Do you run a message board? Do you know what the differences are between phpBB and vBulletin, other than the price?

Last week I started a new message board for one of my more successful sites. With some help from some guys over at the Websitepublisher.net forums I’m happy to say that the board has really taken off.

I launched the board with using the free phpBB software. I’ve used phpBB before. Its easy to install with my webhost through cPanel using Fantastico or “Bulletin Board.” In other cases, I’ve had to manually add the MySQL database and user.

The start was a little slow. I contacted everyone who had e-mailed me through the site and let them know about the board. I also performed a few customizations like front-page registration forums. Next I mailed everyone in the site’s opt-in list. Then the board really took off.

I decided it was time to consider dropping the money on vBulletin.

Unlike phpBB, vBulletin is not free. Don’t try to download vBulletin for free either, Jelsoft aggresively pursues webmasters who use unlicensed copies — and yes, they know exactly what domains have paid and which ones haven’t.

On the outside, vBulletin and phpBB look virtually identical. One is 100% free, the other is going to cost you an upfront free and a minimum of $30 a year. When you log into the control panel the differences become very visible.

When I first started out, I immediately noticed that vBulletin was more complicated. There is a lot of stuff here — but thats not a bad thing. With phpBB you have to edit things by hand. If you want to change a font size or color, be prepared to open your text editor and get your hands dirty. In vBulletin all of this can be edited through the control panel — the colors, fonts, sizes, everything. With an hour and a half of work I had virtually mirrored the layout of my original phpBB theme.

Here is the point of this article. If you are stuck between choosing either phpBB or vBulletin for your forum software, don’t make your decision based on price. If you want to quickly deploy a forum which you expect to have a small userbase, go with phpBB. If you are thinking long term, and what a full-powered message board solution, go with vBulletin.

From Paidcontent.org, economy.com has been bought out byMoody’s for $27 million.

Getting started in website publishing isn’t hard. In fact, its the one business I know of where there are people who, with tiny nvestments, have been able to make $1 million+ a year almost entirely on their own.

Its cheaper now than ever to get into web publishing. Domains are virtually free at under $10 for a .com. Hosting is too at a few dollars a month. Or you could just sign up for a free-hosted blog. Right now my business expenses come into just under $200 a month and I am bringing in well over that.

Software isn’t that big of a deal either, for starting. There are countless free open-source apps and cheap templates that you can buy to build your website.

The barrier to entry in this business is less than most people’s monthly cable bill.

That leaves one more barrier — you. Do you have what it takes?

I have been thinking about this a lot recently. Is this an easy job? It feels like it to me, right now.

I have been publishing profitable websites for a little over a year now. One year to a very healthy business that keep growing month after month with or without daily attention — sounds too good to be true. A tiny investment, slap some Adsense ads on the site and the money starts rolling in, right?

So, is this really easy? Web publishing requires multiple disciplines which most people make careers out of. To be successful at this I’ve had to be good at writing, designing, coding, marketing, convincing people to do things, the list goes on and on.

The reality is, the first website I designed was probably in 1996. For me then it was just out of curiosity, just a game. I was a kid and the idea never even crossed my mind that I could make money off of it. In the past 10 years I’ve done tons of design work, paintings, drawings, written articles and stories, participated in and helped build evolving online communities, and played a hell of a lot of computer games. Its only now that I’ve been able to look back and realise just how critical all of this has turned out to be.

If you are no good at design, coding, or writing, the good news is that if you have a little extra money you can pay other people to do this stuff for virtually nothing. Good outsourcing is dirt cheap. The bad news is that you still need to know what you are doing in order to properly co-ordinate the work.

That leads me to believe that the truly critical skill here is understanding just how the online publishing world works. Where does traffic come from, how do you get it, and how do you maximize your profit when you do get it? There are plenty of internet geniuses out there who have made more this year than I will make in my lifetime — even if I make $1 million a year until I die.

Enough about me, what do you think, is this an easy “job”?

Finally, Google’s free stats program, Google Analytics, has updated my account with one of my site’s stats. This is some very good stuff guys. Basically Google is giving away, for free, a website stats and tracking program which previously cost $199 a month. Over the next few days I’m going to be making some posts both about this Google Analytics and about the privacy and ethical questions this has raised in regard to Google.

Today I read an interesting interview with Rupert Murdoch. If you want to know why News Corp. paid half a billion dollars for MySpace, read this. Reading him talk about print and television, I see a lot of parallels and “I’ve heard this before” with reguard to website publishing.

Here is a quote of him talking about just that, TV and Print — sound familiar?

Content is king, but you’ve still got to get distribution. If you have the leverage of a major distributor, you’ve still got a long way to go developing content, but it gives you a certain security — and it means if you’re really producing great content, you’ve got no excuse for it not getting to the proper audience…You can do it, but not if you’re just doing the same thing as somebody else, someone that’s entrenched. (You have to) get into it in a different way: You’ve got to look for a gap, where competitors in a market have grown lazy (and) lost contact with the readers or the viewers. Viewers are a bit different: The network concept is going fast.

Google purchased Urchin web analytics software earlier this year. Now you can benefit from this purchase, for free. Google has launched a free Analytics service for you to track your website’s traffic.

This goes way beyond AWStats or Webalizer. There is a detailed preview on Google’s site where you can see screenshots and read about it.

Additionally, Google has added Conversion University. I’m not sure if this was just launched, but I just noticed it. If you run an e-commerce site or are interested in increasing action by your visitors (example: newsletter sign-ups) this is something to check out.

I’ll be adding Google’s free analytics software to my site within the next day. I actually used to use an older version of Urchin. Unfortunately, it took up a massive amount of server space and I eventually stopped using it.

Conversion is a critical backbones to online advertising spending. For e-commerce site owners this means more money — because visitors are more likely to make a purchase. This means e-commerce site owners spend more money on advertising. That means more money for Google and you.

The bigger picture — Google is going to have your stats to. That raises another question, if you are already running Adsense on your site (or conversion tracking for Adwords advertisers) Google may already be collecting those same stats anyways. I’m planning on talking about this in a later post.

There is one small requirement for you to use this free service — there is a “5M pageview cap per month for non AdWords advertisers.” I wish I could say I didn’t qualify

If you are like me, you read a lot of webmaster and SEO blogs. While reading Aaron Wall’s SEO Book blog today I can across an amusing post with a bit of truth to it:

Anyone ever notice that the black hat SEO blogs typicially have both higher content quality and more original content than the typical white hat SEO blogs?

This rang true to me after reading a post at SEO Black Hat today — crossing my fingers, I hope linking to them doesn’t hurt this Blog’s Google rankings

I can’t speak for everyone, but many of the strong black hats that I know are using their black hat loot to finance a diverse portfolio of Internet ventures. The reason we are “stepping into the light” is to cover all the bases: to diversify. People get wrapped up in ethics when the real question for web entrepreneurs is: what works best?

As a web publisher myself, I can tell you I live by the question — what works best? People who can answer that question, with an answer that meets both their short-term and long-term goals are the ones who succeed in this game. When SE spammers want people to actually read and use their sites they’ll do it. If they don’t have the skills at least they will have the money to pay people who do.

If you attended the World Association of Newspapers meeting in Madrid you might be leaving with the idea that the future of newspapers is online. Dramatic drops in print circulation across the board to newspapers over the past few years should come to no suprise to veterans of the online publishing industry.

The WSJ, The Guardian, and other newspapers figured this out early on. The sad truth for many other newspapers is that it may be too late to jump aboard.

…the Internet arm of El Mundo (Elmundo.es), Spain’s second-best selling daily in print, has the highest readership of all online European papers with 750,000 visitors a day, and is the most read title in the Spanish-speaking world. A digital strategy dating back nearly 10 years has made the site “very profitable” since 2003, with a profit of 1.3 million euros (1.5 million dollars) in 2004, according to Elmundo.es director of development Emilio Plana Hidalgo.

Skeptical about the power of blogs? Here is another example from adtech reported on Revenews.

GMD’s Clark described how they rolled out a multi-faceted campaign for Audi called “The Art of the Heist.” The result was a entertainment experience that relied heavily on blogs yet tied in various other advertising and promotional elements that immersed participants… Clark said the blog component of the campaign was one half of one percent of the marketing spend and generated..29% of the traffic to the Web site.

A lot of people have asked me about writing press releases. There is a thread over at WebMasterWorld by Syzygy about just this. Press releases are useful tools for promoting new websites and getting backlinks at the same time.

..what I’ve posted above is a fairly typical press release announcing the launch of a new product. Although the wording of every press release is different, they’re usually made up of the same elements:

1. The hype (Hurrah – another new product launch)
2. The facts (The actual story)
3. More hype (This product will change the world forever)
4. The spokesperson (Blah, blah, blah…)
5. Meet the rest of the cast (Nobody wants to be left out)
6. Contact details (For more information. The end of the actual story itself)
7. About the company (Background information that’s rarely of use in this scenario).