If you havn’t read my last post about entrecard, feel free to do so now so you can understand the context in which I’m about to abuse entrecard about.

This is just an example of the bullshit that’s happening over their new pricing of advertising on sites.

Really bad sites with nothing to offer at all are now at a weighted cost of over 4,000 credits…

An example: http://sfi-income.blogspot.com/, http://seeds-of-dissolution.blogspot.com/.

Now not only have they screwed their pricing structure, but by also allowing ads to go that high they have totally ignored the value of their credits and how much time it takes to earn credits, it’s now like living in north korea where the simple things are expensive and the expensive things are government provided to special people.

Few more days I’m giving them to sort their shit out before I jump ship.

Also, entrecard, if you read this and my last post – I’m available to consult.

I think the reason entrecard is as popular as it is right now is because of the ‘dropping’ that goes on.

People run around dropping cards to A, boost their credits, and B to gain some clicks back from having their card left in other people’s ‘drop list’.

People don’t mind so much having people drop and run, because it boosts their traffic a little, but is also does give exposure to people who otherwise have no reason to visit.

Being able to earn credits for dropping and being able to drop to your heart’s content stimulates an economy of credits.

On the flip side of that your blog is ranked based on the number of drops on average over a week x2. So having lots of drops gives you a higher ranking on their site.

Having lots of drops on your blog isn’t a bad thing either, it gives you a higher rank, some other blogs that DO have more traffic but less people that use or drop entrecard don’t rank as high as your blog may because you might have more people coming to drop cards.

Which again isn’t bad, the rankings are skewed, but that’s the point, to give the lesser blogs more exposure and to try and share the traffic around a bit more. It’s also an incentive to the blog owner who does have more traffic to promote entrecard more to boost their rank inside entrecard, again, this is a win for entrecard, more exposure for them.

Now, what they have done is changed the calculation of credits to advertise on a blog.

Before to advertise on here for example it was 150 or so a day, I don’t get a lot of entrecard traffic, but I do get around 200 unique visits a day, and I have gained new readers from having people visit from entrecard.

Right now it’s 2 credits to advertise on my blog. So they have totally killed what my blog was worth simply because there’s no big queue of people waiting to advertise, there’s no big queue because I decline ads to try and keep some quality and relevance, so right now I have to forgo quality and relevance in order to get my rank back up.

Is this better or worse?

Well I know why they have changed it, they want to stop the ‘spam‘ of people dropping everywhere to gain credits, they have forgotten however the fact is that’s why they are popular, you can visit 1,000 blogs, get 1,000 credits and 1,000 blogs now have 1 extra visitor, everyone wins.

Now there’s no real value in visiting other blogs, or dropping cards, there’s no value for me to have an entrecard widget up high in my site anymore – or at all. Having it up high meant people dropped, putting it down lower means they didn’t, so I can put it down lower now and not worry about drops.

So entrecard loses, they are going to get dropped below other widgets, they are going to lose visitors, other sites are going to lose traffic and people will stop using them unless they change their weighting to something better.

Personally I think it should go back to how it was, rank sites based on the number of drops, BUT moderate the people dropping, weight the drops so the first 50 or so are 1:1.5, the next 50 are 1:1, the next 50 are 1:0.75, next 50 are 1:0.5 and so on, so your encouraged to drop 50 or so, then the next 50 are 1 to 1, then after that your classified as a heavy dropper or a spammer, so the credits for dropping diminish.

This way the people who visit a legit number of sites a day under 100, get rewarded, and it limits net worth of spamming.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this because I think dropping was a large part of the entrecard economy and it’s going to really kill them, pricing a site based on ads waiting is stupid personally, no longer is a site based on quality, just the number of people in a waiting list, a quality site that moderates what types of ads being shown will lose out and the shit sites that take everything and swap ads will benefit.

My plan this year is to do away with clients totally by the end of the year. Be 100% self reliant income wise.

How am I going to achieve this? The same way anyone else can. By investing my time and energies into my own business ventures, building web based applications based on subscription models and by investing my excess revenue into offline businesses.

I have a whole bunch of targets I need to meet financially, but with the right planning and by putting the right steps in place I should be able to get there.

The same goes for anyone, and anything. Work out what you want to do with your X (X being your website, business, blog, life, whatever). And then sit down and research ways to achieve this.

For example if your goal is to make money from your blog, you really need to work out how that’s going to happen, why would people read your blog, what hooks are in place to get people to register to your mailing list or subscribe to your RSS feed, what value are you delivering to the end reader that they can’t get somewhere else?

In my opinion for a blog it really comes down to content and hooks, if your content delivers value people will read and search engines will index, if your hooks are of value people will take the bait and refer other people to it as well.

If the goal is to build traffic to the site to sell ads or something, then work on small targets, 100 a day, 200 a day, 500 a day, 1,000 a day etc. But don’t just set random targets without ways to achieve them, for every target put in place a set of actions that will make that target achievable.

It’s easy to say I want 5k visits a day and you’ll get that from writing good content. Well you might but you probably won’t, it’s better to say I’ll get 500 a day from writing good content, and search optimising my site, networking with others in my industry, buying ads on related sites and building some link bait.

And then go from there; work on sustaining that traffic and then growing on it to reach that 5k, it’s the same old story on the internet, once the traffic is there the ad revenue will follow.

For me in my position I’m working on building web applications that generate revenue, I’ll be building them with my team of developers in between client projects, and once they are ready for the public we’ll start small with some basic marketing, and no fees for usage, grow the user base, and start working on ways to monetise once the application has a healthy number of active users.

Until there’s a good amount of users on the system, just like high traffic numbers to a site, there’s no point of trying to monetise, you’ll make shit all and you’ll only drive people away.

The thing with blogging is that it gives people a quick fix of content, if you have a problem you can find an answer in a post, if you want to learn something new you can skim through a post and get the details you need quick, if you’re a regular visitor to a certain blog you can skim through the posts and content of the week and only read the bits that are applicable to you.

But with a video blog, to actually get the content, you have to sit down and really listen to the whole video, it could be pointless crap, like most of what I talk, but you don’t know until you get into it. Which takes time most people don’t have – or aren’t willing to spend.

I think the only way a video blog would work is if the majority of the content was still normal text, and then the videos were a content delivery necessity.
As in, walking through a tutorial or showing how to use a system and implement that on your site or something.

I’m sure there’s a market for a whole video based blog, but the traffic to the same content in text form wouldn’t be comparable. And that’s what it’s all about isn’t it? Traffic?

I don’t get it, I’ve come across so many sites, and blogs (blogs are the bigger culprit here), that have a bad design, almost no real traffic but shitloads of ads.

There are more ads than there is content at times, most of the spots are “advertise here” or are just affiliate links.

The massive amount of ads aren’t making them money, they would be better off removing the ads and concentrating on producing a better site that people wouldn’t just bounce from right away.

By delivering quality content with 1-2 target advertising techniques you’ll make a much more cash than by just abusing people with ads everywhere.

There’s a big downside to having ads everywhere, even if you do have truckloads of traffic, the visitors become ‘immune’ to the ads, they are used to seeing ads everywhere and it becomes a visual overload that is looked over rather than clicked on.

You’re pushing away your visitors from clicking on ads, and your advertisers wont advertise with you again if you’re not delivering a healthy CPC rate.

Take JohnChow for example, his blog is flooded with ads, as soon as I load the page 5 of the 10 main ad spots are all for 1 program, different people are advertising the same affiliate program, saturating the site with the same crap and making me more immune to what’s being advertised.

The only way to achieve a healthy CPC rate from JC.com would be to have him recommend your site in a post. Other than that I’m sure you would be getting clicks from advertising on there, just nothing compared to someone tell you to go visit a site (engaging the visitor with the advert, rather than plastering ads everywhere).

Failing is the best way to learn something in my opinion. You come out the other end with a better knowledge of the market you entered, you end up knowing the to-dos and not-to-dos, you work out how things work and interact, you should have worked out where you went wrong, people you should have spoken to and deals you should have done.

After you fail you realise every area where you went wrong, and you should sit down and really think about it all, it’ll only better equip you for when you do it again, or something similar.

Starting projects or businesses isn’t just a ‘keep trying and one will eventually work’ situation, it’s more of a learning process, you do a few, fail, learn from it all, keep doing it and failing until you’re in a position to have a good go at something, a real opportunity will present itself and when it does, you’ll have the knowledge and experience from before to make you somewhat of an expert in the area.

Maybe that’s a good idea for a site, submit your failure, write down what you did, where you went wrong and make it public so other people can learn and benefit from your disaster.

Then again, maybe that’ll be a failure too…

Personally I started my first dot com when I was 15, it failed obviously, but not long after I started another, which I sold a long time ago now, that business was profitable, and still is today. I started it when I was 16, ran it till I was 18, employed over 10 people, sold it and moved on to my next venture.

That was my first success in the internet industry, at 16 years of age before the dot com ‘boom’ and its inevitable ‘burst’ later on. Since then I’ve had other successes and many more failures. I think I average about 1 in 10, for every 1 success there’s 10 failures.

I don’t think that’s a bad number, I think it’s a result of starting something with the interest of fun and for something to do – personal interest, rather than trying to start a business to turn a profit. I rarely start a ‘business’ everything I start is a ‘project’ in my eyes, it’s something new and interesting, I’m doing it for some fun, to learn something new, and because I’m really interested in the idea I’ve come up with.

I’m an ideas kind of man, I have a million ideas, brainstorm nonstop, I plan, map, document everything, I’ve researched so many things it’s not funny, my knowledge of the internet is extensive due to the enormity of the things I’ve researched over the years, but I love it, I love doing it, I enjoy starting new projects and watching what happens to them.

I think I can honestly say I rarely care if something fails, I have so many other projects on the go, or in waiting that if one fails, there’s another to fill its gap. I don’t have a fear of something failing as long as my overall net revenue isn’t diminished in the process.

On top of my server moves, I’ve also gone through the motions of upgrading legacy apps, as well as this blogs wordress and phpbb3 forum.

I don’t know what version of WP I was running before, but this new version is pretty cool, better design and interface, nice and clean, and I’ve upgraded phpbb from 3RC3 to the latest version, 3.0

This re-iterates what I was talking about in my last post, the more apps and sites you have floating around the more sites and systems you have to mange, update and maintain on a monthly basis.

All of my sites are run on some kind of underlying application, be it 3rd party or custom written, and all of them require upgrades and maintenance to keep them running efficiently, and to make sure they aren’t venerable to attacks or hacks.

Spending this time is fine, as long as there’s a benefit, if you have all these sites out there that don’t have any traffic and you’re spending time upgrading them then you’re only taking time away that’s better spent serving other sites – you could be spending an extra hour a day promoting your more profitable sites while your screwing around with un-required maintenance.

Really look at all the sites your running and have a good think about what’s up there of value to you, and what’s just a waste of time and resources, kill them and maximize the time you spend to make your main sites more profitable.

Having everything organised is important to me, and it should be for almost everyone. There’s nothing worse than having a server die, or system crash and not knowing what’s affected, not having a backup and not knowing what has to be restored.

Aside from a system restore point of view, it’s important in case a server becomes hacked or heavily loaded; it’s good to have your heavily loaded sites on servers that can handle the traffic, or at least have a location for them to move to in a short period of time if one of your sites does become busy.

I’ve spend the first 4hrs of this morning moving sites off 2 of my old dedicated servers and into new virtual server environments. My new virtual servers won’t have hardware failures and won’t need hardware upgrades, additional resources are 1 click scalable and the hardware is spread across multiple servers.

Another part of organisation I like to do with my servers is to remove any sites that are unused, or dead, I like to prune old sites off my servers, rather than letting them linger around for no real reason, I either sell or just delete and let the domain drop.

The fewer sites floating around on my servers the more focus I have on the sites that are actually worth spending time on, rather than having to maintain sites that are a waste of time.

I have a few hundred domains, but actual sites that are operational are around 40. I have designs and systems for close to 100 domains, but I don’t have the time to maintain or market the rest of them, the designs are sitting on our local server for the day when some of the current batch that are operational are shut down or sold off.

I talk about this because my friend just had server die with about 40 sites on it, took him over a week to restore all the sites on a new server, mostly because of bad backups and not knowing what was actually on that server. It was all a bit of a mess, but at least now he’s running on a dedicated virtual server that shouldn’t die anytime soon.

Well it’s the weekend for most 9-5 people, but I try to spend my Saturdays working on personal development.

I try to look away from any client work and do things that benefit my personal business interests and myself, usually more my personal business than myself.

5 days a week like most of us we’re busy with client projects or working a fulltime job, so the only time spare is either after hours or weekends, I work long days as it is so its weekends for me.

Being in Thailand (yes I my office is in Thailand), the work week is a 6 day week, so my office is full of staff who are still doing client work, but I’m in here working on my own personal projects, and today I’m work on my blog, doing some minor updates and writing some articles. Having staff in here is a good motivator, I don’t treat it as the weekend, it’s a working day and I’m putting 100% into what I’m doing just like any other day.

I think it’s important to turn away clients for a day, don’t read your email, don’t answer the phone, just spend a day working on what’s important to you, what makes you feel good and work on your goals.

It’s also important to have personal goals, aside from earning your main revenue from clients, you should have a personal business goal, have a side project to work on and use this day to focus 100% on that project. Plan what you need to do and then every Saturday sit down and tick off items on that list.

That’s one of the ways I approach working on my personal projects, build a list and every Saturday look at the list and attack it like I would any oth
er client project.

Okay so it’s the end of the month, I’ve done a fair few posts, some good some bad, some abusive some pointless, but overall I hope it’s been enjoyable to read and you’ve taken something away.

I’ve also done some minor renovations, updated the navigation, and added my Facebook link so if you like me you can add me as a friend! Why not?

Next month I’m going to try and see if people are interested in the form side of the blog, I’ve only got back into posting again at the end of Feb, and the forum has been stagnant since the end of last year, so I might try and post some more links to the forum.

Also, subscribe to me in a reader dammit, would like to see my feed count rise a little!

Some posts of interest this month:

• A good investment - if you like renovating
• Repeat customers is where your profit is
• Diversification, it’s easy, make it happen
• Project wonderful: good idea, bad execution
• What’s your advertising really worth
• The price of buying a site is more than just its revenue

See you Monday!… Subscribe! RSS!