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	<title>Geek Slash</title>
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	<link>http://geekslash.com</link>
	<description>A Blog by Sean Spurr</description>
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		<title>AdSense &#8216;Niche&#8217; Site &#8211; One Day Project</title>
		<link>http://geekslash.com/adsense-niche-site-one-day-project/</link>
		<comments>http://geekslash.com/adsense-niche-site-one-day-project/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Apr 2012 04:22:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://geekslash.com/?p=111</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve been reading and listening to the AdSense Flippers and Niche Pursuits for a while not but not really done anything in that area. Tomorrow that changes. I&#8217;m going to spend the day, a &#8216;normal&#8217; 9 to 5, doing nothing but building these types of sites. I&#8217;m giving myself strict rules for this: The domains [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;ve been reading and listening to the AdSense Flippers and Niche Pursuits for a while not but not really done anything in that area. Tomorrow that changes. I&#8217;m going to spend the day, a &#8216;normal&#8217; 9 to 5, doing nothing but building these types of sites.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m giving myself strict rules for this:</p>
<ul>
<li>The domains have to be new. The idea for the domain also has to be new, not something I&#8217;ve thought about or researched before. The keyword research element of the project must be included in the project tomorrow to make it realistic.</li>
<li>Build one site at once. After all it would be wasted time in terms of this project to half finish 10 sites. Of course automated processes can continue in the background.</li>
<li>No expensive tools, memberships or backlinking &#8211; make this affordable to everyone to copy the project. I&#8217;m not using any keyword research software. I&#8217;m only using wordpress for the site. My backlinking strategy has some cost &#8211; I&#8217;m using article submitter software called ArticleDemon (there&#8217;s alternatives you could try to this, it&#8217;s just had a refresh and I tried it out today and it seems pretty good). If you don&#8217;t want to do this yourself or pay for the software there&#8217;s guys on fiverr who will do this for a fiver (per article).</li>
<li>Do everything myself: I can afford to get content written and outsource backlinking, but this project is as a test to see how much value can be extracted from one 9 to 5 day. I plan to report on the results over time.</li>
</ul>
<div>So expenses will be:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Domains. I use resellerclub as they come with private registration included. $8.89 for .com and .net, and currently .org is on sale for $4.39. I might decide to target different countries rather than the USA, but the domains are generally relatively similar in price. I don&#8217;t plan to use things like .biz, .info, .co or .me (global TLDs or country code ones that Google considers to be global ones)</li>
<li>Hosting account. I plan to stick these onto one of my hosting accounts, but if you were starting from scratch you could get one for about $10 a month that will work fine for tons of these sites together. A lot of people like host gator for these types of sites, I have an account with them and I also have a bigger account with WiredTree who I&#8217;ve always found have amazing support but don&#8217;t play around in the small cheap hosting game so not one to start out with.</li>
<li>Article submission software (which I&#8217;ve owned for ages). ArticleDemon seems to be $97 currently. I&#8217;m on a mac so theres additional costs to running Windows based software, but I&#8217;ll ignore that. As I said before you could use other software or fiverr gigs which are $5 per article submitted (and often will write and spin the article for you).</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>My process:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Think of ideas for possible high value keywords with little competition. Often logging into affiliate networks is a great way of doing this as the companies advertising on there often list their services and products and the less common ones can often be good keywords with little competition. Then using Google&#8217;s keyword tool to look for exact match local searches (USA or UK or another other English speaking country &#8211; if you can speak another language feel free to do this, you&#8217;ll probably have less competition) which have decent number of searches and a decent adwords CPC. There&#8217;s no exact science to this and it depends on where you expect you&#8217;ll be on the SERPs. A number 10 ranking will require a lot more searches or a much higher CPC to be worth going for than a no. 3 ranking, etc. This competition checking is another important part &#8211; if you get a lot of domain homepages on the search results it should be red flags that this isn&#8217;t a good keyword to target. Also category pages on large ecommerce sites are red flags, although product pages are not.</li>
<li>Register the domain, nameserver it to my host and install wordpress, add ManageWP worker and use ManageWP  to install my favourite plugins fast (you could do this slightly slower without ManageWP, but it has a free trail so I&#8217;ll pretend its free for the experiment and even if you don&#8217;t do it then it won&#8217;t slow you down that much).</li>
<li>Write three pages of content, each roughly 500 words and add to the site.</li>
<li>Write, spin and submit an article to article directories. Leave the submitter running in the background.</li>
<li>Move onto the next site.</li>
</ul>
<div>My estimation is that I&#8217;ll be able to make in about 2.5 hours from start to finish, meaning that I should be able to get three of these made in a normal working day (and have half an hour for lunch). I&#8217;ll keep you updated on how things go, and how the sites do over time. I might repeat the experiment over a week sometime too so that the randomness decreases. My hope is that within 6 months these will have made more than you&#8217;d earn in a day if you had a job paying $50k a year. Obviously I won&#8217;t abandon them completely if they show promise, and I might even opt to try different income methods if there&#8217;s an obvious affiliate match.</div>
</div>
<div></div>
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		<title>Updating Multiple WordPress Installations the Quick Way</title>
		<link>http://geekslash.com/updating-multiple-wordpress-installations-the-quick-way/</link>
		<comments>http://geekslash.com/updating-multiple-wordpress-installations-the-quick-way/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 23 Mar 2012 23:17:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Wordpress]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://geekslash.com/?p=97</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[There was a time when I used to simple install wordpress and forget it. That was until one day a hacker discovered this and defaced about half the wordpress installations on my server. Now I&#8217;m religious about updating the installations and plugins as in the long run this is less work than cleaning up after [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>There was a time when I used to simple install wordpress and forget it. That was until one day a hacker discovered this and defaced about half the wordpress installations on my server. Now I&#8217;m religious about updating the installations and plugins as in the long run this is less work than cleaning up after a hacker attack. Problem is when you have 60 wordpress installations this takes a hell of a long time, especially when plugins like Really Simple CAPTCHA seem to be updating every month for some unknown reason.</p>
<p>The traditional way of dealing with this was to use a multi-site wordpress installation. Problem with this is the set up of this is set complex and there can be issues with plugins etc not being compatible with each other. Further if your hosting on more than one server this just ain&#8217;t gonna work (some people deliberately spread sites around different hosts for perceived SEO benefits and so if one host goes down the rest of their sites are still online).</p>
<p>Enter: <a href="http://www.managewp.com">ManageWP</a>. I saw this initially when reading blogs of other people with sites, I think probably the guys over at <a href="http://adsenseflippers.com">Adsense Flippers</a> were the first to alert me to this. The service apparently used to be free (for 3 blogs only it still is), but the $40 you pay a month for up to 100 blogs is well worth it in time saved (cheaper and more expensive plans are available depending on number of blogs and what services you want). Basically it&#8217;s a central control panel for all your wordpress installs allowing you to mass update plugins, installations and themes, mass install plugins you think you&#8217;ll need (and delete those you no longer want), deal with comments from all sites at once, and on more expensive plans monitor uptime and create automatic backups sent to dropbox or amazon cloud. It also stores logins within it so it&#8217;s great for not needing the same passwords for each installation (thus being more secure by using different ones) and means you can just login to ManageWP from a cyber cafe computer abroad and deal with everything you need to do on all your sites (if your going to be doing this do change your password regularly though, cyber cafe computers are notorious for having keyloggers installed).</p>
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		<title>December 2011 Earnings Report</title>
		<link>http://geekslash.com/december-2011-earnings-report/</link>
		<comments>http://geekslash.com/december-2011-earnings-report/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 01 Jan 2012 17:08:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Earnings Reports]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://geekslash.com/?p=66</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Quite a good month for me, certainly a large increase since my last reported month (August). Adsense: £430.75 (provisional &#8211; they often deduct something before payment) &#8211; Equiv in USD: $668.67 Display advertising: $1082.55 (and this is awaiting two days figures on one network so should increase by about $7) &#8211; Equiv in GBP: £697.36 [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Quite a good month for me, certainly a large increase since my last reported month (August).</p>
<ul>
<li>Adsense: £430.75 (provisional &#8211; they often deduct something before payment) &#8211; Equiv in USD: $668.67</li>
<li>Display advertising: $1082.55 (and this is awaiting two days figures on one network so should increase by about $7) &#8211; Equiv in GBP: £697.36</li>
<li>Affiliate: £380.6 (equiv: $590.82)</li>
</ul>
<p>Overall that&#8217;s the equivalent of £1508.71 or $2342.04</p>
<p>Or, compared with August, a 185.6% increase (almost three times the amount).</p>
<p>Will January be as high? The end of the season will bring down advertising rates, but equally I found a new network in mid December that did really well and what it advertises isn&#8217;t very related to Christmas, plus my educational sites usually do really well in January as people go back to school as doing quite badly in December when students are largely off school. I&#8217;ll be conservative and estimate I&#8217;ll make the same.</p>
<p>My calculation for what I&#8217;d need next year to survive in London was £1100 after tax and expenses, tax on that amount at the moment would be roughly £120, plus company expenses are roughly £300 a month, so I&#8217;ve just about made it to that point.</p>
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		<title>A Future for TomTom?</title>
		<link>http://geekslash.com/a-future-for-tomtom/</link>
		<comments>http://geekslash.com/a-future-for-tomtom/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:21:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Tech Analysis]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://geekslash.com/?p=64</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[TomTom, the Dutch company that chose its name in an attempt to appear friendly twice, today announced it&#8217;s cutting 10% of its workforce. While the company has done well of both its traditional hardware offering of in-car navigational units and high-priced apps for smartphones, the market is clearly shifting from the former to the latter [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>TomTom, the Dutch company that chose its name in an attempt to appear friendly <em>twice</em>, today announced it&#8217;s cutting 10% of its workforce. While the company has done well of both its traditional hardware offering of in-car navigational units and high-priced apps for smartphones, the market is clearly shifting from the former to the latter model and with that shift barriers to entry into the driving navigation market decrease substantially.</p>
<p>Thus TomTom is facing tough competition not just from rivals offering similar, although usually less feature rich, products for a fraction of the price. To illustrate this TomTom is currently the third highest selling Navigation app in the UK selling for £49.99 (TomTom will received £35 of this), while the top selling app in the category, offering core function of turn by turn navigation including voice instructions, sells for just 69 pence. Still TomTom is doing far better than competitor Garmin, based in the low-tax Cayman Islands, whose smartphone app in the UK gross less than £0.69 apps. If you&#8217;re just looking for core functionality then TomTom&#8217;s app&#8217;s pricing mean for most it has, like ten percent of its workforce, become redundant.</p>
<p><strong>TomTom&#8217;s strategy: use traffic data to increase value</strong></p>
<div>The vast majority of TomTom&#8217;s users opt-in to submitting data as they travel about their movement and speed which TomTom uses to calculate traffic difficulties. This data is TomTom&#8217;s goldmine as even for free competitors it&#8217;s hard to gain the kind of traction required to be able to meet the critical mass of movement data to be able to offer accurate traffic avoidance suggestions in real time.</div>
<p><strong>Not a question of profitability</strong></p>
<p>TomTom&#8217;s third quarter results surprised analysts, with a 50% jump in profit to Euro29 million while sales fell 10% to Euro336 million. The latter figure shouldn&#8217;t be too much of concern however as the shift from hardware to software brings higher profit margins, and while Apple&#8217;s 30% cut of app store profits is substantial, this is lower than the cut most retailers would get on TomTom&#8217;s hardware products.</p>
<p>To cut jobs in the context of a 50% jump in profits would seem insensitive at the best of time, but to do so as the company is facing increased competition for low-cost and free apps, like Wuze, which offer functionality such as traffic data seems suicidal.</p>
<p><strong>Social Functionality will help Wuze compete</strong></p>
<p>Core functionality of free apps can help gain traction, but to gain the usage needed to have accurate traffic data it hasn&#8217;t been enough. Wuze however appear to have solved this by building in social functionality into their app which has made in an app store hit. Unless TomTom can catch up and offer new functionality then this could be the app which replaces them. Clearly a mistaken time to restructure your research and development department through job cuts.</p>
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		<item>
		<title>How I&#8217;m going to handle task management</title>
		<link>http://geekslash.com/how-im-going-to-handle-task-management/</link>
		<comments>http://geekslash.com/how-im-going-to-handle-task-management/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 04 Sep 2011 05:19:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Productivity]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://geekslash.com/?p=51</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[My plan is to use a triumvirate of task management software: OmniFocus, OmniPlan and a Desktop Task Timer. This might sound complicated, but there&#8217;s more to making money online than having a good idea, buying the domain and setting up a wordpress (something I tend to do far too often). I need to discipline myself into my [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>My plan is to use a triumvirate of task management software: OmniFocus, OmniPlan and a Desktop Task Timer.</p>
<p>This might sound complicated, but there&#8217;s more to making money online than having a good idea, buying the domain and setting up a wordpress (something I tend to do far too often). I need to discipline myself into my projects and planning out them and tracking progress is necessary.</p>
<p>OmniFocus is a great tool &#8211; especially for tracking private ad sales (I&#8217;ll make a post about this later). Basically you give it a deadline (and sometimes startdate), assign a task to a project, give it a context, perhaps make sub tasks and let it roll. It&#8217;s great for getting all the little nags off your mind and into a place where you can forget about them because you know when you need to deal with them it will inform you. That&#8217;s effectively the principle of &#8216;Getting Things Done&#8217; or GTD. A lot of the stuff written about it is just the standard self-improvement bollocks, but the basic concept is a great one: forget your worries by putting them into a system that will only inform you about them when you need to deal with them and have the ability to do so.</p>
<p>The task of the Desktop Task Timer is basically to record how long I spend working on each project to give me an idea of what is most worthwhile doing and to see if I&#8217;ve been slacking.</p>
<p>OmniPlan is new on me. I bought it using educational discount just before leaving uni knowing that I&#8217;d need it. I need to decide one project to start using it with and go, but first I&#8217;ll need to brush up on how it use it effectively.</p>
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		<title>Website improvement plans</title>
		<link>http://geekslash.com/website-improvement-plans/</link>
		<comments>http://geekslash.com/website-improvement-plans/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 04 Sep 2011 04:58:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[My Goals and Plans]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://geekslash.com/?p=47</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This blog effectively is more like a personal diary that I&#8217;ve made public but told no one about at the moment, so this blog post is likely far more useful to myself than it could possibly be interesting to others. The only traffic to come in so far has been from one comment I made [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This blog effectively is more like a personal diary that I&#8217;ve made public but told no one about at the moment, so this blog post is likely far more useful to myself than it could possibly be interesting to others. The only traffic to come in so far has been from one comment I made on one blog of someone doing this successfully, I read a few of those blogs so perhaps I should become a regular commenter when I want to start getting traffic (probably later this month when I start doing more useful posts about link building, time management, etc).</p>
<p>Anyway my plans so far are:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>American Presidents site:</strong> The site is doing quite well, I just moved it over to wordpress from static php (using includes) and it has a brief issue with losing ranks that it now seems to have regained (I kept the URLs the same, I think the lost rank was from the title tags changing as a revert moved me back). While it ranks well for some keywords and gets most of its traffic from them, there&#8217;s a lot more keywords out there it&#8217;s on the second or third page for which have far more traffic and I&#8217;ve never actively built links targeting. Plus there&#8217;s a lot of related keywords I don&#8217;t have pages for, notably for Quotations and Timelines. My plan for the quotations is rather than just put up the same quotes you find everywhere to put up quotes with verified sources and use this to gain links (most quote sites have lots of quotes that seem improbable, thus I think this would be a good differentiator). I&#8217;m also going to add galleries to get traffic from Google Images searches. The biographies on there weren&#8217;t written by me and a few of them I&#8217;m rather ashamed of. I plan to rewrite these and use the rewriting process as a means of getting links (I&#8217;ll remember a lot about the Presidents as I re-write each one so can use this to my advantage).</li>
<li><strong>URGames.com: </strong>I just recently changed the CMS on this and redesigned it, revenue has leaped, but the site needs far more games added to it. This will be tedious and boring work but it needs doing. I also realised a lot of the games I distribute with my links in have links which don&#8217;t seem to work (i.e. they don&#8217;t even click) anymore. I&#8217;ll have to find the original flash files and sort this out. I&#8217;m also planning on going through those flash files and seeing if I can make new versions of the games from this, a popular one is this set of games where you click a country on a map when the game tells you it&#8217;s name. I could adapt this to things like areas of cities, etc. I may also redesign another one of my games sites, but in general this is probably a shrinking market given the rise of facebook and smartphone gaming, and online games just aren&#8217;t the interest they were to me when I was in high school.</li>
<li><strong>HistoryEmpire.com: </strong>To be honest this site is pretty much a non-site with only a few articles, the odd few I wrote recently but most I wrote back in 2007 (I think). While it&#8217;s not an obvious area for advertisers, it&#8217;s a strong interest and there&#8217;s a lot of traffic out there from high school students (it fluctuates with term times). I&#8217;m going to stick to writing about 20th century history as it&#8217;s what I&#8217;m mainly interested in (and has most traffic) for now and slowly expand the site and build links as I write each article (Dmoz submissions, etc).</li>
<li><strong>PhysicsPlanet.com: </strong>I&#8217;m not sure why I made this as my interest in the topic isn&#8217;t that great, but back when I was making a lot online in high school I commissioned a lot of articles to be written for it, so this site exists. It makes money too &#8211; about £50 on adsense last month from about 400 visits a day. It has some pretty good ranks &#8211; jumping between 3rd and 4th for a keyword with 18,000 exact searches a month, and between 20 and 30 for the term fibre optics, which gets even more searches and adwords tool tells me is worth about $5 a click to advertisers. The site could do with more articles on related topics which also have good amounts of searches, although my interest in this is low so I&#8217;ll probably target writing just one a month.</li>
</ul>
<div>New projects:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Travel site. I&#8217;m making a site for one location I know pretty well. The main keyword I&#8217;m targeting is actually quite long tail but has about 75,000 exacts a month and has a bunch of even longer-tail related keywords with a few thousand each. My plan is to target the site around this keyword as it pretty much describes the content of the site and makes the navigation a bit different and in a way more friendly. Don&#8217;t want to reveal much more, but there&#8217;s a lot of a writing to be done &#8211; I expect about a hundred articles of about 500 words (50,000 words total). If I can discipline myself that&#8217;s about a weeks work. If it goes well then I&#8217;ll probably make more similar sites (I took loads of photos when I was in Delhi for instance in case I wanted to make a travel site about there in future) and continue to update the site. The reason for this site was partly potential advertising sales as there&#8217;s a massive market for tourism in this location and partly that I just missed the location a lot and thought that making a site about it would help.</li>
<li>A network of seasonal sites. I won&#8217;t say any more.</li>
<li>I&#8217;ve started one philosophy site at John-Locke.com, I need to finish this and I&#8217;ll probably make a few more time dependent.</li>
</ul>
</div>
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		<title>One Year to Make or Break</title>
		<link>http://geekslash.com/one-year-to-make-or-break/</link>
		<comments>http://geekslash.com/one-year-to-make-or-break/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 04 Sep 2011 04:35:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[My Goals and Plans]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://geekslash.com/?p=42</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I finished my final exams (and the only ones that count towards my degree) in June and in mid-July get my results: a 2.1 in History and Politics from Oxford University. Friends with similar degrees have already gone on to high paying jobs in banking, head hunting, and other careers. That was never my intention. [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I finished my final exams (and the only ones that count towards my degree) in June and in mid-July get my results: a 2.1 in History and Politics from Oxford University. Friends with similar degrees have already gone on to high paying jobs in banking, head hunting, and other careers. That was never my intention.</p>
<p>While my initial plan was to initially go back and live with my parents, occasionally live cheaply in a low income country (perhaps India, which I visited in February to research my thesis and developed somewhat of an infatuation with), before moving to London when income was high enough (I calculated I&#8217;d need £1100 after expenses and tax per month). Meeting my partner put somewhat of a spanner in the works of that plan, but the intention of not working but instead building my sites remains the same.</p>
<p>So I have until October 2012 to make my websites make enough for me to live on. That&#8217;s when my partner will hopefully be starting a masters in London and I&#8217;ll need enough to afford to live there. If the websites don&#8217;t do this then a job, probably in SEO, will be the only option. And I can&#8217;t go on living cheaply forever: I have debt, and I don&#8217;t just mean three years worth of student debt &#8211; my back of a napkin calculation is that my bank overdraft and credit card negative balances total about £9000. That&#8217;s going to take a long time to pay off on my current earnings, especially as there&#8217;s interest accumulating.</p>
<p>Of course if everything fails I could get a job for a while, wait for the benefits of this years work on sites to pay off (Google is a slow creature sometimes), get rid of the debt and accumulate some savings before starting again. But that&#8217;s not really a prospect I want to consider. I&#8217;ve only ever had one job, 8am to 5.30pm five days a week in an office, even if it was only for the summer, isn&#8217;t something an experience I&#8217;m dying to repeat. Even if the job did allow me to effectively manage their online presence and learn a few things in the process.</p>
<p>Ideally to be on my way to paying off the debt and live comfortably in London I need to be making £2000 a month by this time next year. It&#8217;s not like my sites haven&#8217;t made that before, back when I was fifteen they were consistently making about double that. I just let things slip and didn&#8217;t work on them while in Sixth Form then University.</p>
<p>I made only £750 last month. My target for this month is £1000. So far it looks like I might be on course, AdSense has picked up considerably. Then as traffic to education sites increases a lot during this month and is at its peak in October and November I&#8217;m targeting £1250 for those months. From there on any predictions are more wild guesses, but effectively I need to double my income within a year. I&#8217;ll make another blog post soon about my next plans for my current sites, and might reveal a bit about what I&#8217;m working on next.</p>
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		<title>August Earnings Report</title>
		<link>http://geekslash.com/august-earnings-report/</link>
		<comments>http://geekslash.com/august-earnings-report/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 01 Sep 2011 18:52:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Earnings Reports]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://geekslash.com/?p=37</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[With August over  I thought I&#8217;d do the a post in the time-honoured tradition of web business owner bloggers: an earnings breakdown. I made £528.28 from my sites, plus a bit extra from article writing makes it £781.5. Not exactly enough to live on yet, but August is a traditionally bad month and what I [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>With August over  I thought I&#8217;d do the a post in the time-honoured tradition of web business owner bloggers: an earnings breakdown. I made £528.28 from my sites, plus a bit extra from article writing makes it £781.5. Not exactly enough to live on yet, but August is a traditionally bad month and what I class as my web income isn&#8217;t entirely my only source. I&#8217;ll set a modest increase of £750 from sites and £1000 overall as my target for September.</p>
<p><strong>Earnings:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Adsense:</strong> <strong>£111.77</strong> (equiv in US<strong>$180.80</strong>) only, still better than July but nothing like February which was over £300 and almost paid for my rent in Oxford (which was £318.75 a month). On the bright side the last two days averaged about £15 each after adding adsense to one of my biggest games sites, and it looks like that is continuing, so that combined with Schools going back for my educational sites should mean that a £450 September is possible. I&#8217;ll target that amount as I am planning on putting a lot of work into my biggest history site, <a href="http://www.american-presidents.com">American Presidents</a>, this month which should pay off as it makes about two thirds of its revenue from Adsense (I recently moved the site from being static to WordPress to make updating things easier).</li>
<li><strong>Display networks: $569.10 </strong>(equiv<strong> £351.74</strong>) In addition to the usual networks I was convinced by a persistent emailer to join Intergi which specialise in pre-roll video ads. I added them to my two main games sites late in the month, around the 24th, and they are doing ok &#8211; $23.82 (£14.72) but not great compared with other sources. Still it&#8217;s a form of advertising that doesn&#8217;t interfere with others and as its common practice on these sorts of sites I don&#8217;t think users will be too pissed off. From the impression count it seems as though they are only able to show ads to people in the wealth English-language countries (UK, US, etc). ValueClickMedia did $156.56 (£96.76), picking up towards the end of the month, about average since April, but far lower than January/February when it was doing $300 and December when it was doing $500 (although a majority of that was coming from <a href="http://www.funnysigns.net">Funny Signs</a>, which I since sold). CasaleMedia also faired badly, with $175.38, it&#8217;s lowest month for a long time, but again this reflects August being a traditionally bad month for online games. Tribal Fusion which is only on <a href="http://craziness.com">Craziness.com</a> saw $185.71 (£114.77), slightly lower than normal but August is always a bad month for online games. Burst Media did a pitiful $27.63 (£17.07), compared with May which was over $180, but this is due to the lack of summer traffic on American Presidents, the one site I have in Burst.</li>
<li><strong>Affiliate Income: £64.77 / $104.79. </strong>TradeDoubler had another poor month for me, only £57.35. Put a few more links to amazon books (previously only one President had any) on American Presidents, still need to add links for about 4/5ths of the Presidents, and August is a quiet month, but $12 (£7.42) in commission from 9 items is a promising start.</li>
<li><strong>Advertising income: </strong>None at all, and I had to write off the possibility of $1500 which someone who has paid for advertising before originally agreed to months ago then went AWOL on me. I used to make a lot off a debt help site that hardly got any traffic I sold this year. Perhaps I should make more advertiser friendly sites like that again.</li>
<li><strong>Article writing: £253.22/$409.70. </strong>Not strictly web income, but did this to get a little bit extra in the bank as I&#8217;ll need money later this year.</li>
</ul>
<div>Still along way away from where I need to be &#8211; about £1500 a month overall to survive comfortably without other sources of income and pay business expenses. I could probably get to this quite easily by doing writing work as a freelancer but I&#8217;d prefer to work on my own sites while I can. When I&#8217;m back in the UK in late September I might take up a job I&#8217;ve had previously which pays £1600 a month and is happy to pro-rata, although the 8am to 5.30pm really takes away the willingness to do web work afterwards. I need to make quite a bit in the final bit of the year to pay off old debts and cover other expenses (if I get a business visa then flights to the US and accommodation there).</div>
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		<title>2011 Goals</title>
		<link>http://geekslash.com/2011-goals/</link>
		<comments>http://geekslash.com/2011-goals/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Aug 2011 22:01:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[My Goals and Plans]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://geekslash.com/?p=33</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This only applies to September through December 2011, so four months. Tax: Strategic Investment owes £1,154.44 by December 31st for the period ending March 31st (9 months after period end is when tax is due). Incka owes an unknown amount in tax and fines from an unknown amount of periods. For incka the period ended [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This only applies to September through December 2011, so four months.</p>
<p><strong>Tax:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Strategic Investment owes £1,154.44 by December 31st for the period ending March 31st (9 months after period end is when tax is due).</li>
<li>Incka owes an unknown amount in tax and fines from an unknown amount of periods.</li>
<li>For incka the period ended 2010 it seems £2095.37 might be owed if not already paid</li>
<li>SIL accounts seem to start October 2010, so Incka (period ends 30th April) will owe for May, June, July, August, September &#8211; a total of 5 months</li>
<li>Sean has to fill in a year end tax form and probably has fines from previous unfilled out ones</li>
</ul>
<div><strong>Incka Shutdown</strong></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Sean needs to work out the accounting for every period left</li>
<li>Sean needs to get inland revenue to tell him what forms need to be filled in still &#8211; and see if he can log in to do them</li>
<li>Sean needs to sell the assets to strategic investment</li>
</ul>
</div>
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		<title>Increasing Revenue by Improving User Experience</title>
		<link>http://geekslash.com/increasing-revenue-by-improving-user-experience/</link>
		<comments>http://geekslash.com/increasing-revenue-by-improving-user-experience/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:07:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[User Experience]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://geekslash.com/?p=6</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[My instinct when trying to increase revenue on a site has always been to increase advertising. Basically there&#8217;s a few ways I&#8217;ve done this: Increasing the number of adverts. For instance adding an extra popup, adding a left skyscraper ad in addition to the right sky, etc. Moving ads to positions that get more clicks [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>My instinct when trying to increase revenue on a site has always been to increase advertising. Basically there&#8217;s a few ways I&#8217;ve done this:</p>
<ul>
<li>Increasing the number of adverts. For instance adding an extra popup, adding a left skyscraper ad in addition to the right sky, etc.</li>
<li>Moving ads to positions that get more clicks (for CPA/CPC ads), such as moving the navigational menu to the right side and moving the ad to the left (where heat maps generated from eye ball tracking show users instinctively look for menus).</li>
</ul>
<div>Undoubtedly these things work, but they tend also to decrease the amount of time and number of pages a visitor will go on in your site. They&#8217;ll also increase the bounce rate.</div>
<div>By making improvements to your sites usability you can drastically &#8211; often by factors over a 100% &#8211; increase your number of page views. This is especially great if your site uses CPM ads, but it also helps CPC ads as users will more likely be presented with one they wish to click on.</div>
<div>For instance due to concerns over the security of the old script on <a href="http://www.urgames.com">URGames.com</a> (which remains my most popular site despite my lack of work on it in literally years while I was at university) I recently decided to move. Initially I&#8217;d planned a static and then a wordpress based solution, but after coming across a popular and well executed script I decided to give it a go. The design on the site was intended to get users to click on as many games as possible &#8211; thus to spend as long on the site as possible. It does this while still allowing a fair number of ads, actually increasing the amount from what there was previously but in a less noticeable way.</div>
<div>Basically the average time and number of pages visitors are on the site for has more than doubled. And better still the revenue increase has been several times that, I don&#8217;t want to give out exact details and due to reporting time differences between ad networks (and currency differences) it would be hard for me to do, but the site has probably just jumped from being about my fourth to my first in terms of revenue.</div>
<div>Similar things have happened before when I&#8217;ve increased user experience. I used to own a site called <a href="http://www.funnysigns.net">FunnySigns.net</a> (I sold this to a friend earlier this year when I needed money for to pay taxes). The site was pretty consistent in the traffic it was getting as it had been number 2 in google for effectively the only worthwhile term for its genre (Funny Signs) for years. I&#8217;d therefore effectively ignored it other than once increasing the amount of ads on the site. A year ago I was going through my sites and looking at which ones were, um, frankly ugly. I therefore decided to give it a redesign which included adding arrows to the side of the funny sign images to visit the next image. Overnight the site jumped from around 12 pageviews per visitor to over 40, here&#8217;s image proof:</div>
<div><a href="http://geekslash.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Screen-Shot-2011-08-30-at-15.46.38.png"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-7" title="Screen Shot 2011-08-30 at 15.46.38" src="http://geekslash.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Screen-Shot-2011-08-30-at-15.46.38-300x66.png" alt="" width="300" height="66" /></a></div>
<div>Not only did pageviews increase but visitors started staying longer and visiting more often &#8211; and the bounce rate plummeted:</div>
<div><a href="http://geekslash.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Screen-Shot-2011-08-30-at-15.49.33.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-8" title="Screen Shot 2011-08-30 at 15.49.33" src="http://geekslash.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Screen-Shot-2011-08-30-at-15.49.33.png" alt="" width="345" height="228" /></a></div>
<div>(The scale of this is the same, 1 August to 30 September 2010, with the changes being implemented on the 3rd September.)</div>
<div>I don&#8217;t want to give revenue stats, but from the main ad network more than tripled and the secondary one was by a factor of 2.5 between August and September that year.</div>
<div>I&#8217;m in no way suggesting that you go remove ads from your site &#8211; this really isn&#8217;t the purpose of this post. The purpose is to get you to improve usability of your site to increase page views.</div>
<div>I think a good way of doing this is to think about visitors as goal orientated. Visitors to an online game site want to have fun by playing good quality online games. To reach that goal they need to be presented with options that show what games are on offer at every moment of their journey through the site, including on the pages where they are already playing games (so that when they get bored of the one they are playing they have another one lined up to play). With the funny signs site their goal is to have a little chuckle at eat sign. Why should they have to go back to a category page to get to the next sign &#8211; why not just have a big Next button.</div>
<div>Obviously the two examples above are relatively simple and the user goals are easy to satisfy. This isn&#8217;t ecommerce where a users goal requires significant convincing of by the website to reach due to it having a cost to the user.</div>
<div>I&#8217;ve recently been hired to do some copy (probably for article marketing) for a SEO firm. I&#8217;ve had to write several thousand words for them on increasing conversions on websites that are largely ecommerce. The SEO firm does this by designing the site from a wireframe based on eye ball tracking and changes the design when it&#8217;s implemented by using multivariate testing (randomly showing visitors different versions of the site). For most of us making content sites this is far more than what we need to do, but their focus on visitor goals is a good one.</div>
<div>For instance on my history websites when users arrive while searching for a person they will want one of several different things. I drew up this list:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>They&#8217;ll want quick facts, perhaps wanting one particular one already or just to know the basics. For instance when born, major achievements, career, etc</li>
<li>They may want to read a biography of the person</li>
<li>They might be looking for multimedia &#8211; videos, audio, photos, etc</li>
<li>They might want a timeline</li>
<li>They might want materials by the person themselves &#8211; quotes, speeches, books</li>
</ul>
<div>Having a one-page-fits-all strategy just won&#8217;t work, while just having a long biography is great for SEO it isn&#8217;t what users want. Since the Panda update it seems Google is actually looking at toolbar data on how long users spend on sites and how many bounce, hence why old sites with great backlinks have suddenly dropped down the SERP rankings.</div>
<div>My solution is to offer many pages for each person, the main one being a biography for SEO link building purposes, but other pages for each of the different user goals &#8211; one of quotes, one of speeches, one as a timeline, a page of facts, etc. Then at the top of the biography present users with a very clear menu of the different pages written in a way which will hopefully help them identify what fits their goal.</div>
<div>As I haven&#8217;t implemented this across all pages of my history sites yet I don&#8217;t have any analytics to show you on this, but my guess is this will really increase time spent on the site as users won&#8217;t just be presented with a long piece of text they have to wade through for the answer to the question they had when they searched.</div>
</div>
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