Welcome to 2010

// January 4th, 2010 // No Comments » // Personal Goals

Here we go again for another year, and a decade for matter (it’s amazing to think what’s happened in my life over the past 10 years!).

Towards the end of last year I lost focus for a while as is also evident from the lack of posts here at jono.me.

After having a holiday in October for a couple of weeks I never really got back in to my online projects. The Christmas rush came, work was busy, etc, etc.

Like a lot of people the new year becomes an opportunity to refocus and reset your goals.

For me it’s back to reviewing my various projects and prioritising my time… At this stage it seems that webmasterblog.com.au and australianwebmaster.com will be my focus. Will keep you informed!

and we’re back (again)

// August 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // Personal Goals

I must say I get disappointed whenever I visit a blog and find that the owner is a very sporadic poster,  so I am going to commit to getting this place going and be consistent with my posting.

Although this is a personal blog, it’s still written for people to follow my progress and for me to report what I’m learning. Do I worry about traffic? Not at all.

For me, the real benefit of this blog is keeping me on target. Posting what I want to achieve in the coming week and then reporting back makes me accountable and actually drives me to do what I set out to achieve – rather than spending time on things I shouldn’t be.

So where have I been?

Well for some time on this blog I’ve been debating with myself exactly what I should be doing online. What’s the best use of my time? Without knowing the answer it makes it difficult to actually commit to this blog, and to my web sites.

I know what the long term goal is – it’s to be able to replace my day job with an online income. The big question is how do I achieve that?

I had come to the decision that what I have been doing is probably not the right answer. Building my online income with my limited time is a big ask (maybe impossible) with small websites. Web sites take a lot of time and I do find it difficult to commit the necessary time. Sure, I can build them and maintain them but marketing them (other than SEO) is where I struggle. Without marketing the sites will probably never really take off.

I had come to the realisation a couple of weeks ago that the answer is probably to design and develop an online business application which really put a big question mark about what I do with my existing sites.

I’ve since calmed down a bit and think I will keep doing what I am doing for the short-term but with some changes. I will post my upcoming plans shortly…

Do blogs and forums make money?

// June 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // Personal Goals

With blogs and forums there is only a small percentages of them that have the ability to make a good income. Of those sites making a good income, they have taken many years to build to that level and in most cases they started life as a secondary income and built.

Did John Chow make his money blogging on johnchow.com? No. Did Darren Rowse make his money blogging on problogger.net? No. These sites weren’t their primary source of income in the beginning, even if they are now.

I’d also argue that it would be difficult for these sites to regenerate their success in current times. There is a lot more “noise” now and getting yourself heard is difficult. It’s not impossible however it would be more difficult.

There is no arguement that blogs and forums CAN make money, however there is a small percentage which would make the type of money I’d require to replace my full-time income.

Blogs and forums take a long to build, and in the build phase they take an enormous amount of work.

I see most blogs and forums as marketing tools. They are a great way to build your brand and network, however as far as making considerable money goes, the odds are against you.

Working towards something

// June 3rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Personal Goals

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been considering the best route for me to take with my online ventures.

I tend to have lots of ideas which I haven’t fully implemented for one reason or another, and recently I have begun to question which projects are the best ones for me to work on first.

Ultimately I am doing all of this to make money (full-time income type of money) so therefore whatever I spend my time on should be leading towards that goal.

As I’ve mentioned before, building a non-income generating site would still help me work towards that goal – just for the experience, but I think I need to be concentrating on the projects that will in fact have a direct impact on my goals.

With the current economic conditions I feel some urgency to increase my income and therefore I’ve decided to concentrate on those that that have the ability to become full-time income generating sites.

At the moment I feel as though my current income is where I need to aim. If I look at my current full-time income and calculate it as a daily rate, I need to work out how I can make that amount each and every day. There are going to by ups and downs so I actually need to aim higher than that.

When I see that figure it’s daunting however it does help me to be realistic about what types of sites I should work on. If it’s not going to come close, then it’s something that has to wait.

I actually hope that I never rely on a single site to make all my income – ideally I would have several sites which all contribute to my income, however it’s a good gauge to determine where I should be spending my time.

Weekly Plans & Goals, June 1st 2009

// June 1st, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Personal Goals

Accomplished last week…

The contest on DigitalPoint for a site design was completed. It was an interesting project. In the end I had to blatently spelt-out what I liked from all the entries received and hoped someone would pinch the ideas from the other submissions and make it. I didn’t feel it was completely fair to the contestants however I needed to get a design done – they should have put it together themselves.

The next step is to code the design in xHTML/CSS. Initially it was something we were going to do however will probably pay someone else – I found someone who will code it for $30, our time is far more valuable than that so it makes sense to outsource it.

We need to clean up the design a little and then we’ll get it coded.

The script project also wrapped up. It was posted on two sites, hireservices.com.au and getafreelancer.com. On hireservices.com.au due to the strange way they run their bid process the job automatically closed and I am unable to contact people who submitted prices which is a pain. On getafreelancer.com the bids were a lot more than what we had previously received (ie. on elance.com and hireservices.com.au). On getafreelancer.com the available “budget ranges” were higher and even though our budget was on the lower end of the range, most bids were for the upper end. At the stage we’ve extended the bidding stage for a few more weeks until we decide whether we can stretch the budget.

This week…

I actually have a bit happening this week unrelated to my online projects so it will be quiet.

This week I want to finalise the design we had done on DigitalPoint and send it off for coding.

Other than that I will spend a bit more time on australianwebmaster.com and start preparing the monthly newsletter which I normally send out on the 7th of each month. It’s going to be a difficult one because I have honestly no idea what to include!

I will also run through some more figures, analysing income potential of projects and doing more planning of projects.

Finally, unlike last week, I do have a couple of other post ideas for this site so I will continue to post here. I must also alter the CSS for this theme, the Heading 1 tag is bigger than the post title!

Mid-term Goals

// May 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Personal Goals, diyweb.com.au

I intended doing more of a opinion piece today however have something on my mind…

One of my self-assigned tasks for this week was to plan diyweb.com.au.

I have given it some thought however I’m stuck. The way I see it, I have two options.

Option 1 is to do what I said, turn it in to a site with resources on how to set up your own web site. So cover domain names, hostings, CMS (e.g. WordPress) and how to maintain the site. I could use some video (screen casting) showing all this stuff.

This option could provide revenue by selling hosting (either via my own reseller account or affiliate), template affiliates, etc. I could also offer to do all the messy stuff for a fee (but it would only be a small fee I’d say).

Option 2 is to sell preconfigured custom WordPress blogs which people can then self maintain and extend. This was another idea I had for offering locally, initially under a different site. Costs would need to be kept as low as possible as the market would be small businesses starting out online.

Both options have their pluses and minuses.

I feel the main deciding factor is which one will help me meet my goals, and this is where I’ve realised that I don’t have my goals really planned.

I know my long term goal, but what’s my mid-term goals?

Long term I know I want to be able to replace my offline salary with an online income but I now need to work out how best to get there.

In the case of diyweb.com.au I have the opportunity to setup a simple site which can give me an experience of launching a site and provide some income, or it might be an opportunity to start developing that income which has the potential to replace my offline salary.

The third option is to do both – go option 1 initially and develop it in to option 2 (maybe using a different domain?).

Hmmm…. back to the drawing board!

Plans for this week

// May 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Personal Goals, australianwebmaster.com, diyweb.com.au, freecssgallery.com

I need to put some commitment in to getting some things done. This week I am planning to work on the following:

freecssgallery.com

I have left this site for quite some time, in fact the last template added was 7 March. I was expecting a whole lot more traffic to the site than what I am getting, having said that, the site traffic seems to be picking up but it’s still pretty pathetic.

I have a number of CSS template lists bookmarked so it’s just a matter of going through and picking out the ones I think look the best. As I’m using WordPress I can then schedule them to have a new template to appear once a day.

My plan is to do around 30 templates then I can then I forget about it for a month. After that I can the reassess what do with the site.

diyweb.com.au

Not something I do very often but I was looking at the Whirlpool forums over the weekend and noticed a couple of people asking questions about setting up a basic web site. They were getting some pretty unhelpful advice – like go and learn HTML. Valid advice but I don’t think people NEED to know HTML to build a basic web site.

A while back I had an idea for a web site which catered for this type of person, I registered the domain diyweb.com.au but other than setting up the default WordPress install I hadn’t got much further.

The idea is to teach people how to start their own web site on the cheap.

This week I would like to put a bit more thought in to this site. I could easily get carried away with building the site so I want to work out what I MUST have to do to get it up and running. I’m not 100% sure where the income would come from (it might be a community service project? ) so I want to control how much time I spend on it.

australianwebmaster.com

Planning on trying to hang back a bit on this one for this week and work on some other sites. Will probably do some posting today (as it always goes dead over the weekend) and then see if I can leave it until the weekend.

Other stuff

• I have to put together a web design brief for a web site – planning on holding a competition on DigitalPoint for a design. Mainly done however have to come up with some example sites showing the type of stuff I like.
• I have to re-post a development project on a freelance site after the person we had doing it failed to deliver.
• I also want to keep up the posts on here, jono.me. It’s a bit of a personal challenge to keep committed to this site like I’ve intended to several times. Over the past week you can probably see a mixture of posts from personal blogs (like this one) to more hints & tips – a little  unsure what I should be posting at this stage. Thinking that the “hints & tips” probably deserve a better location than here but at this stage, just posting something is my goal.