I was gone Wednesday, and got caught up with my work upon returning yesterday, so I apologize for this sudden barrage of blog posts I just found something you have to read, from AffiliateBlog.com. Every so often there is a thread on Sitepoint about how to deal with bad clients, how much you should do for your clients, or some variation of that. Ignore the 10 page debates and take a look at this instead.

On his blog, Matt DeAngelis shares ten things he credits for that sucess. Whether you do web design jobs for clients, or run websites which rely on recurring visitors, this list is worth reading.

If you don’t know much about AJAX, take a look at this: AjaxWrite.com. It is a complete wordpressor that runs through your browser. How long until we see a Dreamweaver clone done in AJAX? I don’t think its unrealistic to imagine nearly all software being web-based within the next 10 years. It would go a long way toward combatting piracy and mean you would be less reliant on a single machine to do work. Of course nothing is perfect and there are security issues and technical roadblocks that will have to be overcome along the way.

Here is an interesting story from the Financial Times — MySpace.com, the fast-growing community website hugely popular with American teens, has removed 200,000 “objectionable” profiles from its site as it steps up efforts to calm fears about the safety of the network for young users.

Is Myspace really safer or was this just a publicity stunt? Considering plenty of adult film star profiles are still online, I’m vouching for #2. I could be wrong about this, perhaps Myspace doesn’t consider Jenna Jameson or hundreds of other adults stars objectionable.

1. Birth; this is where you figure out that you can have an online business. Some start a website for fun and only after putting ads or affiliate links on it realised this could actually replace their day job. Others think about money from the very beginning. Many established site owners have gone from zero to hundreds a day while those without a web presense may struggle for weeks or months to earn those first few dollars.

2. Growth; at this point you know how to make money. You can see future goals for your site and have a pretty good idea where you could be.

3. The top; at this point your main site is peaking in terms of potential growth in its niche. You have strong Google rankings and the site is a solid earner. If you have ever seen a product life cycle graph, this is the point where the early exponential growth begins to taper off. If the site is neglected a competitor will emerge and your site’s traffic will begin to shrink rather than grow.

4. Expansion; here you are ready to branch out into related fields. It can be very difficult to successfully pull off the same level of success in different niches, but it is done.

When I first started with web publishing I believed that all I had to do was produce websites and get some incoming links to them. I thought over time I would eventually rank in the top of the search engines. Its clear that this belief may be little more than wishful thinking.

Most web publisher’s business models look like this: create content, send links, get free search engine traffic, filter traffic off through Adsense to make money. If this describes your business, you probably won’t be around 5 years from now. (In fact, it could be more like 2-3 years.)

In the short-term this is a great way to make money. In fact, it probably beats the hell out of just about any business out there. The start up costs are zero and the monthly expenses are in the low two-figures.

Whats the problem? The problem is if you lose the search engine traffic your business model is worthless

On the web, traffic is money. When you put Adsense on your site, advertisers aren’t paying for clicks, they are paying for prospects. Despite what some people say about blending ads, deception, and accidental clicks, thousands of advertisers are dieing to get visitors to their sites. Some of them turn a profit from the ads, other don’t in hopes of a larger payoff in the future, either through customer value or a company buyout.

This means is when you no longer have traffic, your site no longer has value (ok, there may be value to other search engine optimizers depending on site age and links.)

Aaron Wall pointed to a Wall Street Journal who moonlighted on one of those freelance article writing sites. No suprise, content buyers are looking for sweat-shop bargains, and writers are pumping out plagerized, biased garbage. Beyond search engine ranking spider “food” this content is junk.

I’m guilty of producing crap content. These sites make some spare dollars for me, but I’m no longer under the illusion they will make me rich. The real value in the sites was me learning how web publishing really worked. If these sites are making me pennies in a few years, I’ll be suprised.

The long-term demographic trends point to only an increase in garbage content, and I’m willing to bet it will be on an exponential scale. More people are getting into the game, be it English-speaking entrepreneurs to the third world poor who want a few extra dollars a day. If the search engines don’t catch on fast their results will be comparable to a spam in-box (MSN already suffers this problem, just search “credit cards.”)

Ok, now that I’ve given you the doomsday scenario should you just give up and run from this business? If you ride this wave right, you will do very well. If you want to prosper online, in the long-run, here is what you should be doing:

Fill your sites with quality content. Most optimizers take the perspective of fighting the engines; I believe long-term the people who give engines what they want (ie: highly relevent pages for the keywords/phrases they are targetting) will come out on top.

Build sites that people come back to. This can’t be done for every subject, but its far from impossible. That guy making $300,000 a month from Adsense only gets a small fraction of his traffic from Google despite ranking on the top for search terms like “free dating.”

Build relationships with other people in the site’s industry. I’ve started sites on topics I’m an expert in, and others I knew nothing about the topic before I touched it. If experts in the niche/industry of the site are talking about your site, it is a very good sign.

Build the site on top of a premium domain name. Developers cringe when they see the price tags of high quality domain names. Few will make that investment. Right now plenty of premium domains are still priced in a way experienced developers can realize the value from them — and to me, that means they aren’t over-priced (although many certainly are.) A premium domain means visitors remember your site, you have a steady stream of new prospects through type-ins, your site looks more professional (ideal for that multi-million dollar buyout), and if the domain market keeps moving up your site has a salvagable value.

Are you serious about this business? If you don’t have a long-term project in your website portfolio, now is the time to do so.

Have you ever heard someone say you should not rely soley on Adsense for income? Although Yahoo’s publisher program has helped some webmasters sleep better at night, there is some truth to this statement. Seth Godin pointed out to me, what happens if Markus put all the dating sites out of business, who would pay for his ads?

Diversification isn’t so simple as it sounds. An entrepreneur I know said he usually lost money on the projects that were in areas he wasn’t very good at. Once you become an expert at something you usually understand and recognized the subtleties that help create windfall profits. When you can’t recognize these things you lose money or get lucky and just break even. (Beware of the “this looks good on paper” thing.)

This and my own experiences leads me to believe specialization is the best way to make lots of money and diversification is how to avoid losing it. Thus, its not a bad idea to strike a balance between the two.

How does an independent, self-employed web developer diversify? Does it mean create 100 Adsense sites instead of 3?

I’ve diversified my own income through affiliate marketing, building my own products, and consulting. Other oppurtunities could include web design, search engine optimization services, and selling ad spaces to advertisers who aren’t paying by impression (in case your SE rankings tank.)

Here is the problem with diversification: even though you are working in a related area it isn’t directly contributing your main business. Last year I got side tracked on other projects that lost money. Worse, I lost time. This happened because I devoted entire months to projects rather than working on them on the site while focusing on the things I really was good at.

This is my solution to that problem — keep your foot in the door, but don’t go all the way inside. Google uses the 70-20-10 rule (incidently my top searched keyphrase for this blog.) What this means is that Google employees spend 70% of their time on the core business (Adwords, Adsense, Search), 20% on related projects (Froogle, Google Local, etc.) and 10% on new businesses (Google Talk, Google Maps etc.)

If my advertising earnings bottomed out tommorow I could still pay my rent, my hosting, and all my other bills. It would be a pain in the ass, but it would be done. If you are risk averse and can’t bare to leave your current job (I know a lot of web site owners fall into this area) consider this approach. The truth is, you will be safer than a job where you could get a pink slip tommorow. Short of a worldwide economic collapse you’ll do just fine.

If you have found a project that you truely believe you have to devote 100% of your time to, and the payoff will be big, don’t let diversification scare you away. Plenty of people have made it with a single website from Amazon to eBay to PlentyofFish.

As I reported a few days ago, Markus Frind, the owner of the free dating site PlentyOfFish.com has been pulling in $10,000 a day from Adsense. What is even more remarkable is that he is single handedly (with a little help from his wife) running one of the largest dating sites on the internet. I asked him if he would like to do an interview for the blog, and he agreed.

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In 2003 you made a post on WebmasterWorld where you said you were making $40 a day. At what point, either before or after this, did you recognize that you could generate a livable income, and beyond, through your own websites?

I knew the day adsense came out that i would be able to make a lot of money, suddenly here was this revenue stream i could actually build a business on. My site at that point only had a few hundred visitors a day and it was only a few months old. But my growth was steady and I could plot on a graph exactly how much traffic i’d have in 4 or 5 months in the future. This was the same time where i started doing mass anti competitive intelligence, i blocked anyone with the alexa toolbar from signing up and anyone using comscore. I figured if i was to have any chance i would need to stay completely under the radar, if no one knows you exist then no one is going to counter you or clone it.

What was the biggest obstacle you have faced since starting PlentyOfFish.com and how did you overcome it?

I wouldn’t say I had any real obstacles, growth is steady and you have a good 2 or 3 months lead time on when things will start to become an issue. I spent a good 3 months of the last 12 months on vacation. I suppose that the biggest issue has always been performance, In order handle 14-15 million pageviews a day on 4 servers you have to constantly tweak the database, as execution paths etc change as the database grows and load increases.

You started PlentyOfFish to learn and expand your skills. When did you begin treating the site as a business?

I was making around 4k a month off the site and i quit my job to do it full time. At the same time i learned how to do PPC, affiliate marketing , SEO etc. Basically i tried to learn as much as possible, adapt it to my needs and move on.

You appear to be an advocate of simple, quick loading designs. Do you think that there are any other elements of web site development that developers are looking at wrong and may be counter-productive to their success?

Function over form to build an emotional connection with the user. Blend ads into content, No flashing crap, make the site useful. Basically all those things that everyone knows you are supposed to do, but very few people actually do. There is no magic bullet, but you should always test new designs or new text etc to get the result that you want. You will never have the worst design and never the best, but through testing you can always improve.

I’ve noticed some resentment by promotors and owners of paid dating sites. They fear that once a customer gets a taste of free dating they will never pay a monthly fee, thus destroying the online dating industry as it exists today. Do you think they should be threatened by PlentyOfFish.com?

Many of the owners/promoters of these niche sites basically are people who had no clue about the internet and got in the market during the .com boom and lucked out onto a viable business model. Since then they have lived in a bubble with relatively little competition. The large sites are worried, but they have always faced stiff competition. For the most part the industry wants to ignore the fact i exist and they are just hoping that I will go away, so they don’t have to explain to investors why profits are vanishing.

I think in the future paid dating will account for 5 to 20% of the over all online dating market, currently 68% of my membership in the United states has paid for a dating site in the past, draw what conclusions you will.

Do you have a vision of what the internet will look like 5 years from now, and if so, can you describe it?

Adsense and YPN will be standard components of any business models. There will eventually be a massive market place where you just select a age range, city gender etc and your ads will be shown to people matching your demographics. More tools will be developed to track users intentions and monetize them. If you own a site about horses and someone was thinking about buying a car a week ago while searching the net, your horse site may display car ads. We will eventually see online ads approach the ROI of offline ads or even exceed them as monetization of intentions\preferences takes hold.

Aaron Pratt has interviewed Shoemoney over at his SEO BUZZBOX blog. In the interview Shoemoney reveals that his past jobs have included selling appliances at Sears to getting paid six figures by Wells Fargo for 20 minutes of work a day. The most amazing part of the interview is the dramatic turn around Shoemoney had after he learned search engine optimization in 2005 and was able to rocket his websites to the top of Google.

My user driven sites now totaled about 3 million users and I was told by my premium adsense representative that my sites were the highest grossing Adsense sites for the “mobile niche”

When I hear a story of online success, I’m all over it. I want to understand the beliefs and outlook on the person behind it and what they did to make it successful. After plenty of these great success stories this year, here comes another one that perhaps tops all of them.

By now you probably have heard about Markus Frind of PlentyofFish.com. He has gone public both on forums and in interviews about making $1 million in 3 months from Adsense.

I first ran into this story a few days ago reading this blog post on “anti-marketing” design. Up against other popular dating sites, PlentyofFish’s design would lead you to believe that Markus would be lucky to be making about $30 a day; in fact, in 2003 he was making $40 a day from Adsense (although this may have been from other sites.)

So lets back up; is it the design that makes his site successful? Between saved bandwidth expenses, and a better Google clickthrough rate, I think it is very important. However, as I dug further into this story I discovered that behind this simple design was a very complex system and someone who worked smart & hard to be sucessful; here is a direct quote from WMW:

Keeping my site fast and running is one of my smallest issues.

1. Approving and editing 20,000 images/day
2. BLocking 1000 nigerian russian scams, escorts etc per day.
3. Blocking fake accounts, trouble makers etc.
4. 100k+ edits/modications/day

5 to 10% of yahoo’s and the industries total signups are scams escorts etc. I’d guess these guys steal on the order of $100-400 million per year from the industry.

How does he moderate all of this? Automation. This is brilliant. Considering other companies must hire hundreds of employees to do all of this, I suspect he is looking at a multi-million dollar buyout within a matter of months. Could he go the way of craigslist and resist it? I don’t know; he’s waving a big flag trying to get a lot of attention right now, and its certainly working.

This story reminds me about computer games. There has been such a huge focus on graphics the last 10 years that gameplay is rarely innovative and often hollow. The same can be said of websites. Post a link on Sitepoint and people are all over you about web standards, not “does your website work and does it help people?” The ugliness of Myspace was the first big single that may be pretty designs aren’t important; PlentyofFish is the nail in the coffen.

As humans one of our biggest weaknesses is becoming obsessed with what is not important. We spend 90% of our time on that little 5% — and that is why so many of us fail. PlentyofFish is an example of what happens when someone understands that its not the fancy design that brings in visitors, its something else. He understands that search engine traffic is important, but its even more important to have visitors that come back to your site again and again.

There is a lot more to say about this story, but for today I’ll leave you to dig deeper here. I suspect Markus is being bombarded with media inquiries but I’m going to try to get an interview with him anyways.

Google just launched their new Google Finance service. One of the unique features that differentiates it from Yahoo! Finance is the “blog posts” aggregation. The first symbol look-up I did, GOLD, listed this under their blog posts. Splog or not? You decide.

Blog spam aside, it is nice to see Google giving equal oppurtunity time to blogs. I am very curious to see what effect this could have on financial markets. On the other hand, it may open these bloggers to scrutiny (from the SEC) they would rather avoid.