The Power Play Interviews: Markus Frind- $3 Million in 6 Months
This is the first in a series of Internet Success Stories that you will begin to see on the Power Play Blog. Hope you enjoy them!
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Markus Frind, the creator of Plentyoffish.com is a success story worth noting, as he has managed to take a niche formerly ruled by giant corporations and give it his own brand of marketing savvy. A case of David vs. Goliath, where the little guy comes out on top in the end. Markus is the top "individual" adsense publisher in terms of pageviews. Lets find out what some of his secrets are as he shares some advice with our readers. Feel free to comment!
Markus, what is your experience in computer programming and how did it prepare you for becoming a webmaster?
The average pageviews a day is around 14 million for the last week. I'm getting another 80 million pageviews a day from users polling the site to see if they have new messages. Really intensive bandwidth wise!
When I go to your website, I notice that the ads are targeted to my region, yet I have not even registered- can you explain to our readers how you accomplish this feat?
I'm just using ip2location.com- Basically i take your IP, look it up in the database and it tells me what your city is. I then bring up a list of users in your city, nothing magical about it at all.
Are most of your visitors coming primarily from search engines (SERPS), or are you finding that they come from other avenues? Do you actively advertise in the media?
Search engines account for something like 2% of my traffic. The vast majority of my traffic, like any other site with over 5 million pageviews a day comes from word of mouth, and repeat visitors.
The services on your site seem to be offered at no cost to the registrants. Is there some advantage you have over your competitors that allows you to do this?
I've developed new algorithms that allow me to create a mega site for next to no cost. Several years ago I created algorithm that was thousands of times faster then the algorithm used in the 1990's to find a string of 22 prime numbers. At the time a professor used several super computers and hundreds of regular computers over the course of several years to find a record. I did the same thing on 1 computer in 2 weeks.
Fascinating! Are there any other sites you currently maintain, or is plentyoffish.com the only one?
Its the only site at the moment. I've got a few other sites I registered for friends so they could learn to do marketing/affiliate stuff. At this point i think 1 site is enough.
Any tips for those looking to create a profitable endeavor on the internet?
IF someone else thinks what you are doing is a cool idea I'd say it isn't... Find something no one else thinks is important and build up a site with big traffic in that area. Also keep in mind, sites that have low monetization today but have traffic may be the gold mines of tomorrow. In the internet world anything and everything will be monetized at some point and traffic is king.
Traffic is King- very wise advice, Markus. One last question- How do you find the time to maintain such a large commodity on the internet? Surely you must have some other interests in life besides programming and website monitoring?
It only takes a hour a day on average, but its very tiring work. I spend the other couple of hours reading and seeing what is going on.