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Wednesday, April 11, 2007

10 Forms Of Web Site That Lazy Webmasters Love

I have to say I love the forum at Digital Point. It has one of the worst signal-to-noise ratios on the web, but over the years I've got some great tips and deals from there. There's been a lot of crap as well, but hey - we's got to learn somehow. I check there often, and I see a lot of stuff that makes me smile every time I visit. Be it 10,000 original articles for five dollars, MySpace account 20 zillion contacts for ten dollars or another webmaster newbie asking why his AdSense account got banned - it has it all.

Feet up, lazy webmasters at work... notAnother reason I enjoy Digital Point is it (and similar forums) lay bare the rise of a whole army of lazy webmasters, all looking to be the next big web thing. We all want our sites to be successful, that's all well and good, but unfortunately at Digital Point, there's many with little actual will to stand out from the crowd and do something unique. Most are looking for, or selling quick 'sure-fire' solutions that are anything but.

I've sort of touched on this trend here in the past, and indeed been guilty of being caught up in the madness myself once or twice. How do I mean? Well, take for example the old favourite of Pixel Advertising. It goes like this - someone does something, makes a ton of money off it, a whole industry suddenly springs up trying to emulate it whilst completely missing the fact the boat's sailed already.

As a result of this need to make it quickly and easily as possible, Digital Point has become an webmasters' flea market of stuff that's both ludicrously cheap and positively pointless. There's a whole market of instant content, instant incomes and instant success - starting for as little as a $1.

As much as we like a shortcut, in some cases it can also be detrimental to a web master's site. Duplicate content, spammy services, links from bad neighbourhoods, banned URLs, etc. Digital Point isn't alone in being a focus for these dubious services, you see it wherever webmasters congregate. There's a whole cottage industry trying to get rich, one dollar at a time, offering ebooks, databases of stuff and sure things.

And if it's for sale in such quantities, you can guarantee someone there is buying. At times it feels like some would even sell their left kidney for something as meaningless as a PR7 backlink. All sorts of behaviours and cultural misunderstandings abound, and this sort of laziness is also apparent in the sites that many are concentrating on making in a misguided attempt to grab a slice of online success. Unfortunately for most of them, they are doomed for the same reason the Pixel Advertising clones were doomed - the time has passed.

The fact the pan has flashed would also explain why there's usually loads of these sorts of sites for sale there as well. Fortunately for the jaded and spent webmaster, there's a boat full of newbies there to gleefully pick up the slack when they've realised the futility of what they were doing.

These lazy sites fascinate me - they're being mass produced on an industrial level and there seems to be no shortage of webmasters willing to try them out. In my own lazy, list-obsessed style, here's my run down of ten sites that frankly, webmasters should avoid getting involved with. Unless, and this is a big unless that 99.9% of all webmasters trying one of these sites won't be able to do, unless you can do something radical with it.

Many will try these, and clutter up the web with endless copies of cookie-cut website scripts and pointless ventures. But, here's my tip - don't waste your time on 'em. Choose your niche, make it about something you love, make it original, build it up. There.

10 Forms Of Web Site That Lazy Webmasters Love

  1. Directories - Three words you need to know: Dmoz, BOTW and Yahoo. And, let's face it, the only people who use them are webmasters and new surfers who accidentally wound up there without realising. Unless you have something really niche to do, you're wasting your effort. Even then you're probably going to fail, as the main problem with directories is, only webmasters and new surfers who accidentally wound up there without realising will use them.
  2. Proxy Sites - Bit of a poisoned chalice here. Whilst a proxy site can send loads of traffic, the only real way to make money off it is with AdSense or some other PPC. Unfortunately, you're walking a tight-rope with both the PPC provider and your hosts. It's also not like the world needs another proxy with the zillions out there.
  3. MySpace Resource Sites - Sigh... I know, I own one - it seemed like a good idea at the time and at least I made all the graphics for mine myself. However, most of them are cookie cut and whilst there's lots of traffic potential, when it comes from MySpace your PPC providers know, and expect to get smart-priced and crappy clicks. Then you got a growing bandwidth problem to worry about. There's no original content to shout about either.
  4. SEO Forums - With the three big boys out there, do we really, really need another one? Well, yes as a place for other lazy webmasters to try and sell lifelong links for a dollar a piece.
  5. Article Sites - Unless the articles you're going to add to your 10,000 article database are both new and unique, you're pretty much wasting your time.
  6. Blogs - Let me qualify that. Not all blogs obviously, ones like this are fine. There are plenty of good blogs out there, with useful information and the like. But, does the world need another 3 post blog about the PS3 or another SEO blog commenting on what proper SEOs have said? No, is the answer.
  7. Top Sites - Back in the mists of time, the search results were dominated by warez and porn top sites. They made a bit of a comeback with the Blog age, but on the whole, they really show up in the results, there's no original content on them and no one uses them. Make something original instead (directories not included.)
  8. Bad Bingo or Poker Resource Sites - I see these popping up all the time. I do a lot of work in the Bingo field, and frankly some of the crap that gets put up is ridiculous. Inaccurate cut and paste articles and lots of banners for shonky online gaming sites. Enough already - most of the webmasters who own Bingo sites have obviously never even set foot in a Bingo hall.
  9. Image Hosting - Once again, the ones making money from this are the ones who launched the trend. 1000s of webmasters are causing bandwidth hell and getting crappy clicks from their own off the shelf image hosting sites. Really, when was the last time you actually looked at pages on a picture hosting site other than to drop an anonymous Goatse? Me neither.
  10. Arcade Sites - I love arcade games, rather than sitting down and learning Sinclair Basic or something that may have helped me now, I was blasting away in arcades and on video games at every given opportunity. Back then there was something special about discovering a new cabinet in a local chip shop or news agents - now the web's full of em, all cut from the same script with the same games and massive AdSense blocks. Where's the content?! I'd rather read reminiscences and stuff about the bad old days than play a crappy small flash arcade game.

And Finally

We all got to start somewhere, and I have to admit I've been guilty of pointless web sprawl. Partially, as a result of stuff I'd learnt at places like Digital Point. Now though, I've stopped, my focus is on less sites and making them as unique and original as possible (in the main - I still do the odd experiment.)

There are webmasters out there who already knew this, and they're there on Digital Point as well - their advice is priceless. Figuring out who they are is the fun part. Unfortunately, many of us were too busy making pointless sites, rather than concentrating on quality.

If you're a webmaster and you're thinking of starting a site from the list above. Think twice - would your time be better spent developing something you've already got rather than trying to replicate what's already gone? I know what I want to do from now on.

Posted by Dio Bach at 12:42 PM 3 comments links to this post