Archive for January 2007
How much is my time worth?
Nearly two weeks since my last blog - that is very lazy of me. My apologies for not finding the time to tell you all how wonderful my life is…!
Only a week away from commiting to putting a lot of hours into a new company I am heavily involved in. This will mean less time I can personally spend on my own ventures and day to day business activites. Being the optimistic, ambitious (and foolish) individual that I am I still want to see revenue and profits grow in my core business activities. This will mean economically outsourcing as much as possible.
In the past when it has come to do this I have always struggled to justify spending any money, normally I could do the same job to a higher quality and more accurately to my requirements with the benefit of my time being free! However, this is not an option anymore. It was never a longterm solution either - I could never have continued to do everything!
I am in a good position now where I know atleast how much profit I should be making every month, I’ve used this to work out what my time is worth. Not as much as I would like as I do so many hours! When trying to calculate what is good value and what is not in pricing tasks I have had to assess how long the individual task would take me to do. Providing the cost is less than what my equivelant time is worth then I shall outsource. I just need to make sure that the hours I save myself are productive, and I can generate atleast what I have just spent… all sounds obvious, but something I have only recently been able to do.
How much is my time worth?
Not something I am going to tell you … but to make £1,000,000 a year it needs to be well over £300 an hour, which IS more than I am currently making… just!
Busy getting busier
As you may have noticed I like to keep myself busy at all times, working as hard as I possibly can. This is definitely not about to change - in fact things might get even busier for me. I have decided to begin the new year by taking on as much as I can realistically cope with….
I will now be working full time with another company, helping to develop their existing affiliate program. This will involve a huge number of tasks but primarily my role will be to increase growth rate by looking at the following areas:
1) Customer spend & rentention on main site(s)
2) Tools within partner site to increase affiliates earnings
3) Affiliate marketing strategies
In addition to this I will also be working on the new company I am director of. I am just waiting for the final paper work to come through regarding the company registration. Once this is done we will finalise the business plan and get programmers developing the Affiliate Ranking site.
Finally, I will still have need to find time to manage my existing company. Coordinating the new and pending site developments and continue to improve the revenue being generated by my live sites.
Obviously this sounds like a huge undertaking, but all 3 of these are interlinked, with careful planning there is no reason I cannot handle it. By stretching myself like this I hope to improve my management skills and start taking a few steps back form many of the areas I spend a lot of my time now. Much of it simple tasks which could be given to others to do.
I am still a long way from my ultimate goal. Clearly I will only achieve this if I continue to push myself to the limit and learn new skills in the process. This is what I am hoping to get out from undertaking so much (that and obvious financial rewards!)
Affiliate Dating Sites
After spending 2 weeks messing around with spreadsheets I have finally been able to do some work on preparing affiliatedatingsites.com for promotion. This has been a slowly but steadily moving project for a couple of months now.
Concept
It is a simple affiliate marketing idea - Using my knowledge and experience of running dating sites on affiliate programs I would review, write articles and document new projects I was working on. Pulling together a library of useful resources for affiliates or potential affiliates to dating / personals sites.
Quality ahead of Quantity
The site should have been at this stage earlier and still there is a lot of content to be added. The reason for the delay is I have not been working on adding content or adding features, but instead researching the industry and deciding the best way to rank affiliate programs. This needed to be a unique and common sense approach. Rather than looking at volume of traffic, or individual payouts per sign up I wanted to rank by looking at traffic, conversion ratios, retention rate, pricing and commission rates.
The site is now using this system in its latest program update. Each program is scored based on a number of factors to give an accurate indication of which programs have historically and month to month performed best (for me). Something which noone else is doing.
This had been a personal project of mine, but after being approached by another party I have recently made the deicision to also develop the idea on a bigger scale with their help.
Why run 2 Sites?
The new project will be developed as a new site, a larger resource with forums and other contributors from within the dating/online personals industry. I dont wish to give away too much at this stage but the site will not be a replacement of what I havealready done. I will continue to use and develop Affiliate Dating Sites as a personal blog of my experiences with affiliate programs and aim to add as much useful content and links as is possible.
The reason for running 2 similar sites simulataneously is because I wish to still experience and know what is happening with affiliate programs first hand. This will allow me to better develop an affiliate community. I also believe it is more useful to affiliates and new comers to read about programs from a personal point of view.
Timescales
There will be constant updates to Affiliate Dating Sites as I continue to work on my own network of dating and personals sites. I am also in a meeting tomorrow to discuss the new business, timescales and marketing ideas. The idea is to keep the momentum on these sites and build a good reader base quickly.
Both sites should prove to be a very useful resource to anyone interested in growing an income from one of the biggest and best paying industries on the internet.
Why Blog
I’ve started telling a few friends and family about this blog. Most seem to like it, and some who know me well immediatly asked me “why blog?”. Everything that I have done online to date has been not for personal satisfaction or salvation but for money! So what is the point to this blog, there seems to be no way of it generating revenue.
Why people blog
Since I have started to more actively use this site I have done a lot of reading of other blogs (many crap!). It is clear everyone has different personal reasons for blogging. Some blog about their lives and experiences, some blog to market a business or product, some blog about one topic because they love it or to build incomce from adverts on their site.
I saw one blog today - Reader Poll: Why Blog? - I took it and apparently the main reason is to publish/share ideas…. fairly obvious I guess!
My Reasons
These are evolving. Originally it was to make money, pure and simple. When I registered this domain and set the site up I was excited by the name. I thought it would be a great way of me generating an interest in some of my projects. Since starting it however there have been delays in a lot of what I’ve been working on and it has not been as straight forward to build traffic as I initially and naively thought.
Right now I blog because I hope I have something interesting to say. I want to keep people informed about what I am doing within my business. Ultimately I want to build the number of people who read this blog. Hopefully a large number will be fellow wannabe entrepreneurs who might benefit from my experiences, my advice and indeed some of my own sites. This is not ever going to be a tool to sell anything. But naturally I will discuss what is making me money, and what might help others do the same.
Making Money?
Many bloggers also directly make money from putting ads on their blog, this is not something I would consider until I have the traffic. But by becoming a better blogger and gaining good targeted traffic then it is something that has potential further down the line. Especially if the ads were relevent.
I’ve already made good money from certain affiliate programs, I intend to talk about these so others will have the opportunity to try it themselves. I will also soon have affiliate programs of my own. Discussing strategies on here, what worked, what didn’t etc could help gain interest in those programs, what others earn from them and earn me a little extra referal commission.
This really is a business blog. The business is not only my limited company, but me. The target is always going to be £1 million and I hope this blog will help me get there, how directly the blog affects it we shall have to wait and see!
Benefits to working from home?
I have been based at home for over 2 years now. Often people comment on how good it must be or how easy it might be to get distracted. Like everything else there are advantages and disadantages to it. Anyone thinking about setting up from home and going it alone needs to weigh these up and make a decision based on their own circumstances.
I think I am now more than qualified to have opinions on the subject, but obviously my experiences might be very different to someone else who works at home.
Advantages
The advantages of working fron home are all the obvious ones you’d expect. Even as I write this I am sat in my dressing gown - there are not many people who are fortunate enough to be sat in their dressing gown and can claim to be making money!
You can, in most cases, work the hours you like and suit you best. You have to make no time or financial allowances for travelling to work.
You dont have to work with colleagues you do not like, nor worry about a boss looking over your shoulder and checking up on you.
There are (atleast in the UK) tax advantages to working from home. Ways of paying yourself more efficiently and giving the tax man less of your hard earned (or sat-on-your-ass-in-your-own-home earned) money.
You can listen to music, take long lunch breaks and pretty much do what you want. All in all its quite a good arrangement!
Disadvantages
Here comes the bad news….
Firstly, if you are going to be running your own home business it needs to be viable and profitable enough to pay you. An obvious one but unless its going to be paying the bills for you to have the luxury of working from home pretty soon you wont even have a home to live in
Motivation: I think lots of people could be easily distracted by TV, chores or just get used to lie-ins. I am lucky in that I know exactly what I want (if not how to get it) which drives me to work as hard as I can. For me the fact I work from home gives me the opportunity to do even more hours than I would at an office.
Being on your own for all this time might also be an issue for some people. Working with other people does atleast give you some social interaction you cannot get home alone. I’ve not really worked with many people I liked so this has not really be an issue for me!
Something I am currently suffering from is having noone to throw ideas around with. The past few days I have been working on a spreadsheet and a couple of other bits. I have ended up going round in circles. If there had been someone else here for me to work with on these I think I’d have been much quicker.
2 heads are definitely better than 1. Someone else is always going to look at things differently from you which could lead to you having ideas you would never have had on your own.
And thus I Conclude…
Advances in technology, primarily computers and broadband has made it easier and cheaper than ever to work from home. According to a Personal Computer World article 10% of the UK workforce is working from home.
Working from home has been great for me, financially it allowed me to continue to be my own boss at a time when bankrupcy was a real possibilty. Since then it has given me the flexibilty to juggle my own work with looking after a daughter while my partner continues to work full time.
In an ideal world if I had enough space (and money) I would have a larger office at home and a few employess using it. This would give me the best of both worlds. Something else for me to aim for in the future! If I were to employ someone tomorrow I would even consider setting them up to work from their home too.
New Year Resolutions
Happy New Year everyone!
I am not one to make New Year resolutions just so I can break them a couple of weeks later. However I think it is a good idea to set myself a few goals which I hope to achieve in 2007 - these will dictate the sort of changes I need to make personally.
Last year I had many different ideas and was involved in several projects, this year rather than undertake more work I will focus on my exisitng projects and sources of income. At present this means primarily promoting dating and adult personals sites.
2007 Goals
My main target is to make £10K+ monthly profit from the affiliate programs I currently am on - this is obviously significantly more than I currently make but a figure which I think is realistic. Having learnt a little more about paid advertising, marketing etc I hope to launch more niche specific sites and apply the same marketing strategy on each.
My company will also launch 2 affiliate programs of our own. I have relentlessly continued to have developers work on a couple of projects. Regardless of the state of these I intend to have atleast 2 new sites go live in 2007 with affiliate programs to market seperately.
Develop AffiliateDatingSites.com (or new domain using same concept) into a large resource centre for affiliates of dating/adult personals sites. The target is to have atleast 5,000 subscribers to the site by the end of the year.
Resolutions
Dont worry, no nonsense about going for 5 miles runs, giving up alcohol for ever or doing a good deed every day! In order to meet my goals I do need to be as efficient as possible. These resolutions are more really guidelines that I need to constantly remind myself of.
- Always prioritise my workload
- Not to waste time/money on non profitable ventures
- Spend more time marketing than building and tweaking websites
- Use others whenever possible in every aspect of the business I cannot 100% handle myself.
