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 Vision

You decide that you want to be a Web Master.  All you have to do if figure out what your website will be about.  For days you think of ideas.  Every time an idea pops in your head you think it might work.  Then after a few minutes of contemplation you decide that it is not a good idea.  Back to the drawing board.

Then one day while walking the dog, just as his leg lifts, you have a great idea.  You do not know where it came from but you really like it.  The more you think about it the better it gets.  From a little pea the idea grows into a melon.  The website begins to form in your head.  By the time the dog is back digging in the yard the idea has become golden.  You imagine millions of people visiting your site – why wouldn’t they?

My story is similar (except for the dog part).  Once I got the basic idea of the website, all the other things fell into place.  The money counter on the home page, the data page, the ‘did you know…’ section..  Millions of people visiting the website.  Returning again and again to see the number rise  Why wouldn’t they?  If I found a website like mine I would visit it all the time.  I had dollar bills flying in front of my eyeballs.

The Reality

The site has been up for 3 weeks.  And what a crash down to earth these 3 weeks have been. 

For the first week it was only one or two people visiting.  Then I joined forums and the traffic increased.  A little.  Week two and three have averaged about 25 visitors.  Far from millions.  How can it be only 25?  When I envisioned a typical visitor to the website I saw them reading the content while slowly putting a hand over their mouth to cover a wide WOW!  Then, all excited,  forwarding the address to all 200 of their Facebook friends.

The plan was for the few initial visitors to begin the traffic tsunami.  I thought I would need just a couple visitors and they would do the rest.  That is not happening.  To my surprise they are not forwarding the website to their friends.

Not only are they not forwarding it, the average page views per visitor is two.  TWO!  They land on the website, quickly look around the home page, click to another page and then leave.  How can they leave?  If I were to find a website like mine I would spend all morning reading everything – just absorbing all the great content.

And what I do not understand at all.  What has no explanation except that there must be some mistake with my statistics is that 63% of the visitors stay on the site for less then 30 seconds.  What can they possibly read in less then 30 seconds?  Nothing.  They are not even giving it a chance.  Just a quick look around, “I don’t like the background color”, and then they leave.  Only 5% of the visitors are do what they should do – stay for at least 30min.

After all these kicks in the balls.  When I think that the indecency is finally over.  And I am completely covered with tomatoes and eggs.  They go for the final blow.  So far, 0 RSS subscriptions.

The Lesson

At the beginning, when you have your vision.  Hold on to it..  Take it with you everywhere.  Imagin yourself explaining to Opera  how you came up with the idea.   Imagine yourself accepting a honorary writing degree from Yale.  Your family and friends envious of your success.  Cherish the vision because it will be a happy time.  Do it as long as you can because after you build your website all you will be doing is crying into your pillow.

Your Thinking of Building a Website

Your browsing the Internet looking for information about creating a website. You have read a few blogs about it. Maybe skimmed a few forums. You think you understand the concept: Create a website, write some content for it, slap some advertisements on it, and that is it.

That is what I thought when I came across the concept for the first time too. I stumbled on a web page describing the concept of creating a revenue generating website. Three hours later I decided that I was going to create a website.

How Long Does it Take?

What I did not know was how much time it takes to create a website design. And how much time it takes to write the initial content. I read somewhere that you need at least 10 pages of content before you go live. Otherwise the website looks bare. So I made quick calculations in my head. 2 hours per page * 10 hours = 20 hours. Plus 3 days to create the website: the layout, logo, choose some colors etc. Total estimated time 20 hours + ( 3 x 8 ) hours = 44 hours. Just over one 40 hour work week.

I had an advantage because I was familiar with HTML. A website was not a black box to me. I knew the basics. The only problem was that I never used Dreamweaver (website creation software) before and I new nothing about CSS. After reading a few articles I figured that Dreamweaver and CSS are a must to create a proper website. So I added another day to my estimate to get familiar with Dreamweaver and CSS. My final estimate was 44 hours + 8 hours = 52 hours from nothing to a website.

That is a lot of time. Since I have a full time job I could only work on weekends. If I were to work for 10 hours a week then my website would take over 5 weeks to complete. I did not want to wait that long. So around Christmas I took a week off work and forced myself to work everyday until it is done.

Building the website

The first 2 days were slow with little progress. Getting familiar with Dreamweaver, CSS was tedious. But after a 10 hours of messing around I got the hang of it. After that I could begin to concentrate on creating instead of learning. For a week straight I built the website. First the general layout, then the logo, and finally the individual content filled pages.

The content pages are the worst part. Especially since I was forced to write them regardless of what mood I was in. I needed to be done before work started again. Days passed and I sat at the computer creating and writing.

50 Hours Later

As you can see on my spreadsheet it took me 50 hours to complete. After 50 hours I had a website with content. Something I could throw on the website host. Almost bang on with my estimate of 52 hours.

But then came the little tweaks. The touch ups. Change the colors, a little rewriting of the text. Move a image over a few pixels to the right, change the font size. Just tweaking and adjusting. No big steps, just little shuffles. There was always more to do, always some little change. Some little adjustment before going to bed. Let me warn you that these adjustments take forever, literally. Still doing them today.

I was finding to my horror that I was not really done the website. I would leave the computer and then I would get an idea to change something. This kept happening over and over again.

26 Hours Later

According to the spreadsheet it was another 26 hours of this pesky tweaking. Only after a total of 76 hours was I happy enough to state that the website is ‘complete’.

Of course I was not done-done. Never will be really done. A website is a growing entity. It always requires attention. There is always more to do. But I was at the stage that I could upload it to host and make it live. From then on it would only be a matter of keeping it up to date.

How Long Will Your Website Take?

How long will it take you to create website from scratch? If you are building a content based website with around 10 pages. And your abilities are like mine (a little HTML) then I would guess 50 hours of initial creation and then 25 hours of touch ups. In 75 hours you will have a completed website. Then all that is left is infinite hours maintaining it.

If you are a webmaster you probably do not have a balance sheet. You do not need one. What would you put on it? What would you put as your assets and liabilities?

Of course it is possible to start being a webmaster with absolutely no assets. OK, actually you do need one asset. A public library card. Go the library, use one of the computers and sign up for a free online blog (like Blogger). Everyday you go to the library and write your blog. Completely free and no big assets.

Assets

I am sure that there are a few blogs out there created from a free access computer at the library, but most web masters use their own computer, at their own desk, and on their own chair. There you go – three assets right there. Computer, table, chair.

Next you probably do not want to use a free online hosting service. They look unprofessional and your domain name will be tom.freehosting.com. So you register a domain name for 1 year. And because you are not sure you really want to be a webmaster, you sign up for a six month hosting service. There you go again – more assets. You have prepaid a years worth for a domain name and six months for a hosting service. These are assets that you now own.

Liabilities

Now for the liabilities. For a month straight you slave away long into the night punching away at your keyboard spewing out Hemingway quality content. Nobody is paying you. You are doing it for free. But it is still work and you expect to be paid back one day. It is like you are giving your website a loan. One day when the website is making money it will have to pay you back. This is a liability to the website as wages owed to you. After a few months the website will start making lots of money. As soon as it does it will have to pay its debts. Namely the one to you. Your salary.

Equity

You own the website.

After it has paid you and if there is still some money left over that will be your equity. Equity=assets-liabilities. The amount the website is worth to you. If you could sell all the assets and pay off all the liabilities the amount left over would go into your pocket.

Most businesses when they start the equity is not a pretty sight. This is especially the case for all webmasters. You put a little bit of money into the required tools (computer, desk, chair) and then a lot of time into building the website. Once it is built you still have nothing. You have spent money and you have spent time. But you still have nothing. Just a whole bunch of megabytes sitting on some server’s hard drive.

Only after the visitors start coming and click on ads and buy your products do you recoup your initial investment. Only then does your negative equity begin to slowly turn around and begin its climb into the positives.

As I write this my equity is still deep in the negative.

 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.