Welcome

What Is So Great About This Blog?

The only chance this blog has of succeeding is to be different then the 100's of other 'How To Make Money Online' blogs.

What makes this blog different:

• This blog is about a website. It discusses and analyzes the creation, maintenance, and performance of howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com.
• All claims are backed up by actual data. You will not see claims like: 'post comments because it increases traffic'. This blog will show, by using actual data, how much traffic posting comments has brought to howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com.
• There are no false claims of how I made 1000's of dollars a day using a secret system. With this blog, lies and exaggerated claims are impossible because howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com reveals all of its stats.
• Being a webmaster is not always a sunny day. This blog discusses the real trials and tribulations of being a webmaster. If this blog/website are doing poorly then you will see traces of tears in the posts.
• This blog has no advertising or selling of any kind. It is simply information and entertainment. The website howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com does all the money making, not this blog.
• Most blogs expect you to follow their advice on the assumption that they are an authority on the subject. This blog expects you to look at the data and decide for yourself.

All Posts Are Written With The Following in Mind:

• Honesty.
• Mix information with entertainment.
• The visitors time is valuable. Provide clear and original content.
• No claims without data to support it.
• One day this blog and the website it discusses will be successful.

Enjoy!

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How a website makes money?  This question has been the forefront of my thoughts for two years.  (Actually when I think about this question there is a ‘does’ between ‘How’ and ‘a’, but I need the question to be without ‘does’ – you will see why later.)

It has been two years of reading about websites and how they make money with them.  Two years of writing about websites and how I am not making any money with them.

For two years I have had to read people brag about how rich they are, how rich they can make me for $19.99.  I have been tossed around in all directions – buy this, do that, don’t do this, sometimes do that – an acorn in a mountain stream.   If the last two years online was physical then I would now be wearing an eye patch, a bandage around my head, and a crutch under my armpit.

The problem is that you spend so much time and effort – kick in the balls – and receive nothing in return.  A human hamster wheel.  The faster you run the faster it turns.  The more you work the more work you need to do.  Hamsters do not mind the wheel, they increase their stamina, improve their heart and tire themselves  for a good nights sleep.   I get a dollar a day.

The above is how I feel on most days.  But not today – finally good news.

This Website Answers: How A Website Makes Money

Lets say some poor sucker gets the idea in his head that he will make money with a website.  He goes to his favorite browser, opens Google and types in ‘how a website makes money’.

Here is what he will find:

Of course he will click the first two results – most people click on the first few results, but that is not the point.  The point is that I am position 6 and 7 for the phrase.

For some reason Google believes that this website answers the question: ‘how a website makes money.  I checked Google for ‘how a website does not make money’ but surprisingly this website is not in the results – also good news.

I am happy.  Being so high up in the results shows actual, real, unimagined, provable evidence that this website is making progress.

As soon as I saw this I checked how many people type in the phrase per month.
According to Google’s keyword tool around 33,000 people want to know:

So far only about 5 people have come to my website via this phrase.  But that is because I am in the 6th place.  I need to be in the first place.

If I can get myself in position one for ‘how a website makes money’ then I can expect to receive most of the 33,000 people every month.  That is almost 1000 unique visitors a day.

Having a 1000 visitors a day is  how a website makes money.

All I need to do now is to move up 5 positions in the results.   How hard is that? Who knows.   But obviously the first step is to write a post that specifically answers the question:  how a website makes money.

A single all powerful God does not exist – it’s an absurd concept.  Instead there are thousands of mini gods.  Every mini god has a single responsibility and special power.

There is the god that makes sure that your dog takes a crap on the sidewalk when there are more then four people around.  There is the god that makes sure that the grease stain on your shirt does not come out with tap water and hand soap.  There is the god that makes sure that there is always an old lady in front of you in the ATM line.

Lately the god that makes sure that I get disappointed paid me a visit.

Every morning I check the statistics of this website:  how many visitors, how much money has been earned.

This morning task is similar to pulling pubic hairs – painful and tearful.  The difference is that because this website is about statistics it is something that I need to do every morning.

I have come to expect no change.  The sun rises in the east and revenue is less then a dollar.  Lightning is followed by thunder and a new post is followed by a no change in traffic.

But then one day I was surprised.  Traffic more then quadrupled.  Search engine traffic was way up, referent traffic was way up.  Normally there are 150 visitors a day – suddenly there are 600 visitors.

I was so happy.  Finally, the god of justice has arrived.  All the hard work is paying off.  The snowball is rolling – it can only get bigger and bigger.  I was so happy I clenched my hands together and released a quick laugh.

But I was mistaken. It was not the god of justice that visited my website.  It was my old and dependable friend, the god of disappointment.

Looking closely at the website statistics I started to notice problems:

Why Did My Website Revenue Not Increase

The first problem was that my revenue did not increase proportionaly.  One would expect that if you have four times the traffic then you will have four times the advertisement clicks.  Nope.  According to Google Adsense the number of page impressions did not increase.  As far as Adsense is concerned there is no increase in traffic.  Strange.

Why Is Google Analytics Not Reporting An Increase In Traffic

Because website statistics are so important to this website I use two sources.  AWSTATS which is a server based traffic tracker (means that every request to the server is tracked).  And Google Analytics which is a browser based traffic tracker (means that only requests from internet browsers are tracked).

Normally there is a correlation between these two trackers.  They are not the same, AWSTATS is always higher, but when one go up a so does the other.

But AWSTATS quadrupled and Goggle Analytics did not budge.  It is at this point that I spotted the god of disappointment outside my door just about to ring the doorbell.

What Is My Most Popular Webpage?

Why was AWSTATS reporting such high traffic?  What page was geting all this new traffic?

According to AWSTATS my most visited page this month is 404.php.  This page appears when the page being looked for does not exist.

The increase in traffic was due to spam bots, not an increase in real visitors.  Some jackass out there created a spambot that likes to visit my website.  Since it is looking for a page that does not exist the 404.php page becomes my most popular page.

Statistic Havoc Caused By The Spambot

Because of the spam bots my AWSTATS (server side) stats have become useless.  Here are some interesting but wrong conclusions based on the spambot tainted statistics.

• Number of unique visitors in July = 1882.  Number of visitors in July = 14138.  Therefore each visitor visited the site an average of 7 times.
• On Aug 8 there were 534 visitors and 3676 page views.  Which means that on average each visitor views 6 pages per visit.
• Medical and financial sites are linking to my website.
  
• So far this month 40 people have found my website by searching for “earn £437 every day”.

If any of the above were true then I would be happy.  But they are a misrepresentation of what is really going on.  They are based on statistics poisoned by the activities of the spam bot. 

Conclusion And Lesson Learnt

You can never completely avoid the disappointment god.  He is diligent and will always be around.  All you can do is to make things difficult for him.

Use more then one source for your website statistics.

You hear it all the time – to become a successful blogger takes a lot of hard work. Seems logical enough, like everything else in life, if you want something with big rewards then it will take hard work.

To become the CEO of a large corporation is hard work. To become a movie star is hard work. To write a book that becomes a New York Times bestseller is hard work. And so of course, to become a successful blogger takes hard work.

But what does hard work mean? To dig a six foot hole in the desert sun is hard work. To carry a piano up ten flights of stairs is hard work. To copy the entire dictionary under candle light is hard work.

So when the advice is: to become a successful blogger you need to do a lot of hard work – what does that mean?

What Most People Think Hard Work Means

Some confuse hard work with time. They believe that doing something for many hours a day means that they are working hard. They say, I have been working so hard – I work on my blog from 7pm to 1 am every evening. For them hard work means spending a lot of hours working on the blog.

Then there are those that believe that simply doing something, anything, relating to the blog means they are working hard. They do not specify what they are doing because it is not important. They say: I am always doing something to my blog therefore I work hard.  For them it is important that they are working on the blog and irrelevant what they are doing.  If they are doing something to the blog then they are working hard.

Finally there are those that think working hard means finding the time to work on the blog amongst all the other things that need doing throughout the day.  They have a full time job, 2 kids, and a dog with a broken leg.  Their days are busy at work, feeding the kids, and rehabilitating the dog.  The fact they also manage to work on their blog for 2 hours a days means that they work hard.

Spending lots of time on your blog, doing something to the blog and being a busy person does not mean you are working hard.  Working hard by carrying a heavy rock up a mountain everyday for 6 hours a will not help you become a successful blogger, neither will these forms of working hard.  They seem like hard work, but they are not and so will not increase your chance of having a successful blog.

What Does Hard Work Really Mean?

Working hard has nothing to do with how much time you spend on your blog, or how busy you rehabilitating your crippled dog.

Working hard means doing things that are hard to do. To succeed with your blog you need to do the things that most people do not do because they are hard.  Most people are lazy and gravitate towards the easy road – most people have failing blogs.

Everybody can change the background color, leave comments on other blogs, visit forums, submit low quality articles.  Doing these things might help your blog a little bit but they will not make you success.  Becoming a successful blogger is hard work – if you are doing easy things then you will not succeed.

Think of the thing that you keep putting off.  The thing that you know you should do but always find an excuse to do something else – something easier.  That thing is the hard work.  That’s the thing that will increase your chance of becoming successful.

By doing actual hard work, work that most people do not do, you raise yourself above the masses.  Most people would rather spend the whole day leaving comments on blogs, then spend 2 hours doing concentrated and mind twisting work.

Writing a guest post is an excellent example of real hard work.  Guest posts have to be good or they get rejected.  You have to think, write, rewrite, rethink.  Not everybody can write a post good enough to be accepted.  Its hard work and easy to avoid doing.

Writing comments on other people’s blogs is simple cruise control work.  No thinking required.  Read the post, something pops in the head, spit it out and hit submit.  No risk of rejection.  No stress.  Its so easy anybody can do it.  And that is the problem.  Leave comments on blogs if you enjoy it, but do not consider it as working hard on your blog.

Fortunately differentiating between imagined hard work and real hard work is not difficult.  Just ask yourself, I am doing something that most bloggers do not do because it is difficult?  If the answer is yes then you are really working hard and the rewards will come.

Any Comments?

Among the usual bunch of praise filled comments my previous post has a very interesting comment:

Come on dude.  Update your blog.  How do you expect your website to be a success with no updates?

Good point – how am I going to be successful without frequently updating this blog?  The song sung every week by  the choir is “Frequent posts lead to success”.  The preacher thumps his fist on the Good Book and sprays the first row as he shouts, “A website will die if  unattended – DIE!”.  Traffic will decrease, readers will unsubscribe, Google will stop sending you traffic.

Ignoring This Website And How it Effected The Success of This Website

For a couple of months my gaze has been elsewhere.  This website and blog have been on their own.  I have done nothing to prop or push it.  The last blog post was on Feburary 25, 2010.  Three months between blog posts – that can’t be good.

Normally things ignored deteriorate.  Empty houses spawn cobwebs, boards fall off fences, rust grows on pipes.    Without constant care lovers turn into ‘friends’; without constant care pet goldfish start doing the backstroke.

But surprisingly this website  did not  mind that I was gone.  There has been no deterioration, no rotting – the fish did not die.  3 months unattended was no worse for the website then 3 hours unattended.  Actually the fish are fatter and swimming faster.  Some of my stats have gone up in my absence.

Website’s Daily Visitors

Average daily visits has increased by 20%.  Nothing spectacular for 3 months, but pretty good for not doing anything at all.

But if the content is not changing then how can the traffic be increasing?  Without visitors coming back and reading new content you would expect traffic to go down as visitors realize the website is static.  How is it possible that the average daily visits has increased?

The answer is simple.  Even though the limited number of subscribers are not coming back, the almost unlimited number of non-subscribers are increasing.

Website’s Search Engine Traffic

Google seems pleased with my website – it keeps sending more and more .  Although not shown on the graph May 2010 is already at 290 Google visitors and will be at least 350 by the end of the month – making it the second best month ever.

There are millions of internet users for whom this website is fresh and new.  For them 3 month old website is fresh content.  They are looking for answers and this website provides them.  They do not care that it has not been updated in 3 months.  Google knows this and sends traffic my way.

Google does not care that my subscribers have not been provided with new content.  Google is concerned about the millions of internet users looking for answers to their’ how to make money with a website’ questions.  Which of course, this website provides.

Website’s Subscribers

But what about my poor subscribers?  Every morning they check their RSS readers with anticipation only to be disappointed – every morning for 3 months.  The agony and despair they must feel.  You can only court a crush for so long until repeated rejection forces you to look elsewhere.

The subscribers to this website did not miss me at all.  There was no despair due to my absence.  Hearts were not broken, dreams where not shattered.  There was not a mad rush to unsubscribe.   Nobody seem to care that I did not post – no one was angry  enough to unsubscribe.

The only reaction was from the commenter above who pleasantly requested that I write another post soon.  He did not unsubscribe, he simply and kindly asked for more.

This website had  around 80 subscribers 3 months ago and it has around 80 subscribers today.

What Will Happen If You Stop Updating Your Website For 3 Months?

Nothing.

Feel burnt out?  Is the sight of low traffic and no revenue really starting to get on your nerves?  Are you yelling at the dog for no reason?  Are you twirling around on your pivot chair trying to force new content out of your head?  Are you starting to think that the time spent on your website has been a complete waste of time?

If you answered yes to the above then you are like 99% of all webmasters.  You have 3 options:

1. Keep yelling at the dog.
2. Quit.
3. Take a 3 month break.  Don’t worry about your website, it will be there when you come back.

If an apple falls out of an old ladies bag and rolls down the street stopping at my feet I will bend down, pick it up, and hand it to the lady.  She will smile and say, thank you kind young man.  I will return the smile and move on – she is right, I am a kind young man.

A guy is walking down the street staring at a map and obviously lost.  He looks at me with a face that is a plea for help.  I will look the other way and try to ignore him, making a silent prayer that he does not stop me.  Why should I help him – he should be able to help himself.

I feel the same way about my readers – why should I help them?

I do not possess any need to help people that can help themselves.  The old, the blind, the slow, I will help if forced – if an apple hits my foot.  But everyone else are on their own.  I do not care if somebody is lost or needs a dime, there is no force driving me to help people in need.  If they have a brain, eyes and the major extremities then they should be able to help themselves.

And that is why blogging is difficult.  Blogging  is about giving advice, tips, suggestions and information with the intent of helping the reader.  Provide content that helps readers.  They do not know how to do something – show them how.  They do not know about something new – tell them about it.  They want to be entertained – stand on a beach ball and roll around juggling bananas.  Blogs are not for the blogger, they are for the reader.  You exist to serve the readers.  They should be able to help themselves – but no – they want you to help them.

But honestly, I do not care about the readers.  Besides the couple of visitors that leave comments, I know nothing about the other readers.  There is no connection with them – they are just bodies without souls.  No different then the hundreds of bodies I walk past everyday on the streets.

Do Successful Blogs Truly Care About You?

Successful blogs are run by kind people.  People who care.  Their posts offer free advice in a pleasant and loving way.  The bloggers care about their readers – they want to help.

But do they truly care?  Or are they just good at giving the impression that they care?

Obviously they are just pretending to care and are very good at it.

Just like the vacuum salesman who arrives at your door worried about your children.  You open the door and see a man holding a vacuum and beaming a smile.  You say, hello, may I help you? Suddenly with a  worried look he proclaims:  there are a lot of bacteria in your carpets, bacteria that can make your children sick, your children!  Like you, I care about your children – I do not want them to cough and sniffle,  poor little things.  Please buy this vacuum so that your children will not be sick.

Being a vacuum salesman is difficult.  You have to look sincere when you talk about ‘the children!’.  The best salesman are those that can form a little tear at the edge of their eye as they speak.  How could you say no to somebody caring so much.

You cannot sell vacuums if you do not care about the children.  To be a successful vacuum salesman, I mean blogger, you need to appear like you truly care.  Be kind to your readers.

How To Test Whether a Blogger Truly Cares

Probably there are successful blogger that truly care.  To test whether a blogger really cares is easy.  Write the blogger an email and ask them a question.  Be easy – do not make them work hard.  Ask them something simple like:

Hello.

I have really enjoy your blog and your style of writing.  Just wondering how long does it take you to write a post?

Thanks,
You

After you send this email there are three possible outcomes:

1. No response.  Does not care.
2. A quick response.  No hello, no punctuation, no capitalization, poor spelling.  For example: it takes 2 hours.  Does not care.
3. A well formatted email response with greeting, punctuation, correct spelling and capitalization.  Truly cares.

Of course, if you email me my response will belong to the ‘Cares’ category.  But that is only because I am not successful and I need to appear to care even in my emails.