Skyscraper construction workers risk falling thousands of feet to their death. Loggers have to avoid being hammered into the ground by falling trees. Air traffic controllers must fight urge to end the stress by gulping down bottles of Tylenol.

Writers (bloggers) also have an occupation hazard – one that completely kills the writer’s ability to do their job.

A writer does not just sit down and write. The process starts days before. An idea forms. During the next few days the idea begins to take the shape of words and sentences. Once the writer is ready to put it to paper he begins to prepare himself. Go to bed early to avoid being tired, do not eat to much to avoid being full, stay away from the mother-in-law to prevent rage. All this must be perfectly timed and planned so that when the writer sits down to write everything is perfect – comfortable chair, monitor at the proper distance, coffee at arms reach. Ready to write.

Everything is in balance but then it happens – the writer’s occupational hazard. The one thing that completely destroys a writers ability to write. Noise.

Besides the death aspect, the main difference between the occupation hazard of a logger and a writer is that there is absolutely nothing a writer can do to prevent noise. It is unpredictable and invisible until it happens. Like the game with pop-up gophers, you hit one in the head and another one pops up somewhere else – you can not know when or from where.

Noise comes from the outside world – out of the control of the writer. It can be a barking dog, a chirping bird, a screaming kid, a buzz saw, an ungreased bearing in the cooling fan, a strange clicking noise from an indiscernible source. These noises kill the writer. A construction worker can take extra careful steps, a logger can learn to look up more often , an air traffic controller can take more vacations, but what can a writer do about noise?

Noise is an occupational hazard that all writers must learn to live with. As a writer you know it can kill, but it is a hazard you have accepted. Like a Roman Gladiator you enter the arena knowing that today might be the day the Emperor desires to be entertained by watching his hungry lions chew on man meat.

Unpreventable vs. Stupid Noise

Noise kills and you learn to accept that. You really have no other choice. But what can drive a writer to fits of rage and hair pulling is preventable noise. Noise that does not have to be there, noise that if the noise creator had a dab of decency would prevent from ever existing.

I live in the suburbs. I am surrounded by quaint little houses with lush green lawns. Lawns that need to be cut.

Of course, to fit into society, to be a good and respectable homeowner, the grass should be no taller then 1 inch. Anything above an inch is a disgrace – an insult to anybody who walks by.  It is lawn owner’s civic duty to ensure that the grass is kept at a height that does not offend the people that look at it. This means that the lawn must be mowed at least once every two weeks.

Below is satellite picture of my house and the surrounding area. The yellow marker is where I do most of my writing. The read square around my house is the area in which I can hear a lawn mower.

As you can clearly see there are a lot of lawns around my house. Doing a quick count there are 36 separate lawns. Each of them has grass which is always around 1 inch tall. This means that over the course of 2 weeks I will hear a lawn mower 36 times. On average I hear a lawn mower 2.5 times a day. And this does not include the large public space behind my house that gets mowed by the government. But it does not count because it gets mowed by a large tractor 6:30am Saturday morning – it interferes with my ability to sleep off a Friday night hangover, not my writing.

2.5 times a day my ability to write gets killed by the noise a blade makes slicing off the top 5 percent of a blade of grass.

Unlike a chirping bird, or barking dog, lawn mowing is different because it is a preventable noise. It is a noise that does not have to exist or at least can be reduced to a bare minimum. There are two ways to reduce the noise of lawn mowers:

1. Increase the socially acceptable grass length. By making 2 inch grass fashionable, the number of times the lawn requires mowing is reduced by half. On average my writing ability would be killed only 1.25 times a day.
2. Everybody agrees on a specific lawn mowing time. Everybody mow’s the lawn at the same time. This solution has a double benefit: mowing noise is reduced to a specific time, and everybody’s lawn is exactly the same height eliminating grass height envy or grass height scorn.

Although great suggestions, the problem is that the above will never happen. It it one of those things were everybody wins, but regrettably the human race has not evolved enough to make it happen. It is preventable noise but will forever be classed in with the unpreventable and unavoidable noise of a chirping bird or barking dog.

The unfortunate result is that this site suffers. I am sure that if both of the above suggestions were implemented this site would have at least double the posts and as a consequence traffic would be higher and revenue in the 1000’s of dollars.

How does noise prevent you from having a better blog?

Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this, So You Want To Be A Webmaster...Get in my Head

This blog just had its 6 months anniversary. There was no celebration at this house. Nothing to be happy about. After 6 months there are still only a few visitors, there is little revenue and the future looks as blurry as it did the day I started. Actually, it was better when I started – 6 months ago I had more enthusiasm.

I use to search the internet for tips and advice on how to make my blog a success. Every new piece of information was consumed with gusto. At the beginning I thought all I have to do was this and that, and then my blog will be a success. The reasoning was that my blog is not a success because I still have not done this and that, but once I do it then the blog will succeed – my traffic stats will roll like the number of McDonald’s hamburgers sold.

Like most people I got my advice from Problogger. Darren Rowse, the owner of Problogger knows what he is talking about – he is one of the top blogging gurus. His indisputable credential is his very successful blog. Almost everyday he gives out advice on how to improve a blog. And it is good advice, it has to be, he is a success.

Readers of problogger are all looking to improve their blogs. This is evident by the most common type of comments readers leave:

• Great advice! I will have to implement that on my blog.
• I have been meaning to do this to my blog. Now I know it needs to be done today!
• A perfect post. Thanks Darren. I will do this to my blog ASAP.
• You are a constant source of motivation. My blog has been doing poorly but I can see that with a little work I can make it better.
• Good point, going to do this now! Thanks Darren.

Can you feel the enthusiasm! The readers are learning from the master. They are doing something wrong on their blog, they learn from Problogger, and then claim they will fix it.

You would expect that with all these people constantly improving their blogs there would be a lot more successful blogs. If everybody is doing what Problogger is suggesting then success should be everywhere. But it is not. Blogs are continuing to fail – just like mine.

After 6 months this blog has made very little progress. It still hovers around 50 visitors a day and daily revenue is still measured in pennies. The only aspect that has increased is the number of hours that I have put into it. But that is just me – how do I know that other blogs are also failing? Specifically, how do I know that Problogger’s readers are failing even though they are aware of and claim to use problogger’s advice on their blogs?

In my previous post I showed how in 3 years 71% of blogs are dead. To recap, this is how the number was derived:

1. Going back 3 years on problogger’s archived posts, I took the URL’s of the commentors for the month of January 2006.
2. The retrieved URL’s were run through the website webtraffic24 which estimated the amount of traffic that the URL currently receives.
3. It turned out that 3 years after making a comment on problogger 71% of blogs still had less then 200 visitors a day. (for details of how the data is gathered please see post: What are the odds that your blog will fail?)

The data clearly showed that Problogger’s commentors are not doing to well after three years.

Does Commenting on Problogger Improve Your Blog

Now I want to use the same approach to determine whether Problogger commentors are really improving their blogs. They state, ‘great! I will take your advice and do that to my blog’. But are they really doing it? Are they improving their blog?

There is a easy way to test whether reading Problogger’s advice improves blogs. Here is the approach:

1. Gather URLs from current Problogger commentors and find out how many blogs are failing. These are people who just got the advice and still have not had time to implement.
2. Go back 6 months in Probloggers posts and gather the commentors URLs and find out how many blogs are failing now. These are people who got the advice 6 months ago and have had 6 months to implement the advice.
3. Go back 1 year in Probloggers posts and gather the commentors URLs and find out how many blogs are failing now. These are people that got the advice 1 year ago – plenty of time to implement and reap the results.

Using this method we should expect to see that the older blogs have a lower failure rate then the newer blogs. For example, a commentor on problogger 1 year ago stating, ‘Awesome post Darren, I will do that to my blog right now.’, should be better off today then a commentor you just a few days ago stated, ‘Great advice, I will do that today’. People who took Probloggers advice a year ago should be reaping the benefits today.

Here are the results:

No difference. A Problogger commentor who 6 months ago, or 1 year ago, learned some great piece of advice from Problogger has no statistical advantage over someone who became aware of it yesterday and is about to apply it to his/her blog.

2 Possible Reasons Why Problogger’s Advice Does Not Improve Your Blog

There are two ways to interpret the data:

1. Problogger adds no value to bloggers. Implementing advice does not increase your chance of having a successful blog. The advice might of worked for Problogger but it will not make your blog better. You might aswell not read problogger’s advice because it will not help you.
2. The advice is good and it works but people do not apply Problogger’s advice to their blogs. They state, ‘great post, will do to my blog’, but they don’t. They tell the world that they will follow Problogger’s advice but in the end they just leave their blog as is. Not implemetening the advice leads to failure.

Unfortunately there is no way to tell which of these two is reality. Problogger is a success and Darren knows what he is doing – but maybe his advice applies only to him. Just because it works for him does not mean it will work for you. Bill Gates can tell you everything he did to become a success, but it does not mean that simply doing what he did will lead to success. It might even be that by doing what he is doing lowers your chance of success because everybody is trying to do it.

The more likely situation is number 2. It is so much easier for commentors to write, ‘Will do’, then to actually do it. They say they will, but they don’t. This should not be a surprise to anybody since this is normal human behavior. After leaving a motivational seminar the audience will be chanting and clapping with enthusiasm – ‘yes I can, yes I will, I will do it’. They even continue to chant this in the car during the drive home. But as soon as they arrive home their chant changes to, ‘where is dinner, where are my slippers, where is the remote’.

Misery Loves Company – My 6 month Anniversary Present

6 months ago I also made a comment on Problogger so I am part of the statistics. After 6 months my blog belongs in the failure category. But there is some good news: According to webtraffic24 this blog gets 64 visitors a day (which is pretty close to the actual value). I checked how many people that commented on problogger 6 months ago have less traffic then me. It turns out that 39% of the commentors are currently doing worse them me. I am not at the bottom and there are a lot of failures around me. It is not a great present but I will take it – it is the only good news I got.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this, So You Want To Be A Webmaster...Get in my Head, What YOU Expect vs Reality

A couple days ago I was surprised by an email.  In the email the person stated that he enjoyed the website – that is understandable.  But then the email got strange.  He concluded his email with a request for advice.  He asked me to advise him on how to generate more revenue and get more traffic to his website.

The guy missed the whole point of this website.  With my traffic and revenue stats fully disclosed this website clearly shows that I have no idea what I am doing.  Why would anybody want to seek advice from me?  It is like somebody showing up at the scene of a car accident and asking the stunned driver, “Can you please teach me how to drive”.

Why You Should Not Ask Me How To Making Money Online

I have mentioned it before, both on the website and in this blog, that I am completely new to making money online.  Four months ago I never heard the phrase ‘Search Engine Optimization’, or ‘Meta-Tags’.  I had no experience with CSS or Dreamweaver.  I had never made a single penny online.  I was as green as a freshly mowed lawn.  I still am.

I have been at it for four months.  I have learned some things.  Now I can read about website design techniques and adsense monetization and understand what is being discussed, but I still do not have a clue how to make money online.  I thought this fact was obvious.  The whole website is a testament to my ignorance.  Simply by viewing a few pages on the website you quickly discover that:

• I have worked for 365 hours. For my efforts I received $131 dollars. If I had spent that time working at McDonalds flipping burgers and cleaning out grease traps I would now have around $3300 dollars.
• I make 36 cents per hour. The lowest wages in the world are paid to garment workers in Bangladesh. They get paid 22 cent per hour. The second lowest wages in the world are in Cambodia, they get paid 33 cents. I have the honor of having the third lowest wage in the world at 36 cents. A Pakistani garment worker makes more then I do at 37 cents per hour.
• On average this website receives about 50 visitors a day. This has not changed for almost 3 months. No progress increasing my traffic. Commenting on forums, blogs, creating articles for backlinks. All for nothing. Traffic does not budge – 50 visitors a day.
• So far I have spent $491 on this website. The website software (Dreamweaver), domain name, hosting, voting script. Since I have only managed to make $131 dollars, I am running at a loss. Not only am I not making money online, I am paying money to do it.
• I have been promoting this blog for 3 months and wrote 26 well thought out posts. This has gained me around 25 subscribers. My condominium’s monthly newsletter has more subscribers and all it talks about the problem of people not cleaning up after their dogs.

All this information is clearly stated on the website.  Tables and pretty graphs are used to make the point obvious.  That is why I was so surprised that somebody would ask me for advice.  They seem to  not care that this website makes no money.  The only person who should be asking me for advice is a Bangladeshi garment worker.  I can help him make more money.

There are websites out there that claim they know how to make lots of money online.  The webmaster claims that they have discovered the secret of making money online.  They claim to be experts, to be rich, to know it all.  Of course they do not give any proof of their success except for a few pictures of big houses and fancy cars.  These are the websmasters that at least give the impression that they know what they are doing.  So I would expect people to send them emails asking for advice.  But to send me an email asking for advice is ridiculous.  There is nothing on this website that gives the impression that I know how to make money online. 

Maybe In The Future I Will Be Able to Give Advice

Am I bitter?  No.  Do I consider this website a failure?  No.  Do I spend my nights soaking the pillow with tears?  No.  I realize this is just the beginning.  Making money online is not easy.  It is a process that takes time.  The beginning is hard and bound to be full of failure.  Just like anything else.  Even Wayne Gretzky was a bad hockey player at some point.  Time, practice and persistence made him a great player.  Success comes with the passage of time.

So far the only thing this website teaches is that making money online is not easy at the beginning.  That everyday feels like a failure.  That progress does not come overnight. 

If you have a site and you are still learning and not making money then you can come to this website and see that it is normal.  Misery needs company.  It makes you feel better that this website is also doing poorly at the beginning.

What keeps me going is knowing that making money online is possible.  Other people are doing it.  I just need to find out how.  Until this websites starts making money then there is no point in asking me for help increasing the revenue for your site because I have no idea.

If you want to know what I have learned so far then visit the How Well Is This Website Doing section of the website.

Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this, Optimistic and Motivational

The first few months of being a webmaster are challenging. Especially psychologically. All new webmasters should be ready to deal with the following:

Silence

You pluck away for hours creating new content.  After reading it and re-reading it, adding sentences and deleting others.  Making sure every sentence flows gracefully from one to the next.  Creating perfection.  Finally it is done, your Saturday is spent, but it is done.  You post your creation online and wait. 

Nothing.  No comments.  No emails.  Like it was never written.  Like it does not exist.  Silence.  The tumbleweed rolling through a ghost town kind of silence.  The time spent trying to please the masses was for nothing.  There is nobody out there.  Like Robinson Caruso writing a beautiful story, putting it into a bottle, and throwing it out to sea.

As a new webmaster do not expect praise or feedback for your work.  Expect nothing.  Write it, post it, and then write another one. 

Zero

For the first few months expect to see a lot of the number 0.  Especially when it comes to revenue.  With so few visitors to your site, most of the time your revenue will be zero. 

Normally this means that once a day you are disappointed by seeing 0.  But you will see it more then once a day.  You will see it at least 10 times a day.  Because every free moment you have will be spent checking your revenue.  Waiting for the coffee to brew…good time to check the revenue.  A commercial on TV…good time to check the revenue.  Three o’clock in the morning coming out of the bathroom and walking past the computer…good time to check the revenue.

You will come to despise the zero.  Its size, font and color will be ingrained in your head.   $0.00.  As the revenue page is loading you will have a slight emotional high.  The expectation that maybe this time it will be some other number.  But the page loads and there it is.  $0.00.  You close the window and sigh.  For a   fleeting moment you consider the possibility that a mistake has been made.  Maybe the servers are not refreshing and the value is not being updated.  But your energy is drained – you do not care enough to do anything about it.  Acceptance comes at last – it is true. $0.00.  30 minutes later the process starts all over again.

The Unknown

Normally when you perform a task successfully the feedback is immediate.  The boss gives you a raise.  The teacher puts a big A on the test.  The dinner guests compliment your spicy spaghetti.  A website is different.  For the first few months you get no indication whether the website is good or not.  You think it is good – that is why you visit it so much.  But the real test is whether other people think it is good.  At the beginning there is no way to tell. 

For months you build with no feedback.  Similar to building a prototype machine.  Spend lots of time designing and assembling.  No way to test whether it will work.  You have to build it first.   Day in and day out you faithfully work on the prototype. Hoping that when it is complete it works.    Only then will you discover whether all that work was worth it or not.  If in the end  it works then it was time well spent.  If not, then you have to acknowledge that is was a waste of time.

Thomas Edison had the same problem.  He had no idea whether a filament exists that enables a light bulb to burn for days.  He just hoped there was.  His only option was to try as many different filaments as possible.  After trying the 500th filament he was no closer to the answer then he was after the 2nd filament.   No indication if he was on the right track or even if success is possible.  Days, weeks, months passed and he was no closer to finding out whether a filament exists.  No feedback.  Only the hope that one day he will find a working filament drove him to continue.

A webmaster must work the same way.  Not knowing whether what is being attempted will work.  Whether the website will become a success or not.  A webmaster’s motivation must simply be the hope that it will work. 
       

You Have No Idea What You Are Talking About

To have a informative website you need to know what your are doing.  You need to be a authority in the field.  But you are not.  You cannot be.  You just started your website.  Only when the website is a success and only after a few years can you claim to be an expert.  It is a catch-22.  You need to know what you are doing to become a success, but only by succeeding can you know what you are doing.

Fortunately the fact is that you do not need to know what you are doing.  You only need to appear like you know what you are doing.  All that matters is the audience believing that you have authority in your field.  It is an illusion that is not too difficult to produce.  Do your research and the audience can be convinced with ease.  Nobody will know that most of your information is coming from books and not your head. 

The real problem is that you actually do not know what you are doing.  This causes a confidence issue.  It is hard to wake up every morning with confidence in your efforts when you yourself know the truth – that you have no idea what you are doing.  Doubts begin to form about whether your website can work.  “How can I be a success, if I do know what I am talking about?”

The answer is that for all things new – for all things that where created first – like your website, the first person had no idea what they where doing either.  They were just bumbling along, making guesses, trying things.  But all along appearing to everybody else like the expert.  All creators need to sell the appearance of confidence and knowledge about their product.  And then if it works, and the product becomes a success, they become the true expert.  Just like your website.  When it becomes a success, after many years of writing about the topic and discussion, you too will be an expert.

About Revenue, Earnings, Money, About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this, What YOU Expect vs Reality

The Vision

You decide that you want to be a Web Master.  All you have to do if figure out what your website will be about.  For days you think of ideas.  Every time an idea pops in your head you think it might work.  Then after a few minutes of contemplation you decide that it is not a good idea.  Back to the drawing board.

Then one day while walking the dog, just as his leg lifts, you have a great idea.  You do not know where it came from but you really like it.  The more you think about it the better it gets.  From a little pea the idea grows into a melon.  The website begins to form in your head.  By the time the dog is back digging in the yard the idea has become golden.  You imagine millions of people visiting your site – why wouldn’t they?

My story is similar (except for the dog part).  Once I got the basic idea of the website, all the other things fell into place.  The money counter on the home page, the data page, the ‘did you know…’ section..  Millions of people visiting the website.  Returning again and again to see the number rise  Why wouldn’t they?  If I found a website like mine I would visit it all the time.  I had dollar bills flying in front of my eyeballs.

The Reality

The site has been up for 3 weeks.  And what a crash down to earth these 3 weeks have been. 

For the first week it was only one or two people visiting.  Then I joined forums and the traffic increased.  A little.  Week two and three have averaged about 25 visitors.  Far from millions.  How can it be only 25?  When I envisioned a typical visitor to the website I saw them reading the content while slowly putting a hand over their mouth to cover a wide WOW!  Then, all excited,  forwarding the address to all 200 of their Facebook friends.

The plan was for the few initial visitors to begin the traffic tsunami.  I thought I would need just a couple visitors and they would do the rest.  That is not happening.  To my surprise they are not forwarding the website to their friends.

Not only are they not forwarding it, the average page views per visitor is two.  TWO!  They land on the website, quickly look around the home page, click to another page and then leave.  How can they leave?  If I were to find a website like mine I would spend all morning reading everything – just absorbing all the great content.

And what I do not understand at all.  What has no explanation except that there must be some mistake with my statistics is that 63% of the visitors stay on the site for less then 30 seconds.  What can they possibly read in less then 30 seconds?  Nothing.  They are not even giving it a chance.  Just a quick look around, “I don’t like the background color”, and then they leave.  Only 5% of the visitors are do what they should do – stay for at least 30min.

After all these kicks in the balls.  When I think that the indecency is finally over.  And I am completely covered with tomatoes and eggs.  They go for the final blow.  So far, 0 RSS subscriptions.

The Lesson

At the beginning, when you have your vision.  Hold on to it..  Take it with you everywhere.  Imagin yourself explaining to Opera  how you came up with the idea.   Imagine yourself accepting a honorary writing degree from Yale.  Your family and friends envious of your success.  Cherish the vision because it will be a happy time.  Do it as long as you can because after you build your website all you will be doing is crying into your pillow.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Bitter and Pessimistic When I Wrote this, What YOU Expect vs Reality