Both of these are very active forums, Sitepoint’s users are more skilled in development areas however the DigitalPoint users are more skilled in internet marketing strategies.  One can find a lot of useful information spread in these 2 forums, and most of the people gather such information and sell it as “New Guru Ebook”, infact you can find it yourself and ofcourse for free.

Sitepoint.com
http://www.sitepoint.com/

I love this forum, not only because you can get quick help instantly but there are more mature people on this forum. If you post any kind of high level programming question, you get your answer very quickly, I have mentioned about programming questions since I got my answers very quickly. The other forums are also very active and tons of useful information is to digg out. Current statistics are

Threads: 526,161, Posts: 3,778,761, Members: 261,536, Active Members: 13,695

The main reason I stick to SitePoint and prefer it over DigitalPoint is that its more friendly community and their staff rocks, there is no foolish child in their staff, that makes a big difference. A teenager can act like a child and does not always make the decisions a mature person can make. The MarketPlace at Sitepoint is also great for the serious sellers and buyers, ofcourse you have to pay a few bucks to get listed as seller, but that shows that you are serious about make a sale and not just scamming people.

Final Thought: Sitepoint community rocks !

DigitalPoint.com
http://www.digitalpoint.com/

This used to be a very friendly forum and had loads of useful information regarding affiliate marketing, seo, internet marketing strategies etc, and the good point was that many known musketeers were not only member of this forum but very active and that was a positive point. Currently it STILL has tons of good information but flooded with spam posts, what I believe and I have analysed that a year ago 10% of the posts were spam and 90% were with useful information, if you look at the current statistics and analyse quality of posts and threads, its 80% spam and 20% useful information, I believe that useful information comes from those golden days of DigitalPoint. Current statistics are

Threads: 859,719, Posts: 7,906,276, Members: 175,854, Active Members: 53,194

Now this looks like a busy forum, and it is, but most of the traffic is junk I would say, if you go to the buy-sell-trade section, you will quickly realise that there are only newbies selling junk to newbies. Lol, yea that’s right. I mean one would be selling 100 forum replies for $1 ? lol. If you browse this forum, you will be amazed to see how many banned members are there, why ? the reason is their childish staff, child banning another child, and banned child registering again with another username, and the loop goes on. But at the end, I would say it still has some good useful information from the old days, so you can digg out some gems but don’t waste your time by registering there.

Final Thought : Its overloaded with spam, but still has a lot of good information.

Article Popularity : 57%

I hate when I see people selling crap ebooks for $197 or the sites that offer $200 per month membership. Well in 2004 I remember am internet marketing course came up and its price was $1200, I mean its too much and they send you crappy DVDs telling you the basics. I am always yelling at such people because I have wasted a lot of money when I was a beginner, and I dont want my readers to do the same and trying to same you some money ! OH, “you are welcome”..

I am not talking about the most saturated keywords like internet marketing, web hosting etc, but for any other keywords if you follow this strategy, you will certainly get on the first page or atleast at the second page of big search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Follow me…

Get a Keyword Rich Domain Name

This is extremely important and from personal experience I can tell you that if your domain name is keyword rich, it will automatically climb in SERPs. My friend Ali is always looking for good domain names and whatever he registers becomes popular, why ? because he a;ways registers a keyword rich domain, let me show you an example of one of his domain. A few years back he was learning Gimp (an open-source graphic designing software, just like Photoshop), he registered a domain name called GimpTalk then after some time I would say about 1 year later he reached Google first page for the keyword “gimp tutorials” (without quotes). But later he registered another domain gimp-tutorials.com and this domain came on the first page within the first month on Google. wow, I mean Google gives so much weightage to the keyword in domain name, so grab a keyword rich domain name even if its .net .org or .info, any extension would work.

Post your website to Social Bookmarking websites

If you have some spare time to kill, do it yourself, or use any tool like Bookmarking Demon or pay someone $10 on Digitlapoint and they will post on 100 or more sites for you, this will save ot headache but you will have to spend a few bucks.

Post to Social Networking Websites

Create a few profiles on Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Hi5, Tagged and LinkedIn. Well, this is very effective, just create profile with name as yourDomain.com and put the link your profile. You can create on as many sites you like, but I would suggest to create on atleast Facebook and MySpace.

Upload a random video on video sharing website

Just find a video and upload it to 4-5 top video hosting websites, and in title of the video insert your domain name, you can upload to YouTube, Break.com, AOL, MySpace, PureVolume etc. You can also create channels on youtube and groups on some sites, use domain name and keyword in channel / group’s title .

Article and Press Release Submission

This has been the most effective way of marketing and creating buzz for your product or website, and it still works like a charm. Write 1-2 articles and press release and submit to article directories, or hire any freelancer for no more than $10-$15 that will not only write but also submit to directories as well. You must use your keyword in your press release or article title.

Ask for reviews in forums

Go to busy forums like Digitalpoint, Sitepoint, WickedFire, Warrior Forum, WebhostingTalk, v7n, XiTalk etc. Post your domain name in thread / topic title asking for reviews or you don’t like this idea, then ask any quesiton about your own domain so that people can start talking about it.

Create groups on Yahoo and Google

This method was very effective back in 2007 but it is still not saturated, this will give you a quick boost.

 Post Comments on Related Blogs

I know what I am writing may take time, but don’t just spend all of your time on writing comments, you can pick 4-5 high page ranked related blogs and use your keyword in your name and post 2 comments on each blog.

This may take you 1-2 or maximum of 3 days, but the outcome is worth doing this. Just wait for 1-2 weeks or so, depending on how much competitive keyword you are testing, and search for that specific keyword after that and I am sure you will certainly be on first or second page for sure on many search engines. It has been tested and I have been doing this for the last couple of years and its is extremely effective strategy. I have not discussed teh basics like met tags, keyword in page title etc since those are basics. I would love to hear more comments and ideas from you.

Article Popularity : 63%

Well, to be honest I have been in Internet business since last 10 years, I know many of you have been from the very early days of internet when spamming was quite easy and tricking search engines was like a child play, so you became rich quickly and now playing in billions. But at the moment, tricking search engines and generating traffic and then generating more revenue form your websites has become difficult as compared to early days to internet, for the people who have just started and they want to make a living out of internet or they are just fed up with their day job, and looking for alternative. Let me tell you that you can make money form internet if you are dedicated and you think you can spend 2-3 hours of work daily on your business. If you cannot spend 1-2 hours only a day, then close the window and search google for “money making magic formula”.

What’s the plan ?

I sold one of my website for $65K about 2 month ago (I will not disclose my deals’ information so please dont ask) , now you can see that people sell websites at Sitepoint or other forums like Digitalpoint for these prices and sometimes even more highly priced, I was interested in a website for purchasing and was planning to spend about $80K on that, but that was sold for $145K at Sitepoint, here is the auction if you want to check. Yeah, that’s an image hosting website. So what I am going to tell you is how you can do the same and sell websites for a good profit, in the beginning you can easily make $600-$1000 per month, but if you keep working 2-3 hours a day on a single site, you will sell it for higher price for sure, but don’t expect that you will do nothing and become a millionaire one day. There is no magic formula. Anyways, we have 2 options here

1. Make 1 website, work hard on it, generate traffic, and then sell it.
2. Make many similar websites, and then sell them all.

What kind of websites sell ?

My answer will be ‘any kind of‘ ‘ . Yes, you can make any kind of website and sell it for high profits, the general rule for developing a successful website is that develop a website in which you have personal interest, like if you love hunting, go and build a website for hunting, if you love dogs, build a website about dogs. Now, sometimes it is difficult to sell niche websites (depending on the niche), so I will advice you to pick a general niche that is used by all the internet users. So, lets get start, if you follow m advice I can guarantee you will certainly make $600-$1000 in a month, and even more if you spend more time. The only investment will be getting a domain name and a hosting, so I think it may only take $15-$20 for you to get started with my plan.

We are going to develop an image hosting website, because if you check the sitepoint’s Marketplace, and the “Buy, Sell, Trade” section of Digitalpoint.com, WickedFire.com and other internet marketing forums, you will notice that these are the top selling websites and only 1-2 month old websites are sold for $1000-$3000 depending on their Alexa rank and traffic.

How long will it take to develop an image hosting website ?

I would say 10 minutes even if you are inexperienced. I know if you hire a freelancer to develop a custom script for you, he will take minimum of 10 days and charge you something around $600-$800 for such script, but hey we are not spending any money on that, lets go for the freely available scripts. This is not a perfect script, I know it can be bulky for large image hosting website, but we are only developing a website to sell, so its not bad for that, download the script here. Installation process only takes 3-5 minutes. Once you have installed this script, you are ready to move on the next step.

How to generate traffic for an image hosting site ?

Now, it all depends on YOU, how much work you put in it, however I will write a few steps that are extremely effective in generating quick traffic to an image hosting website. We all know the about 70% of the traffic is always looking for fun on internet, joining social networking website like MySpace, Orkut, Facebook etc, sharing pictures, looking for celebrity images etc. Now, the nature of our website is to target such people, so what we will do is find the website (specifically forums) where people are sharing pictures of celebrities, trust me the traffic suddenly goes up once you post 4-5 threads on such forums. 

You already agreed to spend 1-2 hours daily on this, so what you will do is visit a forum e.g. X1 forum, then find a specific thread where people are chatting and has too many views / replies, upload those pictures to your website, and then post those pictures on another forum e.g X2 with your own image hosting website link, that’s it. Just concentrate on 3-4 forums at a time, it will hardly take 1-2 hour per day but you will see a lot of traffic to your website, repeat the process for 20 days then you have some good stats to show and sell that site and move on to next website.

There are many forums that are specifically for celebrity images and are under 15K Alexa, receiving tons of traffic, we will just grab some traffic from them and sell our website.  If you manage to get 400-500 unique visitors per day you can sell it for $800-$1000. Good luck and do share your views and results. I love hearing from you :)..

Article Popularity : 48%