DreamDevourer

I’m back

Jo — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:05:36 +0000

Mondays are a good time to start things, aren’t they?

After just finishing my first longer piece of fiction today (about 11.5k words to be precise) I feel like dealing with the writer’s block I had on this blog.

Trying to figure out a a good purpose for it has been bugging me. I started with the MDBP in mind, but life has led me in quite a different direction. The typo of blog that the project required would need nearly a 100% commitment of energy and effort. And one thing I learned with the site I already run is that that kind of blog would take over my life for at least 6-12 months.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but at the moment I’m actually enjoying writing fiction and non-fiction books more than starting a new blog that would need constant attention. With a few offline projects taking up my time, I don’t want anything that time draining. So I’m putting “VA Recipes” on hold until further notice. I’d rather devote my coding time to a non-blog project (for writers in fact) – I’ll post some more about it as it develops.

So I’ve decided to post here about the progress of whatever projects I’m actually working on.

Amnesty month

Jo — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:58:44 +0000

Last month has been a very hectic one. With so much going on, I ended up neglecting this place. I have also decided to move to running my own business full time, which although might sound like having more time for side projects, actually means a lot more focus on the things that already make money and pay the bills.

Yes in a slightly convoluted way that was me saying I quit my job. And as luck would have it soon after that decision I won a jackpot on betfair.com.

I’m also taking part in NaNoWriMo – which is a major time drain (oh, but how much fun!).

So never fear, I haven’t abandoned my MDBP, just have to postpone it a little bit as I tie up some lose ends, finish my novel and go on a holiday. And you can expect a more elaborate post on all the above topics in the future (probably after November is over though…).

VA Recipes Journal – week #3

Jo — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 23:50:54 +0000

Tasks Accomplished

I’ve found a great pdf library – tcpdf, which will be perfect for generating “task guides” on the fly. Unfortunately I’ve only started playing with it, so didn’t get to finish a task guide template.

Lessons Learned

One thing I’m having serious problems with is not overestimating the amount of time I actually have to spend on my projects. By kind of ignoring the fact that you don’t get much done when relatives are visiting, I’ve set myself up for failure. Trying not too be too ambitious this week and will see how it goes from here.

Finances & Stats

Visitors/page view: 1/1 last week

Subscribers: 0

Income: £0

Expenses: £0

Profit up to date: -£24.98

Tasks Planned

Finish the task guide template

September Journal Update

Jo — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 23:43:43 +0000

Tasks Accomplished

Recipe Site

I’ve expanded my affiliate links by adding a hosting affiliate link (not planned, but done in the spur of the moment) as well as the coaching link for the UK visitors. Now if I could only get an affiliate program out of the US official coaching program that would be great, but I guess I’ll have to wait for that.

I’ve kind of failed on the “6 recipes per week” front. I’ve fallen back to a minimum of 3 and managed to keep that up. I think with all the stuff going on the 6 was a bit unrealistic.

I’ve started work on the ingredient clean-up, but it has been mainly focused on the recipes or ingredients that have been directly related to my newsletters. Run into a few issues with the interface or lack-of-thereof for managing recipes. With the book getting priority had to put the ingredient stuff on hold.

On the plus side I did add a few small tweaks to the site here and there:

fixed an issue with recipe moderation
setup a new comments system (from fb to livefyre)
updated ingredient categories
loads of caching updates
fixed a few typos here and there

Lastly I’ve also upgraded to NewRelic Pro, which I’ll probably do a separate post about, especially as it relates to caching, performance and earning…

Dieting Books

The book really has been a priority, especially as the September deadline was missed. But it wasn’t all uneventful, as I picked a cover and finalised the content. With the recipes selected, and the extra chapter added the book is now with an editor (hired through oDesk – great experience so far, worth a post on it’s own).

Other

I’ve prepared a new site for my sister [CS] – she’s decided to do some serious blogging too.

As I upgraded to the Pro version of NewRelic I’ve also separated all my sites into individual applications for logging on their system.

Lessons Learned

One big lesson from this month was the value of performance. I’ve done some tweaking on the site and as I’ve added caching not only did my pages get faster, but my Adsense revenue went up. Might be a bit early for absolutely conclusive statements, but it definitely looked like a bit more than a coincidence.

A few failures on my part this month were all related to a bit over-ambitious goals… As I’m juggling several projects and a partial day-job (it’s complicated…) I must really learn to remember, when planning, that the hours I have in a week have to be split between tasks and projects.

Finances & Stats

Advertising wise it was one of the best months recently. And after adding non-adsense sources of income it possibly could be my best month ever…

Traffic has been good on my main site, butstill working on building up all the other ones.

Tasks Planned

Publish the book [DB]
Create a sales page for the book [DB]
Create a poster & mouse pad design [RS]
Setup a basic template for the wordpress blog [CS]
Move to new ingredient system [RS]
Prepare a better plan for November

VA Recipes Journal – week #2

Jo — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 22:58:01 +0000

Tasks Accomplished

Updated the Coming Soon page

The first plugin I tried worked quite well, but using feedburner to keep track of potential subscribers didn’t quite sit well with me. Using “Launch Effect”, feels like a more rounded solution. I’m almost disappointed I don’t have a background picture to use with it…

Signed up for Aweber

Everyone has been singing praise for Aweber, so I decided to give it a try. As one of my other projects is running on Mailchimp, I’ll have a nice comparison for the future (I hope! :)).

Lessons Learned

I haven’t finished the mascot design still this week. My other project has been a bit of a priority, and I also decided the mascot might not be the highest priority, so putting it on hold for now.

Finances & Stats

Visitors/page view: 14/36 last week (most of it is me though…)

Subscribers: 0

Income: £0

Expenses: -£1.00

Signed up for Aweber

Profit up to date: -£24.98

Tasks Planned

I’ve decided I need to be a bit less over-ambitious with my goals, especially considering I’ve got a massive deadline next week for another project and will have relatives visiting. You can’t get much done in such conditions!

Create “recipe sheet” style guide template

Designing a logo for VA Recipes

Jo — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 08:40:35 +0000

As promised here’s a little bit of insight into the process of designing the VA Recipes logo.

I’m not a professional logo designer, but as I do dabble a bit in design, and have been discovering Illustrator recently I thought I might give this a shot. It can always be replaced later by something more professional. For a laugh I tried Fiverr to see what would come out, but basically you get what you pay for…

I’ve had a logo done on 99designs before for another project, although it was reasonably priced, I thought it would be a bit too expensive for this project. Trying to keep the costs low with the project not launched and all.

After a little brainstorming, I’ve decided the main symbols would be a task list with tick boxes and a headset to represent the virtual assistant aspect of the site as well as the focus on instruction lists. I’ve also chose a specific blue to be a theme colour when playing around with designs earlier.

A bit of research and a some time later I’ve had my first draft ready in Illustrator:

Now the initial idea was to stick the list inside the headphone, make them overlap, and so on. However no matter how I tried the headset would get lost or the list would look awkward. So it was time to simplify things. I took just the tick boxes and placed these within the headset.

Time to add the name. Aside from the blue, I liked the idea of black & gray together next to it, o in search for inspiration I started with just the plain name with a hint of colour.

The obvious thing here, that can be problematic, is that the logo suddenly became very long. It’s not a disaster, but with my employer having more than a few issues due to a similar problem, I was keen to avoid a long logo, and aim for something closer to a square.

Now this isn’t bad. I tried to include the full name, which meant a bit more colour in there too. Though I wasn’t convinced it would work that great in smaller sizes. Plus the fonts were kind of bland defaults, and once I started trying other ones, nothing seemed to work well.

I then went back to the shortened name. Chiller somehow managed to look good on the VA part. Still struggled with a font choice for “recipes”. The tick boxes looked a bit busy, so I changed them from box outlines to just a gray box with no borders. This was also important to get the “on black” version looking better. It’s good to plan how your logo will look on both light and dark backgrounds, unless you plan to always bring a “white box” with it…

But I wasn’t completely satisfied with that design, the dark version had issues. And again trying to make it smaller would make the tick boxes illegible. It was time to simplify even more. This is when I moved the “VA” part inside the headset. The V does look a bit like a tick box, and bending the “recipes” text made it a little less bland.

So there you have it, the final logo:

VA Recipes Journal – week #1

Jo — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 23:31:23 +0000

Tasks Accomplished

Setup the blog

The WordPress install is up and running with a plugin to show a”coming soon” page until I finish the design and content setup. I used the “Ultimate Coming Soon Page” plugin, which was quick & easy to setup. Might look into something that integrates with a proper mailing list management tool, as it only supports signing up for updates via feedburner.

Setup Clicky & Feedburner
All done. Public Clicky dashboard is available here. Not much there to see just yet. I guess I missed one of my goals for this weeks, still haven’t setup Google Analytics.

Posting schedule

After thinking about how much I can commit to and realistically deliver I have decided to post twice a week on Mondays and Wednesdays (that’s after the site goes live :)).

Designed a logo

This was not planned for this week, but I threw a quick draft together so I can make some headway with the design next week. It wasn’t actually “quick” – ended up spending half my weekend on this, but seemed to be one of those necessary evils… I think the logo evolution might be an interesting post on it’s own, so will probably draft one later

Lessons Learned

I spend too much time playing around with the logo and the mascot graphics. Need to focus more on my specific goals next time. I’m one of those easily distracted people, that once get stuck on a task, for one thing try to get it perfect, and then end up around 5am looking puzzled where did the night go – I was just going to tweak this one thing…

Also probably should spend more time filling out this post through out the week (especially the lessons learned part…), rather than do a last minute update like this.

Finances & Stats

Visitors: 0

Subscribers: 0

Income: £0

Expenses: £23.98

Domain names: £23.98
Hosting: £0 (I already have a server for my other sites, so for now this projects doesn’t cost me anything extra)

Profit up to date: -£23.98

Tasks Planned

Finish creating a site mascot
Create a nicer “coming soon” page
Research and install plugins for wordpress
Setup an aweber account

Other Projects Initial Journal

Jo — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 23:17:35 +0000

Tasks Accomplished

Dieting Books

My first book is making some progress towards the 1st October publishing goal. I have all the recipes researched by my VA formated and inserted into the book draft, now just need to select which ones to actually use and do a bit of editing. Planning to add at least one more chapter, research for which is under way.

I’ve also decided to have the book cover done by someone else and as this is in progress, should have the results next week.

Recipe Site

Slowly getting ready for a major ingredients section overhoul.Added an admin section, so that my VA can do some of the clenup work.

The weekly newsletter was sent – nothing exciting here.

Lessons Learned

Recipe Site

As I was dealing with a lot of things I didn’t have as much time as usual for preparing the weekly newsletter. So instead of writing up a new article I’ve decided to follow advice from Pat Flynn and bring some old content back to life… That way my readers got 3 articles sent out instead of 1 new one. It was a good decision as currently the articles aren’t highlighted on the site, and a lot of the new newsletter subscribers wouldn’t have read them anyways.

Tasks Planned

Week 1

Finalize the recipe selection for the book [DB]
Pick a book cover [DB]
Prepare an “ingredient highlight” for the next newsletter [RS]
Add UK coaching links for UK visitors [RS]
Post at least 6 recipes for the next newsletter[RS]

Week 2

Post at least 6 recipes for the next newsletter [RS]
Prepare a list of 5 articles for the upcoming newsletters [RS]
Clean up the ingredients db data [RS]
Prepare the legal pages for the book (kindle) [DB]
Prepare the subtitle for the book (kindle) [DB]
Unify recipe measurements for the book [DB]
Add the extra FAQs chapter to the book [DB]

Week 3

Post at least 6 recipes for the next newsletter [RS]
Move to the new ingredients system [RS]
Create an auto generated allowed ingredients page [RS]
Create a sales page for the book [DB]
Publish the book on Amazon [DB]

Journal Rules For Other Projects

Jo — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 20:17:18 +0000

The VARecipes project is not the only website I’m running. Given that writing an accountability journal of some form seems a good idea, I have decided to post updates on my other projects as well. These updates won’t be as detailed and won’t follow exactly the same rules as the journal for my 1MDBP entry.

What to expect

Reporting period

Initially I thought I should follow a similar pattern of weekly updates, separately for each project. In the end however I decided against it. I have a few more projects planned and don’t want to end up at some point spending more time writing updates and keeping up with the schedule than I actually do work.

This blog is not meant as a business, but as a way for me to stay organized and potentially accountable, so it cannot overtake my schedule. This lead me to decide on a monthly update cycle for my non 1MDBP sites.

Format

Each post will have the following headings: Tasks Acomplished, Lessons Learned, Finance & Stats, Tasks Planned.

Tasks Accomplished – a summary of what has been completed from the planned tasks from the previous month. Potentially with details on how to accomplish a specific task and if there were any difficulties.

Lessons Learned – partially might be covered under the previous heading. It would also include any insights not related to the tasks accomplished (or not). Although the updates are monthly, I might post “lessons learned” only posts more often, as things pop-up.

Finance & Stats – as the name suggests an update on income (and expenses), visitor stats, etc. This will be more of a highlights section, unlike the full disclosure for my VARecipes project.

Tasks Planned – what I plan to achieve by next month, divided into weekly blocks for easier planning.

Starting a project – week #0

Jo — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 20:30:45 +0000

The project begins! :) Although there were obviously no previously set tasks to accomplish, as I have done a few bits and bobs I’ll mention these in the next section just to keep track of what has been done.

Tasks Accomplished

Bought domains

I have purchased to domains – wasn’t sure which one I would decide in the end to go with:

VirtualAssistantRecipes.com OR VARecipes.com

So far I made the shorter one the main domain, but keeping my options open here…

Setup WP

It’s still a task for next week, but I did already do a basic install. No content or styling yet though.

Lessons Learned

Not much to report here… Just a few ideas that came to mind while doing all this wordpress installing. Will probably make the first “recipes” about the blog setup and tasks related to the steps advised to all participants of 1MDBP – clicky setup, feedburner etc.

Tasks Planned

Setup the blog
Decide on a posting schedule
Setup Clicky & Analytics
Setup FeedBurner