Brad Greenspan, the CEO of eUniverse, posted about the history of his company leading up to MySpace. His company survived the dot com meltdown (while profiting the whole time). By the time they created MySpace in 2003 they had a top 20 (US web traffic) network of community driven sites. When they launched MySpace they were able to leverage their other content sites and traffic streams to help MySpace spread quickly. MySpace may have appeared as an overnight success, but it didn't hurt that eUniverse had years of experience launching numerous high growth community sites.

Almost all high growth web businesses start out with an idea that works but a model that does not, but that is why the evolve, and why experience is worth so much. Paul Kedrosky recently shared this Niklas Zennstrom video:

The type of person who reads this blog and other blogs about search marketing knows far more than the average webmaster (or web user) about search. You can use that knowledge as a marketing advantage over the competition, by doing things like creating a custom topical search engine, or write about harnassing the power of Google to _____. Search is a big power on the web, and it relates to everyone publishing a site. Leverage Google's brand to push your own. If you story spreads great, if not then you site is at least a bit thicker and harder for people to compete with.

In almost every field you can make your content seem more linkable and more remarkable by talking about it as though it is a search play rather than a pure content website. Look how much press Mahalo got compared to the quality of the site and the quality of the concept.

The following is the three step process that I view as the best path for creating sustainable sites that are valuable, successful, and profitable.

Launching a New Website

When starting a new site a webmaster should be willing to do just about anything to build link equity, brand exposure, and an audience. This includes:

• not monetizing too heavily off the start

• buying a good domain name and site design (or as best you can afford)
• paying attention to the marketplace
• stroking the ego of important players in the market (via things like award programs, interviews, mentions, etc etc etc)
• having a unique value proposition and something you stand for
• create real value
• buying a few key trusted links

This phase should include trying many different things...even if 90% of your ideas go nowhere you still do good if just a few of them spread. Test and learn, test and learn, etc etc etc. It is ok if some of your ideas in this stage are flat out bad...it shows that you are learning and it will make others more comfortable feeling they can also learn with you. People don't like to read someone who thinks they are perfect, especially if they are new to a market.

In this phase I usually do not care too much about monetization other than coming up with ideas that I know I can bolt on, unless the site is so niche that it is already immediately focused on the commercial aspect.

If you bought an old trusted site you can skip step 1 and head to step 2.

Monetize Your Site

As the site gets traction, the site can be back-filled with related higher profit content ideas. Don't place ads on your subscription channel in a distracting way. Instead, add other content sections to the site that are of high profit potential. Make a channel / feed of related deals, or create a static content portion of the site with related commercial offers. After you created enough content you can also repackage portions of it in an information product or sell a premium subscription service.

The site's internal link structure should also place more weight on the important high profit pages. As the site ages and gains high authority trusted links, the site's inbound link profile can back-fill that with obtaining some average to lower quality links with the desired anchor text for the most profitable sections of the site.

Here you can also look to launch (or at least think of) ideas that make you the authority on the profitable section of your site. What can you do in that niche to make people view you as the expert? Why would they cite you instead of competitors?

Solidify

If your site makes more than your living costs, but you feel is on shaky ground, it is time to reinvest earnings to create a real brand. If you don't have a great design and great domain name make sure to buy them. Make the site so strong that the competition can't clone you and has no choice but to buy you out. Create thick content that builds your brand even if it does not feel like it will be highly profitable in the short term. After you have enough easy to monetize content keep increasing the quality of your content and create something people would want to subscribe to and share with their friends.

As you keep building your brand and link equity you can also look to increase your income by doing any of the following

• selling consulting or information products

• adding parallel profitable content sections monetized via ads
• going deeper with the commercial sections on your site (by adding more content in that section)
• if you have enough distribution and market leverage, consider creating a marketplace or leverage your brand asset to move your site up the value chain

Question: How do I track the progress of competing sites over time? How do I know what keywords my competitors are ranking for, and which ones they are improving on?

Answer: There are a way variety of means to track competing sites.

Online Ranking Checkers

Online tools such as Digital Point's keyword ranking tool, the ShoeMoney SERP tool, the our rank checker, or the new tool at ZoomRank show where keywords rank. The Digital Point tool also shows you where a keyword ranks over time, but the problems are who wants to check a lot of these keywords one at a time, and where do you get the opening list of keywords?

Competitive Research Tools

There are numerous organic search competitive research tools on the market. SpyFu is a paid tool which offers limited free data, and SEODigger and URLTrends are free tools which shows you keywords that a site ranks for. AdGooroo also takes a look at similar data, with more focus on paid search. If you can afford to spend $10,000+ you may also want to consider trying HitWise.

Keyword Research Tools

After the competitive keyword research tools you may also want to look at the keyword tools promoted by the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and companies like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. The Google Traffic Estimator will tell you what terms Google thinks are most valuable, and you can also check keywords in bulk and track them over time by buying software like Agent Web Ranking.

Don't forget to also consider macroeconomic factors and seasonal traffic trends.

Look at the Competitor's Website

Looking for a few more keywords that the competitor may have found but the market missed? Beyond those competitive research tools the easiest spots to look for keywords on competing sites are

• the internal navigation of competing sites (especially look for pages that are bizarrely over-represented in their navigation)

• a competitor's homepage page title and headings (you can see the page titles with Xenu and the last two data points with OptiSpider)
• abnormal patterns in their inbound anchor text (use a tool like Backlink Analyzer)
• if they participate in AdSense and allow site targeting, buy AdSense ads targeting their site to dig into their traffic stats

Look at Their Reach

As far as general traffic trends for a site go, Compete.com, Quantcast, and Alexa all give snapshots of site traffic trends. That data tends to be rough though...especially for small sites. The two big ways to track site growth from a market penatration and search representation standpoint are to look for changes in the rate of citation by using the following data points and tools

• Yahoo Site Explorer for link count (pay attention to the quality of the top links, also use SEO for Firefox to dig in for more general linkage data)

• Technorati and Google Blogsearch links for links from blogs (pay attention to rate of growth, and the what percent of the links are of decent authority)
• Google News mentions

and look for the rate of the growth of the site's content, reach, and trust using the following metrics

• number of RSS subscribers (use Bloglines subscribers as a sample estimate if they don't have any other numbers public) and/or number of comments on blog posts for sites with feeds

• how often you see well read channels mentioning the competitor
• how often you see (search, contextual, or affiliate) ads for the competitor
• number of pages on the site indexed in Google
• the ratio of the pages that are in the regular index vs Google's supplemental index (having most of your pages in the primary index is a good thing)

As long as Google allows webmasters to report spam and report paid links, few will question how much webspam Google sponsors. As long as they are the lead corporate sponsor of Stop Badware few will think of their Toolbar as spam.

Some of the A list bloggers who trashed paid reviews, are talking up the virtues of conversational marketing, forgetting what they just wrote. The hard part of being a well known blogger is that as one gains exposure, influence, experience, friends, enemies, and a large archives it is easy to appear hypocritical. This is especially true on a rapidly changing network, where successful people change with the network, and advertising techniques that were once unethical are mainstream a year or two later.