I’ve been been running House Of Rave as a part time income for around 5 years now, and by FAR the most trafficked portion of the site is the rave videos section. When I first started the website, I was forced off every hosting plan I had due to high bandwidth usage. I’ve always burned through about 400 to 700 gigs of videos per month….several years ago that was a big deal and a large expense.
I am getting more traffic than ever on House Of Rave, but I’m concerned about the videos.
It was only recently that YouTube.com and Google Video showed up….but they have very quickly established themselves as THE place to go for all types of videos. So if people want videos of club/rave stuff, then YouTube will eventually steal much of my traffic. To counter this, I will instead fully utilize these two free services to my advantage.
I am in the process of revamping the video section to allow users to comment on the videos and view them directly from the site using YouTube. I’ve also started uploading all the good videos to YouTube and Google video, so House Of Rave still gets exposure when people search for club/rave videos on those websites.
I’ve even started using YouTube for individual product videos on HoR, and so far people seem to like them. Sales of certain products definitely increased when visitors could watch the product in action. My first test trial was for the High Intensity Glowsticks, and that worked pretty well.
Instead of fighting a losing battle against these dominating video services, I can get MORE traffic by joining them.
Now I need to translate these changes into results. House Of Rave is around the $2,000/month range, I need to step it up.
Steady Monthly Income – Much Work = Good.
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Due to several confounding factors I could not perform my homeless experiment this week. I was planning on being homeless for about 3 days to see what I could learn. This is not the end of the experiment, simply a temporary delay.
I stopped shaving in preparation for the experiment, and it was a surprise to see I grew this in only 6 days:
!!!
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I already met Michael Dell once, and I get to see him again in Austin. He is giving a speech at UT:
When: Tuesday April 25th 2006 – 7:00pm
Where: Texas Union Ballroom @ University of Texas Austin
I found this upcoming speech surprising, because Michael Dell is notoriously shy in front of crowds. When I saw him, his wife and Lance Armstrong did all the talking…he didn’t speak a word in front of the crowd!