Marketing From Scratch

The website itself is not brand new – I knew the name of the software back in the conceptual stages and registered the domain a long time ago but I have done absolutely no marketing whatsoever. The reason for this is that I simply did not want people going to the site while it was in development. Now that it’s public, I do want people going to the site so it’s time to bring them in!

So I consider this to be a new site in terms of lack of promotion, and thus I have a clean slate to work with!

IMAutomator is Not a Blog

For those of you who are long term readers of this blog, you might be surprised by the marketing strategies that I am choosing to adopt because they are very different to the ways in which I promoted this blog. As a blogger I was heavily involved in the blogging ‘community’ and of course I won’t be doing any of that. Also, social media can be very good for blogging but all I will be doing is the occasional tweet. My marketing efforts are going to focus almost exclusively on SEO.

Backlinks, Backlinks, Backlinks!

IMAutomator is a suite of tools designed to automate the tasks of getting backlinks. Why? Because backlinks are the driving force behind SEO. To try and summarise this as concisely as possible… the on-page aspects of a webpage such as the title and description tags, the body text and so on are just a small factor in the way that search engines rank a webpage. Anyone can put up a page optimised for a particular keyword in a matter of minutes but that doesn’t mean that it’s any good.

Google looks at the backlinks pointing to any particular page and sees how relevant those links are, how relevant the site they are coming from are, what anchor text is being used and many other factors. In essence the more and better quality backlinks you can get, the better your page will rank.

The Basic SEO Strategy

The strategy I am going to use with IMAutomator is the strategy that I would now use with any new website. I want search engine traffic because it is consistent. You only need to look through my stats posts from the last year or so to see that I consistently get the same search engine traffic month after month after month even when not doing anything further to those pages. If you can get search engine traffic for a particular keyword, you should keep it for a very long time. Repeat that process for many keywords and you’ll build a steady stream of recurring traffic and that’s exactly what I want.

So the basic strategy is… determine what kind of topics are relevant to the audience you want to attract. For IMAutomator I’ll be starting with terms around social bookmarking as that what the first tool is. That is quite general so I’ll want to drill down and find some slightly more specific keywords such as social bookmarking software, which is even more targeted. See what I did just there? I linked to IMAutomator using my chosen keyword in the anchor text – that’s a good link :-)

So keyword research is the first step. I use the Market Samurai tool to brainstorm keywords – this is a great tool that I used to use for building niche sites but now I’m using it to promote IMA. I’ve built up a list of keywords that have decent traffic and relatively low competition. Low competition is not about the number of pages, it’s about the pages that are currently occupying the top few pages in the search results. If you’re not near the top you’ll hardly get any traffic so you need to be able to knock them off. I can elaborate on this in another post.

With potential keywords identified, I need to create content around those keywords. With a blog that’s easy – you just write blog posts, but what do I do for a site like IMAutomator? Well that’s actually easy too – I write articles. I have built an article system into the site, you can see the first one I have written about backlink spreading here. That gives me a place to host my content right into the site so these are the landing pages that surfers would arrive at from a search engine and that’s what I want. Though I’m toying with the idea of building in a proper blog like WordPress to the site but that’s a little tricky to incorporate into an existing Zend-driven site.

The third step is to drive backlinks to those articles. How? Well firstly it would be ironic if I didn’t use IMAutomator to promote IMAutomator wouldn’t it lol! Actually right now it supports about 30 sites but that list is growing to about 50 in the near future so I will wait until that point and then I will submit every article I write to IMAutomator which will get me around 50 links for each article.

However there’s some big sites that IMA doesn’t support at the moment such as Delicious so I’ll submit to those manually. Note that I am using social bookmarking here as a backlink strategy – not for the purposes of social media. Although it’s possible, I don’t really expect my articles to get voted up in the bookmarking sites and get traffic that way.

The second backlink strategy I will be employing is article marketing. I use Unique Article Wizard to promote good content that I write. It requires you to re-write your base article a couple of times which is a pain but it then submits a unique version of your article to literally hundreds of sites. I used it very effectively to get my Bloggers Bible sales page up to a PR4 but then stopped as the keyword I was competing on, make money blogging,  was really very competitive.

Using My Blog To Drive Backlinks

Although strategies like social bookmarking and article marketing can drive lots of links, they are usually fairly low PR. Even on some of the higher PR sites (IMAutomator supports some sites as high as PR6), you won’t get the benefit of that PR unless your link appears on a high PR page which is usually the front page and this is usually reserved for the most popular links of the day. On the other hand, if you can get a permanent link from a relevant high PR page, right in the content of that page, and with relevant anchor text like I have been doing with this post, that link can instantly boost the target page!

I have one post in particular that is hugely relevant to IMAutomator – 20 Do-Follow Social Bookmarking Sites That Actually Work. Go to google and type in ‘dofollow social bookmarking‘ and see what’s at the top! That post continues to drive a significant amount of traffic and I can use it in two ways to promote IMAutomator.

First of all, I’ll be putting a backlink to IMAutomator into the post and I’ll choose a good keyword to do so. Secondly I’ll be editing the post itself to promote the bookmarking tool. This is something that should have an effect very quickly because that post gets traffic every day. I really need to update that post so I shall do that at the same time and then aim to keep it updated on a regular basis.

Also, I’ll start going back through old posts putting in links into those and various other places around the blog.

It is called IMAutomator and the first tool is social bookmarking software and a second tool is in development now. Visit the IMAutomator site and click on the ‘Join FREE’ tab at the top right of the page to create an account.

What is IMAutomator?

IMAutomator is a suite of tools (ok just one right now!) to automate your Internet Marketing activities. The first one is an automated social bookmarking tool. The basic premise is that you enter in the details of the page you’d like to bookmark (url, title, description and some tags) and the IMAutomator engine will submit this bookmark to a series of sites in a completely automated fashion spreading out the links over a timeframe of your choosing, such as one per day.

As soon as you submit the bookmark to the IMAutomator system you can see a schedule of all the individual links that will be submitted and as these are submitted the progress updates so you can see how it’s going.

Currently there are 25 supported bookmarking sites in the IMAutomator system and I plan to continue to increase this to around 50 in the coming weeks. The supported sites page shows you which sites are in the system at the time.

Help & Information

Once you have created your account and logged in, please take a few minutes to familiarise yourself with the software. You might want to start with the help page.  There is also a news page (this differs depending on whether you are logged in or not) which will have details on anything new, including when new sites are added. Also, if there are any problems (there aren’t right now!), these will be shown on the current issues page until they are fixed.

• Become a Blogger – $356.88
• Bluehost – $270
• Teaching Sells – $137
• Market Samurari – $118.08
• The Bloggers Bible – $114.06
• Unique Article Wizard – $53.60
• Traffic Rush – $44.87
• Twitter Rockstar – $42.32
• Niche Adsense Themes – $30.77
• Mass Outsource Mastermind – $20.93

Total income earned during February 2010: $1,188.51

It’s interesting how the income is very close to last month’s yet the breakdown is different. The highest payout is from the Become a Blogger promotion. Hopefully this should boost income for a little while as it is designed as a six month program.

Income Only Stats From Now On

As regular readers will know, I have spent around a year now focusing more on my Software Project and less on this blog. Even though the income earned comes exclusively from the blog for now, there has not been any active marketing of the blog itself for around a year and the post frequency has significantly dropped off in that time.

This month I reached a definite turning point. My software is almost ready for the first public release – so far it has been somewhat low key, with only 100 spaces offered and only to those who had previously joined a notification list. This week I’ll be publicly announcing the software and that’s when the real marketing begins.

For the first time I have been doing SEO work for my new site rather than this blog. I will write a separate post about that but what this means is that it really is pointless to discuss subscribers and traffic stats when I know full well that I am doing absolutely nothing to boost either one. I shall leave the income stats as that is really what people are interested in and of course I hope that will increase when I do the first paid release which should be around the end of March.

What I could do instead is post some stats from the new site. That is potentially more interesting as right now the site is new, the only people who know about it are the small group of people on the notification list and there has been no marketing activity yet. But from now on, marketing becomes an important aspect of the project so it will be interesting to see how well I can market it based on what I know now, compared to when I built this blog. I’ll be using extremely different tactics, that’s for sure!

Working from home allows you to set your own hours of work. You can get up whenever you want, have breaks whenever you want, start as late or finish as late as you want. You can wear what you like (right now as I write this I am wearing pyjamas and that’s not just for effect – I work in PJ’s for at least an hour every morning!), you can stop to eat whenever you like. You don’t need to ask permission if you need to pop out for an appointment, or want to finish early or just want to slack for the day. You don’t need to arrange holiday, you can just take time off whenever you want.

Working from home on the Internet brings with it even more freedoms – you’re on the Internet for most of the day so you can check your email whenever you like, you can check Facebook when you feel like it, you can stop to play an online game if you feel like a break, you can read the morning news, check share prices, the weather or a myriad of other things.

This is sounding good right? I’m going to assume that whilst this sounds absolutely idyllic, that as you read it, some of you are getting a slightly uncomfortable feeling… there’s a voice at the back of your head that’s saying, “wow that sounds great but it would be so easy to just get nothing done at all!” – exactly!

In a previous post I have discussed the importance of putting first things first and explained how easy it is to procrastinate. At the end of that post I said I was going to start making an effort to prioritize my work. Well that was almost a month ago and I’m glad to say I have felt much better about my work in the last few weeks. However, the way I have felt towards my work has changed dramatically over the years. I have literally been at both extremes. Let me take you back in time through a little of my work and business history and explain how my work was affected.

I started my first business at the age of 19. It was a mail order company and I absolutely worked my butt off for it. I got a huge buzz from seeing the business grow and become successful and it was my top priority in life. I was in a fairly unhappy relationship at the time and I pretty much ignored my partner and didn’t really care. I ended the relationship around 2 years into the business and then threw myself into it even more. I was literally working from about 6am until midnight most days. I had no social life but at that the time it didn’t really bother me too much.

That business did well while it survived but it did not end well. I was operating in a specialised market that was dying and the birth of the Internet killed off the business model anyway. I got into debt and I had to get a ….. gosh the words pain me to say – JOB!

I stayed employed for the next few years and in 1997 I moved into software development. In 1999 I got fired from my job for being rather naughty (no I am not going to elaborate so don’t ask!) so I did the only thing I knew how to do – work from home, this time on the Internet. However, during this time, I didn’t work hard on my business at all and I went to the other extreme. I was depressed from losing my job and I was just surviving from day to day. At one point, around 2001 I think, I got severely addicted to the online game Everquest. This lasted about 6 months and I basically played that game for about 16 hours a day – I didn’t work at all. The relationship I was in at the time was also slowly being damaged by my behaviour.

Eventually in 2003 I decided I had to sort my life out. I wanted to go to University and become employable again.  I worked very hard in Uni. I knew I wanted to get back into software development so when I wasn’t studying for Uni, I was studying programming. I achieved my goal. I got my degree and got a job straight out of Uni which was great. I was employable, and felt good about my work. I used all my spare time to continue studying to catch up on the lost years. This was great for my career but it was taking a heavy toll on my already severely damaged relationship.

After a while in my new job, my need for freedom started to surface. I resented having to be somewhere at 9am every day, to ask my boss for permission to take a day off and after about 15 months, I just quit. That was in September 2007 when I started this blog. My partner was furious at me for having quit my job that I had spent all those years at University to get and 2 months later, left me. At the time, this was a devastating blow. Once again, work suffered. I hadn’t been in business long so didn’t really know what I was doing so it wasn’t even really like I could just go through the motions. The next few months were a mess and my personal life continued to get worse for a while. 2008 was not a good year but 2009 was a different story altogether.

Work in 2009 was strange because the vast majority of it was spent trying to start a new software project using technologies that were totally new to me. I also found a new partner last year and was absolutely committed to getting it right this time. I am so careful not to let work get in the way of what is really important in life – people! As we enter 2010 I am feeling a stronger need than ever to find a balance. I have seen first hand how both overwork and underwork can be just as devastating as each other. When you have family, friends, well a life really, you need to balance that with work and that’s what I am doing now.

But when you work from home, especially on the Internet it’s also so easy to go the other way and neglect your work too much! How then, do you really find the self discipline to get that balance right when you work from home on the Internet?

Well let me tell you what I’ve been doing. I have quite a few techniques now that I have been honing over the last few months.

Decide on a Number of Hours To Work Per Week

Start with the view of finding your balance. Work is just one aspect of your life and there are other aspects such as people – family, friends etc, and your health, the need for recreation etc. Some of you will be doing this part time alongside an existing paid job which makes it even more difficult to find a good balance. Don’t make the mistake of working every spare hour on your home based business at the expense of other areas of your life! Pick a number of hours you’d like to work a week, that allows you to be productive, but still live your life.

If you work at home on the Internet you have an added problem with your working hours. The Internet can be very misleading. One second you’re working on your website and the next moment you’re on Facebook. Or you’re checking your work email but at the same time you have a personal email that’s taking your attention. You can be at your computer for hours and only get a tiny bit of work done. I would get to the end of a week where I felt as though I’d been working lots and then look at what I had actually got done and think, is that all?

So, the first thing I did was decide on a number of hours I wanted to work a week. It’s not full time. I don’t see the point in having the freedom of being self employed if you’re going to work all the hours in the day but at the same time, work does still need to be done so I picked a number – 30 hours and I have pretty much stuck to that for about 4 months now. This allows me plenty of time for my social life and other aspects of my life and yet enough time to get a decent amount of work done.

How do you know how much time you’re working? I use a handy tool called SlimTimer. It is an online application that gives you a really easy timer. You set up your activities and then just click on one to start the timer, and click again to turn it off. I have a few activities set up – one for my software work, another for blog work and an admin one. I have a couple of others but those are the main ones.

Decide What is the Most Important Work

I remember when I first started this business I really didn’t know what I was going to do to actually earn money so initially a lot of my time was spent educating myself. I read blogs, ebooks, enrolled on online courses and so on. However, when I started to track where my time was going I discovered that I was spending an astonishing 80% of my time just reading!

With any kind of business there’s always some ‘core’ activities which actually bring in the money and whilst other work such as educating yourself, administration, doing your accounts and so on is indeed necessary, you have to be careful not to spend TOO much time on this stuff.

Again, the SlimTimer tool comes in handy here as I can see at a glance exactly where my time is going. For me now, my core activity is work on my software and out of the 30 hours that I want to work each week, I want at least 20 of that to be on the software.

This is also something that can change over time so it’s worth reviewing every now and then. Two years ago my core work was my blog – writing blog posts and doing promotional work. A year later my core work was writing my courses and ebooks. Another year later, it’s software development.

Pick The Absolutely Most Important Tasks

Once you’ve identified what activities you should be working on, there will still be some aspects that are more important than others and this is also something that changes over time. I like to do this on a monthly, weekly and daily basis.

At the beginning of each month I review where I am with my work and identify what I absolutely want to get done that month. One mistake to avoid here is giving yourself too much to do. Pick one big task for the month or a couple of smaller ones. If you finish early you can work on your less important tasks but if you give yourself too much work that is deemed as top priority and you start getting behind then it begins to feel like a never-ending workload.

On a weekly basis I do the same thing and sometimes I find that something has cropped up and I have not been able to finish my task from the week before. Annoying as this is, I avoid the temptation to pile on more work and simply carry it over. Then I do the same on a daily basis.

This idea is not new and there are tons of variations on it but the basic premise is that you should know at any point in time what your most important work is – the work that will move you forwards steadily towards your goal.

Postpone The Unimportant Tasks

Just as there are always tasks that are super-important, there are some that can easily be delayed, sometimes indefinitely! As a project evolves you will sometimes find that as time goes by, enough changes to render a previously relatively important task now unnecessary. For example, you may be doing something like social bookmarking to promote your site and have a list of pages you need to bookmark. This is work that needs doing but is not top priority. Then one day some kind soul releases a free social bookmarking tool online and suddenly your rather large workload is reduced to a couple of clicks! ;-) (Right now my social bookmarking software is still in beta, but it will be revealed publicly very soon!)

Sometimes work really does go away, or you find a better way of doing it, or you find someone else to do it for you and so on. It’s always a balancing game to know when to put off something that genuinely does not need doing and when you know you are just procrastinating on something that really needs to be done. I tend to do a weekly review of my workload, and I’ll make a point of postponing to a later date anything that really can wait another week.

Know What You’re Aiming For!

Perhaps I should have put this section before the last one. Sometimes we can ‘busy’ ourselves by getting a ton of work done, and yet take no steps towards our goal. Let me give you a few concrete examples. Let’s say you’re building a blog. You’ll need to write some blog posts, build a contact page, an archives page, and so on but out of those, the only work that really moves you forward is writing the blog posts.

Whilst you do need a contact page and archive page, you can do that later. In this situation I’d want to make sure that every day I work, I’m spending time writing blog posts and then I’d fit in the other stuff around it.

Another similar example – you’re writing a book of some kind. The actual writing of the content is your core work and that is what moves you forward. You’ll also need to work on the design and the layout, add special pages such as a table of contents, acknowledgments and so on but these don’t move you towards your goals.

Identify what your goal is and from that work backwards to identify the real work that moves you forward towards that goal and then when you plan your important tasks, make sure that you’re always spending a significant portion of your time on that work.

Also, this can play a major part on motivation. When you’re self employed you don’t have a boss on your back making sure you get your work done – you have to motivate yourself and when you’re just knee deep in the day to day work it can sometimes be tough to do that. I know I went through several low points last year when I was learning all the technologies for my software project and feeling like I was getting nowhere. When you can keep your big picture in mind – the ultimate goal that you’re aiming for, you can use that to remind yourself why you’re working in the first place.

Today I am going to work on some improved validation routines for my software – not exactly thrilling but when I look at the ultimate goal of building a large suite of integrated tools to form a membership site bringing in a sizeable monthly income it looks a lot more exciting!

Conclusion

Working from home in any business, but on the Internet in particular can be a huge exercise in self motivation and self discipline. You need to be focused in order to get the job done but it’s also very easy to take this to the extreme and destroy other areas of your life in the process! Start by establishing what and who is important in your life, and decide on a balance that allows you to build your business and still lead a full life.

Pick a number of hours that you’d like to work per week and make sure you track how much time you are actually working – and not just procrastinating with emails or whatever! Define what your core activities are, and on a regular basis pick your most important tasks and also don’t be afraid to postpone those that aren’t really necessary. Always keep the big picture in mind as you work and simply rinse & repeat marching steadily towards your goals!

Each surgery costs around $2,500 to perform, but aided by a government subsidy, the cost is reduced to $1,250 for each surgery. Dr Mani is hoping to raise enough money this year to fund these 47 operations. If you are able to donate, you can do so via paypal here:

http://www.47hearts.com/groups.html

Also, Dr Mani has written a book called 47 hearts which is about how you can live your dream, and change a life of meaningless meandering into one of purposeful passion. You may read it as an ebook by making a donation at the site above or you may also buy it as a print book from amazon. All proceeds go to funding the operations. Read more about the book here:

http://www.47hearts.com/book.html

I can personally vouch for Dr Mani. A couple of years ago I went through a very hard time in my personal life and he reached out to help me and I thank him dearly for helping me get through that tough time. Please donate something if you can and if you have a promotional vehicle such as a blog, twitter account, Facebook etc, please help spread the word.

With my software, I’m busily working away behind the scenes and in these early stages a lot of the work is going into improving the underlying infrastructure, making sure data is logged correctly so I always know what’s going on, improving the engine and so on. With a lot of this work, the members don’t visibly see the results of the work so to them they have no real idea if anything is happening at all.

As soon as I opened the doors for the first time I created a ‘release system’, which is really no more than a numbering system to allow me to keep track of where I am at in the development but there is another motive to this too – it allows me to communicate with my members about new developments and show them when new work is done. On Tuesday I released version 0.03.000. Lot’s of zero’s in there :-) The first number is the major release and right now as I am still in testing this is just release #0. The first paid release will be release #1 and I plan to have around 4 of those. The second number is the minor release and this is when I have done enough significant work to warrant telling my members about it. The last number is just a build number and I increment this every time I make the slightest change.

A few weeks ago I built a load of info pages with a help page, latest news, known issues, features that were coming soon etc and these allow me to discuss things on a day to day basis. So for example if I discover a problem I can quickly publish a post with the issue so members know about it. However the downside is that they have to login to the site to see this and even then, they have to click the links. Not everybody does this. Sadly, there have been quite a few members who created their accounts and never even submitted a single bookmark!

However, if you don’t communicate with people they forget all about you. The solution is to talk to them but if doing this via email you have to be very careful because it’s so easy to annoy people with excess email. So my solution is to email the members when there is a new minor release and I just uploaded the second one Tuesday. I am fairly careful in my development work to do a mixture of work in a given period. I’ll include features that are visibly useful to the members as well as doing behind the scenes work that they can’t see.

After emailing out the release notes I had a healthy flurry of activity as members who had not logged in for a while had another go and I’ve had some good feedback to. I know there are always going to be people who’ll never use it – unfortunately it’s human nature to sign up for something that’s free and then just not bother using it. I’ve been guilty of this myself many times! But every single person who uses the software is a potential future customer and I just don’t know one when that one little feature I add might just be the one they are waiting for that spurs them into giving it another whirl.

I really enjoyed doing this release – it gave me a real buzz having to update the tables on the live database being so careful not to alter any data as this is real live data that real live people have created. It’s exciting knowing that real people are actually using my software every day! I had a lovely email from one of my members after the release and it’s things like that which really make it enjoyable in this early stage before any money comes in.

The goal of the course is very much like my own offering, The Bloggers Bible but one massive difference is that my course is text-based and Yaro’s is all video instruction. The course is broken down in 8 major modules and contains almost 60 videos in all! The modules are:

• Module 1: Get Your Blog Up And Running Fast
• Module 2: How To Optimize Your Blog For Maximum Performance In The Search Engines
• Module 3: How To Create Powerful Content For Your Blog, Consistently and Without Fail
• Module 4: How To Use Images On Your Blog To Make You Stand Out From The Rest
• Module 5: How To Create A Different Dimension To Your Blog By Adding Audio
• Module 6: How To Breathe Life Into Your Blog Using Online Video
• Module 7: How To Create Multiple Streams of High Quality Traffic To Your Blog
• Module 8: How To Make Money From Your Blog

For those of you who like to learn by watching, rather than reading, Become a Blogger makes it so simple to learn. Sometimes text can be useful too and every single video also comes with a transcript in PDF format – you get the best of both worlds! As well as the core module videos, the course also has very active forums for any additional help you may need.

$1 Trial Available Until Tuesday 9th

Become a Blogger usually costs $47 a month, but for the next few days you can explore the program and if you decide it’s not for you, just cancel and you don’t pay a penny more. If you like what you see in the first week and you’d like to continue then do nothing and you’ll be billed the regular price. You can also cancel your membership at any time if you change your mind.

Bloggers Bible Free for Continuing Members

I’ve always thought that my Bloggers Bible course and Yaro’s courses compliment each other quite nicely so I’d like to offer you a special bonus… If you sign up using my link and decide to continue past the trial period, I will send you a free copy of The Bloggers Bible Fast Track which I sell for $119! To ensure you’re using my link, clear the cookies from your browser before clicking on a signup link from this post. I’m sure many other people will be promoting this today but none of them will be throwing in a free copy of the Bloggers Bible :-)

I can see the logs from Clickbank so I’ll know when a sale is made and can email you the free bonus right away but if you have any questions just contact me.

I won’t spend that kind of money until I am earning a lot more than I am now but hopefully one day this year I’ll be able to post a picture of one of them on my driveway with me in the driving seat :-)

Income

• Bluehost – $360
• The Bloggers Bible – $228.12
• Private Advertising – $200
• Teaching Sells – $137
• Twitter Rockstar – $63.72
• SEO Book Training – $50
• Unique Article Wizard – $53.60
• Market Samurari – $46.56
• Traffic Rush – $44.87
• Mass Outsource Mastermind – $20.93

Total income earned during January 2010 – $1,204.80

It’s nice to start the New Year off by breaking back into 4 figures again! I had quite a mix of sales this month – it’s always good to have multiple sources of income as things always fluctuate.

Subscribers

Stats at the beginning of January 2010: 12,602

Stats at the end of January 2010: 12,969

New subs in January 2010: 367

My site was somewhat down for a periof time this month but I think there was actually only one day when it was completely innaccessible so that didn’t affect the growth too much and it’s on par with last month.

Traffic

You can see the dip in traffic where the blog was down fairly clearly in the graph but despite this hitch, this month sees the first significant increase in traffic for quite some time. It’s not huge but it’s there. There seems to be a fairly even increase in both search engine traffic and referral traffic which is slightly odd.

I’m assuming the increase has come from the fact that I have actually started posting again on a regular basis! But that wouldn’t really account for the increase in search engine traffic so perhaps it’s just a January thing and it will drop down next month – time will tell.

Here she is singing an acoustic cover of Daniel Merriweather’s Red – not many people can truly sing with just a guitar for backing…

If you like her, pleas promote her a bit. Blog or tweet the video and also if you’re on Facebook, please join her Facebook page.

Cookie, I’m sure you have great things coming your way :-)

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp() in /home/carolis8/public_html/blog/wp-blog-header.php on line 14

WordPress has a file called wp-config.php which is located in the root of your blog. If you use a system such as Simple Scripts to create your blog you’d never even need to worry about this file as it would all be handled for you. However, for a manual installation you need to edit it to put in information such as the database username and password.

With a default WordPress download, it contains a file called wp-config-samples.php and the idea is that you edit this file to suit your needs and then rename it. When I looked at my config file I suddenly noticed the following line:

include ‘wp-config-samples.php’;

What this would do is full in the entire contents of the sample file into my own real config file. Obviously variables are the same in both files so they’d get overritten. I don’t know how that line got there but I commented it out, re-uploaded and that fixed the problem! I’m just hoping the bloody thing stays fixed this time!

This has been really annoying in terms of productivity this week. First of all, I spent ages googling around and trying various fixes and after a few hours of that I gave up and carried on working on my project. Except that I didn’t really because it niggled at me constantly. I had lots of readers who were very kind and took the time to send me an email to tell me of the problem but every time I got one it made me go and have another play – just in case…

My mind has been all over the place. In short I have lost my focus. I mentioned in an earlier post that I have joined a coaching program and part of the teaching for that is emphasising the need to really focus on one thing at a time. Focus on a major goal, focus on your most important task for the day, focus on what you are doing at this precise moment in time.

And it’s really true. For example, right now it’s almost 1pm and I have done virtually nothing all morning despite having ’started work’ shortly after 9am. I’ve been here at the computer but I’ve been flitting around between trying to work on my software, getting annoyed at the blog, procrastinating by looking at holidays and generally juggling too much stuff in my head at once.

Now that (I hope!) the blog is fixed, I can forget about it and go back to focusing on what I should be doing!

At first I tried manually re-uploading the file that was supposedly missing and I also tried various manual fixes that I found on various support forums after a google search on the problem. None of these things worked.

I originally installed my blog via the Fantastico package supported by BlueHost. Nowadays, Fantastico has been superceded by Simple Scripts which is better. However Fantastico was still there so I loaded that up and invoked an upgrade to the blog from there. This was a total disaster and killed the entire blog! Now a fatal error was shown for all pages – nobody could access the blog at all!

As you can see, I have managed to fix it now – I had to do a manual upgrade of WordPress via FTP. This was pretty simple really – just a matter of deleting some files and uploading the new ones. I can only assume that some file had somehow managed to get corrupt.

Anyway, back to work now :-)

However I was amazed to find that monitor prices have really come down since I last bought one. I think I got my 20″ about 3 or 4 years ago. So with prices so low I decided to make the 20″ the secondary display and buy a massive 24″ instead :-)

It’s really huge – quite amazing! I considered posting a photo but I don’t think you can really appreciate the size without being sat in front of it! I’ll also be interested to see how a game with good graphics, such as James Cameron’s Avatar will run on it… of course, I’m too busy working to play games but I will try and check it by the weekend.

Oh and random point… if you’ve not seen Avatar – go see it now! And pay the extra to see it in 3D, it truly is amazing. The story may be slightly cliche’d but it’s highly enjoyable and the visuals are simply jaw dropping. I’m seeing it for a second time tomorrow because it’s just that good!

This last week in particular really brought home how important this concept can be. At the end of December 2009 I took a plunge and decided to join a coaching program. It’s run by Bob Proctor who has been in the self development field for over 40 years and was one of the main characters in the movie, The Secret. I’m a fan of his work and happened to stumble upon his year-long coaching program which I felt was just what I needed for 2010.

Anyway, one part of the coaching is for us members to specify two top action steps to be completed per week. This is accountability – when you tell somebody else that you’re going to do something it puts an added pressure on you to do it and this week I don’t think I’m going to get my action steps done.

I have a real problem getting into things that are new or difficult in some way. I absolutely love my comfort zone and it takes me monumental effort to break out of it in any way. This is true in all aspects of my life but for work, with my software project in particular, it has been a major problem. Everything I have done since the beginning of 2009 has been new and in some cases difficult for me.

Learning PHP, actually going back even further at the beginning I didn’t even know what language to use as I’d never done web development before. But PHP alone is not enough, there’s all those other technologies. I won’t bore you with the details but my point is that a lot of 2009 has been spent procrastinating!

I see myself do it all the time – I’ll have some important task to do that involves breaking out of my comfort zone in some way but I need to clear my head first so I’ll make sure my email inbox is empty and while I’m at it I’ll just quickly look on Facebook. Then I need to make sure I’m comfortable so I’ll go to the bathroom and make myself a coffee. I come back to my desk ready to get started but I’ve got a text message on my phone so I’ll just respond to that to get it out the way but then  notice I’ve had a couple of emails so I better deal with those too. I’ve drank my coffee now so I’d better get another drink…. an hour has gone by and I’ve done bugger all! I really hope I’m not the only one who does this!

This obviously is not a good thing so I tried a technique to get over this particular problem. Facing some huge unknown task when I’ve not really started work for the day can seem so daunting but it’s often less daunting when I’m in my work mindset. Therefore I figured I could start the day by working on something very easy just to get myself into it and into my work mindset but this is very dangerous territory when your project is a big fat unknown!

In my last post I talked about how work can expand when it has such a big learning curve. This week was a prime example of where it has all gone a bit wrong. I had my action steps for the week and one of them was a task is very important but I have been putting off for quite a few weeks. So the other day I had an entire day free to work and instead of starting on my big task, I loaded up my issue tracker and picked something ’small’ to ease myself into work.

I’m sure you can guess the rest – 3 days later I’m still working on the little **&^%$£”! For me also, I don’t work regular hours. Due to the way my life is, I usually have just 2-3 full days to work and most of the other time I squeeze in a few hours in odd mornings and evenings here and there. I am always more effective when I have a large chunk of time in which to work. I consider this my ‘prime time’ so I try to use these days for the big jobs and leave the little ones for those odd hours.

But time and time again I am making the same mistake of simply not doing those all important first things, FIRST! From next week, I’m really going to make a big effort to do this. My issue tracker allows me to assign priorities to the issues and I also group them by release. I will often think of lots of little things that need doing but I am quite good at lowering the priority on non-essential work or even defering it entirely to a later release. My problem is that when I start work for the day, I pick a low priority item to work on rather than those important tasks I know I should be working on!

When this happens for weeks on end, those big jobs just don’t get done and this is what causes real delays! So, I figure I can discipline myself to do what Steven Covey says, and put the first things first then I stand a much better chance of making solid progress each and every week even if the little jobs keep adding up also.

I use what’s known as an ‘agile’ software development methodology. In the early days of software development is was the done thing to plan out every last detail of the software in its entirety and then try to build it but it rarely goes to plan. Agile methods tend to concentrate on the most important and urgent features first and the planning is done as you go along. You work on just one small piece at a time and you don’t build what you don’t need.

A lot of projects can be approached in that way. For example, if you are starting a blog and you’ve never created one before the old style of working would be to try and plan out everything you would need to do to get it started and then plod through the items. The agile way of working would be to just think of the first thing you’d need to do, do it and then go from there. You might start with getting your domain setup or pick a free host to go with.

Agile methods of working are generally time efficient because you don’t waste time planning something that changes later on. However, where I think it can suffer somewhat is when the project you are working on has a large learning curve so you don’t really know what’s involved with a particular task until you get stuck into it.

When I first came up with the idea for this software I had no idea how long it would take to build. When I decided to start working on it, I didn’t even know where to start. I spent months learning PHP, investigating CMS’s (none of which I used in the end so ultimately all wasted time), frameworks and various technologies related to what I was doing. Once I settled on the technologies I was using and had a good enough grasp of PHP to get started, I still knew very little about what was involved to build the software.

Here’s a typical scenario from a working day… I’ll have a task that I want to do and on the surface it looks fairly small – perhaps a few hours work. But as I start to work on it I realise that actually I can’t do it as I had planned because of the way I have written something else. In order to complete this task, I need to change something I have already done and the work I need to do multiplies. I use an online issue tracker to keep track of everything that needs doing so it’s not in my head and often I will end up at the end of the day with more issues in my list than I started with!

This can be very frustrating and I have had many days like this in recent weeks and months. When I have a whole week like this I feel like the work is just never ending, that I am not putting a dent into it. How then, can I ever expect to release something? Thankfully though, it’s not never ending. This is a problem that occurs in the early stages of an unknown project that has a large learning curve and it cannot endure.

Persistence and prioritisation (a topic for another post!) is key here. If you keep working, you’re going to eventually get through the tasks and as you do so, you gain a deeper understanding of what you’re working on. For my project in particular, I am developing a whole suite of tools and many of them will be similar. Right now I am working on the very first one and much of the work I am doing is getting the infrastructure up and running which will still be in place for later tools. Also, I am learning all sorts of things that I know will be useful for the later tools so hopefully when I come to those, I will have a much better understanding of what needs doing and a more accurate idea of the time required to do it.

One of the things I absolutely LOVE about having a business that is based on the Internet is that it is so portable. I’m not sure if I may have mentioned this already in a previous post but I have both a big PC and a laptop and I have my entire work and development environment setup on both and use online tools to synchronise everything so that my laptop can truly become a mobile office!

All standard documents like Word and Excel files are synchronised with a tool called Dropbox which is free. The source code and issue tracker for my software is all hosted for me by a company called Project Locker who are very reasonably priced and of course the site itself is online and accessible anywhere.

Last week it snowed in the UK. Not a big deal for many of my readers I’m sure but to us Brits it means chaos and disaster! Our authorities do not have the means to clear the snow, our cars are not designed to drive in it, people don’t have proper warm clothes and we just fall to pieces as soon as it hits about 1″ deep! It’s quite funny really… Anyway, when we got the first batch of snow just before Christmas I was somewhat stranded at home (I really hate driving in it!) and felt a bit lonely so when it started up again last week and threatened to be even worse than before I decided to pack up my laptop and go stay with my partner’s family for a few days.

People with regular 9-5 jobs can’t do that and even most self employed people can’t do that but when you have a job that’s all computer and Internet based your laptop becomes your mobile office! I love that freedom! It’s times like this when I really deeply appreciate the work that I do.

I see people around me in regular paid employment and most of my friends and family hate their jobs and going work is something to dread. There’s a few who like their jobs but even then it’s always a chore, something to tie them down and restrict them. Over the last couple of years I have managed to engineer my life so that I have almost complete freedom over everything! The only tie that I have is my cats but even I have a cat flap on my door so they can go in and out as they please and an automatic feeder that will dispense food at set times. I can happily go away for a few days and know they are fine!

Even though I have not yet reached that full time income level, the freedom I have created in my life means so much more to me than money. I have a very strong feeling that 2010 is going to be the year that I slot in the last piece of the puzzle and bring in that income too and when I do that, I will literally be living the dream life! I am very grateful for everything I have – all the people in my life, the opportunities that surround me and just the good fortune to have been born at this time and in the western world.

The snow has melted now and I am back home and working as normal but even then, I still use my mobile office. In the winter it gets dark around 4pm and in my office it feels really gloomy and miserable when it’s dark outside and I hate working in that environment. So now, when it gets dark I move downstairs to my lounge. I have a rather comfy L-shaped sofa and I park myself on that, put the TV on quietly as a bit of background and carry on working for a while. Again – I just love that flexibility!

I went through a phase of being heavily into social media and wrote a lot about that, then I became better at actually blogging so the blog turned into one of those ‘meta-blogs’ that is a blog about blogging and I’ve also touched on various other IM-related subjects on the way but as soon as I started serious work on my software project I ran out of stuff to say.

The reason for this is because I have been trying to present just the marketing side of my work but at the moment 90% of my work, if not more, is pure software development. There’s no marketing going on right now because I am knee deep in the software itself.

The trouble is, I miss blogging – it feels weird to be beavering away every day (I’m actually working pretty hard these days which makes a change!) and not writing about it. Looking back through the archives there’s the stat posts, the odd update and very little else.

So I’ve made a decision today – I’m just going to blog about, well, anything really. I mean after all, this blog is called ‘Caroline Middlebrook’  which gives me free reign to write about just about anything. So that’s what I’m going to do. Well, sort of… The focus of the blog is still going to be my efforts to make a living online. I’m not going to start writing about how my cat loves to puke on my computer chair, or how much I still fall over when snowboarding :-) But I’ll just talk about my day, the issues I have and so on and just see how that goes…

Income

• Bluehost – $555
• Keyword Elite – $89.04
• Private Advertising – $73.70
• Blog Mastermind – $44.37
• Traffic Rush – $44.87
• Unique Article Wizard – $26.80
• Twitter Rockstar – $21.24
• Mass Outsource Mastermind – $20.98

Total income earned during December 2009 – $876.00

So that’s December – BlueHost was up a bit higher than usual but no sales of the Bloggers Bible this month. Now let’s have a look at all of the totals for the whole of 2009:

• January – $2,439
• February – $1,352
• March – $1,745
• April – $1,776
• May – $1,627
• June – $1,062
• July – $960
• August – $1,021 (Business figures)
• September – $2,927
• October – $5,937
• November – $732
• December – $876

I didn’t post stats for August on the blog as I was on holiday so for that month I used my business stats instead. These differ slightly as they are based on when income actually arrives in my bank account as opposed to when the sales are reported. Very often my income is actually paid a month or so after the sale was generated.

Total income earned during 2009: $22,454

Average monthly income during 2009: $1,871

Annoyingly, I never did a yearly summary for 2008, but I’ve totted it up just now and here it is: $18,208.

Ok here are a few interesting facts… in 2008 although I had a couple of rough patches, I worked quite hard on the blog and on developing income sources such as The Bloggers Bible but in 2009 I stopped work on ALL of my income producing sources and focused solely on my Software project which will not earn an income until later in 2010. And yet, despite this – I made more money in 2009 than in 2008!

Why is this?

First of all, a great deal of my income is from my web host, BlueHost. This makes me money month after month and that comes partly from my WordPress ebook (now sadly out of date) but more than half of the sales come from the banner in the header of the blog. Even though this blog doesn’t really get much traffic, it’s enough to pull in a few of those sales every month.

Secondly, the Bloggers Bible is (usually!) fairly consistent in producing a few sales. Again these come from the traffic. New people come to the blog and sign up to the free course every day and a small handful of those go on to buy the full version. Traffic Rush is exactly the same. Both of these courses were completed over a year ago, I haven’t done very much to them since other than a few updates and yet they have continued to provide me an income for all this time.

Another portion of the income has come from specific promotions of third party products such as Yaro’s Blog Mastermind course. This income is dependent on other people and their own promotions but whatever niche you are in, there will always be people around launching products for you to promote.

Bottom line though – if you have a site with a steady source of traffic, stick some advertising on it, develop a product or two and promote that product through an email list which is shown in a popup. As long as what you are promoting is relevant to the traffic that you are getting, those sales will trickle in and as you can see here, they add up. $22k is a nice chunk of change to keep me going whilst I worked on something else.

Subscribers

These figures are a little off as feedcompare only shows you a view from the current day so it’s from 3rd December instead of the 1st but it will do.

Subs at the beginning of December ‘09: 12,227

Subs at the end of December ‘09: 12,602

New subs in December ‘09: 375

Growth is a bit lower than usual but that’s to be expected over the Christmas period. I am expecting a corresponding drop in traffic too.

Traffic

As I expected, the traffic numbers are a little lower whilst the graphs stay around the same.

A Grand Goal for 2010

As you know, my focus for 2010 is my software project. Note that once I open it up to the general public, I’ll refer to it by name rather than the generic ’software project’, but memberships are full right now so it’s just annoying to send people to a site they can’t join.

I have some specific goals and I have mentioned before that at a very minimum, I want to start making a regular, full time income from my software. For me, I need around $6,000 a month to live on comfortably. So that is my minimum goal for 2010.

But what fun is there in minimums? :-) It’s always nice to play with ideas and stretch the imagination. As a much loftier and ambitious goal, I’d like to turn 2009’s yearly income into a monthly one! Yup, $22k a MONTH, not a year. John Chow earns double that just from his blog – easy peasy I reckon ;-) Of course, I won’t be too upset if I don’t quite reach it by the end of the year!

A Look Back at 2009

On a personal level, 2009 was an absolutely gigantic improvement over 2008 which was filled with nothing but heartache and upheaval. It was basically utter shite! However, in 2009 I got my own home again, I made a bunch of new friends, I re-started karate and worked through 4 grades (next one brown belt!), I got stuck into snowboarding completing a sequence of lessons and can now fall over spectacularly whilst unsupervised :-) I even tried indoor skydiving this year!

The summer time really was a highlight as I met a new partner and that took everything to new heights. I’ve been to music festivals, the zoo, the beach,  carnivals, been to BBQ’s and had some at my house, and I even fulfilled a life-long ambition and visited the United States by going to DisneyWorld in Florida.To finish it all off, I’ve just had one of the most wonderful Christmas times ever, tonight I have a load of friends over to mine for a girly night in and Thursday night it’s out on the town to celebrate New Year’s Eve!

From a business perspective, it’s taken me an agonisingly long time to get my Software project up and running but I am so glad I stuck with it as I am now finally doing what I wanted to do right from the start – write internet software (hopefully) for a living. My blog has been pretty stagnant throughout 2009 but that’s ok with me as I never intented to be ‘a blogger’ – the blog is here to just document whatever else I’m doing.

A Look Forward to 2010

2009 was spent getting my personal life in order, and now in 2010 I can start to work a little harder on my business too. I’m really pleased that I got an initial release of my Software Tools out before the end of this year as it sets the tone for 2010.

I have 4 paid releases planned for the software and I would like to get at least 2 of them (hopefully 3 or possibly even all 4) launched in 2010. If I achieve the targets I have set myself for membership, I will be making the full time income that I need, at last! That’s my single biggest goal for the coming year.

I’d also like to lose a little of the old winter flab as I noticed it’s been piling on a little bit despite all the karate and snowboarding! Lastly, I want to continue with my brilliant social life in 2010 – just even more of it! I want to go on at least two holidays – one will be a snow holiday (me boarding, my partner skiiing which is no where near as cool as snowboarding but hey!), and the other, who knows? I think I also want to buy a new car but I might wait another year or so for that until I can afford a really good one.

I wish you all happiness, health and prosperity in 2010!

I’m planning to open my my software to a small group of testers for the very first time today! I have never done anything like this before and it’s quite exciting and a little nerve-wracking too so I thought it might be fun to document the process as I go along. I am based in the UK and it’s around 9.20am in the US, Eastern time so I plan to work through this afternoon and this evening which will be day time for the majority of the United States.

There’s still a few minor features that I want to implement – one in particular is to limit the number of links that can be submitted per day by each member. This is partially a marketing feature as paid members (which wont be released until the New Year some time) will have a lot less restrictions but also it’s a sanity feature for me just in case it all goes horribly wrong! lol :-) This feature shouln’t take very long.

Also, before I go live I’d like to add support for a few more sites (there’s only 6 right now) though I plan to add more over the remainder of the weekend so if I don’t get that done today it’s no biggie.

Lastly, there’s those last minute odd jobs that always seem to take longer than I expect. I need to setup the database on the live server and run some tests on the engine. I don’t foresee a problem here as the tests have all run fine locally and it’s not server dependent. I also need to edit the autoresponder messages for those who sign up, and also for those who join the notification list as the status has now changed.

First though – more coffee!

[5.26 pm]

The functionality to restrict the number of links submitted per day has been implemented. There are another couple of things I’d like to add but seeing as it’s gone 5pm already I think I have to cut my losses and go with what I have.

It didn’t help that I left myself accidentally logged into Windows Live Messenger whilst I was working on it and then I got two friends started talking to me and trying to arrange social engagements for Christmas and discuss presents! Note to self: in future, when doing something important that is time-sensitive, close down external distractions first!

One thing I did recently was to install a development environment on my laptop which is almost fully synchronised with the one on my PC which means I can work on either computer. I find that in the evenings when it gets dark outside I prefer to work on my laptop in the lounge rather than in my office. So I’m going to move myself downstairs now. All I need to do to synchronise is to update my code project from my code server (I use a hosted solution called Project Locker for this) and then to update any database tables that I modified.

Another very cool tool that I use for this kind of thing is called Dropbox – it’s an online utility that installs a folder on your computer that is automatically synchronised with an online server and any other computer you install it on. Its brilliant because it’s automatic – I don’t even have to think about it. I open a document on my PC, edit it and save and next time I start my laptop the new version is automatically downloaded. So I keep all important documents in my Dropbox. It’s free for up to 2 megabytes of storage.

Ok, now I’m waffling – back to work!

[7.42 pm]

The software and database have been uploaded to the live site, the engine has been tested and all seems to be good. Well kind of. One site didn’t work though this seems to be a problem on their end. If it doesn’t sort itself out in the next few hours I’ll disable that particular site until they have resolved their problem and then come back to it another day.

I’ve been fiddling with the site template to make it fairly user friendly and I think that’s about done now. I’ve double checked all my aMember settings and tested the signup again and everything seems fine.

The only thing left on my todo list is to change the autoresponder emails but for some reason I can’t help thinking that I’ve forgotten something! I’m going to take a break to have some dinner and then come back to it and if I have forgotten something then hopefully I’ll remember while I eat :-)

[9.11 pm]

I knew I had forgotten something! I forgot to update one of the database tables that had been modified to support the new feature that restricts the number of links that can be added each day.

At the moment I can upload the whole site to my live server in a single automated operation as I use a cool tool called phing to manage my site deployment. However, I have not yet written the part that updates the database so I still need to do that manually. This is something that doesn’t affect the users as it’s behind the scenes but if I forget certain things it could cause havoc so it needs to be automated properly – another little job for the todo list.

I have two email autoresponders to manage. I am now using the one built into my aMember membership software to manage the list of members so I have written an introductory welcome email. This is the email list that I will use later on to send members training resources over a period of days after signing up.

The other email list I need to worry about is the notification list that I have been quietly promoting on this blog. At the moment there is only one very short welcome email that simply says that the software is coming soon. I need to change the welcome email to let people know that the site is now live and I also need to do a broadcast to the list to actually announce it. This broadcast email is effectively my ‘launch’.

I’ll double check everything again before sending it!

[10.06 pm]

The site is live, the invitation email has been sent so now all I need to do is sit back and wait to see if anyone signs up!

[10.18 pm]

Gosh that didn’t take long! 9 signups in just a few minutes! And I just remembered that I had forgotten about that site that was playing up – damn! While I investigate the problem I have put a note on the site stating that there is a known problem with the site so I’ll go look into that now.

[10.23 pm]

It’s all go! I had an email from one of my members asking a question and I saw an error message regarding the captcha image that I am using on the site. A quick investigation revealed that I had put the wrong API keys in my initialisation files and that I was using the key for my local test server and not the live one. A simple fix so onto the next problem!

Ok back to my dodgy site issue.

[10.40 pm]

Still not had a chance to look at the failing site yet as I found some new problems being reported. I had made a small error with the new code I put in today that restricts the number of links that can be submitted in one day. I write code that automatically tests all functionality but I haven’t written the test code for that yet as I was in a hurry – lesson learned there!

[11.48 pm]

Over the last hour I’ve continued to find and fix a few minor problems by continuing to check the log files. I needn’t have worried about nobody joining as over half the memberships are gone already. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are all gone by the morning. I’m also getting some great feedback from the members which is really helpful.

[0.53 am]

*yawn* Getting tired now but I can’t go to bed just yet … my worst fear happened – the engine seemed to stop running entirely! Well not quite – it ran, told me about the jobs that were piling up and then stopped without any error message!

[1.41 am]

Fixed the engine problem – stupid error and it was related to something I mentioned around 9pm tonight! I hadn’t updated one of the database tables and a database lookup was failing and causing the engine to die. Luckily it died gracefully and didn’t cause any problems other than a delay. Now that it’s running again the rest of the jobs have gone through other than the dodgy site which is still failing. I’m going to disable that one for now and come back to it tomorrow.

There are still some other issues with submission and today’s work has also highlighted various other little things that need fixing and tweaking but for now I’m going to call it a night and get some sleep :-)

I’d like to thank everybody who signed up today and helped me by testing the software and leaving me feedback – it’s much appreciated! Also, if you like this style of diary post let me know and I might do more of them in the future!

I’m anticipating some unforeseen issues so I will be ‘launching’ this quietly. The word ‘launch’ is not very accurate really as all that will be happening on Friday is that I will send the link to the people on the email notification list and invite them to sign up for a free account and start testing the software.

I am not yet revealing the name of the site as the name also happens to be the domain name so of course that would reveal it to a much larger audience than I am ready for right now. I’m sure you can tell by the tone of this post that I am actually quite nervous! I’ve written software for years but this is the first time I have written something for other people with the intention to sell it to paying members so the pressure to get things right is much higher.

When I used to work as a software engineer in the industry I was a conscientious employee but I didn’t CARE about the users in the way that I do here. If there were bugs or issues, somebody else dealt with them at the customer level and I just fixed what I was assigned to fix. At the end of the day the responsibility did not lie with me. Being self employed, and being solely responsible for this software and all the people who use it is really quite a scary prospect for me right now!

What Does It Do Again?

At the moment, this is just a rather basic social bookmarking engine. The idea being that users submit the details of the page they want bookmarked (url, title, tags and so on) and the engine automates the submission of that bookmark to multiple sites. At first the users had to supply their own username and password details for each target site but I quickly realised what a pain in the butt this would actually be for most people – they would have to go out and create accounts on every site before they could effectively use the software.

This is automation software, and as such it is supposed to be a time saver and not create work for the users! So I scrapped that idea fairly recently and now the software manages it’s own accounts internally which actually provides a secondary benefit that the accounts get rotated thus spreading the links around a little more.

Not many sites are supported right now and this has been my stumbling block on getting the software released. I’ve spent most of my time developing the submission engine itself rather than working on adding site support and I’d like to include a lot more sites before I release. However I’ll just go ahead and release with whatever I have on Friday and then add some more in later.

Action Plan For The Next Few Weeks

Obviously it’s Christmas next week so I won’t be working all that much and I’m sure my potential testers won’t be at their computers too much either so work will be a little sporadic for the rest of the month. However once the software is out on Friday there’s quite a few things I want to do:

1. Develop feature to allow me to restrict members to a specified number
2. Add support for more bookmarking sites
3. Allow automatic submission of existing links to new sites
4. Create some training videos (I may wait a while for this)
5. Start working on the new email list I had intended on launching in October

1) Restricting Members

Right now, the membership system is handled by aMember and it works great. It integrates nicely with my software and takes away any security worries. However as far as I can see, there is no way to restrict the number of memberships allowed on a product. Even if there was it probably wouldn’t work the way that I want it to.

I want to restrict the number of active accounts that I have but I know what people are like – they sign up for something and then forget all about it. I want to run a cleanup job that will alert members if they have not logged in for X number of days and then remove their accounts after a certain period of inactivity. Of course this would only happen with free members and not paid ones!

There’s no point restricting members to say 50 people if only 5 of them are actively using the software so this is something I need to monitor internally. I haven’t written the code to do this yet but it’s not difficult.

2 & 3) New Site Support

This software will be in constant development for the foreseeable future – at least a year. The social bookmarking tool is just one of at least a dozen that I have planned but as well as developing new tools I also wish to continue to enhance the existing ones. For a tool like the bookmarker, adding support for more sites will make it increasingly more valuable.

The free version will have a limit on the number of sites though I’m not entirely sure how I will manage that yet – I may rotate the sites that get submitted to or I might just pick a certain subset of them. I think rotation will work better.

However if a user has submitted some of their best links using my software and then the following week I add support for a bunch of new sites, I want a way for those existing links to be submitted to the new sites. I’m not entirely sure how I’ll handle this just yet – ideally it will be automatically handled by the engine and not require the user to do anything. I’ll urge people not to submit their best links in the early stages of testing until at least this feature has been implemented :-)

4) Training Videos

Right now, the software is very easy to use but it will become more complicated as more tools and features are added and I want to be able to educate my members. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, once I release paid versions it becomes very important to keep those paying members interested. Adding new sites and new tools is all well and good but if they struggle to use the software they will just give up.

I intend to create a series of training videos and then direct the members towards this will an aWeber email sequence. There’s also a second advantage – the videos themselves can be used to market the software. I’ll be making them public and distributing them around the major video sharing sites and yes video submission will be a future tool!

However I know from experience that videos can become out of date very quickly and especially in these early stages the look and feel is likely to change so I think I shall hold fire on this for a few weeks at least. What I might do instead is write a quick series of tutorial emails instead as an interim measure.

5) New Email List

I can’t remember whether or not I have mentioned this before but I have been planning to launch a new email list entitled ‘Backlinks Digest’ for some time now but I have been focusing on the software so far. The idea is that each issue will feature a site when you can go submit a piece of content to get a backlink and will be used to market the software. Everything my software does can be done manually but as we all know, that’s incredibly time consuming so I have no qualms about giving out details of the sites being used as it’s the time saving aspect that I am really selling.

Right now this blog promotes the Bloggers Bible in an aWeber lightbox and this works pretty well – I get a bunch of new signups every day and this results in a handful of sales most months. I don’t really want to get rid of this revenue stream so ideally what I would like to do is somehow advertise both of them in a single popup and last time I looked into this it could not be done with the standard aWeber forms. I bit of php magic will almost certainly be required.

Income

• The Bloggers Bible – $343.95
• Bluehost – $270
• Unique Article Wizard – $53.60
• Membership Site Mastermind – $44.37
• Mass Outsource Mastermind – $20.98

Total income earned during November ‘09 – $732.90

The income is quite a drop from last month! I knew it was coming though :-) Next month should be interesting as it will be the last one of the calendar year so I’m going to tot up the year’s totals. I never actually did this last year so I may compare both years and see how that has panned out.

Subscribers

Subs at the beginning of November ‘09: 11,752

Subs at the end of November ‘09: 12,227

New subscribers in November ‘09: 475

Last month I reported a drop in the growth in subscribers but it seems to be back to its normal rate this month which is encouraging. As you can see from the graph, there have been a few feedburner glitches that show up as dips but it looks like the final figure is correct.

Traffic

There was a slight dip in traffic last month but that was due to my site being down for a day and it’s back to its normal level this month. I actually find it uncanny how I can have virtually identical levels of traffic month after month even when the majority of that traffic comes from search engines. I guess that goes to show how predictable and stable it can be.

Conclusion

It’s hard to see such a drop in income and not panic but this is when I have to keep my cool and stay focused. There are a lot of things I could do to make more money from existing revenue streams if I invested the time to do so. I have written an entire course on how to make money blogging so why am I not following my own advice? Quite simply – 95% of my time is now dedicated to my software project and even though it’s nice that I still have some income from the blog coming in, I simply cannot afford the time to boost this as it takes time away from the project that I want to focus on.

I know that I have let the blog slide somewhat this year and I am seeing subscribers drop as a result. Even though there is always a boost in the subscriber numbers that you see posted here every month – this is the combined stats that feedburner reports which is both RSS and AWeber subscribers and I can see from my individual AWeber totals that while my email list is steadily growing each month, my RSS readership is slowly declining.

It’s quite sad but until I get into the marketing aspect of my project, there really isn’t very much to talk about and I knew this was something that would happen. This isn’t a software blog so I am not going to bore you with the details of my php, Zend, testing issues and so on. I know some people have expressed an interest in this stuff but once again I am back to my time issue – I just cannot afford to spend the time blogging like I used to, even if I had the material to blog about.

However, the project is actually coming along nicely now and I am still on schedule for a December launch of Release #0 which will be the free one so hopefully things will get a bit more interesting around here soon!

As regular readers will know, recently I have been beavering away at my software project and recently I announced some estimated release dates for the first couple of releases. When you build anything – whether it is a piece of software, a blog, or any kind of website, the majority of your time will go into the major work of the project but you’ll also find that time needs to be spent on polishing things up, fixing issues, adding little enhancements and so on. These can be major productivity killers.

I use a system called Trac to manage the tasks in my project and as I go along I will raise a ticket for myself to do various odd jobs such as fixing a bug, making enhancements and so on and this week I found that a big chunk of my time was spent trying to knock out some of the tickets that had been piling up. However this is time consuming and while I am working on odd jobs like that I am not working on the major development features so I want to cut down on this time as much as possible.

There are some things that are high priority and really need to be addressed. For example, if the submission code for a site stops working, I need to see what has changed and fix it asap. However there are other things that are just ‘nice’ to have and these are where I will deliberately put them off. Yesterday as I was going through my outstanding tickets I took four of them that I had against the current release and pushed them back to the next one. They don’t need to be worked on right now and I can happily put them off until later.

My mother would not be happy at this attitude but it makes business sense. I have already spent far longer getting up to speed on the project than I imagined so now that I am close to release I don’t want any further delays. When you start thinking of all the little things that can be tweaked it’s so easy to just go on and on and never finish. This is true of any kind of project. This is a situation in which procrastination is good! It’s basically the 80/20 rule – spend your time on the 20% that matters and leave all the rest until later.

If you’re working on some new project such as getting a blog up and running, you may easily find yourself falling into this trap. Another new plugin to install, a tweak to the design, etc etc. Get the essentials done and then go! Come back to those things later. If you can put it off until later then do!

However, as pointed out by one of my readers on the weekend’s software project update, the maintenance of my software is going to be a big and continuous job. I want to focus my time on development of new features and don’t want my time to be sucked up by doing maintenance of all the sites that the software will support. This is an ideal candidate for outsourcing.

So, Tyrone’s report is quite timely as I’m at least thinking about it now even if I’m not quite ready to implement it. His free report is called Secrets of Outsourcing Experts Revealed and it’s quite a hefty 64 page PDF and focuses mainly on interviews with Tim Ferriss, Jeff Mills and John Jonas. I don’t know who the last two guys are but I have certainly heard of Tim Ferris of the 4 Hour Work Week fame, though I’ve still not read his book :-)

One reason I’ve always thought of outsourcing as something for ‘later’ is the money issue. It seems like one of those things where you need to earn the money first before you can afford to pay for staff. I was really surprised to read about how one of the guys interviewed in the report hires a full time PHP programmer in the Philippines for just $300 a month! If I could hire a PHP programmer to do all the maintenance for me for that kind of money, that would free up a lot of time to work on new features and get them released quicker.

The first 50 pages of the report concentrate on the interviews and then the remainder has some outsourcing resources such as project management software, sites to find workers etc. I haven’t yet watched the videos that accompany the report but I’ll probably have a look at those in due course.

What Software Am I Developing?

The aim of this project is to build a paid membership site that provides tools for Internet marketers. Specially the tools will be designed to automatically build backlinks to your websites. Over time, a comprehensive and integrated suite of tools will be developed but I am starting with a single tool to automate social bookmarking. I have at least a dozen tools planned but will not be announcing details until nearer their release.

When Will The Tools Be Ready?

As any true software developer will tell you, it will be ready when it’s ready :-) However I have started to work more closely to a schedule in recent weeks and I think it’s about time I made myself accountable and gave some time estimates. The software will be released in phases. Each release will contain new tools, enhancements to earlier tools and a price increase! However, the very first thing I am doing is releasing a free version which I am calling Release #0. My plan for the first couple of releases is as follows:

• December ‘09 – Release #0 (FREE): Social bookmarking tool
• March ‘10 – Release #1: (~$25/mo):  Enhanced bookmarker + 2 new tools

Beta Testing

Even though I have been developing software for 12 years, this is the first time I have developed a web application and it’s quite different to what I have done in the past. All software has bugs but I am expecting to hit some unforeseen problems initially because that’s just the way things work. One thing I never want to do, is provide buggy software to paying members – that is of course a big no-no.

Therefore from Release #1 onwards, all new features will first of all be released to the free members for a trial period. This gives me two distinct advantages. From a software testing point of view, it gives me a chance to have the software used by real people. In order to encourage the free members to test the software thoroughly for me I shall offer an incentive for those who report new bugs to me – this will be free access to the paid version for some period of time. I’ll work out the details later.

Another advantage of course is that this strategy works as a marketing tool. By giving free members access to the full version for some time, they may like the paid features and decide to upgrade.

Restricting Members

Despite my testing strategy outlined above, I am still concerned about the initial free launch in particular. As much as I want to eventually bring in as many members (free as well as paid) as possible, I don’t want to suddenly have thousands of people descending on my brand new software the first week of it’s launch! If I got any problems I could be overwhelmed with bug reports.

So ideally, I want to restrict memberships though at this time I am not entirely sure how I am going to manage that. I am using aMember to manage the actual memberships but as far as I can see it doesn’t have a built it mechanism to restrict members so I think this is something I will need to code myself into my backend software.

The long term aim is to open up the memberships slowly at first to allow me find find and fix initial teething problems quickly and then gradually open it up to more and more members until it is stable and I can lift all restrictions. At this time, I’m still a little hazy on the details. However one thing I will say is that I am likely to invite initial members from a list of those who have explicitly shown an interest in the software and not from my general blog readership. I have been building a prospects quietly for some time now. If you’d like to be added to the list, fill out the form below:

Development Progress

Up until around the time I went to Florida, I had been really struggling with development. I first announced the project almost a year ago and I spent the first few months faffing around with learning PHP and trying to figure out a lot of the basics such as what PHP framework I should use, how my code would be integrated, how I would manage members and so on. This stuff took way longer than I expected!

When I finally got around to starting actual development work I still encountered a lot of problems and for the longest time it felt like all I did was hit problem after problem after problem. It felt like I wasn’t making any progress at all which is why I didn’t really have very much to say in the way of updates. Over the last couple of months since I’ve been back from holiday I seem to have managed to get over that hump and things are progressing much more smoothly now so I am hopeful that I will actual hit my target dates hence why I have finally felt brave enough to mention them!

If you have any questions about the project feel free to ask in the comments :-)

Income

• The Bloggers Bible – $4,858.88
• Bluehost – $605
• Membership Site Mastermind – $328.45
• Unique Article Wizard – $53.60
• Traffic Rush – $44.87
• The Immediate Edge – $25
• Twitter Rockstar – $21.24

Total Income Earned During October 2009 – $5,937.04

The income boost this month is of course down to my birthday promotion of the Bloggers Bible which I documented shortly afterwards. This is sadly another one off so next month I expect it to go down to more regular levels.

Subscribers

Subs at beginning of October: 11,507

Subs at the end of October: 11,752

New subscribers in October 09: 245

This is quite odd – the growth in subscribers dropped quite dramatically this month and I’m not sure why. The traffic dipped slightly this month (in the next section) but only by about 5% whereas the subscribers dropped by about 50% but I don’t know why.

Traffic

You can see a discernable drop in traffic this month where my website was down for almost a whole day. Other than that, it’s been the usual pattern and numbers as every other month.

Conclusion

My birthday promotion brought me a nice boost in income but I don’t think there will be anything like that coming up anytime soon so I imagine this will remain the record month for some time to come in terms of income.

Last month I toyed with the idea of perhaps boosting income from this blog but I have abandonned the idea now in favour of still continuing to concentrate on my software project which is coming along better now, if still slowly.

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Click here to see full details of the fast action bonuses

What is Membership Site Mastermind?

MSM is an intense six week course designed to teach you everything you need to know about planning, developing, marketing, maintaining and possibly even selling a membership site with the aim of bringing in an income of $100,000 a year.

The course is delivered in 6 weekly modules, mainly in video and accompanied by lots of supporting material and additional resources. Even though the course is presented over a fairly short period of time you are quite likely to need longer to actually put a lot of the material into action. I joined a few months back when it first opened and as well as the course materials Yaro runs regular live calls in which members can ask anything they want and has an active support forum.

To get a good idea of what the course is all about, the best thing you can do is have a read of Yaro’s free report, the Membership Site Masterplan. This outlines the whole process in a condensed report and will give you a very good idea of whether or not the full course will be useful to you. And if not, it’s a brilliant report in it’s own right – you can read my review of it that I wrote last week.

Payment Options & Lifetime Money Back Guarantee

Yaro offers two payment options. Firstly you can pay in 3 monthly installments of $297 for a total cost of $891 or, option 2 allows you to save $144 by paying $747 up front.

Yaro is unique in that he offers a LIFETIME money back guarantee on his products! You don’t have to prove anything – if for any reason you feel that Membership Site Mastermind was not for you, you’ll get your money back.

Click here to order Membership Site Mastermind

Anyway, I thought it would be beneficial to have another read through the report to see how well it applies now. I’ve written a fairly in-depth review here of both how it applies to my own upcoming membership site and how I think it would apply to other membership site models.

Chapter 1 – Preeminence & Building Proof

What preeminence is, why you need it and how to build it. Basically this is about demonstrating to your audience that you are qualified to offer them the content of your site. Yaro’s course & report is very much geared towards teaching and although that’s a somewhat narrow focus in my opinion, you do still need to give people a reason to buy from you so this is an important chapter.

I must admit I feel a lot more comfortable about the idea of launching a membership site now, than I would have done 2 years ago when I was a complete unknown.

Chapter 2 – Marketing

This was a weak chapter in my opinion as I believe that marketing is just about the most important part of anything you ever want to sell. Without potential customers you cannot make any income! Yaro stresses the importance of an email list which I totally agree with but there is so much more he could have included in this chapter. I have a lot of marketing ideas for my own project and very few of them were mentioned here.

However he also discusses joint ventures and the use of affiliates which is very useful as I have not managed this particularly well in the past.

Chapter 3 – Technology

A membership site is probably one of the more technically demanding ways of making money online and the technology can scare people away. Even I, a true techie at heart, found all the technological options a bit overwhelming. This chapter talks about protecting resources, taking payments, adding content features such as forums, email list services and affiliate management.

There’s no waffle, Yaro clearly gives several options in each category, and discusses them all in detail. This chapter is amazingly useful and it applies to any kind of membership site that you might want to build.

Chapter 4 – Content and Pricing

As mentioned, Yaro’s work is quite strongly geared towards lesson based content and I personally believe that this is a flawed model in many cases because you’ll run out of content to deliver! Yaro himself has launched 3 membership sites and whilst they have all made him a lot of money, they are still on a fixed-term timeframe. I consider this to be a single sale spread out over multiple payments.

In my mind a TRUE membership site is one that can keep it’s members for YEARS, not just a few weeks or months. My own project is delivering software tools which of course most people can’t do because it requires programming knowledge but one of my favourite posts that I have written is 6 Models for Membership Sites and there are at least 4 there that fit in with more traditional forms of content that Yaro discusses, and can keep your members for as long as they remain interested.

This chapter also talks about pricing and it’s quite interesting as most people are frightened to charge money for their services!

Chapter 5 – Phychological Triggers

This stuff could have been put into the marketing section really as it’s in your marketing campaigns that you might want to use these triggers. It’s all about giving people a reason to buy from you and to buy right now. Most people who choose to buy later, simply don’t buy at all! Very interesting chapter, I enjoyed it a lot and intend to use some of these triggers in my own work. Indeed, I have already have  just last week with my Bloggers Bible birthday promotion which brought in a rather nice big payday :-)

Chapter 6 – Prelaunch and Launch

This chapter talks about the steps to take in order to actually launch your site and also the pre-launch process which aims to build buzz so that your launch goes well. This is really good stuff and a lot of it borrows from Jeff Walkers Product launch Formula. I paid $2,000 for a that course!

This chapter also talkes about sales letters and copywriting and I was a little disappointed with this section as it doesn’t really present any alternatives to the traditional long-form sales letter which is something that I personally loathe! Many products these days would do better with a short introductory video or something similar and he could have branched  out a bit here.

Chapter 7 – Dealing with Attrition

Attrition is the rate at which people drop out of your site and it’s a real problem! Many people (me included!) get very excited when crunching numbers based on an ever-growing membership base but if people are dropping out on a regular basis you’re wont really be growing your business. This chapter discusses solid ways of dealing with it and minimising it – very useful indeed.

Chapter 8 – Putting Your Membership Site on Autopilot

I’m a big fan of automation – my own software project is all about automation! This chapter discusses how to implement systems that allow you to automate and outsource as much of the work as possible so that once your site is stable, you don’t have to do very much work to keep it going. It then becomes more of a residual income.

Chapter 9 – Selling Your Membership Site

When I first looked at this my initial thoughts were, why on earth would you want to sell your site if it brings in a regular income for you? However, when done correctly, a site can sell for several years times it’s earnings which can lead to a massive cash injection and of course it also frees your time to work on your next big project with all that money behind you.

Yaro teaches how to prepare your site to sell, determine what it is worth and how to find buyers.

Conclusion

Many people think a membership site is just about delivering some content but there is SO much more to it than that and this comprehensive report really does a great job of giving you the big picture even though it’s weak in a couple of places. The report is free so be sure to download your copy and if you are serious about starting a membership site, consider joining Membership Site Mastermind when it opens for the last time this year, next week on the 27th October.

Last week I ran a similar promotion for my birthday and reduced my course about making money blogging down by 68% for just 24 hours. I expected to get a good handful of sales but I was very pleasantly surprised to find that it brought in quite a few more than I expected and I made well over $4,000 on that day! That’s more than I usually make in a couple of months!

The Reality v The Myth

You often see Internet Marketers use days like these to promote their other products. They will want to show you how you can make $10k or $100k in a single day. It looks damned impressive and when you can back it up with proof of earnings, it’s a serious lure for the uninitiated. I don’t try to prove my earnings – I just report it and assume that people will believe that I’m not just making up the numbers :-)

The problem with these kinds of days – the big payday’s is that although they are entirely possible to create, it’s a little more complicated than it seems. I’m delighted by the payday I got for my birthday but I know it’s a one-off so I just want to bust some of the myths that go around about these things.

You Need a Product

To have a big payday, you need to sell something! Though technically, it doesn’t have to be your own product – you could sell somebody else’s but then you are relying on that person’s launch and so you’re working to somebody else’s timescale. To create your own big payday you need to have your own product that you can sell and it needs to be something substantial. Unless you are going for massive volume of sales, you need to be able to have a reasonably high price tag.

Building the Audience Takes Time

This is one of the biggest stumbling blocks in all of Internet marketing. I don’t care if you are a blogger, an affiliate marketer, an ebook writer, developer of Internet tools or whatever else you may do – you need some kind of audience to which you promote your product. This is often built up using an email list and this is the part that takes time to build. To get people onto an email list in the first place you need an audience in itself – some kind of traffic.

For me, this blog draws in the traffic from the search engines and other sources and it directs people to my email list which sends out the free version of the Bloggers Bible lessons every week. I introduced the Bloggers Bible just under a year ago, at the end of October 2008 and started building my email list then. During that year, over 7,000 people have subscribed and that is what gave me the audience for last week’s birthday promotion. If I only had a few hundred people on the list, I’d only have got a fraction of the sales – it’s all a numbers game.

This is very often the factor that Internet Marketing gurus leave out. There are ways to use other people’s audiences – advertise on somebody else’s list for example, but once again you’re not in control so for best effect, you need to build your own list and this is something that takes time.

You Need a USP (Unique Selling Prospect)

Whatever you sell, you need to give your audience a reason to buy it and in the case of a big payday, you need to give them a reason to buy it right now! There are various tactics for doing this but two very common ones are the urgency factor and the scarcity factor. Urgency is simple – you have your offer open for a limited period of time. In my case, I offered my discount for just 24 hours. I ended up running over for a few hours but it was still very limited. The other common tactic is scarcity where you only offer a limited number of your product.

The Payday is Usually a One-Off

I was able to run my promotion because it was my birthday. It’s not something I can repeat over and over. Firstly, most of the people who are interested in buying will have now done so therefore I would not make as many sales next time. Also, if I was run these offers on a regular basis then the urgency factor simply disappears because the unique offer becomes a lie! Have you seen some products that are launched, and then closed down and then re-launched some time later for no apparent reason? I must say, this is something that annoys me a little bit because I can see no reason for it other than as a marketing tactic.

The Reality of the Big Payday

Let me backup and show you exactly what needed to happen for me to be able to pull in over $4,000 in a single day. First of all I needed a product and it took me a few months of hard work to produce the Bloggers Bible. Then came the promotion and here is where we need to back up a bit more. I promoted the course on the blog and it was a combination of the existing subscriber base of my blog and then the continued on-going traffic that gave me the 7,000+ subscribers to which I ran the promotion.

However, my blog has been running over two years – there’s now almost 400 posts and I have spent countless hours building it up and promoting it. Without that I would not have RSS subscribers and I would not get the search engine traffic that I do month after month.

The reality is that I could never have had a day like that without the 2 years of effort that went before it. Of course I’ve also earned a lot of money month after month in those two years as well as last week’s big day but the point being that some marketers will try to hype the big payday and make it look like something that can be achieved very easily by a complete newcomer which is not really the case.

For those who are interested, full sales stats will of course be reported in the October stats report.

As mentioned earlier in the week today is my birthday and for today only as a celebration I have dropped the price of the Fast Track version of Bloggers Bible to just $38! The offer is live right now and will run for 24 hours until tomorrow, same time.

Click here to buy Bloggers Bible Fast Track for just $38

This is a one-time offer and tomorrow the price goes back up to $119 so if you were thinking of buying, now is definitely the time!

The fast track version of the Bloggers Bible is the PDF version of the course which weighs in at almost 200 pages! The email course which is delivered in weekly lessons will always remain completely free but for those who want to work faster, I made the Fast Track. You can download a free sample of the PDF which contains 3 free lessons to give you an idea of what you are getting.

I’m based in the UK but the vast majority of my subscribers are based in the US so I will be running the promotion on PST time. The price will go down to $38 at 9am PST / 2pm EST / 5pm UK time on Thursday 15th October and go back up again 24 hours later on Friday 16th. I will make another blog post when the discount is live and I’ll also be announcing it on my Twitter feed.

Where Did the Sales Come From?

I made three sales, two high priced ones at over $700 each and a lower one, all of a membership site called Teaching Sells. This originally opened up in October 2007 and I joined it but didn’t get around to reviewing it on my blog until April 2008 when they launched a $1 trial.

It’s this review, written in April ‘08 that brought in the $1,659 in sales in September ‘09 – almost a year and a half later! I also made some sales back then too but the reason this has paid out now is due to the way that cookies work with affiliate programs.

How Cookies & Affiliate Programs Work

The vast majority of affiliate programs work by storing what is known as a cookie on the computer of anyone who clicks on the affiliate link. A cookie is simply a tiny text file with some information in it. In the case of affiliate programs it would store the ID of the affiliate who referred that customer. Cookies have an expiration date and with many affiliate programs, they last a long time.

What this means is that if a customer, Bob clicks on an affiliate link of mine today then a cookie is stored in his computer with my affiliate ID. But Bob might not want to buy the product today, or next week or next month. However, as long as that cookie is on Bob’s computer, if he goes back at a later date and follows through to make that purchase, I will get credit for the sale.

Many cookies last 3, or 6 months, some are even a lifetime cookie that never expire. I had a look at the sales report from Teaching Sells. The two high priced sales that I made came from the same referring link – that review post in April and the other was from a stats post. When they clicked through to those links, that would have put that cookie on their computer.

In September, Teaching Sells opened its doors again for a limited time. Usually I would have promoted it but this occurred whilst I was away on holiday with no Internet access so I completely missed the opportunity and it was all over by the time I got back. However… anyone who was previously a member of Teaching Sells, including all those people who signed up for the $1 trial would have been on their mailing list and would have received the promotional emails that the Teaching Sells guys came out with.

When those three people got those emails and decided to make a purchase, my affiliate link was still stored in that cookie on their computer from my original review post back in April 2008 hence how I got credited for the sales!

I hope that has clarified the source of the unexpected sales in the September stats and it just goes to show that a blog post can bring in money for a very long time, even if you happen to be on holiday :-)

Income

• Teaching Sells – $1,659
• Bluehost – $580
• Membership Site Mastermind – $194.37
• Private Advertising – $191.60
• The Bloggers Bible – $114.06
• Traffic Rush – $89.74
• Unique Article Wizard – $80.40
• Niche AdSense WordPress Themes – $18.27

Total income earned during September ‘09: $2,927.44

The income took an unexpected jump this month due to Teaching Sells. I had to scratch my head over that one! How on earth could I earn $1,659 on something that closed months ago? I have a post about that coming up :-)

One thing I noticed this time is that I have been reporting my Bluehost income incorrectly – my commission is reported in UK pounds but I list it as US dollars for consistency but I was reporting $95 per sale (or $65 if it goes through my old links), but it’s actually only, $90 – boooo lol :)

I was pleased to see that even if I take off Teaching Sells, which is a one off as it is closed again now, the income was back into 4 figures (there really must be a summer slump) at $1,268. Good timing really, as I really did overspend on my holiday to Florida!

Subscribers

Usually I would use the stats from the previous month to compare against to determine the subscriber growth but of course I didn’t do the stats for last month. However, on the FeedCompare graph and I see the first number reported for the beginning of the month (not quite accurate as it’s the 2nd today but close enough!) and use that.

Subs at beginning of September: 10,961

Subs at end of September: 11,507

New subscribers in Sep ‘09: 546

Traffic

Same old same old more or less… well not quite actually. I’ve noticed that I am no longer earning money from Twitter Rockstar which is surprising as my Twitter Guide promotes it heavily. I checked the affiliate links and they are all working fine so I decided to have a look at the traffic and that revealed my problem.

The Twitter Guide pages – namely the landing page and page 1 of the guide itself used to be very high trafficked pages on my blog but not anymore! Well, it’s still fairly high but no where near as high as before so I’m not making sales because the pages are not getting the traffic they used to. And why not? Easy – my guide ranked number #1 on Google for the search term “twitter guide” for the longest time but it has dropped down now. It’s at #4 today but I had a look the other day and it was at 6 or 7 if I recall. It just goes to show that the number #1 listing gets a LOT more traffic than others even on the first page.

Conclusion

I’ve said this many times before but this month really is proof of the power of a monetized blog as a source of residual income. As usual, all income earned here is from work done a very long time ago and yet continues to bring in a decent income month after month with the occasional big boost.

As I discussed in my 2 year anniversary post recently, the progress on my Software Project is steady but excruciatingly slow. I’ve been taking a closer look at time scales this month and because the first release will be a free one, it will not be bringing me any additional income for a few more months which means that my only source of income for a while longer continues to be this blog.

I don’t have time to take on any new projects but I might be able to make a few tweaks here and there, possibly post a little more – perhaps try and bring in some fresh search traffic without too much additional effort. I’ll keep you posted, pun intended :)

Freedom Is Still Paramount

My reasons for quitting my day job were simply the desire for freedom and that hasn’t changed one bit. I love that I can do just whatever I like, whenever I like and never have to answer to anybody. Of course this freedom has a downside too – it’s very easy to abuse and I have done quite a bit of that in 2009 in particular.

2008 was a really rough year for me on a personal level. I was reeling from two broken relationships and I moved home 3 times. My whole world turned upside-down and I had to re-adjust to a whole new life. This took a massive toll on my business as I simply wasn’t able to work for much of that year – I was at a very low point for much of it and had no enthusiasm. But the freedom that the business gives me allowed me to get through that – I simply don’t know how I could have coped if I had been in a regular job.

2009 has been a polar opposite. I got my own place, I made a whole bunch of great new friends, I met a new partner, I started karate and snowboarding, I’ve been to music festivals, to DisneyLand in Florida and basically had the time of my life! But… the business paid the price. Once again, I have done very little work this year but at least it’s for happy reasons rather than sad ones but still the fact that I have the freedom to do that is so wonderful and that’s why I could simply never go back to being employed again.

A Shift Away From IM Back to Software

In my first anniversary post I talked about the difficulty of coming up with a long term business model that works online in a world where technology moves so fast. At the time I had started experimenting with AdSense and I said that the second part of my master plan was top secret. That was of course the software project and it’s actually quite shocking to me to realise that I was first thinking about doing it a year ago and I’ve still not released anything! Time really can fly when you’re self employed!

However, at least this second year I have felt more focused even if I have not actually put the hours in. Over the last year I have cut out all other commitments so I literally do nothing but work on my software project and this blog now. That feels much better to me than in the first year where I seemed to be all over the place with lots of different project and I always seemed to be knee deep in several training courses which were all conflicting with one another.

Writing software is much more natural to me than Internet Marketing but of course I can apply everything I have learned about IM to market the software that I am now writing. I am hoping that will put me in a unique position as most programmers are not marketers and most marketers are not programmers :-)

Even though I have been working on this project in one way or another for a year and have still barely touched the surface, it still feels like the right thing to do. For me the only business model that I am interested in now is a membership site.  Therefore I have no interest in creating more ebooks, courses or anything of that nature. It’s not easy to come up with an idea for a membership site that can keep members for months or ideally, years on end. I listed a few membership site models in a previous post and online services was one of those models.

Even if the particular site that I am building does not draw in enough paid members, the skills I learn building that site can then be used to build something else so if my first idea fails, I have the skills to try something else. The software skills I am learning will open doors for me that marketing alone simply cannot do.

The Blog Plods On

This blog has most certainly taken a back seat this year but what is fascinating to me is that it continues to make a fairly decent income month after month after month from work I did well over a year ago. It has become a truly passive income. Just as well too, considering how long my software is taking me :-)

Of course now that I am only developing software and not really doing much in the way of IM or social media etc, there simply isn’t much to blog about and I can’t see that changing in the foreseeable future. However the goal of the blog remains the same as it always – to chronicle my efforts in making a living online. What you read here is real. I’m not some guru who’s made millions online and has a hyped up blog to sell the know-how. I’m a regular person who’s been struggling to make a living for the last two years and who has discussed all the efforts along the way.

Income Earned

• September ‘08 – $958
• October ‘08 – $1,153
• November ‘08 – $1,392
• December ‘08 – $1,498
• January ‘09 – $2,439
• February ‘09 – $1,352
• March ‘09 – $1,745
• April ‘09 – $1,776
• May ‘09 – $1,627
• June ‘09 – $1,062
• July ‘09 – $960
• August ‘09 (Estimated) – $950

I was away on holiday for August last month so I couldn’t do my usual stats but I have done my business accounts and August came out virtually identical to July so I’ve put in estimated earnings. The total comes to $16,912 which averages at $1409 a month. Like the previous year there’s no real pattern in the earnings though they have declined fairly steadily in the last few months. I do wonder if the drastic slow down in blogging has been partly responsible for that. It’s hard to say.

I’m annoyed with myself that another year on, I’m still basically earning about the same as I was this time last year but that’s exactly why it can be useful to take time out at pertinent times like these to reflect :-) My excuse for the first year was that my life basically sucked so I couldn’t work properly and my excuse for the second year was that I was having too much fun to work properly so now it’s time to find a balance and fit in some more work amongst all that fun :-)

Happiness Still > Money

At the end of the first year’s post I stated that happiness was far more important to me than money and of course that is still true. But it’s easier for me to say that because I have money! A lot of new readers to the blog don’t understand how I am able to survive on such a small income and ask if I have any other income streams. The answer to this question is no – I only earn what I show in these monthly stat reports. Well slightly less in fact as I have a few expenses such as hosting, and some services I pay for.

The reason I am able to basically survive with such a low income is due to savings. I was fortunate enough to build up a large amount of equity in my house which I sold in the beginning of 2008 (right before the housing market in the UK crashed!) putting a large amount of cash in my bank account. I now rent a house so that I can live off those savings until I am earning enough to support myself properly and feel secure enough to buy another property. I have enough savings to continue my current lifestyle for several more years so although I am annoyed with myself for slacking so much this year, I have a few more years of slacking potential left before I run out of cash!

What’s In Store For Year 3?

I am 100% dedicated to getting my software released. That is my one and only goal and I don’t care about anything else (work wise I mean). The income from this blog could drop to zero and even though that would be scary, I will continue working on the software project without getting sidetracked by anything else which might come with a lure of easy money.

One personality trait which I do possess is persistence! Nobody can call me a quitter :-) I may suck at getting things done quickly but when I decide I want something I will not stop until I get it. This year I REALLY want to make that full time income which is about $6,000 per month. I’m confident that I shall achieve that goal at some point in 2010 but if not I guess I’ll be even more annoyed with myself in my 3 year anniversary post :-)

As for the blog, I’m not sure what the future is… as long as I don’t reach my goal I will continue to have something to talk about but once I have released my software and have enough paying members to support myself, I’m not sure what will be left to say. I intend to keep posting monthly stats as long as they are relevant but after a certain point it’s really just showing off unless you have something new to teach.

I envision at least a year’s worth of work on my software project after the first release simply because there are so many features that I want to implement. However, the marketing will remain pretty much the same for each release so once again, I’m just not sure what there would be to blog about. I know what I am doing with my time work wise, but I don’t know what the future holds for this blog!

The Meaty Content

With any work there is always some kind of activity which is the most important ‘meat’ of the work. For a piece of software its developing the features of that software, for a blog it’s writing the posts, for an ebook business its writing the content of the book and so on. This activity is always something to spend a lot of time on because without it, you have no business.

Software that doesn’t do anything is not software, a blog with no posts is just a dead blog and a book with no words is, well, non existent :-) For any kind of business its important that you figure out what the meaty content is and prioritise your work around that. Often this work is harder to do than other stuff and so it can be easy to procrastinate and avoid it by keeping yourself busy with other less important work. However there is a time and a place for that too.

Adding the Polish

If you’ve ever started a blog, did you fall into the trap of spending an age fidding with your theme and plugins before actually getting any posts written? This is a common pitfall and is really just a way of procrastinating. However saying that, the polish to any business is still a necessary activity in the vast majority of cases.

Whilst a blog, software or ebook doesn’t really need to look good in order to do its job, it really does help – especially if you plan to make money from what you are producing. I don’t think there’s any doubt that this polish work needs to get done, the question is when should you do it?

It’s this question in my software project that prompted me to write this post today. Before I stopped work for my holiday I had completed the functionality of a specific chunk of work which I was pleased with. It works but it doesn’t look pretty. I am not done though as I still have another couple of important features to implement so I have the dilemma – do I continue working on those new features which need to get done before I can release or do I stop and polish up what I have done already?

With any work that is somewhat ongoing such as web software or a blog, you’ll soon find that you’re never really done with the content so it can be hard to know when to polish. If the work is more finite such as a book then the decision is clearer – you can get the first draft of your book written before you even think about polishing it up.

What I’ve decided to do is alternate to some extent. Now that I’ve completed a major chunk of work I’ll take a break from development to add some polish but I won’t try and do everything as that can be a never-ending job in itself. Once I’ve added a little polish I’ll develop another specific feature and then stop to polish and so on. For a blogger I would suggest concentrating on post content for the most part but setting aside some time every now and then to just polish things up the blog and keep doing this on a regular basis.

Keeping up Your Skills

With most online businesses there is some kind of learning curve at the beginning and then there is ongoing study. Obviously if you are starting something you have never done before then you need to invest in a period of study before you can really get any work done at all. In my case, I needed to learn the PHP language and a few web technologies – this took much longer than I anticipated.

If you’re starting a blog you might want to learn about blogging first but with anything like this, there is usually an inexhaustible supply of free information out there and its easy to get so caught up in the reading and studying that you never actually get anything done. I remember when I first started this business 2 years ago, and I broke down where my time was going I realised I was doing this very thing.

On the other hand, another mistake that people make is that they learn what they need to get started but then they just stop learning. This is a mistake, especially with an online business, because things change – technology changes, new sites, tools and trends come and go, and if you don’t keep up you’ll find yourself left behind. It’s always a good idea to keep yourself up to date using whatever sources are relevant to your work whether that’s a few blogs, an industry magazine (PHP Architect magazine and some blogs in my case), podcasts or whatever.

Balancing It All Out

Personally I find that the meaty content work is the hardest, and requires the most concentration and enthusiasm. It’s not easy for me to start developing something new and challenging at 4pm on a Friday afternoon but I can quite easily catch up on a few blogs at that time. There’s always some work that’s easier than others and always some times or days when you are more or less motivated than others.

Always set aside time for your most important work and do that work when you are at your best but also allow time for other work so that you don’t neglect the other little details.

I’m back home now but wow that was one exhausting holiday! I’ve decided to take another week off to re-adjust to the time zone, get back into the swing of things and spend time with my loved ones who I missed. I’ll be back at work on the 21st September ;-)

I still wont be doing stats as I have missed the date now and I actually don’t have a huge amount of spare time but I have been catching up with emails and can respond to comments now!

As a result, there will be no stats post this month and all blog comments and emails will have to wait until around the middle of September. The little time I do have online is reserved for my special people back home :-)

Speak to you all soon!

Hopefully I will have Internet access (if not I’m flying back lol!) at the villa we are staying in so I should be able to keep on top of email though I doubt I will be posting much. I’ll try and do a stats post at the end of the month but I’m not promising anything.I’m due back in the UK on the 10th September and plan to be back working around the 15th.

Pricing / Volume Considerations

With most products you can choose to price cheaply and aim to make your profit on high volumes or price high and sell fewer numbers but make more profit on each sale. I’ve already said that with my software I’d prefer to have a higher price point and fewer members. There’s actually several reasons for this:

Customer Support

As soon as you start charging money for any product you have yourself a customer and in the case of a product which has an on-going fee, you need to offer those customers support. This is a big issue in my case as I want to ensure that all members are fully supported in case of any issues. Therefore the more members I have the more time is potentially taken up by customer support which makes a strong case for having fewer members and a higher price point.

Technology

A higher number of members means more work for my server to do. I don’t actually think this one will be much of an issue unless it had to support a great many members in which case I’d be making so much money that I’d just pay somebody else to deal with it :-) However it still makes a case for fewer members.

The Exclusivity Factor

The idea of the tools that I am developing is that they will automate many of the tasks which have to be done manually – this gives the member a massive time advantage over people who don’t have access to such tools. Therefore the fewer people who have access to the software, the more of a benefit it is to those who do. It’s probably a relatively minor point as there are of course competing products out there but it’s still a consideration.

Competing Products

There are already products out there that do the kinds of things that I want to do. None of them are quite the same of course but I need to keep them in mind. There’s one new product in particular that has been released recently which is very similar to what my first paid version would look like and it’s introductory price is much less than I was planning to charge for my first version which is the main reason I am having a re-think!

It’s all very well deciding how much I want to charge but I need to stay competitive as well so if there is another product out there that does the same kind of thing for half the price then I doubt I’d get many customers!

My Pricing / Release Plan

I’m not just building a single tool but a suite of tools. However each one obviously will take time to develop so the idea is that I will release new tools incrementally and increase the price as I go along. As new tools are added to the suite, the whole product becomes more valuable hence justifying the price increase. Existing members will only ever pay the amount they signed up for as an incentive for early members.

Initially I had planned on 3 paid releases with the first version starting at $50 (well probably $49 or $47 for marketing purposes) but I have had a re-think and now decided to release 4 versions instead starting at $25 so the $50 version will have a lot more functionality than originally planned.

So that’s good news for the customer but I need to make sure that I am still being profitable. The problem with locking in the price is that if I get all my potential members on board at the earliest release with the lowest price point then I’m not going to get many members paying the higher prices later on down the line.

The way to solve this problem is to restrict the number of members that I take on board with each release. This is something I had decided on before as I want to use the initial members as testers too but I hadn’t really thought about the numbers. I shall have a think about it more carefully nearer the time.

This is all rather moot at the moment as I haven’t even released the free version yet and I’ll no doubt change my mind again but I like to post about my thoughts as I go along!

The way I work is that the vast majority of comments are automatically approved and then whenever I check my blog comments I’ll manually go through them and delete any that I don’t want on there. Sometimes I’ll be away for a couple of days or something so a few rogue comments get through.

Now there are some people who have been commenting on my blog for some time and do genuinely leave personal comments but they still use a keyword as their name. If you are one of those people then I urge you to re-think because your comments are getting deleted so it really is a waste of your time!

Furthermore, the spam button is right next to the delete button and sometimes I wake up feeling a little tired and I simply spam them all rather than just deleting them. I know it’s a little harsh but there are plenty of other blogs out there to comment on and it just looks lame when you comment as “web design seo” or whatever. So be warned, if you continue to comment here using keywords as your name, you are likely to end up in the spam filter on the Akismet system!

I don’t mind if you use a name with a keyword, “Mikael @ Retire Rich” for example is fine, because then at least I can address you if I choose to reply but if you choose to use a keyword in this way please be sure to leave a decent comment because if you catch me in a grumpy mood I might still mark you as spam anyway :-)

When I started the experiment the page ranked number #49 and had a PageRank of 2. I have been trying to track backlinks on this blog for several months but none of the tools I use are accurate – they vary wildly from month to month so I now don’t bother looking at the number of links that are supposedly reported and instead just check the rankings – after all, that’s the only thing that ultimately matters anyway.

Soon after starting to submit a few articles to UAW I noticed that the page had moved up to PR3 but it hadn’t really moved up in the rankings so it wasn’t really at that useful. I then got distracted with my software project so didn’t submit any more articles for a while and forgot all about it.

Then a couple of weeks ago I submitted another one and decided to have a look today to see if there had been any change. My Bloggers Bible page is now at PR4 and has climbed in the ranks accordingly. Today it sits at position #24. This is still not high enough to actually bring in any significant traffic but it’s an improvement.

A Breakdown of the Article Stats

Here’s a shot of my article list in the UAW dashboard. Let me explain the dates as it’s a bit confusing… The date ’scheduled for’ is when I actually first submitted the article into the UAW system for submission. It then begins submitting it according to the schedule you set. As I have mine set to a fairly low 20 links per day, it can take a while for these to finish. The ‘date submitted’ is the date the last article was submitted.

So for example, if you look at the second article in the list – the SEO one, I submitted it near the end of February and the links were still coming in at the end of April – two months in all. This would probably explain why I didn’t see much in the way of results for a while. I wonder how I would be doing now if I had been submitting articles more regularly.

Submitting these articles using Unique Article Wizard is the only work I have done to increase the ranking of my target page. What this service does is take your original article, twists it around and submits unique copies of it to hundreds (they claim thousands!) of blogs and article directories on a schedule of your choosing.

I have set mine up to submit to 20 directories a day and it has actually submitted most of the articles to several hundred directories over the following days and weeks. Not all of them show up in Google of course but that’s why I now prefer to check actual rankings than worry about how many links are out there.

How UAW Works

The way UAW works is that it uses your category keywords to determine appropriate places to submit your links. The better your categories and the more popular the topic of your article, the more links you’ll end up with.

Now I reserved judgment on this for a while because even though I could see all these links flooding in (many of them show up as Trackbacks in my admin panel in WordPress), I wasn’t sure how effective they would be as many of them are PR0 only.

PR0 links are the bottom of the pile – you’ll get more juice from a single high PR link than thousands of PR0’s but the thing is that good quality links are not easy to get and these ones are – they are a doddle. I have gained over 4000 links from just 7 articles so far.

This is not high quality but it’s quantity. It’s easy to do especially if you can rework existing content to use as article fodder and using something like Unique Article Wizard is dead quick too because the submissions take just a few seconds to upload and then they just do the rest automatically.

So to those of you who were asking before, yes now I DO recommend the UAW service :-)

A Side Note on Affiliate Marketing

Recently I posted a condensed guide to making a 4-figure income with your blog and I stated that a lot of the money I make is from affiliate marketing. This kind of post you are reading now is an example of that but what you’re seeing here is an approach that is fairly aggressive but avoids the hard sell.

I could write a review of UAW but that would immediately be dismissed as a sales pitch, which would be accurate. Instead, I much prefer to promote programs that I actually use and then visibly demonstrate exactly what I’m doing and how it is working for me – this is real and avoids all the hype. I have seen quite a few sales of UAW trickle in since I started the article marketing series and yet not until this post have I actually said that I recommended it.

Also, right now, in this side note what I am doing here is being transparent. I don’t need to cloak my affiliate links or try to hide the fact that I am promoting UAW with these posts as that would just insult your intelligence. In my experience I find the up-front way of marketing in a way that is authentic to be far more effective than just trying to hype products up and do traditional hard-sell marketing.

It’s the approach that I use, that works for me and that I recommend to others. Don’t be afraid to promote stuff heavily but do it in an authentic way and provide value as you do so.

Income

• Membership Site Mastermind – $278.92
• Bluehost – $270
• Traffic Rush – $135.07
• Become a Blogger – $84.96
• Unique Article Wizard – $80.40
• Twitter Rockstar – $63.19
• Private Advertising – $47.75

Total income earned during July 2009 – $960.29

This is the first month I have not made a sale of The Bloggers Bible! That’s a bit sad :-) I’m fairly sure that the income from Become a Blogger will dry up soon as that was a six month program so income may drop even further in the coming months which is a little scary but I’ll hold my breath and keep plugging away!

Subscribers

Subs at the end of June: 10,099

Subs at the end of July: 10,574

New subscribers in July ‘09 : 475

Traffic

Erm I just looked at last months post – either I forgot to post of the pictures or the images are not displaying! It’s a little annoying as I can’t compare the stats to the month before but I think it’s pretty much the same.

August / September Holiday

On the 26th August until the 10th September I will be on holiday – a proper one for a change! I’m going to Disney World, Florida so I’m really looking forward to that. However it probably won’t make much difference to this blog as I will be taking my laptop with me so I can still respond to comments etc as usual though I’m not sure if I will get my stats post done or not. We shall see.

What it Does

When I first came up with the idea for this project it was really quite vague but over the last few months I have been clarifying it a little more. In a nutshell I am developing tools that will automate some of the manual tasks done by Internet Marketers – mainly in the name of building links. The first tool that I will develop will be a social bookmarking submitter.

We’ve all seen those before of course and I’ll be the first to admit that what I am developing is not especially new but that’s just the first tool. I have some ideas for future development but they are still a little vague right now and of course I don’t want to give it all away just yet :-)

Technology Basis

The site is being developed from scratch using the PHP language. At first I toyed with the idea of using a content management system as that does a lot of the work for you. I tried out Joomla and Drupal but I concluded that I would have to put so much effort into trying to bend those systems to do what I wanted that I may as well build from scratch.

What many people don’t understand is that this is not some teaching-based membership site like many others around at the moment. I’m not teaching anything – I am providing tools. The idea is that members have an account which they login to and then they submit jobs for submission which the software automates on their behalf in the background. The tools themselves are the crux of the project and so I need to develop that myself – CMS systems don’t help with that.

However, when I say I am developing it ‘from scratch’, that’s not entirely true. I am using a PHP framework as a basis. There are several major ones – Zend, Cake, CodeIgnighter are the three that I looked at. I picked Zend in the end due to the support that is available for it.

One of the disadvantages of working at home on a solo project like this is that if I do get stuck on something I have nobody to turn to but the Internet. I can’t just pass my problem over to a colleague like I would when I was working at a regular job. Therefore having good community support is a huge factor in my decisions.

Member Management

This is another area that has been a point of confusion when I have tried to explain it in the past. There are two distinct areas of member management that I have to deal with.

The first is that of authentication – this will be a paid site so obviously only paid members can login. Well I shall have a free version too but those free members will still need to login. This is the kind of thing that I don’t want to code from scratch as security is such an important issue. I decided to use aMember and this has been working well.

The way this works is that for areas of your site that you want protected from the general public you insert a little piece of code which executes the aMember script and requires the user to login before he can see the content.

However, this is not the only member management issue I have. My software also needs to keep track of members because it will need to store their data in a database. For example I will want users (yes I keep using the words user and member interchangeably!) to be able to setup bookmarking jobs to be submitted so the details of those jobs have to be stored along with their username. Furthermore, this has to tie in with the aMember user.

So what I have done is written some code to check when a user logs in using aMember and then create a corresponding profile in my own database so that their data can be saved. This is where a PHP Framework comes in handy as the code to manipulate databases is really quite simple using the Zend Framework.

The Software Engine

This is something I am still working on… The idea is that users can setup jobs to be submitted and then the software will toddle off and do it on its own in the background. This is different to how some of the other social bookmarkers work as they require you to manually click the submit button for each site. I wish to automate the entire process as much as possible.

I’m not entirely sure how I am going to do this yet. A lot will depend on how much of a load there is. I will restrict the number of members when I first launch and I may even put a restriction on the number of jobs that can be submitted so I can control how much work my server has to do. I have never written this kind of software before so I wouldn’t want it to collapse in a heap under the strain!

Feasibility Testing

One area that has been a sticking point for a while is that I knew what I wanted to do with my software but I had no idea how! I knew it was possible because there are some competing programs out there that do the same thing or something similar so I just had to figure it out.

Thankfully I recently made that breakthrough and was able to automate submission of some social bookmarks to several sites. Now that I know how to do it in a basic way I know that the idea can actually be done so I can move forward properly now. Many sites that I wish to submit to have some issues that I need to get around so I still have much work to do.

For example, many sites use a captcha image to ensure that it is a human doing the submission and not a robot! This is something that cannot be fully automated that I know of so I will probably have to have some sites that are only partially automated and still require some manual intervention by the user.

But in order to get something working I shall leave sites using those kind of techniques until later.

Promoting the Paid Version

I’m going to have a free version and a paid version of the software. The idea of course is that the free version acts as a pre-seller for the paid version. Initially my plan was to have free members put on an email list and promote the paid version from there but of course the rules with any email list dictate that subscribers may remove themselves at any time.

At first I was trying to find a way to ‘force’ members to stay on the email list if they wanted to keep their account and I wrote a post explaining how I was trying to do this with aWeber but the more I thought about it the more I realised it was a bad idea and not really necessary anyway.

Instead, when a user logs into the site I have a small section in my layout that will show the latest new developments of the paid version. Also… and this part is genius even if I do say so myself… I am going to release every new feature to all the free users before it gets integrated into the paid version! That probably sounds odd so let me explain!

I am quite aware of the fact that this is a learning curve for me and although I am a reasonably good programmer, I am not familiar with web development so I could and probably will encounter all sorts of problems. I don’t want that to happen if I am charging people money! That’s a BAD thing! So ideally I want to find people to test the software first – who better than users that are already using it?

By releasing each new feature to the free members they get to test it for me and they get a freebie for a while. I don’t know yet how long each feature will remain free for – I’m thinking maybe something like 7, 10 or 14 days. This should be enough time for the users to know if this is a feature they would be interested in and may just provide an incentive to pay for the full version.

Pricing Considerations

I can announce now that the first version of the software is almost certainly going to be released at $49 per month and it will become more expensive from there. With any product, pricing is a very important factor and you really have to consider your target market when making a decision.

My target market is Internet Marketers, and more specifically, those that are already making money with successful sites. I am not targeting newbies with this software and that’s why I decided to start out with a fairly high price point. Somebody who is already making a decent income from their sites will think nothing of spending $50 a month on something that will save them hours of tedious work but try explaining that to a newbie!

As an incentive for early signups I will be fixing the price upon initial sign up. What that means is that whatever price is paid when a member signs up will be the price they will always pay as long as they stay a member. I intend to release new features as often as I can so over time the software becomes better and better value.

I could release at a much lower price, say $19 a month instead in order to make it more available to a wider audience but to be honest due to the technical considerations I mentioned before I would actually prefer to have fewer members at a higher price than the other way around to ensure that my server can cope with the load!

Release Date

I am not ready to mention any dates yet but hopefully a test version may be available to play with in the not too distant future. Though saying that I am going to on holiday at the end of August for 2 weeks so I probably wont release anything until I get back which will be September.

An Aside – July Stats Will Be Delayed

I am going away for a long weekend and I wont be able to do the July stats until around the 3rd August so the figures will be slightly off but it can’t he helped!

I loved this video so much, watch it, and SMILE :D

What is Outsourcing?

For those not familiar with the term, outsourcing simply means paying somebody to do some work for you. Currently there are two areas of work that I outsource – I pay somebody to re-write articles that I have written for submission to article directories and I pay somebody to do all my graphic design work.

In most businesses, especially online ones, there are many aspects that can be outsourced. Link building, any kind of writing such as articles, blog posts, ebooks, copywriting etc, technical work, design work, and of course the subject of my own project – software development.

Why Outsource?

Quite simply to save time. There are 168 hours in a week and every single person on this planet has the same amount of time. What we do with it determines the substance of our lives and the income that we earn. Lets assume a working week of 50 hours (which is way more than I work but hey, it’s a round number!) If you do work that pays or earns you $10 an hour then you will earn $500 in that week.

Now what if you could pay somebody else to do some of the work you do? Let’s say that you could outsource 30 hours of the work you do and you have to pay somebody else $8 an hour to do it. That will cost you $240 a week but that now frees up 30 hours of time. The big question is what do you do with that 30 hours. In purely financial terms it is only worth outsourcing if you can spend your time doing something that will bring in more money.

For example if you have a new task to work on which earns you $15 an hour but you still want the $10 work done, you can outsource 30 hours of $10 work costing you $240 but you are now earning $450 from your $15 work so in total you are now bringing in $710 a week instead of $500.

There are other reasons too – I outsource my article re-writing work because I simply hate doing it! It bores me to tears and I just don’t get it done. I also outsource things in the real world too. I like having a clean car but I don’t like cleaning it so I pay somebody else to do it for me!

Why Not Outsource?

The biggest obstacle standing in the way of outsourcing is simply lack of income to pay for it but I will assume that is not the issue for the sake of this post. Why else may you not want to outsource? It seems like a perfect solution so surely once the income is there you should outsource as much work as you can? There are two main reasons I can think of not to outsource certain aspects of your work.

You Can’t Outsource Yourself

This is not a generic Internet Marketing blog – it’s Caroline Middlebrook’s blog. With the exception of the odd guest post here and there, only I can write it. This is my personal touch and I cannot outsource myself. I could if I was Britney Spears or something but last time I looked in the mirror I wasn’t even close :-)

Where this becomes a woolly area is knowing where you need that personal touch and when you really don’t. My brother owns a landscape gardening business and it’s been going for over 30 years now. He hates it and really wants to retire yet he doesn’t because he moans that nobody else can do what he does. In other words, he refuses to outsource. Personally, I highly doubt that is the case. I’m sure somebody else could be trained to do what he does, he could outsource his work and retire.

If you are developing some kind of course where you are teaching something and it is your hard earned knowledge that you want to impart then you probably want to do that work yourself but if you are developing a website to generate AdSense income then outsourcing the content creation for that site is perfectly okay because it really doesn’t matter who has written it.

You Are Learning a Skill

Everything you do requires some kind of skill. With blogging, one of the most common aspects to outsource is the techy stuff – getting it setup, installing plugins, designing the theme and so on. These tasks require specialist skills. If you outsource the work you need to hire somebody who has those skills and of course it means that you won’t be developing them yourself.

This is the reason I am not outsourcing my software project – because I want to learn all of the skills involved in developing a website myself as this opens up a whole load of possibilities for me in the future, and not necessarily just related to Internet Marketing. These are skills I really want to learn and therefore I have no desire to outsource the work even though the project would probably get done much faster if I did.

If you are in this position ask yourself if you actually have a need and desire to learn the skills that are required for the task at hand.

Now in some cases, you may simply not be the kind of person who can develop the required skills. For example, I get all of my graphic work done by Linda from eCoverSource.com and she is brilliant. Even though I could in theory learn a package such as photoshop, I have absolutely no artistic flair whatsoever and so I’d never be able to do what she does. This is a perfect candidate for outsourcing.

Similarly, most people wouldn’t be able to learn software development unless they had done it before which is probably why many people who comment on my project are confused as to why I am doing it myself. It’s all about evaluating your own skill sets really.

I’ve been working on my software project for all of this year and when I first started on it I was certainly hoping that I’d have something released by now. There are two main reasons why I haven’t – I have only been putting in a fraction of the working hours that I was intending to, and secondly, I have encountered many more problems than I anticipated.

So now I have a harsh reality facing me – it’s not going to be released anytime soon. I do intend to put in a few more hours than I have been recently but it still won’t be anywhere near full time and I am understanding enough about the technology now to also know that I am going to continue to face many technological challenges.

I am looking at my income and seeing it trickle in and it’s a little scary for it to continue at a relatively low level for the foreseable future. I have another instinct that is urging me to try and do something to just get some money in quick.

I’ve been in this situation before. The time that sticks out the most was actually when I first quit my job and started this business. Back then I was intending to do some kind of web development (though I didn’t have a specific idea at that time) but I figured that it would take several months so I decided to do a little Internet Marketing as an interim measure in order to bring in some ‘quick’ cash!

Well, we all know how that went! I didn’t earn anything at all for those first few months! Now of course back then I really didn’t know what I was doing, I was a complete unknown, and I didn’t have any kind of web presence or assets. The situation is different now. I have an established blog that gets reasonable search engine traffic, I have some decent sized email lists and I have various other little assets.

So feasibly, if I were to put the effort in then I could reasonably expect to make some money relatively quickly. However what this all boils down to is really time.

The reason my software project is dragging out is due to time – not enough time spent working and more time needed for the actual work. Therefore if I take time away from that project to make a more immediate income then I am only going to drag the project out even more.

I suspect many people go through this kind of dilemma when starting an Internet business such as a blog. I am making a decent income through my blog right now but that is only happening because of the months of work that went into it at the beginning. I am earning money now for work that I did over a year ago.

I think it is very difficult to continue to work on something that is not providing an obvious immediate benefit and not to get sucked in by the lure of the ‘easy money’. I’m going to resist the temptation to try and make some quick cash (well unless I can think of something that really doesn’t take up much time) and continue to dedicate my time to my software project.

If you are starting a blog, or writing a course, or building a membership site or working on any project that you know isn’t likely to really pay off in the short term and you are feeling the same thing as me I’d say hang in there and stick with it :-)

Income

• The Bloggers Bible – $342.18
• Bluehost – $285
• Membership Site Mastermind – $181.23
• Become a Blogger – $97.12
• Unique Article Wizard – $80.40
• Traffic Rush – $44.87
• Niche AdSense WordPress Themes – $18.27
• RSS Feeds Submit – $13.09

Total income earned during June 2009 – $1062.16

I was surprised to find that I hadn’t made any sales of Twitter Rockstar as I thought that was going to be a regular thing from the traffic that goes to the Twitter Guide every month. Oh well, you can never tell.

Subscribers

Big milestone this month – I have hit the 10k mark which is rather nice. I’ve pulled this diagram a day late so I’ll take the subscriber number from yesterday which is when I usually do it.

Subs at the end of May: 9,171

Subs at the end of June: 10,099

New subscribers in June ‘09 – 928

Last month I noticed that the growth had been lower than usual at just 344 and this month it has shot up to 928. This indicates that perhaps the numbers weren’t quite being reported correctly last month. You’ll see from the graph that Feedburner had a rather big glitch at the end of the month too.

Traffic

Traffic levels have taken a bit of a dive this month but I’m guessing that’s due to a natural summer slump as well as lack of new posts here. Much to be expected really.

Where Have I Been??

I’ve actually had people emailing this month just to check if I’m still alive :-) There are two reasons why I haven’t posted this month. The first is that my work now is entirely focused on my software project. I’m not doing any kind of marketing activities at all so I’m working on all technical programming related stuff and as this isn’t a development blog there’s simply not much to write about.

However the main reason is quite simply that I have done very little work at all of late! The reason I quit my day job back in September ‘07 is not just because I wanted to do my own thing but far more importantly because I wanted my freedom. I don’t like having to be at a certain place at a certain time. I don’t like having to call in sick or ask permission to take time off.

Over this last month here in the UK we have had the most gorgeous weather which is rare as usually it’s so unpredictable! Over the last few weeks in particular I’ve been having BBQ’s, going to the beach, snowboarding, picnics in the park, walking along piers, indoor skydiving, partying etc and have been having the time of my life! I do feel guilty that I’ve hardly done any work but you know what? I had a really crappy time for most of 2008 and it’s about time I had some fun so I decided to live now and work later :-)

However I am still working on the project, even though it’s doing my head in at the moment so I will write some updates if there are some non-techy developments to report!

Income

• Bluehost – $570
• Become a Blogger – $275.39
• Membership Site Mastermind – $273.72
• The Bloggers Bible – $228.12
• Private Advertising – $95.80
• Twitter Rockstar – $92.69
• Unique Article Wizard – $53.60
• Niche AdSense WordPress Themes – $26.36
• Article Marketing Domination – $11.98

Total income earned during May 2009 – $1,627.66

Well this has been a bit of a funny month income wise. I noticed a significant drop in the sales of my own products so I expected the overall figure to be down a lot but some other affiliate sales seem to have made up for it instead so I’m happy with the overall figure.

Subscribers

Subs at the end of April: 8,827

Subs at the end of May: 9,171

New Subscribers in May ‘09: 344

The growth in new subs has slowed quite a bit this month though I only really wrote one real post in the whole of May! The others were sales pitch so don’t really count. The low growth is also I suspect caused partly by the drop in traffic this month – see below…

Traffic

Traffic is quite a bit lower this month and looking at the traffic sources shows a drop in both search engine traffic and referral traffic. Referral traffic is quite likely lower due to lack of new posts recently but I’m not sure about the search engine traffic. It could be related actually… Google favours busy sites with lots of fresh content so perhaps a lack of posts is lowering my rankings in Google. Of course it might also be something entirely out of my control, it’s difficult to tell.

I became a software developer in the mid nineties but lost my career after a couple of years. I then spent a few years self employed doing work I hated (it was Internet Marketing but the dark side!!) and finally went to University as a mature student. After I got my degree I was able to get a job as a software developer and for a while I was really happy but after a year or so I started getting this nagging feeling going round my head – “it makes no difference that I am here doing this…”

It occurred to me that I was just using my skills to do somebody else’s work and it didn’t seem particularly important or interesting. We wrote the software that puts pretty graphics on the TV for sporting events and as I’m not into sports either, it was really quite meaningless to me. I worked in an office of less than a dozen developers and each day we’d have a short meeting discussing the project and what part of the software we were each working on. People would get moved around onto different parts – we were all just cogs in a wheel, doing as we were told.

I thought to myself, if I leave this job they will just hire somebody else to do it. It makes no difference that I am doing this. If I don’t do it, somebody else will. This bugged me for about six months until I couldn’t stand it anymore and I quit. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do but I knew that it had to be mine, whatever it was and so I started this blog and any of you have have been around a while or have read the archives will know the story from there.

I’ll be honest here, I look at my earnings, I look at how long I have been doing this, I look at my day to day life and sometimes I just don’t see the point and I feel quite fed up with it all. But every now and then something happens to remind me why I’m doing this and the reason is – because everything I do here in this business makes a difference even if it’s in some small way.

Right now as I write this post I know that these words will be read by the thousands of people that read this blog. Nobody else can write this post because it comes from me and I am unique, just as you are. Everybody who reads this post will react differently but I know that for some people who read it, it will make some difference and I know that I am the one that made the difference – hopefully a positive one!

I had an email today from RJ Licata of siteroast.com thanking me for my WordPress ebook (that I wrote 18 months ago now) and telling me what a difference it made. I get emails like this all the time but for some reason this one stuck out. Maybe it’s what I needed to hear today.

What Makes a Difference and What Doesn’t?

I have worked in Internet Marketing for almost 5 years now though most of it was in that time between my development and University days and in those years I have tried many different things to make money. There are some things that I have felt better about than others and now I can start to see why – those things that I didn’t feel good about usually made no difference (or worse with some of the dodgy stuff I was involved in years ago!) and the things I felt good about did so I’ll take a moment to look at some of those business models.

Affiliate Marketing

This is not something I do anymore but it was my bread and butter for over a year and there are a lot of IMers now that made an absolute fortune from it. You can incorporate affiliate marketing into just about any other business model (how I promote products in this blog for example) but the model I am talking about here is the more ‘pure’ form where you set up landing pages that are designed to promote a specific affiliate offer and then drive traffic to that page, usually with PPC.

When you get this right, it’s easy money. If you can spend $100 on traffic and make anything more than $100 from that traffic you are onto a winner and the more traffic you can buy the more profit you can make. Does it make a difference? Nope, not a diddly squat. You promote something that somebody else has produced and with this model of using a landing page you don’t even produce anything of value along the way.

Niche Websites

In my WordPress ebook I showed you how you can use WordPress to build small niche sites and I wrote a post about how this can become a good income stream if you can find the right niches. I used this technique for a few months for my AdSense project and I hated every minute of it. The income here usually comes from an on-page ad system such as AdSense but many people will promote affiliate products as well.

It can be a slight step up from a landing page because in order to get traffic you are building a website with ‘good content’ however usually that content is nothing more than a rehash of what is already out there. I know that for my niche sites I simply read about the topics from other sites and article directories and re-wrote what I had learned into my own words so although it was unique in terms of the Google duplicate content filter, I was still just spewing the same old crap that was already out there.

Writing Ebooks

There is a very fine line here. I have seen a lot of information online about how to make a living from making ebooks and the danger is that it can be very easy for the ebook you write to be just a rehash of whats already out there – just like the content of most niche sites. However on the other hand if you write something that is truly unique and genuinely useful then it can make a difference.

I was always surprised at the success of my own ebook and I think the reason for that was that I wrote it at a time when I was in a very bad place and just needed something to do to keep my mind occupied. Still, it obviously has made a difference and 18 months on it still does as today’s email shows me so this is good. Unfortunately for me, I never really got any more ideas for ebooks so that was a one-hit wonder!

Courses, Membership Sites & Other Teaching Materials

Since that ebook I’ve since gone on to write two courses which I have been quite proud of. These do make a difference because although I teach a subject that has been taught many times before (especially in the case of the Bloggers Bible), I write in a way that nobody else does so there will always be some people out there that prefer my style to somebody elses.

I look around the Internet and see a lot of teaching resources and I suppose every one of them makes a difference in some way simply because they are unique but there is also that fine line here between creating something that’s truly useful or is just a rehash of what’s been done before.

Blogs

For a blog that is written by a single author (not those corporate blogs that hire writers) they really can’t fail to make a difference because as long as you are writing your own posts and not using stock articles or something, everything you write is unique to you which means that nobody else could have written that post which means that every one of your readers gets uniquely affected by every post that you write.

That’s quite a nice feeling. There’s lots of ways to monetize a blog and ways to do it that don’t feel sleazy so I think that blogs are one of the better business models out there. Plus as I have discovered in recent months, once you get some revenue streams setup, they can continue to pay out for quite some time.

I’ve been so wrapped up in my software project recently that I haven’t had much to blog about but I miss it really. I often find myself wanting to ramble on about random stuff as I am today but I hold back thinking I should stick to marketing material but hey, maybe I’ll just post whatever is on my mind anyway as having the blog just sitting there with no new posts is kinda pointless so I may as well post something :-)

Services

As most of you know, I have been moving away from writing ebooks and courses and looking for something that will provide a more stable income stream and I am in the process of creating a software service that I shall charge a monthly fee for. There are lots of sites that provide services and I think they can be some of the most useful sites out there but the question is, do they make a difference? I suppose the answer depends on how unique the service is.

I worry a little bit about my software project because I’m not really doing anything truly unique – I’m taking some existing ideas and putting them together in my own way which I hope will make a difference but we shall see.

Conclusion

This has been a bit of a ramble. I’m having a funny day, well funny week & month I think. Nevermind. I think sometimes the drudgery of day to day life gets the better of me and I wonder what on earth the point of it all is? But then I look at what I’m doing and I see little areas where I am making a difference and try to remind myself – yes that’s the point.