Web Publishing Notes – August 2019

Time for this month’s round-up of interesting posts about web publishing. The included posts are the ones that are most relevant to me and my business strategy. These are actually my “notes” which I keep for my own learning needs.  If like me, you focus on publish a large number of decent-quality blog posts based on search analysis, I think you’ll find them interesting.

I do read about other stuff, but since at this point in time I don’t do YouTube, social media (except Pinterest), active link building – nearly anything other than clean good old content publishing – I tend not to include the other stuff in my notes here.

Before we go into the posts – my favorite part of the blog notes. The cover picture. A few months ago, I decided to pick photos from our family trips as cover pics for these posts. They remind me of our fantastic road trips, and of where we plan to return to – hopefully as digital nomads – in a couple of years time.

This is Yosemite National Park. The photo was taken from Glacier Point in August 2011.

Let’s begin.

Ubbersuggest New tool – NeilPatel.com

Patel launched his new and improved Ubbersuggest tools with a detailed tutorial describing the various features. I’m going to give this one a run in my next search analysis session. It seems to offer many of the search analysis functionalities that I look for in Ahrefs – and it’s free. Sure, Ahrefs offers a variety of other tools as well, but I don’t use those, so Ubbersuggest might be a good alternative.

Q2 Report – April, May, June 2019 – EmpireFlippers.com

Clearly, Empire Flippers have an entirely different business model than I do. It’s not their profits that I’m interested in (impressive as they are). The post provides some good data about the market as a whole. It looks like FBA sites are killing it with huge profits and 7-figures price estimates on the sites themselves.

Note to self: Take a closer look at Empire Flippers content sites listings. I’m currently building my portfolio so that I’ll be able to sell 1-2 sites in a couple of years, to reduce the overall risk, so I’m interested in seeing what informational sites sell for. Also, listings usually provide some data about the profitability of sites in various niches. Always interesting.

Conquer web publishing like Caesar – Fast Stacks Blog

Jon Dykstra discusses taking risks in online publishing. While the first part of the post isn’t really relevant to me – I’ve been doing this for 20 years now, so I don’t consider myself a newbie – the second part goes into looking at the risks faced by an established web publisher. That’s something that’s been on my mind a lot in the past couple of weeks.

With my husband’s help, we’ve been assessing various scenarios, considering how much do we want to invest in content right now as we look at the projected long-term results. I’ll spare you the endless debates over detailed spreadsheets and graphs. The bottom line is how much can we trust current positive growth trends. And as Dykstra points out – the Internet can be a treacherous place. Your actions as a web publisher, however, can affect the volatility, at least to some extent.

That’s it?

For this month, yes. I’ve skimmed through probably 30-40 blog posts this month, read about 5-10 but I only found these three worthy of a note. If you know of any posts that might offer something new or interesting in web publishing, leave me a comment with a link – would love to read other people’s recommendations.