Kyle Ritter

Right now, two of my websites are experiencing growing pains. Portland Bars is exploding, and I can’t program enough features to keep up with it. The problem is, I figuring out how to monetize. I hadn’t really planned on generating this much traffic, nor what I would do when I got it.

I’ve found that Adsense is not performing as well as I hoped vs. the type of traffic I am recieving. Then I realized why: My traffic is coming from search engines, and had ignored the very same PPC ads that were origininally displayed. They want listings.

Now to monetize, now to monetize. I’ve been contacting larger local agencies and trying to work out a Pay Per Click deal, where the first have of the page is overtaken by an MLS form, that is posted through a tracking script. Argh. This came so quick, I wasn’t expecting it.

SiteProNews has posted a wonderful article chock full of information that oughta be common sense about how to get your blog listed.

Give it a read if you are new to blogging…It can help greatly.

I have recently been contracted to help promote On The Farm With Farmer Bob. This has been an exciting project to work on, the animation and art direction are top notch.

These DVDs are faith based Christian cartoons, yet they also have broad appeal to the secular market. The while the underlying theme is to deliver educational messages based on the Bible’s Parables, such as the Parable of the Sower and the Parables of the Pharisee.

I’ll be doing some SEO, as well as some other promotional tactics.

One thing I want to stay away from: Link exchanges. While trading links with sites is a valuable traffic tool, I am searching more for one way inbound links from relevant sites. I believe that the content and message of the product will make generating inbound linking far easier than it is in other industries. I have a feeling that part of this will be due to the “spread the word” nature of faith based organizations.

Off too work.

I’ve been talking to my friend Greg from Web-Fu Design in Portland about finding ways to parse Commission Junction datafeeds and insert them into a mysql database. Basically, my goal is to create a complete product catalog from these feeds yet create a search engine friendly, spiderable catalog.

I think using mysql, php, and mod_rewrite is the key, as I’ve seen how successful that tactic has been on Portland Bars.

The difference is, I’m not sure how I’ll be able to create understandable urls. I am going to be creating this for a website to buy wine from. So instead of having a page called product123456.html to deliver information about a nice 1994 Pinot Noir wine, I would have a page in a products sub directory with the actual product name as part of the url. For instance, the way I am trying to write this is as follows: products/1994-pinot-noir.html

I just think that psychologically surfers are more prone to respond to a page whose URI indicates that it has information they are looking for. After all, what does URI stand for? Do I hear Uniform Resource Indicator, keyword being INDICATOR.

In the grand scheme, I think this is a very small factor, but I think it has enough value to merit a little extra work.

I’ve decided it is time I make an honest effort towards using strict valid XHTML code. Lately, my code has often been a neapolitan mixture of HTML 4.0, a little CSS, and sometimes XHTML, often on the same page.

Much of the reason I haven’t been consistent with my coding style has been due to the need for rapid deployment, and taking on a wide array of tasks. This gave way to my pragmatic approach of “Just make it work”.

It’s long overdue for me to set more rigorous standards when it comes to the underlying code. Here are some sites I have been using for reference.

w3c XHTML page
XHTML Tutorial

I am pleased with how the Portland Bars website is turning out. Jason and I have worked our asses off getting it up and going, and we are starting to see a nice flow of traffic.

The blog is a handy asset as well, complete with a “bar detector” module that tries to match any bar name mentioned in a post then links the bar name to it’s corresponding page in the directory. This is helpful for breaking up the text and creating stop words, and helpful for getting spiders to crawl newly added bars, since we will often mention them in the blog after they are added.

In a past article I posted about Yahoo Slurp, I had mentioned Nocturnal, a nightclub here in Portland. Ironically, I have got the page listed at #10 in google, and according to my search engine logs, have recieved 13 visits based on the terms Nocturnal Portland since then. It seems that we are appearing above the actual bar itself, due to it’s artistic yet spider un-friendly design.

I programmed the site to be very friendly for visitors, hence making it friendly for search engine spiders as well. It is wonderful to see a fresh site indexed and appearing so quickly.

Mark my words, kiddies, traffic generation comes from recognizing your website as a business asset, not as a chance to satisfy your ego. This is an unpopular opinion amongst the creative but misguided designers in the community.