So I have been getting a large number of about my website type emails recently from people who have been using my free link popularity analysis tool.

One of my friends recently sent me this feedback:

I know there isn't much point duplicating the existing webmaster
forums out there, but if you are going to offer tools, a support forum
is probably a good idea.

It may also be a good accompanyment to your blog, adding space for
discussion and creating a broarder landscape for your sites.

Anyway, I'm sure you would have considered it in the past... just a
prompt to consider it again today.

In the past I debated the idea of a forum, but many of my friends have told me bad call bad call bad call.

So do you think I should start a forum or not? What is the best way to efficiently answer questions related to the tools? Forums? Make an FAQ page? Both?

The problems with forums are:

• even if they start off great eventually they lose their appeal to some extent.

• the bigger they grow the more of a problem management is.
• they are exceptionally time consuming & can cut into my ability to have time to learn other things.
• I am not exceptionally even keeled. Sometimes I like to work hard and other times I like to take a break, plus I go away from home somewhat often now.
• I really need to become more physically active, and I don't see running forums helping that any.
• even if I started a small one just for tools I am sure it would eventually widen out, as that is what happened to Shawn, although he did it in a manner where he does not need to spend much time on moderation.
• You can get sued for anonymous comments that occur on chat boards. More on that later today.
• although sometimes I have grand ambitions I am not sure forums work profitably unless they have an amazingly huge reach, and I am not sure if I am that ambitious.

The positives of running a forum:

• it would make it easy to launch new items / ideas / software projects.

• it could help teach me more about social interaction
• so far today I have probably answered about 200 emails. there is no archive of that information, although if it were on a forum all that information would be reusable and able to help more people.
• If I was making enough money from advertising I could change my business model & potentially be able to afford giving my ebook away. But then again if I put a price of $0 on it that is exactly what some people would value it at: as being worthless.

I have learned a lot from SEO forums, but I have also got to do IM chat with people like Dan Thies and NFFC. The biggest complaints with forums are noise, and learning everything in such small chunks that you view them out of proportion. Getting to listen to guys like NFFC or Dan Thies in an IM conversation it really helps you step back and view things from a broader perspective.

I posted about this before, but recently Google updated the AdWords system to the quality based minimum bids system.

Old disabled words remain disabled, and in about a month or so they intend to purge the disabled terms from the accounts. To re enable your disabled terms

• go to edit your keywords

• copy the list
• delete the disabled terms from the active account
• go to add the words and past the whole list from before. It will enable most of the disabled terms, although some may also require you raise your bids to meet the new quality standards. Also I found that sometimes I had to post the keywords into the ad groups twice for them to load.

Google dance keeps company engineers, Internet entrepreneurs hopping includes information about:

• THE couch

• black hats
• keyword stuff - which really ought to be modernized & replaced with the term "link stuffing"
• dancing
• and a nickname that may well stick, the Mick Jagger of search. To get an appreciation of how swamped Matt was take a look at Chris R's picture of Matt, literally being cornered in.
• I am a bit surprised that the writer did not research to see how some people got to meet Larry & Sergy at the dance.

So I do not do the best affiliate program management here (I have not marketed it hard), but a friend of mine recently saw ads for his site that were so bad that he thought someone was trying to sabatoge his brand and business model.

It was one of his affiliates!

I guess it can happen to anyone, but if you are large and your affiliate program is going to be a small part of your business model you may want to make sure that you put out some fairly strict guidance on it until you can figure a way out to help grow it into significance.

Also to affiliate program companies, if you make links contain an affiliate id number it should be easy to search through affiliates.

My internet connection was down for 4 or 5 days recently (due to a short in the line), and when I came back to it I did not feel that I missed that much (eek, what an underinspiring blogger).

It is kinda weird, because most any success I have ever had has came from the web, but sometimes I do not necissarily appreciate how fortunate I am, while other times I feel so lucky that I resist change at nearly any cost. Both of which are opposite extremes and probably a bit bad.

It is easy to think that what made you do well in the past will make you do well in the future, but that is not always true. While offline I did not go out link hunting, I created no new content, and did not post on any forums. Oddly enough my income was about the exact same as it was when I was online a bunch, which means that something outside of what I attributed my doing well for was causing my income.

Ultimately a lack of posting will lead to less visitors, a lower share of voice, and lower income, but sometimes it is worth changing things up a bit though. I think if I posted far less frequently and put far more thought into each word I would be more helpful to others and far better off myself.

At times I think I have gotten a bit ahead of myself, and realize that most any success I have had has come from friends my than myself. Recently I pissed one of them off really bad, and to her I say sorry.

I hope to be spending a bit less time on the web in the near future such that I am more efficient with the time that I do spend, and so I do not get stuck in ruts.

My customer of quality service has probably slid a bit recently due to downtime and deciding that I need to have a business model that makes sense. Some people send me like 40 emails that take a half hour each to answer, and that is a lot of work for one ebook purchase (although I am sure it leads to word of mouth marketing) but there has to be some balance to that.

I need to take time to re evaluate many of the things that I am doing such that I am not stuck in ruts and I need to make sure I do not piss off friends, because without them there really is little point to the web.