When I first started building a site using Drupal, I was using a private site I had set up on my HostGator account, but I kept seeing people saying that you can’t use a certain company’s shared hosting for a Drupal site. I would also see people saying that it could be done without much trouble, so I decided to launch the site using that particular company’s shared hosting.

It was quite the learning curve, I piecemealed advice and instructions from wherever I could find it. Usually I would try something, which resulted in a new problem. The new problems were almost always related to how that company’s hosting is set up. In fact, these problems almost always appeared to be unique to Drupal installations on accounts with that company.

Working through these problems, while being extremely frustrating, they always showed me new things about how Drupal works, and also gave me a taste of PHP programing. This kept me going and is why I stayed with it, instead of switching back to my HostGator account.

I ran my site for a few months on that account, and it seemed like I had gotten over all of the limitations of that hosting. Then I began to notice that the organic traffic to my site was growing, which was incredible since as a site built to show that I could build a site using Drupal, I had filled the site with reprinted articles.

Suddenly, I decided to invest some time in my site, and print some original content. I talked to my friend, Bette and she agreed to write some new material for me. I also made some major changes to the site to give it more of an appealing layout, inspired in part by some comments MiMi had made to me.

Starting with Bette’s first article a couple of weeks ago, the site began to experience major problems. “500 Internal Error” was the most common, and I could only attribute it to the hosting account not being able to handle the sudden influx of traffic. In fact, when the first article was published, it marked the most people to visit my site for a single article on the same day.

That was when I finally gave up on the host I was using, and moved the site back to my Hostgator account. I had four domains hosted there under my main domain using their “Addon Domains” feature, and have plenty of room to add more. I didn’t need to change my hosing package at all to be able to move my site over, I was even able to get it all done on a Sunday.

Just in time, too!

Bette’s second article, Single Parents Getting Back on the Career Path, actually received close to 100 visits the day after I published it. A traffic quirk, to be sure, but my site had absolutely no problems from this new traffic load.

If I expect to do work for other people, I’ll need to be able to use different hosting companies, but for my own sites, I’ll stick with HostGator.

As the days went on, I watched the search results on Google daily to see my page slowly rise from not even appearing after 37 pages of sites returned for the phrase “cash gifting scams” (without quotes), to it’s current location of being #5 overall. It took a couple of months, but that was with just a few blog posts, and hardly any additional social bookmarking.

But wait a minute! That’s only out of about 250k sites, and an average monthly search volume of 4,400 searches… Nice, but the real brass ring for me would be to get onto the first page of Google for “cash gifting” with a little more han 1 million sites against me, and an average of about 135,000 monthly searches!

I was able to reach the top of the heap on a somewhat simple search phrase, not to mention several “long tail” keyword phrases, and stayed there. I could have easily claimed to have reached “Page One on Google in a Week” (maybe less) based on the “Long Tails” like many “SEO Gurus” do, but that’s not my style. Besides, I have higher aspirations!

Well, I sort of lost sight of actively trying to do anything more after the page seemed to stall at about page 10 for “cash gifting”. I had added more content, and better pictures. I also added a new link I had found to a recent (at that time) article by the Better Business Bureau warning that people running Cash Gifting and Pyramid schemes are like little Bernie Madoffs all over the Internet trying to scam people out of their money.

After almost six months of getting wrapped up in my quest to join the Giant 100 Club on Squidoo, working with Tenfinity and learning more about Web Site Design, I finally went back and looked to see how well I’ve been doing, I see that I’m now on page three!

Looking over the other sites on the first three pages, I only see four or five sites besides my own that expose Cash Gifting for the scam that it is, that’s like 5 or 6 out of 30 sites! Besides that, only two of them are older than mine, and most of the scam sites are sites that weren’t up in the top returns when I last checked.

This is a highly competitive category, and while there are many newer sites that have managed to get past me in the race for the top, I suspect that, as I saw when I was watching this search before, many sites race to the top, then steadily slide back down the slope, or drop off completely. I suspect that the drop offs are scammers who either get their articles deleted from the free sites, or their sites get shut down as one Law Enforcement agency, or another catches up to them.

Of course much of the backsliding is do to poor SEO tactics that can’t stand against onslaught so many desperate people building sites to rope in suckers.

One thing I haven’t done, is work on promoting this site using the many ways described in the Squidoo Step-by-Step Guide, I guess I need to find time to do that. Here I helped work on this Step-by-Step Guide, and I haven’t been able to find time to put it all into action on my own Lenses. It was put together by 10 individuals, so it’s not like it was written by a single person who was outlining every step they had done on their own. Many of us had overlapping experiences, but each of us brought something unique to the table.

It’s not so much that I want a ton of traffic because of the few items I have for sale, but it’s a matter of pride and prestige.  Last year at this time, and for a good portion of 2009, the highest ranking Squidoo page for this search was a scam Lens that had been locked.

Despite being locked, that Lens remained on the front page of Google for “Cash Gifting” for most of a year. Google’s description for the page even identified it as a locked Lens. There was no information, good or bad, about “cash gifting” on it.

Now, that Lens is gone and my Lens is the highest ranking Squidoo page about “cash gifting” on Google. I can’t be happy until it is displayed on the first page of Google for the more general phrase of “cash gifting”! 

The subjects of careers, jobs and employment are currently very relevant to my life as I’ve been looking for a new job for quite some time. Needless to say, in the current economic climate, this is a very frustrating pastime. In years past, I would just go out and get the new job that I desired. Heck, for my last four positions, I wasn’t even required to fill out an application, or even submit a resume before being hired.

Anyway, I need to give a big thanks to Alex for announcing my site launch here at the Beach – not to mention all the other nice things he said! Alex was one of a small handful of Squidoo friends with whom I had shared the site with before I was ready to go public with it.

I started a Twitter account (http://twitter.com/CareersResource) and started getting some pretty good traffic, unfortunately, with so many people clicking around the site, all the cracks started to show. I haven’t had time to announce the launch here myself because I’ve spent the last two days watching the access and error logs, then trying to stomp out all those little bugs that showed up!

Launching a new site just days before a major Holiday – What was I thinking!?

Still, it’s nice to have Internet-savvy online friends to bounce ideas such as this off of before facing the brutal masses! I did make a few changes based on that feedback before posting on Twitter. I’m sure I gave a good first impression to many of my vistors, despite some of the mishaps!

What a difference from my first site launch! I had no one with experience with site-building or producing online content that I could really get an opinion from back then.

My first site is currently back in the sandbox as I figure out a way to restart it, but at least it is what originally brought me to Squidoo, an experience worth going through again! I’ve learned so much there, and connected with so many wonderful people, and this is my first attempt to take what I’ve learned and see what I can do with that knowledge outside of a prefabricated environment.

That’s not to say I’m done with Squidoo, far from it! The Squidoo community is very strong, and is, in my opinion, an excellent place to stay involved with as the digital landscape continues to change and grow.

In fact, there’s a good chance that as powerful community sites continue to dominate the cyber-world, people with an active presence on Squidoo and similar networks will be on the cusp of the next Big Thing!

Image by tzankov from Stock.XCHNG the leading FREE stock photo site!

I never even realized that these existed, but they do. Not long after I had been talking with Crystal in the Fresh Wonders Chat Room, I was there talking to Tam about listing Domains on Sedo.com.

We were talking about how it looked like good site to sell Domain names on, then the next day I found myself registering eight new Domains based on “All This and More” then parking them and listing them on Sedo.com. Now before you say anything, I swear I do not have a problem… well, perhaps I am a bit impulsive at times!

So, back to the scam. About two days after listing my sites, I received and email addressed to the account I listed in my contact information. The person contacting me said that his company was interested in purchasing one of the Domain Names.

Our company invests in Internet projects and domain names. What is your price for the domain name?

I went to the domain listed as part of the sender’s email address and found a Blog type page with some general information about the value of Domain Names. Not a very compelling site, but no red flags so far.

The person also requested information on any other Domain Names that I may also be selling, so after waiting about a day, I sent back the list of eight related Domain Names listing my price for a single one, but that I was open to selling them in a package deal.

Within six minutes, I received a response. He didn’t agree to the price, and didn’t suggest any counter offer, just repeated the price I quoted and said “ok”, then he launched into this whole spiel about appraisals and evaluations by a reputable appraisal company.

He also sent me a link to a message board saying that he had asked “domain experts” about reputable appraisal companies. He called the message board a “blog” and the link led me to something set up on 007sites. Another site I had never heard of before.

The first thing that struck me as odd was the lack of dates in regards to the posts. They also appeared to be a snippet of an ongoing conversation, but lacked any reference to anything that came before, or after. It was pretty obvious that this was faked, and set up with the sole purpose of making the reader focus on their point.

The posts make a huge deal about manual verses automatic appraisals, which sort of made sense, but what was truly ridiculous was how they bashed some big name companies while recommending an overpriced unknown company!

They didn’t count on me being very skilled in seeing through scams and tracking down the real truth, like I did with my article about Cash Gifting Scams!

I copied a sentence from the message board, and searched for it on Google which led me to this thread on the Sitepoint Forums. The name was different, but the emails were almost completely identical. The phony forum web address was different, but it’s content was generally the same as the phony ones listed in the Sitepoint thread. Interesting that in pretty much every case, the scammers appear to be using 007sites to set up the phony message boards.

The Scam Appraisal Site I was being directed to was different than the three listed in the Sitepoint Thread, but there was a post indicating that they were being shut down due to complaints.

Needless to say, I didn’t respond to the last email. I did do a little bit more digging, and found the same scam mentioned as far back as 2005 in this Thread on Webdomain Talk.

I think that the bottom line is that if someone wants to buy your Domain Name, they should have an idea of what it is worth to them. If they want to have it evaluated, then they can pay for it. If you want to know the value of your Domain Name, do the research for yourself, and don’t let the “buyer” steer you to the information!

Now, what am I going to do with these sixteen Domains, if I don’t sell them? “What was I thinking?!”

Image by tikideputy from Stock.XCHNG the leading FREE stock photo site!

To be clear, this wasn’t Crystal’s fault. I am not blaming her for this, but the fact is that after talking to her in the chat room at Fresh Wonders, I came up with the idea to register eight domains based on the words “Live Success“.

Now it’s not as if I don’t have enough things to work on right now, so I’m not sure what I’m even going to do with eight versions of “Live Success”!

When I did a domain search, a similar name came up as a “Premium Domain” name which happens to be for sale for $2,588.00, so until I can figure out what I can do to develop them myself, I decided to park them and put them up for sale. If someone does offer to purchase them from me, I certainly wouldn’t mind getting some cash up front! Otherwise, I think they may work well as some kind of motivational site.

When I begin to type “live success” into the search box, Google suggests looking for things like “eat to live success”, “52 Ways to Live Success” (a book I haven’t heard of, but a lot of people must be interested in it), “how to live successfully”, and “quake live success”. I could probably do well with “eat to live well” and “how to live successfully”, but I don’t know much about the other two.

Using more Google tools I can see some search volume for the words, not the greatest results I’ve seen, but by combining it with other results, I can see the top searches that include these words are “live for success”, “success in life”, “quotes about success”, “xbox live success” and “quotes for success”. I can also see that the Rising search lists “quotes for success”, “quotes about success”, “live for success”, and “success in life” as terms that are becoming popular.

Armed with this knowledge, I can most likely build and monetize a very nice site if I don’t find anyone interested in purchasing the domain names from me. Of course, I didn’t figure any of this out until well after actually registering the domains, so I still have to ask: “What was I thinking!?”