Hello, Universe

It’s been a long time since my last blog post, but I thought I’d start 2010 off right by posting an update.

2009 has come and gone and here are a few things I’ve learned:

Being chosen to be a moderator at a forum I participate in for the third time in my life (1st time I was around 17-18, then in my early 20s, now my late 20s) shows me that maybe I do possess some leadership ability. I’ve always been a timid individual in face-to-face situations, but on forums, it’s just a lot different for me since I can gather my thoughts and refine what I say before I make my posts.

Also, with being a mod, I’ve learned that I actually enjoy the investigative behind-the-scenes aspects of it when it comes to identifying who’s a spammer and who’s not. Don’t tell anyone I said this, but it’s kind of fun for me to research that kind of stuff because it just makes my Googling skills that much better. I’ve always been able to find anything online, but doing it with an actual purpose makes it that much more interesting.

I’ve learned that I am not much of a Mac user. I bought that MacBook for my birthday and really haven’t used it all too much. Anybody want to buy a MacBook?? Don’t get me wrong, I like it, but it’s just not for me.

As far as affiliate marketing, I’ve learned that I get lazy when it comes to link building and traffic generation. I can do the niche research, write content, and make a website with no problems, but when it comes to driving traffic to my sites, I really don’t like to take the time and find relevant websites to get backlinks from. Maybe this process is something I should try to outsource for 2010. I actually do want to outsource as much as possible eventually.

My affiliate plan for this year is to stick with what has already made me money. And that’s selling physical products, not information products. Instead of moving from one thing to the next, I’m going to stick with physical product promotion and not move on to anything new until it’s making a steady stream of income. Right now it’s only making me money during the holidays since my main earning website is holiday based, so I’ll have to choose a niche product that can be sold throughout the year. That’s my plan and I’m sticking to it!

My new year 2010 started out great and here’s to it continuing to be awesome throughout the rest of the year and beyond!

I love WordPress. I’ve been using it since 2004 and it makes it easy to create blogs or general websites with dynamic content.

Back before WP, I used MoveableType, which was awesome but I forget the reason that made me switch. I think it was because I found WP more user-friendly than MT and just easier overall. I’m glad I made the switch since the plugins, themes, and community just make WP great to use for any type of site you want.

One thing about using WP is that search engines (I’m specifically talking Google here) actually know you’re using blog software, so it seems like they expect fresh content in order for you to continually rank high, at least that seems to be the case for me for my WP sites. I’ve never made a WP site that only used static pages, so I don’t know how those rank, but the ones I’ve made that are mixed static pages + posts don’t seem to stay up in the results unless I continually update them.

Back in 2007, I made a site about a video game that didn’t use WP since I thought that was overkill for a small site. It only consists of about 13 total pages and takes up less than 3 MB of disk space (probably less than 2.5 MB). The pages use PHP, but the content never changes and hasn’t changed much at all since 2007. I’m still ranking #1 in Google for broad matched terms like [character name] guide, [part of game title] guide, and #3 & #4 for [full game title] guide.

So this really makes me wonder if I’d just be better off not using WP and going back and creating sites manually again. In other words, using the Notepad++ & WYSIWYG HTML editor method. I guess it would depend on the topic. I think newsworthy topics that are constantly changing should use something similar to WP that allows you to add new content. But topics where there’s not really much to talk about should be static sites.

This is something I should do more testing with. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about since this year’s 30DC since the two topics I ended up choosing really have nothing really new & revolutionary about them and I think they would be better as websites with static pages instead of WP blogs.

Anyone have more experience with this? Have you found your result to be the same or different? Do your blogs keep their ranking better than your static sites? I’m really curious about this, so leave a comment!