WebmasterLibrary: Keep or forget?
Blogged on June 18th, 2007 at 2:35pmFrequent readers, such as GoogleBot, will remember my mentioning of the purchase of “webmasterlibrary.info”, powered by a custom script that pulled results and content from RSS feeds, basically meaning that there was no need for me to do anything - simply just leave it to let the money roll in. Either way I couldn’t update the site since it’s encoded!
I bought the site for £18, which is $36. At the time it wasn’t much money, and I thought I might as well try it out as an experiment to see just how successful these niche sites are. Well, so far it’s not going so great. Admittedly I would say the script is pretty crap and I could do a damn slight better than whoever programmed it.
Here are a few of its downfalls…
Page loadtime is slow. Seriously slow - and it’s literally the only site being hosted on my VPS from IKhost. Though this can, in part, be blamed on the amount of external URL requests and processing time since it’s pulling the results from Yahoo in RSS form, I’m sure the programmer didn’t set up cacheing or anything more advanced than that.
Not compatible with security conscious hosts. Trust me, IKhost has probably got the most extensive security plan out there. Though really, most hosts who care about not losing data or having their clients’ sites defaced run in safe mode or block at least some functions. I first had the site debut on my shared account which still runs PHP4 (and FYI, it’s being phased out at the end of the year according to Zend) and it didn’t get very far at all. Infact, it got about as far as showing the header and then exiting with a fatal error telling me it was unable to connect to the remote host. cURL, anyone? Nope - still using file_get_contents. Shame on you.
Not compatible in safe mode. Perhaps this truly reflects those sleazy sites that end up getting linked on those domain parking pages. It doesn’t like safe mode, and it’ll error on every page that requires something out of safe mode’s scope. Again, a pretty insecure script that can’t be changed. (It’s trying to set the time limit, which really shouldn’t be allowed..)
So, from what’s been said, there isn’t much to dig right now. My marketting strategy, however, hasn’t been too good either - hence very little money coming in from AdSense, or LinkBucks.
My main source of linkage has been through AvengeX and also through HashMash (another one of my sites I feel like selling). No PPC schemes, no advertising other than that. I might well start posting a lot more on SitePoint and using the link in my signature. PageRank is still zero, so so far it’s a disaster for me.
Talking of LinkBucks, have any of you guys tried or used it before? Personally this is my first time, and so far it looks to me like it’s got the corporate face like web 2.0’s uncle and the payout rates of Bidvertiser.
I’m seriously thinking of selling this, but I’m honestly not sure how much money it would go for. If you’ve got any ideas, plug them in a comment, and trust me when I say I won’t be offended when you start asking me for money to give it away!
Anyway, that’s it from me for now. In an update to my last post, I’ve just battled through 10 pages of forms and I feel damn good about myself!