10 Lessons I Learned From Building a Site That Received 1 Million Uniques Per Month

One day in in 2007 my wife and I were reading a funny article I found on Digg.com and I thought to myself, I can do that.  I bet my wife that I could get 1 million people to visit my site in one year.  Not pageviews but uniques.  I decided there were two niches that I knew and would have to focus on, plants or trading.  There were no funny trading sites or sites that showed the fun things you could do with your trading profits so I concentrated on this.  Over the next year I realized I would have to stray from this a bit in order to reach my million readers so I just started writing straight up com... Read More »

I Don’t Squat on Celebrity Names But I Did Make One Exception A Few Weeks Ago

When I first got into domain names I used to buy up celebrity names and hold them.  I'd buy my favorite singer or some good looking actress and put up a fake fan page and try and make some money.  It's no longer my "style" and dumped all my names many years ago ( I think I may have one I couldn't sell) but a name came up that I absolutely HAD to have..........BearBryant.net Although northern born, I was southern raised.  My father moved us to Tuscaloosa, Alabama when I was 6 years old and we stayed until I was ten.  That was during the seventies and in the seventies there was no bigger thing ... Read More »

Changing Meta Tags Really Does Work

I really am no SEO expert but I try.  I am not trying to get my mini sites or "fun" sites to the first page of Google, but my real business.  My family's nursery realized a while ago that yellow book was fading and that thousands per month could be saved if we concentrated on newsletters and working on getting to the first page for local keywords.  My father had always been in charge of the website.  He's done it since 1995 and I 'm pretty sure we hadn't updated it since then.  The website was my Dad's thing and I never got involved despite the fact I was getting pretty good at the whole web thing.... Read More »

Using Google’s “Random Walk” and My Guesses to Rise in Search Results

Many years ago, Larry Page of Google invented "Page" rank as one of the variables in his method to index the billions of sites on the Internet.  Since that day, every site owner has tried to figure out how to improve it, why it's important, and what it means if it means anything at all.  I've never really put much focus on it but it's like religion.  You're never quite sure if it's real but you really don't want to bare the consequences of not practicing it and it provides some good if you do it right. Everyone knows of pagerank but most really have no idea the "real" definition.  Pagerank is thi... Read More »