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In September 2007 I quit my day job in order to follow my dreams of becoming an Internet entrepreneur.
This blog is my record of that journey. My aim is to learn how to make a living online and transfer that knowledge
to others through this blog.
It’s time for another podcast! At the weekend I moved house and now have somewhere permanent to live so life should become a little more settled for me now. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do with my work time and how I want to focus on building assets and spend less time on unimportant tasks.
In this podcast I talk a little more about how easy it is to waste time and I discuss all of the projects that I have coming up in my foreseeable future.
Click the play button to begin streaming the audio (9 minutes)
Or click the link below to download the MP3 file: (8.5Mb)
Oh near the end of the Podcast I get a date wrong - I say that tomorrow is the 28th but now I realise that it’s actually the 27th tomorrow, doh! Couldn’t be bothered to record it all again!
Regular readers may have noticed that the quality of posts has dropped a bit over the last few weeks and I’ve not been working on any of the projects I had taken on. This podcast explains why and I also talk about what I’m going to be doing until the end of the year and in January.
Sorry there’s no transcript available but I never put anything earth-shatteringly important in my podcasts :-)
I love the 1st of the month when I can really take a good look at my stats and crunch some numbers. This is my second full month of being online and for the whole of October I have been working full time on this, so I should definitely see an improvement.
To accompany this post I have done another podcast in which I discuss where I am going with the blog in November and beyond.
or you can download it using this link (MP3, 8 minutes, 7.8Mb):
Well this blog certainly seems to have done well in every respect over the last month. Thank you to everybody who visited here, has subscribed to my feed, commented on a post and linked to me!
RSS Subscribers
For me, this is my most important statistic. I set myself two goals this month (though I didn’t publicize them). The first was that I wanted to hit 250 subscribers and then make my feed counter public. I hit that goal! The second was that I wanted to reach 275 subscribers in October. I missed that by 16 :-)
This graph shows a fairly steady growth though the last week has been a little wobbly. I think this is partly due to an a StumbleUpon traffic spike which subsequently settled back down. Now here is where I have some fun…
I more than doubled the number of subscribers (which admittedly is pretty easy when you start with small numbers). If that growth continued, I’d have 10k subscribers by March 2008, and over 8 million by the end of the year lol :D
Traffic Numbers
In September I had just over 3k unique visitors and in October that has jumped to 11k which is nice. Interestingly, I had more traffic from a single post this month than I had to the entire blog last month! See that big spike at the end? StumbleUpon again…
That spike distorts the graph somewhat and makes it difficult to see the growth. This is Alexa’s version:
Traffic Sources
The pattern for the traffic sources is very similar to the previous month though there is a slight increase in search engine traffic. It now accounts for 3.5% compared to 2.75% the previous month. In raw numbers, I had more than quadruple the amount of search engine traffic which is good. I had some funny ones in there too, check these out:
“quit surfing and start monetizing”
I know, I know! Get off my case already!
“can i name my business world domination”
Sure you can dear, go ahead. Caroline says it’s OK :)
“dreams in middlebrook”
Uhuh, I dream about myself a lot too…
“making a living by on-line bingo”
Now that’s one strategy I haven’t tried :/
“umbrella on the piano for free”
That’s giving me very odd mental pictures!
“why do i keep wasting my time”
I don’t know, I ask myself the same question…
“you ask me why i make my home in the”
In the what?? Oh the suspense is killing me!
Referral Traffic Breakdown
This month I am far more interested in where my referral traffic came from as I have been very actively commenting on other blogs and participating in Social media so I want to see how those things have paid off. Here are my top referrers:
StumbleUpon has accounted for 63% of all my traffic, wow! For me, that’s far too big an egg for my basket! As I said last month, SU traffic does not leave a lasting impression. Still it’s always nice to have traffic, even if its untargeted so I shall continue to market with SU.
Last month the Thirty Day Challenge dominated my traffic somewhat but that is no longer the case. I have only had a tiny proportion of traffic from the site itself and my new friends on Facebook and Twitter are coming mainly from this blog and not so much the 30DC any more. 30Dc was a great means for me to launch this blog but I am very glad that it’s doing well without that support now.
Blogs That Have Sent Me Traffic
Below is a list of all the blogs that have sent me more than 10 visitors.
If you add all these up, that makes 673 visitors. I believe that these are just about the most targeted visitors I can get because they have come because that blog linked to me, or because I made a comment and they linked through from that. Thanks to all of the above blogs :-)
BlogRush
I haven’t mentioned this much since I did an update after a week because the whole world was blogging about it and I didn’t feel the need to add to the noise. Well after an entire month here is what that wonderful widget brought me - 31 visitors! That’s it. That widget has to go :-)
Most Popular Posts
Now that I have feedburner, I am aggregating together the numbers from Google Analytics and the feed stats to give me a better idea of the real numbers of viewers to each post.
Looks like I am learning what goes down with with Social media. The top two posts were written especially for the StumbleUpon / Sphinn audience and they certainly drew in the traffic.
The question is, does it matter? They didn’t bring extra RSS so is this really where I should be spending my time? There were some surprises in there, number 3 & 4 were really just me blogging my thoughts about stuff and I didn’t expect them to do well at all. To be honest, these are the types of posts that I prefer to write - where I blog out loud, discuss my thoughts, share my experiences etc.
Business Stats
Money Earned
$0
I’ll say that again…
$0
Let’s get one thing straight here… I did not quit my job to launch a successful blog! I quit my job so I could earn a living online! I love that the blog has done well but all it’s doing right now is stroking my ego. A great (unmonetized) blog does not pay the bills! I slipped further into debt this month as I will every month until I am bringing in enough money to cover my living expenses.
This isn’t good enough. Things must change! Now the first thing I should do is figure out WHY I have not earned any money. One thing that helps me is that I track every moment of my working time with a cool utility called SlimTimer. So I can analyze that too…
Where My Time Went in October
Well first of all, I didn’t fail to make money due to slacking off. I worked 235 hours, averaging 52 hours per week. This is way more hours than I put in at my day job. Here is the breakdown of the main items, in order of amount of time spent:
Blog Reading & Commenting - 54.5 hours
Researching / Writing for this blog - 50.3 hours
3 Niche Experiment - 21.4 hours
30DC & Immediate Edge - 20.3 hours
Bum Marketing - 18.3 hours
Social Media - 17.8 hours
Email / Stats etc - 13.1 hours
Technical Stuff - 12.5 hours
New Opportunities - 11.3 hours
ArticleMasher Development - 4.6 hours
Ok first thing, 54 hours reading and commenting on other people’s blogs! Wow, and lets not forget 17.8 hours of social media! That’s 72 hours in total. All that stuff is mainly networking in my niche and I believe that is the main reason the blog has grown so well this month but that also accounts for 30% of my total time spent!
Now here’s the killer - there are very few activities in that list that have the potential to directly earn me money. The 3 niche experiment (total failure that was!), the Bum marketing project and the ArticleMasher. How much time have I spent on those things? Combined - 47 hours, exactly 20% of my time on money making work.
Okay I just gave myself a virtual slap around the head! There is an 80/20 principle and it does not say, only spend 20% of your time on activities that earn you money!! I have it all backwards.
I like to read. I read a lot. I read to educate myself and to keep myself up to date in my niche. But let’s look at how much time I have spent reading. That includes the blog reading, Social media, Immediate Edge stuff (some of that was research - but mainly reading, listening to podcasts etc), and new opportunities. Oh and if you’re wondering what that is - I throw into that stuff like reading newsletters, videos from people like Ed Dale, checking out new things that I might explore in the future. All in all, a shocking 104 hours, 44% of my total time reading.
Somebody recently commented on my blog that I need to make sure I DO stuff as well as reading about it. Boy are they right! I also spent 50 hours working on the blog itself, a lot of that time was spent on the twitter guide and unfortunately I didn’t track it separately. I’m guessing that was around 15-20 of those hours. It’s been far more work than I anticipated.
So what am I going to do now? Listen to my podcast to find out…
or you can download it using this link (MP3, 8 minutes, 7.8Mb):
Yesterday I got myself a nice new headset so I can try my hand ad podcasting for the first time. To be honest it’s not really a proper podcast because I have not integrated the audio into the RSS feed. Instead I have just made it available to download if you want to listen to it.
As this is my first ever podcast it’s a bit of an introduction to me, and this blog. I talk about:
My financial situation after quitting my job
Why I don’t blog about software
What this blog is about
How it’s different from other similar blogs
Where I am going with it
Click the play button below…
or you can download it using this link (MP3, 10 minutes, 9.5Mb):
That’s pretty much it! I’m not used to doing this so I’ve stumbled over my words a bit, I hope you’ll forgive me :-)
Please let me know in the comments what you think. Go on, be honest - I can take it! If it’s utterly boring please tell me. If you liked it, tell me that too. If I get positive reactions then I’ll consider doing more but obviously they wont all be just introductory, as that would be somewhat redundant. Anyway, please leave your feedback.
