Welcome

What Is So Great About This Blog?

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

What makes this blog different:

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

All Posts Are Written With The Following in Mind:

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

Enjoy!

 The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.  Everybody knows that.  But what I did not know, and just recently discovered, is that the price of traffic is also eternal vigilance.

As you can seen from the website traffic data page so far the traffic is coming very slowly.  At the beginning there was basically no traffic.  Then I started to post on a forum.  Each post ends with my signature which is a link to the website.  Every time I made a post, a few hours later my traffic would go up.

The problem is that the traffic does not stay up.  If I miss a day of posting then the traffic goes down.  Post then get visitors.  No post, no visitors.  Eternal vigilance – post everyday.

The website is still at its infancy and no traffic has come by search engines or word of mouth.  I can deem some interesting information with the threads I have created on a forum.  Since all my traffic has come from them.

So far I have started a total of 6 threads.  By taking the number of people that visited the website (147) by the number of posts (6) we can see that every post is worth almost 24 visitors.  This is sad.  Because so far it looks like I would need to create 41 threads a day to get 1000 visitors a day.  Unfortunately to make this possible I would need a team of a thousand monkeys typing a thousand words.

This means that the forum I am creating threads at is too small.  Not enough views.  Looking back at the last few days of my posts I can see that they have been viewed 851 times.  Out of all the people viewing my threads 17% of them click on the signature line.

All the above can be summarized as: for every thread created on a forum my website receives 17 visitors per 100 views.

Therefore to reach my goal of a 1000 visitors per day I need 5882 thread views.  Or to start 10 threads each receiving at least 588 views.  Still a lot but getting closer to being possible on large forums.

Two conclusions can be made:

1. By posting on big forums I will still need to be vigilant and post every day, but at least I will be closer to 1000 visitors a day and not 15.
2. I need to find other ways to get traffic.

Data used to for calculations:

• Unique visitors: 67
• Visitors: 147
• Threads created: 6
• Clicked on Signature: 23
• Number Views in forum: 851

Note: The only way to explain the discrepancy between ‘unique visitors’ (67) and ‘clicked on signature’ (23) is to assume that some of the visitors that clicked on the signature emailed a link of the website to their friends.

Recently Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book about geniuses (Outliers: The Story of Success).  In it he argues that our notions of geniuses are mostly wrong.  We picture a genius as someone who, against all odds, rises to the top because of talent and special abilitie.

Gladwell claims that this view is wrong.  In fact, he argues, successful people got where there are not through special talent, but simply by practicing a lot.  The winners are those that have the most experience.  And most importantly have that experience before anybody else.

Becoming an Expert In Only 10000 Hours

It is claimed that 10000 hours is the time required to become a expert in a field.  And it does not matter which field.  It could be piano player, programmer, or accountant. 10000 hours of practice is required.  Only once you achieve this base amount of experience can you start trying to direct your experience into a specific direction and become the best.  Before you even try to be the best you better have 10000 hours of experience.

In the book Gladwell gives many examples.  Bill Gates had access to a computer before almost everybody else in the world.  While other kids where playing with hula hoops Bill was practicing his programming.  By the time computers became accessible to other people Bill had the 10000 hours under his belt.  A big advantage.

Other examples include Mozart, Gretzky, John Lennon.  All of these guys had some advantage that enabled them to get 10000 hours of experience before their competition.

I will be an Expert in 9,900 Hours

What does this mean for me?  I am just starting out in the online business world.  My total experience is ~100 hours.  And I know that I am starting out late.  Making money online has been around since at least 1995.  This puts me way behind.

First I need to gather 10000 hours of experience just to become an expert.  If I spend ~2 hours a day working on my website then I will gain the required expertise in 5000 days (13 years).  Only then I can begin to compete against other experts who have been around for a while.

This is not good.  People with 10000 hours of experience are already around and they are making money online.  But by the time I get my 10000 hours they will have 10000 more.  There is no way out of this conundrum.  I cannot become the Bill Gates, Gretzky, Mozart of the online money making industry.

The problem is that I started too late.  I can never become the best in this field.  There will always be somebody with more experience then me.  Somebody who will already know what I just “discovered”.

The only thing I can hope for is that Gladwell is wrong.  Well at least partly wrong.  I need some of my personal talent, whatever it is, to give me some advantage.  An advantage that lets me bypass 9,900 hours of experience.

I just checked – WordPress 2.7 (a blog creation tool) has been downloaded 1,175,343 times.

This does not necessarily mean that there are 1,175,343 WordPress 2.7 blogs out there.  Lets try to figure out how many people have downloaded it and have a blog.  Some assumptions: 

1. Half of all the people that downloaded it had to download it twice.  Who knows, maybe the first time they downloaded to a folder which later they could not find.  Actual blogs: 881,507
2. Half of those people download it but never bothered to go further.  They had a dream of creating a blog and 1000’s of people reading it everyday.  That dream, like most, will never be realized because they do nothing after downloading.  Actual blogs: 440,753
3. Half of those people create a blog but do not do any proper advertising.  So there is no way to find them.  Only their family and friends know about it.  In Google search it is on page 16.  Actual Blogs: 220,376

Ok, so after all this assuming is done we are left with 220,376 actual blogs that can be found on the internet.

How many successful blogs are there.  This is hard to determine, because the definition of a successful blog is quite relative.  So lets say a blog that makes enough money to suport the webmaster and his family confortably is considered successful.  So:

1. Of all the blogs in my niche (making money online) I can think about 5 of them that have enough traffic to be considered a success. But since I have probably not found all of them lets say there are 10.
2. There are hundreds of niches with blogs that are popular enough to be considered a success. Lets say 500.

Therefore of all the blogs created (220,376) only 500*10=5000 can be considered a successful.  That is 2%.  The above can be summurized for Wordpress downloads:

• Of all the WordPresses downloaded only 0.42% will become successful.
• Of all the WordPresses downloaded and blog created only 2% will become successful.

Of course all these are just rough numbers full of wild assumptions, but I would not be too suprised if the real figures are much different.  Actually my gut feeling is that the percent of successful blogs is even less.  Expecially since these are only WordPress blogs.  A lots more other types of blogs are competing to be the 10 best of every niche.

The point.  Do not be suprised if this blog is not around next year.

My high school English teacher explained that to get your ideas across in writing you need to do the following:

• Have an introductory paragraph which clearly states the thesis
• Summarize the key points to be argued
• In detail argue each point
• Have a concluding paragraph which summarizes the arguments and clearly states the conclusion.

If I tried to do that for this post then nobody would read it.  You would give me an F.  Blog posts are a completely different entity then high school essays.

First of all the audience is not your teacher – a person who is paid to read your writing.  Teachers must dread reading that rambling, formatted, go nowhere dribble.  They constantly remind themselves that they are doing it to put food on the table.

Blog posts must not resemble high school essays at all.  Look at any successful blog and you quickly get a sense of the format.

• Exciting title
• Attention grabbing sentence withing the first few sentences
• Short paragraphs – just a few sentences each
• Lots of lists
• And if possible pictures

A blog post should resemble a children’s book.  Why? Because the audience of your posts are people who do not need to read it.  They are using up their free time to read your post.  You better give them something; and you better make it easy to read.

Actually even asking them to read it is already asking too much.  They will not even read it.  They will just skim.  Reading every 4th word.  Or reading just the first sentence of each paragraph. Why do they do this?  Because most likely your blog is not worth the time.  This can be deemed from the fact that 99% of all blogs created are failures.

A visitor has a 99% chance of landing on a bad blog, one that in a short time will fail.  So why should they risk the time to give it a careful read.  They will quickly scan, find nothing of interest and look for another one – gone forever.

Maybe after your blog has a loyal audience which has been reading your short, interesting, list filled posts, can you dare to please your English teacher.  But even with a loyal audience I still doubt that anybody will read it, including your English teacher.

The first time I came across the word ‘WebMaster’ I did not know what to think.  What came to mind is Jedi Master. Is a webmaster some mysterious cloaked super being that controls information?  An all powerful, behind the scenes, manipulator of the web. Is the webmaster watching me now?  These were the kind of thoughts running through my head when I saw the word webmaster at the bottom of a website.

Lately I have become a webmaster.   I quickly discovered that webmaster simply means the person who is responsible for the website.   I have found that the term is misleading. A webmaster is absolutely nothing like a Jedi Master.   There is no comparison.

As a webmaster I feel more like a service droid then a Jedi Master.  If I were to put a web cam in my room here is what you would see the webmaster doing:

• You will notice that instead of living in a dank cave surrounded by all sorts of potions and dusty books, most of my time is spent in the spare room.  The walls are egg white and there is a plastic red flower in the corner.  When there are visitors at the house I get kicked out and am forced to perform my magic at the kitchen table.
• You might see me getting extremely aggravated as I spend hours trying to find out why an 30×30 pixel image is not aligning to the left.  It is a stupid little image that will not move over 5 pixels.  Move, damn you, move.  It is a fight that can last all day.  For an hour I might be wining – it moves over 2 pixels, but then two hours later I can be loosing terribly – the image is gone.  It is a battle that takes all my powers, but absolutely nothing like the one between Luke and Vader.
• Every 20 minutes I am tempted by the dark side of the force.  A temptation that I always give in to.  The need to check my visitor stats.  I know they have not changed much and there is no need to check.  Once a day is enough.  But the force is strong.  If I was a budding new Jedi I would probably turn to the dark side right after Yoda serves me soup.
• In the summer I am in my boxers and t-shirt.  The shirt might have remnants of supper from the night before.  In winter I wear my fuzzy yellow slippers and have a blanket across my lap.  I have been searching ebay for a big brown hooded cloak (like Obi One Kenobi’s) which would be ideal for those really cold days.
• Lot of time is spent on forums.  Since it is a great way to bring attention to the website.  Although usually a tedious task, it gets interesting when I need to figure out which smiley to use.  There are so many to choose from.  I need to make sure that the proper meaning is received by the reader.  Deciding on the right one sometimes takes all my mind powers.  Quite unlike Obi One Kenobi who with the wave of his hand can convince the guards that “these are not the droids you are looking for”.
• My arm always hurts.  The motion of moving between keyboard and mouse, and then back again can be very stressing.  This action does not seem like much, but doing it over and over again causes pain.  And the sharp edges at the end of the table pinch my wrists – after a full day of typing it can become crippling.  Luke was able to defeat Vader even after his hand was cut off.

Web Master <> Jedi Master