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!

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:

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:

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.

Ever since I created this blog I have wanted to know what my odds of success are. Out of 100 people that have a blog how many fail? After searching around the best I could find was 99%. You see it everywhere, 99% of all blogs fail.

This is an interesting number but the problem is that there is never any data to back it up. The number comes from nowhere. Maybe it is just intuition – the people that have been around a long time notice that most bloggers come and then they go. To them it seems like 99% of them disappear.

Intuition gone wrong is the cause of the current 50% divorce rate – intuition is not good enough. I would like to see some data to back up the claim. I can find out the chances of killing myself skiing, so why can’t I find out the chances of success with a blog?

Blogs Die Without A Trace

There is a good reason why there are no actual statistics for becoming a successful blogger. The problem is that blogs do not leave a body when they die – they disappear. They are like aliens in a computer game – once you shoot them with your photon laser they disappear. No trace remains, no clues that they were ever there, no dead bodies to count.

To find out my chances of dieing on a ski hill is easy. All I have to do is to go to the ski hill parking lot and wait till the end of the day. On a piece of paper I draw a line down the center. On the left side top part I write ‘Alive’ and on the top right side I write ‘Dead’. At the end of the day I make a mark on the left side of the page for everybody that leaves the hill with their skies and for the skiers that leave in a body bag I make a mark on the right side. By doing this everyday for the entire season I will have nice set of statistics. By adding up the marks on the left side and the the marks on the right side I can easily figure out how many people out of a hundred die skiing.

Unfortunately this kind of data gathering is hard to do with blogs. There is no way to count dead blogs. Looking around the internet there are only two types of blogs: successful blogs and those trying to be successful. The blogs that have died leave no trace, so there is no way to count them, there is no way to gather marks for the right side of the paper. All you see are the living blogs.

Problogger to the Rescue

Problogger is a very popular and successful blog. The owner, Darren Rowse, has been doling out advice on how to write a successful blog since 2005. His audience is thousands of eager bloggers trying to figure out how to make their own blog more successful.

Everyday he writes a few paragraphs of advice and tips on how to improve a blog. Most of the visitors are beginning bloggers – bloggers who just started their blog and want to learn how to make it better. These advice seeking bloggers consume his wisdom in the magnitude of approximately 15,000 visitors a day.

With this kind of traffic it is no surprise that each of his posts have lots of comments. People leave comments for many reasons: 1) To give praise. 2) To show disapproval. 3) To increase their own traffic. By leaving a comment the person also leaves a link back to their own website in the hopes that somebody will click on it and visit their site. This is great for them, but it is also great for us because they leave a foot print – a permanent record of their existence.

Problogger has an archive section on which is stored all the posts and comments since 2005. Anybody can go and look at the posts from 2005. The posts are there and so are the comments. BINGO!

We can go back in time. We can go to 2005 and have a look at the comments for each post. Each comment has a link back to the commenter’s website. In 2005 the commenter was a beginning blogger seeking Darren’s advice on how to make his blog more successful, full of hopes and dreams. Regardless of what his dreams were in 2005, now in 2009 we can find out if (s)he succeeded or not.

A Website That Estimates Traffic to a Website

Lets imagine you are sitting at the bar and next to you is a beautiful and sexy girl listening to you as you eagerly describe your blog. Her eyes are wide open with wonder as you talk about your blog. You are an honest guy: you tell her how much work it is and how slow it is going, how you have been trying to get more visitors but it is a ongoing struggle. She smiles and touches your knee – she seems to like you. Being an optimist you start to think about what you will make her for breakfast in the morning.

But then disaster strikes. In walks a fast talking, Fabio haired, blue eyed, muscles bulging from his tight shirt lady’s man. He has it all – he rarely leave the bar alone. He sees the girl next to you and makes his approach to her with a complete disregard of your feelings. He runs a hand through his bangs slowly, making sure the girl notices his camel back biceps. After introducing himself and making a lame joke he begins to talk to her about his blog. He claims that it has 10,000 visitors a day and that he makes $100/hour. The girl is impressed – you are screwed. Looks like it is going to be another night of checking your pathetic blog stats alone.

But all is not lost yet. Fortunately you never go to the bar without your laptop. You pull it out and go to the website webtraffic24.com. It is a website that provides an estimate of how many visitors a website gets. You simply type in a URL and click a button. webtraffic24.com will then check the page rank, alexa rank, backlinks, etc of the website and using an algorithm return an estimate of the amount of traffic the website receives. It is not perfect, it is just an estimate. But an estimate is usually all you need – you need to know whether a website gets around 10 visitors a day or 10,000.

After typing in the stupid brute’s blog address you get the results – 20 visitors a day. Just as you suspected – another bullshitter making false claims about their blog to pick up girls. Proudly you show the girl the results. Seeing the number she slaps the brute and turns back to you – ‘tell me more about your blog’.

Combining Problogger’s Archives with Webtraffic24.com to Count Dead Blogs

Using the URL left behind by the commentors in the problogger archive with the webtraffic24 tool we can count dead blogs. All we need to do is to go back to the old comments, for example in 2006, and using webtraffic24 see how the blogs are doing now. To simplify I have broken up the amount of daily visitors a website receives into 3 main states:

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

Webtraffic24 is not 100% accurate but it is good enough – it can separate the dead from the living.

How to Find Out the Success Rate of Blogs

To determine the success rate of blogs and websites I have done the following:

1. From the problogger.com archived posts comment section I have taken all the URLs for the month of January 2006. There was a total of 2514 comments for that month.
2. I had to do some editing:
   • When somebody put a link to a specific webpage I edited the URL to just the homepage. For example, if the the URL was www.mywebsite.com/my-dream-of-having-a-great-blog.html I changed it to www.mywebsite.com.
   • I excluded Darren Rowse’s comments.
   • I excluded all URL’s that were email addresses.
3. After getting rid of all the duplicates (same person who made more then 1 comment that month) I was left with 693 distinct URLs. 693 eager bloggers and webmasters hoping to be successful one day.
4. Using webtraffic24 I checked each URL to see where it stands today. Is is dead, injured or alive.

I gathered all the data into a single table (download table). Each URL and its statistics are recorded. With the table complete it is a simple matter of adding up the living and the dead.

How Many Blogs Become Successful And How Many Die – The Results

• Total URLs: 693
• Dead: 497 (download table)
• Serious Injury: 81 (download table)
• Alive and Well: 115 (download table)

If you were a commentor on problogger during January 2006, here are the odds of what state your blog will be in three years:

Analysis

72% chance of total failure. It is high but not as high as the 99% claimed by people who ‘just know’. Another way of looking at it is you have 28% of your blog not being dead in 3 years.

I was quite surprised by these results. They are much better then I expected. Even while working on this blog I was under the assumption that there is a 99% failure rate. I am glad that it is not that bad.

To answer my original question: 72 out of every 100 blogs die.

Of course this experiment has some flaws. The biggest one is that there is no way to tell how well these blogs where doing at the time they made the comment (January 2006). It is possible, although very unlikely, that all the Alive and Well blogs where alive and well in January 2006. The only real conclusion that can be made is that in 3 years 72% of the commentor’s blogs have died.

The second flaw is that problogger commentors do not represent the entire blogging sample. There is a lot of commentors but they do not represent the whole. It is possible that by being a problogger commentor you improve your blog and your chance of avoiding death. Maybe problogger commentors have a 72% chance of death but bloggers as a whole have 99%. Unfortunately there is no way to tell because there is no means to count dead bodies on the entire blog population. This experiment applies to all blogs only by assuming that problogger commentors are bloggers just like everybody else. But if you want the certainty of a 28% chance of avoiding death then become a problogger commentor.

More Then Dead

497 blogs are dead. Above I defined dead as having less then 500 visitors a day according to website24.com. Having anything less then 500 visitors a day for a website or blog is only virtually dead (you probably will not be making too much money) because even 3 visitors a day is still not dead. True dead is 0 visitors. 0 visitor happens when website24 cannot find the domain – which means the owner of that domain canceled the hosting and the domain is unused. Out of the 497 dead blogs 192 are truly dead – 28% of the total and 39% of the virtual dead.

Further Study

The data for this experiment was only 1 months worth of problogger comments. Of course it would be better to use a whole years worth of comment URLs. But, as you can probably imagine, that would be a lot of work. For 2006 problogger probably has over 30,000 comments. If you eliminate the duplicate URLs you might be left with at least 5000 URLs. I cannot imagine anybody wanting to collect all those URLs and then run them through website24. I would be glad to see it, but I am not going to do it.

What I might do in the future is to check how many blogs die within 6 months.  Instead of going back 3 years I will go back 6 months.

Acknowledgments

• Thank you www.problogger.net for having such a great archive.
• Thank you www.webtraffic24.com for not blocking my IP during my 693 website checks.
• Finally I would like to thank Robby G for his post http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/06/28/perseverance-will-save-your-blog/ because it gave me the idea for this post.

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.