Web Empire

OK, you asked for it. Well, no you really didn’t — more like you failed to ask for anything. So I’m forced to up the stakes. I’m not getting enough sign-ups for my newsletter, so for the next two months (May 2008 /June 2008) I’m giving away a free database each month for all subscribers.

Now of course these are not going to be my premium database products, I need to sell those … these are databases that you can find online if you search deep enough and long enough. But you won’t need to search at all — by subscribing I’ll give you a direct link that you can use, no charges, no further up-sell, nothing except you need to subscribe to my newsletter, which will tell you of new premium databases as they become available.

Our first free database will be the first-names database, over 28,000 first names, their origins and meaning. I know, lots of you may already have this — but I also know only a small minority have noticed that over 8000 names have a tab character preceding and following the name entry in the original database. I have deleted those from our version of course, because they prevent ‘exact match’ queries, which is what most people would use for a first-name (or baby-name) query.

I looked at some of the names that had the tabs, and searched them on Google. Results returned were as low as 300-and-some matches. Names that didn’t have the tabs always return about 500,000 matches. Obviously, most people with baby-name or first-name websites have never noticed this problem with the database. You can have a database without that problem simply by subscribing to my newsletter (put your email in the box at upper right). If you have an existing baby-name or first-name meanings site with fewer than 28,000 names returned on query, I’d suggest you replace your database with this one.

If you don’t have a first-name or baby-name site, I don’t suggest you start one with this database, though you could. Much better, would be to use this database to enhance a site that focuses on other information. Maybe a biographical site, with each first-name linked to a pop-up that gives the meaning and origin for those names. Use your imagination.

No publicly available database should be the basis for an entire site! Use commercial databases to enhance sites you build around your own private database, to create ‘value added’ sites that will attract loyal visitors.

Added two new databases to our Web Content Center, one is a list of towns, cities and communities with their postal codes, the other is a sub-set of that with just the names of localities, the civil administration municipality and state they are found in. The postal code database has 44,947 records, while the locality database has 41,417 records. There are fewer locality records because some of the postal code records are for Universities, government organizations, etc.

The postal code database is $48 — (discounted to $24 for the first 30 days), and the locality sub-set is just $18 (or $9 at discount for the first 30 days). I have seen only one other source for the Mexican postal codes, and somehow they have 14,000 more records than I do, but I can not explain why. So far as I can tell, my database is complete — if anyone knows where they came up with those extra records, let me know! They also include longitude/latitude with their data, which is not available with mine. But then, they charge $350 for their database — more than seven times my base price, or 14 times the discount price.

I have zip code and locality information for the U.S. as well, and will add those databases soon. I also have some genealogical and biographical data that will be added. Put your email address in the yellow box at upper left to get notifications when new databases become available — remember, get them in the first 30 days for half-price!

Over on Blue Hat SEO an interesting little drama has been playing out that caught my attention. Now let me say from the start that that site recommends both black-hat and white-hat solutions to Search Engine Optimization problems — hence the name I guess. Recently the host posted a guest commentary on ‘captcha breaking’.

Captcha refers to those little graphics with crooked letters in shades of gray or other OCR unfriendly styles, that are intended to ensure that only ‘real people’ enter data (such as registration details), rather than automated scripts. The guest post gave a long, complicated programming technique for converting these graphics into something an OCR program can read with fair reliability, thus allowing black-hat hackers to overcome this obstacle.

Now I have no use for breaking captcha’s, that just doesn’t fit with my style. But I was delighted by the subsequent post by the host of that site, where he gave his own technique for breaking captchas, just because the solution was so simple and elegant — the kind of concept that can be applied to other problems.

Instead of writing a complicated program in C and implementing various steps and procedures, his solution was to use a website that was already part of his web-empire. With a simple little PHP script, he simply displays the captcha he wants to ‘break’ on his own site, as a log-in requirement or in order to use some feature, just as if it were a typical captcha situation. Only he records the result from the user’s response, and feeds that back to the program that needs to know what the captcha says. So long as his site where he displays the captcha gets plenty of traffic, the response will be fast enough to use the results immediately. Such urgency is not inherent to the technique, but applies to this captcha example only.

This is a wonderful example of using a social engineering approach to solve a problem. I’m sure it can be applied (or modified) to many other situations where there is no programmatic substitute for human intelligence. There are sites that use similar techniques to identify the content in photographs, or distinguish galaxies from stars in high-resolution telescope images. How could you use this technique in building your web-empire?

NOTE: if the link to bluehatseo.com does not work, it is because the site is currently under various hack-attacks, supposedly because someone took exception to his revealing ’secrets’ about captcha-hacking. That is the drama part of this story I referred to at the beginning. Most hackers endorse the concept that information should be free, but apparently some harbor IBM style business concepts.

Well this is my 48th post on this blog, and I bet you’ve been wondering when I would begin to monetize things. There were 47 posts without a single ad, affiliate link, or promotion … surely you knew the other shoe had to drop! I’ve made it clear that I’m in this business to make money … like you. I think my best bet (for this blog at least) is to help you make money by enriching your website content. So yes, I’m selling data.

I have lots of ideas and data already available, and plans to acquire more. Today, however, I added my first database to my Web Content site: a list of  13,000 news headlines from the last quarter of 2007. That database is just $7 for the first 30 days, half the regular price. I have plans to automate the sale and delivery using PayPal’s IPN, but have not yet actually written the code, so if you buy in the next few days the sale will be hand-processed and may take a while — that will be corrected as soon as I get the time to write code to handle it.

As with any database, I implore you not to use this information in bulk without either selection or modification. That is a sure road to duplicate content problems. You are not the only one with this data, so use it creatively. Select parts of the database, using keyword searches or other criteria, and use only those fields that will benefit the SEO characteristics of your site.

This blog is about Web Empire’s of course, so I assume you have, or will have, more sites. Use the same database in different ways on different sites. Select different data, use different fields, randomize the order — or sort on different values — to achieve unique results. Follow the link to the site, above, for an example of just one potential usage for some of this data.

There are lots of ways of making money online — here are my brief definitions for some of the most common:

• Sell Advertising — that is where people pay you to steal away your visitors
• Affiliate Marketing — where you try to convince people to buy a third-party product through you rather than one of the other ten-million affiliates for that product
• Multi-Level-Marketing — requires trying to get others to sell the same overpriced junk you sell
• Product Sales (1) — where the product is not of your own production, is where you try to get people to pay more for something than you paid for it
• Product Sales (2) — where you create your own product, requires convincing people they need another ebook of money-making secrets so you can begin to actually make money
• Subscription Sites — just convince people they should pay to read the stuff you copied off the Internet
• Get Paid for Work — become a virtual assistant, write content, make websites, etc., at prices competitive with third-world economies

Despite my sarcastic tone and somewhat pessimistic summaries, all of these techniques really do work — people make money on each of them, and some of us even earn a living from nothing but these methods. The reality is though, you can only make money if you can offer something of value. It is difficult to find those value-laden products and services, but not impossible. There are no instant riches, but hard work that is intelligently directed will, in time, be rewarded.