Part Time Webmaster Blog

Ok, this is my opinion only, but it dawned on me one day after reading an article about PlentyofFish. They are making millions each year from ads. Then, I thought, wow, that would be nice, how do I do that. I mean after all, the site runs itself. And, what about facebook and myspace?

Key number one is visitors, you do need a lot of visitors. But, one of the things we’re always taught to get more visitors is to write content for your site. Obvious right. But, it takes a lot of time to write the articles, posts, whatever. Aha, the key to these sites is they really don’t write their own content. Think about it, we do. So, for every post we write, or question we answer, we are giving these companies more visibility and more opportunities to make money for advertising. It’s brilliant.

So, what is the next big thing? My guess is giving the back some of this advertising money to the users, you and I. Give the ability to let us post to these sites and place our ads on there. Why can’t we share in the revenue? This way, I will not only stay on their site, but I’ll write even more!

We’ve attempted to do this, not sure if it will work though. We created Jahbs.com. It’s not the prettiest site now, but it allows you to put your Adsense code into your profile. So, whenever you blog, or add to discussions, your Adsense code will display. Pretty nifty. It’s our way of saying thanks!

So, if you want to place your Adsense ads on someone else’s site, feel free to do it at Jahbs.com. Also, don’t forget to add a link to your site there.

I’ve started a new forum section for the website. You can find the link at the top of each page titled “Webmaster Forums”. One of the first forums launched is the Website Software forums.

The website software forum is designed for a couple of reasons mainly:

• Let website owners know there is other software out there, and free software.
• Allow people that have not built their site yet that there is free software out there and you can be up and running in minutes.
• Have discussions on this software. Too many times, we make a software decision based on a word of mouth. Why not have an area where you can see how others did with the software.

Now that we have some hosting forums, you can hopefully determine the software you want, and find a good suitable hosting company for it as well.

You can find the website software forums here: http://parttimewebmaster.com/webmaster-forums/?vasthtmlaction=vforum&g=6.0

I typically try to block out time to write all of my posts. It just doesn’t seem feasible to sit down every couple of hours and write a blog post. So, one of my favorite features of Wordpress is scheduling blog posts.

So, what I’ll do, is block out an hour or two for the posts. I’ll write one, then publish it immediately. On the next post, I’ll use Wordpress’s publish option to choose another time. In order to do this, I look down to the bottom right where it states “Publish Immediately Edit” I’ll click on the edit button and schedule a time in the future. I typically try to have at least 2 blog posts a day, so, I just add 12 hours to the current time. Once that’s complete, hit ok, then hit the schedule button, and voila! Wordpress will publish your article when you want.

What does this do for me? Well, right now, I’m still experimenting. But, it does allow me to show users that this blog is updated often, and it makes me look like I’m working all of the time. My favorite thing about this is that if I’m blog happy, I can write blog posts for several days out. Heck, maybe I’ll take a break.

Well, what are you thinking about right now. At this moment, I was wondering, “What do people want to know about their website?” So, I thought, where can I go to find this information. I sat for a moment, then thought, what about Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends).

So, off to Google Trends. I sat there for a couple of moments and analyzed the topics. They all seemed to focus on current events. For example, there was news of someone dying, latest lottery numbers, what actresses had babies, and tv shows. Ah, so, off to write an article about how an actresses baby is being named after your website. Sounds pretty cool, but pretty sketchy. Then it dawned on me, my next posting topic may not be about an actress, but about Google Trends.

So, my next topic is on Google Trends. So, what do I write about Google Trends, after all, that’s pretty generic. So, off to Google’s keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). So, I typed in Google Trends. I looked at some of the topics, and since we talk about websites here “google trends for websites” caught my eye especially with 3600 searches per month.

Next, I opened up another tab in my browser and searched for the specific title “google trends for websites”. There are 74,200 search results as of today. That’s a lot with a lot of competition, but I figured I’d check it out. It just so happens that Google has set up something special for Googling trends for websites found at http://www.google.com/intl/en/trends/websites/help/index.html.

Here’s a summary of Google trends for websites from Google:

With Google Trends for Websites, you can get insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of your favorite websites. You can compare data for up to five websites and view related sites and top searches for each one.

Aha, which website trends would I like to see? Well, I’d like to see my competition, see what they’re talking about. So, I went back to another browser and typed in webmaster. Pulled a couple of common links and typed them into Google Trends. My first set of attempts resulted in zero results. Ugh, so, tried again a couple of times. Finally, I had some hits. As it turns out, the top two searches after webmaster are “authorize net down” and “javascript array”. Because the first topic is pretty generic, javascript array seems like an easy win. So, that’s my next topic.

So, in summary, here’s the process on how to choose your next blog post.

1. Find a generic keyword of your interest.
2. Find the top sites listed in the search engines
3. Go to Google Trends and type in the top websites
4. Look for the most common trend
5. Write your article

We’ll see how it goes, off to the next topic!