InterSites New Home Page

I’m happy to announce that we’ve finally relaunched the first stage of our InterSites.co.uk site. For those of you that don’t know InterSites.co.uk is the hub site of the network. It no longer will contain any topic specific content, but will instead be a shop window for every site in the network.

The first stage of this is now live. Each of the 520 individual Inter Sites is listed by the following categories as well as in A-Z form. The categories are as follows:

• Arts & Entertainment
• Business & Commerce
• Careers & Jobs
• Cars & Transport
• Computers & Hardware
• Education & Learning
• Electronics
• Finance & Money
• Food & Drink
• Games & Toys
• Government & Society
• Health & Fitness
• Home & Garden
• Internet
• Lifestyle & Fashion
• Music, TV & Film
• Reference
• Relationships & Family
• Science & Nature
• Shopping & Gifts
• Sports & Hobbies
• Travel & Holidays

At the moment each site has a screenshot and snippet of information about it, such as our Gardening site which you can see here.

Advertising

In the coming months we will incorporate all the advertising options across the sites, all collected in one place. We’ll probably be offering initial advertising options such as:

1. Display advertising
2. Site sponsorship
3. Enhanced listings on our business directory sites
4. Contextual advertising through our own Adsense-like program

Some exciting things are in store and I’ll be announcing those on the blog as and when they appear. in the meantime, check out a slideshow of all 520 sites here.

Network Search

As part of the new site we also launched our network search. From InterSites.co.uk you can now search content across the entire network of sites. Initial indexing completed yesterday evening and will be updated every month as we launch new content and sites. Currently there are approximately 150,000 pages of content across the network.

As advertising has in the large part shifted away from CPM deals to CPC and CPL/CPA type campaigns so too have the metrics you should be forcussing on. Traffic is no longer order of the day, now Targetted Traffic is far more important even if the overall levels are lower.

This was reinforced for me at the beginning of this month, when I sat down and went through traffic and revenue figures for all the individual Inter Sites for March 2009. One of the smaller sites in the network had the following traffic figures for March 2009:

• Vists – 775
• Pageviews – 1813

Not very impressive by itself, but over the same period this site did the following revenue:

• Affiliate – £110.43
• Paid Search – £15.86
• Adsense – £3.88 (based on a rough £1 to $1.50 conversion)

That’s a £130.17 from 775 visits or approximately 17 pence per visitor to the site. I won’t give you the exact site, but it’s a small niche that pulls in a small amount of organic and type-in traffic.

Now obviously if that was your only site, you wouldn’t be retiring anytime soon, however consider in this case it’s just one of 520 sites in the network currently and the figures start to look more interesting.

Another thing to note is that with such few visits, you’re not chalking up large bandwidth bills, or hardware costs even when you scale up (and more on scaling up in a post soon). Lastly look at the breakdown between affiliate sales, paid search and adsense. As I’ve stated before, if you’re only relying on Adsense and looking at getting lots of traffic to make any significant money, you should look again and see if you have very specific traffic that might convert well into an affilate based sale.

Some of these chores might be:

• Renewing domain registrations
• Renewing hosting
• Patching server software
• Patching and upgrading any site software such as forum scripts, CMS’s etc
• Updating third party code such as invocation code for ad servers, or analytics snippets
• Updating contact details, about us pages, copyright dates etc

All this is before you even think about writing fresh content, adding new functionality or doing SEO or SEM.

One of the biggest swings in perception I now have is that any change no matter how small, has some kind of time commitment. For example if you’re running a single site and need to update your robots.txt and ftp it to the server it might take 2 minutes. In the past this kind of time I never consiously thought about (after all if you’re explaining what you’ve done in a day, telling people it’s taken you 1 minute to correct a typo seems inconsequential).

Lets take that robots.txt example again. If I had to update and ftp a robots.txt file to every Inter Site across the Network at 2 minutes a site, that would take 100o minutes (just over 16 1/2 hours). That’s two whole working days for some people, even if we ignore the time taken out of the day to check mail, make a cuppa, or the toilet breaks all those cuppa’s require! In reality it’s probably more like three days.

Now when I look at a 1 minute change I see it as a whole day’s work, and a 5 minute change takes a week. Think about that next time you update your wordpress software, or change the copyright date on your blog at the beginning of the new year!

If you’re running large numbers of sites automation is your friend, and without it all progress can quickly disappear into an endless series of updates, tweaks, changes and fixes. Some of ways we minimise extra manual work is through:

• Standardising everything we can, such as: themes, plugines, script versions on each site
• Documenting previous update sequences for re-use in the future
• Running multiple sites of a single CMS codebase
• Outsourcing everything non-core
• Extensive shell scripting for common tasks, such as backups, software updates, new site installations etc

These are just a few examples and I’ll come back and talk in more depth on any of these people are interested in, in future posts. As always, leave a post if you want more info.

InterSites.co.uk Home Page

In these common question posts I’m going to try and answer some of the most frequent questions I get about the Inter Sites. Feel free to send any questions not covered through and I’ll try and answer them.

Q. What are  the Inter Sites / What is the Inter Sites Network?

A. The Inter Sites are a network of UK websites offering information and advice on a variety of topics. Although primarily a content network, we also seek to provide useful tools and community features, where appropriate.

Q. How many sites do you have?

A. There are currently about 520 sites in the core Inter Sites network. In addition we have just started creating a further 75 geo sites covering all the cities in the UK, so all together about 600.

Q. How long have they been around?

A. We launched the first site in 2002 (InterCoffee.co.uk) and launched the hub site (InterSites.co.uk) in summer 2003. We  have gradually added other sites since then.

Q. How many of you are there?

A. We have tried to keep the number of employees as small as possible. We currently have the 2 founders (myself and one other) working full-time as well as a full-time contractor. In addition we have several part-time contractors doing project work for us, and outsource as much non-core work as possible, such as hosting, financial etc.

Also check out Part 2 and Part 3.