It is my intention for Live Free and Blog to be more than another Make Money Online blog. Sure, I’m certainly trying to document my triumphant rise to the ranks of the Internet Mogul. However, I think it’s also important for this journey to be reasonably transparent - and personal.

And that means talking about some of the less than triumphant moments. Like last Friday. After posting on Thursday evening (my time) about how it was so important to get things done on my Fridays, it was ironic that the day turned out to be a bust.

I needed to get up early for a Doctors appointment. I attended that, and ran a couple of other chores. By the time I got back home it was close to 11am. I checked my email, cleaned out my feed reader and got started.

Then about 1pm, I crashed.

No idea what happened. All of a sudden a wave of tiredness swept over me and that was it. I could barely keep my eyes open, and this was immediately after a cup of coffee. I decided to take a quick nap, and was out for the rest of the afternoon. In fact I was out for the rest of the weekend.

By the time Sunday evening rolled around, I was quite annoyed. I’d done a couple of the things I had planned. I had written some blog posts and some research of PPC affiliate marketing, but I felt like the whole weekend was wasted.

Stuff Happens

This is the way life goes sometimes. Start a vacation and come down with the flu. Go out on a date and spill the tomato pasta down the front of the white shirt. Run late and realize the car needs gas.

Often it’s when you want to start something new - a new venture or perhaps a new relationship - it seems there are a whole bunch of obstacles in front of you. What’s strange is that you never noticed them before.

Am I alone here?

But probably not for the same reason the Easybeats had Friday on their Minds. I have Friday on my mind because I arranged with my current employer to move to a four day week starting from the beginning of the year. I mentioned this in my first ever Income/Expense/Activity report a few days ago.

The problem I faced on my first Friday was a realization that I wasn’t prepared. Oops. I quickly sat down and brainstormed a few activities for the day, and came up with some things to do. In the end I got a couple of things done, but it wasn’t a productive day. I also realized that I hadn’t mentally prepared myself for the day.

By the time the next week had rolled on, I had put some more thought into it and came to a single conclusion.

The One Thing

That conclusion was to have one primary goal for each and every Friday.

The goal is to do one or more activities that will generate income.

It’s too easy to fall into the trap of doing a set of activities that while they may be useful - such as writing blog posts - don’t directly produce income. This isn’t to say that writing content doesn’t produce income, it does. A good post can increase traffic and readership and thus have a positive effect on income.

However, I see content generation as an ongoing activity that brings continual growth to a web site. It’s the secret that isn’t really a secret, encouraging readers to become subscribers and come back day after day to read my valuable content.

I would be better off planning and building a new website, or spending some time on an existing website evaluating how I the ads are performing and looking at other alternative. I could spend some time searching for appropriate affiliate links and building a PPC campaign. I could even create a product using Cafepress and sell it through my site.

These are all things that could be done in a single day, but would take a lot more time to achieve over several evenings, and would take away time from developing content.

Friday On My Mind

This still doesn’t help me when Friday arrives. Sure I’m going to do some activities that will produce some revenue. But what?

Well, I think about this during the week. I’ve got a whiteboard on the wall in my home office, which I use to write down the ideas and random thoughts that pop into my head.

On Thursday night, I’ll decide on the main activities for the next day. Sometimes those activities are left over from the previous week. I’ll estimate how long each activity will take and write that next to it.

Finally, I’ll list the activities in the order in which I’ll do them, with their allocated times next to them.

Let’s Dance

When Friday arrives, after all the preliminaries, I’ll start working on the actions in the list. When I complete an action, I’ll cross it off, take a short break - maybe for coffee or a 10 minute sit down on the couch - and then I’ll move on to the next action.

Even though I’ve ordered the actions in the order I want to do them, it doesn’t always happen that way. I try and keep to the time limit, and in most cases I do, bit sometimes it’s necessary to finish the action even if it takes an hour or two longer.

I also find that the list grows during the day. I’ll finish an action, look at the list, and think of something else that belongs there. I write it down on the assumption that if it doesn’t get done then it will next Friday.

I should also tell you that I’m not a morning person, so the morning is generally unproductive. My mojo kicks in around midday, and I can finish quite late on Friday evening or early Saturday morning. A great reason to do this on Friday and not Monday.

Anyway, that’s my current process. As this experiment progresses I expect that my processes will evolve and take new directions.

Darren Rowse at Problogger is sharing a secret tip today. It’s a secret for finding new subscribers for our blogs, and it’s a good one.

Here it is.

The secret is to make your readers think that you will produce valuable content in the future.

It’s really quite obvious isn’t it?

Every blog feed in my reader is there because I expect that there will be new content at some point in the future that will have some significance for me. If a blog stops producing it will be removed. I might give it some leeway, two or three months perhaps, before I remove it, but really, it’s not doing me any good sitting there taking up space.

So how do you convince your readers that you will produce valuable content in the future?

Also pretty obvious. You create valuable content in the past.

The topic of creating valuable content could take up a whole truckload of posts. I’ll save those for a later time. Suffice it to say that there are three things that will convince your readers that your content is valuable enough to subscribe.

1. Relevance - Your content should be relevant. If you have a blog about tennis, your readers won’t appreciate always reading about your cat, unless he’s a great tennis player.
2. Quality - While blogging is a lot more personal, I think readers are turned off by poor grammar and spelling. That’s not all though. Creating a style all your own is part of building a quality blog.
3. Consistency - It doesn’t matter if you blog five times a day or once a week, make sure your readers know that you are going to keep producing new content. Actually, quantity does matter - too much or too little can both be bad - but regularity matters more.

Sounds easy doesn’t it?

Don’t fool yourself. Keeping on top of these three subscriber lures is a lot of work, and requires time and dedication. Sometimes it takes years.

About seven years ago, I came across my first Wiki. It was Ward Cunninghams C2 Wiki and I found it while looking up some information on Extreme Programming. It was a pretty nifty concept, pages of info that linked to other pages of info, all dynamically generated. I must have spent several hours that first day just travelling the links.

When I say to turn your blog into a wiki, I’m not talking about swapping Wordpress for MediaWiki. I’m suggesting that you interlink your content as much as possible.

People don’t just visit your blog for a single article, they visit your blog to read your content. They might find it while using a search engine, reading someone elses blog, or through scraped content, but once they’re in your blog, give them an incentive to stay. If you have lots of links, they’ll travel them.

This also gives you a defence against scraped content. Most scrapers are pretty lazy. They just want free content to get some search engine rankings. If you link to other articles in your site, you’ll not only be able to get a free linkback from the scraper, you’ll have an opportunity to get the reader back to your site.

In the case of scraper defence make sure your link is an absolute link. Wordpress allows you to enter just the slug part of the permalink, for example /living-free-online. This is a relative link and won’t generate a trackback. However, in a scraped article it won’t link back to your site, in all likelihood it will just end up directing to the 404 page of the scrapers blog. Your best bet is to use an absolute URL, for example http://livefreeandblog/living-free-online as your internal link.

Happy Linking.

Getting It All Started

This is the first monthly report detailing my online business activities. As you’ll see below, the profit/loss report isn’t looking too good. I’m not worried though because I’ve only just started.

Much of January was spent just setting things up. In fact January marked a major milestone for me as I cut my work hours down to four days a week. Late last year, I arranged with my employer to take Fridays to devote to my online business. I’m working as a contractor, which makes it much easier because I only get paid the hours I work anyway. There’s no fussing about with HR organizing pay cuts and adjusting all the little details.

This gave me the extra time in January to get three web sites up and running, including this one. Not all are completed, I’ve still got to find some affiliate programs to run on some of them.

Income/Expense

January 2008 didn’t see much in the way of income, however the expenses are still there. I made a grand total of fifteen cents, and the expenses were around thirty one dollars. From a Profit/Loss perspective, January was a loss. From a learning perspective, it was a real gain.

Income

• Adsense: $0.13
• CPM Ads: $0.02
• Total: $0.15

Expenses

• Hosting: $19.92
• Domains: $12.06
• Total: $31.98

Grand Total: -$31.83

I’m using two web hosts at the moment, Site 5 for my gaming blog, and Dreamhost for the niche sites including Live Free and Blog. Hosting costs are given on a per month basis, so I’m just including the full monthly costs for the main blog on each account.

Domains on the other hand are yearly costs, and some sites have several domains. LiveFreeAndBlog uses .com, .net, and .info TLDs. So I total up each sites TLD costs and divide by 12 to give my monthly cost. That way the monthly cost is spread out over the year and gives a better idea of the true expenses.

I haven’t done any real promotion yet on the three Dreamhost sites. The game blog has been going well over a year now and is regularly promoted, but not advertised. It’s doing well with over 200 RSS subscribers, and 18000 page views a month, but I’d like it to do better. I see real potential there.

All of the income came from the last few days of January. The Adsense income came from purely organic traffic as the (so far minimal content) of that particular blog brought in some searchers.

Goals For February

Okay. Time to set some goals for February.

I still need to research and develop content for my major niche site - henceforth called Niche Site A. My goal is to have 100 articles on that site by the end of February.

The other niche site (Niche Site B) has enough content for the moment, but I need to research some affiliate programs. I’m not looking at putting Adsense on this one.

I’m also not looking at paying for any promotion in Feb. I’m expecting to dive in with paid promotion in March.

Goals

• Niche Site A - 100 Articles, 300 visitors, 600 page views.
• Niche Site B - All set up with programs
• Game Blog - 250 RSS, 30000 page views, $50 income.
• Generate total of $100 income.
• Minimize expenses.

Techcrunch is reporting that Microsoft has just made an offer of 44.6 billion dollars in cash and shares for Yahoo.

The rumors had been circulating for a while now that MS was interested in purchasing Yahoo. Google’s dominance in both search and online advertising was/is making both Microsoft and Yahoo pretty nervous.

Microsoft’s offer directly broaches the subject of Google, even though Google isn’t directly mentioned. From the letter sent to Yahoo:

While online advertising growth continues, there are significant benefits of scale in advertising platform economics, in capital costs for search index build-out, and in research and development, making this a time of industry consolidation and convergence. Today, the market is increasingly dominated by one player who is consolidating its dominance through acquisition. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a credible alternative for consumers, advertisers, and publishers. Synergies of this combination fall into four areas…

With Yahoos recent worries about its stock price and the talk of laying off thousands of staff, this is a strategically good time for Microsoft to pounce. Will the board of directors of Yahoo be nervous enough to sell? Maybe, maybe not.

At this stage Microsoft is approaching softly, as a friend offering a solution to the behemoth that is Google. If Yahoo refuse the approach, the next may be far less friendly.

And don’t forget that this has now opened the door to Google, or anyone else for that matter, to look at buying Yahoo. If they refuse the offer, will Google offer 50 billion?

Oops.

I say that a lot when I’m working. I’m a software developer. I’ve spent many years, nearly 24, writing code in one language or another. And I always say ‘oops.’ When my finger misses a key, I say ‘oops.’ When the program crashes, I say ‘oops,’ and sometimes other things too!

My supervisors over the years have told me that it doesn’t sound that good when they hear ‘oops’ over the partition. But still, I say ‘oops’ when something goes wrong.

Unfortunately, the theme that I selected doesn’t work all that well with Internet Explorer 6. It’s all out of whack. Oops.

I considered for a while dumping it and finding something else, but I’m not going to. The reason is that Microsoft is planning on a forced update to Internet Explorer 7, which works perfectly well with the theme. In fact, IE7 doesn’t have the little problem that Firefox does with the 125×125 ads in the sidebar. There’s some little css twitch there that I need to find.

Since IE6 is on the way out, I don’t believe there’s that much of a problem not supporting it.

I realize that some of you IE6 users don’t plan on upgrading to IE7, so I’ll apologize to you for the theme problems. I do suggest that you upgrade to Firefox, Opera, or at the least IE7 since all of these browsers offer a much improved experience over Internet Explorer 6.

As always a new blog theme, and a new blog for that matter, will have those little kinks that need to be worked out. It was a busy weekend getting this blog and another up and running, I still haven’t worked out all my plugins.

I hope you’ll bear with me. It shouldn’t be long before everything is up to spec.

Welcome to Live Free and Blog, a blog not just about making money online, but about the lifestyle that goes with it.

Trying to come up with a name that hadn’t already been taken was a little tough. For a while I toyed with YAMMOB (Yet Another Make Money Online Blog) but those six letters had already been taken for nothing of consequence. I considered making an offer on the domain, but realized I didn’t feel strongly enough about the name to do so.

I also considered BlogNoob as a possible name for this blog, because that is exactly what I am. A noob. I’ve been blogging in the online gaming niche since late 2006, and have learned an awful lot about what it takes. I did buy that domain when I first came up with the name, and still expect to do something with it one of these days.

It’s good in a way because coming up with names helped me to focus on what I wanted to write about, and to set the goals for this blog.

The Inspiration

Over the last year, I’ve come across a number of blogs that are being written by folks who are aiming at making a living online. These people aren’t the A List bloggers, they’re not independently wealthy, and they don’t (appear to) possess any arcane knowledge about building online wealth.

What they are is ordinary people who are taking steps, and conducting experiments, to create something that will allow them to escape the fishbowl.

It was about this time last year that I created my second blog with the goal of doing exactly that. Unfortunately, I jumped the gun. Shortly afterwards there was turmoil at work and in my life. I didn’t have the experience (or the patience) to push through the barriers and finally, lost motivation. The new blog needless to say died.

It almost killed my gaming blog too. There were several months of minimal posting resulting in lost subscribers and readers. Towards the end of the year I pulled myself together, found a new freshness, and am finally getting that blog back on track.

At the same time I found myself inspired to dip my toes once again into the world of make money online blogging.

I know. This is a subject that is being done to death. Every blogger and his dog has a MMO blog. Which is why I’m going to approach this a little differently than I did before.

Live Free and Blog is not an experiment in and of itself. As I wrote above, there are few blogs I’ve been reading where the goal is to earn an income with the blog itself. While this will be part of my strategy, it’s not the primary goal.

Live Free and Blog will essentially be the record of my experiments in making money online. Not every detail will be included. I won’t be sharing websites, keywords, or the fine details of my experiments until I have finished with them. There would be two effects of doing this.

1. The results of my tests would be influenced by observers coming from this site just to see what is going on. This would skew the results and may prevent any useful conclusions from being drawn from the data. Remember that in science, observing something changes it.
2. What I am doing will be affected by others, watering down the results. A profitable website would be copied by others who may then affect my earnings. Some may even attempt to sabotage them to gain an advantage for themselves.

What I’ll be doing is sharing what I’m learning as I go along. As I said, I’m a noob at this, and I’ve got a lot to learn. I’ll be including my mistakes in my posts so that you can learn from them.

A lot of make money online writers are quite happy to tell you what their revenues are, but they never mention the expenses. I’m never quite sure when I read the results what the profit is. Does “I earned $400,000 last month,” mean that he spent $395,000 to earn it and only made $5,000?

So, I’ll be tracking my expenses as well as my revenues at the end of each month.

The Goals

When starting something new, it’s always good to set some goals.

1. Be earning a living pre-tax income of $5000 a month in six months, and double that by the end of the year.
2. Live Free and Blog to earn $500 a month within six months, and $1000 by the end of the year. It should be about 10 percent of total earnings.
3. To have one thousand RSS subscribers reading Live Free and Blog by the end of the year.
4. To have at least three blogs, websites, or programs providing the bulk of the revenue.
5. To not rely on a single income stream and have multiple sources of income.

Escaping the Fish Bowl

When I was looking for images to use for the banner, I had all sorts of pictures floating around in my mind. None of them had anything to do with fish. But when I came across a picture of a fish leaping out of it’s bowl, I knew it was the right one. It instantly resonated with what I wanted to achieve in my life.

The metaphor of a goldfish escaping its bowl has a lot of connotations.

The first one is that this fish is escaping a tiny constricting environment. In much the same way, escaping the office or cubicle is what this blog is all about. It’s what I want to do.

However, where is the fish going to end up?

That’s not covered in this image. Is it going to land on the floor and suffocate? Or is the target a big pond or ocean? And is there a bigger fish in the pond just waiting to swallow the little goldfish?

Escaping the fishbowl means freedom. It also means risk. The leaping goldfish doesn’t know where it’s going to end up, in much the same way that I don’t know where I’ll be in a year. Sure, I’ve set some goals, and I need those to have something to aim at, but the destination is still a mystery.

Wether you leap out of the bowl with me, or just follow my progress, I hope to see you at the destination. Wherever it is.

Update: I’ve just included the earnings goals for Live Free and Blog. While they were included in the original revenue goal, I wanted to pull them out as a goal on their own.