Although the hyper-niche local markets might at first seem like a lot of work for small return they don’t have to be. Actually it can be quite an easy and enjoyable experience building the online presence of a local business and building them a ‘brand’. The rise of social media has made this job a whole lot easier. Here are some recommendations for quickly and cheaply building a local following.

Firstly, a Facebook page. I recommend the Facebook page over a ‘proper’ website or even wordpress blog because:

1. Everyone uses Facebook. If you’re going to reach and engage a person, FB is the place to do it.
2. Quick and easy setup (like five minutes or pay some guy on fiverr.com to do it for you)
3. Easy to administer by the local business owner (everyone knows how to use FB, right?)
4. Engagement – once you’ve hooked a customer as a fan on Facebook it’s easy to engage with them.

If you have some time and money to spend Facebook PPC can tightly target a demographic (if your business sells wedding dresses then target people recently engaged) and the cost per click can be amazingly low when you’re targeting a small geographical area. This works super well for local gyms, personal trainers, local speed dating events etc etc. Easy and cheap, less hassle that Google AdWords for sure.

There’s a whole heap of things you can do with Facebook pages to gain ‘likes’, lots of plugins and scripts available to (for example) unlock a printable discount coupon when your visitor ‘likes’ the page.

Encourage the business owner to take charge of the page and publish an item of news daily or weekly (example: our local bar has different specials each day of the week – locals night, $10 parmie and pot, live music on Sunday arvo, cheap cocktail Friday). Don’t overdo it with the news and publishing though, you’ll just annoy people and be seen as spamming.

This certainly saves the local business owner a lot of cost (domains, hosting, web designer etc etc) and hassle and can provide so much more value to both the business and the community.

The key to gaining valuble traffic is (now more than ever) good quality content that provides value to the visitor. Ignoring SEO if you have a good quality site is like leaving money on the table – SEO is certainly still relevant and will continue to be for some time. Google appear to be weeding out lazy SEO’s – in fact the nickname of the update (farmer) suggests that the update has hit the AdSense content farms the hardest… leaving those of us with higher quality websites with more traffic to share.

If you have a website but don’t find the time for SEO why not consider hiring a full service company such as seo kansas city ? Even having a simple site review to make sure that you’re not blocking spiders from indexing your content, duplicating your own content, or linking out to unsuitable domains is well worthwhile.

The internal name at Google for the ‘farmer’ update is ‘Panda’… Google have gone as far as making comment (analysis on SearchEngineJournal). Notes include:

1. Avoid duplicate content
2. Clean up your spelling
3. Check your analytics – high bounce rate, low time on page etc. are key indicators of low quality content
4. High Ad-to-Content ratio

All in all this update is certainly going to make life more difficult for the content farms such as Associated Content et al however it may prove to be a good thing for publishers of quality content.

I had been struggling to set up my router; I had found useful information on portforward.com and was considering using the PFconfig application which they sell for $29.95, however I had read several reviews and although the software seems OK the backup support (for if the software cannot solve your problem) was reviewed as poor.

From a comment I read on a review I found a link to PCWinTech who offer a free tool which does basically the same as PFconfig. I downloaded the tool and followed the steps and still no forwarded ports

I noticed that the forums were active, and that Shane (the forum admin) was offering one-on-one help for free. I dropped a note in the forum, and the very same day Shane contacted me to help fix the problem. We spoke first on the forum, and then by MSN. Shane directed me to download teamviewer and took control of my computer whilst I watched. Shane logged in to the router and located the problem; the router firewall was blocking traffic from the internet to my LAN.

Shane asked for nothing in return for his help; I would like to say a big thanks to him, and to his wife who wanted him to go to bed as it was 11pm!

Domain only for sale; no files/backups to be supplied. You’re welcome to grab the text off the sites.

Minimal traffic.

If you don’t buy then I’m going to allow them to expire.

See the original auction here:

http://flippa.com/auctions/57484/50-Review-Sites-Package-Deal

Domains $15 each; $12 each if you buy 5; $10 each if you buy 10 or more.

For those of you who need to see stats go here.

• Plenty of time but no money
• Plenty of money but no time

I’ve recently realised that building a house and getting married means I have no time and no money hence I’ve got to sell some stuff. Many of you Reading this will know me and know some of the stuff I’ve got (online and off). Feel free to make me an offer if it’s something you like.

One thing I have more of than I will ever have time to develop is domains and websites. I’m a bit of web kleptomaniac… buying websites and domains is so much more fun than selling them. As I’m working offline these days I don’t have time to do any development (I struggle to keep up with maintenance) so watch out and grab yourself a bargain.

I’m going to start small and sell some of my low value stuff. As there is a lack of a decent web marketplace I will be selling the really cheap stuff on digitalpoint (no cost, but probably loads of hassle) and other stuff on sitepoint/flippa (expensive fees, especially as they offer nearly no service).

I figure I will probably list stuff here on my blog for a couple of days before posting on the marketplace to give people I know chance to snipe stuff.

EDIT: Wow… over a year since I last posted.

About time you lot registered the glastonburrows domain too, someone will sooner or later. Hope the weather was good for this years festival and everyone had as much fun as I remember having back in ’06.

TechPuddle is a site I purchased last year from an online friend of mine. I have several blogs that I run with paid writers – I don’t have too much time for blogging these days. TechPuddle doesn’t make me a fortune, but it pays the bloggers and buys me a few beers each month

When designing a site there is no need to reinvent the wheel – sometimes it is easier to follow the leader. If you are a reader of tech blogs you will see that TechPuddle is basically emulating what Engadget.com and other popular tech blogs do – and obviously these bigger guys have done a lot of work on ad placement and site design to optimize their income.

The theme I created for TechPuddle is similar to Engadget in that it has variable width (it stretches in width to fit large screen resolutions and shrinks in width on small screen resolutions so that it still shows all the ads in the right hand sidebars- many themes with right hand sidebars lose revenue on low resolution screens as the ads are ‘cut off’ the screen!) Other features that are similar to Engadget are the double sidebar with industry-standard widths (the sidebars are optimized to fit standard size adunits and banners) and inline advertisements after every post or two. In addition, there is a header advertisement (although this doesn’t get much traffic – I’ve been thinking of incorporating a site-relevant headline above it to draw the readers eye).

One tip I picked up from Zac (the previous owner of TechPuddle) was to include a break in most blog posts – this means that the reader has to view two pages to read the entire story and then reload the previous page to continue reading down the news stories. More pageviews = more revenue from advertisements (even if the number of clicks are the same many advertisers such as valueclick pay per pageview). More importantly, contextual advertising such as AdSense becomes more tightly targeted when on a single post page as the content and tags are all related to one topic, rather than the topics of all posts on the index page.

As with most of the things I do, this theme is a work in progress. I’m going to release it as soon as I make it a little more user friendly. Before I do release it I would love some feedback – any views on ad placement, features etc. Save me doing it twice

Please also leave a comment below to be notified as soon as the theme is released. (BTW, I’m going to turn on my dofollow as soon as I get through the comment backlog). Chow fer now…

Back in the early 1980’s it wasn’t uncommon to build computers from parts and plans – in fact, soldering irons were a big part of the hobby scene. Whilst hunting around on the net I came across a guy in the US who had a stock of unbuilt ZX81 kits – a goldmine to a geek like me! So I started importing and selling them. Then I found another guy who had caves full of Atari games, Split Screen camper telephones(!) and other treasures. Needless to say I started importing and selling them in the UK. My eBaying became a bit of an obsession, at one point I started buying and selling Sinclair C5 cars… I still have a Sinclair Zike and probably 50 Sinclair computers in my attic. I built my first real website for selling ZX81 kits.

Selling on eBay was fun, and the main reason I don’t do it anymore is the amount of travel I do (it makes it difficult to hold stock). The hardest part of running a successful business on eBay is finding a reliable, cost effective wholesaler who does small batches. Often buying in large lots is impractical for different reasons (cost, value of inventory, storage space, turnover) and it is difficult for the little guy to get a foothold.

I first experimented with PPC in 2003 whilst on a year’s holiday. I was living in a VW kombi in Cairns, Australia, and working out of an internet cafe. I built my first adsense website in January 2004 (I still own the site) whilst on the same holiday – I bought a secondhand laptop from a pawn shop for $300, and used software off a magazine cover disc to build the site, transferring it to my digital cameras memory card and uploading to the server from an internet cafe. I wrote all the content and did the design myself. I was hooked after the first click!

Affiliate Marketing makes more sense for me as I can walk away from the business for days, weeks, or even months and I know that my websites will continue working for me, and other people will be fulfilling all the orders behind the scenes. I tend to use large, reliable companies (google’s adsense, cj, clickbank etc) who do not change their offers too often, and aim for natural search traffic – I’ve worked with PPC (and had some success), but my commitments mean I cannot stay on top of campaigns effectively. Those of you who have worked with PPC will know that it isn’t an easy business to stay in control of if you are not 100% focused.

Thats enough about me for now anyway. I’m sure there was a point to this post when I started typing, but it seems to have gotten* lost along the way.

*why do I always wind up using Americanism’s when I type on the net?