Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

I recently posted a link to a story about Weblog Inc bringing in $1 Mil per year in AdSense revenue. It was a popular story circulated by many other bloggers too because people love to hear about people making money online, especially bloggers making money online. When the specific dollar amounts are released then people are even more interested.

Jason Calacanis, the owner of Weblogs Inc mentioned in the article that he has a paid staff of over 100 bloggers, which at the time, as I’m sure many of you did too, I wondered how much they were paid. Well I have another story which might answer that question and will at least tickle your fancy if you like blogging for dollars news.

Blog Herald: According to the contract, writers for Slashfood are paid $500 USD per month and are expected to write “125 monthly blog posts, along with monitoring of comments, responding to readers in comments, and deleting offensive comments. Posts under the goal of 125 will be pro-rated at $4.00 per post”

Slashfood is part of the Weblogs Inc network so we can reasonably guestimate that bloggers are paid around $500 USD per month to write for Weblogs Inc. My initial reaction was that’s pretty fair, especially given the exchange rate brings it up a bit if I’m spending my cash down under. Then I read that they want 125 monthly blog posts! Okay, a Weblogs Inc blog post is the shorter newsbite style of post, about a paragraph or three on average so it’s not quite up there with my 1500 word articles that I often dish out. Nonetheless that $500 is certainly earned but I think it’s a reasonable salary for a blogger given most bloggers earn sweet bubkiss.

Being paid to blog would be great, but being in control of your own business is better, although, perhaps doing both would be nice…hmm, where do I find the blogger want ads.

As a solopreneur working from home you no doubt enjoy your independence. One of the main reasons you decided to start your own business was so you could choose when you work, how you work and where you work. You make the rules, you are the boss.

Business is going really well. You have clients, work to do and feel that you have made the right decision by starting up your own enterprise. The future is bright. You find yourself waking up excited, checking emails, working on your computer all day for weeks and weeks, charging towards your goal of self-governed financial freedom and independence.

Then one day your energy dissipates and you feel as if you are missing something. You can’t quite put your finger on it so you knuckle down and get some more work done knowing that the satisfaction of completing a task usually makes you feel better.

Then one day it all falls apart. You wake up and nothing feels right. You can’t work properly. You dread turning on your computer to “deal” with all the annoying emails. Making a sale doesn’t give you a buzz like it used to. Your work ethic drops and you know your baby — your business — will suffer if you stay solemn and unmotivated, but you just don’t care anymore. Nothing matters because you are not the happy home based business entrepreneur you once were.

So what happened?

I have experienced this de-motivated state before and I can tell you why it happens – the computer can’t hold a conversation with you. There is only so much solo-enterprising you can handle before you require contact with other people. Humans, by nature, need contact with other humans. That goes for entrepreneurs too.

How to Beat the Home Business Blues

The solution to this problem is simple – get some friends, communicate with humans and make plans to get away from your business on a regular basis. The real key however is to be proactive and seek out socialization otherwise it is all too easy to spend a night at home alone with your email, web statistics and/or content writing.

“But I just have this bunch of email to respond to” or “there is this new software tool I’d like to test” are two examples of excuses you might use on yourself to “get out” of socializing. Believe me when I say this – you have to make the effort, even break your comfort zone, to keep things in balance – and your business will thank you for it when you wake up super-motivated because you are back to being a happy human.

Some people are extroverts, requiring a lot of stimulation from other people and often bursting with energy. Others are introverted and time spent with people burns energy that must be recouped with some time alone. It doesn’t matter what you are (incidentally I’m more introverted so going out takes more energy but I love my time with friends), you still need some time with people and that means more than just the occasional phone call to suppliers or the bank.

I’ll leave the decision on how much people time you require based on your own needs and personality and offer you some examples of what I have done to help alleviate home business loneliness.

Processing Friendship

Socialising, making friends, especially the right kind of friends, is a process. The first step I have already mentioned – choosing to be a proactive socializer. The remaining tips I offer below should be used as an ongoing process to slowly meet the right kind of people that you enjoy being with and will even be prepared to leave your business to meet once and a while. Remember this is a slow process, friendship in general takes time and you should never feel rushed or obligated to do anything.

Generally I find there are two types of people I enjoy socializing with; those in a similar situation or with similar ideas and goals as me — in other words entrepreneurs and business types — and just generally good people I click with (this of course is harder to predict but you know when it happens). It’s important to have friends that do not trigger a business conversation all the time because leaving your business to talk about business isn’t a break. Hopefully you can find people that bring a nice mix of business similarities, outlook on life and interests, so that you will be happy to hang out with them.

Internet Communication

You probably already make use of online communication, at the least through email and maybe an instant messaging program like MSN or Yahoo! Messenger. With the proliferation of broadband and advances in technology voice and video chat are real options too. If you have read some of my articles or listened to my audio podcasts you will know I’m a big fan of Skype (free voice over Internet software) and I certainly recommend you try it if you haven’t already.

I used IM and voice chat initially to chat to friends I already knew in real life and until I started my blog, Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, I didn’t really leverage this technology to meet new people. When my blog started to get well known people started to contact me, either by leaving comments on the blog or through email and Skype because I made my contact details publicly available (if you want to meet people you have to be “out there”).

Generally my blog readers are people that have very similar interests to my own and I have made a good handful of new contacts thanks to blogging, and I hope to make many more. Most of them are people I have never met in real life because they are located all over the world (future travels may change this – it’s good to have people to look up when you go travelling) but a couple are located in my hometown and have become people I regularly catch up with.

Web communication isn’t enough on its own and in some ways it’s also cheating because you don’t actually leave the computer, but it’s still a good start and will often lead you to make new friends in person. The best part is that often if you work online you will make friends with other people that spend a lot of time online and hence you already have one very big thing in common, your love for the web.

Leverage Your Friendship Network

Using the words “leverage” and “network” when talking about friends just seems too business-like, nevertheless, your existing friends should be the first point of contact you use to get socializing, because you already know you enjoy spending time with them. If you are the kind of person that waits for others to notify you of a social outing you might need to change things and become the organizer. It does take some effort but if you are always relying on others to get you out and about you might be waiting a while.

Take some initiative and organize a dinner, or drinks, or lawn bowls, or a picnic in the park, or a visit to the zoo, or a festival or a night out at the theatre. The options are endless and chances are your friends will thank you for it. Better still as the organizer you are more likely to be invited to future events and encourage others to organize more events so you won’t always have to be the guy or girl making the plans.

Meeting New People

The trick to meeting new people is to A) take steps to find strangers and B) make sure these strangers are likely to have similar interests to you. There is no better way to go about meeting these two criteria then to attend conventions or events focused on your hobbies, business or interests. Again it does take effort to leave your computer, have a shower, make yourself presentable and worse still, to be proactive by initiating conversation with strangers and “mingling”. It will all be over quickly enough and you may even leave with a business card of a new potential friend or two. The key here is to get out there – remember you can claim some events as a tax deduction and you might even get some new ideas for your business. No excuses!

Business and Pleasure

Just recently I enjoyed a spur of meeting other business owners. Some of it was random, some of it was via the blog but I had managed to collect enough people that were all managing their own businesses and seemed to talk and walk a similar path to me (this is no mean feat, Brisbane is a small city!). I enjoyed my time with them all individually and decided to bring them together for a casual gathering over drinks. It turned out to a great night both for general socializing and also for talking shop. Business cards were swapped and already some of my friends have started to make use of mutual contacts and network amongst each other. I continue to arrange these events every month or two.

Not Working Helps Your Business

Perhaps the most important aspect of socializing and leaving your work behind is how much it can help your business. The ideas generated by outside stimulation are often some of the best you will ever have. Helping others with their business helps you to realise things you could do to improve your own business. Time spent chatting about non-business topics makes you eager to get back to work and indulge in your business (absence makes the heart grow fonder…). I can honestly say that without my friends my business life would not be nearly as much fun as it is. If you can’t say the same, take some initiative, book your mates for some coffee and chess and get out there!

Yaro Starak
Business Guy

Stick your hand up if you review website traffic logs everyday. Yep, me too. It’s an addiction only surpassed by that “send & receive” button on my email client. That button is clicked many times a day, sometimes multiple times an hour…ahh, it’s like a drug hit when you download a new email. Anyway, I digress, this is a topic about webstats not email.

Traffic logs are important metrics which help you to determine how popular a site is, where your visitors are coming from, why you might get traffic spikes, whether search engine spiders are indexing your content, what keywords visitors are using to find your site, etc etc. All great stuff and very interesting for web business purposes. The problem is when you become addicted to making those numbers increase, especially early when you first launch your new baby.

I know the feeling of desperately trying to push those little numbers higher and higher, making your unique visitor figures reach double figures, then triple, then quadruple per day (if you are lucky!). Worse still this process is never quick unless you are A) Famous B) Pull off some great PR stunt or C) Have friends in high places. For most of us we have to pull our traffic one visitor at a time hopefully convincing each person to come back tomorrow and keep the numbers rising.

Blog Business World: If your traffic flow to your blog is consistent or rising slightly, you are probably keeping your regular readers happy. They are returning and enjoy your posts. If that’s the case for your blog, stop reading your traffic reports for the rest of the week. Try looking at overall trends from week to week or from month to month. That longer term approach removes any day to day fluctuations either up or down.

Not reviewing my traffic stats for a whole week?! Well you might have something there. Certainly BBW has some good advice. Traffic stats should only be taken seriously over longer terms rather than a daily obsession. If your site brings in 10 regular visitor after your first week you are doing well. Make that 50 a day after your first few months. Maybe a few hundred after you hit six months. That is if you stick at it every day, don’t expect even these numbers if you post new content only once a week.

Regardless of the real business implications and long term trends a daily visit to your traffic logs is fun. It’s fun to see which sites are linking to you, when you get a link back from a high profile site or you see that your article marketing campaign is working. It’s interesting to try and explain an explosion in pageviews on a particular day and yet no additional unique visitors to justify it. I like to know how many new podcast downloads occurred and which articles are being read more often. As much as traffic analysing might be frustrating at times, provided you don’t get obsessed with pushing the numbers up at all costs, a daily visit to your logs is all part of the fun of operating a web business.

SEO Book’s Aaron Wall was sued today by Traffic-Power.com for alleged inaccuracies and lies appearing in comments other people have left on his blog. If this case goes to trial, it’ll set an important precedent in the blogging community and the Internet at large, answering a critical question, particularly for business blogs: are the comments others leave on your blog a legal liability?

From The Intuitive Life Business Blog

An interesting case but one I hope doesn’t make it to court. I can’t imagine what would happen to the web if comments made by other people on your website made you liable for lawsuits.

Jason’s Google hate comments on Entrepreneur’s Journey might even get me into trouble

Download the MP3 [ 56 Minutes - 9.7MB ]

This is a podcast audio by Jonathan Mizel interviewing Perry Marshall. It reviews a lot of the basics of using Google AdWords. If you are familiar with AdWords you might find this audio a little redundant but for the newbies interested in learning how to use the system I recommend a download.

Additionally they cover a few interesting topics like:

• The top three ways to build a mailing list, generate leads and make direct sales
• What sells on Google and what does not, based on dozens of scientific tests
• Case study of a campaign that could NOT be made to work, and why

If you want a short introduction to AdWords in an email course format I suggest you try Perry’s free e-course.