Gadooney.com

I’d earmarked this weekend for finally motivating and tearing down the sizable-yet-rotting-and-falling-down shed in the backyard that we inherited with the house, but it appears Mother Nature had other plans, as it’s raining like a mofo, the temperature is dropping, and we actually might get a little sleet/freezing rain on Monday and Tuesday.

It’s always funny watching people in central Texas collectively lose their minds when there’s even a hint of winter weather, as we’ve already got newscasts blaring about the Killer Winter Storm barreling down on us, people are ravaging bottled water supplies at stores, and some state agencies (like the University of Texas, where my wife works) are already planning to be closed on Tuesday, and to open at 10 AM on Wednesday.

It’s Saturday, people, and its like 60 degrees outside. You’re already planning to be closed 3-4 days from now, based on that dude on television that tells you how hot or cold it might be in the future? Yeah, I know, Killer Winter Storm moving in, but the worst you’re projecting is that it’ll drop to 30 degrees or so late Monday night. I realize I’m a bit jaded due to living in Colorado for four years, but geez.

The last few weeks have been busy but good, as far as things on the affiliate front. I should probably broaden that a bit to the “business front”, as I’m taking the first fledgling steps to expand past the pure affiiliate marketing model I’ve been doing the last 5-6 years via my business. The potential rental property I was looking at fell through, but I did get a revolving line of credit established for my business, which opens up a lot of possibilities.

The plan is to still look for a rental property in the $30,000-$40,000 range (which is actually feasible where we live, if you aren’t scared off by owning rental properties in lower-income areas of town), use the revolving line of credit to pay cash and buy it, rent it for a year or two, then rehab and sell, aggressively paying down the line of credit with any net rental income plus what I make on the affiliate side of things. Which actually has been a good motivator on the affiliate side, as far as ramping things up to where I could reasonably expect to do all of the above and own the property, free and clear, in a year or two.

But it’s also made me get more focused in general, as far as building my business and being open to possibilites outside of affiliate marketing. That’s always going to be my bread and butter, but there are also pretty close relatives to it that I can pursue, as well as completely unrelated things (like real estate) that it can provide the funds to pursue and invest in.

As far as the weekly recap, things have been clipping along nicely. Here are the traffic stats for Gadooney.com, since I installed SlimsStats near the end of December:

Week 51: 308 unique users
Week 52: 225 unique users
Week 1:  365 unique users

In the broader Web picture, that’s tiny traffic, but for a brand new site with hardly anything indexed in search engines, that ain’t too bad. You really shouldn’t pay any attention to traffic at all for the first few months, as it’ll likely only disappoint you, but I’m throwing it out there just so you get a sense of scale. Webmasters tend to be very clouse-mouthed about traffic numbers, and for good reason, but that doesn’t help you one bit when you’re getting your feet wet, so screw that noise.

The top referring domain for the week was IamFacingForeclosure.com, followed by my poker blog and Digg. One practical thing to note about Digg is that you only get truly crazy traffic from there if you landon the main page, which is what people talk about when you see stories about getting Digged and having your site crash, due to immense traffic. If you’re not on the main page, your Digg traffic is usually more of a trickle, so don’t freak out if you ever see Digg in your referral stats and think your site is about to be overwhelmed with traffic and about to crash.

As far as income, it was a decent week but nothing spectacular. I’m going to move towards reporting that stuff on a monthly basis, as it’s too time consuming to do it weekly, and I’m also going to expand it to include all of my Web-based schemings and not just Gadooney.com. I’m finding myself working more on other sites of late, so just reporting on things here isn’t really indicative of what I’m doing, and where I’m making money. I still think it’s valuable to be transparent about all of that stuff, as it motivates me and shows you what is actually possible and what to expect, I just want to shift it to monthly to save me some hassle and to expand it, to show the value in working on assorted things and projects.

As far as what the hell I did this week, I’m still working more to revamp some older, largely dormant sites than on getting new content out there. None are really ready for public consumption but they’re getting there, and should start kicking in a bit of money to the bottom line. I’ve got a couple of new sites ready to roll out, too, but I’m waiting to get my hosting sorted out, as far as switching over to a dedicated server package, before putting up any new sites that I’d immediately have to move over, etc.