As 2005 winds down I’m getting ready to mail out my January e-mail newsletters tommorow. A few days before Christmas I spent several thousand dollars purchasing a domain name that was perfect for my target market. The last few days I’ve been working hard to get it off the ground (which I happened to do, thank you.) In this business there is no such thing as a holiday and I don’t mind it one bit.

Its been a pretty wild ride this year, and I can’t begin to imagine what 2006 will be like. Good luck guys!

Its been a busy day today, I just moved a forum to a new domain and I’ve still got a lot more work to do. But.. I couldn’t resist making another post.

This comes from John DeMayo.com — a chart of mortgage lead value by state. The most valuable — California, least valuable, Louisiana. As John says — “this should give you an interesting perspective on the huge variance in value looking at just one dimension.”

Remember what I said about niches earlier?

Yes, even more about the international differences in web development, and yes, India again.

There is not shortage of English dating sites on the internet. So what happens when a culture looks down on dating? You get marriage sites for people to find their life partners.

Estats India recently released a list of top Indian websites for 2005. The list included B2C, travel, ticket brokers, e-commerce, and greetings. No where to be seen was dating. In its place, “matrimony.”

As the dating market has become saturated success has been found in the niches — be it little people, STDs, or in this case, Indian marriage partners.

If you want to beat a monster site that dominates a billion dollar market don’t copy it — niche it.

I read an article in the WSJ last week about a successful hedge fund manager who was shorting Overstock.com’s stock. Overstock’s CEO, Patrick Byrne isn’t too happy. He ended up claiming that the manager is an evil “Sith Lord” and is leading a giant conspiracy featuring the FCC and DOJ. Oh, and this is the same hedge fund manager responsible for uncovering what was going on over at Enron.

I don’t use this blog to make personal attacks on people, but this story is just too wierd… and it gets even wierder. Here is what Mark Cuban at to say about CEO Patrick Byrne on his own blog:

Patrick byrne is a paranoid fool. I am short 20k shares. I would love to short many many more shares because a rule of thumb I have is that companies run by people I feel are paranoid fools, tend to go out of business. That makes them a good short

Considering the things that Patrick Byrne talked about during a recent conference call, I think I’d have to agree with Mark Cuban on this one.

I’ve been covering China and India recently, and for a good reason. ContentSutra reports that the Indian government has demanded Google India hand over cash for selling advertisements — in other words, tax money.

Interestingly over Christmas I watched an interview with Milton Friedman on PBS where he was asked to compare China and India. Both are rapdily growing & developing countries. One is communist, the other is a “federal republic.” Friedman said that while China lacks personal freedoms it has great economic freedoms — while India operates the other way around. These economic issues, such as taxation and other government intervention could prove to be a large wall to India’s internet development just as it has to its economic development over the last 50 years.

Thats not to say that the Communist government hasn’t held a heavy hand of censorship over its own internet development either. Both countries have much room for improvement which will only occur if they open the gates of both personal and economic freedom.

ShanghaiDaily has a list of the top search phrases for 2005 from Chinese search engine Baidu.com (ranked #4 on Alexa.) The number one search, MP3. The top follow up searches included television shows, celebrities, and other entertainment terms.

I’d be interested to know what kind of traffic being ranked #1 for “mp3″ on Baidu brings..

Yesterday Joe Dodge made a post about worthwhile things to spend your time on. His list — write great content, build connections, build a CMS, make sites you are interested in, learn new things, update regularly.

Here is my list, perhaps they’d make good New Years Resolutions for you:

1. Read & Participate in Forums — being active in the online community is important. I give 100% credit to where I am right not to forums. I found out how much you can make online through forums (everywhere from a couple hundred a day from Adsense to millions from other ventures.) I found where to start. I found out what I needed to do to reach my goals. That being said, at some point you are going to be spending too much time on forums. Stop posting for a while and put those ideas you’ve gathered to work. It will pay off!

2. Focus on what you do best — if you are a programmer, program great tools and pay a writer to make content for you, pay someone else to design a site for you.

3. Don’t read what the “experts” write — read what the successful write. (That may rule my blog out, depending on your definition of success — lets just say I went from completely clueles, making $0 a month online to living comfortably entirely from my online ventures in under 2 years.)

4. Test, test, and re-test. I can’t think of anything easier to do that can increase your income by many multiples. I don’t know why more people don’t do it. I’ve helped people with Adsense sites double to triple their earnings through a few very simple tests and changes!

Do those four steps and you are well on your way to online success!

From CNet — the days of online publishers claiming inflated web site statistics could be coming to an end (at least at big US companies.)

An Internet standards body is hammering out new rules for tallying traffic numbers on Web sites and their content partners, in an initiative called the Nomenclature Project. Under changes proposed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and its members, publishers will have to work under more stringent rules about what can and can’t be counted as part of their site.

Personally, I find it very interesting how certain large media sites set their pages to auto reload. Or how about those slideshows that auto load the next page? Are advertisers paying for “pageviews” from minimized browser windows? I don’t know — but perhaps we’ll soon find out.

I’m not a big fan of bureaus or organizations. I don’t plan on joining or supporting the IAB. According to their website annual dues start at $5,000 a year. For small publishers, like me and many others, this simply doesn’t make any sense.

Here is an interesting story from Asia Business Media. Apparently eBay China isn’t doing so hot. They’ve started by dropping the fees to open eBay stores and it looks like more fee drops will follow. This is bad news for eBay.

This isn’t an oddity either. Interestingly enough, Yahoo! Auctions dominates the online auction market in Japan. I think it would be a safe bet to say eBay China is going to be a loser. That is may seem like a risky prediction considering that here in the United States eBay literally means online auctions.

What are you doing to capture international markets in your niche? I’ve considered having translations of some of my sites done but I don’t think that language is the ultimate “tipping point” here. After all, eBay China is in Chinese.

Why should you care? Because you need to — “By 2015, Americans will be less than 15% of Internet users and will likely account for about one-third its value.”

Seth Godin is an interesting guy. He is the author of a bunch of marketing books and is widely respected by guys quite a few website developers and marketers including Brendon Sinclair.

He’s been making headlines recently with the public launch of Squidoo. Today I had a chance to ask him a few questions about the new site.

1. When someone who isn’t very technical-oriented asks you what is Squidoo, how do you respond?

Squidoo is an easy, free way to build a page that shows your expertise on any topic.

2. How long did it take from getting the first idea for Squidoo to having a working prototype online?

six months. The first two were mostly messing around getting
up our nerve.

3. From what I’ve been reading on various webmaster forums there is a level of skepticism over Squidoo. What sets Squidoo apart from other expert sites such as Wikipedia.com and About.com?

well, those same people were totally skeptical about wikipedia, friendster and even google at the beginning. If they weren’t skeptical about us, I’d be worried.

4. There’s been a lot of hype about Web 2.0; some people are saying its the next big thing, other people saying its just marketing jargon and doesn’t really exist. What are your feelings on this “controversy?”

Hardly a controversy. Check out the article in wikipedia on web 2.0. It defines what it is. I think that definition represents something new. That doesn’t mean it’ll be successful, but it is new! I remember having to persuade people in the old days that email had critical mass…

5. Where would you like to see at Squidoo in 2010 in terms of users, features, lenses, etc?

Hey, if I’m still walking in 2010, it’ll be a win!

Thanks Seth!

Be sure to stop by and take a look at Squidoo and, if you haven’t already, check out his blog.