Another one of my sites is Resources.eu.com. The site is a hand edited directory for various resources that can be found on the internet.

A few years ago it seemed that Google used to list a lot of directories high in the serps so I thought I would go about making one. Quite honestly its not worth the bother. Now that the site is somewhat established it gets about 10 - 20 submissions a day which can take a lot of time to manually review. Out of these 10 - 20 submissions it isn’t unusual for only 1 or 2 to actually be approved and entered into the directory.

Anyone thinking about starting up a directory to make money with I would personally think again. Its not worth the effort.

Another one of my sites I have is Podcastblaster.com.

Podcasting is a new way of distributing audio broadcasts using the Internet. Using this method, people can subscribe to a variety of content in a certain file format (usually as MP3s). These files are then downloaded to a PC or a portable media player and can then be listened to at any convenient time. Podcasting is a new word that combines “broadcasting” and “iPod”.

A definite distinction of podcasting from other media delivery methods online is its subscription component – which basically defines the whole podcasting experience. Podcasters usually use a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) or Atom feed to push their content to subscribers. It also allows independent producers and “broadcasters” to create and self-publish their own syndicated “radio shows” – whether it be talk radio, poetry readings or even comedy shows. Podcasting also gives traditional radio programs another distribution method for their shows – one that is not confined to the airwaves and available on demand. All that a listener needs to get the podcasts is “podcatching” software that is designed to check for and download new content at a given time. Other podcatching software are even designed to synchronize the downloaded files to the listener’s portable digital player.

PodcastBlaster.com was setup to sell a unique podcasting package for beginners who wanted to enter the world of Podcasting. Everything needed to get started is included with step by step instructions, professional quality recording software for creating your podcasts together with ready to use professionally produced voice-overs, loops, background effects, stingers and Podcast-safe music.

The whole package costs only $39.95 and come with a no risk 30 day money back guarantee. In the year or so that I have been selling this software I have only had 1 refund request. That must say something for how useful people have found it.

Last week I set myself a target to get in the top 10 results in Google for the search term “Philip Nicosia” without the quotes. I was a bit preoccupied yesterday to check but I had a look this morning and to my surprise I came in at No.2!

Hats off to Google for that one. Now you might think it pretty obvious to come in so high for a search term which is basically my name and the name is in the domain and I would agree.

However, despite my site being crawled and listed in both Yahoo! and MSN the same search term doesn’t find me in the top 100 results. I didn’t bother looking any further than that so it might be somewhere. I guess there is more work be done there.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes Yahoo! and MSN to catch up.

One of the many websites I have and one of the most popular according to Alexa (it’s currently the 6707th most popular website in the world?) is XML-Sitemaps.com. This website is slightly different for me too as it is the only website I have which is a joint venture with another person. I can’t really take any credit for this site as the brains behind it is a very talented programmer named Oleg Ignatiuk.

I first came across Oleg at Scriptlance.com which is a site that puts programmers and webmasters together. The idea being if you need some programming done on a website you setup an auction and programmers will bid on the project for how much they will charge for doing the works.

When I first heard about Google’s sitemap program, not being that technical I asked Oleg to take a look and see if I could use it for one of my websites. It turned out that I couldn’t as the site I had in mind was dynamic in that all the pages were written on the fly by the server so they didn’t really exist. The way Google’s sitemap generator worked is that it would scan your file system for files and add them to the sitemap. As these files didn’t exist I couldn’t do this. The other option would be to scan your log files which would work but only for pages that people had visited so potentially a large volume of pages would be missed.

So the next question was, can you write me something which would work. The result was a truly amazing script which would crawl my website picking up all the pages and adding it to a sitemap which I could submit to Google. Oleg went the extra mile and added in some other useful features for me like identifying problem areas of the site where there were broken links and reporting pages which these were on so I could easily fix them. He also made it possible to create multiple sitemaps automatically. Google only allows 50000 urls per site map. Because my site had around 300,000 pages it was necessary to split up the sitemaps and create a sitemap file for the remaining sitemaps. This was all done automatically and all I needed to do was press one button to start the crawl.

Now I had this amazing script which worked perfectly and I remember looking around the internet for something similar and there wasn’t anything that even came close to it. So I asked Oleg what he thought about selling it to the masses. There were so many webmasters in a similar position to me that I was sure there would be a good demand for a low cost script that enabled them to create Google Sitemaps for their own sites. By this time the script had cost a considerable amount of money to develop. The decision to sell it was two fold. 1. To recoup my development costs and 2. to reward Oleg for all his hard work. We agreed I would pay for development costs and hosting and promote the site and Oleg would handle all the technical support and we would split any revenue from the site.

We decided to create a free online sitemap generator that was limited to 500 pages so most webmasters would have an easy solution for creating sitemaps and hopefully would spread the word around about the site. It was launched on 25th June 2005 and was generating quite a lot of interest within days mainly thanks to Google who linked to the site from their Sitemaps 3rd party programs & websites page. Meanwhile Oleg worked hard on adapting the script to make it suitable for self installation and to protect the code. We launched the standalone php script on the 5th July 2005. The timing couldn’t have been any better.

I remember waking up on the 6th July 2005 and checking my emails and thinking “that’s a lot emails to come in overnight”. On opening my in box I was surprised to see order after order after order for our newly launched sitemap script. I was amazed and it took a while to realize where they were all coming from. It turned out that someone had written an article and mentioned our site in it. This was picked up by Sitepronews.com and sent out as an email newsletter to all its subscribers.

The site has gone from strength to strength since. In a little over a year it has created more than 190,000 free sitemaps crawling almost 29 million pages. It now creates more than 1000 free sitemaps a day and had to be moved to a more powerful dedicated server to cope with the demand. The script has evolved too with added features due to customer demands such as creating text sitemaps to submit to Yahoo! and html sitemaps for human visitors.

I am very pleased with the way this site has worked out and its success is predominantly due to Oleg’s dedication, skill and hard work. I am obviously biased about how good this site is but check out what other people are saying.

Okay, I have been very lazy with this site. Partly the reason for this is I wanted to get the site design right before anyone saw it. I’m not expecting to get many visitors if any at all other than from friends and family but I believe presentation is important. I’m a bit of a perfectionist at times and if you are going to do something then you must try to do it well.

Designing and building websites isn’t difficult. Doing it well takes real skill. Its easy to buy a ready made template on the web but I personally don’t like that idea. I would always worry about coming across another site that was using the same template much as a girl would be horrified to go to a party and see someone else wearing the same dress!

If you don’t have the necessary skills to do it yourself then it is worth paying someone to do it for you. There are plenty of web designers around and you even see them advertising on Ebay. Choosing one though can be tough. I’ve looked through many sites and their portfolios and am horrified to see broken pages, bad design and just general lack of attention to detail and that is on the web designers own sites. A tip to any web designer: Make sure your own site works and looks good before trying to sell your services.

The other thing that amazes me is the vast difference in rates that people charge. I have seen people charge as little as £10 for a single page up to £2000 for a 5 page website. Choosing the £10 page will likely be a waste of money and you will get what you pay for. Paying the £2000 for a 5 page website may seem a good idea for a naive company with a budget (who these deals are targeted at) but you are being ripped off.

I was lucky to stumble across Mike Anholm from Anholm.com. Mike has designed a few websites for me including this one. He did the original concept and then integrated into a customized Wordpress theme. Mike offers very affordable web design and produces very good results too. He is very conscientious and will work with you to get the results you want without breaking the bank. If you are looking for a good web designer then give him a go. You won’t be disappointed.

Anyway, back to setting myself a target. Now I have the site design completed I am going to make an effort to get the site ranked for my own name “Philip Nicosia”. Getting to number 1 should be achievable but because I have written quite a few articles that have been published on the internet there are some strong sites which are ranking for this. So my target for this week is to get into the Top 10 results in Google for “Philip Nicosia” within 7 days. I will check next Sunday, 30th July to see if I have achieved it.