Take More Risks

I think this month has been the most crucial thus far in that I’ve decided that I’m only gonna reach my goals through practice. I could spend all day talking about how there are great opportunities to make money on the net, but it won’t lead to me (or you!) getting any richer. My aim is to write from experience. I feel ackward writing in this journal when I’m earning such a lowly amount! I want to continue to increase my earnings and then come back and offer solutions. At the minute I just feel like I’m patronising half of my audience because most of you are earning a lot more than me.

But yeah, in the last week I’ve made over $10 on Adsense alone on 5 seperate days. This is seriously promising when you consider that I was at about $2-3 at the start of the month. My aim for April is to be making $22.50 on average from Adsense by April 30th I’m gonna achieve this by coding some link bait for fartnoises.info in particular and continue with the development of my Hateful Dead network. It should be good fun.

Anyway here are eight things that I’ve learnt from Interneting in the past month. I’m mostly talking to myself throughout this bit so don’t get offended if you think I’m a pompous ass.

• You can read all of the blogs you want but you’ll never learn anything unless you try things out for yourself. A lot of young affiliates (including myself recently) are “fans” of making money rather than people who actively make money.
• Stop looking towards Darren Rowse, Shoemoney or any of the big guns as the be-all-and-end-all of affiliate marketing. Your journey is entirely personal and you should focus your own particular talents towards what you love. By all means, take account of their advice but let experience by your guide and if it conflicts with what the “gurus” say, continue on if it works for you!
• You have to know where you want to go before you can actually get there! If you’re afraid of setting goals, don’t be! They don’t have to be long term goals to start with. Start small. Would you like a new laptop or a holiday? Where would you like to go after that? You won’t get anywhere if you don’t have a roadmap.
• The pursuit of success inevitably breeds failure. Instead of stalling if one of your ideas fails aim to recognise what went wrong and then build upon that.
• Enjoy what you are doing! If you are tired of writing about celibacy in elephants then move onto a topic that you can write about with fluency. Don’t let ad prices dictate the niches that you target. Become an authority at what you love whether it be farts or the foundations of Democracy.
• Relying on Adsense alone is a definite no-no. If Google are your only means of income then they have effectively become your paymaster and they can then fire you when they like. Remember you are providing services to the net and you deserve to be compsensated, especially if you’re writing killer content!
• If you are wrong about a topic (as I was about the feeds a few posts ago) then don’t shy away from admitting it! Instead focus on why you were incorrect and write about your experience. It’ll help more people than you know.
• If you feel bored or lost working in that area aim to freshen things up. For example earlier this year I was tired of creating niche sites so I decided to give domaining a try and it was cool. Aim to maintain that spark of excitement about your work.

Recently I’ve been depending a lot on Wordtracker’s Keyword Researcher to identify niches. The process has been fairly hit and miss in the past with some of my keyword targetted domains receiving little to no traffic for supposedly popular keyphrases.

The phrase “spirituality information” is a perfect example.

Wordtracker predicts that 2490 searches will be performed on this keyword alone. Wow. Now I could go ahead and register spiritualityinformation.info, create a website and sit back as several thousand visitors flood my site daily! Well in theory, at least. It would be foolish to register that domain based on this evidence alone. It’s important to cross-reference traffic stats with the help of other keyword suggestion software.

This is where the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion tool comes in quite handy. It automatically provides you with the phrase’s monthly Overture score, along with links to other tools like Google Trends and Google Suggest.

Hmmm, Overture doesn’t seem to recognise the “spirituality information” keyphrase and instead recommends “information on spirituality” which has 1,148 searches. It should be your aim to find a keyword that is reported consistently across all of the tools. In this case “spirituality information” just isn’t good enough. It’s hard to know whether to target “information on spirituality” or “spirituality information”. Of course you could type each of the phrases into Google Trends and see how they perform against each other.

Let’s try that now!

Based on this evidence, it wouldn’t be worthwhile targetting either of these keyphrases. Use your common sense here. Would 2000 people type “spirituality information” into Google a day?

The morale of this post is to be thorough with your research. Don’t start registering keyword domains until you’ve done your homework!

I’ve went mental with GoDaddy’s $0.99 .info deal and bought about 40 new domains so far. I would have had so many more if I’d found phrases that I could develop for. Ach well. I’ll concentrate on building what I already have and then I’ll have another look.

Site News

Fartnoises is going from strength to strength and I think within the next 2 weeks I’ll start breaking $10 a day consistently. I’d like to eventually break $20 with it before the summer.

On Sunday I discovered that everclearalcohol.info is generating 50-75 unique visits a day which is pretty cool. I still can’t find a decent affiliate program for it though. I’ll have to sign up for CJ again and try to create some links this time, heh.

I’ve now made enough to receive my first Adult Friend Finder check. Wahey, I’ll scan it in when I receive it.

New Goals, Re-Structuring

March 2007 – Consistently average $10 a day on Adsense by the end of the month
April 2007 – Average $22 a day
May 2007 – Average $37 a day
June 2007 – Average $60 a day. This is important as I’ve got a few ideas for a vacation in August and I’ll need about $1500 alone for the accomdation and flights.

This is easily achievable, especially if the recent growth rates are anything to go by. I just need to keep my focus. I’ve got a vague idea where I want to be in a years time, but I’d rather concentrate on fufilling these short term goals first of all and then set new targets that coincide with my overall objective once I’ve achieved them.

I’ve been having a look at the Zend PHP framework for a project we’ll be carrying out over the next few months and I must say I think it’s a lot better than I initally thought. Over the last 3 months I’ve done zero development work because I’d run into such a rut with CakePHP. It was if I was developing the same application over repeatedly! It’ll be cool to actually learn the Zend Coding Guidelines off-by-heart and start afresh with a different outlook towards development. The problem with much of this stuff is that about 1,000 different technologies seem to pop out at you at once and it can be seriously overwhelming.

Anyway my aim is to create something basic with it over the weekend. I’ve a few ideas. Well I’ve more than a few, but you know me!

Forum Development

Spent a bit of today reading through Lee Dodd’s In The Beginning series geared towards forum development. He makes some very interesting points and I came to some new conclusions.

• It’s important to set some goals before establishing a forum. Will I be running it for the community on a long-term basis or am I looking for a big-pay out within a year? It’s pretty important to be honest here.
• You shouldn’t let General or Off Topic discussion be the main focus of the forum, otherwise it will eventually wane it. The forum should preferably be based around a niche which will spark sustained debate from it’s core members.
• vBulletin is definitely the way to go with long-term projects.

All of this has got me thinking about Implicit Gaming and why exactly it failed. It’s now obvious – how many general online gaming sites are there out there? The figure’s probably in the thousands. Implicit Gaming offers nothing special enough for it to stand out amongst it’s competitors.

I think in the future I’m going to refrain from buying any more forums until I have a bit more experience with running them. When I took over IG, I had little to no experience as an Administrator. I think it would be better if I actually expanded my knowledge as an admin whilst the site itself is expanding organically. Which reminds me, I have a spare vBulletin licence over on the Drunken Hero forums. I was half expecting those forums to magically generate themselves by feeding in a lot of traffic from the main site but it obviously isn’t working. I still have a great deal to learn about all of this.

I’m kinda intrigued by the way I’ve seen David use the vbAdvanced module to generate a site wrapped around a forum. It’s seriously cool. I need to find a new niche to base it on or use an existing niche and it approach it from a different angle. I have a few ideas, but first I’m gonna read Lee’s site a bit more and study how his forums are laid out. I’ve found in the past that you can learn a lot more by analysing how someone implements their ideas – rather than just reading their blog!

So I’ll use the vBulletin licence for another site and install phpBB on Drunken Hero instead. I’ve no timescale for this yet. It should be by the end of the month.

Ok call me a heretic if you will but I’ve only ever used a feed reader once or twice. I can understand that they are necessary if you have to keep up with a bazillion blogs everyday but I don’t. I read maybe 10-20 blogs daily and that’s it.

Why does it seem that everyone has the same chicklet on the blog showcasing their amount of subscribers? Is it even important? Who are these people that are subscribing to feeds? Are they experts or novices in the field of SEO/Entrepreneurship? Is a blog with 250 subscribers always more authorative than one with 25?

I’ve absolutely no idea to be honest. After I press “Publish” my blog might implode and disappear off into a spooky ghost world choc-a-bloc full of leprechaun types smoking Grade-C Irish hashish. Either way I’ll still be typing into a half empty text-box in Wordpress hoping that the next paragraph will be pure fucking gold….

I don’t think I’ll ever care much for people who subscribe to my feed and never visit the site. I love visiting websites on my blogroll individually and experiencing everything about them. I like seeing the layout of their blog and reading stuff about the blogger. It makes everything more intimate. That might sound incredibly pretentious (and it is) but I think you can miss out on so much if you simply subscribe to a feed.

If someone doesn’t have enough time to visit your site, either they are too busy or your branding isn’t strong enough. And if they are too busy, fuck them. What do you stand to lose? People come and they go I guess. I’d rather people actually felt something about my site. A “fuck you, you are full of shit” is much better than a “yeah he’s alright” in my eyes.

What I’m trying to say is that I hope that I provide enough on this website so that people want to visit it and experience something! Not purely through a feed reader What matters is that people contribute and respond in some way to my posts!

I’d rather have 5 active contributors than 5000 passive subscribers any day. And thankfully y’all contribute regularly (or at least you used to before this rant, heh).

Anyway, I had a bit of an off day today and created the Rosie O’Donnell Swing page. I’m experiencing a bit of a meltdown at the minute. Bare with me.

Ever have one of those days where you have about 10 different ideas but you don’t have the energy to go through with them? Well that’s where I’m at today. I’ve been trying to write this post for about 3 hours and I haven’t been able to create anything that’s good enough. It doesn’t help that I haven’t posted for 3 days! I feel like I owe you all gold or something. The longer you leave off a post the harder it is to actually create something.

It’s strange though because last month I was producing a lot of good posts and spending quite a bit of time promoting the blog but my net earnings were rock-bottom. I wasn’t making any new sites as most of my attention was focused on Take More Risks. Now it’s flipped right the other way, I’m really busy creating new sites but I’ve been struggling to create good ideas for posts.

Part of the reason for this is that I’ve felt that over the past few months I’ve been toying with the idea of making money. I’ve been talking about it. Now I’m actually doing it and I’m finding it hard to balance that with keeping Take More Risks up to date. I need to begin dedicating a little more time to this as I really don’t want to let it slip as it’s been a great source of motivation and inspiration for me over the last 6 months.

So please bear with me whilst I get back into the stride of blogging here. I should really save all of my post ideas as blank drafts as I keep forgetting loads of them!

Earning Money Independently Vs The Career

People keep asking me what type of job I’d like after I graduate. When I say that I want to do this full-time they don’t seem to take me seriously which would have made me angry in the past. Why should it make me angry if I’m already certain about my path in life?

Since I paid for the John Chow review and set the $30 / $60 a day targets things have started making a little more sense. Before I was toying with the idea of doing this full time – now I know I have no other choice as an office job isn’t really viable for me.
In the meantime nothing else matters bar meeting that first $30 target in June. I want to continue to enjoy what I’m doing and I hope to keep you all properly updated with what’s going on!

Hopefully tomorrow will be more productive than today. I think I’ll take a walk to the duck pond in town. The fresh air and exercise will really help me. I might even stop off for a Meatball Marinara Sub afterwards. Woo! I can’t wait for the summer to start playing tennis again.

Anyway I’m losing my train of thought here. I’ll get back to watching this program on comedians. I have the sound down now as I was finding it hard to concentrate.

Bye for now.

Wahey! I’ve finished work for the week which means I can dedicate more time to developing websites. I keep coming up with tons of ideas for sites and it’s just a case of prioritising them now. I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything concrete recently, I’ve been hard at work, honest! I think you can only talk so much about reaching targets before you have to put things into action. I’m still worried that I’ll begin neglecting my blog a little bit though!

Brandon pointed out that leaping from $30 – $60 in 2 months will be a big ask and he’s right. That’s why I’m aiming to be well over $30 by June and at the minute I’m not far off $20!

So I’m trying to strike whilst the iron is hot by developing websites in my own peculiar style. I’ve had a lot of fun over the last few weeks and it hasn’t felt like I’ve been working at all which is a massive plus.

It’s just occured to me that I could probably reach the $60 a day target on it’s own with a network of fart sites. Heh. That’d be something to put on the CV, wouldn’t it? I’m a Doctor of The Farts.

Fuck the new Keyword Evaluator tool on Wordtracker is brilliant! It allows you to research a maximum of 1000 related keywords from a root search term as opposed to the limit of 300 with the old tool. This is seriously cool! I’ve uncovered 3-4 profitable niches in the last hour. God bless the Ajax interface too.

Anyhow I’m off to set up a few Wordpress websites, thankfully my chest infection is starting to subside. And no work tomorrow, hurrah! Things are seriously beginning to look up.

Hey, it seems like ages since I’ve last posted here! Sorry for the delay, I haven’t been feeling very well since Friday. God damn chest infections! Oh well, onwards and upwards.

Website developments 

On Sunday I had a really pleasant surprise when I found out Fart Noises was still receiving around 100 uniques a day! This is brilliant news as it means I can concentrate on developing it along with Gothic Fairies. I think I’ll develop more of We Hate Cats too.

I’ve been pretty restless lately, coming up with about 20 different ideas for sites. Most of them are mini-sites which could be fleshed out in a few months time in a similar vein to Fart Noises. It’s definitely worth a go, especially since the ideas are quite fun.

More on that at a later date.

My Plan

The plan is still to be earning $30 a day by June and $60 by August. I’ve completely rearranged how I’m going to achieve this. For starters I’ve decided against monetising Take More Risks at the present moment in time. I don’t really have the time to be dealing with the management of links and sponsored posts, I’d rather dedicate more attention to developing content on this blog and on my other sites.

The important thing is I haven’t lost sight of the target and I’m working my ass off at the minute towards that first target of $30 a day.

Things are going great at the minute with Adult Friend Finder, I’ve been consistently averaging $7 a day from it which is a surprise. I won’t start to celebrate until I’ve received my check though!

Domains 

After reading another article on X/HTML 5, I registered the following .co.uk’s

html5.co.uk
xhtml5.co.uk
xhtml2.co.uk

I’m seriously considering developing html5.co.uk as it’s something that genuinely interests me. It’d help with the Future and Emerging Technologies module we have in college next year too.

Anyway I’m currently watching my DVD boxset of Peep Show (an excellent UK sitcom starring Mitchell and Webb). I’m gonna rest for a while as I feel like my face is about to collapse. I’ll post something a little more interesting tomorrow, I promise!

Since Google sees www.takemorerisks.com and takemorerisks.com as two seperate entities, I decided it was time to take action and correct the current PR leak by redirecting all takemorerisks.com requests to www.takemorerisks.com.

It’s interesting to see that takemorerisks.com is a PR2. If I left things as they are it’s possible that this value could increase – making it the difference between my blog achieving a PR4 and PR5. Or even worse…

To correct the problem I added the following lines to my .htaccess file

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.takemorerisks.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.takemorerisks.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Now if you type http://takemorerisks.com you’ll be automatically redirected to http://www.takemorerisks.com If I wanted http://www.takemorerisks.com to redirect to http://takemorerisks.com I’d have used this.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^takemorerisks.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://takemorerisks.com/$1 [L,R=301]

It’s important to decide whether to use www. or not when you first start your site as it will prevent any of the problems I’ve outlined here. Google SEO expert Matt Cutts delves into greater detail in his SEO advice: Url Canonicalization post.

Update

If you’re using Wordpress and want domain.com/file.html to translate to www.domain.com/file.html you must position this code before the “RewriteRule . /index.php [L]” rule in the .htaccess otherwise visitors will be redirected to www.domain.com/index.php each time.

Here’s what my .htaccess looks like now.

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# BEGIN re-direct code

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.takemorerisks.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.takemorerisks.com/$1 [L,R=301]

# END re-direct code

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

</IfModule>

# END WordPress