The End of Another Month
Posted On: 2009-02-26
As a webmaster I seem to be spending a lot of time in my car lately. On Tuesday it was a 600 km round trip to Brisbane in one day and today, just as soon as I've finished this column, I'm off to Brisbane again for another quick round trip.
Then next Tuesday I'm doing an 800 km round trip north ... a repeat of one I did a month ago. And here I was thinking that being a webmaster meant sitting in your home office ... or maybe an office downtown ... and doing nothing but staring at computer screens.
At least there's nothing all that boring about today's trip ... at least not for Steve. I'm taking him down to Brisbane to collect a beaten up old truck for one of his kids and he will have the pleasure of coaxing it all the way back home. It will be interesting because the first part of the trip back with the truck will be in some very heavy traffic and I'm not going to hang about to watch.
I'll have a nice cup of coffee waiting for him if he manages to get as far as our favorite roadhouse on the north side of the city. Actually if there's anyone who can coax a vehicle along when all it wants to do is turn up its toes and die it's Steve so I'm sure we'll get home ... eventually.
I notice that we've just about arrived at the end of the month again so maybe lets finish off the month with a wrap-up of a few things that should be interesting for real webmasters ... you know, those people who do stay at home staring at their monitors and actually working.
Nofollow is dying?
This is some talk in several places around the Net that the Nofollow tag that Google introduced a while back is starting to be ignored by Google. There's an interesting report on one site that's full of big words and techno-talk and if you can sift through all that the author does make some interesting points that are worth considering.
From our point of view though the nofollow tag was never something that webmasters should have been scared off. It certainly didn't stop Googlebot from following those links and I'm not sure that it does anything to sculpt page rank as some SEO gurus might suggest.
It's also not anything that we've ever stressed about ... in fact we hardly ever use it - unlike some who add it to every link on their site, even the internal ones ... and we're yet to see an problems arising from that. Of course there are some out there who would tell you that if you don't use nofollow then you're going to be condemned to hell but well ... there are some people out there who will tell you just about anything simply because someone else told them in the first place.
Video ... you had better be using it
146 million Net users in the United States view online videos and that's 77 per cent of the United States Internet audience. 34 per cent of those watched more video than they did in the year before and the average online viewer watched 273 minutes of video.
That doesn't mean that they need to be shown huge chunks of video to get them interested ... or even to keep them interested. The average duration for a video that people watched was just 3.1 minutes. So if you're not using video to get your marketing message across then perhaps it's time to look at ways of incorporating video into your sites because that's people are prepared to use more bandwidth to be entertained.
Clothed females naked males
Now that might have you scratching your head but it seems to be a niche that is really taking off. You might think that it's something quite new but the fact is that I was writing content for Boss Hawg for that niche at least four years ago.
If you haven't had a look at the niche then you really should because it's definitely kinky and it's going to appeal to a lot of guys. Spend a little time wandering around some of the sponsors that have CFNM sites and get a feel for it. I don't think that it's going to be all that hard to promote but it's probably a niche that you will need to spend a little time researching so that your marketing can be right on target.
And that's about it for me this month. Now I'm off to play long-distance taxi driver. I have to admit that the time I spend in the car isn't wasted. On long trips you have a lot of time to look at where you're business is going and think about what you can do to make even more money ... at least that's what I do.