Archive for January, 2006
Behind plan, my adaptation and the Month in review
Barely a month into my 0 to independence plan, the Chinese New Year holiday is wreaking havoc on the plan. The demand of relationship added to that as well.
Already I’m behind plan for the last two weeks. Beside a personal short-coming that need improving, I seriously need to adapt and overcome.
So, I’m behind
- writing content
- weekly plan
- forthnightly idea
- forthnightly round up
Some of the original plans and thoughts had to be changed.
I was supposed to launch a new idea every 2 weeks. I believe this is still possible, but need more focus.
The last idea, Whois.la, was simple – brought it and made an introduction. A new design was made and should be ready this week.
The idea for week 5-6 was in the head but I might not pull it off, again because of the happenings in my offline life. Despite that I’m going to put in a filler idea.
The filler idea is really just that, to fill up the gap in my plan. It will be lightweight so that I can get a grip on my time and get back on track.
More reports on my progress, traffic, revenue, plans and idea coming up.
About Directory Submission
First, some backgrounder.
Online directories are very much like their real world counterparts. They are classified list of websites.
Two of the most well known directories are Yahoo and dmoz. Getting a listing in these 2 can mean a noticable increase in traffic and search engine ranking but it is not easy.
What about other directories?
There are countless other directories. Some are effective, some marginal, the rest worthless waste of time. But how do you know?
One useful method is to look out for personal testimonies or experiences. My plan is to also report my experience with directories on this blog as time goes by.
As countless as the directories are services that will help you submit to them. Coincident? Just say they mutually ensure eachother’s existence.
So, what about the paid inclusion and paid submission services?
Is Yahoo directory worth $299? Personally I have yet to use any paid service so I cannot comment from experience. Again, report will appear as if I ever try them.
More good readings:
Stop reading and start Blogging
An advice I will give myself today and those planning to make a living blogging.
The Internet can be a tremendous time waster. Links goes from one page to another, before you know it hours are burnt.
If ever there is a way to add up all those hours spent reading online, it woudn’t be surprise I spent a good portion of my last 10 years doing just that.
A typical scenario often starts off as follows:
- Proceed online with a valid objective in mind (say research for a topic, school report).
- A quick search revealed a number of results which are successively opened in windows (now tabs).
- Upon reading each result, more windows/tabs are sprawned from links within the page.
- Slowly, topic began to drift from related, to fairly related, to distantly related, to unrelated.
- Attention, interest level raises which drives more reading.
- More reading
Familar?
Bet I’m not the only one with the problem. How do you deal with it?
How to be the fastest glowing blog?
Ever wonder how some people are able to get their blog right off the ground and immediate into the Fast Glowing WordPress.com blogs list?
It is like they sign up for an account and the with next few posts they are on the list.
Well I thought it would be nice to know the secret. So I’m going to find out.
Let’s look at the top list today and collect some statistics
- SHARE
Topic: Mp3 download?
No. of post: 11
Google: 0 (using allmusic.wordpress.com)
Yahoo: 1 (using allmusic.wordpress.com)
MSN: 0 (using allmusic.wordpress.com) - arturogoga
Topic: Technology, games (in Spanish?)
No. of post: 24
Google: 1
Yahoo: 92
MSN: 38 - Squash
Topic: Technology, web2.0
No. of post: 20
Google: 1
Yahoo: 68
MSN: 534 - Jen’s thoughts
Topic: Freebies, technology, miscellaneous
No. of post: 30
Google: 1
Yahoo: 66
MSN: 81 - B(oot)log
Topic: Music, MP3 download links
No. of post: 6
Google: 1
Yahoo: 5
MSN: 11 - Pay Attention To Me!
Topic: Technology, photo, blogging, miscellaneous
No. of post: 50
Google: 1
Yahoo: 153
MSN: 429 - 家住杭州
Topic: Technology, audio/video, satellite tv code?, (in Chinese)
No. of post: 99
Google: 0
Yahoo: 1
MSN: 0
Obviously the data I’m looking at has no trend at all except that certain topics might prove to be extremely popular.
An 1 hour exercise, but no where near an answer. Any thoughts?
ToDo Week 4
Last week (week 3) really dampen my momentum. It proves beyond doubt that being a ProNetizen is a fulltime endeavour that tolerates no slacker.
Points learnt
- Get those content written!
- Focus on task at hand, not wander off surfing
- Find a mechanism to keep track of my time spend
- Be more realistic in terms of goals
- Get Whois.la redesigned
- Get content written (at least 2/day)
- More linking, promotion
- Research and write on topics
How much can a blog worth?
A lot it seems.
(Yes, I back in Singapore. Great to get some warmth and sunshine. Plus spending time with people that matters.)
Right, blog. According to The Mystery Blog, The Blog Herald is going for a cool USD72K. (This is confirmed according to the comment here.)
I’m not sure if this is the highest yet paid for a blog yet but it sure is a significant landmark in terms of blogging and online revenue.
Looking at the annals of the Internet, technology startup hogged the limelight in terms of attracting the big money. Little known to many, money are also made online on “simpler” things like domain names and now on blog.
This proves to me one thing:
There is more path to success online other than the technology path.
So if you are not a techno-wiz, take heart. Perhaps you can use your writing skill to good use. Perhaps your marketing skill. Perhaps your networking skill.
Get those idea working to your greatest strength!
Disruption in plan
This week is simply packed to the brim for me.
In my real world work life, we are moving office. We used to work in a home office, but we now moved to a office building. Still have lots of boxes to unpack.
Three more people joined our company! Two of them interns. That’s a 100% increase in head count. So I really had my hands full guiding them what to do.
If that is not enough, I am also looking for a place near the office to stay. I had to confirm the place, pack, move. All these before leaving for Singapore this Friday. Chinese New Year is just round the corner.
This is a big distruption, which mean I had to readjust my “0 to independence” plan accordingly.
Review of week 1-2
A quick round up of Week 1-2, this is long overdue.
2 weeks of hands-on traffic generation had given insight whereas before it was simply knowledge.
As you can see from the traffic graph, still a lot to be desired. Nothing close to revenue generating level yet.
Moving ahead there are still lots to learn. It will be critical in making sure I meet my target.
Next, whois.la.
ToDo Week 3
- Routines (8hrs)
- blogging content (10hrs, 2.5hrs/content)
- link building (2hrs/day)
- research, reading, surfing (2hrs/day)
Content coverage:
- Domain name backgrounder
- Audience Alignment
(open)Setting up and backgrounder on Whois.la- (open)
Routines
Commentary
Based on the last 2 weeks, the following were finetuned,
- cut content coverage to 4/week
- move tasks repeated every week to a separate routine section
- more specific time allocation
Idea for Week 3-4 – Whois.la
This is what I am going to gun for on week 3-4 – Whois.la.
Nothing new or ground-breaking about the idea. I had wanted to do it for a while and now looks like a perfect time to get it off the ground.
Background
I brought the domain whois.la end last year. So far I had just left it there with Adsense and affiliate links. It generates some income everyday from Adsense and none from affiliate yet.
Based on the current figures, I am able to recover the purchase price in 1.5 year.
Objectives
- Increase revenue so that it breakeven faster and contribute to my final revenue target.
- Improve website and evaluate site-extension options
To do
- clean up site presentation
- improve traffic, SEO activities
- do traffic analysis
Any ideas and suggestions about what I am doing are most welcome!
Financial Account for Online Revenue
Like most people, I hate keeping account. But when I start wondering where the money went, I wished I had kept an account. Ever wonder how many ProNetizen keeps account of their online earnings?
For the purpose at hand, I want to approach accounting from a single person, work at home perspective. Keeping it simple because we all want to spend our time blogging and surfing but doing account.
The basic of accounting is simple: revenue – expenses = profit/loss
Revenue
Sometimes also known as gross revenue, is the amount you received from, for example, AdSense or affiliate programs.
Expenses
It can get a bit complicated with what you want to include as expenses.To begin, let us understand indirect expenses. In order to earn revenue online, we got to have a notebook/computer, power supply, Internet connection. We might also have living expenses like food, housing. All these indirect enables us to create income online.
On the other hand, direct expenses are those that incurred directly from our activities. For example, domain name registration, hosting fee, transaction fee (like PayPal), bank charges (like cashing foreign cheque).
For my purpose and to simplify work, I consider only direct expenses for accounting.
Profit/Loss
Here I will clarify my revenue objective mentioned earlier. The target amount is really the net-profit not the gross revenue. So I will have to first take away all the expenses I had incurred.
So far so simple?
Using a spreadsheet you can create a simple account to track your real online revenue. Here are 2 templates to get you started:
- 59ideas-accounting.ods (OpenOffice Calc format)
- 59ideas-accounting.xls (Microsoft Excel format)
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
An often heard term if you are very active online, creating content. A very important term indeed if your additional objective is to earn revenue online.
This post is a backgrounder and added to make this project journal complete.
I had talked about submitting to search engines and how the top 3 search engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN are worth the attention. Most SEO focuses on these 3 search engines. Some even only one – Google.
In a nutshell, SEO refers to activities that influence the search engines.
Why influence search engine? The primary motive is to rank high on the search result so as to attract more visitors. The underlying general principle is traffic translates to revenue.
There are many ways, both good and bad, to influence the search engines. Some ways may work better on one search engine than others.
SEO activities can broadly be divided into 2 categories
- within the website
- outside the website
Within website activities includes
- meta key words and description
- content, copy writing
- linking
- url, domain name
Outside website activities mostly revolve around linking.
This is a basic list and is not exhaustive. Some practices had been consider standard practice while many are full of opinionated views.
A good place to learn more about SEO is SearchEngineWatch.
How to sign up and manage lots of website
My Web 2.0 Marketing post touches on using the many Web 2.0 services out there to help create network and promote your website.
Many of the services require you to sign up by creating a username and password. Most of the time email is required as well.
Today I share 2 ideas to help make it real easy to signup and manage all those accounts,
- Gmail
- KeePass Password Safe
Idea 1, Gmail, need no introduction.
The web email service by Google gives you plenty of space to store mails, tag your mails and most importantly zap all the spam.
Use Gmail and not your personal email especially if you are somewhat concerned about privacy.
(Anyone still needing invites can send an email to 59ideas, at gmail of course).
Idea 2, KeePass Password Safe, is nice, simple program that helps to save and track all those accounts your had created.
If you are like me, paranoid about using the same password for each service, KeePass can generates password which you just copy and paste to sign up.
To sign in, simply use the hotkey Ctrl-Alt-A to auto-fill the username and password.
No worries about keeping track of which site you signed up adn forgetting the passwords.
With these 2 ideas, you can now sign up all the services on the net and mange them with ease.
ps. Remember to share any new ideas and sites you found with 59 ideas.
digg storyRevenue Target revisited
In his plan for 2006 Ben Bleikamp stated
I’m going to develop a new blog in January or Feburary to flip, my goal is $3,000 in 2 months. It will require quite a bit of work with writing content, optimizing ads, and some SEO, but I think it’s possible.
That really put my revenue target into question. I am targeting $1000/month in a year and he is aiming $1500/month average in 2 months.
This is by no mean a “so can I” comparison but rather whether I am setting too low a target and under-achieving. Keep in mind that Ben certainly had much more experience. Can I acquire that in a year?
With just one week into the year, I will stay on course and review this again.
