September 18, 2007
It’s been more than 10 weeks since I wrote the last post. There is so much that has changed in this period of time, guiding the lives of my wife and me in a total different direction… and country.
The new job
My wife Barbara, a demographer, was recruited as Deputy Program Manager Statistics of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). For this we needed to move to Guyana, our neighbor to the west, where the secretariat of the CARICOM is located. She was very excited about this new job, because she will finally get to “get her hands dirty” with all those numbers and stats.
The preparation
For me it meant that I had to try to finish as much of my work as possible, since I didn’t want to leave too much unfinished while I wasn’t around. I went back to spending days and nights working. Unfortunately I still didn’t get to finish all I had planned to.
Barbara was also finishing up her work there. She still had some work at the university to finish and at the office she was preparing for her leave.
Around the house nothing much happened until the last week or so. We had movers who would do the packing for us, so there was not much to do. This was good, because we both had our hands full with work.
The move
Our household goods were sent to the movers to be shipped and we hopped on a plane in the early of August 25. Since we got here we are staying in an apartment, while we’ve been looking for a decent house to rent. Barb started working, and I was at “home”, trying to get as much work done as possible.
This was very frustrating, since it seems like everyone suddenly wanted their work to have first priority, since I’m no longer physically around. That got me back in the same vortex I was in 3 months ago, until last weekend.
I decided to get back to my schedule. Now I’m freeing up time to do those things I love. These include taking care of my blogs. I spent some time looking around, and now I’m ready again.
I have some nice projects I will be working on in the near future. I will try as much as possible to keep everyone updated about my quest of making money online, full time.
Posted in General chatter, Personal development 
1 Comment »
July 4, 2007
After little over a month I finally am back. I’ve been very busy lately, both professionally and personally. This was necessary to get back on track.
Professionally
In my last post I wrote about changing my schedule to be able to get the most of my time. I soon found out that it was easier said than done. I had too much work piled up to just change my schedule. I had to get rid of the huge pile first.
I did get to organize my work better, so my time was spend more efficiently. Even though I had to keep working till late at night, this organizing of my work helped me to get stuff done faster. I am now back to creating a basic website within 24 hours.
By the end of the week I expect to be able to gracefully switch to my new working schedule.
Personally
Some health related issues with my wife really messed up our schedules. I’m happy those issues are now behind us. She’s well again.
We are planning major changes in our life and living environment. It’s time to switch our lifestyle up a notch. We managed to bring our lives in balance, and now we are ready to move on. Watch out world, here we come!
By the way, to all my American readers: Happy Fourth of July! Be safe with the fireworks.
Posted in General chatter 1 Comment »
June 1, 2007
Running my own Web development business has always been hard. I never managed to follow the instructions of all those time management trainings. So my schedule was always hectic.
In this whole mess of a schedule, my priorities were misplaced: I had the Blind Squirrel Problem. I knew sending out those invoices is important, but I would rather spend the day commenting on blogs and working on my own. Keeping my wife warm at night is very important for the marriage, but I’d rather work till 4 in the morning to finish some jobs, so the customer can see results when they get up from keeping their wifes warm.
The change
I decided that, as of yesterday, I will treat my work as if I was working for someone else. That brought me to the following partitioning of my time.
- Work hours: 8 am to 4 pm (could be extended but no later than 6 pm)
This is the period I would dedicate to “working for the company”. Anything for the company needs to be done between 8 and 4: Invoicing, design, meetings, support. After hours are for emergencies only. And with emergencies, I mean things like my server being unreachable for my customers. Anything else will need to be reported via ticket and will be answered in order it was received.
- Secular work/hobby: 6 pm to midnight (could be extended to no later than 1 am)
This is the period is reserved for my blogs and other projects I’m working on. I am yet to make a weekly schedule for each activity.
- Family time: any time
Whenever my wife needs my attention, she gets it. Since she is at work during my work hours, her time does not usually interfere, but I’m ready to free some time there too. During the work hours I may need to take a break to do some family related chores, like paying the bills or doing some shopping that can’t be done after 6 pm. Most of the time after 6 pm is subject to the attention that my wife needs.
- Weekends
Weekends are for a combination of my wife, secular work/hobby and work, in that specific order.
The good thing is that this schedule has my wife’s blessing. She’s an independent woman, who understands my schedule and won’t misuse the priority 1 spot.
Now to make this actually work. I’m not too good at time management, but I’m sure this is doable, a first step to growth in this area.
What are your experiences with time management?
Posted in Personal development 2 Comments »
May 31, 2007
This series of articles is about helping your visitors find the information they want, or you want them find, as quickly as possible. The easier your site is to browse, the longer visitors might stay.
In part 1 of this series I compared blogs to libraries to emphasize how important it is to provide search options on your blog. I also mentioned the use of Google Adsense for Search to monetize your search. The income of this source is not much, but every penny (cent) is welcome, I assume.
Internal links
When people link to your blog, they usually link to a specific post. A visitor entering your site through that page will generally just read the article and go back to where they come from. One way of keeping them on your blog is to give them links to other posts to follow.
Constantly linking to other posts will not only keep your visitors a little longer on your blog, it can also help fight blogging’s biggest problem: most of the best content gets lost on almost every blog out there. Some of your best posts can be brought to attention again.
Internal links can help your individual posts with their individual Page Rank. The more you link to articles, the stronger their reference in the search engine indexes. This is good for getting better search results for that particular post.
Not linking internally can also drive people away. I wrote on Rehuel punt kom about an instance when I tried to find other parts of a series, but due to the time it consumed to look for the parts, I left the site. And I’m sure this happens to most visitors.
Related posts
One good way to link internally is by adding a list of Related Posts at the bottom of your post. I’m using Aizatto’s Related Posts plugin to display them on my blog and in my RSS feed. Sometimes the relation is not perfect, but at least you have a number of internal links.
In the next article in this series I will about listing your best posts and categorizing your content.
This article is part of the Helping visitors browse your content series. Please check out part 1 for the introduction.
If you like this article, subscribe to my RSS feed to be kept update about this series.
Posted in Blogging 1 Comment »
May 29, 2007
Unless you started blogging very recently, the content of your blog won’t fit on your first page. In fact, most of your content will be scattered over several pages.
The key is to make your visitors find the information you’re presenting. There are several ways to make your visitors find information on your site.
- Let them search for it
- Show them links to related posts
- Link internally
- List your best posts
- Categorize your content
- Paginate your pages
Provide search
The library
In a library you can find a book by going to the specific section, and look at the titles of the books one by one, hoping your eyes will fall on that particular book. Even if you have seen that book on a shelf before, it might take some time to find that book. Imagine what happens when you look down 2 rows of shelves without finding what you’re looking for.
Thank heaven they decided to provide an alphabetical directory (either a large book, or a file cabinet with a lot of cards, stored alphabetically) of all the books in the library, so you can look the book up, look in which section, aisle, and on which shelf it is. Even better is that most modern day libraries provide this directory electronically. You just type in the title, author or some keyword, and voila, there is everything you need to know about your book.
Your blog is a library
If you expect a visitor to go through you blog page by page to find certain information, this visitor will not stay very long. Even if you provide some sort of table of contents (usually called archives), it can be like hell to go through all these archives to find what they’re looking for. And since web users are lazy, they will leave it at that and maybe never come back.
This is why most blogs offer a search option: the author knows that web users would rather type in a keyword they are looking for, then go through your archives. They will probably still have to go through the results, but this will have narrowed down the posts.
Make money with search
Yes, even your search option can be turned into a source of money. Google provides Adsense for Search. Don’t expect to make a fortune, but in my opinion, every penny you could add to your income, can help out. And if you can make some money with something people are bound to use, why not?
To add Google Adsense for Search to your blog, you need to have an Adsense account. If you don’t have an account yet, get one now.
More on installing Adsense for search later. Update: I wrote an article on Rehuel.com about adding Adsense search to your Wordpress blog.
In part 2 in this series I will be talking about related posts and internal linking.
If you like this article, subscribe to my RSS feed to be kept update about this series.
Posted in Blogging 4 Comments »
May 28, 2007
If you like this article, buy me a beer.
This line suddenly appeared on the bottom of posts from a couple of blogs. This is the author’s way of asking for donations. But my question to the readers is: What triggers you to donate to a person/organization/event?
- The cause?
Is it the reason why the person asks for some contribution? One may want a beer, another may need donations to continue working for free, another may need sponsoring to visit an event, some just need your help, like starving children. Some need help covering the costs of basic services when they start off doing business online, or when they work on projects used by a lot of people, like creating themes, plugins and scripts.
- The person?
Do you donate depending on the person who asks for it? Will you rather donate to someone famous than to someone without “name”?
- The amount?
Do you donate when there’s no set limit? How much does a minimum donation influence your decision? What impact does a “Total amount to raise” notification have on your decision?
- Type of donation?
Does it matter what kind of donation is asked? Most of the time financial donations are requested, but it also happens that food, clothes, life’s necessities are asked for.
- The reward?
Are you expecting something back when you donate? The mentioning of your name, maybe? Or is donating purely to unconditionally give?
- Any other factor?
Which other factors can influence you to donate to someone?
So, What DOES trigger you?
Please let me know in a comment what makes you consider donating to someone or to a cause. That might very much be part of your donation to this blog.
Posted in General chatter 7 Comments »
May 28, 2007
One piece of advise: "If you start off blogging for money, you might as well not start at all."
Remember this sentence, we’ll get back to it later.
I’ve been reading (about) blogs for a while. It was not until I clicked on a Google ad, which led me to John Chow’s site, that I understood that there is money to be made with blogging. Frankly, seeing that John made about $7000 with his blog that was about half a year old, I got interested in blogging. Imagine what reading this will do to someone in a country where an average annual salary is about US$2000.
See, the problem with this is that some draw the conclusion that John made $7000 just by writing in his blog. They tend to see it as easy money right away. They fail to see that John has his eggs in several baskets. He’s not just splashing some Adsense and some other quick “fire and forget” monetizing options on his blog. He has at least 1 other non-blog site where he makes money. He uses his blog to generate traffic for his other online businesses.
I’m naming John here as an example, because his blog was the one that triggered my interest in blogging. My first thought was “If he can make $7000 within 6 months, I should be able to make at least $2000 within the first 6 months“. And that’s when I decided to start blogging to make money.
NO, it’s not wrong
It is definitely not wrong to have “making money” as motivator to start blogging. It’s just like any other job you would do. It’s to make money. The reason why people generally look forward to a promotion is because it brings more money in the bank account.
However, just like any other job, blogging should be something you need be good at. First you need to be able to express yourself so others can understand you and learn something from you. You also need to share useful information in your blog, because that’s what brings people back. This means that the topic of your blog needs to be one you love yourself. It’s no use writing about airplanes if you hate flying.
Passion makes money
I love web related work. I love to research the Internet, I love web development, I love online communities, making friends with people I might not ever get to see, people I never knew existed. Then that is what I should blog about. Why?
Because I won’t get bored writing about those things. And the more I write, the more there is to read, the more traffic I can get to my blog (if promotion is well taken care of), the more money I can make with my blogs.
It’s like with any other job. If you work somewhere, only motivated by the money you earn, you will not produce at your top level. If you love your job, you will work with passion, which creates better chances for growth and excitement. The more you grow, the more exciting life becomes and the more money you can make.
Again, don’t focus only on blogs
Even if you think you can make some decent money with your blog, “don’t quit your daytime job” yet! In any case, make sure you have other sources of income besides your blog, because Internet will always be in beta, not finished. Things are constantly updated and anything can go wrong at anytime. Prepare yourself to have something to fall back to when your blog isn’t making you the money you expected.
Blog for money, with passion
So even though it’s not wrong to blog for money, there are some questions you might want to ask yourself first:
- How are my writing skills?
- Who is my audience?
- What will I write about
- How much can I write about this topic?
- How much passion do I have for this topic?
- How much knowledge and experience do I have with this topic?
- What else can I do to make money?
Remember the quote at the beginning of this article? This advise is given numerous times on the web. I know it’s well meant, but it’s also easily misread. If you’re trying to tell people to focus more on their content than on making money, so they eventually will make the money, find better phrasing to do so.
Blogging for money is not wrong. Just make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into.
Posted in Blogging 2 Comments »
May 27, 2007
Due to a heavy work load last week (actually still a lot to do) I’m posting the useful links I encountered of those 2 weeks. There is a lot of pretty nice stuff out there to read.
Posted in Useful links 2 Comments »
May 26, 2007
A while ago I started a campaign to visit the Future of Online advertising conference in New York. Since then I’ve been constantly talking to possible sponsors locally to see what they can mean to me. The main problem I was having is that this was on too short of a notice to have funds made available to me. Since time is short, I have to cancel the trip. Next time, better luck? No, next time, better preparation.
Lessons learned
Even though this project was to get me to NYC for the conference, the main purpose was to study the possibilities for someone in my position to gather donations and sponsoring to visit an event in a different country. And there are very valuable lessons I’ve learned in this process.
Asking online for donations
Asking complete for donations requires some sort of base of trust. When people online donate, they look for several things:
- Who are you? Who talk about you on the web, what do they say about you on the web? would those people talking about you offer their donation?
- How popular are you? It’s a fact that people want something back, so they consider your popularity to see if that what they get back will be worth it. I, with my less than 5000 unique visitors per month, may not have much to offer in return. And even if I did, like promising a links page for this project, the links would not weigh heavy enough, cause by that time, my blog was still PR NaN.
- Does your blog fit in their niche? Obviously, why would your blog readers be interested in a link to a site about Indian politics?
- What do I get out of this? This is probably the most important question. If what you offer is not appealing enough, don’t expect to get anything
If people can’t find satisfying answers to these questions, don’t expect them to pull out their checkbooks.
In this respect there are some aspects I didn’t pay enough attention to.
- I didn’t approach enough (or, the right) bloggers personally to ask for sponsoring. Now that leaves me wondering what could have been reached if they would be willing to sponsor me.
- The same goes for spreading the word. I could have asked some A-list bloggers to write about my quest, in trying to see if it’s possible for a beginning blogger to get help from the blogging community. I did ask some, of which I have regular contact with, but none of them wrote something about my project. I’m not blaming them, I’m just pointing out that I needed to try out contacting a lot more bloggers to help me spread the word. Yet another “What if” in my head.
The big problem is that people expect you to have a lot of traffic in order to do something for you. Understandably they want something back. But people who have a lot of traffic don’t need to ask for donations to visit such an event. They make enough money with their traffic to pay their own ways.
Looking for local sponsors
Local sponsors usually have set budgets. To dig into that budget you need to offer something worthy, because they need to see some results in their books after sponsoring. This means you need to filter out those who have something to gain from your trip. Promotion of any kind, that can guarantee conversion of the spent money.
Most companies (in small countries) that are able to sponsor have a lot of people who will want to know why that money is spent and how that money will convert to profit for the company. Smaller companies, with just one boss, or a small board, usually don’t have that kind of money available.
In any case, it’s extremely important that the company has enough time to have internal discussions about this sponsorship and decide on how to go about it. Sometimes the money may be available, but there are more pressing investments to make at the moment. Given enough time, more money could be accumulated, and if they know that sponsoring you is on their spending list, they will set that money apart for you.
So freeing resources for someone on short notice can only be done by large companies, who may have that money available, but the process of getting your request approved travels a longer road, which takes time.
Conclusion
So here’s what I learned from this experience.
- Don’t expect people to donate money to you if they don’t “know” you
- Make sure you can guarantee something useful in return.
- Plan ahead. One month is not enough time to plan your trip AND find sponsoring
- People need time to consider your request.
- Promote your project. And don’t be hesitant to make it a big promotion campaign. Think about it: if you need 200 people to donate $20 each, expect to need about 2000 to 5000 to read about it to get that number of people to donate.
- Don’t hesitate to ask other bloggers in your network for donations or for putting out a good word about your quest. The more of them you ask, the bigger the chances of getting some to help you out. My dad always said: “You already have NO, but you can get YES if you ask”. Not asking equals a negative answer, while asking could get you a positive answer.
- Learn from your mistakes and try again, or move on. Don’t let failure to get desired results knock you off. Analyse your mistakes and try again. In any case, move on, while keeping your chin up!
Words of thanks
I need to thank Nathan Metzger for helping me out with getting the ChipIn widget. Then there are also people like Andrew Kuo, who tried hard to help me to get ways to receive donations online. Rafiek is one of the very few who did make the effort of donating. Thanks to Matt Coddington who included a link to my project in last week’s top links without me asking for it. Thanks to Darren Rowse for providing the free pass to the conference and an opportunity to spread the word.
Thanks to everyone who, in any way, showed their support. If I don’t get to reward you for your good intentions, I’m positive that nature will.
Posted in General chatter 1 Comment »
May 25, 2007
One of the other monetizing options besides Adsense is the Amazon affiliate program.
People still love to read books. That’s what keeps Amazon in business. What’s so great about that, is that they pay you up to 10% of the price of an item that was sold though your affiliate account.
Building links
There are several ways to display Amazon’s products. But it is made very easy to display the links to those products, with your affiliate code embedded.
Product links
These are links to specific products. There is a choice of Text only links, Image only links and Text and Image links. Examples:
Text only link (basic):
Affiliate Millions: Make a Fortune using Search Marketing on Google and Beyond
Image only link (basic):
Text and Image link (enhanced):
Context links
Just like most other context links by other networks, these links automatically identify and link relevant phrases within your page content to Amazon products. Just tweak the settings, copy the code to your theme, after your content, before the closing </body> tag, and Amazon does the rest.
Omakase links
As explained by Amazon: “Omakase links will show an Associate’s visitors what they’re most likely to buy based on Amazon’s unique understanding of the site, the user, and the page itself. To create Omakase links, simply modify the template and appearance elements below and copy the resulting code on to your page. Then leave the rest to Omakase!”. Here’s an example:
Recommended Product Links
To create this type of link, first you need to pick a product line (Books, Electronics, Baby, Automotive, etc), then you can either enter keywords, or select a subcategory. Next you can select the size of your block of links. On the final page you get the chance to customize link appearance and change the content of the links before you copy the HTML code to paste it in your template. Exapmle:
Banner Links
These are graphical banner ads. You can select them by Promotion or by category. You get to see a preview and the code to add to your site. Example:
Text Links
You can create your own text links, using product line ad keyword combination, product line and subcategory combination, or just create a link to an Amazon.com page, with your own achor text. Examples:
Subcategory: Computer and Internet Books
Keywords: Books on Blogging
Link to Amazon page: Amazon’s Significant Seven, May 2007
Search boxes
You can let your visitors perform searches for products on Amazon by adding search boxes to your site. There are 2 types:
The Standard Search Box:
The Seach box with Dropdown:
aStore
As an associate you can create up to 100 aStores. An aStore is your own personalized storefront. You can hand pick products on each page of your store, or you can display products from Amazon’s Listmania lists or from selected product lines and subcategories. The latter can be narrowed down with keywords. I create an aStore with all kinds of books in the top category, and a sub category of web design related books. Another top category in my aStore is Electronics. Take a look at what a simple aStore looks like.
How you make money
Whenever someone clicks on one of your product links, either on your site or in your aStore, there is a cookie placed on that person’s computer with your affiliate information. This cookie has a 24 hour lifespan. This means that the person has 24 hours to place an order, in order for you to get your referral fee. This is CPA, you get paid for an action, in this case, someone ordering products at Amazon.com.
When it comes to referral fees, you can choose the Classic payment plan, where you get 4% on any item shipped, or the Performance payment plan, where you get between 4% and 8.5% of items shipped, depending on the total number of items that were shipped.
Final thoughts
The Amazon associate program is especially advisable for niche blog. When done right, this can be a very lucrative source of income. But, this program is not a “fire and forget” program. The more money you want to make, the more energy you will have to put into it.
If this sounds like something you want to try, join Amazon Associate and let me know your experience with this program.
Posted in Monetizing 2 Comments »
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