(UPDATE 12/16/2009 = due to some legal technicalities, I changed the domain and revamped my business site.)

Engipress is my professional output for anything and everything related to WordPress. I designed the WordPress Theme, designed the vBulletin forum skin, and I even went out of my way to find great mods to enhance the forum posting experience, all done by myself (to assist in showcasing my skills).

The designs are intertwined to give a great overall similar feel for the new website structure (The vBulletin forum sits atop the WP Theme forum), so the forum doesn’t impair the blog’s CSS layout or font stylings.

Perhaps the main attraction of this new website for me will be to contract freelance website work for those using WordPress as either a Blog or Content Management System. Just visit my hire page to see what services I offer. I’m very flexible with the pricing as I realize different people will require different needs for what they want to accomplish.

Also as a FYI, any posts relating to WordPress or blogging will probably be made on my Engipress Blog from now on. This doesn’t mean I’ll be neglecting Lightning Shock, it just represents the fact that my personal website will be shifting directions in a sense.

I feel I’m doing everyone a favor by providing this great resource to anyone who uses wordpress or plans to.

Then the commercials came on. They didn’t seem much different than a regular season game’s advertisements.

The quality of humorous and memorable Super Bowl Ads have really gone down in the past few years. Bud Light and FedEx Shipping are the only two services worth mentioning out of the entire lineup off-hand. The large birds delivering packages from last years big game along with Budweiser’s smart-cracking, male-oriented television spots seem to be all that’s left of this once-famed media spectacular.

The collection of 2009 commercials doesn’t exactly hype up the anticipation for next year, nor give us much to look forward to when that time comes around.

At least Anheiser-Busch’s marketing division (along with Federal Express’s) can still present a product and get a message across that’s actually worth the $3 Million pricetag.

You can find this Kool-Aid in many flavors such as PR, Alexa, and Link Exchange. And there’s also the primary Kool-Aid stores to avoid consider (Digital Point, V7n, etc.).

If you don’t believe me, allow me to debunk the flavors for you:

PageRank is NOT Important

Alexa Stats are Useless

Link Exchanges are NOT Important

Now that you’ve read these pages, and considering the fact that most SEO’s still follow this logic, what do you have to say about it?

For me? I’m personally conflicted on the subject. One the one hand you have Marketing wannabes selling their scammy services to guarantee number one search rank positions and the like. But on the other, website owners actually spend money on this stuff, believing the SEO Experts are actually telling the truth. So it’s a toss up to me.

Why not make your voice heard? And respond to the poll

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

Or are you getting annoyed with pertaining to all the scams and suckers that exist? And those that surf the web looking for the next Get-Rich-Quick Scheme?

I think something should be done about it, but what action should be taken, exactly, I don’t know.

My First Example

As I was searching for a good name for a site that I wanted to write top ten lists around (until finally settling on toptenlisted.com), I stumbled across topten.com, I thought this would be the perfect name for my new website. It’s not being used by anyone, and I find out it’s already taken!

So naturally, I was kind of peeved, but figured someone already conceived the concept of developing top ten lists (this is a whole other matter which I don’t want to ramble to much in this post). And I wanted to figure out what the competition was up to, even if I didn’t think I had any at the time (I was naive, and didn’t do much searching). While visiting the domain, I expected to find a flourishing website with tons of great content, only to discover there’s just a wasted page. That’s right…. all that was there was a search box, a couple of “community links”, and a few random keyword links at the bottom of the page, and I was thinking, “WTF, what is this?”

As my blood pressure rose even more, I decided to do some research into this “registrar”. I find out it is owned by some company known as Mark Monitor Inc.

I don’t know who “Mark Monitor” is, but they are a perfect example of what I hate about the domain business. They gobble up good, memorable domain names and just sit on them waiting for someone with enough cash to pony up, and come by and pay the costs of their heavy fee.

This was about a year ago….

Fast Forward to More Recently, Business is Insane

This domain “cybersquatting” business is huge. A few months ago after reading stories like: “Vodka.com sells for 3 Million” or “Business and ancestry.com acquired for roughly 300 Million a piece“, I’m thinking to myself “Geez, how can people or companies be paying so much for just a .com name?”.

Only the wealthy have access to these dictionary, one-word, top-level domains, and if that doesn’t make you angry, I don’t know what else does.

Crazy Offers

Another thing that bugs me about the domain industry is the people involved in the business and the ludicrous dealings they make.

Take PageRank for example. Some people think you can sell a PR3 Domain, or a Domain with good rankings, so I had to explain to them that this is not possible.

Then there’s also single webpage scams to consider. Some “marketing gurus” purchase entire domains like illmakeyourichthroughafffiliatemarketing.com just to sell their scammy $20 eBook. They’ll claim something along the lines like “Buy my book and I’ll make you rich!”. Here’s a newsflash: THE ONLY PEOPLE GETTING RICH ARE THE ONES SELLING THE EBOOKS. Do you honestly think if they knew how to make money online easily, they’d be giving out their secrets for cheap amounts of cash?!?!

The Leftovers…

There aren’t many good, short domains left, in my opinion. If you want something brief and unique, it’ll have to be something like sda48fs5ud.com. Yeah, just a bunch of random letters and numbers thrown together, not very appealing nor memorable.

Anybody looking to start their own website won’t have that many options within the domain field, unless your willing to fork out the extra cash to pay for a reasonable name, but most aren’t (or can’t afford to).

What Should be Done about this?

I consider myself LUCKY to have been able to register lightningshock before anyone else (whether it’s a domain company, a one person cybersquatter, or just a competing website developer) had the opportunity to snatch it up (although I wouldn’t feel half as bad if it was the final choice).

I say if you’re going to purchase and sit on a domain for awhile, you should at least put it to use and build a website around it, you know, something pertaining to the domain name.

Or else, I wouldn’t mind seeing a law or two passed and enforced against this travesty of an industry. If nothing is done about it, who knows I might decide to take a complete 180 and start registering spiffy domain names of my own, and see how they like it.

Blogging requires a great amount of time and effort to write great article posts and market it effectively. If you want to take the money path, you have to treat it as a business.

Take this Pavlina post for example, he tells his story of how he was able to make a living of of his blog, and provides some tips to newbies at blogging. He didn’t start out with just a couple of ideas and hoped for the best, he offers a unique perspective on life and writes about something he is passionate about, Personal Development.

Most people are probably thinking that you could write maybe about 15 or 20 posts for their site, place some ads on their site, and expect the income to just roll right in, however this is certainly not the case, it doesn’t work that way. How do I know this? It’s because I had a similar mindset when I was first starting out.

Take my first site I ever created as a prime example, Toptenlisted.com. I started out thinking that if I wrote a few Top 10 Lists that were mildly interesting, my income opportunities would roll right in and I’d be flowing with the cash. Not necessarily scamming people or anything, I just thought I originally had a great idea, only to learn that there were already at least 5 or 10 other competing sites (another lesson to learn here, make sure you do your research properly beforehand).

I first started out with my ideas back in the Fall of 2006. I figured I’d purchase some Website designing software (Dreamweaver), use a common template without knowing much about HTML or CMS systems, slap some content together, and I’d be on my way. This was before I really knew how wonderful WordPress can be.

I completed everything I mentioned around February of ’07, and I can honestly say my first site attempts were awful. Take a look at the site archives of Toptenlisted to get a few screenshots of what it looked like.

After I realized just how awful my designs were, I thought that I couldn’t create something great. But then I decided to look around at WordPress.org and played with a few designs until I finally rested on my current theme, which looks pretty good to me at this moment, in my opinion, miles better than what I first started out with.

Although I felt my design was OK, and I had a fair amount of content written for it, it was too restricting for me. I feel that my mind is always racing with ideas and always writing a “Top 10 Reasons…..” or a “Top 10 Ways…..” was just holding me back, thus the reasoning for this blog’s creation was born.

You have to keep it at and not give up so easily, even now with my current blog, I’ve made about a grand total of $10 via adsense. However, money is not my primary concern at this moment, you have to build a traffic base and network with others who have similar interests as yours. If monetizing and writing for money is your primary reason for getting into blogging, you probably won’t be very happy with the results you receive.

Vangogh gave me some great advice a while back (over 6 months ago) on the Webmaster Talk Thread “How do you build Quality Links?” (among others, such as St0x and Seolman, etc. not to discredit the advice everyone else also gave, but Steven’s really hit me). I’d recommend reading this thread if you’re just starting out and would like to receive some great insight on blogging and internet networking, or to find out just how much of a n00b I was back then (Not saying I’m not a n00b anymore, that’s still up for debate ).

Your Content Sucks

You don’t want to admit it, but this is likely a reason why you’re not doing to well. While you may think you have just written a great blog post, many of us are highly biased in favor of our own content, and in turn have a subjective viewpoint on what we write about.

In order to whether what you are writing is truly “good” or not, depends on who reads it, and what comments hey may make on your site. Other bloggers will definitely link to your site if they like it well enough.

You’re Not Marketing Properly

See an earlier post I made about how to effectively network with those that have similar-minded interests as yours to gain some more insight.

Instead of using strategies like “link building” or SEO, if you decide to just have something other bloggers want to link to, the marketing aspect should take care of itself. Remember, hyperlinks are there to navigate through the web, not for whatever “perceived” SEO benefits you *think* they may have.

Your Site Design Sucks

Whether its due to the colors you choose or just usability issues, Website design can turn away up to half of your potential visitors.

One other point to keep in mind here is that your site may also have a wide variety of visitor-types. For example, there is a large percentage of the elderly population online, thus considering things like text size, flashing lights, etc. may turn some of them off, because they may have trouble viewing the screen, or controlling the mouse effectively.

You’re just being Lazy

This is the probably the biggest reason. You know you want to write that extra blog post, or comment on a few other blogs, but deep down, you realize you just don’t feel like taking care of the problem.

You’d probably rather be doing something like playing online games, or chatting with friends all night. But remember, in order to have a great, high-quality-traffic site, it takes a great amount of time and dedication. It reminds me of the 10/90 quote:

“Everything in life is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.”

It seems to me that Big G will have a long way to go if they wish to reach the size and reach of Wikipedia. They are offering some innovative ideas, such as showing who wrote an article and reviewing current existing articles in the Knol’s archive.

However, I believe this will be the downfall of the project:

Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

With the addition of comments on articles, no Google Moderation, and most of all ads, the Knol Project seems to me like it will be nothing more than an advanced Blog Content Management System.