Web Development – Nate Whitehill

Website Launch for Best Selling Author and SEO Professional, Michael Fleischner

Recently, UBD launched two new WordPress-powered websites for Michael Fleischner, the best selling author of Public Speaking Made Simple and SEO Made Simple.

Fleischner is an Internet marketing expert and founder of Upward SEO. He has appeared on ABC World News, The TODAY Show, Bloomberg Radio, and other major media with experience in all types of marketing including advertising, direct marketing, Internet marketing, market research, and trade show management.

Here’s what we did for Michael:

Wireframing and design
HTML5/CSS3 Markup
Assisted in site copywriting
WordPress integration
Cross-browser testing, staging & deployment

Our Work

Visit Public Speaking Made Simple

Visit SEO Made Simple

Here’s what Michael said about working with us:

UBD has done an amazing job on a number of my websites. Not only do they bring world class design, but functionality as well. My sites look good, are highly engaging and have elevated my brand.

Michael’s Books

If you’re interested in either of Michael’s books, you can find them here:

Interested in a blog/site design?

If you’re interested in a blog or website design, head over to Unique Blog Designs or send us a message below:

[contact-form to=’nate@uniqueblogdesigns.com’ subject=’New UBD Lead from Blog’][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Website’ type=’url’/][contact-field label=’Comment’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]

My Favorite New Analytics Tool

For anyone who reads my blog, you know that it’s fairly rare that I promote products and services that aren’t my own. However, since I am fond of mentoring folks new to Internet Marketing and Blogging, I’m going to make an exception, because this is going to save folks tons of time!

Check it out now by clicking here.

I’ve been playing around with this new tool that’s going to revolutionize how we get our analytics for our websites. You ARE studying your sites’ analytics, right? Well, if you’ve ever thrown up your hands in frustration because you’re logged into 5 different sites, trying to pull metrics from each one, and then digging through all the data you got from them manually, I’ve found the solution to your problems!

HeatSync, is a powerful new web-based tool that aggregates data from all those sources (Alexa, SEOmoz, Compare, SimilarWeb, Klout, Twitter, and more) automatically, so you don’t have to. It’s an all-in-one solution that’s easy to use and gives you deeper insights than if you relied upon one or two of the aforementioned sites to get your data from.

In the past, I’d spend far too much time monitoring my sites, checking their page ranks daily on Alexa, then going over to Compete to see a breakdown of Unique Visitors vs. Total. If they had Facebook pages or Twitters, I’d have to log into each of those to see if I’d gained new followers or likes. The time it took me could have been spent on far more productive endeavors, but the process is valuable.

Now with HeatSync, I log into one site. It’s like a personal assistant that lives on the internet and does all the legwork for you. I’ve got half a dozen sites of my own that I track, and because it’s so easy to use, I have the luxury of tracking other sites in my industry too, because it’s always important to keep informed about what the competition is doing. I can see any metric, for any site, and even graph a few of them together so I can compare.

The time I save gathering data means I have more to spend on interpreting it. I get deeper, more thorough insights, which allows me to better tailor my sites to what their visitors are looking for.

If this sounds like something that would save you time, you owe it to yourself to check out the free beta version at www.heatsync.com. Let me know what you think!

Developers, Developers, Developers!

That is Steve Ballmer’s famous quote from a Microsoft Developer Expo. Anyway, I have had many roles at our business, infinFX, over the past year, but my main one has always been web development.

Just recently, we started a JV with another local firm developing International domain names for China. We are now planning and working toward developing hundreds of unique web sites over the next few years in both English and Chinese. I am also in the process of organizing another venture aimed at producing a dozen or so custom blog designs per week.

I Need Developers

Obviously, I have a lot of work in front of me and many business models to work with. The point of this story is that I am on a massive developer hunt now.

I am looking for freelance individuals with any, but preferably all of the following skills and experience in:

CSS/XHTML
PHP/MySQL
WordPress Theme Customization
Photoshop Web Design

I have a lot of exciting work ahead of me and it would be awesome to work with some of my readers on some great new projects.

Contact Me

Please use my blog Contact Form to contact me. Further, feel free to forward me your resumes and portfolios. I would also like to chat with people on any instant messenger client too, so if you have my IM names, feel free to contact me.

I have been extremely busy lately with projects, but Josh and I are planning on recording our first podcast here this week. We would like to include in our podcasts any questions any of you may have. If you have any questions about business, blog, or web development, please free feel to message either of us. We will try to answer everyone’s questions in our podcasts.

Valid Source Code Helps SEO?

I just read an interesting article at Search Engine Journal claiming valid source code helps spiders better index your site. I’ve known about the importance of validating, but I had no idea it affected how your site was indexed.

What is Validation?

According to the W3C:

Validation is a process of checking your documents against a formal Standard, such as those published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for HTML and XML-derived Web document types, or by the WapForum for WML, etc. It serves a similar purpose to spell checking and proofreading for grammar and syntax, but is much more precise and reliable than any of those processes because it is dealing with precisely-specified machine languages, not with nebulously-defined human natural language.

The article gives a few tips including:

Use W3C to make sure your site is viewable in major browsers, especially Firefox & Safari
Test your site on mobile browsers
Check for all errors in HTML coding and fix them when possible

If you are interested in learning about the benefits of valid source code and how it could help SEO, then read SEO & Importance of Valid Source Code.

When To Sell a Site: A Brief Guide to Site Flipping

More and more web publishers these days are actively engaging in “site flipping,” which is the business of creating niche web sites only to turn around and sell them for a nice profit.

My business partners and I have created one niche site, Treo Express, which covers news, rumors, and product information for the Palm Treo smartphone. We also put together a 130-page Treo Help Ebook which we have sold on the site for $4.95 a piece. To date, TreoExpress sold around 30 ebooks and made several affiliate sales.

The only problem with creating niche minisites is that they often require quite a bit of work to maintain and build traffic for. We have not updated Treo Express in a few months, and the traffic has dropped off significantly. At this point, I am thinking the best thing to do would be update it a few more times, and simply sell it.

The great thing about Treo Express is that since it is easy to find great affiliate deals and Adsense ads are targeted really well for it. Not only that, but even though it has not been updated in a while, it received a PageRank 4 at the last update.

When To Sell a Site

Clearly, if a site is no longer being actively maintained and you do not enjoy working on it, it is probably best to put a little more work into it and put it up for sale. At first, we were enjoying writing for Treo Express and selling the Treo Help Ebook on it. However, between our other three businesses, we were just too busy to maintain it.

I was considering putting it up for sale a month ago, but I wanted to wait until the PageRank was updated. When selling a site, it is much more valuable if it already has an established PageRank.

One of my good e-friends, Matt, from Take More Risks.com, has had a good amount success flipping web sites. He recently sold emohairstyles.info several months ago for $1000. Time to create the site? A few hours. At that time, the site was making about $12 a day from Adsense, but had no PageRank. When selling a site, the price is often calculated by monthly earnings times 10-14.

I asked Matt how he decides when to flip a site. His response was:

The best time to flip a site is when you feel like you’ve taken the site as far as it can go, no less than 3 months after you’ve acquired it. You must have traffic and revenue stats for that time period as it will guide people towards a price. Also, you should consider how you could potentially use the money you get from the sale. It’s easy enough to acquire 5 good blogs without revenue which have no seo work done to them and convert them into earnings.

Where To Sell a Site

The best places to buy and sell established web sites are Digital Point Forums and SitePoint Auctions. Matt recommends using SitePoint for technical, SEO, and entrepreneur blogs.

Another e-friend of mine, Nomar, recently picked up an established forum on Digital Point for $150 and sold it almost overnight on SitePoint for $950.

Clearly, there is a lot of potential in flipping sites. Matt says, “There are some serious opportunities out there for people with the enterprise to implement multiple revenue streams, add some content and sell it on for crazy markups.” The key is to know what sites to buy and when to sell. In a future article, I will talk about how to pick sites to buy. In the meantime, check out the blogs of Matt and Nomar – they have some great information about site flipping.