This is the first and a start a series of Internet Success Stories that you will begin to see on the Power Play Bog. Hope you appreciate them!
Do you Know Markus Friend? He is the creator of Plentyoffish.com is a success story worth noting, as he has managed to take a Category formerly ruled by Big corporations and give it his own brand of marketing savvy and his Unique Touch. A case of David vs. Goliath, where the little guy comes out on top in the end. Markus is the top “individual” ad sense publisher in terms of page views. Let’s find out what some of his secrets are as he shares some advices with our readers. Feel free to comment!
Markus, what is your experience in computer programming and how did it prepare you for becoming a webmaster?
The average page views a day is around 14 million for the last week. I’m getting another 80 million page views a day from users polling the site to see if they have new messages. Really intensive bandwidth wise!
When I go to your website, First Thing I notice is the ads are targeted to my region, despite the fact that I have not even registered- can you explain to our readers how you accomplish this astonishing feat?
I’m just using ip2location.com- Basically I take your IP, look it up in the database and it tells me what your city is. I then bring up a list of users in your city, nothing magical about it at all.
Are most of your Website visitors coming mainly from search engines , or are you finding that they come from other avenues like affiliated websites? Do you actively advertise in the media?
Actually Search engines account for something like 2% of my traffic only. The vast and most majority of my traffic, like any other site with over 5 million page views a day comes from word of mouth, and repeat visitors. It is the best advertising.
The services on your website seem to be offered at no cost to the registrants whatsoever. Is there some advantage you have over your competitors that allows you to do this?
I’ve developed new algorithms that allow me to create a mega site for next to no cost. Several years ago I created algorithm that was thousands of times faster then the algorithm used in the 1990′s to find a string of 22 prime numbers. At the time a professor used several super computers and hundreds of regular computers over the course of several years to find a record. I did the same thing on 1 computer in 2 weeks.
Astonishing! Are there any other sites you currently maintain, or is it only plentyoffish.com?
It’s the only site I have at the moment. Nevertheless I’ve got a few other sites I registered for my friends so they could learn to do marketing/affiliate stuff. At this point I think 1 site is more than enough.
Any tips or advices for those looking to create a profitable endeavor on the internet?
Yes! If someone else thinks what you are doing is a cool idea and awesome I’d say it isn’t… Find something no one else thinks is important and build up a site with huge traffic in that area. Also always keep in mind; sites that have low monetization today but have traffic may be the gold mines of tomorrow. In the internet world anything and everything will be monetized at some point and traffic is king and the Ruler.
Traffic is King- very wise advice, Markus. One last question- How do you find the time to maintain such a large commodity on the internet? Surely you must have some other interests in life besides programming and website monitoring?
It takes usually around an hour or so a day on average, but its very tiring work. I usually spend the other couple of hours reading and seeing what is going on.
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