I’m officially in the middle of the silly season as baseball is days away from getting started. Client work takes precedence over the blog so I apologize for the lack of updates recently. I thought I’d make a quick post today with some brief thoughts I’ve had on a variety of subjects.

• I finally found a newsletter winner for the Single-Use License of Adii’s Premium News Theme for WordPress. I had a really great response to that contest so I definitely plan on running another one soon.
• Along with client work I’ve been spending a lot of time working on a new side project that, unfortunately, I don’t plan on discussing here in any great detail. It’s basically a brand new type of content management system I’ll be using internally to manage a network of sites my friend and I will be launching. Again, I’m dying to talk more about this but in the best interest of the project I’m going to remain silent.
• Thanks to this intense workload I’ve started to dip my feet into the outsourcing pool for some help. This is a topic I’ll definitely be writing about more in the future but probably in a more general sense. It’s been a really interesting experience so far and I’m looking forward to using outsourcing again very soon.

I’ve been spending some time this weekend going through the Buy, Sell or Trade forum over at Digital Point. I like to do this not only to spot some good potential deals but to also get my finger on the pulse of what’s doing well online. This is a great way to pick the topic for your next project.

So how do you use this as inspiration for your next web project?

The Secret

The sites that are doing well online are not being sold at Digital Point. Most people are selling their site on Digital Point because it’s an absolute failure and they want to get rid of it.

Look at what people are selling and if you’re considering doing something similar trash that idea immediately.

The seller will use excuses like he doesn’t have the time or doesn’t know how to promote it. Those are key phrases for “this web site is a failure.”

Examples of Bad Sites

The following types of sites are pretty commonly on sale right now. Avoid starting sites in these niches like the plague. They just don’t work.

• Image Hosting
• URL Shortening
• Sites with “Four Unique Sources of Income! Amazon, eBay, ClickBank and AdSense!”
• YouTube Video Aggregators
• WordPress Blogs Powered by Auto-Updating RSS Scripts

Those kinds of sites have been the main offenders for months now.

Examples of Good Sites

So those are the sites that aren’t apparently doing too well online these days. I’ll wrap this post up with a list of the types of sites you rarely see for sale. I take that as an indication sites of the following nature are reasonably successful for their owners:

• Established Blogs with Hundreds of Indexed Pages, Thousands of Backlinks and some PageRank
• Unique Content Sites in Niche Topics (again, with Indexed Pages)
• Membership Sites with Recurring Monthly Subscriptions

There are more, of course, but you’re going to need to do your own research. Again, use forums like the ones at Digital Point to find out what is and what isn’t working online. Most of the sites selling online just aren’t working which is why they’re being sold in the first place.

I’ve never really written a post specifically about this blog. I thought I’d write a bit tonight about how things are going and about the upcoming changes I’m planning on making here.

The Stats

There are some good and some bad things to report about this blog’s statistics. For starters, the Alexa Rank has dropped to 135,680. Getting that score below 150,000 was one of my goals when I began a concerted effort to post more regularly here back in December. Mission accomplished.

I’m seeing around 150+ unique visitors come to this blog each day and the majority of those are from search engines. I think that has a lot to do with writing keyword rich posts and content on long tail topics. This site sees a lot of traffic to my posts on tech support problems and my programming examples. I have no opinion one way or the other if this is a good or bad thing in the long run so I’ll take a wait and see approach.

One disappointment here would have to be my stagnant RSS subscriber count. I won’t bother giving you the exact figures because they’re pathetically small and, quite frankly, I just don’t put a lot of stock in RSS counts to begin with. The actual number itself doesn’t bother me. What does bum me out a bit is how there doesn’t seem to be much growth from week to week.

Upcoming Changes: Subtractions

I’m going to be dropping my regular features on interesting links and the WordPress plugin of the week. This actually started this week as some of you may have noticed. My original intention with those posts was to make writing here easier but they ended up being more of a mental burden than I had planned.

Also getting the axe here is the Entrecard widget. In the last few weeks I’m seeing traffic from the Entrecard site dwindle into nothing as I’ve stopped actively dropping cards and buying my own advertising. I’ve also been noticing a pretty big difference between the Entrecard-related numbers I see on Google Analytics and the numbers Entrecard is reporting. It’s enough of a problem to cause me to decide to take the widget down.

Upcoming Changes: Additions

I’m going to definitely be posting more interviews with other web developers and freelancers who are doing interesting work. The interviews are personally some of the favorite posts that I do.

I’m going to write longer but less frequent posts as well. I like to ramble on (subscribers to Jack’s Newsletter should be painfully aware of that by now) about whatever topic is obsessively on my mind at the time and the traditional short-post format just isn’t well suited to that kind of writing.

I’m also tossing around the idea of adding some advertising options. I have the 125×125 banners on the sidebar but they currently go to sites I recommend or own myself. I might be offering those to the public sometime soon. The idea of doing paid reviews has crossed my mind as well but I’m not totally sold on that idea just yet.

Tighter Integration

The last thing I want to try to do applies to more than just the blog. I really want to make more of an attempt at unifying this blog, my newsletter and my WordPress themes site. I think the closer together I can tie all three of those sites the better chances of success they’ll all have.

There appears to be a new PageRank update this weekend or possibly this morning. I bet this comes a little sooner than most people expected.

PageRank Update Day is always fun for me. Anyone who tells you that PageRank is dead is fooling themselves or just hasn’t learned how to take full advantage of it.

Here’s the newest scores for the sites throughout Jack’s Empire:

This update was full of surprises. Here’s some quick analysis:

• As usual, each update comes with some sacrificial lambs and this time around it was the Michigan Sports Report and New York City Sports Report. And, as usual, the reason for their drop should be more than obvious to anyone who visits the sites.
• The biggest leaper in the bunch was the Northwest Sports Report going from 0 to 4. I have no logical explanation for that except that it was well linked between all the sites in the empire. Conventional wisdom from SEO experts says that inter-linking like that doesn’t pass much Google juice so believe what you want.
• It’s nice to see my free WordPress themes site get a small bump. I’ve been trying to do a bit more recently to get the word out and it seems to be paying off both in the number of theme downloads and this small PR boost.

I’m actually focusing next week’s newsletter on my thoughts and approaches concerning PageRank and utilizing it to your advantage. If you haven’t subscribed yet and are interested in that kind of information sign up when you get a chance. There’s a form in the upper right hand corner right now to make it easier on you.

I’ve decided to launch a newsletter to compliment my posts here. Jack’s Newsletter will offer web development tips, WordPress news and thoughts on freelancing that won’t appear on this blog. I’ll be running all of my future contests to members of the newsletter as well.

Speaking Of Contests…

As an incentive to subscribe and to help promote the launch, I’m going to be giving away a Single-Use License for the popular Premium News Theme for WordPress to one of the newsletter’s verified subscribers. It’s free to subscribe so you’ve got nothing to lose by signing up.

Subscribe Now

In fact, I’ve made it really easy by including the sign up form right here:

I’ll be picking the winner of the free premium WordPress theme at midnight on March 7th, 2008. Feel free to tell everyone you know about the contest and have them subscribe to Jack’s Newsletter for their chance to win.