For now, I’m going to put this website on a little hiatus for the summer. I plan to do a lot of traveling around the country in the next couple of months and plan to start a blog detailing my adventures. (I’ll post the link later if anyone is interested). Of course, I will also be keeping my regular money-making site(s) updated. (The power of a laptop and wireless card…)

Perhaps when I return and settle down, I will actually start blogging here regularly.

However, there is always the chance that I will never settle down, and never come back. And if I don’t, just remember: it IS possible to accomplish your dreams and goals. I can offer this advice for budding web entrepreneurs/bloggers:

1. Choose your subject wisely. The more controversial, the more traffic you will probably get.
2. Don’t copy other people’s hard work. Only the most original and clever ideas get really popular, not copycats!
3. Don’t send link requests to bigger sites asking them to add you before you add them. Also, try and tailor each link request to the site you are sending it to. The more personal you are, the better chance you have of them listening.
4. Don’t spam other blogs by putting links to your site in their comment sections. This really pisses off site owners.
5. If you will be starting a blog, select a subject that you are truly interested in and have some knowledge of. Trust me, it is very tedious to write about something day in and day out that you can care less about but only selected because it is “popular”.

!!!

I mean, I knew I was making some serious dough these days. I knew I just started bringing in five digits per month - last month in the teens, in fact. But it didn’t REALLY occur to me until pointed out.

It’s astonishing, if you think about it. I never, ever thought I’d earn a six-figure salary, especially not by doing something I loved. (Well, I’ve actually fantasized about it over the years, but I never truly thought I would do it). I never thought I’d earn that kind of living by sitting in front of my computer, at home in my pajamas.

Believe it or not, since realizing this, I’ve been confused and out of sorts. Am I really doing what I should be doing? Can I keep this up? What should I do next? Of course I want to continue earning this kind of money, and even go up to a higher level. That’s a given. Not to mention the fact that I still have a LOT to do before I can really “relax” in the finance department. I just got a major portion of health stuff taken care of last/this month. But there is more to come. I still have some debt to pay off. Braces. A car. Some other things as well.

Anyway, I’ve had the last few days to sit and think about what to do. I got oral surgery Friday, so I couldn’t really leave the house all weekend because my face was swollen pretty badly in two places. I have been on percocet, which tends to either knock me out, or keep me up pondering life. (Weird?) So after lots of in-depth thought, I’ve decided on the following plan to both keep up my income, and bring it up even higher:

• Get a total of 10 blogs up and running. (Which will include my “popular” site).
• Figure out a plan to get a certain amount of traffic to them.
• Figure out a way to earn income from ALL of them.
• Start an official blog network for my blogs.

Believe it or not, I already have 20-something blogs up and running, but most of them just “sit” there. I tend to ignore many of them because I focus on my “popular” site. So, my goal is to get 10 of them running and keep them updated regularly from now on.

I’ve already selected 7 of the 10 I’ll be using, and spent the weekend revamping some of the themes. I need to decide on the last 3.

My next step is to sit down and plan out a traffic and income goal for each of them. Then I need to schedule when I will begin regularly adding content to them. (And possibly hire someone to help me with adding content). And decide which ad companies I will use for each.

Hmm, it sounds like my 3-hour workdays are over.

It’s going to be a lot of work, but I’m looking forward to it. After all, I’ve gotten this far. Let’s see how much farther I can go!

I’ll keep you all posted on my next steps and how it’s all going.

My “popular” website got mentioned in the London Times this past Sunday, and I added several new link exchanges to my blogroll - and I’m talking other high-traffic websites that get over 20,000 visitors per day EACH. Like many of you, I get many link exchange requests each week from various other sites, but I don’t always want to add them. If their content is too generic, or their “link exchange” email sounds like a robot typed it up, or if their site is completely unrelated to celebrities, then I will not add them.

In other news, I’m getting $2000 worth of oral surgery done this Friday. It’s going to be a miserable weekend recovering, but I’m thankful that I have the money to shell out - for once.

Also, my web expenses are going up again. I will have to start paying a photo agency to use their pictures on one of my websites. More on that later.

I am planning on hiring a friend/tech guy I know to help me with server stuff that my web host seems not to really care about. I’m hoping this guy can help me with the occasional MySQL errors, server issues and stats problems.

In other news, I am now boycotting Myspace. My chicklitbooks account got hacked and the idiot sent multiple comments to tons of people in my friends list. I took it kind of personally that people thought it was actually ME doing it. Honestly - if a site as big as Myspace.com cannot stop accounts from being broken into and private data being posted all over the internet, why should I bother with them? Come on, they are a multi-million (billion?) dollar company. I have always been disgusted with the constant errors and poor performance of the site, but now it’s gone too far. Thankfully I’ve never needed it to get additional traffic to any of my sites.

Now, I’m not going to do the same, because I would fail. Badly. For the first time in 10 years, I am enjoying my life not having to work in a stuffy, miserable office, and damn it, I want to continue it. But with all this freedom comes massive laziness. Yes, it’s true.

I’ve gotten a lot better with my work ethics over the past several weeks. But before then, let me tell you how I would spend a typical day:

10am - Roll out of bed
10am-12:30pm - Work on site stuff, which consists of: approving user comments, deleting spam, answering emails, doing new posts, checking stats, etc.
1pm-12am or so - hang out with boyfriend, friends, drink a LOT of alcohol, laze around playing games on the computer, etc. I lived in a building full of people who literally partied 24/7. I have since moved, which has helped my schedule enormously.
1am- Shower, than go to bed.

Unfortunately I did a bit too much drinking and wasting of time. Thankfully it didn’t affect my website much. BUT. The past few weeks, I have gotten a little better. Now, my schedule is:

2pm: Get up, coffee, breakfast (I have a terrible day-sleeping pattern I am trying, with no avail, to break. I cannot fall asleep until the sun is coming up.)
2pm-6pm: Work on site stuff
6pm-10pm: Either go out with friends for dinner, etc, or go to an AA meeting, or stay home and do more work.
10pm-4am: Waste time on the computer playing games, or reading a book.
4-5am: Work on website (do the first part of the next day’s posts)
5or6am - 2pm: Sleep

I really, really need to fix my sleeping schedule - it really screws everything up. But I cannot fall asleep before dawn these days, especially now that I rarely drink alcohol anymore.

But I do get a lot more work done nowadays, it seems. However, I still have days where I literally don’t go near the computer. The past week was kind of like that.

The confusion came about because one of my ad networks pays me either by ad impression, or amount of clicks - whichever is greater.  I forgot to look at ad clicks because of the fact that I had over 5 million impressions, which equals $5,000.  Well… turns out that I had over 12,000 clicks last month, which actually means over $6,000 because they pay .50 cents a click.

Awesome!

So, I asked around on the Sitepoint forums how to increase my traffic, which already stands around 40,000-50,000 visitors per day.  Nobody really had an answer for me, unfortunately, except to suggest that I expand my site.  So, I’ve decided to add forums.  I ordered some vbulletin forum software and have installed it.  I just need to customize and tweak it a bit.

People are already leaving multiple comments on my blog posts (on my “big” site) so I know for a fact they will enjoy a forum.  The only problem is that I will have to moderate it heavily.  It will be a bigger time challenge than I already have.  I guess I don’t mind, though.  I’m planning to buy a laptop any day now and will take it with me wherever I go.

I am happy to say that for the first time in my life, I actually have a balance in my savings account that is bigger than my checking account.  I am saving for some upcoming oral surgery, new contact lens prescription and glasses, a car, and a laptop.  Not to mention a couch for my semi-new apartment.  (Moved in here in Feb).  I used to spend money like it was going out of style, and now that I’m making a LOT more of it, I’m actually saving.

Anyway, onto my post. The final numbers are in and I made just over $9500 for the month of March. Yay! The increase in revenue was mostly caused from one particular ad network I use. I got well over 5 million ad impressions with them in March, which means… $5000 from them. On the downside, one of my higher paying ad companies has bottomed out.

My website was mentioned in a major women’s beauty magazine, bringing even more visitors which caused the server crash discussed in the last post. Funnily enough, it wasn’t the most flattering of mentions… but a mention all the same. Apparently everyone and their great grandmother reads this particular magazine because even people I knew in person started telling me “omg your site was mentioned in ____ magazine!” Plus, several people mentioned it in either the comments section of the site or via email to me.

It was the April edition of the magazine, so hopefully it will continue bringing more visitors this month.

More later… I need more coffee before I fall asleep on my keyboard.

Let me tell you how much work it truly can be when you are managing everything on your own. Today, (Tuesday) the sh*t hit the fan in a bad way. I’ll start with a brief history of my web hosting situations:

When I first started my “popular” website, I was using Hostgator’s Baby hosting plan. Which meant at the time, something along the lines of $9.99 a month and 70GB of bandwidth a month. (I may be off a little with the estimates - it’s been a while. They have since increased their bandwidth in their plans). All was fine until my site started getting a few thousand people a day. I was using quite a bit of bandwidth and needed a new solution.

My next step was a bad one… I had a few different websites, so I decided to get a Site5 account - their deal was something like 5 accounts, 200GB of transfer, for $24.99 a month. After a couple of good months with them, things went downhill quick. My site was down way too often. Site5 ended up being a complete and utter nightmare. My site was down for - on average - a half hour a week. UNACCEPTABLE. I won’t even get into the whole nightmare story behind their hosting my site. (Search the internet - you can find many horror stories about their hosting reputation).

Anyway… I went back to Hostgator - to their Swamp plan, which was 100GB of bandwidth per month. Things were good - I had little to no problems. But then my web traffic increased yet again, and one month, I came up to like 97 GB of bandwidth. It was time to find yet another new solution. So I switched to Hostgator’s semi-dedicated plan at $75 a month.

I did that for about 6 months… thing were OK. My traffic meanwhile increased more and more. I started having problems with high server loads. I started getting around 20,000 visitors a day on average, and apparently someone else on the semi-ded server I was on complained. (I don’t blame them - I would complain if another site was sucking up all my resources!) The tech support at Hostgator informed me that I had no choice but to upgrade to my own dedicated server. So I did… at $174 a month, for their lowest plan.

Things went badly for at first… I was still crashing the server for some reason, so they had to do some CPU tweaking to optimize things. After a few bad days, things were fixed and running smoothly. This was January of this year.

Fast-forward until Sunday night of last week (two days ago)… I was working on a new template for my site. Things were fine and dandy in the hosting sector. My website was averaging anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 visits per day, and 100,000-200,000 pageviews per day. Until… the site started timing out Sunday night, around 4am. (Yes, I tend to burn the midnight oil). For some reason, I would get a “page busy, not loading, etc” error message for 10 minutes, then suddenly the site would be fine again. I was confused, but wasted no time in contacting tech support. I was up literally all night Sunday trying to figure out what was going on, submitting a ticket, calling support, etc. I went to bed at 7am Monday morning, hoping things would be OK by the time I woke up.

It wasn’t.

To make an already long story short, the April edition of “Allure” magazine published an article that mentioned my website. It has brought even more traffic, and my poor website’s server couldn’t handle any more. I spent most of Monday freaking out, then Hostgator finally rebooted my site in the evening, and everything was OK. Until this morning, that is… today was a bad day. I spent the entire day going back and forth with tech support in emails, phone calls and live chats. I even spoke with the owner of Hostgator! It turns out that the regular dedicated plan wasn’t enough to handle my website’s traffic. Things crashed and burned, big time.

I ended up having to upgrade to Hostgator’s most powerful plan - which is $374 a month (gulp) because my old server sh*t the bed. After a conversation with Hostgator’s owner, I agreed to switch to their pro plan. It took some convincing on his part, believe me… I couldn’t figure out why my site was fine for a couple of months and would suddenly go “kaput”. Anyway, the new server should be able to handle my site’s traffic unless it gets around 90,000 visitors per day. (Damn, would that be awesome…) He pulled me some strings and got the server set up within hours, which would normally take 24-48 hours. Which I am extremely grateful for.

Yep, this took pretty much 2 days. I barely ate a thing in that time, didn’t get to work out at all, and probably lost a few years of life due to stress. (I live from the ad revenue of this website, and several of the ad companies pay you according to how many pageviews you get in a month).  I knew that article was sending more people to my site, and I knew if they got an error message instead of the site, they would probably give up and go elsewhere.
I probably lost out on thousands of new site visitors in the time my site was down today… But the only thing I can do is keep going. The new server is in place, and let me tell you, it is so lightening fast I can’t believe it. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Do you still want a high-traffic site?

Things are going pretty well in my WE world at the moment.   I got over my previous bout of laziness, buckled down, and I made a whopping… $8,100 last month in ad revenue.  I originally had thought I’d made about $7,500, but then I recalculated. One of my ad companies didn’t have automated reports and I had to wait to get the check a month later. Now, finally, they are automated. I also now keep meticulous records of what I make from each company and update it every few days. This month I will make a little less - as of this moment I’ve made just over $7,000 for the month of February.

You might be wondering how I managed to get my revenue to jump like that. Well, it took a lot of moving my various ads around. Plus, a certain popular CPC text-ad company emailed me and helped me optimize my ads, which pretty much tripled what I was making with them. Also, there is this one ad company (more like a blog network) which pays depending on ad impressions. For instance, if you get over 2,500,000 ad impressions with them in a month, you will make $2500. Well, I moved their ads around so that they now show on every single page of the site, and the impressions have skyrocketed. In fact… next month, I will likely get over 5,000,000 impressions with them, in which case I will make $5,000 from them alone.

My site traffic has remainded strong, ranging from 25,000 on weekend days to 35,000-47,000 on weekdays. I am seriously considering running an ad campaign somewhere in the next few weeks to get some new traffic.

Now some more interesting/good news: one of my other sites, which sits stagnant, suddenly started getting more than 3,000 visitors a day. It seems google is indexing the photos on the site. So I spruced it up last week and now am getting around 5,000 a day. Not bad! I added Adsense and Adbrite. So far it isn’t netting much revenue, but it’ll get there.

I also bought some new domains over the weekend. It is quite an addiction for me… but I’ve managed to get some great names over the past year or two.

Some of you have asked what my popular site is. I’d rather keep it anonymous, but if you really tried to find it, you could. I will tell you it is a celebrity blog of sorts.

Anyway, that is about the sum of things right now. In personal news, I’ve moved into a huge new apartment and dumped my boyfriend (for the 7th and final time). Now it’s time to find a nearby AA meeting… just kidding!

This entry will be about the ups and downs of my life now.

People hear what I do for a living and they immediately start gushing: “Omg you are so lucky” and “You have to teach me how to do that” and “I hate you!”  I have to admit that I am content with what I do and yes, wouldn’t trade it for anything else right now.  I absolutely hated working for other people, hated always having bosses breathing over my shoulder, and hated having to get up early in the morning.

However, there are ups and downs to this business.   We already know the ups: being my own boss; no set hours so I’m free to do what I want, when I want to; freedom; I can update my site in my underwear if I so choose; not having to go to a day job and get yelled at.

My ex boyfriend knows it’s not all roses, however.  (I used to complain to him).  Here are the downsides of being a freelance Web Entrepreneur:

• Waiting for Checks: Instead of being paid every week or every other Friday like I used to, I now have to wait for my checks/deposits.  I am now paid 5 or 6 times a month, mostly at the end.  My typical payment days are: the 15th, the 20th, the 25th, 28th, and 30th or 31st.  So, I am forced to learn how to budget my money.  And I’ll be quite frank: I suck at budgeting.  (But am getting better, slowly!)
• Not always getting paid on time: I recently went through a nightmare with a certain web advertising company who shall go nameless.  I ran their ads- over 3 million impressions, and they decided not to pay me.  I went back and forth with emails and phone calls and FINALLY got 2 months of earnings, which were also so low it was ridiculous.  I took their ads off my site a while ago, and am still waiting for Sept and Oct payments.  Sometimes, a company will just be late with payments.  You are stuck either waiting or being the bad guy and calling/emailing to find out what is going on.
• Up and down revenue: My site’s revenue hovered around $4,000 for July and August.  However, in Sept it dropped down to around $2,800.  October was a bit better around $3,400.  This month will be even better, thankfully.  But what is there to do when your revenue goes down?  Get a part time job?  Suffer in brokedom for the month or two?  (Which I did).

Basically, I’m still not complaining about my line of work, but there really are lots of ups and downs to consider.  I still don’t for one moment regret my decision to quit my job back in July, either.

So, update on other stuff: my main website received over 25,000 visitors last Wednesday.  It’s now averaging over 21,000 a day.  Sweet!  I also signed up with a new ad company.  I’m a little worried because they are new, and what if I get ripped off again?  But we shall see… it will mean an additional $800+ per month in revenue.