Google Trends now tracks website traffic, which is great news (previously, Google Trends only showed search trends). Personally, I’m glad to see this new feature, because:

Alexa.com is not very accurate.

Compete.com is more accurate than Alexa, but only uses U.S. traffic and only shows traffic for the past 12 months.

Google Trends for websites has the following advantages

• Probably accurate (although I can’t prove that)
• Allows you to look at traffic for various time periods
• Allows you to look at global traffic, or look at traffic by specific countries

Almost all Google’s products are fantastic, in my opinion, and this new feature is a great addition to Google Trends.

Here’s an example of how Globalization and the Internet helped me solve a problem yesterday…

THE PROBLEM:

I decided that I wanted to set up 2 new websites, partly because I wanted to experiment with different types of website functionality and CMS’s, and partially because who knows the websites might possibly become successful.

I wanted each of the websites set up with a different type of Content Management System (CMS).  A CMS basically allows a website owner to control and modify a website with very little (if any) technical knowledge.

I had already bought the domain names, and I have a web hosting account, but I know very little about hosting and how to use it.  After spending a frustrating hour trying to figure out how to get the CMS’s set up on my hosting and with my domain names (and getting absolutely nowhere), I decided to outsource.

THE SOLUTION:

Scriptlance.com is a website that allows people to post projects (mainly computer software / website projects) that programmers (a.k.a developers) can bid on.

I posted a project description on Scriptlance.com, explaining that I wanted two websites set up with the two different CMS’s, and that I also wanted to be shown how to do it so that I could do it on my own next time.

I posted the project description at 9:45am. By 10:55am, I had received 12 different bids on the project from website developers, which ranged from $15 to $500 (the $500 bid was out to lunch; most of the bids were $50 or less).  The bids had come in from India, Pakistan, Serbia, Moldova, Ireland, Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

I selected a $20 bidder to do the work, and after a couple quick emails back & forth to clarify the details, I headed out for meetings etc for the rest of the day.  When I returned to my computer in the evening, I had two new websites up & running (just shells basically, which I can now customize as I choose using the CMS’s) along with a clearly written explanation in my email inbox of how to duplicate the process for other websites.

I’ve outsourced like this before, but every time I’ve been quite impressed.  I don’t know exactly how much traffic ScriptLance.com gets but another similar website called ELance.com (which I didn’t use because they have a $50 minimum bid) currently has over 40,000 “providers” registered to bid on projects, and 15,000 projects have been posted in the past 30 days …so you can see that outsourcing like this is quite popular, and many of the projects are much more extensive than mine.

Cool stuff, eh?

This rant is not about this blog. It is about another website I own. This other website has been up & running for just over a year.

The only monetization in place (so far) is Adsense. The site consistently makes around $125 per month from Adsense, but after paying the hosting cost of $150 per month, it’s still in the red.

The most frustrating part of all is that it takes me about 4 to 5 hours a week to keep it updated. And the updating is not as interesting as writing blog posts. The work involved in updating the website is totally mundane, brainless work, and most of the time I absolutely hate doing it.

I work 4 to 5 hours a week to make -$25. How crazy is that?

For reasons I won’t mention here, I can’t just shut it down.  Anyone interested in buying it? A few (rounded) statistics:

• 12,000 visits / month
• 7,500 unique visitors / month
• 180,000 pagesviews / month

I think the site has HUGE potential if promoted and expanded correctly, but being my first internet business, I made a few mistakes at the beginning – I will likely elaborate on my “lessons learned” in a future post.

I want it built in such a way that I can easily manage it using a content management system (CMS) that anyone with no technical knowledge can easily use.

I also want it built using an free, popular, open-source CMS so that I can easily switch developers if I want to (I’ve made the mistake before of going with my developer’s own custom-built CMS; a decision which kind of screwed me on a previous site – I’ll save that story for another day)

Two of the major open source CMSs are Joomla and Drupal.  Not wanting to spend too much time deciding which one to use, figured I’d go with whichever is most popular.

After checking Google Trends to see which is searched for more…

…and after checking Compete.com to find out which website  gets more traffic…

…I’m still at a loss.  Any suggestions from you readers?  (It’s going to be a simple, super-basic, e-commerce website, BTW, – a website with likely no more than 5 pages that will sell just 1 product)

The first thing I’m going to do is credit Timothy Ferriss and his fantastic book “The 4-Hour Workweek” with giving me the motivation to start this blog. Before reading the book, I already had more experience and knowledge about Internet business than the average person (in my opinion), but this book opened up my eyes to many new possibilities, and to just how efficiently all types of online businesses can be started up and run.

Timothy Ferris clearly explains everything from how to ultra-effectively manage your time, to how to cheaply test a market before you create a product to see if customers will buy it, to how to outsource everything (including arguments with your wife), to how to escape your day job, to how to spend the rest of your life traveling the world, and of course how to run your business from anywhere by working just 4 hours a week. Fantastic book. I very highly recommend it.