Gadooney.com

I have to admit that I’m pretty excited about the upcoming year. You never know what life will throw at you, but I feel like many different factors are perfectly aligned for 2007 to be a pretty exciting (and profitable) year.

2006 was a pretty interesting year for me, especially on the affiliate side of things. More so in the “May you live in interesting times” sense of the word, with everything chugging along nicely until October kneecapped me, then kicked me in the groin, then stood there, laughing at me writhing on the ground in pain. But it never quite managed to kill me, and I suppose there’s some truth in that which doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger.

I think setting goals is always a good thing, but I’m at a bit of a loss as to what they should be, either for this site or in a more general sense. My first impulse was to set a monetary figure to shoot at as far as net income for the year, but that can be a double-edged sword. I’m pretty good about scrambling around and finding ways to make cash in the short term, but have fallen on my face at times in the past as far as taking bigger picture concerns into account, which sometimes require different actions than what might maximize the money you make in any given month.

On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for challenging yourself. It’s easy to hedge and say that I can’t know the future, that I can’t predict what sort of affiliate work I’ll be doing 12 months from now, and/or that I can’t fall into the trap of setting myself up for failure by setting unrealistic goals. That’s a lot of can’ts. Why not instead simply blurt out what I want and then force myself to find a way to make that happen?

• I want to end the year making $3,000/month in net income from affiliate and freelance work. Any Web-related work I do that is outside of my day job goes into this column, but it doesn’t include any income from real estate or income investments in stocks, precious metals, options, etc.

That’s going to take some work, but it’s not impossible. $36,000/year from something I’m doing part-time sounds ridiculous but I’ve easily surpassed that each of the last two years. It’s going to take some scratching and clawing, as far as building up new sites, as well as a lot of work on some of the existing assets I have, that I can squeeze more money out of.

• I want to end the year with either $50,000 in net income from flipping real estate or holding properties worth at least $250,000 (exclusing our primary residence).

This one is more doable, but it’s also connected to the first goal. My wife and I are lucky enough to have decent paying jobs, substantial savings, no kids, very simple tastes, and no debt other than mortgage debt. My plan is to immediately sink every penny I make on the affiliate side into real estate. I finally have all the levers I need to make a fortune in real estate, and the only thing stopping me is fear of the unknown and a fondness for complacency. Screw that. If there’s ever a time in my life to roll the bones and leap, it’s now.

• I want to make at least $1,000 during the year selling art and other stuff I make.

This is kind of a tangent, but the point is that I really enjoy the metalcasting stuff I’ve been doing, and have some cool ideas for welded furniture and bathroom vanities, as well as more mercenary projects to make money such as casting custom hood ornaments and replicas of vintage cabinet hardware, switchplate covers, etc. It’s also something my wife and I do together, so including this is a reminder that I need to fight the tendency to focus too much on the things that make me money, at the expense of other fun things that are much more meaningful in the long run.

Will I hit all those goals? We shall see. I imagine in the end I’ll get pretty close, as far as the overall number you get if you add them up, but I might fall short in one area but make it up elsewhere.

One thing to note, before you accuse me of possessing a time-generating machine, is that I’m in a unique spot as far as my day job goes, which makes some of the seemingly crazy goals above more feasible. I telecommute two days a week, sit at my desk in the office for the other three days with absolutely no oversight at all, and, frankly, have thrown in the towel as far as maintaining any loyalty to HyperGlobalMegaCorp, as far as feeling obligated to give them a dedicated 40 hours+/week in return for a paycheck. I wish it were me being petty and/or selfish but sadly they’ve completely run the company I work for into the ground after acquiring us, pretty much looking to suck the soul and life from everyone at every juncture, with malice aforethought, so don’t feel too badly for them. Long story short, I’ve got a good bit of free time, even when I’m on the clock at the day job, and plan on taking full advantage of it.

In keeping with the routine of checking up on assorted stats every Saturday morning while waking up and swilling sweet, sweet coffee, here goes:

Traffic:

Traffic was down a bit from the first week, but with the holidays in effects (which typically kill website traffic in general as people are having off having fun away from the computer and not bored at work) that should be taken with a grain o’ salt. Most people are here because of the poker blog, too, as nothing has been indexed in search engines yet, so I’m not paying a ton of attention to unique users, hits, etc. The first few months of any new site isn’t really indicative of much, traffic-wise, so don’t get too hung up on looking for trends and anything useful.

One nice thing I’m seeing, and a trend that you should look for early on, is whether the search engine spiders are finding and indexing your content. Each search engine sends out automated spiders or bots that constantly crawl through your site, taking a snapshot of each page for the search engine’s index of what’s out there on the Web. The schedule varies from site to site and search engine to search engine, but hopefully within the first few weeks of your site being live you’ll be visited by the search engine spiders for the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN).

These visits from search engine spiders show up in your stats, so when you see that Googlebot has been hitting your site, that’s good news, as it means Google is aware of your site and indexing. What’s important to remember, though, is that it doesn’t mean that your pages are being included in search results yet, so don’t go nuts searching in Google and trying to find them. Remember, Google typically imposes a sandbox filter on new sites, which means that they have to wait a month or two before they get included in results. They’re being visited and indexed, but they’re not included in the search results until the site has been around for awhile.

So it’s good to see visits from spiders in your stats, and I’m already seeing regular visits from the spiders for Google, Yahoo (whose spider is called Inktomi Slurp in some stats packages), and MSN.

I also got a lot of traffic from Reddit last week, as some kind soul bookmarked my Writing Good Content post in their system. One thing I like about the WordPress theme I’m using for this site is that if you’re on an individual post page (not the home page, but clicking through to the individual page that posts are on), it has built in support for people to recommend pages at social bookmarking sites like delicious, Digg, Technorati, Reddit, and more. Those links come baked into the theme and I didn’t have to lift a finger to make that happen. Depending on the type of site you’re working on, you can get some nice traffic from social bookmarking sites such as those above.

Another nice benefit of using WordPress is that it’s integrated with Technorati and automatically makes your content immediately searchable there, so I got a handful of hits from people at Technorati searching on various affiliate topics.

Income:

For the week I made $3.89 at Adsense, and $12.50 at CommissionJunction, for a total of $16.39. Again, not paying much attention to these numbers for the first few months, as they’re not indicative of much.

Content:

While it’s nice to review your traffic stats and income on a weekly basis, it’s also a good idea to check in with your output on the content side, too, as well as running a quick dipstick test to make sure your project as a whole is on track with where you want it to be.

I’m pretty happy with the form things are taking here at Gadooney and it’s been easy (and fun) to get content up on a daily basis. It’s a pace I can maintain pretty much indefinitely, and, to be honest, the stuff I’m posting is also helping me as an affiliate myself. I always cringe at putting myself out there on public display, in any capacity, but good things happen when I force that upon myself. I’m maintaining better habits myself in my own affiliate work and staying more abreast of assorted issues and topics than in the past, for fear of looking foolish about something I might preach about here.

I’m also encouraged by the fact that this site is reasonably unique and reasonably valuable to people looking to make some extra money via affiliate marketing. Sure, there are the uber affiliates discussing the business at sites like ProBlogger and JohnChow.com, but that’s an entirely different world than most people starting out in the affiliate business have access to. Don’t get me wrong, both of those are great, useful sites, but the issues you struggle with when learning the ropes are different than the issues faced when trying to optimally monetize your hugely-popular, heavily-trafficked sites that have been around since ancient times.

I still need to work at being more accessible here, putting a face to things, and finding ways to drag readers into the fray, especially those who end up being successful in launching their own sites. The ultimate success (and profitability) of the site not only hinges on whether I can successfully help virtual strangers make money from the Web, but also in my ability to make those successes patently obvious to any new visitor to the site. I’d assumed originally that it’d be enough to simply show that I can successfully crank out profitable sites, but that’s not optimal. If Manny Ramirez filmed an infomercial offering to teach anyone to hit a curveball for $1,000, you’d see housewives and ninety-seven year old geezers mashing curveballs, not footage of Manny himself hitting curveball after curveball.

As far as being more accessible, I just need to get over my fear that anything personal and off-topic is to be avoided. Sure, a few readers will likely be annoyed, as they’re solely after content that might make them money, but most people enjoy seeing the person behind the blog, as long as it’s interesting (not a list of things I’ve eaten for lunch in the last week, sub-divided by food group, then listed in alphabetical order) and done in moderation. I’m shooting for an open, conversational sort of tone, so there’s no reason to shy away from the personal at times. If anything, it’s likely more profitable, as it’s much easier to take someone’s advice if you feel like you know them, even if it’s just a friendship conducted over the Internet tubes.

Was it really just last week that I started this thing up for reals? I suppose the lifespan for Web ventures is a bit like dog years, with one week live on the Interwebs equivalent to a month or two in meat space, but it seems like I’ve been kicking around here for much longer than a week.

Free for all Friday. Got a question? Ask it.

Today is shaping up to be pretty hectic, so it’s a coin-flip as to whether I’ll have time to babble on later about anything even remotely useful. I’m meeting with a realtor later this morning to check out some possible investment properties and I still need to wage war on the last of the boxes and unpacking from when we moved in August. I swore I’d knock that out during my glut of time off from the day job in December, and, err, the clock is ticking much more loudly and it’s still not done.