There are two things that you can do to increase your productivity:

First, work in three dimensions, not linearly.

Second, use hand written lists to keep close track of what you are doing.

Recently someone mentioned that they had been sitting around for days waiting for a designer and programmer. They could not proceed with their project until these jobs were complete.

This is an example of what I call a stopping point. Stopping points are very bad. A few of these a week and you are in trouble. As an employee you may get away with looking for reasons to not work, as an owner you need to be looking for reasons to keep working.

Instead of waiting around watching TV this person should be writing the content that is going to go on the site. Not only will this be a better use of his time, but the site will also be fully usuable on launch.

Starting around a week and a half ago I began making use of hand written lists to schedule tasks I needed to do.

By placing steps in pencil, on paper, right in front of you, you always can see what you have done, what you need to do, and update that list accordingly.

I used to make these lists in Window’s Notepad application. For some strange reason hand writing it works so much better.

I’ve used Registerfly for a big chunk of my domain collection. Last month I got my credit card statement and the charges from them were close to $200. I registered 3 or 4 domains, and renewed about 2. That was well over $100 on there that was unaccounted for, enough for me to notice.

So, I sent them a message. In their reply I was told that the extra charges was from their auto-renew feature that didn’t work, and I shouldn’t use it anymore.

I’ve have had minor issues with Registerfly’s control panel in the past. However, none of the problems were so critical to their business operation.

Consider this: Auto renewing gives them a revenue stream that requires zero effort on their part. By forcing their users to manually auto renew I am guessing their churn rate has gone up substationally.

What this tells me is either Registerfly’s owner(s) are unaware of this or they are aware of this and don’t care or don’t understand whats going on. Thats too bad, because I’ve now ceased using them for new registrations and I will never recommend them again.

Instead try out Enom, Moniker, or just may be GoDaddy (they have a nasty habit of ransoming your domains over single spam compalints.)

EFF, where are you?

If you have been an active reader of my blog, I alerted you about this bill back in May.

On Thursday the US House of Representatives passed a law the Deleting Online Predators Act 410-15. As I speculated earlier, and CNET confirms, the wording of this law effectively bans any site where a user can publish and/or communicate with others from being accessed in schools and libraries. Adults can ask permission to use them. The law targets Myspace and chatrooms, but loops in everything including forums, Amazon.com, blogs, and the list goes on.

All of this talk about the digital divide may come true after all.

From a reasonable perspective this law will probably just be struck down as unconstitutional. Being that an election is approaching rapidly this was expected. It is unfortunate that the people who represent us neither read the bills or have any understanding of what they are regulating.

Amazon has launched a new program, called “Amazon Omakase.” What it does is not only pull contextual data from your page to find relevent products but also use behavioral data to display products the visitor looked at previously on Amazon.com.

Chris from WebsitePublisher.net who broke the story of Amazon entering the contextual ad market suspects that Omakase is what they were talking about.

I am not a member of Amazon’s affiliate program so I haven’t been able to test this out. First, I wanted to know if I could even run this on pages with Adsense. Other blog posts said it was ok, but I wanted to hear this first hand. What I heard was neither a yes or a no:

Hi Andew,

Thanks for asking about running additional ad services on your web pages. While we’re unable to comment directly on Amazon Omakase ads, in general, AdSense program policy does not permit Google ads to be published on the same page as other contextually-targeted ads.

Wow, that was informative!

If you are like me the technical aspects of this business easily become stopping points. Recently I’ve been having problems getting geotargetting working. Lucky for me John West, aka Westech, has written an article over at WebSitePublisher.net on setting up ad geotargetting with php.

Why is this important to do? First, Yahoo doesn’t want non-US traffic right now from YPN users. At best they won’t pay you for it, at worst they’ll kick you out. Many publishers have reported higher earnings from YPN over Adsense, yet they still have international traffic. It makes sense to geotarget YPN ads to your US traffic while delivering Adsense to the rest.

I had a funny thing happen to me today, a new site I launched last week was linked to on a local politics blog. The headline went something like “Mayor Y makes X.com” ..as if I had some huge important site! I chuckled and wondered how this blogger found out about the site.

When I first started this blog, I ran a few modestly high profile interviews. I was also suprised when other bloggers made single posts like they were news. I was left scratching my head wondering if everyone thought I was someone important. It just happened that I really enjoy reading and writing about the internet publishing industry.

I now have a good idea of the key factors that make a brand new site look like an authority. By an authority I mean that visitors come to your site and believe that it is legitmate, credible, and worth paying attention to. Good content alone will do this, but there a few other things that really help.

Here is a list of specific things you can do to make your site look authoritative:

-A good domain name. None-of-this-stuff.com. I chose WebPublishingBlog.com, it was clear and to the point. If you want to make up your own words (which I have done) make it short and memorable.

-A clean and professional design. Jaggy and pixelated images from improper resizing along with default templates is a no no.

-Association with recognized names in the market. Interviewing well known or accomplished individuals has been a huge boost for WebPublishingBlog. Sales pages slap thumbnail logos of newspapers, tv stations, and magazines they’ve been featured in.

There are good reasons to ignore some of these, namely sticking out from the crowd. I have also written at length about designing sites for clickthroughs and conversions in which I have said the opposite. From a tactical perspective you may need to appear credible to get those natural backlinks that will ultimately give you your traffic.

This industry is evolving at a very rapid pace. What I say works today may no longer work tommorow. You need develop your own skills to recognize patterns and apply learned concepts to your own sites.

I just finished reading an article over at the Hollywood Reporter in which Ross Levinsohn, the president of Fox Interactive Media talked about what they are planning and doing with Myspace right now and over the next few years.

I have been paying close attention to News Corp NWS for over a year now. By far, this is the most revealing look at their internet media plans.

One of the biggest problems with Myspace is much of the traffic is very generalised, thus resulting in only modest ad earnings. To combat this News Corp is working hard at how they can sub-niche Myspace’s general untargeted traffic to high-profit “vertical miniportals.”

This article also reveals that Fox Interactive Media has a “stealth group” of engineers who look out for new ideas and companies to buy. Now those would be some priceless contacts to have.

I want Yahoo’s YPN to do well. Solid competition with Adsense is good for publishers. By commoditizing contextual advertising publishers will recieve a bigger chunk of the revenue pie.

That being said, Yahoo has some serious issues they need to work out before YPN comes out of beta. A recent post on the official Yahoo Publisher Network really made me realise how sloppy some of the things they have been doing are.

Number one: Yahoo says “we don’t want international traffic.” Filter the traffic out in the first place, don’t kick out legitimate publishers who aren’t even getting paid for the international clicks. Setting up geo-targetting in phpAdsNew is not easy for everyone.

Number two: Get in line with Google’s standards. Right now Yahoo makes general statements about not placing images next to ads, while Google is doing it themselves.

Number three: The recent things not to do post says “Don’t use inappropriate ad targeting. If your site is about flowers, it’s not cool to be targeting finance.” Why should that even be an option?

Number four: This statement on that blog post really sticks out to me “Don’t go nuts with the ads and place them all over every page like they’re your content or something. It looks like you are trying too hard.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? Perhaps that we should stick the ads in the yellow and white areas instead of orange?

Number five: Get rid of this delayed auditing stuff. Publishers need to know no later than tommorow what they made today. End of month auditing is like trying to drive a car with a patch over one eye.

I understand that YPN is still in beta, so these slip ups are understandable and excusable. However, these issues do need to be resolved.

Last week Yahoo’s stock took a serious hit. I don’t own any of their stock, or really understand the details around the drop. From what I heard it had to do with delays in their ad program.

All Yahoo has to do is make YPN as close to Adsense as possible, but pay more and Google’s revenues will start to slide while Yahoo’s rise. If Microsoft really wants to damage Google they should buy Yahoo and crank that revshare up to 95% or so; then Google will be in trouble!

One of the biggest stopping points that causes small website owners to not commit is the concern that they do not have the ability to make it online. Many people live their entire life setting a low bar for goals because they think that if everyone can’t do it its not worth trying for.

Consider this, in 2005 online consumer spending was estimated at 143.2 billion dollars. Advertising spending, close to $4 billion. Sure thats not all profit, and its not just going to fall in your lap. However, that does give you an idea of what we are dealing with.

An attitude of failure is curling up in to the corner and playing it safe. Safe is a commodity. A good union job at GM looked like a safe bet for decades. Today that “safe” company is losing millions of dollars a day.

I challange you to take a serious look at your life and evaluate your own personal goals. If you don’t do it, someone else willl.

Forums are hot internet properties this year, largely thanks to Jeremy Schoemaker and Lee Dodd showing just how profitable they can be. Unfortunately they are also very tricky to start, maintain, and grow — and most barely make it past the starting line.

I have started a grand total of 3 forums. The first is still up, and hardly gets any use at all. The second went up on a larger site than the first, but I couldn’t get anyone to use it. The third is live and has a very active niche community of around 5,000 users after 7 months.

Based off of what I have done, and what I have seen others do, here is how the typical “newbie” starts a forum:

- Uses lots of catagories and sections
- Hires paid posters or creates alternate nicks and talks to him/herself
- The forum is the entire site, or..
- The forum is a tiny “forum” link buried on a navigation bar
- Expects real visitors to start showing up once there is enough content to pull in SE traffic

These are all mistakes. When and if your visitors do stumble upon your forum few will register because the corrects functions are vacant. Your web site is a machine, if its set up wrong visitors will not convert into registered users — this is not magic.

Follow the “newbie” steps, and you aren’t going very far — at least for a while. Be prepared to wait 12 months or more before you see any real activity. Instead try these steps.

- Set up the forum with 5 sections max.

- Configure your forum to show a message to unregistered users asking them to join.

- E-mail two or three contacts within the niche and invite them to join and make a few posts.

- Send real targetted traffic to the forum. If its PPC its going to be expensive. Find blogs and other niche sites that will link to you. If you need to run a contest or do something noteworthy, do it.

- Most importantly, have a content site in your forum’s niche that you can direct traffic to indefinately. If you can’t do this, find another site(s) that can.

If you have the traffic, there is no reason you can’t set up a forum in an already flooded niche. Typically dominant players will have dissatisfied users.

Years of age result in a growing bureaucracy of rules which put many people off. Forum owners get lazy/complacant/afraid of change and their sites starts to look like a museum (yes, I do mean WMW.)

I believe that some people create rules and limitations in their head simply because they are so used to following the paths of others. For example, there is no reason you can’t start up multiple forums in the same niche, check out TanTalk and IamTan.com. Look similar? Check is out with a whois, it is the same.

Judging by the 80/20 rule it would appear that starting a forum is the hard part. Based on experience, its just the beginning of a very big journey.