I figure I’m going to start using this space to talk about business, and the direction I’m taking different things in. So here we go.

This entry’s subjects:

• Red Reporter blowing up
• Page Rank Update
• New Themes for celeb blogs
• MB Project
• Links

Red Reporter blowing up

Red Reporter, my first and favorite site has been doing great things lately. The community has exploded, and there are now over 600 members of the site. Game threads now routinely get 300+ comments, and there is tremendous participation from the community. It’s really awesome to see.

The Reds made a big trade last week, which caused traffic to rise quite a bit. My reaction to the trade was quoted in two newspapers, here (Lexington Herald-Leader), and here (Dayton Daily News). That’s always a bit of a thrill, and it’s nice to have something to tell people about. The whole website business is tough to explain to people sometimes (the monetization especially), but when you can point to a magazine or newspaper and show them quoting you … people tend to understand that you’re doing ok then.

And just to put the traffic in perspective, I started my Reds site back in 2002, and it got very little traffic for the next year +. I got a little more serious with it in February 2004, but even then I was thrilled on days when the site got more than 100 visitors. But I kept working, and got an invite from Tyler Blezinski to join Sports Blog Nation, a network run by him and Markos Moulitsas. Traffic kept increasing, but even as recently as March I was still just getting 300 uniques or so a day, and maybe 8-900 page views. In the last couple of months that number has grown and grown, and I’m now getting 6,000+ page views a day, and well over 1,000 uniques. In the grand scheme of things this still isn’t a lot of traffic, but for a small niche like the Cincinnati Reds I think it’s pretty good!

Page Rank Update

There was a Google Page Rank update last week, and I made out pretty well. Mobile Herald went from 0-5, and I had another site go from 0-4, and a couple of other sites go from 0-3. My only drop was The Beijing Blog (about the 2008 Summer Olympics) which went from 4 down to 3. Overall I’m pretty pleased though, and I signed up Mobile Herald for Text Link Ads, so hopefully it’ll start bringing in a bit of money from text links.

New Wordpress Themes for celeb blogs

I started two celebrity fan sites after reading this at ProBlogger, just as kind of a long term experiment. I had been using K2 as the theme on those two sites, but for some reason lately every time I changed something on the sites the layout would break. So I figured it was time for a new theme, and I chose fLight from Fahlstad.se, a guy who seems to be a pretty talented designer. You can see the theme in action on my sites here:

Scarlett Johansson Watch
Hilary Duff Watch

Let me know what you think, I thought the theme was very well suited to those two sites.

MB Project

I’ve mainly done nothing but blogs so far in my business, but I’ve got an idea for a forums site that I’m going to be starting this month/next month. I need to get it up and running by the time school starts, so we’ll see. Not quite ready to reveal what this is, but it’s a pretty big market, with a good demographic, and I’ve yet to come across another site serving the subject. Should be good. I’m planning on using Vbulletin and getting the logo and skin professionally done, so that’ll be something I’ll be looking into in the near future.

Links

And finally, if you’d like a link on my sidebar, please ask. I’m always looking for other entrepreneurial blogs to read, so definitely send them my way. I figure I’ll be adding Tyler Cruz since I’m kind of stealing his posting format, but I’m looking for other links too.

And that’s all for today. Thanks for reading, and feel free to drop me a line if you’ve got a link I should look at, or if you have any questions or anything.