Posted February 28th, 2009
OK, it’s been a couple of months since I last posted and I feel pretty crap about that. I just haven’t been able to get the momentum going again on any online projects. That isn’t to say that I haven’t tried, I have spent the odd couple of days every now and again thinking the enthusiasm is coming back and then it just goes again very quickly, so frustrating!
I knew when I started this stuff that there would be times like this, but I always thought I’d be able to ride it out, but it’s proving a bit more difficult, and this is lasting way too long.
When I am going back to work on ideas I had months ago I’m just not seeing them as positively as I had before, which isn’t helping, and new ideas just don’t seem to be coming as freely as they did in the beginning.
Hmph. I didn’t want this blog to turn into somewhere for me to moan and whine about not getting anywhere, but it seems like that lately.
Anyone got any tips to try and turn this around?
Posted December 30th, 2008
No doubt you’ve already seen a bunch of these kinds of posts in the last couple of days… so I thought I’d better get mine in before everyone’s sick of them!
So, it’s been 6 or 7 months since I started this blog and other online endeavours, and no everything has really gone as I had hoped. Things started off quite slowly, then as I got into the swing of things the income and activity here picked up a bit, and then the last couple of months have really slowed down alot. All-in-all I think I’ve learned quite a bit, I just need to start putting it all into practice and really sticking with it.
There are various reasons for me slowing down lately, it started when I was out of the country for a week in October, I really lost the momentum at that time, and rather than throwing myself back into my online projects I started doing other things in my free time (mainly gaming…). Since then I just haven’t had the motivation to go back to my sites, I just haven’t been able to get my head into it, mind just goes blank when I sit down with the intention of working on something.
Anyway, evil games. But… I will change this in the new year!
Of course this time of the year has a habit of getting people to make promises for the year to come, and so seems like a good time to make my own resolutions and set some goals for 2009.
Here we go then, here are my online goals for 2009:
- To get one site up and getting traffic every month. Now this doesn’t necessarily mean each site will be very big or very involved from myself. Some may just be quite static affiliate type sites, some ebay/amazon mashup sites, but I also do hope to try one or two bigger projects.
I have just made a list of all the domains I own, most of which were bought in the last 6 months, and it turns out I have 25 of the buggers… so I aim to work with those rather than buy new ones, after all I did have ideas for them all in the first place!
- To be making £300/$500 per month regularly by the end of the year. May not seem a high goal to some, but to me if I could do this by this time next year then I’ll be very happy. I know I can do it, I just need to focus more on my online work.
- To learn how to create WordPress plugins. This might be really simple, I don’t know, I haven’t looked yet, but it’s something I do want to learn so that I can start to enhance my WP sites properly rather than editing the WP files. I already know PHP fairly well so I’m hoping this might be something I can get out of the way early in the year and build on. You never know, I might even be able to create some really good plugins that people would actually pay money for!
- Start to regularly contribute to blogs and forums in the niche(s) I am interested in or will be working in. At the moment this means MMO sites, web development type sites, and maybe some general techie/gadget sites. These are what I’m interested in, but I will also add others related to whatever projects I work on. I do enjoy visiting and posting on blogs and forums but just don’t make time to do it very often. I think this could really help to promote my sites and get traffic too, as well as hopefully helping other people and maybe learning a thing or two myself as well
Those are the main ones I have at the moment, and I think if I really work at it then it can be done. These aren’t massive goals, but a good start I think, and when I get to them then it will be a good starting point to raise the bar considerably.
I hope you’ve all had a great 2008, and wish you all the best in your plans for 2009! Feel free to comment and let me know what your goals are for 2009.
Posted December 24th, 2008
Just wanted to jump on here to quickly wish everyone a Happy Christmas!
Have a great day!
Posted December 18th, 2008
Yes, it’s been very quiet indeed recently with all of my online activity.
I fear I’m very close to losing all momentum for doing this stuff, but I really want to try and get back into the swing of things. It’s strange, because when I’m doing other things I’ll come up with some ideas that I think are quite good, and sometimes just think about things I could/should be doing on my current projects/sites and I get a bit excited, but when it comes to sitting down and actually doing some work all motivation just goes out of the window! I literally go brain-dead and can’t focus at all on what I’m trying to achieve.
Maybe the problem is that I’m not trying to work on something I am really really interested in. I’ve tried things that I’m a bit interested in but nothing that I have really go into.
I don’t know. I just hope I can find something to pull me out of this slump, because I really want to make a go of making money online.
What I have decided to do, in an effort to try and get more active on this blog and hopefully spur me on to work on my other projects, is to re-define this blog a little bit. Nothing drastic, I still want to discuss how I am doing in my MMO efforts and post about relative information, tips etc., but I may also post about other topics, some will kind of go hand-in-hand with the MMO stuff (like web programming), and some may not (general tech kind of stuff - nothing too serious though, I’m not THAT much of a geek ).
I hope that doesn’t adversely affect my traffic or subscribers here, maybe it will help, I don’t know, but I think it will help me get a bit of drive back if I’m posting more regularly here. I’m obviously not trying to become a “thought leader” in a specific niche here, so figure it can be a more relaxed and personal blog which I’ll enjoy posting on.
I’d be glad to hear what others’ opinions are?
Anyway, that’s that out of the way… you never know, the next post might actually be upbeat!
Posted October 19th, 2008
I arrived back from New York yesterday and have had a nice surprise, I won $100 in the Tyler Cruz Cash Giveaway! Not bad for simply signing up to the newsletter of a blog I already read regularly! Thanks Tyler!
Apart from that welcome boost to my online earnings this month things aren’t really progressing as I’d hoped, adsense isn’t really up to much lately and neither are others (ebay, in-text ads etc.), but there’s still some time to improve those so we’ll see how that goes.
I should get back to my regular posting and of course working on my sites next week and hopefully can kick things back into gear.
Posted October 15th, 2008
There is a good reason that I haven’t posted anything here so far this week… and that’s because I’m currently visiting New York! It’s not all fun though, I’m here to visit the NY office of the company I work for, but still I have the evenings to get about and see the city which is cool.
Of course because of this I’m not really going to have much time to post this week, or do much work on my sites. However, I did just check analytics and adsense stats and the new technology site I created last week seems to have just been indexed by google in the last couple of days, already started to get visitors searching for my main keywords and had one adsense click so far, so fingers crossed this just gets better and better. I’ll work next week on adding more content and hopefully I’m onto a winner!
Hope things are going well for you guys.
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 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 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?
