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Ideas for Starting New Blogs - Part 4
Here on Blogs for Sale we like to encourage those of you who are blogging or who are thinking about blogging by writing articles on the ups and downs of getting a blog started. We have been writing in this series of articles about a blog we started called Hurricane Tracking Sites. It started with a flourish and then it spent some time in the Google Sandbox. As the 2009 hurricane season gets started, we are happy to report that Hurricane Tracking Sites is a solid page one Google return (position 4) and the site is getting a daily stream of traffic. The number of visitors will jump dramatically once the first storm of the season develops.
We have spent some time thinking about ways to monetize the site. The Google Adsense ads that display for the site are not all that helpful, so we have limited the space for Adsense to a 468 x 60 test banner at the top of the articles. We have added some affiliate programs to the left and right sidebar, as well as to the top and bottom of the site. We have redesigned the site so that it has a static front page giving it more of a classic Website look than a typical blog. We have added some informational videos, as well as a number of links to important informational sites when a storm is approaching.
As a person who actually lives in a place where hurricanes are far to common, I designed the site to be an effective one stop place to go for information when a hurricane is approaching. I have made all the links open in new windows so that people never really leave the site until they actually close the site window. This allows for easy access to all of the hurricane tracking sites we have listed on the page. This site is poised to be an excellent blog for the right person to purchase and take to the next level. If you are interested, use the Contact page to let me know.
Ideas for Starting New Blogs - Part 3
On Blogs for Sale we have been writing a series of articles about ideas for starting new blogs. We have been discussing a site we started called “Hurricane Tracking Sites“. This site was started, indexed by Google, and getting hundreds of hits in a matter of hours.
Now, after spending six weeks as a page i Google result for the keywords “hurricane tracking sites” it has vanished from the Search Engine results. It is not in the the top 1000 results. The site has been effectively sandboxed.
What is a sandbox. Here is the Wikipedia definition:
The Sandbox (a.k.a. Sandboxing or the sandbox effect) is a phenomenon that people have claimed to observe in the ranking of web pages that is performed by Google. It is the subject of much debate. Its existence has not been confirmed, and several observers state that they have observed the contrary to what is claimed for this perceived phenomenon.
The phenomenon that people have claimed to observe is that Google temporarily reduces the page rank of new domains, placing them into what is referred to as its “sandbox”, in an effort to counter the ways that search engine optimizers attempt to manipulate Google’s page ranking to bring sites to the top, by creating lots of inbound links to a new web site from other web sites that they own before creating that web site. A “reverse sandbox” effect is also claimed to exist, whereby new pages with good content but without inbound links are temporarily increased in rank, much like the “New Releases” in a book store are displayed more prominently, to encourage organic building of the World Wide Web.
David George disputes the claim, made by some, that Google applies sandboxing to all new web sites, saying that the claim “doesn’t seem to be born out by experience”. He states that he created a new web site in October 2004 and had it ranked in the top 20 Google results for a target keyword within 1 month. He avers that “[n]o one knows for sure if the Google sandbox exists”, and comments that it “seems to fit the observations and experients of many search engine optimizers”. He theorizes that the sandbox “has introduced some hysteresis into the system in order to restore a bit of sanity to Google’s results”.
Matt Cutts has stated in an interview that “there are some things in the algorithm that may be perceived as a sandbox that doesn’t apply to all industries”.
The site will eventually come back. It could be back in three months, or it could take a year. This is perhaps one fo the best reasons to buy a blog that has been around for a while. If I was depending on the Hurricane Tracking Sites blog has an integral part of my blogging business and I had to wait out the sandbox effect it could be very frustrating. My hope is that the site comes back before the next hurricane season starts.
Ideas for Starting New Blogs - Part 2
in our last article on Blogs for Sale we introduced you to a website we had started called Hurricane Tracking Sites. This site was started six days ago. It went from an idea to being indexed by Google in a matter of a few hours. This is certainly not a typical response to a new blog. The site continues to be a page 1 Google return and in its first three days it had over 400 page views. The page views have dropped off significantly over the last two days as there are not any hurricanes to track at the moment. This will allow us to make some improvements to the site at a more regular pace. Because of the site’s immediate popularity, we had to throw a lot of things on the site in a hurry. The information we put on the site needed to useful and factual, and we believe we have the foundation for a very successful blog. The site could still easily undergo a sandbox period, but it remains a blog with great potential in the future.
The idea for the site all came from an Internet search while I was sitting in the path of a storm. This is a great way to develop ideas for your own blog. What are you searching for on the Internet? What are you interested in? What would you like to know more about? My advice is to keep an open mind to what you are searching for in the near future. The more natural the search, the better the idea for a blog will probably be. Sometimes, trying to think of an idea makes it hard to think of anything. The ideas that spring out of normal interaction with the Internet are often the best potential blogs. Once you have a good idea, you still need to do a little research before you launch the site. While our research on the tracking site was not as extensive as usual, a quik check on keyword usage, existing sites, and the competition was done before we jumped in to it. Our initial plan was to just market the site to our existing readers, many of whom live in coastal areas, but the Search Engines made that unecessary for the time being.
