Devil Works

One of my biggest problems is that I’m constantly changing my plans. If you read back through this blog I’ve presented some ideas that I’ve never actually got off the ground.

If you read back to the retirement project that was a grand plan of 100 blogs earning $80 a month from text link ads. Although I think the theory is good. This has died for a couple of reasons. The first is that it’s too hard for one person to maintain 100 different blogs. The second that is I was having trouble getting any decent PR or traffic to them, hence no link sales.

So my current plan is to maintain 4 blogs including this one. Three of them will get regular (weekly/daily) attention, the other one is what I’d call a side project that I’ll put some time into when I get a chance. My aim is to have the four well enough ranked that I make a few bucks from text link ads and a few more bucks from paid reviews. I think I’m doing okay with the paid reviews for now, I’ve avoided quite a few that are completely irrelevant to the blogs I have, even though the cash would be nice.

The other two projects I have on the go are an online workers resource, and a massive recipe site. This needs a lot of programming which I’m not in the right frame of mind to do right now but with the plans I have I can’t see it not working. At the moment I have about 40 recipes on it and it generates a paltry $2.50 a month. I’m calling it a proof of concept, I have access to approximately 170,000 recipes and if I manage to get the same sort of traffic to each of those pages then I’m looking at around $10k a month….. not so paltry now.

I know I’m not giving too much away but that’s the name of the game. I made a mistake a long time ago that cost me a lot of money. I had worked out how to get my sites onto the first page of AOL search. I started to share that knowledge with close friends whose sites weren’t competing with mine. That was all good, I didn’t have enough hours in the day to own AOL, but the close friends would tell their close friends and sooner or later everyone knew and the gig was up.

I’m a lot more careful now about who I tell what !

Something I have to spend a lot more time on is traffic generation, I’m really slack at it, these days I write something and hope the search engines find it. I know it’s not the best way to go but when I already spend a large part of my day job in front of a computer, It limits my motivation after hours. I really prefer the creative part of it as it doesn’t seem like such a chore.

Don’t forget my Alternative Alexa Train Idea, I haven’t been completely slack on building traffic.

Install the Alexa toolbar !

My opinion is that Alexa rankings are a load of crap. However, other sites use the Alexa ranking to calculate advertising rates and whether or not you are accepted into some affiliate programs.
I’ve had sites I haven’t even launched yet go up half a million spots in the rankings just because I was working on them with the Alexa toolbar installed.

If you really want to game the system get ten friends to install the toolbar and ask them to surf your site a few times a week.

Consider this, you’ve had a bloglines account for a while, you start reading about how good Googles reader is and you decided to set up an account. Being moderately clever you export your feeds from bloglines and load them into google. Seeing as bloglines is free you don’t worry about closing your account there but you find google so good that you’re not using your bloglines account at all.

But you’re still subscribed to both.

So as far as feedburner is concerned you’re now counted as two subscribers.

Now if your like me and can count your subscribers on both hands, even after a small accident with a power saw, then the stats don’t really matter. I’m not using them as a claim to fame, nor am I selling advertising based on my feed readership.

However recently John Chow and Darren Rowse couple of bloggers that I read reguraly reported there subscriber stats jumping in leaps and bounds.

I’m not having a go at these guys, they’re just reporting what they are seeing, but I’ve done a little testing and I have a strong feeling that the subscriber figures from feed burner are a little fudgy.

At least Feed Burner responded to the hype surrounding the increase in subscriber numbers and have given a pretty good explanation of what the numbers really mean.

update: I Found another blogger that thinks his readership has gone up by 50% since Feed Burner started including Google results. I don’t think so.

I’m a forum member and occasional poster at Wicked Fire. I was surprised when I saw this post in my bloglines feed that the owner had been offered $16 Million.

I checked out this thread and it appears to be entirely true. The owner, Jon, turned down the offer without a second thought which has surprised a lot of people.

Personally I can’t see the value of $16M in the forum as it currently stands. Jon said himself that it’s an incredible offer for a site that doesn’t have any income yet. The site is less than a year old which makes it more amazing that it received such a high offer.

So why did he turn it down ? you’ll have to have a look at all thread for all the reasons, but Jon basically says that he didn’t need the money and has bigger plans for the site.

What it does however show is the value of User Generated Content (UGC) and how much web 2.0 investors are valuing it at. I’ve got my own plans for a UGC site when I have the time and motivation to get it programmed. I don’t think it’s going to be ready for the web 2.0 demi bubble but hopefully it will gather some interest when web 3.0 comes around.

I have a full time job and I’m committed to getting my online business to the stage where I don’t need the full time job. I guess what I’m really saying is that I spend a lot of time in front of a computer.

This week I’m on leave from the full time job, not actually taking holidays but using time in lieu that I’ve accumalated over the last couple of months.

When I decided to take this time away from work, I had great plans of spending the whole week working on my sites. That was until I sat down and wrote a list of all the things I needed to get done.

Some of them are “must do” items, and some of them are “should do them now cause it’s easier while I’m on leave” items.
Well today I did something that wasn’t on the list. The sun was shining, the sky was blue and the thought of sitting inside bashing away at a computer all day was beyond depressing.

I dug out my snorkelling gear that hadn’t seen the light of day for a good nine months and hit the road looking for a nice spot to dive for some fresh abalone. After a bit of driving in circles I settled on an isolated spot and it was heaven. I had the place to myself, and less than 40 metres from where I’d parked the car I found the abalone I was looking for.

While this might not be everyones idea of a great day out, It was reinvigorating for me. I learn’t that I really want the freedom to do what I want when I want and it reinforced my belief that the net is the best way to do this.

If I was at my regular job it would be difficult for me to decide at midday that the weather was nice, and I should leave work for the day to do something I really enjoy. I want the freedom to hit the water any day I choose.
So I guess what I’m saying is that no matter how goal focussed you are, It’s worth taking time out. It refocuses your thoughts and goals and gives you a refreshing break from your daily druggery.