Posted October 6th, 2008
You may have noticed that there have been a few changes here in the last couple of weeks so I thought I’d explain what they are and why I did these.
Ads
While I have had ads on here before, I never really formally announced that you can buy ads on this blog, or set up a page with information for prospective buyers. To be honest, I didn’t think it was worth it at the moment, but then I got to thinking, someone did show interest once before, so how do I know others wouldn’t be? As you’ll see on my Advertise page I offer ad placements on this blog at a very low price. I’m open and honest about my site stats, because I’m not out to con people into paying to get their ads up, I just want true stats there so people can make an informed decision. Also I hope that as the blog progresses this will be visible in the stats so you can see that it is growing!
Increased Posting
I’ve been making a very real effort to post regularly here as it definitely slowed right down during August and I really don’t want this site to just fizzle out like so many other things I’ve started in the past. I’ve been trying to post around 4 times a week, and so far I’ve been managing it. The idea is to get more comfortable with it and obviously get more content up here. I’m sure the quality of what I have to offer here will only get better and as I learn and progress into this journey of making money online!
Additions to the Sidebar
I’ve changed the “Subscribe to RSS” bit at the top to stand out a bit more, and have added an option to subscribe by email. I’ve also added a list of some blogs that I read regularly. Although I won’t simply exchange links with other blogs, I will add any blogs to the list that I enjoy reading and return to often.
CommentLuv
I’ve just installed the CommentLuv plugin, so every time you post a comment on here you will have the option for it to also include a link to your most recent post.
What do you think of the changes? Will they help the blog or turn people off? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
Posted October 2nd, 2008
Here we go then, my October project, earnings and blog goals.
Earnings Goals
This month I would like to see around a 50% increase in earnings on last month, so I’m looking at about £20-£25 ($35-$45). Because I’m now not going to include any GPT earnings (like Greasy Palm), this should be a good little challenge as I’ll have to try and coax my other income streams (Adsense, affiliates, in-text ads, direct advertising here…) into performing a bit better.
Project Goals
In terms of goals for my online projects, the main one is to get at least one new site I’m working on up and running and to start getting traffic to it. This will probably be the real estate niche site I’ve mentioned before, as part of the challenge over at NicheToRiches. I still haven’t got very far with it, not even really narrowed down my niche, so there’s lots of work to be done here.
I’m also going to take one of my existing sites and try to double the traffic and income from it. This site is in an IT niche which I think has some room for my site in there. It’s getting a trickle of traffic, but the site is only really very basic at the moment. I am going to work towards writing 5-10 articles this month to try and increase the organic search traffic, and also see about doing a little bit of blog and forum marketing, and submitting to stumbleupon, delicious etc.
Apart from those two sites, I would also like to spend a little bit of time looking into another possible income stream which I’ve been getting increasingly interested in these days, domain flipping. If I feel confident enough that I know what I’m doing I’d like to try one domain flip before the month is out. If I do I’ll be posting here about it along the way and sharing my experiences.
Blog Goals
I’m quite pleased with this blog last month. It’s still not getting lots of traffic, but it has increased on the last couple of months which is obviously the right direction to be going in!
Here’s a quick list of my goals for this blog for October.
- To get 10 RSS readers
Currently 6 
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- To make at least 15 posts
Last month I managed 10 posts
- To get 300 unique visitors
Last month there were 190 uniques
- To get 600 page views
Last month there were 435 page views
- To break into the top 1,000,000 on Alexa and Technorati
Alexa has currently shot up (not good) from the 1.2m mark when I checked on September 24th, to 1.5m as of 30th September. Not sure why this has happened…
These might be very modest goals, but I know that I’ll be sorely disappointed if I was aiming for this blog to instantly gain 100’s of readers and 1000’s of page views. It’s going slowly at the moment, but at least it’s going in the right direction.
So, those are all my goals for this month. I’m going to work hard to achieve these, and hopefully that hard work pays off.
Do you set yourself goals? If you do, do you normally reach them or find you set them too low/too high? It would be great to hear from you.
Why not subscribe to my RSS feed and follow my progress this month? You never know, you just might learn something new along the way :)
Posted October 1st, 2008
I know, this is the post you’ve been waiting for all month, the c-online earnings report. Well, the wait is over, it’s October 1st so that means it’s time for my September Online Earnings!
Seriously now… I have only really got stuck in properly to the stuff I want to be doing in the last week or so, so I haven’t really seen much progress in terms of earnings just yet. However, a little trickle of passive cash is coming in… I just need to turn that into a flood.
- Greasy Palm (cashback / GPT site) - £10.00 ($17.78)
Not really done much on this site as I think the number of offers I can actually do are drying up, and I really don’t want to be buying new home insurance, car insurance, 10 credit cards and taking out loans just to get some cashback! I think this is probably the last time I’ll include this kind of site in my online earnings as it’s not really what I’m after.
- Affiliates - £1.93 ($3.43)
Again, the only affiliate income I’ve made is from eBay. OK I guess since I haven’t touched the site that uses it in about 2 months.
- AdSense - £1.46 ($2.60)
A bit less than last month, I was hoping for at least a little bit of an increase but I guess that will come when I start getting visitors to my sites!
- In-Text Advertising - £2.23 ($3.98)
I’m pleasantly surprised at this figure as it’s alot more than last month, and hopefully will keep on increasing as I build up traffic.
Total = £15.62 ($27.80)
Expenses = £0.00 ($0.00)
Total Profit = £15.62 ($27.80)
Again, nothing to shout about, but I am pleased that my passive streams of income have increased a little on last month, and hopefully they will continue to increase as I keep working at this. I am aiming for October to be the first full month that I work on my online projects without any major interruptions and fingers crossed the earnings will reflect that.
How did you do last month?
Posted September 30th, 2008
When I started this blog and my journey into making money online, I had a few long term goals in mind. These are the big, life changing goals that I would love to reach through online earnings.
I tried not to be too greedy, but they are long term goals so I may as well aim high! These might not even seem that much to ask to other people out there, but to me they would be absolutely huge things to achieve.
- To Earn Enough to Buy a House
Yes, this is very high up the list of wants. I’m 26 and live in the UK, haven’t got much money saved and have a wife and three kids to support, and we currently rent a house. With the housing market the way it is, not to mention the state of the economy as a whole, I can’t see us being able to buy a place in the near future. So, a real long shot this one, but this goal is to be able to buy a house outright! I reckon maybe £200,000 or so should do it
- To Quit My Day Job
This one is probably the number one goal on most people’s list. I think for my online income to be able to just equal my current salary would not be enough, before I would quit my day job I would want to be consistently earning about 150% of what I currently do at work. I would imagine I would need this to cover things like days I’m unable to work or on holiday, or just as an added bit of breathing space should things start going belly up!
Of course it would be fantastic to work from home, work my own hours, spend more time with my family, and get rid of this 4 hour round trip into the office!
- To Make a Million
This one isn’t really as important to me as the ones above (although would obviously be nice ), but if I can achieve the other two then hopefully I’d be on the way to the £1,000,000 mark anyway
Each month I am trying to set short term goals for my online endeavours to help me stay on track and keep a check on my progress. Each milestone I reach is just another step closer to those big goals!
What are your long term goals? Are you as greedy as I am ?
If you want to see how I get on in my journey towards these goals then why not subscribe to my RSS feed?
Posted September 30th, 2008
It’s been a bit quiet on here for the last few days, and that’s because I’ve been having some trouble with WordPress on my web hosting which is driving me insane. I can’t post, when I hit the Save button I get taken to a 404 “not found” page. This still isn’t sorted but hopefully will be soon, in the meantime I’ve just discovered a decent-looking app called BlogDesk which allows me to write a post offline then publish it straight to my blog when I’m ready. Hopefully this works well and my WP issues won’t be such a major problem.
It has been really frustrating me because I’ve made a big effort in the last week or two to post regularly and have a few posts lined up that I’ve wanted to get out in the last few days. Oh well…
Assuming this post makes it up to the blog without any issues then there should be some more on it’s way soon.
Posted September 25th, 2008
Since I started this blog one of the things I’ve thought about is selling advertising on it. Now I know, as it’s still fairly new and doesn’t pull in a high number of visitors at the moment, that advertisers aren’t going to want to pay a lot for the potentially low exposure, but I still wanted to put up an “Advertise here” type page to at least give people the option, so this is what I’ve done! You should notice the “Advertise” tab in the menu at the top of this page.
As a way to kick start advertising here you can now get your hands on either a 468×60 ad at the top of the page (next to the title - only one available), or a 125×125 ad on the right sidebar (six slots available) for one month for just £1 (less than $2)!
I’m working hard at the moment to get more exposure for this blog, get more traffic and of course get the readership up, so why not try out an ad spot here? There isn’t much to lose, it will only cost you £1 and there is no obligation to renew if you feel that it’s not worth it.
To allow people to make an informed decision on whether or not to advertise, I’ll be including the last few months of stats including Alexa rank, Technorati rank, Google pagerank, number of unique visitors and number of pageviews. Hopefully from now on this will show increases in the numbers month to month and show advertisers that the blog in on the up. I was in two minds as to whether I should include my stats at the moment since they are so low, but I’m not trying to hide anything or con anyone into buying up ad spaces so I thought there’s no reason not to.
As well as ads I am also going to try my hand at paid reviews. Right now you can get a well-written, honest review of your site with a minimum of 500 words for just £5 (under $10)!
I’m not offering subscription options for the ad slots at the moment as the prices are likely to change as the blog does get more traffic, but this is something I will look at in the future.
If you’re interested in buying any advertising or paid review on here then please take a look at the Advertise page.
Posted September 24th, 2008
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m the type of person who will come up with an idea and fling myself into a project with tons of enthusiasm, but then I’ll come up with another idea and do the same thing, leaving my original project to wither away. I do this all the time and the end result is that I rarely get one site up and into what I would consider a finished state.
If I’m honest then it’s probably after the initial excitement about the idea dies down, or when it gets to the “boring” bits that I move on from a project. I guess I need to learn how to grit my teeth and just get on with it when I start to get this feeling.
This really does frustrate me as there are loads of ideas which I’d originally had high hopes for that I’ve just left for dead in the past. I think I need to stop this cycle now!
What I’m going to do is to pick two projects (maybe three… we’ll see) and only work on those until they are complete. Anything else that I currently have in my list, or any new ideas I come up with, can go into a queue and be worked on once one of those 2-3 slots is free’d up. Hopefully this will mean I can turn out sites much quicker, and more importantly that they will actually be complete, working sites. I’m hoping it will also help me stay focused rather than have a million things on the go.
For now the sites I want to work on are my real estate niche site, an IT related niche site and possibly, if I can squeeze it in, a mashup site that I am working on with a friend. There is enough to do on all of these to keep me going, and if I stick to only these then I think I will start seeing some good progress over the next few weeks or so.
Are you like me with many projects on the go, or do you tend to see each one through before starting on the next?
Interested in following my progress? Why not subscribe to my RSS feed and learn from my mistakes and successes.
Posted September 23rd, 2008
WordPress producing duplicate content is an issue which I’ve heard about a couple of times recently, and it seems to me that it’s something that every blogger should spend a little time in correcting.
The problem is that, by design, WordPress takes your posts and reproduces that content in archive pages, tag pages and feeds. Search engines don’t like duplicate content and will typically exclude pages they see as duplicates. But, they seem to have a habit of indexing those copies of your posts, and not the actual posts themselves. Not only that, but the duplicates that have been indexed don’t get very good rankings at all.
As Paul from themakemoneyonline.net has pointed out, this could be a simple, 5 second fix. However, while fixing the issue on your site might only take a few seconds, reversing the effects in the search engines may take considerably longer while they re-index your pages, as Kirsty found out here.
I think the word needs to be spread about this because as Kirsty proved during her testing, this problem can have a drastic effect on a sites organic traffic numbers, and therefore the overall success of the site.
I’ve actually found that if I search Google for pages it has indexed from my site that alot of my posts are there, so hopefully this hasn’t affected me too much so far, but I am going to be implementing Paul’s fix and also some of the suggestions from Kirsty and hopefully avoid this problem.
Hopefully this also helps some of your guys out there.
Liked this post? Why not subscribe to my RSS feed.
Posted September 22nd, 2008
If you haven’t already been there then you should definitely head over to NicheToRiches and take a look.
The idea behind the site is that affiliate marketers can all get together there and participate in some friendly competition to help motivate them to getting their affiliate sites up and running.
I think this is a great idea, especially for a newbie affiliate marketer like myself as you can get some really invaluable tips along the way through posts and comments by other people there.
Empress (who runs the site) also allows members to publish their own posts, so you could share your own experiences with the other members. To me, in theory, this could turn into an excellent resource as you could see what people have tried, whether or not that worked, and what they’ve learned along the way. In practice people might not be that willing to share too much info for fear of giving their top secret ideas away. I still think that people could share their experiences without giving too much away, and it could still be very helpful.
I’ve joined up and I’m currently in the early stages of putting together a site as part of the recent Real Estate challenge. Already the posts by Empress have helped me alot in figuring out how to go about things and get the ball rolling.
Again, I think the idea of this is great and if people would just share a little bit about what they’ve learned, what worked, what didn’t etc. then the site could turn into a little gold mine of information for affiliate marketers.
Posted September 19th, 2008
I’ve come to realise that I have a bit of a problem which eats up a good amount of my online time… I think I’m obsessed with checking stats!
Even though none of my sites has really got off the ground yet, all get very very low levels of traffic (if any), I still end up spending a fairly long time going through stats for them! It’s crazy since there’s nothing really there to check!
So, I’ve decided that I need to nip this in the bud so that when I do start seeing some better traffic numbers I’m not spending all day staring at tables and charts rather than actually working.
Allocating Time To Check Stats
This is one of the things I mentioned in my last post, allocating time to each individual project. I think this should also be the case for checking on my site stats. What I think I will do is allow just 1 hour per week to check them. It’s going to be hard for a stat-junkie like myself, but I’m willing to give it a try!
Maybe when things have picked up and there is more of a need to keep a better eye on traffic numbers etc. then I’ll do it a couple of times a week, but at the moment I know there’s no point in me checking every single day.
How often do you check yours?
