81–90 of 109 posts
This may have been a lucky break. Google keyword tool suggests that "how a car works" is 1) low competition 2) 135,000 global 3) 60,500 local. This is an amazing and rare find, most keywords like this are already well picked over by niche site creators - also from the looks of it you were the first registrant in 2011.
I'd welcome any suggestions on where to go next - it's a bit of a fire-and-forget side project, but I'd still like to get it as good as possible before I leave it to stew for 2013.
Since there are so many articles, I think a search box on the left side under the introduction content would be handy. Something that shows suggestions/auto-completions by matching the input against article titles.
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I run a similar site on a different niche, which I have monetized to good effect. 1) get a few links. google will likely send you more traffic if they see others linking to you. 2) ask people to link to you on the site. 3) add some social buttons ("share this on facebook" and "+1 this"). Also, try to get it on pinterest. You might create a "5 car tips" image that could get shared as an image on pinterest, generating…
Just to add - split testing your adsense can really be a big deal. For something this small, you probably don't need to split test the colors. But, the ad placement (and which ad units to use) can make a HUGE difference. I like to select a few different formats, make adsense "channels" and then weighted-randomly select one of my splits. In other words, keep testing, but display the combination of ad units that works…
This is nifty, and I feel like this could be pushed a lot further. Epub output is an obvious next step, and I'd imagine a better table of contents view would make the web version more inviting. As for generating money, maybe hotlink products to an Amazon/etc affiliate link so when a user reads the page about "Replacing engine mountings", you can suggest sites that sell engine mountings. I'm curious about the intermed…
I, for one, would be interested in seeing that nokogiri script that turns ugly HTML into markdown... although I'd totally understand if you want to keep it close as a competitive advantage. ;-) I regularly have to deal with the ugly HTML that various apps' "Export" features disgorge.
Converting to markdown is a bit of an overstatement - it only handles the limited content that I encountered in this book.
- H1 heading -> ##
- Strip P tags and add newlines
- Replace 'See SHEET \d+' with [[Article:\d]]
I would 1) Make the pages editable by trusted individuals but with your validation before any change goes live. Allow the authors to be credited (with links to their blogs, pages etc etc). 2) Why stop at cars? Find a domain "howdoesa???work" and subdir it off that - offer written credit to anybody who wants to add any large-ish content. 3) Put in some clever links to amazon etc so that if someone wants to buy a new c…
Way too much work
> Why stop at cars?
You'd need some content to begin with. He was lucky to have a friend who gave him permission to use the book. Other material might not be so easy to get.
> Put in some clever links to amazon etc
Great idea. Done tastefully, it would not be intrusive like an ad, but a useful tool for the reader who would need this kind of book.
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I put in the comments because I thought it'd be an easy way of adding some content for free as people add to the information already there, and also to let people moan about errors so that I can then go in and fix them. Comments are a fairly low-maintenance feedback system, especially with Disqus dealing with the spam filtering for me. An eBook is a great idea. I just worry that the information is slightly out of dat…
Yeah but comments will add load time and clutter to the page. Also I'll bet if this picks up any steam, the comments will devolve quickly without technically being spam.
Plus I don't think it's such a bad idea from a reader's perspective. Seems like the worse case scenario is that no one uses it, and the best case scenario people are able to contribute to improvements.
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PageRank is based on links, not on content. His PageRank will only go up if he gets more inbound links to the site. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
I think the point was that Google spend a lot of effort to identify quality content vs. link farms, auto-generated content and low quality adsense-optimized content.
To say that PageRank will increase because the content is good quality is wrong, and I was just pointing that out.
What he meant to say was "... the search engine rankings of his site would go up..."
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I think the point was that Google spend a lot of effort to identify quality content vs. link farms, auto-generated content and low quality adsense-optimized content.
yes, but PageRank is a specific term with a specific meaning. It is a rank based on the number and quality of links to your site. To say that PageRank will increase because the content is good quality is wrong, and I was just pointing that out. What he meant to say was "... the search engine rankings of his site would go up..."