Your visitors are strangers. You know almost nothing about them. All you are told is where – where in the world they are located, and where on the internet they came from.

There are occasions when knowing the location of your visitor matters, if you are selling snow tires and your visitor is from Egypt then you will not make a sale. But for the majority of cases geographical location is irrelevant. At most it reveals the local time for your visitor. If it is morning for him then he is grumpy, if it is evening then he is either full of wine or tired – how you can use this information is unknown.

The other where is the important one. From where did the visitor come from? There are three possibilities:

1. Some other site
2. Search Engine
3. Address bar or Bookmark/Favorite

Knowing from where your visitor arrived is vital information. Because when you know from where they came, you know their intent.

Know Their Intent, Predict Their Behavior

Like the father of a beautiful daughter, your main concern is: what is the intent? A boy walks up to the door, rings the doorbell, father opens, “hello…what are your intentions with my daughter?” The coy boy replies, “Nothing much, we are going to play baseball. I like to pitch and your daughter enjoys being catcher. After the game we are going to a BBQ for some hotdogs, which reminds me, your daughter needs to bring some buns – I bring the wieners.” The father smiles and shakes the young boys hand, ‘you kids have fun’.

Unfortunately you cannot ask your visitors about their intentions, the best you can do is infer. And the most useful piece of information about their intent is to know from where they came. Unlike the word of a horny school boy about to take your daughter on a date, knowing how your visitors came to your site is a true description of intent.

Why is intent important? Knowing intent allows you to predict visitor’s behavior on your site.

Obviously you want your visitors to behave a certain way. For this site I want my visitors to do at least one of these four actions:

1. Click an Ad
2. Purchase an affiliate product
3. Purchase my product
4. Backlink to this site

Visitors who do none of the above can be ignored – they do nothing for this site. If you are reading this blog then you probably belong to the ignorable category. You are familiar with this site so you will not click on the ads or buy the products. The only way to turn yourself into a valuable visitor is to backlink to this website. Some of you have done it, but most of you have not and will not.

If I want visitors to behave in one of the four ways above then I need to look at their intentions. Once I know their intentions then I know how they will behave.   So once I know which traffic sources brings me the properly behaving visitors then I can focus all my energy into getting more traffic from those source.

The Intent of the Social Website Visitor

Social website visitors have no intent. They just drift around aimlessly from one website to another. They like funny, shocking, sexy, and strange. If you do not provide one of these then they are gone – looking for the next zap of instant satisfaction.

They are pigeons moving the mouse and pressing the button hoping to land somewhere that dazzles the eye. Click, look, click, look, click, look. If the there are lots of colors, pictures, videos and sounds they will clap their hands ecstatically and stay – otherwise they are gone.

These visitors have no intent. They are aimlessly wondering around the internet killing time. With no intent they are useless for this website. They are not interested in anything I have to offer. They arrive at the website; see all the words, yawn, and leave. That is why I completely ignore social traffic. No need to promote via facebook, digg, twitter. I give visitors the option to do it for me, but I will not do it.

The Intent of the Search Engine Visitor

These are visitors with direction and purpose. These people are not wasting their time walking around randomly hoping that something interesting happens. They arrive at your site with their intent written on their foreheads. Hello, I am here looking to ‘make money online’, can you help me? Yes I can. Click on one of these conveniently placed ads which will show you how to make $5000 a month online. Thank you, thank you too.

Hello, I am here because I want to know ‘how to build a website’, can you help me? Yes I can, buy my starter kit and you will have a money making website in no time. Thank you, thank you too.

See how pleasant it is when you know what the visitor wants. No guess work involved, no trying to find something that the visitor finds interesting. When you know exactly what the visitor wants you can easily direct their behavior into an action that benefits you.

Image you have a website selling a Philips screw driver. What would you rather receive – 10,000 visitors from a social website looking to be entertained, or 100 visitors from a search engine that typed in ‘buy philips screw driver’?

Intent is everything.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, What YOU Should Do

A little birdie told me that I have a guest post on Problogger.  This is great news.  With over 15,000 visitors a day Problogger is the biggest blog for bloggers.  And with a Page Rank of 6 this website will receive a great backlink along with the exposure.

Exposure and a great backlink should give this website a much needed boost.  Unfortunately ’should’ is not good enough.  What if I get a traffic boost for a couple days and then things settle back to normal – back to 60 visitors a day.  I want proof that a guest post on Problogger provides a long term benefit for this website.

Without a bubbling cauldron and a dash of bat wings it is difficult to determine with certainty whether the guest post will help in the long run.  The best I can do is figure out statistically whether sites with a guest post on Problogger are doing better then sites without a guest post on Problogger.

Question: Do people who have done a guest post on Problogger have more success with their sites then those who have not done a guest post?

Most Sites Fail

In a previous post (What Are The Odds Your Site Will Fail) I tried to determine the success rate of sites by taking the URL’s of Problogger commentors 3 years ago and seeing how their sites are doing today.  The current state of the sites where put into three categories:

• Dead (0-500 visitors/day)
• Serious Injury (500-2000 visitors/day)
• Alive and Well (2000+ visitors/day)

The results where humbling but promising.  Popular lore is that 99% of sites fail.  But according to the results things are not that terrible.  Here is the current state of site owners that commented on Problogger 3 years ago:

 

Instead of 99% failing only 72% are dead three years later.  Grim, but better then expected.   Commenting on Problogger does seem to give you a statistical advantage.

Most Guest Posters Succeed

A commentor on Problogger has a 72% chance their site will be dead in three years.  But now I am guest poster.  I have advanced from commentor to guest poster, what are the odds that my website will fail?

Determining the answer is simple.  Thanks to the great archive on Problogger I can go back in time and gather the URL’s of all the guest posters.  Then run them through a traffic estimator and see how the guest poster’s sites are doing today.

So with Vivaldi blasting out of the speakers I spent the day going through the Problogger archives gathering guest posters URLs.  From January 2007 to June 2009 I collected all the guest posters and put their URLs in a table.  If the post started off with something like “this is a guest post from…” I grabbed the URL.

After a few hours I accumulated 63 distinct guest posters.  Then I ran each one through a traffic estimator (webtraffic24.com) and noted how much daily traffic they currently receive.
With all the data collected I broke the results up into the same three groups – dead, serious injury, alive and well.  Here are the results (download table):

54% of Problogger guest posters have a successful site.  And only 24% ended up dead.  This is a big difference compared with people that only comment on Problogger.  I have drastically increased my odds of success with my guest post.  Now it is a coin toss – heads I win, tails I lose.

Why Does Guest Posting Increase Your Chances Of Success?

Answering this question bumps against the classic problem of causality.  There is no way to tell what causes what.  Do people with guest posts on Problogger end up with successful sites, or do people with sites that become successful guest post on Problogger?  Do people who smoke end up with cancer, or do people with a cancer gene end up smoking?  There is no way to tell.

All that can be argued is that if you belong to the group that smokes then you have a greater chance of having cancer, and if you belong to the group with a guest post on Problogger then you have a greater chance of having a successful site.

How much of the success can be credited to the guest post and how much can be credited to your site?    Again, no way to tell.  Most likely it is a tangled combination of the two.  Here is how it works:

1. You create a site. You think it is good but are uncertain because with little exposure not enough people have seen it to judge it.
2. You write a guest post for Problogger. It gets accepted – this confirms your suspicion that your writing and content is good (at least Problogger thinks it is good enough for his blog).
3. Your guest post goes live and exposes your site to a lot of people. Because your site is good, the visitors stay and tell their friends.
4. Your site becomes a success.

Your site becomes a success for two reasons: it is a good site and exposure.  To get the exposure you need a good site.  You cannot have one without the other.

It is not the guest post by itself that increases your chance of success, it is the fact that you have a good site and you get exposure.  It has been said a million times, in a million different ways – before anything else, before thinking about SEO, social networking, promotion, backlinks etc. make sure you have a good site.  Without a good site you are simply digging a hole to China – you will drown in a pool of hot lava.

Will This Website Become A Success Because Of A Guest Post?

I do not know.  But I have dramatically increased my odds by being a guest poster for Problogger.  Now I am hanging with the right crowd.  Mingling with winners.  Chess club is great for playing chess, but if you want the cheerleaders you need to join the football team.  Of course, there is still a 50% chance of failure – high, but a lot less then 84%.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, What YOU Should Do

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

Making comments on blogs is claimed to be a great way to increase traffic to your site. Here is how it is suppose to work:

1. You write a quality comment on a blog post.
2. Other visitors reading the post notice your comment. They find your comment interesting and click on your URL to find out more about you and your site.

What is a Quality Comment

Writing comments to increase traffic to your website only works if people click on your URL. People will only click on your URL if they are interested in what you have written. I always thought this point obvious. But reading some of the comments on blogs it seams that some people do not understand this fundamental point.

For example, this is a comment left by someone on a blog I frequently visit:

You hit the nail on the head on every point. All of those points are just as important as each other.

This person has no idea what commenting is for. Why did he take the time to leave this comment? Besides the obvious ambiguity of the comment (are the points important or not?), this comment does not provide any value. Who cares that the commentor likes the post. Who cares that commentor thinks all the points are equally (not)important. The only reason anybody might click on the commentor’s URL is to find out if their site is as pointless as the comment.

The commentor read somewhere that to increase traffic to your site you should leave comments on blogs. And like a 4 year kid who climbs into the drying machine because his big brother tells him to, the commentor goes and writes comments on blogs without thinking about why. A commenting zombie with only one thought running round and round his head, “Must make comments, must make comments, must make comments”

What this commentor has failed to understand is that for the comment to have any effect on his blog’s traffic the comment must entice people to click on the URL. It is the whole point of commenting. A comment is a sales pitch. You are selling yourself. You are saying, “Look how smart, interesting, funny I am. Visit my blog for more of the same.”

A quality comment is one in which you make the reader interested enough that they click on your URL. So before clicking the submit comment button ask yourself – why am I climbing into the drying machine.

Longer Comments are Higher Quality Comments

By making a single simple assumption we can test whether quality comments increase traffic to a site. The assumption is that longer comments are higher quality then short comments. Assumptions are usually a bad thing but in this case I think it is a safe assumption because the more text a comment has the better chance there is value in it. Short comments consist mostly of the “Great post, will do on my site.” type – no quality comments. Longer comments have something to say so they tend to be more interesting – quality comments.

Do Commentors of Successful Sites Leave Longer Comments

To determine whether quality comments lead to more traffic to a site I did the following:

1. Going back 1 years on Problogger’s archived posts, I took the URL’s of the commentors for the month of July 2008.
2. The retrieved URL’s were run through the website webtraffic24 which estimated the amount of traffic that the URL currently receives.
3. For each URL the average amount of characters per comment was calculated.

By doing the above I can determine whether there is any correlation between a commentor’s comment size and the success of their site 1 year later. What I expected to find is that successful sites have a higher average comment size then failing sites. In other words, currently successful sites should have on average larger comments (quality comments) then failing sites.

The results:

	Comment Length
Total Average Comment Size:	384
Average Comment Size of Dead Blogs (Less then 200 visitors a day):	363 (table)
Average Comment Size of Successful Blogs (More then 2000 visitors a day):	412 (table)

Commentors of currently successful site had only 13% larger comments then commentors on currently failing sites.

I was a little surprised by the small difference in comment size. I expected the comments of the successful sites to be at least 50% bigger then the failed sites. I really do not know how to explain it. There are two conclusion one can make from the result:

1. Larger comments are not higher quality comments
2. Making quality comments does not have any real effect on the success of your site.

My hunch is that number 2 is the real case. I have never had good results by leaving comments. Even when my comment is one of the top 5 comments on a high traffic blog like Problogger, the number of visitors I receive is around 10 – and of course my comments are high quality. 10 visitors does not make a site a success. I guess if you made a comment every single day on 20 high volume site then the numbers become significant. But if you are making that many comments you will be left with little time to work on your own site.

The lesson: If you need to tell the world that you think that a post is great and that you will apply it to your site then go ahead. Nobody cares – but if you feel the need to say it then say it. On the other hand if you spend 45 minutes making a high quality comment that makes people laugh, cry and nod their head in agreement then write it – but do not expect it to make your website a success.

A suggestion for a comment on this post: what percent of your traffic comes from leaving comments?

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, What YOU Expect vs Reality, What YOU Should Do

Time to blow some dust off this blog.  It has been over a month since my last entry.  Many things could of happened to explain the lack of blog posts:

• A terrible accident with the lawn mower– all my fingers scattered in the backyard.  I tried typing with my elbows but found it very uncomfortable.
• A friend gave me a dog as a present.  The dog cannot deciede where he wants to be.  He wants to go outside, then back inside, then outside, then in, out, in, out, in, out.  My days are spent opening and closing the door. 
• I could not see the words on the screen through my tears.  Tears that formed every time I looked at my AdSense revenue.
• I stumbled over a tree root and hit my head on a rock.  When I woke up I experienced a  instance of perfect clarity and reason in which I realized that this website was a big waste of time.  So I quite this blog and went back to watching TV reruns.

All these are possibilities but none of them is what happened.

The Website Starter Kit

About a month ago, just after my last post, I was walking across a parking lot carrying a bag of potatoes and a big chuck of cheese when I suddenly realized that I know a lot more then I give myself credit.  I know things, things that other people do not know, things that I could sell them.

During dinner as I munched on my baked potato I started to formulate what was to become the ‘Build Your Own Website – Starter Kit’.  A complete package composing of a few ebooks and website templates.  The ebooks would explain to the beginner everything they need to know to start their own money making website:

• How to create a website
• How to setup a web hosting account and domain name
• How to decide on a Niche
• How to write content for your website
• How to get traffic to your website
• How to setup AdSense and generate revenue
• How to become an affiliate and generate revenue

As you probably know ebooks about this topic are plentiful.  Ebooks about ‘making money online’ are offered like trinkets in a Mexican resort town.  So I needed to differentiate myself somehow.  That is why I also created a special template that comes with the ebooks.  It is a complete website template  – the same one used my howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com.

A person who buys my Starter Kit will get all the information they need to be able to understand the ‘make money online’ business and they will get a website to apply their knowledge.  All they need to do is add their own content and make a few stylistic changes to make their website unique.  What took me months to accomplish on my website, doing all the research and creating the website, can be done in a matter of days with the Website Starter Kit.

I loved my idea the instant I came up with it.  So for the next month I sat at my computer and punched away.  I could think of nothing else but my Starter Kit.  If I have a flaw then this is it – I can only focus on one thing at a time.  I had to complete the entire package before I could write another blog post.  Even though my traffic started to suffer – where once I was averaging about 70 visitors a day I was now averaging around 45.  The blog was calling me but I was not listening – must finish the Starter Kit first.

The ebook ended up being 5 main parts and over 200 pages.  I am so glad that it is finally complete.

One of my biggest fears is the blank page and everyday I had to confront it, 200 times in total.  And on top of that some parts of the ebook were extremely boring to write.  Specifically the tutorials on how to use the website template.  The tutorials are step by step screen shot based guides.  So I had to do every step, take a screen shot, format the image and then place it properly into the document.  Hours spent fiddling with margins and padding just to get the images to appear properly on the page.  There are 80 images in the ebook – 80 instances of grief and frustration. 

But that is the past.  It is all done now.  The past me suffered but the present me will benefit.  Now all I have to do is sell it.

The Damn Button

You have probably had this experience or something similar.  You buy a large shelving unit from IKEA,  you are a handy person so putting it all together will not be a problem.  Following the instructions and using the special tools you put the cabinet together.  You are almost done – everything goes without a problem, all that remains is to put on the last little cabinet door.  So far to build the entire cabinet has taken two hours.  But now the stupid little door just does not go on.  For the next 3 hours you try everything to get the door on.  It just does not fit properly – the fu*king thing won’t close.  What started out as a pleasant Saturday afternoon project turns into a red faced cursing day in hell.

That cute little button you see at the top right corner of every page on this website was my last cabinet door.  The entire Starter Kit went relatively well.  The ebooks, the templates, the landing page all went quite smoothly.  All were done in calmness and in a state resembling nirvana.  Sometimes I whistled while I worked.

The little button was left for last.  Such a simple thing – make a little button and place it in the top right corner.  I did not even consider it as a task.  It was just something I needed to do after I was done the Starter Kit – put the ribbon on the Christmas present.  I allotted 30 minutes.

Now looking back I am surprised my laptop lived through the ordeal.  If I would of expressed my frustration in a physical manner the laptop would be on the floor scattered in a million pieces, the bottoms of my feet would be full of computer parts lodged under the skin.  But fortunately I am able to keep my feelings of hate and disgust safely to myself.

It ended up taking 3 hours to put that button where it is.  Sometimes it was on the top left corner, sometimes it was in the middle of page, sometimes it moved around when I re-sized the browser window, and worst of all, sometimes I could not find it anywhere on the page.

But now like the cabinet door which now opens and closes perfectly, the button sits where it should.  It does not move, and looks the same on all pages and on all browser versions.  There were some good things that came out of the experience.

1. In CSS I fully understand the difference between absolute and relative position.
2. To make absolute position work on a <DIV> tag the container in which the <DIV> tag sits must have have the position element set as relative.
3. browsershots.org is a great website to check the browser compatibility of your website.
4. For the little cabinet door you need to use number 13 screws not 18.

First Two Starter Kits Are Sold

If you have been keeping an eye on the number (total revenue) on the homepage then you must of noticed the recent large increase.  For the first 160 days this website managed to make $150 and then in a matter of days it jumps to over $400 hundred dollars.  Looking at the revenue graph you can barley see the Adsense revenue for the last 30 days – the Starter Kit and hosting Affiliate sales dominate the graph like four skyskrapers in an native African village:

The explanation is simple – I sold two copies of the Website Starter Kit.  The two sales of the Starter Kit completely overshadow 6 months of AdSense earnings.  Am I excited?  No.  These two sales did not come easy.  I had to invite a couple of my friends over for dinner, fill them up with alcohol, and then spend the night persuading them to buy the kit.  Being my friends, and drunk, they capitulated.  The day I put the kit up for sale they bought it.  The money is real, but the sale was forced.

If I could get you drunk and force you to buy the Starter Kit I would.  But unfortunately I cannot.  Selling to you and other visitors is a lot harder.  I will be excited when someone buys the Starter Kit through the traditional method: Loving this website, wanting one of their own, clicking the landing page button, reading the landing page, clicking the buy button.

You can find the website starter kit here.

Making More Money Online, Optimistic and Motivational, So You Want To Be A Webmaster...Get in my Head, What YOU Should Do