History is one of my interests. It was always my favorite subject in school. I’m mostly into American History (Revolution and Civil War), but do enjoy ancient history as well. My passion for the subject led me to build Historum almost 2 years ago. I sold the site back in December of 2006, but regret doing so. The forum is still active and probably producing nice revenue for the current owner.

Several months ago I bought a history domain. It’s just been sitting in my account, so I finally decided to do something with it. The site I’m launching today is called History Facts. It’s a brand new history facts website run on wordpress. My goal for the site is to update it 4-5 times a week with a couple of history facts. Sure there are a ton of history websites out there and since history doesn’t change, there may be a lot of dupe content too. I plan to get around this by listing my own comments about each fact I present. Maybe just a sentence or two, just so the search engines pick up the unique content.

The site still has some work to do (pictures, videos, contact page) before I start actively building links and promoting it. I plan to have it completed by the end of the week. It should be a nice little site that I hope to get to like 100 uniques/day. History is a decent paying keyword (not like the terrible 2 cent keywords I get on some myspace sites), so with enough uniques this site could turn into a $50-100/month site in a few months.

So check out History Facts and let me know what you think.

Just a week ago I posted about getting some of my Google Love back. Well, this morning when I woke up I had a nice little surprise. The few rankings Google returned to me are now all gone again… and this time it seems even worse. Even more of the pages on my site Myspace Tweaks that I had indexed in Google are gone.

No way to tell if this is just a dance or if Google just bitch-slapped me again for another 6 months. Either way I’m getting sick of it. This site was getting 7,000 uniques/day before the penalty. It dropped to a low of about 1500, and then the past few weeks had climbed back to 2500. Now today after the second penalty it could be even lower then 1500 uniques.

What to do? What to do?

You work so hard to achieve something and then overnight it’s all gone. And there’s nothing you can do about it. I know some of you probably share my frustration, and others probably have been lucky and never had a site just disappear from Google. I’m not usually one to complain or whine about things not being fair… but this is really starting to piss me off.

Do you ever go on vacation or quit working on your websites for a couple of days and notice a drop in activity? It happens all the time to me.

I’ve been out of town on vacation for about 7 days (been off a computer for like 10). Thanks to a little Wordpress friend called timestamp, I was able to keep a couple of my blogs going while I was gone. But for two of my other sites, Mass Effect Forum and Gator Envy, I noticed some big drops in activity… because they are forums.

If you’re an active administrator on a forum and you leave for 10 days, it can put a big hit on your community. My forums rely on me creating new topics and keeping discussions alive every single day. My sites aren’t to the maturity level where they can run without me.

Even my non-forums sites showed some decline while I was gone. Websites just need your presence. There are very few websites that can be totally fine for long periods of time without anything done to them. The only site like this I have is Fight Song Lyrics, which I haven’t touched in years. I guess the key to making true passive income is the find a ton of websites like this. Sites and blogs that need daily updates with new information are hard to keep going when you aren’t there.

Myspace Tweaks, one of my myspace resource sites that was Murdered by Google 6 months ago… just recently got one of its rankings back. Actually it was the main keyword ranking in Google and is back on page 1 for that search term. Although it’s not ranked in the top 3 like it was… my site currently ranks around the #7 or #8 spot. Not bad.

I’ve gone through all my de-indexed pages and pages that lost rankings and none of them are back except the main keyword which goes to the index page. None of the subpages are back and none of the long tail keyword phrases are back in Google. But could this be a sign of reinclusion? Why would Google bring my home page back to page 1, but leave all the subpages out?

My other myspace site, Pimp Myspace, has seen no keywords brought back.. in fact, it’s still getting worse. Google is a tricky beast that no one can tame. I’ll continue to monitor this situation. I’ll probably freak out if all my rankings come back. It would actually give me motivation to start working on the sites and making new sites again.

A wiki is software that allows registered users or anyone to collaboratively create, edit, link, and organize the content of a website, usually for reference material. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. Anyone can make a wiki about anything.

Getting Started
There is an entire list of wiki software for you to choose from. Pick the one the best suites your needs. I like MediaWiki the best. It’s widely used and free.

Chosing a Niche
Pick a niche that interests you. Try to think of something that other people will like to contibute to. Also look for a topic that doesn’t already have a wiki. One of the wiki’s a visit often is Complete Mass Effect. It has everything about the video game Mass Effect that you can think of.

Building Content
If you’re an expert on the subject, then go ahead and start writing the content yourself. If you aren’t then browse forums and websites about your wiki niche to look for information. Use forum threads as article titles. It’s a great way to start building categories. Once you have a lot of categories, people may be more inclined to contribute.

Marketing a Wiki
If you have other websites about the same niche as your new wiki then this will be a lot easier. Just promote the wiki on those sites. If you don’t, then you will need to rely on the standard website marketing concepts. Link building, content, social networking promotion, forum signatures and word of mouth.

Once you’ve got that going, just sit back and wait for the search engines to index you and you’ll be getting traffic in no time.

I don’t know if I’m out of the loop or something, but today I was browsing the web and stumbled upon Wikimapia. At first glance it looks just like Google Earth. But if you look closely you will see little squares over the major cities. If you clikc a square it will zoom you in to that city and display the area map with a lot more squares.

Each square represents a popular location. It could be an airport, museum, school or neighborhood. Once you click on a square it will zoom you in to that location and give you the location’s name and description. You can even vote on if the information is useful or not. There is a way to edit entries as well by clicking on the menu icon for each location.

I’m not sure if there is a way to make money or gain anything from Wikimapia. You can add links to location descriptions, but unless its an authority site and highly relative I doubt the editors will keep it up. This is just a fun site to play around with. Hope you enjoy.