Gadooney.com

Stupid Real Life

Sorry about the sparse updates of late, but real life has been an inistent bugger of late, what with putting in an offer on an investment property, taking our silly, clumsy pet rat to the vet, and all the other boring details that manage to quickly fill up one’s day, leaving little time for blog ramblings.

Soon, though, we shall get back to the regularly scheduled ramblings.

Much Ado About AGLOCO

Weekly Recap

Weekly recap is going to be on the brief side this week, as this weekend promises to be on the hectic side.

I’m still catching up on some lingering work from shifting hosts, as far as getting the last few sites moved over, so that I can completely shut down the old hosting account. WordPress isn’t helping matters, either, as they’ve released three upgrades in the last few weeks, so I’ve been spinning my wheels a bit there, upgrading sites here and there to the new version, only to find out a few days later there’s a newer new version, etc.

On the content side, I rolled out a new site at Vroomchatter.com, which soaked up much of my time as far as content creation. I’m not a die hard NASCAR fan, but we watch the race most weekends, and actually went to a race in Phoenix on our honeymoon, so it’s something I’m interested in, which makes content creation much easier. I also wanted to try an affiliate site that was a bit different than my other stuff, as far as taking a popular niche like NASCAR (which has lots of fan sies, blogs, and news sites) and creating a site that would aggregate a lot of the content, with a little wit and insight thrown in for good measure.
I’m probably going to chill a bit on adding new sites for awhile, as I’ve got a good mix of sites going at the moment, and a month or two to really crank on the content and site optimization before Google and other search engines fully index the sites. We’ll see if I can stick to that promise, though, as I’m sort of a sucker for suddenly deciding that OH MY LORD I MUST HAVE A SITE ABOUT DIABETIC WOMBATS and registering the domain, slapping up a site quickly with WordPress, and creating a bunch of content for it.

Traffic is inching up here, week by week, which is encouraging, especially since I’ve done very little to try to generate traffic, other than simply post content.

Saturday Ramblings

Pretty hectic and crazy week, despite the fact that I got two extra days off from work, due to ice and sleet and what-not in central Texas, of all places.

Much of that was due to switching over to a dedicated server at HostGator, and all the work involved in that. There’s not much joy in switching hosts, especially if you have a lot of databases to move over, but I didn’t feel like I had much choice, as my old host couldn’t come up with a solution to the fact that performance across all my sites of late would inexplicably (according to them) bog down at times. Umm, okay. Bye.

Weekly recap is going to be pretty high level, as I need to get my butt in gear and crank out some content myself, having spent much of the week on behind the scenes sort of things. I’m still picking away at Cisco Certifications, but that project goes very slowly. Let that be an object lesson to you, as far as how it’s much harder to write content for a topic that you have little interest in.

It’ll get there, and I’m not really sweating it’s glacial, slumbering pace of getting done, but a good contrast is the Patio to Pool site I launched this week.  Less than a week into that one and I’ve already got tons of pages up, and banging out new pages with relative ease. Don’t get me wrong, I have no great love for pools and/or patios, but it doesn’t put me into an immediate coma, and there are different things to write about to jazz the content creation process up slightly.

I’m still re-vamping some older sites, including Oddsnark, Pig Iron Malt, and Science Fiction Robots. These are hard as they get lots of traffic but they’re also broad and sprawling, so it’s hard to wring much money out of the traffic. The narrower the focus of the site, the easier it is to monetize the traffic it gets, as nearly everyone that comes through the virtual door is a decent, pre-qualified lead. Not so much with broader sites that are about “sports” and “weird” and “technology”, as it’s hard to serve up ads or links that surfers are inclined to respond to and click on.

The plan for the next few weeks is to really grind on the content front, as I’ve got probably half a dozen ideas for new sites lined up, and now that the hosting is sorted out the goal is to just put my head down and get as much stuff out there as possible.

*Wipes Sweat from Forehead*

Sorry about the lack of posts the last few days and general wonkiness of site accessibility. I’ve been making the switch over to the land of dedicated servers and wrestling with moving over databases and in general getting my head around some of the control panel stuff on the backend. ‘Tis nice to have pretty much complete control over everything but with great power comes lots of wading through less-than-user-friendly interfaces, installation guides, and support documents. Things seem to be back up and fairly stable now *crosses fingers* so hopefully we’re ready to roll.

Thank You, Rain Gods

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.

Free for All Friday

Ask me a question. I dare you.

Things have been pretty hectic of late, with no signs of it easing anytime soon. I’m working on some pretty cool new stuff, though, which is close to being unleashed upon the world. I know, coy and annoying, but them’s the breaks sometimes.

In somewhat related news, I’m just about to make the leap and get a dedicated server package at HostGator. I’d been happy with my current host but of late my sites have been pretty sluggish, and their “solutions” are anything but that, as far as shifting things from server to server, blaming the slowness on the compiling of stats each day but refusing to simply turn off the stats compiling, etc. It’s probably time for me bid adieu to shared hosting anyway, and the managed dedicated server packages at HostGator have some pretty nice bells and whistles attached, including the ability to re-sell Web hosting and eCommerce packages pre-installed, and other potentially useful stuff.

So look forward to some posts in the near future about the trials and tribulations of switching Web hosts. It’s actually usually not that bad, and hopefully not something you’ll ever need to know about, but potentially useful to file away in that rainy day category.

So…Very…Tired

Nothing like three or four consecutive late nights with my nose to the grindstone to remind me of a simple unavoidable truth: getting older blows. Yeah yeah, I know that being the ripe old age of 32 doesn’t exactly qualify me for a discounted rate at the EconoLodge, but it’s also a far cry from the days of yore where I’d only get four or five hours of sleep a night for weeks at a time and never blink an eye. These days, not so much, with much dragging of ass accompanying even just a few nights in a row of burning the midnight oil. And it’s only going to get worse, too.

Not much going on other than extreme busyness, but assorted deadline crunches are now behind me and I’ll get back to posting regularly the next few days.

Saturday Morning Ramblings

This was a pretty hectic week on the affiliate front, although there’s not a lot to show for it in the “Done” category. I ended up sinking a lot of time into a potential freelance project, which basically involves building out a pretty large site from scratch as a resume, which hopefully will be good enough to land me the gig. I’m also in the process of reviving a couple of older projects that had lain dormant for awhile, Oddsnark and Science Fiction Robots, as well as getting close to launching an entirely new sort of endeavor that’s got  me pretty excited.

But what about your Cisco Certifications site, you ask, the one you were going to bang out by last Sunday and be done with?  Err, yeah, not so much. But in the whole vein of not fearing getting sidetracked (as long as you’re working on something), I’m not going to sweat it too much. Remember, new sites don’t get full traction in search engines for months, so the only real deadline for new sites you launch are the fairly arbitrary ones you set for yourself, at least until it gets fully indexed.

I still plan on knocking out the Cisco site in the next week or two, but I’m not going to freak out if I end up working on other stuff. As long as I’m doing work and making progress and not sitting in my boxers, watching Beauty and the Geek marathons, picking my nose, it’s all good.

I’m probably going to skip the full on review of traffic and stats income this week, as I’m a little short on time this morning, but it wasn’t very exciting. I think I made $12 on the Adsense side, and $0 at CommissionJunction. Traffic was up a bit from the previous week but largely due to people coming back to work after vacation.

Free for All Friday

Gots questions? Ask ‘em.

Falstaff has been playing along at home and asked that I take a quick look at the sites he’s working on. Can do. If you’d like reviews of your own sites, holler at me and it shall be so.

Here are the sites we’re looking at today: Full Shill Poker, Boogie Turtle, Lighting for Worship, and Charlotte Theatre News and Gossip.

As a whole, that’s a damn good start, especially since you were starting from scratch just a few weeks ago, with no real knowledge of Wordpress, hosting stuff, etc. It’s easy to be overwhelmed at first by all the things you don’t know, but you’re plowing ahead and getting content up. I also like that you have many different types of sites you’re working on, so it’s easy to mix in different types of content, work over here a bit, then over there, and not get burned out writing about the same stuff on the same site.

Full Shill Poker and Boogie Turtle are the most developed, as far as content and theme. It’s pretty easy to tell that both are subjects you’re interested in and knowledgable about, and the content you’re posting on each is right on track, as far as the stuff that’ll get you search engine traffic. Each fits into a niche that you know about and can easily create content for. Each also has existing affiliate programs that meshes well with your content (poker and casino affiliate programs and online retailers that sell CDs), so you don’t have to rely solely on Adsense as far as monetizing the sites.

While I usually don’t worry about the layout of the site all that much in the beginning, I do have to say that I’m not a fan of the dark backgrounds, especially on Full Shill Poker, as the combination of the black background and white text in that font makes my eyes scream for mercy after reading it for a bit. This falls into the personal taste category somewhat, but in general it’s recommended that you stay away from black/dark grey background sites, as a gawdawful number of expensive studies have shown that sites with plain white backgrounds, black text, and blue links/colors perform the best.

My approach to this in my own sites is to generally look at the Yahoos, Googles, and Amazons of the world and do what they do, as it’s obviously working. Boring, yes, but it’s hard to argue with their success.

A by-product of the dark backgrounds you’re using is that the ads (which generally have a white background) are very obviously ads, jumping out from the screen and blaring at the surfer. This is a little counter-intuitive, but that’s actually bad. Your goal is to be sneaky and to blend and incorporate the ads as much as possible into your site design. If it screams out “I’M AN ADVERTISEMENT!”, surfers have become conditioned to almost subconsciously ignore it; if it appears to be part of the navigation of the site, more people tend to read it and/or click on it.

Don’t be afraid to specialize your ads, especially on Full Shill Poker. I like the riff on “Full Tilt Poker” and wonder if you could simply shill for them, as far as the ads and baners you display. Having done the poker/casino affiliate thing, in general there’s not a huge difference from what you’ll make from program to program, barring special circumstances. If all of your advertising is focused on Full Tilt (and tghtly integrated into the site design) it gives it a more weighty, polished look, instead of banners for a bunch of different sites jumping out at you.

As far as Boogie Turtle, I’d work in some direct product links in each review, especially if they’re sold on Amazon, iTunes, or at some other online retailer. You might have to do some poking around to see what music CD programs are out there, which pay the best, etc. The reviews are great but you’ll make more money if you have linked album covers or tracks. You could also list the tracks on each album and have them hyperlinked, so that surfers click on them looking for a sample but end up getting transported to the page at the retailer, where sample tracks actually are and where they can buy it, and you can make some cash.

For affiliate sites that are tied into products, it’s always best to include as many direct product links to specific products as you can. Links and banners to Amazon are fine but your real money is in providing direct links to buy the specific product you’re talking about, as that’s what people are after.

Lighting for Worship and Charlotte Theatre News and Gossip are still in the infant stages, so not much to say there.  Forum sites like the theatre one are hard to monetize sometimes but they’re usually very little work for you, as forum members supply most of the content. They’re also a no-brainer if it’s something you’re already involved in, especially if it provides a useful service that is otherwise lacking. I like the idea behind Lighting for Worship, as I can’t imagine there are too many sites with content about that particular niche, and you can potentially not only get Jebus-related traffic (of which there’s a bunch) but also traffic from people looking for more info on the equipment itself.

All in all, you’re off to a great start, especially considering that you’re starting from square one. Keep cranking out content. The main things I’d consider tweaking are the dark backgrounds on the first two sites and to fiddle with the ads more, trying to incorporate them as seamlessly as possible into the site.