No other way around it really - sometimes you do things that don’t work out. Sometimes you have to change your tracks (after you already changed your tracks).

The recent ILM:07 was fun. I still have about 3-5 posts to write on it. And I will.

But for now - we’ve placed a moratorium on our city sites.

I’ve talked previously about exploiting Digg to get links and so forth. All links in the ‘who blogged this’ and ‘comments’ area are direct links - no nofollow or anything of that sort.

Now - what Digg does is hide old comments from old stories. But what they do do is show new comments for old stories.

So - you find old stories that were heavily dugg, and throw in your comment. Easy as pie!

Observe our friend Card Warrior going at it.

Check out the Google Cache copy of the first post he commented on.

And a ton more links - all from Digg.

The USD vs CAD chart on Yahoo pretty much sums up my experience with the USD.

Being a Canadian company, when we started we had roughly 1 USD = 1.5 CAD. Now the rate is at 1 USD = 0.95 CAD. And it hurts. My spending power outside of the US has been dealt a blow to the gonads.

But there is an unexpected reversal - our consumer-oriented business is seeing a spike in business outside of the US. Case in point: vB Skins. We charge roughly $600+ USD per custom template (and we’ve done over 100). A year ago I would have said 95% of our customers are from the US. Now I would say it is roughly 40% US, 60% overseas (just last week we sold 5 skins to 3 different EU customers).

So - yes the USD is hurting. But the world is far bigger than the US. This is a grand opportunity.

I thought I would mention it because I’ve mentioned it before (in regards to targeting). Plus it fits in with my latest post.

The one thing that burns super-bright in my head - liquidity. Having cash on hand is just plain useful. You could have a deal with massive company X and giant company Y, but without the liquidity to make it happen, what is the use?

The other thing that I think a lot about is opportunity cost. If I have a site that makes me $100 a month - and I sell it for $3000 - which is the better deal? Having a steady (yet extremely unspectacular) source of money, or having the cash today (which could, over those 30 months, make you a lot more).

The past month was the best month for this site. It did 1399 pageviews, it generated $205.41 dollars (yep a CPM of $146.82), and I sold it for a nice 31x monthly at $6500.

Both of us are happy. The buyer is building up a collection of content-websites (he has bought about two-dozen from us already). I’m pushing that money back into our other larger projects (which should generate a lot more money within those 31 months).

The site has been steady from day one - Google sends it a nice chunk of traffic. But there is no way to guarantee that traffic won’t go down (or in last month’s case - go up). So it still is a calculated risk on behalf of my buyer - and I decided I would rather have the liquidity today and ‘invest’ in it than waiting for its slow return.

So something to think about - you may have sites generating revenue, but you might be better off selling them and creating something else. The other lesson of course is don’t get hung up on traffic too much - $200 dollars from <1500 pageviews is nothing to sneeze at.

b Feed Me, Celebrific, Blogging Pro, Forever Geek, and Filmsy are no longer owned by Bloggy Network LLC - they are now part of Splashpress. Check out the press release.

I’ve talked about one of our strengths being our diversity - so why sell the blogs?

Quite a few reasons:

1. Blog Flux. It “holy shit this could be huge” excites me. 95,000 [approved] blogs. Alexa in the top 5k. Over 145,000 registered users. Yahoo says 4.4+ million backlinks, Google [sitemaps] says 4.8+ million backlinks. Blog Top Sites has tracked over 1.25 billion pageviews - in under a year!

   This site oozes potential. It has traffic. It has a base. It makes money. What it doesn’t have is a coherent plan to take it to the next level (10+ million backlinks, 500k+ registered users, sub-1000 Alexa). Part of the problem has been time. Our biggest blogs (being the biggest) required considerable effort and time on our end to maintain. Selling them frees us from that. At the same time, the sale provided us with …

2. Liquidity. Cash is the life blood of any business. We are self-funded. Yes Enthropia Inc itself is strongly in the black. Yes we have money that could continue to fund Bloggy Network’s growth. But I already helped fund the creation of BN. Two years in, it’s time for the company to start standing on its own. There is a reason it is its own LLC and not a subsidiary of Enthropia Inc. So the sale provides us with a good liquidity boost as we re-focus on Blog Flux.

3. Resources. Related to liquidity - Gawker and Weblogs Inc got in early, so they got all the press. Since then there have been only two blog networks really worth noting - b5 Media, and Splashpress (who bought the blogs). b5 is VC funded, and Splashpress has its own pool of money. Competing versus that is hard. You have to be realistic. We have our strengths - our fantastic web design department and Blog Flux. Few others can claim such a combo (I can’t think of a single site that competes directly with Blog Flux). So we put our full effort into our unique offerings. Best bang for the buck.

4. Personnel. No doubt about it, the people you have determine how well you do. We had a project recently fall into our lap that was just too good to pass on (it is related to local - and no detail is public yet). So one of our programmers is moving to that. Another blogger (who was the primary writer on b Feed Me, Celebrific, and Filmsy) was promoted. Michael (who wrote primarily on Apple Gazette and Forever Geek was promoted to run our city-blog network: is My Home. And since his passion was Apple, Forever Geek was the odd man out. And they wanted David [to deal with the technical issues - their weak point]. A good fit for David too - he was close to their Performancing team, and the blog he ran was Blogging Pro. All this movement created a huge headache for us - finding good capable bloggers. The simple solution was to move on.

It’s a win-win for both. Splashpress gets some high quality blogs with real loyal followings. We get to stay small and focus on what we think will yield the biggest bang for the buck.

For those that read TechCrunch, you are obviously aware of the ugly infestation that is Crunch Base.

The idea is simple - while TechCrunch covers the news, Crunch Base is where they keep persistent profiles on each company. This profile includes investors, revenue, press releases, etc. A decent idea. But what TechCrunch decided to do was every time a company name was mentioned, it linked to the Crunch Base site (instead of directly to the company).

Now there would be a simple solution to this - every time a company was mentioned, link to it directly, and then have a ‘(profile)’ link after it. But the dirty little secret was that it was a no-go due to search engines. Most of Crunch Base’s traffic is from people searching for company names. Linking using ‘(profile)’ wouldn’t give it the linkjuice it needed. I just bought a search analysis for Crunch Base on Compete.com - and other than their own brand being #1, all of the other traffic-generating keywords were company names. Point proven.

But there was a lot of angry feedback. People were not happy. So they created a widget. While you read the blog post, you would also see information on each company. You can also minimize it so that you never have to see it again. Good idea.

The problem of course is that the underlying HTML still contains links (for search engine purposes) to Crunch Base. Not that I find anything wrong with. Except that it absolutely uglifies the RSS feed.

Thankfully, there is a simple solution. Add tags around the widget HTML. Then create a WP hack that makes sure none of the HTML in between appears in the RSS feed.

Voila! This way TechCrunch gives its (well-deserved) SEO juice to Crunch Base, all while sparing their RSS readers the HTML eye sore.

Lots of ruckus about Microsoft’s $240 million investment, supposedly valuing Facebook at $15 billion.

Microsoft’s original ad deal was for 3 years (ending in 2009). That was their original relationship with Facebook.

So Microsoft spent $240 million and got 1.6% of Facebook. That means $240 million / 0.016 = Facebook valued at $15 billion right?

To rip from Techcrunch (with added emphasis):

It will invest $240 million in Facebook and expand its existing relationship to international markets, according to the WSJ. (The previous advertising relationship was only for the U.S., now Microsoft is Facebook’s exclusive advertising partner both in the U.S. and abroad until 2011)

So not only was there 1.6% of Facebook given up to Microsoft, but (which everyone seems to miss) - the ad relationship was expanded and extended to 2011.

Microsoft doesn’t value Facebook at $15 billion. It values 1.6% of Facebook and an expanded and extended ad deal at $240 million. That’s it. You can’t ignore the ad deal and magically come to a $15 billion valuation.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed.

I had recently posted about how we had changed from ForumTemplates.com to vBSkins.com. One of the issues I hoped to be fixed was the domain name - banned from Google/etc, the new domain was to let us back in.

And results are already in.

Currently ranking in at #25 for ‘vbulletin skins’ and #11 for ‘vb skins’, the SE traffic is already trickling in. And Yahoo is even better - vBSkins.com sits at #9 for ‘vbulletin skins’ (with ForumTemplates.com at #8), and #3 for ‘vb skins’

The domain change has helped tremendously - no more are we generic ‘forum templates’ - you know what you are getting before you click on the domain.

And another interesting tidbit - #12 for vbulletin skins was a site called vbskinstudio.com. I saw it was parked, saw it was for sale for $75, and while I wrote this post, I purchased it. According to Yahoo, it has 38,000 backlinks. The domain will now be promptly redirected to vbskins.com, generating even more traffic to the domain, with a very minimal investment.

Not to mention vb-skins.com is also likely sending me (inadvertent) traffic.

Moral of the story? A good domain helps, and be on the look out to buy defunct sites that can send you traffic you want.

It sure has been a while. As always, things keep happening at lightning speed.

I’ve talked about personal balance before (you need time away from work), but it seems like I can’t even follow that myself. From 8 am to 6 pm, and then back at it from 11 pm to 2-4 am, it seems like one day blurs into the next.

One of the things we had been grinding out (and finally released) was vB Skins. I had posted earlier about ForumTemplates.com and how it was going nowhere (when it came to Google). At that time Yahoo saw 800k backlinks - that number had since increased to 1.75 million. At that time Google saw roughly 155k backlinks - that number has again increased 235k.

And yet nothing. A painful penalization. So I went ahead and plunked $5000 and bought vbskins.com

There were of course other reasons in changing the site. The domain no longer fit (we just did vBulletin, not IPB/phpBB/vBulletin as we did originally). The design was crap - I actually lifted it from CSSFill (a semi-defunct site we own). And the code-base was absolutely terrible - another horrible experience in outsourcing (when we were smaller) that resulted in me having to go in and patch things up. The new site was (of course) all built in-house, and it shows - much nicer design, much more robust backend, smarter ordering system - superior in every way.

The lesson here is obvious - buying a domain that was previously parked is like playing with fire. Google not only ‘kills’ the domain when it is parked (nevermind they generate at least 50% of all domain parking revenue), but even when its up, when it gets links, when people find it useful - it is still knocked out.

We also have some huge organizational changes happening in-houses (in regards to a few of our divisions) - that should be interesting to talk about (when the time comes).

In my previous post, I had said you are not a company. The issue was simple - if the business falls apart without you (ie single-employee situations), then that isn’t a company. It is more freelancing.

The same should apply to ‘companies’ that rely purely on widgets.

I read today on TechCrunch on how JS-Kit just secured $1.2 million. It boggled my mind when you look at their stats:

• 1 CEO
• 12 engineers (what in God’s name!)
• 5,000 sites using their widgets
• 1,000 adding each month (but no mention of how many stop using - unless 1000 is net)

First off - what does JS-Kit do that requires 12 employees? I’ve talked about Blog Flux scaling issues, and we were able to solve that with a rotating 1.5 man programming team. Back then we were doing 20 million Apache requests a day - that number is far higher.

But even more depressing is 5,000 users. That is absolutely horrible. Hell iBegin Weather has over two thousand sites using the widget and it was just launched on May 10 (< 3 months).

So really - 5,000 sites isn't impressive. 1,000 a month isn't impressive. 12 engineers begs the question - "wtf are they doing?"

At the end of the day, it is the entire business case that blows my mind. $40 a month. How many people do they honestly believe are going to pay $40 a month? Even with 1,000 paying customers, that means $40,000 in revenue. Is that suppoused to pay for 13 employees? And dropping ads into the widget? Sure you may make some money, but expect a lot of users to drop you like a hot potato - most serious professionals (which is who they want) would rather take the time to find a new widget/install a new widget than to have ads cropping up into a simple rating widget.

And this 5,000 is with TechCrunch having mentioned them before - imagine if they had gone TC-less.