Why have MySpace and YouTube been so successful? Slashdot picked up this article from Slate which explains everything in a “grand unified theory.” What does the author say? “YouTube and MySpace are runaway hits because they combine two attributes rarely found together in tech products. They’re easy to use, and they don’t tell you what to do.” I agree.

If I would have taken a stance against commercial posting I don’t know if tattoo artist Devin Sheehy would have become an active member of one of my sites, TattooArtists.com. If not, he may not have found a new kidney.

This post is about the bare basics of the web: traffic. Yet, this is often the #1 challenge for any web site. If you have just built a site and don’t know why you aren’t making money, read on.

In order to make money, your site needs visitors.. so where do they come from?

1. The Search Engines.
Pros: Once you rank, it isn’t too difficult to get visitors to click through onto your site.
Cons: Your traffic can fluctuate violently if you lose rankings, and you have no recurring visitors.

2. Links from other sites.
Pros: These natually help with #1
Cons: Require you to publish high quality and/or original content to get the links that can really send you a good volume of traffic.

3. Pay per click advertising
Pros: Immediate delivery of highly targetted traffic. Get an Adwords account and you can have targetted traffic within hours or less.
Cons: Very expensive. Often impossible to have a positive ROI for publishers relying on advertising for revenue. (If you are an affiliate, break even or profit is realistic.)

4. Print advertising
Pros: Visitors who may be missed through methods 1-3
Cons: Extremely expensive, lots of waste through untargetted audience viewing your ads.

5. Word of Mouth
Pros: Free once you have a site that people want to tell their friends about.
Cons: Forgetable domain names will kill you, so will dashes and non-dot coms. (I’ve pointed out before, poker sites advertise non-gambling dot nets on American television because people just type in the dot com anyway.)

This list really is not complete. I could add video, radio, billboards, and more. However, these are the 5 big ones you should know about. If you are not working hard on #1 and #2 you will have a very difficult time succeeding online. #5 should follow naturally.

I don’t write much about myself on this blog, but I’ve decided to deviate from that “rule” today. This isn’t really a typical day, but it should give you an idea of what kinds of stuff I do.

This month’s issues of B2B, Business 2.0, Harvard Business Review, and Wired just arrived today. The problem is when I get just one of these magazines I can kill a whole evening reading it.

Last night I registered ErgonomicsBlog.com. Despite having a $400 ergonomic chair my keyboard is giving me problems with my wrists (in fact, its bothering me as I type this.) Up until now it has been my mouse from clicking; this time it is different. Because of this, getting an ergonomic keyboard has become a top priority.

Today I have been working on some designs for joint-venture projects, moderating my boards, and working on my PPC campaigns. The end of the month is coming along so I have to start hustling on my e-mail newsletters.

I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of two books from Amazon.com: The Long Tail : Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, and The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology. The Long Tail is a perfect example of a blog selling a book (the recommendation by Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt didn’t hurt either.) The Singularity Is Near is a book by Ray Kurzweil which I have been putting off reading for a while. If I manage to finish reading either of these books you will be hearing a lot more about them.

Thats about it for today. Its Wednesday, so I will probably doing a lot of work with a nice break in between to watch one of my favorite television shows, Alias.

I just took a look at my blog and noticed every post since the last is in bold. Is anyone else seeing that? Looks like I have another thing to add to my “to do” list today.

A lot of webmasters get angry when someone else makes a website similar to theirs. The fact is, unless they are directly copying your layout or copyrighted work there isn’t much you can do. I don’t even think its worth getting mad about — this is just the way the internet is.

From Mosaic to IE to Firefox the web has been built on inovation and doing things better than the last guy. MySpace was hardly the original social networking site, but they definately walked away with the biggest pile of loot (at least so far.) Is Google just being a copycat of Yahoo and Overture? May be, but so far they’ve certainly done a better job.

The web is very transparent. It is not difficult for the competition to borrow your idea and make it better. Thats actually why I created this blog in the first place. On forums, most users have websites they can associate with themselves. I don’t mind people looking at my work, but I do mind the extra competition in what is sometimes an already very tight niche.

How do you build up the barriers to entry to prevent competition with deep pockets from burrying you? Two things — your brand (domain name) and your user base (returning visitors who are fanatical users.)

Surging internet ad revenues mean more investment dollars are pouring back into the web, bubble style. If you aren’t going to be bought out you might be seeing someone new try to outspend you. The good news is that veteran publishers still have the upper hand; just don’t count on it lasting forever.

Think Adsense is an unsustainable business model? As Lee from the Forum Fix points out, Adsense raked in about $10 million dollars a day of revenue at Google last quarter. Perhaps a publisher making $10,000 a day off of Adsense actually is pretty reasonable.

Every so often I sit back and take a look at a situation in perspective. I don’t consider myself a Google worshiper, but the fact is their system of contextual advertising is having a dramatic impact on the internet. Adsense connects buyers with sellers in an incredibly efficient way, and allows web site owners to focus on building great sites rather than focus on finding individual advertisers.

Is the “system” perfect? No; but what is?

I am interested in some user feedback here. While interviews with people making millions of dollars a year online clearly bring in the bulk of the backlinks, it may not be whats keeping you here. I don’t know. Most of my posts can be broken down into the following catagories:

1. Interviews
2. New website ideas (like the post below that)
3. News (like multi-million dollar buyouts)
4. Practical advice for running your own site; could be SEO, advertising, etc.
5. Personal Wealth Building/money management

If I haven’t listed something, feel free to say it.

Struggling for a new niche idea? Here is a study that suggests 60 million Americans are very interested in science, whether or not they admit it publicly. There are thousands of oppertunities to start blogs, content sites, communities and forums surrounding these ideas. This article breaks down American’s with scientific interest into several catagories — perfect demographic research information.

Online Personals Watch has posted interviews with two very influencial people on the web, Dr. Andrew Conru of Adult Friend Finder and Craig Newmark of CraigsList. Both of these guys are “old timers” in internet years (got started in the early to mid nineties) and run sites with millions of users and billions of pageviews each month. Despite these simularities each has taken dramatically different approaches to building and promoting their sites.

I was reading a post on WebsitePublisher.net’s webmaster forums today and I came across a thread about successful ugly sites. If you’ve read about PlentyofFish, you may have figured out that perhaps a pretty design won’t take your website as far as you hoped. Why is that? Here is an abbreivated post that I made to the thread on WebsitePublisher.net.

Compared to Yahoo, MSN, or even Ask, Google is damn ugly. Has that had any negative affect on Google? Possibly, but its so small that the pros far outwiegh the cons. Before I was doing this I planned on being an artist. In the beginning it was all about detail and realism to me. As I got older I realized how critical layout and eye movement was.

The problem with websites is that most web designers don’t really understand this. May be they took a graphic design class and the teacher went over it, but they haven’t mastered it. And if they have, they are focusing too much on the sites design rather than the content. Despite what web designers think, people don’t visit web site to look at the design unless the site itself is about design.

Instead, web designers add all kinds of elements that kill navigatability (yes I think I just made that word up), conversion rates, and click throughs. I think this problem is exacerbated by the ease of use of all of these web design and graphics programs. I’m not saying there is anything bad with it, but just because someone can make gradients doesn’t mean they understand the core concepts of design.

What happens when someone who can’t use Photoshop, Frontpage, or Dreamweaver puts together a webpage? It just looks plain. The useless elements that distract are left out, and the core function of the site shines through.

On the other hand, there are plenty of ugly sites that don’t work too. However, every time I’ve seen someone say — hey this site is ugly, why is it so successful? — I’ve looked at the design and its actually laid out very well, even if it isn’t pretty.

In the following weeks I am going to try to put together some posts showing how you can design your site to not only function better, but still look “pretty.”

Here is a screenshot from Google Analytics for WebPublishingBlog.com. This is the Geo Map Overlay showing where our readers are located geographically. If you have not signed up for Google Analytics yet, be sure to do it since there is a waiting list. I am also working on a detailed overview of using Google Analytics in my new blogging book (soon to be released, I swear!)