Halloween Australia has been one of my best performing sites in a couple of ways. It is usually number 1 at Google for Halloween Australia, and also Halloween Events Australia. Probably because it has one of the few dedicated halloween event calendars, listing around 50 events each year, ranging from streets offering trick-or-treating to big commercial events, and it was definitely built with SEO in mind, to get organic traffic. It was light, source-ordered content, highly optimised, and had some nice incoming links. And with Google AdSense and a few affiliate links, it would make October my highest earning month online.

Last halloween it peaked at 1600 hits on 31 October, but at this time of year its still around the 30 visits/day mark, but it’s starting to ramp up now. There have been 4 events added so far, and a magazine contacted me for an interview last month. (Haven’t done it yet).

But it was labour-intensive. I had to manually approve each event, as it was added – actually by editing a field on the database – I had never got around to writing an approval program. And photos were also supposed to be manually uploaded. I didn’t make it easy for people.

So it was time to convert to Drupal again, to get more community oriented.

I took a few shortcuts. Reused my Christmas Drupal template, and just changed the colour scheme. Styled a few view tables that hadn’t needed styling on the old white background.

Then I had to copy the content across. Create new data types for events, recipes, craft, stories. Create new views for each data type. Manually add the events from this year. Check that access was fine for new members. Then importantly, redirect the old URLs (eg halloween-recipes.php) to the new format (/halloween-recipes/).

Elapsed, it took from Fri night to late Sat night, with a few late tweaks on Sunday, to add polls, and finish the redirects. Probably 6 hours all up.

Again, it will be interesting to see how the traffic continues for the new site. Whether the redirects will work properly, or if I lose any ranking at Google for changing the page URLs.

There didn’t seem to be any negative impact on traffic for Womens Health and Fitness – it’s still around 30 visitors/day.

But now it’s time to learn a new CMS for work – goodbye Drupal, and hello Mura. (There goes Sunday afternoon…..)

As usual, I focus on the Australian market, because it is under served. And there are few things more annoying that searching for an online shop in a particular niche, even restricting the search in Google to Australia, and being presented with a list of American results. Unfortunately the domain I wanted was already taken. And the site looked like it was rarely updated. What a waste.

There was recently a big fuss about the release of Niche Socializer – software to build online communities. A large lead up to the launch, with lots of promise and hype, but no real examples to look at. I like examples. You can look at the code, links, and decide factually if the product has value. There was a definite lack of sample sites – warning indicator number one.

I tried finding samples. Using Google to search for uptodate info isn’t as good as it should be. Even with the Greasemonkey script to permanently have the Google date pulldown (so you can restrict searches to the past 24 hours/week/month/year), I don’t get the results I want. So these days I often end up using search.twitter.com. And then restricting it to the hash keywords, for example searches for #sytycd gets quality results from twitter, by people who really want you to know what they’re tweeting about. Or at least how to use twitter.

But from all my searches on twitter for #nichesocializer since it was launched, today was the first time I found an example site. All the other tweets have been attempts to flog the product. The site I found was http://www.perranporth.tv/. My first impression was how similar it was to phpfox, myspace, elgg and the other online community software packages I’ve looked into.
And the site was slow. It didn’t have a business directory (yet), which I think has to be the first priority for a niche community site these days.

But because of all the hype, plus lack of examples, I didn’t bother with Niche Socializer.

I had tried playing with Elgg, but it didn’t have all the functions I wanted as standard – business directory, in particular. And I couldn’t be bothered building a module, as I just haven’t played with Elgg enough. Even though it has that big bonus – it’s FREEEE.

PHPFOX was my choice. I’ve used it before for mydogspace, very happily. It just keeps getting better. And there are so many add-ons available.

So my new site is now ready. I may have left it too late for the traffic for tonights So You Think You Can Dance final in Australia. I may experiment with twitter, to see if that garners some interest. Haven’t SEO’d the site yet, or even submitted it to directories.

Check it out. It’s free. For dance in Australia MyDanceSpace

It’s moved up the organic listings at Google, and is now high on page one for “halloween australia” and “halloween events australia“, which was my objective.

People are finding it, and submitting listings for halloween events this year. Some really cool events at the Australian Museum, Manhatten Bar and Nepean River cruises so far.

So I beefed it up again tonight.
Previously, the events search page just had the search fields, and if you hit “Search” without putting in a suburb, it listed the suburbs for you as links. That way you could see if your suburb, or one nearby, had any events.

But it wasn’t easily showing some of the recent cool stuff. So I added a little teaser, showing the last 5 events added, as soon as you land on the page. That will also help SEO, as the content on the page will be frequently changing. Made the suburb an active link, to make it user friendly, and reduce clicks.

And improved the formatting and colours of the event listings.

Wonder if there’s any chance of getting to position one by the end of the month.

Wonder if it will translate into some earnings, from affiliate costume sales, and adsense.

Cross fingers.

It’s a replacement for the shopping site that I lost last year, when the domain renewal email went to an old address I wasn’t using any more. Someone quickly grabbed it, as it had a great ranking at Yahoo, and solid PR, and then offered to sell it back to me for $800. No thanks. I did the work for that once, so he won’t get any profit from me. And it no longer ranks anywhere useful.

MyOnlineShops was completely created with Drupal, an open source Content Management System. I didn’t have to do any code at all – it is pure core Drupal, a large number of contributor modules, and CSS. OK, maybe 10 minutes of html for the page layout, moving a few things around from the default layout.

I obviously have a thing about My…. websites. This is my third, after MyDogSpace and MyDogSite.

The reason for calling it MyOnlineShops, is that it lets me (and free members), create my own list of favourites, have my own shopping blog, my own profile, and make my own reviews and comments on shops I’ve used.

I’m still busily adding more online Australian shops, but feel welcome to suggest any missing ones through the contact form on the site.

I logged in this week to check that links were working, and found someone else’s strange site there! My sites were christmas.best-australian.com and best-australian.com – and as you can imagine, there starts to be a lot of Christmas and online shopping traffic at this time of year.

I had put a lot of effort into getting my Christmas site ranking well – it was position three at Google for “Christmas Australia” all year, and had even been position 1 for a long time last year.

So I looked at the registration details – and it no longer had me as the owner. However it was unusual looking – my original registration date of 2003 was still there, but it had been updated in November, which is obviously when the new person’s site was loaded.

I had registered the domain through my host, so i contacted them. But they were just a reseller for Godaddy, and suggested that I contact them. So I lodged a support claim to both Godaddy, and WildWestDomains, the new registrar, who is actually a kind of sister site to Godaddy. No news yet.

I did a bit more research, and yes the expiry date on my credit card was out of date – even though funds were available, and the card number hadn’t changed.

But I did not receive any warnings that my domain was about to be transferred to someone else.

The (wry) twist is that I had just rebuilt a new more improved Christmas site at a new domain – Christmas Australia. But I had been planning to use this as a case study on transferring sites – using 301 redirects etc. Well I can’t do that now. But I do have all the details on my old incoming links, and you can bet I will be contacting them and asking them to link to my new site.

It may be too late to rank well this Christmas.

But it has taught me a few lessons. Centralise domain registrations, so you don’t have lots of email addresses to check. Hide your domain registration, so you don’t get spammed to death. Lock all your domains. And use captcha’s to stop automated robots from spamming your addresses.

I was in the process of doing all this anyway. But I wasn’t quite fast enough. Wish me luck in my new domains.