Photo by sammix2008

In part 1 we considered two free programs you can use for monitoring and measuring the traffic to your website.  One of my readers suggested a third program, Gostats which I’m still checking out.  In this follow up article, I want to go through another aspect of this subject, which I had n’t thought about until it became a problem for me.

Last week, I got an email from my Web Hosting provider which read:

“The domain technicalarticles.co.uk has reached 80% of its bandwidth limit (2707.29/3000.00 Megs).   Do not respond to this message. Your reply will go nowhere. !!!!”

This was a bit ominous and caused some alarm bells to ring, and I was in a bit of a panic for a few days.  Let’s just go through what happened and how I got to the bottom of this little episode.

Web Hosting Packages

When I got the email, my first thought was that my new Videodippers site was taking up too much space.  Since buying the web space, I’d bought a lot of domain names and tried to build different sites, but the only ones that were really active were the Technical Articles & the Videodippers sites.  So I started to delete some of my inactive sites using my ftp program.  Since launching my Videodippers site, I’d been adding videos to the site furiously, and my second thought was that this was the problem.  But when I checked my actual space useage, it was only around 13Mega bytes for the Videodippers directory.

At first though, using the Filezilla ftp package, I found it difficult to get a good view of what my actual useage was.  So I went to my CPANEL interface provided by the Webhosting provider, and in there was a utility called Disk Space Useage, which gave a neat graphical display of this as you can see below.

Public_html is where all your web site folders are stored, this is where all your files (websites, templates, articles, images etc.,) are kept.  The tmp directory is used by the various stats programs provided by your web hosting provider to give you monitoring information (eg. Webalizer, Analog Stats).  So my Webhost was telling me I was only using 67.39 Megabytes in total.  Now when I bought the package I knew I had 200Megabytes of Data space, so this was no where near 80% utilisation.  After a bit more digging, I learnt that when you buy a Web Hosting package, you also get another fixed parameter with the package which is called the Bandwidth.  This was where my problem lay.

Understanding Your Bandwidth Limitation

My web hosting package came with the following options:

WEB SPACE ……………………..   200MB
MONTHLY BANDWIDTH……….. 3000MB

Bandwidth is the amount of traffic your site is generating or using on the Web Host.  What this means is that the more popular your site grows, the more bandwidth your site uses.  Like with everything else in life, nothing comes for free.  So, more bandwidth equals more money.  Now where was the culprit, what caused this.

These were the stats for my two sites:

Technical Articles     Videodippers

December 2008………………  511.23Mb                       1.28Gb
January 2009………………….  354.4Mb                         2.11Gb

The traffic to Videodippers had almost doubled.  So my efforts on adding more videos was paying off, and the popularity of some of my videos had increased the traffic to my site.   So, by trying to make my site popular, although I was not getting any richer, I have to now fund the sites success by moving my hosting package up from Basic to Premium.  The premium package gives me 1000Mb storage and 10Gb of bandwidth, more than 3 times what I have now.

Conclusions

I guess the lesson to learn is just be aware of this issue, as traffic to your site grows, you will come across this problem and you will need to increase your bandwidth appropriately.  This is a good state of affairs, something we are all striving to do in one way or another.  We all want increased traffic, that’s the business we’re in.  The more traffic we get, the more options open up to us for monetizing our web-sites and making it more attractive for advertisers.  So when this happens, welcome it, because you’re headed in the right direction.

Good luck!

Photo by Irina Patrascu

This lovely photograph by the truly exceptional photographer, Irina Patrascu, carries the words of Goethe ‘I find the great thing in this world is, not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving’.  The compass beautifully captures this thought, and yes Irina, we all need to use a compass when we are lost!  In the vast seas and oceans of the internet, it is so easy to be lost and hard to know if we’re headed in the right direction.  Measuring and monitoring the traffic to your site, gives you that necessary compass, that helps you to find your way and know for sure whether what you are doing is achieving the desired results.  So join me now, as I go through the process of how to monitor or measure traffic to your website / blog, and outline what has worked for me…

The Need for Website Traffic Stats

Very early on in any web / blog project, once you have got through the business of setting up your first few pages you soon realise that although you have created something quite unique which you are proud of, no one else knows about it.   You then go through a whole series of activities to work out how to tell the world about your new ‘baby’.   I won’t go through all the things I did, but it included submitting my site to the main search engines, registering on social networking sites, joining forums and creating backlinks.

I remember how excited I was to actually get some visibility of who was actually visiting my website.  This came about when I joined Blogcatalog and installed their widget in my sidebar.  The widget was fairly customiseable, and showed which members from Blogcatalog had come by recently, and I configured it to show the last 30 or so visitors.  It was always nice to see the returning visitors avators/icons, and how recently they had visited.  In it’s own way it kept me pretty busy touting for friendships on Blogcatalog to try and increase my returning visitors.   But, over time, this became a very time consuming process, as I tried to keep my Blogcatalog visitors actively returning for more content.

The reason for recounting this story now is to make the point, that without measurement you have no idea of the success or failure of your efforts. Even though the Blogcatalog widget was a rudimentary view, for the first time I had some visibility of who was visiting my site.  We need this measurement, this ability to monitor and track visitors to our sites, to give us an idea of whether we are on the right track or not.   The two programs I have used, and indeed still use are STATCOUNTER & SITEMETER.  They are both online web-traffic monitoring tools, both are free to use and have sufficient features for my purposes.  You can also buy and update your installations for more features if you choose to do this at a later date.  So, lets take a closer look at both of these now.

Installing and Using Statcounter

To get Statcounter, you will need to go to their website here:

http://www.statcounter.com/

The website has a link for a live demo where you can try out all the options, and see whether you like it or not.  To use it, all you need to do is register for a free account and install a small snippet of javascript code on your website, I have put it at the end of my ‘footer.php’ template file, just before the ‘/body’ label which marks the end of the html code on your web page.

When you register, you have to set up a project for each web-site you want to monitor and install the code on every site for tracking purposes.  It’s pretty easy to do, but once it’s set up and working you start seeing what’s actually happening on your website.

We now have visibility of traffic to our site, in an easy to understand graphical form which displays page loads, unique & returning visitors.  Now you have some data, and this information will help you understand the effect of your website postings and all your other promotion efforts.  This is important, because you can use this to gauge the popularity or otherwise of what you’re doing.

The other nice options with Statcounter are:

• The ability to see where your visitors came from, gives you a broader picture than just the single view you get from the Blogcatalog or Mybloglog widgets.
• Keyword Analysis tells you what people typed into a search engine to get to your website.  This is probably one of the most important reasons you will want to get stats from your sites, because this information shows you the effectiveness of your Search Engine Optimisation efforts.
• Visit length, tells you how long people stayed on your site!!!

Here is an example piechart showing visit lengths:

For me Statcounter provides a quick summary of whats happening on my site in an easy to understand graphical format, and it’s one of the things in my toolbag for website development.  Go and check it out, try out the online live demo, and if you like it, just use it!!!

Installing and Using Sitemeter

I use another software called Sitemeter on my Videodippers website.  You can get it here:

http://www.sitemeter.com/

Again, Sitemeter has an online tour of their software which you can try out.  To install it, just register for the ‘Site Meter Basic’ offering which is free, install a small piece of code which displays their small icon (you can see it on the Videodippers site, at the footer section, next to the CommentLuv icon) and thats it really.

Once you’ve got a few days stats, that’s when things get interesting.  Sitemeter gives me a lot more granularity regarding the traffic I am getting and where it is coming from.  It gives me a different perspective to Statcounter and a useful view on ‘referrals’ to my website.  For a site like Videodippers, I’m much more interested in what people are typing into Google or other search engines to find my site, less so about people coming through for social network and forum sites, and Sitemeter gives me a good view of this.

Conclusions

If you looked at the example piechart for visit lengths produced by Statcounter, you will agree with me it’s not a pretty picture really, 66.3% visitors left after 30 seconds.  Ok, I know the data needs more analysis with regards to sample size and which visits are being counted.  However, this sort of information, throws real light on what you’re doing, and sometimes the truth is not pleasant to read!!! But, without this knowledge you will always be in the dark, without a compass to steer you in the right direction, and being blind in a world where everyone else can see is n’t a good place to be!

That’s all for this post.  I would be interested in your comments on the article, whether you’ve used either these or other online traffic monitoring tools and your experiences with them.

Photo by Irina Patrascu

Firstly, I would like to wish all my readers a very Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year, as this is likely to be my last post for the year.  As the last few days of 2008 slowly take a bow and leave, the new days of 2009 are eager to join into our experience of life.  The time at the end of the year is indeed a good time to take stock and review what we have achieved.

Always be good to yourself, there’s enough people out there to knock us down in one way or another, so look at your achievements, accentuate the positive.  I am really proud of this website, it started of as an experiment for me, to just create some sort of a web presence and learn the ropes.  However, its come to mean a lot more to me now.  It has has become an avenue for my thoughts, a vehicle to share my experiences with others.  Life is a journey, and I do intend to see this journey through to the end, not give up and let things go.  So join me as we take a look back, and then look forward to what I want to share next with you, my readers.

In the Beginning

I started with a blank piece of paper, like most people I expect.  I had read two books, one about Google SEO, the other about blogging, Darren Rowse’s Problogger book with Chris Garrett.  I scribbled out all my ideas, and I stuck with the idea of creating a site for writing technical articles on networks, stuff I knew about.  So far I’ve only posted one article on that subject, but will surely return to it in due course.  I had to settle for the ‘.co.uk’ domain, which was fine, it only cost around £6 for 2 years.  My webhosting cost £20.  Not too much of an outlay, the rest was just time.

The look and feel for the site took me some while until I was happy with it.  I’m pleased with the end result.  I had a recent review somewhere, and the person commented on the photos not having any relevance to what the text was about.  That is true!!!  How can you get any interesting photos on Making Money Online, or Blogging.  No, you don’t want to see too many pictures of Darren Rowse or Schoemaker, one is enough.  But there are some brilliant photographers, and what I do here on this website is to showcase their work, they deserve all the credit for the fantastic pictures that we can enjoy whilst reading these posts.

I also struggled for a long time with the name of my site, Technical Articles, until someone on a bulletin board said it was a really good name.  It’s one of those titles you can use to write about anything, as long as it’s technical.  I learnt as I went along, which was n’t hard as I’ve always had a bit of a programming background, even though it’s not necessary, I think it just made things easier for me.  I also realised as time went on, that this site would only be a voice for my thoughts and ideas, it was unlikely to earn me much money, though I’d love to be proved wrong!!!

Guy Kawasaki - The Importance of Meaning

I chanced upon Guy Kawasaki’s video which helped me realise, that more important than quantity, was the quality of what you write.  You can fill pages and pages of content on a website, which say nothing.  It’s when you add a bit of your Self, that inner You, that you start to give meaning to what you’re writing.  So, I don’t post as regularly or frequently as I did, the pressure to do so was just too much.  Now, I write because I want to write, and share something with my readers.  In one of my recent posts, I gave an example of the DOSHDOSH.com website, where the author, Maki, has actually created meaning.  He writes stuff you want to read and that should be our aim, to write for a higher purpose.

When you realise you know how things work, but what you’re doing is n’t going to work, you have to change your approach.  That’s why in my last article, I explained how I launched my new site, Videodippers to try a different formulae.  I am really pleased with the results for Videodippers in the recent few weeks, and I hope it will become my own personal engine for traffic generation.

Friendships Made Along the Way

If there was one person I would like to mention, its my good friend diTesco from Iblogzone.  He has been consistent in his friendship from the first day we met on Blogcatalog, and has been supportive of all my efforts on this website.  He also writes with meaning, and a clarity which I admire very much.  He is mentioned on my Recommended Links under ‘Make Money Online‘ and you can learn much from his site.  I know he will do well, it’s only a matter of time and I hope one day, when time permits, we’ll be able to do a joint project together.

More recently, I came across the writings of Ryhen from Virtual Synapses and again he has that flair, or that personal element in his posts which appealed to me, and I like to think of him as one of my new friends.  You may remember his post on the Count of Monte Cristo, the story and his post were worth reading. There are a lot of other people on Blogcatalog, who I’ve added as friends and some have even added me out of the blue.  But my focus has changed, I’m no longer looking to actively promote this website, if it happens fine, if it does n’t that’s ok too.

A lot of people won’t share what they’ve learnt or know, guarding it with secrecy.  That’s not my game, I want to share my journey of trying to make money online through my own efforts and try and keep to the truth so that some of the misconceptions are removed.  That’s my way of giving meaning to this writing.  Well, that’s the plan for the time being anyway.

Conclusions

I never expected that watching Guy Kawasaki’s video would impact on what I was doing with this site.  Anyway a few weeks ago, I wrote to him and guess what, he replied back to my email the same day.  We’ve exchanged quite a few emails, and in my next article I will tell you about something that’s come about through that contact which has given my two websites a higher profile on the internet.

I’ve learnt a lot from the Videodippers site.  I checked yesterday, and I had about 80 odd visitors from Google searches alone, that’s not friends from Blogcatalog, just people searching on Google and they found my site and clicked on it.  I don’t think I’ve had that many visitors from Google to this Technical Articles site in all the time it’s been running.  So I know, something I’m doing is right.  I want to write a series of articles on this, how to find out what your competition is doing, how to use SEO tools to help you get the search engine results, how to collect and analyse stats for your site.  I will share the data from my Videodippers site to show you how you can check these things out for yourself.   That’s my present focus, and of course the earnings, I will share how this is faring too.

That’s it.  I hope you’ve liked reading what I write about and thank you for your support.  All that remains for me to say is, have a very peaceful and Happy Christmas and my very best wishes to you all for the New Year.

Photo by JdeePanIII

In the previous article on Adsense, we discussed the pros and cons of using this to monetise your website/blogging efforts, especially with regard to the issue of when it should be introduced.  We still need to cover the technicalities of setting up Adsense, but before we do that, let’s look at what works and what does n’t from my own personal experience to date, and also, see if we can learn something from the professionals.

Using Adsense on Technical Articles Website

If you ever ventured in the direction of the About page on this site, you would have discovered that one of the Raison d’Etre of this website, the “why” I started to put this thing together, was to look at how to make money from the internet.  I’ve come a long way in the last few months, learnt a lot from my mistakes, and what you see in front of you is the evolution over that time of the website.

In the picture above, you can see how the site looked previously, before I remodeled it to focus on the content.  This picture I have of the site was after I had removed the Google banner ad from the header, after some useful comments from my readers.  Originally, I had gone to town a little bit, with the banner, affiliate advert boxes, several Google Adsense in the side bar and again at the bottom of each post.  Some of this formulae I have kept, and others I have removed.  Remember, the aim is to earn money, not just blog for the fun of it!!!

An Update on Adsense Earnings

My Google Adsense earnings to date as at close of play 8th December 2008, amount to a grand total of $45.96 not exactly earth shattering amounts, but hey it’s still going up is n’t it!!!

In my previous earnings update on 21st October 2008, the site was reporting $26.54, so after a good start in the first month of the site, the last month and half has n’t been too successful to say the least, but $20 is $20, and we will have to wait some time before it reaches the magic number of $100 before Google dishes out anything.  It was these thoughts, that led me originally to think about all the hype around making money online, and it spawned a whole series of articles on the subject (I’m still writing about it!!!).  A site, like this which is visited by people looking for information on how to improve their own efforts or learn how to do things they are curious about or struggling with, sites like these don’t necessarily attract people who are Google Adsense click-happy.  No!  This sort of site is for the tech-savvy, people in the know, they are more after the content you are providing.  It’s a different market.  And, that is the secret:

Learn to recognise the market you are in, capitalise on your visitors intentions, and use this knowledge to direct your monetising campaign.

It’s not an easy point to grasp this, and if you look at a lot of blog/websites, some people never grasp it.  Your earnings from a site like this are limited, the sooner you recognise this, the easier your journey will become.  You will not get disgruntled, or phased by it.  Accept it for what it is!

The opening photograph is of a path that leads to a Tower that looks like a lighthouse, by JdeePanIII and sometimes, we all need to stop, and take a look at our own work from a different vantage point.  Look beyond our own immediate activity, and see what we can learn from others.

Lessons we can learn from the Professionals

My blogging journey started with Darren Rowse and Chris Garret’s book ‘Problogger-secrets for blogging your way to a six-figure income’, and like it or not you have to admire the guys who can make it work.  You can read more about this here.

If you read some of things Darren Rowse writes about on his Problogger site and in the book, you will come to learn that he realised the same point I’m making above.  Tech savvy people, don’t come to your site to click on Google Adsense, by that I mean if your site is focussed on technical material.  David Rowse has removed Google Adsense completely from his Problogger site and replaced it with paid advertising slots.  The same is true for Maki’s site Doshdosh.  They both state the same reasons for doing this.  Now both these guys have sites which get huge amounts of traffic, and Google Adsense does not work for them!!!

David Rowse admits that most of his revenue from advertising comes from his other site, the photography school site.  A niche market.  Which can be easily targetted with adverts which this completely different set of people are quite happy to click on, because the adverts could be selling things they would be interested in.  Yes, if there is a lesson here, this is it.  Understand the market you’re in, is it one which will earn you sufficient Google Adsense revenue to make your efforts worthwhile.

Think hard about it, analyse your own efforts and then…

Entering a new Niche Market - Videodippers

About a week or so ago, I launched my new website/blog called Videodippers, which is designed to capture and attract a different audience altogether.  You can see a screenshot of it in the far right hand sidebar.  This is aimed at a more wider market, people who are looking and searching for videos on different subjects, the core will be focussed on music and movies, but it will cover a broad range of topics.

Go and take a look, I’d like to have your comments on it here.  What do you think?  Will it work?  Let me know your thoughts.

Conclusions

If you read my article on Problogger, Making Money Online & The Hunger to Succeed you will have read the famous quote from Thomas Edison in his efforts to light our world with his electric bulb:

I have not failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work, which makes me that much closer to discovering the way it will work..

I guess in some small way, that’s what I have learnt from this exercise so far.  I have found one of the ways it won’t work, so I guess I’m a little closer to finding the way it will.  I hope this has given you some food for thought, some insights into this area which is hidden in secrecy.  I’d be interested in hearing from you on your own experiences with the success or failures of your Adsense efforts, because sharing this information will help others avoid our mistakes.  Good Luck!!

Photo by JdeePanIII

Part 1: The Making Money Online Hype
Part 2: Problogger, Making Money Online & The Hunger to Succeed
Part 3: The Importance of Making Meaning

Let us now continue our journey and see what it really means to add meaning to something.  I’m going to share with you in this post one of my favourite blog sites of all time, which exemplifies this principle and if you would take time to study this blogger’s format, and his message it will really change your own thinking.

At the end of the day, what it is all about is the VALUE you add as an individual, to the sum total of human knowledge, either by creating this with some original thought or sharing what you know with others.  True, we want to make money, but the meaning that Guy Kawasaki talks about, comes from that core, that essence of helping our fellow mankind to better themselves through knowledge.  It does n’t matter how you do it, but reach that inner core within your self and let it guide your efforts, and you will find the meaning and the purpose.  Enough of the preaching, so let’s begin.

My Favourite Blog Site - www.doshdosh.com

I can’t honestly remember now how I came across the site, but I’m glad I did.  My first encounter with the site was to read Maki’s post on

How ‘Mini-Funnel’ Websites Can Help You Increase Traffic, Generate Leads and Build Exposure

To tell you the truth, I was hooked.  I had never heard of mini-funnel websites, and how the recent US Presidential Elections were fought more on the internet marketing campaigns of the Barack Obama supporters than any other campaign in the past.  The turn-out of voters, speaks for itself, and last month in some form or other, we all witnessed history in the making.

Early on in the campaign, there was a lot of bad publicity for Barack Obama concerning whether he was a muslim or not.  At that time, that single question:

Is Barack Obama a Muslim?

Was probably being searched for by millions of Googlers and other search engine users.  To counter this, the Barack Obama campaign team, created a website called:

isbarackobamaamuslim.com

If you go to it, all you see is a single page, with the big letters in black saying ‘NO’, and if you click on it, you will be taken to a page on the Barack Obama website, which has a post with the headline, ‘Barack Obama has never been a muslim, and is a committed Christian’.  Wow!!!  That is the power of the internet, to drive a message home in one single sweep and quash all the negative rumours in a second.  And, if you missed it, that is what a mini-funnel site is, it’s used to funnel traffic to your main site.  Makes you think does n’t it, how to create loads of mini-funnel sites which are Google KEYWORDS optimised and use them to boost traffic to your primary website.

I learnt something that day.  Something that was useful and valuable.  Maki’s post had meaning, it increased my knowledge in a measureable way, and I could see the value of what he was saying.  I bookmarked the site.  Now there’s very few sites that I really subscribe to, this is one that I have an email subscription to, because I know what he is writing about, is worth reading.

As a matter of interest, that particular post alone, has 126 comments, mine included!!!

Infographics Can Help You Spread Ideas and Attract Attention

Maki’s recent post on Doshdosh concerns Infographics, and again it is one of those posts that will teach you something which you may find useful.  He talks about the power of graphics, and how a particular type of graphic which contains useful information can help spread the word about what you’re doing.  Again, a lot of food for thought there and something I’d probably seen and noticed, but never paid much attention to the power of using something like this for what I’m doing myself.  Maybe not something most of us can use immediately, but I know I’ve produced quite a few presentations myself in the past on MS Powerpoint, and it would be quite easy to turn a concept into a visual infographic which captures peoples imagination and wants them to use your graphic on their sites.

‘Spread your ideas’, it’s again that same thought, of how to generate mass traffic get your ideas out there and visible, because we are all trying to capture that few second attention-span of most internet users long enough for them to want to come and visit our sites.  That surely is the challenge, as I’m finding out for myself through my blogging to date.  How to generate people’s interest in our work and then to hold them long enough to want to stay.

Again, Maki’s post hit the mark for me, he increased my knowledge about how I myself could use something like infographics to promote my own efforts.

Knowledge is Worth more than Freedom

Only yesterday, I came across something through Blogcatalog.  A fellow blogger Ryhen Satch, has a website called Virtual Synapses, with the sub title, ‘Let’s make a connection’, a very apt title if you ever studied the central nervous system.  His recent post on ‘Are you a Wise Blogger’ highlights excerpts from the film ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, and I was interested enough to go and watch the actual video.  It was a long video, but it was worth watching, because of the soul-destroying struggles that Dante faces locked up and beaten in a prison cell.  It certainly makes you appreciate the comforts we take so much for granted.  When Dante, meets the priest, he is offered Knowledge in return for his labour, and the priest says:

“Freedom can be taken away as you well know.  I offer knowledge.  Everything I have learned.  I will teach you Economics, Mathematics, Philosopy, Science…”

Dante accepts the offer, helping the priest in digging the tunnel to their freedom.

Conclusions

That excerpt from the film ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ brings us full circle back to the importance of knowledge.  In a time and place where the priest and Dante find themselves, money has no value.  The picture of Dante’s sheer delight in being able to sit on a chair in the priests cell after so many years of being locked up in a cell with nothing, is quite moving to watch.  To think that something we consider so ordinary, can be so priceless.

The examples I’ve chosen highlight one way to add meaning to whatever you choose to do, by increasing the knowledge of the people who take time to listen to what you have to say.  There’s much you can learn from the DoshDosh website, please visit it and let me know what you think.  I hope you will be as inspired by Maki’s writing as I have been, then look at ways on how you can do the same, increase the knowledge that you spread through your articles.  Good Luck!!

NOTES:

Here’s the link to Maki’s Site:  DOSHDOSH
- to his Post on MiniFunnels:  Mini-Funnels
- to his Post on Infographics: Infographics

Here’s the link to Virtual Synapses and the link to the video: The Count of Monte Cristo

Photo by JdeePanIII

This is a follow up article on the Making Money Online Hype versus Reality series. In Part 1, we dispelled some of the myths about earning huge sums of money when you’re starting off, that you need to be realistic with your expectations. In Part 2, we gave real life examples of people who did make it big, and you can see the photo of Jeremy Schoemaker holding his Google adsense check of $132,994.97 which shows it can be done, and how you should persevere with your efforts to succeed in this game.

Now, in Part 3, I want to share a video from Stanford University with my readers, for anyone who is into making money, this is a must watch video because it teaches the importance of ‘Meaning’, and why you should focus on this rather than think about making money. I have found this video really inspirational and it is one of the reasons I decided on a new blueprint for this website to focus on the quality of content. Let’s take a closer look at why we should take heed of this message in our blogging journey.

Entrepreneurship And Making A Difference

The video was produced around 2 years ago, but it’s message is still very clear and relevant to us today as we blog our way around the world seeking to make money from our efforts. It is from a series of talks by Guy Kawasaki, of Garage Technology Ventures, and is about the ‘Importance of Making Meaning’ in your company or business venture. Guy Kawasaki, states that:

“The core, the essence of entrepreneurship, is about making MEANING’.

Most people start companies to make money, in our case we’ve started Blogs with the same intention. But what Guy tells us is that of all the companies that he started, funded or was involved with, the ones which are fundamentally founded to:

“Change the World”
“Make the World a Better Place”
“To Make Meaning”

are the companies that make a difference, they are the companies that succeed. He goes on to say boldly, that if you set out to make money without making meaning, you probably won’t make meaning or money. This takes us back to the fundamental question, why are you Blogging? We have to answer this question, time and time again, to ensure our focus is right and correct for what we want to achieve. It’s a very deep statement, and you need to realise its importance, because money and success is a by-product of something you have done really well. Believe me, there is no substitute for hard work.

His message is clear to us, the core reason why you should start a company or venture is to make meaning. Now lets see what he’s trying to get through to us.

How To Make Meaning

There are 3 ways to make meaning:

1. Increase the Quality of Life
2. To Right a Wrong
3. Prevent the End of Something Good

Your motivation can be to change people’s lives, by looking at how you can make things better for them and that will give your blog a purpose and an identity, a reason for people to come to your site. Or it could be you find something wrong in the world and you want to put it right and fix that. Maybe you see something beautiful and you can’t stand what’s happening to it, and you want to do something about it. All these things will give purpose and MEANING to your blogging efforts, and I tend to agree with what he’s saying.

Without one or more of these three things, you probably need to reconsider what you’re doing. I see a lot of blogs out there, and the authors admit they are their own ramblings, they are not out to change the world, they are just blogging about life, and using their blog as a journal. There’s nothing wrong with that, and there is space in the blogosphere for everyone to survive. The message of this article is to those, like myself, who have been drawn into the ‘Making Money Online’ hype, to give meaning to your work and give it a higher purpose if you want to succeed.

When I started off, my intention was to share some of my knowledge of networks and what I was learning about blogging with my readers, so that they would benefit from this. As far as this blog goes, I think that’s a good purpose, to teach and educate, so people can learn to do things themselves and thereby improve the quality of whatever they are doing themselves. I had no knowledge of Domain Names, had never owned one myself, so as I learnt things about this, I wrote about how you can get your own domain name, register it, and then link it to your blog. I think, this is the crux of it, there are thousands of websites out there with so much information on them, but when you get down to it, you really want to come to one place where you can find everything you need. Once your website does that, it has authority and as it’s popularity spreads, you will gain the relevance and move up in Google’s rankings.

Conclusions

I hope you will take the time to watch the video and listen to it’s message. The points are well made, because if you’re swallowed up in the Making Money Hype, then this might just give you the grounding you need to give purpose and direction to what you are doing. I know it’s made me think about what I’m doing, and to take away some of the stress of blogging and trying to drive traffic to my site.

With the right meaning, your efforts will have purpose, and that in itself will bring you the rewards. Let’s go out and make a difference in the world.

So here’s the Video.

Enjoy!

Daniel Hunt.

Footnote: Who is Guy Kawasaki?

Guy Kawasaki is a founder and Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures. Prior to this position, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. and sits on the board of BitPass, FilmLoop, and SimplyHired. A noted speaker and the founder of various personal computer companies, Guy was one of the individuals responsible for the success of the Macintosh computer. He is also the author of eight books including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. Guy holds a B.A. from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from UCLA, as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

Futurepost: I have been asked by a good friend of mine to do a guest post on his blog, so my next post in the coming week will be on the reasons why you should set up your blog on a web host of your own choice as opposed to a hosted platform such as blogger.com or wordpress.com.

A long time ago, when I had just graduated and was starting off in my career as an engineer, we relocated into some new offices and on the wall was a sign which said:

“The only certainty, is Change”

It struck a chord with me, that Life is beset with Change, and we have to come to terms with the changes that go on around us and adjust our own worlds to live comfortably in the space we inhabit.  In a similar vein, my browsing journey across the blogosphere led me to some inspiration which has made me want to change the complete look and feel of the Technical Articles blog, because I realised something important.  So, please bear with me, and join me as I recall the steps to this decision which will set the blueprint for this site from now on.

In the Beginning

My blogging journey started in September 2008, as a need to create a web presence, and to look at how I could make money from this.  I had heard about blogs, but never really looked into them or got unduly excited about the phenomena.  Basically, I knew how the internet worked, and I knew I had to:

1. Get a Domain Name
2. Get some hosting space on a web-server
3. Put up some web-pages for people to visit

In essence, those fundamental steps apply in all cases, the challenge is in the detail and to what extent you want to do this.  I was n’t in the market to compete with web developers, but I soon learnt that you could very easily create a professional web-presence by using some Content Management System (CMS) platform like Wordpress.

In parallel, with sorting out the mechanics of doing this, I had to think what my website was going to be about.  I had worked in the Telecommunications industry, and had some good technical notes which I could write about, and make available to people, that’s really where the idea for the name for the site came from.  Also, I had now got interested in ‘blogging’, and ’search engine optimisation’ and how people promoted and sold things on the internet.  So, this hotch potch of things became my ‘raison d’etre’ for the site.

Technicalarticles.co.uk is launched

After all the preparation, the site was lauched in the beginning of October 2008, and I submitted it to all the search engines, and was really pleased with what I had done.  Great!!!  Now what!!!

How was anyone going to know about my site?  Yes, I’d got my site optimised as best I knew, and after a few days, when I did a search in Google and put my full site address in, it was able to find it.  But, if I did a search for something general, like ‘technical articles‘, it was on the 6th or 7th page.  This was after I’d added in some decent content and optimised this with key words.  This is when the fever set in!!!

I got this notion, and I’m sure most beginners do, that I had to write at least 3 or 4 posts a week, to build up my content and make Google’s indexing of my site more relevant.  I became, more and more stressed out trying to generate content and trying to meet my own self-imposed deadlines.  I could n’t keep up the original postings, and so I settled for doing at least two posts a week.  In between, I would spend time promoting the blog and building up awareness.  But it was becoming a chain around my neck, rather than something I enjoyed doing.

I was learning a lot, new ideas were flooding in and before I knew it I had become like the sorcerer’s apprentice, having so many things running that I could n’t keep all the plates spinning.  I imagine this experience is n’t new to me alone, everyone who gets the blogging bug, is enthused by it and sets off on a high.  We’re all flooded with good ideas and taken off on different directions and routes.  In my case, I was starting too many different projects, before I’d really got the first one established and bedded down.

Writing to a Purpose, the importance of Quality Content

I had to stop chasing all the hares, they were leading me all over the place.  It was time to re-focus, and look at what I was doing and get one thing right.  I began to drop all the other spinning plates, and keep one running, because it was time to ground my Self, to go back to the essence and find a new purpose.

When I started Technical Articles, I had the vision that it would be a magazine style web site rather than a blog, and I had settled for a theme that allowed me to do this.  As I wrote my articles, it was great to get the feedback from people who visited, and that’s when I realised the most important thing people visit your site for is because they like what you have to say.

It was the words, my own experience and the sharing of it that mattered to people, not how glitsy the site was.  It took me a long time to realise this, and I’m glad I realised it soon in my journey.  It’s not important, whether people come and go, it’s important that people come and stay, and want to keep coming back.  They want to bookmark your page, or subscribe to it in some news reader, or be notified of updates or new postings by email.  And, I don’t mean lured into signing up for a newsletter so you can get that free e-book which will make you rich overnight!  No, no, and no again.  Try and remember this next bit, because it’s taken me sometime to realise this:

Good content is not about QUANTITY, but about QUALITY.

So, if what you’re writing about is the most important thing, then remove all the other clutter from your website.  You want people to focus on your words, not the distractions.  A lot of whitespace is good, I find it easier to read an article.  That’s why I’ve completely remodelled the website on a different concept.  The focus, now is clearly on what I’m writing about, some easy navigation to help you find your way around, and lots of whitespace!!

Conclusions

The beautiful photo above is entitled Dawn in Donegal, and signals the Dawn of the new Technicalarticles website, and a change in direction.  I will still be writing about the same things, but my focus has changed from just generating a large quantity of content, to providing some quality content that people will value and will want to come and read.  And, that is the new blueprint that I’ll be following.

So embrace change when it happens, because it is a time to grow.  Having read this article, take time to review your own efforts, take a good look at what you’re doing, and think hard about what makes your website or blog stand out from the crowd.

Above all, make a difference.

Daniel Hunt

Futurepost:  In my next article, I want to share a video from Stanford University with my readers, for anyone who is into making money, this is a must watch video because it is so inspirational and is one of the reasons I have made the changes to my own website.

In this article, we will take stock and review the progress so far with this Technicalarticles.co.uk site and look at the Top Ten articles which I would recommend you to read.

When Making Haste is a Good Thing!!!

When you start a project like this, it’s good not to spend too long procrastinating and drawing plans, but to just launch yourself head long into the activity and LEARN AS YOU BLOG.  Because, from my experience, that is the fun of blogging, you never really know where things are going to end up because you’re constantly learning new things and making new friends through your social communities.  Most importantly, you must always be prepared to change course, if it feels necessary.  So don’t hesitate or delay your need to blog, read some of my articles on how to get started, or search Google, and just GO FOR IT!!!  So let’s look at how my journey has gone so far.

My Blogging Journey

This has been my own journey in blogging, and I hope writing my experiences of it will help others who start afresh like I did, just over a month ago.  Up till now, we have covered various aspects of blogging:

1. How to Start Blogging covered the basics from deciding on blogging on an external hosting option or chosing your own private hosting solution.  Read this if you want to know the difference and make a decision on what you’d like to do.
2. In Blogging for Beginners Using Blogger.com we went step by step through setting up a typical blog using the external hosting option provided by Blogger.com, and if you want the easiest way to start blogging, then follow this tutorial to get started with your own personal blog in minutes!!!
3. We then looked at the more complex option of How to start your own Blog on an external host and we covered the businessof Domain Names, Web Hosting and selecting Wordpress as a Blogging Platform.
4. Our next tutorial covered a step by step guide on How to Register your Website/Blog DNS Name using the company 123-Reg, see their ad banner in the side panel.  This is the first step in your journey to a self-hosted blog, but it’s also important to help you get a unique presence on the internet by having your own name.  For a lot of people, this is one of the main reasons to start blogging, so read this article if you want to learn about how easy it is to buy your own Domain Name.  Since starting, I have bought 4 Domain Names already!!!

It was at this juncture, that my journey took me on the Making Money from Internet route, but we will need to go back and complete the blogging series of articles.  I have taken you to the step of getting your domain name, however, we still need to cover the steps of:

• Setting up Your own External Web Hosting Solution using a web hosting company such as WebHostingUK.com, we will cover the steps of buying the hosting package, how much it cost me, and what came with it.
• The steps you need to go through for making the connection between your Domain Name and your Web Hosting solution, so that people on the internet can find your pages on the internet i.e linking your web hosting name servers to your domain name.
• How to use the Fantastico toolset on the Web Hosting providers servers to make life easy at the beginning, and then of course,
• How to do it all yourself and install your own blogging platforms and software, so you’re running the latest version of your chosen platform.  In particular, we’ll be covering Wordpress, and the reason why I had to do my own upgrades.
• Next we’ll cover Wordpress themes and how to give your blog that personal touch and make it unique.  We’ll discuss various ready made templates you can use, where to get the free ones and why I settled on the theme I’m using now.
• Finally, we’ll cover moving on to another blogging platform called Drupal.

That should give you enough grounding to set up a professional looking web presence in a step by step guide.  Plus, you can always ask me questions via the comments on each post and I will do my best to answer them as honestly as I can.

Making Money - the Welcome Diversion

When I started writing last month, I’d heard about Google Adwords and Adsense, but I never really appreciated how individuals actually made money from these things.  So my journey was also about learning the ropes as it were on how to monetise my own blog or technical journal, and a lot of my recent articles have focussed on this area.  The first thing that struck me was how people were making money out of buying and selling Domain Names and that soon, these were becoming scarce commodities as a lot of the rare and unique names were being snapped up.

5.   In Making Money from Domain Names - Part 1 we discussed the story of how someone was selling a Sarah Palin domain name for millions of dollars!!!  Read it to find out for yourself how you can make money this way.

6.  The follow up article, Making Money from Domain Names - Part 2 gave you an option of what to do with unused domain names introducing the concept of Domain Parking, this is an essential step if you’ve bought several Domain Names and are busy developing a website, the parking services may make you some extra cash.

7. By now it was time to face reality, I had made $26.54 not exactly the get rich quick scheme I’d hoped for, but read this article to find out why I was happy with this result: The Make Money Online Hype versus Reality!!!! You have to be careful, don’t believe the hype, take your time and learn from your own experience. This has been my MOST POPULAR article so far from the the point of view of the most commented category, which shows a genuine active participation.  So thank you for your comments, they are all appreciated and taken note of to help my efforts on this blog.

8.  But there is money to be made, and to put a positive angle to the previous article, look at this picture of a guy showing off his Google Adsense cheque of $132,994.97 and remember, be inspired by these pictures but keep your expectations realistic.  Read the article here:  ProBlogger, Making Money Online & The Hunger to Succeed!!!.

9. In The Secret of Automatic Content Generation and Platform Choice we looked for the first time at how user input into your blogs can help create new content and keep your blogging efforts alive, and how somethings like forums can really automate this process for you.  We will need to look at this more closely later, but for now, its a good step to consider this in chosing your ultimate web platform.

10. Finally, my last Top TEN recommendation is the article on when To Adsense or not to add sense discusses the pros and cons of using Google’s adsense at the beginning of your blogging journey or later downstream.

The making money series of articles will continue to grow and have been posted under the Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation categories.

Conclusions

Its always good to take stock and review what one has achieved, and I hope by selecting these articles in a list and presenting them in this way, my readers will get more of a feel for the whole picture in it’s entirety rather than the individual pieces of the jigsaw they may come across when reading a single article.  I have still more articles to write on the money making theme and I will introduce these as a series of planned articles in my next post later this week.

Please let me have your thoughts and comments.  Have you found the articles interesting and helpful, be nice to get your feedback.  Thanks!!!

Daniel Hunt

Let’s consider Adsense and the what, when and why you should, or indeed, why sometimes you should not use it until the time is right!!

Adsense - What is it?

Anyone involved in blogging or web site development will have heard of Adsense and it usually comes into play when you’ve got somewhere with your site and are looking for a means of monetising your efforts.  Adsense is an advertisement program run by Google, and website / blog owners can register for an account with Google to display text, image, and video on their websites.  When visitors to your sites click on these advertisements,  they generate revenue for you on a ‘per-click‘ or ‘per-impression‘ basis.  Lets look at this in more detail.

The key thing is the advertisements are administered by Google, you don’t have to do anything once it’s set up.  When you sign up with Google Adsense, you can select the type of advertisement  you want to display and then you are given a piece of HTML code, which you need to place onto your website where you want the advertisements to appear.  We can cover how to do this separately, but for now all we need to know is that it is ONE way of monetising your website. Most other programs like affiliate marketing, work in exactly the same way, you register for the service and place the advertisements as HTML code on your websites.

Yahoo are also keen to get into this billion dollar market and have launched their Yahoo Publisher Program,  which we will be looking at in another article.

Adsense - When Should You Use it?

Now, there is much debate about whether you should use Google Adsense or any other advertising in the early days of getting your blog or website up and running.  Indeed, in a recent discussion on Blogcatalog on what people disliked the most when they visited sites, the over-splattering of Adsense and banners was seen as a major put off when visiting sites.  I’ve visited a lot of sites myself as part of promoting technicalarticles and this has been my personal viewpoint too.  Adverts that are misplaced can deter you from getting to the information you seek, and consequently reluctant to re-visit.

So, too much is bad.  Let’s accept that, because it’s more or less common sense.

When you start off your blog or website, your primary objective is to gain some sort of decent ranking with Google so that your site gains in popularity.  The key to this is developing returning visitors.  Through your site promotion efforts, you want to attract enough people to come and visit your website for the first time, your unique visitors, but your real aim is to get them to come back again and again to develop sufficient readership to win in the popularity stakes.  Anything, you do that puts people off, will hurt your promotion efforts.  So the advise often is, build up your blog or website, with decent original content and then introduce adsense when your readership has built up.  But, some people also suggest, that the introduction of adsense to an established readership can also be damaging, as people have got used to your site without the adverts.

In my own case, I started off with Google Adsense and affiliate banners, and even played around with Amazon’s slideshow widget showing off books on blogging.  The funny thing is I got an email last week from Amazon saying how I had n’t earned anything from their affiliate program asking me to look at their help pages for affiliates.  Thanks Amazon!!!  When you look at it deeply, few people click on adverts unless it is directly related to the subject they are researching at that time.  Also, because you have no control over what Google Adsense is putting there, other than through targeting your content to selective adwords, it is very hit and miss.  That is my experience so far.

Adsense - Why you Should use it or not?

In the end, if your objective is to make some money from your website, then I find the use of text based Google Adsense is tolerated by most people, as long as it does n’t blatantly take over your site.  I’ve included some Adsense in my sidebar and at the end of each post, which I think is ok, but again, please let me know what you think.  Where would you find it most acceptable?  What’s your experience on your own sites?  Leave me some comments, as this is an important subject for all of us, important enough to get right.

Early introduction of Google Adsense or later, maybe a matter of choice in the end.  I know some people never make anything out of it, others enough to cover their costs and some, make enough to want to have their pictures taken showing off their Adsense cheques (read article on this here).

The professional bloggers are at the other end of the spectrum, they have established readerships of thousands and to a large extent move away from Adsense and sell Advertising space on their web sites as their main source of income.  But most of us don’t have that luxury.

The choice of using Adsense or not, is yours to make and will be governed by what your own original  objective for creating your website or blog was.

Conclusions

As with most things in Life, there are no simple answers.  When it comes to Google Adsense, what’s right for one person may not work for another.  Try things out, you have nothing to lose.  If something works, then good, use it.  If it does n’t move on.

On this subject, what is your thoughts on the banner advert that I have at the top of my page.  Have you ever clicked on it, or any other banner ads placed at the top of pages.  The reason I’m asking is because I’m seriously thinking of removing it, and some feedback on this would be useful.

My own Adsense efforts have dried up a little at $31.28 and I think I’ll seriously have to look at targeting high paying Adwords in my articles and see if that makes a difference.  I will devote some more to time this in another article because most people use Adsense for monetisation, and if we can crack it, it’ll be worth doing.

Daniel Hunt

Postscript:  Since writing this article, the banners have been removed and the whole site has had a major facelift to remove clutter and make it easy on the eyes!!!  Read about the reasons for the changes here:

A new dawn for Technicalarticles.co.uk

In this article we will discuss the secret of automatic content generation and for those using the Wordpress platform how your choice of blogging platform may limit your future developments.

As your endeavours in web/blog site developments progress, you will inevitably ask how do I do this in Wordpress and you will soon come to the realisation that you need to look else where.  Let me start by explaining my own experiences in this area, and the reasons why I’ve started looking for an alternative.

Wordpress

As a beginning Content Management System (CMS) platform, nothing can match Wordpress in it’s ease of use and straight out of the box functionality that it gives you.  As you can see, the web site you have accessed where I am blogging about all my technical forays into getting things to work for myself is an example of this elegant and very useable platform.

For those new to Wordpress, I can’t do better than quoting what they say on their website:

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

New to blogging? Learn more about WordPress, then follow the three easy steps below to start blogging in minutes. Or, for the ultimate in ease of use, get a free blog on WordPress.com.

Yes, it is the ideal platform to start blogging and publishing in an external hosting solution, without getting into the guts of programming.  It does what is says on the tin.  It has all the ingredients you need to start you off and create great blogging sites.  Go to http://wordpress.org/ click on extend and then themes, you will be amazed at all the fantastic themes out there for this platform, and I’m sure you’ll recognise lots of them from sites you’ve visited.  In a previous article, I covered how to start blogging with blogger.com, and Wordpress also has this functionality.  You can create your own blog on Wordpress and share it with the world, and it’s all free too, just like blogger.com.  The beauty of doing it in Wordpress is the integration with all their themes, although I have n’t tried this myself yet.

No, what I did was, get myself a Domain Name from 123-Reg, get some space on a web-server from Webhostinguk, and build it all myself, bottom up as they say.  Well, I tried all the options that my hosting company provided through some scripting software called Fantastico, but I found that their versions of Wordpress were out of date.  So in the end I went over to Wordpress.org and just downloaded and installed the latest release myself and got it going.  I spent quite a bit of time looking for a good theme, and I wanted a magazine style theme as this is the craze at the moment and allows you to put nice front page content which teases readers into your various articles with a good splattering of images.  The theme I settled on was the Arthemia theme by Michael Jubel.  That’s it really, it took a bit of tweaking to get the theme working but once that was done, the site just needed to be maintained and kept up to date.  I will cover the steps in more detail in some other articles, but for now lets look at reasons for changing.

The Secret of Automatic Content Generation

From my recent posts on making money and the hype versus the reality, you will have gathered the importance of content.  Your ranking in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) will be determined by your content.  Google and other search engine’s use complex algorithms to determine whether the content on your site is ORIGINAL and also whether there is enough of it to warrant your site as an authority on a particular subject.  This is called relevance.  How relevant is your content to the searches a user is performing.  Now, search engines crawl the internet to update their databases on this new content, and the emphasis is on new, not duplicates because the algorithms already know the sites that are authorities on various subjects and if you’re not careful they can easily stop crawling your site if all it contains is duplicate content.

Truth is, unless you have an army of writers at your disposal, it’s hard to keep generating new content.  The trick is to look at how we can generate this without effort from ourselves, because once you have posted your article, it sits there as a flat page, no new content is being added to it and the search engine’s don’t keep tabs on it if it’s not changing.  This is where getting readers to make comments on your articles comes in, because what is happening is that your readers are adding new content to your web-site or blog, on that already indexed page which makes it more interesting to search engines.  Basically, your content is growing through your readers contributions, and this really is the way some of the big sites such as Pro-Blogger stay at the top, they have an active readership.

That will work on a standard blog, you can get your readership up through newsreaders and email subscriptions to your articles and comments, but really it’s the people’s comments you want, and the more they add the better.  Now, this is where the next trick comes in.  If you can create a COMMUNITY of people interested in what you’re doing or talking about, and more importantly adding content to your site, then your content generation process becomes automatic.  Other people do the work for you.  Your web-site grows in relevance because people are discussing subjects, creating new topics and basically doing your work for you.  That’s the beauty of Forums and getting people to register with your website so they log-in before they can add comments and get involved in discussions.

There you have it, we need to move into the space of SOCIAL COMMUNITIES, groups of people who help and support each other and add content to our site, how do we do this with Wordpress.  This is the limitation, I am talking about.  It does a good job of blogging, but when we want to go beyond that and extend what we’re doing, we’re stuck.

Conclusions

I have enjoyed using Wordpress as a blogging platform, it was the ideal stepping stone for me to start my journey back into web programming and creating websites that are up to date and can join the blogosphere as worthy contenders, as good as the best that’s out there.  But it’s not enough, I guess in my journey my own expectations have grown beyond what I started with.  It’s a platform I’ll continue to use, as it has an ease of use, which is unmatched in my opinion.

For where we want to go next, the pretender to the throne is Drupal 6.x, which offers so much flexibility and versatility that it is mind boggling!!!  In my next article, I’ll cover the pain I’m going through with this new platform.   Yes, nothing comes easy, but then, you only get the view of the vistas, once you have climbed the mountain!!!

Daniel Hunt