The Single Web Page Experiment is going really well. With a dedicated domain name and a page of highly focused content I’ve managed to get this page into the Google top 5 for a fairly solid three word search combination. I’m not sure how long it will be there, but that’s the other half of the battle. Here are the main points behind the design:

• As mentioned above the domain name and content are highly focused
• The title reflects the intended keyword (note that I chose a singular and not the plural for “web page”)
• meta tags are all in-sync with the theme
• HTML is all validated

I also took a few minutes to do some self-promoting and posted links from:

• Danifer.com
• on SitePoint
• and digg
• on del.icio.us
• and on How to Advertise

Total invested time: about fours hours including the site validation and promoting. The site was started on July 2nd, 2006 and achieved its goal position on July 20th, 2006.

Total profit so far: none – yet. The domain name is for sale if you’re interested…

I administer a lot of sites and have statistics tracking for all of them. I use the unix based Webalizer program which gives a nice overview of how the site is doing – unique visitors, page views, most popular URLs, etc. In addition to that, I also use a modified cookie tracking script called Sale Tracked from Down to Earth Scripts (which I guess has changed its name to Astriden) that builds its own log files. That file is intended to give me notification and referrer information when someone buys a product, but I find it handy for getting a quick and dirty look at the last 100 or so visitors to the site in real-time. I’ve posted a sample line below or you can see it in action (temporarily ) on the single web page experiment so visitors can track how the project is coming along.

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danifer.com|655|http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22danifer%22|Thu Jul 20 16:40:18 CDT 2006|63.173.92.65|Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

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Here’s the problem: some yahoo visited 1km1kt yesterday and left his browser information in my log. Instead of his leaving his browser version (Opera, Mozilla, IE6, etc.) like he’s supposed to, he or some malware software had modified his browser to leave a single line of javascript code code that redirected me to the horrible people at syncrisis.com. The effect was immediate – I tried to view my referrer log in a browser and as soon as it loaded that line of code, I was redirected.

I’m really upset about this and am working on a solution. Today’s hijack was a simple redirect, but it could have been much worse. I’m probably going to have to remove the tracking information from singlewebpage.com because I just can’t allow other users to execute their own scripts on my web pages. That means I’m going to lose a really cool user-experience feature on that site.

For now I’m chalking this up to yet another spammer victory. I’m always sad when I see the internet being used to cause more harm than good by people who can’t make a good enough product that sells legitimately. If you see the people who designed syncrisis on the street, punch them in the face for me. Better yet, drop them a line and tell them they suck. Here’s their whois information:

Registrant:
Gigahertz Inc.
PO Box 5318
Oswego, NY 13126
US

Registrar: NAMESDIRECT
Domain Name: SYNCRISIS.COM
Created on: 13-SEP-05
Expires on: 13-SEP-07
Last Updated on: 04-JAN-06

Administrative, Technical Contact:
Artificially.Intelligent@GMail.com
Gigahertz Inc.
PO Box 5318
Oswego, NY 13126
US
1-315-4207-065

Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.MYDOMAIN.COM
NS2.MYDOMAIN.COM
NS3.MYDOMAIN.COM
NS4.MYDOMAIN.COM

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Update: 8/4/06
I’ve been getting a lot of search traffic for this post, so I thought I’d share my solution. Apparently, lots of people have been having the same problem. Of course, the easiest way to prevent the issue is simply not to check your referrer logs in a web browser. Since this is extremely convenient for me, I’ve decided to just disable javascript in my browser. I’m using IE 6 something or other and it’s kind of a pain to turn it off via the settings, so I just use a tool called the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar which allows me to toggle lots of cool features on and off with ease. I highly recommend it.

On another note, I did have to remove the tracking feature on the single web page experiment. I expected someone to exploit it eventually, so I guess it was silly to put it up in the first place.

Way back in the day, I bought web hosting service from one of the millions of web hosting companies online today. At the time I only had one website and was just getting my feet wet. I think I paid $99 for the whole year. That first year, my website went down for no less than 10 full 24 hour days for things that were the responsibility of the hosting provider – too much server load, inadequate bandwidth, etc. My rant is that this service and many others boasted the 99.9% uptime you see from virtually every provider around. Where are they getting this figure from, anyway? By my count a web hosting company claiming 99.9% uptime can only go down for 8.76 hours a year. Sharing this information with other webmasters only fuels the question. Their sites are going down far too often for anyone to be making this claim. It just makes me mad.

So mad in fact that I learned Linux and switched to managing my own dedicated server sometime in late 2003 or early 2004. Part of the reason my business has been so successful is my Dad. He owns User Friendly Computer Consulting, a computer consulting firm in the DFW area of Texas. Since he’s as big into technology as I am and had the resources to do it, he installed a full T-1 line in his home. This was just when VOIP was getting popular and he foresaw the ability to pipe in his television signal from the ether. Anyway, he had the connection and by nature of his business always had one or two spare computers lying around. He loaned one to me for over a year so I could learn Linux and run my own web server out of his house. Pretty cool.

The machine I used at the time was a monster. It was seriously huge. It was one of the Dell PowerEdge servers that weighed something like 150 pounds. I remember having to help him muscle it upstairs into his server closet so we could hook it up. Yes, I did say server closet. You have one, right?

Anyway, after installing the box and moving my first website onto it I quickly learned that running just one site on a 150 pound Dell PowerEdge server was kind of a waste, and I could add on pretty much as many other sites as I wanted with relative ease. Thus, the business we now refer to as Danifer Web Services was born.

With one site ticking along, I soon added a hobby site for my wife and a few more for myself. Her hobby soon expanded to cater to a 1000+ member base of chatty scrap booking women who posted to her forum while my sites started to generate a trickle of income. Things were great and everything grew. They grew so fast that in a year we had become a little over-reliant on the server, the connection, and my Dad’s network as a whole.

I quickly learned how much painful it could be to have a hundred or so scrap-bookers with your phone number on speed dial calling you while you were losing money and visitors because someone blew a fuse or decided to re-work the internal DNS structure by installing Windows Small Business Server.

The next step brought Danifer Web Services to its new home which is also my home in Lewisville, Texas just outside of Dallas. Having experienced less downtime with my Dad’s setup (even with blown fuses and middle of the night changes to the internal network DNS) than I ever had with a hosting provider, I decided to go the same route and keep a server in my own house. Since the old one was still on loan and a several thousand dollar piece of business capital, I couldn’t take it with me. I opted instead to invest in one for myself.

The server this website (and all the other) now resides on is a Dell PowerEdge SC430 purchased in December of 2005. It is powered by a Pentium 4 processor with an 800mhz front side bus, has over one gigabyte of RAM and boasts an 80 gig SATA hard drive. Its broadband service is provided by Verizon Fiber Optic for Business which I believe offers 2mbps upstream and 5mbps downstream. The entire system (both the server and the fiber optic network setup) are wired to a dedicated circuit in my home and have battery backup to sustain them for several hours should the power to my house fail.

Personally, I’ve been thrilled with the setup and the way Danifer has evolved. I’m interested to see where it goes from here. Maybe in five years I’ll have a server in a facility somewhere and will be sipping cheap beer on the beach somewhere in Brazil. My daughter would enjoy that.

I’ve gotten a lot of requests for a comprehensive list of the projects I’ve been working on. Here’s most of them (minus one or two for privacy reasons). It includes the active SiteShare partnerships, but not the ones in development as well as some of the one-offs and domain names I’m not putting a ton of effort into. There are 24 on the list total, and 14 of which will report a legitimate profit this year. You might notice that some of these sites have similar themes (the importing ones in particular). These are generally gateway sites that maintain some of their own content, but are generally designed to drive traffic elsewhere.

1km1kt.net
abimportexport.com
air-freight.org
automatedmanifest.com
customs-tariffs.com
danifer.com
dieselearth.com
firmscode.com
freight-forwarders.org
howtoadvertise.net
import-duty.com
importer-exporter.net
irs-forms.net
itintl.com
marketingsmallbusiness.net
mygreenhat.com
portcodes.com
saleroad.com
scraplove.com
shipping-international.net
singlewebpage.com
teachablemethod.com
usimporters.org
veterinaryhelp.net

If you’re following along, I’d like to point out that the single web page experiment is going swimmingly. In its first month it’s been picked up by Google for terms very similar to the target terms. They’re listed below for anyone interested (since searches are dynamic, the results probably won’t be the same as on the day of this post -thanks for understanding).

Google

Google India

Google UK

I’m pleased to report that traffic from one of my most successful sites (my importing website) is at an all time high. It’s not only seeing more general traffic, but visitors are staying longer. More importantly, the traffic that’s coming in seems to be highly targeted. I’m not getting people looking for “how to ship stuff” but rather am seeing requests for “US import tax on cigars” which I’m very pleased about. Since the site is geared around selling ebooks related to how to import and the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, I’m thrilled to have an audience looking for just that information.

On the flip side, however, my free rpg games site has taken a downward turn. We were sitting in the top five on Google for the terms “free rpg games” and “free online rpgs” but have taken a major hit in this month’s update. I know Google is ranking based in part on fresh content, so this is largely out of my control since 1km1kt relies heavily on user submissions. No worries though, it’s not going anywhere. In fact I’ve recently been discussing some plans to revamp it, moving the forum to a different platform (vBulletin is working well for ScrapLove).

That’s all for now. I keep getting emails of encouragement from friends and ex-coworkers and they always make me feel good. Drop me a line if you haven’t already and let me know how you’re doing.

Day one of the business was great. I was up at 8:00, wrote several really good articles for itintl.com and dieselearth.com and a solid blog post. Today however has me up at 10:00 in the morning. It will take a huge amount of discipline to get the same amount of productivity out of myself that others have been able to achieve by employing me. I don’t expect myself to have the phenomenal will it would take to be pro-active 24 hours a day, so instead I’m trying to achieve this by setting systems in place for others to motivate me. I have a tremendous sense of responsibility when it comes to other people relying on me, so I’m looking to focus my efforts on the initiation of a project and then have others rely on me to make their work successful. From experience I know this will have the effect I’m looking for. For example, I’m setting up another SiteShare partner website today with the theme of small business networking and marketing (website under construction). I’ll expend the initial effort to establish the site and will then rely on the author (a fantastic lady who’s writtn some really great articles in the past for howtoadvertise.net) to ask me to post her articles. This allows for me to be proactive 20-30% of the time and reactive for the remainder which I feel is more realistic.

The more I research on this and tell others about the SiteShare program, the more cool stuff I’m finding out. Here’s a blog entry from copyblogger (recommended reading for any niche author) on the trend toward niche market websites.

This echoes an idea I read about in one of my SEO magazines, Search Marketing Standard, called “Targeting the Tail.” Both have to do with focusing less on the broader, general audiences and more on the smaller, niche markets. In copyblogger’s post, he argues for capturing focused audiences for content websites. In the SMS, the focus is on targeting buyers close at the “tail-end” of the buying process.

I agree with both. It would be nice to develop a product that transcends the boundaries and individual challenges we all face in life and develop a product or service that fills a need for virtually every individual on the planet (Coke, Microsoft, Boeing, etc.) but chances are slim and getting slimmer for me. In writing this I believe that most people who are dreaming the big dream of capturing the broader markets are missing the little dreams along the way.

For me, it’s a shift in focus. I’m no longer trying to skip steps in between my-life-right-now and the super-accomplishments I want to achieve. Instead, I’m going to take it one day at a time, focus on my skills and let them develop naturally into something more.

Veterinaryhelp.net is one of our fantastic SiteShare partner sites. It’s authored by a close friend of mine who is just a wealth of information on all things veterinary. Hers is one of my favorite sites simply because it’s one of the first in what will soon be a large network of niche-market content sites. It’s great for the author because she has the means to produce really valuable content in her everyday activities, and now can use that same content to produce articles that will generate an income for her for the lifetime of the website.

Let me repeat that: The lifetime of the website. She earns money for the lifetime of the website. As long as I can make her work produce income, she makes money.

Imagine yourself, working at your chosen profession, dishing out valuable advice to clients, co-workers, friends, etc. Now, if those ideas were valuable enough to doll out to those around you, what’s stopping you from taking that extra step putting pen to paper or fingers to the keys and turning your idea into an article that will generate income day after day, year after year with no additional effort on your part?

Here are some numbers just to give you an idea of the moneymaking potential:

Let’s say you write one article a week for five weeks on public speaking for a public speaking website. In the first month you average .53 cents a day because your topics provided some unique insight into public speaking that hadn’t really been addressed by other public speaking websites in the past. In your first month you would earn $8.95. Now, let’s take a look at what would happen in a year with a measly 3% growth in traffic to your website (3% is an extremely low growth rate especially if you’re adding a new article every week).

With a growth rate of 3% you would earn $112.83 in your first year. In the second year another $160.86. In the third, $229.35. In three years time you would earn $503.04. That’s $100.61 per article. Not bad.

Let’s not stop there. Remember, you’re going to get a check every month your articles make money for the lifetime of the site. If your five articles are still on the internet ten years from now with the same rate of growth and earnings potential, you’ll have earned $8923.88. Stop and take a look at that number again. Now what would happen if you put a little effort into it to improve your growth rate?

4% = $21,776.58
5% = $55,283.11

The math on this makes sense. I have one site that I started in 2004 and made $120.35. in 2005 it was over $6,000. As of today, I’m halfway to my 2006 projected earnings of $9,000. Do I post to it regularly? Yes. Do I add relevant content that people come back time after time to read about? Yes. Is it fun and easy? Yes.

It’s finally official. I’ve quit my day job to pursue the Danifer Web Services full time. It’s been so successful for the last two and a half years that Jamie and I have decided to quit working for the man and start building something for ourselves.

We’re both really scared at taking the plunge but just feel like it’s the right thing to do, simply because we both want to be rich – really rich. Rich enough to not have to worry about how much things cost or to let it stand in our way when we want to go and do. Yacht in Greece and summer in Europe rich.

So how do we get rich? It’s certainly not by working for someone else. When you sit back and think about it, having a nice hourly wage or a salary you can count on is a great thing – especially if it comes with perks like stock options or healthcare. The problem is that you’re capped for life. There’s a ceiling to how much you can make over the course of your lifetime. Even with regular promotions and advancement, you’ll still always make the guy above your richer than you’ll be yourself. It works great for lots of people, but I want to at least try to be the guy on top.

Failure is definitely an option here. The business model may be flawed, or I might turn out to be a really lazy person when I don’t punch a clock. We could have some terrible family tragedy (god forbid) that lands us in a financial situation that the business could not support. All of these are possibilities and I’m not going to ignore them. The key I keep focusing on is that Jamie is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met and I have a lot of faith and confidence in myself as well.

I firmly believe that anything we put our minds to and pour our effort into can’t help but achieve at least some measure of success.

With that in mind, wish us luck and check back to see how it’s going. Feel free to send business my way or just drop me a line to chat.

Keeton