While reading through the Forbes Richest Men in Sports, I came across Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks. Now I’ve flipped some websites, and I’m sure you have too. We make a few bucks here and there. Hicks makes our thousand dollar profit look like fractions of a penny.

Forbes says Hicks “made fortune in soda: bought Dr Pepper, Seven-Up for $45 million, flipped 2 years later for $700 million.”

That’s right. $700 million in 2 years.

Now if we brought those numbers down to our terms, you might say “hey I wouldn’t be happy at all if I bought a website for $45 and 2 years later sold for only $700″. Ya, you’re probably right. $700 after owning and developing a website for 2 years is not a lot of money. But you can’t simply use the same profit ratios. Would you be happy if you bought a site for $450 and then sold it for $7000 two years later? You probably would.

The higher in dollar amounts you get, the more impressive his flip looks. I’ve never heard of a business being flipped so fast for so much profit. There isn’t really a point to this post. I just wanted to share with everyone how badass Tom Hicks is. For more info about him, click here. He is currently #380 on Americas Richest List.

It’s been three days since I added Blogrush to my blog. I’ve had a lot of people ask me how it’s doing. Does it really work? So today I thought I would show you screenshots of my Blogrush Dashboard and maybe we can figure this out together. There’s no doubt my blog traffic has gone up some since installing Blogrush, the only problem is my Statcounter doesn’t show where the traffic is coming from. So I’ll assume it’s coming from people clicking my headlines on other blogs with Blogrush.

The first screenshot shows Syndication Credits Earned. According to Blogrush: Users earn “syndication credits” (the right to have their blog post titles shown inside a widget on another related blog) based on their own traffic (loads of the widget) as well as the traffic of other users they refer to BlogRush.

Having my server bug out on me the last 2 days hasn’t helped my case. That’s why you see in downward slope in my traffic totals. However, I have no control over the downward slope in my Referral networks traffic. As you can see in the screenshot below, I only have 1 blogger in my referral network. The screenshot below also shows my Current Credit Balance, which I’m assuming translates to the number of times my blog headlines will appear on other blogs.

The more bloggers you refer, the more credits and traffic you will receive.

Below you will see a screenshot of my Activity by Generation. I’m not sure if this shows how many uniques I’ve had come to my website or if it shows the number of times my blog headlines have been shown on other Blogrush users. I’m leaning towards the latter, because my traffic hasn’t gone up that much. On my traffic screenshot above, it shows my traffic steady at 120 or so.

The final screenshot I have to show is Syndication Activity. This also could mean the number of times my blog titles are shown on other blogs. I’m confsued, and their ‘help’ section doesn’t explain what these things mean. So if anyone out there can clarify this for me, please drop a comment.

So that’s where I stand now. My traffic has gone up. I don’t know if it’s high quality traffic though. My RSS numbers have been about the same all week, so I feel that if the traffic was high quality that some of those hundreds of new uniques would have added my feed. I’ll continue to run this for now. I don’t think it can hurt you… only help.

Getting a new website indexed in search engines can be accomplished very easisly. However, getting every single page on a site indexed (and quickly) can be a little more challenging. One of the best ways to ensure your website gets fully indexed is to add new content and create internal links to all your pages. But if you’re running a website with thousands of pages, most of which have static content, it make take search engines longer to find all those pages, especially if your link structure is whacky.

The solution? A sitemap.

One of my favorite tools is Site Map Builder. This website lets you input a URL and it will create an xml sitemap for you right there. No need to download any programs. Its fast and simple. For those of you who have very large websites, Site Map Builder also has a program you can download (for free) that will build you a sitemap. The program has a lot more features, including:

• Extract links from a site recursively
• Extract links from a single page
• Edit and delete link properties
• Generate TXT or Google Sitemap
• Save map as TXT or XML
• Generate a map from a text file
• Option panel for page time out and simultaneous connections
• Link Validator

There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a sitemap. A sitemap helps guide those little search engine spiders to all the pages on your website in a fast and accurate manner. Without one, the spiders can get lost. If you haven’t signed up for Google Webmaster Tools, you really need to. They make it very easy to submit your sitemap url to them. I’m not 100% sure that submitting your sitemap directly to them will help get you indexed faster, but really…it can’t hurt. They also give you statistics and diagnostic reports for every site you submit. It’s a great tool to help show your rankings.

In conclusion, if you don’t have a sitemap on every site you own… get to it. Having a sitemap can only help you.

I’m having serious server issues today. It’s taking like 1-2 minutes to load any site/page on my server. Tech support at my host is aware of the issue. If it’s fixed soon, I’ll write up a real blog post. Thanks for being patient.

I have a website on my hands with great potential. I’ve been sitting on Mass Effect Forum for months now, and haven’t really done much to it. The forum is completely dead right now, with no active members. It’s time to turn this project around.

Mass Effect launches for the Xbox 360 on November 20th. It’s part of a planned trilogy of games, so this forum definitely has long lasting ability. Halo 3 comes out this month… that’s like 6 years after Halo 1. Imagine how popular a forum could grow in 6 years time. I have an awesome opportunity to turn my forum into the leading source for Mass Effect discussions. Of course it will be very hard competing with the official game forum, but their forums can’t offer members the bonus features that a Vbulletin forum can.

I want to give Mass Effect Forum my full, undivided attention over the new 2-3 weeks. I plan to use some forum marketing tips to drive up memberships.

If you visit the site, you will already notice that I am using a new style. The previous one had a few bugs in it that I could not fix. The solution… a new style. With the new style, I also upgraded the forum software from vb 3.6.4 to 3.6.8. I uninstalled all the previous products & plugins and re-installed new upgraded versions. One of the coolest plugins I’ve added is the Xbox Live Leaderboard. Of course, my gamertag is the only one listed on it, because there are no other active members.

I’ll start my forum marketing with simple link exchanges. Since my site is PR3, it shouldn’t be too hard to find some decent gaming link exchanges. The only space I have on my site for links is in the footer. Hopefully that won’t hurt my chances of finding good links too bad. The next marketing strategy will be hitting myspace. Myspace still remains one of the best places to recruit members for a forum. After that, a contest may be my next best chance. The forum is dead, but the site still gets traffic. About 10-15 unique visitors a day come to my site, they just need a lttle incentive to sign up and post. Giving away a free copy of the game may set me back $60, but in the long run (think 6 years), it would definitely be worth it.

I know I talk a lot, and have very little to show for it. I dedicated a ton of time to Gator Envy and looking at it right now there have been 30 members online in the last 24 hours. That’s double from where it was a month ago. I think I can do the same thing with Mass Effect Forum.

I came across a post on Digital Point saying there’s a great new way to increase traffic to your blog. It’s called BlogRush, and it’s completely free. You may have seen it by now, as many other bloggers are testing it out. Look on my sidebar, and you will see a new widget that says “From the Blogosphere”. What BlogRush does is publish 5 new posts from other related blogs, hoping you will send traffic to them.

For more information on how it works, click here to watch the video. Below is an excerpt from the member dashboard on how you get traffic to your site:

In our video we mentioned that you earn a 1:1 ratio of syndication credits on your own traffic, and any direct referral’s traffic (such as “Bob” in the example video) and any direct referral’s referral traffic (yes, that sounds confusing!) such as “Jen” in our example. We also mentioned that you’d also earn credits based on activity through 10 generation levels. Here’s the breakdown of our formula:

Your Traffic = 1:1 1st Generation Of Referrals (Directly From You) = 1:1 2nd Generation Of Referrals (i.e. Jen in the video) = 1:1 3rd - 6th Generation Of Referrals = 1:4 7th - 10th Generation Of Referrals = 1:8

1:1 means you earn 1 syndication credit for every 1 impression of the widget by your own traffic or by any users located on the 1st (direct) or 2nd generations. 1:4 means you earn 1 syndication credit for every 4 impressions of the widget by any user located on the 3rd to 6th generations. 1:8 means you earn 1 syndication credit for every 8 impressions of the widget by any user located on the 7th to 10th generations.

When all of this math is added up, it leaves 1 headline space available out of every 10 that are served. This means that BlogRush uses 10% of the headline spots (5 headlines in each widget load) to monetize the service. We currently have plans to sell these extra credits to any user that would like to purchase additional credits — this is one of the ways we will pay for the service.

I’m not sure how well this will work on my blog, but at this point I’m down to try out anything new. If it does actually send me new traffic and new RSS readers, I will use BlogRush on all my blogs. With sport niche blogs, this program could work very well.