Archive for December 2006
The end is nigh (for 2006)
With only a few hours to go in 2006 I decided to do my final bit of email checking for the year. Having done that I think I just about have time to reflect on the year:
What happened in 2006
As I mentioned before, it has not been as productive as I might optimistically have liked. My main website I had been trying to have developed hit several barriers and set backs. The site is still not ready, has cost me lots of money and on completion may not be the all-singing all-dancing appilcation I was after.
Other projects were started and not finished. Yet more sites were developed and not marketed properly (including this one!)
Reading that makes it sound like a complete failure of a year! But I have learned lots; I have experienced the down falls of using cheap developers, learnt about the time needed in managing such projects - even without being directly involved in the coding or graphical design. Most importantly I am more aware of what makes money and what doesn’t!
I have sites which have built up natural traffic from search engines, experimented with different marketing strategies and with different affiliate programs to maximise the income the sites can generate. These now make a steady monthly profit with no extra work on my part. I have also recently been able to renogotiate and increase the commission some earn. Throughout the year monthly profit has increased and I expect this trend to continue in to the new year. I hit my turnover target, and from next year will be earning more than had I continued in my job (taking generous pay rises in to account!)
Though I did not make any real impact on £1million I am pleased the way things have panned out. I have networked and met several very useful contacts. Profitable sites are almost self sufficient freeing up my time to concentrate on other exciting joint ventures with some of these contacts. Best of all these do not require huge investment which would eat up the profits from the areas which currently make money.
So I say bring on 2007!!! Time to have a few drinks now…. just before I go, since most people will try to sing this later I decided to look up the words. I cannot vouch for the accuracy as I previously knew no more than 2 lines. Enjoy.
Old lang syne
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?
Chorus:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne.
We’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp!
And surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
We twa hae run about the braes
And pou’d the gowans fine.
We’ve wandered mony a weary foot,
Sin’ auld lang syne.
We twa hae sported i’ the burn,
From morning sun till dine,
But seas between us braid hae roared
Sin’ auld lang syne.
And ther’s a hand, my trusty friend,
And gie’s a hand o’ thine;
We’ll tak’ a right good willie-waught,,
For auld lang syne.
Social Bookmarking
It has been a couple of mornings since the madness of Christmas Day. I am pleased to say I was clearly a very good boy and santa brought me all I wanted, and more! I’ve just about managed to find time to begin to do a spot of work on my trusty laptop.
“Work” is perhaps a bit exagerated. I have not used my laptop much in the past few months - I did not have the right or latest software on here and my bookmarks were very unorganised. So all I have done is try to sort both of these issues out. This alone has taken me a few hours. Despite having done nothing productive towards my business ventutres it has given me the opportunity to do a bit of experimentation…..
On this blog I have included the facility for people to add a link to del.icio.us, digg and furl. These sites are collectively know as Social Bookmarking sites. What they allow you to do is instead of bookmarking to your web browser, you add the webpage to your account on your chosen social bookmarkign site and “tagging” it. In this day of mobile computing, people using many different compouters at the office, home, friends houses and internet cafes it is useful to have all your bookmarks accessible from one remotely accesible place - as I am discovering. What makes these sites even better is that each time you add a bookmark, you are effectively adding a vote for it. This allows you to search for pages, stories etc and see how popular they are.
I am new to this and just experementing with a couple - delicious and digg. Both I think will prove useful to me not only for personal organisation, but also for promoting and marketing my sites, including this one! Because I am no expert I wont give advice on which I think is the best, or even how to use them. If you wish to do a little more reading on the subject I found these interesting.
Social Bookmarking Tool Comparison
What Happens When The Simple Dollar Meets Digg/Lifehacker/etc.: A Special Report
I now have to sign off. I must pack up, and start our journey to the next stop in our little family christmas tour!
Blogging Rules
Firstly - I have just noticed it has turned 1am, so it is Christmas day. Don’t worry, I wont get all festive on yo asses just yet. I will save that for tomorrow after I have consumed some alcohol.
Have spent a few more hours today working on this site - a few cosmetic changes and more importantly changes to the rss feed, now hopefully easier to read. One new feature is the email subscription which sends my latest post out via email. Cunning!
The About page has also been updated to provide a more detailed timeline of the events leading up to this very blog.
I have also spent some time reading about blogging ettiquette, methods and rules. Alot of it is obvious, but still useful to have it pointed out.
Heres a little summary about Good Blogging:
Apparently the title should relate to the topic. Currently I am not alone in thinking blogging rules! AND I am writing about the rules of blogging, so…… suitable enough title?
You should write something which your audience want to read. Well I have very few visitors so it is difficult to know what they want. If the blog is personally linked to you then I think it is probably a good idea that your writing style should refelct your character. Some of my friends pointed out that I was failing to do that on my blog. You know who you are - mofos!!
You should link to other blogs and articles which are relevent to the topic bringing and spreading readers through the blogsphere. Here is a link to a post in another of my blogs. It is not strictly 100% relevent, but in it I do mention about this blog, and here I am now writing about that blog. The two must therefore be somehow related. If you can figure out which I wrote first let me know.
Blog regularly. This is something that many bloggers do not bother with. If you have something to say the say it! I guess the theory is once you’ve got a captive audience you need to keep them interested with new material. Similarly you need to attract new readers by giving them something new and up to date to read.
Categorize your blog. This is something I have not done particularly well, I could do with a few more categories for tagging my posts with. It is on my list of things to fix. I’ve not done a huge amount of blogging yet so its not been an issue until now.
In her More Traffic, More Readers: More Work! post Patsi Krakoff, editor of coachezines.com,
recommends using a provocative title. I put this last as clearly I have failed with the title of this blog!
Write good! If, what you can do is make a good written blgo. Then it will be betterer to read. Came across this amusing article which demonstrates it very well!
Christmas, Business and RSS
Only two days left before many of us celebrate the birth of Jesus by exchanging gifts, eating too much and getting drunk. Most people will have finished work yesterday. I however will spend today and tomorrow doing some last minute work. I will then not be doing anything major until the new year.
The last couple of weeks have been extremely hectic for me working on a few fronts…
As you may have noticed I’ve made a few layout changes to the blog. This is to make it easier to navigate and read. Mainly it is to entice new readers. The original reason for this blog was afterall to help me promote some of my sites, so I need readers to do this! The changes should also make it easier for me to market. I won’t go into detail about the various marketing methods I will use just yet, but I should quickly mention RSS.
On the right you will see lots of buttons to add the RSS feed to a web based reader. Subscribing to a feed automatically downloads the latest blog to your reader or web based reader, meaning you do not need to visit this site to read it. Very useful if you regularly read several blogs.
Yaro Starak has written a great article - What is RSS and How Do I Use It? about this. I have to say thanks to Yaro, have taken some inspiration and ideas from your blog already!
I have also started doing some marketing for World Dating Partners, a site I have used very succesfully to build some of my own dating sites. If you are interested its worth a look. To give you an idea setting up a basic site takes a few minutes and with simple marketing can start earning quickly.
I have further been working on Affiliate Dating Sites. No great cosmetic changes to the site, or even a great deal of extra content. Just behind the scenes work. Talking to companies who run different affiliate programs, improving my statistic tracking software and putting a business plan to paper.
My other 2 website projects in development are moving forward. Unfortunately due to my time restraints the latest delays have been completely my fault. I need to work on some templates for one site, and fully review the other. Something I hope to do at some leisure over my Christmas break.
Whats New?
December already and Christmas just round the corner. Sadly I dont feel like I have achieved a great deal this year. I dont think there is much happening over the few weeks to change that…
… BUT I shall reflect on the year later as it is still a little premature to do so.
This is the latest since my last blog:
MySpace - now over 5K friends, but slowing down as I’ve not been on it much since I recieved an email saying I was to have some privilages taken away. Not sure why, but someone else said they had the same thing, so hopefully it will be back to normal soon.
New Sites
Site 1 - Despite haveing a launch date of over a week ago, minor changes are yet to be made before can go live on my whacky site idea.
Site 2 - I have two admin areas to go through for the site I have been commissioning since April last year! This is the third set of developers working on it and they started scratch. The site is diverging further from my original spec - especially with regards to being well coded and modular. Even the basic key requirements seem to be beyond the programmers grasp, I am constantly going backward and forwards trying to get them to produce something true to the spec. The result is a mish mash of badly structured pages and database, I dread to think what the back end code is like.
As ever it seems impossible to keep to any sort of timescales that THEY set, or even just to get developers capable of understanding my requirements. Had I built the site myself I would be finished by now - instead I took the decision to employ “professionals” - and this is the result!!
Quite frankly it makes me fucking sick! I will NOT be using devlopers next year for anything other than very simple tasks. For a change I might pay myself a healthy salary.
Other News - I have spent this last week working and in meetings regarding the formation of a new company. I will say no more about it at this stage, but it is a very exciting opportunity. I am partnering with some individuals who are hugely successfull and are looking to add to it with this new company. I am in the process of putting together a business plan and provitional figures.
Company - My company had another good month, in fact the best month to date. This will show in January’s accounts. In contrast my personal balance sheet seems to have gone down since last month and I have not started buying Christmas gifts yet!
So, despite my web development woes business is still picking up - plenty to be optimistic about as the year starts to come to a close.
