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.

So You Want To Be A Webmaster...Get in my Head, There is a HOW TO in the Post

The Problem Of Being An Organ Grinder…

The problem with being an organ grinder is that the monkey will dance only while the music plays.  So to make the monkey dance you need to be there to turn the handle round and round, over and over again.  You turn, music plays, monkey dances.

As an organ grinder, everyday you get up early in the morning.  Feed the monkey a date, shine the organ, and head to the streets.  You drudge along and push the organ to your allotted spot on the corner – the monkey still tired, sleeps on your shoulder.

At 7:30 you start.  Put the monkey on the organ, place the jar in the curb and step behind your organ.  Seeing the first group of people come around the corner you place your hand on the handle, heavy breath, sign, and spin.  For the next 8 hours the monkey will dance and you will spin the handle.  All day you hear the same melody round and round interrupted only by the sound of quarters clinking as they fall into the jar.

The monkey needs you to be there.  Without you spinning the handle there is no music, without music the monkey does not dance, without a dancing monkey nobody puts money into the jar.

The Problem Of Being An Employee…

The problem with being an employees is that your boss needs to see you dance.  5 days a week 8 hours a day you need to dance in front of your boss.  Your boss only pays if he sees you at the office performing the employee dance.

7:30 you arrive at the office and the music starts.  “Good morning boss”, “Good morning employee”.  You hang your coat in the cloak room, say hi to employee2.  Turn on your computer, go to lunch room, get coffee mug with company logo, pour coffee in cup, say hello to employee3, walk back to desk, check your email, the phone rings, you click some keys on the keyboard, 8 hours to go.  Your boss needs to see you dance for 8 hours a day.

If your boss sees you dancing for a month then at the end of the month he will throw money into your jar.

The major drawback of being an employee is that you only get paid while you are at work.  You only get paid if your boss sees you in the office.  As soon as you leave the office the money stops – you are off the clock.

To get money, you need to be in front of your boss going through the motions of an employee.  It doesn’t matter if you are adding value or not, only that you are there.  As long as you are spinning the handle the monkey dances.

This is a huge waste of your time.  The work that you accomplish in a day could be done in a couple of hours.  You are smart, you know what you are doing, you know the most efficient way to do your job – you could have everything done before noon.  But that does not matter.  You have to be there all day.

Also being an employee means that throughout the working day, regardless of what you are doing, you get paid the same amount.  One hour you are designing a product that will make the company 1000’s of dollars in revenue – you get paid $15.25 for that hour.  The next hour you are painfully relieving yourself from last night’s spicy chili dogs – you get paid $15.25 for that hour.

As an employee there is no way to value your time.  Each hour has the same value to you, every hour you get paid the same amount.  So the obvious thing to do as an employee is to try to do the least amount possible – the amount just above the point of being fired.  And why not?  Why work hard, why try to get things done efficiently, properly and quickly?  Regardless of how it is done you get paid.  Why get it done early?  You have to do the office waltz till 5pm regardless if you are done or not.

Being an employee sucks all creativity, productivity and incentive out of you while while you are there – and when you are not there you do not get paid.

Websites Are the Perfect Dancing Monkeys

In one hour I have to be at work.  The next 9 hours will be a complete waste of time.  So, to cheer myself up I will remind myself of the benefits of having a website:

• Websites work all the time.  You do not need to be there.  You can be clipping your toes, tormenting the cat, or wondering the street aimlessly – does not matter what you do – the website will be working.  You do not have to be always spinning the organ’s handle to make the music play.
• Working on your website you become a productive and optimized superhuman.  You do not look like you are working – You are working.  It is not a dance.  You are actually trying to get the most done in the least amount of time.  And there is a direct relationship between the quality of work and the amount you get paid.  The better your product the more you earn.
• As an employee you only get paid one time for your effort.  If you write a great report you will get paid the hours that where spent writing the report.  Even if that report is used by the company for years after you leave – you still just get paid one time.  But for a website the webpage you write keeps paying over and over again – potentially forever.  You only need to write it once.  Online it will be generating revenue for you 24 hours a days, every day, for years.

Websites are dancing monkeys that never stop and you do not need to always be there turning a handle round and round for it to dance.

So You Want To Be A Webmaster...Get in my Head, 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

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