The Secret to Building a Website Worth $1M

Gabriel writes in and asks: nibbledish contains around 3,000 recipes and gets around 165k uniques per month, while sparkrecipes contains nearly 170,000 recipes but only gets around 16.3k uniques per month according to quantcast.  Do you have any explanation as to why this is the case?  I would expect sparkrecipes to garner much more traffic since it's more established and it contains more recipes. It's an outstanding question.  Competitive intelligence is so crucial when analyzing any market, so I ...  Keep reading »

I know that sounds like some get-rich-quick scheme, but hear me out.  I promise you that the vast majority of sites that I have ever worked with were able to double their revenue with 30 minutes of work (or less).  Here's how. In most cases, our efforts to increase revenue center on increasing traffic.  In many cases, in fact, that's the only method we're using to increase revenue.  We get so close to our sites that we ...  Keep reading »

Somewhere along the way, most of us get to the point where our site just isn't having the success that we want it to have.  I've been there myself, and I talk to others all the time who are right in the middle of it. There are three big things that could be holding you back. Your Content is Forgettable Is your site unique and/or better than other sites in the same niche?  If not, you'll always be swimming upstream -- trying to ...  Keep reading »

I presented on one of the Elite Retreat mastermind calls a few weeks ago, and someone asked a question along the lines of what kinds of sites I buy or what I look for in a site.  Maybe counter-intuitively, my answer was that I like ugly sites -- but ugly sites where the ugly is only skin deep.  That's because you can see a stunning amount of improvement when you put a better face on a site that is otherwise ...  Keep reading »

Pat Lazure from WikiCity is a good friend of mine, and I have been helping him some along the way as this great idea has gone from concept to execution to success.  We talked recently about his first foray into using press releases, and I asked him if I could share it with you guys.  Here is his story. ------------------------------------------------- In an effort to promote the official launch of WikiCity, we decided to spend $680 that we really ...  Keep reading »

Last week, Jeremy from Wildfire Marketing Group commented on my post about local internet marketing.  I had written that local business owners had no excuse for having an ugly site when great designs could be had from 99designs for less than $1,000.  As a web designer, Jeremy took extreme exception to that and understandly so.  I owned Unmatched Style for a long time, and the "no spec" issue is one that I became very familiar with. Jeremy ...  Keep reading »

I was an Internet Marketing consultant for several years -- including 2.5 years full-time while my first website was still getting off the ground -- and I still do pro bono consulting from time to time just to meet new people and be exposed to new industries. Virtually all the sites I've worked with have been U.S. sites that marketed nationwide, but I've worked with a handful who were only interested in marketing locally.  Here's what I've learned with ...  Keep reading »

It hits me constantly just how many free apps I use that I would find it hard to do without and how many of them it took me so long to find out about, so I wanted to share. Yes, I know.  All the cool kids use Gmail.  I use both, but I still much prefer Yahoo! Mail.  Maybe it's the more traditional method of replying to emails ...  Keep reading »

Last September, I wrote about how important it was to focus when you found something that was working for you -- and what a constant challenge it was for me to do that.  Well, it's still a challenge (and probably always will be) but I'm doing much better I think. Part of that is recognizing when a project is an outlier and will take a disproportionate amount of time and effort to be a success compared with other projects that ...  Keep reading »