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.

I decided late last night to put Web Auctions Daily up for sale over at SitePoint.

The idea came to me when, oddly enough, I was checking out the sites section and saw someone selling a site very similar to Web Auctions Daily. It was seeing some bidding action and I felt my site was at least slightly better and could get a good return as well.

This is my first sale at SitePoint so I’m anxious to see how it goes. It’s only a seven day auction so I’m hoping that prompts a quick response out of people. I started seeing bids about ten minutes after the auction was posted.

If anyone here is interested in bidding please stop by SitePoint and bid. If you have any questions about the site please feel free to contact me.

I’ve written about Web Auctions Daily, my auction aggregator aimed at Internet marketers, before but it’s time to mention it again after a recent refresh the site was given.

I’m calling it Web Auctions Daily 1.5. The general idea of the site has stayed the same but now there are additional sources for more web site, domain and template listings. I’ve also included Facebook Application auctions to the site as well, for those of you looking to get into that game. I’ve tightened up the look a bit to hopefully make it easier to navigate and find what you want.

The search feature is brutally basic so when I find time I’ll be working on that a bit. That’ll be the main improvement for version 2.0 I think.

A Promised Look Back

I literally put the original version of Web Auctions Daily together in about three hours on December 1st of last year. I wrote a post about it afterwards and promised to follow up later on detailing my methods of promoting it. This site isn’t a money making venture for me as much as it was a technical/educational exercise so my marketing strategy was just to get eyeballs and not necessarily turn a profit. As it stands today, there are no means of generating revenue on the site.

With that in mind… my marketing efforts were a complete disaster. I’ll be honest with you when I say I’m not really good at driving traffic because I’m generally too lazy to do all of the grunt work that is required. All of my side projects rely on automation to run and generate income regardless of large traffic volume.

As a web developer, my job is to build a site and then hand it off to its new owner. I’m not used to or very experienced in post-launch promotion. I didn’t have a lot of time to go around building up backlinks and whatnot so I made the classic mistake of trying to take the easy way out with marketing.

With that in mind, here’s what I did to advertise my auction aggregator…

My Failed Advertising Methods

I did try a few of the regular, link building means to start with. Right out of the gate I made an announcement post at Digital Point that promptly fell on deaf ears. The thread is exactly 60 days old as of today and it has 0 replies and only 83 views. Needless to say I haven’t seen a lot of referral traffic from Digital Point.

At this point I was back knee-deep into a freelance programming gig so my time was extremely limited. I decided I would try and advertise with some small banner ads on a few blogs. This proved to be a waste of dollars.

I chose three blogs that were either entirely focused on making money online or mentioned it frequently. They all had reasonably sized audiences. I’ll not reveal the names of the blogs I advertised on but my CPC averaged out to be about $0.67 between all three of them over the course of a month. I don’t think that’s very good. I also advertised on an RSS feed related to domaining. This was the cheapest method I tried and it also didn’t lead to much traffic.

Wrap This Up

I’m droning on here a bit so I’ll sum it all up for you. I took the easy way out and it cost me a bit of pocket money but I learned a lot. It was definitely worth the money. I’m going to try one more advertising method in the upcoming weeks that I think might be a bit better but we’ll see.

The bottom line is that Web Auctions Daily was built for my own personal use and I just happen to think other people might find it as useful and interesting as I do. I’m not really hell bent on making the site popular but I certainly learned a lot trying to move things along. The lesson, as always, is to not be lazy and get out there and do the dirty work to generate backlinks and traffic to your site.

If anyone has any personal experience with banner advertising (and managed to stick around and read this far) let me know about it in the comments.

I’m running a “Winter Sales Event” over at Fore Score Golf Stats, which is my golf score tracking site. If any of the site’s new or existing users want to upgrade their membership they just have to enter in a coupon code at the payment screen and they’ll get 50% off.

I use 2Checkout to handle all of the membership payments and I’ve been pretty satisified with them so far. They’re a relatively local company (based in Columbus, OH) and I found their system much easier to implement than something like PayPal.

But for some reason they seem to hide their coupon creation stuff. So if you have a 2Checkout account and want to make some coupons go to the link below. Replace the “XXXXXXX” with your Account Number.

https://www.2checkout.com/2co/admin/create_coupon?oid=XXXXXXX

The interface is pretty simple. The only real gripe I have with their coupon system is that you can’t actually pick what the coupon code will be. The sequence of characters that make up the code are automatically generated and are gibberish like: 6BWH9HU