Matt Coddington

I’m not sure if it’s just me or if it’s a more widespread habit, but I tend to watch over my projects long after they’ve changed hands forever. I like to see my sites succeed even after they no longer belong to me. Unfortunately, that rarely happens. Most buyers in today’s online market are lured in with promises from the occasional article in the business section of their local newspaper heralding a home-town star making $100,000/mo online. They think it’s easy money.

But I digress. This isn’t about buyers in general, but about the buyers who are now running what I used to run.

Forum Rank - http://www.forumrank.net

This was my first project of 2007, and probably the most ambitious (at least at the start). The idea behind the site is simple but very complex at the same time. It is a forum ranking system, similar to Big-boards.com but with a much more sophisticated algorithm powering it. The algorithm weighed various options rather than size alone such as average users online at a given time, average registrations per day, etc. It made it so that fast-growing forums could compete in rankings with monster forums.

This project is where I learned that a good product is only about 15-20% of creating a successful website. Despite the work I put into the site it garnered little to no interest. No support. But that’s the way things go.

I sold the site a few months later for a few thousand profit to a British fellow. He hasn’t done anything with it since. A shame.

Net Business Blog - http://www.netbusinessblog.com

NBB was really just an experiment to see if I could dazzle the “make money online” sheep the way gurus had. It worked. People enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize how much of a drain it can put on you when the vast majority of your audience is a mindless zombie, buying into any and every easy money idea they can get their hands on. Sure NBB had a lot of quality readers with strong input and a good head. But of NBB’s readers were just DP kids pushing their turnkey sites and CPA scams. So I sold.

The sale went fine (was the most I ever made from a single site sale) and since the buyer had eCommerce experience I thought it was going to be in great hands. Unfortunately the site has grown zilch since the sale and from what I can gather, the income is in the pooper. A shame.

Creep Colony - http://www.creepcolony.com

Now we finally get to a success story. Creepcolony.com was your standard gaming fansite (based on StarCraft). Due to the fact that SC2 is really not going to be very good, I decided to sell. I just can’t run a site unless I’m passionate about it. Anyways, some young fella bought it and man did he hit the ground running.

Since the sale he has totally revamped the forums, had a very successful contest, and seemingly doubled traffic. That’s awesome!

I did more in 2007, but these were the biggest I guess. They’re all I can remember right now at least.

If any readers out there have some more success stories of what has become of their sites after sale, I’d love to hear them!

So I’m a little late for my Halloween post, but hopefully it’s still fresh in everyone’s minds. The company did a little in-office decoration for children of employees, and it was a lot of fun. Many happy faces. And one really ugly hairy one.

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It seems that every blogger in the “make money online” niche is dead set on preaching how important is to quit his or her day job and focus on self-earning 100%. While that may be what many (or even most) people want, it’s not the answer for everyone. Many people may actually enjoy working a 9 to 5 and would like to learn how to better compete in today’s web job market.

I am only 22 years old and have not really been in this industry for very long. When I started I couldn’t afford to go to the seminars, certification courses, etc. I learned everything I know on my own with little to no help from anybody. And although that might give me a great sense of pride, it doesn’t really look good on a resume. So when I decided I was going to start looking for a web design / marketing position within a company, I had to overcome 1) my age and 2) my resume. How did I do that?

I scrapped the resume and wrote a letter instead. In the letter I leveraged the success of my most recent site, Net Business Blog, to demonstrate my knowledge of the web industry. It worked. I got the job I wanted (as well as a ton of interviews with other companies).

If you are a professional or even hobby webmaster working from home but aspiring to get that dream job, maybe you should consider scrapping the resume too. Instead use one (or a few) of your sites as a case study showing your knowledge and ability as it relates to the position you’re applying for. You could also always just attach the resume at the end. Give it a shot. See what happens. It worked for me.

Below is the letter (very slightly edited) I used when I applied for position after position earlier this year. As you can see it’s nothing fancy. It’s just a candid assertion of my skills and experience.

Dear Sir or Madam,

My name is Matt Coddington, and I am a graduating senior at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. I am 22 years old but have been doing website design and creative advertising design for the last 7 years. I have also been doing SEO and various forms of internet marketing for the last 4 years.

I am very familiar with Website Design (full web pages, banner creatives, HTML templates - all using Adobe suite), Search Engine Optimization (White Hat, although I have working knowledge of Black Hat and what *NOT* to do in SEO as well), PPC marketing, Social Media Optimization, Affiliate Marketing, Viral Marketing, E-mail Marketing, Blogging, Domaining, Community-powered Websites (Web 2.0), and much more. All of my work has been for myself or for contract client work. I have never held a permanent position, but that is not due to my lack of knowledge or ability.

Because of my age and lack of formal experience in the industry, I would like to present you with a case study of my work rather than a conventional resume. This case study will be of my most recent website. It is a blog in the online business niche that is only 4 months old yet has already become an authority in the field and gained widespread recognition.

Net Business Blog
http://www.netbusinessblog.com

This blog was started on January 7, 2007 with myself as the webmaster, designer, web tech, marketer, and sole blogger - ie. I didn’t have any help. Since it launched 4 months ago it has acquired a Google PageRank 5, risen to become one of the top 20,000 websites on the net according to Alexa rankings, created a loyal readerbase of over 2,000 readers per day generating over 80,000 page views per month. Of that traffic 38.62% (as of 5/6/2007) is generated by organic search engine results. Much of the the initial traffic came through my unique use of Social Media Marketing. This website was built adhering to W3C standards using the WordPress engine.

On this blog I exercise my knowledge of online business. All of these articles demonstrate my knowledge and experience in the field, many of which apply to the skills required by this position. Here are some of my more popular articles on the subject:

Increasing Your Other
Analyzing Page Views per Visitor by Source
Building a Niche Minisite
How Cost-Effective is SEO?
Optimizing Images for SE Traffic - Is it Worth it?
Link Building Through Design & Link Building Through Theme Distribution
Fight Against Click Fraud Moving Forward

These are just a few examples of my work. I selected these because I think they are most relevant to this position and do a good job of illustrating my basic experience in the industry.

If you would like to see more examples of my work or learn more about me please let me know.

Regards,
Matt Coddington

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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.

It’s official, I have jumped onto the TWERQ boat. I think my formal title is Director of Public Relations or some such fancy phrase, but the long and short of it is that I’m going to be managing the TWERQ Official Blog and doing my best to market and promote this amazing search tool online.

I wrote about TWERQ RC3 on NBB a long long time ago, but I have been watching TWERQ since day 1 … well more like day 13 or 14, but still pretty damn early on. I’ve been hooked with this tool even when it was little more than “tab-based browsing”. It has come a long way since then. TWERQ is now, in my opinion, the most useful search tool on the market and is quickly adding new features.

I have no doubt that TWERQ will be making headlines before long, and I’m excited to be a part of the company while it’s still in its infant stages.