Name That Website

You’d think a guy named Norman Sheppard with a blog at normansheppard.com could get the number one spot for his own name. Alas, I got the six but I’m stuck at number two. My competition? A PDF. Granted, 75 year old Professor Norman Sheppard is a pioneer in his field and this site is more about SEO and web design AND my link building efforts don’t include my name. Still, even though Norman Sheppard is not a competitive keyword and certainly not a profitable one, it erks me just a little. I definitely have nothing against the Professor, he looks like a really nice guy and he is undoubtedly very smart. A PDF though.

I don’t really expect this site to be a big money maker, mostly due to the URL and subject matter. Rather it is a place I “attempt” to put quality content about web design and its relation to SEO and other stuff I learn along the way. However, I will be putting more ads and such here soon because of an increase in traffic its been getting. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Where is all this new traffic coming from? Well, I just got back from a two month, low down in the street, free ride on my most favorite blog, Griz’ make money blogspot blog. In two months, the little blurb about this blog on the bottom of his site was responsible for 300+ links and about 800 unique visitors. Now THAT is power. Hot Blue and Righteous. And holy beatbox, what a nice guy, can’t say enough good things about the Griz, besides, I think he’d be happier knowing that I have made some money online utilizing several of his SEO techniques. I thank you. For me, a web designer, the most difficult of those techniques is the ugly blog. Its So Hard for me to make an ugly blog, I almost can’t do it. It makes me twitch at night but I’ve got a few doosies now and I can’t wait to see just how they pan out.

Yes I’ve been out making other sites and continuing my quest to get a grip on the whole adsence / affiliate marketing thing. Every site I build I either learn a new tactic or discover something I’ve been doing wrong after which I have to doubleback to all the previous sites and update or fix the mistake. Learning gets exponentially more time consuming but I don’t know of any other way to do it.

In my quest I find that there’s a lot of conflicting information out there but the one piece of info that seems to be consistent is getting the keyword into the URL… unlike normansheppard.com. Indeed there are many steps up the mountain of website bliss. On one of those steps we meet the A-Listers. Many have their name as the URL. Once I discovered several of these I went running to the nearest domain store and bought my name. Another few steps up you discover that it is a better idea to have your target keyword in the URL. This leads to the time consuming but very addictive sport of keyword research. Here you search for a word that is A) available as a URL or Blogspot sub-domain B) not too competitive and C) a subject that you can write about. Here I acquired a fistful of useless URLs, URLs based on keywords that are in fact not too competitive and deal with familiar subjects BUT several of these were not monetizable. They deal with interesting subjects but the subjects have no merchandising potential.

A few more steps up you arrive at a fork, a point where you realize you have to make a choice. You must choose to be a writer or a marketer. I realize this is regurgitated info for some of you but it is such a valid point for anyone trying to make a living with the internet that it is worth being made into a movie. If you want to make money with a website you need to be able to sell stuff. You can sell actual stuff or you can sell information but if your site focuses on Dreadmonboogaloo philosophy your better off taking the writer path. If you decide to go the way of the marketer then you need to find the cheapsunglasses, the manicmechanic of URLs. You can definitely sell sunglasses and car stuff.

Many of the marketers who use their name as the URL seem to be in the make money online niche. There’s a million of them. This was probably a very hot niche… 5 years ago. However we’re all nasty dogs and funky kings now and know that clicking on an ad or affiliate offer will just take us to another squeeze page for the latest $49.00 deal that says the same thing as the last one we bought. So we don’t. We go back to Google and click the number two or three spot to see if we can find what we were looking for… for free. And we usually do. It is a very difficult niche. Carl Ocab and Courtney Tuttle seem to be the only ones who have been able to pull it off effectively with their name as the URL. There are still many exceptions to this rule, PotPieGirl does not sell pot pies, Yahoo doesn’t sell crappy chocolate drinks and we don’t browse to searchengine.com to find websites. Me, I need all the help I can get so I try really hard to find URLs that contain the keyword I intend to focus the site on.

So, what’s the plan with this site? There is none really. I’m married and not very pretty so the gigilo angle is out. Norman Sheppard is my name and SEO Web Design is my game so I’ll just continue along and let it move me on down the line.