David Pitlyuk

A company by the name of Aeros has envisioned a new concept in flying called the Aeroscraft. It’s sort of a mix of an airplane, blimp, and helicopter all in one, but looks more like a blimp:

The Aerocraft is about the size of two football fields, and can fly by a mixture of helium and 6 turbofan engines. The aft-mounted propellers are electric powered in order to reduce the amount of noise. It can travel at close to 200mph, and goes about 8,000 ft up.

How Will It Be Used?

This is the most important about why the Aeroscraft is so innovative. Since the craft is so large, it can fit quite a bit of stuff in it. For the consumer market you can imagine a luxury hotel in the air. Imagine getting picked up in Los Angeles, going on the Aeroscraft where you can freely walk around, eat dinner at a fancy restaurant, go dancing, see the view from only 8,000ft, going to bed in your luxury room, and waking up in New York City. For the industrial market the Aeroscraft can carry a ton of cargo, but more importantly it has the capability of taking off and landing anywhere. The craft takes off and lands straight up and down like a helicopter, imagine a new Wal Mart opening up, and its entire inventory being delivered in one shot. For the military market the Aeroscraft can carry a ton of vehicles like tanks for example. As you can see, there is great opportunity here, and I’m excited to see this come out.

A scaled-down prototype is supposed to be released next year, with a production version to be seen as early as 2010. Here’s a video I found on YouTube you may enjoy:

July was definitely a big growth month! Mainly a huge jump in search engine traffic played a part in generating over 7,000 unique visitors and over 10,000 pageviews. That’s a 66% increase in uniques and a 49% increase in pageviews just comparing to the previous month. Lets take a closer look.

Traffic

Monetization

There were three sources of advertising this month:

Text Link Ads: $8.51
Kontera: $4.12
AdSense: $30.63

Total: $43.26

While it’s not a lot of money, it is a decent increase over previous months. I do not put a big emphasis on maximizing monetization on this blog, but it’s interested to watch over time and see how it grows with traffic growth. I did spend $20 and placed a text ad on Jane May Blogs, so net profit is $23.26. The blog is hosted on the same server as ActiveTuning.

RSS Subscribers

The number of subscribers keeps slightly moving up, but it’s doing so slowly. I definitely hit record high points on average days, and am coming closer and closer to the magic “100 subscribers” number. Maybe in August!

Search Engine Goodness

Last month search engine traffic grew 28.2% from the previous month. This month it increased 180.25% over June alone! There’s an interesting breakdown to look at for each search engine, and how much traffic increased from June:

Google: +162.71%
MSN: +324.14%
AOL: +700%
Live: +675%
Yahoo: +341.67%

Those are some impressive numbers, but I have a feeling this will come down a bit in August. Much of the search engine traffic came from my article on the new Virginia civil fines, and has since come down quite a bit. Lets look at the top 10 searched keywords:

1. virginia civil fees
2. e92 m3
3. 10 dollar plane tickets
4. best blog designs
5. virginia civil fines
6. new traffic laws for va with petition info
7. blog title ideas
8. virginia traffic fines petition
9. 240sx
10. alantic city

We can see 4/10 of top searched keywords are all in regards to the civil fines article. I reached a new high in number of referring search traffic in one day…247! Last month I broke this record with 106. Look at how search engine traffic has increased every month since the blog inception:

Popular Pages/Content

Here was the most popular content in June:

1. New Virginia Civil Fee For Traffic Tickets Is Nuts
2. Petition Against New Virginia Civil Traffic Fines
3. Tech Sector Corporate Web Designs: Best Of The Best
4. David Pitlyuk (Homepage)
5. Cars (Category)
6. Hot Import Nights 2007, Washington DC Pictures
7. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: A-G
8. April (Month)
9. Dell Customer Service Outsource Nightmare
10. The Best Blog Designs From The Technorati Top 100

Top Referrals

As mentioned, search engine traffic took a big jump in the total amount of referral traffic that came to the site this month, take a look:

Here’s a list of the top referrals that do not include search engines:

1. CSS Globe
2. Digg
3. CSS Drive
4. Think Vitamin
5. Smashing Magazine
6. Daily Web Ideas (Paid for sponsorship)
7. Reddit
8. bildirgec.org
9. StumbleUpon
10. html.it

10 Reasons Why Target Is Better Than Wal-Mart: A really good article comparing Target and Wal-Mart, and why Target is better. Many of the things I can relate to, that I didn’t necessarily realize before.

Rich, online, and nowhere to buy: Online retailers are the wave of the future, so why are the world’s trendsetting luxury brands so far behind?

32 How To’s for Internet Marketing and Entrepreneurship: A nice compilation of resources and links for anybody getting into internet marketing and entrepreneurship.

How to Sell Your Blog: Another nice compilation of resources on selling your blog. If you’re just building up your blog to flip it, definitely give this a look.

How To Use Press Releases to Your Advantage: A good guide on writing and distributing a press release.

Increase Alexa Ranking, Get Paid More: An article on why Alexa ranking is important, and things you can do to increase your sites ranking.
Why Coke Pay Billions Just to Show You Their Logo: Get a better understanding about why big companies spend so much money on just brand advertising.

Guide to Traffic From Digg Comments: Utilize Digg’s commenting system to bring more traffic to your blog/site.

Have a hard time reading? Check out some education resources and download reading lesson plans to learn the basics. By developing a reading curriculum, you'll be on the right track to learning to read and be one less person who can't read!

My personal blog has been around since only March and as of writing this, Akismet has caught 1,336 items of spam on it. I’m trying to figure out what’s normal. My ActiveTuning blog hasn’t been around for much longer than this one and has caugt 1,669 items of spam. VideoExperiment.com has been around for about 9 months or so and has caught only 352 items of spam.

I’m sure that bigger blogs will get more spam, so we’ll see how it’s relevant…but for now, post a comment with how many years/months your blog has been around, and how much spam Akismet has caught.

Over the past couple of months I went through all 1,088 websites in the tech sector that are traded publicly on the stock market. This was quite a tedious task that took me 3 different parts to do split up by letters (A-G, H-O, P-Z). The idea behind this was to see what companies that obviously have a technology background can do with their websites since they normally have large budgets to do so. You would think that most of the companies would have amazing websites, and it would be quite difficult to weed out the best. I was surprised by the number of the sites that really didn’t have anything impressive…from an aesthetic and even functional standpoint.

Now that I’ve looked through everything, I’d like to pick out the absolute 20 best of the best from the 135 that were picked out to be the best in their letter category:

3COM

Akamai

Autodesk

Blackboard

EA

F5

FalconStor Software

Intraware

Iomega

Magnetek

Microsoft

Omniture

Saba

Safeguard

Salesforce.com

SGI

TDK

Viewpoint

Visual Science

Xerox

What do you think about my selection? Do you believe these were the best out of the original 135? Did you have any other favorites?

Until now, Alexa has only had a toolbar available for Internet Explorer users.  The problem with this is that Alexa bases its ranking on the number of users that view a page and have their toolbar installed.  This means that even if your site has the most traffic of any other site on the internet, you still won’t rank high if none of your readers have the toolbar installed.

Why Does It Matter?

For whatever reason, Alexa ranking, although drastically not accurate, is still used for monetary purposes.  Companies like Text Links Ads take your Alexa ranking and base what rates it should charge for links on your site, effectively making a difference on the amount of revenue you bring in.

Now Firefox Users Can Make A Difference

I’m surprised it took this long to come out, but Alexa finally released a toolbar for Firefox which they named Sparky. It’s really less of a toolbar and more of an informative box on the bottom of the browser:

For blogs like mine, this can really make a big potential difference in my Alexa ranking as 49% of my readers are Firefox users.  It won’t make as big of a difference on my eCommerce site (ActiveTuning) because about 26% of my readers are Firefox users.

If you are trying to increase your site/blogs Alexa ranking, but you’re a Firefox user, get the toolbar installed and hopefully you’ll see your numbers increase.

A new company just launched that allows for a new simple way to monetize videos that are embedded on your site. Prerollr essentially works by overlaying an ad onto a video, and offering the publisher a revenue share. The ads are not video, it’s just a regular ad over the video, and requires the user to click a close button in order to get rid of it. As a publisher you can choose whether you want prerollr to display 100% of the inventory or just 25% of the inventory. Here’s an example of what the ad would look like over a YouTube video:

If you want to see a live example, I’ve implemented prerollr on VideoExperiment.com.  I’ll report back and let you guys know how it does from a revenue perspective.  As of right now, the reporting system doesn’t even get released until tomorrow (at the time of writing this).

Implementing the ads onto your site is easy, just add one line in your <head> area, and that’s it.  Signing up to run the ads takes about 1 minute, just fill out the form and click a verification link in your e-mail.

What do you think about this?  Is it ok with you?  Or is it too intrusive/annoying?  Do you even realize there is a video behind it?  My personal opinion is that the ad is slightly too big, and may make people not realize there is a video behind it.  Either that or maybe make the close button more obvious.  Either way, this is a great new opportunity for vloggers to monetize their sites better.

I’ve previously written about one multi-billion dollar product that makes wireless power a reality. A new one that I’ve found is a device that is made by a company named NeuroSky. The device allows you to control things with your brain by turning brainwaves into commands.

Now, first thought is what applications will it be used for? The company is targeting three things mainly; sleepiness/drowsiness detectors for automotive and industrial markets, gaming consoles, and therapeutic solutions for ADD problems. Check out this video to get an idea of some of things it can be used for:

There is just such a huge market for this product, and surprisingly enough, it sounds like it’s going to be really cheap to implement. They mentioned in the video the component was only $15. You can definitely expect next generation consoles to use some of this technology, especially considering the success of the Nintendo Wii. In fact, according to CNN Money, the CEO of NeuroSky is already in talks with the makers of Dance Dance Revolution.

How many times have you been driving down the highway late at night and started to dose off? I had a friend take my car for a 7 hour one-way trip back and forth to pick up a car. They drove, picked up the car, and drove back. On the way home, he fell asleep, did a couple spins in my car, went into the grass, back onto the road (while still spinning), and managed to stop somehow (with a mud all over the car). In the future, an application can be built by NeuroSky for the car that would have prevented him from doing that and potentially had a much worse situation. Now imagine every car in the future has this, that’s a lot of money to be made, and that’s just one application. Another big market is health. For example as was stated in the video, people in wheelchairs may be able to move the chair by just thinking about it.

Do you agree that this has the possibility to be a multi-billion dollar market?

I’m a little late on this news, but give me a break, I was in Ocean City, MD last week!  Last month I reported that Google purchased Feedburner for $100 million.  Like what Google does with many of the companies they pick up, they are now giving away for free what you used to have to pay for.  More specifically two products, Feedburner Stats Pro and MyBrand.

FeedBurner Stats PRO
PRO is feed analytics taken to the next level. You will now have access to the number of people who have viewed or clicked individual content items in your feed and “Reach,” which estimates the daily number of subscribers who interacted with your feed content. You can turn this on by signing in to your account, navigating to the Analyze tab and heading to the FeedBurner Stats PRO section. Click the “Item Views” checkbox to activate these PRO features.

MyBrand
The MyBrand service (also PRO-level) is located under the “My Account” tab after you’ve signed in. MyBrand lets you maintain consistency between your feed address and your hosted website’s domain, if matchy-matchy is your thing. For example, rather than using feeds.feedburner.com/MyFeedName, your MyBrand-ed feed address can be feeds.myexcellentdomain.net/MyFeedName. To get started with MyBrand, sign into FeedBurner, click the “My Account” link in the upper left-hand corner, and then click “MyBrand”. Nota Bene: You must be comfortable playing around with DNS entries and own the rights to the domain whose DNS entries you’ll be playing around with in order to successfully activate MyBrand.

Keep in mind that you’ll have to manually activate the pro features on your own in order to utilize them.  So if you haven’t done so already, login to your account and get that activated!f

Traffic

Last month I considered a “truth” month because there were no spikes in traffic, so it gave me a chance to see what traffic was really like. This month was similar, but I did get a couple of posts linked around the net…the result doubled my traffic from the previous month. This goes to show you how important it is to write good content, that other people will want to link to.

June brought 4,202 unique visitors and 6,733 pageviews. You can see around June 18th, traffic started growing quite a bit higher than previously. This was mainly due to my third installment of best corporate web designs post I made.

Of the visitors, 18.54% of were returning:

Monetization

This month I put AdSense back on the site, and implemented Text Link Ads. Here’s the breakdown of all income:

Text Link Ads: $6.57
AdSense: $13.85
AuctionAds: $0.19

Money from Text Link Ads came in the form of the one link purchased from Carl Ruderman as well as a specific post being sponsored. AdSense was doing really well in the beginning of the month, as the revenue per click was much higher than normal, but then it has since come down for whatever reason. AuctionAds just has a couple of ads left over on some posts, so it’s barely getting any clicks or impressions on those and wasn’t expecting anything.

Monetization is not a true concern of mine at this time, as I am more concerned about writing good content and building traffic.

RSS Subscribers

RSS subscribers slightly went up in range, but not by much. I hit a new daily high on normal traffic days, and ended up averaging 71.2 subscribers for the month.

Here’s a couple of charts of RSS subscribers with the linear trends from all time as well as just June:

June

All-Time

Search Engine Goodness

This month my search engine traffic grew by 28.2% from the previous month alone. My search engine traffic has been getting better and better over time, and hopefully will help build the foundation for the blog to continue growing. Here’s a list of top 10 keywords that were searched for to get to my site:

1. e92 m3
2. new virginia traffic fines
3. blog title ideas
4. new virginia traffic laws
5. linkin park at bamboozle fest
6. best blog designs
7. $10 plane ticket
8. new va traffic fines
9. best wp theme to base new design off
10. virginia mansions

A lot of traffic has been coming in to the article I wrote on the new traffic laws in Virginia. In fact, it was the main reason for a new all-time daily high in search engine visitors (106).

We can see here how search engine traffic has been growing since the blog inception:

Popular Pages/Content

Here was the most popular content in May:

1. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: A-G
2. The Best Blog Designs From The Technorati Top 100
3. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: P-Z
   
4. David Pitlyuk (Homepage)
5. The 45 Best Tech Sector Corporate Web Designs: H-O
6. Who Is David Pitlyuk?
7. New Virginia Civil Fee For Traffic Tickets Is Nuts
8. My Home Office…And Tagging You For Yours
9. 2008 BMW M3 (E92) Production Pictures
10. New Design Beta - What Are Your Thoughts?

A lot of sites out there linked out to my best tech sector corporate web designs series, and they were all cross-linked to each other. This of course is the reason these pages generated the most traffic. I noticed that many of those people then wanted to find out more about who I was, which is why they clicked the “Who Is David Pitlyuk?” tab.

Top Referrals

There are two main statistics we want to look at with top referrals. First, which source referred traffic, and then which specific sites referred traffic.

While search engines went down 22% of the total traffic from the last month, it actually brought more visitors since there were more visitors in the first place.

Here are the top referrals for websites (not search engines) that referred traffic to my blog:

1. bildirgec.org
2. CSS Globe
3. Digg
4. html.it
5. TimeForBlogging
6. DesignWalker
7. Smashing Magazine
8. StumbleUpon
9. HarpzOn
10. del.ico.us

This month I hope to launch my new design, and I have a feeling it will better build the brand for my site. We’ll find out over the next few months!