In 1999 through early 2000s I had a huge Club Music / DJ community. I grew it to 35,000 members in 2-3 years. People tossed around words like lucky and easy .. but nobody realised that on top of my full time "real world" job, I was working 50-60 hours a week developing content. On top of that I had developed some great efficiencies and most certainly had found some custom secret tricks to growth. But the reason I was so successful (with $0 marketing) was hard work.
That being said .. this time around with my daily lists at NameCult I find myself a little more frustrated. For a couple of years now, day in and day out I post the most comprehensive manually curated list of expiring domains in the industry. Yet even after hundreds and hundreds of daily auction and closeout lists, most people don't bother to use the affiliate links .. or even more frustrating .. most don't even bother clicking like/thanks for my lists here at NamePros.
Beyond that, even NamePros doesn't think my site is worthy enough to merit a "NameCult" badge .. lol. I guess the biggest part of the problem is that nobody really wants to talk about my lists because those that use it don't want other people to find my list which would effectively mean more competition for the same names. On top of that I'm thinking "lists" aren't very SEO friendly compared to text articles.
Heck .. even Domaining.com refused to post links to my daily lists because the other people who make lists don't want it. That just boggled my mind as I thought to myself: shouldn't it be in the best interest for their readers to have the best daily lists possible? Apparently not!? lol
At a certain point hard work only goes so far .. after a while if the industry you're trying to serve doesn't show any respect, then that "boulder" you're talking about suddenly starts to feel significantly heavier than it actually is.
So on that note Michael/
@Whizzbang .. thank you for your blog, your writing/musings and most importantly .. your time!