Last week, one of my most popular websites, Gator Envy, underwent some minor upgrades. Gator Envy was still running on vb 3.6.4 that I had installed 2 years ago. It was unstable and needed to be upgraded. Because my forum has a ton of modifications and plugins, I enlisted the help of the site’s designer to do the Vbulletin upgrade for me. The last thing I wanted was to screw something up and wreck the forum just before football season kicks off.

In addition to upgrading to Vbulletin 3.7.2, I also had the designer adjust the site’s width from 800px to 1024px. Not many people use 800×600 resolution anymore. Hell, even 1024×768 is almost out of style. I thought about just making the forum skin a fluid width, but really didn’t want to hamper the experience of someone with a 30″ widescreen monitor. Reading text across the entire width of a large forum can be tiring.

So all the upgrades and template changes cost me $100. It’s not a bad deal since I know I’m getting professional work and excellent customer service. Gator Envy now has over 1,100 members and nearly 30,000 posts. It should be a great year!

Every now and then I like to make a post listing some of the funny keyword phrases I rank for. One of the more popular ones I used to rank for a year or more ago was “highest earning internet entrepreneur.” I thought that was hilarious because I was number 1 in Google for that keyword. After looking through statcounter and awstats, here’s the list.

adbrite f*ck up my blog
adbrite scam
hip hop harry lyrics
quattro razors suck
prince abakaliki
etology ads f*ck off

It’s amazing to see what people actually search for.

What’s on your list of off keyword phrases you rank for? Send me a link and I’ll check it out.

Today is Part III of my State of the Union Address 2008. I still have a lot of websites left in my portfolio, but I don’t have the time to discuss them all. So I’ll just go over a few more. If you have any questions regarding other sites I own, please contact me.

Pimp Myspace

Ahhh… the good old myspace resource site. Can’t believe it’s still alive. This one is the subject of so many of my “Murdered by Google” posts. This site used to attract 7,000 uniques/day and make me a killing. Now it’s struggling and only gets worse every day. It’s hard to motivate yourself to work on a dying website, especially when nothing you do can help it grow. When you’re in a Google penalty, the success of a site is not in your hands. I continue to add new content every now and then just in case the penalty ever gets lifted, but I’m not holding my breath. It gets about 2,000 uniques/day now and dropping.

Myspace Tweaks

See above… it’s the same story here. Myspace’s popularity is dropping every month, and with that so are the amount of people searching for myspace resources. I’ll keep this site alive along with the other one, but I have no plans on improving it or spending a lot of time on it in the future.

Assassin’s Haven

I purchased this website several months ago. It came in a package deal with Mass Effect 360. I got a great deal on it, and in just a few months I’ve already made my initial investment back and then some. When purchased, this site was attracting 600+ uniques/day. Of course the game was still hot and only a month or so old. I continue to update it about twice a week. There isn’t much news coming out about the game because Ubisoft didn’t make any DLC for it. Assassin’s Creed 2 will come out in the future, but who knows when. It could be 2010. I’ll continue to keep this site for now because it still gets 400+ uniques/day and makes OK money from adsense. I don’t have any major plans for it though in terms of design or promotions.

Phlip Rivers

I’ve had this Philip Rivers fan site for almost 2 years now. Since launch, it’s been very well ranked (#3 overall) in Google. During football season it brings in over 100 uniques/day. Posting during the offseason is tough, but once things get rolling I will try to maintain 3 posts a week. If I updated the design to make it more ad friendly, I could probably make more money… so that’s something I might think about before the season kicks off in September. Otherwise, I’ll keep posting away. I have no intentions to sell this site as it’s the best Philip Rivers fan site out there.

This concludes the 2008 State of the Union Address.

Yesterday, I gave updates on three of my websites. Today, I’ll continue with my State of the Union Address and give you updates on a few more websites. I’ll talk a little about their history, current state, and future goals.

History Facts 101

This is a relatively new website/blog that was actually created by accident. I bought this domain for a different project. I canceled that project and wanted to do something with the domain instead of letting it sit there. History Facts 101 is a general history blog that I update 1-3 times a week depending on how busy I am. After three weeks, the site was getting 50 uniques/day. I thought I was on to something. However, since then, traffic has fallen to like 15 uniques/day. I’m not sure if it’s because school is out or what? It makes some money via adsense every now and then, but nothing great. My goals for this site are to continue to add new posts every couple of days (maybe daily eventually) and to generate 100 uniques/day and 100 RSS subscribers by the end of 2008.

Tebow Zone

This website is one of my absolute favorites. I really enjoy posting on it and interacting with the commentators. Tim Tebow is my favorite college football player so keeping up with him and posting daily is very easy. I consider Tebow Zone a huge success. It didn’t take long after launch for this site to climb up the rankings in Google. And because Tim Tebow was such a big draw and was always in the news (Heisman) I was getting a ton of traffic. I’m talking 2,000 uniques/day when I was ranked #1 in Google. Now there is more competition with other Tebow fan sites, but I still think this one is the best. I’m the only one that provides real blog posts. Tebow Zone makes good money from Adsense, especially during football season, and even makes money from Ringtone sales. My goals are to maintain a top 5 Google Ranking and keep posting everyday. I plan on keeping this site forever, even when Tebow is in the NFL.

Harvin Zone

This website is almost an exact replica of Tebow Zone, only for a different player. I have good rankings for this site too, although the search volume isn’t half of what Tebow’s is. Nonetheless, it does well during football season and will get a 100-200 uniques/day. I don’t plan on changing anything with this site. I’m just going to keep on posting and doing what I do. The only way I could increase revenue is to directly sell merchandise instead of just slapping up a link to the affiliates store.

Mass Effect 360

I purchased this website a few months ago for the sole purpose of driving traffic to Mass Effect Forums. It has worked… to an extent. This blog still gets 200 uniques/day even though there hasn’t been much game news coming out. I’m very glad I purchased this site, because I’ve already made my money back in just a few months. I’m going to keep this blog as long as Mass Effect is alive. It’s got good rankings and a solid readership base. I don’t really have any plans or goals for it at this time.

Well that’s it for State of the Union 2008 Part II. Please check back again tomorrow for the final update.

I figured it’s time for me to give a State of the Union Address. In today’s post, I’ll go over a couple of my websites. I’ll quickly discuss some brief history, what’s been going on recently with the site, and any plans I have for the future. Because I own a lot of websites, there will be multiple parts to this topic.

Overall, I feel like my website portfolio and earnings are down from a year ago. I lost a lot of Google SERPs back in October/November 2007, and never got them back. This is a big reason why I’m in a downturn or flat period right now. I haven’t launched any new websites lately that have seen tremendous growth. Maybe I can blame the US economy for my problems? Anyways, here we go…

Fight Song Lyrics

This is my oldest site to date. I’ve had this baby for coming on on 3 years. FSL is a cash cow during football season, and a low earner during the off-season. But what I love about this site is that I get a couple hundred uniques a day during season and it requires 0 maintenance. I never have to touch anything on this site. I don’t promote it or anything, yet it continues to rank strong in the search engines. I don’t plan on doing anything to FSL in the future either. I’m just going to let it be.

Gator Envy

GE is probably my most valuable site. It was launched back in December 2006 and to-date has over 1,000 members and almost 30,000 posts. I work very hard on this forum, but naturally it comes easy for me because I am such a big Gator fan. It continues to get great traffic and earns a modest amount during football season. In the coming months I plan on upgrading the forum to Vbulletin 3.7.x and changing the fixed site width from 800 to 1000. My goals for this site by the end of 2008 are 50,000+ posts, 1300 members (250 of which are active).

Mass Effect Forum

Mass Effect launched on Xbox 360 back in November 2007, almost 1 year after I created the forum. During the month of November this site saw major growth and high activity. It was doing 600-700 uniques/day at one point. We saw another surge in traffic when Mass Effect was released on the PC. Since then, numbers have dropped because of a lack of game info coming out. Unlike a lot of RPGs, the current Mass Effect game actually has an ending… so gamers can beat it and will get bored with it. Lucky for me, this game is a planned trilogy and will be popular for a good 5 more years. MEF recently surpassed 10,000 posts and has 450 members. A goal by the end of 2008 will be 17,000 posts and 650 members (100 of which are active).

Stay Tuned Tomorrow For Part II.

Tomorrow, July 23 marks to two-year anniversary of this blog. It’s hard to believe I’ve been writing here for 2 years and people are actually still coming to read it! A lot has happened in the 2 years since this blog launched. I’ve gone through a lot of blog themes, made 450 posts and even made a few dollars here and there.

Looking back, I think this blog was better off 2 years ago then it is today. I think the content was better and I had more traffic. It’s not that I don’t enjoy blogging as much as I did 2 years ago, it’s just that I’ve moved on to more lucrative projects… and that takes away from this site. As much as I’ve tried in the past, I just won’t ever make this blog one of my featured sites like so many other bloggers out there do. This site will continue to be an outlet for me to chat about what’s going on with my internet venture.

In conjunction with my 2 year anniversary, I decided to do a State of the Union address. You will see Part I tomorrow. Anyways, I also wanted to say thanks to all my readers. The 125+ RSS readers and the 50 or so uniques I get daily. It’s much appreciated! And if you’ve been here since day 1… I’d love for you to comment, maybe tell me some good/bad changes you’ve seen in the last 2 years.