I thought I would take some today to thank those of you who read my blog on a regular basis. I’ve only been writing since late August and it has been a great few months. Today I wanted to spend some time going over two key lessons learned in ‘07. Hopefully it will help prevent you from making the same mistakes, and give you some great ideas for your own businesses over the next year.

Smooth Upgrades Aren’t Always Smooth

If you’ve been a member at our site for a while you might remember a period in the early summer where we were down for several days. Our entire site was powered by an aging phpbb2 platform, and we needed to move yet again to help cope with the ever increasing traffic to the site. We thought this would be a great time (since we were going to be down anyways for the server move) to upgrade the back-end of our site to something more robust, a little more custom, and expandable for future upgrades. Boy were we wrong.

It has been about six months since the switch and our traffic hasn’t fully recovered to the levels it was pre-upgrade. My bet is that it altered the way our site was indexed and large search engines like Google considered us a new site all over again.

My advice for you is to make sure that if you’re upgrading a large site the changes are absolutely necessary for your survival, otherwise you may be shooting yourself in the foot for no reason. Our upgrade was entirely smooth to our new platform but it has changed the way and to what level the site gets indexed. Luckily for us we care more about my next point (innovation) than consistency so it wasn’t a problem :)

Keep Innovating

One thing that I think we did extremely well in ‘07 was lay the groundwork for our social networking features and money making opportunities. The forums here have always been a great place to connect and get information on making money online, but at some point we want to actually provide our users with an opportunity to directly make money. I think in the new year we will have everything we need to make this happen.

I can’t stress enough how important it is constantly innovate. We are always experimenting and looking for new ways to keep things fresh on the site. With the introduction of “My Page” (tab at the top) and personal blogs on everyone’s page we will enable those who want to make money online to reach others interested in the same things.

We’ve also been working closely with the boys at Unique Blog Designs on a new design for the launch of our social networking components so 2008 looks to be a very exciting year for us.

More than ever before the Internet is the place to turn your online business dreams into a reality. It has always been our goal to be an enabler in that process and I thank those of you who give us a chance and join our community.

I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season! :)

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