Eristoddle.com is the third domain I've owned. My first was Profit-ware.com which was banned by Google for years and now has a Pagerank of 4. I have found a use for that site and will be moving forward on it soon. My second was ClickbankEbook.com which now redirects to Digital Products Review.
It began as an internet marketing site running on PHPnuke. PHPnuke was the first CMS I played around with and the reason why I started learning to code in PHP.
Shortly after that I found StumbleUpon which sparked a lot of old interests in writing and art. I had a Stumbleupon account before it was even considered a tool for marketers. I just thought it was a way to find cool sites. Plus I like to show off with the 2000 some bookmarks I had collected and horded since I first got on the internet. I was a top stumbler a lot, hitting the top spot a few times. Another top stumbler with similar interests became a best friend and is now my wife. During this time Stumbleupon was dofollow. Yes, my sites benefitted but mainly indirectly through the links to my sites in my profile.
So I turned Eristoddle.com into a writing resources directory to consolidate some of the writing links I had collected along with the new ones I had found. The fact that I had met my soul mate by tapping into my lifelong interest in writing had a little to do with it too. It even had a forum for a while and stayed pretty busy with other top stumblers coming by. It still ran on Nuke.
I have been through a few hosting providers with the site and have managed to keep the link database backed up through each change. This time I decided to move to a Wordpress installation with the Link Exchange Manager plugin. I converted the database tables and it was up and running within a couple of hours.
It's a little rough around the edges and is bound to stay that way for a while, knowing me. The directory listings could use some styling. But it's at an automated stage now which is good. It will grow in size on it's own. It will collect PageRank on its own. I just have to moderated submissions which can be a hassle but worth the time. You never have a clue how much spam you can get until you open a directory.
Ware23.com is a shareware site I started with a similar goal in mind. It's the only site I wrote from the ground up because I didn't like the open source pad directory software that was available. It gets about 15 software submissions a day with a grand total of over 24,000 software titles. It could use a little revisiting also but it's good to know the show goes on without me involved.
Bloglot.com was once a bookmarking site that crashed because it couldn't handle the load one too many times. The main cause of the crashes was spam. I think I am going to throw a Drupal installation up and make it a blog directory. I am going to run Wordpress blogs on the subdomains to test a few plugins I am writing and having written for me, which I may just beta test by having a few people sign up for blogs. The goal of the plugins are to take manual crosslinking, affiliate program selection, related content choices out of the equation. What if your sidebar widgets worked like the ones the Squidoo lens builder?
I originally planned to build a site in each category of my lists. They would all run 95% unattended and build pagerank and age while I figured out a system to monetize them. "Adsense !", everyone says. I say, "Google gets a cut, the affiliate who bought the ad gets a cut, and the retailer gets a cut." You lose a lot of profit through ease of use. Jobs once outsourced to companies now cost must less through the use of smarter software. At least telling myself that is what keeps me on this crazy trail.
Those are weekend projects along with my ongoing one of building a system to save time when running multiple blogs which I hope will converge with at least an alpha version of my Wordpress plugin. At that time, I will convert all of my other PageRank banks into Wordpress blogs. And I start writing about more than internet marketing and regurgitate some of the words I packed into my head through constant reading because the framework will be in place.
And that's how you learn seo, the internet, programming, and marketing to support yourself as a writer. The switch from starving fiction writer to nonfiction writer helped. And guess what, fiction writers don't have a trademark on passion.
This post is for my wife who married a construction worker making $24,000 a year and never thought I was crazy. I love you baby.