Having created and managed several websites (LandlordMax.com, FollowSteph.com, etc.) over the last few years, I’m getting pretty good at predicting a website’s chances of success, as well as which areas will generate the most traffic. I have to admit that this website (LearningCentre.com) completely through me for a loop. I expected the main page to get the most traffic, followed by the blog (free valuable content), then followed by the forums, as this last section costs $100 for a lifetime membership. Was I ever wrong!!!

The forum, based on the number of unique visitors, never mind hits, gets a little more than twice as much traffic as the blog and the main page! Yes, the paid content gets almost double the amount of unique visitors! That really surprised me, in a good way.

So all this to say that you no matter how much experience and expertise you have in creating and managing websites, you can never really predict what will happen until it goes live. The more experience you have, the more likely you are to be an accurate predictor, but you can never know for sure without trying it out first (test test test).

Another interesting tidbit of news about LearningCentre.com, we’ve already beaten the traffic (in terms of unique visitors) from last month and it’s not even half way through the month! Not bad for a brand new site.

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Why Use Affiliate Ads Rather Than AdSense or YPN?
Quick little example of why sometimes its worth seeing which type of website monetization is better.

One Year Anniversary Review: Blogging and Blogging Tips
All I can say is that this article has a lot of amazing and valuable content. If you’re planning on blogging, definitely check it out!

101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006
Some great advice on how to build links for your website

Essential SEO-Related Plugins for WordPress
4 good plugins for WordPress if you’re inclined. The only one I’ve had issues with is Sociable because it took a lot of processing, but that could be something I missed when installing it.

Google Adwords & “Quality” Scores - Its NOT all about content.
Interesting little article on Google Adwords bidding.

One Year Anniversary Review: WordPress Tips, Tricks and Techniques
Some great WordPress tips, tricks, and techniques from Lorelle.

Today’s Lesson: Domain Expirations and Emails
In the seminar we talk about how it’s possible for people to forget to renew their domains, here’s a perfect example!

5 + 1 Tips Towards Being An Efficient And Successful Biz-Blogger
Some good tips on how to blog successfully

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Today I just came accross a very interesting website, BlogShares.com. It’s an interesting concept in that’s it’s like a fantasy stock trading game, but for blogs using fictional money. I don’t yet know the details, but it seems very intriguing, enough that I’ll probably give it a try this weekend.

As an added bonus, it might generate a lot of additional traffic to your blog (hence extra monetization) and potentially give you some high Google PR links to your blog. Not only that, it will definitely give you some additional exposure as people will speculate in you.

Worse case I see is that it will be fun to start speculating on which blogs will make it. And if enough of you try it, we can even start our own internal competition in the LearningCentre.com forums!

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Google has just recently updated how it updates the crawl date in it’s cache. This is very handy because it lets you know when Google last took a look at your site. In the past, it would only store the last date it crawled in which something changed, now it stores the last date it crawled period.

To better explain, please check out the video by Matt Cutts below:

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From now on you can purchase a lifetime membership to our members-only forums for $100. Yes, that’s only $100 for permanent access to the forums! At this time you can contact us at sales@learningcentre.com for more details, but hopefully by the end of the week we’ll have it completely automated on the website so that you can purchase it directly online.

Also, anyone who takes one of our seminars, you automatically get access to the forums without having to pay the $100 fee. That’s a great savings considering everything else you get with the seminar.

And if you’re new here, take a look at the forums. There’s already a lot of activity for only being around a week or so! You can read all the thread titles, you just can’t read their content without being a member.

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Just to let you all know, the deadline for registering for this amazing seminar is only a few short days away (September 8, 2006). Don’t wait until the last minute in case its sold out. Register now!

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21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic
Very good list of ways to increase your blog traffic. I mention almost all of these items in our seminars.

The Search For A Domain Name
Some very interesting statistics on the domain industry

5 Ways to Improve Your Affiliate Sales
Quick and easy ways to improve the odds of converting the products you promote through affiliates

10 Reasons Why I Don’t Like Your Blog
For those of you are trying to generate traffic through blogs, here’s a good list of what not to do on your blog.

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