Matt Coddington

Some of you probably remember the post that rocketed Net Business Blog from obscurity to a commonly read blog. It was my guide to building a niche minisite. After posting that article I promised to go more in depth on the subject and offer it in book form. Well I’m glad to say that although it has taken me a while (a year actually) I’ve finally finished the book and it’s ready for consumption.

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.

Although it’s impossible to know for sure, I would assume Date.com’s glorified landing page that serves as its homepage is right up there at the top of the most profitable landing pages on the net. More profitable than Firefox’s little page?

So maybe the term “landing page” doesn’t really do Date.com justice. It’s much more than that. A lot of time and effort has been put into the inner workings of the site, and it has a lot of nifty little features. But when I arrive at their homepage, all I can see is a landing page.

Is this the best solution? Date.com must know what they’re doing. They’re over 10 years old and are still in business. In the internet world, that means something, right? I can’t help but to think, however, that such an in-your-face attempt to collect data on the user’s first load of the site might be a little too strong. What throws me off a bit more is that the actual introduction to the site and what they do is hidden below the fold in fairly small font. The message is essentially “Give us your information now. Oh and hi we’re a dating site.”

My knee-jerk reaction is to email Date.com and remind them that this is no longer 1997, when the site was founded. The web is changing has changed. People expect instant gratification, and why shouldn’t they? Social networking has taken the dating site to a whole new level - a dating site without being a dating site. Users can interact with each other and form relationships without the pressure of a dating site or the stigma of “having” to use a dating site to meet someone of the opposite sex. Myspace is used as much for hooking up now as it is for finding new bands. Facebook gifts allow you to tell that special someone that you “like like” them without all of the nasty embarrassment. And assuming you would actually prefer a traditional dating site to the newer methods available, what is stopping you from simply hitting up PlentyofFish or a similar dating site that gives you instant access to other member profiles?

And Date.com is still just a landing page.

Flaws aside, the landing page is obviously working. But with a domain like Date.com, what wouldn’t be?

So what’s the point of this post? Hell if I know. I guess if I had to sum it up into one sentence it would go something like this: landing pages work, but they’re not the future.

Read more…

It’s hard for a man to admit a weakness, yet here I am spilling my heart out. I am an extremely lazy emailer. Here is a screenshot of my Inbox at the moment:

I’m a lazy bastard. Granted most of those emails are newsletters, MaxBounty spam messages, and other odds and ends. Most of these emails I don’t open because I can tell all the info I need from the title (ie. if it’s someone I want to ignore). But all excuses aside, I really should be on top of my emails. How many possibles leads have I missed in the rubbish I let pile up in my Inbox? Who knows? I hate to think about the money I’ve lost by just simply not keeping my Inbox organized.

At the end of the day, that’s what weaknesses do - they cost you money. My biggest problem is my email. What is yours? Email also? Spending too much time in your feed reader? Refreshing your analytics by the minute?

We all have weaknesses. Acknowledging them is the first step to defeating them and turning that lost cash into some green. I’m going to go ahead and clean up my Inbox, how about you get to work on your weakness too.

I told you I wasn’t dead. In case you’re reading this through RSS, my blog has been redesigned (by me) with a cleaner, more functional design. The last one done by Jens (hjalmar) was amazing but just didn’t lend itself to serving up high-content posts. Since I sold NBB I’ve needed an outlet to talk about the industry the way I did earlier this year, but this blog just wasn’t built for it and I didn’t think it would be fair to NBB’s buyer to start a new “make money online” blog. So my solution was to redesign this one with a slightly less visually stunning, but exponentially more functional design.

What do you guys think? Good?

Read more…

Morning! I’m not dead and neither is the blog. Updates coming soon.

The honeymoon is over, but at least I almost got hit in the face by a semi on the way home. (image has not been photoshopped)

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.

I thought it would be fun to start up a little segment here where I highlight and talk about some sites, blogs, and forums that I read the most and consider a good source of information.

First up, and justifiably so, is Deep Jive Interests, the first RSS I ever subscribed to.

If you have to throw DJI into a specific category it would probably fall into Web 2.0, although Tony talks about much more than just Web 2.0 fads. Rather than being yet another TechCrunch copycat (God knows the world can only handle one Arrington) Tony has separated himself by offering real analytical thought about the world of online applications and internet trends that is quite honestly hard to find anywhere else.

Tony is not a guru. He is, however, one of the smartest people I’ve come across in this industry, and just about everything he writes is well thought out and well argued. It’s refreshing also to read a blog written by someone with some writing (Journalism?) background and who can convey his thoughts so well and in an entertaining fashion. Unfortunately that’s a skill I lack. But I digress.

The only off-putting thing about DJI is its design, but I don’t want to hurt Tony’s feelings since he just had it redesigned. Personally I miss the robot.

Whether you’re deep into the Web 2.0 scene or just a casual bystander of all that is social bookmarking, interactive applications, and new media, you really should consider adding DJI to your feed reader or bookmarks now. Do it.

I was taking a quiz over at CNN called “Do you have what it takes to get rich?” The quiz is adorable, but is not really geared at giving you a magical answer to the question. The point of the quiz is to show you basic facts about making money in any industry. Facts that you know but probably tend to overlook in the hopes that you’ll strike it rich off of some spur of the moment amazing idea or a genius website. The truth is most people get rich through good old fashioned hard work.

Most of us have an image of entrepreneurs lodged in our heads: hyperactive, visionary, guts of steel. But those who study entrepreneurs say that’s an illusion. “Some have very boring personalities,” says Schramm. Part of the problem, says Kelly Shaver, professor of entrepreneurial studies at the College of Charleston, is that we tend to focus on superachieving outliers. (You could be one-53,000th as successful as Bill Gates and still be a millionaire.) And many books and magazine profiles about entrepreneurs look only at the ones who have already made a fortune. When asked to explain their success, Shaver says, people tend to think back and try to identify some brilliant thing they must have done - and maybe forget about the routine work, their many mistakes or their sheer luck.

That is just one of the nuggets of valuable information in this quiz. This is probably the best article I’ve ever read on CNN not only because it comes in the form of a sexy fabulous quiz but because it’s real, it’s concrete, it’s no fluff, and it actually tells you how to earn your wealth rather than sitting around waiting for it to happen.

Use your common sense. Don’t get lost in delusion. Hard work creates wealth.

Wow this blog has been down for quite a while hasn’t it? Well it’s back up now and finally off of iPowerWeb! This was the last site I had hosted with iPower, and I was just waiting for my term with them to expire before moving. My domain was also registered through iPowerWeb so there was a couple weeks of limbo when transferring that I didn’t expect which accounts for the recent downtime. I’m now testing out BlueFur so we’ll see how that goes.

So What’s Going On?

I’m going to be settling back into this blog and updating it more than I have been over the last 2-3 months. As you can see I didn’t bother uploading the old archives, and I don’t plan to.

I’m going to keep it primarily related to my own projects but will start to do opinion pieces on the internet marketing industry as a whole as well as some current events (with my unique take on them of course). I don’t plan on really promoting or commercializing this blog as I did with NBB. The few readers I have here I hope stick around and possibly spread the word about my blog, but I have no real ambition to make this anything more than a personal blog with some tidbits here and there about the internet marketing and web development industries.

As most of you are probably aware, I recently sold NBB on SitePoint. The final price was $13,000 which was about what I expected and certainly enough to make me happy with the sale.

What’s Around the Corner

With NBB gone my design business is now again my only real source of income which is fine for now. My design company has always paid the bills and been my primary job. That does not mean, however, that I don’t have some new sites around the corner.

I’m currently developing two sites in the design arena. One is with David Myers (digit) and the other is a lone venture. I hope to have both of these websites launched by the end of the summer and have them in full gear by Q4. Unfortunately both are in the infant stages so I can’t disclose anything more about them.

So I just wanted to give you guys a little heads up about what’s been going on with me and what you can expect to see from me in the near future. If you’ve taken this blog off your feedreader list please add it back as I will be updating often!