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I am starting to realize that I need some financial goals to continue seriously with this “hobby”. The thing that I like about my webmaster-ing hobby is that financially it is self-sufficient, however I do spend a lot of time doing it, so this is my plan.
Like I stated before all of my sites MUST make money, at least to pay off their hosting bills. However I am now going to be up-ing the ante a bit. Along with being self-sufficient I am going to set minimum of $10 per hour of my time spent on them. This time will not include the administrative time that I need to keep track of this however. $10 an hour is pennies really compared to my day job, but really if I am going to be spending time online I should get something back for it.
For the last month I have been spending a lot of time on my new website, and expect it to pay me back within 6 months for my time, however I have been neglecting my remaining “fun” sites somewhat. These sites still make me some money, however I am not really paying attention to them and I think that they are getting spam filled. So I am going to have to sit down and crunch the numbers to see how long I should be spending on these sites per month based on their current “haul”.
On top of all of this my new financial goal for 2007 is to be bringing in $500 per month in passive income by the end of the year. I really have an up-hill battle on this one since I make about $100 a month in passive and a bunch more in active. But I mean VERY active. If I did the time / money thing I doubt that I would be making $10/hour.
I will keep you up-dated on how it is going. Hopefully most of that passive income will come from my new site.
I have started work on my new site with some vengence. Now however I am starting to get over whelmed with all of the information that there is out there on this topic. Also I thought that I had a relatively narrow niche, but it turns out that this is not the case, therefore I have a bit more work to do to narrow down my niche farther before I do to much more work.
Then when I start with the narrowed down niche then I can start to widen it, all the while keeping track with all of the metrics of the site. I would hate to broaden into a niche that hurts the rest of the site for example.
This weekend, day job permitting, I am going to be starting to think about how to narrow the niche, and then continue to come up with topics to write articles on. When I have my first couple of articles written I will start my linking campaign. I will start with the directories, then move to the paid option. May even think about a network option, depending on the network.
The moral of this story is to ensure that your niche is narrow enough so that you can target your audience correctly, but not so narrow that you don’t have too much of an audience.
I am turning into a regular poker playing webmaster lately. For the last week I have not been doing a lot in the run of webmastering, but I have been playing a bit of poker. I got a Poker book by Phil Hell-mouth for Christmas and after reading it I thought that I would put some of what I learned to the test.
Well I did much better than I thought. Especially in my online game. I have been playing some low-limit, Limit poker and have been doubling my money every evening (I usually start out with about $20 every night, so I am making about $20), and all I play is about 90minutes. I have found that it is not a good idea to play to close to bedtime since I either get excited when I play good, or when I start to play bad I can’t stop analyzing my hands.
Anyway I am pretty sure that this is only a minor lapse, and will be back to developing my baby in no time.
The following is a paid review of ShoeMoney Blog.
I have been reading Shoemoney blog since about Dec 2005 when I REALLY got interested in webmastering and coding and making money online. I like the blog so much that it made my round of cuts from my reading list. The post that made me put him in my rotation initially was Matt Cutts memo to Shoemoney – ‘I cant be bribed’, strange post to get hooked you say?
Hey, we try to keep folks in webspam from accepting gifts, so it’s only fair that I do my best to uphold that. I appreciate the thought though!
Matt
Well a lot of people in the blogoshpere would have flamed Matt, sure they would have sent a nice email back saying that they like his blog, but they would have definitely make some snide comment about how he is too good for a Shoemoney T-Shirt, or make a rebuttal of his “webspam” comment.
Shoemoney has a lot of tips, keeps you up to date on what is happening in the webmastering world and all of this without getting TOO full of himself. He will help you out with all of the information that he has in that head of his, and his story on how he got to where he is today is one of the ones that you hear all of those marketing gurus on TV tell you about. However he will NEVER tell you that it was easy, he didn’t sit at home and spend 15 minutes a day online, he spent hours and hours.
Shoemoney will also talk about his failures along with his sucesses. I have found that you will learn A LOT more from where people have gone wrong than where they have gone right. Most of the blogs that I deleted, after the ones that were obivously just gathering feeds, where the ones that you would swear that they were perfect. No one is perfect. The best post to describe what I am talking about is My Top 10 Worst Ideas To Make Money.
There are also a number of posts on his site that I keep bookmarked. One of them being New Adwords Quality Score Bot Aims To Nuke Arbitragers, this is a great post on how to “cloak” you affiliate links so that you aren’t going to be killed by Google. I am an old hat at this now, however I keep it bookmarked since it is easier to point someone to that post rather than typing it all out myself.
I am not sure what else I can say about ShoeMoney Blog, or about Jeremy himself other than add his blog to your reader, blogroll, or just your reading list. Love him or Hate him he knows what he is talking about (or he is very good at bull-shitting) and is worth your 10 minutes a day to read. The funny thing is that even though I am getting a bit of quidd to do this post, but I was actually planning on doing a post on why I chose to add the blogs to my list that I did. 
So go out there and add Shoemoney Feed to your list.
::EDIT::
I forgot to add that Shoemoney does have some great tools. My favorite is SERPs tool. If you read through his archive you will find some other tools, however some of them don’t exist anymore. If there is one there that you like send him a note….maybe he will revive it.
I am not sure how I should feel about this, but I guess that I am Binary when it comes to programming.
