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!

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For the last couple of days there has been a spike in traffic.  Retribution has come at last.  Finally the recognition I deserve.  After almost 9 months of work and waiting, after over 400 hours at the keyboard, the website is taking off.

That was my initial reaction after seeing the sudden increase in traffic.  But after some digging around in the website stats I discovered that it was not my hard work paying off – it was somebody else’s.

Clue 1 – Referral Websites That Do Not Link Back To This Website

The first thing I checked after seeing the spike in traffic was who it was coming from.  Who is sending me all the traffic.  Is it Google, is it a guest post I did, was this website featured on some blog, was this website submitted on a social network like reddit.com? 

I quickly discovered that it was none of these.  Using awstats I noticed that the top three websites sending this website traffic are website’s that I have never heard of before.  I checked them out and discovered three things:

1. They had nothing to do with my niche (make money online)
2. They were not in English (mostly Russian)
3. They did not have a backlink to this website

Number 1 and 2 are strange.  But 3 just does not make sense.  How are these website sending me traffic without having a link to this website?  Something is not right.

On seeing this the initial smile on my face slowly flattened out. 

Clue 2 – Traffic was not increasing in Google Analytic

Every morning I check the website traffic via two sources: awstats and Google Analytics.  Awstats is a server side analytic tracker.  Every time a request is made of the server then awstats make a note of it.  It could be a human viewing a webpage, or a search engine spider indexing the site, or a hacker trying to gain access.  Server side means that every request the server is asked to do gets recorded.  It is the most detailed and accurate measure of your website’s activity.

Google Analytic on the other hand is a client side analytic tracker.  It is a small java script sitting on every webpage that gets activated only when a browser views the webpage.  Client side analytics is a good measure of how many people are viewing the webpage – every time a browser reads the webpage the Google Analytic script is activated and the page view is recorded.

There is a major drawback to client side analytic tracker: the visitor must permit the running of java script in their browser.  If the visitors browser has java script disabled then the Google Analytic script cannot run and the visitor is not recorded.  For this reason the server side analytic traffic stats will always be higher then the Google Analytic stats.  That is why every morning I check both.  Usually they report the same number of visitor but sometimes Google Analytic is a little lower.

But with the recent traffic spike the numbers being reported where completely different.  Awstats was reporting 218 visitors while Google Analytic was reporting only 54.  Why the large discrepancy? 

The edges of my mouth became heavy and I could no longer hold them up.

Clue 3 – Pages That I Did Not Create Had The Most Amount Of Page Views

Again looking at the awstats I noticed that there where some strange looking pages that where quickly rising in the number of page views.  The odd thing is that they where pages that I did not create.  Pages like:

• howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com/SpryAssets/_vti_logs/CitiBank/CitiBank/citibankupdate/images/newimages/secure/bankofamerica/signon.php
• howthiswebsitemakesmoney.com/library/_notes/www.bankofamericaonline.com/www.bankofamerica.com/Onlinesecuritydepartment/bofa-update/session.cgi/cgi-bin2/Signin.Do/

CitiBank?  Bank of America?  What the hell is going on?  What are banking pages doing on my webpages?  I clicked on the links and here is what came up:

Request for banking information.  This is not good.

On seeing this my face was completely deformed.  Eyebrows pointing downwards and wrinkles on my forehead.

This Website Was Making Money By Collecting Banking Information

My website had been hacked.  A not so nice person uploaded and ran a script on my webspace.  This website was sending out requests to people asking them to update their banking information.  Those that dutifully complied sent their banking information to the not so nice person.

Based on the stats the request to update banking information was viewed around 500 times.  Unfortunately there is no way for me to tell how many people actually filled out the form.  Or how much money was stolen from those that did.  But to those that did fill it out, and had money stolen, I apologize for the small part this website played.

The funny thing  is that thanks to my low traffic numbers I was able to catch the problem quickly.  Only because my traffic doubled from the usual 70 visitors a day to over 150 visitors a day I able to notice the hack.  If this website was more successful and had 1000’s of visitors a day then it would of taken a lot longer (if ever) for me to notice.  An extra 50 visitors a day would a been a small unnoticed blimp on the radar.

How This Website Makes Money?  By stealing peoples banking information.  This website makes money – but unfortunately in this case I was not be the one receiving it.

How the Hack Was Removed

Although I liked the high traffic numbers I felt the right thing to do was to remove the hack.  I contacted my web host and told them about the problem.  They quickly disabled the infected folders on my website and deleted the hacked files.  Now if somebody tries to access the banking page’s  URL’s they get a 404 error instead of a banking information update page. 

Then I did an IP block for the suspicious websites that where sending traffic to my site.  So now if they try to send traffic to this website they get an access denied message. 

Now my website is back to its old self again.  Traffic is down to where it should be and the website is back to making a couple of dollars a day that go into my pocket. 

I admit, there were casualties – some people lost a lot of money.  But I am glad it happened.  I got the taste for success.  I got to feel, even if for just a brief few days, the excitement of this website finally taking off.  And I learned something – how to make my website is a little more secure.  I benefit from somebody else’s loss – that does not happen to often.

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:

 

Month – 2009	AdSense Revenue ($)
January	40.14
February	53.80
March	11.60
April	14.03
May	11.82
June	13.51
July	24.51

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.

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?

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?

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:

Visitors who read and commented on Probloggers advice	% blogs failing today (less then 200 visitors a day)
1 month ago	55.00% (536 out of 976 URLs)
6 months ago	57.00% (502 out of 877 URLs)
12 months ago	56.00% (485 out of 866 URLs)

 

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.