, like Squidoo.

Even the best pages will be thinly disguised self-promotion (except the ones Google employees do).

What’s your prediction?

New URL

As of now, I’m putting my blog on www.petertdavis.com and redirecting www.petertdavis.net

I’ll sort any issue with the feed as it comes up.

Getting ready to pull this blog out of mothballs.

RSSMagician Coupon

RSSMagician Coupon

I just got this in - I don’t mean to review RSSMagician, but to simply pass along a coupon to anyone who’s interested in buying RSSMagician.

Use this when you purchase and you’ll save 20% on RSSMagician.

LUCKYYOU124112

It also works on their other products such as BlogSolution.

Here’s their site: http://www.rssmagician.com/

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