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This is the third and final installment of my year 2007 round-up report. You should read part one and two first, before reading this. Here are links to the previous articles -

• How I Made Six Figures In One Day - 2007 Year In Review Part 1
• What Do You Do When Everything Happens At Once? - 2007 Year In Review Part 2

Forming A Routine

I moved from my dad’s place into my own place in July and in August I began settling in, slowly buying furniture and household items. It’s amazing how many things you have to do when you first move into an empty house. Ikea certainly benefited from my money during this time as I stocked up on stuff.

My working life became quite routine and although initially I had trouble keeping up with all the new tasks, I eventually found a balance.

This is what I do most days when working at home

Each week I had to produce one lesson for the students and I would usually create one additional piece of multi-media, like a video case study, or an audio interview. In between this, I would man the helpdesk, write blog articles and prepare little mini-promotions, one of which I did with Darren Rowse of Problogger and another with Anita Campbell of SmallBizTrends and one with Jason Katzenback of Portalfeeder.

Rob Kingston took over the helpdesk and Fran Kerr started assisting with other Blog Mastermind tasks, like adding materials to the members area. This freed up some time and meant I could focus my energy on producing the best content for my blog and Blog Mastermind. It felt good to practice what I preach about working less by outsourcing, focusing your energies on your core skills and of course, increasing your income at the same time.

Breaking $10,000/month in Blog Income

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If you missed the first part of this 2007 rap-up article, please go back and read it first here -

• How I Made Six Figures In One Day - 2007 Year In Review Part 1

The Eye of the Storm

The span of May - June - July was simply crazy. During this period I conducted my first online product launch, which is a massive task in itself, I bought a house, moved from my mother’s place to house sit my father’s place while I waited for the tenants to move out of my new house, completed the transfer of BetterEdit and maintained the status quo here at Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, writing several times a week.

Oh, and I bought a new car too.

Looking back it’s hard to imagine I managed to do all these things at once, but besides the few days around the launch of Blog Mastermind, I was quite calm and relaxed the entire time.

Nothing is more important than your health, so I made sure I kept exercising, sleeping and eating well, and avoided too much continuous computer use. I also have a core belief that despite how “major” all of these things might be to a person’s life, they are still all related to material possessions and not that important in the grand scheme of things.

If something went wrong, for example, I didn’t get the house loan or the BetterEdit sale fell through, or my membership site tanked at launch, it wasn’t that big a deal. I would move on and be okay. However, I was confident if I focused on staying patient and just getting things done, it would all unravel fine and I could look back with a feeling of satisfaction.

I’m happy to say, that is exactly what happened.

Choosing A Car

For about six years I didn’t have a car. I got my first car when I was 21, a second hand $3,000 Mitsubishi Cordia, but it was written off in a car accident a couple of years later. I then moved to West End, which was close to everything and has access to trains and buses to get anywhere I wanted to go. Then I headed to Canada for six months, so I didn’t need a car.

Posing in front of my new car

With the sale of BetterEdit and moving further away from town, I knew it was time to get mobile. Given the world is the way it is, with the rising price of petrol and the environment falling apart around us, fuel economy and low environmental impact were top priorities for my new car.

In 2007 Toyota released the Yaris in Australia, a car that matched most of my criteria and just happened to have a “cool” name - Yaro in his Yaris was already being bantered around by my friends. However the car isn’t all that pretty and I briefly fell under the temptation to purchase a more fancy car with part of the proceeds of the BetterEdit sale.

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As per Blaine Moore’s instructions, many bloggers are completing a year in review blog post recapping their blogging for the year before it rolls over into 2008.

Instead of highlighting my best articles from this blog during 2007 I’m going to do something a bit different - look at my business achievements for the year that was. This is part one of a three part series I will publish recapping the big events of 2007. Part two is coming tomorrow and part three is out on new years eve.

This year was quite simply the most amazing year I have had in many ways, but none more so than financially. This was the first year that I broke the fabled six figure income, I bought a new car, bought a house, sold a business, and started a new one, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Here’s how the year broke down…

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Update: Since they added a new video to this series, you have to click the “view playlist” button in the video player and choose the video with Andy Edmonds presenting StomperNet Scrutinizer to get the video I am referring to.

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Andy Jenkins and his team at StomperNet are at it again, releasing more great free videos, this time under the label of “Going Natural 2.0″.

Here is the current video that reveals a ton of information about how a few simple changes to your navigation structure, your use of whitespace and contrast, will improve your site’s visual appeal and ensure you keep visitors at your site for longer.

The video is 30 minutes long, so set aside some time and have a notepad ready, you will definitely want to run back to your site after this video is done and make some changes to your design.

Your Blog Design Sucks Too

I’ve looked at a lot of blogs and had a lot of people ask me to review their blog. The most common problem I see when looking at blog design is how cluttered and “busy” most blogs are, full of widgets and graphics and buttons and just too much going on. And yes, I’m taking my own advice - my new blog design is definitely cleaner than the current one.

When I tell people to “simplify” their blog it’s not just based my opinion - it’s the cold hard truth about how people interact with websites.

How do I know this is the truth? Because scientific eye-tracking tests confirm it.

Using technology that can track eye movement, advanced marketers like the team at StomperNet are testing how people look at websites, what keeps them interested and what drives them away. It really is eye-opening stuff - no pun intended!

It’s worth watching this video just to see eye-tracking in action and also learn more about the human eye. After this video you will understand why so many site designs deliver information in tight little boxes - it’s because of how the human works!

If you have a high bounce rate at your blog or you sell products from your site using a shopping cart or you just want to know how to better structure certain elements of your site design to encourage people to stay longer and perform certain actions (join a newsletter, click a checkout button, etc), this video is a must watch.

You can watch the larger version of the video by going to www.stompernet.net.

Now I’m going to go back and watch the video before this one about duplicate content.

Yaro Starak
Eye-Tracker

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Blaine Moore is one of the mentors in the Blog Mastermind forums, an experienced blogger and is one of the original readers of this blog. He’s the author of Run To Win, a blog about running marathons and is someone who I really appreciate as an online friend since he helps out so much.

Blaine skyped me last week about an article he wrote for his fellow bloggers, and since he doesn’t have a blog about blogging, he offered it to us here at Entrepreneurs-Journey. In this article Blaine explains how important it is to publish a “retrospective year end” piece. You only have a few more days to get this article done before the new year, so you better get cracking!

The Retrospective Blog Post

Every blogger should write an annual retrospective on the previous year. The retrospective is a great way to improve your sense of community on your website and can also clue you in on trends that may have slipped by unnoticed. Planning out what you want to do in the new year is made much easier for having known what happened in the past year.

The first time that I wrote a retrospective was part of a Problogger group writing project on reviews and predictions about anything. I chose to write mine on what happened on my site over the previous year and what I expected in the year to come. This year I decided to write another retrospective, and it was interesting to see how accurate my predictions from a year ago had turned out to be.

How old should your site be before you write a retrospective?

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