These words are written in hesitation, almost agony.  For more then a month I have not had to think about this website.  It was a month of total bliss.  My mind was clean.  I ignored my traffic stats, I did not read other blogs, I did not add new content.  It was back to the good old days – before I had this website.  My mind was free to roam about anything and everything.

Time was my own.  Reading,  I was able to concentrate on what the donkey was saying to the turtle.  When I had a shower I was able to sing.  I ate slow and chewed all my food.  No rush and nothing pressing me.  No pressure to be at the computer doing something to the website.

I did not care about this website or about the online world.  It was great; but like the courting phase of a relationship, it must come to a end.  The fun stops and work begins – kisses and hugs become obligations and commitments.

So here I am, back at it.  Writing about the website.  Oh God, the agony.  With these words come all the attachments:  HTML, visitors, traffic, Adsense, comments, backups and that is just the technical aspect.  There is also the physiological damage – mental strain, sense of failure,  syphilis pushing a rock up a hill only to have it roll back again,  a slave to the website.  Back at it, back to having the website as a constant companion while I walk the streets, take a shower and sip my coffee.

Why do this?  Why put one self through it?  What is it all for?  The same reason destitute and repressed people left their homes, traveled the stormy seas, and landed on the beaches of the unknown called America.   A dream.  I do it in pursuit of a dream.  Pilgrims came to America to avoid suppression and start a new life on their own terms.  This website is in pursuit of a dream of living on my own terms.  To be free from the terms of my employee contract.  To be free from my 1 hour lunch break.  To be free from my boss’s mood swings.  Free to call time my own.  I have a dream.

Lots of people died on the journey to America.  And a lot more when they got there.  In their case failure turned the dream chaser to fertilizer.  Fortunately for me the worst that can happen is I spend a lot of time and money and end up with 20 megabytes of useless HTML.

I have spent a year on this website.  In terms of making money it was a complete waste.  I could of made a lot more with a lemonade stand setup beside a water fountain.  During the year I spent a lot of time thinking about the website – mental time that I will never get back.  Was it worth it?  Maybe if I spent that time thinking about something else, like building a perpetual motion machine, I would be a lot better off now.

But that was last year.  Who knows if it was for the best.  But I am not a crazed nut that pursues an impossible dream of turning dung into gold.  One more year is all that I will allow this website to suck out of me.  If nothing drastic happens within a year I will release myself from its grasp and be free to sing in the shower again.

About Revenue, Earnings, Money, Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this

Like a green oasis in the desert, a life giving miracle has appeared.  This website is making a profit.  Finally after 320 days this website has incurred $538.23 in costs and made $544.71 in revenue – revenue is a bigger number then the costs number.  That is a cool $6.48 that goes straight into my pocket.  A crisp five dollar bill and some jingling change.

Of course $6.48 is a lot less then the $10,000 I was hoping to have.  But I take is a learning experience.  I have no other choice, the only other thing I can take it as is a total failure; so in this case I am choosing optimism over the truth.  I learned that my expectation was way to high.  I year ago I thought that in 320 days I would be drinking hundred dollar wine and deciding between a red or black corvette.  Instead, I have made just enough money to buy a coffee and ride the bus.

Bitter?  Yep.  Basically I got ripped off.  I have put in 494 hours of work and received a meager $6.48.  This is criminal – a scam.  A rational human being would never accept these terms.  The only way a person could end up in this situation is by force or trickery.   In my case it was not force – nobody made me make a website.  I chose to make a website.  I chose to build a website because I believed that I would get paid fairly for my efforts.   

Who knows how I fell for it.  Or who did it to me.  Or how they benefit.  It is like the Kennedy assassination – the deeper you look the more mysterious it gets.  I have tried to analyze what happened, how I get duped, where did it all start.  My investigations have led nowhere.  Somehow I believed that the internet would be a great source of income.  I have no idea who did this to me.  But to keep my sanity I have stopped asking who and why.  Kennedy is dead and the circumstances around it strange – period.  I spent 494 hours to get $6.48 – period. 

What To Do With The Bitterness?

Being bitter raises an interesting problem for a webmaster.  There is no way to vent or redirect negative feelings.  At the work place it is easy to redirect bitterness. 

Let’s say you do not get the bonus you expected.  No problem.  Do not buy toilet paper, pens, calculators, or coffee – the office will supply you with these.  Take one or two items a day.  It’s not stealing, it is your bonus.  You can come to work a little later, have a longer lunch, leave a little earlier.  Its is not abuse, it is your bonus.  One way or another you will get your bonus.

Boss does not appreciate your work?  You work over the weekend to get the report on the boss’s desk first thing Monday morning and all you get is a ‘great – thanks’.  No problem.   Monday and Tuesday you play solitaire and browse your favorite websites with a clear conscience because you are simply recouping your weekend.

Having a bad day at work:  Co-worker talking in your ear about her stupid domestic issues?  Crappy computer crashes?  Client upsetting you with unrealistic demands?  Phone keeps ringing?  No problem.  Hit the keyboard a few times, open and close the laptop monitor many times and really fast, hang up the phone extra hard, start a dirty rumor about your co-worker and give her real domestic issues.

That’s what so great about the work environment.  You get bitter and upset, but at least there is something you can do to vent.  The workplace offers many ways to redirect that bitterness onto other people and office equipment.

Sadly a webmaster has no such luxury.  A webmaster works alone and with their own equipment.  Nothing to steal, nothing to hit, nobody to bad mouth.  Something goes wrong and all you can do is sit there and stew.  You could hit the keyboard but then you need to buy a new one.  You could have a longer lunch but then you will have to make it up later.  You could yell at the dog but he will just wag his tail and want to play catch.

Like a egg, a webmaster can only boil in their pot and harden.

Raking The Sand

The other day I was browsing Amazon for something to spend my $6.48 on.  I quickly discovered that I have enough money to pay for shipping but not enough for the product.  So I went to the only place where I can spend my website profits – the dollar store.

The pin wheel hat was too tight and the plastic gun did not look real.  But then I saw it.  As soon I as I tried it I knew it was exactly what I needed.  It is a simple thing.  Sand, rock and a rake – a mini zen garden.

Now it sits beside my computer.  Before I check my stats I pick up the rake with my left hand and begin to slide it across the sand.  It has a calming effect.  Little rocks are placed randomly in the sand so I rake around them.  The four little lines in the sand twist and turn around the rocks and relax me as I check my revenue stats.  Monks have zen gardens to bring them closer to nirvana.  I have my little zen garden to avoid destroying my own keyboard.

My zen garden has taught me something else.  Just because I spend lots of time on my website and receive almost nothing in monetary return, does not mean my time is wasted.  Now I know that there are even bigger wastes of time possible – like raking sand around little rocks.  This calms me and the bitterness floats away.

I strongly recommend that you purchase a zen garden.  It will really help you as webmaster and make you gentler and kinder blogger.

If 26 of you buy the zen garden via the Amazon link above then I will earn $6.50 from Amazon – almost doubling my annual profits.  I am raking with my left hand and pecking the keyboard with my right.

Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this, What YOU Expect vs Reality, What YOU Should Do

The First Time You Were Surprised By Reality

Around puberty you begin to think about love.  Not the love for your mother or bone fetching friend Rusty.  You think about being in love.  Meeting that special someone to share your life with.  Walks in the park, smiles across a crowed room, tingles in the stomach, kissing as you suck a single strand of spaghetti.  You lay in your bed, stare at the ceiling and daydream about being in love.

Also around puberty you become inundated by the mass media machine.  Movies, music, books, and paintings.  You read books about eternal love, listen to songs about true love, watch movies that end with  ‘and they lived happily every after’,  your favorite picture is of a couple feeding each other grapes under a large oak tree.  The concept of love, how beautiful it is, how perfect it is, how eternal it is, forms in your young mind.

You cannot wait to be in love.  Everything will be perfect.

And then it happens.  You find somebody.  It is exciting – just like your favorite song said it would be.  Always smiling and skipping – everything just like in the movies.

Unfortunately you do not live in Disneyland – things do not end happily ever after.  Reality suddenly  arrives with a kick in the crotch.  Just knocks down the door and storms in, no knock, no ‘can I come in?’.  Love turns out nothing like you though it would be; like they told you it would be.  Instead of butterflies and rainbows there are slaps and flying dishes.  There is jealousy, pain, doubt and sometimes lawyers.  Cupid’s arrow hits the pulmonary artery and causes internal bleeding. 

Fortunately you are older now.  Now you know that mass media simply doles out what people want to hear.  Songs about love eternal sell.  Movies that end with happily ever after sell.  Paintings of couples embracing in the sunset sell.  Perfect love is not real but it sells.

Now you know better.  Your expectations about love are more realistic.  Hearing a song about love eternal causes the eyes to roll instead of the heart to swell.  Teens walk out of the movie theater with tears in their eyes, you are holding your mouth trying not to laugh.

Surprised By Reality Again

One day browsing the internet you come across a website that catches your attention.  A big flashy header, ‘Start your own blog today!’, it is easy, make lots of money, be famous.  You start getting excited.  This is exactly what you have been looking for.  To write and be famous.  To work from home and make lots of money.  To sit on the beach with your laptop and a martini.  You lay in your bed, stare at the ceiling and daydream about being a blogger.

The more you look into it the better it gets.  There are so many successful blogs out there – everybody is doing it.  And the best part is that it is so easy.  All you need to do is write a couple paragraphs everyday.  Visitors will adore your writing, they will tell their friends, your blog will have thousands of visitors in a matter of months.  No more nine to five at the office, goodbye idiot boss, time to get off your knees begging for a bonus.  Everything will be great – you will be a rich blogger.

Like a giddy little school girl on the first day of class, you start blogging.

Six month later you are a bitter old man feeding pigions in the park, cursing the cruel world with an occasional shake of the fist.  Without asking to come in, reality barged through the door again.  Writing everyday is not as easy as you expected.  You only have 50 visitors a day.  Instead of thousands of dollars you have hundreds of pennies.  Most of your time is spent deleting spam.  You dread the boring promotional tasks that need to be done everyday: commenting on blogs, writing articles, adding links to directories.  Being a blogger is nothing like you thought it would be.  It is hard work with little reward.

You were fooled by mass media again.  Stories of people making thousands of dollars a month.  Websites claiming that you can have a successful blog by working only a few hours a week.  Blogs claiming that all you need to do is buy their ebook and in no time you will be making a living from home.  They make these claims because they sell.

Now you know better.  Again.

Real Love, Real Blogger

Real love requires patience, persistence and hard work – so does being a successful blogger.

Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this, What YOU Expect vs Reality

Fossil fuels are bad.  By burning them CO₂ is released into the air.  People get sick, the earth heats up, and nature is thrown into a tailspin.  Do not use fossil fuels – use renewable energy sources like wind power.

Wind power is bad.  Birds fly into the rotating blades and get chopped up into small nuggets.  The swooshing sound of the blades creates noise pollution.  Due to the low air pressure around the wind turbines bats die – it is believed that the sudden pressure change around the turbine causes their lungs to collapse.

The environmentalism movement is full of such contradictions.  It seams that everything humans do has a negative effect on the environment.  If humans are doing it then it is bad – not natural.  And regardless of what solution you try to find there will always be a group of people who do a study showing how harmful  it is to the environment. 

The problem is that environmentalists do not have a united front.  Thousands of  individual groups each fighting for their own chunk of the environment to save.  One group wants to reduce the use of fossil fuels and another wants to save the bats.  There is only one solution to satisfy every environmental group’s wishes – move the entire human race to the moon.

Although environmentalists are a threat to the existence of humans on this planet, there is a more pressing matter which directly concerns bloggers.  So far the environmentalists have not turned their gaze towards blogs, but soon they will aim their punitive eye towards us.

Blogs Are Bad For the Environment

Factories are an easy target for environmentalists.  Dark gray clouds of smoke hover around them revealing their evil.  The sun is blocked, trees covered in soot, squirrels coughing.  It is easy for environmentalists to rally up the public and force the factory to shut down or move.  All they need to do is point to the smoke stack.

Bloggers do not create smoke.  There are no smoke stacks to point at.  No dead birds, no three eyed fish and no confused wales.  But environmentalists are very determined – they will not give up so easy.  With will there is always a way.  Let’s give them the credit they deserve – they are awesome at discovering ways to show how humans are destroying the earth.

Here is how they are going to do it: Blogs are created on computers.  Blogs are read by people on computers.  Computers use electricity,  electricity that was generated by CO₂ emitting fossil fuel generators and bird killing wind turbines.

Environmentalists will look at the blogosphere and ask: how much electricity is being consumed creating and reading blogs?  Every blogger spends countless hours on the computer writing posts and promoting.  The readers of the blogs collectively spend more hours on their computers reading the blogs.  Environmentalists will add up all the electricity consumed by the blogosphere.  Then they will do some calculations and figure out how much environmental destruction is caused by generating the  electricity.  When this happens, we as bloggers are screwed.  The cross hairs of their big environment saving bazooka will be pointed right at our heads.

Of course, they will not try to shut the entire blogosphere down all at once.  They will start by picking off the easy targets  – the millions of low traffic blogs.  Blogs with a small following.  Blogs that nobody cares about.  Blogs that if they suddenly disappear nobody would notice.  They will argue that electricity is being wasted on these little blogs: are they necessary, do  these little blogs add enough value to justify the damage they cause the environment?

The problem is that the environmentalists would be right.  A lot of electricity is consumed on blogs that end up going nowhere – blogs that have their run for a couple months and die.  Earth heating up and birds dying for nothing. 

How Much Electricity Does the Low Traffic Blogosphere Consume?

Although the environmentalists have not attacked the blogosphere yet, lets see what they have in their arsenal before they arrive.  Specifically lets focus on their first targets – the low traffic blogs.  Blogs that have a small amount of visitors and therefore do not contribute to the greater good – are not worth the electricity being consumed by them.  Individually these blogs consume a small amount of electricity, but taken as a group they consume a lot.

According to technorati.com in March 2006 there were 15.5 million active blogs (blogs that have been updated in the past 90 days).  Also according to technorati.com 49% of blogs have less then 1000 unique visitors a month.  This means that in March 2006 there were 7.5 million active low traffic blogs.  Blogs that the environmentalist will target first because they do nothing more then waste electricity and pollute the environment.  

Here are the parameters we are going to use to get estimate of the amount of electricity consumed and CO₂ emission created by blogs with less then 1000 visitors a month:

• Number of active blogs with less then 1000 visitors a month: 7.5 million
• Average visitors a month: 500
• Hours a month spent updating the blogs: 20
• Average time visitor spends reading the blogs: 2 minutes

Unfortunately I could not find reliable statistics for the average amount of time bloggers spend on their blogs.  Nor could I find the average time visitors spend reading blogs.  Fortunately, this blog is a blog that fits nicely in the ‘low traffic blog’ category so I used the stats from this site to estimate for the entire low traffic blogosphere.  It is not perfect but good enough for this general calculation.

Following are the results for the amount of electricity consumed, the cost, and the amount of CO₂ produced by blogs with less then 1000 visitors a month:

As you can see, a lot of electricity is being used by blogs with less then an 1000 visitors a month.  Lots of waste, lots of money spent on electricity, lots of CO₂ emissions.  Environmentalists do not like wasted electricity and they certainly do not like lots of CO₂ emissions.

One of the tactics environmentalists like to use to persuade the masses to their cause is to take the numbers and create statements that people can visualize.  Like these:

• Every month low traffic blogs consumes enough electricity to light 385,416,667 standard 60W light bulbs for 1 hour.
• Every year low traffic blogs produces the same amount of CO₂ emissions as 36,513 passenger vehicles.
• Every year low traffic blogs produces the same amount of CO₂ emissions as 7,928,571 propane cylinders used for home barbeques.
• Low traffic blogs consumes the same amount of electricity a year as 27,750 average homes.
• It will take 5,045,455 tree seedlings growing for 10 years to absorb the CO₂ produced by low traffic blogs.
• 149,173,171 pounds (67,663,812 kilograms) of waste will need to be recycled instead of being sent to the landfill to offset low traffic blog’s yearly greenhouse gas emissions.

Should You Be Worried That Your Blog Will Be Attacked By Environmentalists?

Its seems that the environmentalists have a good case.  Blogs with less then 1000 visitors a month do cause a lot of damage to the environment.  They use up precious electricity that could be used for people (or preferably animals and plants) that really need it.  And by wastefully consuming the electricity these blogs contribute to the CO₂ emissions problem. 

The environmentalists will argue: what good are these low traffic blogs?  Who needs them?  How do they benefit the planet?  Wouldn’t it be better if we shut them down and conserve the electricity?  They will caricature bloggers as big steel footed monsters stomping through a pristine nature scene and they will be on CNN stating that, “Low traffic blogs will cause massive hurricanes that will wipe out the entire eastern seaboard”.

There is no stopping them.  If they could have their way all blogs would be abolished.  Like a swarm of army ants – individually they are harmless but together they demolish everything in their path.  They will take down the entire blogosphere.  The only consolation for bloggers is that that it will take time.  They need to start at the bottom – attacking the low traffic blogs first.  You will never be completely safe from them but you can get off the forest floor, climb up a tree as the first wave passes by.  They will get you sooner or later, but you can keep your blog alive a little longer by working on getting more monthly traffic and not being the first in their path.  

How Much Pollution Does Your Blog Generate?

Here is a online calculator you can use to find out how much CO₂ pollution your site generates.

Sources:

Number of active blogs in March 2006:
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives/2007/04/blogging_growth.html

Percent of blogs with less then 1000 visitors a month:
http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/the-how-of-blogging/

Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this, What YOU Should Do

When I decided to create this website the first thing I did was open an account with a web host service.  The second thing was to create a few email accounts.

Three email account where created:

1. info@: this is used for the contact page.  When a visitor fills out the contact form and clicks send I get an email from info@.
2. roman@: I use this address when I want to email somebody or when I need to leave a contact address.  For example, on blog comments and on my AdSense account.
3. paj@: When someobody fills out the PAJ order page this email is used.

It is amazing how optimistic and ignorant I was.  The reason I created 3 different accounts was for organizational purposes.  I imagined that emails would be flooding in all day.  By having 3 email address I would be able to quickly determine what the email is about.  Is it a contact page submission, PAJ order, or a response to a blog comment I left?  It was suppose to be a great time saver.

Seven months have gone by since I created the email accounts.  No emails have come in via paj@.  Not a single order for a PAJ.  You are not surprised – I am.  Of course I did not expect 100’s of sales but at least 1 or 2 a month.  Nope – nothing.

I also expected that people would have questions and comments about the website.  Where did you get that number? How did you make that graph? Can you tell me how I can…?  I was actually worried that I would be spending all my time answering email questions and have no time to work on the website.  I have proof of my ignorant optimism – when you fill out the contact form the thank you message states:

Thank you for your comment. I read all emails, and I try to respond to all emails.

TRY to respond to all emails.  Large mail bags arriving everyday and my hand cramped up from writing to all my fans….I will try to respond to all emails.

Reality: the contact page has been up for 227 days.  I have received 12 contact page emails.  Around one contact form email every 20 days.  Wandering around the Sahara desert for 227 days I would certainly stumble upon a oasis more often.  Every time an email comes in from the contact form I think it is a mirage – it has been so long since I have seen one.  I will try to respond to all emails. 

A couple days ago I received one of the precious and rare contact form emails.  For me it is an event – I do not just open the email.  I savor it – somebody took the time to send me an email.  I get an coffee, close the door, turn on some music, and click on the email.  Before responding I read the email over and over again.  What do they need?  What are they asking?  How can I help?  Taking a sip of coffee my brain begins to formulate a response.

But the email I received a few days ago was different then the 12 before it.  I read it over and over again.  I could not believe what I was reading…it had to be a mirage.  An email that cannot exist. 

In essence it called me a liar.  It questioned my honesty.  It stated that the numbers on the website must be fabricated.

The reason the person doubted the numbers was that my AdSense revenues are too high for the first month.  The first month my AdSense revenue was $40 dollars.  That is too high.  The whole website it bullshit.  That was the message of the email.  It was not a mirage, the oasis was real, but the water was poisoned.

Why The AdSense Revenue Was High During First 2 Months

Here are my AdSense Revenue’s for the first 6 months:

As you can see for the first two months AdSense revenue was great.  Much more then the next five months.  How can this be explained?  There are two possibilities:

1. I am a liar – and this entire website is spattered with fabricated information.
2. The numbers are real. There is a rational and logical explanation for the high AdSense revenue.

The first possibility cannot be discounted – I am making the numbers up.  Even though the homepage states: “This website is a no nonsense, no hype, honest account of how it makes money online.”, it is just another lie on a fly infested dung heap of lies.  This website should have been called: How This Website Lies To Make Money (and how much it lies).

Of course there is nothing I can write to persuade you to believe me.  You do not know me and I do not know you.  The safest thing for you to do is not believe me.  The only argument I can give is that there is no reason for me to make up numbers.  How do I benefit by fabricating numbers?  Would this website make more money if I made less during the first month? I have no idea.  I cannot think of any reason to pull numbers from a hat.  It is actually easier for me to give the actual numbers because it requires no thought from me – I simply take numbers from one report and enter them into another.  Monkey work – no thought required.

Fabricating number with an intent to make more money is a level of thought beyond me.  I do not even know where to start.  Should I be claiming that I get more traffic?  Will more people click on Ads if I do?  Will that improve my SEO?  Or maybe it is better to claim that I get very little traffic.  People will come to my website just to see what kind of loser I am.  I do all this work and all I get is 10 visitors a day – would this website make more money if people thought I was an idiot?

Lets assume that you do not think I am an idiot and that the numbers are real.  What could be the logical explanation for the large AdSense revenue the first two months and then the big drop thereafter?

Here is a graph showing the traffic sources for this website for the previous 7 months:

Looking at the graph, what sticks out like a pimple on a super model, is that for the first two months most of the traffic is from referral sites.

The first two months I received almost no traffic from search engines – the website was new and not indexed.  All my traffic came from forums I visited.  Forums in my niche: make money online.  I was leaving comments and the signature was a link back to this website.  People who clicked on my signature where exactly like me – they were looking for ways to make money online.  They come to this website and see ads about making money online.  They clicked them because the ads are specifically targeted to them.

This was great.  I was driving perfectly targeted traffic to my website.  And made money with AdSense.  The problem was that it was a lot of work.  I spent countless hours on the forums reading and making comments.  Roughly an hour a day.  So for the entire month I spent 30 hours driving traffic to this website which earned me $40.14. A little over a dollar an hour.  Pathetic.

Month 2 was more of the same – 30 hours work for $50 dollars.  I needed a new plan.  Driving traffic from forums is too much work with very little gain.

So at the end of month 2 I changed strategy.  Instead of working like a donkey for a measly $1 an hour I changed focus.  Decrease my forum time and spend more time I getting search engine traffic.  Increase backlinks, improve SEO, add more content to the site.  Because of this change my AdSense took a big drop.  Search engine traffic is targeted but not as perfectly as the forum traffic.

The hope is that in the long run it will pay off.  If ever the day comes that search engines start to send me traffic in the 1000’s per day then I will be making a lot more in revenue and doing a lot less work.

And as this is going on I will be diligently updating the website’s tables and graphs.  Monkey see number, monkey copy number.  Of course, when I do become a success there will be lots of people who will not believe the numbers.  But whether that will help or hinder the website I have no idea.  Honest sells, but so does a lot of 0’s.

Actual Stats From The Website Used, Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this, So You Want To Be A Webmaster...Get in my Head, What YOU Expect vs Reality