Matt Coddington

It has taken me a total of about a week and a half, but I’ve finally finished the redesign/WordPress upgrade of CreepColony.com. Getting the design done and implemented actually turned out to be the easy part. The difficult task was migrating the tons and tons of content from a 7 year old site from a hard-coded static structure to a dynamic CMS (WordPress). I still have one or two pages to do, but it’s ready for the most part.

Next on the agenda is to upgrade the forum to vBulletin and integrate the new design into that as well. Then I will move into search engine optimization and further improving monetization (I’ve added Kontera and a CJ store, but haven’t spent a ton of time monetizing it).

That will have to wait a week or so, however, because this Saturday I’m getting married. I should be back from the honeymoon next Friday, so then I will start up again working on CreepColony. Don’t expect many updates from me as I will be happily offline after the wedding. I’m going to enjoy my vacation!

I haven’t bought a website in quite a bit, but when StarCraft 2 was announced I started looking around at some of the old fansites that I used to regular back when I ran my first website which was a SC/BW news and downloads site. I discovered that pretty much all of the old juggernauts that ruled StarCraft in 2000 were still the top dogs - not entirely surprising, but refreshing nonetheless since that meant if I did decide to get back into the SC niche that I would already know most of the competition very well.

One of the fansites I regulared was CreepColony.com. It is pretty much the same as it was 7 years ago, with a tiny upgrade - hella traffic. After the announcement of StarCraft 2, CreepColony’s traffic has increased by 211% and is still on the rise! There are now only 2 StarCraft websites that seem to be performing better than it traffic-wise and that is because they just get a ton of search engine traffic. Luckily, I know a bit about SEO, so I believe I can compete with them for that search traffic.

There are a couple problems with the site, however. First off I think it’s pretty clear that the design is extremely ugly. CreepColony was a hobby site for its entire existence, so the design wasn’t a top priority. Now that I’m running it, my first objective is to get a design upgrade. I’ve already finished the design (a snippet is in the image at the top) and will be implementing it soon.

Another problem is that the site is *ALL* hard-coded HTML, so I’ll have to port it all to a CMS (WordPress). This also leaves me with not only a ton of content to move but a *TON* of 301 redirects to do. I’m also a little nervous about moving all of the content to new URL structures because I don’t want to lose what search engine traffic I have, but after reading some articles I think I can safely move the pages and retain the search traffic with 301 redirects. We shall see.

Finally, the site is currently severely under-monetized. There is a single, unblended Adsense block at the top of the page which is the only source of revenue. Because of this I was able to get the site for a great price, but I also don’t really know the revenue potential. With the amount of traffic the site is getting, I really do expect that I can turn a great profit, but it will be a guessing game for a while.

Most people probably consider Jon a little shady - I guess he sort of is. He makes it no secret that he enjoys making money online and is open to doing so in any way possible. He makes a killing running Myspace resource site(s) and has tested with numerous blackhat techniques, including but not limited to arbitrage. So I really wasn’t surprised when I got an email from him telling me about his new project: Buy Blog Comments.

The blogosphere has, not surprisingly, risen in uproar over the new service. The main concerns seem to be 1) this is promoting paid spam (no argument there) and 2) the ones receiving the spam get no compensation (which obviously, they don’t).

Although I don’t support spam, I really don’t think Buy Blog Comments is going to have that negative of an impact on the blogosphere. First off, the comments will *have* to be of at least decent quality of Jon has any hopes of receiving repeat customers. Poorly written or obviously spammy comments will get moderated out by most bloggers leaving Jon in a position of either under-delivering comment volume or spending too much time and money to deliver.

Secondly, this is no different than blatant self-promoting commenters. Why is it that bloggers can recommend people comment on other’s blogs for no reason other than self-promotion and in the same breath say that a paid comment service is wrong? In an ideal world every person who ever comments on someone’s blog is doing so because they have something valuable to share, but in reality a lot of blog commenters are there solely to promote their own sites. This service just saves them time in doing so.

Thirdly, I don’t think Buy Blog Comments will ever really get big enough for bloggers to worry about spam invasion. Jon is targeting black hatters with this service, but real black hatters will find more affordable ways to deliver blog comment spam whether it’s through automation (most likely) or a $2/hr employee from the Philippines. Buy Blog Comments just doesn’t come across to me as being cost-effective.

I think the moral of the story, at the end of the day, is that the blogosphere is friggin whiny. Buy Blog Comments *will not* introduce a new dimension of blog spam and it *will not* destroy blog comments as we know it. What harm is being done? Someone is being paid to add thoughtful, relevant comments to a blog. Damn, that’s just awful.

Edit: Just sent out my last invite.

Tony from DJI hooked me up with a Pownce (my profile) invite yesterday. I think he and his invitees have all of his readers covered with invites, so I have 6 to give to whoever comments here. Just comment with your email address and I’ll send one out.

My first impressions of Pownce are that it’s pretty nifty. I was going into it all determined to find massive flaws, but aside from the obnoxious default email notifications it’s really a pretty solid site. Is it better than Twitter? I don’t think they’re really all that comparable. Twitter has the benefit of being open-ended and is already being integrated into other systems such as Facebook. Pownce comes across as a lot more restricted. I could be wrong, but it doesn’t look like Pownce will be like Twitter in that it will be easily integrated into multiple sites, software, etc.

As far as the bonus features that Pownce has over Twitter - picture sending, file sending, etc etc. They’re nice baubles, but they’re little more than baubles. I could, however, see how some people would prefer it over email, Facebook, etc.

At the end of the day Pownce is just a better organized and better constructed Twitter. If this succeeds it won’t only be because Kevin Rose’s name is all over it (although that certainly doesn’t hurt it), but because it’s a prettier, easier to use, and better organized Twitter.