This is 1Offs, a weblog about niche web marketing, online entrepreneurship, web design, user monetization experience, SEO, niche websites we like, and more.

When it comes to publicity, ShoeMoney knows best! He just started a contest to find someone who can outrank his own sites on the search keyword ’shoemoney’. This SEO contest has very simple rules. Anybody up for a challenge?

P.S. Just followed a commenter on that particular post and found Thor Schrock who gave away that ShoeMoney has 1200 domains. How many domains does ShoeMoney really have?

If you blog at Blogger.com (aka Blogspot) and maintain a niche blog with decent pagerank, traffic and the blog is regularly updated. And if you are looking for a different way to monetize your other than Adsense, Chitika or affiliate programs. Then you might be interested to know about a project in the works to bring an existing advertising program to your site. The program is currently not being utilized by many Blogspot accounts.

The reason while test subjects are needed is because it needs to be tested out in the field, and your feedback can also be used as testimonials!

For more information, please make contact by (more…)

Just discovered a series by Dave Davies at BeanStalk about how to game the big 3 search engines and produce SEO results! The posts are basic but well written and discusses many activities that new webmasters can begin to implement. It’s well worth a (more…)

Traditionally, site promotion has been about getting your pages to rank high on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) at all cost. Google has maintained its grip on webmasters and bloggers by dangling this quest like a reachable oasis in front of us. Well, not anymore! Bloggers now have alternative SEO methods and new philosophies in their quest to reach a wider audience.

The last post about Squidoo ended with a suggestion for Squidoo to focus on being a lens search engine. Aaron Wall also interviewed Seth Godin, and Seth explained that

[...] Squidoo for the lensmaster is a place to point to your blog or your company or your organization. [....] For a surfer, it’s more direct, more trusted and easier than a search engine in some ways. It’s a place to start, a place to leave, and easy directory. [...]

In the same vein that Squidoo is a search engine for lenses, Technorati has become the benchmark search engine for blogs. There are different benefits to optimizing for Technorati, and the process can be easier than optimizing for traditional search engines like Google. (more…)

Seth Godin’s social-blogging/advertising venture, Squidoo, has been acting deader than its namesake that are thrown on the ice of the Joe Louis Arena (oops, those are octopii!). Squidoo helps normal people build web pages called lenses. Lenses are another way to describe a niche site - one person’s view on a particular topic. Many have since tried their hands at being a lensmaster, but being a niche webmaster would have been more profitable thus far.

Squidoo has recently started payouts to its lensmasters. The top lens is currently earning around $30 per month. Which begs the question on what Squidoo has been doing wrong. Here are a few observations: (more…)

Some heated discussion about Markus Frind’s claims have popped up at ShoeMoney’s blog. 1Offs.com will not be taking sides on this but would like to invite ShoeMoney to clear up his story about the 10,000 domains claim, since he is all for honesty?

The post does raise the interesting perspective of whether Markus is really able earning that kind of revenue. Do you have an opinion?

Webmasters fret about being in the search engine sandboxes. But after reading Bryan Veloso’s article about the importance of a development sandbox, it is relatable to view search engine sandboxes in the same vein. If you were running a niche blog, you needed that sandbox time to churn out a good amount of original content. If you were doing niche web, that sandbox period would allow set up of your site’s look and feel. Many people use templates, but better results can be obtained if you customize your content and layout to the click audience of your niche.

While Getting Out Of The Sandbox …
Don’t just worry about the product, this is also a marketing game! While you are in the sandbox, don’t forget to start working on getting ranked on search engines. You want your pages to rank high on (more…)

Coming on the heels of our post about Markus Frind’s postcast, here’s a look at how successful he really has been. Let’s break down the figures for you and find two more examples for comparison!

Case Study #1 - Markus Frind
The first exposure I found on Markus’s revenue numbers were on Robert Scoble’s blog. That was on March 4, 2006. Let’s use his base number of $10,000 a day.

• $10,000 per day
• $30,000 $300,000 per month
• $3.65 million per year
• 1 Employee

(more…)

Put it this way, Markus Frind from Plentyoffish.com, is an inspiration to anybody who ever wanted to make money from web projects. Single-handedly, he has beaten down corporations with many more employees, and earning $10,000 a day in the process!

And let’s put it this way, listening to 2WebCrew’s podcast interview with Markus inspired me to change my paradigm about what one man can do. More amazingly he did it with little to none marketing efforts, besides word of mouth!

Finally, let’s put it this way and say that you need to head on over and listen to the podcast yourself. I’m sure you will pick something up from his success story!