This time of year is exciting for me. It’s draft time. Soon I’ll find out whether or not the Cowboys will finally fix their weak secondary or if the Panthers will finally get a decent complement to Steve Smith. But I digress.

With draft time comes the mock draft. The mock draft is as far from an exact science as you can be, but then again so is online business. Predicting the draft is tough, and so is predicting the next big online earning avenue or niche. Here’s why.

Writers try to take in so many factors when coming up with a mock draft to make it as accurate as possible. They look at overall performance, year-over-year improvements, combine numbers, and personality. They take this all over the place data and try to quantify it and put a value on each player.

Analyzing a new online business is similar. Rarely you’ll find specific data that will tell you exactly what you will earn with each site you produce. Sure you can take certain data - competition, total searches (estimated traffic from those searches), growth trend, available monetization methods, etc. But at the end of the day, it’s an educated guess.

Even the pros make big mistakes with their draft picks (*cough* Leaf *cough*). But that doesn’t stop them. They do the best they can with the information available.

They make the call on draft day and wait for results. If they’re good they continue - if they’re bad they cut it and move on.

Food for thought.

But I digress. This isn’t about buyers in general, but about the buyers who are now running what I used to run.

Forum Rank - http://www.forumrank.net

This was my first project of 2007, and probably the most ambitious (at least at the start). The idea behind the site is simple but very complex at the same time. It is a forum ranking system, similar to Big-boards.com but with a much more sophisticated algorithm powering it. The algorithm weighed various options rather than size alone such as average users online at a given time, average registrations per day, etc. It made it so that fast-growing forums could compete in rankings with monster forums.

This project is where I learned that a good product is only about 15-20% of creating a successful website. Despite the work I put into the site it garnered little to no interest. No support. But that’s the way things go.

I sold the site a few months later for a few thousand profit to a British fellow. He hasn’t done anything with it since. A shame.

Net Business Blog - http://www.netbusinessblog.com

NBB was really just an experiment to see if I could dazzle the “make money online” sheep the way gurus had. It worked. People enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize how much of a drain it can put on you when the vast majority of your audience is a mindless zombie, buying into any and every easy money idea they can get their hands on. Sure NBB had a lot of quality readers with strong input and a good head. But of NBB’s readers were just DP kids pushing their turnkey sites and CPA scams. So I sold.

The sale went fine (was the most I ever made from a single site sale) and since the buyer had eCommerce experience I thought it was going to be in great hands. Unfortunately the site has grown zilch since the sale and from what I can gather, the income is in the pooper. A shame.

Creep Colony - http://www.creepcolony.com

Now we finally get to a success story. Creepcolony.com was your standard gaming fansite (based on StarCraft). Due to the fact that SC2 is really not going to be very good, I decided to sell. I just can’t run a site unless I’m passionate about it. Anyways, some young fella bought it and man did he hit the ground running.

Since the sale he has totally revamped the forums, had a very successful contest, and seemingly doubled traffic. That’s awesome!

I did more in 2007, but these were the biggest I guess. They’re all I can remember right now at least.

If any readers out there have some more success stories of what has become of their sites after sale, I’d love to hear them!

For now it’s just a blog, but I do plan for this site to be the staging ground for my first adventure into podcasting. I’ve wanted to do podcasting for a while, but this blog just doesn’t seem to be the place for it. I feel that if I started podcasting here it would just turn into yet another “make money online” podcast full of advice that is heard but never followed (hence the main reason I got rid of NBB).

So anyway, if you feel up to it check out Oddball Gifts. My wifey will be posting there a bit too

What Small Sites, Big Money Covers

• Niche research
• Keyword research
• Competition research
• Design & development
• Monetization
• Search engine optimization
• All within the context of building niche minisites

If you’re interested in learning more, be sure to check out the sales page.

If you’re interested in promoting the book please contact me and I’ll happily get you a free copy and help you get setup with an affiliate account. Of course I’m not going to just be giving away free copies, you must have a decently well-read blog, forum, newsletter, or website.

Lets take SEO out of the equation and instead replace it with any profession. Is it possible to create a physician cheat sheet? Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, how about a McDonald’s employee cheat sheet? I assume a practicing M.D. would have a tough time narrowing his job down to a few key points. And I can tell you from first hand experience that you can’t even put all of a McDonald’s employees day-to-day responsibilities on a single piece of paper.

So how would you respond if you were asked to create a SEO cheat sheet? Would you refuse or would you do it and just try to cover as much as you could? Or would you laugh and ignore the question?

The web consulting business has been booming lately with a ton of new, localized web design and SEO shops popping up everywhere. Visual Scope Studios is a web site development company located in Seattle, Washington.

If you’re interested in getting some SEO work done, these guys may be worth checking into. It looks like they have a good idea of link building. Paid posts are by far the easiest ways to get targeted inbound links to any site. Since they are obviously engaging in paid posting for SEO purposes I assume they’d do the same for their clients.

Looking at their homepage, however, I do see some missing elements of on-page SEO. Missing alt text, images replacing some vital text (like company phone number), etc. Of course one could argue that on-page SEO is nothing to fret over, considering the fact that link authority is the top ranking factor.

There are a ton of SEO shops out there now. If you’re in the business you should be sure to do your research. While you’re looking, check out Visual Scope Studios (and their web design portfolio).

It is no longer a question of whether or not we have the technology to achieve this. We do. The question is now, in my opinion, how social should search be?

Lets get basic here. What is the function of search? To find an answer relevant to your query. Google does this by showing website results (and some other types of results mixed in there - think video, etc) ranked based on relevancy and authority. Hopefully the top ranking websites will have the answer you’re looking for. Social search tries to make your results even more accurate by applying your previous search data, preferences, and even your social networking information into the results.

Sounds fun, yes? But is it really necessary?

Now I admit, there have been occasions where I’ve been disappointed with Google’s results. Some things are just hard to find. But will social searching make hard-to-find information easier to find? I don’t think so, and here’s why.

If social search bases results on information it already has on you then the only thing it can help you find is something that you’ve already searched for before and/or are very familiar with. Search engines can’t guess what you’re looking for with a brand new search outside of your realm of past searches.

If you’re arguing with a co-worker about what makes gasoline so explosive and you decide to load up the ol’ search bar to find the chemical equation, do you think the fact that the search engine knows you’re into Cold Play will help you out? Of course not.

But that’s not the point! So yea social search can’t help you with brand new searches (if it can, then I’m amazed and will correct myself upon seeing proof), but it will make those repetitive searches easier.

Maybe so. But again I ask, is that necessary?

If the only thing social search can help you find better results for are things you already search for on a regular basis and are extremely familiar with, how useful is it? Shouldn’t you of all people (or algorithms) know how to get results when you search on the same topic regularly?

Just to make things more complicated, many of the social search functions available now require the user to actively interact with the search engine to get the desired results. I don’t know about you, but my search experience begins with the Google toolbar in Firefox and usually ends 6 seconds later. Why waste time interacting with search when 99% of my searches return such quick results already?

I just don’t see the value. No software will ever know exactly what a user is looking for. Period.

Maybe we should stop trying to make search easier for dumb people. Most of the answers you’re looking for are right there in front of you. And as for the 1 in 1,000,000 queries that give you trouble - is it worth investing the time into social search to make those easier, or is it more time efficient to struggle with the algorithmic results every once in a while?

I’ll take the algorithm.

Now I’ve been a reader of Andy’s blog for a long time now, well over a year. The man is smart and concise, which are two traits I have to have in a blog. He also tends to speak his mind, and no matter how different his opinion may be he tends to persuade.

He covers internet marketing, but he’s not a “tips & tricks” type of guy (although there’s some of that over there too). Mostly he just gives a seasoned and unique spin on current events, lately being no-follow, Google PR slaps, and TechCrunch hypocrisy. All fun stuff.

So if you get a minute, head on over to Andy Beard’s blog. You’ll enjoy it.

Well my new job requires me to do things that I honestly thought I’d never do, vector illustrations being one. I touched Illustrator for the first time a couple of months ago, and just before Christmas I made my first vector illustration. Thought I’d share it.

This is an illustration of my monitor, which is hooked up to a PC (nope, I haven’t switched to Mac yet!). It’s very basic, but I think it’s a good start. Hopefully I can develop this skill into a client service.

It’s always fun to learn new things, no?