The latest security update from Jelsoft for their Vbulletin product:

JELSOFT SECURITY BULLETIN
http://www.vbulletin.com/
November 24th, 2006

* New vBulletin Versions Released
* Your License Information
* Contact Us

————– NEW VBULLETIN VERSIONS RELEASED ———–

The discovery of a potential cross-site scripting (XSS) issue in the administrators control panel has necessitated the preventative release of new versions of vBulletin for the 3.6, 3.5 and 3.0 series.

Due to several mitigating factors, this issue is hard to exploit and careful browsing by administrators can prevent it entirely. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that all of our customers upgrade or apply patches as soon as possible.

We have posted instructions on the vBulletin.com announcements forum detailing procedures to upgrade or patch each affected version. Please follow the relevant links below.

Note: While we have supplied patches and updates for all affected vBulletin versions, we do recommend that all customers upgrade to 3.6.4, as this is our latest stable release.

Upgrade information and patch for 3.6.* series
http://www.vbulletin.com/go/364

Upgrade information and patch for 3.5.* series
http://www.vbulletin.com/go/357

Upgrade information and patch for 3.0.* series
http://www.vbulletin.com/go/3017

If you absolutely cannot apply the patch or upgrade…

We strongly recommend you actively take steps to address this issue. However, if this is not possible, we recommend that administrators only log into the control panel when work is necessary. While you are logged into the control panel, do not click unknown links. Log out from the control panel using the link in the upper right of the screen immediately after finishing your work. If you are unexpectedly presented with the control panel login screen after clicking a link, do not login.

A question from one of my clients regarding comment spam on her WordPress blog:

I have a quick question for you — been getting tons of crappy posts to my website. Is there a way to adjust some of the wording so it kicks out the pill and sexual content posts? Some of this are beyond nasty.

Thanks a million,

Joi
Before all your memories yellow and fade… Scrap-To-It!
www.scraptoit.com

My reply

When it comes to comment spam, there are a couple of settings in the WordPress control panel. You can turn off the comments all together or require approval from you before they get posted. I normally set mine to require approval, but it depends on how much comment spam you’re getting and how valuable it is for people to be able to post comments.

If you’re in the market to buy a content driven marketing blog, check out this auction over at SitePoint.com:

Here are the details:

PR3 – Business networking site – All original content

MarketingSmallBusiness.net is a content driven web site related to small business marketing and networking.

Content

This site contains 19 professionally written; original articles related to small business marketing and networking that have not been republished or distributed elsewhere.

The contributing author is available to do follow-up work on a paid basis, but that is not included as part of this auction.

Traffic

MarketingSmallBusiness.net is fully indexed by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. It averages about 20-25 unique visitors per day*.

You can view traffic statistics at:
http://www.marketingsmallbusiness.net/stats/
username: guest
password: guest

* Our traffic numbers are not inflated with bot visits, paid traffic, or links from our other websites. Our statistics program does not count the majority of visits that would artificially inflate traffic.

Revenue

We started using Yahoo!’s YPN program to monetize MarketingSmallBusiness.net in September. Earnings are as follows:

Sep 2006 – $0.09
Oct 2006 – $6.79
Through Nov 17, 2006 – $2.38

You can view a screenshot of the most recent earnings at:
http://www.marketingsmallbusiness.net/ypnstats.jpg

Domain

The domain name is registered through GoDaddy. It was registered as a new domain on 7/14/2006 and is included as part of this auction.

Backend

This site is powered by a fairly standard WordPress installation. All content is contained within the WordPress database.

Terms

The buyer will receive a copy of the site contents, database, and domain name. The winning bidder will be responsible for their own hosting and moving the website to a new home. I’ll be happy to set up one year’s worth of hosting and move the site for you for a one-time fee of $200.

If you don’t stay in front of your customers, your competitors will.

Your existing customers are your best future customers. They’ve purchased your product or service once before and are the most likely to need it again. If you don’t take the time and effort to make yourself memorable, you may not earn their business the next time around. Staying at the forefront is critical to success.

If your customers don’t remember your name when they go to shop, you’ll have to compete for their business all over again!

That’s where email marketing comes in.

I’m not talking about sending thousands of spam messages peddling Viagra and knock-off Rolex watches. I’m talking about sending valuable information about your products and services to individuals that have already taken the time to establish a business relationship with you.

What’s the return on investment?

When you send an email newsletter or bulk mailing to your existing client base, you can typically expect a 1% to 5% response rate from your subscribers. That means that if you send out a thousand emails to existing or potential customers, you’re likely to generate anywhere between ten and fifty qualified leads. From there, you’ll have to do your own math based on your business.

For my business (Danifer Web Services) I find that out of ten leads I’m likely to generate one sale. Out of fifty, I’ll generate five. From each sale, my profit margin is anywhere between $300 and $2000.

That means for the 15 minutes it takes to put together a monthly mailer advertising my latest special or value added service to two thousand subscribers, I can expect to receive between $2500 and $10,000 worth of business. Not too bad, right?

How can I build a subscriber list?

• Networking is a great way to get started. Sign up with your local chamber of commerce and attend some of their “get to know you” functions. Collect business cards from interested individuals and plug them into a database.
• If you have a restaurant, bar or retail outlet, put out a fishbowl and encourage visitors to drop in a card for a chance to win a small prize.
• Have a website? Consider adding a newsletter sign up form like the one at the bottom of the page.
• Try giving away something for free like a white paper related to one of your products. By signing up for the information, you pre-qualify individuals who are interested in what you have to offer. Here’s an example from one of my sites where I give away statistical website information in exchange for email subscribers.

Conclusion

Email marketing is a low cost, highly effective advertising solution for businesses on a budget. My own marketing is limited to this and to the networking I do at local business events and returns 90% of my customers.

If you’re interested in setting up an email collection service or sending out a newsletter, please feel free to drop me a line anytime.

Yesterday I launched RPGLaboratory.com, a Drupal-based blog hosting sister site to 1KM1KT. The primary audience members are developers for role playing games. Since 1KM1KT was already hosting completed RPG projects and a discussion forum, I thought the members might appreciate and contribute to their own individual RPG development blogs.

I decided to make a separate website for them rather than add on to 1KM1KT for diversification purposes, to track statistics independently, and to appeal to a similar but equally targeted audience. Most of 1KM1KT’s traffic are individuals looking for free downloadable rpg games. RPG Laboratory will instead focus on game developers and development.

A friend of mine recently turned me onto a service called greylisting for my mailserver. His comments are great, so I’ve just pasted them below. Thanks to the guys at GreatDaneHosting!

Keeton,

You need to look into greylisting for your email. The first time you get an email from a specific email address, the mail server tells the remote mail server to resend in 30 minutes. Most spam servers don’t bother. Once the email has successfully been resent to your mailserver, it goes on a whitelist, so future emails are not delayed.

If you can handle the delay in email, which most people can, then it is a very effective way to cut down spam. You can manually add email addresses to your whitelist, so they won’t be delayed the first time.

Mike

If you want to email me at danifer.com, there’s only one page where you can find my email address. The reason for this is two-fold:

1. By having a contact page, I can avoid putting my email address on every web page where I encourage customers to email me.

   This is nice because if I have the need to change my email address, I can do it without much difficulty. It’s easier to change the address on one page than it would be to find every instance where I’ve used an email address and change them manually, and the extra step needed to get a hold of me is fairly inconsequential.

2. I get a LOT of spam and the only effective way to control it is to regularly change my contact email.

   I think contact forms are annoying, so I like to publish my address in the name@domain.com format so interested parties can email me using their method of choice. I find that when I’m faced with a contact form on a website rather than an email address, there’s about a one in five chance I’ll just decide it’s not that important that I get in touch with that person and I would hate if my customers felt the same way.

The problem with number two is that spammers are now using email scrapers that will visit websites looking for email addresses to add to their spam lists (that’s why you see people using email addresses and spelling them out like “name at domain.com”).

One way I’ve found to control the email scrapers is to publish my email address using javascript which most bots can not read. You’ll notice if you turn off javascript on your browser my address on the contact page will disappear. This is a little more complicated to implement, so it’s nice to have it on one page instead of dozens.

On the back of my business cards, I include a URL that users can visit to view special offers, get discounts on my services, and basically just get cool extra stuff for free. The idea is to gauge who is actioning on my business cards when I give them out – meaning I want to know if people are taking the time to look them over, absorb the information and bothering to visit the website.

Basically, I created a new page on my site and included the noindex, nofollow metatags so it wouldn’t get spidered by the search engines. I don’t link to it from any other pages on my site, so the only way to get to it is to manually type the URL into your browser. On this special page I included a script that sends a quick email notification to me whenever it is loaded in a browser. Basically, an email notification of web visit. The email it sends looks something like this and can be easily customized for a variety of applications:

A request has been made to your specified web page.

Site Visited: http://www.danifer.com
Viewed Page: http://www.danifer.com/secretpage
IP Address: http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=an IP Address
Referrer:
User Agent: Useragent info here
Time: October 18, 2006, 7:26 pm

Of course you can always get this information from your log files, but I don’t know anyone who has time to read those everyday, and I wouldn’t expect someone outside of my field to know where to find them. I’m billing this more as a low tech tool for clients to get real-time feedback from their website in an email format that most of them are comfortable using.

This was a pretty simple tool to setup and I’ll be pitching it to clients as a good way to feel out some of their marketing efforts. Since the script can be shared via a php include statement and includes custom page/site info for each page visit notification, it’s easy to host the script in a single location and call it to wherever it is needed, so use on more than one page is very simple.

I’d like to see clients use this to judge the effectiveness of things like bulk mailings, word of mouth advertising, TV commercial spots, and other offline and online marketing efforts.

I’m sure these have been posted all over the net, but they’re a good reference nonetheless. From the List of the keyboard shortcuts that are available in Windows XP.

• CTRL+C (Copy)
• CTRL+X (Cut)
• CTRL+V (Paste)
• CTRL+Z (Undo)
• DELETE (Delete)
• SHIFT+DELETE (Delete the selected item permanently without placing the item in the Recycle Bin)
• CTRL while dragging an item (Copy the selected item)
• CTRL+SHIFT while dragging an item (Create a shortcut to the selected item)
• F2 key (Rename the selected item)
• CTRL+RIGHT ARROW (Move the insertion point to the beginning of the next word)
• CTRL+LEFT ARROW (Move the insertion point to the beginning of the previous word)
• CTRL+DOWN ARROW (Move the insertion point to the beginning of the next paragraph)
• CTRL+UP ARROW (Move the insertion point to the beginning of the previous paragraph)
• CTRL+SHIFT with any of the arrow keys (Highlight a block of text)
• SHIFT with any of the arrow keys (Select more than one item in a window or on the desktop, or select text in a document)
• CTRL+A (Select all)
• F3 key (Search for a file or a folder)
• ALT+ENTER (View the properties for the selected item)
• ALT+F4 (Close the active item, or quit the active program)
• ALT+ENTER (Display the properties of the selected object)
• ALT+SPACEBAR (Open the shortcut menu for the active window)
• CTRL+F4 (Close the active document in programs that enable you to have multiple documents open simultaneously)
• ALT+TAB (Switch between the open items)
• ALT+ESC (Cycle through items in the order that they had been opened)
• F6 key (Cycle through the screen elements in a window or on the desktop)
• F4 key (Display the Address bar list in My Computer or Windows Explorer)
• SHIFT+F10 (Display the shortcut menu for the selected item)
• ALT+SPACEBAR (Display the System menu for the active window)
• CTRL+ESC (Display the Start menu)
• ALT+Underlined letter in a menu name (Display the corresponding menu)
• Underlined letter in a command name on an open menu (Perform the corresponding command)
• F10 key (Activate the menu bar in the active program)
• RIGHT ARROW (Open the next menu to the right, or open a submenu)
• LEFT ARROW (Open the next menu to the left, or close a submenu)
• F5 key (Update the active window)
• BACKSPACE (View the folder one level up in My Computer or Windows Explorer)
• ESC (Cancel the current task)
• SHIFT when you insert a CD-ROM into the CD-ROM drive (Prevent the CD-ROM from automatically playing)
• CTRL+SHIFT+ESC (Open Task Manager)

I borrowed this from a sitepoint article entitled “Survey Exposes the Four Web Dev Stereotypes – Which are You?” Read the full article here.

• The “Guru” is strongly motivated toward technical excellence, actively tracks new technological trends, and is interested in learning how to use them to improve the quality and functionality of web sites.
• The “Entrepreneur” is strongly motivated toward building and retaining an audience, and is less interested in using technologies just because they’re new.
• The “Designer” is strongly motivated toward the timely delivery of visually appealing web sites that meet the business requirements of clients.
• The “Corporate” is strongly motivated toward reliable, stable performance; the “Corporate works in a larger organization, and faces the unique mixture of constraints and opportunities that the corporate environment offers.

FYI – I had trouble pigeonholing myself into one of these categories. I’ll probably need someone else to do that for me. I do, however, recognize each of these four elements as critical to the success of a web project. I guess if I had to choose, I would lean toward the Entrepreneur and away from the Designer stereotypes.

Here’s a nifty tool from a company called crazyegg. It’s a utility that will track user activity with a little bit of javascript on your specified webpages and will create some nice tracking information. I’m particularly interested in the heatmap it’s supposed to generate so I can see graphically which areas of my pages get the most clicks. I’ve currently got it running on:

http://www.firmscode.com/index.php
http://www.itintl.com/index.php
http://www.1km1kt.net/index.php

Just view the source code and search for “crazyegg” on the page to see the javascript.

No results yet, but I’ll post some images as soon as they come back. Here’s an example from their site.

Update

I’ve gotten my first heatmap back for 1km1kt.net and WOW am I impressed! The detail it gave me is nothing new – I’ve always known where my clicks were going and what my visitors were doing from my reports, but I’ve never seen it laid out like this before. I’m a visual learner, so seeing a graphical representation like this immediately got me thinking of ways to improve the site. Here’s what’s come back in the past hour or so:

Off the top of my head, here are my initial thoughts:

• My ads are in the right place. They get the majority of the clicks already, so I’m not going to move them.
• Game titles are having an effect on click throughs – I need to let the site authors know that so they can maximize their traffic.
• Crazyegg is tracking not only what gets clicked on, but the exact spot the user is clicking. See that one on the EVE Online banner at the bottom of the “V”? That’s me.
• Lots of people are clicking on the “Free RPGs” link at the top of the page. I need to check on that page to make sure it’s got a good design.

I’m sure there’s more I can get out of this as it develops, but for a start that’s pretty good.

The idea behind a robots.txt file is simple – place a static text file at the front door of your website with a listing of files and directories that you do not want search engine robots to index.

There are two problems with this concept:

1) Participation is at the robot programmer’s discretion. If you can program a search robot (or search spider as they’re sometimes called), you can program it to ignore the robots.txt standard.

2) By publishing a list URLs you don’t want indexed, you’re also publishing a list of top-secret cool stuff on your site. Take it one step further and start developing a robots.txt search tool, and you can start to see the bigger problem.

My suggestion is that if you have cool stuff on your site that you want protected, consider using the robots meta tags nofollow and noindex. This keeps you from having to publish a road map to your secrets while still making use of the robots.txt standard.

Here’s a quick search just for sites with a published robots.txt file.

More helpful hints:

Search spiders invariably look for a robots.txt file when the visit your site. Create a blank one to allow full access and reduce the number of “file not found” errors in your error log.

Use your robots.txt file to block whole directories rather than single files. Unscrupulous surfers my know which directories you’re protecting, but they’ll still have to guess at file names. Be sure to create a blank index.html file and turn off indexing so you don’t display your protected directory content to the world.

Google PageRank, the arbitrary ranking system instituted by Google has recently been updated for some of my websites. I don’t pay too much attention to this statistic because it’s important to have multiple sources of traffic and not to rely on any single source. I do, however, note when the rankings are updated because they typically mean my sites will be moving around in the search results which can have an impact on my bottom line.

Average PageRank for the majority of my sites until today was 5 (on a 0-10 scale). I don’t have any sites that have broken a 6 or higher. Today’s update seems to have made some changes, bringing most of my sites down to a 4 with one or two 5’s mixed in for good measure. During a period of change, there’s always a little fluctuation and the results don’t finalize for a day or so. It’s actually a little terrifying sometimes when your PageRank drops from a 5 to 0 for several days while Google updates its index!

Like I said, PageRank is just one measure of site performance and is in no way a stand-alone indicator of a site’s health. A far better indicator is my own personal gut feeling that my sites provide useful and relevant information and resources and the traffic statistics to support it.

If you’re using Google Adwords and are unhappy with either your cost per click or your ad placement, consider the position preferences option for your campaigns.

Using position preference, you can target your bid to aim for a specific position in the ad lineup rather than always trying to be number one. I’ve found that by forgoing the competition for the #1 spot, I’ve lowered my cost per click by as much as 60%. Not only that, but with well written ads I’ve seen a negligible drop in click throughs.

Try aiming your ads at the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th positions. Often times the top one, two or three ads will appear in a separate section of the page leaving whatever ad didn’t make the cut in the top position on the right hand column. This is hard to describe, so check out the picture to see what I mean.

Google has developed a short tutorial for users asking the question “where should I place my ads for the best click-through rate?” Although useful for answering that question, Google’s tutorial also offers a good overview for which parts of a web page draw the most attention. Check out the full tutorial or go directly to the Google Heatmap.

I recently had an experience I thought might be of value to anyone who wants to know a little more about the benefits of online marketing.

Last month I remodeled my upstairs bathroom and on one of several trips to the local Home Depot, I came out of the store to find a flyer on my windshield under my wiper blade. I get these every once in a while and normally I discard them because they’re usually advertisements that I’m just not interested in. This one, however, was different.

The flyer from the Home Depot parking lot was from an individual who was interested in selling a set of five wheels and tires that would fit a 1995-2001 Ford F-150 pickup truck or Ford Expedition. A quick glance around the parking lot showed that the only cars who had received the flyer were individuals like myself who were driving the year and model car that matched with the wheels and tires in the ad. I’m not normally one for shiny wheels, but I took an extra few seconds to read the flyer carefully, look at the pricing, and put it in my back pocket for later. I can only imagine that the other car owners who received the flyer did the same. At the very least I expect that each one took time for a second glance and one may very well have purchased some new tires!

This individual’s marketing method is spot-on advice for most of my clients. Yes, online advertising is a numbers game but by targeting a small, highly qualified audience, you can maximize the return on investment from your advertising dollars. Try one of the following to help target your audience more effectively:

• Use your current client email database to solicit additional business from your existing customers. As prior customers you know immediately that they have an existing need for your type of product or service. Why not share with them some of the similar or complimentary products/services you have to offer?
• Many pay-per-click advertising campaigns offer the ability to restrict your ads by time of day and geographic location. Try using these filters so that you spend the most money when potential clients are most likely to purchase and where they’re most likely to come from.
• Build an online marketing list by offering a free product that would appeal to a potential customer. A good example is our free report from the Department of Commerce entitled A Nation Online: Entering the Broadband Age that details internet usage statistics for American consumers including their reasons for going online, their most frequent online activities, and their socio-economic category.

I’ve got a few resources I use on a day to day basis for web-design, personal projects, etc. I thought I would share a few of them here today:

DeGraeve.com hosts a color palette generator that’s useful for designing a page layout around a particular image. The palette generator breaks down the image into 10 or so of the most prolific colors and makes it easy to coordinate a layout.

Alertra.com is an uptime monitoring company and their spotcheck tool will tell you how fast your website is loading from multiple locations. Their pay service is worthwhile as well, and not that expensive

4webhelp.net offers a convenient .htpasswd encryption tool that I use to encrypt user passwords. When I use the tool, I normally just enter “test” in the Name field.

Feedburner.com is a good resource for developing your RSS readership. They offer some good tracking tools as well as some other features to help you get the most out of your feed.

I’ve found that there are two types of websites that generate large amounts of traffic right off the bat. Both have to do with the amount and type of content found on each site.

Before I get into the type of content I recommend for most site owners, I’d like to ask the following question:

Why do you go online?

For me, there are two parts to the answer and each answer reflects a different type of website.

1. I’m looking for highly specific information (addresses, telephone numbers, product manuals, how-to guides, images, software, etc.)

   With this in mind, consider building a website that offers a highly focused and specific type of information. A lot of new website owners think that they need to tap into the massive marketplaces that some of the world’s largest websites leverage for traffic, and offer things like general news, broad reaching articles, and simple services.

   In fact, the exact opposite is true. My most effective websites offer very limited, but highly targeted bits of information. AutomatedManifest.com is an excellent example. By offering a tool to look up US Customs AMS error messages I’ve seriously limited my audience, but I make up for it with a growing number of subscribers who desperately need just that information. That site has quickly become an authority on the topic and is the first stop for anyone needing that type of information. Database driven websites or focused articles both make effective target audience websites.

   It is important to remember that there are 300 million people in the US alone, and nearly 60% of them go online at least once a day. Just because your content is focused doesn’t mean people aren’t interested in it.

2. I have a give and take destination in mind – an online tool or resource that I’m already aware of that I want to either contribute to, use for my own purposes, or both.

   Examples of this type of website are online forums, blogs, or services. These are websites that I’m already aware of that offer an online tool that is beneficial to me. This type of website has an enormous amount of potential, but can require a lot of maintenance and upkeep. The effort on the front end is usually much higher as well. Before you can have an online tool, you must first build that tool from scratch or implement a pre-built solution. Neither of which is a small undertaking. Once built, you will need to introduce your site to others and sell its return appeal. Both of these can be difficult with a new website.

   Once built however, the benefits of these destination websites significantly outweigh the time invested. With an online forum for example, you can rely on users to maintain and add to the website with little intervention on your part. As the site develops, traffic builds exponentially as users add more content, that content drives more traffic, and that traffic results in more users. My import/export forum is a good example of this kind of undertaking. A blog is s similar undertaking.

   By developing a site that acts as a destination for internet users, you can leverage your userbase to generate search engine traffic, an effective email marketing campaign, or viral marketing strategy.

There are many other types of websites and many ways to be successful. Before building one, ask yourself what you’re looking for online and build something from that experience. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results.

If you’re reading the company blog, you’re obviously interested in what’s going on at Danifer Web Services. So, why haven’t you signed up for the newsletter? Use the form below and sign up now.

(Did I mention I send out free offers and other cool stuff just to the newsletter subscribers?)

I do a lot of self-promoting on this blog, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I’m in the Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) area. About 25%of my client base is local, and the rest are outside the immediate area so I forget to mention where I’m located. I’ve recently started doing some local networking, so this is becoming more important.

That said, if you’re looking for a web designer, online marketing company, or general consulting in the DFW area please feel free to contact me.

A pretty website design is important, but I like to focus more on functionality than appearances. Why? Because I’ve learned that presentation is a distant second to traffic when it comes to online selling. Think about it – your beautiful site sees 100 visitors a day and converts a whopping 5% into paying customers (that’s 5 customers for the math illiterate). Compare that to a clean, less artsy site that sees 1,000 visitors a day and only converts 1% (10 customers). Which do you think you’ll make more money on?

Here are some of my favorite websites that put more emphasis on functionality than they do appearance:

Google
Digg
Technorati
Woot
FeedBurner

Do you get Google Alerts? They’re a free way to monitor your site’s standings on the world’s biggest search engine. Try creating a Google Alert for site specific searches like:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3awww%2edanifer%2ecom
Which will show you how many pages your site has in the Google index

or

http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3awww%2edanifer%2ecom
which will show you how many site Google has tracked that link in to you.

Try it out yourself at: http://www.google.com/alerts

A friend of mine mentioned to me that he reads my blog regularly, which blows me away. I’m continually amazed when people mention any of my sites and that they gain something useful from them. This particular vote of confidence really got me jazzed up about blogging (hence the four previous posts from today).

Anyway, thanks Mike!

I heard an interesting term today called forced obsolescence. It was used in reference to Windows 98 being a perfectly functional and usable operating system, but it was being forced into retirement before its time by Microsoft. By cutting off all the support for the project, they’ve made it an obsolete piece of software. Since the single web page experiment is going so well, I thought this might make a good topic for a one-off project. I’ve got a lot on my plate, so if you want to run with it help yourself. A link back to danifer.com would be appreciated.

I’m a little blog-happy today, so I’ll post about a recent swell of traffic on firmscode.com, the US Customs warehouse database site that’s part of my group of importing websites. Until recently, it’s been holding steady at 150-200 visitors a day (a very respectable number for a site that requires so little upkeep). It’s a database driven site listing the four digit alpha-numeric number that US Customs assigns to every warehouse approved to receive international import freight. This number is required for many Customs transactions, but the list is fairly inaccessible unless you have an expensive program that ties in with US Customs.

The site is popular both with new users searching for the FIRMS codes, but at least half its traffic comes from return visitors using it as a tool in their day-to-day operations. Businesses like Customs brokers, freight forwarders, etc. I actually take some pride that employees from my previous employer use the site daily as an online tool.

Anyway, Google has been doing some updates and has finally recognized the site as an online authority for the information it offers. Here’s a picture of my recent stats showing a 200%+ increase over the last few days. Hopefully the trend will keep up and we’ll see even more in October.

I recently made an adjustment to the ads I’m serving on 1km1kt.net. I eliminated one of three ad units on the page in favor of a monthly billed banner placement. The result was very positive! By eliminating one of the ad units, I caused the remaining units to display fewer, higher paying ads. The effect was an increase in income from the Google AdSense program, along with a revenue bump from the direct-bill skyscraper ad. The logic makes sense, but I guess I wasn’t expecting the results to be so dramatic.

I built BERNinc. for a customer about a year ago for his poker tournament business. He brings just-for-fun poker tournaments to bars and restaurants (primarily in the DFW area, but also in Houston). I’ve been doing the updates on the site – tournament leader boards, new venues, etc. for quite some time and he’s recently asked me to add on a forum to generate more traffic to his site. Rather than add a forum onto his existing site, I registered a new domain name in order to maximize his keyword potential.

The new site is http://www.texaspokerplace.com. Here are some of the potential benefits:

• He’s already got a strong offline user base with a common interest.
• Poker players love to talk about poker. Games they’ve played, beatings they took, strategies, etc.
• A forum allows the membership to involve themselves in the game on a daily basis rather than every week at the tournaments. Hopefully this will draw more existing users to the tournaments by peaking their interest in their off-time.
• The keywords in the domain name are more focused. The theme of the site is currently DFW poker tournaments (and that’s who we’re trying to draw), but could easily be adjusted to refer to Texas holdem style poker as the site grows.
• I’m hosting the forum on my server which gives me more control over the site management – something that’s critical when it comes to community based websites.
• Having two sites helps to generate additional buzz. TexasPokerPlace.com will not only serve as the online community for the BERN inc. poker league, but will also be open to non-league members. This will increase both site traffic as well as provide more opportunity for cross promotion.

Yesterday I was invited to attend a business networking event called BNI in Southlake. I’m horrible about getting out and networking and generally rely on referral business, but I thought this would be a great opportunity to meet some new people.

The event was early and across town, but I was pleasantly surprised at the content! The meeting was short enough that I didn’t get bored and the presentations were worthwhile.

The meet and greet before and after the event was pleasant and relaxed. I wasn’t there specifically to generate leads (since I hate being too much like a used car salesman at a networking event), but I was interested in learning about some of the different industries the members were in. I’m always surprised at the number of ways people have found to be successful, and I like to listen to them talk about their businesses.

I’m definitely going to get involved in either this group or one similar, and hats off to the BNI group.

ImportAssist.com is the newest partner site under the Informed Trade International umbrella. Seeing as how Informed Trade has a solid membership base, I decided to spin off a blog hosting service for importers, exporters, and people involved in international trade. With even a few reputable sources posting to ImportAssist.com, I hope to turn it into a resource for import business advice.

I spent today building Croptastic!, a blogging/social networking site for J’s members over at ScrapLove. The site is powered by a really cool piece of softwared called Drupal. It’s my first real venture into a content portal management system (CMPS), and I’m very pleased. The controls are excellent, it’s got a lot of management features for me and neat-o stuff for the users, it installed and customized quickly, the community is very active, and the addon features are literally load and go.

All in all I’m thrilled. If you’re looking for a really cool CMPS system, I highly recommend Drupal. And if you’re looking for a place to blog about scrapbooking, check out Croptastic!

I thought this deserved a mention:

Apparently, J’s website ScrapLove.com has been gaining in popularity among the scrapbooking celebs! Tim Holtz, a big time playa in the scrapbooking industry recently granted an interview to one of J’s crew. This is kind of a big deal because he has declined to interview on some of the bigger scrapbooking competitor sites. Go ScrapLove!

Check out the full Tim Holtz scrapbooking interview.

Giving away free banner advertising on 1km1kt has really had an impact on its growth. I offer other people placement in the site’s banner rotation and they place a static link to 1km1kt. This results in a whole lot of incoming links (for the search bots to see) while only having one outgoing link at a time visible for SEO purposes. Don’t think that it’s an entirely one-sided equation though – the advertisers on the site get a good amount of traffic via their highly visible banner from 1km1kt (which is becoming quite popular). I’ve recently implemented the same strategy on firmscode.com and portcodes.com to see if I can achieve the same results.

Last night I updated two of my database driven websites, firmscode.com and portcodes.com. Both are part of the Informed Trade International group of sites because they offer US Customs info and resources. I particularly like them because they’re database driven and require very little maintenance from me, while offering a very useful tool to the import/export community.

Firmscode in particular is quite popular and gets most of it’s traffic from people who have bookmarked the site. Aside from being a tidy little earner, it’s cool to have produced an online tool that people find useful enough to come back to. One of my shining moments before leaving the freight-forwarding industry was when someone brought up firmscode.com in a department meeting (totally unprompted) and cited it as a resource. Ten minutes later one of my co-workers sent out the broadcast email that I was the author! I don’t think people understand that a lot of times websites originate from one person. I think a lot of people have in their minds that websites just spring into existence on their own. That’s fine by me.

I accept donations primarly on itintl.com, and I received my first one the other day! Oddly enough it came via firmscode.com, but what the hey, I’m not complaining! Along with the actual cash ($100) there was the pride in knowing that I had made an online tool useful enough to warrant a donation, which was cool.

So, I’ve found myself doing some web design/maintenance work in addition to running my websites. I really avoided doing it at first, because I wanted to focus on building and maintaining my own sites. I’ve had to reverse my thinking on this 1) so I can meet my monthly revenue goals, 2) because it’s kind of fun and a nice break, and 3) because people keep asking me to do it!

I’m really surprised by the last one. In the last week, I’ve had three large projects put in front of me as well as several quickie fixit type requests. What surprises me about this is that the work is completely unsolicited! Are web designers really that hard to find or is a question of quality or some other factor?

Anyway, check out a recent project I did for one of J’s scrapbooking buddies: http://www.scraptoit.com