The First Week
The first full week has come and gone. I feel a great sense of accomplishment at some of the tasks I was able to complete, but I feel like I could be doing more. I’m taking that as a sign that motivation is strong and it’s the reason I’m posting at 12:32am on Sunday night. Owning my own business certainly keeps me motivated – it’s nice being at the top of the food chain, but it’s difficult knowing there’s no one else to blame.
This week I’d like to focus on getting up at 8:00am, doing some of the boring work I want to avoid (quickbooks and donation calls), and getting some regular exercise.
Report on last week:
- Site traffic is up across the board which is great!
- ebook sales have remained stable or increased slightly.
- The new “ask a question” feature of itintl.com is working beautifully. I’m getting 5-10 questions daily and one or two are generally article worthy.
- June, July and September have been historically the lowest earning months and that’s reflected in this month’s earnings. This July started very slowly, but had an immediate turnaround with full time attention. It’s still going to be a hard road to match last year’s July sales.
- dieselearth.com is neck and neck with veterinaryhelp.net for traffic – they’re both about the same age and I expect one of them to take a sizeable lead in August.
- New SiteShare partners marketingsmallbusiness.net and madmandan.net are both off to a promising start.
- Jamie soft-opened the ScrapLove Store and response has been positive. Eight or nine orders so far and climbing.
Here are the goals for the week:
- Make some calls for DieselEarth.com and try to get a donation vehicle. The site is getting hits from more than one person’s blog reader as well as some really good search queries, so I know people are reading it. I want to have more to offer the audience than EPA facts and how much vegetable oil weighs. Although the content on the site is useful and certainly providing value, it’s not the chronological experiment I had in mind. I keep seeing the trend surface (the NY Times did a piece on it today and another here) and I really want in as close to the ground floor as possible.
- Traffic building. I can write all the good content I want, but if no one knows it’s there it does me no good. I’d like to standardize this, but the internet is changing so rapidly I can’t really make a checklist for how to promote a website. Just going to play it by ear. This week I’ll focus on cross-blog posting and paid advertising.
- Insurance. My premium is paid through July, but my COBRA option expires in mid August.
- Articles. Content is stll king, so I need to write.
- New website idea. I have one similar to firmscode.com. It will probably take close to a day to set up, but firmscode has done really well ($308.48 since May 1). It’s averaging $2.71 a day and it should be bringing in just under $1000/year. Not bad for one nights work and zero follow-up maintenance.
- I need to develop an author contact system for some of the SiteShare authors. I want to be more in touch to help motivate them to write for the sites. I’ll probably start a weekly to-do calendar that will remind me when I need touch base.
- Quickbooks. Accounting is going to be a beating, but with the taxes I’m going to be paying as a small business it’ll be worth thousands of dollars.