Fancy Dress

What’s really interesting running the Platinax Business Directory is the type of submissions that it attracts.
While not expensive, the £14.95 submission fee is enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, and there are very few low quality sites that get submitted.
What’s really interesting is how many paid submissions I get from multinational companies. […]

Rip-off links

Take a look at these two threads:

Want Help to Get Registered Office in UK
Another interesting Question?

The “SEO company” responsible for this forum spamming has a London address, but is essentially a bunch of Indian spammers.
Get this, though - I contacted them, and they told me each link provided in those threads cost £15. Each.
I don’t […]

Learning from experience and turning failure into success

A lot of business/marketing/webmaster blogs are filled with speculation - sales-speak which defines success with a subject in generic terms.
Success is nothing more than working hard and focusing on your subject. Apparently.
I disagree - success with anything comes from experience, and a big part of that experience comes from doing things *wrong*.
That means wasting […]

How long before citizen journalism is faked?

The BBC lauds the contribution of user generated media - photos, video, etc, not least in the recent spate of flooding to hit the UK.
As a viewer, it was brilliant being able to access images of places I knew, photographed by old neighbours and published on the BBC website.
But here’s the stark stark warning - […]

10 reasons why my sites suck - do yours?

It gets just a little intimidating when I read of publishers earning over $1000 a day for a single site, and other sites generating hundreds of thousands of visits per day.
Especially as I’m doing nowhere near either with any of my sites.
So what am I doing wrong?
Just a cursory examination of some similar sites in […]

Some more great Wordpress Plugins

Writing on the fly here - but in an attempt to help make my sites more useful and professional looking, I’ve just applied a couple of key Wordpress plugins for some of the sites, and will finish the rest later:
Daily Top Posts - allows the display of most popular posts today, and of all time
WP-Email […]

Wordpress: Images with excerpt in categories

So bloody annoying - you run a news site, include images with the post, then set up excerpts in your categories a) because it’s easier to read, and b)to minimise duplication of content.
But the image you post with your story doesn’t display with the excerpt…
Just spend a while this evening trying to crack this (or […]

Tips for brainstorming for a brand

If there’s one thing I’ve really gotten wrong in the past, it’s registering domains on a keyword basis.
I don’t mean anything obviously spammy, and I’ve only ever registered a single domain with more than one hyphen in it.
But otherwise, while the domains have been good for getting a keyword in there, they really suck as […]

Consolidation vs Niche Targeting: Pros and Cons

I’m currently in a conundrum, so I’m going to think aloud for this post.
The problem is one of Generic vs Niche targeting - especially with regards to consolidating a number of niche sites into a larger generic one.
If you have multiple sites in the same generic vertical covering different niche elements, should you consolidate them […]

Hull and Yorkshire Flooded

Originally born and bred in Hull, East Yorkshire, it’s been pretty shocking to see the images and video of the severe floods that have hit the entire eastern England.
Especially as Hull and the surrounding area seems to have taken the brunt of it.
Even more so that a combination of amazing power of the internet coupled […]

Google News - getting harder to be syndicated?

For some reason, for the past two years I’ve taken it on board to develop a whole string of news site.
I figure it’s partly because I have a closet desire to be a newspaper publisher for real - it was one of my dreams even before I’d heard of the internet.
The other reason is that […]

Simple vbulletin SEO tips: The Title Tag

We covered SEO titles for Wordpress in the last entry - now let’s optimise the titles for popular forum software platform vbulletin a little better.
As before, we want our site name to actually be the forum index page name. That means moving away from the generic titles to something a little more specific.
There are a […]

Some Simple WordPress SEO Tips

Here’s a neat little tip for all you Wordpress users out there…
Really, it has to be said - WordPress titles suck. “Blog Name > Post Title”.
That’s not what we want to see.
So go here and copy/paste the code for dynamic titles Paul provided in the Platinax forums - Wordpress titles without the junk - […]

Revenue Share - the next webmaster economy?

Recently I’ve noticed an emerging new trend online - revenue share as a business model applied to forums, blogs, and news communities.
The idea is simple - whatever advertising revenues the site earns is split with the active community members.
The most common way this is set up is via contextual advertising accounts, such as Google Adsense, […]

Now is the time to have a business survival strategy: recession is looming

I know many people don’t pay too much attention to general economic data, but because of the news sites I publish I’ve been covering economic indicators over the past three years.
Here’s the bottom line - the booming world economy has been financed by borrowing - a debt bubble that has been warned about continually for […]

Targeting your audience

Over the past couple of years I’ve been quietly developing a series of small and unambitious news sites.
Even before I’d heard of the internet I’ve toyed with running an independent press, and while my current endeavours at targeted in commercial marketplaces for potential future leverage, I’ve never really sat down and focused on who […]

STFU about Jason Calacanis

If anyone wants to check out how to really leverage SEO, just watch Jason Calacanis in action.
Somewhere, somehow, the guy just knows how to bait people. No pun indeed, but he is one talented master baiter.
I’ve read before that link baiters are themselves some of the easiest people to bait, and Jason know how to […]

Passion - the great asset online

If I look at my sites, the most successful are those where I’ve had a real passion. Not simply for the subject matter, but also in promoting them.
The least successful are those where I feel little enthusiasm and make only token promotional efforts.
The best websites I think communicate that passion from the start - in […]

My Business Credit Card has been used for fraud

Just got off the phone with the Royal Bank of Scotland’s credit card fraud division. They wanted to run through a couple of recent transactions with me.
Fine - I’ve done this a few times before, and it’s always a false alarm, but I don’t mind - it’s nice to know people are looking out.
They run […]

Paid blog posts - a closing window of opportunity

I’ve tested out the ReviewMe service previously, but after they opened their campaign marketplace I’ve been tempted to try them again and run a few campaigns - especially after Shoemoney’s recommendation and decent quality of some of the paid for reviews.
Anyway, results have come in from the weekend - so far variable as expected.
There’s a […]