Site Review: NOBOSS.com

I had the opportunity this morning to review NOBOSS.com, which is short for “The National Organization of Business Opportunity Seekers and home based entrepreneurs”. Online since 1995, with a discussion forum and an email list with 80,000+ readers, I was looking forward to checking this one out.

Perhaps that set my expectations a bit high, because I was disappointed at first glance of the site. It’s very Web 1.0, complete with a live link to a direct email address on the home page. I decided to dig in and check it out a bit, and get a feel for the content and what attracted their 80,000+ readers…

A quick glance at their lastest issue (NOBOSS, March 2007) shows the old-style format of newsletters, including sponsored advertisements and article snippets along with closing thoughts from the publisher. Add to it the fact that the list is hosted by Topica… and I’m left wondering what year it is!

Seriously – if you want a flashback, or a great example of a successful website from say 1997-98, this is it

A list that size, emailed monthly and including conversion tracking option, would cost an insane amount at Topica.com. In fact, I requested a quote based on a list with less than (up to) 25k subscribers… and the cost would be $449.95/month! Aweber, which is currently the industry leader in list management, allows you up to 10,000 subscribers with your account, each additional 10k is $9.95. So for the sake of comparison, 25,000 subscribers would cost you less than $40/month. That just doesnt add up to me…

It was at this point that I decided to use that cool new tool I posted the other day: dnScoop. A query on dnScoop.com confirms that NOBOSS has indeed been online for over 11 years (since May of 95). Interestingly, dnScoop is reporting a PageRank of 0 (zero) for this domain, but my toolbar is showing a PR4. Low traffic rank on Alexa as well, but its showing a few thousand pages indexed in both Google and Yahoo.

I assumed the source of those pages would be the article database on the site. Strangely, the filename to the main articles page is “noread.html” (no read, as in dont read??) and my Google Toolbar shows a PR0 for this page. I did a quick scan and found an article by Willie Crawford, so I clicked through… to find a 404 Not Found error.

A quick search on Google shows articles and older pages (on a different site template) as the primary pages that are indexed.

My last stop was the NOBOSS Discussion Forum, which has less than 500 members and 128 threads (at the time of this post). The forum appears to be fairly new addition to the site, though – the “admin” user showed a Join Date of January 2007.

That would tell me that their list of 80k readers converts at less than 1% – even with a free, related resource on their own site. That would be me assuming they sent an announcement to their list when the forums launched… Interesting. Of course, you can buy advertising on NOBOSS but the page that answers Why Advertise With NOBOSS? … is “under construction”.

My point here was to give a thorough and unbiased review of NOBOSS.com, as requested. I hope that some of this information proves useful or helpful to you. Perhaps it gives you an idea of how people may be looking at your sites when determining whether to do business with you or purchase advertising from you.

Best,

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Category: Online Reviews

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