A Pleasant Surprise May 22, 2005
Posted by Martin in : Business, Computers , trackbackMy United World Telecom 4 Me website has been pretty much dormant since January when I contracted a group of incompetents to revise the site. Now that there is an end in sight (most probably a big fight and me taking my business elsewhere to complete) I checked on the feedback from a lot of tedious SEO work which I conducted months ago.
I’m pleased with the results so far, I’ve managed to rank highly for some very competitive keyword phrases …
International Callback ranked in Google, Page 1, Position 9
International Callback ranked in MSN, Page 1, Position 1
International Callback ranked in Yahoo, Page 1, Position 2
Overseas Phone Calls ranked in Google, Page 2, Position 2
Callback ranked in Yahoo, Page 2, Position 16
I’m going to brave one enormous (and enormously boring) SEO campaign in the next few weeks for United World Telecom 4 Me and once the new site is finished then it should be able to look after itself.
My Calls in Thailand site is fading … Search Engines ignore the word ‘in’ and I fought a hard battle with all the hundreds of companies offering calls to Thailand. Frustratingly I’m not competing for calls to Thailand so I’m being pushed down in search results by companies which sell to a completly different market.
The governments telecom operators have been subsidizing international calls since the middle of last year and the services I could make good money from are no longer practical for 99% of clients. As the site is making little direct money it is unrewarding for affiliates to work with me, and the possible returns are not worth the cost of advertising. The mailing management was done sloppily by me before I realized the potential of it and I regret not really building up a qualified list to market.
This week’s update will tidy the site up. Two years after conception of the site I am horrified at the now-obsolete TTCMS 2.3 system which has more bugs than features. It’ll be a boring update but I’ve resigned myself to promoting United World Telecom 4 Me’s VoIP Service and a VoIP service offered by a colleague. There is little money in VoIP but in handling account refills and getting referral commissions I’ll at least be able to gain some residual income without it taking up much of my time. Most likely I’m going to prostitute the site to Google Adsense and then leave it in peace. The cost calculator is an impressive piece of work, detailing the costs of phone calls from 18 differnt services to 450+ destinations each, taking into account the nature of the service and working on mutiple currencies. The data from this is a huge asset to my site and therefore I’m going to continue updating it for the publicity it does provide.
Phone-Guide.com is doing OK, not great but it was only really built to triangulate reciprocal links and to add credibility to United World Telecom 4 Me which it is doing. Rates on it are perhaps a little out-of-date but I’m not too concerned. The site brings in about 5-10 potential agent leads in every month although I think in two years only about 3 of these have resulted in a sub-agen - none of which have been worthwhile. I’m goign to have onle last email-merge to see if I can salvage any new agents from the list although if they aren’t taking the initiative to get started, I doubt we’ll get any miracles.
Once these loose ends are tied up the new busines is going to move very fast and it’s going to be a huge challange. I am very excited about it and market research and design specifications are moving ahead very fast already.
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