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?
Posted September 18th, 2008
Things have not exactly been going to plan around here lately, I just seem to be going round in circles. I plan to work on some sites and have every intention of knuckling down with them, but then something comes up which severely limits my spare time and I just don’t get round to doing it. This has been going on for the last 6 weeks or so.
I have a fairly decent sized list of sites/projects that I would like to get into some kind of “live” state in the near future, and hopefully this time I can really get stuck into them. Part of that is also to be more active on this blog.
Making Time
This is the major stumbling block for me. Time. I’m not trying to make any excuses because I know there are people out there who are working a crazy number of hours to get their online empire off the ground, but I do find that time to spend on my online projects is just so hard to find.
I work full time, Monday to Friday, and I “enjoy” a 2 hour commute (each way), so that’s 12 hours out of my day. I also have a wonderful wife and three great kids who obviously want to spend time with me in the evenings and at the weekends, and I want to spend time with them too. That usually leaves me with some free time from about 10-11pm, and since I have to get up at 5am to start it all again, I’m usually a tad knackered by that point and can’t get my head around anything.
So, the plan…
Well since I moved house and acquired an extra hour (each way) commute I thought it would be a good idea to get myself a laptop so I could work during the 1 hour+ train journey. I was after an Acer Aspire One, but instead have managed to get my hands on a Lenovo X61 from work. Lovely. So this is a good start, giving me roughly 10 hours a week. That’s not bad.
I’m going to also try and actually take a lunch break every day (gasp!) and also use this time for online work. If that goes to plan, it’s another 4 hours (I play footie on Friday lunchtimes).
At weekends I’m going to try and set aside a couple of hours for me to lock myself away from distractions and get some work done then too.
All in all I’d like to be able to find at least 15 hours a week. I think in that time I could definitely get into the swing of things and start seeing some positive results, seeing as I’m barely spending an hour or two a week at the moment.
Getting Organised
This is another thing I need to work on. At the moment what I tend to do when I do get the odd hour is to work on whatever comes to mind at that moment. This usually means that each of my projects never gets a chance to gain momentum as it’s only getting the odd bit of attention here and there. I’m also terrible at keeping to-do lists, so never really have any good indicators of how that particular project is progressing.
I’ve now started a to-do list for each of my projects, along with some basic goals for them. As I complete each item on the list I’m hoping the sense of having achieved something will spur me on to keep it up.
I’ve also started to prioritise my list of projects, so I can see easily which ones I want to get rolling first and can then dedicate more time to those.
I was considering allocating specific blocks of time to specific projects as well, but I’m not sure how well that would work (do you do this? Any comments welcome).
So there you have it, this is my plan for helping me get back on track and start to get things done and hopefully see some results.
How do you make time to do your online work? Care to share any tips for freeing up those extra hours or organising your workload?
Posted August 25th, 2008
I’m back online at home now, but have only just now had a chance to sit down and figure out where I was at a few weeks ago. I’ve realised that at least one of my projects has passed a kind of important deadline, which I hope is not a killer. I’m going to try and work on that tomorrow and get it up to speed then hopefully make up for lost time on that one. This site is not selling anything and is free to use. It’s more of a hobby type site for me with potential for alot of returning visitors, so I hope to monetise it with affiliate banners and possibly adsense.
I’ve got a few others I should also be working on, mostly ebay/affiliate type sites, again I hope to find a bit of time in the next week or two to get back on track with those.
Although I will post an earnings report for this month, believe me it’s not going to be anything special at all, but I think this month has been pretty much a write off for online work/earnings so I’m not too worried about that, and hope to do much better next month.
I also want to try and find some time to post some helpful information up on this blog, I have a few posts in mind to start with but want to find enough time to make them half decent quality rather than incoherent ramblings.
That’s where I’m at right now, just getting the wheels in motion again. Hopefully you guys are faring better than me at the moment.
Posted August 18th, 2008
I’m back at work now after a week and a half off while we were moving house, and so I’m back on a normal Internet connection! Unfortunately it’s been a busy day in the office today so not much time to really get back into reading through my RSS feeds, checking on my sites etc. Also, hopefully our home broadband connection is being turned on tomorrow… so fingers crossed that goes without a problem.
As long as all goes well this week then I hope to get a post or two up here by the weekend, as well as work on my sites.
In terms of meeting this month’s goals, I think that is highly unlikely, at least in the making money online goals. It looks like it’s going to be a really really poor month (looking like around 10% of last month at the moment 
), but you never know what could happen in the next couple of weeks…
So, hopefully normal service will resume shortly and I can try and get back some momentum.
Posted August 10th, 2008
Actually, no, i’ll stick with the same goals, but… it’s going to be a bit harder going because I moved house on Friday and, as well as being in a totally new city, we have limited internet connectivity for up to 2 weeks. Ouch! This might sound stupid but it honestly didn’t dawn on me until yesterday that it’s going to be hard work getting things sorted for the next week or so, not to mention exploring our new surroundings, getting a feel for the place etc. And that added to the fact that we’ll hardly have any internet access has made me realise that maybe, just maybe, it might be a tad more difficult than I thought to achieve my online goals this month.
It’s obviously going to be harder to post here very often over the next week or two (has anyone tried using WP Admin from their Blackberry before?!), let alone work on other sites/projects, but we’ll see how it goes.
Rest assured, as soon as we’re settled and back online, i’ll re-double my efforts to try and make up for the lost time, i’ll keep the same goals in place, it will just be more of a challenge that’s all!
Posted August 3rd, 2008
I’ve been thinking lately that it’s about time I set myself some goals to aim for both in making money online and for this blog. The reasons for this are quite simple… 1) I think it will be motivating to be working towards something; 2) It will be a great way to track my progress, so I can look back when I’m a millionaire (stop laughing!) and see how far I’ve come.
I’ve never really formally set goals for myself before, so I want to try this out and start with some fairly modest goals for the month of August and see how I get on.
Online Earning Goals for August
Last month I thought wasn’t too bad at all for money earned online, but as I mentioned in my July Earnings post a large portion of that was from a cashback site (Greasy Palm) that, although very good for some quick cash, I’m not sure whether you could sustain any decent income from it following the initial spate of higher paying offers available. Keeping this in mind I’m actually going to set my August earnings goal to £50 ($98.70), less than what I managed to earn last month.
Although I will keep doing offers on this cashback site (and any other decent ones I can find), I would like to see my affiliate and adsense income make up a bigger percentage of this months total income. I’m still working on a few affiliate/adsense sites which are slowly but steadily starting to increase in traffic, so hopefully this will happen naturally.
Blog Goals for August
I really would like to build this blog into not only a journal of the things I am doing to make money online, but also as a helpful resource for others who are just starting out and need help to kick things off. I know there are plenty of blogs out there with tons of information on this subject, but I’d like to bring everything that I think would be helpful to a newbie into one place and try to have almost a step-by-step guide with plenty of specific details at each stage, which will walk anyone, no matter how technically minded (or not…), through what they need to do to get started.
This month I want to start this off with a couple of beginner articles with all the information I can find and links to some of the best resources out there, the ones that I’ve personally found the most helpful.
With regards to numbers, I’m still very low on the stats at the moment, but this month I want to start to go about changing that. Here are the goals:
- RSS Subscribers
Of course, getting massive amounts of people reading your RSS feed is one of the main things most bloggers are looking for. At the moment my feedburner account says I have a whopping 6 readers, so by the end of the month my aim is to have at least 20. I know what you’re thinking, “he’s crazy, no-one can get THAT many people to subscribe in just one month”, but I’ll give it my best shot anyway.
- Unique Visitors
Another highly regarded metric, and probably more important in my eyes as these are actually how many unique people are browsing on your site. Google Analytics tells me that I had 155 visits last month, or an average of 5 per day. Based on that, I’m going to set this goal at 250 visitors.
- Page Views
Again, Google Analytics says I had 349 page views last month. I’m not too impressed with that as it means that the average number of pages a visitor reads is only 2.25. I’m going to look into some ways of making the site more “sticky” and try and give people some reasons to stick around a bit longer. Hopefully this will also help with the RSS numbers.
I think that will do for this month. I’ll be a happy chappy if at least some of these can be met, but I’ll work hard and see how it goes.
Posted August 2nd, 2008
I’m quite pleased that I can already do a post like this, I didn’t really think I’d make much money online (if any) by this time so it’s quite nice to have made a little bit.
There’s not really much adsense/affiliate earnings just yet as I don’t yet have any one site that I can say is 100% complete, although I do have a bunch of site which I’ve been working on and have started getting traffic and the odd AdSense click or eBay lead.
It’s been a good month for PepperJam earnings mainly because of their blogger incentive bonus, but I’ve also managed one referral (woohoo!).
As you will probably notice I also added some ads to the sidebar and header of this blog. This was mainly a response to being approached about advertising, but I had been considering doing it anyway. I’d like to take this opportunity to say thanks to Market Leverage for being the first advertisers on this blog! So… thanks Market Leverage!
Apart from the above, I’ve also found Get-Paid-To (GPT) or “cashback” type websites can be an easy and fun way to earn a bit of cash online. I was contemplating not including this in my earnings post as it’s not the sort of thing I was thinking about when I started my “make money online” journey, but then I thought “well it IS money earned online, so why not?”. I know that I probably couldn’t earn a massive amount from this income stream, and it may not be possible to sustain a decent level of earnings every month (I’ll let you know how I do as time goes on…), but I do think it can be something that you can spend a couple of spare hours on during the month and make a little additional cash with. The site I signed up with and have used so far is Greasy Palm. This is a UK site, so is perfect for me, but I know there are plenty of these types of sites out there and plan to check some more out in August!
I didn’t have much in the way of expenses. I already have a hosting account which I can host unlimited domains on so no expense there. I bought 10 .info domains as GoDaddy had a sale on those, and this is what I’ve been building some of my sites on.
So, here’s the rundown of my online earnings this month. Drum roll please…. 
- Greasy Palm (cashback / GPT site) - £44.47 ($87.78)
This has been quite a fun way to earn some quick cash. Once you’ve signed up for the site you can find tons of (free in many cases) offers you can sign up for and get cashback. There is actually £59.47 in my Greasy Palm account but I did have to deposit £15 total in a couple of gaming sites to get some of the cashback (those sites gave a combined cashback of £32.50 - so I made £17.50 and got to have a bit of fun playing some games for money!).
- PepperJam Network - £18.74 ($37.00)
This great affiliate network not only has some really good affiliate programs available but also has some great ways to earn extra cash that I took advantage of last month. Apart from a $10 signup bonus I got just for joining them, I also got $20 in bonuses for blogging about their services. I also managed to get one referral through this site which I’m pretty pleased about.
- Direct Advertising - £10.13 ($20.00)
As you can no doubt tell I added some ads to the sidebar and site header, this was because I had an enquiry regarding advertising here. I didn’t think I’d get any advertising on this blog just yet so I’m happy about this as well.
- Affiliate Earnings - £0.65 ($1.28)
The only affiliate program that earned me anything last month was the eBay one. I’ve started setting up a few sites using my own mashup script (still in development… hopefully I can release something here in August), and one site in particular has been getting some clicks through to ebay items and a few people have gone on to make an eBay purchase. It’s only been low value items so far hence the low earnings, but hopefully this can get better this month.
- AdSense - £0.60 ($1.19)
Again, not really much to shout about but it’s still more than nothing . The Adsense earnings this month were from a few clicks on a couple of sites.
“Grand” Total = £74.59 ($147.25)
Expenses = £7.50 ($14.80)
Total Profit = £67.09 ($132.45)
Well, I don’t think that’s too bad at this early stage. If I could make at least this amount every month until the end of the year I think I would still class that as a relatively successful 6 months.
Next post… my make money online and blog goals! Keep an eye out for that one in the next day or so.
Posted July 27th, 2008
As many are no doubt aware Google has just completed their latest page rank update. As a result of this update this site has been dumped down from a PR 1 to PR 0. Now, i’m not too upset by this (although it would be nice to at least have kept the 1…) as I know the blog is new and has still got a long way to go so PR 0 is probably fair. I am, however, slightly surprised as I have had the PR 1 for a good while now, and before I started this blog the domain c-online.co.uk was just sitting there for a good few years not really being used for anything except the occasional script/site testing.
So, not really sure why I was given the PR 1 in the first place, but I do think it’s strange that now the domain is being used and the site is being updated fairly regularly, and is getting some visitors, Google have decided to take it away.
Anyone else had any weird/good/bad PR changes after this update?
Posted July 10th, 2008
As you may well have already noticed i’ve changed the blog theme! I think this new design is much cleaner and easier to read, and just generally looks better than the old one. This new look is based on the Corpo Geek theme, which i’ve changed a little bit to how I want it. I’m still tweaking it so don’t be surprised if you find that something changes quite suddenly.
Other updates
I’m still working on my own mashup software which I hope to have ready for at least a free release in the next couple of weeks (i’m also considering a paid “Pro” version). I seem to be working on this software more than actually trying to put together affiliate sites, but i’m enjoying it and hopefully it will make setting up those sites easier and be more profitable in the long run.
I’ve decided to try and post more often here, for this month i’m aiming for at least 12 posts (average of 3 a week), which I then would like to build on in future months once I get some momentum going.
I’m also starting to get a bit of cash in from my online endeavours, so I think July might warrant my first monthly earnings report! Ooh, getting exciting now!
