10. Been island hopping and jet skiing
9. Too Drunk
8. Way too busy to even think about blogging
7. I have a life outside where there aren’t any computers
6. I’m really trying not to be one of those bloggers who regurgitates other peoples shit cause they have nothing else better to say
5. Been out shopping a lot
4. Too busy playing games
3. My other businesses are more profitable and less time consuming!
2. I’m in the progress of writing a business investment plan for one of my other businesses

And the #1 reason why I haven’t blogged all week is….

1. I’m really trying not to be one of those bloggers who regurgitates the same old shit that has been said 1,000 times already

Oh and there you have it, I said it mostly because I’ve come back after doing so much, read all my feeds and out of almost 1,000 new posts that I’ve skimmed through there was only about 5 I actually read, the rest was regurgitated crap that I’ve read 1,000 times before.

Yes traffic is the main currency of bloggers not money and no I don’t want to read another self serving bullshit ebook… this is why I read and respect bloggers like Maki over at DoshDosh, he’s made a commitment to deliver real content that you probably haven’t seen or read before, and if you have, it’ll be different and provide something new.

Another reason for this post is that after skimming through them all it kind of pissed me off to see the same crap over and over again and I wanted something easy to get me back into the rhythm of blogging daily again, so there it is.

I’m putting a new feature up today based on my latest advertising with AdBrite. I think AdBrite has its pros and cons, one of the cons for me is that it’s not very good for advertising businesses, the large majority of its target audience is teens and people who visit file sharing sites, humour sites that kind of thing.

But, I’m always willing to experiment and that’s what I’m doing, advertising a webmaster site on AdBrite… We’ll see how it goes, should have that up in a few hours, will be a nice change from Adwords.

It’s been an interesting month, I’ve had lots of work on, lots of projects on the go and I’ve still managed to push out blog posts that have created some interest, some traffic, some comments and my features about domain kiting and making money from domain names made it on the front page of dnscoop.com – a digg for domain names, which I’m pretty happy about.

August also marks the 1 month old mark for this new little blog that I’m building and in this first month we’ve had over 600 visitors, over 1,500 page views, over 20 subscribers, 44 posts and 58 comments. I’m happy with that, for the first month it’s fine, I haven’t been able to give the site as much attention that I would have liked, I’ve been busy with the company’s other developments, which I’m hoping I can announce over the next few weeks.

In August I’m hoping to be a bit more active on the blog posting, keeping the posts more regular, I’ve been taking weekends off, I’ll experiment with that a little more, maybe schedule some posts or something like that, I’ll see how it goes.

I’m also going to be a bit more active on other blogs, get to know a few more people around me, I had the chance to debate with Kevin from Blogging Tips earlier in the month which I really liked, I like a good objective debate, sometimes I try to debate a topic with people and all they do is get the angry and want to fight over it, which in turn pisses me off but Kevin actually engaged in a debate / discussion on a post I made, which was a direct rebuttal from a post he made which was fun.

From the looks of it Kevin likes a good debate; he’s offering $100 cash to the top 2 replies to his latest debate “Blogger or Wordpress.com, which is better“.

Anyway, back to ME any my blog, here’s a roundup of the most popular and some of my favourite posts for the month

• Profiting from domain names – the complete how to guide
• The secrets of profiting from domain names and domain kiting
• PPC campaign intelligence
• Perfect example of a bad Adwords ad
• Google can’t sell anything but search
• Sponsoring the underdog, underrated marketing that pays off
• 8 PPC marketing tips that I use for every campaign I do

I’m not the biggest fan of time management, but I do like project management. I find when you map out what you need to achieve you will have a clear path from start to finish, even if it’s not exact it’s still going to help you read your end goal.

You can go to the full extent of Microsoft Project to manage what you need to do, but if you’re like me you don’t work on 6 month long projects that require that kind of macro management (I used to but not anymore thank god!).

What I do is keep a simple task list broken into simple categories. I actually keep multiple task lists, each list being a project. The problem I find I have with working on any project is that I love getting stuck on tangents, while I’m working on something I’ll do some research and end up reading 20 other websites on different subjects, that initial 10 minute task is now over an hour long.

To combat my poor focus, anytime I catch myself jumping off the project, I look at the list and see what I need to do next, if I REALLY don’t want to do it, I check out what else on the list I can skip to right now and work on that instead, if everything in that project is not that interesting to me right now, or if I can’t do it for some reason, I’ll check my other projects, find something small to work on and tick off the list, once you start ticking a couple small tasks off you’ll find yourself in that working groove again and keen to work on the bigger tasks.

For management of what I need to do I use GoPlan, I don’t track time spent, unless I’m doing client work, I just write down tasks I need to do and categorise them. GoPlan is a great project management tool, you can build simple tasks lists that you just check off when you’re done, you can build multiple projects and easily jump between them and you can collaborate with multiple users.

GoPlan is actually really powerful, but the extent of how much functionality you want to use is up to you. A system like this works for me because I keep all my projects in there in very simple lists so I can just tick off tasks that I need to do, and keep a track of where I’m at, and if I have client work I can assign tasks to programmers, external people for them to tick off and track all the time spent etc.

You can join for free and manage 2 projects, if you want to manage more projects plans start at $10 a month and you can manage 12 projects with 8 users per project. They are always updating the system; you can see their activity on the system on their blog.

Here are some screenshots of the system

For a while I thought it was just me who found his blog to be boring and offer the reader no real value. I’ve just looked at all those little rating stars he has under his posts, on his front page his posts have an average rating of 2.5, with 4 of the 10 posts under 2 stars. One of the posts above 2 stars is just a quote from another site, another is a paid review, another is him making the Technorati top 50 and another is a funny video from the onion.

On the other hand I think doshdosh.com needs to have those little stars, as tacky as they are I’m very certain you’d see every post above 4 stars, every post is quality content and it’s all going to help you make more money online, contrary to what johnchow.com does. I’ve never read anything on johnchow.com that would help me make more money.

Check this out from doshdosh.com, “A Comprehensive Guide to Using Flickr for Traffic Building and Brand Marketing“

What’s the deal with clients?

They expect you to drop what you’re doing and fix their issue and they can’t understand why you’re sending them a bill for your time spent.

They assume what they are asking is easy – but they can’t do it, if it’s easy or hard it doesn’t matter, they can’t do it, hence they are asking you, your time is money so charge for it.

My usual rebuttal is ‘if you called a plumber to drop everything and go fix your issue, would you expect a bill?’

Why should designers or developers be held to any fewer standards, time is money no matter what industry you’re in. You will find designers and developers’ time is often worth more.

Fortunately I haven’t had this issue for a long time, I learnt all this years ago, you need to bill for your time and in the end your clients will respect what you’re doing more, I always let my clients know up front that every bit of time I spend doing any work for you will be billed (unless its super tiny), and it’s not out of greed or anything, but if all my time that I spend on client work is billed for then my hourly rate will be less since I’m not running around doing errands for clients that are asking stupid questions. If you pay for my time I’m going to deliver the best quality work I can.

The other thing is you find clients ask for lots of other things done out of the scope of a project, since your already billing them for a project they expect the extras free. If a client pays me for time spent, no matter what I’ll work hard and deliver a quality job, if they don’t pay for that time all I’m doing is neglecting other paying clients so I’ll spend 0 time on their out of scope task and end up doing a poor job. I don’t want to deliver a bad solution and they don’t want to receive one, if they understand that they’ll pay the money.

The simple answer to all this is to deliver them a bad solution when they want free work done, when they bitch about it say well, you paid nothing so I spent nothing on it, I have 8 hours in the day that are full with paid work, if you need me to spend hours on your task then you could wait until I have free time in the next few months or I can invoice you and I can put it into a task list to get done today. If you were one of my other paying clients and I wasn’t doing you work because I was too busy doing free work for someone else, how would you feel? Paid customers always come first. This is a business not a charity.

I’ve done this a few times before, works 90% of the time, the other 10% of the time the client never used me again, but that worked out well anyway because they were the clients that always paid late, always bitched about their bill and always wasted my time. Of course what I said above I articulated better to the client, I sat them down and explained everything and I always try to use their business as an example, if I was a client of theirs and always wanted free work done how well would it get delivered?

Okay so I spent the whole last week only posting basically 1 article broken into 7 parts and I posted each part once a day. So the end result was 1 post a day, but the idea was for the post to be something big and good that lots of people would want to read. It kind of worked, I’ve received a whole bunch of traffic from digg.com, Technorati.com, search engines and all that, but the most traffic came in one hit from dnhour.com, someone submitted the article to dnhour.com which is basically a digg.com for domain names.

I had never heard of it before but it’s certainly sent me some traffic! The article is sitting on the front page which is pretty cool! I’m happy, any media is good media!

This week I’m going to take more of the doshdosh.com approach and post 3 or so posts a day, see what that does, quality vs quantity. Just a little experiment, why not eh?

My ideal plan for my site is to post a feature every week, hence that big colourful bar with the heading ‘feature’ at the top of the page. Ideally a good feature every week and the 2+ a day blog posts will be a nice long term plan to build content for the site. Time will tell…

Bloggintips.com has written off Technorai’s authority rating and ReviewMe in one foul swoop. That’s fine, I agree with his arguments to an extent, but these things have to start somewhere. You can’t expect the perfect authority ranking system from their first try at it; at least they are doing something.

Technorati’s authority ranking is pretty simple and it is easily gamed, it’s just based on back links from other blogs, the more you have the higher your rating. Yeah you can buy links and what not to build it up, but at the end of the day there’s only so much you can spend on doing that, real blogs with real back links will grow faster and longer than anyone who buys links. Having people cheat the system is a good thing, that’s how these systems evolve, Technorati will learn how these people are cheating it and change their algorithm, just the same as search engines do, people cheat the rankings and the search engines change how they rank, it’s the cycle of internet life.

I think Technorati have bigger issues, their search is average to say the least. I’d like to see someone use the Google search API and integrate that with Technorati’s authority ranking and Alexa data to provide a more accurate view of what blogs are authorities. Mostly because Google is the king of search and Technorati have at least made a start on some kind of authority ranking for blogs.

Bloggingtips.com also criticised how ReviewMe sets their pricing, saying that since Alexa ranks and Technorati authority can be easily inflated it’s not a good indication of what the price of a review should be.

I agree, it’s not perfect but I think the buyer should always use some due diligence and go investigate the blog themselves. ReviewMe are using the biggest sources around to base their pricing on and that’s the same sources most people look at when buying a link or a post direct from a blog themselves anyway.

Everything out there can be faked, page rank, RSS subscribers, how old your blog is, how old your domain is, posts, everything, Technorati’s ranking does show the big boys as big boys, shoemoney.com has a 4.5k authority ranking and that’s more than most people could buy if they tried. I think the authority rank will get better, it needs to but at least it’s a start, for now if you’re buying any advertising from blogs, check as much as you can before you buy.

I’m a little out of the loop today, had an internet / power outage for the last 2 days because of a storm… will get back into blogging tomorrow!

Okay so one of the main things I’m going to be doing on TalkingDynamics are business experiments. An experiment will usually be in the form of us acquiring a website, re-doing the design, trying to improve the SEO, and then throwing more traffic at it via a few different means.

Overall it’s one big experiment to work out if we can improve on what we’ve got, and to make more money from it - either from ads on the site, selling a service on the site or from selling the site for a profit.

I’m going to start off with 2 sites to experiment with, these are two sites I’ve had kicking around on my server for over a year now, I’ve never promoted them or done much at all with them, kind of set them up and then forgot about them so I figure I might as well use them as an experiment…

First site is a hit counter, myvisitoractivity.com, and second site is a text banner exchange, wxtraffic.com. I have no idea of the value of the hit counter, but I know wxtraffic.com is worth at least $300 at the moment, because that’s the last offer I had for it.

I opted to keep it and use it as an experiment, see if I can build it up with more members and more traffic and sell it at auction for a higher amount.

Each experiment will have its own post with its own information, check out the myvisitoractivity.com experiment here, or wxtraffic.com experiment here.

If you’re interested in keeping up to date on what’s going to happen with these experiments of mine, subscribe to the feed!