FamousQuotes.com

[interlution]

I've brought my Famous Quotes web site back:

FamousQuotes.com: Famous Quotes

It was up for 2 years then parked for nearly 2 years. I plan on keeping it online this time. In the long run it makes more money with a web site on it.

Please post your comments or suggestions for possible improvements.

[YOYOYO]

nice site...

so you're saying the google ads make more for you than having a parked site with quote links on it

what ppc company did you have it parked on

[Ubiquitous]

I've brought my Famous Quotes web site back:

http://famousquotes.com

It was up for 2 years then parked for nearly 2 years. I plan on keeping it online this time. In the long run it makes more money with a web site on it.

Please post your comments or suggestions for possible improvements.

I love famous quotes and think it's a great name for the purpose of your site (the name says it all). I think the design and layout could make all the difference in the world. What do you hope to achieve with the site? If you are interested I could possibly help you out with a few things along the way...

Regards ~

[interlution]

"this domain name is not for sale"

- FamousQuotes.com Whois



Thanks Kingpin. My main goal is to make it the best Famous Quotes site on the 'net! I know that's an Internet cliché, but if you look at my competition out there I think FamousQuotes.com is cleaner and more useful. I designed the site so that it is useful for me and I hope useful for visitors. I'm forcing myself to also keep the 1 text ad block per page, like Google. It’s basically a Google theme. Right now I'm cleaning up the site and add a few more pages and improvements. Of course, I'm also always adding new quotes and cleaning up the database.

YOYOYO, I had it parked at DS from late 2004 up to a few weeks ago. It had built up a bookmark visitor base after the web site was up for 2 years from 2003-2004. So the parking revenue slowly declined, although the domain does get typein's by itself. I closed it because I started a message board which started taking up too much of my time and made the site not as fun for me because it's frustrating to moderate or have others moderate. I parked it and was happy with the increased revenue, unfortunately at the expense of my loyal visitors. It definitively makes more with a web site, but it takes time to build up a visitor base and links. I new that at the time... I should have never closed it.

[YOYOYO]

interlution

I can tell you I had 2 quote sites parked at ds that got substantial traffic. I moved them to dotzup.com and the revenue increased by 10 to 20 times what it had been. This is not an exaggeration, ds is good for some things, but the "quote" genre did not seem to be one of them.

dotzup.com owns quotes.com, so they have a lot of experience in putting together a productive page for this area of interest.

While their page though emphasizes insurance links I myself found I did better with a "famous quotes" concept on both sites I have.

I have 2 quote pages parked with them, one in which the domain name indicates a "general area of interest in quotes," and another which the name clearly relates to "famous quotes." Both pages have "famous quote" links on them. The "general quote" page gets a 50% click thru rate and the "famous quote" page has a 75% click thru rate.

There is no doubt famousquotes.com is one of the great internet domain names, what a name to have. It is quite understandable you would want to make this one of the best and most useful sites available to people.

I guess this all depends on the time you have and what your overall income is like. Best of luck in what ever you do with it.

[interlution]

Thanks YOYOYO. I did the same thing, switching to dotzup.com! You're right, they're great. Forgot to mention that. It was parked at dotzup.com for about a month before I turned the web site back on. Dotzup.com is definitely great for quotation sites. I found them from quotes.com and DNF. At first the revenue jumped more than double from what it was with DS, but it slowly decreased over the month to only slightly better than before. Still not as much as when it was a legitimate web site years ago.

Lesson learned for me was, parking a traffic name is certainly profitable but can vary greatly between sponsors; but a legitimate targeted web site with time invested in building the site can be much more profitable in the long run. It's a shame that a lot of us domain owners don't develop some of the prime Internet real estate we own. A lot of that is because we're not experts in all the domains we own and most of us aren't developers. I know I tend to get greedy with the parking revenue on my domains and forget the common sense that a real trageted web site can grow and produce much more revenue in the long run. It's a trade off between a lower CTR in the beginning but a good chance at increasing the traffic over the time.

[Keyboard Cowboy]

First of all, ditch the layout. I'm not even sure you can call it a layout, it's as simple as it gets. While clean and simple sometimes can work out great, this is basically just a white page.

Second, the name is awesome. You could really make this into something worth while, but you should optimize more for the search engines. While this is cool and all (http://famousquotes.com/by_last_name.php?letter=a) you should a) put more links on the frontpage (e.g. more navigation) and you should (if you don't know how to do it yourself) hire someone to rewrite the site using htaccess mod_rewrite feature to make the URLs look like http://famousquotes.com/by_last_name/a/ instead of http://famousquotes.com/by_last_name.php?letter=a, that would help search engine wise.

For generating more revenue with google, and still keeping the site clean, i'd make the banner blend in more. Maybe make the banner same color as the background of the site, so visitors don't think about it as an ad - will probably make more click it.

That's it for now, hope that helped.

[interlution]

I disagree on the poor layout... It's a quotation site, with a Google search theme. There's not much need for graphics, since they take away from reading the quotes, I think. I want to emphasize the words of the quotations.

I don't see how a page like this is all white page:

http://famousquotes.com/search.php?search=edison

The main page is mostly white space because it is 1 random quote and the simple main site navigation page. If I clutter it up, it becomes less useful and the 1 random quote loses focus. You have to read the quote. The first thing you should notice on the page is the quote. You should read the quote and want to explore the web site reading more quotes. The Google.com homepage is mostly white space.

Google is already harvesting the URL's. They don't seem to have a problem with the php, although you're right .htaccess modified URL's may look better, especially for surfers. When it was fully indexed by Google years ago, all the pages were listed in Google, they're slowly coming back:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%...usquotes%2Ecom

I am working on making the page titles more individually descriptive. I'm not sure if the .htaccess modified URL's would improve the page ranking with Google, I am not familiar with that.

I understand that making the banner blend in more would increase CTR. However, a webmaster does that at the expensive of his visitor. I want my visitors to understand that they are clicking on an ad. This helps increase my surfers enjoyment and increases the quality of the clicks to my advertisers.

[Keyboard Cowboy]

It is your site, and it's your call how to present your content. I'm just saying it could do with a better looking layout, and still keep it simple.

Google will pick up on your dynamic urls like index.php?search=edison eventually, you're just helping it by making static urls - trust me, it will help you. You also have to keep in mind that there are other search engines than just google, who aren't as developed. Static urls will help you there as well. Also make sure you have a unique descriptive <title> tag on each page. Example:

http://famousquotes.com/show.php?_id=1049627
Instead of having the title say "FamousQuotes.com: Quote Detail", make it say something along the lines of "William Allen White Quote" and maybe blend in a small bit of the actual quote. But also make sure the title isn't too long. Just make sure each page has its own unique title.

Regarding the banner: again, your call of course, just saying visitors will know it's an ad anyway. It does say "ads by google"

[YOYOYO]

I'm surprised you only had a doubling of income at dotzup, on my highest traffic domain at ds I was making just cents a day and at dotzup it went to between $6 to $18 a day.

If you had the dotzup.com page hooked up this last July or August it would not reflect the new school year starting. Just the last two days I had a big increase on both domains I believe because of the colleges and all other schools starting back up.

I think the look of your site right now is fine. I guess everyone can always change something if they want. Small thing, like maybe make "Quote of the Moment:" larger, and maybe the main menu type on the left hand side a little larger, but it is a very nice and useful site right now.

[interlution]

Better looking layout and keeping it simple don't really go together, imo. To me webmasters overkill their sites adding unnecessary formatting. It's a quotation site. Which is mostly text. I have to emphasis the text of the quotes and don't want to use large font for quote text. The large site title is obvious on every page and the quotations are easy to read. The search feature is fairly evident. Sure, I could add popups and confusing ads to increase CTR, but what I want is people to want to use the site and come back to read quotes.

The "FamousQuotes.com: Quote Detail" titles are being changed this week to also include the authors name and the first 4 words of the quotation.

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Wow, less than $1 to $6-$18 is quite the increase! Some of that is magnified, I think, because you were making less then $1 though. i.e. it's easier to greatly increase cents than dollars or tens of dollars, easier to go from $1 to $10 then $10 to $100. My rev almost tripled with dotzup, but even then, it was less than the average when the web site was up. Plus with the web site I have the chance to increase traffic over time.

No doubt, school year has a huge effect on this web site.

As far as the font size, I like to use the regular size, if the surfer wants to he can increase the font size through his browser Text Size. I also made that Quote of the Moment text smaller because I want the first thing you notice on that page to be the quotation.

[Keyboard Cowboy]

Matt, with all due respect. What kind of feedback where you expecting? Seems to me like you've already made up your mind how the site should look and act?

[interlution]

You should expect the author to defend his work?



I appreciate your feedback.

I think we've discussed your specific feedback details. I disagree on the SEO effectiveness of the URL mod rewritting, but will probably implement that in the future because I agree it looks better and can't hurt. I disagree on the simplicity of the web site, or changing the ads to be more confusing with the text and hyperlinking of the web site. You do not offer details except to say it could look better and still remain simple. I think that's forever debatable. I agree with changing the Quote Detail title and will be changing that this week as described.

[YOYOYO]

I'll just give you from my point of view, when I went to the site and saw the large quote, I didn't connect it to the - Quote of the Moment - phrase. This is just my initial reaction. My thought was that this was a permanent quote on the front page.

I think because the quote was above the photo of the person the quote was made by.

Now I realize that a lot of the - Quote of the Moment - pages don't have photos or pics of a person, so it is clearer to me then

You may want to consider moving the - Quote of the Moment - title below the photo when that occurs. It's not a big thing though

[interlution]

Good point. I don't think it's obvious that you can just hit refresh or click that link, unless you read towards the bottom of the page, which people probably don't do at first since they probably click a link first. You're right... I don't know how to emphasize that fact. Not sure about the "Quote of the Moment" wording. I think I had it without that once too.

Yeah, some quotes have pics some don't. I have to add them manually. There's thousands of authors. I added pics for the top 100 most quoted authors. It'll look a lot better with pics for everyone. I also need to make the backend database more relational, so that last names and quotes are related, i.e. you change the name and it's changed for all the quotes. Right now it's not like that, because last name, first name and title (mr., dr., sir, etc.) are different fields and I don't know how to set up that relationship. I guess it has to be by unique full name.

I'd love to add biographies using an automated system. But then again, I also want to concentrate on quotes and not clutter the site. Cleaning up the database is a lot of work too. I'd like to open that up to the public, as more of a moderated wiki like system, but that's a lot of work too. Not sure what the best way to do it. I've hired programmers, but basically I need a programmer to sit down with and hash out the details. Hopefully will get to that eventually. Right now just adding things slowly.