The set-up

Increasing my online income consisted of 2 parts: 1) increase my earnings from Squidoo by creating more articles and building better backlinks to them 2) create a new income stream with a blog with affiliate marketing and ads.

The Squidoo part was pretty straight forward: during the last couple of months I’ve created more articles on a number of topics I’m interested in and optimized the ones that already were doing pretty well. Squidoo has a ranking system where a higher rank means a higher share of the ad revenue of the site, so you’re looking to get as high a rank as possible. Also, you’re able to add affiliate marketing to your articles, either by using your own links or by using Squidoo’s own affiliate modules.

The blog had some startup issues. Choosing a topic was pretty easy: it was something I’m passionate about and have quite an extensive knowledge on. So starting a blog on traveling light or one-bag travel seemed only logical. I did my keyword research and it seemed there was an audience and not so much competition. A domain name (lightertraveler.com) and hosting was quickly arranged, but I had some wishes when it came to the theme used on the WordPress backbone. I have to admit that I was a bit cheap when it came to this, because I opted to re-code an existing theme instead of buy one which was tailored (which to be honest, is not that big of an investment). I ran into a few snags when it came to my knowledge of HTML and other WordPress theme related coding, so I asked a friend, who’s a website designer himself, to help me out. He did, but it took more time than I anticipated so the blog took a bit longer to launch on November 1st. By that time however I had created 10-12 articles that could be published and created an accompanying Twitter account and news letter through Mailchimp.

So figuring I was off to a good start, I started further researching the subject (there had to be some things I didn’t know) and publishing weekly updates to the blog and newsletter and daily updates to the Twitter account. The Twitter account gathered some followers pretty soon (+100 in 3 weeks), I started building more backlinks to get higher in my Google rankings which helped and plotted along. Then I ran into a few bumps in the road.

For one I had a following on Twitter, but they weren’t actively engaged with my account, meaning they didn’t share the stories or links I put out there. Also it seemed that I had all the knowledge there was on the subject and there were just a relative few things you could say about it. It was like this: traveling light was to travel what dribbling is to basketball: it’s an (integral) part of it, but once you explained the mechanics, there’s not much more to say. Also, the audience I thought was there really wasn’t. Yes, there was a group of people out there who were as passionate about this way of travel as I was, but it was just a small group. The keywords I used in my initial research were also used for an unrelated topic with a much larger following.

So me running out of topics to write about without rehashing content (something I wasn’t willing to do after just 5 months of running a blog; competition didn’t seem to mind so much), the smaller than anticipated audience and not creating share-worthy content made me reevaluate the blog and I decided to stop with it. As an experiment is was educational (see the things I’ve learned below) but as a revenue generator it wasn’t.

Results

Since this was all about earning/increasing my online income, let’s see how I fared from the months august 2011 to february 2012.

Month:   Squidoo:  Amazon:
Feb-12    24.94        0.04
Jan-12   19.97         49.40
Dec-11   26.11        1.53
Nov-11   11.42        1.20
Oct-11   14.07        0.00
Sep-11   18.42        2.16
Aug-11   18.68        0.41

Totals: 133.61        54.74      

Grand total: $ 188.35     Average per month: $ 31.39

All the income I had was from my Squidoo pages. So not exactly the $100 a month I was aiming for, but all in all not bad from starting from about $5 a month. I still want to reach that goal at some point so there’s need to grow. In conclusion sextupling my income on Squidoo is something I’m pleased about, not getting any revenue from my “money-making” blog of course was something of a letdown.

As for traffic, in the those months my articles on Squidoo had 34.734 visitors with 40.631 pageviews (about 80% of that coming from my top 4 lenses). This has been an increase of 142% over the traffic I had in the 6 months before that, so I’m very pleased about that. The blog had 1042 visitors with 1106 pageviews. One article (a review of my favorite travel bag) had 40% of those visitors. Overall I guess not bad for a blog starting out, but since most of the visitors were gone in a matter of seconds and didn’t interact or read the articles is a telling point. So is the fact that I gained 1 RSS subscriber in 6 months and no subscribers on the newsletter.

What I’ve learned:

So what have I learned from this experiment?

• Research upfront is key: making sure you use the right keywords for your topic, that there’s an audience out there for the topic you want to talk about and you have enough topics to talk about is extremely important. I have to say I erred on that part in my initial research which lead to the demise of the blog. Of course you can always start a blog about something you care about and not worry about visitors, but if, like me, you’re setting out to make money from it there are different parameters.
• Having friends/followers on social networks is fun, but if they’re not engaging with your content or click your links they’re of no use to you. Having 1000 true fans is far better than having a million followers that do nothing to enhance what you try to achieve.
• Even when you optimize your SEO, getting traffic to your site takes time. There are no shortcuts, at least if you want to do it the right way and not use black-hat SEO tricks (which ultimately you will get punished for in your ranking when Google makes an update to their algorithm again). It takes at least half a year to get a) a good ranking in Google and b) build an audience. This may be different for you when you’re already a well-known entity, but when you’re starting from scratch that’s the way it is (although there are ways to increase your exposure such as guest posting)
• Never be cheap on your design. Design attracts your readers, content keeps them there. You may be the best writer in the world, but if your websites turns people off, it will hurt you visitor-wise. Make it user-friendly and nice to look at. If, like me, you’re not a designer, make sure you either buy an attractive theme or have it custom build for you.
• Promoting your content and make sure your readers understand what you want them to do (subscribe to the newsletter or RSS feed, click a link etc. etc) is something I still have much to learn on. Design of the blog can help but tone of writing is more important.

For me this experiment has been partly a success. I haven’t reached my goal of $100 a month, but my online income saw a substantial increase. And as a learning experience it has been very valuable. Since I’m planning to keep on trying to increase my online income, the things I’ve learned here will come in handy once a new project comes around. Maybe that experience is worth more than money.

For the ones not in the know: retweeting is reposting a tweet by someone else in your own timeline because you think it’s worth sharing. This used to be a sort of copy where you would put RT (= Re-Tweet) together with the @-name of the original tweeter in front of the tweet you wanted to share. If you had the characters available after that, you could still add something yourself if you wanted to. That’s the way I prefer it. Now Twitter just puts the original tweet in your timeline, without you having (as far as I know) the opportunity to add something. Reasoning behind it is that this way the original tweeter gets the credit for the tweet. Although I agree with that (give credit where credit is due) I think there’s a fundamental flaw in that way of thinking. Let me tell you why.

Yesterday a guy I follow called Erik Bras shared this tweet which I thought was hilarious. So I retweeted it almost immediately. So it was displayed in my timeline as given which gives credit to the original tweeter. Nothing wrong with that. However, I think it’s only fair that I would have the opportunity to acknowledge where I got the tweet from and add that to the tweet. Again, credit where credit is due. But with the way Twitter handles retweets I can’t. And let’s just say you find a tweet that just has a link in it. The link might be worth sharing and thus worth retweeting, yet, in order to provide some clarity to what it is, with the way retweeting is done now, you cannot provide that clarity by adding some explanation what the link is about, which may lead to some thinking my account is hacked and some spammer just uses it to send out links to malware sites.

Of course you can always c/p the tweet in your own tweet-window, add the appropriate @-name and add what you want, but that’s a bit of a hassle. And I understand the reasoning behind the way Twitter handles it, because with the old kind of retweeting many took credit for some funny or informational tweet that wasn’t originally theirs and sometimes the tweet itself had to be shorted to fit the RT and @-name. However in this case I think the cons outweigh the pros. But that’s just what I think….

Of course I’m also running Google Analytics on this blog and the blog of my online income experiment. When it comes to this blog those numbers don’t matter much to me, but for my experiment I want to know what works and what doesn’t, how people come to my site, how long they stay there and what links they do or do not click and so on.

To me it’s just interesting to see how a bunch of numbers can tell you a story. But not always the whole story.

One of the things you can interpret are posts that are shared on Social media. But as far as I know with todays tools you can interpret the amount of likes or retweets, but not the, I believe, most essential information. Because what you want to know is how your stories are perceived, not just the amount of times they are shared.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s an important statistic to know how many times your content is shared, but it’s even more important to know how people feel about it. A blog post can be shared hundredfold, but if the reaction to it is negative it hurts more than helps. And you want to know how people react to your content. Then you’ll truly know what works and what doesn’t.

So new social media metrics tools should not only measure the numbers, but also the type of buzz content is generating. Then the numbers tell you the real story.

For a while now I’ve ordered items from Avanti Sport which is a large online sporting goods retailer. Orders I’ve placed in the past have been shipped as confirmed and I haven’t had any trouble whatsoever. So when it was time for a new gym bag, since my heavily used one of 3 years was beyond mending, I ordered one from the site. To be honest, I didn’t really look at the specs, just the dimensions. That was a mistake. It proved to be one of those football players use with a hard bottom and spinning wheels. Not what I wanted, but my mistake. Still, I wanted to see if there were any option to return the bag. And there were plenty.

First I had a choice of returning the bag with a full refund or exchange it for another product (for both, items had to be in original package and unopened, which mine was). I choose the latter and picked another bag. The system immediately recognized that the newly picked bag was cheaper than the original one, so it gave me a choice to either order something else to make up the difference or have it reimbursed to my bank account. Again, the latter was my choice and then it was just a matter of picking the shipping method. I could either bring it to a Kiala point and shipping would be free, have it send to their postal adress and have a few euro of administration costs or have it send to their shipping address and have the shipping costs on me. Since the Kiala point was close by I opted for the first. I confirmed the new order and received an email confirming the exchange. I dropped the return parcel at the collection point, got a receipt with a tracking code and went home.

With the tracking code I could see the parcel had arrived at Avanti a few days later and that same day I received an email with the shipping tracking code of the new order and the amount difference was transferred to my bank account. Next day, new bag arrived.

As positive as I was about them before this, I noticed that I turned into an advocate for them, telling friends and family this story and how much I’m impressed with their service. Perfect example how a customer experience like this can create great word of mouth. I will surely order from them again.

As I have been doing for a couple of years now the new year for me means getting some perspective on the year before and identifying the things I want to focus on in the upcoming year.

Last year the 3 words I focussed on were: Social, Experiment and Execution. I have been fortunate to meet some new people through work and new activities. And although none of those new relationships have grown into the kind of friendships I have with some of my older friends they certainly have improved my life. Experimenting and execution have come together in my new online income experiment. The beauty is that some of these experiments have become lifestyle choices (such as the primal/paleo diet). I have to be honest and confess that in some areas execution still is a bit lacking, but overall there has been a significant improvement on that.

Now on to my 3 words for 2012!

Relationships

As was the case in 2011 I’m more open to meeting more people. But on top of that I want to spend more time with the people I love spending time with, whether those are new acquaintances or people I’ve known for years. I don’t feel I’m neglecting people, but I find that I love spending time or doing things with certain people. I want to make more time available for spending even more time with those people, while spending less time with people that feel like a psychological drain.

Health

I’ve been around the same weight for about 8 months now, which is about 10-12 kg away from my goal. So this should be the year that I reach the goal of my weight loss journey which has started a couple of years ago (yes, I was that overweight). In order to do that I will be focussing on being stricter on what I eat (read: more strict with Paleo) and increase the number of times a week I will Crossfit, something I started about 2 months ago, and keep on spinning. Crossfit is something I really like to do, despite the fact that my muscles have been extremely sore after every workout and I’ve been called crazy by a couple of my friends for even doing it. And since I hate people telling me I can’t do something without me even trying, it’s just a bit of extra motivation. It’s also about more than just the weight issue. I want to improve my overall health, cutting down on sick days and appointments to doctors and dentists, but also being more agile and flexible. This means I have to take (even) better care of my body (and all aspects of it) than I have been doing previous years.

Entrepreneurship

Although I consider myself to be far from an entrepreneur, I think the word represents what I will try to achieve in 2012. As part of ongoing experiment I think it’s important for me to learn what running an online business entails. It will certainly mean more learning but also testing what works and doesn’t work. I’ve started a blog a couple of months ago and the information I’m getting from running it has already helped me in understanding what it means to run a site where the ultimate goal is making money.

I’m looking forward to 2012. Beside my 3 words I’ve just started a new job which seems to be a challenging one and I’m looking forward what the year will bring. Hope it will be the same for you.

In todays internet world this kind of behavior happens more than you could imagine. People like Chris Brogan and Tim Ferriss have used their Twitter accounts to point out people who have used their work and claimed it as their own in products or blogs. So I was aware this kind of thing happened, but never saw it up close. Until recently.

As I’ve mentioned before one of the people I follow on Twitter is Aaron Lee. Besides being a solid resource for social media news and information, he’s just a great and approachable guy. We’ve been having short conversations for a while now so I wasn’t exactly surprised when I saw (at least I thought) one of his tweets mention me. However, it was one that he send me a couple of days earlier. I hadn’t really paid attention to the Twitter handle because I recognized him from his picture, but then I saw that another name was mentioned. Since his name has become somewhat of a brand I found it strange that he would change it. So I took a look at the profile that send the tweet and I was stunned about what I saw.

Here was a profile with Aaron’s picture, his description and look and feel. It was the same but for a different name and (at that time) 3 tweets. I DM-ed Aaron to ask if he had seen it, but he was as surprised as I was and decided to take action against this. Luckily Twitter has a procedure in place for this kind of thing. In other instances you might not be so lucky.

When somebody copies your work on the web, there’s not much you can do. Of course you can go the legal way and send a seize and desist letter, but if they refuse and they’re in another country your options are limited. Because of this it’s easy for scammers to do this and ride the success of others.

I never understood why you would want to make money by copying what others have created. If you want to make money on the web there are numerous ways, but I’m guessing some just want to take the easy route. And it’s a shame there’s not much that can be done about it.

As part of my experiment in generating online income I’ve been starting up another blog and have been writing for that. The blog has been launched on November 1st (yes, 3 months later than expected due to some issues) and since then it has published 7 posts. Not a whole lot you would say, but I’ve also had to create an about page, a disclaimer, a privacy statement, a disclosure and other pages. I’ve also written some drafts for upcoming posts.

Furthermore I’ve been going back to something I did a while ago and that’s creating Squidoo lenses. I came back to them in order to create some backlinks to the new blog, but I had some ideas for some new stuff and started to create new lenses. I still have some ideas for some other ones so I set myself a goal to get to at least 20 lenses, with 50 being a long term goal. With 50 lenses and some good content I believe this can also become an online revenue generator, albeit not a big one.

So yes, I’ve been busy writing, but because that writing has taken up most of my time I haven’t been coming back to where my online writing has started: this blog. So see this post for what it is: not as an excuse to why I haven’t been writing here for a while, but a simple update on the experiment I’m running.

I think the overall quality of the writing I’ve done so far is good and could be of value to my readers. But I’m lacking in both execution and knowledge when it comes to other subjects:

• SEO: or Search Engine Optimization. Since I’m using WordPress with a theme that has SEO build in, my on-site optimization is pretty good, but far from perfect. I also have to make sure that my content is optimal for both search engines and humans. Off site optimization is non-existent, except for some incoming links I’ve put up. I have a general understanding of the concept now and are applying some of its rules, but that needs to be better.
• Social Media Strategy: I’ve already have some strategy in place with an accompanying Twitter account to the blog, where, besides the posts on the blog, I share things related to its subject. This needs to be build upon further and I especially have to make sure that I use the different channels to their strength.
• Marketing/Promotion: when it comes to marketing/promoting the site there’s still a lot of work to do. Partly this is because I want to make sure that before I start with this I have quality content already up and partly because I still need to learn how to do this effectively.

There’s still a steep learning curve for me here and I know that. I’ve started to learn SEO now and will move to social media strategy after that. Marketing and promotion will be last on the list. I’ve chosen this order because I think it’s the order of most importance.

Since I want this experiment to work, I really don’t mind going about this. I have to admit it’s a bigger challenge then I first anticipated, but that makes it worth while.

Reason for contacting KPN in the first place was the fact that I had to arrange a new mobile contract for a new account manager at my job. So, after comparing the offerings of the 3 largest mobile providers, I decided to go with KPN. The ordering side was pretty straight forward: go to the site, create an account (email received with account details), log in, place the order. After that I received an email with the order confirmation and a mention that we would be contacted by a courier to make an appointment for delivery of the phone. Within 2 hours we were called and delivery was scheduled for next day between 9 and 11 in the morning and received a confirmation of this by email as well. Next day, at 9:45 the phone was delivered. We received a confirmation mail of this as well. So far so good.

I opened the box, took out the packaging with the phone and the sim card. Also enclosed were a packing slip and a summary of the mobile plan. Nowhere was the phone number mentioned. Before I called support I rechecked the contents of the box and the emails I received. No mention of the number whatsoever. So that’s when I made the call and got that reply I mentioned above. He did also say that maybe because of the fact that the contract would be activated at the end of the month (our choice) I would receive an email when the number was activated. That might have the number on it.

So in summery: they send you an email with the details of your account, they send you an email to confirm the order. They send you an email to confirm date and time of delivery. They send you an email when it’s delivered. But they “might” send you an email when it’s activated which “may” hold the information of your phone number. Why would you gaff on the last step of the process? I cannot believe that a company like KPN isn’t capable of doing this right. What first started as a positive experience with a company I haven’t had many dealings with before, now left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

I think this is a great example of how a company could improve greatly on their communication to their customers by just adding/sending one small, extra (essential) piece of information. KPN isn’t the only company I’ve dealt with that has this problem, but it’s the most recent one I came across. Customers shouldn’t have to contact a company to receive essential information. They should get it automatically.

Besides having a great holiday in september, I also did a small experiment: I asked for what I wanted. Whether it’s about some extra perks you can get in the hotel/hostel you’re staying, a more personalized dish in a restaurant or better seats on a flight. There are a lot of possibilities out there which are not willingly advertised, but are feasible nevertheless. And all you have to do is just ask.

It’s also a trick of wording your question just right. When booking a rafting trip I thought the price was a bit high. So I asked him if any type of discount was available. When the answer to that was no, I asked if there were any combination trips available which would lower my price. When it turned out that I could also book a personal driver for a day there, which would help me get from Sanur to Ubud AND look at some sights along the way, which would half the price of the rafting and get a 25% discount on the ride I booked immediately.

I did have one rule though: when the definite answer was no, I didn’t push further. I hate it when people nag about something not being possible (especially when you notice the person you ask is trying to help but just can’t) so it would be wrong for me to do it myself. When something just wasn’t possible I thanked them for trying and let it go.

Asking for what you want is a bit of a trick and for me a change in mindset. You often think that when it’s not advertised it’s not possible, but that proved to be a wrong assumption in some cases. As said, the wording of the question is important and if you do it right the benefits can be great. I know it helped me enjoy my holiday more than I already did.